Accommodations Read online

  The last dregs of my energy leave me as we walk inside a plaster-coated compound separated from the street by an iron gate. Past that gate it’s stuffy. My head is pounding. Flu pain clamps down on my muscles. Dragging my feet, I follow the oblate through the walled-in courtyard straight to the entrance to the convent. Thinking of Márquez’s story “I Only Came to Use the Phone,” which I had read in some literary journal before leaving home to come to college, I hesitate at the threshold of this order, but in the end I cross. We go through the vestibule and pass by another little booth, here inhabited by a porter woman. A woman the residents of this house call Mother Superior gives me a pair of wooden clogs and says I must absolutely wear them when I walk about the convent, then gives me a few further instructions. The sisters buzz around me like bees, collecting my soaked clothes and my boots that are too big for me that Ludmila gave me in the morning. Then they redress me in a linen nightgown and invite me down to the refectory, where a steaming krupnik, sprinkled with fresh dill, awaits.

  When I finish eating, the Mother Superior makes me drink a bitter herbal infusion that reeks of black elderberry, fungus and cat pee, then leads me up the stairs to the attic, kicks aside the dried Advent wreaths sprawled across the doormat, and, cracking a door with the number eleven on it, she motions for me to go inside. In the warm, clean room, the roof creaks like a moored ship, the bedding smells like wind and starch, and the light green satin bedspread ripples like winter rye.

  AFTER SO MANY INTERRUPTED NIGHTS at the Vega, the Congregation of the Sisters of Christ’s Heart seems like an oasis of peace. I quickly grow accustomed to the heavy clogs I have to wear on convent property, to the early-morning wakeups, the canonical hours from matins to vespers, the vegetarian dishes consisting primarily of buckwheat porridge, fermented milk, peas, beans, zurek and cabbage.

  Dressed up in the mandatory uniform of the oblate—a loose blouse and skirt that has to be below the knee—I humbly carry out the orders of the Mother Superior, written out in ink on a special card I find every morning under the door to my room in the attic. My duties include: mopping and polishing the floors in the tourist wing; washing the holy figurines with warm water and dish soap; cleaning the confessionals in the chapel, where a priest comes in to take the sisters’ confessions; preparing two dozen bottles for the healing water that comes from Saint Barbara’s Cathedral’s little holy spring; and helping out with all the smaller tasks.

  At first the sisters—who are used to the perpetual short-lived visits of the pilgrims to whom they rent rooms at any time of day or night—regard me with a certain wariness, as a stranger who has suddenly shown up in their home and now eats in their refectory and drinks from their mugs and—worst of all—sleeps in the guest room in the attic, which is supposed to be reserved for curia higher-ups.

  But as I meekly wash the plaster statues, polish the floors and peel potatoes, the sisters begin to accept me; they talk with me in the hallways, share preserves, pass down holy pictures, herbal mixtures and whatever treats get left behind in the rooms rented by pilgrims from the West. And so I get to know Zyta, who is the Mother Superior’s right hand—although in fact she seems to run the whole convent; Sabina, the cook, who comes from Bytom and who, like my aunt, used to work in a mine canteen when she was younger, making the tastiest soups in all of Silesia; Sister Basia—short for Barbara—who plays violin in the chapel and who, like her namesake—Saint Barbara—is an only child and ran away from home in her youth, jokingly referring to her father as Dioscorus since, like Saint Barbara’s father, he wanted to keep her imprisoned in a tower on his estate, built on a post-Soviet field. And yet I have the most to talk about with the youngest oblate, Sister Anna, who lives next to the library, is around forty years of age, and like me studied languages and letters. Whenever I hear her clogs tapping out iambs on the staircase, I hurriedly tidy up my room, toss the green bedspread over the bed and wait for her to come like a child expecting Santa Claus.

  Then Sister Anna comes into my room. As we sip our tea, we stretch out comfortably atop the bed like teenaged girls at summer camp. Sister Anna tells me about her great-grandmother, who had five children and ran a pharmacy by the train station and who died in thirty-nine from the one bomb that fell on Częstochowa.

