The Unmade World

  “This machine we’re going to get costs how many zlotys?” Elena asks as the light changes and they roll onto the bridge.

  “Forty-five thousand,” Bogdan says.

  “Mother of God. How many cups of coffee it can make at one time?”

  “I don’t know. Three or four. It’s one of those elaborate ones from Italy, and because our currency’s in free fall, it’ll probably soon cost even more than it does today. She says we’ve got to have it, that the other good pensions have them because that’s what guests expect. They also expect you to have beer on draft, not in bottles, and you need to have at least three kinds, and one of them has to be a brand they’ll recognize if they’re from the U.S.”

  On the other side of the river, she can see the nicer parts of Krakow: old buildings, church spires, the famous castle where all the kings are buried. “I drank an American beer once,” she says. “I never will forget its name. Miller’s Beer. Terrible. Just yellow water, and the smell reminded me of the time we went camping and my husband pitched our tent where somebody peed.”

  “It doesn’t have to be an American brand. Apparently, the Americans she’s got in mind don’t like their own beer any more than you do. They just need to recognize it, so that’s why we have Heineken along with Lech and Tyskie.”

  “I drank one of those Heinekens the other night,” she says. “It tasted to me about like Miller’s.”

  Maybe because the day is sunny and nice, the traffic is awful. They only make it halfway across the river before they again have to stop.

  “I spent one of the worst nights of my life here,” he says while they wait.

  “Where?”

  “Here on this bridge.”

  “You slept on the bridge? You never said you was homeless.”

  “I was and I wasn’t. This was after my wife and I split up, and I’d moved out of the flat. I was staying at Marek and Inga’s, so I had a roof over my head. But I couldn’t sleep. I’d wait till they went to bed, and then I’d go out and walk the streets. One rainy night, I ended up on this bridge and stood here forever, looking at the river.”

  “You were thinking of jumping in?” The traffic begins to move again, and they roll off the bridge and onto a broad street with a grassy median and plenty of trees.

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe it did cross my mind.” He reaches over and lays his hand on her knee. “I’m glad I didn’t, though.”

  She places her hand on top of his, but this is all she will do to indulge his self-dramatization. “Yes,” she says, “me too. It’s not that far down, and the fall probably would not have killed you, or even knocked you out. And as soon as you knew you were drowning, you would have started to swim anyway. You could do that in a pool.” With her free hand, she gestures at the tall buildings they’re passing. “If a person plans to kill himself, he should jump from one of those. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because that sidewalk over there don’t believe in second chances.”

  What’s in a place?

  In this one, to start with, there’s the white wardrobe. It stands in the hallway and is the first thing Richard sees when he opens the door. It was bought at Ikea in the summer of 2005 and is not nearly as nice as the one it replaced, which belonged to Julia’s parents and before that her grandparents. The older one had ornate wood carvings on both doors, but it got invaded by powderpost beetles, and because they were gone for most of each year and Stefan and Monika never opened it when they stopped by to check on things, no one discovered the damage until it was too late. Some men came and hauled it away. Next to the wardrobe, there’s a coat rack, a spindly one that has been there as long as he can remember.

  He sets his bag down, bends, and pulls off his shoes. He opens the wardrobe and puts them inside, then pulls out his leather slippers, which were bought from a vendor beneath the Hala Targowa overpass thirteen or fourteen years ago. They’re now the color of a well-worn catcher’s mitt. He puts them on and steps into the living room.

  There’s the leather sofa that replaced the Communist-era daybed Julia’s parents used to sleep on so that she and Stefan could each have a room, a nearly unimaginable luxury for a Polish child in the ’60s and ’70s. Her father, a history professor who died the year before Richard met her, did his work over there at the round dining table, trying to figure out how to convey some version of the truth without losing his job and having to leave the country. Pictures of him and her mother stand on the nearby sideboard, pictures of various family members like her maternal grandfather, who died at Monte Cassino. Below that, behind glass doors, a set of blue-and-white Boleslawiec stoneware: a large teapot, a smaller one, matching cups and saucers. In the liquor cabinet, a ten-year-old bottle of Bushmills, unopened and ready for use. Two Bordeauxs, both from 2003; a Montepulciano; two bottles of prosecco. He steps over to the big bookcase and runs his finger along the spines of books that he brought here, read, and left behind.

