The Lullaby of Polish Girls

by Dagmara Dominczyk

  The stars in Poland are bright and sharp, as if torn from a connect-the-dots coloring book. They baffle Anna and remind her of religion and faith. In New York, the neon signs and tall buildings disturb the heavens, and all Anna can make out, aside from the moon, is the lone North Star. But not here—here the grass looks and smells like grass, rampant and overgrown among the cracked stones that pave the sidewalks—it’s not pretty, and it’s a far cry from the well-maniucured lawns in Brooklyn, but it’s real. Even downtown you can sometimes inexplicably catch a whiff of cow manure and wheat. Here, nature forces its way into every corner, in its purest form, and the stars take over at night, illuminating everything the way God intended. It’s all as if from a fairy tale: the blackbird’s call at seven in the morning, the magpies’ flight at dusk, the century-old wooden huts nestled next to the brightly painted seventies-era Communist apartment housing. Everyone smokes and laughs, but nobody smiles unless they really fucking mean it. And at the heart of everything is the one thing that unites everyone: przetrwanie—survival.

  Anna knocks on Justyna’s door and Justyna answers, wrapped in a towel. “I’m not ready.” She glances at Anna. “And you’re giving me that tank top. My babcia made tea. Get the fuck in! The guy across the hall is a total pedofil.” And then she quickly undoes her towel, flashes her boobs for a second, and then sticks up her middle finger.

  “You’re crazy!” Anna cackles. Justyna pulls her inside and loudly shuts the door behind them.

  Kamila

  Kielce, Poland

  The bathroom sink fills up quickly. The water is so hot that Kamila can feel her pores opening up as the steam rises. She submerges her hands slowly. The water scalds, but it’s the only thing that eases the itch. None of the eczema creams help one bit, not the fancy cortisone prescriptions that Doctor Poniatek scribbles, not the natural aromatherapy salves, and not the tubes of black tar that her friend Lidka Frenczyk swears by. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the pain is when Kamila dips her hands into a torrid stream and rubs her palms vigorously. Above the din of the running faucet, she can hear her parents in the kitchen, still going at it.

  “There is no way, my beloved God—that—she—is—going! Running around with a bunch of boys, in the middle of the woods? Over my dead body!” screeches Zofia.

  “What’s another dead body in this family?” Kamila can’t believe her father actually said it, but he did. Then there is a small pause before Kamila hears a loud whack and then glass shattering. Włodek lets loose a howl and then he is at the bathroom door. His knocks are gentle and few, like he simply needs to pee.

  “Kamila? Can you let me in please, córeczko? I’m bleeding.”

  When Kamila lifts her hands out of the water, they look stippled and bloated. Włodek knocks again. “Sweetheart, she threw a glass at me. I need to get the shards out. Proszę cię, Kamilka.” Kamila opens the door and regards her father with a mixture of disdain and pity. “Why do you let her do that to you?” Her father is holding his hands to his temple, and there is a stream of blood trickling through his fingers, down his cheek.

  “Can you just help me clean up, córciu?” Kamila shakes her head and holds up her ruined hands.

  “I can’t.” She walks past him and goes straight into her room. Her overnight bag is on her bed and she zips it quickly, making a mad dash for the door, her mother’s strangled “Kamilaaaa!” echoing in the stairwell after her.

  The bus headed for Sielpia doesn’t leave till tomorrow morning but, thank God, Emil Ludek lives only two buildings down. It’s raining and she doesn’t have the energy for a long walk. When she buzzes Emil’s intercom, he answers immediately.

  Emil makes herbata for her right away, sweetened with raspberry syrup, just the way she likes it. The honey-based balm he rubs on her hands feels good. She wonders briefly if her eczema is stress-related, like Doctor Poniatek suggested.

  “They look terrible, Kamila. The worst yet. Are you taking your vitamins?”

  “Yes, Panie Doktorze, I am. Nothing helps. Especially not the damn humidity. I’m ravaged by it!” Kamila pretends to faint, eyes rolling back in her head.