  Late into the evening she reads me poems by Narcyza Zmichowska, Julian Ejsmond’s The Lives of Trees, Henryk Zwierzchowski’s sonnets about his granddaughter from The Garden of Life, until at some point, she falls asleep.

  Quiet as a mouse I venture out into the bathroom, where I change into my pajamas, and then I lie down beside her along the edge of the bed, listening to her soft breaths, examining the skylight, its glistening patterns, embroidered by the frost.

  MY BIRTHDAY IS ON THE NINTH OF FEBRUARY, but I don’t mention it to the sisters. Since I have tonsillitis I spend the whole break in the convent. I lie feverish in bed, waking up and falling back asleep, listening to Paganini’s caprices for violin, which Sister Basia plays in the chapel.

  Just before Lent, Sabina, the cook, looks in on me, fluffs up my pillows and offers me some angel wings, which she has fried in lard. At one point, she goes up to the nightstand and picks up the little pot with the Mother Superior’s herbal infusion in it.

  “Ew, girl, this stinks to high heaven. I would not drink this if it were me,” she says in horror, then leaves.

  I pour the Mother Superior’s infusion into the toilet and immediately feel better, and then when Sister Anna brings me ampicillin capsules from a doctor friend of hers, I recover fully. As I snack on the wafers I found overnight in the common room of the convent’s tourist wing, I read Klemens Janicki’s Meditations. Under that lyrical influence, my thoughts return to my grandfather Władek. My mom wrote me that he had the flu, too, and that he wasn’t doing very well. “He keeps switching from one end of the bed to the other, sure that as long as the Grim Reaper only hovers over the headboard, rather than going down to the foot, a person still has hope.”

  I go down the hill with my grandfather; we pass the forest and the dolostone mine. It all looks familiar. Our little hill, the barn, the outhouse, the stoneware, the cherries, our juniper. Dogs run around the square, but they don’t come up to us, don’t bark and don’t growl. They don’t seem to notice my grandpa. Has he already died? I remember that before I left he asked me for a new hat. I measured his gray head with a ribbon, but since the last day of last September, I haven’t gone home. Now guilt peals in my ears.

  The next day, in honor of the approaching Week of Prayer for the Sobriety of the Nation, at Sister Zyta’s behest, I outline and cut out the cardboard letters that, when tacked to their wooden slats, will make up the principle pronouncement of that apostle of sobriety, the Venerable Matt Talbot: “May today’s world, so absorbed by sensuality, learn how to properly mortify the body.”

  ON MY RETURN FROM MY LECTURE on descriptive grammar, halfway along Saint Barbara Street, I peek inside one of the ruined, cluttered outbuildings, where I watch with a smile as children collect ladybugs on a burdock leaf, count the dots on their wings, prepare in emptied cans sorrel and daisy soup spiced with sand or swing on tires. By seven their mothers show up outside, coming down the brick steps, calling them for dinner, taking down from clotheslines laundry permeated by the definite chill in the air.

  When the courtyard empties fully and starts to smell like cocoa and boiled wiener sausages, I get hungry and turn back to the main street, heading towards Saint Barbara’s Cathedral, its copper spire delicately piercing two clouds that are slowly evanescing into night. I pass shop windows scrubbed clean in preparation for Easter, glance at the orange sign of the clergy supply store Temporis. Old blooming trees drenched in spring light seem to cleanse the street, stop time. I run my fingers over their warm bark, their rough boughs and hanging twigs. Spring has taken hold of more than just the city. As buds burst into bloom, my yearning for Kamil intensifies, gets more physical, hurts, throbs in every cell of my body. His face has transformed in my memory and is noble
r.

  In the end, exhausted, I make it to the Congregation of the Sisters in Christ’s Heart. I pass through the iron gate and put on my clogs. In the empty refectory I leaf through a newspaper left on the table and read an ad encouraging childless women who love nature between the ages of eighteen to forty to go to Austria, Switzerland or Bavaria. It’s been circled in black marker. For dinner I have buckwheat porridge with kefir, then I wash my dishes and hole up in my little attic room. After bathing, sipping the infusion of medicinal herbs made by the Mother Superior, I gaze up at the skylight; behind it, a seething ocean. Before I go to sleep, having thought once more of Kamil’s face, I read the instructions for my descriptive grammar homework, go back over the first conjugation for my Latin class and crack the window to air out the stuffy room.

