Accommodations Read online

  PRAISE FOR SWALLOWING MERCURY

  “Achieves a form of literary alchemy that mesmerizes.”

  —The New York Times

  “Warm, subversively funny and elegiac for a lost rural life but unflinching in its depiction of the darker strands of Polish society, Swallowing Mercury is constructed around a spine of resistance and individuality.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “The book’s appearance in the U.S. is a great gift … Greg’s masterful first novel is charming, seductive, and sinister by turns.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

  “Greg’s fictional debut combines the opposing literary styles of socialist realism and magic realism in intoxicating sentences that convey sensuous detail so delightfully that one feels as though one is eating watermelon outdoors in summer.”

  —Booklist (Starred Review)

  “Marciniak’s deft translation amplifies the engrossing sensory details of Greg’s heartbreaking and enlivening novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This enchantingly elliptical fiction debut by British-domiciled Polish poet Wioletta Greg sparkles with a gem-like quality. Thanks to Eliza Marciniak’s crisp translation, it brings freshness even to the crowded genre of the novella-sized bildungsroman, and can be devoured alongside the best coming-of-age translations of recent years, such as Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera and The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov.”

  —The Guardian

  “Wioletta Greg’s first novel shines with a surreal and unsettling vigor. As an award-winning poet, Greg writes with a lyricism that brings alive the charms and dangers of Wiola’s life.”

  —The Financial Times

  “Swallowing Mercury is both magical and sinister, a memoir and a fairytale and, like Wiola, completely captivating.”

  —The Irish News

  “Greg writes with a precise, strange charm, and the poet’s acute sensitivity to detail. Little by little, I felt the presence of young Wiola appear beside me—vital, quick-witted and curious, picking her way through the dark woods of faith, family, sex, and politics as if in some melancholy fairytale. I experienced the book like a series of cool, clear drinks, each more intoxicating than the last.”

  —Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

  “I have been utterly ‘swallowed’ by this odd yet oddly familiar folk novella—somewhere between memoir and fairytale—which has magic and menace in perfect measure.”

  —Sarah Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

  “I really loved this strange book, which is sometimes sinister and sometimes lovely, and many other things besides.”

  —Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing

  “This book comes the way memory does, in fragments, like something overheard or glimpsed through a gap in a door. It might feel as if you shouldn’t be listening, should turn away, but it is impossible to do so.”

  —Daisy Johnson, author of Fen

  “A sparkling little gem of a book—there is a freshness and truthfulness in Wioletta Greg’s writing that reminded me of Elena Ferrante and Tove Jansson.”

  —Carys Davies, author of The Redemption of Galen Pike

  “Swallowing Mercury shows how the overwhelming forces of beauty, politics, mortality, violence, and hope can animate even the smallest moments of life.”

  —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You

  ACCOMMODATIONS

  ACCOMMODATIONS

  Wioletta Greg

  Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft

  Published by Transit Books

  2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

  www.transitbooks.org

  PUBLISHER & MARKETING CONTACT

  Adam & Ashley Levy | [email protected]

  Copyright © Wioletta Grzegorzewska 2017

  English translation copyright © Jennifer Croft 2019

  Originally published in Polish as Stancje by W.A.B. in 2017

  The rights of Wioletta Grzegorzewska (writing as Wioletta Greg) to be identified as the author of this work and of Eliza Marciniak to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING INFORMATION AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

  DESIGN & TYPESETTING

  Justin Carder

  DISTRIBUTED BY

  Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  (800) 283-3572 | cbsd.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1. Vega Speaking

  Chapter 2. Your Name’s Anula Now

  Chapter 3. Hey, Sleeping Beauty

  Acknowledgments

  I was trying to subdue the city by turning

  it into a projection of my own growing pains.

  ANGELA CARTER, “Flesh and the Mirror”

  1.

  Vega Speaking

  I’M HEADING TO THE VEGA HOUSE in Częstochowa at a quarter before sunset. It is Friday, September 30, 1994.

  Rain streaks across the bus’ windows. The dusk toys with the faces of the passengers and makes them into shapeless gray amoebas. When the driver turns the lights off, the crowd blurs together, looks like an expiring cetacean. Its bulky body heaves and swells and bursts into bundles of chives, dill, parsley poking out of people’s plastic bags. I am nauseated by the odor of musty rugged jackets, wool, the tonics with which the women spritz their hair. Sitting on my suitcase I stare out the window, where the sunlight disappears into the poplars like when water closes over a cuttlefish.

  Suddenly I think I see, standing up near the front of the bus, my old acquaintance Kamil, with whom I fell in love over the summer and then lost contact. That has to be him, I think, thrilled, squeezing myself and my suitcase towards him.

  “Is it really you?” I ask, excited, grasping his leather jacket.

  “Course it’s me, honeycakes,” responds this stranger as he eyes me up and down.

