Swallowing Mercury

by Wioletta Greg

  After a riveting game of cabbage-head football, which was won by the bridegroom’s team, Romuś, sweating like a pig, wiped his forehead with his snotty chequered handkerchief, ate a chicken thigh, drank three rounds and went to the loo without his jacket. I was reaching into the inner pocket for his Lajkonik matchbox when he suddenly sprang out of nowhere right in front of me. Cold pigs’ trotters quivered on a plate. Grapes fell into the sauce boat. Romuś grabbed my hand and squeezed it so tight that I almost passed out.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ he hissed, pulling me towards the exit.

  We stopped behind the fire station. I was so scared I grabbed hold of the lightning conductor, just in case. A flabby balloon was dangling over my head. My bun, which I had misted with hairspray, was slowly unravelling in the damp air.

  ‘What are you gonna say now, you crafty little thief? You wanted to nick my wallet, eh?’ He leaned down and I smelled the stench of half-digested vodka.

  ‘No, not at all, I just wanted to see your Orbis matchbox label. I swear.’

  ‘What? What label? Don’t bullshit me. I’m not that drunk.’

  ‘No, Romuś, honestly, I collect matchbox labels. Ask anyone.’

  A long line of guests spilled out of the building, and one of Romuś’s drunken friends started yelling at the top of his voice, ‘A couple in love! A couple in love!’ Romuś gave him a friendly wave.

  ‘My car’s over there.’ He pointed at the maroon Fiat 126p by the fence. ‘If you’re not there in fifteen minutes, I’ll tell everyone at the after-party tomorrow that you tried to nick my wallet.’

  That was too much. I burst into the fire station to grab my handbag, announced to my parents that I had got food poisoning from the cabbage stew and, without waiting for their reply, ran past drunk Uncle Lolek, purple-permed Aunt Salomea and the waitresses carrying trays of steaming tripe. I headed for the back of the building, where I knew the firemen had a little storage room. I pushed aside helmets and dusty Volunteer Fire Service banners to get to the window, jumped out onto a manhole cover and ran straight home across a patch of beets in my high heels.

  I left the muddy shoes in the hallway, lit the stove, pulled out my shoebox of labels from the cupboard and pushed apart the stove lids. I decided I had to put an end to these phillumenic games once and for all before they turned me into a nervous wreck. I threw the labels one by one into the fire and watched with strange satisfaction as they burned: the thirtieth anniversary of the Polish People’s Republic, national censuses, anniversaries of the Volunteer Fire Service, Polish–Soviet friendship months, War on Tuberculosis days, adverts for Zefir king-size menthol cigarettes, Ruch newsagents, Presto fly killer, Wólczanka shirts and Marago coffee, collections of Polish fish, mushrooms and flowers ordered specially from the woman at the corner shop in Wojsławice. The smell of burnt cardboard and wood woke up my grandmother, who popped her head into the room. Seeing her, I calmed down a bit and put the remainder of the collection back in its shoebox. I lay down on the sofa in my crumpled dress next to the cat and fell asleep.

  Dolce Vita

  I HAND-WASHED THE ONLY JEANS I OWNED, A PAIR of Mawins which my father had bought for me from a pedlar, and hung them on the stovepipe to dry. Water dripped rhythmically from the trousers onto the floor, spreading into a blue puddle. I decided to take advantage of the fact that everybody had gone to Aunt Salomea’s to celebrate her name day: I built a makeshift screen out of the chairs and the bedspread, poured water from the cauldron into a plastic tub and started to bathe. Steam scented with the fragrance of Familijny shampoo drifted up towards the soot-covered ceiling and condensed on the golden face of the Black Madonna.

  I could hardly wait for the following day, when I’d cycle over to Natka Roszenko’s house, which was famous throughout the whole region. Actually, it wasn’t Natka’s house; it belonged to Cynga, who – according to Natka – had gone for a few months to East Germany on business.

  The next day after lunch, I announced to my mother that I was taking my bike to Natka’s. She barred my way to the barn, where I kept my bicycle.

  ‘You’re not going! How shameful! Everyone in the village knows what an oddball she is.’

  ‘I am going. You go there yourself on Sundays to buy cigarettes and Hungarian tops.’

  There was silence. Taken aback, my mother let me pass.

  ‘Fine, go ahead, if you’re so grown-up – but don’t come crying to me later!’ she yelled after me angrily, shaking her fist.

  I turned from our dirt drive onto the cobbled road, then onto the main road, where my bike chain kept falling off and I got covered in grease up to my elbows pulling it back on.

