The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  He drove, and the pain eased. The boondocks episode began to fade in the accustomed, dreamlike way. Bella, asleep in the back, felt ever more like his talisman, his salvation, as he scurried for the sheltering walls.

  February 1992

  Grazing the Long Acre

  The first couple of girls I saw, I thought they were hitchhikers. I’m not naive, but that stretch of the E75 between Czestochowa and Piotrkow Tryb must be the most lost, godforsaken highway on earth. Talk about the middle of nowhere… It was so incongruous. You wondered how the hell anyone came to be there, least of all this plump unattractive girl with thick thighs, puce in the cold, in a crocheted miniskirt and a strange little satin jacket, skipping about beside the traffic like a lonesome child; or this other girl, skinny as a rake, with her dishwater hair, black hot pants, and pathetic thigh-high patent boots. After the third I got the idea. I sat up and watched, it was something to break the monotony. I couldn’t work out why they were here in such numbers. I’d never seen whores plying beside a Polish freeway before. World War Two bomb craters, yes. Kids skateboarding on six-lane high-speed curves abandoned half-way through their construction; potholes, crevasses; ambling horses and carts. But never anything like this line of shivering, primping, ugly girls.

  “How do they get here?”

  My friend shrugged. “Their pimps drop them off, I suppose. It’s none of my concern.”

  “But what makes this stretch so popular?”

  “Habit. Police protection, how should I know? Word passes round.”

  He spoke excellent English, my friend. I went on staring, bemused, at the cabaret. The sex must be dirt cheap, but how could anyone get turned on in such a setting? I could tell that my friend thought my interest was in poor taste. He glanced at me and settled his eyes back to the gliding, jolting grey road ahead with a frown.

  “Something preys on them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I say. Something kills them. Sometimes they find a body, sometimes nothing but a heap of dirty clothing. Some devil… It’s been going on for a while, maybe years. Many, maybe thirty, fifty girls have died. Or more. Of course the police do nothing.”

  “God, how awful.”

  “It’s a pollution problem,” he added. I was afraid for a moment that he was approving of the predator. But he was a decent enough guy, my friend. “There are monsters who feel they have a right to do away with women of this kind. They are a product of our crazy society, animals like that. A pollution, like the air and the water problems.”

  “But if they’re getting killed, why do they keep on working here?”

  “Why not? What else would they do?”

  Sometimes you’d see an actual deal: a girl leaning into the open door of a halted car. Two of them getting down from the cab of a truck; the second slipped, scraped her bare buttocks on the crusted dirt of the bumper and recovered herself exclaiming, adjusting the grubby scarlet thong that divided her backside. “Grazing the long acre,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  It was an expression my Irish grandmother had taught me. It’s what peasants used to do in the old country, when they had a cow but no pasture. They’d send the kids out to lead her along the roadside and eat weeds. If you say someone’s “grazing the long acre,” it means working the margins, making the best of a bad job, with a little cunning thrown in. I explained this to my friend. He liked “grazing the long acre.” He said it sounded Polish. It made him laugh.

  We drove on south to Czestochowa, where he had business. I went to see the famous icon of the Black Madonna, the most sacred object in Poland — which is saying something in this country full of sainted hallowed holy bones and swords and tombs. In the year 1430 some vandals tried to steal the picture. They couldn’t shift it, so they slashed her face instead. Apparently she started bleeding real blood, and that was the debut of her miraculous career. So the story goes, and there’s still a mark on her cheek to prove it. I didn’t see anything, actually. The place was far too crowded, thick with patriotic crocodiles of schoolchildren and rattling with the brusque, hectoring voices of tour guides. But I bought a postcard.

