Krakow Melt

by Daniel Allen Cox

  “They will go to hell holding hands. We will send them there quicker.”

  (Interlocutor speaks unclearly.)

  “No, Cracovia takes it up the ass. That’s why they run slowly, because all the [muffled] is pouring out of them.”

  “Kurva, you are making me horny to beat up a queer.”

  “Just go home with them in the taxi. Say that you have a foreskin, and they will fight over you. My brother [muffled]. The hospital wouldn’t take them because [muffled].”

  The hooligans walk through a parking lot to a red-brick industrial building, and then climb a metal stairway. The gay club doesn’t have a sign—there is never a sign—but someone has spraypainted four words that identify it quickly:

  SOLIDARITY FOR POLISH QUEERS

  We hear the thump of 1990s house. The men are about to tramp in and destroy human bodies, but then they freeze and turn around. They have discovered their shadow and look right into the camera. We suddenly see sideways footage of the city skyline. The sound is still running.

  “Kurrrva. It’s a faggot.”

  The camera operator has caught them visiting a gay nightclub.

  “Do you want to die, motherfucker?”

  Scuffling sounds. Shoes squeak.

  “Let’s rape him.”

  “The scissor kick. Wisła would have won if they did the scissor kick. Let’s show him how we score a goal. Now your face will become a football, motherfucker.”

  “[Muffled] been born.”

  DEAR MAGPIE

  May I call you that? I think the name suits you, not only for your crazy appetite, but also for the colouring of your hair. Hope you don’t find it too weird.

  After some reflection, I realize I was being weak when I refused to answer your question fully while we were floating in the Baltic Sea. You know, the question about my interest in fire. I didn’t think I was ready, but you’ve since shown me that jumping head-first into something is the best strategy.

  Here it goes.

  When I was a little dziecko of six years old, my favourite toy was a green plastic smok. Dragon toys were hard to come by (this was before Communism ended), so I was lucky to have an American model with such exciting advanced features as movable jaws and interlocking scales. By itself, the toy would have been lifeless, but my favourite book—The Legend of the Smok Wawelski—gave it blood and teeth.

  The smok and I had a love affair. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to play with him under the covers when my matka and papa had gone to sleep. I illuminated his cave—a tent under the sheets—with a tiny flashlight, and fed him his midnight snack of cookie crumbs. He always did as he was told, unlike his literary alter ego.

  One time, my matka caught us awake. She turned on my bedroom light, and the smok instantly fell asleep.

  “Radeki, lights out means lights out. A growing boy needs to rest.”

  “I’m not growing anymore, I promise. I haven’t grown in a week. I even measured against the door to make sure.”

  “My silly smok, you will grow for a long time.”

  I loved it when she told me that. I was disappointed that my little green friend would never grow. Forever confined to the skeleton of a dwarf. Jaka szkoda. (Which means quelle horreur.)

  “Anyway, I don’t want you playing with this flashlight,” she continued. “It has given your father some trouble in the past.”

  The flashlight was not American like my best toys were. It was Soviet-issue, and it fizzled reliably. One time, the batteries leaked corrosive acid all over the inside, and we had to clean it out with baking soda and vinegar. In those days, it was hard to get new equipment unless you were well-connected. Either my papa didn’t know anyone important, or he was banking up his favours for something big. Matka and I were recycling long before it became an official program, because we had no choice.

  “The smok and I will make it our royal duty not to give trouble. We will eat in the dark.”

  She reached under my pillow and removed two shortbread muszelki.

  “No, you will eat at the table, and you will sleep in the dark. Tell your dragon that tomorrow is a very busy day. We are driving to Zakopane for an excursion with Brother Father. You know how he loves the snow.”

  “I don’t have to tell him,” I said. “Smok’s ears are very good. He heard you.”

