Accommodations

by Wioletta Greg

  “You’re alive?”’

  Scurvy blinks his bloodshot eyes and takes a good long look at me.

  “How do you do, Rys’s kid.” He smiles, puts a finger on his lips and jams the parcel into his briefcase.

  I shuffle after him towards a cream-colored VW I’ve often seen parked in the drive of the Vega. I’m tired, so I’d rather ask no questions and not bring up Natka. A wooden rosary draped over the front mirror rocks rhythmically. The sound of the engine half puts me to sleep. I look out the window, where the trees delight me as never before: poplars, aspens, hornbeams, beeches making with their branches the discreet movements of clock hands. Stately and silent, they turn the surfaces of their leaves towards the setting sun, which for one split second clings to the hawthorn fruit, wild rose and bird cherry, until at last like a knot of hair tossed onto the hot surface of a stove it is extinguished completely.

  “DO YOU EVER SEE at the station this homeless geezer who just stares at the tracks and sings carols and gives out religious cards?” Scurvy stops the car by the train station and hands me a cigarette. I’m afraid to say no, so I take a reluctant drag.

  “Yes, that guy does hang around here. I’ve seen him a couple of times,” I answer shyly, coughing a little.

  “That’s Clod.”

  “You know him?”

  “I gave him that nickname myself back in the clink in Herby, because—fittingly enough—he had this clod he’d dug up, and he was always singing carols at the station, you know.”

  “What was he in jail for?”

  “Butter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. He was locked up for nothing, because he took something, out of hunger—I think it was a little bread, and because he had no place to live, and the law in our country is so fucked—pardon me—that if you don’t got an address, then you go straight into captivity to await your case. At first he was in this other block, upstairs, but since he was slightly off—just the facts—he couldn’t quite accommodate their rules there, so they threw him out. Meanwhile the chief officer in Herby was, no joke, Herbik.”

  “Herbik in Herby?”

  “I’d hardly make it up, now would I?”

  “Right.”

  “Herbik had things arranged with some butcher—brother-in-law, son-in-law, uncle, I don’t know, but I do know that when I was in the hospital for some tests my food was seven times worse than it was in the can: a kilo of kielbasa for breakfast, another kilo for lunch. It got to where we couldn’t even stand to see a sausage. But since Clod had been homeless for most of his life, he’d learned to put away some food for later, and he would keep his kielbasa in a pillowcase. It started to smell like you can’t even imagine in his cell. We’d give him all sorts of things from the donations so he’d stop, but he’d still store his kielbasa in his pillowcase. We could never get him to quit—that was just the way he was.

  “Clod would write in to the court every day, every letter of every word some two centimeters tall, like he was a child, pleading with this judge Ms. Ania Something-or-Other: “I did not do nothing, I did not do nothing,” he’d write, and he’d slip in some religious card, with the Virgin Mary, you know, because of that’s the way it is in Częstochowa. I thought I was a pretty tough cookie, like your pops, old Rys, who fled the army and got half his unit onto a wild goose chase, but when I’d look at Clod my heart would really break into a million pieces. He was the only one of all of us who longed for freedom so bad he was capable of standing four, five hours without any break next to the window, staring out through the bars into the forest, the tracks and shouting how he wanted to go home. Home: the very thing he’d never had—and never would.”

  THE STREET RUNNING IN FRONT OF THE STATION starts to smell like chimney smoke and exhaust fumes. Anxious travelers pace it up and down. From the ground floor of the Polonia Hotel come the muffled sounds of an orchestra. Steam rises from drainage wells. The wind raises a shred of wrapper and flings it onto a wire sticking out from the fence. Scurvy takes his Centertel phone out of its black case and, chomping on a kebab, anxiously converses with someone. I glance at his tanned, unshaven face, and then at the platform: off scoots another train I could have taken home.

  “I guess I’ll take my leave now, Scurvy, sir. Thanks for the lift.”