  Next, the bedroom, with the familiar brown curtains that failed to prevent the sun from waking him at four a.m. The photos on the wall: the three of them negotiating rapids in the Truckee River, all wearing orange life jackets, Anna at the bow with a canary-yellow cap; Julia leaning over to cut a chocolate birthday cake with the number 4 in white icing; Richard shirtless on the back steps in Fresno, Anna with red baby cheeks perched on his knee.

  He walks into the downstairs bath, where there’s an oversized shower they installed in 2002 so that he would no longer have to fold himself into the small bathtub. The kitchen, with a framed poster advertising the 1998 Krakow Summer Jazz Festival headlined by Branford Marsalis.

  He climbs the staircase to the attic, ducking at exactly the right moment to avoid banging his head. He steps into the room where first his wife and then his daughter slept. Several British editions of Harry Potter remain on the shelves. A pink jacket hangs in the closet. He hears someone moving around on the other side of the wall, sees a rectangle of the purest blue through one of the skylights.

  He returns to the living room and takes a seat in his old armchair, removes his slippers, and places his feet on the coffee table. He leans back and within a moment is sound asleep.

  Bogdan lets her out in front of the Ukrainian Consulate. Her daughter has no passport and no means of obtaining her birth certificate, but fortunately, Elena brought the original with her when she left their former home. Someone at the consulate—from what she’s said, a man about her age, who he suspects is taken with her—promised to expedite her application. She says they told her to plan on being there for an hour. She promises to text when she’s finished.

  He drives to the freight office where the espresso machine is waiting. Having it delivered to Zakopane would have cost another seven hundred zlotys. If you’re willing to spend forty-five thousand buying the damn thing, it seems to him, you shouldn’t balk at dropping another few hundred to have it brought to your door. But his sister’s mind works differently from his, which is why her business is a big success and his was an abject failure. He arrives at such judgments now without rancor or bitterness. It’s just how things are. They could be many times worse, and anyway, picking the machine up will give him a chance to see Marek and Inga and let them meet Elena while saving her from a solitary bus trip to the consulate and back.

  Two guys load the heavy box into the back of the van, and he hands each of them a ten-zloty tip. He still hasn’t heard from Elena, so he gets into the van and drives around for a little while, enjoying being back in his hometown. He passes Galeria Kazimierz, the site of the grocery store where he once woke up drunk on the floor. He wonders what happened to the young assistant manager who fired him, whether he moved up in the chain or is still unlocking the doors at six a.m. and wearing the same green tie. He drives past one of his and Marek’s old stores, the one where the judge who sentenced him to prison got cheated. What happened to her? As strange as it might sound, from time to time he thinks of her fondly. She saw him at one of his better moments
, when he did what was right, and at one of his worst, when he admitted committing despicable acts. That she remembered him when he appeared in her courtroom remains a source of amazement these many years later. Just as he gave her back the sum she’d been cheated of, she gave him something too: the chance to write Paid on at least one delinquent debt.

  Finally, he receives the text from Elena saying she’s finished. He pulls into the parking lot at Hala Targowa and calls Marek.

  “Ready, Bogdan?” his old friend asks.

  “I still haven’t picked her up, but I’m about to. So why don’t you wait fifteen minutes before you leave?”

  “Sounds good. We’re looking forward to meeting your lady friend.”

  “See you at the café,” he says, then pulls into traffic.

  Richard is not sure how long he slept, but the angle of the sunlight streaming in through the window would suggest it’s past two p.m. This is not something he has to think about, just as he did not have to think about when to duck as he started up the stairs to the bedroom in the attic. It’s the kind of thing you know when you’ve lived someplace long enough. And he has been living here for years, even though he last set foot within these walls ages ago.

