The Unmade World

  As if by prior agreement, everyone else begins to do the same. Before he knows it, Bogdan is doing it himself, bouncing on the balls of his feet, like he’s at one of those idiotic exercise classes his sister attends between packs of cigarettes. Somebody hands him an EU flag, which he begins to wave with all the others. The last time the country saw large-scale protests, he kept his head down. He sympathized with the protesters but figured he had too much to lose to get caught in their midst. Since he lost everything anyhow, he figures now, he might as well have acted on principle. Though he’s unaware of it, a film crew is a short distance away, behind him and to his right. Later this evening, back in Zakopane, he will spot himself on independent television. It will be a fleeting glimpse, just a second or two, but seeing himself there among the other protesters will evoke an emotion last felt so long ago that he cannot properly identify it.

  The woman next to him is bouncing up and down too, puffing hard. She’s about his age, maybe a little older, and she looks at him and shouts, “My knees are about to give out. I’ve got arthritis.”

  “My bladder’s full,” he hollers, the repeated impact with cobblestones making the synapses fire an alert. “I drank a beer.”

  Continuing to run in place, she points toward Planty. “There’s a bathroom over there. Not far.”

  “I know. I used to live here.”

  “And now?”

  “Zakopane.”

  “Zakopane,” she gasps. “It’s beautiful.”

  She’s a nice woman, with gray hair that was probably once brunette. She’s wearing Nikes, as if she came prepared to exert herself on behalf of the cause.

  It’s the kind of day when the rules of decorum seem not to apply, when who you are and who you might like to be don’t seem so far apart. “Are you married?” he hollers.

  “Married?” Playfully, she digs her elbow into his ribs. “Listen to you. Making a move on an old woman.” She gulps air. She probably ought to take a break. “The answer’s yes,” she wheezes. “My husband’s at home in his wheelchair. What about you?”

  “My ex-wife’s at home with her girlfriend.”

  She stops for a moment to catch her breath, so he does too.

  “What your ex-wife’s doing?” she says. “That’s exactly the kind of freedom these new bastards want to rob us of. You’re so good to be here.”

  She locks her arm with his, and together they bounce up and down a few more times. Then he detaches himself and takes off toward the bathroom, still waving his EU flag. He makes it with seconds to spare.

  Because of the demonstration, traffic around the Old Town is a nightmare. It’s after four when he pulls up in front of the Ukrainian consulate. To his relief, Elena is not there. The demonstration acted as a mood elevator, and her sullen presence could only spoil the vibe. He switches the van’s audio over to Bluetooth, whips his phone out, and scrolls through iTunes until he finds what he’s looking for: Willi Boskovsky and the Vienna Philharmonic. He pulls away from the curb to the opening strains of “Blue Danube.”

  When he glances into his mirror, he sees Elena running after him, shouting and waving. “Shit,” he sighs. He stops and sits there waiting.

  The woman who opens the door is a different person than the one he deposited a few hours ago. Her face has more color than he’s seen before, which he initially puts down to her recent exertion. But it’s more than that: he can tell as soon as she climbs in.

  She’s smiling.

  “Thank you. Oh, thank you for waiting,” she says. “I don’t think they’d let me spend the night at the consulate. Do you?”

  “I doubt it,” he says.

  “No, certainly not. They have rules. Rules everywhere you look. Some good, some bad, but lots and lots of rules.”

  There’s no traffic on the street right now, and he still has his foot on the clutch. For a moment, he entertains the possibility that she might be bipolar. Then he notices the bottle protruding from her purse. Elena has had herself a few drinks.

  He looks into the mirror again, then pulls into the street. “So,” he says, “I guess whatever business you needed to take care of went well?”

  “Oh, it went very well,” she says. “I thought it wouldn’t, that this is why they made me come in person. But I was wrong. It was opposite. She’s alive. My daughter,” she exults, “is alive.”

