‘But of course.’ I watch as she pulls two cups out of her bag of essentials, each printed with her likeness. There she was, all dolled up! Wearing glasses, a gold plastic necklace, dressed in her Sunday best, as if she was off to church!
‘I’ve been coming here every year since the mid-nineteen sixties, when they were still holding those Miss Nature contests… And every year since 1989 I’ve had my picture put on a cup on the promenade. I always have it done on my last day; there’s a bloke there who charges five zlotys. That sort of thing was unimaginable before. And on every cup, I’m a year older.’
‘You’d never guess…’
‘Oh, get away with you!’ She looks at me coyly. Now we’re approached by another elderly queer whom everyone calls the Pensioneress. She’s running with a newspaper in her hand, some crappy, glossy tabloid, and even before she’s joined us: ‘A UFO! A UFO! Girls, get on your knees! A UFO is landing!’
‘Here in Lubiewo? Why, that can’t be possible!’ we respond sceptically.
‘They said so in Fakt. They even have an interview with a Martian!’ She won’t let it drop.
‘Is it an official interview?’ I joke. But they don’t get it, both of them being model tabloid readers. They just soak them up! They probably don’t really understand what I’m talking about either.
‘What? Huh? Of course. But here, listen: “Yesterday Usedom, today Wolin. Those weren’t meteorites. The balls of light that Genowefa and Zenon Kozów saw flying over their barn were flying saucers. Our reporter succeeded in speaking with the pilot of one such vehicle. Asked why they had decided to visit Earth, the extraterrestrial replied: ‘We’ve come to Earth to try out our antennas,’”’ – here my queens sighed in unison: ‘Oh! Their antennas!’ – ‘“Although the extraterrestrial did not specify how the antennas were to be used, he did announce they would land today on one of the beaches on Wolin Island.”’
I shout at them, but they’re lost to the world, at least this one, this earthly dimension. They’re engrossed in the newspaper, can’t get enough of it, sighing, talking about how handsome he is. For a Martian.
Finally I can’t take it any more. I explode:
‘Do you tarts know what I do with crap like this? I use it for wiping my arse! See?’ I rub my bottom with the newspaper and crush it. ‘Martians! What the fuck!’
The ladies seem a little disconcerted, feel a bit stupid. They look around and burst out laughing. To make amends, my bumblebee queen proposes more coffee.
‘You’re making such a fuss! Care for another cup of coffee? Perhaps with some cream…?’ And would a queen dream of uttering that word cream without some smutty allusion in her eyes? Never!
Then the newcomer, the one who joined us, notices the cups, the ones adorned with her aging self.
‘Oh how lovely! And the photo, is it glued on?’
‘It’s a transfer,’ my old dear says through clenched teeth. ‘A permanent transfer. I get one done every year.’
‘And where does a girl get a thing like that?’ She primps her hair, poses for the camera.
‘Right over there, behind the fish and chips stand, and the shooting range, and the rubber balls. Right in front of drinks and ice creams. Up by Pizzeria Florida.’
‘You mean by the old Workers’ Holiday Fund that got converted into a beauty farm?’
‘Exactly, just a little to the left, on the way to Lightning Lodge 11.’
‘Care to reveal what you paid for the pleasure?’ the older one asks.
‘Five zlotys,’ my old dear drawls, already a little bored.
‘Ooh, that’s a lot…’
‘Well, it ain’t cheap,’ she says, proud as a peacock.
‘I used to come here on caravan holidays in the fifties. You know, here and Niecko. But it’s much better here. No comparison really.’ She laughs effusively.
