by Jay Martin
I dragged myself to vertical. My arms held my head, elbows dug into my knees. My eyes, red and puffy; my mouth and nose, full of thick, sticky saliva. The sound of water being poured into a mug reached me.
‘They’ll find him.’ Shannon put a box of tissues next to me.
My head moved up and down. She returned and held out a cup. I took it, and my fingers turned pink. If I survived this, I’d tell Tomek that it wasn’t tea that we found comforting. It was having someone there to make it for you when you needed it.
‘Look!’ Shannon pointed across the courtyard to our apartment. The light had been turned on in our bedroom. Shadows moved behind the curtains. I leapt up and bolted across the gardens to our apartment in my bare feet, leaving tea, jacket and slippers behind.
Tom was on the bed, fully clothed, his eyes closed and breathing deep. First, I hit him as hard as I could. Second, I called Shannon and told her he seemed to be OK. Third, I fell on the floor by the bed and howled. He gave no response to any of it. When I was spent, I took his shoes and belt off, covered him with a blanket, turned the light off, and went into the lounge room.
He was home, with me. I couldn’t have felt any more alone.
***
The footpath was icy as I walked down the road towards our house, a few days afterwards. I’d walked along this path in the summer, the spring, the winter and the autumn. It seemed fitting that this, the last time I would do it, it was like this. Icy. Cold. Dark.
I pulled my stage-three coat around me. It was new this winter. Blue, down to my calves, with a hood and twice the down stuffing of my last one. All of a sudden, I could be outside on a day like today when it was minus-twenty-plus, in my own little cocoon. I pulled my hood closer around my face. It cut off everything except the slice of the world right in front of me.
A babcia shuffled along. I hurried around her on the pavement, jumping down on the road to get around a light pole, picking up my pace for a few steps – as much as I could without slipping, anyway.
‘You can’t overtake on that side of the pavement!’ she yelled out after me.
How can there be a rule for that? I wanted to yell back.
But I didn’t. I was quiet.
The day before, I’d trudged my way to the fruit and vegetable stand I’d frequented for the last two and half years. ‘Do have any fresh basil?’ I’d asked the woman. She was a little younger than me.
‘You need to order it the day before, proszę pani,’ she said. Madam. The formal version of ‘you’, that Poles use for people they don’t know.
I’d bought vegetables from this shop for two and a half years. I’d bought basil from this shop dozens of times before and never ordered it. I bought basil from you last week without ordering it! I wanted to say to her. I stared at her. Did she even know she’d seen me before? That she’d seen me almost every day for nearly three years? In Australia we’d be on first-name terms. I’d know about her children and her no-good husband and her holiday to the coast, and she’d know we were due to leave in a few months and about my no-good husband and that I was friends with Shannon and Fee, who she would also know, since they also came in here most days and often together with me. Did she recognise me at all? If she did, she gave no clue. I didn’t say a word.
It was the same at my yoga studio. I’d been going there two or three times a week since we arrived. Dzień dobry, pani – Good day, madam – they would say to me every time. Really? You’ve been seeing me in my underwear for three years. When do I rate a hi? I wanted to ask. I never did.
Next, I’d gone to pick up my old jacket from the tailor. I’d taken it to the drycleaners, who’d explained that he couldn’t dryclean it as there was a hole in it, but that I could get it fixed, and I’d asked where, and he’d told me, and I’d gone there and the woman had been able to do it right away. Yes! I was getting Poland! I could do this!
Then I’d gone back to the drycleaners, with my now mended coat. No recognition. Not of the time, barely two hours before, that he’d seen me and helped me. Not of any of the other dozen times he’d seen me this year. Instead, he’d asked me, as he always did, for my godność. Godność in Polish has two meanings: surname, and dignity. ‘M-A-R-T-I-N, I said, trilling the ‘r’ as I did each time to make it distinct. Without fail, he would look up at me as though he didn’t know what to make of such a ridiculous name. He was one of your saints, you know, I felt like saying. I tried the Polish surname ‘Przybysz’ once when he asked – just for fun. He started to write it down. ‘No, I’m just joking. It’s Martin.’ I trilled the ‘r’. He looked at me, thin-lipped, and crossed out the Prz– he’d written. I’m funny in some languages, in some countries, I wanted to say. Wanted to, but didn’t. Couldn’t. I suspected he wouldn’t find this much of a joke, either. I opened the door. A jangling bell celebrated my return to the snow-bound streets outside, their hidden time-bombs ticking away.
