by Steve Almond
And later, scrubbed and pink-eared, I sat at the Olszewska’s dining-room table, gorged on rice laced with cumin and slivers of sautéed liver. Mamu appeared, flushed from the cold (and, it would turn out, a good deal of wine). She was a handsome woman, wide cheeks and a plucked mouth. Basha’s face bloomed. It was clear at once that they were deeply in love, as mothers and daughters sometimes grow to be, without the interfering needs of men.
I stood and Mamu looked me over. I could see Basha watching us, the slowing of her breath. Mamu shook my hand and announced, in her wobbly English, that she was delighted to meet me. Then she pulled me into a sloppy hug and Basha laughed and pulled me back to her side, scolding Mamu in Polish, a language that seemed to me always, in the mouths of the Olszewska women, a volley of quick and playful whispers.
What did I have to do? Stand there and look pretty. This was the secret dividend of loving a woman from a foreign country: very little was required of me.
“We will have wodka,” Mamu said.
“Vodka,” Basha said.
“Vodka,” Mamu corrected herself elaborately.
Yes! Vodka with bitter tonic and lemon wedges, drunk from tall glasses. And later, in Mamu’s room, plum brandy from snifters. The three of us were huddled at the foot of her bed; there was no other place to sit. Her room accommodated a single bed, a bookshelf, a small dresser for clothes.
Mamu was one of those smokers whose motions are so calm and practiced, so assumed, that the act becomes an extension of their personality. She preferred a brand called Petit Ceours, whose box was decorated in tiny gray hearts. The cigarettes themselves were as slender as lollipop sticks. Mamu could kill one in six drags, though often she let them burn down untended, the ashes making elegant snakes. She seemed to enjoy the option of smoking as much as the act.
Basha and I took the tram to the central plaza, with its smooth new cobblestone and stately, gabled buildings, refurbished with foreign money and painted in cake-frosting colors. These housed clubs and restaurants and clothing shops, for tourists of course, but also for the new class of strivers represented by Basha and her friends, who had learned the first lesson of the bourgeoisie: that the acquisition of wealth required, to some mysterious degree, the appearance of wealth.
We visited a few clubs, smoky places full of old pop songs and young people trying hard to acquire the defensive irony of American culture. This made me sad. But liquor helped soften my sadness, helped me occupy a little more gracefully my role as Basha’s exuberant Americanski. We wound up in some hotel lounge. Basha was there, next to me, laughing. The other women, dour and beautiful, watched me. I downed shot after shot and proposed toasts in mangled French and serenaded Basha with a fair rendition of Elvis Presley. Some fellow pulled a glass pipe from his pocket. “Hash,” he said. “Hashish.” I smoked some of that, too. Sure. I was the star. The star drinks. The star smokes.
Then we were outside, on the stumbling cobblestone, under the splotchy moon. Basha folded herself into me. Everything about her seemed perfect just then: her cheeks, the way her mouth smooshed vowels, her new decadence, her pale body. She was emotionally inobvious. That was true. But wasn’t that just part of the mystery? Wasn’t that, in some sense, the entire point?
That we made love I recognized only by the feeling of my lower body, a wet, suctiony joy. Most nights I would have curled around her, kissing the skin between her shoulder blades, my low arm going slowly numb beneath her. But the bed didn’t seem entirely solid, seemed more in the nature of an ocean. Salt rose in my throat and I staggered to the bathroom. My body heaved and gasped. I suspected—as do all unpracticed drinkers—that I would never feel right again. Far above, I could see the racks of emollients, Basha’s cherished blow-dryer, panty hose laid like molted skin across the radiator, a calliope of homely bras.
There was a tap on the door. Basha. Basha come to rescue her lover.
I struggled to my feet and opened the door. Mamu stood in her robe, blinking. I was naked. My penis dangled. The sweetness of her daughter’s sex, like flesh that has been perfumed and licked, rose into the air between us. I wanted to duck behind the door, but in that moment such an action seemed to constitute an accusation.