They both agree. We pour coffee into those mugs of hers (mine has a picture of her circa age forty), and light up. They smoke Mars; I’m smoking R1. I make myself comfortable, lie down. The sky overhead is amazing, eggshell blue with fluffy white clouds. The skin on my face tautens in the hot sun. It’s not long before they start pressing themselves against me and groping me down below. I let them because I know that otherwise they’ll get mad and there’ll be no story. They may as well have a bit of fun. And get off, too, why not. On that dickery-dock of mine. I close my eyes and puff away. It’s nice. It’s slick. Warm. It’s entirely possible I’ll be staying here late today, and when everyone, and really everyone (except that blond), has left, then I’ll reign in perfect solitude; I’ll go skinny-dipping, I’ll romp around in the sand and take a pee wherever I like! And I’ll stroll about in the dunes, where the day’s flotsam will still be looking to get some… That’s the sort of holiday I’ll be having, too, until I get back to my rented room at the Deaf Hag, where I’ll pull out my scholarly texts, papers, and pens, and dash off a page or two of cultural criticism. But here… I’ve got Cicadas in the Cyclades running through my head… And while one of them is sucking me off and unable to talk because her mouth is busy, the other one starts thinking aloud:
‘They said we’re going to have beautiful weather tomorrow.’
‘Oh-uh,’ the first one affirms with her mouth full.
‘On RMF FM…’
‘Uhh.’
‘A good station, that one.’
‘Nnnn…’
‘And a UFO…’
That was a ruse for getting my pecker, because the minute I hear the word ‘UFO’ I grumble angrily, turn on to my other side, and there’s a change of scenery at the well: the first one loses her place and the other one moves in on me. Then the tension grows: the empty-mouthed queen is quiet, until out of the blue she’s reminded of some snippet in the tabloid and says, ‘Janda’s oven exploded in her face.’
To which the other queen, the gorged one, mumbles something that sounds like, ‘Already read about it.’
Then I explode too. The two old gazelles slowly wind up their work; they got what they wanted. With younger queens, cruising someone can take weeks: first a movie, coffee, chatting about the weather and the birds. An old queen will tell you: ‘But what if it’s pointless? What if there’s not much in his trousers?’ The older queens learned Villon’s bitter wisdom long ago: Take only boys, while there’s still time. Their time was up long ago, and yet they keep taking it, they take belatedly, even if what they get isn’t quite as photogenic. They stand there like late arrivals at a party that’s just coming to an end, where all that’s left are the crumbs.
I turn over lazily on to my tummy and ask them to rub Eris tanning lotion on my back. It’s suddenly all so Polish. While only a few miles away, on the other side of Świnoujście, latex is all the rage in Ahlbeck. Everyone’s buff there, clean-shaven, tattooed, nipples pierced, barbells dangling from their penises, metal bands around their cocks. Did you see all those Western gays, eyes bloodshot like pigs, on the nudist beaches outside Amsterdam, Berlin, Utrecht, Zurich, Stockholm? Phalluses like the teats of female savages – stretched out, saggy, worn out. Gorged. Wrinkled. Shaven. Lubed. The sweltering heat, the mosquitoes, ‘The Night Chicago Died’ playing on the radio. They’re nothing if not physical in that Western sun, every last spot, every last pustule on a neck or in an armpit, every last bruise or reddish blotch. The farther off in the woods you find them, the more pustules they have; they can’t be got rid of all at once, can’t be frozen off in the portable cooler, where bottles of Corona chill among the ice cubes. Waiting to be drunk with a slice of lime stuffed down the neck. Only a few short kilometres away these and other Western customs prevail. Butch men. Bald men. Shaven men. Skinheads. Hunks. Reeking of poppers. A headrush of latex.
Thank God it’s only queens and jolly old ladies here. The radio warbles Maryla and Budka. We have our Mars cigarettes, our Eris sunblock, our memories of caravan holidays, when you’d spend a whole night on the train just getting there, honey, and a crowded train at that, standing in the corridor the whole
journey, but happy just to be going to the beach.
‘It’s not the same now at all… All you have to do now is board the coach or express train, sit your fancy arse down, and off you go…’
‘Our employment enterprise used to have railway cars that they’d converted into dormitories, regular camp beds with clean, starched sheets stamped with the enterprise logo. And artificial flowers on the side table, and loos out in the forest, because the cars were in the forest.’