  The meowing of mating cats sounds like newborns crying, or like a riveting rendition of the Song of Songs.

  AFTER BREAKFAST OF RICE PUDDING made by Sister Sabina, I put on a dark green linen dress with slender straps, a wooden pendant and some sandals and exit the convent to wander the heart of Częstochowa in the hopes of catching sight of Kamil in the crowd. All the mannequins in all the boutiques look back at me with his eyes. Meandering up and down HVM Ave, I stare passersby’s faces. Will I even recognize him after all these months? Though couldn’t he have left town by now? Sometimes I think I see him outside the Franke House at the intersection of First Avenue and Wilson Street, by the observatory in Staszic Park, on Solidarity Square by the sculpture of buxom Mrs. Kowalski, supposedly installed on the orders of a party secretary named Mr. Kowalski; I look in the window of the Zyrafa, of the Orbis. But he isn’t ever anywhere.

  The heat reaches its apogee, and I can smell melting asphalt. I sit on a bench and stare at the Cepelia building; the colorful round stones that encrust its façade glisten in the sunshine like trout scales. The sidewalks are littered with the remains of balloons, golden everlastings, ferns and evergreens from harvest festival wreaths, as well as pennants with the symbols of parishes from all over Poland.

  “Our book works for you,” says a man who, in such broad daylight, looks like the devil’s legal representative. Despite the heat, he’s dressed in a black suit and a synthetic silk tie. “It works for you three hundred and sixty-five days a year, twenty-four hours a day, and it truly is everywhere,” he recites hoarsely.

  Assuming he’s referring to some new collection of apocrypha, I reach out to receive whatever it is. Sweating and smelling of Brutal cologne, this devil’s lawyer reaches into his attaché case, hands me a phone book and vanishes around the corner just as suddenly as he first appeared in my field of vision. I cover my head with the yellow tome and remain seated on the bench until finally a band of pilgrims from Zytomierz with a crumpled banner that reads “Children of Ukraine” emerges from Third Avenue. Some patron of first aid greets them with saline drips. Bored, I drag myself off the bench and take a look around the reading room, where I look for articles in the papers about Częstochowa’s Bloody Monday for a few hours, at the Mother Superior’s request.

  When I leave the library I put on my sunglasses, which makes me feel safer, and I wander the city center almost till nightfall, feeling strangely feverish, stumbling into people, shadows and birds that swoop down from the roof of the town hall straight to my feet. I pass a bakery that smells like Napoleonkas, the Lee Cooper on the corner, then walk to Biegański Square, which used to be called Magistracki Square; it was there in the earliest days of the war—on Monday, September fourth, nineteen thirty-nine—that hordes of people spent hours on end lying face down on the ground.

  “It was maybe eight or nine o’clock in the evening,” says the woman I meet walking around by the town hall. “We were just at home. It was my father, brother, and, you know, my mother and I with the baby, because my husband had gone off to the war. We had no lights on in the house—you weren’t allowed to. A lot of the neighbors had fled already, but my father didn’t want to because there’d been this neighbor who—well, she kept on saying, you needn’t run away, there’s no one going to hurt you. And my father, well, he heeded her, while the rest of them all fled. Like my other brother, ran off into the fields, up into the Kawie Mountains—they lay down there in the potatoes clear till morning, but my father wouldn’t run away. My father wouldn’t flee. I began to hear gunfire coming from Warsaw Street, and then they came for us. They went into all the apartments, when they were locked they just beat down the doors with the butts of their armaments, tore through locks, that’s how they conducted their searches. They led us all out into the street, which was full of automobiles. They lined up two hundred men under the window, while we women had to go under the other, on the other side. I was holding the baby, my son, who was about to be a year old on September twenty-first. I got up to my father, and I say to him: Dad, where are you going? And he says, How would I know, child? How can I know? They drove us all outside, locked the gates. They kept us there and kept us there, with our hands in the air, up against the wall. They had their machine guns—then this older one took out this piece of paper and read something in German to us, and at one point he said: Heil, Hitler. The army said it after him, and that’s when he gave the order. My father was wounded and fell down to the ground, but my brother and all of those other ones were killed. Then the Germans went to their vehicles, but one of them turned around and threw in a grenade, and that grenade took care of my dad … You went up to look at him after that, and it was … My God, and when I saw my poor brother, just lying there like that. Of course we were the ones who had to bury them, but all we had to do it with was our own two hands. That evening everything burned, everything but everything, burned …”

