Swallowing Mercury
Page 5
‘You were supposed to help me twist faworki, not run around the village,’ she said reproachfully.
‘But Mum, I have to finish the brooch for school, or I’ll fail.’
‘Fine, fine, go if you have to, but drink this first.’ She handed me a glass of carrot juice, which, as the chief anaemic in the family, I had to drink several times a week, alternating with a flaxseed infusion. Mum would first grate some carrots on a dull grater, then squeeze the orange mush though cheesecloth into a bowl. The juice tasted like rust and soap. I felt queasy at the mere sight of it, but I had to drink it to avoid another visit to Dr Kwiecień.
‘Be careful and take the little torch because it’s awfully dark out.’ She accompanied me all the way to the gate.
I tried skating on the ice-covered path, humming the ballad ‘Hey, Gypsy Man, Where Are You Going?’ The lights in all the houses in Hektary, Kolonia and Świnica were on. The stench of burnt fat wafted out through chimneys, smoke holes and cracks in windows. People were making sweet treats for Fat Thursday.
All of a sudden, Gienek the Combine Driver emerged out of the darkness. He was walking his bicycle, or rather the bicycle was walking the full two hundred and ninety pounds of Gienek to the Jupiter Inn for beef roulade with cabbage. In the winter, Gienek seemed somehow different from how he was at harvest time, when he’d drive the Farmers’ Club combine up to the open door of our barn, all tanned and smiling. Now he looked like a plaster cast of himself: his face was swollen and he was breathing with difficulty. He kept stopping to pull up his heavy-duty work trousers, which were tied with a cord under his belly.
‘Hi, Gienek.’
‘Who’s that? Oh, it’s you, sweetie. You’re off to religion class?’
‘No, religion’s on Friday, in the house by the forest. I’m going to Stasikowa’s. What’s in there?’ I pointed at his bag, hoping he’d offer me some orangeade.
‘I bought this at the corner shop to warm me up. Want a sip?’ He pulled out a green bottle of birch-water aftershave.
‘No, thanks. Do you have any sweets?’
‘Ha, a little sweet for a little sweetie.’ He chuckled, showing the gap in his teeth. Then he fished around in his trouser pocket, pulled out a milk toffee coated with tobacco and chaff and started waving it in front of me. ‘How about a little kiss for Gienek?’ he teased. ‘Come on, don’t be like that… give us a kiss!’
‘Kiss schmiss!’
I gave him a quick peck on his prickly cheek, grabbed my toffee and dashed off to the dressmaker’s – but she wasn’t home. The windows were dark. A complex maze of chicken tracks stretched across the ash-strewn path to the barn. There was a note on the door: ‘Gone to my sister’s to fry doughnuts. Back soon.’
I knew that for Stasikowa the word ‘soon’ meant a good two hours, so I decided not to wait and turned around to go home. On the way back, I started playing with the torch, illuminating knots in wooden fences and shining it on meadows covered by grey blankets of snow, on which dogs had spread out pig bones left over from the carnival slaughter. I kept turning the light on and off as if I were talking to the leafless trees in Morse code. I stopped by a little bridge to bounce reflections off the freezing stream and noticed some sort of strange bundle lying in the ditch. I would have kept going, but the bundle started to groan. I went down carefully, hanging on to withies sticking out of the snow. It was Gienek. He lay all curled up, clutching the frame of his Ukraina bicycle, as if he were afraid that if he let go he’d tumble into an abyss.
‘Gienek, Gienek, wake up,’ I said, nudging him gently. He opened his eyes and belched right in my face, with the sour smell of the inn storeroom on his breath. ‘What happened?’
‘I slipped as I was coming back from the Jupiter.’
‘Just keep lying still. I’ll run to get help.’
‘Zo… sia, is that you? I’m not ly… ing, I’m float… ing,’ he began in a slurred whisper, as if he were trying to swallow something. A drop of bright red blood ran out of his nose.
‘Gienek, it’s me, Wiolka, Zosia’s daughter.’