‘In the forest, in the forest… Pine cones would be dropping to the ground. When we made a bonfire, everyone would sing, “We’re on holiday, in this forest on the coast”… or wherever you were. You could put that forest wherever you wanted. In the mountains people would sing the original version “In this forest in the Tatras”, and at the lakes they sang “In this forest in Masuria”, which sort of changed the meaning. And the chorus would end up with a split personality, some singing “in Masuria”, others “on the coast”, and a few older girls still stuck in the Tatras. And a bottle of vodka making the rounds. Back then we always took our holidays in such out-of-the-way places. Say there was a little river flowing peacefully somewhere, before you knew it a holiday camp would pop up there, with folks singing “In this forest on the Vistula”. Except that under communism, as soon as you discovered some really scenic spot, they’d hang up those gigantic rasping megaphones in the trees and destroy the peace and quiet. From morning to night you had to listen to things like “Karolina’s Gone to Gogolin”, and have your bath in the lake. You’re not used to that sort of thing I suppose; you wouldn’t have managed.
‘Back then it all just felt a lot more like Poland. We had Polish products, Polish music was played on the radio, and you could really only travel in Poland, what with it being so hard to get a passport. There we were with our Ludwik washing-up liquid, listening to Maryla Rodowicz, and dreaming of holidays on Lake Wigry. Today you feel like an Ausländer* in your own country. The way it was in West Germany: everything so expensive, you can’t afford a thing, colourful in its way, garish, alien, but not a Polish product in sight…’
‘But we still come here,’ chimes in the second old dear, ‘while the other queens are all off in Ibiza or Cap d’Agde. They have conventions there for porn stars in those gay movies; they all go in aeroplanes. They say the sex is non-stop. All those Latinos show up, and it’s off into the bushes. I like it here much better. I take the slow train, which drags along but is cheap, and I sleep in a tent at the Gromada campground. It still reminds me of when I was a child, the smell of the sea. No southern sea smells so deliciously of pine trees and salt and chips from the snack bar…’
‘Yes, but under communism…’
They recall how under communism you had to come here in secret, because everyone knew each other, and all the employees were housed in the same railway cars.
At that, Old Dear No. 2 says:
‘Forgive me for being so forward, but perhaps we should introduce ourselves.’
‘I’m Michał.’
‘Zdzisław…’
‘Wiesław…’ Smooch. Smooch.
‘Michał.’ Smooch. ‘Zdzisiu.’ Smooch. ‘Pleased to meet you, Zdzisiu.’ Smooch. ‘Wiesio.’ Smooch.
‘You can call me Wieśka…’
‘Zdzisia! Zdzisława Sośnicka…’ Smooch, smooch.
‘Michalina…’ Smooch.
‘Oh! Michalina Wisłocka!’
‘So, Michał, there was one time that I was walking here, and I’d already taken off my drawers and I was checking out the lads on the dunes, each one hotter than the last. And all of a sudden, who do I see? It was that witch, the secretary at my enterprise, I don’t remember if I was at “Fortune”, “Rainbow”, or “Daybreak” back then. She’d ventured all the way up from Międzyzdroje, only she was near the green steps, at the nudist beach, the straight one. She was looking around to see if anyone noticed her.’
Yes, it’s all elderly ladies here, spreading their pensiony warmth all round; the kind of ladies who bring soup in flasks and chit-chat about their ailments.
‘So anyway, that witch found herself a place to make her camp, and I made it as far as here, walking along the bluff, so she wouldn’t see me, since back then you had to walk even further, further down; that beach gets closer every year. Oh yes, back then you had to walk a really long way.’
‘You had to walk a long way back then,’ repeats the other. ‘What year was that? ’69? That beach practically reached the Levee.’