“You are sick?” Mamu said. She was careful not to let her gaze drop below my chest.
“I drank too much,” I said. “Wodka.” I pantomimed taking a shot, and in this motion, as my arm rose to my mouth, my fingers flipped toward my lips, I became acutely aware of my cock, rising up, settling back.
“You would like tea?” Mamu said.
“Oh no.” I laid a palm on my stomach. Mamu glanced down, not entirely understanding the gesture, and her eyes settled there for a moment, not even a moment, a charged little half moment.
How long had it been since Mamu had looked upon the chicken-necked vanity of a man’s sex? She had buried two husbands, and, by Basha’s account, no longer considered the idea. But Basha did not yet understand what a stubborn customer the body is. The heart may turn the lights out. The body never closes for business.
“No tea?” she said.
“No, thank you.”
“Okay,” Mamu whispered. She stepped back into the hallway and turned; her robe traced the soft square of her hips. She had the same body as Basha, after all, only dragged by time, by the tolls of motherhood.
“Sorry for waking you up,” I said.
She turned back to me, and her face emerged from the shadows so abruptly it was as if she had leapt toward me. I ducked behind the door. This was not a conscious act. My body, drunken and shy, simply reacted. And yet the expression that settled onto Mamu’s face then seemed unutterably sad. Her teeth carved out a tiny failed smile. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said.
* * *
Mamu spent the day before my departure preparing borscht. The windows fogged with a bouquet of onions fried in chicken fat, celery, carrots, peppers, the subtle acrid undercurrent of beets. I’d never eaten borscht. That was the joke. From time to time, I shambled to the kitchen to fetch tea from the porcelain kettle that stood, perpetually steeping, on the narrow ledge between oven and sink. I paused to watch Mamu core the eyes out of a potato.
“She is sad,” Mamu said quietly. “Are you sad?”
“Yes,” I said.
She raised her hands, as if to make a gesture, and her fingertips came to rest on my cheekbone. I could smell the dirt and onions on her hands, which were beautiful, pink and swollen, the backs laced with delicate veins. “Yes. Sad.”
After dinner we drank vodka. Mamu put some folk music on the record player, and Basha attempted to teach me the rudiments of a polka. Then Mamu rose from her seat, handed me her softer body, which moved with a surprising buoyancy.
And later, piled into her room, Mamu pulled a silver punch bowl from beneath her bed, filled with family photos. There she was, thirty years ago, on a youth-brigade outing, a pretty, stylish teenager in a uniform and a beret. She looked at me as I looked at the photos, leaned against my shoulder. Her face sang out the same caption again and again: This is me, young and beautiful!
There were other photos she wanted me to see: Basha looking darling in a white pinafore, nestled on the lap of her stepfather, fending off sleep with a gummy smile. Mamu set her hand on my thigh. She leaned toward me. For a moment I thought she would kiss me, that her red, smoky mouth would seek mine. But I was missing it. The person she was reaching for was Basha. The photos fell from her lap, her youth, her motherhood, her daughter, the men she loved, all tumbling onto the rug, faceup, facedown, the bowl used for storing them showing streaks of tarnish under the amber light.
Basha clambered off the bed and went down onto her forearms, pushing her backside into the air. She was quite drunk.
“Do you like the way I look like this?”
It took me a moment to gather my voice and Basha laughed, as we should wish all women to laugh, at the fallacy of their depravity, at the idea that anything, in the end, can disgust them. “I want anal love,” she said
, making the word sound French and exquisite.
Is it cruel for me to repeat her words like this? Should I lie, make them somehow prettier, more poetic? But this is what she said. This is the form her desire took at that moment. Or perhaps, less flatteringly, she intuited my need for a memorable degradation, some form of going-away present.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Put some jelly.” Basha sucked in a little breath and pushed back. The heel of her palms pressed down and her arms tensed. I braced my heel against the radiator. The knuckles of her spine buckled softly. Her face was pressed to the rug and her eyes were closed and she was smiling.
I could hear Mamu in the bathroom, making her ablutions before bed.
