At these words I get pale and come close to fainting. I dig my nails into the gritty sill. Sister Anna notices and pulls me away from the window.
“I’m stealing our student away into the garden, Mother,” she says to the Mother Superior, who, instead of responding, shuffles barefoot over to the corner of the refectory, where she takes from the newspaper basket a few issues of Sunday and wraps up her crumbs in them.
We rush out of the refectory. Sister Anna picks up a bag of dried-out weeds lying in front of the greenhouse and takes me into the boiler room, where she opens slightly the little door to the furnace and in one nervous movement throws the white goosefoot and thistle branches onto the fire. The bitter aroma of the herbs fills the room, startling the moths out of the pipes. The flames devour the little yellowish and lilac flowers.
“I always burn them in here so they won’t spread.”
She blows from my cheek an uninvited fleck of ash and looks at me with a penetrating gaze, as though wanting to bless me. In alarm I take a step backwards and stumble onto a mousetrap with my clog. The spring clanks. The trap snaps. The wire latch pins down the corner of my skirt. Sister Anna bends down and carefully opens the trap back up.
“Wioletta, you have to move out as fast as you can. You have to,” she whispers. “It’s what will be best for you, okay? You have to believe me. You never know what the Mother Superior is going to get in her head next.”
“Next?” I ask, alarmed.
“Sometimes, to Sister Zyta’s great dismay, she brings some student into the congregation, taking her for her daughter who was murdered in the camp.”
“I’m not afraid of her.”
“I saw that today, how you don’t fear her. You try to play the role of Anula especially for the Mother Superior, Wioletta, you’re always going to the reading room and looking through the magazines in the archives so you can really get into that world, but it takes its toll on you emotionally. That’s not going to turn out well for you at all, okay? You need to get your things in order and escape, okay? Don’t drink those herbs the Mother Superior brews for you every day. Do you understand?”
“But …”
“You almost fainted today in the refectory. Listen carefully to what I’m about to say. About two years ago your room was occupied by Zuzanna from Poraj. The Mother Superior also made her drink the same herbal concoctions.”
“What happened to her?”
“We took her away in the night.”
“Took her where?”
“The hospital in Tysiąclecie.”
“Jesus!”
“Do you have someplace to go?”
“Not really.”
“Family, friends?”
“There is a person, a man, older than me, but he isn’t really living in Częstochowa on a full-time basis …” I clear my throat.
“My cousin works at the boarding house for Slowacki High School, on Kosciuszko Avenue. Her name is Malgorzata. As soon as you’re ready, pack your things, go to her and use my name. I don’t think there will be any problem with you staying there for a couple of weeks. And here are the keys to the congregation. I made copies yesterday, just in case. The bigger one opens the gate, and the smaller ones open the entrance,” she says and slams the furnace shut. Darkness pulsates in the boiler room and under our eyelids.
THE BUS TICKETS GO UP on the first of October. I don’t buy the monthly pass, and almost every day I walk back to my accommodations with the sisters, though without the same enthusiasm I had at first. “Every day takes just a little more from me,” I jot down in my diary, and I really do get thinner quick, and paler, and have frequent dizzy spells.
At eleven o’clock Piotrek calls at reception and invites me out to the last showing at the movie theater. We meet at three on the Kwadraty, in front of the Megamart, and after eating pierogi ruskie at U Matuli, which is filled with college students, visitors and half the over-sixty population of Częstochowa, we roam around the city plucking the seeds from a sunflower head.
Fall, doled out by the Energetyka clock, pierces with copper and gold the dirty blue between the tenement houses and lends the city softness. Posters of Goplana sitting on a Honda bike from Adam Hanuszkiewicz’s Balladyna dampen on the poles in front of the center for the promotion of culture, but Piotrek insists we go over onto Freedom to see Batman. When we leave the theater, Second Avenue has been taken over by a band of skinheads, thirty-strong, shouting Roman Dmowski slogans. We stand on the corner staring at this procession, our faces looking like we’ve been transported from Jasna Góra to Gotham City. Piotrek takes my hand and offers to escort me back to the convent, all the way. I say no. Night shrouds us in Bakelite, rolls up the Avenues. The lights of the banks, the pharmacies, the displays of the stores smolder in fog. We stop at the wooden gazebo at Staszic Park to have a little wine.
“You still running around with that old hippie?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“So he’s your man now, huh?”
“Come on.”
“Are we still playing this game? Or are you just pretending, to get your revenge?”
“Revenge? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you’d better go home.”
“You’d better go home, you’d better go home,” he mocks me. “Look at the little mommy.” He sits down beside me on the bench and rubs my back. “Sorry, I guess I’m a little irritable today.”
“A little?”
“Look at me, Wiola.” He takes my chin in his hand. “Have I really changed that much in the last few years?”
“What are you talking about?”
“After I moved from Myszków to Częstochowa I bulked up a little, started shaving my head, but I was sure you knew from the start who I was and that you were just kidding around, or else pretending.”
He passes me the wine. I drink straight from the bottle.
“From Myszków?”
“You really didn’t recognize me that first day at the registrar’s?” he asks in the calmest voice. “Then I’ll remind you.”