  His neck hurts, and his head does too, which is not surprising given how much he drank last night and how little he’s slept over the past forty-eight hours. In addition, he’s damp all over. It’s a hot day, and there’s no air conditioning. Monika is probably right: if he plans to stay, he should install it. And maybe, he thinks as he rises and works the kinks out of his shoulders, staying is what he should do. Go to the demonstration in Warsaw with Franek and Rafaela, start talking to people and working on a piece about where the country is right now. One thing he knows, because he knows Poles: as dissatisfaction grows, a breaking point will come, and stories will demand to be told.

  Tomorrow, he will go to the cemetery. He intended to do it today, but his stomach is growling, and there’s no food in the apartment. The food court at Galeria Kazimierz never had anything fit to eat and probably still doesn’t, just stuff like McDonald’s and KFC. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to the Old Town and another five or ten to his favorite café, the place where he met Julia. He decides to go there. He wants to see it again anyway.

  He locks the apartment and sets off, taking the most direct route, as opposed to the lengthier one along the Vistula that they used to prefer. This requires him to walk up an ugly street named Blich, where the buildings are still covered in soot. The balconies on the top floor are level with the tracks, and he used to wonder how anybody could sleep in those flats, with trains clattering by all day and all night.

  He turns the corner onto Kopernika, walking past the Church of St. Nicholas. Up ahead, he can see Planty. He waits for a tram to pass, then crosses the street and enters the shady park, where he follows the contours of the old moat, passing the fortified outpost known as the Barbican and opposite it, on his left, the Florian Gate. Bikers pedal by in each direction, young women push baby carriages, older ones lounge on benches in groups of two or three, drunks snooze beneath the chestnuts or sip from bottles and cans. It’s all so familiar, as if he never left.

  Marek and Inga are the first to reach the café. They came on a street car. Though Bogdan doesn’t know it, they no longer own an automobile. Since his heart attack, Marek hasn’t worked a day. They live off his disability payments, the salary Inga draws as a ticket clerk at Polish Rail, and the money she’s able to earn cleaning people’s flats on Saturdays. They never go to cafés anymore, and they even discussed the possibility of making an excuse again today, or letting only Marek go. Neither of them, though, wants to miss a chance to meet Bogdan’s new companion. Earlier, Marek remarked that they had better meet her now, since odds were the relationship wouldn’t last. “Poor Bogdan,” he said. “He just doesn’t seem to have what women are looking for.” Inga didn’t contradict him, though there’s more to Bogdan than her husband suspects.

  They seat themselves at a table in the nonsmoking section. They agreed ahead of time that even though their friend will surely try to pay their check, and they will have to let him, neither of them will order anything except a cup of tea.

  A waitress comes over and slaps two menus on the table. She’s tall, a dishwater blonde with such a miserable expression that Inga takes note of it. “I wonder what’s wrong with her?” she says. “She looks like she couldn’t smile if you paid her.”

  “She waited on us a few times when I came here with Bogdan,” Marek says, examining the menu. “She always looks like that. She’s just extremely sullen. I’m surprised they didn’t fire her years ago.”

  Inga watches her disappear inside. She’s a big-boned young woman, not so different physically from Inga herself at that age. She isn’t wearing a wedding ring, so she’s obviously single, whereas Inga married Marek at the age of nineteen and gave birth twice before she was twenty-three. Back then, they had as little as they have now, and then things changed, and for a while they had a lot more. She knows they will never have more again. If anything, they might soon have even less. But at no point in her life has Inga ever shown the world such an unhappy face.

  She reaches under the table and squeezes Marek’s knee. “All things considered,” she says, “we’ve had a wonderful ride, haven’t we?”

  Marek closes the menu and lays it on the table. “Yes, we have,” he says. “Do you think I could order milk with my tea? It’s only an extra fifty groszy.”

