Swallowing Mercury

by Wioletta Greg

  My father smirked under his moustache, kissed my mother on the cheek and led her out onto the porch. He opened the cupboard, and out fell the stiffened claws of eviscerated hares, pheasants, martens, goshawks, buzzards and kestrels.

  ‘Look at this.’ He pulled out a dead goshawk, spread out its slightly stiffened dark blue wings and looked at them with admiration. ‘I promised to prepare this beauty for the director of the paper mill. If I do a good job, I might get a pay rise. This is the last time, I swear to you. You know I can’t live without it. Gypsy blood! My grandfather Szydło, the one who raised me, he was also into stuffing birds, and my great-grandfather would bring skins to trade at the market in Siewierz.’

  My mother narrowed her green eyes. The bit about a higher salary clearly persuaded her because she changed her tone.

  ‘Okay, fine, but this ghastly bird is the last. You can stuff the rest in the barn!’

  She went back to the kitchen and began to singe a plucked hen over the stove. The fire blazed between the partly open stove lids. The smell of scorched skin and burnt newspapers filled the house.

  I heard the rustle of a nylon housecoat. My mother pulled the warm duvet off me and laid it out on chairs arranged together by the side of the bed. Even though it was summer, she didn’t air out the bedding on the fence on Sundays because, as she used to say, it would be a disgrace to display all that clobber outside on the Lord’s day.

  After I washed and put on a puff-sleeved blouse, a checked mid-length skirt and knee-high socks, my grandmother called me into her room. She pulled out her purse from under the straw mattress, gave me a banknote for the collection tray, verified that I had plaited my unruly hair and sent me off to church.

  Still feeling a bit sleepy, I walked down the cobbled road, chewing dried pears. Near the fire station, the ice-cream man’s painted van sounded its horn. I glanced at the banknote and inwardly prayed that this week I wouldn’t yield to temptation to use the collection money to buy three scoops of ice cream – and then have to own up to it at confession.

  ‘Well, well, who do we have here? Rysiek’s daughter, I see,’ smiled the ice-cream man. ‘Do you know how my hare is doing? Is it ready yet?’

  I shrugged. ‘Dad was reinforcing it a couple of days ago, so I guess it’ll be done soon.’

  I took my ice cream and turned by the holy spring towards the lane that crossed the road to St Anthony’s Basilica.

  After Mass, I wanted to slip away to my hiding place in a pile of breeze blocks to read my comics about Tytus, Romek and A’Tomek, but an acquaintance of my grandmother’s was cycling beside me, watching me closely. On my way home, I picked two parasol mushrooms which had grown in the ditch, in the exact spot where our neighbour would dump animal slurry. When I got home, I steeped them in milk, put a lid over them and left them in a cool room. Then I sat at the table, which was set with plates full of pasta, laid my head down on the surface and felt the pulsating of the wood. In its cracks and knots, christenings, wakes and name-day celebrations were in full swing, and woodworms were playing dodgeball using poppy seeds that had fallen from the crusts of freshly baked bread.

  ‘Wiolka, watch where you put your head. Your hair will get into the pasta,’ my mother admonished me. I woke up. Golden light was gliding along the wall unit, the crystal, the glass fish, the stoneware cups.

  After scrubbing the burnt pan with sand in the company of insatiable chickens, ducks and turkeys, my mother filched a few cigarettes from my father’s jacket pocket and disappeared. I finished the washing up and went off to look for bantam hens’ eggs among the nettles because on Sundays I always felt like kogel-mogel, which I would scoop up with a teaspoon and dip in freshly brewed coffee.

  When I got back, my father removed the tablecloth, covered the table with newspapers, washed his hands thoroughly like a surgeon and began making an incision in the goshawk’s belly with his penknife, taking care not to stain its shiny down with blood. He spent over an hour removing the entrails, which he threw into a tin bucket under the table. The bird, stripped of its light pink flesh, bones and fat, lay on a newspaper. After carefully flipping it inside out, my father rubbed the skin with alum, which he kept in a pickle jar. The climax of the process was the preparation of a wire frame to replace the bird’s skeleton. This activity demanded considerable concentration, so my father usually took a break at this point, reached for the cigarettes in his jacket and told me to brew him a cup of strong tea with five teaspoons of sugar. When preparing animals, he always liked to drink this sort of sickly sweet syrup.

