Notes from Warsaw (2)

Andri’s the first person I’ve talked to all week when I swing by for English practice in the evening and I eagerly plumb his company. It’s too cold so he’s drawn a map for how he’ll organize the fruits inside.

“What do you think?” Rain drizzles from the apples as he sets the crate on the rack.

He’s wearing a thick waterproof jacket and checks his phone with an exasperated sigh. “Another case in school—he’s only had a few weeks total because someone keeps getting sick. They say COVID, but they don’t have a rug—can you explain to me what kind of preschool doesn’t have a rug? They probably let them run around barefoot too...” he grumbles, pulling his beanie over a skin tag on his left eye, then laughs, suddenly remembering a story:

“I went to the flea market the other day to buy my wife a winter coat. It’s mostly Chinese, Turkish, and African folks over there, lotta Ukrainians too, but they’re all shopping. Anyway, one of the Chinese women is calling me over. I tell her I just spent my last penny on the coat but she keeps calling and calling: ‘Just come. I need to tell you something.’ So I walk over and lean in; she whispers, ‘socks are three for ten.’”

He chuckles then catches someone’s eye through the window. “Ah, Panie Darku! I think you owe me a cigarette—maybe even two!”

We step outside to smoke. Pan Darek raises his lighter at the timorous pace of old age, concentrating all his energy on keeping a steady hand until a cloud billows from beneath his low- fitting cap.

Someone mentions soccer; the boys need a win.

“How about these Russians lads on the border?”

“My grandma didn’t mention anything—reporters dramatize,” Andri replies. “You know Ukraine makes one of the strongest tanks in the world—I’m serious!—but they sell them off. You’d think we’d keep at least a few for ourselves.” He laughs and excuses us, adding “I’ll have the groceries over in thirty.”

When I look at him curiously, he shrugs, “not bad to get a few deliveries in at the end of the day...also, I like him. You know how most people are...nice and pleasant, but deep down they see me as a foreigner. He has a heart condition...I want him to live a little longer,” he smiles. “Need a lift?”

*

Like the Ghibli, which blows off the Libyan highlands and dusts the Mediterranean with sands from the Sahara, the polar Zonda, whose white winds cover the Andean glaciers in drifts, or the Chinook, which waters the Pacific rainforests and Rockies before raking its dry tongue across the Great Plains—the Halny has left century-old scars among local highlanders, the górale of the Polish and Slovak Carpathians.

In mid-February, just after it sweeps through the Tatras, the storm lands in Warsaw and I find the bazaar a-titter over a car accident. One of the butchers is on the phone, “...it just went up in flames, luckily the brigade came before it really got going...”

She and her partner wear matching red aprons with a battle-ready bearing appropriate to the profession. “The second he heard the sirens, lad ran off, yep, yep—listen, I’ll call you back...”

By the time I get to the vegetable shop, I’m caught up in the excitement.

“Oh yes,” Lenya replies quietly, sorting the oranges and avoiding my eye, “right in front of our store too. I don’t mind a bit of rain or snow you know, but when it’s windy like this...”

On my way to family dinner in the evening, a message alert warns to “remain indoors, if possible.” A gust slams my uncle’s front door behind me.

“There it is!” he exclaims.

“Just a draft...” my aunt replies dryly. “The air pressure in the house is different from the one outside,” she explains as we sit to eat.

“Air pressure’s an awfully big word for wind,” my uncle smirks, reaching to serve her plate.

“Can you just worry about yourself,” she snatches it back and turns to me, “salad?”

“Growing boy needs more noodles,” my uncle argues.

“If he wants more, he can serve himself.”

As we wash the dishes, I mention this sort of weather can affect peoples’ moods.

“Yes,” my aunt nods sympathetically, “some people are particularly susceptible to meteorology.”

*

The following Thursday, another phone alert announces that Russian troops have marched into Ukraine, North from Crimea, West into Donetsk and South toward Kiev. My mom calls, “maybe it’s time you come home, huh?” People I haven’t heard from in a long while send curious texts.

I go to check on Andri and his mother. They’re video-chatting with family and attending a long line of customers with a sleepless, transactional numbness. Someone in line gently asks the question on all our minds.

“We’re telling them, ‘go to the basement, take some blankets, and cans’—or you know, food that will keep for a few days” the words spill from Lenya and her accent is thicker than usual. “Sirens are going off in our village—who knew we had sirens?—they might be in the line of Russian advance.”

A teary voice calls her back to the phone and she switches to Ukrainian.

The line instinctively clusters nearer the register. An elderly lady pockets her change and lingers by the clementines; a teenager holds one long carrot.

“It’s hard to know...how,” Andri tries to satiate our hungry silence, “it’s hard to know how to help.”

