I should be a botanist, I thought then. Maybe teaching Charles Dickens to thugs and dimwits, going to the bars in Kazimierz on a Friday night with the gang isn’t so ambitious. But flowers are like challenges. What do they mean? Up on that ridge the flowers seemed more alive than some of the people we know. And a lot more mysterious. Because it was wild, Kazia. How could that be? Because I could almost see Burger King.
Ten more minutes, I thought. Then I’ll turn round. It was only 3 p.m. but so hot. Sometimes it gets hotter here than we thought it would. I was burned, I knew. Red and bitten and burned. But indefatigable, Kazia. You know me. (Look it up, you lazy trollop. You can always call me a termagant, remember.)
So I walked out on to the ridge. It was like a spine, the land falling away into a wood at one side, the plain on the other. That’s when I saw them. I crouched down to see what these red things were. And they were strawberries, Kazia. Wild strawberries. First there was one, then two. When I looked again there were a hundred. All along that ridge, a thousand strawberries, maybe a million. Strawberries the size of my thumbnail. And no one else in all the world had seen them or knew about wild strawberries.
I’ve told you about the prices here, haven’t I? Mad cabbages. Insane beans. And how expensive the strawberries are, the Californian strawberries like cows’ hearts we used to see in the butcher’s. But these were the real thing. These were prehistoric strawberries. What all the strawberries since must have been bred from. Oh, it made me laugh, Kazia.
Here was I, on top of the world, filling my handkerchief with strawberries, filling my mouth and my bag with strawberries sweetened by the sun and the sea air, strawberry juice on the knees of my jeans and running down my chin. And there are Anna and Petr and all the others, I thought, picking strawberries in polytunnels somewhere, ludicrous strawberries, grotesque and tasteless, weighing them, getting paid. Getting paid money for picking strawberries. Learning to hate strawberries.
If only they could see me, I thought. On top of the ridge, the bees around me, the yellow spears. The sky was that weird white, like the sheet they put over my father’s coffin. And that soundtrack in my head that I couldn’t forget, the song they played at All Around the World. Andrea True Connection singing ‘More, More, More’. You remember, Kazia, they always play it in the students’ bar. Wow, Andrea’s had a life, Kazia. She only made that record because she was trapped by a volcano on a Caribbean island. Can a porn star be a role model? Well, Andrea can.
Love from Zuzanna (not a porn star. Yet.)
June 25
Kazia, guess what? Another one’s happened. Though now it doesn’t take much guessing. And this one is different. This boy had gone missing about a year ago, months before we arrived. Nothing unusual in that. He was 22. Off to London, they thought. Find a new scene. But somebody discovered him in sheds behind the fairground. Where I was this week. Apparently it’s all derelict there. They call it the Backs. They’ve been going to knock the sheds down for years but nothing gets done. He was there. In that horrible place. Only rats, Kazia. And broken glass. Old carriages from the funfair rides. A carousel horse with the name ‘Nathaniel’ painted on it.
He’d been there all that time and nobody had the wit to look, despite the missing person posters and the newspaper articles. So although he’s the latest, which makes him the twentieth, they’re calling him one of the first. The first to do it. He’d hanged himself like most of the others and now it’s on the television. His famous face on all the big programmes. And he looks so lonely in that picture they use of him. His hair shaved in swirls, with this silly tuft on his forehead, dyed red. His eyes bewildered.
But when I watch those shows I can’t help but laugh. The journalists are always struggling to describe this area. Industrial. No, ex-industrial. Or unlovely. Or unremarkable. Always ex or un. Something that it’s not. Defined by what it isn’t. Even undiscovered. Yes, that’s what one of the TV people said it was. One of the undiscovered parts of the country. Because nobody famous comes from here. Nobody anyone’s ever heard of. And there’s despair here. And hopelessness. And it rains. And there’s cheap drugs. And everything’s unpronounceable anyway so let’s not bother. Maybe they should try Soznowiec. So here I am, Kazia, wandering about the same place, keeping my eyes open, and to me it’s obvious. It’s like, blinding. There once lived, in a sequestered part of the country of… Ha ha, Kazia. Keep up.
