Я беру пустяк: анекдот, базарный рассказ—и делаю из него вещь, от которой сам не могу оторваться.
Biore jakąś bagatelkę: anegdotę czy plotkę z rynku—i robię z niej rzecz, od której sam nie mogę się oderwać.
I take a trifle: an anecdote or bit of gossip from the market—and make of it a thing, from which I cannot tear myself away.
– Izaak Babel
Fall has arrived in earnest and my running shorts are a scandal with the bazaar’s elderly clientele. Pani Hania from the dairy shop, a matronly woman with a smile reaching so high up her cheeks that it’s more fixture than expression, has begun calling me “the hot-blooded gentleman.”
I feel particularly exposed in line at the newsstand, which is always slow in the mornings as people wait for their lottery numbers. Pan Grzegorz, the newspaper man, finishes with someone in front of me. “Maybe cigarettes? They’re two for one,” he says, as though perennially disappointed by his patrons.
A woman brushes past and mutters, “Just you wait. Sir will get sick, then we’ll see.”
“Nothing else?” P. Grzegorz asks sadly when I place a paper on his counter. A photo of the prime minister mirrors his hangdog expression under the headline, “Law and Justice silent as fourth wave spreads.”
In Andri and Lenya’s vegetable shop, Lenya is alone with a customer. Chatting with her and Andri over groceries has been my primary contact with the living world while working on my book here in Warsaw, and they’re the only ones with whom I’ve switched to the informal.
“Americans wear short pants all winter long,” Lenya tells her customer matter-of-factly, glancing over at me for confirmation. Her jet black hair is cut short on the sides with long diagonal bangs running across her forehead. Something about the way her eyes peep out from over her large glasses gives the impression of a child caught misbehaving.
“Well, not rea—”
“Oh, that reminds me! Would you consider helping me with English? Think it over, think it over. When I look for work, it’s always ‘English speakers preferred.’ Selling shoes, selling hats...” her voice drops to a conspiratorial hush, “...cleaning rooms, ‘English speakers preferred.’”
My initial impulse, as it has been with all potential obligations of late, is a blanket “no.” I’d come all the way to Poland in search of that most effective of excuses: “alas, I’m not in the country!” But having spent a lonely month or two as the pedantic autocrat of my own calendar, I tell Lenya I’d be glad to.
Andri is unloading crates from his truck in the back alley.
“Your wife mentioned English lessons...or perhaps your sister?” I stumble, realizing I’ve never gotten to the bottom of their relationship.
He blushes, “my mother.”
“Oh! she looks so—”
“Yes yes, everybody says so.”
“Well if you want to join...”
“I do. Yesterday someone came in and asked for ‘an onion,’” he laughs and holds up his hands in defeat.
Turning for home, I tiptoe past the other vegetable stand. On the rare occasions when I do my shopping there instead, the owner’s eyes follow me with mild contempt. Go back to your favorite, I imagine him saying, go back to the Ukrainians. Or perhaps it’s my clothes, or my selection: any idiot can tell those plums are out of season.
My aunt, as my great-grandma did when she was alive, always does her shopping there. The produce is, in fact, fresher and arranged in a more dynamic fashion. There’s more light from the street corner and the owner is wiry, quiet and always on his feet. He has a fine mustache and a kind of roguish charm common among working-class Poles:
“Let’s have some of those hotdogs I like,” I overheard him ask at the butcher’s once.
“Which ones?”
“You know,” he grinned, “the ones I like!”
He looks a decade or two older than his competitors, and there’s something about his and his wife’s guarded manner that recalls a different time; I can imagine my great-grandma asking a pointed question about the price of pickles. My aunt says he helps carry her groceries to the car, or will advise what’s not worth buying; “we don’t have cherries, today.” It’s of a trust more dearly bought, and it makes my rapport with Andri feel cheap.
But, one thing led to another, and my commitment to Andri and Lenya solidified. Once, I set out to buy tomatoes and those at my aunt’s favorite looked shabby; another time, Lenya waved me over and we started chatting; another time, I forgot cash and only Andri’s takes card—and now you see my predicament. When I asked my uncle why he and my aunt preferred one over the other, he shrugged, “someone went once, and then they went again.”
*
In the evening, storefront lights flick off one after the next turning the rosy cobblestone to a burgundy. The sun-washed Pepsi ad plastered over the awning closest to the street is barely legible, and the graffiti covering the other shops acquires a forbidding quality.
P. Hania puts her back into a crate of eggs and trades a joke with the woman from the neighboring stall in a tone that warbles the way brooks and gossip do. She throws me a sly grin when I pass and I laugh, though I didn’t hear what she said. Parked cars begin to grumble.
Andri and Lenya have packed all the produce inside and a stool is out waiting for me. They stand and fidget with the store’s loose ends, replacing a wandering price tag or clementine. We go over vegetable names and easy greetings. I ask how much the potatoes are, where the fruits are from. Andri is happy to fumble through in English, switching to Polish when the mood carries him.
