“Jarek Jaskolka,” I whisper to remind myself that I will soon be far away from this place and all its horrors. Every time I say the name out loud, my head feels a little better. “Jarek Jaskolka,” I say to Waldemar. He smiles sadly.
The woman, hearing me say Jarek Jaskolka’s name, drops her long wooden spoon. It skitters across the kitchen floor, dripping with the tasty yogurt. She comes at me.
“Urszula,” she says. “How do you know this name? Where did you hear it? What have you done?” She isn’t angry, as she so often is. Her face looks white and her eyes are wide. She holds her lips tight and frowns, holding me by the shoulders. She is scared.
“Oh, he is just some person,” I say, batting my eyes so she cannot see the murder in them.
“Jarek Jaskolka is a bad, bad man,” the woman says, shaking me. I stop blinking. “If you see him on the street, you run away. You hide from him. Jarek Jaskolka likes to do bad things. I know because he lived on Grjicheva, next door to my house before they tore it down for the tramway when I was little. Many girls came away from his house black and blue and bloodied. You have seen my marks?”
“Oh no, Mother!” cries Waldemar. “Don’t show her those!”
But it is too late. The woman pulls her skirt up past one knee and points. There they are, marks like swollen earthworms, enough of them to make a lump from the side, the poor woman.
“Jarek Jaskolka will do the same to you,” she says. “Now go to school and don’t be stupid. And if you meet that bad man on the street, run away like a good girl. And you, too, Waldemar. Who knows what Jarek Jaskolka is up to now?”
It is usual for the woman to get in the way of good things I want to do.
• • •
“Jarek Jaskolka made those marks on the woman, but so what?” I ask Waldemar on the walk to school. “What’s so bad about some measly marks?”
“You don’t want those marks,” Waldemar answers. “You’ll end up like Mother, always angry. She only has bad dreams.”
“But I have bad dreams already,” I say. “All my dreams are about this place here and all the boring, stupid things and people.”
“You take it too hard,” Waldemar says. “Things here aren’t so bad. Anyway, what if the other place is no better? You could go back there and be just as troubled.”
“Impossible,” I say. But I wonder. “What do you think Jarek Jaskolka did to the woman? How did the marks get there?”
“There are things men do. Nobody knows. It’s like a magic act. Nobody can solve it.”
It doesn’t sound so bad to me. Magic acts are easy to solve. There is an old man in the town square who eats fire and makes the crows that mill under the big tree there disappear in a puff of smoke. Any fool can see that they’ve just flown up into the branches to hide.
“Will you help me find Jarek Jaskolka?” I ask Waldemar. “I really want to get out of here. Even though I’ll miss you when I’m gone.”
“I’ll try,” he answers and frowns. He is angry at me, I can tell. When my brother is angry, he plucks the poison berries from the bushes on the road and puts them up his nose. Everybody knows that’s where the brain is, up the nose there. Waldemar likes to poison his brain that way. It makes him feel better to do that. I myself like to swallow the poison berries like tablets. So because Waldemar is plucking berries, I pluck berries, too, and swallow them one by one. They are soft and cold. If I snag one on my fang, goop spills out and tastes bitter, like the poison that it is.
At school we sit at different tables. At chorus I can see Waldemar’s mouth moving, but I know he isn’t singing the song. When we file out of the big stone church, I ask Waldemar again. “Will you help me find him? Not just for me, but for the woman. Maybe if I kill him, the woman won’t be so angry all the time. It seems she holds quite a grudge.”
“I won’t help you,” says Waldemar. “And don’t try to cheer me up. You’d better think of a way to kill him when you find him. I’m not going to help you do that.”
Waldemar is right. I’ll need some kind of knife to kill Jarek Jaskolka with. I’ll need the sharpest knife I can find. And I’ll need poison. The poison berries from the bush make our brains just a little sleepy, but that is all they do. If I make Jarek Jaskolka eat many poison berries, maybe he will fall asleep, and then I can kill him with the knife, step into the hole, and go back to the place at last. This is my plan.
On the walk home with Waldemar that day after school, I fill my skirt with poison berries. I look like a farmer girl holding my skirt up like that. I tell Waldemar to fill his pockets with berries, but he says they will get squished, and anyway, I have picked enough to kill Jarek Jaskolka already.
