Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  ‘We went down on them then, but we were mourning them, too. In a hundred days they would be gone! But then, oh, the things they told us… For instance, how they would never forget us, even when they were far away, when they’d started nailing pussy again. They told us we were their first loves…

  ‘“Ty znayesh,*** for happiness we not need very much, any vodka, a little pussy. I’m simple man, I find woman there, and job in mines, but you here, you keep going after the cock and thigh.”

  ‘He was a Cossack. White face, moustache, a Cossack legionnaire (they smell so different, like the steppes, like Asia!). He told me he’d never done this before with anyone. He was surprised when Patricia took him in her mouth. At that she said:

  ‘“But you eat pussy.”

  ‘Then he said not really, because “pussy – vonyayet”.* And then Patricia gave him such a simple, austere answer, it was like she was born a Buddhist:

  ‘“Then the pussy should be washed.”

  ‘It’s true, they’ll never forget us. They’re lying there on the banks of the Don, married now, with children, old and fat in their deerstalker caps, no longer the young men they once were. But they’re there – they told us they would be – looking up at the sky, at the stars, thinking: “Somewhere, under these same stars, my Andriyusha (Patricia) is at the barracks now, far away in Poland.”’

  ‘I once fell in love with a certain Dmitri. I got myself all dolled up for him: new shoes, perfume, my good Wrangler jeans, and over at the barracks Radwanicka, pissed and all bent out of shape because her dentures were hurting her, shouted over at me:

  ‘“You stupid slag, you dumb cunt! What do you think you’re doing? Those are normal lads! Hmm, I really like that, I like the way you dress, you have good style, it’s similar to mine. But so what? Under normal conditions you’d be reviled, he’d spit right in your face; but here you think you’re fucking in love! In a normal country, where a lad has a choice, he’d sooner eat out the oldest, most festering piece of snatch, and he’d beat the shit out of the pansy and spit in his face, no matter how young or tarted up! He’d kick your arse! What kind of life is this? Completely abnormal, and no place to hide!”

  ‘Later, when they were leaving, everyone was schlepping around, complaining how nothing was happening, and Radwanicka says to me:

  ‘“You fucking slag, don’t you dare complain! No faggot ever had it as good as we did, and you’ve got memories to last you a hundred and eighty-five years! And now you won’t, now we won’t get jack. Tossing off something drunk on a bench once a year, that’s what our new life will look like. That’s the kind of life we’ll be living now.” And she burst into tears.’

  Tak priroda zachat’ela—pochemu, nye nashe delo.*

  ***

  As soon as Zdzicha Aidsova started getting really sick, everyone in the park began to shun her. They didn’t want to sit on the bench drinking vodka from her bottle, they didn’t want to sip the warm backwash. Once silky, her hair was ragged now; once sonorous, her voice a yelp; her eyes, once anthracite, were little pieces of coal. They stopped talking to her because her breath had gone sour. A fungus, some kind of fungus must have taken root in there. They’d say: Zdzicha, that banshee. Then, Zdzicha Aidsova’s pretty but pimply and acne-scarred face began to take on a tinge of bitter irony. No one could forgive her for continuing to trick with outsiders, for infecting them. All along the path in the park they’d throw empty vodka bottles at her. One of them landed with a thump on the ground. Some dog limped over, thinking they were playing fetch, that they’d tossed her a bone. Zdzicha took me with me to her coach, before I learned her nickname. What could a teenager like me know? Right, so she was walking to her coach. She’d discovered it behind the station once when she had nowhere to sleep for the night. A coach in the siding, windows boarded up, and wherever you looked, rows of points and crossings. Railway sleepers, withered shrubs, signalboxes, lights that shone only red, steel rails bearing impossible weights, poles with wires carrying thousands of voices, electronic signals, internet chats, laughter, tears. All together it sounded like distant racket from a school sports field under a viaduct, a sight in summer for passing travellers. Freight wagons loaded with long-forgotten timber, left standing for decades. Others were fitted out with roofs, even chimneys and windows, through which a signalman’s kingdom would come into view: a time schedule bound in an old oilcloth, a pot-bellied stove, thick gloves. Grease coating everything opalescent, violet-grey. Grey ribwort overrunning the gaps between grey sleepers. Grey flowers emitting the scent of creosote-treated wood. Eau de Polish State Railway. Such were the tracks of Zdzicha’s fate. The strangest thing about it was her looks; her face was pale and thin, and her practically white hair was falling into her eyes – but for all that, she’d let herself go, she was dirty, and there was the fungus, too. They said that Zdzicha had had a lover who lived in Paris and that’s how she got sick. With nothing else to lose, Zdzicha started to drink seriously. She had a huge German shepherd who would lead her, when she’d been drinking, back to that coach of hers, like a blind man.