“We opened last spring, right after the vaccines came out, so this’ll be our first winter...there’re more and more Ukrainian vendors at the wholesale market, and farmers too, maybe it’ll give us an edge.”
Lenya keeps an uneasy silence.
“I...” she looks at me ominously from under her glasses when I try to bring her in. “Am?”
“Am...” she glances nervously at a turnip.
“Happy? Sad? Cold?”
“You talk, you talk, I’ll listen. It’s like all the words have left my head. You talk.” As I get ready to leave, Andri calls me back.
How do you say,” he points to an eggplant. He and Lenya both look at me with expectant smiles. “Eggplant.”
They’re not satisfied.
“Well, the British call it an ‘aubergine.’”
“That’s the one, aubergine,” Andri says with relish.
*
My grandma sweeps up her coat and shoes in a bustling outward-bound crescendo: glasses, backpack, handful of vitamins, glance at the clock. She throws a light blue scarf over her sweater and pauses in the mirror to fix a curl; a smolder rises to the surface.
On the first day of her weeklong visit, she has planned lunch with two childhood friends, drinks at a gallery opening with a third, and dinner with a fourth. Her leather jacket flies over the threshold and the front door slams, casting a silence of the sort that follows when a TV is switched off after some time.
Pani Olena—whom my grandma hired to amend my imperfect cleaning efforts—quietly changes into a loose pair of pajama pants and plastic Adidas flip flops. She looks the apartment over with a practiced eye, examining the jars of nuts and dried fruit, absently polishing a splotch from the stainless-steel fridge, passing an investigative finger over the mold in the sink, taking inventory: Clorox, brushes, steel wool...
Spying from my desk in the next room, I feel like I’m both intruding on her impression of privacy and failing in my role as host.
“Could I offer some tea?”
“A large mug will do nicely,” she returns without missing a beat. “And could you find me a good rag? So, you’re a writer? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? Just like my Daryna. Should I clean these jars?”
I scramble like a junior officer, tea kettle in one hand, dish rag in the other. She purses her lips and runs it between her fingers as I bow out of the kitchen.
“I used to clean for Ryszard Matuszewski, the translator and writer—well more of a literary critic. And for his mother, she lived to a hundred and five. I cleaned for Kopalinski too— the one from the dictionaries—for his second family.”
My desk, I realize now, is within earshot of most of the apartment, and the old family photos I’d been pouring over start to blend together.
“His wife always had a certain professor, I won’t say his name, visit in the evenings. Between you and me, the daughter has no more Kopalinski blood in her than I do. Funny thing is though, she looks just like him. But that’s genes for you—so your girlfriend doesn’t clean?”
The sing-song vowels of her east-Slavic accent arpeggiate between hard Russian L’s and I miss the question entirely. She pokes her head into my room to follow up. “Oh! W-well—”
“You don’t have one, huh? These micro-fibers are great, I’ve never seen a mop like this.” I murmur my assent as she begins mopping my room.
“Not many friends either, huh?” Her phone buzzes. “That’ll be my Daryna asking what to make for dinner. Yes, that’ll be her—very attentive, my Daryna.” She peers over at my computer. “How does it work? With Facebook. You can just type in someone’s name and their picture comes up? I don’t know much about that sort of thing. You could just type in ‘Daryna’? How does it work?”
She hovers expectantly and I pull up Facebook.
“It’s: D-A-R-Y-N-A. No, no. Oh, that’s her! Pretty, no?”
I concur demurely and beat a hasty retreat to the shower.
“Pretty girl” I hear her say to herself after I leave, and I hardly emerge from my steamy refuge before her voice finds me again.
“I love these kinds of old albums,” she says, dusting the pictures on my desk. “What’s with his hat? Must have been some sort of Turk.”
I drip over in my towel and relay with confidence that my great-grandfather was a Lithuanian farmer.
She eyes his hat apprehensively. “My brother and I were born in Siberia, my sister later once we got to Ukraine. I’m year of the horse,” she says as if that explains it, “we were born galloping across Europe—aren’t you cold in that towel?”
“I’ll go put on some—”
“Looks like you exercise, just like my Daryna—she started secondary school without a word of Polish, finished with top marks, top marks. Above a lot of the Poles even—door open or closed? Open, open” she urges with an endearing smile before I can reply.
*
Andri leans against the shop as he smokes a cigarette and plays with his hoodie, pulling it low over a pair of thoughtful eyes and sandwiching his cheeks. Though he can’t be much older than twenty-one, he nods and exhales with the self-assurance of a man in his thirties.
“Mom decided to practice her vocab more on her own, so it’s just you and me.” The wiry owner of the neighboring shop yells, “she’s stealing your car!”
Andri forces a laugh and shouts something back, then rolls his eyes and gestures to me, ‘yap yap yap.’
They’re the only two storekeepers left open aside from the woman at the salon, whose silver tools flutter over one last client’s nails. The glow from their windows pours over empty wooden fruit and vegetable racks, and tapers along the corrugated aluminum storefronts lining the alley: Anya’s Pierogi, Tailor and Seamstress, Kufta Kebab...
