The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  The people who worked the checkout stands in the first stores he and Marek opened were mostly women in their forties and fifties. They’d learned the appropriate survival tactics. Initially, they skimmed a few zlotys from the cash registers, but he put a stop to that by switching the drawers out several times a day. So they began overcharging the customers or shortchanging them, and complaints escalated. Finally, he called a meeting. “Listen,” he told them, “things aren’t like they used to be. You just can’t keep cheating our customers. It has to stop.”

  A woman who reminded him of his grandmother asked, “Why do you care? It’s not your money.”

  “If you steal from the customers, they’ll quit shopping here. They’ll go someplace where they don’t get cheated. It’s really pretty simple.” Even as he made the statement, he knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t simple for her, and it wasn’t simple for lots of others. The world was changing faster than they could. Once people accept the notion that an old car ought to cost more than a new one because the old one is readily available but you can acquire the new one only by paying up front, putting your name on a list, and waiting ten years, it’s hard to sell them the opposite reality. If you’ve lived your whole life upside down, living right-side up is like walking on the ceiling.

  “I don’t want to work here anymore,” the woman said. He realized tears were on the way, and he prayed they wouldn’t flow right there in front of him and the other employees. She pulled her apron off, flung it on the counter, grabbed her coat, and walked out. He stayed awake a long time that night, drinking vodka and feeling like a predator. Now he’s become prey himself. And by this time tomorrow, if he’s not dead, he’ll be a thief as well.

  Marek hangs a left, bound for the Grunwald Bridge. The snow is falling harder, in defiance of the forecast. “You know how this guy we’re about to pay a visit to got started?” he asks.

  “How?”

  “Summer of ’90, he begins hanging around the Auschwitz train station. This is before you had all those fancy tour buses ferrying visitors around from one concentration camp to another, giving them the Zyklon B tour. When he sees some Americans waiting on the platform for a train to Krakow, he ambles over and tells ’em the train’ll take nearly three hours, that the bathrooms are filthy and smelly and there’s no soap or toilet paper, and then he offers to deliver them in under an hour for fifty dollars. You know how impatient and finicky Americans are. A couple of times a day, all summer long, somebody accepts his offer. He converts the dollars on the black market, and come September he’s got enough to start his construction business. Next thing you know, he’s the go-to guy if you’ve made a bundle and want to build your own private swimming pool.”

  They’re crossing the Vistula. Right in the middle there’s a sheet of ice, though the water’s still flowing on either side. “How rich can you get,” Bogdan asks, “building private swimming pools in Poland?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that if you’ve got enough money and a big enough house, you can put the swimming pool inside?” With a gloved finger Marek thumps the steering wheel. He can only stomach so much defeatism. Even if you think the world is shit, why not call it manure? It leaves a better odor. “No, it didn’t,” he says, shaking his head. “Besides, that’s not all he does.”

  “So what else does he do?”

  “Builds hot tubs, saunas, and heated doghouses. He’s got branches in Warsaw, Gdansk, every major city. By the way, you didn’t forget the kielbasa?”

  “No, I didn’t. Did you get your stuff?”

  Marek pats his coat pocket. “Right here.”

  “I hope you’ve got the dose right.”

  “I guarantee you I do.”

  “I don’t know how you can guarantee that when you’ve never laid eyes on the creature.”

  “The average weight of a German shepherd is thirty to forty kilos, and my cousin says this one’s just regular-sized. To be on the safe side, I’m estimating forty.”

  “The safe side for who? Us or the dog?”

  “We’re people. It’s a member of the animal kingdom. Besides, if it gets a little extra juice, all it’ll do is sleep a bit longer.”

  Bogdan loves dogs. He’s always loved them. As a boy, he wanted one more than anything, but his father said no. He and Krysia had to put down their chocolate Lab three years ago, and they’ve never gotten another one because they can’t afford to take care of it. He’d rather starve to death than harm a dog. “You’re sure about that?” he asks.

  “Totally.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked the vet.”

  “What vet?”

  “The one who sold it to me.”

  This is not a good sign. “You said you were getting it from a farmer.”