“We should stop,” I said.
Basha shook her head: No, it feels good, but it hurts, let’s keep trying.
There were other women around, more suitable, in baggy sweaters and glasses much like mine, their clocks fizzing away. But I was in no shape to cooperate with them. The last thing I wanted was a woman who actually understood me. Once back in the States, that is, face to face with the prospect of a reasonable adulthood, I fell back under the aegis of my own bloated heroism. I knew I was being played. But that, too, is a part of love. I missed Basha. I missed her Old World manners, which made me feel debonair. I missed Mamu’s greasy borscht and her confused longing. I missed their warm little apartment, where I was always the center of attention.
Katowice was made new by May. The buildings, ash-streaked and rotten in winter, bloomed with mongrel hyacinth. Sun baked the mud to dirt. Shirts fluttered brightly on laundry lines and kids kicked soccer balls in the courtyards and couples in long shadows strolled the plaza at dusk. With the windows thrown open, the breeze carried the fragrance of broiled chicken and baked sesame seeds, the sweet reek of garbage.
And the women! The women of Katowice unpeeled themselves, plum-titted, translucent, with cheeks a mile square and big sleepy asses, teenagers in sullen halter tops, business molls slotted into rayon suits, college students spilling from green miniskirts, young mommies pushing strollers. And the girls of the meat shops, whose flanks and chops sweat in glass cases, whose beauty hid beneath tiers of acne, who handled the sweet, smoky kielbasa as if handling thick lovers—brisk, worldly imitations of sex!
Each morning Basha and Mamu bustled off to work while I got up and pretended to write. I was hard at work on what was—to my knowledge—the longest outline in academic history; 471 pages, not counting footnotes. At noon I fixed myself a breakfast of eggs, sugar-cured bacon, rolls pan-fried in the fat. Then I settled down for a nap, listening to the yips of the kids on the playground below. It was all quite bohemian. I smoked Walet cigarettes, at 85 groszy a pack, which tasted of cloves and dung.
In the evenings I talked literature with Mamu. She’d studied philology at the university, and devoured the Western Canon. Die Blechtrommel was an after-dinner mint to her. I bounced a few of my ideas her way and they came back deboned and neatly skinned. Basha preferred TV, which consisted, in large part, of American sitcoms dubbed into Polish by a single droning monotone.
Aside from sexual congress, during which her mind and body seemed open to the fluctuations of experience, she remained determinedly opaque. She was not dumb, or shallow. She had mastered five languages and spoke each of them beautifully. There seemed no sound her tongue couldn’t make. She simply mistrusted the depth of her feelings.
But even our glorious sex life wilted under the rigor of permanence. Basha kept me on what the behaviorialists would recognize as a variable reinforcement schedule. She wanted to be cuddled, fawned over, stroked like a child. If I pushed for more, she claimed to be sore, or tired. I couldn’t figure this out. Where had the wanton accomplice of our early days gone? Once a week or so I staged a blowout, on some despicable pretext, so as to storm out of the apartment, valiant and misunderstood, and wander the weedy banks of the Valia river, whose slick tides were the color of veinous blood; so as to return to the balm of her negligent love, which was for me like floating in a warm sea.
* * *
Toward the end of July an old professor, who had known me in a steadier time, tracked me down. He needed a lecturer for fall. The job itself was no great shakes. But his intention was clear. He was offering me reentry. A decent paycheck. Enough respect to take another pass at my dissertation. “What are you doing over there anyway?” he said.
Basha remained unconvinced. “You won’t leave,” she said. “You love me too much.” She refused to imagine that I had another life, beyond her beauty, thick with the troubled symptoms of adulthood.
“You can come to the States,” I said. “Like we talked about.”
For all her brave claims of a year ago, Basha said nothing about this plan. Instead, we let the weeks drift by, watched the dour sun elongate the days. The cedars shed elegant white scrolls along the aimless paths where we went to eat ice cream.
