Here Is Where We Meet (20 page)

It is a swing, an indoor swing. The seat of polished slats (the horizontal stroke of the A) is high off the ground. It was made not for a child but for a woman, perhaps when she announced she was going to have a baby. A throne, a rocking chair, a nursing seat, a swing, a perch. I undo the cord attachment and gently push the seat. It soars, comes back, soars . . . I hear the clock ticking. I remember the first time I was here and how I helped Mirek move the swing from the room where we ate into this room with a bed in it. I remember how he looked at the swing when we had placed it in its new position. He looked at it as if it were a relic.

Mirek has the talents of both poacher and innkeeper (the lean and the well-fed man) and these serve him well for the clandestine jobs he finds and performs in Paris: building chimneys, laying tiles, constructing verandas, mending roofs, installing central heating systems, building duplex apartments, or repainting a bedroom with a specially chosen colour, for Parisians. He is strong with sharp eyes and the methodical intelligence of an engineer. He has something else too, his own way of planning each job, for no two jobs are the same.

When he was at school and living in his mother’s small house in Zamość, his mother’s brother, Zanek, lived with them. Zanek was almost totally paralysed. He could not speak and he noticed everything!

Everything – that’s why I loved him. After school I would go and talk with him, for we invented a language between us, a language like no other, neither Polish nor Russian, nor Lithuanian, nor French, nor German, a language in which we could say what nobody else said; maybe every love invents a vocabulary, a cover to shelter under. With him I discovered something I’ve never forgotten.

Zanek spent the days alone in the house in Zamość because his sister went to work. Before she left, she arranged the day’s newspaper for him. He read everything in it and couldn’t turn the page. In December 1970 Polish soldiers in Gdansk were ordered to fire on Polish workers, who were on strike in protest against rising prices and the lack of food, and that morning Zanek asked his sister to leave the radio on. Usually his days were silent.

Mirek pondered all this while he was at school. He started making diagrams and eventually he built a radio with a control system whose switches his uncle, lying immobile on the bed, could operate with his nose!

No two jobs are the same.

In Paris Mirek learnt how to work and remain unnoticed – taking a painter’s ladder out of a car or dumping sacks of gravel into a street container at the wrong moment can lead to questions and speedy repatriation. He discovered where to buy materials and to pay for everything on the spot with cash. He got used to insisting in his elementary French and not answering back, listening, waiting and making certain that he was paid as promised. With the money he earnt and hid away, he dreamt of what he would one day build at home. He bought, after five years in Paris, a two-roomed flat in Warsaw. He had further dreams. He became another Polish Rider but older. Meanwhile he lived with what fitted into two suitcases and with a few dozen Polish songs, including several that his uncle loved to listen to on the radio.

I give the swing another push. It goes high, and when it returns, soars as high as my head.

In Paris women fell in love with Mirek – Polish women who, after many tribulations, had settled abroad to earn a living independently, or pursue their careers. Some fell in love with him for a second time, for they had known him when he was a student. He took them fishing on the Marne at night. He cooked borsch for them. They spent whole Sundays in bed. They watched satellite Polish TV. When they were with him, it was as if he stopped danger existing.

One by one, each did her best to persuade him to join her in Germany, in Switzerland, in Houston, USA, and stay for good. There are more Poles in Chicago than in any other city of the world after Warsaw. These women had sustained their courage alone and they knew they must refuse to look back: only look ahead. They still loved eating ice cream. And each, in her own way, sharply wanted Mirek at her side. None of them, however, could contemplate returning with him to Poland and having children who would go to school and fall in love there, and in their turn have to leave and say goodbye. Mirek, each one of them told him in her own words, you’re my dream, but you don’t understand women!

And so, two years ago, Mirek looked at the swing as if it were a relic.

A knock on the door. No vehicle has drawn up. I cross the porch whose broken windows have been replaced with dark polystyrene panels and open the sagging door. Bogena is holding out a bowl of eggs. For the sorrel soup, she says. Bogena, except for regular errands to Zamość and the occasional visit to Lublin, has never left the village. This is evident in the way she observes me standing in the doorway of this house she has always known. The uninhabited and visited house. The house without a doorstep. I thank her and she turns away, walking at a pace that hasn’t changed for years.