  Smoking, he would narrow his eyes and scrutinise the dead bird drying on the warm stovepipe. Then he’d get his toolbox from under the bed and start trimming pieces of golden wire with his pliers. I liked the metal frame much more than the bones, which reeked of coagulated blood. After slipping what remained of the goshawk over the structure, he would stuff it with wadding, using tweezers to push cotton wool into places that were harder to reach. Finally, he sewed up the skin with fine thread and affixed ruffled feathers with Butapren glue. To finish things off, he inserted suitably painted glass balls into the eye sockets. Using the thin wires sticking out of the talons, he attached the goshawk to a birch bough that had been marked by a hot poker with his initials: RR.

  The clock struck seven. My father told me to salt the table and scrub it thoroughly, while he himself took his paints and moved to the porch to work on the final touch-ups under the 200-watt bulb. Right after I put the tablecloth back on the table, my mother came back with a basket of plums. She called me into the kitchen to help prepare supper. I cut the bread and spread paprikash paste onto the slices. When I returned to the dining room with a plateful of sandwiches, my father was no longer sitting at the table; he was dozing on the sofa. The goshawk, with its artificially spread wings, soared above him.

  Waiting for the Popemobile

  IN THE SAME YEAR THAT A RUMOUR SPREAD through Hektary that the Pope would drive past our village, my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo. It wasn’t just beehives and cages with goldfinches, canaries and rabbits, or a dovecote in the attic, where clumsy nestlings hatched out of delicate eggs that looked like table-tennis balls. In the middle of February, right after my birthday, wanting to cheer me up after the loss of Blacky, Dad pulled out of his jacket a little soggy, squeaking ball of fluff, which by the warmth of the stove gradually began to turn into a several-weeks-old Tatra sheepdog. We called him Bear.

  That spring, my father got hold of an excavator and widened the pond behind our house, close to the road. My mother forbade me from going anywhere near it, but after she left for work I would sneak out to what now looked like a trapezium-shaped clay-pit pool. I would crouch by the mound of excavated soil, holding on to the stubs of whitewashed trees or clumps of sweet flag surrounded by frogspawn, and I would watch the wrinkles made on the water by pond skaters.

  One Sunday just before the arrival of the Pope, my father handed me the binoculars and told me to watch the nearby field. ‘A good opportunity came up, so I got you a number in exchange for a litre of vodka,’ he whispered, pointing at the farthest meadow, sprinkled with dandelions. ‘That’s where we’ll build a new house.’

  I didn’t know what this ‘getting a number’ involved, but I had come to think that since his return from military detention, Dad had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating, an attic scented with resin and a shiny bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling.

  That evening, I noticed that my grandmother had prepared a cake and had washed the floor with diluted vinegar, which usually heralded the imminent arrival of guests. Sure enough, shortly afterwards, women from the village began to arrive: my grandmother’s two sisters, Zofia and Salomea, almost all of our female neighbours fr
om Hektary and, to my surprise, Stasikowa the dressmaker, who seldom dropped in on anyone because she was buried up to her ears in work. Including Mum, there were probably a dozen women at our house. They had all brought cloth pouches and farm sieves, which were covered with kerchiefs.

  I thought this might be some sort of feathering evening, even though nobody in Hektary ever got together to tear up feathers in June. Instead of feathers, the women started to toss out of their sieves various scraps of colourful fabrics, fragments of dresses, housecoats, christening shawls, curtains, embroidered wall hangings and fringes left over from Easter Turk costumes, whatever they happened to have at home, and under Stasikowa’s direction they set about sewing pennants for bunting to adorn the roadside during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland.

  When the line of bunting was nearly ready, snaking around two rooms, the hallway and the porch, my grandmother started to lay out refreshments on the dresser and the windowsills, while Mum took out a bottle wrapped in a rag from a secret cranny in the kitchen.