On the eve of my departure I took Basha to Katowice’s toniest bistro. We ordered coq au vin and tenderloin braised in anisette. I had hoped to take a last walk on the plaza, but by the end of the meal Basha’s complexion looked like cement. She barely touched her food. Back at home, Mamu prepared her tea and got her to take aspirin and lie down.
I finished up packing. When I came to bed, Basha was staring out the window, at the torn clouds. Her face was the kind of thing one sees in the classical wing of a museum: beauty as a force of history. Her robe rode up the back of her thighs. I had it in mind that we might make love. That was what my great, quivering cliché of a body had in mind.
I climbed onto the bed and curled around her from behind and nuzzled against her bottom. “It’s our last night together,” I said.
Basha shook her head.
“Honey,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Don’t,” she said softly. “No.”
“I just want to love you.” I pressed myself against her.
This was the wrong move. I knew that. But I felt, at that moment, as if I had nothing else to fall back on. Our affair—our grand drama of abandonment and reclamation—had run aground. It was time for our bodies to leap to the rescue.
Basha, for all her evasions, was ahead of me there. She understood that the body can only express wishes. It cannot undo facts. “No,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
What sort of comment was this? Leave me alone? We were lovers. This was our last night. I stared at Basha’s long, slender legs. Her skin seemed to grow more and more pale, as if she were dissolving into the sheets. But I didn’t want her to go yet. My hand reached for the stem of her neck.
Basha began to weep. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t touch me.”
“Does that hurt?” I pressed at the warm cords of muscle. “Am I hurting you?”
Suddenly Basha was kicking at me, the robe riding up until I could see the cleft of her ass, her lovely white halves tensing, the fine hairs and skin darkening to blue in the furrow. I knew what I wanted to do. It was perfectly clear. I grabbed her hips.
Basha’s elbow swung back, knocked me in the mouth, and I could taste blood now, a good taste, sweet and full of ruin. Basha wriggled away and got up from the bed. I might have leapt up, pursued her, done God knows what. But I could see, through the frosted glass of the door, Mamu hovering just outside.
“Run away,” I said. “That’s right, run away.”
“You’re the one,” Basha sobbed. She opened the door and collapsed into her mother and the two of them stood there for a minute. Then they moved off, like a pair of wounded soldiers, and I heard the door to Mamu’s room swing shut.
I waited for my breathing to subside, then went and stood outside the door. I could hear the two of them, whispering in Polish. I opened the door, but neither of them bothered to turn. Mamu reached to straighten the compress she had laid along her daughter’s brow. Basha whimpered, in the manner of a child struggling toward sleep. She held the hem of Mamu’s skirt in her fist. And I understood, now, why Mamu had never resented
my presence: she knew Basha would never forsake her, not in the end.
Mamu emerged from Basha’s room an hour later. I was in the kitchen, staring at the empty courtyard below. She smiled politely and took a Petit Ceour from the pack stashed in the cupboard. “Maybe you like sandwich for the trip?”
“That’s okay,” I said.
But already she was reaching into the fridge, removing a hunk of cheese, some kielbasa wrapped in foil, pulling a knife from the magnetized strip above my head. The skin of her hands was like beautiful pink paper.
“She’s asleep?”
Mamu nodded.
“Maybe I should sleep on the couch?”
Mamu shrugged. She sliced the kielbasa and the cheese and layered them on the roll. “You have made all your suitcases?”
I nodded. I could feel the swell of my fat lip.
“I guess I might have hurt her,” I said. “I was pretty angry. You know, having to leave and all. We’re both a little crazy.”
Mamu gazed at me. Smoke drifted from her nose. She had known this was coming, after all. Men were people who left; they were not dependable. Their other charms, their money and their words and their cocks, these were only temporary compensations. Her daughter was finally learning this.
Later, there would be another soggy good-bye, lurid with airport hope. And later still, the letters and phone calls, which slipped to hollow, fainter in their promise, until they vanished altogether. Basha was not the sort to cling, not the sort I might dial up in the small hours, with a bit too much wine and night in me, to make sure she was still somehow stuck. There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything.”