Swallowing Mercury

by Wioletta Greg

  In thirty-nine, miss, the first day of school fell on the fourth of September. I really didn’t want to go. I was afraid the other kids would remember my strawberry and would start tormenting me again. I stuffed myself full of unripe fruit and got stomach pains. Mother gave me a snifter of walnut liqueur and by the afternoon I felt a bit better, but I didn’t have to go to school anyway. You know, miss, the war had broken out and I stayed home. The people in the village seemed restless; they kept looking inside their wells, pacing back and forth between their barns and their pigsties, checking cellar doors and storage clamps.

  When Mother went out to see a neighbour, I couldn’t resist. I left the house and went to Sitkowa’s barn. I sat down on a tree stump and started whittling a stick with my penknife. All of a sudden, someone pushed the door ajar. I saw the corner of a percale pinny. It was Jadzia. She opened the box behind the thresher where she used to hide her corncob and straw dolls, bottle caps and pebbles. Delighted, I ran up to her.

  ‘Hello, Jadzia!’

  And you know what, miss, she didn’t say a word to me; she was distant and cross. We sat down on the highest beam, right under the roof of the mow, and looked out at our little hollow through a knothole in one of the planks. A gust of cool wind from the forest startled some partridges into flight. The autumn was coming, but I was happy because Jadzia had come back.

  ‘So, what’s up, Satan’s child?’ she snarled suddenly.

  I knew that she wasn’t joking, that this wasn’t my Jadzia any more, but just another brat from the village, a stranger. I pushed her as hard as I could. My God, she fell right on top of the chaff-cutter. She lay there in a pool of blood. I fled from the barn to the forest. The bells of St Anthony’s began ringing.

  You look pale, miss. A bit of water? I always carry a bottle in my bag, to wash down my pills. You see, miss, before you could say knife we’re already in Stradom. This is where I get off.

  The Woman with a Dog

  WHEN WE FINISHED CARTING BUNDLES OF RIPE poppy heads in from the field, my mother went to smoke a cigarette behind the house and fell asleep under the apple tree by the pond. When she woke up, she called me over. Chewing a mixture of fresh seeds from crimson, purple and grey poppies, I lay down beside her and watched the sky spin candyfloss out of the clouds.

  Accompanied by starlings, the wind was whistling an off-key melody in the drainpipes, tugging at the plastic foil over the tomatoes, rocking the metal signs by the road that said ‘Christmas trees sold here’. Something rustled in the reeds. A golden orfe jumped out of the pond. My mother started telling me her dream about an old classmate, Stella Dynus, and wondered anxiously whether she mightn’t have mysteriously contracted the little Stella’s sleepwalking illness and would soon start running around the fields, as Stella used to do, shouting across the limestone pits that the Germans were coming. It was a Russian-doll kind of a dream, in which my mother thought she was Stella, but Stella dreamt the dreams of someone else – the Kurzaks’ five-year-old daughter. The Kurzak girl, they said in the village, had been executed by a German firing squad in 1943 in revenge for the Jędruś’ assault on the Hitlerjugend centre near Myszków. She was buried behind the priest’s field, in what later became part of a state-owned farm.

  Stella was the only one in the class who didn’t go to religion lessons and the other kids teased her a great deal because of it, but Mum admitted that she envied her because the girl stood out from the rest, with her distinguished manner and elegant clothes. Back then, all schoolgirls wore identical cross-back pinafores, white linen shirts and dark blue pleated skirts, but Stella always looked more stylish: she had a collar with a crocheted edge and patent leather shoes. My mother used to sit next to her in art class and borrow double-ended coloured pencils, which Stella got from her family in America, as well as foreign paints and a red ballpoint pen with a rotating multiplication table.

  Just before Easter 1968, Stella started missing classes, or she’d turn up late, with dark rings under her eyes. Strange rumours circulated around the village. The Dynus’ nearest neighbour described how the girl would come out of the house in the middle of the night and wander around the fields wearing only her nightie, shouting something about the Germans. According to Mum, someone from our village had to finish dreaming the abruptly interrupted dreams of the Kurzaks, and for some reason it had fallen to little Stella.