  Emil laughs, but there is sympathy in his eyes. He’s the only person she will let comfort her so openly. Long ago, it was the other way around. Kamila was the bully to all his bullies. When the other boys in third grade snickered at the tights he wore in the winter, Kamila stood up for him. When girls called him laluś and pulled on his golden locks and gave him Indian burns, Kamila swatted them away. But now, Emil doesn’t need a bodyguard, and he has to fend off the girls for other reasons. At sixteen he is tall and very handsome, like a young Laurence Olivier. His eyes are gooseberry gray and piercing, and his blond hair is always slicked back with pomade, high off his forehead, like Rick Astley’s. Kamila would do anything to be his.

  “She hit him again.”

  “Well, better him than you.”

  “But that’s the thing, Emil. I wish it were me, because I’d teach her a lesson real fast.”

  Emil smiles gently. “Your dad might seem cowardly to you, Kamila, but he’s doing the right thing. It’s so easy to strike back. The hard part is to turn the other cheek.”

  He’s almost biblical in his quiet martyrdom. Emil knows what he’s talking about. He hasn’t only endured beatings after school when the upper-class thugs cornered him at the bus stop. Emil’s own father used to whale on him, until last year, when he fully gave over to the vodka, and became a mere shell of a man. Right now, he’s probably passed out in front of some liquor store, his pants stained with day-old urine tracks.

  Emil’s mother moved out last year. Someone had to keep the old man from starving, and being his only child, Emil felt it was his duty. Kamila often thinks that she has it bad—drowned brother, feeble father, ravaged hands, countless unreciprocated feelings … but Emil takes the cake when it comes to shitty luck and somehow, he never complains.

  “You sure you don’t wanna come with us tomorrow?” Kamila asks, her eyes pleading.

  “I’m sure, Kamila. I have work, and if I leave for more than three days, I’d come home to find Franciszek choking on his own vomit.”

  Kamila nods and finishes her tea.

  “Your hands will get stronger when you get stronger, Kamilka. It’s all in the mind. Trust me.” She does trust him. She more than trusts him, she adores, pines for, dreams about, and waits for him.

  That night, Kamila and Emil sleep dressed in their clothes, on top of his sheets. Emil wraps his brawny arms around her torso, but his hands don’t travel up or down or anywhere she longs for them to. There has been only one kiss between them, last summer, but it was sloppy and drunken and all but forgotten on Emil’s part. Kamila, however, remembers every second of it.

  At seven-thirty the next morning, she slips from his warm clutch and grabs her bag. In the living room, Franciszek is passed out in his clothes, his legs shuddering.

  When Kamila joins the group at the bus stop she is battling many things—anxiety, guilt, and platform shoes that are one size too small. She sits quietly next to Anna, who is constantly turning around and kneeling on the seat to gossip with Justyna, who is seated behind them.

  The bus is a dinosaur—a piece of shit on wheels, treading slowly and stopping and starting till it finally breaks down thirty kilometers from the campgrounds. The passengers waste four grueling hours standing around while Kamila’s friends get drunk on what’s supposed to be a week’s supply of beer and wine. When the repaired bus finally rolls into the depot, it’s dark and cold outside. As they stumble into the woods, Lolek heaves all over himself. Kamila and Anna have to hold him up the rest of the way, slowing everyone down because the girls are no match for his two-hundred-pound frame. On top of everything else, it starts to rain.

  They throw their stuff down under the wooden gazebo at the site’s entrance. The rain comes down with no signs of stopping, the kind of relentless downpour typical of early spring or late fall but that has no business ruining a perfect
ly good summer night. The boys sleep like bums on the floor, while the girls sit up on the wooden benches, taking turns keeping resentful watch over their belongings. Kamila wishes she were back in Kielce, under her afghan, reading a book.

  “Why didn’t we stop them from drinking all that beer when the bus broke down?” she whispers, worried about waking the other innocent campers, not her slovenly, fucked-up friends.

  “ ’Cause we’re not their mommies. Relax, Marchewska. This will make a good anecdote for you someday. You’ll be a hero back in Kielce, as the lone virgin amongst the savages, keeping vigil in the wild!” Justyna laughs loudly.

  Kamila ignores the insult and furiously whispers, “Be quiet! You might wake someone up and they’ll—”

  “They’ll what? Come over and rape us all?”

  It’s no use with Justyna; nothing gets the girl down. Kamila activates her wristwatch’s neon light. It’s already past midnight. She frowns and sighs. “Anyway, I’m not the ‘lone virgin’ here, not by a long shot—not that it’s anyone’s business. I’m only saying this out loud right now because they”—she points toward the comatose boys lying on the floor—“can’t hear a word. Besides, why is everything with you about sex?”