  Once, back when Zdzicha still had a job and a flat, they called her Jessie.

  ***

  They come to life at night. Their vision is better then, too – in the daytime they always wear dark glasses, ugly, gold-framed sunglasses from the market. At night, when they roam the parks and Polish Hill, when they find their way into the station waiting room, with its sleeping soldiers, drunks, and junkies, and poke their long noses, protracted from constantly sniffing out quarry, into the rotund, tin-walled cottages, then even the faintest silhouette of a distant passer-by will awaken a frisson of hope: that’s him! Desire must have driven him here, too, into the night! They’re not ones for beating around the bush – beating off in the bushes is more their style. And they’re not especially fussy – old or young, sick or healthy, crippled – as long as it’s not queen or cunt. The park at night is pitch black, and every now and then a patrol car passes by. It cruises slowly, majestically, cutting the darkness with its sharp headlights; it forces its way through the shrubbery, climbs the hill, circles the yard around the public toilets, then disappears. A phantom car. Someone had inscribed something on a tree with its bark torn off; but it wasn’t about us – even when people know about this place, they always act as if they’d never heard of it before.

  After ten hours of ‘picketing’, their throats are parched from smoking, shoes caked with mud from walking in ditches and cruising the bridges and ruins. Their lips are chapped, their feet pinched and chafed, and their single handkerchiefs rolled up in soggy knots in their pockets. It’s time, time to go home, but all of a sudden: they freeze at the sight of a figure in the distance, which, close up, turns out to be a tree or a stump. The imagination works wonders. What counts is the tingly excitement, the hope, because anything can happen. And no one would even think to go home now, though the birds have started to balls up the atmosphere of night, and it looks like the sun’s coming up on the other side of the hill. But experience tells them that now is the time when miracles happen, when the nets of night start to teem with golden fish!

  Before the walls are streaked with the day’s first light.

  Now is the time when their drunken Orpheuses might appear! A lush passed out on a bench, a tanked-up teenager on his way home from a party – whatever. They don’t give up. The park is cold, pitch black; the park is evil. At night the park turns into a wild forest, bristling with stories of big bad wolves and Red Riding Hoods. The wolf might infect Red Riding Hood with some disease or other. The roots of the trees swell to fairy-tale dimensions, and in their hollows roost malevolent owls – decrepit, grey poofs hungry for one thing and one thing only. They sit there on their benches, gossiping – what else is there? They harass and annoy the passing grunts, but as soon as some yob comes to beat them up, they flutter away like owls. No surprise when a grunt wrecks the benches in a rage – they’re always looking for something to bang. From their hiding place, the queens wa
tch the grunt smash the benches up and think: Always banging something! In the evening, when the queens cross the threshold of the park, they feel a rush of excitement, like the junkie about to shoot the syringe into the vein, like the gambler sitting himself down at the scarlet, felt-covered table. Anything can happen; something always happens. Who knows who the beneficent God of the homos will send my way tonight. Queens do believe in God, after all, like all the other old ladies in their tasselled berets. And they really don’t think of what they are doing as sinful – after all, they’re hurting no one!

  At five in the morning, panic sets in. It will soon be daylight, and all the imagined lads will have changed back into trees, No Entry signs, boulders, and monuments. No deceptions remain, the emperor has no clothes. Something had been stirring in the bushes all night, and now it’s clear what it was. Not some grunt standing there in front of the hole in the fence – just an old, abandoned vacuum cleaner, its long hose wrapped around it, looking like a tracksuit with a thick neck and close-cropped head poking out! In a moment, the park will fill up with people. Unfortunately, it won’t be drunken, horny grunts, but ordinary people taking their shortcuts to work, nannies with children – they’ll look at us from the other side of an invisible wall. Fragrant with shoe polish and toothpaste, fresh newspapers tucked in their shoulder bags. Hideous and sober, freshness unfurls along with the breaking day and spangles it with birdsong. Brrr. It’s better to run away from this scene of desecration. To run away from people, to avoid their faces. To go home, to sleep.