‘Zo… sia… I… I… love ya,’ he mumbled and lost consciousness.
I tried to wake him up by shining the torch in his face, but he didn’t react. He let go of the leather bag attached to the frame of his bicycle and began floating, floating off to only he knew where.
Pierced Lids
THE LITANY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY WAS still ringing in my ears – since, as usual at that time of the year, I had to listen to it over and over at various May devotions and do my share of standing in front of decorated crosses and shrines – when I remembered that over lunch my father had mentioned a May bug hunt. I burst into the house like a ball of lightning, grabbed a screw-top jar off the table and ran to see my father, who was crouching by a tree stump making a funnel-like contraption out of wire.
‘Can you pierce this?’ I put the jar lid on top of the stump.
‘You’re going on a May bug hunt?’
‘You said it would be a good idea.’
‘Yeah, it’s high time we got rid of those bloody things.’
I finished eating a heel of bread, which always tasted better to me in the dark, and he stopped punching holes in the lid with a nail.
‘Enough?’ he asked, showing me the lid, riddled with holes like a sieve.
‘That’s enough, Dad, thanks!’
I screwed the lid onto the jar and strode off to the meadow behind the barn. I got into position on a well-trodden patch of grass, as if in a boxing ring. The May air smelled of jasmine and caramel. Heavy, juice-laden May bugs came flying from the direction of the apple trees. One of them flew right past my temple like a miniature bomber, brushing my face with its wings. I ran around chasing it in the dark, barefoot on the damp grass, until at last – smack, smack – I got it with an open palm. Stunned, it fell down. I picked it up with my bare hands with disgust and threw it into the jar. I continued my hunt for another half an hour, and then I sensed that a change had taken place inside me: I could see everything more clearly and I was more alert as I set my feet down in the dark.
When the jar was swarming with May bugs, I sat down tired next to Bear’s kennel. He was rolling around on the ground trying to shake off fleas. The beetles crammed inside the jar looked like reddish balls from a pilled jumper or a puppet made of burrs.
I popped my head into the pigsty. In their wooden-slatted pen, young turkeys were crowding on the hay, pecking at shredded yarrow. I hesitated. It seemed to me a pity to let the May bugs be devoured. In the end, I unscrewed the jar, dumped the half-dead beetles into the pen and ran off so as not to have to watch the ensuing carnage. On the way to the door, one leg of my trousers got caught on a nail in the chicken ladder. Smack, smack fell the wooden construction, right on top of me.
The dirt floor was warm and damp. The space inside the pigsty glowed brightly, then crumbled into little pieces, like a mosaic. Swallows greeted me with a piercing ‘tweet-tweet’ from their nest up in the rafters. I felt a tingling around my shoulder blades. Suddenly, I became as light as a scrap of foil. I rose up and sat on the pane of the little window which had been left slightly ajar. I flew out into the yard and circled over the orchard for a while. The sky, like the lid of my jar, was pierced with stars. Through them, a different kind of lining was showing. From up high, I could see the whole village, with the brownish-green forest to the north and the white circles of the dolomite quarry to the east. I had almost broken through the lid, into the second sky, when suddenly – smack, smack – someone smacked me on my feverish cheeks.
I never found out who had dragged me from under the broken ladder and helped me out of the pigsty. The next thing I remember, I was in front of our door. My mother later said that I had come back by myself, dreadfully filthy and with my hair all dishevelled. After a bath, I lay down on the sofa in the dining room, but I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Something was buzzing in my ears, my head hurt and the skin on my back was burning. A full moon
rose over Hektary. On its pale face and on my own, chickenpox spots multiplied.
The Dressmaker’s Secret
ONE EVENING, I COULD HARDLY WAIT TO GO TO the dressmaker’s, but Mum told me to first put the homemade juice in the cool hallway and then lock the front door from the inside with the bolt. With the bolt because we never used a key, since it was always getting lost somewhere. Mum waited in the yard while I stayed inside and slid the knob along the door. The smell of rust stuck to my fingers. I went behind the hallway curtain, heavy with dirt and fly droppings, and popped through the little door into the pigsty. The chickens were dozing on their ladder. The cow was licking the stone wall. I climbed up to the spiderweb-covered window and jumped out into the icy air.
