Accommodations Read online

  “DING-DONG, TIME TO WAKE up. No sleeping in class.” When I hear the theatrical whisper of Professor Brankowski, I jerk to in my chair as the other students in the room all burst out laughing. It is their guffaws that rouse me fully. Torn from my doze, I glance up at the blackboard, which has Cyrillic scrawled all over it, and I remember it’s Monday already, and that I’m sitting in the rector’s building in a class on historical grammar.

  “I’m sorry, Professor, but the Russians …”

  “What Russians?” he interrupts. “Might we perchance have seen them in our dreams?”

  I return his gaze in terror. So that I don’t have to give any further explanation I just nod, although I could swear that from Sunday night into early Monday morning as I lay shivering under the blanket in my unheated room at the Vega I heard Russian voices, songs, shrieks, which had persisted until dawn, preventing me from sleeping. Professor Brankowski squints his rat eyes, does a little loop in the front of the classroom, then strips off his tweed jacket, hops up onto the bench in the first row, where I’m sitting, and presents to us a lotus pose we recognize from yoga. The girls are silent. The boys applaud.

  I hurry out of the room, trying to get out of the rector’s building before I run into anybody I know from my year, since I’m pretty sure they’re planning to have, for the third night in a row, a meet-and-greet at Filutek, the students’ bar.

  It’s past one, and since all I had for breakfast was a tiny cheese sandwich, I start to feel weak. I sit down on the bench next to the coatroom and close my eyes. The rumble of conversation that fills the hallways of the university takes a soporific effect on me. After spending eighteen years in the country, where a few passersby in the daytime on the rocky road might well be considered a crowd, this kind of human density reminds me of the processions when the fields were blessed, or for Corpus Christi, or for funerals, when they would make their way down the muddy trails like black caterpillars in clouds of limestone dust.

  “Aren’t you coming with us to Filutek?” Piotrek pipes up. Since the day we ran into each other at the registrar’s, he’s barely left my side for a second, carrying my backpack for me and sitting next to me in class.

  “I have to get back a little earlier today.”

  “Where?”

  “To the place I’m staying,” I say, trying to get out of it because I have no desire to participate in these group outings. First of all, I don’t have any money, and secondly, I feel uncomfortable in the company of my peers. I have less knowledge of the latest hits on MTV than I do of the collected works of Shakespeare, or Polish classics, or French, or above all Russian literature, which after the fall of the Polish People’s Republic my father would bring home by the kilo from the pulping section of the Myszków paper mill where he worked. And when it comes to sex, as a teenager raised in the countryside I know quite a bit of theory, meaning more or less whatever I could glean from Michalina Wislocka’s Practical Guide to Marital Bliss, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Memoirs of Fanny Hill, plus the information drawn from my uncles’ stories after they’d had a few too many drinks. In practice, all I’ve got is fifteen rushed lessons given to me by Natka Roszenko along with whatever I’ve been able to surmise from the men I’ve happened to cross paths with, among them the forty-year-old dance teacher I met over winter vacation two years ago and for whom I would walk five kilometers through snow drifts every day in order to reach the district’s cultural center.

  Stasikowa, the dressmaker, used to sew my clothes for me, but since her death I have at last been able to dress as I please, meaning contrary to fleeting fashion and to my mother, meaning I can be avant-garde. I bleach streaks of my hair and weave feathers and strands of leather into it, wear jasper amulets, wooden pendants, amber beads; I favor earthy tones: bronzes, dirty violets, copper, rotten green; natural materials: cotton, corduroy, linen; lightweight crocheted cardigans, wool sweaters, long skirts, bells, floral vests. Since coming to Częstochowa I’ve enjoyed wandering around town on my own, browsing used book stores, stores with Indian imports and places that sell used clothes by the kilo, where I read the labels on old garments; I smell the paints in art supply stores; in a notebook with a daffodil on it from the Wroclaw Paper Mill, I write short stories about Marie Skłodowska-Curie, after whom my middle school was named, about the folk painter Séraphine Louis, about Sadako Sasaki of Hiroshima, who died of radiation poisoning, and not least I just sit out in the reading room in the hopes that I might run into Kamil somewhere.