  ***

  Lucretia is crying. She stows the souvenirs in their plastic bags into the drinks cabinet and carefully closes the door. But not before we each had a sniff. I, too, inhaled. At first I smelled nothing. But then I detected the faintest soupçon of prison funk, sweat, and Lysol. Maybe I’d got a whiff of some musty footcloth! Now, on the table, all that was left were pictures. They stared up at me, most of them teenagers, not even in uniform yet. The pictures had been taken somewhere beyond the Volga, some far-off Soviet photographer’s studio. Patricia picks up one of them, wipes it on her sleeve, and examines it as if for the first time.

  ‘This one must be back in the Caucasus now. My beloved Sasha. And here’s Vanya. Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I pick up a map and look at it. Where is my Sasha now, where’s my Vanya, my Dmitri? They didn’t leave us a thing. Even the camp has been donated to the university. Nothing, no park, no barracks, no nothing. Everyone was all in favour of the changes, the new order, but not Lucretia and me; we prayed it wouldn’t happen to us. Everything’s going downhill. Under communism, plucking a recruit off the train was a piece of cake… All those Stasyas and Romeks came straight off the farm, and there were no girls in the army back then, no leave either… As soon as I heard they were making the army more “humane” I knew it meant bad times for the queers. Now every recruit can get as much as snatch as he wants.’ Lucretia weeps. Suddenly Patricia straightens up and asks in a hopeful voice:

  ‘But maybe we’ll be invaded again, Lucretia. What do you think? Maybe we could get occupied by the Germans?’ Patricia quite evidently has never heard of NATO.

  Lucretia looks anxiously at her watch. Church won’t wait, and she wants to go and say her prayers for her Vanya, her Dmitri, and her Sashenka. Or maybe that’s just what she says, and in truth she’s off to her usual haunts. Dressed in black, of course. But before she leaves, she calls back from the hallway:

  ‘Eh, they’ll never invade us again. To se ne vrati.’ Suddenly she brightens up. ‘Unless we could… You! Unless we could get ourselves sent to prison! Oh! They’d make a prison pansy out of me, all those criminals. I’d be their bitch, I’d put out for each and every one of them…’

  ‘Don’t you start! We’ve got company! Goodness, there she goes again… You’d better get to church and say your prayers. Look at her, going to church and praying to those saints of hers, but she’s still got the Devil inside her!’

  ‘… every last one of them, I’d do each and every one. I’d be their whore, their widow… And there’d be one who looked like a murderer, who’d say, Wash the floor with your face, bitch! He’d cough and spit on the stone floor and piss on it. Lick it up, bitch! And I would – I’d lick it up!’ Lucretia’s nostrils flutter like a film star’s, and she runs her fingers up and down her chest, her stomach, further down; hunger has dragged her down into the depths of abjection. Something is itching away at her, something is sucking at her insides. Who knows what it is, but wherever it takes her, it definitely won’t be good…

  ‘Shut your face already! Fine, so you’ll be his whore, we already knew that. Now shut up!’ Patricia can’t cope with this image. Suddenly she’s reminded of something, but it’s clear she’s waiting for Lucretia to leave. Lucretia turns and tries on some old caps; finally she chooses one that makes her look like a fat, old grandad going fishing. A brown leather one. She sticks her tongue out at us, then curtsies politely and walks out the door. Patricia gives a sigh of relief, and is gearing up to tell me something when the door opens, Lucretia walks back in, grabs a pack of cigarettes and lighter from the table, waves goodbye to us, and then leaves. Patricia gets up and from an enormous kettle adds more hot water to my coffee grounds. She gives me a glug of peppermint vodka, too. Suddenly she’s a completely different person. She gets serious, stops talking in the feminine. An old and tired life. Compulsively she starts to tidy what’s left of her hair. And at that – arghh! – Lucretia walks in again.