  “I had to say that to keep you from backing out. See? You’re scared now.”

  “Of course I’m scared. We’re driving around in a snowstorm, in a stolen BMW, on our way to commit a crime. And you’re telling me you bought a controlled substance from a vet . . . and asked his advice about how to tranquilize a guard dog? Stop this car right now. Let me out.”

  “Relax. The vet’s in Rabka.”

  “In the mountains? What were you doing down there?”

  “Going to see the vet.”

  “And telling him what?”

  When you know Marek Ficowski as well as he does, you can tell when inspiration pays him one of its not infrequent visits. His face, young beyond its years, becomes even more boyish. In the greenish dashboard glow, the corners of his mouth have advanced with wide delight. He looks as happy as he did in fifth grade when they slipped away at recess with a bottle of vodka they’d stolen and drank it behind the wall of the Jewish cemetery. Bogdan got sick that day, and he’s feeling sick right now. This night could end badly. It will end badly. He can all but guarantee it.

  “The vet wasn’t really a he,” Marek announces. “It was a she.”

  “I don’t care if it was a plow horse. What did you tell him, her, or it?”

  “Funny you should mention a plow horse. Because the day I went to see this vet, her foot was in a cast. She’d been trying to vaccinate a horse the night before, and it stepped on her and crushed her instep. I told her I needed to knock my dog out for several hours because we were having our kitchen painted and a couple of years ago he’d bitten a plumber. This poor young woman was in terrific pain, and she just gave me what I needed, no questions asked. She was drugged herself and probably didn’t remember the encounter an hour later. I felt pretty bad for her. I hugged her before I left, and the way she pressed herself against me . . . well, I’ll be honest. If she’d offered to give me a rabies shot, I would’ve seized the chance to drop my drawers. You’ve got to take that first step somehow.”

  He probably walked into the closest veterinary office, greased the palm of some assistant with access to the medicine cabinet, and walked out with a syringe and a vial of liquid. Bogdan will just have to hope that he didn’t say enough to become memorable. Because the truth is that if they don’t come up with somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand zlotys in the next few days, their last store will go the way of all the others. And then what?

  He’s forty-eight years old, with thinning hair and a potbelly. Sometimes in the morning, while they move around the kitchen making their separate breakfasts, he catches Krysia staring at him. She’s quick to look away, but there’s no mistaking her expression. It’s not distaste, it’s not disappointment, it isn’t even pity. It’s astonishment. How can someone who used to do so many things so well suddenly become incapable of doing even one thing right? When they were young, had almost nothing, and were still sleeping on the folding sofa in her parents’ small flat, all he needed to do was lay his hand anywhere on her body—even someplace supposedly nonerogenous like her kneecap—to make her quiver. Now, if he touches her, she stiffens. He can’t even recall the last time they kissed.

  Marek turns off the highway, and they soon start to ascend, t
he road snaking past the occasional brightly lit villa that looks like it must’ve been transported here from Disneyland. When Bogdan was young, his grandmother lived out in this direction, in a two-room farmhouse that she’d once shared with his long-dead grandfather. Though there was always plenty to eat when he visited, Bogdan never quite understood where the food came from. For a while she owned a cow that she milked twice a day, had several chickens, and apparently sold eggs in a nearby village, though that was never talked about. At some point in the early ’50s, as a result of remarks she’d made about the local collective farm, she’d been sent away for “reeducation.” After that she kept her business to herself. She got by. That was all that mattered.

  “You ever wonder who lives in these new houses?” he asks.

  Marek shrugs. “Folks like our pool builder. He gets tired of the cold, so he and his young wife fly off to spend Christmas in Fiji. He has imagination. We’ve got imagination too, but so far we haven’t tapped into it. When we get past this next little hurdle, we’re going to have to innovate. Either innovate or deteriorate—that’ll be our new slogan.”

  The snow falls harder, and they climb higher, finally cresting a big hill and then beginning their descent into a valley. You can see several clusters of lights down there, each one distant from the others, all of them gauzy, as if viewed through a layer of cheesecloth.

