Accommodations

by Wioletta Greg

  “You can’t just wander around the city like this at night. Fortunately we arrived in time.” She pokes a French tip into the tip of my nose.

  I want to say something, to say thank you, but I can’t manage to get a single word out. I just bow my head and glance at the two cream-colored towers, remember I’m sup posed to meet Kamil. Lest the next set of people should arrive, I turn and head quickly towards the apartment buildings.

  “Come and visit us sometime at the Vega, college kid!” Waldek shouts after me.

  “Stop by whenever you like, and forgive me,” Natka adds more quietly.

  “Mudaki,” repeats Sergey, staring at the dark gate, and then he adds something else, but his words are drowned out by the rumble of a passing train.

  KAMIL IS WAITING for me in front of the building, leaning on his Fiat.

  “Don’t tell me: they kept you late at work again,” he says in an irritated tone and hands me an orchid with a ripped ribbon.

  Instead of telling him everything, I stand on the step by the entrance to the building and kiss him so passionately he staggers and accidentally leans back against the rows of buzzers. The gruff voices of all the residents we’ve woken up come through the speaker. Delighted, we race up to the fourth floor. Inside the apartment I make him some Earl Grey tea and turn on the radio, where a love-struck Peggy Lee’s coming down with a fever: Sun lights up the daytime. Moon lights up the night. I dim the lights, leaving one sconce on, and I do something I’ve never done with him around before: I go to the bathroom to take a shower. I return after a quarter of an hour in pajamas, having oiled my body and perfumed it with the remnants of a Dolce Vita sample. As I pass I graze his back with my palm and then stand at the window, behind the curtain. The moon stands out from the darkness and hangs over the city round and glistening like a Phallus mushroom.

  “Today Saint Jerzy controls the wolves by playing the violin,” I whisper to myself, but Kamil hears it.

  “Did those sweet little sisters tell you all about the lives of the saints?” he asks. I turn toward him without coming out from behind the curtain.

  “It’s an old Hutsul legend.”

  “Oh is it?” He takes two steps forward like in a paso doble. “It’s a full moon today, does that mean the wolves will gobble it up?”

  I don’t respond. The tulle tickles my cheeks. I take two steps forward, like him, and stand in the striated light of the drive. Kamil lifts the curtain slowly like a bride’s veil, petting my head, resurrecting once more the sparks in my charged hair, and then he slips his hand under my pajama top and softly caresses my smaller, but more sensitive, left breast. I pull back. Maybe because of what happened at the Dwernicki Market I still need a few moments to absorb. I look down at my hands. Under my fingernails linger patches of white paint like cabbage butterfly wings. Fear pulses under the painful skin on my forearm, flushes my cheeks. The adrenaline heightens my arousal. I stand focused for a moment, my eyes gleaming like a panther readying itself for the attack, but I don’t know what to do. In the end he can’t take it anymore, he takes me by the hand and leads me to the table. He pulls down my pajama bottoms and sets me on the tabletop. In the darkness I can hear the sound of his belt buckle hit the wood. In the end the fear passes. I wrap my thighs around his waist and use my hand to help him enter me.

  And all I am aware of is a rhythm, a rhythm that casts my adolescent body into dark warm depths. His tongue is muscular and gentle. His pubic hair in tiny spirals and soft. The moles on his abdomen like the axis of the Big Dipper. The head of his penis satin and bittersweet to the taste. The way he looks at me, like a wild creature, penetrates me, absorbs me, gets deep inside of me, and in the last spasm becomes me.

  An hour later I’m lying naked under the blanket and can remember little of what’s just happened. It hurts inside, but not like I’d expected. The first time for those in love, I think, for those who’ve waited for each other so many months, is like rafting a fast-moving river or leaping right into a waterfall. “I love you,” he repeats as he takes me on the mattress, on the floor and against the wall. Afterwards he always holds me and kisses me firmly on the forehead. “There’s something in you I can’t quite name. That attracts me to you. Some sorts of strange quality, I think. You’re sometimes more animal than human. You’re like Krajewski’s Podolanka being brought up in the cellar, or Rousseau’s child of nature, you have an extra sense that on the one hand distances you from people, but on the other brings you closer to them and lets you see inside them. Wouldn’t you say?”

  He’s really laying it on thick, I think, and remember the day he came over for the first time in his Fiat, right after the fields had been blessed, when behind the miniature chapels languished broken elderberry and aspen branches tied with ribbons. It was a Sunday. He got out of his Fiat and slipped on the wet grass. Watching him through the broken window in the attic, I had burst out laughing.