“Really? This is enough to kill him?” I ask my brother.
“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t ask me.” Waldemar is still so angry. I don’t blame him. I try to sing a funny song as we turn the corner and cross the town square, but Waldemar covers his ears.
“Sorry, Waldemar,” I say. But I don’t feel sorry. Sometimes Waldemar loves me too much. He thinks it is better I stay with him on Earth, rather than be happy in the other place without him. “When you die, we’ll be together again,” I say, trying to console him. “Or maybe you’ll find your person to kill. Don’t give up.” My legs are cold as we walk the rest of the way home. But I have so many poison berries. I am happy. “I’ll make poison berry jam,” I say. “I’ve seen the woman do it with cherries.”
“She will never let you use her pot,” Waldemar says. He looks at me. I know I could persuade Waldemar to help me make the jam, but I don’t want to. When he is angry with me, I feel he loves me even more, and that feels good to me, even though it also feels so bad.
• • •
When we get home, the woman is outside hanging wet clothes on the line of rope between the trees. I imagine the marks on her thighs again. They are like welts, like slugs crawling up her leg. My thighs are like my arms. They are just skin and flesh with no marks. They are clean blank skin and flesh. Nothing is ever going to crawl up them, not ever, I decide. I’d die before I let anyone give me marks like the woman’s, I decide. Even if they are just marks of magic. I hide my skirt of poison berries behind Waldemar as we pass and wave to the woman. We go inside the house. I pull a big black pot from the cupboard and fill it with the poison berries.
“How do you make jam, Waldemar?” I ask my brother.
“Add sugar and cook it for a long time.”
“Oh, I love sugar,” I say. “I’ll do it tonight while the woman is sleeping.”
“You better not taste too much of it. Don’t forget, when you cook it, the poison gets stronger.”
“Will you help me remember, Waldemar?”
“No,” he says and puts a few more poison berries up his nose. “I have to sleep at night. If I don’t sleep, I feel sick during the day. I don’t like feeling sick at school.”
“Oh, poor little Waldemar,” I say, mocking him. I swallow a few of the berries and drag the pot into our bedroom and hide it in the closet.
When the woman comes back in from hanging the clothes, she says, “Go play outdoors, children. Waldemar, go run around while the sun is still shining. Urszula, go and be energetic. You look so serious. You look like an old lady. Go out and have fun. It’s good for you.”
“I don’t like fun,” I say.
Waldemar snorts and goes outside to play. I want to play with Waldemar, but I have to stay in my room to guard my pot of poison berries in the closet. If the woman finds it, she’ll start asking questions. She’ll get in the way of my killing Jarek Jaskolka, and then I’ll be stuck here on Earth with her forever. I can imagine what she’ll say if she discovers my plan. “There is something wrong with you, Urszula.”
“No,” I will tell her. “There is something wrong with this place. There is something wrong with you and everybody here. There is nothing, nothing, nothing wrong with m
e.”
And anyway, I still have to find Jarek Jaskolka. I can’t kill him if I don’t know where he is, after all. While Waldemar is still outside playing, I go to the kitchen. It smells like cooking rice and parsley.
“Hello,” I say to the woman. “Jarek Jaskolka, does he still live on Grjicheva?”
“Of course not. Unless he lives in a hole in the ground. All the houses got torn down there. I hope he moved very far away. His sister is the lady in the library.”
“That big fatso?”
“Don’t be cruel.”
“I think I need a book to read,” I say.
“Then go, go,” the woman says angrily. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but remember what I said about Jarek Jaskolka. Remember the marks. But go, do what you want, as if I care.”
“You’re angry at me now because I want to read a book?”
“Urszula is Urszula,” is all she says. She leaves the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, and goes outside to watch Waldemar build a tower of pinecones. The woman is mean and stupid, I think. The entire world is stupid. I find a sharp butcher knife in the drawer and take it to my room and hide it in my satchel. I kick at the walls for a while. Then I start off for the library to find the fat sister of the man I am going to kill.