  Then we went on south to Kraków, where we stayed in a very nice hotel near the Slowacki Theatre. My friend left me alone for long stretches while he did whatever they do, these well-built Polish men in well-made suits, with their big-shouldered physical presence that you could cut with a knife. It was the beginning of April, very cold and not really the tourist season, but I did a lot of sightseeing. One day I went to see what’s left of the Jewish Quarter: which is not much. I sat on a bench next to some dignified memorial or other, in a public garden by the Ariel cafe; which is fashionable with American tourists. I was brought up a Catholic as far as anything, but I’m Jewish enough in ethnic origin that I had a weird sense of belonging, sitting by that cold stone. I thought of the sixty thousand people who had been stripped out of these streets by the Nazis and wondered how they’d feel about their errant child. Jewish Internationalism; that’s me. I’m one place where the old, nation-stateless, assimilating spirit ended up…other than Auschwitz. I tried to visit the Jewish cemetery, but it was all locked up. I walked along by the ballast of the railway line and picked up a blackened larch cone as a memento, which I keep still; I’m not sure why.

  I don’t think my friend liked the fact that I’d been to the ghetto. But we didn’t quarrel. He was never nasty to me, never raised his voice. The day afterward we headed north again. I thought we were going back to Warsaw, but he didn’t say. We went by the same route, on the good old E75. Most foreigners in Poland take the train or fly from one tourist destination to another, unlike my friend, who liked to drive. He didn’t say so but I could tell. To have a big car, to travel big distances under his own power, was important to him; it was like the suits. As soon as we were in open country, clear of the commercial ring around Czestochowa, the whores in their tasteless little outfits were there again. But I was cool about it this time and pretended not to notice. About three in the afternoon he pulled off into a bright, new service area. The middle of the afternoon is hungry-time in Poland, where many people haven’t picked up the unhealthy twentieth century habit of dining in the evening; so I knew we were going to eat. He filled up with petrol, parked beside a black and chrome Cherokee jeep, and guided me into the shiny “Modern Grill Bar,” sat me down, and ordered me a pizza.

  “Just stay there for a while,” he said. “I have to talk to someone.”

  I had a funny feeling. The place was full. No one took any notice of me, but I was uneasy. Outside the big road went by, slicing through the flat, grey empty fields without a glance — on its way to somewhere real. I picked at my pizza, which was god-awful, and watched the family next to me tucking away sour soup, rice with dill and cream, slabs of fried fish, great heaps of meat and potatoes. Another decade of peasant meals without peasant labor, and the great-looking coltish blondes you see in Kraków and Warsaw will be vast. The driver of the Cherokee jeep, a stylish dark-haired woman in a military-grey overcoat, was sitting a few tables away with a cup of coffee. I wondered how old she was. Probably younger than she looked to my foreigner’s eyes, because she had the kind of face you meet more often in Europe than in America, beautiful but toughed-out, as if she’d been living hard and wasn’t ashamed of it. I thought she looked Jewish, which even today is not the most popular ethnicity in this country. She saw me staring and smiled a little. I glanced away.

  At first I couldn’t see where my friend had gone, then I spotted him at a table with two other men the same type as himself. This was normal. It would often happen in restaurants. He’d go off and talk to some buddies and come back after a while. But I had that bad feeling. None of the men so much as glanced my way, and yet I was sure I was the subject of their conversation. And suddenly I knew what was happening. I went cold all over, because I am such a damned fool.

  I was being passed on.

  I stood up, casually as I could make it, thinking
in my mind so my gestures would match I am just taking a trip to the john, to powder my nose. The woman in the grey overcoat had paid for her swift coffee and was leaving. I followed her out, and instead of going to the toilets I put my hand on her arm. I said, in my best Polish, “Can you give me a lift?” She’d seen me come in with a middle-aged local guy. As soon as she heard me speak she knew I was a foreigner. She could probably work out the rest. She didn’t hesitate.

  “Sure, come along.”

  I guessed she might not have been so willing to help if she had known what a clown I was and how richly I deserved the situation I was in. Luckily she didn’t ask for my life story. We went out and climbed into the huge jeep and drove away. If she’d asked me where I was heading I’d have had no answer. I couldn’t speak more than ten words of Polish anyway. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t say a word until we’d been driving for about ten kilometers. “Would you mind,” she said in English then, slowing down. “I have some business.”