  Humiliated, I try to withdraw, but the bus tilts over the ruts in the road and instead of taking a step backwards, I wind up with my cheek pressed against his hulking chest. The man, who is barely keeping himself upright, because he’s drunk, squints his left eye, reaches out for my breasts, waving his hand around in the air for a while as though he were trying to pull back an invisible curtain and then starts feeling up the front pocket of my backpack, where a beef-stuffed roll has been festering since morning.

  “Keep your hands to yourself, you filthy pervert!” shouts one woman who has witnessed the whole scene. At the word “pervert” the crowd disperses. The bus stops in the city’s outskirts, and I get off like a fish leaping free from an aquarium; clinging on to the shelter at the stop I greedily suck down gulp after gulp of fresh air.

  In my plaid duffel coat, auburn sweater and cords that are too long for me, I pull my suitcase down the side of the road, trying to avoid the puddles the pearly moon clasps and links this evening. A fog rises over the fields and instantly rids them of their stench of burning. Off in the distance looms a mushroom-like brick water tower. I pass a lumber yard, big factories and a warehouse of artificial Christmas trees where faded graffiti vie along the wall for attention: “Soviet Army=with you from birth” and “Widzew rules.” From the direction of the city’s center comes, wobbling along on the ruts, a dumper loaded up with scrap metal, and it splatters me with mud. Past the yellowed plane trees
I glimpse two tall provisional buildings fronted with corrugated sheet metal. Over the first, attached by a wire to a rod, hangs a big sign scrawled in thick black Gothic script: “Waterproofing Exteriors Foundations Insulation”; over the second I can just make out the pink neon of the Vega workers’ housing. I turn and go towards it.

  I’m greeted at the door by a Dachshund, who sniffs over my sullied sneakers and wags her tail.

  “That’s Adelka. Our resident canine,” says Natka Roszenko; she looks even prettier than she used to. Tanned, with her golden-brown hair cascading over her shoulders, she looks as though cut out of a fashion mag.

  “I was a little worried you wouldn’t find us. But why so frightened? As though you’d seen a ghost!”

  I shrug.

  “All well out in the country, with your folks?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “You can leave your things in the guardroom,” she says and points out a makeshift booth of white plywood. “Waldek!”

  In the little window, like in a puppet theater, the bald head of the property manager pops into and immediately out of view.

  Then it’s dark inside the Vega, and the manager gets up and squeaks over to the light switch in his Kubota slides. The neon flickers, and bright light floods the hall way, makes the glass bricks glow, sinks into the paneling, the crooked slats, the holes in the walls stopped up with newspapers.

  Blinded, I follow the clack of Natka’s heels. We enter a small area that looks like the storeroom of a textile merchant—on the wall unit, the desk and the floor lie jacquard blouses in plastic wrap, collapsed jute purses, lightweight scarves in garish colors, alpine slippers, linen tablecloths and Russian candy. Natka makes her way through this spoil tip of miscellany and, exhaling, she pushes aside a pair of pantyhose-clad mannequin legs as she sits at the desk. I sit in the chair facing hers, and in my panic I clutch the foot of one of these plastic legs in its adhesive mesh stocking.

  “Tea?”

  “I’d love some tea.”

  Natka leaps up, cracks the door, shrieks, “Waldek, give me back the water zapper!” Then she picks up a plastic container and taps a little bit of instant raspberry tea powder into a glass. In that dark Arcoroc, that powder looks more like rat poison.

  “Maybe I should just quickly show you the room first, get it out of the way.”

  So we walk to the other end of the hallway, where between the bathroom and the rec room there’s a little bedroom that is more like a cell, with mold stains on the walls, a wooden table covered with an oilcloth, a chair, a dilapidated daybed, aloe on the sill, an Eltra Hania boom box, a Gierek-era wardrobe, a sink slivered up by rust, and over it, a dry husk of a fern.

  “To your liking then?” she asks in a tone that suggests she has deduced that after dragging myself and my suitcase clear to the ends of the earth—or at least the city—I might be uninclined to return to the train station now, at night. “If so I’ll take the money up front.”

  “Do you think I could get a little family and friends discount?” I ask, copying my mom’s slick techniques, surprising even myself.

  Smiling, Natka gets comfortable, crossing her legs, lighting a cigarette in a glass holder, disappearing into rising, coiling ribbons of smoke.

  “Last year there was a college girl staying with us. She colleged for around two weeks, romped around the discos, and then after the first test she failed she up and got packing, and you can be sure she left none of what she owed behind,” she says, keeping her poker face perfect, flicking her ashes into a vase. Then she regains her full range of expression: “And yet there I’d been that whole time, like some nincompoop, taking her fresh soup to preserve her from that supernausea bowl they have the students eat at, where they say they sprinkle baking soda over everything.”

  I reach into my bag, resigned. This is before the zloty devaluation, so the stack of bills I hand her looks like a lot. But Natka throws it into her own bag without counting, and as the clock with the cross-eyed Mickey Mouse on it hits eight, she looks at herself in the little doors of the high-gloss wall unit, runs her hands through her hair and runs a tube of lipstick over her voluptuous pout.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Wiola. I’m expected elsewhere. We’ll see one another tomorrow.”