After work yesterday I caught the bus to the Odeon in the retail park. Took my pizza to the usual seat where we went that time, right at the edge where you can look down the glass wall into the atrium and watch the kids messing about. Some of the girls were off their heads, but from up there you can tell how they take care of each other. Motherly protocols. It’s all ritualised.
The Mutant Crew they call themselves. I think it’s ironic. Some programme last year asked if we’re creating a new species of young person. Anyway, I couldn’t really understand what the girls were saying because they all seem to use text language to one another. And all their ring tones were going at once. But, as soon you get over how loud they are, they’re quite sweet. Easy to see their priorities. Straight out of school, get the rhinestones and slap on. Then down the centre and pretend to be bored. Pretend to be bored when really you’re terrified. And you’re terrified because you don’t understand how it all works yet but you’re there to learn. Even if the north wind is blowing down the crack of your arse and Red Square vodka tastes like cat litter and makes you puke. You are determined to learn. Because there’s no alternative.
Sorry, yes, there is an alternative. The alternative is not to survive in this unplace. This explace. Everyone else has already written you off, but you’re determined to prove them wrong. So you scream at nothing. You text crap. You eat junk. You drink poison. And then you paint each other perfectly in heartbreaking L’Oreal. Foundation, concealer. Block up every pore. And you learn, Kazia. You learn down there amongst the plastic palm trees and the takeaway kebab trays. I call it mall-ediction. I call it mall-ancholy. Tell me you get it, Kazia.
But I’m learning too. I’m learning up here with a margarita slice and a coffee with as many sugars as will dissolve in it. Writing my letter to you, Kazia, but about to pay half price for Into the Wild, which should be good because Sean Penn directed. It’s about this silly, sweet kid, Christopher McCandless, who drove away from everything. Pulled the plug on the world. With the inevitable result.
Maybe he should have met the girls down there, with their silver belts from Primark and their denim shreds. Uniforms for the front line. Maybe if he had found an interpreter they might have taught him something. Because there they are in the life class, all of them down there, determined to graduate, bawling under these huge pieces of polystyrene fruit. A five-metre long banana. An orange bigger than a chillout room. I think it’s part of the healthy eating campaign, Kazia.
Love from your maddening friend, ZuziX
July 3
It’s Saturday night, Kazia, and there’s a war going on. I just came down the hill from the railway station. I’d been to see another film, Once, which is pretty good if you believe in fairy stories. Which I do, so it was great.
But back to reality. There were hundreds of police in the station. Well, about ten. A boy’s been killed. They kicked him to death, someone said. This stupid gang. But they were older men so not so stupid. Just brain dead. Desolate souls. They came out of the hotel and the fight went on all the way back up the hill. Skirmishing they call it. And one boy was cornered and they kicked him down. He was trying to escape. He was crying. But they stamped on his head. That’s what this man was saying who saw it all. How nonchalant he seemed. Or perhaps he’s given up caring. They jumped on the boy’s head, he said, like it was a burst football. You could see the brands of their trainers on the boy’s face.
All this is one hundred yards away from the flat, Kazia. Under my window they’re still coming out of the clubs, Marilyn’s, The Matrix, Sacha’s. Some are lying in the street even though
it’s misty and cold. That’s men for you. I can’t understand them. Why can’t I understand men, Kaz? Next year I might want to marry one. Or next week. Seems bizarre now but you never know how your hormones are going to betray you. Because your totalitarian genes want to reproduce themselves. Like moss does. Like mildew. Everything demanding another chance of perfection. Imperatives of the slime mould.
The streets are pedestrianised here, so at 2 a.m. the girls are swinging on the flower baskets and pissing in the doorways. Men are fighting but not properly. They’re too drunk. So why don’t I understand men? Or the men down there on the precinct. Like negatives of themselves in the orange streetlights. Ghosts in gold chains and designer vests. Ghosts with their heads shaved like stormtroopers.
Remember that football crowd we saw in Warsaw? We were at a café table outside, and there was a grumbling sound. I thought it was thunder. Then everybody started to get up and leave and around the corner came the supporters. Good word, that. Supporters. What do they support, exactly? With their flags and their boots and a thousand broken bottles under their boots. In their white tee shirts their mothers had washed. So clean and well scrubbed. I smelled that crowd, Kazia, and it smelt of aftershave. Of deodorant. A chemical garden. But such a sound. Like it was coming out of the earth. Out of the sewers. Drum ’n’ bass shaking the room.