  “That’s cool … Suit yourself,” mutters an offended Piotrek, whose shadow falls upon a poster for a newly founded University of the Third Age. “I guess you’re avoiding us.”

  He sits down next to me and hands me a Prince Polo bar.

  We go to the Dwernicki Market, where from the various stalls we learn, in just a few minutes, all the most important national and international news, like that the cholera epidemic in Ukraine is spreading, after already affecting more than three hundred people, or about the disaster with the Estonian ferry that set sail for Sweden from Tallinn on Wednesday and wound up at the bottom of the Baltic, with eight hundred and fifty passengers, just after midnight, or about the image of Jesus appearing on a soybean-oil storage tank towering over a town in Ohio, or about the mutant mushrooms from the forests of Olesno, which you apparently can’t buy due to the fact that, tainted by cesium following the Chernobyl disaster, they glow, or, finally, about hikes in the prices of bread, dairy products and coffee.

  “Just think,” says a florist to a man from a vegetable stand, who in his rumpled maroon windbreaker looks like a walking Krakowska kielbasa. “Last week butter cost sixteen thousand zlotys. Three days later, nineteen. I hate to think what’s next!”

  “That’s nothing, my dear. Third of October alcohol goes up by fifteen percent. That’ll mean your standard-issue vodka’ll run around eighty-five thousand zlotys.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, it is what it is, but our liquor, too?” Having depressed herself, the florist returns to twisting maple leaves into roses. With the last of the money my mom gave me out of my grandpa’s pension I purchase two loaves of wholegrain bread with pumpkin seeds, a mushroom-flavored spreadable cheese, tomato and some trail mix. At the same stall, alongside the zucchini and pumpkin and chrysanthemums, I see a dark green plant with little yellow splotches that looks, under the autumnal drizzle, like a severed alligator’s tail.

  “That’s a bottle gourd,” says the sausage. “I’ll throw that in there for free. I’ve got to leave here in an hour or so, anyway, my bones’ll be howling at me something awful.”

  “Oh, but—”

  “I’ll take it,” says Piotrek. “My mom’ll like it.” And he stuffs the gourd into a plastic bag that says World Cup USA ’94. Now it’s like a crocodile hatchling, and we take turns carrying it down Holy Virgin Mary Ave, into a Zyrafa store to look at bags and as we amble back though the city center past Sienkiewicz High and all the way to Jasna Góra, where, according to local legend, there was once a huge underground dungeon.

  “On Biegański Square, right where you stopped for a minute without even knowing it, there used to be this big pedestal with Vania on top of it,” says Piotrek. “They used to call him the patron saint of shitting, just because there was this below-ground public restroom not too far from him.”

  “Who’s Vania?”

  “This soldier in this billowing half-shelter, with a PPSh-41 and an olive branch. I guess after ’89 there was a big push to get rid of him, so by World Youth Day, when it was held here in ’91, I guess it was gone. This friend of my mom’s who was working in this parliament deputy’s office had this guy who kept coming in, he’d been a pilot in the Battle of Britain, and he had this money-saving scheme to sever Vanka’s half-shelter and just give it to Pilsudski. In the end, the marshal got a coat of his own, and all that remains of Vanka is this little ditty: “There once was a soldier atop a high column, facing the church, his ass to the Presidium.’”

>   WALDEK CRACKS THE LITTLE DOOR of his manager’s booth, covered over in a map of the night sky, and proudly presents me his solved Rubik’s cube.

  “Howdy, milady. Look, I got it in an hour this time.”

  I give him an admiring nod.

  “That’s really great,” I say. “It’d take me all day to do it.”

  “Now, now. What’s got our college gal so grumbly today?”

  “The bus was packed.”

  “At this time of day it’s always Sodom and Gomorrah. You must’ve noticed on your route, kid, how many different businesses they’ve opened up these days. There’s the waste screening plant and the water bottling plant and the Christmas decorations depot. Who knows what else. Czestochowans have spread so it’s gotten hard to keep up with them, but once you pass through that gate it’s the same clusterquag as ever. At one time this here was the very edge of town. The bus would stop at Zyzna, and you had to walk another kilometer from the station to get to the factory. And there were only a couple of ’em: morning and afternoon. Although that’s nothing, college kid. They say that underneath these barracks there was once this network of shelters they built during the Cold War, and they say one of them had—” He stomps his slipper on the floor.