  Brother Father was not my papa, but a priest who had been living with us for several years. He was a boarder who paid his lodging faithfully, and who helped us out with our spiritual troubles, as pedestrian as they were. We were a good Christian family, save for a few forgivable habits like drinking alcohol on Sunday (Matka), smoking on the toilet (Papa), and listening to the Beatles (Matka and Papa). Brother Father corrected us mildly and brought us closer to God, powered by my mother’s cooking and by coffee she fortified secretly with shots of cognac.

  You might say this arrangement had the blessing of the church and was part of the Out-of-the-Pew-and-into-the-Home program, enforced mercilessly by the Communists. In other words, Brother Father had no church to go to, and we were his only parishioners.

  “It’s not a secret,” my mother would tell me. “Just tell people he’s your uncle, and that he’s too sick to work.”

  I wasn’t allowed to know his name, just in case I squawked. We called him Brother Father and nobody slipped up, not even once.

  Or so I thought.

  One night after lights out, smok and I were playing in his den without detection. The flashlight was giving off sparks and I was thrilled: fire breath in a convenient tube. With a simple fluke, I had vaulted twenty years ahead of the toy industry. Park Jurajski, eat my underpants.

  But I’ll never understand why she let me keep the flashlight. I wish she had taken it away, and if I’d rebelled, I would’ve wanted her to lash me with a belt and flense my skin into strips. But no, she let me keep the damn thing.

  I read from The Legend of the Smok Wawelski in a loud whisper, hoping to increase the heartbeat of my toy dragon to a rhythm approximating my own.

  Magpie, I’ll try to retell the story as I remember it, but I’m warning you, my memory for literature sucks compared to yours. And you’ve probably already noticed that I get everything mixed up when telling stories (including places and dates).

  I have, however, corrected spelling mistakes that I remember from the original book (the Russians never cared to learn Polish very well).

  Chapter 1

  Once upon a time, there lived a King in the Royal Castle on Wawel Hill. He ate piggishly and fucked fair maidens from near and far, orchestrating abortions in the dungeon when they got pregnant. What king would want a shoal of jealous sons lining up to poison him and steal the throne?

  One day, terrible news rocked the city: someone had found a huge fire-breathing dragon nesting in a cave beneath the castle. Sheep, cattle, and chickens started to disappear, and the cityfolk realized that the Smok must be eating them to satisfy his voracious appetite, belching eyelashes and effluvium after every snack.

  (Dorotka, I’ve drawn you a picture of the Smok Wawelski below, in colours with much better fidelity than in my Soviet-issue book. They made him brown. LOL.)

  [Picture of a dragon in crayon. His body is an equilateral triangle, shaded emerald green and covered with striated tiles supposed to be scales. Rudimentary legs jut out. He has a Pac-Man mouth with yellow studs for teeth, and he’s exhaling blue smoke by the cheek-load.]

  The pigs and boars and kozy were not enough to keep the Smok Wawelski happy. They were possibly not nutritious enough, or maybe too noisy, so the Smok—to the great horror of Kraków—began to target young virgin girls for breakfast. How do we know they were virgins? The fathers who lost their daughters gave detailed descriptions, while making the sign of the cross, of the intact hymens of their offspring: crescent-shaped bands from the two to eleven o’clock positions, no tissue at six o’clock, fimbriated perforations in the shape of praying hands. Whatever they said, it was convincing enough to nail down the Smok�
��s exact breakfast habits, and the King ordered little girls across the land to stay in their homes. And yet, the dragon always managed to get one, to suck the flesh from her bones, and to leave the skeleton in a neat, crumpled pile at the entrance to his den.

  Unfortunately, presumed masculinity in monsters is a hallmark of children’s literature. In future retellings, and at your request, I will jam the signal with a more bent monster. (A girl, possibly.)

  My book lit up when I got to the end of the chapter; the sparks from the flashlight had jumped onto the paper and turned to embers. The embers grew into flame, and the page I was reading blackened, curled, and floated away. A sheet of ash; spent words.

  This, Dorota, is when it all began. Sorry it has taken me so long to tell you.