  Teresa has just finished her entree, a saddle of rabbit with buckwheat, walnuts, and carrot puree, when she looks out the window. It’s an oddity of contemporary Zakopane that its most elegant new restaurant stands right across Krupowki from a peasant kitsch place—the kind of establishment where hams and farm implements hang on the walls and a spitted pig roasts perpetually. For a moment, she can’t believe her eyes. “Hey,” she tells Roman. “Quick. Take a look.” She points across the street.

  He hasn’t got his glasses on, so there’s nothing to do but squint. “Is that Bogdan?”

  “It sure is. Do you see who’s with him?”

  “It’s not Elena, is it?”

  “It most assuredly is.” She watches the door close behind her brother, who politely held it open for his companion.

  Their waiter is just passing, so she taps his arm, and when he turns to her with ill-masked annoyance, she orders herself a Pour Moi and, for her companion, a double Ballantine’s.

  Roman watches the waiter walk away, then looks at her and laughs. “You didn’t think maybe you ought to wait and see if I wanted something different? Since you’re paying, I might’ve preferred a twenty-year-old single malt.”

  “I knew you’d ask for Scotch,” she says, “and it’s the only one I can remember the name of right now.”

  “What’s our hurry?”

  No one, not even Roman, knows how her brother’s fate troubles her. Such a sweet man, he never did anybody any harm until his business losses dragged him down. She would have helped. All he needed to do was ask. He’s been alone for years, and his marriage was not good. “I want to celebrate,” she says, “before he turns back into a pumpkin.”

  In the venue on the far side of Krupowki, the tables are wooden slabs balanced on sawed-off stumps. A folk ensemble is playing up front, but the place is full this evening, and you can’t hear the music very well over the raised voices. Behind Elena, mounted in the corner, there’s a flat-screen TV. The businessman running for the American presidency must have insulted somebody again. He’s pointing a finger at the camera and snarling.

  Their waiter is decked out in embroidered woolen pants and a sheepskin vest, a halberd suspended from his sash. Bogdan orders them each a big mug of herbata po goralsku—tea the mountain way, laced with vodka.

  After all this time, it feels strange and wonderful to be together with a woman in a bar. For years, he assumed it would never happen again, that he shouldn’t even let himself hope for it, that it was about as likely as the reappearance of the powdered oranzada he loved as a child.

  When their drinks come, he props his elbows on the table and leans forward. “So tell me,” he says. “You promised.”

  The glow that graced her face back in Krakow has dimmed a bit, but it’s not entirely gone. “I don’t know do you really want to hear it. It’s not pretty.”

  “I do. And by the way, my story’s not pretty either.”

  “I know. You went to jail.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  She shrugs and mentions the name of another waitress at the pension. “She told me, but it don’t matter. I’ve seen worse places than prison.”

  Strictly speaking, so has he. But the evening’s not about him. “Go on,” he says. “Please.”

  Her husband was a mechanic. He worked a long time for someone else. They saved. One day he opened his own shop. Their son worked with him, and before long they’d built a solid clientele. They could fix any car: Russian, Japanese, German, it didn’t matter. If they couldn’t buy the parts, they’d invent them. She once walked in there and found an enormous green thing suspended from the post-
lift. It looked like a tank.

  “An American Ford Galaxy,” she says. “Made in the 1970s. Nobody ever saw such a vehicle in Luhansk. I asked him who it belonged to, and he said it was owned by a Polish man who love America’s things and was driving in this terrible car from Warsaw through Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, then back up through Bulgaria and Romania, taking pictures of people and landmarks in all those countries. This was before the war came, but I still thought what he was doing was stupid. That car was old and unusual, and if it hadn’t been for my husband, probably can’t nobody fix it.”