He wraps his arms around my waist and kisses me in such a way that I finally lose all control over myself. We lie down on the floor of the gazebo that smells of rotting bark. The larch needles sprinkled around poke into my back and thighs. I feel his cool touch under my denim skirt. Piotrek tears my tights off, putting his hand under my underwear, and although his touch is painful, maladroit, and far too impatient, I want it, I want him, I want.
“I don’t want to!” I cry and as I try to scramble up, I scrape my left palm across the rough surface of the floorboard. And a wound long since healed now makes itself known again. Displaced time gets found. Not a minute goes by before I have recalled every last detail.
I’m sixteen years old. The mobile soda fountains rasp around the village’s small squares. It’s a sunny day. I sit by some buckets on the little main square feverishly measuring out a half-liter container of fruit; the almondy acidic aftertaste of cherry still sits in my mouth. Beside me bustles my grandmother dressed in some five flowery skirts. On my palm, where I got a dirty splinter while picking cherries the day before, a blue streak has appeared. Suddenly Piotr, the boy I’d been going out with for a few weeks and with whom I had fallen in love, comes around the corner, accompanied by his elegant mother, a doctor. I wave to him, but he doesn’t return my greeting, just casts an indifferent gaze on me as though I am a stranger.
“That was you!” I say now. “Back then you just …”
Piotrek seizes the hem of my skirt, but I pull away from him in time, and with all the strength I have in my legs I run towards Saint Barbara Street.
At the congregation’s gate I take off my torn stockings, shake out the larch tree needles from my skirt, try to fix my hair, and with the copied key I received from Sister Anna, I enter into the convent. I pass the dozing porter, grab my clogs from where they’re hidden behind the plaster figure of Saint Barbara and go up to the attic, where, exhausted, I fall asleep almost imm
ediately.
At midnight the moon breaks free from a dark blue cloud, slides through the skylight into my room and sways under the ceiling like a helium balloon from which someone is slowly releasing the contents. When the November rain drums against the skylight, I take from my suitcase all the obituaries I always carry with me and set them out on the bed. Obituaries, the dead’s full-page IDs, which once in the form of a postcard invited the living to obsequies on behalf of the departed soul. Instead of a PESEL, corners pierced by thumbtacks, vanitas motifs: a skull, rotten or withered fruit, a clock, musical instruments, crosses leaning over under ribbons or palm leaves, the official designation with the letters RIP, the bars above and underneath the I present or absent, wreaths of ivy, pine, juniper, past adverbial participles beleaguered by the wind and rain, sentences in Times New Roman on the transport of the dead.
In the obituaries printed by missionary priests that I recently Xeroxed from Zygmunt Gloger’s encyclopedia, the corpse’s head is resting on its shins, festoons between the teeth; it’s framed by the figure of a snake with a cross made of a scythe and a shovel, and out from the eye sockets poke four ears of wheat. An angel with the face of Larry Flynt slumps against a sarcophagus.
My mom can’t stand my funereal hobby, which has obsessed me since high school, or to be more precise, since the time after my cousin’s wedding when I ceased to be a phillumenist and lost all desire to keep collecting matchbox labels.
“Have you completely lost your mind? Now it’s obituaries? But you’ll bring down a curse on our whole family!” she says, and as usual her words go in one ear and right out the other, and with the same zeal with which she burns them in the furnace, I keep bringing home new obituaries and hiding them in the detachable, specially hollowed out table leg where my grandpa once kept his souvenirs from real and imagined enemies: notes on the fates of the stoves he’s installed, information on the debtors who owed him for their stone, his button with the eagle in the crown, his army ID, and his Kennkarte.
In late October, when my mother, standing before the yawning proprietor of a funeral home, hesitates as to the design of her mother’s—my grandmother’s—death notice, I step in and suggest the one with the windmills and shells. In this way, in the waning days of the twentieth century, I link the stories of all the women in my family. Windmills, because their days were dictated by chaff-cutter and mill; shells, because they lived and died in the Jurassic Highland, where beneath the surface roared the sea, imprisoned in dolostone, limestone, marlstone.
“Stefania Lubas, née Walo, died the eighteenth of October, nineteen hundred and ninety-four, having survived seventy-nine years,” I read aloud, relishing the past participle clause “having survived.”
Stefcia was born in a hut by the forest at the start of the twentieth century, in a world completely dominated by men, and from earliest childhood she grew accustomed to domestic service and to farm chores, until at the age of sixteen she was given in marriage to a man she did not know, one Wladek, from Brudzowice. A woman who falls asleep at the kneading board, over the suds-filled wash tub, who faints during her period in the hayloft at the chaff cutter, in the pigsty in pig shit, who goes out behind the barn and buries the placenta and the remains of the babies she loses near the nettles after vinegar rinses and tansy infusions, launders in secret in the well or the stream the linen scraps that serve her as sanitary napkins, mends her husband’s and sons’ underpants, mending herself and her life by night. Will that girl be able to grow up into a strong, self-aware woman? If after giving birth to or losing six children she survives a few more decades, then maybe she will begin to get the occasional glimpse of who she is. For me, she is a symbol of twentieth-century womanhood, a person who had to play many different roles in her life, in order to keep going. Before she could become a beautiful enchantress, she began to be destroyed by hypothyroidism. I was able to get to know her during that period of transformation, and I observed her disappearing body, went with her to the forest, to the meadows by the quarries to gather herbs, and I sat down with her among the tracts of rye where she would hide her illegal poppy beds. As we traveled over fields she would tell me about the souls of unborn children that lived in the willows’ trunks, and she’d sing me ballads as I combed and cut the gray hair she was losing, then gathering it up in bands off the linoleum and throwing it into the stove.