  After Easter, Stella didn’t come to school again, and my mother thought she’d gone down with chickenpox, like everyone else, and would soon show up in class covered with zinc cream – but she never came back. Apparently her family moved abroad. My mother never heard anything more, neither about Stella Dynus nor about the Kurzaks’ wartime tragedy.

  One day in August, my mother and I were sitting together on an upturned wooden washtub in the yard, shelling beans. Construction workers were making a racket on the state-owned farm close by, digging foundations for a new building. Two large excavators were taking turns spewing out rich black soil onto the field of stubble and goosefoot. After a while, a dark blue Volkswagen pulled up next to the building site. The car’s wheels dug themselves into the mud. An elegant, slim woman in a blue waterproof jacket and white jodhpurs got out, followed by a black-and-tan mutt.

  My mother walked over to the fence and waved at me. ‘Wiolka, come here, I have a feeling that the woman with the dog is Stella Dynus from my dream,’ she said. ‘My word, she’s grown.’

  The tall woman with chestnut hair tied in a ponytail was walking slowly towards the construction site, stumbling on clods of ploughed earth. She stopped beside the foreman, who was leaning against a caravan. As soon as he saw her, he instinctively wiped his cheek on his sleeve and straightened up a little. The woman reached into her handbag, showed him a tattered newspaper cutting, explained something and pointed at a spot on the stubble field, gesticulating vigorously. He didn’t even glance at the paper. He continued leaning on the caravan and wiping his muddy wellies on the grass. The woman didn’t want to leave; she stubbornly kept explaining something, but the foreman just pointed at his temple, rolled his eyes and walked off towards the field kitchen, since a break had just begun.

  A gust of wind snatched her scrap of newspaper and lifted it up like a miniature kite. The dog chased after it, but the paper corkscrewed down and fell into a lime pit. Golden-brown hazel leaves rustled above our heads. Water rippled in the wooden pail by the drainpipe. A cool breeze rose. My mother put down the basket of bean pods and went inside to get a jumper. I remained by the fence, picking at a mouldering post and looking in the direction of the state-owned farm.

  The woman lingered a while longer by the cement mixer and tried talking to an older worker in a woollen cap who had emerged out of a combination bus. But he didn’t want to listen to her either and hid inside again. Eventually, she gave up and started walking back to her car. The black-and-tan mutt dug up a molehill, ran after a dry leaf and then joined his mistress.

  The workers clustered around the field kitchen like a single exhausted organism, collecting their portions of beans in aluminium mess tins and glancing back at her as she walked away slowly, swinging her hips.

  The wind puffed out her jacket and lifted it up like a bright blue lantern.

  Sour Cherries

  IT WAS THE THIRD SATURDAY IN JULY. MY GRANDmother woke me at six in the morning. I didn’t have the energy to get up because I was tired after all the work picking sour cherries the day before. Finally, I dragged myself out of bed, washed my face in cold water and rummaged around in the medicine cabinet for salicylic acid solution and a safety pin, to pull out a splinter that was stuck in my left palm. I didn’t find anything, so I just sprayed my hand with deodorant. My grandmother was waiting in the front yard, yelling, ‘C’mon, c’mon, or we’re gonna miss the bus!’

  I dressed quickly and ran out into the yard. After the rain, the air smelled of watermelon pulp. When we passed the gate, my grandmother paused by the milk churns and told me to check if the milkman hadn’t left any c
o-op butter or cheese inside. Sadly, the churns were empty that morning. We trudged down the cobbled road, lugging two bucketfuls of sour cherries each, to the bus stop in the neighbouring village of Wojsławice.

  The morning bus to Myszków was stuffed like a sausage. People squatted on the floor or perched on top of sacks or fruit baskets. Animals were making a din in their cages. Sauerkraut brine was leaking under the seats. I crouched down by our sour-cherry buckets and watched puppies dozing in a satchel next to fogged-up plastic bags filled with broad beans. The sleepy driver wasn’t paying any attention to this zoo. He adjusted his hat and tried not to drive into the ditch as he dodged potholes and herds of cows shuffling along to their pastures.

  On Saturdays, all the spots at the Myszków market were taken, but this didn’t faze my grandmother. She went up to a bearded man who was entertaining passers-by with card tricks on a portable fishing chair.

