Accommodations

by Wioletta Greg

  I finish my tea, which tastes bitter, like wormwood, and I agree with her, thinking she has in mind the frequent pilgrims who come from Germany.

  I play with the deer-patterned wool blanket that covers my armchair and, yawning, I look over at the volumes displayed on the oak bookcase.

  “Remember how they dragged him out of the apartment in September?”

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  “I think so,” I say reluctantly, having been instructed that during flare-ups of the Mother Superior’s illness the best response is silence or agreement.

  “I didn’t tell you, but I sent you to Aunt Zyta then, and I went with that Wehrmacht officer who was a Silesian and spoke good Polish. Remember?”

  “I …”

  “I let it happen, and then I begged him to—I don’t know what. The Germans were already herding them over to the gathering point on Mirowska. They searched them there and marched them out again, to the jail over in Zawodzie, but the jail was so full already they couldn’t fit another soul. I ran down Warszawska between burning buildings to Cathedral Square! I saw them, your father and your uncle. They were all standing there. After about ten minutes Bishop Wróblewski came, the Germans had summoned him, and he opened up the cathedral. I hid at the gate. My heart was pounding. I saw the thrilled faces of those Germans, and I just knew they’d open fire. And the machine guns started rattling, and that was the end. Oh God, they didn’t make into the cathedral …”

  I turn towards the window, where the wind is tearing at the branches of the pine tree and knocking yellowed needles onto the sill. That wind again, I think, remembering the night I first met Mother Stanislawa on New Year’s Eve at the train station. Anxiously I set my teacup down on the little table and make as if to leave. The Mother Superior stands up, too, and blocks my path, knocking over the lamp, which scatters streaks of light from the floor up along the pale walls, transforming the room into the cabin of a ship on choppy waters. Then she stuns me by kneeling beside the bed and pulling out from under it a dusty trunk.

  “Pack your things, Anula!” she orders me. “You have to get out of here as fast as you can! They’ll be here any minute!” She opens drawers and throws their contents onto the floor: slips, kerchiefs, a pilled serdak, silk stockings riddled with runs, Ultrasol cream, Elida soap, a wooden brush with gray hairs in it. And instead of holding her back or arguing with her or even just running out of the room, I help her pack the things into the trunk. After letting her confuse me with her daughter who was sent to the gas chamber by Margot Kunz at Ravensbrück, I feel it’s too late now. Our fates have been intertwined since the night we met at the station, and in some sense, I have become Anula: I respond to her name, I do my hair as she did, with the part in the middle, I wear her gold cameo ring, I dress in her skirt and blouse, and every day I absorb more of the smell of those clothes. Yes, I want to be Anula, have dresses tailor-made for me at Foltynski’s, put on patent leather shoes and silk stockings and sip tea out of a porcelain cup come evening, read The Częstochowa Dispatch and Illustrated Weekly, attend my classes at the Juliusz Slowacki School for Girls, dress up as Queen Jadwiga or an elf to take part in the carnival parade down the Avenues with my mother and father and uncle and Aunt Zyta, see The Rage of Paris with Danielle Darrieux at the Luna Theater, secretly go to a palm reader who lives in a trailer opposite the fire brigade and hear how based on a broken life line, knots in my heart line and changes of direction in my fate line she predicts a passionate love for an older man, tells me tales of a long life and overseas travels; I want to go on excursions to glassworks like Anula, go to Krynica, Rabka, to the rocks just over at Olsztyn, to the Zofia Villa that belongs to the administrators of my school and that sits at the base of the ruins of the Olsztyn Castle, near the road; I want to be shown around Abraham’s on Nadrzeczna and try on all the most fashionable hats, to go for tea at the Grand Café, to be a pampered young lady from a good home and in the trolley on the way to the Wielunski Market to snuggle up to my lavender-scented mother.

  “You’ll go to Olsztyn now, to Aunt Bronka.”

  The Mother Superior looks around the room as though searching for a passageway to another era, when announcements from Der Stadthauptmann hung over the walls, and Częstochowa was crossed by Adolf-Hitler-Allee, while the Ration Card Sales Bureau was located at Dąbrowski 11, and the Adolf & Eduard Holler Freight Forwarding Company could ensure a quick and painless customs clearance, as well as storage, insurance, regular transport, and group wagons.

