Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

‘OK, how about that time Zdzicha got up on that gravestone so the attendant at the cemetery would see her, and started wanking, and then the gravestone collapsed, and she said to the police: What’re you arresting me for? I’ll be punished when the ghost whose grave I smashed up starts tormenting me! And afterwards Zdzicha went to that fortune teller, but refused to pay her the five hundred zlotys. Anyway. OK, I’ll slow down the narration now, take a deep breath. So time moved on, and back then Zdzicha used to have a wank all over the place. Whenever I was on the train, passing by the landfill, I’d hear someone yell:

  ‘“Abomination! A pervert! People, close your eyes, look away!” And everyone would crowd against the windows, except for me: I knew that was Zdzicha’s turf… But what was I saying? Oh right, Zdzicha wouldn’t give that fortune teller the money, and strange things started to happen… There was a fire at her flat, blah, blah, blah, silly little things, and finally she put those five hundred zlotys in an envelope and sent them to her by post; and things calmed down after that’.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then… what? That’s all, Michał. Will you be putting it in?’ Queens are seriously mental.

  ‘Let’s get serious, I’m certainly not going to write that Zdzicha’s psychotic, and spanks the monkey everywhere she goes, and has the police chasing after her. No…’

  ‘But when you start at A…’

  ‘You don’t need to jump right to Z.’

  Brrrrng! One of the two Kiosk Sisters is ringing.

  ‘Hey ho, did you write about that time in 1988 when you came by to show us how big your willy was? You know, at our kiosk, inside…?’ Queens are always tenderly calling each other things like ‘slag’ and ‘tart’ and ‘bitch’: it cheers ’em up.

  No… The way you lot would write this book, there’d be nothing left for me to add… Whatever… I never thought it would come to this, Flora writing my book instead of me! Isn’t it enough that half the Wrocław picket line is writing my book for me? Like all I have to do is proofread it?

  So the Kiosk Ladies do remember me from back then. Nothing has changed. Except that now they’re rich and go on holiday to Tunisia for the Arabs.

  ‘You know, you have to bring vodka for them, and you really have to be careful, because they’ve certainly all had their fair share… They’re all prostitutes basically, I mean, not the way we are, but same thing…’

  ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great to run into Grasser Grażyna…? But she hardly ever goes out any more, only to Szczytnicki Park. You really should talk to her, though. She used to keep files on all the chanteuses there, you can ask her anything…’

  The Perspective, Not the Human

  Old Dear No. 1:

  Those wild beaches, where I used to gather amber, they’re gone, all gone! It all happened back in the eighties. No one had heard of AIDS yet; they were all spreading it like crazy. Nobody used condoms. Why would they? And then, around 1988 or so, people suddenly started talking about it. It never occurred to anyone that anything like that could happen in Poland: it was a product from the mythical West, like pineapples; it was chic, a little bit like drugs, I guess. It was exotic; no one ever thought that we might get it, too. And no doubt everyone was completely convinced that if communism hadn’t ended it would never have happened. AIDS under communism? Some bloke with a red star-shaped blotch on his forehead queueing in one of our dismal shops? AIDS was all scarlet and crimson, and communism was grey through and through. And even if we had things like that under communism, no one would have spoken, let alone written, about it. The West came to Poland and brought its diseases with it, its rotten pineapples. Who asked them anyway? Or was it really so bad on Lake Wigry, those nights in Augustów, the delicate thread of cormorants, dances on the wooden pier… The mosquitoes. The fare at the cafeteria was superb, oh, it really was… On holidays we always had our BLUD, which was our acronym for Breakfast – Lunch – Dinner. In the morning we’d have milk soup, an apple, a hard roll with a pat of butter, jam, and we’d often get cheese slices as well. Later, we’d have a proper lunch, no junk food or anything, just soup (tomato or cucumber) and for the main course a cutlet, mashed potatoes, cucumber salad. Compote or even liquid jelly to drink, and dessert, too: cream cakes, stuff like that. Then at teatime, there’d be sweet rolls, apples and pears, and compote. And for dinner, well, they had just everything: slices of yellow cheese, sausage with those little blobs of fat, herring salad… Kiosks with souvenirs. We used to travel, but now a pensioner like me only gets a couple of hundred zlotys, so just to get up here once a year for a shag you’ve got to save your coins in the vase all year long, the one on top of the television, the crystal vase (whatever I want now, I need to fill a new crystal vase). Back then everyone had a right to his holidays, and that was that. We had a right to go to the spa. Time was when you had really lovely books from the enterprise lending library to read, sitting on a bench, in the park, in bed. And young people today? Then, they joined the scouts and provided a service to society by cleaning up, planting flowerbeds, all those little pansies and petunias. And now? Please – the dunes are completely covered with rubbish, plastic bottles, and tattered newspapers – because they use the gay press for wiping their bums. All I’d like to ask is: ‘Queens! Stop littering like that, think about what it looks like after you’ve left!’ You can write that down, Michał.