  ‘Well, girls, shall we drink to the Holy Father’s health?’ she proposed. She didn’t have to say it twice. The women set aside their thimbles, rags and thread, made themselves comfortable and, sipping the homemade egg liqueur, began to spin their tales.

  ‘Since my old man died, I can’t be bothered to melt caramel to wax the hair over my lip,’ confessed the dressmaker in her low voice, hemming the last edge of a pennant. ‘I don’t scrub my heels with ash, I don’t rinse my hair with camomile tea, I don’t dream at dawn about falling from a ladder. My nose has grown longer, my breasts have sagged – in other words, girls, I’m on the way out.’ She laughed hoarsely.

  ‘Oh, come on now, you want to leave us behind? Who else would help us when we need it? Who would do our sewing for weddings and First Communions? You’ve managed so long without a bloke, surely you can bear being alone in this world a while longer,’ said my grandmother.

  ‘And how’s little Wiola?’ my grandmother’s elder sister, Salomea, asked her. ‘Has Aunt Flo come to visit her yet? You know, her aunt from America… her blood relation…’

  ‘How would I know?’

  The women looked at me searchingly, and I blushed all the way to the tips of my ears, because even though I didn’t understand a thing from all this mysterious talk about an aunt from America, I intuitively felt that something important was at stake. I moved Bear off my knees, and as he played with scraps of cloth under the table I pondered what blood relation could possibly come to visit me. Maybe they were talking about my grandfather’s paternal uncle’s wife, who had stashed tsarist roubles in her stockings and fled to Canada during a dysentery epidemic. But she would have had to be about a hundred and twenty.

  ‘Keep on sewing, girls, keep on sewing, ’cause you’re chinwagging and dawdling, and the boys will be here in no time to get the bunting,’ said my grandmother’s other sister, Zofia, coming to my rescue.

  Someone knocked on the door, and there was a commotion on the porch. Three men stuffed the line of bunting into a jute sack and went to hang it up by the side of the road. Later it turned out that the men whose task it was to destroy the decorations had already been waiting for them on the far side of the crossing.

  In the morning, I rushed to the road with Bear to welcome the Pope, carrying a paper pennant with the Vatican’s coat of arms which I had bought at the corner shop. All that was left of the half-mile of bunting were muddy shreds soaking in the ditch next to empty vodka bottles and cigarette ends. I waited for the Popemobile for several hours. It kept drizzling. Bear started to look the way he did the day Dad brought him home. The asphalt glistened like the skin of an aubergine. A delayed coach plastered with images of the Holy Father drove past from the direction of Katowice carrying pilgrims to the Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa, then the blue-and-white uniforms of the junior cycle club from Poraj flashed before my eyes, then came Gienek the Combine Driver, who usually headed to the Jupiter Inn around that time for lunch, and two tractors and a lorry with the words, ‘Buy your clothes at CDT’. When the rain settled in for good, I took shelter with Bear under the lean-to roof of the inn, inhaling the aroma of cabbage rolls and hunter’s stew, and the buffet lady told me to go home for lunch because they said on television that the Pope had flown that morning to Częstochowa in a helicopter.

  The Little Paint Girl

  ONE DAY IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY, MY FATHER GOT back from work early, and as he replaced the flypaper around the ceiling lamps, he said to my mother that martial law in Poland would end in a couple of days. I was nine, and even though I could remember the day when the children’s show Telemorning had failed to appear on the telly, I still had no idea what he was talking about. I wondered why my grandfather, who was an expert when it came to the previous two wars and who knew all the Resistance songs and all the caves in the Jurassic Uplands, where he had hidden after his escape from a camp, never mentioned this martial law. I thought that he was interested in politics because one day, when no one was home, he called my grandmother and me into the kitchen, put two coffee beans on top of a ten-złoty banknote, so that General Bem was transformed into General Jaruzelski, with his dark glasses, and burst out laughing so hard that the clips of his braces nearly popped open.