  “Where are you rushing off to? It’s not like I’m going to eat you,” Scurvy laughs. “I wanted to give you your suitcase and tell you a little story about our mutual friend, Waldek. Do you know how he got his limp?”

  “Nope.”

  “It was the hats and bats that did it.”

  “What are the hats and bats?” I sit down next to Scurvy on the bench.

  “Easy there, easy. I’m about to take you through it step by step. Waldek was in the clink with me for some drunken brawl, and the whole time he wouldn’t talk to anybody, unless he absolutely had to. He just went mute. He would read some old magazine on stars and moons and planets and periodically wake up in the middle of the night screaming, ‘Adelka! Adelka!’ Adelka had been living with Waldek and hanging around with this guy who had a mirror factory; two years she worked in his brothel on Mirowska Street.”

  “He told us about her, too.”

  “What a cunt. I would never have tolerated a woman like that …” Scurvy clears his throat and takes a swig from his flask. “Coming up to Christmas the guys and I were scheming on how to get some mash in here, to get some liquor going. Kind of a paste, you can make it out of toothpaste and diazepam, sixty- to eighty-proof, but that would stink, and it wouldn’t be too good, and we wanted something better for ourselves. During visiting hours we would go to the canteen and get five-liter mineral waters, so we already had the bottles, that was a start of sorts, at least. Then we all got Danishes for Christmas, and none of us ate ours, we just stored them up, eager to ferment them. We sprinkled some sugar in there and took care of it like it was a child. We really did. Wrapped them up in newspapers and blankets, kept them in back of the beds, but since there wasn’t that little tube that would ventilate it, you had to take turns getting up every hour to take the plug out and release the gas so it wouldn’t explode. Things went along like that just fine for about three weeks, us getting up to burp our little one, which had started to smell lovely like wine, when all of a sudden the goon squad comes into our cell for a shakedown. They rounded us up along with a cell of snot-noses …”

  “Snot-?”

  “Twenty-five-and-unders. So they round us all up and have us strip down completely so they can search us, and they check our shoes, our pants, have us squat and so on. They come up with nothing, so we start to go back. But the cells have been absolutely fucked, it’s a real shambles in there: bread in the toilets, socks in the sugar. And basically we get that we are fucked because they found our hooch. Once and they hold our parcels, our visits, take away our TVs and so on, twice and they send in the hats and bats to fuck us up for real.”

  “What are the hats and bats, Scurvy?”

  “The hats and bats are this special C/O unit that’s kind of like urban counterterrorism or something. Mostly ex-ZOMO. They generally don’t stick out too much because they’re constantly sitting around just getting shitfaced. That’s how it is, a habit from communist days. But whenever somebody presents a threat, they strap on their helmets, pick up their shields and their bats and open up the cells and storm in there six at a time and just beat the shit out of everyone. Anyone they come across, they fuck them up, they don’t care. You go to try and smile and you find out you don’t have any teeth left.”

  “Were you afraid of them?”

  “Well, what do you think? Even the biggest thugs are scared of them. They’ve killed their share of guys, and after wards they write it up like as though the poor guy hanged himself, or whatever, had a heart attack or something. But getting back to the hooch. So we’re standing there butt naked. That dick Frania comes out of the condom—condom’s what we called that ribbed C/O booth they had there—and he says, ‘Gent
leman, I’m gonna keep it short: if you don’t tell me whose hooch this is, you’re all fucked.’

  “But we refuse to confess to anything. The snot-noses don’t make any peeps, neither.

  “‘Gentlemen, this is the last time I’ll ask, and if you don’t answer me I’m calling the hats and bats, and all hell will break loose. Who brewed the hooch?’

  “And that’s when Waldek stood up, scratching at his chest because he’s had scabies for ages, and he says:

  “‘It was me!’”

  2.

  Your Name’s Anula Now

  THE TRAIN STATION’S WAITING AREA is separated from the passageway by a wall of glass. In it frolic the flashes of arcade games. Guys in tracksuits put in their tokens and fire up The Punisher. The figures of the Terminator, Jungle King hanging from a vine and a red-hot Tekken fly across the screen.