Milczę. In English, ‘I am silent.’ But being silent in Polish isn’t an adjective, like it is in English. It’s a verb. Not a description of a state, but an action. In English, you exist in a state of being silent – I am silent. Not so in Polish, where one’s existence ceased, replaced by one’s lack of communication. You silented. I don’t think there was an exact translation in English – in English, it still implied that you had been making a sound, but you stopped. In Polish, it wasn’t exactly like that, but was the best I could do.
Sometimes it’s hard to grasp the essence of a word or concept in another language when you don’t have a word in your own language for it. But I knew exactly how this felt. I felt it often in Poland. When I couldn’t respond to someone. When I couldn’t communicate a feeling or a desire or an emotion. When I couldn’t tell Agnieszka how hard it was for me to feel so inadequate when I couldn’t understand that passage she’d read out to me, or share with Gosia how much the Uprising footage had moved me – or resolve the misunderstanding over the hours I was supposed to work. When I didn’t speak. When I said nothing.
Before I’d come here, I had advised governments how to communicate. I’d crafted words that ministers had stood in parliament and said. I’d written opinion pieces that had appeared under their names.
Then we’d moved to Poland, and so much of my ability to communicate had been ripped away. I communicated for purpose in Poland. I could ask questions and understand answers. Give directions, understand the babcias that yelled at me. Follow the arguments of people on the street, even tell a story or two. But I couldn’t be witty, or insightful, or articulate, or succinct or any of the other things I could be in my own language. I had no sense of humour. I had no personality when I spoke Polish. More and more, I silented. And every time I did, it sliced away a little of my dignity.
More than anyone else, it was Tom who I silented with. Nine years earlier, we’d promised to love, honour and cherish each other. We should have added ‘to listen to’ while we had the chance. It was two days ago when he’d been lying on that bed, back after seven in the morning from wherever he’d been. At five that afternoon, he was still fast asleep. Still drunk, probably. I’d gone into our bedroom, sat beside him, looked at him.
Where were you? What did you do?
Who are you? Who is this person you have you become?
Why don’t you want to be with me anymore? When did you stop wanting that?
So many questions, no answers.
I have no way of talking to you. I have no way of making you hear me.
And finally, the realisation: I have nothing left to try.
What choice did I have? I’d thought it before, and not seen any. But there was one, and I’d decided to take it.
I would go. Away. I didn’t have much of a plan. Gab’s in London first, probably. Then back to Australia, I guess. Find somewhere to live, get a job. Break the news to everyone: it hadn’t worked out. I couldn’t keep my promise. I imagined the hurt I would see on his parents’ faces, the concern on our friends’. Tears welled up. I pushed them back. No, I wouldn
’t think about that yet. One thing at a time.
I had tried my best. Mary, you of all know I tried. But the more I had come to understand Poland, the less I understood the man I’d married. I’d started sleeping in the spare room, he didn’t say anything. I’d stopped coming to functions, he hadn’t mentioned it. I’d stopped asking where he went at night, and he’d stopped telling me.
The missing hours, the unanswered phone calls, the disappearances, the distrust, the anxiety, the walking on eggshells. The pain of his actions, the guilt of feeling it was my fault. It’s what our relationship had become. Pain and guilt. It was clear, now, that there was some part of him that didn’t care if I were here with him or not anymore. Had these two and a half years of memories and friends and adventures been worth losing what we’d once had? Maybe the universe did that – accounted for good and bad, and spat you out if you got too far in credit. Is that how it worked?