There’s no one like that here, really. They’re all too drunk to be organised. But what I notice is the men are hard on each other. They don’t help each other out like the girls. Where were that boy’s friends, the one whose head was split? On Bebo and the other sites you look at the faces of the boys who’ve topped themselves, and you think, maybe they hated this. The fighting. The glassing. Maybe they hated the hatred.
Note that word. Top. As in to top yourself. A kind of phrasal verb. Your favourite. Yes this is the perfect place to live, Kazia. For now, and for someone like me, it’s good. The flat’s like a theatre seat but of course I’m only peeping. You know, between the peeling wall and the tatty curtain. I love nooks and crannies. Remember the art room? I could work there because I had that tiny space in the corner, surrounded on three sides. That’s why I love Alchemia. But if they saw me looking down there’d be trouble. Yes there is a war, Kazia, but I think there always has been a war. Or else we have fallen upon strange times, and Heaven only knows the end of them. Get it Kaz? Sorry.
Now the boys are sitting around the plastic flowerbed that was put there last week. A token to the summer. Most are half-naked and their tattoos are black in the sodium lights. They’re all the colour of those Strongbow cans. How perfect the steroids have made them seem. And now one is lying on the pissed-on concrete. He’s down to his jock strap, Kazia. In the streetlight he’s like a golden altar. Not the sacrificial calf but the cold stone itself. Perhaps he’s dead too.
These might be the Roid Boys. Locally notorious, if you believe the newspapers. Their headquarters is the Station Hotel. I looked in once but deemed it prudent not to linger. Ha ha. There were three of them playing pool. The biceps of bison, Kazia. But the drugs shrink their funny little scrotums. Their dicks become babies’ dummies, apparently. And their brains go to blubber. But nobody cares about that. I bet they still smell gorgeous, Kazia, the boys out there. Of manly roses. Of masculine violets. How I want to breathe in their magnificent perfumes. Do you remember the Spartans, my darling? Always combing their hair?
L.Z.Xxx
July 5
Kazia! You say it’s always about me. But it’s not. About me. Not always. I’m not one of those idiots who put my travel diaries on a blog. I could have blogged the sand dunes here that nobody seems to know. But I didn’t. And I’m still finding sand in my shoes.
I remember my grandfather telling me a story about when he was a boy. There was a potato field behind their house. Their hut. Well, my grandfather and my father used to go out at night and steal the potatoes. Because no matter how well harvested a potato field is, he said there would always be potatoes still there. It was impossible to get all the potatoes out. And they would sprout the next year. So my father and his father went out stealing. At night of course. Scavenging for potatoes because everyone was poor and some people were starving.
They would dig in the frosted earth. Sometimes the ground was frozen, he told me, hard as concrete. But it didn’t stop them. They dug with bare hands or trowels or knives or spades. And my father was the one who always found at least one potato. Sometimes a bag full, but always at least one potato to take back to my grandmother. My father was the best potato thief there was. Potatoes with the frozen soil on them. Potatoes that were icy inside, which was bad news, because they rotted. And grandmother would roast the potatoes. Or boil them. Or make chips with the black fat they used, which was part coal powder and part old oil and part offal. They’d have a fire of sticks and wood shavings and stolen coal from the sidings. Once he told me they even boiled potatoes in a kettle over a candle flame. Imagine how long that would take. Would the potatoes boil before the candle burned out? But it was food. Their food. As good as if they’d grown the potatoes themselves. Better, because sometimes it’s harder to steal food than to make it.
And they tasted wonderful, my grandfather would say. There’s nothing like a mouth full of hot potato. And there was my father, waiting for the potato to be passed round, his hands still in their filthy mittens, his fingernails broken by the frost.
You know, I was thinking about us, Kazia. About being friends. Remember two winters ago when we said, hey, let’s go to Oswiecim? Just like that. Two little Goths with our black nail varnish. So we caught the bus to the village and walked in the frost. How cold it was, your breath like a scarf. I was wearing your brother’s leather jacket, remember. With the Harley badges. We laughed because there was a condom in the pocket. And we were the first people in the cafeteria and had cabbage and dumplings, and boy, it tasted like the best food ever.