  I used to go to Ciechocinek, to the spa… People would dance in a café near the Mushroom Fountain… The compere encouraged everyone to dance… People would sit on benches around the towers, inhaling and gossiping, and at the spa, too, with the pump room and peacocks and coal black swans with their red beaks wandering about… It was so pretty! Ciechocinek water went by the name Krystynka; I think it’s known all over Poland. In the pump room you paid a pittance and you could drink the water all day from a spout shaped like a little frog. Of course the queens would meet each other in the spa as well. Did they ever! It was a cruising ground, with all the frills. Peacocks in enormous cages, at the centre of the park. You wanted mountains? Krynica-in-the-Hills. The beach? Krynica-by-the-Sea, which was somewhere else. All you had to do was go to Krynica; there was something for everyone there. I’d sit my arse down in the train and be whisked away to wherever. None of that stress, that rushing around. You could spend your whole day at work just gossiping, sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes. I had a job in a cloakroom, and no one is going to tell me that was bad work! My friend Kangaroo would come round early in the morning since I worked right across from the picket line. All I had to do was take people’s coats, and my work was done. Except for the door, that heavy, carved wood door the tossers always left open. I made a sign: ‘Closing the door is the mark of a civilised person’. No luck. So I changed it to ‘Shut the door!’ But to no effect either. I put up a third sign and shouted my head off. But no matter: they never shut the door; it was always left open. I asked them to put up partitions, from the counter to the ceiling, made of glass, so it would be like I was sitting in a kiosk, and they could pass me their coats through a little hole. And this smart-arse, some professor, an architect (ugh!) says to me:

  ‘No, it’s an historic interior, it would spoil the perspective,’ or something along those lines, to make sure I understood why. And then I told him that for people like him it was the perspective, not the human, that mattered. As for the counter, when they were renovating, the handymen asked me how high I wanted it, and I gave them special orders to keep it just a bit lower than the crotch so I could take a good look while I was there.

  You could buy suntan lotion at Baltona if they had it, and if they didn’t then you were out of luck. Queens were always rubbing their faces with whatever they could get their hands on, not lotion but things like oil or yogurt. And the music back then was wonderful: Wodecki, Sława Przybylska; the songs had melodies, and the lyrics were classy, they rhymed and had a beat. Now they listen to that rap music… The wild beaches are gone… And let’s say, God forbid, you fell ill at the beach: you just went and saw a doct
or, no questions asked. You could get treatment anywhere. And now if there’s something the matter with my heart, God forbid, they tell me I’ve got to go back home. I’m telling you: Puppy Pancratius and Floppy the Bear are dead… The wild beaches are gone, the wild beaches are gone…

  Old Dear No. 2:

  Well, life wasn’t always a bed of roses. One time, I remember (we had a centre here and one on Lake Niecko), everyone got sick from the bigos. Everyone loved the bigos, couldn’t get enough of it, and there was this waiter who took a shine to me, pulled me to one side, and said:

  ‘Listen, Wiesław, it’s like this. Don’t eat that bigos; the sausage meat is bad. This morning it was green, rotting; but the cook said that no one would notice after it had been fried.’ And everyone stuffed their faces; and that night the news went round like wild fire: ‘Food poisoning!’ Queues to the toilet, people in the queues vomiting. They only had that one little cabin there, with a hole in the ground and flies buzzing around… Or that other time when I went with a girlfriend to the kiosk to buy ice cream, and the lady says to us:

  ‘Not right now. What I got was thawed out when it arrived, and I haven’t had a chance to freeze it again. Come back in an hour…’ Can you believe it? Or when you went to the post office: back then, Michał, you had to make your phone calls in a little booth, and during the call the operator would interrupt every few minutes and ask:

  ‘Still talking?’ You couldn’t even camp it up properly because that old slag could break in any moment with her ‘Still talking?’ That’s how she checked to see if the caller was still on the line, and all you could do was answer her with a blasé ‘Still talking, still talking…’ But under communism everyone talked all the time. We had nothing. The shops were all empty, so what could we do but make things up? When the queens talked behind each other’s back, it wasn’t out of malice, but just because… everyone needed something funny to talk about…

  ‘Before we left I washed the curtains and the windows, vacuumed, and took the plants over to the neighbours… Uff. I can breathe now.’

  ‘I moved the sofa. But I don’t think I got enough bread for Sunday.’

  * German: Foreigner

  * German: Work!

  ** Slovak: I’m a lazy woman.

  *** Slovak: I’ve already found my stud…

  * German: I’m tired today, leave me alone.

  * German: Save your money, save your money, Didi! You need to save money!

  * German: Bloody queers! Bloody queers!

  * German: No business.

  ** Russian: You understand?

  *** Russian: Little bird.

  * Slovak: I don’t understand it.

  * German: personal stylist

  THE GREAT ATLAS

  OF POLISH QUEENS

  Style Queens

  I grabbed my cigarettes and went for a walk through the dunes towards Świnoujście. I looked over and saw that Apothecaress from Bydgoszcz lying there. She had her umbrella with the Vichy logo opened up and was slathering on sunscreen as usual. I bowed politely, proffering my respect, and started to pester her about lice: how could I get rid of them? She gave me a long lecture, explaining how I had to shave my entire body, even my legs and armpits because there’s no place they can’t spread, and in extreme or chronic cases the little bitches can even infest nose hair and ear hair and eyebrows. Finally she told me to go the chemist and buy a bottle of Lindane, without saying anything about the lice. Just say:

  ‘Lindane, please’.

  I thanked her and got the hell out of there quickly because she said that if I had lice I might have probably picked up something even worse, and I should go to the STD clinic for a battery of tests… Again she tried to persuade me to buy a webcam and give up my real-time depravities. Even though she was rich, she still lived in the very room where she first drew breath, with her aging mother in the next room, her first girlhood ponytail, instead of a plait, pinned to a tapestry as a memento, the whole thing looking a bit like Auschwitz. The ceiling was covered with porn, the peeling wallpaper was a backdrop for old movie posters from the eighties, kung-fu films, E.T… And smack dab in the middle of this hole was the computer. Dear children, please make sure you never, ever answer this man’s private messages in a chatroom, even if he tells you he’s thirteen and still plays with dolls! He’s the fat bloke in the poster, the one warning kids against talking to strangers on the internet. He has a one-track mind. He’s a client of the Hottie Tot escort agency and the Whippersnapper travel agency. He’ll swallow you up entirely, bones and all. He’ll stick out his tongue and start licking. He’ll get at you through his state-of-the-art camera. Just imagine his enormous, red tongue clambering out of the camera and licking you all over! The internet – that’s where the real depravity takes place, that’s the real libidinal Lubiewo, the real lewd beach!

  ‘My neighbour came over, installed everything, totally professional, explained how it all worked, started up Windows, and what do you know: There on the desktop was one of the nude photos of Mr Poland 2003!’

  The sun in its golden chariot had already covered half its course, and the buzzing of bumblebees slowly gave way to that of mosquitoes. The sea was calm and silvery, the air still, the flat water inhabited by half-immersed, motionless figures, like a picture of the baptism at the River Jordan. But there was no sin any more. Up above, on the dunes, stood a corpulent queen I had always admired. She was making a toga for herself out of a silk towel printed with enormous white flowers; crouching, she wrapped it around her breasts and knotted the corners. She was old, but the hair on the back of her head was long and dyed red. I once overheard her talking Russian on her mobile. Another time I greeted her from a distance, and she responded with a dignified nod, like a cultured matron from Germany.

