It struck me that our house was a kind of stone prosectorium, a cold store watched over by the bloodshot eyes of the stove, where I had grown as used to the fetor of decomposing animal flesh as I had to the sweet scent of bread. A wooden cross hung over the door, but something else was the true religion here: the most holy books of zoology, the bird and fish guidebooks anointed with alum and dried Butapren glue, the eviscerated jackets with their padding removed, waiting faithfully at the bottom of the wardrobe for the master of ceremonies to return from the paper mill in the afternoon, spread out newspapers on the table and begin his ritual of taxidermy.
Mum handed me a mug of hot soup. ‘Drink it down fast and go into the dining room.’ She opened the double doors slightly and pushed me forward. ‘You must.’
I burned my lips with the soup and paused on the threshold. The coffin lay on the table. It was handsomely made, varnished, surrounded by wreaths.
My father in a coffin? Was it really him? Maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was just a stuffed double. A drop of dried wax on his lapel looked like a sliver of a yellow fingernail. A fly sat on the lace bolster.
‘Get out of here, you vile thing,’ my mother whispered, ‘and don’t you start breeding. I’ll go and check, maybe there’s a fly swatter in the dresser.’ She left.
I sat down in the chair beside the coffin and touched my father’s icy hand.
I saw an eight-year-old boy. He had skipped school again; he had hidden in a field of wheat. Brushing his curly hair off his forehead, he pulled a pâté sandwich wrapped in brown paper out of his satchel, but instead of eating it, he threw crumbs to the partridges wandering around in the wheat. He raised his head, looked straight at the sun, then squeezed his eyelids tightly shut, and in the flickering spots he saw the face of his mummy, who had recently died in Sosnowiec. They said the flu had weakened her heart. The inscription on the dark granite slab read, ‘Sabina Rogala, née Szydło’; there was a star and a row of numbers, and then a cross and a row of numbers. He remembered her black plait and the way she sliced bread, holding the loaf against her breasts. A partridge came closer. Rysiu carefully took off his jacket and flung it over the wheat. A moment later, he was holding the bird, which flailed about under the fabric like a puppet.
Everything changed after his mother’s death. Rysiu wasn’t a little boy any more; he knew that his daddy, who was a policeman, wouldn’t come home at night. Rysiu could peel an apple all by himself and eat it, and then the peels too, and when the peels were gone, he’d suck on a lump of sugar or make little balls out of oat flakes. The following day, the woman from next door came and gave Rysiu a slice of bread with lard. After her came a different woman, with a briefcase. She took him by bus to where his mother’s parents, the Szydłos, lived: out in the countryside next to a forest, in a wooden cottage with a tar-paper roof. The windows in that cottage were so small. Red fabric casings stuffed with musty feathers poked out of the duvet covers, and when Rysiu went down with measles, he slept with his duvet uncovered because his grandmother said that the colour red would draw out the fever. At night, Rysiu was afraid; he kept calling for Mummy and had to sleep on the windowsill under a horse blanket and fresh walnut leaves, so that bedbugs wouldn’t bother him. After Christmas, his grandfather pulled out a sheepskin coat from the shed. Rysiu didn’t want to wear it to school, but Grandpa insisted.
‘Hey, shaggy beast!’ children yelled, throwing snowballs at him.
Spring came. Grandpa Szydło whitewashed the walls. Bedbugs stopped being a bother, and the children at school didn’t beat Rysiu up any more, because he could draw so nicely that some of them even took his sketches of animals home and asked for more. On Sundays, he’d go to the forest with Grandpa. They would cut notches in pine trunks, collect the sap into a tin cup, set hare snares. Grandpa carved little bark boats for Rysiu, and they’d go to sail them together on Green Lake. Grandpa Szydło was probably the wisest man in the whole world: he could talk to animals and knew which mushrooms were good to eat and which were poisonous. They would bake potatoes together in the fire.
One day, Grandpa showed him a pine marten’s nest in the hollow of a tree. Rysiu put his hand inside and groped around in the down until he felt the warm litter. He wanted to swap lives with the young martens, to come and live in the forest and share their bird eggs and rabbit holes – but he ran after Grandpa, because it got dark, and then afterwards he always had to run after someone and everything flew by like in an American film. There was never enough time or money. Rysiu kept rushing around, to earn enough for a new pair of shoes, for his first suit, to make it through his spell in the army, to buy himself a motorbike, to take Zosia to a dance, to be on time for the exam at the agricultural college, and for his wedding, and christenings, and for the night shift.
*
Twenty years passed. We were together on the bus to Myszków: my father was going to the paper mill and I needed to get a book for school. Dad was dozing in a seat at the back. He had turned up his jacket collar because the early morning was cold.
‘What a strange world this is,’ he said to me suddenly when the bus turned into Pułaski Street. ‘Before I’ve even had time to blink, they’re already calling me old, when inside I’m like an unripe fruit.’
One Sunday morning in late August, he took his bicycle and went fishing. He laid out his rods on the edge of Green Lake. He kept falling asleep and waking up because his left arm was going strangely numb and there was a burning in his chest. The bright-coloured float, which he had carved out of polyfoam, bobbed up and down in the water, but nobody was watching it any more. Before noon came, before the first tench swallowed the bait, this fifty-year-old boy was dead.