  At this point the forest, which is always there on the edge of the cold flat fields, had closed right in on either side of the road. In Poland, you never lose the sense that this country really belongs to the trees. Sometimes they look pretty sick, but they never give up. There were trees in a thick crowd around the long wooden shack and its churned up parking lot. They made the place look kind of sinister, but appealing.

  Inside, the shack was an old-fashioned Polish roadside diner: no plastic, everything wood; mud-coffee and a handwritten menu. For the coffee they don’t use a pot or a filter or anything, they just dump boiling water on a heap of grounds and the rest is up to you. Getting anything other than a mouthful of grit is quite an art. She ordered for both of us without asking what I wanted (I was used to that), and we took our glasses of mud to a table. She offered me a cigarette and lit one herself. Close up she was both more good-looking and more ravaged than she’d seemed back in the Modern Grill. There were crinkly smoker’s creases around her big dark eyes, and a faded scar on her cheek that was only partly concealed by make-up. From the few words she’d spoken I could tell her English was good. I wanted to break the ice and head off some of the questions she was bound to ask: but then I looked around, and I got distracted.

  Our diner was the whores’ restroom. Here they all were, off duty, their peepshow nakedness looking less ridiculous: as if we, fully dressed, were the ones who had stumbled into a chorus-girls’ dressing room. There were a few men, too, eating their meals and joking with the girls in a comradely way, as if this scene was perfectly normal. I couldn’t stop staring. I am not naive, but it was so interesting. There was a constant coming and going. A girl would rush in, pulling a bundle of notes out of her bra. She’d go up to the counter and have an intense discussion with the woman behind it, a narrow-eyed, respectable-looking dame in a rusty brown overall. Some notes would change hands. Sometimes the girl would enlist a friend to help resolve the transaction, and there’d be some sharp exchanges. Or two of them would dive into one of toilet cubicles at the back of the room, and there’d be much laughter and banging before they emerged, eyes bright and make-up slipping. They came in from the road looking exhausted: they left again refreshed, tugging at their underwear; rearranging nearly naked tits in rats’ nests of dirty polyester lace.

  It jolted me a little when I realized that my new friend was equally fascinated. She smoked one cigarette and lit another, in silence: absorbed.

  “Excuse me,” she said at last. “I have to talk to someone.” Off she went, taking her coffee, to chat with a little blonde in a crumpled black vest dress, who’d just walked in.

  Well, here I am again, I thought.

  The great thing about these old East Bloc countries, with the two-tier economies, is that when you find yourself on the street again, suddenly your last scraps of spare change turn into a month’s wages. I looked in my purse. I could eat, I could buy a night’s lodging if it came to that, wash my smalls out in the basin. I had my toothbrush and my lipstick, what more does a girl need? I went up to the counter and ordered a plate of bigos, the universal meat and sauerkraut stew. It came with fresh rye bread. I wolfed it down and lit another cigarette. I felt like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, the ideal of all teenage runaways. I wished the diner was a hotel so I could stay and become part of the louche scene. I wished it was Martinique out there instead of a slab of dour Polsku highway, but you can’t have everything.

  There was a flurry going on among the girls, around the blonde: who was slumped with her head on her folded arms, looking in sore need of a pep-up trip to the john. My friend was in the midst of it. I watched without seeming to care; I didn’t want to be pushy. I wondered what I’d say when she asked me how did I get into this scrape?

  I was at school in Paris. I wasn’t failing, I had friends, I wasn’t taking drugs. Some of my smart and pretty bourgeoisie classmates were selling ass around the Maréchales — that’s a ring of Paris road junctions, all called after old generals, for some reason — for jet-set pocket money: I wasn’t in that league. Maybe I just wanted my parents to take notice. Maybe I resented the way they’d brought me up international, following Daddy’s job all over the world, when I’d have preferred to stay home with my grandmother. I don’t know why I did it. I wanted to have an adventure; I wanted to be in a Howard Hawks movie. So I took a flight to Budapest, to see what I could see.