  I stopped in front of a two-storey villa on the main street of Markowice. The façade, covered with broken mirror shards, was reflecting the afternoon sun, and the house looked like an enormous rippling aquarium.

  ‘Come in, come in! I have new labels for you!’ Natka shouted from the half-open window of the kitchen.

  I wiped my grease-smeared arms on a cleaning rag drying on the radiator, took off my plimsolls in the hallway, entered the bright sitting room and sat down on a cream leather sofa. The walls were decorated with strange rugs and a picture of an angel dissolving in red and gold paint.

  ‘That’s Pryjma-Tamioła,’ said Natka, emerging out of the kitchen dressed in black jeans, a studded belt and a red top, and smelling of tomato and basil spaghetti.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That painting – it’s by Roksolana Pryjma-Tamioła from Lviv.’

  ‘Oh, cool. Where did you learn to cook like this?’

  ‘I met an Italian guy at the Baboon who came many times to see me when Cynga wasn’t home,’ she laughed. ‘This Italian showed me how to boil the pastas.’

  Natka treated us to at least two bottles of Sophia wine. We were pretty sloshed when she leaned over to remove a speck of black olive from the corner of my mouth.

  ‘I think I’m going to head home.’

  ‘Why in such a hurry? You want to go pedalling that old machine at this time in the night? Why don’t you stay to morning. We can watch videos.’ Instead of replying, I burped loudly. ‘Or maybe you want something else?’ She opened the drinks cabinet, revealing fanciful bottles of alcohol and a pile of sweets.

  ‘Go on, pick a box of chocolates, don’t be shy.’ She touched my hair and French-kissed me. I stood dumbstruck on the colourful mat.

  ‘Your skin is dry. Come on, I show you how to fix it.’

  Swaying, Natka led me to the bathroom. She staggered on the slippery floor.

  ‘You find lavender oil on the shelf. Go on, have a bath, don’t be shy. You have to rub it into damp skin.’ She smiled and left the bathroom.

  I looked around. Everything was sparkling clean. The walls were covered with cream tiles from floor to ceiling. I opened the wall cabinet. Apart from the indigo bottle of Pani Walewska, everything was unfamiliar: packages available only at a Pewex shop, with names like Dior and Lancôme. A perfume bottle labelled ‘Dolce Vita’ which looked like a crystal sugar bowl caught my attention. I sprayed my wrist. The scent of vanilla cupcakes and summer filled the room.

  I took off my jeans without thinking and threw them on top of the washing machine. Drunk, I got into the bathtub – or rather fell into the water.

  ‘I think I’m going to puke,’ I muttered to myself.

  ‘You called me, Wioluś?’ I heard from behind the door of the bathroom. ‘Can I come in? It’s got cold in the house.’

  I didn’t reply. A moment later, Natka was sitting opposite me in the tub, naked. I felt her prickly, shaved groin against my thigh. In the water, the slender misproportioned body with small crimson nipples looked like a beetle with an elongated abdomen which I used to see sometimes by the edge of the pond but whose name I couldn’t remember. It had two red spots on its wings. And that’s when something struck me – a strange memory of a stormy day, visions of spiders jumping out from behind paintings. My head spun. Little ducks glued to the tiles turned int
o yellow gnomes and reached out their vile, wart-covered paws towards me. I jumped out of the bathtub like a scalded cat, threw on my clothes and ran out of the villa without saying goodbye.

  Masters of Scrap

  IN EARLY JUNE 1989, MY BREASTS GREW AND THE boys in my class began to tease me. One day, Older Lajboś sat down behind me in music and started snapping my bra. We were in the middle of playing ‘The Girls from Opole’ on glockenspiels. On la, I prayed for the stupid lesson to end at last; on sol, the mallet fell out of my hand and the pre-war tile stove in the classroom collapsed.

  When I got home, I told my grandfather about the stove incident. Without saying a word, he went up to the wardrobe, poked in the keyhole with a piece of bent wire, opened the creaky door, took a little notebook out of a winter coat and put a cross in a chart next to the year 1934.

  ‘That stove’s given up the ghost, but it was first-class work. Show me another stove in Hektary that’s lasted so long without asphyxiating anybody.’

  My grandfather was a tile-stove builder, among other things, and he was recording the history of all the stoves he had ever built. In St Anthony’s parish alone, he’d installed more than anyone could count.