  ‘Lord be praised,’ the man spoke first, as if he’d known my grandmother for years. She didn’t reply; she just adjusted her kerchief and handed him two rolled-up hundred-złoty notes. The fellow folded the chair and gave up his place, just like that, then walked off towards Pułaski Street.

  ‘How much are sour cherries going for today?’ my grandmother barely had time to call after him.

  ‘Today, seventy.’

  I knew nothing about these market customs, so I walked off to the side and spent a while pressing my sore palm against a cool wall. A bit later, I went back to help my grandmother measure out sour cherries with a pint-sized mug.

  All of a sudden, Piotr, my first love – no fewer than nine Saturdays spent dancing together at the disco – appeared from around the corner. He was accompanied by a woman in her forties, the spitting image of TV presenter Krystyna Loska. They paused next to a stall with leather highland slippers. I guessed right away that this was his mother, a well-known doctor, about whom he’d told me so much. I wanted to vanish into thin air, to hide inside a bucket of sour cherries.

  Dear God, I thought, please make me disappear and I promise I’ll go to midnight Mass this Christmas. Never mind midnight Mass, I’ll even go on a pilgrimage to Częstochowa, just please, don’t let them walk down this aisle. They mustn’t see me here, I’m begging you. Oh shit, they’re coming!

  I smoothed down my messy hair and licked my lips. My tanned face was freckled, my shorts were dirty, and I was a sorry sight. I put my juice-stained hands in my pockets and tried to hide behind my grandmother’s back. It was all in vain: Piotr caught sight of me anyway.

  ‘Girl, what on earth, what’s got into you?’ my grandmother scolded me. ‘You’ve nearly crawled into my bucket! You seen a ghost or something? Sour cherries, ladies and gentlemen, get your sour cherries! Picked just yesterday, ripe and juicy sweet!’

  Piotr was looking at me with surprise. I forced myself to smile and wave, but he didn’t respond; he turned the other way. They walked off to the left and disappeared behind stalls. I knew I’d never see him again. I sat down on the grass and with a single slap killed a red spider mite which had been strolling along my arm.

  I don’t remember how much time passed, how many hard, sticky hours my grandmother and I measured out in pints of sour cherries. I felt more like myself again in the late afternoon, when both buckets were empty. People walked past us. Ice-cream cones dripped down onto sandals. Instinctively, I started sucking the aching spot on the inside of my hand. My grandmother packed up our bags and gave me a few banknotes.

  ‘Why so glum? Go on, girl, buy yourself something, and there’ll be enough for your disco too.’

  She wrapped the rest of the money in a little pouch and hid it in a secret place somewhere in one of her seven skirts. We left our things with a flower seller we knew and made our way through the deserted square towards the centre of town, treading on candyfloss sticks and soggy strings left behind from wreaths of little bagels. Puddles of pickle brine glistened on the warm asphalt. We stopped by a small shack covered with white plywood. My grandmother bought us two zapiekanka pizza toasties. When she wasn’t looking, I threw mine into a bin.

  We went straight to the local department store, commonly known as ‘the tin shed’. A throng of workers returning from the paper mill poured into Pułaski Street. Soda-water carts wheezed next to little squares. The queues in bakeries and butcher’s shops grew longer.

  I walked around ‘the tin shed’ feeling feverish, reading banners, staring at misshapen mannequins, passing shelves of tinned food and vinegar adorned with faded crêpe-paper flowers and aspen-bast cockerels, looking at Soviet watches – Poljots, Zimas, Vostoks – and porcelain figurines laid out on tulle in glass cases. The clock by the tills showed nearly five. The splinter under my skin, with its crimson halo, throbbed and oozed poison into a two-inch red streak.

  The Phillumenist

  COLLECTING MATCHBOX LABELS TURNED OUT TO BE a difficult hobby. Because how can you bring your razorblade to bear, with the necessary precision, on the label of that matchbox calling to you from the table during a name-day party, when Uncle Janek, the happy owner of the box, isn’t drunk enough yet for it to be pinched, and there are no more vodka bottles in the crate behind the curtain? Familial singing had not managed to put my uncle to sleep, and neither had my grandfather’s stories about the Soviet tank that drove into Balwierka’s yard instead of into Warsaw. He even stayed awake through all my father’s monologues on subjects such as taking a ‘friendship train’ to Russia, the smuggling of jewellery, the use of sulphates in the preparation of stuffed animals. So I decided I’d have to resort to drastic measures. I scattered peppercorns on a hot baking tray. The smell of burning pepper had the same effect as tear gas: all the guests quickly evacuated to the yard, while I, with a kerchief over my face, could finally take care of the ‘Storm’ matches in peace.

