Accommodations

by Wioletta Greg

  “Sister Basia …” she tries to say, swallowing tears. “There won’t be any music anymore, my child. Our Basia is no more … She always took such good care of herself …”

  ON THE FIFTEENTH OF AUGUST, Blessed Green Virgin Mary Day, I spend the whole morning washing the confessional in the chapel with Ludwik detergent, then I throw my rag into a corner and sit on a bench by the door to the refectory, near the door’s frame, which is decorated with evergreen and wildflowers, and I patiently await my turn, eavesdropping on the sisters as they debate important convent matters, as the convent fills with the smell of Sister Sabina’s broth. It’s a blend of scents: bay leaves, leeks, celery, allspice, lovage, parsley, lightly charred onions, pepper; their resounding grinding always reminds me of my grandmother Stefania. In August of 1979, as a five-year-old, I was barely tall enough to see what was on the table, but all the same I knew how to milk a cow, peel potatoes and make soup. My grandma would call me into the barn and have me stand by the chaff cutter and turn the crank as hard as I could. The gears would turn as in a music box, and then the chaff would fall into the basket and onto my bare feet, attaching to my cream-stained and blackberry-stained clothing. Dust and husks would swirl in shafts of sun. I’d lay more and more bundles of straw down on the wooden bed, and the chaff cutter would swallow them, creaking thrilled as a cradle swung into motion. That made me happy, too, and I always felt honored that my grandmother would spend so much time with me. Of course, what I understood then as playing in the barn with Grandma I later understood to be an important part of my training to work on the farm.

  The mother superior calls me into the refectory. I sit down across from her at the table and stare at the plate of steaming broth with noodles.

  “Go on, eat, just don’t forget,” she says with an enigmatic look.

  “Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts,” I recite, thinking she means I mustn’t forget to say a prayer before my meal. “Through Christ, our Lord …”

  “Anula!” she interrupts me excitedly, calling me by a name that isn’t mine as she sets a little case with a ribbon tied around it on the table. “Surely you haven’t forgotten it’s your birthday today?”

  I look up at her in some alarm.

  “… Amen,” I say, and I take a deep breath. Then I venture: “Mother, my birthday is in February.”

  “I’m in no mood for teasing now, child—go ahead and unwrap it.”

  Reluctantly I pull the ribbon undone and peer into the case, where I find a gold ring with a cameo set in its center.

  “God bless, Mother, but I can’t accept this.”

  The mother superior leans in over the table and pushes the ring onto my finger.

  “Now. Why don’t you tell me why you went to the Grand Café today?”

  “Grand Café? I don’t know where that is. I’m sorry, I don’t really know my way around Częstochowa quite yet.”

  “So what were you doing all day, then?”

  “I spent the morning in the reading room, and then I went for a walk.”

  “I know, I know, my child, you don’t want to talk about it, or you can’t, but by God, if you really have to keep seeing that Leon, then don’t go to the Grand Café, it’s crawling with Volksdeutsche.”

  I cough, choking, it having hit me at last that the Mother Superior must be having trouble with her memory, just like my grandmother did.

  “You’d better hurry up and get done with your food, you’ll have to head to your lessons with Idzikowska in a minute.”

  Sister Zyta appears in the doorway of the refectory and signals to the Mother Superior that it is time for vespers. Once the Mother Superior, muttering curses or teachings under her breath, has left the refectory, Sister Zyta comes up to me, leans onto the table and, noticing the gold ring with the cameo on my finger, gives me a hard slap in the face.

  “I would advise you, you sniveling beast,” she hisses, “to get out of this place before it’s too late. Just leave Mother Stanisława in peace.”

  “But …”

  “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to you. I know perfectly well you’ve been provoking her, bringing up the war for no reason.”

  “I didn’t do anything, Sister, I promise.” My face is on fire. “It was the Mother Superior herself who always started the conversations, telling me about a husband and a pharmacist brother-in-law—I swear!”

  “Quiet, you ungrateful brat! Your tongue will break out in hives when you lie like this, are you aware? Is this how you repay the Mother Superior for taking you in, taking you under her roof? She went through so much during the war. Do you understand?”

  Instead of responding I stare at the silver cross that glitters over her neck like a molted mayfly, its nymph self lost.

  WHEN I GET BACK UP TO THE ATTIC, I throw the satin bedspread on the floor, and just to spite Sister Zyta, who inspects room several times a week—looking for pills or cigarettes or anything that might give her a pretext to throw me out of the convent—I lie down in my clogs on the clean sheets. My cheek is still burning.

  I’m a few years old and don’t know how to hide, how to protect myself. Everyone is stronger than me, they brandish their hands as though they’ll wrench out pieces of me and keep them for themselves. My father calls me a changeling, a horrid changeling—words I can’t quite understand, just like I don’t get why, over the break, after the parish fair, he beat me with his army belt until I started bleeding. Maybe I messed up, maybe I did something I wasn’t supposed to like scattering his bobbers, or maybe he did it out of a fear that he might have told me his secret while he was drunk? My grandma beats me just because—with a rag, a switch, anything she happens to run across—because of dementia, because of hypothyroidism. My teacher hits me on the knuckles with a ruler, or on the palms, because she hates her job. The boys stick their legs out to trip me, hit me with sticks, grope me in the boiler room at school, smash snow into my face on the playing field before our classes start because I’m just a little girl, defenseless. Only my grandpa, who must have killed people during the war, seems to have no intention of striking anybody now. He just takes his pickaxe, spade and shovel and goes and hides away in the quarry behind the barn, where—covered from head to toe in mud and dust—he spends hours extracting limestone. My mom, seething with resentment—over my father’s outbursts, over the tragic death of her beloved older sister, over her life—hits me the most, because of anything and everything I do that angers her. One afternoon she notices a louse on my collar and hits me so hard in the back that I stumble into the hot stove. I’m too young to understand and start to think that since I am a horrid changeling that means that my blood is sweet, which is why the lice are breeding in my hair, so I start cutting my hands with pieces of glass. My mom, believing these wounds are accidental, pours hydrogen peroxide on them, sometimes a salicylic acid solution with ethanol, which burns, and then she bandages me up and kisses me on the cheeks and rubs my shoulders, heats up some water, and scrubs my head for me in clouds of steam. Then she uses a thick comb to get the lice out of my hair and onto a newspaper, where she crushes them with her fingernail over the dignitaries’ bald heads. When she notices that I still have nits in my hair, that the combing has been insufficient, she takes the bike from the barn and rides four kilometers to the township, where there’s a pharmacy, where she buys a solution that stinks like the pesticide we use on potato beetles, and she smears it into my unruly hair, wraps my head up in a kerchief and tells me to sit in the attic wearing that uncomfortable turban for the rest of the day. My head itches and burns. I play hide-and-seek with the cat, draw pictures on the dusty floor with my fingers, put together a mosaic out of shards of broken mirror and look under the tarpaulin where there are earwigs scampering around, apples rotting, celadon oat sprouts coming up. Hanging on lines to dry are clothes that smell of Pollena and my grandma’s herbs: mint, sage and tansy. In bundles of poppy heads shades of green, violet and cerulean are gradually extinguished. Mother doves dive down into the
ir hatchlings’ little throats.

  Suddenly, from behind an empty barrel, thrust into my field of vision by a beam of light, bursting, belted by a red tape like a chamberlain, a sack of wheat’s appeared.

  “Changeling, changeling!” whisper the poppy heads.

  “Chay-chay ling, chay-chay ling,” repeat the mother doves.

  I hop from one leg to the other, swaying, like a puppy deafened by a shovel, then I grab a metal rod and, remembering all the blows, all the beatings, all the times, the wrenching, the spanking, I pound the sack so long that finally the burlap bursts. Through the opening in it escapes a golden stream of grains.

  AT NINE, THE BELLS OF THE JASNA GÓRA APPEAL remind me of the Mother Superior’s latest assignment. Inhaling the lightly dizzying scent of the adhesive from the strips of tape with which the cardboard boxes are assembled, I put out on the table the pink and blue plastic bottles that imitate the figure of Saint Barbara, which the sisters call Baby Marys. It’s so quiet in my room I can hear the doves skipping around on the roof.

  I put crown-shaped caps on the bottles and stick on labels with the convent’s logo, continuing my work for such a long time that I produce a veritable pink and blue army of Baby Marys, standing ready to attack in two rows on the table. I crack the window. Hot air rushes in, blows over their bellies. The Kryk bakery, which does great business during pilgrimage time, emits rich and delicious scents.

  I run down the stairs straight into the basement, where the convent’s storeroom is. I find the door ajar. I take a peek inside. In a dark corner, by the plastic-wrapped artificial Christmas tree, glimmers the tip of Sister Anna’s kerchief.

  “God bless, Wioletta, I see you’ve forgotten the bottles again. I’m just doing inventory and put out your assignment by the door so that you wouldn’t have to look for them.”

  “Bless you, sister.”

  My tired eyes peruse the two boxes with the carefully calligraphied WR11.15.08.1995: my initials, Wioletta Rogala, my room number and today’s date.

  “Doesn’t it seem odd to you, Sister, that the Mother Superior spends so much time writing out all these numbers on our boxes?” I ask.

  “Maybe she gets bored, or I don’t know, maybe it calms her down to do it,” she replies thoughtfully, then sits down on the newspapers in the corner of the storeroom. “Tada! Look what I have!” She takes out a tin of chocolates from under her apron: cat tongues, in German packaging.

  “Katzenzungen! Sounds delightful.” I sit down beside her on top of a box of wafers.

  “The mother superior would beg to disagree.” She smiles and winks conspiratorially at me.

  Relishing the taste of chocolate, which I haven’t had since Christmas, I think about my grandfather, who hated the German language as much as the Mother Superior does, and once more I turn my gaze to the numbers written on the cardboard boxes, imagining I’ve suddenly found myself inside a labyrinth with imprisoned women who can only ever escape by cracking these symbols’ mysterious code. Some numbers seem to repeat, appearing in chains of sorts, in ciphers. Perhaps they’re important dates from the Mother Superior’s life.

  “Are you still drinking those herbs?” asks Anna unexpectedly. “You’ve been looking a little frail lately,” she adds, peering into the pale skin of my face. “You’ve got some inflammation at the corners of your lips and dark circles under your eyes. Maybe we should take you to a doctor?”

  Instead of answering, I look at the watch wrapped around her slim wrist.

  “Oh my, it’s so late. I have to go, Sister, or I won’t finish the Baby Marys for tomorrow. Good night.”

  “Nighty night, nighty night, don’t let the bed bugs bite,” she says, then quickly recites a stanza from a ballad by Narcyza Zmichowska:

  Oh! but beware!, oh! but beware—that sorceress

  Enchanting and delighting you with songs and sounds

  Is already flying so close and obscuring the stars,

  Tearing your heart out, devouring your soul.

  Thinking about Kamil, I masturbate for a long time, so long it hurts. I grasp onto my forearms and thighs and leave bruises. The bruised tissue takes on different hues, loses its transparency, which lets me recover for some time the body I preferred to forget just a few years ago. Without turning on the light I wander through the convent, peeking into all the nooks and keyholes. I know that in these dormitories, so suffused with the fragrances of liquid wax and floor polish and incense, painful secrets lurk. I linger at the Mother Superior’s cabinet, turn the golden knob and step inside. Candlesticks crusted over with wax, nib-carved, ink-stained notches extrude locks of hair of various colors, crumpled breviary pages, empty metallic candy wrappers. On the polished desk stands a gilded frame with a photograph of a young girl. Overwhelmed, I sink down onto the chair. That must be her! She is my mirror image, down to the light-colored curls and the freckles on her cheeks. I take the portrait in my hands: So you’re her Anula? I take the elastic band out of my hair and look at my reflection in the glass, trying to wear my hair the same as Anula, parted in the middle. I glance around at the paintings hanging over the desk. All saints with pastoral scenes, scepters, skulls, lilies, miters, palms and peacock feathers seeming to lean out of their gilded frames, as though wanting to run away, up to the top of Jasna Góra, to the bergfried of the ruins of the Olsztyn Castle or to the Bleszno TV tower on that outlying hill.

  Next to the folders with invoices on the desk I find, marked in ink and wrapped in plastic, a newspaper clipping that features a photo of a woman with blond hair. Margot Pietzner, married name Kunz, was an SS-Aufseherin at Ravensbrück until April 1945. After the war, she was arrested and sentenced by a Soviet military court and spent eight years behind bars. When she got out of jail, she took advantage of a unification agreement to apply for damages for the years she spent in prison and was granted compensation in the amount of sixty-four thousand Western marks. My eyes linger over an ad for Felix nuts in the lower right-hand corner, next to the article, the nuts’ producers luring potential customers with the prospect of five marks’ winnings in select cans. The juxtaposition surprises me, turns the ad into something more like a Częstochowa Courier PSA: “The brooms are here—let’s turn out the lights at the office.” I remember hearing the words “Margot, you bitch!” Did I hear those words? Where? Tromping nervously in my clogs over the parquet floor I go from wall to wall and back again, as though trapped in a dark cell. Finally, unable to remain any longer in this space so saturated with strangers’ voices, where the clock beats like Giordano Bruno’s heart and fantasies of the future take on vibrant shades, I cover my ears with my hands and run furiously out of the office, not knowing whether I hid my tracks behind me, whether I turned that golden knob, whether I even shut the door. I pass through the narrow entryway to the common room in the tourist wing of the convent, where as usual I go to the fridge and eat up the leftovers I find that foreign pilgrims have left behind or forgotten. I spit the half-chewed packaging from some cheese spread into the trash and, staring into the empty refrigerator, struggle internally over whether or not to again drink half a bottle of Maggi, or vinegar, or to eat the rest of the butter or a dry crust of bread. But at last I calm down and go back up to the attic.

  With the photograph of Margot’s face still vivid in my mind, I can’t sleep. Mosquitos buzz rhythmically, as though copulating. I sink into the August night, into some intoxicating thing, jasmine-caramel, that won’t let me sleep. I shudder under the covers and feel something taking root inside me. Shreds of others’ memories and words effect certain changes. I remember that day when, plucking cherries, I accidentally knocked my ladder against a wasp nest. I was positioned near the top of the tree, tossing ripe, almost black fruit into my bucket. Suddenly, my thighs, shoulders, arms were riddled with such searing stings that it was as if someone were shooting at me with an air gun or burning me with a cigarette. The enraged wasps stung me again and again. Crazed with pain and fear, I let go of the ladder and fell from its highest rung right
onto the nettles that surrounded the row of cherry trees that grew near the limit of the field. I got up in agony and ran home, where my grandma rubbed fermented milk into my stings. At night from stress or an overdose of venom I ran a high fever. In my dreams, as I broke through the white wasp nest and took hold of something that looked like glass wool, I saw them, my dead: my recently deceased grandpa Wladek, my grandma Salomea from Sosnowiec, whom I only know from a portrait since her heart gave out long ago, my grandma Stefania, my grandpa Stanislaw, my aunt Ania, my godfather Józek, uncles and aunts; I recognized them with some other sense, though they no longer had faces or individual features. That force, one emerged from many, a kind of quagmire.

  “Sink into us! Come on! Come in!” they whisper, until finally spring starts here, though after a fleeting warming period, a frost cuts off the thaw, transforming the meadows around our stone house into a mosaic of shattered mirrors. Abruptly all my relatives exit one by one, and when they haven’t come back into the room after a long while, I look for them in the entryway, in all the rooms, in the attic; I go over to the door to see if they might be outside, in the yard, but I can’t cross the threshold. Finally I grow wings like bladder cherry leaves and fly out into the courtyard, where a fire burns in the center. There is a stench of smoldering tires, burnt hair, and skin. She, Margot Kunz, comes out of the shed—a charming salesgirl recast in the forties as executioner. Under the watchful eye of Maria Mandel, she excelled at her training for the concentration camp.

  Those empty eyes, of uncertain color; the dark brows penciled into lovely arches; the light, sensitive complexion, somewhat broken out; the delicate neck with prominent hickeys; a ring on her finger. A pleasant voice, low; strong calves; little feet. She straightens her uniform, fastens the button at her neck and flashes me a smile. At that sight I leap into the flames.

  AFTER LUNCH—Sister Sabina has prepared lazanki with mushrooms and sauerkraut—I return to my room, putting the latch in the hook behind me. I open the wardrobe and take out from the secret compartment in my suitcase an Urania of Waldek’s, which over the course of my many-month stay at the convent has managed to absorb the aromas of incense, wax, and lavender moth cubes.