Accommodations Page 4

  “Where’d you learn to speak such great Polish?” I ask Alex.

  “I learned it just like Natka did: from Poles.”

  “But Natka grew up here, in the countryside, in Poland.”

  “Alright, alright. I will confess. My mother taught me, her dad was a Pole; he lost his parents in Siberia when he was five, or maybe four, years old. All my pops could say in Polish was ‘hello,’ but whenever he got pissed off about something, he’d always swear in very old-fashioned Polish.”

  “Why doesn’t Sergey speak Polish?”

  “He does, he just doesn’t like to. He’s weird because when he was little he fell out of his stroller. First we were living in Georgia, in Tbilisi, because they’d sent our father there. Then we spent almost a year in Azerbaijan, in Baku and Nagorno-Karabakh, where there were riots.”

  “You saw them?”

  “I didn’t, because we were residing in a big apartment block by the army unit, but I saw the tanks heading in, and I’d wake up at night because of the shooting.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Me? Nah. I actually wanted to go out there, but my mother would not permit me. All of us wanted to be in the army. Our father bought us a Makarov pistol that was just like the real thing, just blue so you could tell the difference, and you’d load these little caps into it. Plus we had shishigi.”

  “What are shishigi?”

  “GAZ-66 military four-by-fours. Sergey and I were always hanging around the unit. There was this hole in the fence somewhere. You weren’t allowed to get into it, but we’d do it anyway, and one time I met Azer, this boy about my age. We started hanging around together, just hanging out and then whenever the unit alarm bell went off, we’d go up and hide in one of the army towers …”

  Suddenly the beads at the entrance part, revealing Sergey’s head. Having overhead his brother’s story, he taps his forehead and recites something in Russian.

  “What did he say?” I ask Alex, because although I supposedly studied Russian all through school I understand very little of it.

  “It’s a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev,” answers Alex.

  “What does it say?”

  “Let’s see … ‘Russia can’t be comprehended with the mind. Russia is unique. All you can do with Russia is believe.’”

  Just then, as I’m about to mention the bombing of Grozny to the twins, Adelka leaps out of my lap and runs out into the hallway. The doors to the Vega open. At the clacking of Natka’s heels, the brothers get up, turn around and race up the stairs.

  “What are they running away from her for?” I ask Waldek. “Haven’t they paid their rent?”

  “What do you mean, college gal? You don’t know?”

  “I guess not.”

  “They’re both in love with her.”

  “Well, what does she say about it?”

  “Natka being Natka, she doesn’t say a thing. She’s still stuck on her old beau, Scurvy, who is alleged to have died in a car crash as he was making his way to Deutschland.”

  I DON’T GO HOME OVER THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY, much to my mother’s disappointment, the official reason being I need to prepare for my Old Polish Literature exam, the unofficial reason being I just want to stay at the Vega, even though it’s true it’s just as cold as it is on my family’s stone home on the pond, heated by a single coal-burning stove. Yet my accommodations in Częstochowa are more peaceful, and nobody turns out the lights at ten p.m. By the twenty-sixth, when snow has covered the Vega’s drive, and the fruits of the plane trees look like coconuts on their bared branches, I begin hungrily lamenting my decision to spend the holidays here. I miss my mom, who would make the most of New Year’s Eve and buy sangria and bake a glazed cocoa cake in her electric pan. We’d munch on delicacies left over from Christmas Eve: poppy seed cake, the crumbs of Christmas wafers, red borscht with dumplings, cabbage with beans.

  I go out and pause by the stairs, where Sergey is playing his harmonica. Getting lost in its melody, I remember my father over the holidays in eighty-seven, dragging home—my mom and I had preferred not to know where he had found it—a nearly two-meter-tall spruce tree, which he subsequently decided to reduce in size. He brought a saw from the barn and sat down on the linoleum, now splattered with spruce needles, then spent the next twenty minutes pondering how best to trim this trophy. My mom, anticipating problems, immediately determined she would vacate the premises, heading to the neighbor lady’s, while I stayed behind. To make my father’s deliberations go a little quicker, I went to the kitchen to make him some tea, but when I returned, the spruce was still lying exactly where he’d first laid it down. My father was now cradling the saw, using some stalk to play this ballad on it by the folk group Kapela Czerniakowska: “Over the houses a gray fog, a cold wind that outspread it, and every day to the factory went the factory girl.”