  Sometimes she would walk along the edge of the woods here with a cane, like a wraith, her curly hair shimmering all these shades of vermillion at the back, the rest of her head bald. She always wore a skirt, made out of a blanket or that floral-print beach towel, anything as long as it wasn’t trousers… And she never, ever showed her breasts; she always knotted something over them. There was always another man at her side, stocky, elderly – her husband. An old married couple, one the man, the other the woman, her in her floral-print beach-towel dress, him with his fishing rod and cigarette…

  I walked past her, past a series of hollows inhabited by naked, fortysomething men tanned almost black. There were a lot of them. Each on his own, each with his own designer rucksack, fashionable cigarettes, expensive tanning oil, his own designer sadness permanently plastered across his face. Suddenly I happened upon a hollow that was entirely in the shadow of some peculiar bushes and occupied by two young, fashionable damsels – one with enormous glasses and a woolly perm dyed purplish-black, the other gorgeous, ginger-haired, the face of an eighteen-year-old ephebe… They at once whistled after me, so I called back loudly:

  ‘Hey ladies! What are you doing hiding in the shade? Is our little bit of sun too hot for you?’

  ‘Well, it certainly is too hot for my Eugenia. Her complexion is so delicate…’

  I was certain these were Style Queens, which is to say they lived in the big city and earned more than three grand a month, but they seemed very nice regardless. In order to find out for sure, I gave them the ‘hair straightener’ test, which involves merely mentioning at some point in a conversation the fact that one has recently purchased a straightener for one’s hair. If the queen under examination responds with ‘What’s that?’ then she fails. But if she asks, ‘Ceramic?’ then you have a classic Style Queen on your hands.

  ‘A ceramic one?’ Eugenia asked earnestly. Yes, of course it was ceramic, I informed her; it isn’t worth buying metal ones since they totally ruin your hair. Then there’s the question of whether to get a dual straightening and curling iron. And there are all sorts of other complications, too. Straightening, fine, but with what? With those professional hair products you can find for a hundred zlotys in only the mos
t expensive salons? Very well, but now: which brands leave a sticky residue in your hair, and which don’t? Then there’s the question of whether or not to colour, and if so, whether to colour the whole head or just have the top spiked and highlighted – which is in again now, part of that wave of eighties nostalgia (which Limahl’s autobiography has certainly contributed to as well). But that’s just the head, there’s so much else. Nails, for instance. Is it better to go to a salon for a manicure, or do them yourself at home with nail clippers and special sandalwood sticks? You can buy everything in the shops these days. And then: will generic cosmetics do, or should you get them from Sabon? Well? Who knows? Because every Style Queen will tell you something different. And then: is it better to whiten my teeth with that crap from Rossman, or get something from the dentist? And my hair: when the ends start splitting, is it better to fix them with Kerastes or Wella Professional or L’anza? Who the hell knows. And clothes:

  ‘Should I run them up myself or not? Are retro and secondhand still OK? Or maybe it’s better to buy fewer more expensive items rather than to have a whole wardrobe full of shite I’ll never wear…’

  Suddenly Eugenia glances at my Zara shoes, which I was holding in my hand and now toss on to the sand, and says to the monkey next to her:

  ‘Oh look, remember those?’

  They both giggle.

  ‘Oh, the trouble I had with those shoes!’

  So, she had had the same ones. The problem with Style Queens is that whenever Zara brings out something really nice, all the Style Queens in Poland will be wearing it the next day; it’s the only place in this country they dare to shop. Unless they have something tailor-made by Arthurina, of course, but that’s really upmarket. Then later at Scena and Scorpio and who knows where else, suddenly everyone’s wearing the same thing, and they all swear how they’re never, ever shopping at Zara again. Well, maybe a blouse from the ladies’ department – these queens are so skinny, with their long arms, long necks: a new type of human that can actually fit into those super-tight, super-short tops (a diamond in the belly button!). And jewellery, too, for decorating their fingernails and toenails, wrists and ankles… A whole market of footcare products spread out before them, those affluent queens, bored silly at the end of the working day.