• • •
“Jaskolka?” the fat woman asks. “I don’t use that name anymore. What do you want? Why are you asking?”
“I’m just curious. What happened when they tore your house down for the tramway? My mother lived on Grjicheva once, too.”
“Whose daughter are you?” the fat lady asks.
“My name is Urszula” is all I say.
“Those houses on Grjicheva were all poor and ugly and it’s a good thing they’re gone now or else they’d just crumble down over our heads and kill us.”
“Kill you?” I ask.
“We moved to a small apartment near the river, if you must know.”
“You and your family? And your brother?”
She puts down the rubber stamp in her hand and closes the book on the counter. The sunlight through the windows falls on her face as she leans toward me.
“What do you know about my brother? What is it? Why are you asking me these questions?”
“I’m looking for Jarek Jaskolka,” I say. The lady is so fat and lazy looking, it seems not to matter what I tell her. “I have to kill him.”
The lady laughs and picks up her rubber stamp again. “Go right ahead,” she says. “He lives up the street in the house across from the cemetery. He’ll be pleased to have a visitor. You can’t imagine how pleased he’ll be.”
“I’m going to kill him,” I tell the lady. She just laughs.
“Good luck. And don’t come running back here full of tears,” she says. “Curious girls get what they deserve.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t listen to me.”
“I will kill him dead, you know,” I say. “That’s why I’m curious.”
“Do what you can,” she says. “Now be quiet. People are trying to read.”
• • •
On my way home, I walk through the cemetery, past my father’s grave, and I look through the windows of what I guess is Jarek Jaskolka’s house. The sun is setting, and the sky is beautiful colors and I wish Waldemar were there with me, holding my hand. “Why is it, Waldemar,” I would ask him, “that when something here is so beautiful, I just want to die?”
“Because it reminds you of the other place,” Waldemar would say to me. “The most beautiful place of all.”
Jarek Jaskolka’s house is clapboard painted cloudy green like pond water, and the windows facing the road are covered by a dark curtain. The front steps are missing, and in place of the steps there are big broken pieces of cement piled on top of one another. There are dry bushes around the house full of orange meadowlarks. I pick up a little rock and throw it at Jarek Jaskolka’s window, but the glass doesn’t break. The rock just makes a little ding sound against the glass. The meadowlarks start to chirp at me, whining like babies crying. I don’t care. I could throw rocks at them if I wanted. I could crush them with the heel of my shoe. I wait, hiding in the bushes, waiting to see if anything will happen. Then I throw another rock. This time, Jarek Jaskolka comes to the window. I watch him pull the curtain back. His big wrinkled hand grips the dark cloth, and just for a moment, I see his face. He looks like any normal grandfather, eyes drooping, white beard, wrinkled cheeks, and a nose like a melted candle. When he moves away from the window, his fingernails tap against the glass. They are long and yellow like an ogre’s. But it’s clear he’s just a feeble old man. It will be easy to feed him the jam, then hack him up with a knife, I figure. Old men are easy to hack. Their flesh is like an old limp carrot. But if Waldemar is right about the black hole opening up, and if Jarek Jaskolka is really my right person, then I don’t have to worry about hacking him up all the way. Maybe one hack will be enough to kill him and I can just jump down into the hole and go back to the other place.
When the curtain falls back across the window, I run away, back through the cemetery, kicking at the stones that mark whatever silly people have come and gone, and I wonder where they’ve gone off to, if there are other places for each of us, and whether my father is really, as the woman has always told us, in a better place than this.
• • •
That night the woman is angry at me again. She wants to know what I was reading at the library. “I hope you didn’t get some book that’s going to fill you up with crazy notions.”
“I didn’t find any good books at the library,” I say. “They were all boring. They were all dumb.”
“Ach, Urszula,” the woman says. “You think you’re smarter than all the rest.”
“But aren’t I? Who is smarter than me? Show me the person. Don’t you always say—” The woman has always said not to mind other children at school when they tease me, and that I am the smartest, and the best, forever and ever, amen.
“Forget what I always say,” says the woman. “You need to learn respect.”
“Respect for what? For you?”