  I dropped the book and ran to the foyer. I zipped up my winter jacket, threw on my boots and mittens, and ran outside. We were one of the unlucky families with a bungalow. You can only fit so many people into apartment blocks, we were told, so some had to live separately—medievally—without the conveniences of modern life. I suspected that our living situation had something to do with Brother Father (I wish I knew his name), even though we never told a soul about him.

  I ran outside to the street and just stared at the house. The darkness was total. One of my mittens was on the wrong hand; my thumb wriggled without finding its sheath. The snow was deep, and it crept into my boots. I was waiting for my parents to run out in their winter clothes to comfort me, to rescue me from the fire I had already escaped.

  What kid ever thinks their parents need help? You’re trained since infancy to believe that they hold the keys to medicine, education, law, opening jars, gardening, ripping off bandages, starting cars, and finding money. They are wizards with fire, and forbid you to know its secrets.

  Certainly, I didn’t need to save them from anything. Besides, I was too little to fight a real dragon.

  I knew something was wrong when they still weren’t outside after a few minutes, when the living room drapes exploded orange and melted into goops (I now know they were synthetic polymer). I peed my pants, sure that the Smok Wawelski had come to life and was going to eat my parents and Brother Father. I heard the dragon knock down the curtain rod with his arched back, and then smash the glass ornaments on our Christmas tree. Crushing my present, for sure.

  Still, nobody came out, and I wondered if they were already dead. Icy armour crept over my leg; urine freezes quickly.

  Then, my parents’ bedroom window flew open, and dear Papa fell naked through the blinds and into the bushes by the house. This was not the hero I was expecting. Thick grey smoke followed him and continued upward into the night.

  Papa ran barefoot across the snow-covered yard, cussing and screaming my name. His ass was bloody where the frozen bush-twigs had lacerated it. I could tell by the notes in his voice that he wasn’t angry. He was scared, like I was. I didn’t say anything, and he ran back into the house through the front door. Smoke pushed him out, so he got down on all fours and crawled inside. I wondered if the last I would see of my father would be his pendulous, hairy balls.

  “Please save Matka and Brother Father,” I said, after he had disappeared inside. “Matka first. Don’t save me. I’m already outside.”

  Dear Dorota, it is incredible how one can collect a lifetime of “why”s in the span of a few minutes. Maybe we’re born with a mechanism to create these questions, so that we can answer them later in life and have something meaningful to do. What do you think?

  Now the house glowed cherry from all the windows, and I could hear the crackle of the dragon munching everything I loved. Pulverizing the family flashlight in his back molars, I was sure. He shattered glass in his teeth, and bashed holes in the roof with his thorny head. The whole house soon puffed smoke, puffed madness, funnelling into a monstrous pillar that twisted ugly into the night, its blackness sucking up shards of flame. Poland didn’t have tornadoes, I knew, but the Bible promised many impossible things:

  And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night.

  —Exodus 13:21

  Was this the salvation that Brother Father was supposed to bring us? The heat had melted my frozen pee, and I remember thinking that I had nowhere to change. As if it mattered. I ripped off my jacket because the fire was heating the zipper like a branding iron. I burned my chin more than once.

  Papa screaming my matka’s name

  The fire truck screaming my house’s name

  Me screaming my papa’s name

  The neighbour screaming the name of God

  The firefighter’s radio screaming that the water was shut off

  God screaming the name of the beast

  The Smok Wawelski screaming the name of its next, and possibly last, meal

  Brother Father screaming my name

  The meal screaming not to be eaten,The fire is too hot, too hot, why won’t anyone save me, my nightgown is burning, now my skin now my hair, so hot, God I have always believed in you, let me hold my son one last time, do not let him see me like this, kurvakurvakurva, is there a sin I don’t know about, tell him—

  I couldn’t hear the rest, no matter how close I got to the bedroom window.

  I was deaf to the most important words ever spoken to me.

  “Tell him.”