I peel and slice the potatoes and cut the bacon into small pieces and wash the leeks. Their outer leaves pull off like satin sleeves and the ones disclosed glisten. Towards their heads, earth, as it always does, has infiltrated between the skins, so I make a short vertical cut and flicker through the skins like pages and wash out the irritating dirt. Cutting the leeks into round slices, the knife makes a ratchet noise, which is one of the oldest sounds I remember.

Four days ago, Mirek married Danka. They’ll be here in an hour.

Danka was born in Nowy Targ in Galicia. Under socialism there was a shoe factory in the small town employing over three thousand workers. It was the country’s largest shoe factory, established there because of the long-standing local tradition of working with skins and hides from the cattle of the nearby Carpathian Mountains. Now the factory is closed and the town poor. Nobody starves in Nowy Targ as they do in Milano or Paris, but there’s a pall of silence over the town for there are no projects to discuss. The town lives, like dust, from day to day. And its six or seven taxis wait discreetly, just off the main square, for the occasional fare, usually a foreigner. Danka is the youngest of five children. Her father worked in the factory. Her aunt has two cows.

She left Nowy Targ nine years ago, at the age of eighteen, to go to Paris where she eventually found work as a maid. Paid like a cleaner, she in fact brought up the two children of her employers, who leased her a small room above the garage where they kept their cars. There she slept and there the children – when they were old enough – sneaked in to hear bedtime stories. Within a couple of years Danka spoke a fluent French.

Mirek met Danka on a Friday night, her night off, at a birthday party of a mutual Polish friend in Paris.

I’m turning the leeks and the bacon and the potatoes in a frying pan, and I’m inventing their love story.

They both noticed one another that first evening. He was fifteen years older than she. She noticed how he talked. He talked like a horseman who had studied at some distant university, but she was not intimidated. He noticed her shoulders, neck and mouth; they shared a kind of insistence, the insistence of a goose in flight. At one moment he put his hand on her shoulder and she responded without a word. She spoke little; she preferred her thoughts to be read. At the end of the evening he offered her a lift home in his car, and on the way she told him about the children she was looking after, and he told her about his flat in Warsaw. Into the car stereo he put a CD of the Warsaw group, Budka Suflera (Prompter’s Box).

When they reached her employer’s house, the car stopped, but she didn’t get out, and the car turned round to go to the other side of Paris where Mirek had his room.

Red poppies already here
beloved body already sore
to our foreheads apply
the cool salt of Wieliczka.

The next time they met, they showed one another photographs and he cooked for her.

Where did you learn to cook so well?

I’ve been teaching myself for twenty years.

She said it would be better if he slept with her in her room for then they wouldn’t have to get up so early.

And the patronne? he asked.

I pay her rent for my room, she said, you can sleep in my bed all day long if you like.

I’m slipping everything from the frying pan into a saucepan of salted, boiling water.

After two weeks Danka announced that, ideally, she would like to have at least two children.

Two?

One after the other, quick, so you’re not too old!

Me too old!

Not now – but in ten years when you’re teaching them to fish, or when you’re climbing Mount Trzy Korony with them for the first time!

Have you climbed it?

With my brother when I was a kid. We saw some mouflon. Ouch! Men never get used to undoing hooks. Let me.

I’m cutting up the sorrel leaves with my pocket knife. Finely and not too finely. It should look like green confetti.

When it was confirmed that she was one and a half months pregnant, they agreed to get married after the baby was born.

In a few weeks we’ll know, he said, whether it’s a boy or a girl.

A wedding in Nowy Targ! she said. No, she wouldn’t dream of getting married in Paris!

In Paris they will buy a wedding dress.