  Now I take a look around the city. Small balloons knocked around by the wind rock over the pavement. Older people doze off under parasols. Tipsy bandaged pilgrims in straw hats, looking preposterous with neckerchiefs affixed to their heads, trail around the monastery, the baths at the Pilgrim House and the stations of the cross. In the underground passageways volunteers give out water and condoms; pickpockets, religious fanatics and prostitutes divvy up their beats. Jehovah’s Witnesses, carrying old issues of The Watchtower, announcing the latest upcoming apocalypse. Younger pilgrims, clustered in and around the pavilions, gazebos and places to grab a bite like Prasowa or Wakans or Alex, hum “Abba Father” and peruse the twenty-four-hour liquor stores and the drug dealers, who come to Jasna Góra in droves during pilgrimage season. I sit atop a low wall and, without taking off my sunglasses, I stealthily touch the hot concrete with my palm. The city swells with the cacophony of guitars, harmonicas and drums, but beneath that surface rest layers of silence, pulse underground rivers, only barely making themselves known, as though the ground were a kind of forgetting.

  AFTER THE CALL OF JASNA GÓRA, with dusk encroaching, I speed up my step, cut across Staszic Park and tread carefully between the bodies of pilgrims numbed by alcohol and deep asleep, lying on benches and mats placed under trees as though they’d just finished fighting some tough battle.

  Once I pass the tiny stores with devotional articles along Seven Tenements Street, I turn left, onto Saint Barbara, which drops steeply to Kazimierz Street, rising again slightly only to fall once more towards the Cathedral. I linger among the rows of wooden stalls, deserted at this time of day, littered with popsicle sticks and broken parasols and tinsel and bottles and cards for “Mercantile Mercury” with a timetable of August pilgrimages.

  I’ve made a new friend who hangs out at one of these stalls, a gregarious rat I call Rydzyk, like the milk-cap mushroom, because his coat changes color depending on the light: sometimes he looks reddish gray, other times just brown. Behind a scrap of something hanging, in that darkness, Rydzyk’s little eyes now gleam like phosphorescent grains. When he detects my scent, he runs down a beam straight onto my hand and stares at me stubbornly, just waiting for me to break up some bread for him, part of one of the obwarzanki or the Kaiser rolls I get from a woman I know who sells them. I kiss Ry
dzyk on his tiny twitching whiskers, set him on my shoulder and sit down on the steps of the annex, right outside the pharmacy, where in the red light of an ad for some heart medication I remove my mascara, take off my earrings and tie my hair back into a ponytail so that I can return to the convent as the school-girl version of myself. I put Rydzyk down in the courtyard next to a trash can, open the door and watch him for a moment as he zigzags back towards the stalls like a brownish leaf driven by the wind. A golden glow pulsates in the windows of the dormitory. The iron gate is locked. I’m afraid to use the entry phone—I wouldn’t want to wake the sisters—so I toss my backpack in between the bars and climb up the gate, which is topped in what looks like the bars of a gridiron. Alerted by the noise, the porter woman glances out and sees me hanging from the enclosure.

  “This is the last time I’m letting you come in this late,” she says, wagging a finger at me through the little window of her booth as I creep inside the convent.

  “Please forgive me, sister.” I look at her imploringly, begging her internally to please not rat me out.

  “This had better be the last time, or I’ll tell the Mother Superior about all of it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now get up to the attic.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” I say, eager as a team captain, and I grab my clogs from behind the statue of Saint Barbara and start to tiptoe up the stairs. But on my way I come across a weeping mother superior, sitting on the floor, slumped against the door to her office.

  “Is something the matter, Mother?” I ask, alarmed, trying to lift her.