  In time, I learned to lift matchboxes from tables, wall units and dressers using knives and spoons, to work with fishing line and hooks or to simply wait until everyone had gone to do the chicken dance at a New Year’s Eve ball. Eventually, however, my battles under the banner of the State Match Monopoly began to wear me out.

  One day, when I sat down in the front row in maths class, I was suddenly struck dumb. A yellow ‘Pomeranian Griffin’ from Sianów – ‘64 matches for 25 groszy’ – was lying on Mr Kropik’s desk, tempting me ruthlessly. I had been hunting the Sianów griffin for a year, hoping that one of the long-distance lorry drivers who popped into the Jupiter for lunch would leave one behind, or that Natka Roszenko would bring one back from the Baboon Club – and now there it was, as luck would have it, belonging to none other than my maths teacher, who didn’t like me because my surname reminded him of a soldier who had deserted from the Lubliniec army unit many years earlier. I never admitted to Mr Kropik that this unfortunate private was indeed my dad, but he suspected it anyway, and I had a feeling that he wanted to get back at me somehow but couldn’t find an excuse. After all, I was an exemplary pupil and a scout; I went to every competition organised by the Polish Red Cross, the Voluntary Labour Corps, the Volunteer Fire Service, to vigils at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Koziegłowy, to contests and workshops – in other words, wherever schoolchildren could get a free meal. At last, Mr Kropik caught me in the act of trying to appropriate his empty matchbox and with evident satisfaction sent me to the headmistress’s office.

  Luckily, I had a few old labels in my school bag that day because I wanted to show them at a meeting of the history club. I slowly laid out my collection on the headmistress’s desk, presenting it as a learning aid. I pointed with my pencil to a 1920s ‘Eastern borderlands’ label and began describing how in 1925 the lower house of Parliament leased out the State Match Monopoly to a Swedish company headed by Ivar Kreuger, the ‘Match King’, in exchange for an unimaginable sum. Of course, I neglected to add that the government used the profits from this transaction to build the port of Gdynia, the pride of the unmentionable Second Polish Republic. The headmistress was very pleased with my explanations and w
rote only a brief note to my parents.

  A month later, my cousin from Lgota invited me to her wedding, and for lack of a better option she paired me up with the well-known local bachelor Romuś Lepiarz. He was around thirty. During the bridesmaids’ and ushers’ social evening before the wedding he was already coming on to me, and later, in a lorry on the way back from a trip to the forest to get conifer branches for the newlyweds’ ceremonial gate, he even tried to put his arm around me, but I hid behind some spruce boughs.

  On the day of the wedding, as custom demanded, I pinned a freesia and asparagus-fern boutonnière to Romuś’s jacket, and in exchange he presented me with a box of chocolates and drove me to the church. I thought our joint duties would be over after the Mass and the ritual circumambulation of St Anthony’s altar, but unfortunately that was just the beginning. I had to sit next to Romuś at the table and also dance with him. When during the ‘my handkerchief ’ game Romuś threw down his snotty chequered nose rag in front of me, kneeled down and stuck out his gob for a kiss, I couldn’t bear it any more and fled from the fire station. Fifteen minutes later, Mum made me go back to the hall and told me not to ‘bring shame on us’ and to endure Lepiarz’s attentions until the end of the party. So Romuś continued pouring vodka for me and terrorising me in turn with creamy Swiss rolls, rollmops and devilled eggs. Mum’s argument about ‘not bringing shame’ wouldn’t have worked on me that night if it hadn’t been for a certain small detail, imperceptible to others but highly significant to me: Romuś had a box of Orbis travel agency matches featuring Kraków’s famous Lajkonik horseman, precisely the label I needed to complete a series. The problem was that he kept going outside to smoke, with the Lajkonik matches in his jacket pocket.