“Raspberries?” he suggests, gesturing to the dull berries with a sheepish smile as I’m paying. “Oh—and listen! Let’s postpone English for a couple weeks, yeah? With all this...”

*

Cellphone footage from Kyiv shows civilians lining up for arms and basic military instruction. A woman rushes by with long pink fingernails. A student steps away with a rifle that’s longer than his torso. It lies across him, in the way guns do, and changes his gait to the recognizable swagger that is the signature of armed men.

The store is packed even though the produce has a day-old tarnish. Someone in line asks about collection.

“Yes, I’ll have more information in the next few days,” Lenya answers briskly, not for the first time. “We’ll be distributing to twenty families or so...”

A man in line raises his eyebrows as his wife hands him a bag of half-sour pickles, whose deep green suggests they’re rapidly becoming ‘full-sour.’

“They’ll be fine,” she hisses, slapping him lightly on the chest.

“Andri found some day-work,” Lenya tells me at the counter, fixing her glasses with one hand and reaching for my groceries with the other. “You know, construction, whatever pays—I don’t ask. So I’m alone.” She surveys the crowd wearily. “Of course, now the store’s busier than ever...”

She weighs my tomatoes. “He’s shouting at me, tells me he wants to go fight—and, you know, I’m...” she corrals an apple onto the scale. “I’m his mother...” She looks up at me and adjusts her glasses with the corner of a knuckle. “I ask him, ‘what are you going to do?...you’ve never held a gun in your life, what’re you going to do?’”

I nod as she looks back down to punch in the key codes, “anything else?”

“Maybe a pineapple...”

“They’re delicious, help yourself—I tell him, ‘you can help from here, every little bit counts,’ help from here.’” She sighs as she hands me my change. “But, then again, if they were fighting in our village, I don’t think anyone could stop me.”

When I step into Anya’s Pierogi, I see a phone lying beside every pair of hands along the flour-powdered countertop. The woman carrying trays of freshly-folded dumplings to the vat of boiling water balances hers in the crook of her neck between her headscarf and shoulder.

Pani Anya takes a call outside. She holds a cigarette in one hand and presses the back of her palm to her forehead. 

In the evening, I get a text from a friend in New York, “Yo, have you seen any refugees? Must be wild.”

*

“Yes, it’s horrible, my brother’s dead.” P. Olena’s monologue streams into the apartment as if she began speaking on the stairs up. “Not from the war, he went to the basement for some jam and on the way back up—blood clot or something—I won’t be able to go for the funeral.”

“S-so sorry to hear,” I stumble.

“Only sixty-five, might’ve lived a while longer,” she reflects while taking off her coat and changing into her work pajamas. “My older daughter and her two kids, just arrived from Lviv and the kids started school last week, twelve and thirteen. They put them back a year—the fuss they made! Nikolay’s a good kid—lots of Ukrainians here already, you know, so he made friends, but Daryna—what am I saying—Danya, she sits off by herself. And my god already with the makeup. She spent too much time with her father.”

“But do they speak any Polish?” I ask, fighting to keep apace.

P. Olena laughs, “‘good morning’ and ‘goodbye.’ That’s it. Yesterday Danya asked me what chemistry means. In Ukraine we call it, ‘chimia,’ here you say ‘chemia.’ If she can’t figure that out. ‘Why didn’t you go ask the other Ukrainians?’ I said to her. ‘Make some friends?’— Nikolay was always my daughter’s, Danya was her father’s.”

“It must be difficult.”

“It is, it is. But my youngest, Daryna—you looked her up on the internet last time— started without a word of Polish, and finished with top marks. This is her here” she says pulling out her phone. “Oh wait no, these are the flowers she bought me. She swipes. Here’s an old tree...tree again—I like that sort of thing—here I am,” she giggles. “Oh, here she is. And here she took me to dinner,” she zooms in, “pretty girl...looks like my mother.”

She swipes again and a picture of a shelled apartment building pops up. She shuts her phone off quickly. “They were sending pictures from Kyiv...I-I don’t know why they keep downloading onto my phone, I can’t look. All bombed up, can’t recognize a thing—I spoke with my uncle in St. Petersburg, he says—you don’t speak Russian do you?”

“No.”

“He says, ‘don’t worry, it’s just a special operation to displace the Nazi regime.’” She taps her head. “It’ll end up like North Korea over there, I’m telling you.”

I hand her a cup of tea and a slice of cake with walnuts, imagining myself quite the gentleman.

“Not bad! I’ll tell Daryna, ‘Victor, knows how to make breakfast all on his own,’” she nudges me with a wink. “Eh? Or should I say Witold? My grandparents used to call me ‘Alena’—that’s Byelorussian for Olena—in those days there were, Poles, Byelorussians, Russians of course too, all mixed together. For example your grandmother has that Turk for a father.”