  Sergey, having noticed me huddled up on the bench by the driveway, stops playing, sticks his harmonica in his pocket, comes up, wraps me in his big scarf and leads me through the back of the Vega to the one-story structure behind it, which Natka rents out to people for storage. He slides a key into the padlock. We enter the structure, which smells like grease and carbide and sawdust; between two posters of a busty Baywatch Pamela Anderson there hangs a square plywood target. Sergey opens a metal case that sits in the corner by a pile of damp cardboard boxes and presents me with a succession of daggers and knives.

  It’s cold. My breath glides down those polished blades. That steel reflects our faces: mine small and pale, his tanned from the markets. His jaw juts out like the Terminator’s. After examining the contents of the case, we stand in the center of the room. Sergey demonstrates a knife toss, landing a bullseye. I applaud him, then try to imitate his movements precisely, positioning the blade as he does, along my index finger, but every time I hurl the knife it bounces right off the plywood and lands on the sawdust-strewn ground. After a dozen failed attempts I’ve completely forgotten the storehouse chill. I press part of an icicle to the cut on my finger and force my rapidly weakening hands to keep trying to hit that target. Sergey sits straddling the metal case and watches me, laughing. Finally, bored, he stands behind me and arranges my shoulders, thighs and back so that I’m standing how I should be. Now, finally, the blade I launch tears into the white plywood and sticks deep in the heart of the target. I squeal with joy and throw my arms around Sergey’s neck; Sergey blushes, takes me by the waist and lifts me up like I’m a straw doll. I spread my arms like I’m a hawk being released into the world by my father; I gulp down the cold air and dust. Coming back onto the concrete floor, facing away from Sergey, I accidentally brush against his stomach, then his thighs. I also feel his penis, hard against my bottom. Turned on, I turn around to face him. Sergey takes my hand and puts my bleeding finger into his mouth and sucks it for a moment; then he leans down and—his lips smelling of iron—kisses me with tongue and slowly, so that I don’t trip over any of the knives we’ve thrown around, he moves me towards the corner of the room. Very aroused, I lean into the cool wall. Sergey unbuttons my jacket, kisses my nipples through my shirt, leaving patches of moisture on the cotton; whispering something in Russian, he lifts up my shirt and sticks his tongue into my navel.

  “Having fun, my pets?”

  Wearing her sheepskin coat and the suede boots that go up to her knees, Natka is sitting on the storeroom’s threshold, smoking a cigarette. Only now do I catch the fragrance of the tobacco and her sweet perfume. I tug my shirt down, leap aside.

  Natka stomps out her cigarette butt on the cement and comes up to Sergey, who’s still standing by the wall, keeping his hands at his sides.

  “What did I tell you?” says Natka in a menacing tone I’ve never heard her use before, and then, as hard as she can, she punches Sergey in the face.

  AT A QUARTER BEFORE EIGHT I’m awakened by police sirens. The indigo lights come spilling through the shutters. Still half asleep, I sit up in the daybed and wonder whether by any chance the VCR in the common room mig
ht have jammed, making these just the effects of Miami Vice.

  I rub my eyes and try to look outside, but scraps of wet snow cling to the panes, obscuring my view of the little square in front of the hotel.

  Someone knocks softly at the door. I climb out of bed and turn the key. Ludmila slips into my room. Her swollen face, edged with yellow curlers, looks like a tansy bouquet. She takes a look around my room, opens the wardrobe and hands me a pair of jeans, a shirt and Natka’s boots. Her grip is shaky. In a kind of frenzy she then throws all of my other things into my suitcase.

  “Wait, what’s going on, Ludmila?”

  “Eet ees better if you do not know.”

  “Where’s Natka? Did the brothers get into another fight over her?” I ask anxiously, zipping up the jeans.

  “Eet ees better if you do not know.”