Mum gave me her hand. We decided to take the short cut through the fields. Dusk was falling slowly. The frosty grass crunched under our boots. After a fifteen-minute march, the dressmaker’s house loomed up in the distance. I knocked a few times. Nobody answered, even though we could hear footsteps in the hallway. A cat jumped out of the dovecote, carrying a nestling in its mouth.
Mum went up to the kitchen window, knocked a few times and whispered, ‘Hello? Please open up, it’s us. The collection for church repairs isn’t until next week, and they won’t come checking the meters till tomorrow morning. I know because Janek let it slip.’
A moment later, the door opened. We walked through the hallway, which smelled of sour rye soup, into a bright room. Women’s suits, georgette dresses and coats edged with outdated trims and fringes dangled from a broom handle suspended under the ceiling; shrunken ladies’ jackets swung like hanged men. A Singer machine stood by the window. There was a little box of pins among the crystal on a dresser shelf, a button jar next to a rucksack on the floor and a mannequin with a cracked head in the corner of the room, draped with ribbons and starched napkins and impaled on a wooden pole like a straw Marzanna effigy drowned each year to celebrate the end of winter. Thimbles, buttons, pins, hook-and-eye clasps, press studs, appliqués, pieces of Velcro and bits of interfacing were sticking out of a cardboard box behind the lamp.
My mother laid a bundle of fabric on the table and started untying the twine. A pink stream spilled out onto the dirty surface. The dressmaker examined the material with admiration, caressing it as if it were her departed husband’s flesh.
‘Stunning… And what an even hem! You didn’t buy this in Koziegłowy, did you?’
‘No, my sister brought it from Katowice. Apparently she queued all day to buy it. So, what do you think? Will it do?’ Mum asked with a note of anxiety in her voice. ‘Can you make a gown for the end-of-school ball out of it?’
The dressmaker sized me up with her eyes, spread out the fabric, measured it with her forearm and said after a pause, ‘Only down to the knees, and that’s if I do my best.’
‘To the knees? No, that won’t… What would the headmistress say? For a ball, it has to be longer. But maybe…’ My mother touched her handbag. ‘Maybe you could manage to add some other fabric?’
‘God forbid! What other fabric? You can tell at a glance that you splashed out at a Pewex shop.’
After that day, I went to the dressmaker’s regularly to have fittings. I got used to the smell of her hallway and her house. She would baste the fabric, wrap me in it like a mummy, sew a little. She did everything with great concentration. She’d add things up in her head, draw the pattern on brown paper and then, at the end, she’d sweep all the scraps of fabric from the table to the floor, make some tea, offer me cake, show off her wedding portrait, which hung over the dresser, and reminisce about her husband, Stasik. Then she’d lay out the cards and tell me my fortune, repeating the same thing every time: that I would have two children, a boy and a girl, and that foreign voyages, fame and money awaited me, and when she’d add at the end that I would not find happiness in love, I’d come up with a pretext to leave the table. She would start watching Return to Eden, and I’d play with the cat, rummage through bags of fabric scraps, explore all the nooks and crannies pleated by light and shadows. There was only one room I was forbidden to enter. Of course, I tried to disobey several times, but unfortunately the room was always locked.
At night, I often thought about Stasikowa’s room. Sometimes I imagined it as a little chapel, except instead of a picture of a saint I would envision a golden cage with parakeets. Other times, I suspected it looked like a theatre dressing room, with costumes and a dressing table. In my dreams, I would enter this room and try on wigs and colourful outfits.