“Lith-Lithuanian” I stammer, all gentlemanly composure lost.

P. Olena gives me a dubious look and begins scrubbing the sink. “Well, there you go.”

*

Streaks of grey hair and crow’s feet place my driving instructor, Pan Marek, over a certain threshold of youth. But he says goodbye to the young woman before me with a boyish energy, laughing with the whites of his eyes and squirming in his seat like a dog hoping for a treat.

The car, in which I’m acting out my own boyhood desire of learning how to drive stick- shift, has the dank smell of vaped tobacco and a large “L” announcing my incompetence from the roof. After my prettier counterpart leaves, P. Marek assumes a more dignified air, rolling off homely instruction that veers toward a rhyming meter like a shopping cart favoring its right side.

“Foot on the brake, foot on the clutch, into reverse. Turn on your signal, look out your window, now put us in first.”

I hiccup into the right lane.

“Second, now third, mind the curb.”

“So, how’s business been during COVID?” I venture at a red.

“Never better!” The puppy is back in an instant. “Suddenly everyone wants a car. But, you know, this whole pandemic...” he shakes his head. “Who’s making a buck? You’re telling me everyone in the hospital has COVID—know how much a COVID bed costs? Three thousand a day, feel me? Three thousand—left turn signal, check the window—I read an article about euthanasia, they ran out of beds in Germany. I mean it’s a calculus they have to make, right? You need ten beds, ten old people disappear, it’s a calculus.”

“Well hospitals have been overwhelmed...” I say pathetically, as my multi-tasking brain tries to sort the calculus of three mystifying pedals.

“Notice how no one’s talking about it now? The war started and COVID disappeared— into third, mind the curb—who’s talking about anti-vaxers now?"

“Maybe they all died off,” I suggest curtly, raising my foot from the clutch too fast and sending us skipping past the Palace of Culture.

He laughs. “Traffic is slowing, so we’re shifting down,” he glances out the window “second then first...we’re moving through town.” He completes the rhyme like an afterthought while packing his vape.

Refugees in bulky winter jackets cluster around white tents near the central train terminal. A middle-aged woman in a practical pair of sneakers rolls on the balls of her feet and holds a plastic bag stretched to transparency with clothes. Children offer stuffed animals and other colorful tokens of friendship to a volunteer dressed as a unicorn.

“Here we are then,” P. Marek says, taking a long drag and furrowing his brow as though urging his verse to higher reflection, “carefully translocating, peacefully arbitrating, and...” he pauses for effect, “mindfully, finding ourselves.”

“Following yesterday’s attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant,” a newscaster on the radio announces, “stores have been cleared out of Lugol’s fluid.”

“Do they know something we don’t?” I joke as he turns it up.

“...we’d like to remind listeners that consuming Lugol’s fluid as a prophylactic can have serious side-effects...”

“Remember what happened with a little place called Chernobyl?” P. Marek asks. “Foot on the clutch, foot on the break—WWII was Hitler and another guy too, Stalin. Feel me? U.S gave it to them good. We’ll see what happens this time around.”

“I don’t think Biden would ever put troops on the ground.”

He turns back to the window and repacks his vape pensively. Twilight mingles with headlights as traffic begins its evening descent into a melancholy wonder.

“What’re you learning stick for anyway?” he asks as we pull back into the lot. “Engine off, handbrake up, and don’t forget the lights.”

“Quick getaway” I laugh “...maybe a road trip in the summer.”

“Ah,” he nods sagely, “bit of careful translocation, huh?”

*

The forsythia dance merrily from the fenced lots in the alleys as I jog to the bazaar. It’s not quite eight o’clock, and a handful of customers weave among the shopkeepers still setting out crates of apples and pears alongside trays of early berries. A boy flaps his arms trying to keep the straps of his Spiderman backpack over his shoulders.

“...we need a playmaker, not just a star...”

“...Kefir is up to 6.99, farmer’s cheese 11.99, Greek yogurt...”

“...he’ll catch his death in those shorts, mark my...”

A tall cart with shelves of fresh bread, sweet poppy-seed buns, and rose donuts rolls by. I buy a discretionary sample of each and head to Andri and Lenya’s to see about some vegetables.

It takes me a moment to realize that Lenya, standing absently by the register, is at the root of the space’s unease. The door shuts behind me before she looks up.

“Victor! How are you, did Andri call?”

“No...I don’t think so.”

“He said he’d call...he probably hasn’t had time.”

“I...is-is everything alright?” I say taking closer notice of her pale face and reading in her swollen features the markings of an unkind night.

“He’s on his way back” she says in a dry voice, “crossing the border today...or tomorrow.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Yesterday, he—sorry, I haven’t slept, and then picking up the produce this morning—”

Her knuckles are white on the countertop and I help her into a stool. An acidic unease settles as I cross the fourth wall of clementines and tropical fruit that has separated me from the register these past months.