That cheery waitress said you look famished, girls. So she heaped our plates out of the steaming vats. The first portions that day, she said. There was an old man in, drinking coffee. She said he was there every day, winter, summer, even when it was crammed with tourists. Drinking his coffee. He always took his coffee there.
What was his story? we asked. She said she didn’t want to know his story. Anyway, it was obvious what his story was. Everybody had a story. There were millions of stories about that place. And each one of them was the worst story in the world.
But you didn’t want to be inside, or in the huts. Being in the huts on our own would have been too much. I always prefer it when there are schoolkids there. Lovers holding on to one another. Some moron with an iPod. So we hitched with the electricity man over to Brzezinka. His leg touching yours. How electric was that? And it was better, you said, because we were outside in the clean air. Absolutely no people, and the ground rumpled and broken as if they’d mined coal. Everything crooked and falling down. Pulverised and frozen into strange shapes. A derelict factory with iron coming out of the ground. The broken ovens. All that abandoned space.
And we walked around and you found the plover, Kazia. A golden plover.
It had been caught in a snare. Or at least a piece of wire coming from the earth. It was dead and perfect. You spread out its wings and there it was. A bishop, I said, but you said no. An angel. It’s like a fallen angel, you said, with his wings spread out on the ice.
The grass was white as needles but you were smoking like you were on fire. I thought there was a fire inside you that day. A flame burning in your blood. And we stood there and looked at the plover. How big it was. A bubble of ice at its beak, its leg twisted. It came down on the moor looking for food and it never flew away. The white moor of Brzezinka. We both had our cameras but we didn’t take a shot, and we both knew why.
Before we went you freed the plover’s leg and we left it there. Because what else could we do, what else but study where the gold of its feathers met the black. Then walk away. There was only us, remember. And the crows hunch
ed up in their overcoats. We walked away and you said you were never going back, even though you live so close. We walked away in the dead of winter and everybody on the bus was too cold to talk.
So you see, Kazia, it’s not about me. Truly it’s not. It’s about you too and about everything. It’s about your randy brother and his girlfriends, and the man with his coffee, who is there now in the canteen, I know it, even as I write. Sitting there on his own and sipping that horrible coffee every day of his life. Which is his way of telling his story. It’s about him too. And the potatoes. It has to be.
Love from Zuzanna
July 8
Kazia, I’m playing Andrea, over and over. More more more. It’s a really true connection tonight. You know she’s a therapist now? In Florida? And yes, I confess, I’m drinking. Red Square vodka like the mutant crew. I like the mutant crew. They came through town tonight and they were the only people on the streets. Nobody older than fifteen the whole evening. So this is an SOS. What does SOS mean? Save our Souls? Save our Shit, more like. I just don’t trust it. Don’t trust vodka. But it’s only water, after all. Only water. But we should have tried. To trust water. But we never did. So it’s out there now. Coming our way. Black. Black and white. Black and white and no colour at all. Roaring. Whispering. Speaking its own language. And coming our way. Coming out of the ground. Coming out of the air. Made in the clouds. Made in the sea. Coming out of me, Kazia. I can even smell it coming out of me. Strong as battery acid. Stinking. Like the brakes on a train. But it’s made in us. We’re making it. Cell by cell. Making itself in us. And it’s coming. It’s coming all right. After everything we’ve done to it. After everything we’ve done to ourselves. Damned it. Dirtied it. Denied it. Derided it. We should have blessed it. But we blasphemed it. We bastardised it. We belittled it. We should have worshipped it. But we worsted it. We should have worshipped water. Because water’s a god. No. Water’s the only god. But it’s too late now. Because water’s coming. It’s angry at last. So water’s coming. Black water. White water. Black water and white water and water no colour at all. Retribution they’ll call this one day. Or justice. The justice of water. Maybe we should pray. What else is there? There’s nothing else. Because where can we run when it’s in us already. So I’ll pray. I’d better pray. But what does praying sound like? A river running? A typhoon turning? Or maybe praying is quieter than that. Like a tap running? Quieter than that. Or a woman crying. Quieter than that. Or vodka over ice. That kind of crackle. Quieter than that. Then maybe it’s like a hailstone. A hailstone dissolving. On the tip of your tongue. As quiet as that? Maybe. Yes maybe that’s the prayer that’s going to save my soul.
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