  I lost my credit cards to a mugger, but otherwise I had a good time. When my cash was running low and I was thinking about phoning home, I met a guy, another American, in a picture gallery. I told him my troubles; he paid the rent I owed at my pension. He took me out to dinner; we went back to his hotel room. It was no different from having an older boyfriend, a grown-up who would naturally pay for everything: until one morning a couple of weeks later I woke up, my friend had checked out, and there was money on the table. Then I understood, but it didn’t matter. He was gone, and I didn’t have to face him.

  Since then I’d been living on my wits. I could have stopped the adventure any time. I didn’t want to. It had been fun riding up and down that big road with my Polish friend. It makes you feel part of something exciting, to be cruising with some guy whose mysterious business is like an intriguing foreign film without subtitles. It makes you feel different. I’d been scared by what had happened, or nearly happened, in the Modern Grill Bar. That had given me a shudder, like the time in Kraków’s Jewish quarter when I’d suddenly realized I was easily Jewish enough to have been shipped out with the others, down the railway line to the death camp.

  I like to choose my friends.

  But it was okay, I’d escaped. Now here I was with this beautiful Jewish-looking woman, who had a thing for hanging out with whores. Another strange encounter, another adventure. I recalled the story of the predator. Was that true, or something my ex-friend had said to scare me? On the wall behind the counter — where a small tv stood, playing a quiz show with the sound turned down — I saw some Missing Person posters, the kind of thing you get in big train stations: a poorly copied black and white photo of some girl or boy. Have You Seen Her? Do You Know Anything…? I didn’t have to know Polish or get close to get the message. There seemed to be a lot of them, among the National Soccer Team pics and the gaudy advertising: graded in age from grey and battered to brand new.

  I fantasized that the Jewish woman and I would investigate. She’d be cynical and wary of getting involved, but my belief in her would swing it: we would be a team. Would she accept that role, playing reluctant good guy to my blunt tomboy, Humphrey Bogart to my Bacall? I wished I could make it happen. Trouble is, you can give yourself the illusion of choice, but you can’t really choose a new protector. They have to choose you.

  I was just beginning to get melancholy when she came back to me. “I’m sorry about that,” she said, with a smile that left her eyes pensive. “We can go now.”

  “What was going on?”

  “Oh, another girl has disappeared, Malga’s friend. The police think she’s dead.�
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  “Oh wow, I heard about that, the killer. They didn’t find a body?”

  She shook her head. Her frown said she didn’t want to dwell on the subject, so I laid off. This time she asked me where I was heading. I said Warsaw for the sake of argument. Her English was very good. We talked, neutral stuff about how I liked Poland and what other countries I’d visited. She knew damn well I wasn’t a tourist, but she’d obviously decided to ask no awkward questions, and I was too proud to throw myself on her mercy. A song I liked came on the radio. I asked her what the words meant and she translated the catch for me —

  If I could spend some time alone with you

  In some place that’s hard to find, but easy to remember…

  I wanted it to be our song, the one that captures almost as an afterthought the whole fragile, bittersweet mood of the movie. I wanted to drive along with her all night. But we only got as far as the next roadside restaurant. This one was more like the Modern Grill in outward appearance, only without the petrol pumps. I wondered, just a little uneasily, what was going on now. Was she going to dump me?

  “You did well to eat at the other place,” she said. “The food here is terrible.”

  It was the same scene as before, except that the clientele was more mixed and the girls were more discreet. They wore coats. The same as before, she bought two coffees (granules from a Nescafé sachet, tasting of grease) and left me on my own. I watched her with the girls. You could see that the news about “Malga’s friend” had hit this place too. They were like little birds, huddling together in an invisible storm. And my friend was in the middle of it. This time I saw the deal. I saw some kind of pills in a clear plastic envelope, slipped from the pocket of the military-grey coat into a hungry teenage hand. You wish there’d be a little more variety, but it’s always either drugs or sex. Always.