  “Waldek—” I interrupt, since I’m barely managing to avoid collapse. “Natka said something about soup for dinner?”

  “Did she now?” He stands up with evident displeasure. “We’ll get that right out for you, then. I’ll just go and get that little heater-upper from her office.”

  He leaves with a fistful of keys and, limping, walks to the opposite end of the hall and into Natka’s office. Once he’s back he shows me two yellow packets of ramen noodle soup.

  “Crab or golden chicken. Which does our college gal prefer?”

  I figure I might as well pick the first, since I know they taste identical. I do and then sit on the stool and survey the area, where the main motifs are not, as it seemed to me at first, dangling cables, the remaining half of a mirror hanging over the sink, the brush, the shaving paste, the pack of Polsilver razors or the collection of empty beer cans, but rather, pinned to the thin straw liners on the walls, pennants of football clubs from the West and yellowed pages from an astronomy magazine.

  Waldek rinses two mugs in the sink and sprinkles the contents of the bags into them; when the little pot begins to boil, he pours the water into them. As the coils of the noodles swell, and the small space fills with the scent of soy sauce, he serves our dinner on the metal lid from a box of chocolates.

  “Spicy, eh?”

  “Hot as heck.”

  “It’ll burn off all our sins.”

  “So what’s that?” I ask hesitantly, pointing to the rose he has tattooed on his left hand.

  Waldek is silent but for slurping down his soup. He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his patterned sweater.

  “Oh, what’s the point, college kid.” He waves his hand. “It’s ancient history. I was a troublemaker in my youth—no surprise, of course, considering I was raised without a mother, out past Częstochowa. I finally ran out of room to maneuver and ended up getting arrested. They put me upriver at first and then back here at the Herby Jail, but when they let me out I got a gig at a factory, which is how I became a Częstochowan. At first I was living in the Bermuda Triangle, where I got my dental work done pretty quick. Well, you know, I tended to talk back as a kid, so of course they went straight for the kisser and knocked out all my teeth.”

  “Bermuda Triangle?” I say.

  “It’s in the slums, between Mala, Mokra and Stawowa. Under communism they got the whole seedy underbelly set up there so’s they could keep their eye on it. While I was living on Krakowska Street I’d hardly ever show my face on Mala Street. But this once when I was still wet behind the ears my aunt and uncle sent me to the blind pig to pick up some of the strong stuff. And I go on down to this basement where I think a Mr. Bobas resides, and instead I find this dirt floor, you get me, the chick with no clothes on lying on a pile of rags, not moving. I think to myself I better fuck off quick, I don’t want any problems, but this chick somehow resurrects from the dead and jumps me with a whisk and chases me down the street butt naked!”

  “And you like astronomy?” I change the subject even as I choke on my own laughter.

  “Oh, you know. Got bored in the slammer, started picking up this and that to read. Around three years ago I secured myself this whole huge stack of Urania issues at this used bookstore on Copernicus.” His eyes sparkle, and he wriggles a little on his hard stool, probably because of the Antabuse implant he has in his rump. “I brought ’em in here to my booth so I could do a little reading, time to time.” He unpins from the straw liner a page with scribbles in the margins. “Get a load of this, Miss College Kid.” He puts on his glasses and opens an issue from the second of October, 1938. “‘In the first four months we have observed five comets,’” he reads. “‘We’ll see what the next months bring.’” He gives me a significant glance, but I don’t immediately get what he’s saying. “Five comets and meteor showers right before the outbreak of World War II? You don’t see where I’m heading here?”

  “Yes! I think so.”

  “The guy that wrote that, this guy Antoni Czubryński, he was an astralist and a Polish freemason, and his wife had a perfect mastery over occultism, palmistry, graphology, Kabbalah, Asian beliefs, you name it. Their daughter could see the future. That was her professional occupation, actually.”

