The Unmade World

  She’s not unobservant. These chairs and tables have been at the café since the day she first worked here. “They’ve been around,” she says, “as long as I have. And that’s quite a few years.”

  It’s as if he’s looking at her but not seeing her—that’s how she will put it later, when she tells a friend about him. The thought that he isn’t really seeing her is something new. The other men who have come on with lines like his were looking right through her clothes as if they possessed x-ray vision. Which is an altogether different way of not being seen.

  “I met my wife here,” he tells her. He nods at the next table, where the two older couples are sitting. “Right there. That’s why I asked. But back then, the chairs were different. They had rawhide seats, and they were rickety as hell. You never knew what might happen when you sat down in one of them. I haven’t been here for a long time.”

  She seldom engages the patrons, not even women with small children, the ones all the other waitresses and waiters ooh and coo over, hoping to increase their tips. But she has yet to move away from this man, though two young guys just sat down at a table in the corner and are waiting for menus. “When did you meet her?” she asks.

  “Nineteen eighty-nine.” He smiles. “Here and yet not here. But it was closer to here than anyplace else.” As if he understands that such reflections have the potential to unsettle her, he glances at the menu. “No Zywiec now,” he says. “Just Tyskie and Pilsner Urquell. I believe I’ll have the latter. And a burger and fries. I might want a second beer pretty quickly, so keep an eye on me, if you wouldn’t mind.” He hands her the menu and smiles again, and she goes off to place the order, then carries menus to the two guys who recently entered.

  When she returns to the bar, the pilsner is waiting, so she stands it on a serving tray and carries it to his table. He’s watching something in Planty and at first doesn’t react when she places it before him. Just as she’s about to walk away, he says, “Thank you. It used to take forever.”

  Elena is the only one at the table who pays him any mind. He looks, she thinks, like a man with nowhere to go. A moment or two later, she revises her assessment. What he really looks like is a man who has already seen everything worth seeing. Or at least thinks he has, which amounts to the same thing.

  It hasn’t been long since she felt like that herself. What kept her going through the motions at the refugee center and, later, when Teresa hired her to wait tables, was the possibility, slim though it seemed, of seeing her daughter again. And then she found out that she was alive, and this led her to go to the restaurant with Bogdan, and then to his room, and now she sees him every day, and in a matter of months, she and Leysa will be reunited. She hopes this man has one good thing to look forward to. One is all you need. More than one is icing.

  Marek starts telling a story about how he bought a car in Germany in 1992 and drove it to a shop near the Polish border. “I had them completely disassemble it,” he says, “and ship it over the border as ‘used auto parts,’ which had a much lower tariff. On this side, I paid another shop to reassemble it. I saved a huge amount.”

  “Yes,” Bogdan says, “but what happened later?”

  “Well, they didn’t get all the bolts completely tight, maybe because they put some in the wrong holes.”

  “And?”

  Elena can tell that they’ve been through this routine many times. Little boys talking about little boys’ toys.

  Marek laughs. “And one day I went out to get in it, and it was lying on the ground. The chassis had come loose from the wheels. But that didn’t happen for several months. Until then, it was a wonderful car.”

  The two couples talk a while longer, then Bogdan takes a look at his watch and tells Elena that as much as he hates it, they’d better be going. The traffic will be at least as bad as it was earlier, if not worse. He signals for the check. When the sullen waitress arrives with it, Marek and Inga mount the obligatory protest, but he tells them not to be silly, that today, the privilege is his.

  Though Richard is watching the activity in Planty, he has been listening to the conversation at the next table, where so long ago a happy accident occurred that altered his life. It’s a habit, listening to others—an essential habit for a writer of any ilk. You can learn all sorts of things that way, and if ninety-eight percent of it is inconsequential, there’s always the other two percent. This is what he often told his students, back when he still had them. “That two percent could be worth everything. It could give you the beginning of your story. Or, if you’ve already got most of a story written, it could lead you to your ending. Or it could provide you with the single detail that could energize the entire narrative. At any given moment, you never know what might be laid on your table. As a writer—or, for that matter, as a human being—sometimes your main job is simply to be receptive.”

  He has freely given that advice, but it’s been a long time since he took it himself. He’s felt so little investment in his surroundings for so long that he stopped paying attention as he once did.

  Today, he has already learned that the older of the two women belongs with the little white-haired man with faint scars on his face. The woman who keeps mangling Polish grammar is with the man whose back is turned to Richard. His best guess would be that she’s Ukrainian. Given what’s going on in that country, most likely a refugee. The Poles resist taking them if they’re from the Middle East, but about a year ago, the New York Times reported that over three hundred thousand Ukrainians had arrived here since the conflict began. A great many have been granted temporary work permits. Suffering, apparently, has been assigned its hierarchies too.