Neon over the Jupiter
A STRANGE SOUND RESEMBLING THE COOING OF a collared dove woke me up before dawn. I opened my eyes and heard the cooing again. I threw off my duvet, pushed the window ajar and looked outside. Older Lajboś was sitting on the broken apple-tree stump by the pond, in a halo of glow-worms.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked sleepily.
‘I’m getting out of Hektary. You coming with me?’
‘Where to?’ I did up a button of my flannel pyjamas.
‘My old man got a job at a mine, so we’re moving to a housing estate on Saturday.’
Slowly, I started waking up properly. I was cross that Older Lajboś had got me up so early, just when I had been dreaming my favourite dream about the outdoor painting workshop which I had attended a few years earlier. A white moth with grey spots was dragging itself along the fogged-up windowpane. It seemed particularly anaemic, so I finished it off with a slipper. I put on my jeans and a jacket, threw a couple of boxes of crackers into my rucksack and jumped out of the window into a clump of nettles. I sat down beside Older Lajboś on the stump.
‘You’ve been huffing again?’
‘I–I–I got pissed off at my folks,’ he stammered out. He drew closer and tried to put his arm around me, but I got up.
‘I can’t sit on this thing for long or I’ll get a bladder infection, so keep it short. Where are we running away to?’
‘I’ve saved up some cash from returning bottles. We’ll go to Częstochowa, to my aunt Jadzia’s place, and then we’ll see. Maybe to Central Station in Warsaw?’
‘You’re lucky, you know, that Mum forgot to let Bear off his chain last night, or he would’ve really fucked you up. If we’re going, let’s go.’
We walked in silence towards Świnica, beyond which the road, worn by long-distance lorries, twisted and turned; we walked slowly, like one walks after midnight Mass, like my father coming home on Sunday from a fishing trip or from a little game of poker, like the curate after administering extreme unction, like my grandmother returning from the fields dragging a pram, in which instead of her first-born, prematurely dead daughter, there lay a bunch of ripe poppy heads covered with a kerchief; we trudged on, full of doubts, through beet patches, through pale blue rows of cabbages, through fields of grain with hidden beds of poppie
s; we trampled the grey heads of dandelion clocks. Brambles slashed our legs. Warble flies bit us. We forced our way through thickets, through burdock, sweet flag, rye fields encrusted with cornflowers; we walked in a frenzy, stumbling on crooked stakes in the ground, on limestone rocks, on piles of steaming hay. Our trainers and trouser legs got drenched from the dew, but we kept going, along the field margin by the little hollow with an oak tree, where a stream once ran and where before the war Jadzia Nowak used to meet her teenage murderer with a strawberry on his back. We walked through barren sunflower fields, once weeded as part of community action projects by women brought in a combination bus on Sundays; we walked through pesticide-filled havens for birds and grimy children which Gienek the Combine Driver traversed every day on his way back from the Jupiter.
‘When it clears up, we’ll catch the bus,’ Older Lajboś murmured under his breath, but I wasn’t listening to him. I walked with my shoulders hunched, trying to think only about not stepping into a cowpat or a trap. The sun began to look more and more boldly at its reflection in the surface of clay-pit pools, ponds, flooded quarries. Every now and then, I stopped to nibble on some crackers from my rucksack. Older Lajboś didn’t want to eat anything; he just kept putting the little glue bag up to his mouth more and more often.
At last, we reached the bus stop. Older Lajboś lay down on the bench in the shelter and put his head on his rucksack.
‘I gotta have a little kip right now because I have the shakes. Wake me up when the bus to Częstochowa comes. Okay?’ He looked at me with bloodshot eyes. I nodded and started reading out to him the graffiti on the bus shelter: ‘I love Kasia’, ‘Fuck Legia Warsaw’, ‘Your winter, our spring, Moominsummer’. Flies clustered on a half-dried turd covered with shreds of newspaper. I went behind the shelter and, because I was hungry, I started sucking on the sweet spikes of clover flowers. The bus to Częstochowa came, but I didn’t flag it down. I gazed with apathy at the fields, the road, the dolomite quarry.
Across the street, two men in high-vis jackets were rolling a tractor tyre that had gone flat. An indigo neon sign lit up over the Jupiter. I suddenly thought of my mother, who since my father’s death always got up at this time, with this neon sign, put on her mourning clothes with a housecoat over the top, brewed herself a cup of milky grain coffee, looked in on my ill grandfather and then came into the dining room, which I had converted into my bedroom and where I slept on the sofa under Jesus Teaching from a Boat.
‘Get up for school, it’s seven,’ she’d whisper, put a mug of weak tea on the night table and pull off my duvet. What if this time, instead of me, she found three neatly arranged pillows in the sheets? Would she slump down dejected into the chair by the door, next to my posters of Republika and Perfect, or run out of the house to look for me on the road?
