Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  That’s how they would sing around evening—him, dressed in pajamas, her in a nightgown—their mantras on memory. “Ninety-one, mounting a child on a wooden spike”—their rosaries of pain, and I wouldn’t listen to them usually because I’d be busy with much more important stuff, and why would I listen anyway? “Three hundred fifty-five, taking one’s life with twenty two or more blows of a knife; three hundred fifty-nine, nailing one’s hands to one’s doorstep; three hundred sixty, crushing a child under a wheel,” and da capo, da capo. I didn’t listen because I didn’t know how to listen. Just like my neighbors got rid of Witek the imbecile, in the same way they sent away their deformed dogs for an eternal retreat to the mud of the countryside, I sent my family away—and only now I’m trying to rebuild it on my own, crooked and lopsided. It’s too late to change it, so that’s merely my written elegy.

  I try to recall the strong Witek; Witek the imbecile who, all tensed, with his veins popping out on his neck, tried to lift the back of his parents car. And then he disappeared one day, together with his retardation, and his regular sized head, though obviously a dysfunctional one. His weak mind was his greatest strength; it was the source of his power because he lived entirely in his mind. When he was afraid of something, he would run. When somebody threatened him, he would lift them up and hold them in the air. When he was happy about something, he was happy with his entire body, he’d laugh and shake and salivate. And then, one day, he just got shipped away; it was sort of inevitable. Our neighbors were the kind of people who moved to our city just recently. They came with some assets and some clout and weren’t like others who took jobs dedicated for the newcomers, poorly paid gigs for the internal gastarbeiters. They were uneducated directors who were given their positions for reasons other than their exceptional skills. They earned them through unthinkable humiliations, hundreds of vodka shots, by distilling moonshine so they could save on store-bought alcohol. They were true people of the countryside, resourceful and cheap, and they could do everything themselves. The bred pigs in their basement and were astonished by neighbors who couldn’t stand the smell. They were genuinely upset when, after castration, one of the pigs would be healing poorly and fading, so it had to be butchered, which, by the way, they also did on their own because they didn’t want to pay the vet and the butcher. Or they were doctors from the countryside, already after being promoted for the first time, having moved to the city with more success yet to come. They wanted success as quickly as possible. They desired it more than anything, like anyone else, and it was no sin. So, their retarded children and crooked dogs would be sent back to the countryside “to get some fresh air,” as they’d put it, for fresh milk straight from the cow. As if the fresh air and blue skies could help those poor mutts in any way, as if sending Witek somewhere else, far from people’s stares, would solve the problem forever, and erase him from existence. They did that, acting as if they wanted their chained mutts to squeeze every possible ounce of happiness from life, as if they cared about their fates at all. Their dogs were always loud and their children were forbidden to be around them because a dog was like an electric fence, working twenty-four-seven, dangerous and almost entirely cost-free.

  But times have changed and they’ve gotten rid of their defense systems, though reluctantly—a bad dog meant good security. But they’d get rid of them and buy purebreds instead. They had to do this because purebreds brought prestige in an urban environment. They assumed that sending their shameful children and beasts to the villages, to boarding schools with a permanent residency, was equivalent to sweeping the sidewalk in front of your house—so that luck wouldn’t trip on its way in. The dogs howled under the open sky, ugly and mixed just like before, but at least no worse than the rest in the neighborhood, nor more dangerous. There, where the dogs ended up, nobody cared about their looks or pedigree. The neighbors didn’t complain about dogs barking all night, or that they’d attack you and bite your ankles. After getting rid of these failed creatures, nobody made any more remarks to the newcomers about beating up the animals, or children, to which they used to respond with “fuck off” because it was their dog, or their child. The city was not a place for those animals. Even dogs’ names condemned the owners in the eyes of proper city dwellers, making them the butt of a joke. So dogs were all kicked out, along with Witek the imbecile as he was called and never took any offence because he couldn’t understand. His parents called him other names lacking affection, when he’d come back home in the evening all dirty; “you dumbass” they’d say, “you big dummy,” and he was huge, he was a giant who grew up with a head to small to make room for the alphabet. It was obvious he was created by his parents to be ridiculed. Witek left, I don’t know where and I’ll never know, but it’s not like anyone cared anyway and, to be honest, I never thought about it twice either. In the beginning they’d bring him back every now and then, in that car of theirs he’d tried to lift by its bumper so that he could show them he was alive, that he was healthy, that they can’t get rid of him entirely. And he was getting bigger with every visit, at first crying and sniveling from happiness at seeing his old tormentors, and then one day he disappeared for good. It was as if water had closed above his head, like it does above a stone dropped into a lake.