  That evening, he led me out into a field. ‘You see the smoke from those chimneys?’ He pointed with a dry stick. ‘They’re mine. I’m keeping an eye on them. In the evenings, I come and stand on the hill to watch how they’re doing and see if the smoke is rising evenly up to the clouds.’

  After the tile stove in our classroom collapsed, my grandfather’s handiwork was carted off piece by piece in a wheelbarrow and dumped behind the rubbish bins. The next day, all the antique tiles had vanished, leaving yellow imprints in the grass. At school, work began on a central heating system and classes had to be combined. During one lunch break, the headmistress assembled all of us in front of the building and read out a report titled ‘A Thousand Schools for the Thousand Years of the Polish State’, which put even the caretaker to sleep. When she had finished, she ordered the chair of the student council to establish a Student Society for the Construction of Central Heating, with the aim of organising a collection of scrap metal by the end of the school year. Then she looked at her watch, turned on her heel and went back to her office.

  A few days later, the chair of the student council divided us into three groups and announced that the team which collected the most scrap would get to go on a trip to Warsaw. I was assigned to Hektary, together with the Lajboś brothers, Big Witek and Justyna. For starters, each of us managed to drag in some metal junk from home. I carried off three bicycle frames and a mudguard from the shed belonging to Uncle Lolek, who did nothing all day apart from smoking his pipe, breeding coypus and training pigeons, but when it turned out that our scrap pile was the smallest, we held a secret meeting in our hideaway in a pile of breeze blocks and came up with plan B. We marked potential targets on a specially drawn-up map of Hektary. We began by exploring barns and attics and looking in every shed, shack and pit, then we widened our search to areas beyond the priest’s field: Świnica, Kolonia, Sarnia and Boży Stok.

  Even though the end of the school year was fast approaching, the quest for scrap absorbed us utterly. Our parents said we’d gone off our heads and they kept well clear of us. I dreamt about scrap at night: it beckoned to me from old German bunkers near Zendek, from within dugouts, storage clamps and the nearby yew reserve. I started noticing objects which had never before interested me in the least. Thresher wheels, anchor plates, screws, mudguards, old cables and pipes all drew me like a magnet. After a while, we completely lost our minds: we would wander around construction sites, limestone quarries, vacant buildings and state-owned farms, looking into every hole.

  One night, we somehow managed to cross the Rzeniszanka between Świnica and Hektary with a few large pieces of sheet metal, which we hid in the reeds. Tired, soaked and with splinters under our nails, we were walking home slowly, leaving wet footprints on the cobbled road. All of a sudden, a Dobermann jumped out from the gate next to the headmistress’s villa, reared up in front of us like the hound of the Baskervilles and clamped its teeth onto Younger Lajboś’s trouser leg. I was afraid it would go for his throat next, so without thinking I tore a mouldered board out of the fence and hit the beast on its black rump. The dog leaped towards me, growled and showed its brown gums. Just at that moment, the porch light came on and the headmistress appeared in her full glory, in a pink dressing gown and slippers, with rollers in her hair.

  ‘Trinket!’ she yelled. ‘Trinket, come here!’

  The dog wagged its tail amiably, crawled back through a gap in the fence and scampered off into the yard. We breathed a sigh of relief. In recognition of my heroic deed, the boys gave me a badge carved out of bark and a huge sunflower head from the state-owned farm.

  Two weeks passed. We met in our hideaway in the pile of breeze blocks. Big Witek stuck a Donald Duck bubblegum comic to his forehead and announced that we had less scrap than the Wojsławice team and that we’d have to go to Balwierka’s house.

  ‘Have you gone nuts?’ said Justyna. ‘That place is haunted.’

  ‘It can’t be haunted as long as she’s alive. You’re all just scaredy cats, that’s all,’ Big Witek declared.

  ‘I’m willing to bet there’s no scrap in that house,’ Older Lajboś said.

  ‘Okay, let’s bet. If we find even ten pounds, you’re going to jump into the septic tank.’

  ‘Fine. Wiolka, cut the bet,’ Older Lajboś said, turning to me.

  To keep the peace, I brought my hand down like a blade over their handshake, and we left our hideaway among the breeze blocks.

  At Balwierka’s house, water dripped from the ceiling, drumming out a march in a rusty basin. Medicine bottles stood on a night table by the bed. The linoleum and the carpet runner stank of valerian, urine and lye.