Choosing a wedding dress is unlike choosing any other garment. The bride, when dressed, has to appear to have come from a place where nobody present has ever been, because it is the place of her own name. The woman to be married becomes Bride the moment she is transformed into a stranger. A stranger so that the man she is marrying can recognise her as if for the first time; a stranger so she can be surprised, at the moment when they make their vows, by the man she is marrying. Why are brides ritually hidden before the ceremony? It is to facilitate the transformation whereby the bride appears to have come from the other side of a horizon. The veil is the veil of that distance. A woman who has lived her whole life in the same village walks down the aisle of her village church as a bride, and to all those watching she becomes, for an instant, unrecognisable, not because she is wearing a disguise, but because she has become a newcomer being greeted on arrival.

Danka, after much delicious hesitation, chose her dress of arrival. It had a scooped neckline, bare shoulders with lace trimming, a sheath bodice with a thousand silver threads, and a satin skirt with flounces and twelve white roses of organza. It cost the equivalent of four months of her wages. Don’t think twice, Mirek said. A Parisian dress in lace and satin and with flounces as wide as a bed – selling it when we get to Warsaw will be child’s play!

So we can leave it to Olek? she asked. By now they knew she was carrying a boy.

Their plan was to move into the flat in Warsaw, which they would later exchange for a slightly larger one. Mirek would start a business installing bathrooms, jacuzzis, saunas, etc. He didn’t want to work like a mule on building sites any more; he’d become an ablutions specialist. And in the larger flat, when they found it, Danka would run a nursery looking after other babies as well as her own.

I put on the eggs to boil. From over the shallow sink to above where the logs are stacked beside the kitchen stove runs a clothes line for drying linen. Since the house has been empty for months, nothing is drying on it; all that hangs there is a soup ladle whose bowl has been reworked and pinched together in such a way that it has a throat and a lip to pour from; it has been transformed into an improbable multipurpose utensil for distributing soup, serving custard, and pouring steaming jam into pots. In one of the stories I do not know of this house without women, men too must have made jam.

Olek weighed 4.2 kilos at birth. He was delivered in a hospital in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris. Danka’s employers arranged for her to have papers and a work permit so that she wouldn’t have to leave them before they found someone reliable to replace her. She’s irreplaceable! said the man. Everyone is replaceable, said the woman.

When Danka returned to her room above the garage, the expression of plenitude on her face had not diminished. Instead of listening to herself, she listened, day and night, to the sounds that came from her boy. Within a week she restarted work, taking Olek everywhere with her. The daughter of the house, aged five, declared she wanted a baby. A baby like him. She was watching Danka breastfeed Olek. After she said this, she let her head fall against Danka’s shoulder, as if sharing the worries of motherhood.

Amongst their Polish friends in Paris, Olek was passed from hand to hand, the men’s hands often swollen or bruised, roughened by cement, the women’s hands sometimes over-pink as if over-licked from the incessant work of ironing and washing. Everyone agreed that the baby looked like Mirek, the same wide hands, the same blue-grey eyes. And look! Look! He has the same ears. Perhaps Mirek, with a father’s pride, was trying to look like his son.

Were I to have another life, born on another continent, there would, I believe, be one kind of gathering which, should I ever come across it, I would unerringly identify as Polish, even if I didn’t know where Poland was!

A small room. People seated on chairs, a stool, a click-clack bed, backs to the wall. In the middle of the crowded, small room, on the floor, a baby asleep in a carrycot. They are talking, knitting, telling stories, cutting a sausage, discussing prices, yet the gaze of them all repeatedly returns to the carrycot as if it were a fire whose flames draw their attention. Every so often one of them gets up to look closely at the baby. The fire has become a home-movie that they can only watch close-up in the camera’s viewfinder. If the baby is not asleep, they pick it up and hold it against their breasts. The men do this as confidently as the women, one of their huge calloused hands totally covering the baby’s swaddled torso. Italian Madonnas are regal, their bambini adored. Here the celebration is different. The circle of illegal migrant workers sitting with their backs to the wall are marvelling at a faraway victory. Of course the baby’s birth is no surprise and has been awaited. But time after time, and life being life, a victory is never assured until won. Those who haven’t yet drunk take the occasion to drink, eyes a little damp. And all are equally astounded by the news of a victory from far away.