  Unfortunately, while her husband loved working on cars and would get excited talking about throttle linkages, their son took no pleasure in his job at the garage. He couldn’t figure out what to do with himself. Nobody would pay you for doing what he loved, which was to sit on his bed and watch YouTube videos. As far as she could tell, it didn’t necessarily matter what the videos were. She got hold of his computer once and went through his recent browsing history, and she found all sorts of items: sure, he watched a little pornography, and that bothered her, but he didn’t have a girlfriend, and that’s what boys do. He watched a lot of music videos, too, terrible-sounding stuff by loud bands that jumped around a lot onstage, shrouded in smoke of various colors. He watched cartoon clips. His favorite seemed to be about a ghost called Casper.

  “Can you imagine that? Cartoons are for children, and somebody invents one that stars a ghost?”

  In the summer of 2012, when Ukraine and Poland cohosted the Euro Cup, he went to see one of the matches in Donetsk, and though he said he’d be back that night, he wasn’t. They didn’t see him again for two days, during which she was frantic. The match had been played against the British team, and everyone knew their fans’ reputation for rowdy behavior. Serhiy was a mild-mannered boy, but maybe after Ukraine lost, he’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

  It seems ludicrous now, some of the things she worried about. He met a few people at the football match, and they went out afterward for drinks. Donetsk was twice the size of Luhansk, it had all kinds of clubs. He spent the first night carousing in one after another, and somebody let him crash on their sofa. The next morning, he was too hungover to go home, worried about facing his parents, so he stayed and did it again. He should’ve been worried too, because when he returned after missing two days’ work, her husband was livid. He was a big man, much larger than Serhiy. He’d been drinking that night, which unfortunately was how he’d always dealt with his worries. She was on her knees in the bedroom praying when she heard the door open. The next thing she knew, there was a loud crash.

  “It sounded like a gun,” she said. “Like today when the tractor driver threw something on our car.”

  Her husband had hurled the son he adored against the wall. The picture of her grandfather saluting General Zhukov in Berlin was dislodged, the glass shattering when the frame smacked the floor. She ran into the living room and found him straddling Serhiy, hitting his face hard, alternating hands while their son did his best to shield himself.

  “The next day,” she said, “rather than go to work at the garage, Serhiy decides he’ll join the army. I begged him not to, because he hadn’t been conscripted. But he told me he can’t never work for his father again.”

  Listening to her story is like watching an impending train wreck in one of those old American Westerns. The camera cuts from one locomotive to the other and back again, and the audience knows they’re bound for destruction. The engineer in one of them is dead, slumped over the throttle with an arrowhead in his heart. You can’t do a thing in the world but wait for the crash.

  “So off he goes to the army,” she says. “People do it. Everybody in my family. My grandfather, my father. All my uncles. Every one of them lived to be old. But Serhiy don’t. The war comes. And Serhiy goes.”

  You can’t let a statement like that glide by without posing the obvious question. If the person you’re talking to chooses not to answer, it’s her business. Then you honor the silence. “What happened to your son?” he asks.

  She says a missile hit the armored vehicle he was riding in. “Some say it was the separatists, some say it was the Russians.” She shrugs, her eyes dry as stones. “Me, I say once it’s shot, a missile’s got its own mind. It took the top off his vehicle, and the ammunition they were carrying blew up. Everybody else burned to death, but Serhiy was thrown into the air. He caught on some kind of high-voltage wire. And for days they let him hang there. You may’ve seen the picture. It’s on YouTube too. At last my boy got his own video.”

  His eyes look away from her, at the TV set she saw when they walked in. Until now, the only people she’s told about her son were officials of one sort or another: border police, embassy personnel. At the refugee center in Warsaw, where others had their own troubles, some perhaps as bad as hers or even worse, nobody passed them around. Why she’s chosen to tell this particular man, she doesn’t know. Maybe because after she shared the good news about her daughter, he cared enough to ask how she came to be where she is. He told her he’d heard her footsteps every night. He knew what that kind of walking meant.