  “Do you remember her address?”

  “I don’t think I do,” I answer with a voice that is no longer my own.

  “That’s all right. I’ll put it down on this paper for you … or perhaps not, that would be unwise in times like these. You’ll have to learn it by heart. Repeat after me …”

  “Stasia? Stasia, what the hell are you doing to her?” says Zyta in her hoarse voice, from the other side of the door.

  “Get out of here!” screams the Mother Superior and runs to the door to close the latch. But Sister Zyta manages to shove her way inside the room.

  “You’re always interfering. You were supposed to not let me see you with that pharmacist husband of yours. He’s the one who denounced Anula. Is that not right?”

  “How can you say that? After what he did for you both? Do you no longer remember how you and I contracted typhoid fever in forty-three? Who was it who took care of Anula then? Who was the one who kept on bringing you your soup? Hunh?”

  “Go away!”

  “But I’m her godmother, for heaven’s sake. And if you must know, it was Sapota who reported her to the Gestapo, not my Stefan,” she says artificially, as though reciting an old and long-rehearsed speech.

  “Sapota? Wiesiek Sapota? Come on, we were in school together. You told me he was shot over by the railroad tracks.” She sits down on her bed and keeps talking, but her words get drowned out by an ambulance approaching. “They’re already here. It’s too late!”

  “We have to get Anula off to Aunt Bronka’s in the country right away.”

  “But how, by God? Father sold the automobile back before the war.”

  “I hired a wagoner. He’s waiting out front. You stay here, and I’ll take Anula out.”

  Time in the room condenses, drips viscous as the candles in the nearby cathedral. Sister Zyta grabs me by the wrist with her bony fingers and drags me toward the door. I wrench myself out of her grasp and go to the Mother Superior and kiss her hand.

  “You take care, child.” She sniffs, then shudders as though waking up suddenly from a deep sleep and landing in another dimension of time; holding a pillow to her breast, she rocks it, humming, “Oh little star, something glimmered when I glimpsed the world. Why is it, little star, your beam has dimmed?”

  I stride obediently after Sister Zyta, first down the stairs, into the vestibule, where in the corner an impeccably packed suitcase awaits me. Sister Zyta pulls harder on her invisible strings, leading me like a marionette out into the courtyard, down the sidewalk along the wall, straight to the iron gate.

  “Hand me your keys!”

  I reach into my skirt pocket and give her my key clip with the matryoshka on it. “Don’t you come around her again, you hear me?” She squeezes a wad of cash into my hand. “It’ll be better that way,” she adds, not looking me in the eye. “Do you understand? May God be with you, child,” she says, a little more gently, with tears in her eyes, and turning on her heel, she hurries away.

  I want to run after her, shout, give back the money and above all say goodbye to Sister Anna, whose face flashes in the second-floor window of the dormitory, but the iron gate has already slammed behind me, shutting me out.

  3.

  Hey, Sleeping Beauty

  MY CLOGS CLATTER down the pavement. Rydzyk peeks out from my coat pocket. In front of the train station, which has suddenly grown a turret in the shape of a locomotive, a crowd has gathered, and I hear the clatter of horses’ hooves, the
melodies of barrel organs, shouts from carriage drivers and paperboys:

  “Get your National Lottery tickets at the Antoni Eger Lottery Office, fourteen First Ave!” hollers a boy dressed in a patched-up double-breasted coat. “Regular number of big winners!”

  “Unprecedented Czech assault on Polish territory! The battle for Olza rages on. Will England surrender the colonies to Deutschland? Read The Częstochowa Dispatch. Just ten groszy!”

  I pick up a paper off a bench: October 2, 1938. The Feast of the Guardian Angels. Sunday. Sunrise 5:44 am. Sunset 5:22 pm.