  After my grandmother’s death, my grandfather broke down. He gave the impression of not really being there anymore, spending whole days just digging or wandering around in the fields. What was strange was that in spite of his mourning he took a liking to Kamil’s visits. Every week he’d change into his Sunday best, and pleased as punch someone would want to write down his little folk songs, he’d crack the door to his room with his poker and holler to me, “Kiddo, go and take a look where the road is, see if that city man’s a-comin’.”

  “When you quit coming to see us, I still went out to the road every day to check if your Fiat wasn’t up there on the hill,” I confess. “Now I think I must have picked Polish literature in Częstochowa just so I’d see you again.”

  “I wanted to keep coming.” He sits down on the mattress and gropes blindly for the lighter tossed onto the floor. “But your mother …”

  “My mother?” I interrupt him in surprise, and as the one with better night vision I pick up the lighter off the floor. The flint sparks. A little pale blue flame illuminates his face.

  “Towards the end of the summer she stopped me by the crossroads and gave me to understand I shouldn’t be coming around anymore because, she said, I’m too old and too married for you.”

  “Married?”

  I feel weak, so I lean against the cool wall. I try to breathe, but the air in the room sets and gets rough, scratching in my throat, getting stuck in my gullet. So that was why he was always going away to Katowice: he was going to see his wife, not his mother, I think.

  He notices I’m not feeling well and takes me out onto the balcony. We sit facing each other on plastic chairs. Kamil, glancing over at me again and again, smokes down his cigarette, ashing on the drive in front of the building. Flashes cut across the darkness and fall straight onto the concrete.

  We go back to the bedroom, where he tells me all about himself now, acquainting me with each of the different stages of his life: his childhood in a big Communist building like this one, college, his older sister who emigrated from Poland, his overworked mother, and finally his father, who was killed in 1981 in the pacification of the Wujek Coal Mine.

  Focused on the rhythm of his disjointed tale, I steal a glance at the window. Past the glass something is setting, seeming to enclose us forever inside this stuffy space that is filled with the smells of our bodies. Kamil lies next to me on the mattress, wrapped up in the sheets as though he’s just come out of a shroud. A smile lingers on his face. We’ve been meeting on weekends for weeks now. He brings me gifts: books, lace lingerie, jewelry, perfumes, brand-name clothing I try on and place in a box at the bottom of my wardrobe.

  He is ten years older than I am, I think, examining his face with surgical precision, but then again that is exactly what attracted me at first: the crow’s feet, the furrows around his nose, the slack skin of his neck and those first gray hairs amidst that otherwise dark brown mop. I’m sure if he were younger, I would never pay him any mind.

  Wild thoughts spoil the charm of our night together. I wonder if I could spend my whole life with him. Stari
ng at the wall, where between the slats of the bamboo flower stand a spider web trembles in the draft, to my surprise I start to think about Piotrek. So Kasia wasn’t Piotrek’s girlfriend, just his cousin? I recall the words of one of the skinheads who attacked me several weeks ago at the Wały Dwernickiego. Sorrow causes my stomach to cramp. I press my face into the pillow and allow my tears to soak into its case.

  When I have calmed down, I remember that summer day when my older female cousins from Siemianowice took me to the Fala watering hole in Chorzów.

  We spend half the day bathing in the warm water. We never say a word about the fact that nearby, in the park, at dawn, some unknown perpetrator murdered my mom’s older sister, Aunt Ania, as she was on her way to work. The newspapers have long since dropped the matter, but I am unable to forget.

  One day my mom gets a postcard from Canada signed with her sister’s name: “Andzia.” She gets pale, stares terrified for a moment at the panorama of Toronto and then tosses the postcard into the furnace. I want to hold her back, I reach my hand out, but the paper is already burning on the hot lumps of coke and curling up into a brown roll. My mom locks herself in the dining room, takes some Diazepam, and sobs on the sofa bed under a cover.

  “She was there, she was there in the morgue!” she screams. “I saw her, I identified her body.” There is a moment of doubt. “But what if it wasn’t her, what if it was just somebody who looked exactly like her? It was summer, it was so hot when those kids playing soccer found her in Silesia Park.”

  The sun pierces the basins of the pools, alters the smell and color of our young, chlorine-infused bodies, is scattered out across the orange tennis courts, undermines the towers with its heat, finally snags on the pole of the television tower.

  My cousin and I hold hands and leap into the water gleefully, like nothing even happened a few years ago, like we could trust the world again. An ice stream flows down, but instead of the coolness I expected, probably due to a short-lived thermal shock that deceives my synapses, I feel a painful burn on my skin.