Then one week, I mixed up my days because there was a difficult maths test at school, and I went to see the dressmaker on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday. To my surprise, the front door was ajar. I went inside. The cat was sleeping on a cushion. The clock was ticking on top of the dresser. In the dressmaker’s absence, I decided to peek into the forbidden room. I paused in front of the heavy door, thinking, ‘Open, Sesame,’ then pushed it and looked inside. The room was in semi-darkness. When my eyes got used to the dim light, I saw what looked like a hunter’s study. Stuffed birds, deer antlers and a shotgun were hanging on the walls. The dressmaker was sitting on the bed, half-naked, rocking rhythmically on top of a rag-filled dummy dressed in a man’s suit.
Strawberry
SO WHERE’S THE YOUNG LADY GOING, ALL BY herself? Częstochowa? The train’s really crawling along today, isn’t it, just crawling along, but we’ll be in Korwinów before you can say knife. Where are you from, miss? Hektary? My goodness. I used to live there myself. Do you know the birch grove by the forest? When I was a young lad, I used to go mushroom picking there, with Jadzia, the Nowaks’ girl. Oh, Jadzia… she was pretty as a picture. You look a bit like her, young lady.
What was I saying? Ah, yes. Before the war, the place was full of mushrooms. They spread like wildfire under the young birches. You just had to take care not to mix up the good ones with the bad. We used to put salt on them and grill them on stove lids. I’ve never eaten anything better in my life. They tasted like heaven.
Oh no, in the countryside before the war, you’d never think of buying toys for kids. We didn’t even have a privy, only a bucket in the hallway. The girls played with dolls made from corncobs. Do you know, miss, how to make a doll like that? Before the corncobs ripen, they grow green and lilac silks, just like hair. Jadzia loved those cobs. I used to go behind the priest’s field and bring back a few inside my shirt, so that she’d have some for later.
In July of thirty-nine, we would play in our little hollow almost every day. There was a stream running through it. The water was cold and shallow, but we wanted to swim, so we dragged together lots of sticks and stones. It was hard work for a couple of days, but when the dam was ready the water rose and made a little pond. We splashed around till evening, with burdock leaves on our heads to keep the sun off. When we got bored of splashing, we’d have a rest under the oak tree. That oak tree is still there, isn’t it? Even the Germans didn’t touch it. Ha! Jadzia loved lying under that oak, flushing the game from the clouds, as she’d say. Around five, we’d usually go home our separate ways. Hiding from everyone, Jadzia and I would sneak into Sitkowa’s barn, go up to the top of the mow, which was full of hay, and slide down on sacks. I’d climb up to the very peak with a hat full of chaff and toss it out so that it rained down over the threshing floor. Jadzia had such fun with this, until a husk got into her eye and she started bawling and ran off home.
One day, I leaned down to scoop up some chaff into my hat, and my shirt rode up. Jadzia saw the birthmark on my back – a strawberry, we used to call it back then, miss. She started laughing and fled from the barn. I chased after her, but she’d hidden somewhere behind the woodshed, the little demon.
The next day, I made myself a bow out of a hazel branch, grabbed a hunk of bread with lard and went to look for the other children. I was surprised because they were already waiting for me by the road. I ran up to them to show off my bow.
‘Witch child! Witch child!’ they yelled at me.
Mother lit the stove, pulled out a wooden washtub from behind the curtain in the hallway and got a bath ready. The warm water calmed me down a bit. When the bath had cooled, she pulled me out, wrapped me in a sheet and rubbed iodine into my wounds. I couldn’t get to sleep. I tossed and turned in bed until morning. It all came back to me, those brats beating me by the road, and I thought I saw Jadzia among them. But I never breathed a word to anyone about what happened by that road.
On the Feast of the Assumption, I picked hollyhocks, tiger lilies, whatever I could find by the fence in the garden, and I went over to the roadside cross. Rain was lashing down on the little shrine as I begged Our Lady, Jesus and all the saints to let that rain wash the strawberry off my back. But the strawberry remained. I rubbed it with the juice of greater celandine, the way Mother would cure my warts, but that didn’t help either. The strawberry stayed where it was, exactly in the same spot, except the juice turned it into a reddish-brown map.