She told me how one night “right around the middle of the war” she heard up on the hill a ruckus of armored cars. She got really scared that time. Wladek still hadn’t gotten back from the Stalag, and now she had to look out for the children by herself, as well as taking care of the farm and managing anything else that might come up. Now she told the children to hide in the root cellar and sit there and not make any noise. She looked out the window. A blinding light flooded the kitchen. She squinted. She heard enemy conversations in German in the hallway, an offensive of army boots on the hardwood floor. With all her strength she tried to keep from fainting.
An exhausted officer crossed the threshold of the room, sat down in a chair, pointed with his polished boot and his Mauser to some fresh bread covered in a starched cloth. She understood. She ran up to the table, laid the loaf on her breast as her mother had taught her, cut it in thick slices and spread butter over each. Never in her life had her hands shaken the way they did then. The German slid off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve, and gave her a long, hard look. Slowly he ate the bread, still watching her. The clock ticked. Shadows glided across the floor. The dog thrashed on his chain by the shed. Suddenly the officer stood and began to wander around the room, peering into the clay jug where the rye meal was souring. He went up to her and whispered something in German. Then he called his subordinates, gave some orders, and nodding farewell, quickly left the kitchen.
To her surprise, the Germans only took a sack of flour and three ducks from the coop, and then they left. Twenty minutes later, she went to see the children, wanting to make sure they were okay. She told them to spend the night in the barn, just in case. She herself lay down on the floor by the brooder and sobbed all night long. Only around dawn did her fear let go, and then she was able to breathe a sigh of relief.
She remembered the German officer’s short utterance, as though sensing that those foreign, hastily spoken words had some connection with the fact her life got spared. Just after the liberation she rode her bicycle to the local library and requested a dictionary. With the help of the librarian, who knew a little German, she translated the officer’s words, which came from Goethe’s Faust: “The eternal feminine draws us on high.”
“Traveling? What do you want that for? You’ll wander aimless like your father,” she would say whenever I asked her to lend me a little money so I could go somewhere. A woman who gave birth to five children at home on a straw mattress, never crossed the border of the Katowice province, walked the same paths for seventy years, yet knew the world better than any number of self-proclaimed Herodotuses. She would stand in the yard, put the base of her hand up to her forehead and gaze out at the horizon, instantly understanding when floods or storms or plagues of potato bugs would come or that some stranger was wandering in the night among the blackthorn bushes up on the hill. Trips filled her with fear because those of her nearest and dearest who left the village lost their lives, like her daughter, Anna, or came back only half-alive and broken, like her husband from the Stalag. And yet she always asked to be told about the Errant Rocks in the Central Sudetes, the Skull Chapel in Czermna, the mechanical nativity scene in Wambierzyce, the taste of the grapes from the Žilina region.
We would often go out into the fields together. She would gather herbs, while I would lie down on that ground covered in chicory and cheddar pinks, feather grass, Michaelmas-daisies, steppe cherries, mountain liveforevers and stemless carline thistles, staring into the sun. Past the horizon, the ocean swelled.
1996, THE NEW YEAR, has snuck up on me. The melodic voice of the radio host informs listeners of wounded Brits in Sarajevo, quintuple
ts in Opole, the upcoming finale of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity. In his New Year’s address, the new president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, proclaims the adoption of a new constitution the most pressing challenge of the coming year. Due to the flu epidemic, the Ministry of Health asks superintendents and local officials to extend holiday breaks.
Due to the hike in electricity and gas, the Mother Superior now has us turn off all the lights in the dormitories at nine o’clock at night. Until nine, I slide up and down the corridor, buffing the floor, feeling like newly appointed figure skating champion Chen Lu, my braid tied with a black bow. Suddenly the doors to the corridor open to reveal the Mother Superior. I have too much momentum to brake in time and skate straight into her. We fall in a heap together onto the gleaming floor. A moment later, the Mother Superior stands, brushes off her pleated skirt, and instead of chastening me as usual for my bad behavior, my clowning around, my wild swoops around objects of religious significance, she invites me into her room for tea.
I wipe my wet hands on the apron I’ve hung over the railing of the stairs and follow the Mother Superior to the second floor of the southern wing. She heats some water in an electric kettle, then brews the tea. We sit in silence for a long while, during which time she watches me very carefully, as though wanting to paint my portrait. A nun moth turns on a knot in an oak shelf and travels up the wall towards a table lamp that’s switched on.
“Have you seen how many Germans have been roving around?” Stanislawa begins at last, in a hushed croak.
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