I glanced at Older Lajboś. He was breathing heavily. His pale spotty face looked like a badly risen loaf of bread. He was drooling. The little glue bag was sticking out of his pocket like a used condom. I couldn’t stay with him at the bus stop any longer. I tied my messy hair with the rubber band which I’d cut from an inner tube and always carried in my jacket pocket, took off my soaked trainers and ran barefoot back to Hektary.
Translator’s Note
WIOLETTA GREG’S DEBUT NOVEL IS SET IN THE Jurassic Uplands of southern Poland, in and around the small fictional village of Hektary, in the 1970s and 1980s. A brief explanation of some of the political and economic context of the period is provided here, especially for readers for whom the fall of communism in Eastern Europe is a historical fact rather than a memory.
The 1980s were the last decade of the Polish People’s Republic, a communist-run state within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. At the beginning of the chapter titled ‘The Little Paint Girl’, the narrator alludes to a moment which defined the era for a whole generation of young Poles. On Sunday 13 December 1981, children all over the country were waiting for that week’s episode of the popular television programme Teleranek (which I have translated as Telemorning). The show never aired. Instead, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the leader of the Polish communist government, appeared, dressed in his military uniform, and gravely read out a statement announcing the imposition of martial law – or ‘state of war’, as it is referred to in Polish.
This drastic measure was largely an attempt to crack down on the political opposition, which had emerged during a wave of strikes in the summer of 1980 in the form of the Solidarity movement, led by shipyard electrician Lech Wałęsa. A failing economy and frustration with decades of communist rule had combined to create a powerful challenge to the authority of the government. By late 1981, the one-party state was on the verge of collapse, and a so-called Military Council of National Salvation, headed by Jaruzelski, seized power. With martial law came arrests, military control of key services and industries, the banning of various organisations, renewed censorship and a curfew. Solidarity went underground, but the movement remained a popular force for change.
Life in the village of Hektary is punctuated more by folk traditions and the Church calendar than by political events, but historical developments are taking place in the background, from Lech Wałęsa’s Nobel Peace Prize to Pope John Paul II’s morale-building visit to his homeland in June 1983 (during which he met with both Jaruzelski and Wałęsa). The uneasy relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the communist state is evident in ‘Waiting for the Popemobile’, when men from the village go to put up pennants by the roadside to welcome the Pope, only to encounter another group already waiting to destroy the decorations.
There are other ways in which the world of Hektary reflects the realities of daily life in Poland in the late communist era, with its scarcity of consumer goods and its flourishing black-market economy. The Polish złoty was virtually worthless abroad, circulation of foreign currency within the country was severely restricted, and ordinary shops frequently ran out of even basic necessities. Luxuries such as Natka’s perfumes and the fabric for Wiolka’s special dress could be bought on the black market or from Pewex, a chain of ‘internal export’ shops which stocked Western and Polish ‘export-quality’ goods available to purchase only with American dollars or with vouchers issued by the state bank. These vouchers, which were valued in dollars, could be obtained from the bank in exchange for foreign currency, as part of a complex and paradoxical system under which the use of dollars, Deutschmarks and other hard currencies was both forbidden and widespread. The ability to shop at Pewex, which implied some combination of money and social connections, was not necessarily to be flaunted. During times of scarcity and rationing, ordinary shops were often so poorly stocked that even the rumour of a delivery could trigger the formation of a long queue. Wiolka’s mother claims that her sister queued all day to buy the fabric for Wiolka’s dress, but the dressmaker can tell at a glance that it comes from Pewex.
By the end of the book, the 1990s are beginning and the communist era is over. The Soviet Bloc is collapsing and Poland is in transition, having held its first multi-party elections in June 1989. Yet while the book mentions certain developments in Hektary, such as the arrival of paved roads, the changes which Wiolka experiences – and the new maturity she develops – are intensely personal.
The theme of growing up is reflected in the book’s Polish title, Guguły, which means ‘unripe fruit’. This word also appears in two chapters. The narrator of ‘Strawberry’ recounts how he did not want to go back to school in September 1939, so he made himself ill by eating guguły. ‘Guguły’ is also the title of the second-to-last chapter, where I have translated it as ‘unripe’. Near the end of this chapter, Wiolka’s father tells her one morning – out of the blue, as their bus pulls into Myszków – that although in the eyes of the world he may already seem old, inside he is still like an unripe fruit.
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote lit
erature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.
Each year, a dedicated committee of professionals selects books that are translated into English from a wide variety of foreign languages. We award grants to UK publishers to help translate, promote, market and champion these titles. Our aim is to celebrate books of outstanding literary quality, which have a clear link to the PEN charter and promote free speech and intercultural understanding.
In 2011, Writers in Translation’s outstanding work and contribution to diversity in the UK literary scene was recognised by Arts Council England. English PEN was awarded a threefold increase in funding to develop its support for world writing in translation.
www.englishpen.org
Copyright
Published by Portobello Books in 2017
Portobello Books
12 Addison Avenue
London
W11 4QR
Copyright © Wioletta Grzegorzewska 2014
English translation copyright © Eliza Marciniak 2017
This book was originally published in Polish as Guguły in 2014 by Wydawnictwo Czarne.
The rights of Wioletta Grzegorzewska (writing as Wioletta Greg) to be identified as the author of this work and of Eliza Marciniak to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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