  But now he’s embarrassed. Confronting another’s grief is almost always embarrassing, because you know something about them that you shouldn’t. Whether they’ve told you themselves is beside the point. It’s as if their skin has been peeled away, revealing their internal organs, their bowels full of decaying matter.

  The thing is, he did see the photo: it was in Gazeta Wyborcza, on the front page, if he recalls correctly, the soldier draped over the power cables, his pants bunched at his ankles, his shirt and jacket hanging over his head and shoulders, his bloated corpse gleaming as if lit from inside. He remembers thinking that if that had been his son, he could not have faced another day.

  Is the loss of one child balanced by the discovery that the other is still alive, that if things go well, she’ll join her mother here or someplace else? A conductor for Ukrainian Rail, she was trapped in Debaltseve when the Russian-sponsored insurgency gained control. For more than a year, Elena told him on the drive back, she’d received no news of her despite repeatedly contacting the embassy. Then last night, they called and asked her to go to the Krakow consulate. She thought she’d be told her daughter was lost too. Instead, she learned she’s been hospitalized in Mariupol. God knows how she’s suffered, but she’s alive.

  He can’t look away from her forever. “And your husband,” he asks, “what happened to him?”

  She says that one day after the fighting started, some men came to the garage and told him they needed his help. They knew he could fix anything, and they wanted him to repair some military equipment. One of them was a man her husband had known all his life, an ethnic Russian. He’d worked on this man’s car; they got along. “This was after we lost our Serhiy,” she says. “Did these people know it? I think not. They didn’t tell who he was when they showed the picture on TV. They didn’t put his name in the paper either. It was like he was everybody, but because he was everybody, he was also nobody.

  “Would they have asked my husband this question if they knew who that was they’d seen hanging off the wire? Maybe yes, maybe no. But if no, it would’ve been because my husband was a big man, with a big wrench in his hand. It would’ve been because they were scared he would hurt them rather than being scared they would hurt him. And they would’ve been right, because for a man his size, he could move fast, and he hit that man whose car he worked on, he hit him hard across the head with that big wrench. He split this man’s head open. He wasn’t going to drive that car for a while.

  “The other men, they left carrying their friend. I know they did, because my husband called and told me. And he told me he might not see me again, that when it got dark and he closed the shop and started for home, something might happen. And he said if it did, I had to leave, and that if it didn’t, both of us would have to leave now anyway, that we should have left weeks ago. He said for me to call our daughter and
tell her we need to go, so I did what he advised, though I already knew what our daughter would say: that she couldn’t, because she had her own life, her own guy, and he couldn’t leave because, like Serhiy, he’d gone to the army.

  “In his life, my husband was wrong about many things, and I must admit that after what happened to Serhiy, I had made up my mind to leave him. I told myself that when things get normal again, I’m gonna sit down with him and explain my reasons, so it wouldn’t be sneaky, it would just be what it was. But unfortunately, he was not wrong about the last thing he ever told me. I never did see him again, not alive I didn’t. Somebody shot him before he walked a block.

  “For a long time, the only thing I could think of to be glad for was that he never knew I was planning to desert him. But now I’m glad our daughter is alive. And I’m glad you asked me to tell you what you called my ‘story.’ I never knew a story could kill nobody, but sometimes it seemed like mine would kill me.” She finishes her spiked tea. “That’s what I was trying to walk away from,” she says, “on all those nights when I made your ceiling sigh. But I guess we can’t walk away from our story, can we? We can’t do nothing but tell it.”

  He signals their waiter for another round. Then, without giving himself time to think it over, he begins to tell her his.

  Teresa owns a small villa, and for a good while now, she’s been living there with Roman, granting him, as he likes to joke, provisional permanent residence. It’s only a block from the older of her two Zakopane pensions, the one where her brother stays.

  It’s snowing when she and Roman start home. Bogdan is still in the farm kitsch place with Elena. There’s only one way out—through the front door—and they haven’t taken it.