  That night, my father, who belonged to the work security force, did not put on his armband and go to take up his post by the fire station and the co-op. Instead, he spread out his tools on the lino and started weaving a trap out of copper wire for the muskrats, who since the spring had been waging a hit-and-run campaign against him near our pond. When the trap started to look like a golden hourglass, I mustered the courage to ask him who his enemy was, under martial law. He gave me a frightened look and said that if I ever asked that question again, I would get a proper spanking.

  On the tenth of August, we walked two and a half miles to the parish fair at St Lawrence’s in Cynków. At the market stalls, arranged in two rows near the wooden church, I bought a barometer in the shape of a Tatra mountain cabin, with a highland woman looking out to indicate rain and a man emerging to forecast sunshine, as well as a string of little bagels and a raffle ticket. I slipped the raffle ticket into the pocket of my dress and hid behind the shooting gallery, so as not to have to show it to the other children, just in case I won, say, an enamelled pot or a bobble-head bulldog. As it happened, my number turned out to correspond to a set of Old Holland Classic Colours oil paints. I raced to tell my parents, who were playing cards with some friends near the wooden deer feeder. I showed them my prize. Uncle Lolek gave my father an amused pat on the back and said, ‘Well, Rysiek, you have an artist on your hands.’

  We walked back through the fields and got home before midnight. Dad lay down on the sofa in his suit and started playing prison ballads on a lime-tree leaf, while Mum and Bear, who had been let off his chain specially for this occasion, formed his faithful audience. I shut myself in the dining room, made a makeshift mosquito net out of a sheer curtain and with reverence laid out seventeen tubes of paint on top of a duvet. Seventeen because one was missing. The English names of the colours made me think of distant planets: ‘cyclamen’, ‘ultramarine’, ‘umber’. I tried to squeeze out a bit of paint onto a straw mat, but all that leaked out of the tubes were colourless drops of viscous liquid. It turned out that the paints which the priest from St Lawrence’s parish had donated to the raffle had come from gift parcels from the West and were past their expiry date.

  I went back to school after the summer holidays and forgot about painting – until I spotted an announcement for an art competition on the noticeboard in the common room. The theme was to be ‘Moscow through your eyes’; the deadline was the end of October 1983. Obviously, I had to enter. In January, I had won a province-wide competition titled ‘Threats around your farm’. I had painted a potato beetle climbing out of an empty Coca-Cola bottle. Nobody believed that I had really seen my grandfather collecting potato beetles in just such a bottle. The jury at the provincial level concluded
that my drawing ‘portrayed, in a deeply metaphorical manner, the crusade of the imperialist beetle’. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my father had been boasting to his co-workers that he was distantly related to the Sinti Gypsies, my work might have even made it onto postage stamps. In any case, it all ended very well for me. My mother stopped dragging me to evening religion classes in the shack by the forest, and I got a rucksack and a box of chocolates from the competition organisers.

  Three weeks after the results of the ‘Threats around your farm’ contest were published, a letter came to my school. The headmistress announced during assembly that a special sub-committee of the committee for the promotion of culture in the province of Silesia had chosen to send me to an outdoor painting workshop in nearby Lubliniec for the winter break. This was a serious blow. The entire school laughed at me: I was going to spend a week in the loony bin, since Lubliniec was home to a psychiatric ward. On top of that, the holiday centre in which we were lodged was right next door to an army unit, and as we walked around the woods in search of inspiration, soldiers at the training ground were firing blanks, practice bullets were whistling over my head, and I couldn’t concentrate. However, the week-long workshop turned out to be a splendid adventure because the common room had satellite TV and a VCR. In my free time, when I wasn’t watching films, I painted a series depicting the derelict Lubliniec distillery, but this time I got only a special mention, and instead of my longed-for oil paints, I came home with a certificate and a glossy book about the Russian painter Vasily Surikov, whom I’d never heard of before.

  Third time lucky, I thought to myself, and decided to enter the competition entitled ‘Moscow through your eyes’. I didn’t know what the capital of the socialist republics looked like, and the pictures that accompanied the readings in my Russian textbook were rather blurry. Fortunately, my form teacher, Mrs Walo, who also ran the art club, brought me some colour postcards showing the Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral. I spread out newspapers on the table and went on painting a panorama of Moscow until two in the morning, when the power was cut.