She sits and her breath comes in short, halting stutters. “My mother’s not well...I hardly got out of bed this morning...but there’s credit on this place after all...”

“Calmly, calmly. I’ll put on some tea?”

“My sister has been calling...then the news from Mariupol...”

The electric kettle rumbles good-naturedly. “Let’s take a breath, in through your nose...”

She obliges but the words tumble out again when she exhales. “A friend was driving down with donations so they gave him a lift—it was a chilly morning, I wonder...”

“And in again,” I interrupt, glancing over the countertop. A ribbon curls out of the price gun and sticks to a puddle around a half-sliced watermelon. The cash drawer, just ajar, reveals a muddle of coins and paper bills. A laminated file of key codes reads: “...14 aronia, 45 quince, 162 canned horseradish...”

Lenya takes another deep breath as a petite woman rolls her shopping cart into the store.

“Kilo of brussel sprouts please, a few carrots, cucumbers, radishes—are these tomatoes Polish?”

Without thinking, I reach for a bag and make for the sprouts as Lenya jolts out of her stupor.

“Yes!” she replies, “and they’ve just started taking this beautiful red. How many would you like?”

“Four, if you please, and which potatoes do you think will do best in a broth? I’m here with the cart,” the lady explains.

“That’ll be the Orliks.” Lenya bustles over to the potatoes as I estimate how many fistfuls of sprouts make a kilo. “Just picked them up today, nice and firm—like so?”

“Maybe a couple more...”

“Anything else? Some watermelon?” Lenya asks amiably. “This little slice comes out to twenty flat.”

“Well...I suppose the kids might...”

“I caught my baby grandson with half a melon—” Lenya laughs, turning to me, though her eyes remain fixed on the woman—“hiding in the shower, all sticky, spitting seeds left and right...”

“Go on then, go on,” the lady concedes, “I’ll get Paweł to help me drag this thing up the stoop.”

Lenya places the cling-wrapped melon in the cart and I hand over the sprouts like a hard- won treasure.

The kettle clicks off and Lenya fills two mugs.

“Forgive me. Between the wholesale market, and setting up here, I haven’t had time to process. My mother fell ill. The stress or...I don’t know, she’s older now. I was going to get her—you know, women are allowed to cross in and out—I should have realized he was planning something, didn’t say a word all day.”

“But surely he isn’t planning on fighting?” I ask.

“I don’t know. For now he’s just checking on my mother.” Lenya swirls her teabag once and tosses it in the trash.

“I’m sure...I’m sure he’ll be alright.”

“But what was he thinking,” she snaps, glaring up. “His wife and child...”

A man comes in with a baseball cap curved low over his brow. “Do you sell blenders?...Or a food processor?”

“Yes, we have one right up...Victor, would you mind?”

“Think I could throw kale in this thing?” he asks, turning the box over along with several months’ dusty dew.

“Oh yes,” Lenya replies gravely, “though you might give the leaves a soak first.”

“And how are you managing?” I probe, as the man leaves, box under his arm. “With the crates and what not...the apples?”

“I’m used to heavy lifting...during tourist season in Odessa, me and the girls would load up like packhorses,” she shakes her head wistfully. “Once we started making a bit of money, we hired a boy.”

“Well, if you ever need someone—”

“That’s very kind,” she says, wiping the melon juice from the counter and looking away.

“And-and how does selling clothes compare?”

“With a shirt, at least you know where you stand. At least it won’t start rotting in the back of your store. And if you do sell it, you might actually turn a bit of profit—know how much I bought those apples for? The lettuce, peppers, sprouts too—they’re really just to round out the selection—radishes, sometimes, if you sell them all. You make a little on potatoes, onions— things that can sit around. And the oranges, pineapples, berries...Andri has a nice way of offering the fruit.”

A woman in a dark suit places three pears on the counter. “I’m really here for the honey,” she whispers, “nothing too sweet.”

“That’ll be willow then, good for circulation, builds the immune system...”

“And delicious,” I add tentatively.

The woman acknowledges my comment with a nod, and Lenya beckons me behind the counter as she types up the receipt. “This way if I do need you, at least you’ll know how—Oh, that’s Pani Małgorzata in the back there, she’ll want two kilos of loose oats...”

I jump to help, and the better part of the morning soon slips away in the bazaar’s mild ebb and flow. I crane for cans of tomato paste and chicken stock, and learn the distinguishing features of regional fudge.

“Such tall handsome boys you always have helping you,” an elderly woman says with a twinkle.

Lenya forces a laugh, “yes, well...we have to maintain a standard!”

I blush and hand her a misprinted receipt.

**

Photo Nicolas V. Nikonorow

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.