  I read that the Dwernicki Walls are to be covered in slag from the railway bridge on. Several electric lamps will be added to the streets so that the darkness that’s prevailed thus far does not give rise to “unsavory practices.” A moment later I pass a strange procession of local officials marching stiff as mannequins, scarcely shuffling their feet, only pausing so that the shoe-shiners can polish their slippers with their rags. An orchestra of tram conductors accompanies. Red and white pennants flutter on poles with sirens carved upon their tops. They’re headed straight for the Cathedral of Our Lady in Jasna Góra. I follow them as though hypnotized and listen as they cheer for President Ignacy Moscicki and Marshal Śmigły-Rydz.

  Begging pilgrims sit along the wall with signs around their necks. Next to a covered cart crouches a vendor woman wearing a black kerchief on her head who tries to force a grayish yellow quarter of soap that reeks of tallow and reads Schicht into my hand. At the odor of decaying corpses I shudder and run off to the gate.

  An hour goes by. Now the walls display announcements from the fourth of November, nineteen thirty-nine:

  With the establishment of the General Government, following the introduction of military protection of Polish areas under German supervision, the historical episode brought on by the blind government clique of the former Polish nation as well as the hypocritical insurgents in England may now be considered concluded. German army divisions have restored order to the Polish lands. A renewed threat to European peace by means of unjustifiable demands for a state entity that shall never rear its ugly head again …

  An hour later, standing at an exhibit of devotional articles, I stare at crucifixes, lamps and carpets. Between January and February of forty-three suddenly everything is put up for sale—cheap, one-time, instant—light coats, fur coats, broadtail fur coats, silver fox coats, otter collars, grand pianos, stallions, two nickel-plated chandeliers, table lamps and an electric teapot, a pot and a stove, a modern imported piano, a Singer sewing machine, a candy maker and its drum, knee-high boots, a winter coat with a muff for a young girl, a photographic camera, a brown men’s hat, a women’s mannequin, a child’s fur, a cabbage barrel, an infant child, for free, for keeps (male).

  I walk through Staszic Park; I pass wooden rows of chairs that bow before the monastery; I stop for a moment at the Lubomirski Gate and then head straight into the cloister, where renovations are underway. Under a low ceiling hangs a yellow sign that says: “Attention! Workers overhead.”

  “WANNA LOOK WHERE you’re going, slut?” At the door to the McDonald’s on Freedom Avenue a pimply blond wearing a striped uniform pops up, then tries to pick up the folder I’ve knocked out of his hands while racing down the sidewalk. But then the blond says, “Wiolka? Wiolka Rogala? It’s been ages. Barely recognized you, you’ve gotten so thin you’re just skin and bones now. I think the last time I saw you was that night you left me out to dry at that bus stop by the main road, but I don’t hold a grudge, I don’t hold grudges …”

  He glances in surprise at my clogs, which I forgot to take off after Sister Zyta threw me out of the convent, and when Rydzyk peeks out of my coat pocket, he makes a face and takes a slight step back. I want to explain to him, but the sidewalk is still swaying, and then I fall down right onto the folder with the colorful hamburger.

  “Elder Lubush?” I mumble. “Did you read the General Government’s proclamation? Were you sent here in punishment, as well?”

  “What punishment, girl? Sent me where? What are you talking about? I got myself this job.” He examines me for a moment. “You’ve changed, friend … I can’t believe you, drugged out with a suitcase and a rat, wandering around town? Where’d you get him from? You break into the zoo?”

  “Drugged? Me?”

  “Oh, come on. It’s pretty obvious. What are you even doing here?”

  “Majoring in philology.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “Oh my god, is it night already?”

  “Man, what a major. I’d never have thought you’d become the old Polish schoolmarm.”

  “Just kind of happened that way I guess.”

  “You’re not looking for work, are you? We need a hostess for the lobby.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, a hostess, like a general waitress,” he says in an impatient tone. “The kind that gives out balloons, mops the floor, picks up the cake from the bakery for the clients’ birthdays, wipes off the tables and the trays. That’s basically what it entails.”

  “Could I come in just in the evenings?”

  “Sure.”

  “That would be great. Ever since my grandma died, it’s been hard to stay afloat in the big city.”

  “Let’s go talk to the boss about it. She’s real laid-back. She’ll hire you for sure.”