Andri tosses his cigarette and waves us inside. Setting the kettle, he describes the psychological battle he’s been waging against his competitor. “I try and open before him and leave my lights on later. He’ll start thinking, ‘fuck, he’s always here.’”
He places two mugs of instant coffee over a crate and offers me the stool as he perches next to the bananas. Another shopkeeper, with a sharp, hawkish expression pops his head in and fires a joke in Ukrainian.
Andri laughs and explains. I understand, “...English lessons...New York...”
His friend looks at me sardonically, “Coca Cola! Marlboro!” He nabs a grape.
“Hey, hey! Two złoty!”
Andri turns back to me still wearing a lopsided grin, and for a brief moment I see him as a young boy.
“We’ve been back and forth, but there’s no work at home. Politicians are all paid off... they’ve been rebuilding the road in front of our house for a decade; taxis refuse to drive up. We’ve been trying to get my grandma to come here but you know how old people are...all her friends, cousins. We had to sell the farmhouse when my grandad passed away. Apartments come and go, but a house like that should stay in the family.”
The woman from the salon waves as she heads home. “Maybe you’ll teach me next!” she winks.
Andri laughs. “Her dad was from the village next to my grandad’s, so I call her auntie now.”
His phone buzzes. “That’s my wife,” he says with a coy smile. It rings again. “Ah, and now my mom.”
*
My uncle delights in gestures of kindness and suffers the melancholy of farewells. When we take my grandma to the airport, he sinks into a quiet stupor. “I much prefer waiting in arrivals,” he murmurs as we watch her navigate through security.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” a stewardess grimaces in accented English at a man with a thick beard. He points insistently to a creased paper document and tries to press it into her hand.
“When one comes to the airport, one must have the correct identification.”
She picks up the phone. “Listen, can you grab someone from Emirates? I can’t understand a word this man is saying...I know, I know.” She eyes his duffle bag. “You got that right.”
By evening, my uncle has regained some of his humor and he entertains a small gathering for my aunt’s birthday.
“There was a live wire dangling over the river—“
“The Bug or the Narev?” my aunt calls from the kitchen.
“No no, on the Vistula—and some kind of sick impulse came over me...”
“Can you believe the idiot?” My aunt calls again.
He raises his arms and looks at us significantly, closing his two heavy fists over an invisible line, “hell of a kick!”
Talk turns to politics and Poland’s socio-economic potential.
“They’re filling ministry positions like a family business...‘how about your brother then?’”
“...Łukashenko packs the border with Iraqis and now we need the E.U...”
“...an agricultural economy falling straight into the third-world trap, which only South Korea...”
“Not to mention a third-rate education system...”
“As an educator of over thirty years...”
My aunt’s beautifully manicured fingers arrange pineapple, cheesecake, chocolates, and an experimental chia-mango moose on the table—my uncle catches one of her hands, like he might a leaf from the air, and presses it to his lips.
Don’t be ridiculous” she waves him away, fighting a smile. She’s an editor for a leading Polish dictionary; when I ask about work, she sighs, “I’m almost through with ‘E.’ Twenty-eight more to go.” Sometimes I’m not sure if they speak the same language.
“...I’m just glad our grandparents aren’t alive to see the country now,” someone’s voice cuts in.
“Don’t say that—how can you say that?” my uncle interjects and my aunt looks over at him fondly.
*
A house has a way of telling you when it’s time to leave. Sometimes it’s a smell. A poem has a way of telling you when it wants to be written—in a dark movie theater or after you’ve lent your pen to someone on a plane, when you’re late or as a train roars into the station... Sometimes your passions whisper, a friend told me once.
Standing in line at the pharmacy to buy Vitamin D (which normally comes from the sun), I wonder if I’m listening carefully enough.
There’s a word in Polish for the greyness of early winter. I’ve canceled on friends and stopped going to the movies. I deleted my uneventful foray in Polish dating apps and, to the credit of these noble sacrifices, spent many fidgety hours a day at my desk.
I know the airy sound the doors make before they slam in the draft, and where to catch every mirror on the way from my room to the kitchen.
One of the pharmacists is on the phone: “it comes to 79 złoty and 8 cents. Yes. Yes. Yes...with the Echinacea it’s...”
In his historical handbook for aspiring Poles, Norman Davies writes that harsh winters helped foster isolated and self-sufficient Polish communities.
I imagine my great-grandma growing old alone. I imagine finding her in the night, like I used to when I was a child, her ancient body with its sharp bones and long skin stooped in prayer, muttering, “oh Lord, take me from this world.”
“Next!”
I ask for Biotin and earn myself a sideways glance; if your hair falls out and no one’s around to see it, are you still going bald?
“...alright Magda, dear, be well.”
(Part 1)
Nicolas Vivas Nikonorow, a writer and cello tutor, raised in New York City, living in Warsaw. Graduate of Manhattan School of Music and Yale University, currently studying Musicology at the University of Warsaw.
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