  I wander around the station and try and think where I could wait out the night. It’s warmer than usual, and flu viruses are running wild. A southwest wind gusts against the station’s glass roof, ferreting around the twenty-two pylons that hold the building up.

  When it gets colder again, though, I take my suitcase and move into the snack bar, where I buy tea in a little plastic cup and sit at a little metal table, mesmerized by the contorted reflection of my hands. In the paper, under the new currency design with the portrait of Władysław Jagiełło, I read announcements for a German holding company, envelope addressing, tire retreading and the discrete young ladies of Monika & Co.

  A tall man wearing glasses walks into the snack bar, orders tea and settles down next to me at my table.

  “Can you gals believe what they’ve done to this station?”

  The woman who runs this place looks him over and adjusts her unlacquered perm, releasing flurries of dandruff onto the counter. The reflecting triangles glued to the wall proliferate her heavily made-up face.

  “I had—if you’ll permit me—the pleasure of first encountering this station of ours during the era of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway,” says the man and strokes his chin as an amber-colored droplet of tea makes its way down and onto his neck. “The old building had this little turret that resembled a locomotive in shape. It used to be a place with a fine attention to detail: little windows, light fixtures, the street lamps outside. In spacious restaurants around tables covered in white cloths, waiters wearing suits, bustling about.” He closes his eyes for a moment, then gesticulates as though slides were being played in the triangular mirrors on the wall.

  “I don’t know why, but it used to smell more like brewed coffee than it did like food. Next door there was a hairdresser’s, and I think it was even open at night. Oh, those were the days, my dears: trains, the whistles of the locomotives, smoke, steam that would hiss, the smell of grease and oil, commotion, the passengers’ progress, people on pilgrimages, old broads from the country and big city dames, conductors and civic militia walking two by two, the straps from their caps dangling under their chins. I remember that over by Freedom Avenue passengers would just walk right out onto the tracks, where the conductor would stand in one designated place and check tickets. Back then tickets were like heavy cardboard tags.”

  “You’re a regular Papa Smurf! That memory,” jokes the snack bar attendant as she sets some cans of Coca-Cola in the fridge.

  The man glances at her with a glint in his eye, fingers the skirt of his coat. “I recall it all, Madame, because in the late fifties and early sixties I would often travel by train with my mother to Krakow. For several years every two weeks she would take me to the ophthalmology clinic where I underwent a surgery to improve my sight. But I was an unlucky child. The surgery was not a success, and as a result, my view of the world is limited to that which I can glean through just one eye.”

  NEW YEAR’S EVE JINGLES take over the snack bar radio. The new year—1995, a time of privatization, acquisitions, cable TV, securities, the issuing of bonds, companies, investment firms, pyramid schemes and predicting the end of the world—bursts over Biegański Square. I retreat from all that, escape into the station’s passageways, check out the waiting room, where I sit in a row of wooden benches and slip into a drowsy lethargy. Through the openwork backs of the benches seep spots of light that dart along the floor like tadpoles. The passengers’ breaths condense in the air. For the second time since I arrived in Częstochowa I think about dropping out of college, which—aside from a couple of lectures in my class on Old Polish literature—I haven’t gotten anything out of so far, think about not trying to find Kamil anymore, about going back to Hektary.

  “What could you be doing all alone at the train station at this time of night?” says an older, rather hefty woman with a pageboy haircut. She’s come out of nowhere; in astonishment I stare at her a moment: each element of her outfit appears to hail from its own individual era, from the faded maroon waterproof coat to the black combat boots to the plaid scarf to the ornate felt hat with the feather in it, worn aslant; and she smells like lavender soap, like my grandma. “Aren’t you afraid to roam around all alone like this, at night?”

  Her solicitous tone feels artificial. There is something about her I find unsettling, and yet, I answer.

  “It just sort of happened this way, Ma’am.” I hide my hands, which are scraped up by blackberry bushes, in my pockets.

  “You must be hungry,” she says and proffers a sandwich wrapped in gray paper. “Did you just arrive in Częstochowa?”

  “I’ve been in Częstochowa since the end of September. I just moved out of my previous accommodations in Sabinów, Ma’mmm,” I try to say as I devour a slice of Mortadella: I’ve barely eaten all day, just wandering around since parting with Scurvy outside.

  “Sabinów? Where the Russkies are stationed?”

  “They’re not stationed there anymore, it’s just civilians who come to Poland for business.”

  “But how could you have ended up there?”

  “I didn’t get a spot in the dorms because my village is too close to Częstochowa, but since I wasn’t going to be able to get cheap passes to take the train in every day, I rented those accommodations in a workers’ residence.”

  I want to tell her about the Vega, about Natka, Waldek, Adelka, the Russians, but instead I merely mutter something about the workers’ housing being so terriby cold, since there wasn’t any heating.

  “Good thing you got out of there, my dear!” She gives a sweeping wave: the wind is howling outside.

  A spirited band of teens jolts down the passageway, toting half-full bottles of cheap sweet wine under their jackets, boasting of their recent heist of the contents of the alms box at the monastery in Jasna Góra. One of them, dressed up as an elf, leans out over the railing at the top of the stairs. His white pom-pom dangles over the precipice like a snowball.

  “I’ll fucking jump, I’ll jump, and can’t nobody stop me! Daria! Daria!” he screams out across all the station’s premises, but when a city guard looks up from behind a partition, the teen shuts up, covers his face with the corner of his cap.

  “I think we had better get out of here,” the woman whispers.

  “It’s just … I don’t have anywhere to go, Ma’am. I have to wait for my train here, till dawn.”

  “I can rent you a room in the attic of where we live.”

  I look at her intrigued, but without saying anything, knowing I’ve only got a few cents in my wallet.

  “Listen, child, you can’t wait in here all night alone. It isn’t safe. I’m Mother Stanisława, an oblate from the Congregation of the Sisters in Christ’s Heart.”

  “Oblate?”

  “Like a nun, but without the habit,” she says in a more familiar tone. “Just think, for some time I’ve been looking for a female student who might, in exchange for her accommodations, help me out with a few small domestic tasks.” She reaches inside the pocket of her coat and hands me an apple covered in communion wafer crumbs, and then, without waiting for a response, she takes my suitcase and drags it out along the sidew
alk towards a stand where, since it’s New Year’s Eve, there are no taxis.

  NEW YEAR’S NIGHT IS ASTONISHINGLY WARM, and also rainy and windy. The street lamps dissolve into the mist like pears in the midst of leaves. In half-curtained windows, the twinkle of television screens. Paving stones glisten in the drizzle like snakeskin. Drunk girls clad in sequins clack along the sidewalk, inadvertently invoking the echoes of the city as it once was, when the streets were given rhythm by the trolleys and by horses’ hooves. The wind ruffles the Fiat Punto ads stapled to the fence, lifts aloft the flyers for phone sex hotlines, those soaked to crumbling Xeroxes of virgins driven mad by passion, eager-to-please police ladies, cleverly treacherous wives.

  We’re standing near the stalls that sell French fries on Pilsudski Street, where even the tree bark has soaked up the scent of the frying oil. Finally our taxi drives up and squeals to a halt. A seemingly drunk driver squeezes out of it. He has the sloppy posture of Kokosz and after situating my suitcase in the trunk, he hurls himself onto the front seat with such force that the car literally sinks down to the cobbles. Glancing at us with his bloodshot eyes in the rear-view mirror, which also shows our own exhausted faces, he switches on the radio and starts singing, or more accurately, howling the latest hit by Varius Manx: “Don’t be afraid to be afraid. When you feel like it, just cry. Go out and hunt down the wind.” Peeling ourselves off of the beer-infused upholstery after being bounced back and forth, in first gear, from curb to curb, for twenty minutes, we finally get out near a church with a brick tower at the intersection of Saint Barbara and Saint Augustine Streets.