  Suddenly my body starts to itch as though someone has dropped some turnips down my blouse. My fingertips get numb. Very carefully, I set Rydzyk down on a gleaming tabletop. The lamps along Freedom Avenue are coming undone from their posts; they clatter onto the asphalt and, like billiard balls, roll down the tram tracks.

  “Shoot, Lajbos, where’re you running off to? You’ll be swallowed up by bright dark nebulae. Don’t go that way, brother,” I mumble, covering my eyes with a hand because the headlights of oncoming traffic are hurting me. “You know, my name is actually Anula. In the gas chamber I went towards the light,” I tell him, reciting my own poem. “At the timber yard the scent of resin drifts as I play hide and seek with my mother …”

  “Aw, man, you’re so fucked up,” whispers a shaken Lajbos, and just in case, he shuts the door to the restaurant. “Did you just go out because of Saturday? Maybe somebody slipped you something, in your drin, in, in, in …”

  Snippets of his words seem to make their way to me from some vast distance; the film breaks off.

  “ARE YOU THERE?” I hear the voice of Sister Anna, who is standing next to me in the boiler room and passing me dry stalks to burn.

  “Here!” I respond emphatically, as if to prove my presence to myself. “I think I’ve been poisoned, Sister, I feel really weak, I can’t stand up anymore.”

  I need to get some fresh air, I go up to the little window and stand in the glow of the late afternoon sun, letting the light play out across the surface of my face.

  “Is she asleep?” says someone. I try to open my eyes, but I can’t. My lids are too heavy, maybe glued.

  “Yeah, she’s asleep. This is that daughter of that Zosia from Hektary. You guys remember the beautiful Zosia, the one half the village was in love with?”

  “But the one who loved her the most was Gienek the Combine Driver. Big dumb teddy bear.”

  “Okay, but what’s the girl doing here, with you?”

  “Well, she’s sleeping, and she’s raving about being some Anula. I didn’t think she was going to wake up again, to be honest. Jacus brought her over three days ago in a taxi. She was in a terrible state. Filthy, highly agitated.

  “What was wrong with her?”

  “I think some hooligans must have drugged her, but to be honest I don’t know what happened. When Jacus found her, she was roving the city by herself.”

  “My God, such times. You can’t even leave your house anymore—we used to walk around on our own all the time, go to carnival.”

  “Have you ever seen somebody sleep uninterrupted for three days, Józefka?”

  “My dad slept like that
when he came back from the war, but he really didn’t ever wake up again after that.”

  “Well don’t despair. She’s young. She’ll come out of it.”

  “You think I should call a doctor?”

  “Eh, I don’t think you need to. Her cheeks are pretty pink. Let’s just give her some milk.”

  “Good point. Milk detoxifies.”

  “Did she just move her eyes a little?”

  I open my eyes. Above me stand the three Moirai. The first is the seller of the Schicht soap from my dream. The second is Jadzia Nowak, Elder Lajbos’s aunt, and the third and youngest resembles that snack bar attendant from the train station.

  As I stand on the platform for the tram I take daily from Aunt Jadzia’s apartment to school, I eavesdrop on my fellow passengers, whose conversations at daybreak are like the slight scrape along the ground of an apple peel. Sleepy, they move their lips, but only their hands really converse; in an odd sequence of gestures they clutch at the air or grasp onto metal, rocking against the railings like tissue paper flowers on their wires. The spring morning is already swollen with light. I look around the tram, where in an instant everything freezes mid-motion, in its smell, in its shape, as though I’d just hit pause. Staring into reflections of faces, deformed in the dirty panes covered in advertisements and announcements, I think about how someday people will learn to bend space-time, travel from space station to space station, from one specular portal to the next.

  When after my classes I’m returning to the North district, Professor Brankowski unexpectedly appears at the tram door, takes the empty seat beside me.

  “Well, well, who do we have here. Greetings, Sleeping Beauty.” He doffs his cap, then falls silent, and like a Janus statue from the island of Boa stares at the other passengers in disgust. Dressed in his usual moth-eaten tweed jacket, white gloves and plastic glasses from a street vendor, he looks like a kind of moth-man heading to a costume party.