  Amazed by all his knowledge, I give him another admiring nod.

  “Five comets in just the first half of the year!”

  “And meteor showers!”

  “Look here, kid.” With a trembling hand, he pulls out a crumbling page from 1920. “Back then they didn’t even know of Pluto yet, you know, they wouldn’t discover it for another ten years, and yet here they are talking about some planet on out past Neptune. Some pretty sharp SOBs, wouldn’t you say? This here is a thing about the canals on Mars.”

  But now my mug falls out of my hands, and the rest of my cold soup splashes over my cords, which I just got through washing in the sink. I don’t think about that, though. I look from the engraving of Orkisz’s Comet that makes it look more like a roundworm to Waldek’s face, sweaty from the hot soup, which has suddenly, unexpectedly reminded me of that of my dead father. My dad was a taxidermist, beekeeper and angler. Looking through nature books, he’d spend hours on end telling me tales of rare species of fish and birds, and then with great relish he would catch them, then kill them.

  LYING ON THE DIVAN with the dachshund and snacking on poppy-seed pretzel sticks, I gaze out at the October sky.

  “Is that pretty?” I say to Adelka, who seems to understand because she jumps up onto the windowsill, gets over by the aloe plant and lifts her little black nose. Someone must have scattered glitter out there, or taken a cosmic pick to the bottom of things and let out clouds of fireflies from that black hole—and for a second I feel like the dung beetle, whose vision is so frail it hardly sees a thing in its vicinity, and yet its every movement is in keeping with the light of the Milky Way.

  From Urania I learn that the constellations we see in the sky may no longer be in existence, separated from us by a billion light years, and that astralism has nothing to do with horoscopes, but is instead the study of cults of celestial bodies in ancient myths. Next I read the old Hutsul legend of Saint George, who sits on the moon taming wolves with his violin song, and after that I read about teleportation by means of infrared radiation, about Martian channels that crisscross in recurring patterns as though the products of intelligent design, about the framework of the Milky Way and the nebulae according to Lindblad’s theory:

  Let us imagine the inhabitant of an island covered in dense forest. The inhabitant is unable, for various reasons, to leave his territory, nor is he able to move freely within its bounds. Needless to say, an unfortunate soul such as this one will be unable to know what his island looks like. As it turns out, we find ou
rselves in a similar situation on this island-world of ours—in other words, our galaxy—to which we are condemned, without the possibility of free movement, with our view of what is further afield, and in particular that of the immediate environs of our galaxy, obscured by clouds of opaque matter.

  “Clouds of opaque matter,” I read over, now aloud, gazing into the ceiling, where two fat flies—among fall’s few survivors—trace figure eights. The engraving of the Milky Way makes me think of the shells of the snails that would dash madly from the calcareous soils of my village in the Polish Jurassic Highland, the place where I was born and raised.

  I set Urania down on the linoleum next to a sleeping Adelka, thinking how the hundred-year-old black-and-white photographs of nebulae in the Orion constellation would no doubt be of interest to the man with whom I lost touch in August, the man I miss so much these days.

  Kamil, a graduate student in ethnography, would come in his Fiat from Częstochowa to Hektary to record folk songs and tales since the spring of last year. One June afternoon he came up to me in the courtyard and asked me if I might be able to show him to a couple of places where he’d be able to take some photographs. I splashed my face with water from the hose, tamped down my rowdy hair, and—to the total outrage of my mom and grandma and the neighbor lady—led him, little by little, down a trail through the mown fields past the juniper shrubs, where once there flowed a river, and stemless carline thistles bloomed.

  That meadow by the limestone mines in chaos smelled so strongly of wildflowers that I got dizzy. Not heeding the admonitions of my mother, who always insisted I behave “as a lady must” when in company, I lay down in an empty reinforced concrete gutter—abandoned by builders in the eighties—on the balk between State Agricultural Farm fields and took a look up at the sky through the inside of a snail’s shell.

  Kamil sat down near me, on marlstone, snapped some pictures, softly singing a folk tune I didn’t recognize about a girl who grazed on a peacock’s meadow.