  ‘Remember that time we went to Oleśnica, to the prison? While we’re on the topic of prison pansies… I really have to tell the story again, for posterity’s sake, because I’ll be coming home late and Reporter Man here will have gone. Remember, Patty? It was late autumn. All day they’d been sitting in their windows, gripping the bars, staring at the street. All rough-and-tumble, dingy-grey, chiselled, their heads shaven and hard to make out. You can see both wings of the prison from the street, not like the one by us on Kleczkowska. Sometimes families would stand under the windows, using hand signals to exchange information with them, but that evening no one was around. And we went up and just stood there. They sensed us immediately.’

  ‘No, first one of them asked us, “What are you gawping at?” We practically shat ourselves. A great hunk of a criminal like that, talking to us! And locked up too, so it was like he was in the army! Say what you like, but to my taste, a real lad is an incarcerated lad. If he’s out of jail it means he’s behaved himself, just a brown-noser. A real lad’s got to be all piss and vinegar and full of himself! No education, just a normal lad, you know, in prison, in the army, a young offender perhaps. Even a fireman…’

  ‘And they were there braying, and we said nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all, we just stood there, craning our necks, stopped in our tracks. Nothing. Then by some fluke they figured out what was going on, because they started shouting at us, and people walking by stopped to point and stare.

  ‘“Hey you! Whores, queers! Hey, you queers: I’ll fuck you up yer arsehole!” Those people had a week’s worth of gossip. And we stood there rooted to the spot, we were so turned on; it was like gulping a whole box of sweets down all at once. Oh my God, were we hot for them! And we were turning them on, too! They could feel the punk in us, they already knew what they would do to us, they’d dream of it at night while they were wanking themselves off. They’d ask each other, “Which one you wanna do? The one with the cap or the tall one? I’ll take the tall one, the one with the cigarette. Already know what I’m gonna do to him.” That’s how those straighter-than-straight macho men would talk about us in their bunks. In their bunks, bunking in their bunks!

  ‘And that’s when I whispered in your ear, “Patricia, wiggle your arse!” Her face and lips were motionless, it was like she’d turned to stone. “Be dramatic, girl! Camp it up! They want to see us as women, so let them. They’ll fantasise about us later! They’ll get hard thinking about us! They’ll cook chai off a razor blade, off a lightbulb. G
ive them a little sophistication, girl, be provocative! Something refined, delicate, smooth! Oh Patty, dear old Patty, just camp it up a little…” Then you lit your cigarette, and that was enough. They shouted bravas at us and stamped their feet. They roared until the guard appeared in the corner tower; they were shouting at us from all the windows. We couldn’t take it any longer and ran off…

  ‘So we made a little tour around Oleśnica’s main square, and what do you know, we ran into Oleśnicka there. But all she could do was roll her eyes when we told her what we were up to. She’d discovered that game twenty years before, and had long grown bored of it. Everyone knows about it, if you’re from Oleśnica… So we ditched her and moved on. Then I said:

  ‘“Look, you nutter, it’ll be dark soon. Let’s get the train home. Because if we miss it, we’ll have to hitchhike, and you’re the one who’s going to have to lift your skirt up for the drivers.” Then I said:

  ‘“We’ve been found out, the guard saw us.” And the prisoners had kicked up such a fuss, starting fights, smacking each other in the toilets and the showers, that the guard in the tower had to order them to pipe down on the megaphone! We didn’t hear it exactly, just rumbling from the horn and the even louder din of their response. Our womanly passivity had driven them wild, along with their being incapacitated while some poofter, some queer, some loser was standing there free as a bird, smoking a fag and watching them; they were locked up and couldn’t fuck us up or anything, not even light up… Some bloke with a steel pole was walking down the street, and they shouted at him:

  ‘“Beat the shit out of them with your stick, mate! Beat the shit out of ’em!”

  ‘The bloke just started walking faster. But we went back, even though we’d already been found out. What? We’re not allowed to stand on the street? And right next door there was a hair salon, so it was as if we were waiting outside for some other queen to come out. Well, she just went in for a tanning session and that’s why it’s taking so long, and then she was going to get her highlights redone, and her nails done, ooh! And the minute they saw us they started shouting for the whole world to hear: