Accommodations

by Wioletta Greg

  “Try these on,” he says and slips his specs onto my nose. “With glasses like these you look at the world like a wasp would: they divvy up your view of the world and protect you from dangerous radiation coming from the cosmos.”

  Amused, I look at his overstuffed plastic bags. The professor shows me their contents: tomatoes with specks of mold, potatoes and withered greens he tells me he gathered out of the trash outside the discount grocery store in Tysiąclecie.

  We get off at the Polonia Hall stop. I find myself picking up some of his bags and helping him cart them up to his apartment. We pause on the staircase, where the professor peeks into the little hole in the mailbox.

  “I’d like to invite you in for some soup,” he says, without taking his eyes off the perforated mailbox with flyers sticking out of it.

  Thinking of his antics at school, I hesitate, fearful of going with him into his apartment, yet to my own astonishment, I accept his invitation. For some reason, I am fascinated by his psychopathic nature.

  A few minutes later we are sitting in the kitchen, chatting like old friends. The professor heats up yesterday’s tomato soup, made out of other vegetable trophies, on the gas stove. The apartment fills with the smell of stewed tomatoes. The soup turns out to be delicious. But the professor doesn’t eat, smoking cigarette after cigarette instead, spinning yarns about humanity, which after the flood got divided into Semites and anti-Semites; Troy, which he believes lay on the Adriatic; the Polish language, which is in fact Ukrainian; the Huns, who were all Slavs; the fact that Christianity existed in Poland a century earlier than has been believed; that Siemowit was the great-grandson of Ruryt; and that the Polan tribe bore some relation to the Bavarians.

  “There’s something in you,” he says suddenly, looking me in the eye, “that’s elusive somehow. This morning I was planning on walking home, but when the tram came up to the stop, your face in the window flashed by. What were you thinking about in that moment? What were you thinking?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember, Professor.”

  “You don’t really look, but you do see, right?”

  I glance down, and the professor, realizing he’s not going to get an answer out of me, waves his hand and walks out into the entryway. I hear him dragging up a stool and then clambering up onto it and having a much harder time than when he showed us the lotus flower in the classroom; then he opens a cupboard and throws something down onto the floor. He returns with a large tube, from which he takes out an old map of the Polish Jurassic Highland. We unroll it on the bench in the big room. The professor sits next to me on the sofa bed and for a long time he just shows me his favorite brooks, groves, and caves, though as evening approaches, he begins to slow down, until finally he lays his gray head somewhere in the Gypsy Rocks on the Eagle’s Nest path and falls asleep. He breathes heavily, as though there were some limestone sediment in his lungs. I look at him for a moment. The tension dissolves from his face as it sinks into sleep. His eyelids, covered in a network of maroon veins, vibrate.

  In him awakens that boy, touching the wall, the cold forehead of his mother who was shot dead hours ago. When morning comes, he leaves the shelter along with others and runs, like I did once on New Year’s, down the path into the fields. It’s cold out. His broken boots squelch. The wet bands his mother wrapped his legs in a few days before their flight from the bombarded city have begun to rot. The distance, unknown and rustling with frost, appears infinite and dark. Finally some lights pierce through it. A stone home reminiscent of his ancestral manor appears. He goes up to the gate, where he sees the inscription Ordo et pax carved into the wood. He lowers the brass knocker with its coat of arms with the cross.

  The professor twitches anxiously, is pale, finally slides down onto the sofa bed. I lean over him and look on in disgust, remembering all his vile behavior, his attacks on female students, his abuse of his power as rector. For a moment I feel like punishing him, tossing his collection of valuable volumes into the garbage chute, pouring tomato soup all over his favorite maps, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Making sure he’s breathing, I cover him up with a blanket, turn off the light, and leave his apartment.

  ON THE EIGHTH OF APRIL, on Easter Monday, I wake up in Aunt Jadzia’s apartment, surprised the skylight has left the ceiling, that I can’t watch the shining sky in my first waking moments. It’s still hard for me to believe that I don’t have to leap out of bed before daybreak and make my bed perfectly and check at the door for Mother Stanislawa’s instructions. Instead, having slept my fill, I sit back down on the duvet, stretch out, and out of habit look around for my clogs.

  After breakfast, Aunt Jadzia goes to church, absent-mindedly leaving the door ajar. The aroma of the cheap perfumes the neighbors spray each other with in honor of Dyngus Day wafts in from the building’s halls. Gleaming pale green willow branches smack into the windows. Over the North housing development a dark cloud hangs heavy like a slack-baked cake. By the dumpster, just behind the little wall, boys lie in wait for passersby with water toys, buckets, and plastic bottles. Taking advantage of Aunt Jadzia not being at home, I open up my suitcase and take out the wad of bills Sister Zyta pressed upon me back in February, by means of farewell, now hidden in the pages of Urania. I count quickly. It’s over a thousand zlotys—enough for two months’ rent. I rush to gather up my books, my cosmetics, and my notes, which in the course of my mad dash between my job at McDonald’s and my classes I’ve scattered all over the whole room.

  An hour later, when my aunt comes back from church and changes into her housedress in the kitchen, I go up to her and hand her a box of chocolates and a pack of coffee.

  “Already? You should have warned me.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you in the lead-up to the holidays.”

  “You could have at least stayed with me until the break.”

  “I can’t.” I kiss her on the cheek. “Thank you for everything.”

  “No trouble at all, my dear. But where are you going to go now? Don’t tell me you’re going back to those nuns who were poisoning you.” She gives me a worried look.

  “No, no, I’ve rented a studio apartment on Lelewel. I’ll be closer to work and just in general,” I say in an uncertain tone, and I swallow because I’m aware that the real reason for my moving out is something else. I’ve long dreamed of having my own place, where I can meet with Kamil.

  “Do you want something to eat before you go?”

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

  “Have you packed up all your things already?”

  “I think so.”

  “Wait a second. Lest I forget. I’ve wanted to give you this for a long time now,” says Aunt Jadzia and reaches into the pocket of her housedress and hands me a crumpled photograph. “They came to visit once upon a time, your mom and Ania,” she says, as she accompanies me to the door.

  I drag my suitcase toward the tram terminal. When I get there, I take the picture out of my purse and take a good look at it. Two very young blondes are sitting on a bench in Staszic Park. It’s early spring, just like it is now. The chestnuts are in bloom. Aunt Ania looks worldlier, fashionable in her poppy-patterned dress with bell sleeves and wedge heels, looking provocatively from under painted lashes, straight into the lens. My mother isn’t wearing any makeup; in a V-neck sweater and a pleated skirt, she clasps her beat-up purse. It must have been her first time in the city, I think, as suddenly a merry cackle bursts from behind the kiosk. A group of teenaged boys runs up to me. I am drenched in bucketfuls of ice-cold water.

  AROUND ELEVEN, towards the end of my shift at McDonald’s, Elder Lajbos barges breathlessly into the employees’ area.

  “Remember that night when those nuns OD’ed you and kicked you out of their convent?” he says to me.

  “Let’s just say it rings a bell, Lajbos.”

  “I took you to Aunt Jadzia’s place in a taxi and then I got you a job in the lobby.”

  I shrug.

  “And despite the fact you just le
ft me at that bus stop that time I never made you feel bad.”

  I shrug again.

  “Well now I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Continue.”

  “Would you be willing to keep this chick at your spot for a couple of days?”

  “You mean a girlfriend of yours?”

  “Sure. It’s just a tough time because she’s been sleeping out back here on some cardboard ever since her mom kicked her out of the house.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Do I look like an idiot?”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. Sixteen.”

  “Why can’t she stay at your place?”

  “Are you nuts? Don’t you remember my folks?”

  I have no intention of hiding some underage girl in my rented apartment, but when one evening a girl in tears and soaked to the bone knocks on my door, I can hardly turn her away. Kasia, as it turns out she’s called, quickly makes herself at home: during the day, she is either sleeping or vomiting, and in the evenings, after availing herself of the contents of my fridge, my bathroom cabinet, and my coin purse, she heads out to the Vacance nightclub. Elder Lajbos visits her rarely, but every few days Kasia does receive her forty-year-old uncle, who is a vicar in one of the parishes around Częstochowa. The priest’s frequent visits do not strike me as strange, since I have a clergyman in my family too—my grandpa’s cousin, a respected rector—so I don’t give too much thought to what goes on in my apartment when I’m not there.

  One Saturday, however, I’m not feeling well and decide to leave work a little early. I turn the key in the door, then stand frozen in the entryway. Kasia, wrapped in a towel, is sitting on the mattress, resting her legs on a stool. Beside her, on the floor, kneels the half-naked vicar, splattered with cream, in the middle of shaving the girl’s right calf.

  “I’m—I’m—I’m sorry,” I stutter, and stumbling over the articles of clothing lying on the floor, I step into the kitchen, where through a crack in the door I secretly watch as Kasia and her uncle pack up as fast as they can and run out of my apartment. In the late morning I stop by the registrar’s, where I receive the news of a dorm room allotment with indifference. After I get back to my apartment I read over my notes for my classes and write a paper on Stefan Grabinski, a Galician writer who suffered from tuberculosis, woke up in the middle of the night, wandered down train station halls, fell asleep on benches, made quick visits to the old railway casino, chatted with conductors, and in feverish states wrote anecdotes of railwaymen and horror stories made up of ghost trains, hallucinations, a lost station, a blind track where passengers would disappear like in the Bermuda Triangle and the phantasmagoric giant of Smoluch, who appeared on trains and called forth railway calamities. I read and think about the Częstochowa train station, where I met Mother Stanislawa, where Scurvy told me about Clod, where Waldek awaits his Adelka. As Grabinski writes, the exuberant life of train stations gets placed in too tight a frame, and so it rhythmically overflows. The chaotic buzz of passengers, the calls of porters, the shrill calls of whistles, the roar of escaping steam all combine into a vertiginous symphony that causes you to lose yourself, gives back a smaller, dazed version of your ego on a wave of some potent element that can carry, rock, intoxicate. In the end, on account of his advanced tuberculosis, he retreated from life, settled in Brzuchowice, a spa outside of what’s now called Lviv, where, like Clod from Częstochowa, he spent hours on end walking along train tracks.

  Listening to the radio, I fall asleep. At half past five I drag myself off my mattress to take a shower and change into my uniform. I stick the gold hostess badge—on which, unlike my colleagues at work, I have no stars—onto the little pocket of my white blouse, fix my hair in the mandatory braid and go off to work.

  The lobby hours are long. Trays fall onto the floor. The helium I inhaled as I inflated the balloons enables me to last until the end of my shift. After taking two laps around the dining area, several strolls on behalf of order pickups outside the restaurant and checking the restrooms three times, finding a cufflink on the vomit-covered sink, I pray the shift manager doesn’t call me over for fries. In the end, tired, I bump into the fire alarm with a tray. An evacuation begins. The shift manager runs to the door and opens it wide, asking everyone to calmly leave the dining room and head outside. First mothers with children, then everybody else. I stand paralyzed and squeeze a balloon with the distorted image of Ronald McDonald so hard it bursts with a bang, which heightens the panic in the restaurant considerably. One of the teenagers steals lunch from the next table and tosses it into his bag. A young mother, unable to undo the straps of the highchair where her several-month-old daughter sits, nervously tugs at the child and would no doubt have dislocated his little hands had not a man run up to help her release the clasps.

  Completely saturated in frying oil, half-dead and called by the shift manager everything from retard to loser to lubberly cunt, barely able to see out of one eye, my hair sprinkled with salt crystals, I leave work and go and sit out on the Kwadraty by the Megamart. My fingers reek of Domestos. Salt irritates the burns on my wrists. It’s so quiet I can hear the rainwater flowing in streams down the manholes to the sewers. I decide that after I get next month’s paycheck I will quit my job in fast food, give up my studio apartment, and either move into the dorm or leave Częstochowa. My days are intertwining dangerously, creating a knot that draws tighter and tighter and tighter: classes-homework-work, classes-homework-work. Between these, the dizzying days of longing for Kamil, who—because of his mother’s illness—often goes to Katowice. The demons of desire, as well as an irrational fear of intimacy, transform with time into an explosive mixture. Erotic tension brings on dizziness and stomach pain. He makes me sick. My fingers long for him. I fall asleep thinking about him, as aroused as if I’d spent half my short life in some tantric marathon. His hands are subtle but decisive, his fingers like Paganini’s, his lips sensual and full. He a gorgeous and confident Svetovid, I a quiet samodiva, lost in the metropolis.

  In order to calm myself, I decide to stop by Jasna Góra, to watch the pilgrims, breathe the monastery air, and pine away in peace for Kamil and Sister Anna. By the Lubomirski Gate a couple passes me. I turn around and recognize Kasia’s face. Behind her, with a baby in a sling, trots a broad-shouldered guy with a shaved head. I realize it’s Piotrek.

  SOMETIME AFTER ELEVEN I leave work and turn onto a deserted Dwernicki, planning to pass through the little market that way, in front of the twin towers at Lelewel Street. Around the butcher’s I hear some noise that resembles soles pounding against asphalt. Unnerved, I speed up. Pale blue lights glow inside the empty meat market. On the wall, beneath the stern face of Our Lady of Częstochowa, portraits of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II, strings of sausages dangle. I look away. The shadows of two figures emerge from around the corner. Facing me are two skinheads in balaclavas. Dressed in tough jackets with orange lining, they look like demons that have crawled out from some dark cavern in search of a feast.

  “Aw, man, it’s you, hey, fuck. That’s Piotrek’s bitch, that asshole from our building who went after you when you tried to fuck with that little cousin of his, you know, that Kaśka.”

  “Hunh?”

  “Man, fuck, take a good look, man. Don’t you see who that is? It’s that little blonde that was standing out there in front of the movie theater with him that time we fucked up the city last fall.”

  “You know what, you’re right, that is her.”

  This taller one leaps up to me now, trying to grab me by my left forearm so he can draw me into the corner behind the dumpster, where it stinks of piss and mold; a Nazi song plays on a boom box.

  I want to scream, but I can’t. My voice dies in my larynx. I duck to avoid the skinhead and run off towards the tracks, coming to a stop before a fence where the philharmonic is. I swallow and, instinctively leaning forward, seize onto the white railing with both hands. The skinhead catches up with me and tries to pull me down. Th
e hooks and eyes on my coat snap apart, their wooden pegs clattering down onto the ground. The pain in my forearm stupefies me for a second. From the direction of the philharmonic train lights pulse, slipping through the fence and settling in a patina over the aspens’ leaves. The litter-strewn section of the market is momentarily transformed into a lit circus arena. Just when I finally can’t take the pain anymore, and my hands begin to slide off the rail, some jubilant men come out from the direction of the Business Center. Between them steps a well-dressed, dark-haired woman, clacking her heels over the concrete, leaning on the arm of a short, limping man in a cap.

  But that’s Waldek, I think.

  “Natka, smotree!” Alex shouts at full volume, and even the skinhead trying to drag me down looks up and towards him.

  “Vot chort!” Sergey echoes.

  Natka, like an experienced lion tamer, gives the signal with her index finger. Instantly the brothers leap into action and are racing towards me. The skinheads let me go and retreat towards the other end of the market. In the corner by the dumpster a fight breaks out; the drunken locals have no chance against two guys brought up on the training grounds of Siberia. I shut my eyes for a second; when I open them, the baldheaded thugs are gone. All that’s left of them is some bloodstains, their trampled balaclavas, and the screws, valves and springs of the boom box scattered at the gate.

  “Mudaki!” Sergey spits on the sidewalk and, with one loafer, crushes the valve of the boom box that has been swaying at his feet.

  “S toboy fsyo f poryadkie?” Alex asks me, and then comes down from the footbridge. I don’t answer, I can’t get any words out. I’m still frantically pressing my hands together and relax only when Waldek comes up.

  “That’s it, college kid, it’s over.” He pats me on the back. The rose tattooed on his hand flashes before my eyes. For some reason, I have this feeling that the appearance of the Vega people at the Dwernicki Market isn’t an accident. I still can’t say anything. Natka takes my stiff hands, where a few paint chips still glisten, and applies them to her powdered cheeks.