  The two men and the older woman have known one another forever. They’ve made numerous allusions to a shared past, but they speak with greater detail than they would if they were only talking among themselves. The Ukrainian woman, if that’s what she is, and the man whose face he can’t see are a more recent pair. This is a get-acquainted encounter, a chance for the other couple to meet their old friend’s new interest. A café is, after all, a place where people often greet others for the first time. Let’s meet at Bunkier Café. Three o’clock. Would that be okay? You know the place I mean, the one in Planty that’s attached to the art gallery? Those are the exact words once spoken to him, over a phone line that both he and the speaker assumed was tapped. The majority of these meetings lead nowhere or, at most, to casual relationships. Every now and then, things follow a different course, as they did for him and Julia. Deeper attachments get formed, the kind that can survive anything, including death.

  The older woman and the little white-haired man will almost certainly remain together forever. This is Poland, where divorce is still rare, no matter how rocky a marriage might be, and theirs doesn’t sound troubled. They have children and grandchildren, and they see them all on a regular basis. Their extended family probably visits the cemetery together on All Saints’ Day, they attend Christmas Eve mass together at St. Mary’s, and they open presents together on Christmas morning.

  In the natural course of things, one day, either the man or the woman will not wake up. If you were going to place a bet based on their physical appearances, you would place it on the man, who looks as if he’s withering from the inside out. His skin is pale and flaky-looking, as if it’s been sprinkled with white powder, and when he gets excited, he grows breathless. But then again, you never know. As healthy as she looks, the woman could go first. One of them will bury the other at Rakowicki, and eventually, the other will follow.

  The second pair has embarked on a new adventure. The Ukrainian woman looks eight or ten years younger than the other woman. Mid- to late forties. If she’s here as a refugee or even as a guest worker, it’s probably because leaving was her only option. And if that’s true, it’s possible she left no one behind. Maybe she lost her husband in the war. Maybe she lost others as well.

  He can’t see how old the man with his back to him is, but his thin gray hair and lifelong friendship with the f
irst pair would indicate late fifties. There aren’t many single men in Poland in their fifties. It’s a country where people marry young. About the only men who don’t are the ones with such fatal flaws—alcoholism chief among them—that nobody will have them. But this man doesn’t sound like a big drinker, and out of the corner of his eye, Richard can see the coffee cup standing near his right hand. He’s not even having a beer or a glass of wine, perhaps because he’s driving.

  It’s likely that at one time, the man whose face he can’t see had a wife. It’s not impossible that their marriage ended in divorce, but the odds are against it. Maybe he lost her to breast cancer. Or uterine cancer. Or ovarian cancer. Or heart attack. Or deep-vein thrombosis after a twenty-two-hour flight from Melbourne. Or any number of other diseases that kill thousands of women every day.

  Maybe he lost her in an accident.

  Maybe she’s not the only one he lost.

  Maybe he lost everything and everybody but the people at that table.

  The man whose face he can’t see has a calm voice, a steady voice, resonant without being loud. He sounds affable. He laughs when a good line demands it, pokes gentle fun from time to time at his male friend. They’ve been buddies forever, after all, and he wants him to meet this woman who has stepped into his life. He wants his friends to become hers.

  Whatever loss he suffered, this man, whose name Richard doesn’t know, whose face he can’t see, found the means to overcome it. It could not have been easy, and there’s no telling how long it took, how often he felt as if his body were a great leaden weight, how many nights he lay awake staring at the ceiling, how many mornings he woke and thought, Why bother? Luck may have lent a hand, as luck does more often than some of us want to admit, but the choice to accept it was strictly up to him. Now, here he sits where Richard once sat, with a woman he probably didn’t know existed this time last year. They’ve seized that space and made it theirs.

  Certain endings should be resisted. Others had better be embraced with all the grace you can muster.

  As the people at the next table are leaving, Richard looks over his shoulder and gets a glimpse of the face that he couldn’t see until now. The guy is around his age, maybe a little older, and thoroughly unremarkable.

  When the waitress returns with his food, she discovers that he has moved to the table where the two older couples were sitting, transferring their cups and glasses to his own and wiping their table off so that there’s no extra mess for her to clean up. He asks if she could bring him another beer and some ketchup. She grabs a bottle of Heinz from a nearby table, slaps it against her palm, sets it before him, and goes to the bar to order another pilsner.

  The burger is cooked just the way Richard used to love them, seared on the surface but still juicy inside. The French fries are crisp, the pickles sour. He can’t even recall the last time he ate a hamburger and fries, nor can he recall the last time he was this hungry. When he’s finished with his meal and the second beer, he considers ordering one more but rules it out and beckons for the check.

  It comes to forty-four zlotys. He pulls out two one-hundred-zloty notes, places them in the leather check holder, and hands it to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t understand. Would you like me to break the other hundred as well? I don’t know if they will let me do that.”

  “No, it’s all for you.”

  “But it’s too much.”

  “The service was great,” he says. “And in the end, I got to sit where I hoped to all along. Things worked out for me today.” He smiles, tells her good-bye, and walks away before she can protest.

  For the next week or so, each time she reports for work, she will expect to find him there, ready to try one form of flattery or another, just like so many of the other aging men she’s served. But he won’t return tomorrow, or the day after that, or next week, or next month. After a while, she will forget his face, though she will always remember the extravagant tip.