  Leaning back, Stefan Mirecki pats his stomach. With his wild shock of salt-and-pepper hair and matching beard, he looks strikingly like Jerry Garcia and is, appropriately, a devotee of the Grateful Dead. “I just ate a meal,” he announces, “worthy of a German field marshal. By the way, did you know one of them died upstairs, Rysiu? In ’45, right before our liberators arrived.”

  Richard is still working on his duck. Roast duck with apples is his go-to dish in Polish restaurants, even one offering the potential for exotic fare. Stefan thinks that since his mother was a Polish immigrant, this must have been his favorite meal growing up and that he orders it in homage. Richard knows this is what his brother-in-law believes because he’s read all his novels. In the most recent, a minor character clearly based on Richard appeared in a couple of scenes. When he ordered his duck, he was assigned a point of view for all of two paragraphs, solely so the reader could learn just how mawkishly sentimental a certain type of Polish American could be. The reality, at least in Richard’s opinion, is more revealing than the fiction. His mother never cooked Polish food. His father, north-of-Boston Irish, doesn’t like much of anything except roast beef, fried cod, lamb stew, and boiled potatoes. Richard never got to eat roast duck until he came here back in ’89, and the first time he had it, he was with Julia. And now she won’t cook it either, because she’s worried about his cholesterol. He orders the goddamn duck because he loves it. That’s why most people choose one dish over another.

  “I guess I didn’t know that about the field marshal,” he says. “Which one was it?”

  His brother-in-law rolls his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling, admiring the inlaid crystals. The Jaziri family spared no expense when it came to renovation. The enormous ivory chandeliers must have cost many an elephant life. “Von Hötzendorf, I think.”

  Stefan has his own personal relationship with truth, and it seldom involves adherence to fact. Right now he’s probably trying out the field marshal business because he likes the atmosphere and is thinking of setting a scene here. Generally, Richard lets these moments glide by, but sometimes he can’t resist calling him out. “Von Hötzendorf’s from the First War,” he says. “He died eight or nine years before Hitler took power.”

  “Well, then, it must have been some other von,” Stefan says cheerfully. He turns to Franek, who’s laboring over his wild boar and hasn’t said two words since they sat down. “You better get moving on that,” he tells his son. “They’ve got some great desserts here, and you’ll be ineligible if you leave that much on your plate.”

  The boy’s cheeks turn red. Looking at him now, Richard senses that he feels very much alone. His mother plays viola in the Philharmonic and is often away at night, and his father makes frequent jaunts to foreign countries as new books are released. The poor kid’s by himself too much, and puberty’s on the way if it hasn’t already struck.

  “Give him time, Uncle Stefan,” Anna says. “I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than the young.”

  “Little lawyer!” To Richard: “I see she takes after my sister.”

  “Yeah,” Richard agrees, “she’s absorbed a few of her mom’s character traits.”

  “You two are discussing them as if they weren’t sitting at the same table,” Monika says. “Like it’s guys’ night out. It’s offensive.”

  To Richard, his sister-in-law has always been a mystery. A small, shapely woman who dyes her hair so black it’s nearly blue, she usually doesn’t say much. But when she does speak, she stares at you like you’re the score of a concerto she’s playing. This never fails to cause him discomfort, and he’s occasionally had the feeling that she knows and enjoys it. Why that would be, he can’t imagine. But she’s the person who kindled Anna’s interest in violin and gave her her first lessons, so he thinks maybe he should apologize, though he’s not sure what for.

  As though reading his mind, Stefan says, “I think maybe it’s time for the guys to go have a smoke.” He pulls a pair of cigars from inside his jacket. “Guess where these came from?”

  “They’re Cuban?”

  His brother-in-law grins. “The benefits of being un-American.”

  Richard chews the last bit of duck and lays down his knife and fork. “The balcony?”

  “Of course.”