  I dress as fast as I used to for morning roll call at summer Scouts camp and in two minutes am ready to go.

  “Klas,” chuckles Ludmila, though I can tell she is spooked. “Idi, nie bojsia.” She points to the wardrobe.

  “You want me to hide in there?”

  “Nyet.”

  “Where do you want me to go, Ludmila?” I press, trying to make sense of her words.

  In the hallway, footsteps rumble ever louder, Ludmila goes up to the wardrobe, opens it wide and in one fell swoop has ripped out its back. She points to the dark space this leaves, covered in cobweb fringe and slaps a note into my hand. I skim it: “Ludmila will give you a package. Put it under the floorboard by the exit to the shelter. We’ll give you your suitcase. I love you. Natka.”

  “Be on,” whispers Ludmila, putting back the back of the wardrobe before slamming the door to my room shut behind me.

  As I turn around, I hear, coming from behind the door, Adelka whimpering, but I can’t go back now, it’s too late to say goodbye to her. I go down the stairs, holding on to the damp concrete wall. Darkness cozies up to me, supplying plush and cobwebs. “You can do this, you can do this,” I tell myself over and over.

  At last I reach a ruined room that looks more like a large cell. Rows of cables run along the walls. Every now and then my fingers catch on metal bands, nodules, valves, and the odor of mouse droppings and dust and the carcasses of mice catches in my nose. I swallow in an attempt to get rid of the taste of dust, and I try to avoid the broken vodka bottles as well as something that looks like desiccated human feces. My God, I think. What am I getting myself into, exactly? I must have lost my mind, letting myself get mixed up in the kind of thing the crime shows like to feature.

  In the distance, splotches of diffuse light pulse.

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, underslept and exhausted, I wander my environs. The ice is beginning to melt. I take off my duffle coat and on a wood platform by a pond teeming with cattails and grassweed I lie down gazing up at the clear blue sky. Above me, on the rough branch of a wild apple tree, a single apple dangles, reminding me of a certain forebear.

  During the war, my grandfather Wladek, along with some other riflemen from the infantry, wound up in the Lamsdorf Stalag in Lambinowice, near Opole, which the Nazis called the Briten lagen because since nineteen-forty they kept primarily British prisoners of war there. My grandfather got a tip about an upcoming dispatch to a concentration camp and so planned his escape. As a carpenter, he occasionally got a pass and went out for materials through the gate of the Stalag. Apparently, he took advantage to copy the keys, and he did escape, along with two English commandos. In the whole history of Lamsdorf, out of a hundred thousand inmates, only thirteen or fourteen managed to get free. The guards mostly shackled and chained the English soldiers, especially the airmen. My grandfather was one of the few who survived and was able to hide until the end of the war in the caves and dugouts around the Polish Jurassic Highland. I lived with him for eighteen years, and during that time I tried repeatedly to ask him questions about the war. In response, he would sing forbidden songs, but he would never talk about the Stalag, making it clear to me that talking about his adventures with the Allies was a punishable offense. One day I was sitting in an apple tree, eating up ripe paper apples, swinging my legs. My grandfather was just coming back from the quarry and noticed me sitting on my branch.

  “Get down from there, you’ll fall and then we’ll be in trouble!” he shouted.

  “I’m not coming down.”

  “Get down!”

  “I’m not coming down.”

  “If you don’t get down right now you’ll get sent straight to Lamsdorf!”

  “Lasdorf? Ladorf, la, do, fa,” I mocked him, unaware of the significance of the word I was breaking apart.