  Anna glances at Kamila and shakes her head. Anna, who always wants to be on everyone’s good side. She seems to think that her greatest tragedy in life is that she’s caught between two worlds. Two worlds! Can’t her dear friend see what a blessing that is?

  “Everything with me is about sex because everything is about sex. Perhaps a week stuffed into itty-bitty tents with a few happy drunks will finally make women out of you two.”

  Kamila shakes her head. Her friends were not happy drunks. They were drunks that hurled empty beer cans all over the place and grabbed you by your waist too hard.

  Somehow, in the morning, the tents get pitched. The guys wander off in search of a snack shack that will sell alcohol at eight A.M. It’s a balmy morning. Tent mates are chosen and most of the girls change into their bathing suits and head to the water. Kamila stays behind. She sits on a blanket looking out onto the lake, the same lake that her little brother drowned in. She fumbles in her backpack for her journal, a small black notebook adorned by a collage of torn-out pages from books and quotes from her favorite poets. Kamila’s going to be a junior in the fall at Kielce’s fine arts high school. Her father wants her to be an artist, but even though Kamila has spent all her semesters weaving tapestries and copying paintings of fields and valleys, she has a secret dream. Kamila wants to be a writer, like Anaïs Nin, like Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, whose poem “The Lady Who Waits” is copied by hand a dozen times throughout her diary. She waits, she looks at the watch of her years, she bites her handkerchief impatiently. Beyond the windows the world pales and grays … and maybe it’s too late for the guests to arrive. Every time Kamila reads it she feels like Pawlikowska is calling out to her.

  One day, she wants her journals to be read by girls like her. She wants her words to strike a nerve, but thus far her own poetry feels mawkish and lacking. Kamila closes her eyes and waits for inspiration to strike her. When she feels droplets on her legs, she looks up and sees Anna, wet from head to toe, grinning at her as she plops down on her stomach.

  “It’s heaven.”

  “What is?”

  “The water, the trees, us in the midst of it. Jak w raju! All of it, it’s all heaven. And I never want to come back down to earth again.”

  “Why? Is Kowalski flirting with you?”

  “Nah. He’s all about Justyna. By the way, she’s this close to taking off her top. She’s trying to convince everyone to skinny-dip! In broad daylight!” Anna cracks up and flips to her back, squinting up at her friend.

  “Uh-oh. You look sad. Are you upset I didn’t show up yesterday? Was it that bad?”

  Kamila shrugs her shoulders and closes her book. “It’s not that.”

  “Oh, Kamilka, don’t be sad. I bet Emil will realize what a fool he’s been and come riding up here on some white horse and steal you away.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Anna.”

  “Kamila! You’ve got to stop this! Stop pining and start living. Look around you. This isn’t 1892, okay? It’s 1992. Poland is finally free! And we have options too, dziewczyno! But you have to be in the moment.”

  “I am in the moment. And this moment sucks.”

  Anna laughs. “The moment is ripe, my friend. I wish I never had to go back to New York.”

  “Oh my God, you’re crazy. New York is a gilded city. Everything is modern and ready to burst there. It’s like fireworks. Here? It’s like everyone is taking a perpetual nap in the name of ‘tradition.’ It’s old news. It’s Lolek getting wasted on some poison he brewed in his own bathtub and pissing in front of my grandmother’s doorway.”

  “Nah. New York is dirty.”

  “Well, at least you have air-conditioning on public transportation.”

  “Dobra, dobra. I guess the grass is always greener, but New York makes you feel alone. Besides, you wouldn’t like my New York friends. I don’t even know if I like them. They don’t know what it’s like to work for anything.”

  “And Lolek does? And Kowalski? They’re on the freaking dole! I wish we could trade lives, even for a few days.”

  “Listen, one day I’ll fly you out to New York and you can make up your own mind. For now, let’s just enjoy this. We’re sixteen and it’s summer. The possibilities are, like, fucking endless. Now read me a poem!” Anna grabs Kamila’s notebook and starts flipping through it. Anna is probably the only person in the world, aside from Emil, who is privy to Kamila’s secret aspirations.