  “But …”

  “Never you mind. Waldek’s on duty, he’ll show you everything you need to know. Oh, and make sure you remember your first dream in your new accommodations tonight—it might come true.”

  And she pops a red hooded cloak over her shoulders, and she walks out the door.

  THE DREAM MENTIONED BY NATKA ROSZENKO puts me back at the train station in Częstochowa, where we pull up towards noon. I slide open the door to my compartment to step out with the mass of other travelers onto the platform and go through the passageway to get to the square from the other side, on Freedom Ave. It’s overcast, although it was supposed to be sunny. The wind isn’t much. By the shooting gallery the smells of dust and exhaust are overwhelmed by the stench of shit that wafts over from the pig farm nearby. Piglets’ muzzles press against the fence like rubber ducklings. On the little square, called Kwadraty by the locals, brimstone devils go off, little mechanical dogs spread out on a blanket writhe until they stop and some old guy sings Christmas carols and hands out religious pictures. Fascinated by this city that brims over with village, I buy some soft-serve ice cream that comes out of a machine, look through a few rows of sunglasses hanging on display on wire racks.

  A little while later I’m getting off of a tram and going inside a four-story concrete monolith on Home Army Ave, where down corridors that smell damp and like old paper and cigarettes pale students meander. At the registrar’s office I collect the little booklet where all my grades will be recorded, write down my class schedule and while I’m there also discover that my name is not anywhere on the list of people granted university housing.

  “It sure isn’t,” says the secretary. “Ain’t nothing we can do about that, honey. You come from too close to Częstochowa, and we’ve got too little room in the dorms.” She gobbles down two Ptasie Mleczkos at once and licks the chocolate rim around her mouth that expands the border around her mustache. “But you can rent your own accommodations, can’t you?”

  I don’t respond because in the presence of the students standing behind me in line I don’t really feel like explaining that after my grandmother’s death I can’t afford to rent a room.

  I’m relieved to get out of the registrar’s, and scraping alongside the tram tracks towards the city’s center with the wheels of my suitcase, wobbly, I try to think where I could possibly spend the night. Obviously I could still catch a train to Myszków, and from there go by bus to my village, but … For starters, by buying a ticket back I’d be costing my mom extra, and secondly, I’m afraid to go back to Hektary, where for the foreseeable future I might wind up stuck.

  At the intersection a tall boy with blond hair catches up with me. He’s wearing a jean jacket with patches sewn on. He looks familiar. Against his tanned face his blue-gray eyes gleam like polished zlotys.

  “Hey, where do you think you’re headed with that suitcase?”

  “Headed ahead.”

  “Do you recognize me?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind. Name’s Piotrek.” He offers me a sweaty palm.

  “Wiola.”

  “Sorry to bug you on the street like this, I was just wanting to talk with somebody in the same year.”

  “We’re going to be in the same year?”

  “Sure looks like it. My mother talked me into trying to get in here, and as per usual she was right. If I hadn’t listened to her after I took the exams I’d be scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush right now. Want to stop in for some coffee?” He nods towards a blocky two-storied building at the corner of Home Army and John Paul II.

  At the coffee shop we sip prune liqueur that looks like tea and fight about books. I like Lord of the Flies; he prefers Lord of the Rings. I’m a Tempest
girl; he’s a Catcher in the Rye kind of guy. When the conversation turns to favorite movies, I squirm in my chair and smear Wuzetka filing up and down the laminated tabletop.

  I can’t tell him I actually don’t even know any movies, I grew up in the fields, I spent half my childhood with the animals in the cowshed, in the attic and the pigsty, that I haven’t seen TV in years because our old Rubin has long since been consigned to rest and recuperation in the dining room on the sunken floor next to the wall unit, while the film showings the mayor organized in the firehouse were finished the same day they started since someone stole all of the videocassettes, for some reason leaving only Total Recall, which after a few weeks everyone in the village knew by heart, but it really stuck with my good friend Older Lajbos, meaning he sniffed some neoprene adhesive and turned into an agent from Mars and ran all over the post-State Agricultural Farm fields disarming the straw coverings over the bushes. Last time I was in a movie theater was several years ago to see some Soviet movie about the war by Nikita Mikhalkov, I forgot the title because I was sidetracked by the fact that the viewers at the district culture house booed the performance of my school choir for its rendition of “Now We Can Move on from Lenin, Where Every Song’s a Battle Cry.”

  We leave the coffee shop. The big Energetyka clock flashes four. Piotrek and I part ways in front of the Freedom Cinema, and I go back to trying to figure out what to do and where to stay since I know no one here and have no intention of giving up at this point, meaning calling my mom to say I didn’t get into the dorms and that I’m not going to go to college after all and that I’ll be home tonight and starting Monday I’ll take that secretarial job she got me, and then I remember that for several years now on the outskirts of town an old acquaintance of ours from a neighboring village has been running a workers’ residence. I race to the phone booth that is rusting away before the Megamart. I insert the necessary tokens and dial, hands shaking.

  “Vega speaking,” says the voice of Natka Roszenko.