  ARE YOU THERE, LITTLE LADY? says my grandpa’s voice. Can you hear me? I look around, there’s no one there. On a branch over the swift stream of water that flows into the pond from some mysterious source, a dark-brown dipper flutters its wings. Would you come home already? Do you remember how I sowed that wheat? Now that you’ve gone off to that school of yours everything’s been lying fallow. Your grandma in the grave, your mom alone don’t have the strength for it. There’s nobody left on our farms. They’ve all gone off into the cities. From ours, Lubasy, Wladzia to Będzin, Ania to Siemianowice, and the boys off to the factories. But the youngest Zoska stayed, but she was taking two shifts at the plant doing those woven baskets. Even wet behind the ears she could help quarry, and with timber she was strong as though she weren’t no girl, not like you, just sitting around all day with your nose in some book. Better off writing how nobody these days puts up pine crowns on the doorframes anymore, nobody puts anything up by the bridge when there’s a wedding, nobody makes zurek, It’s been three years now since the firemen brought a calendar. They used to give them out. You’d just give what you could for them, so long as it wasn’t less than fifty zlotys. The milkman doesn’t make his rounds no more, meanwhile there’s nowhere to go and get a simple footstool now, and they went and opened up that inn in Koziegłów on the main little square there. We all had a good cry when they did that. Then they fixed the streets up. They said we lived on Dluga. How could we live on Long Street, I ask the letter-carrier, when it’s as stunted as it is? The kids saw too much television and got it into their heads to get rich off artificial Christmas trees, and bark, and florals, wreaths—and then everybody took the doors off the hinges to their houses and made arches just like in a chapel. But I’ll tell you one thing: it wasn’t the televisions made them stupid. Whether for the priest or the nobility, we never had any respect round here.

  Once in thirty-nine this guy in Siewierz ratted me out for smuggling sausages. I must have had four kilos hidden in my pockets when all of a sudden out pops this Kraut pointing his Luger, wanting to know what I’m doing there on that cart, and I hardly think about it, I just say: Trinken, essen und schlafen. My God, the panic that got hold of me. And there that Kraut just bust out laughing. Ever since then I’ve always played the fool, whether it’s church folk or party folk, I’d sign with a cross, although you’ve seen yourself how good I know how to write.

  You wouldn’t remember when your father Rys got bumped from the paper mill, would you? Since he was the porter there, he was the one to open the gate up, and shut it, but I guess he’d leave it open a little too often. Soon as they got rid of him, he learned how to lay boards from a pal, and from that then on he could get away from work. Everybody had him do their bathrooms, and then they’d offer him some vodka at the end of the day. That’s how the poor kid drank himself to death, his heart just wouldn’t hold out.

  But were you still here when the mayor invited the choir for the harvest festival? Kid, he brought these devil-worshippers into our town to perform at the, well, at the amphitheater. They called themselves the Nightingales, but they weren’t even a choir, just some hooligans. And the way they played, kid, the way they let loose—well, it was like the drums of hell sounding off right here in Hektary. The kids all wailed, and the womenfolk ran home, and that was the end of our harvest festival. And then when you went off to that
school of yours, these chicken farms started building in Hektary, pipelines, and people were selling off their fields. Once up top the hill I even saw some people collecting snails into a cart. Even snails, you understand? Even snails they want to take away from us, gall darn it—what do they want them for? I’ll hand them the snails, the quarry’s crawling with them. And who knows who they plan on giving those plots of land to. Sounds like it’s through contacts. Once they started building on the priest’s field and on those, you know, state farms, where the basements’d flood every so often, then I really did get scared, that just look, here come the Germans back to buy up all our land. Kiddo, that would be the end of days, or however you want to think of it, but if they took our fields from us. I’ve got pitchforks and an ax should anything arise.

  FROM A NEARBY MEADOW a flock of crows takes off, bearing up some sapphire clouds along their wingtips. The shadows of the trees and rushes over the pond are getting longer. I sit on the platform, and recalling Natka’s parcel, I take it out of my jacket pocket, examining the electrical tape that covers it completely. I sniff it; my internal struggle over whether or not to check to see what it contains rages on. Finally, however, I decide to leave it be and turn and go back to the shelter. When I get there, sleet is falling. The smoke from the chimneys slants to the west. I kneel at the entrance, which has been dismantled by scrap collectors, and pat the loose board. I’m trying to stuff the parcel underneath it when suddenly someone touches my shoulder. I jump, covering my face. Before me stands Scurvy, Natka Roszenko’s old lover, who in my village in the eighties was the owner of Baboon, a nightclub by the side of the highway. He hasn’t changed except for going slightly gray and shaving off his bushy mustache.