  He takes a circuitous route back, wandering the streets near the market square for an hour or more, then making his way down to the ancient Jewish Quarter. Once dark and seedy, this area is now lined with bars and restaurants, which are starting to fill up with young people, nearly all of them speaking Polish. He hears rap blasting from one pub, alt country from another. He strolls around there for a while longer, getting himself reoriented. Then, without giving it too much thought, he heads for the river.

  In the fall of ’89, he and Julia walked along the Vistula nearly every evening right around this time. After they bought Stefan’s share of her parents’ place and began coming here with Anna, the three of them took the walk together. They did it almost every day. The nice thing about a river is that while the water may be a little lower or a little higher, it’s otherwise the same, looking just how it used to. This evening, the only thing he sees that surprises him is a new bridge for bikers and pedestrians, a graceful, arcing construction that reminds him of the Zakim Bridge in Boston.

  On the way to their building, he drops by the grocery store in Galeria Kazimierz, picking up a couple of rolls for breakfast along with a package of butter, some cheese, and a carton of orange juice. He’ll worry about laying in more substantial supplies tomorrow.

  The apartment, he discovers, is stifling, as he should have known it would be. He opens the windows in the living room and bedroom, carries the food and the juice into the kitchen and stores them there, then sends Monika a text, asking if she’s still available for lunch and if he could drop by their place beforehand and see Stefan—assuming, of course, that it wouldn’t disrupt his writing.

  She responds immediately: Yes to lunch and Stefan says he wants to see you every day for the rest of his life. Come over around noon.

  He steps back into the living room, opens the liquor cabinet, and breaks the seal on the Bushmills. After pouring himself a nice-sized drink, he carries it to the coffee table and sets it down. The stereo stands on the lowest bookshelf, a point of contention, he recalls, between him and Julia. Who puts a stereo that close to the floor? She won, he lost. It’s a small, basic unit, a Panasonic with detachable speakers that can’t do all they were designed to because they stand side by side. To his surprise, it comes on when he flips the switch. It’s tuned to a rock station, probably from the time when Franek hid here to keep from being sent away to Fresno. He turns off the radio and punches the CD button. The tray hesitates, then slides out.

  The discs are lined up on the shelf next to the speakers. They’re all copies that he burned and brought here over many years. They have labels, but they’re not alphabetized, though they once were. It takes him a while to find the one he’s looking for. He slides it in, sits down in his old armchair, and takes a swallow of the Bushmills as Ella caresses the first lines, inviting him to listen to her tale of woe.

  Everybody’s got a tale of woe, though some are worse than others. He let his tale turn into a tail instead. Some days he didn’t know if he was dragging it around or if it was dragging him. Most often, it was the latter. It dragged him to the ground and all but buried him.

  She soon glides into “Day Dream,” written by the great Duke Ellington with John Latouche and Billy Strayhorn. Who was John Latouche? The same lyricist who wrote “Taking a Chance on Love.” Friend of various luminaries, all more famous than he was. Gore Vidal, Leonard Bernstein, Jane Bowles. These kinds of facts matter. He shared them with Anna, as his father once shared them with him.

  About halfway through the disc, he leans over and changes the mode to continuous play. Ella sings the same songs again and again, just as she did the day he and Anna decorated the Christmas tree all those years ago, right here in Krakow, right over there in that corner. Outside, it grows dark. He rises and turns on the lights. On the way back to his chair, he pours himself another drink, smaller than the first.

  The apartment hasn’t cooled off, and it’s not going to anytime soon. The hottest time at the top of the Bauhaus is between midnight and two a.m. The sun
turns the roof into a griddle, and the heat is slow to dissipate. Until he installs AC, it’s going to be like this. It would make sense to go take a cold shower. But he’s reluctant to leave his chair. Some of the sadness that plagued his nights and days has lifted. For the first time in years, he feels at home.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, my deepest debt is to my wife, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, who has been my first and most astute reader now for thirty-three years, and to my daughters, Antonina Parris and Lena Yarbrough. My agent, Sloan Harris, remains the finest champion any writer ever had. Greg Michalson, who along with Fred Ramey launched my first novel eighteen years ago, did a magnificent job editing the book, and my gratitude to him and Unbridled Books knows no limit. Thanks to Maria Koundoura, Robert Sabal, Michaele Whelan, and Emerson College for the sabbatical that allowed me to finish the novel in Krakow, where I started it, and to my colleagues in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College and also those at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for their friendship and support. Special thanks to Pablo Medina and Pamela Painter. My thanks also to all my friends in Krakow and Warsaw, especially those in the Komitet Obrony Demokracji, for welcoming this American into their midst. Tim Judah’s superb nonfiction book In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine was an invaluable source of information about that tragic conflict, as were the Guardian and the New York Times.

  About the Author

  Steve Yarbrough is the author of ten previous books for which he’s received numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright and the Robert Penn Warren Awards, etc. He has also been a PEN/Faulkner finalist. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Japanese and Polish, and in a number of other countries. Yarbrough currently teaches at Emerson College and lives in Stoneham, MA with his wife Ewa.