“God forbid!” She turns her back and hacks at a loaf of bread with a butcher knife. It isn’t as big as the butcher knife I’ve stolen, though. I can’t wait to kill Jarek Jaskolka and leave this place, I think. Again I wish that the woman would be my person to kill. But she isn’t. I am pretty sure of that by now.
“And you, Waldemar,” the woman says when she turns around. “Who stole your candy? Why are you frowning like a lost little child?”
Waldemar looks sad with his soupspoon in his fist. He won’t look at me. He takes a chunk of bread from the woman and doesn’t answer.
“Did you do something?” the woman asks me. “Did you hurt my special boy?”
“I would never do anything to hurt Waldemar. Why would I? I love him the most.”
“Sometimes you can be rough, Urszula. You don’t show love the best way. When was the last time you did something nice for me? When was the last time you said ‘thank you’?”
Waldemar stands and leaves the table.
“Waldemar, come back, please. Your soup will get cold,” the woman says gently.
“Let him go,” I tell her. “He’s crying because of those marks you showed us. He thinks it’s his fault. But it’s yours.”
I really think I am just so smart.
The woman sits and lowers her face so that it is dark and sad and I can see her spirit rise up a little from her body, like it doesn’t want to be here either, like it has some better place to go.
“Jarek Jaskolka,” I say softly, reaching my hand out to touch the woman’s soft knee under the table.
“Ach!” she says, flinching. The legs of her chair scrape on the floor as she pushes herself away. “Pest,” she calls me and stands up and goes around the kitch
en, opening and closing cabinets. I think she might be looking for the iron pot I’ve hidden in the closet. But she doesn’t ask if I’ve taken it. Nor does she notice her big butcher knife is gone. She puts the bread in the bread box and takes my bowl of soup away, spills it in the sink, unties her apron, and goes and stands by the window, staring out at nothing, it seems, just the darkness between the trees.
• • •
That night I have a dream about the old magician in the town square. He is showing me his tricks. “Like so,” he grumbles and shakes into my hand a pile of little pellets. When I drop them on the ground, they explode into puffs of smoke. “These are made from moonstones,” he says. He points up into the dark night sky. “You see that darkness? And you see the moonlight? There isn’t one without the other.” I guess I say some thing to show an interest in how his magic is possible, even though I know it’s just a sham. “You’re just a little child,” he says. “Why are you so concerned with what you don’t yet know?”
I wake up, and there is Waldemar sleeping in his bed beside me. It is very dark and quiet in the room. The woman is asleep in her bed on the other side of the wall. I can hear her snoring. At night, the noise from her nose is like a locomotive chugging. We are used to it. I think the noise from her nose is so enormous because her brain wants to take a train far away from here. I know she isn’t happy. She likes Waldemar but she doesn’t like me. It seems well enough that I leave this place. It will make her happy, I feel, if I leave. But it will make Waldemar so sad.
As quietly as I can, I drag the big pot of berries from the closet and take it to the kitchen. I light a fire on the stove and set the pot on the flame and drag a chair to the stove so I can stand on it and stir the berries. I pour a cup of sugar in and stir and listen to the berries singe and steam. The only light comes from a few lone stars through the darkened windows and the blue fire from the burner. “Jarek, this is for you,” I say under my breath and inhale the poison-berry smell. My brain is comforted a little by the smell. My eyes are drowsy. But I keep stirring. I feel sad there all alone in the dark kitchen. I wish Waldemar were here to help me. This is my last night on Earth, I think to myself. And here I am, toiling over the stove like the woman does all day. “Ha.” I laugh. Because my cooking seems funny suddenly, like I am making fun of the woman and her stupid life. I keep stirring. When the berries are all melted and smashed and mixed with the sugar, I spoon them up into one of the old glass jars the woman keeps on the shelf for her own jams and jellies. I switch off the stove, put the chair back by the kitchen table, take my jar in one hand, and drag the dirty pot back to my room, where Waldemar is still sleeping. In all that ruckus, nothing can be heard in the house but the locomotive engine, the woman snoring her way far away from here. I hide the dirty pot in the closet again. The jar of poison jam in my hands is hot. I get back into bed and let the jar cool on my nightstand. I sleep a little, but I don’t have any more dreams.
Homesick for Another World Page 22