  Brother Father and Papa came running out of the house and hugged me, telling me not to listen, blocking my ears. Telling me not to worry, that it was just a hysterical neighbour. I still hadn’t moved. The world had changed, and I hadn’t moved a centimetre. Since when were things allowed to change without you? How was that fair?

  Later, a detektyw policji asked me the strangest questions, and I tried my best to answer them.

  “Do you remember how the fire started?”

  She wouldn’t understand a thing about the Smok Wawelski, so there was no point in telling her the truth.

  “In the Christmas tree.”

  “Then you ran outside.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you dressed in your winter clothes?”

  “Because it was cold outside.”

  “So you had time to get dressed, but not to warn your parents?”

  I fiddled with one of the buttons on my pajamas. She didn’t know how it was. She couldn’t know. She held a tissue to my nose, told me to blow, and pressed on with her inquiry.

  “Radek, why didn’t you answer your father when he called your name?”

  “Because I didn’t want him to think I was talking from inside the house,” I said.

  “Why would he think that? You were behind him.”

  “I don’t know. Papa doesn’t like it when I pee my pants. I was waiting for them to dry.”

  “Your papa was naked.”

  She should’ve known, dear Dorota, that the “why” questions have no real answers, that we can only give fake ones to placate, and that some of us are better at lying than others. She should’ve known that I was dazed and terrified, and that my little body was battling shock and hypothermia. The bitch should’ve given me a blanket.

  “Did your parents ever fight? It’s okay to talk about it. Your papa said it was okay to talk about anything with me.”

  They didn’t care about my papa. As I got older, I began to piece things together: why the firefighters had come late, why the water was “turned off” on our block. It must’ve been because my papa refused to be a stool pigeon for the Communist Party, and they probably knew about Brother Father, too.

  “Do you remember anything else about the fire?”

  What a fucking question.

  I refused to give any more answers that she could twist maliciously and write on her clipboard.

  Dorota, I hope you never have a housefire, if you haven’t already. Because decades later, you will not remember how long you stood in the cold, or how many fire trucks there were, or when you realized your mothe
r had become a charred skeleton, or the last words she ever cried to you through a throat that was blistering and peeling away. You will not recall the changing colour of the flames, but you will make them up. You will reinvent everything.

  The smell of smoke, on the other hand, will never leave you.

  You’ll be lying in bed about to go to sleep, and charcoal will suddenly fill your nose. You’ll sprint through the house, taking inventory of your combustibles and sniffing cracks in the wall, but it’ll only be a phantom scent. Furniture will smell like campfire, and the sulphur in your shit will make you jump off the toilet seat. This will happen repeatedly, but there will never be a pillar of smoke to guide you. Perpetually lost, I’m afraid.

  Magpie (is “girlfriend” better?), I’ll have to transcribe the remaining chapters of The Legend of the Smok Wawelski some other time.

  I’m getting sleepy.

  Love,

  Radeki

  KRYPTOZOOLOGY

  “Poland is clearly in Eastern Europe,” I told Dorota as we walked through the main gates of the Pozna Zoo.

  “It used to be Eastern when it was Eastern Bloc,” she said. “But the map was redrawn after free elections. By 1990, we had become Central.”

  “Central is nowhere,” I said, buying us two tickets. I noticed that my wallet was dangerously empty; I was going to have to destroy another city soon to pay the rent.

  “And Eastern is somewhere?”

  “It’s extreme.”

  Our train excursion to Pozna had been fun because we’d found a thrilling new way to claim a cabin to ourselves: taking off our shoes and hanging our funky socks on the curtain rod.

  “Let’s find the Elephant House,” she said.

  We had come to see, with our own eyes, what Rzeczpospolita had once described as “the wild beast of the Book of Revelation.” Elephants weren’t very biblical animals, but evil apparently took many forms. It appeared that Ninio was gaga over the other male elephants, and wouldn’t “mingle” with the resident female, even when the keepers— it was rumoured—sprayed her pussy with peanut extract. He had to be an envoy of Satan.