It didn’t matter. I hadn’t got to choose. I would just pay my bill and walk away. I had lost, as surely as if there had been another woman. I thought I would feel sad. But now the decision was made, I didn’t. I felt relieved. That it would all be over soon. I hadn’t told him yet, of course. He’d be hurt. I knew that. And I wouldn’t be there to comfort him. Tears threatened again. Once more I pushed them down. Because his pain and sadness were my pain and sadness. And I needed to be away from them, and that meant being away from him.
There wouldn’t be any signs. There wouldn’t be any miracles. There were just two human beings, who had humanly failed.
The footpath curved ahead of me down the hill. Every surface around me was covered in grey ice. Banks of gritty snow separated me from a wall on one side, and the road on the other. They made an icy valley half a metre deep, dirty from the feet of others. Dirty, wet, cold. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley …’ The words came to me from somewhere in my childhood.
There was a bang behind me. As if something had fallen from a car. And then another sound. As if another car had hit whatever had fallen. My blinkers focused my gaze ahead, and it was an effort to look around. So I didn’t. Whatever it was didn’t concern me.
It was the smell that activated an instinct somewhere in me and made me jump up away from the road. It was only then that something registered. Petrol. I turned around. A metre behind me, where I’d been walking seconds earlier, there was now a car. It had mounted the kerb, ploughed through the icy snow, and slammed into the wall. Where the windscreen should have been was a spider web of cracked glass. Where I might have expected the engine was a mass of twisted metal. Without even taking a step, I reached out and pulled on the door. It fell open at an angle.
‘My stomach! My stomach!’ the driver inside moaned, clutching his belly. Blood gushed from a head wound. Its colour matched the inside of the windscreen.
‘Don’t touch him!’ A man’s voice materialised, snapping me back. ‘He’s alive, so the best thing to do is not to touch him.’
I took a step backwards, on autopilot. From up on the snow bank, the scene unfolded below me. I reached up to my face. My hand came back wet with gritty snow, and pink from tiny pricks of blood, drawn by slivers of rock thrown up when the car had slammed through the embankment. At the distance of an outstretched arm. Where I would have been if it hadn’t been for that slow-moving babcia I’d hurried around. Or if I’d stopped to see what had made that sound. Or …
Now a man on a mobile phone was giving the location. Another diverted traffic around the car, which struck a right angle across the street. Inventive parking, even by Polish standards. The man who owned the voice was talking to the driver. Despite the freezing wind, he’d taken his jacket and shirt off, and was holding the cloth to the driver’s forehead. Blood flowed out from under the makeshift bandage, and dripped on the snow.
The man looked from the driver to me. ‘Are you hurt?’ Ty, he said. The familiar form of ‘you’, used for children and friends. He had removed any distance between us with just a word. So I was still here, then. I shook my head. He turned back to the driver. Everything was under control. Yes, it was all under control.
I ran for home.
The shower wall was hard against my back as I sat, legs bent, in the bottom of the stall. It hadn’t been designed with the comfort of people who might want to sit in it in mind. I leaned my head back and shut my eyes. The hot water charted its own course over my face.
Opposite me, Tom shifted. My hand reached out and touched his leg, tangled with mine. It had taken him ten minutes to get here. An eternity. When he arrived, I was already on the floor of the stall, under the warm water, sobbing. He threw his clothes off and, still panting, joined me, wrapping his arms around me as best he could in the cramped confines.
‘Did you see the crash? Is that what happened?’ He scanned my face, trying to understand what was wrong. He would have had to go past the accident to get home.
‘I was this close.’ I reached out my hand from where I was sitting, to the car door still in my mind. The driver clutched his stomach and bled on to the icy snow again, as if before my eyes.
Tom raised his hand to my cheek, pink with blood returning to my face from the frozen world outside. He ran his hand across a thousand tiny, newly etched scratches. I stroked his head. His hair was so short against his scalp. No wonder he felt cold so often here.
‘Are you leaving me?’ he asked.
So he had known.