  ‘Hello. My grandmother Stefania sent me. Do you recognise me?’ I asked. I sat down on the edge of the bed, stirring up clouds of dust, which got caught in a light beam and swirled around lazily. The old woman nodded. ‘I’ve brought you something from Grandma.’ I handed her a paper bag full of biscuits. Balwierka took it and started eating greedily. When the bag was empty, she licked out the remains of the icing sugar, turned to face the wall, which was adorned with a linen embroidery of a lake and pink flamingos, and fell asleep.

  ‘Wiolka, what’s wrong with her?’ asked Younger Lajboś.

  ‘I don’t know. I think she’s fallen asleep,’ I answered sadly.

  ‘Well, if she survived being invaded by a Soviet tank, she’ll pull through just fine,’ Older Lajboś quipped.

  ‘Come on, let’s take a look in the cellar. Maybe there’s some scrap down there,’ Big Witek whispered.

  We pushed aside the trapdoor and went down the ladder one by one, but apart from two candlesticks, a crucifix and a leaky metal tub, we didn’t find any scrap. Instead, Big Witek sniffed out a crate covered with hay which turned out to contain four bottles of homemade wine. Older Lajboś uncorked them with his penknife. We poured the wine out into glass jars. Bits of cork floated in the liquid, which was as thick as half-set jelly and tasted like musty blackcurrant juice. We sat down in a circle on the clay floor and started playing spin the bottle. Younger Lajboś spun first, and when the neck pointed at his brother we all burst out laughing. We carried on playing until midnight. I had never before had so many tongues in my mouth, and the next day I got a cold sore on my lip.

  On Sunday, we didn’t look for scrap. Towards the evening, we met in the birch grove, gathered a lot of dry branches and started making a campfire for a feast. We greased the inside of a cast-iron cauldron with lard and added layers of sliced potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, sausages, parsley, celery and leeks, then seasoned it all with bay leaves, salt and pepper and put young cabbage leaves on top. We placed the cauldron on a specially prepared brick hearth. Big Witek had brought a churn of soured milk from home, an indispensable drink to accompany our dish.

  ‘Anyone
got a piece of paper?’ asked Older Lajboś, bending over the hearth.

  ‘I’ll pop over to Grandma’s. She keeps issues of The Sunday Visitor under her straw mattress,’ his brother shouted in reply, and soon he was back holding a magazine with Saint Faustina on the cover. Older Lajboś shoved a bit of dry grass under the sticks and lit the paper. Big Witek started laughing, saying we should thank Saint Faustina, because it usually took Older Lajboś a good quarter of an hour to start a fire. When the smells from the cauldron were strong enough to set all the dogs in Hektary drooling, the boys slipped wooden sticks through the handles, lifted the cauldron out of the fire and started serving purple portions of baked potatoes on rinsed burdock leaves.

  After we finished eating, we cleaned the cauldron with sand. Older Lajboś insisted on walking me home, even though our field was only a stone’s throw away from the birch grove. We set off towards the pond, stepping on young puffballs on the way. Smoke stung our eyes. We both smelled like kabanos sausages. Our hands met in the darkness. Older Lajboś stopped, looked at me peculiarly, wiped my sooty freckled cheek with his sleeve and handed me a little piece of cardboard. I looked at the gift and flung my arms around his neck. It was a matchbox label I had been after for ages, from the match factory in Czechowice: ‘More scrap – more steel, 64 matches for 25 groszy’.

  ‘Where is it?’ he asked in a lowered voice.

  ‘I’ll be right back.’

  I went up to the fence, groped in the dark for the gap between the mossy stone and the boards and pulled out a little jar of Butapren glue which I’d pinched that morning from my father’s taxidermy toolbox. We sat down inside a reinforced-concrete well ring. Older Lajboś dribbled the honey-coloured gloop into a little plastic bag. We took turns sniffing it. In the thick, impenetrable silence, I heard the rhythmic throbbing of my blood. Under the plastic, which billowed out and deflated like a white jellyfish, shoals of fish multiplied, tickling my nose and throat with their fins. I started giggling. I was lying under a waterproof jacket. Older Lajboś nestled his head between my breasts and began to caress me. When he slipped his hand inside my knickers, I tried to pull away, but he held me back gently. The little flowers printed on the cotton fabric grew moist. I looked up at the sky. The handle of the Plough was pulsating with a bright metallic glare in the biggest scrapyard in the universe. I shivered, parted my thighs, and just as I felt Older Lajboś’s finger inside me, I heard my mother’s voice from behind the hazel trees: ‘Wiolka, time to come home! How many times do I have to call you?!’