  They excuse themselves and wind their way between tables. The other diners are all well dressed—a couple of women glitteringly so—and Richard hears a smattering of German, a phrase or two that he thinks might be Croatian, a fair amount of English. There’s jazz on the sound system, “Someday My Prince Will Come.” That’s the only kind of music they seem to play here, and it’s a big reason he loves this restaurant. His father ran a seedy jazz club in one of Boston’s northern suburbs, and though it went out of business nearly thirty years ago, Richard thinks about it often, easily summoning the sight and smell of nineteen overflowing ashtrays, one on each table and three on the mahogany bar.

  They step outside and light their cigars. The snow has slackened. Down below, they can see the lights of a few villas and farmhouses and, to the southwest, the airport’s runway lights. It’s cold but not that cold, especially because they’re full of food and wine.

  “Is it my imagination,” he asks, “or is Monika on edge?”

  “Rysiu, I’ve always felt you were wasted on journalism. With your sense of seismography, you ought to be a novelist.” He looses a puff of loamy smoke. “I had this little thing going on locally. And Monika’s not used to that.”

  The protagonist in his novels, a middle-aged detective in the Krakow police department, repeatedly cheats on his wife, often with three or four different women over the course of a three-hundred-page book. The twist is that he never pursues younger lovers. They’re always at least his age and sometimes even older. His forte is highly atmospheric mature sex. He calls on them with weary eyelids, a bottle of Egri Bikaver, a tin of pasteurized roe, a chunk of smoked sheep cheese, cranberry relish. The world may be changing, but his actions affirm that in matters of the heart he adheres to the old ways: he kisses their hands coming and going.

  “What kind of little thing?” Richard asks.

  “She’s twenty-two, works at that record store on Florianska.”

  He wouldn’t be able to conceal his dismay if he tried. “Jesus. The blonde with that milky-white complexion?” The girl looks about as old as Anna.

  “If you think what you’ve seen of her is milky white,” Stefan says, “you ought to . . . Well, you don’t like hearing this. Do you?”

  “Not especially.”

  Stefan laughs and pats his shoulder. “I felt sure you wouldn’t. But
the setup’s perfect, and I couldn’t help but want to watch your reaction.” He sucks hard on the cigar, the tip of it glowing bright orange. “Two brothers-in-law alone outdoors on a snowy night. One of them utterly, blindly infatuated with his wife. The other a hedonistic rake. Don’t be surprised if this appears in a novel.”

  Richard won’t be. “What surprises me is her age.”

  “Several of her predecessors were a year or two younger. Rysiu, our good detective’s consorts are camouflage. They serve their purpose, though you should see some of the women who hit on me at book signings. The problem with this latest one’s not her age. It’s the fact that she lives in Krakow. I broke it off last week, but just yesterday I glanced out the window and saw her standing on the sidewalk watching our building. I suspect I may have fucked up.”

  “And Monika knows?”

  “She does and she doesn’t. In other words, she hasn’t been told. I’m sure she has no idea who it is, at least not yet.”

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  “Is that what you’d do if you were in my shoes?”

  He’s not about to say that he’d never be in Stefan’s shoes. The only people who can truthfully say how they’d behave in any given situation are, by and large, people Richard Brennan does not want to know. “I think I probably would,” he says.

  “I think you probably would too. Of course, you’d never put yourself in this position to begin with.” He gestures toward the dining room. “In there at that table, you’ve got everything you need. You’ve even got everything you want.”

  Why argue with the truth? In Richard’s profession, you travel a good bit and see a lot of different people, a fair number of whom are women. He spends the occasional night in L.A., where he sometimes has dinner with a film producer in her early thirties, whose love life, he knows, is a disaster. The melting nature of her good-night hugs has led to the suspicion that if he wanted to, he could get himself invited back to her place or entice her to his room. It’s not that he finds her unattractive or that her relative youth summons scruples an available woman closer to his own age might breach. It’s just that he’s already found what he spent his twenties looking for. How this came to be seems every bit as mysterious now as it did seventeen years ago. A geopolitical event got him sent halfway around the world, and he stumbled across the right person. That his domestic happiness is firmly grounded in happenstance sometimes unsettles him, but when he looks around at other contented couples, their stories are often similar. You can’t say why fate smiles at some and sneers at others.