  Because there’s a forty-five-thousand-zloty espresso machine in the back of the van, Bogdan decides to park at a guarded lot on Karmelicka, two or three blocks from the café. His friends are already seated when they arrive. He makes the introductions, and they seat themselves, and the waitress he hoped they would not be served by appears and throws down two more menus.

  They talk for a while about the reason for his and Elena’s trip to Krakow, the expensive coffee machine, her visit to the consulate. On the phone, he gave Marek a heads-up about the deaths of her husband and son, her daughter’s health and immigration issues. He would have put it all in an e-mail, where he could have elaborated, but Marek almost never checks his e-mail anymore, and Bogdan thinks he knows why: they can no longer afford to pay for the Internet. Odds are, when Marek does check it, he’s at a public computer in the library. Though Inga is still robust, his longtime friend has turned into a frail little man who looks a lot older than fifty-eight. He still has his hair, but it’s nearly white now, and his skin has that translucent quality you find in the elderly. If there’s a positive in all of this, it’s that his facial scars have eroded along with everything else. They are no more than thin white lines, hardly visible.

  He orders coffee, and Elena has a glass of red wine. It pleases him to see how easily the two women are talking. He hears Inga telling Elena about a trip to Ukraine that she and her family took when she was a girl. “We only went as far as Lviv,” she says, giving the city its Ukrainian name rather than calling it “Lwow” like most Poles would.

  Marek tells him about their grandson, a burgeoning football star who, like the great Robert Lewandowski, once scored five goals in a single match. “Since my heart attack,” he says, “I’m supposed to avoid getting overly excited. I told him, ‘Mietek, if you’re not careful, sooner or later you are going to kill your poor grandpa.’”

  Neither of them is aware of the tall man in jeans and a white long-sleeved shirt when he steps into the café. Bogdan has his back to the entrance. Marek would be able to see him if he looked in that direction, but he’s caught up in his grandson’s exploits. Inga would also be able to see him if she looked that way, but she’s giving all her attention to Elena, to whom she has taken an immediate liking. The only one who notices him is Elena herself. She happens to glance at the entrance. He’s staring at her. When their gazes meet, he smiles and looks away, as if to make it clear that he’s just searching for a vacant table.

  There aren’t many. A moment or two later, he sits down at th
e one next to theirs, positioning his chair so that he can observe people strolling by in the park.

  The waitress, of course, has a name—two of them. The one she was born with is Bozena, which means both “happy” and “blessed by God.” She likes neither the sound of the name nor its dual implications. “Happy” she sometimes is and sometimes isn’t, like most people. “Blessed by God” she is not. Her father drank himself to death, and her mother worked herself to death taking care of four children. The name she uses in her professional life is Carlotta. As far as she knows, it means nothing at all. She likes how it sounds.

  Bozena/Carlotta is an actress. She’s appeared in a couple of films—a peasant woman drawing water from a well, a hooker working a street corner—but most of her parts have come in theaters in Krakow and Katowice. She’s never had a leading role, though she did once play Dunyasha in The Cherry Orchard. People like Marek and Bogdan assume she’s been here nonstop for many years, but that’s not true. The café is owned and run by a friend, and thus far, he’s always been able to give her hours when she needs them. She works here only when she has no work that matters, and the absence of it is one source of unhappiness. She sometimes wonders if she won’t be waiting tables off and on for the rest of her life. That’s another.

  She grabs a menu and heads toward the tall man who just sat down next to the two older couples. He’s an American, she decides. In a job like this, you get good at spotting them. She’s about to lay the menu down and walk away when he provides the first surprise of a mundane day, addressing her in flawless Polish. “When,” he asks, “did the café get these new chairs?”

  You hear a lot of pickup lines from men his age, which is the major reason she puts on a stiff face when she approaches a table where one of them is sitting. Even if they are with their wives, they’ll often return by themselves and come on to her. She knows, without ever being told, that it’s the kind of thing her father used to do. He treated himself to several drinks and then tried to treat himself to something more.