  “Don’t get it wet,” mumbles Kamila.

  “Soon you’re going to be a famous poetess and I’ll make you write my Oscar speech. Pinky swear.” Anna holds out a pinky and Kamila holds out hers, and they intertwine, just like Anna taught her a long time ago.

  “Peenky sweer.”

  “Now let’s go swimming. The water’s divine,” Anna proclaims in a Joan Collins-y voice, and hops up, her long legs pumping as she runs back toward the lake. Kamila watches her get smaller and smaller until she looks like a little fish, diving in headfirst, breaking the surface. Kamila crawls inside the tent and curls up into a ball, wrapping her arms around her own torso. She pretends they belong to someone else.

  Justyna

  Kielce, Poland

  Justyna ignores the gooey sediment on the bottom of the lake, trying not to notice how her toes sink into what feels like piles of cow shit. The moon is full, casting a silvery shadow onto the still water. In the distance she hears Lolek singing the words to Dr. Alban’s “It’s My Life.” He’s wasted and the foreign words slur and slide into one another, so it sounds like complete gibberish. Justyna inches closer to Kowalski.

  A small part of Justyna was surprised that her mother allowed her to go on this unsupervised trip. In June, Justyna got kicked out of school, permanently. The history teacher caught her giving Lucjan Popiel a hand job in the custodian’s office. When the door creaked open and Pani Jesienowska walked in, Lucjan was just cumming. “What in God’s name?” she shrieked. Justyna wiped her hand off and looked up at her teacher. “I believe God’s name for it is spunk.”

  A two-hour-long meeting followed between the principal of the school, Justyna’s mother, and Pani Jesienowska. The school had a laundry list of Justyna’s misdemeanors: hooky, failing grades, graffiti in the girls’ bathroom, the time Justyna punched a girl who was rifling through Justyna’s book bag, about to swipe a very expensive L’Oréal lipstick. “This latest incident just proves to us, again, Mrs. Zator, that your daughter has no respect for the educators here, nor for the institution itself. Although she’s never been caught, we suspect she’s cheated her way through her last two years here. Justyna’s lack of interest, integrity, and effort lead us to believe that she couldn’t care less about us, and so we too have stopped caring about her. Your daughter is no longer welcome here.”

 
Teresa just nodded and walked out; she couldn’t argue with Justyna’s track record. She briefly thought about filing for an appeal—Lucjan Popiel got off with a two-week suspension, which Teresa secretly thought was more than unfair. She sat on the steps outside the school, chain-smoking for twenty minutes and thinking about when she got pregnant at seventeen and the bastards at her school had kicked her out. She had bigger plans for her own children, but Teresa had made a fine life for herself despite her lack of diplomas, and Justyna could too. There was no use crying over spilled milk; she had a high-school castoff on her hands and aside from giving Justyna a good thrashing, there was nothing Teresa felt she could do. It was time for her daughter to get a job. She’d go home, smack Justyna upside the head, and place a call to her friend Janka over at the new supermarket in town.

  When Justyna’s mother told her the outcome of the meeting, Justyna had tried to keep the relief from registering on her face. Inside, she was thrilled. The charade was over. She would no longer have to pay Tobiasz Tedoroski to write her essays for her, she would no longer have to waste time penning tiny cheat sheets. It was no accident that the subjects she was passing, geography and chemistry, were taught by the two male professors who were defenseless against her miniskirts and pushup bras. She wrote off the rest of her teachers as cunts, jealous and disgruntled, high on power trips. Education came in all forms anyway. The nerds at school, the ones who memorized and studied ad nauseam, the ones who recited facts on cue, they were the ones who stuttered and cowered through life. Once you graduated, who the fuck cared what an isosceles triangle was, or when World War I began? How was such ancient shit relevant? Justyna believed success relied heavily on simple charm, a forceful personality, and the skill of lying in the pursuit of grander dreams. So, in other words—fuck school. Both her parents had been high-school dropouts and look at them now. A year ago, the Zators bought a modern three-story house in the suburbs of Sieje, past the zalew, just a few kilometers from downtown Kielce, and somehow worlds away from their cramped apartment life. Come September, Justyna wouldn’t be scouring flea markets for used textbooks; she’d be standing behind the till at the Super-Sam, gossiping with the other cashier girls, and that was fine by her.