  “ARE YOU THERE, GIRL? Are you there?” I hear my grandpa Wladek’s voice and look around the room. At the open window the curtain puffs up. ‘Sleepin’ outdoors, sleeping outdoors, a night outside with things to eat and things to eat but not a way to cook ’em,’ so we sang in September with the infantry regiment where I was a rifleman in the second company. Now nobody goes and sleeps outdoors. I knew right away it would turn out like this once we quit reaping with the scythe. The boys all came around, started working to drain the land, and then that little creek what went through our fields dried clear up, and the little holy spring did, too. And just look at them taking down the crosses, pretty soon there won’t be nowhere to get the fields blessed. Who even goes and gets their fields blessed nowadays? Young people today are stuff and nonsense. When the wheat would break out come May, darlin’, remember how that’d look? Hektary would be waves of it. Fields like a sheet would flow in the May breeze, and a person would be lifted up on it, and all the weight would fall clear of his heart. And at the end of the month we’d put the crosses up. Made from lilac branches and alder altars. The womenfolk would bring the vestments and the flowers and the ribbons, but it wasn’t ever about those adornments for us, not really. It was something greater. A person would sow the fields, and sleep in the fields, and then he’d bless the fields—now he mows the chapel down instead. That’s all gone the way of the dodo now. Devil’s cropped up in the quarries, mangled up Hektary. Nightmares is the only dreams. Boboks orbiting around in them. You know I got all the way over to Sarni Stok, over to Swinice, Kozieglówki, and now they told me that ain’t Sarni Stok, but Rzeniszanka by the map, but I got a different map in my head, you know, girl? I can find my way anywhere with my eyes closed. Where I’m going now, girl, I don’t need a map. And it’s time for me to go, I suppose. My bones ache, my soul aches. I just come out a minute, just to have a little talk with you, and see the fields. Over there, in the garden under the window a lupine used to flower, and in that corner there was a pear tree, and over there, in those blackthorn bushes your papa hid from the militia. Uff! And right here I put piles of stone, and there was an orchard, which isn’t there no more because a storm took it, but I see it, because when a person really looks, then he sees everything. We’re chaff, chaff, understand? In a beam of light that trickles down into a dark barn through an eye in a board.

  So go on, girl. May you be blessed with fortune, health, may you be rich in wheat and peas, not only in the summertime, but even in winter may it be sublime.

  AS THE BIRDS BEGIN to chatter I awake exhausted, since on my last night in my studio in the development on Lelewel, a few days after separating from Kamil, I was unable to sleep, and then I tossed and turned in my sheets until nine, recalling all those years spent in Częstochowa, day by day, minute by minute, Natka Roszenko, Alex, Sergei, Ludmila, Waldek, whom I still choose to think of as a storyteller and property manager, Mother Stanislawa, Sister Zyta, and above all Piotrek and Sister Anna, whom I miss the most.

  Did all this really happen? Over the course of three years, from the day I got off at the train station, I have lived like a pupa bound up in its chrysalis; I have carried my suitcase down a road I’ve let others determine for me, choosing roles for me to play, giving me direction.

  I set an envelope with my last month’s rent beside the sugar bowl behind the glass of the cupboard, I pick up the phone and ask for the special price to the train station, and then I go out and into the bathroom to wash up and get ready. I look in the mirror. My lips are swollen, my cheeks scraped up by stubble, darkening hickeys on my neck. Kamil has given me back the body I had always chosen to forget before. Even though it’s been several months since what happened at the Dwernicki Market, my left forearm is still sore. The moon on the edges of the mirror dictates the last score. The water from the tap drips rhythmically: drip, drip, Caprice in A Minor. Without a doubt Saint Jerzy is playing that melody of Paganini’s today. The invisible instruments seize at their strings. The violin music has reached me, but I don’t want to listen to it closely, give in to it or even hum its melody.

  I press my hands hard against the cold enamel, and then I scream—tentative at first, like a frightened child lost in the woods, crying out for her mother, terrified, but then louder and louder, until finally it’s so loud the whole building can hear me, and all three Avenues and Jasna Góra combined.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The citation on page 33 comes from Urania, Nr 3 (65), June 1939 , “The Structure of the Milky Way According to Lindblad’s Theory,” by Dr. W. Iwanowska, of Vilnius.

  WIOLETTA GREG is a Polish writer based in the UK. Between 1998–2012 she published six poetry volumes, as well as a novel, Swallowing Mercury, which spans her childhood and her experience of growing up in Communist Poland and was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her works have been translated into seven languages.

  JENNIFER CROFT is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, Tin House, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. Her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

  Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities. Visit us online to learn more about our forthcoming titles, events, and opportunities to support our mission.

  TRANSITBOOKS.ORG

 

 

 
scale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share