‘Except that under communism it was a little different here. Different atmosphere. Basically it was a cruising ground on the dunes. And people didn’t smile like they do now; they all looked like they were up to no good, as if just being here made you a criminal. It used to be you had to be so covert here…’
‘And now everybody’s utterly overt here…’
Berging Queens
‘How do we get by? Well, it’s hard. First, you’re lonely your whole life. Second, you’re poor, you’re on the outside, retired, beyond the pale of reality. Even the young ones, they’re on the outside, too. Doubly marginal: first, you’re poor; second, you’re a poofter. So you have to create your own world. It’s true. The first part of your life you’re bent on finding someone to spend the rest of it with. But it’s not exactly easy, especially in times like these. And then there’s wanting to be somebody important, to be someone… Later on you get used to being alone, to being a no one. And that’s when the fun begins. Oh, you can spend the whole year (in secret, at work, under the table, under the covers) looking forward to coming here, just waiting to spend your whole summer getting laid, lubing yourself up in the sun and heat, cruising… The tanning lotion from last year squirrelled away somewhere like buried treasure… and sometimes, when you’re really sad, you take it out, open it, sniff, and remember the feeling of getting off… the train… the hot sun on your face again, and the sand dunes! But you can’t go sniffing it all the time, or else the memory will gust away… You escape into your own private world, where it’s as cosy as the hollows between the dunes… And everyone thinks this is the bottom. But they don’t have breezes like this at the bottom…’
‘Or those chanteuses who actually think they’re women. They’re not even transvestites, they just feel like women inside…’
And with that the other Old Dear gave me a little nosegay of blue flowers that she’d been gathering all day long on the dunes. So tiny – perhaps they were forget-me-nots. She knew exactly what she was doing! She wrapped a towel around me, a makeshift dress, and stuck the nosegay down the front…
‘That’s how these queens have fun with each other! They just make a few compromises: they dress up so no one can say they’re in drag, but they’ll have on things that you might find a real woman wearing, too. Under their jackets they’ll have on a deep v-neck vest with a medallion dangling in the cleavage – voilà! instant décolletage! And they’ll slip on a bracelet or two, and if anyone asks why, well: boys wear bracelets, too, these days! And lipstick, or lip balm actually, which you can get at any chemist’s… And if they accidentally gave you the tinted lip balm, whose fault is that? And now the fun can begin. In secret, when no one’s around, you make yourself up in the toilets, put on your face… Your fingernails might be a bit on the long side, too, but still acceptable…’
‘So it’s Berg! A faggy Berg!’
‘What?’ I can see they’re laughing. Even if they’ve never read Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, they know a thing or two. In their bones.
St Rolka of the University
‘It’s all right for you, you’re in a doctoral programme… You really don’t have it so bad… Uh-huh!’
Rolka sits in the reading room studying the catechism. Has been for years now. She wants to get into the Papal College on Ostrów Tumski. The first time I ever saw her was in the local nellie bar, back in her disco days. Long hair, but a receding hairline, rolling eyes, fanatical, inspired, but in the depths of those eyes there also lurked a kind of affectation. Then
the news broke: Rolka’s gone crazy! She went mad and was locked up in Kraszewski Street, in Zegadłowicz Street. In that enormous red brick cloister, behind sky-high walls.
Five years later, Rolka was standing in front of the mirror in the toilet at Scene. She had some kind of rag draped over her head and was prattling to herself:
‘You’re pretty, I love you. You’re pretty, I love you. Mwa, mwa!’ A moment later, in the main room:
‘Everything’s fine now. I just have to get my stuff from the mental health centre, all those plushy things of mine.’
Rolka inhaled nervously. Nervously! A drag on her cigarette, a sip of beer. And she raised her eyes in her eternal perturbation, a little too untethered, all that endless relocating, and now she had to get her plushy things out of isolation, too. All her teddy bears and threadbare stuffed toys, so they won’t throw them out, but they hadn’t given her permission to take any of them. So she rolled her eyeballs, a little too evidently terrified (somewhere at the bottom of her eyes), smoke, beer. Finally she lowered her eyelashes, looked at her fingernails. I never go anywhere, not out in public, I’m persona non grata… Uh-huh!
‘You have it good, I come here to read.’ Two years later, and I see Rolka every day in the reading room. She doesn’t budge during the breaks, when they ventilate the hall. She’s wholly absorbed in her studies, but still she rolls her eyeballs (all that bother she’s had with the administration), and her hair keeps getting longer, too, and it’s grey now. Grey. Streaked. But gathered up in a pointy tassel on top of her head, like a little girl. If they take her at that college, they’ll canonise her, no doubt about that! And she was always the first on the picket line! And at the sauna. Only today she asked me:
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