  11/16/78

  “Dear Children and Gc and Ggc—”

  This is how the letter found in a broken cupboard begins. Gc stands for grandchildren. I’m among the great grandchildren to whom this chaotic story about a life coming to an end, this letter arrived too late from the valley of death, is also addressed. Only now, thirty odd years after being sent, I can read it consciously and very carefully, just like the five holiday cards sent between 1958 and 1976. It takes great concentration to read them because my great grandpa didn’t use any punctuation, and had issues with orthography and language in general. He knew Polish mostly from hearing it, which is how I reconstruct it now, and he passed maybe two, maybe four grades in school. At home they spoke Ukrainian. I’m not saying that to excuse him because he doesn’t need to be excused. He lived through his life somehow, even though it wasn’t easy. But the explanation is in order to understand where this stream of half-intelligible sentences came from. I preserved the following text as it was in the original. I can’t show the letters themselves. They appear childlike, slow, and in their own way meticulous. But it was a senile hand writing them and so it’s hard to decipher sometimes. Holiday cards are fairly easy, but this letter is much harder. I’ve been working on it for a long time and there are still spots left blank.

  Dear granddaughter tank you very much for the letter

  Alot you have written and it is good

  Its worthwhile reading this columns as always

  Im sick and so time of mine and life I live on

  [here unintelligible] meet I can eat ground everything

  As log as its soft all of that gives me

  Hernia and no option is left but procedures

  [here, he most likely says there is no other solution than the operation]

  But I scared 85 years will pass

  17/7 next year and my life for me

  Brings nojoy because what I feel always

  Pain –

  And in 1958, around Easter, he wrote about that pain that accompanied him at all times: “Allpains me, such is my Life,” and for Christmas it was much like that as well, “Sick I fallen, allpains me but what is there todo.” In 1976 he confirms his suffering once again. And so, from his eternal pain, my great grandfather Skowroński, a widower after my great grandma was killed in Gaje, the only one of his family who escaped, God knows why, moves without a comma or a full stop directly to the story of his life; his post-war life that we knew nothing about. It seems he wanted to write it down, or maybe someone asked him to:

  . . . I came to England it was 48 I was

  in Germany in gulag then to America to

  Kanada but for youth I waited in 48 England

  Older [?] goto England I was 54yo

&nbs
p; Worked on the farm 1y 1 year in kitchen

  In Scotland from scotland I goto England here

  I worked in textile in bakery in gasworks

  Last I worked 5y in textile and

  On wages becuse here you can work

  65 years unless youre good then factory

  Keeps you me they didnt want to let

  I can put some meat on those bones, a little bit of everyday flesh, a piece of a single day and the usual hardships. He described them in his Easter card from 1976 and, somewhat strangely, everything seems to fit. On the one hand it’s an endless wandering from country to country, from continent to continent, but on the other hand it’s a life identical to that in other places where the rest of the family lived:

  Dear Children and Gc and Ggc

  Tank you for letters for pictures

  Dont worry I dont write alot

  To you but what will I

  Write I’m alone have nothing

  To write I reach my day

  What is left I think is to die

  That is all I dont interest

  Myself in anything because there no need

  Yesterday I was in the garden I planted

  Potatoes broad beans and onion but here

  Its cold a lot of wind when it

  Gets warmer than I will sow spinach peas

  Carrots if grow cabbage

  Califlower beet roots lettuce

  This interest me this is my

  Everything I had letter from uncle

  Wasyl so I dont write to nobody

  Only to you I write and I think to

  Help you because I have noone else

  My head is [?] stomach

  Will not stop such is my life

  This is the end of the card. In the letter, on the other hand, the only letter that survived—that preserved his life’s history—my great grandfather tells the story of how he retired and how he went to the hospital, but I can understand very little beyond its general sense. My grandma is long gone and can’t read it for me. She was the one who knew all his letters and could put them together, and then distill some sense. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin she would say, although everyone saw in it only convoluted nonsense and she, like Daniel, kept explaining what those words meant. That’s why my family was shocked, but also had their spirits raised because, even though the stories were full of sadness and written in a foreign language, our great grandfather lived in England, a dreamland, and, one way or another, it couldn’t be that bad for him. The clothes that he’d send us sometimes, the clothes that were later repurposed into something more appropriate for us to wear, were the proof.

  Later on in the letter there is a detailed list of all the financial misdeeds of different people, of different financial miseries, and, finally, my great grandfather writes:

  . . . such fake peoples how many of mine [things]

  Been lost on people they took all from my

  Apartment kitchen bed sofa 2 dressers table

  Knives forks kettle glass flask

  25p lost all is lost I was here 7m

  Not even but I suffer and dont say a thing

  People I saw only fake

  I live here for 13p becasue she lowered

  [he meant that his landlady, his worst enemy, lowered his rent]

  I payed 14p so it leaves 8p almost

  [of his retirement]

  I buy tobaco for 3p and some fruit somewhere

  I buy busfare for 2 weeks bottle of vodka for 4f

  I wash my underwear myself sometimes to 11

  I have tv here sometimes I watch to 11 I go to sleep

  And then follow more complaints about health and descriptions I’ll keep for myself because I have no desire to share them. Finally, I read these words and I feel as if I hear my own grandparents speaking:

  . . . I dont live just for myself

  For you becasue I dont have no life no happiness

  And right after that, there follows a general reflection about life. My great grandfather reports that fate was harsh not only to him. On the contrary, it was actually generous to him in a peculiar sort of way. It wasn’t only the poverty and desolation, not only the “ruthlessness” of the surroundings, but also the madness that feasted on the minds of others:

  And when I look at how many people gone mad or

  They took life themselves Jarymowicz she 4y

  Younger 10y he rests in the ground too

  Lost his mind how much trouble I had before I

  Always talked to him let God Father bless

  I sent 11/14 70p to Sławka child

  20p and rest divide between your children and grandchildren

  . . . now I wait for you to write for those

  Stockings and about the visit if I live for

  Another [year] we [see] how is health / I end now

  All the best to Kopiec Family to

  All Friends and God Bless all

  The best

  When I lost my Roamer watch on the train in Romania, a gift from my great grandfather, I lost the only physical link between him and me. Now all I have is this letter and five holiday cards, his self-portrait as an old man. Not too many words, one longer letter—the only trace. It’s worse than when I had nothing. Maybe in his other letters things weren’t so glum, but in those cards—every sentence is misery. Although, I comfort myself, at least I have something left, so let it be. It’s a written testimony where the history of life blends with the glass ampoules stolen from his kitchen, the cruelty of his surroundings, with him saving every penny to send back to the family. There are more questions than answers, but it seems that’s how it has to be. Not a single word about his suspected visit to Cuba, which everyone knew about, though I don’t know how they knew and I’ll never learn. And one last thing: out of his life, which ended long ago—the life of a defeated man—came a blessing for my own. God Bless.

  Wojciech Nowicki is a Polish essayist, journalist, critic, photographer, and even writes a culinary column. He is also the co-founder of the Imago Mundi Foundation devoted to promoting photography. Salki is his first book to be translated into English.

  Jan Pytalski is a graduate of the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, and has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of Rochester.

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