‘It’s what you want, isn’t it?’ I looked into his eyes. He didn’t respond. ‘There is some part of you that does not want to be with me anymore. Isn’t there?’ I waited for him to say something – anything – to convince me that what I’d just said wasn’t true.
‘You know when you go off and have all your adventures? And you text me and send me photos and things – “I’m at a grass-cutting festival!”, “I’m in Ukraine!”, “I’m in Lublin drinking cappuccino out of a packet!” ’
And him stuck at work. Rubbing salt in the wounds, I saw now.
‘The second I get those messages, I see you. Your smile, your excitement. You, being you. Those moments, they are what has kept me going. Right now, those moments are the only thing that keeps me going. You are the only thing keeping me going.’
Our tears, the water falling on us, all mixed up. Both of us too tired to pretend anymore.
‘Do you remember the first day we were here, Tom? Do you remember the old couple on the bench in Old Town? Feeding the pigeons? And he helped her up when they were done, and took her hand, and they shuffled off together? That’s the future I want. With you.’
‘It’s what I want, too.’
‘I don’t know how to get there anymore, Tom.’
‘Me neither. But we will.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do, my baby. I just do.’
Faith isn’t rational. Faith defies logic.
‘Things need to change,’ I said.
‘Things will change. I will change. I’ll cut down on the out-of-hours meetings. For real this time. We can do less travel. I’ll spend more time with our friends, and less energy on people we don’t like. More time just with us. I’ll come and meet your friends. I’ll take up yoga.’
‘It’s OK. You don’t have to take up yoga.’
‘Are you leaving me?’
‘Jeszcze my żyjemy,’ I said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘We are still alive.’ The opening line of the Polish national anthem.
‘I more wanted to know if it meant you were leaving me or not.’
I sighed and shook my head. ‘Not today.’
The sides of his eyes crinkled. I’d always thought of him as being so strong. That’s how he felt, when he was wrapped around me. I realised now how much effort that must have taken. All these months. All these years. When he’d felt anything but.
‘What about me, Tom? What do you need me to do for you?’
‘Anything at all?’
‘Anything.’
�
��Well, I could do with a hand with some filing.’
Was that all? ‘Of course. I can make some time for that.’
Tom eased himself up and opened the shower door into the steamy bathroom. He took a warm fluffy towel from the heated towel rail and held it out for me. I turned the water off, stepped out, and let him wrap me up in it.
‘How about we go out for a nice dinner tonight?’ he said.
‘How about we stay home. I’ll make you something nice.’
‘How about I make you something nice.’
‘How about we make something nice together?’ I said. Yes. That’s what we would normally do. How things were before normal. Normal normal.
‘Hey, you’ll never guess what,’ Tom called out to me from the kitchen, pots and pans banging in the background. ‘Alex has met someone.’
‘Polish girl?’
‘Of course.’
I hoped Alex was up to the challenge of a relationship with a Polish girl.
But every relationship has its challenges.
PRZEDWIOSNIE – PRE-SPRING
From then on, we chucked the gold-embossed invites in the bin. Instead, we started going to a Pilates class that Sarah had started up for people with bad backs, and the nights we weren’t there, we would don two beanies, a scarf, long coats, tights under jeans (me), gloves and boots, and go for a stroll around our neighbourhood. No longer were we going to let little things like a Polish post-winter – or other people’s expectations – stop us from spending time together, doing things that we wanted to be doing.
We still had six months to go, but our nightly conversations had now started to involve various aspects of the move back home. Between the embassy here and the Department in Canberra, most things were taken care of. They arranged for packers, they booked and paid for our flights. Already the man from the removal company had come to talk us through the uplift process – how many boxes we’d need, any special requirements. ‘There must be some mistake, we’ve only just arrived,’ I’d wanted to explain. We’d packed so much in to these years, that sometimes they’d seemed like dog years – worth seven normal human ones. Yet now that we were in the home stretch, it seemed barely months ago that we’d been having the same conversations in Canberra about moving here.
