Krakow Melt (11 page)

The Smok Wawelski screaming the name of its next, and possibly last, meal

Brother Father screaming my name

The meal screaming not to be eaten,
The fire is too hot, too hot, why won’t
anyone save me, my nightgown is burning, now my skin now my hair, so hot, God I have
always believed in you, let me hold my son one last time, do not let him see me like this,
kurvakurvakurva, is there a sin I don’t know about, tell him—

I couldn’t hear the rest, no matter how close I got to the bedroom window.

I was deaf to the most important words ever spoken to me.

“Tell him.”

Brother Father and
Papa
came running out of the house and hugged me, telling me not to listen, blocking my ears. Telling me not to worry, that it was just a hysterical neighbour. I still hadn’t moved. The world had changed, and I hadn’t moved a centimetre. Since when were things allowed to change without you? How was that fair?

Later, a
detektyw policji
asked me the strangest questions, and I tried my best to answer them.

“Do you remember how the fire started?”

She wouldn’t understand a thing about the Smok Wawelski, so there was no point in telling her the truth.

“In the Christmas tree.”

“Then you ran outside.”

“Yes.”

“Why were you dressed in your winter clothes?”

“Because it was cold outside.”

“So you had time to get dressed, but not to warn your parents?”

I fiddled with one of the buttons on my pajamas. She didn’t know how it was. She couldn’t know. She held a tissue to my nose, told me to blow, and pressed on with her inquiry.

“Radek, why didn’t you answer your father when he called your name?”

“Because I didn’t want him to think I was talking from inside the house,” I said.

“Why would he think that? You were behind him.”

“I don’t know.
Papa
doesn’t like it when I pee my pants. I was waiting for them to dry.”

“Your papa was naked.”

She should’ve known, dear Dorota, that the “why” questions have no real answers, that we can only give fake ones to placate, and that some of us are better at lying than others. She should’ve known that I was dazed and terrified, and that my little body was battling shock and hypothermia. The bitch should’ve given me a blanket.

“Did your parents ever fight? It’s okay to talk about it. Your
papa
said it was okay to talk about anything with me.”

They didn’t care about my
papa
. As I got older, I began to piece things together: why the firefighters had come late, why the water was “turned off” on our block. It must’ve been because my
papa
refused to be a stool pigeon for the Communist Party, and they probably knew about Brother Father, too.

“Do you remember anything else about the fire?”

What a fucking question.

I refused to give any more answers that she could twist maliciously and write on her clipboard.

Dorota, I hope you never have a housefire, if you haven’t already. Because decades later, you will not remember how long you stood in the cold, or how many fire trucks there were, or when you realized your mother had become a charred skeleton, or the last words she ever cried to you through a throat that was blistering and peeling away. You will not recall the changing colour of the flames, but you will make them up. You will reinvent everything.

The smell of smoke, on the other hand, will never leave you.

You’ll be lying in bed about to go to sleep, and charcoal will suddenly fill your nose. You’ll sprint through the house, taking inventory of your combustibles and sniffing cracks in the wall, but it’ll only be a phantom scent. Furniture will smell like campfire, and the sulphur in your shit will make you jump off the toilet seat. This will happen repeatedly, but there will never be a pillar of smoke to guide you. Perpetually lost, I’m afraid.

Magpie (is “girlfriend” better?), I’ll have to transcribe the remaining chapters of
The Legend of the Smok Wawelski
some other time.

I’m getting sleepy.

Love,

Radeki

KRYPTOZOOLOGY

“Poland is clearly in Eastern Europe,” I told Dorota as we walked through the main gates of the Pozna
Zoo.

“It
used
to be Eastern when it was Eastern Bloc,” she said. “But the map was redrawn after free elections. By 1990, we had become Central.”

“Central is nowhere,” I said, buying us two tickets. I noticed that my wallet was dangerously empty; I was going to have to destroy another city soon to pay the rent.

“And Eastern is somewhere?”

“It’s extreme.”

Our train excursion to Pozna
had been fun because we’d found a thrilling new way to claim a cabin to ourselves: taking off our shoes and hanging our funky socks on the curtain rod.

“Let’s find the Elephant House,” she said.

We had come to see, with our own eyes, what
Rzeczpospolita
had once described as “the wild beast of the Book of Revelation.” Elephants weren’t very biblical animals, but evil apparently took many forms. It appeared that Ninio was gaga over the other male elephants, and wouldn’t “mingle” with the resident female, even when the keepers— it was rumoured—sprayed her pussy with peanut extract. He had to be an envoy of Satan.

Pozna
city counsellor Michał Grze
of the right-wing Law and Justice Party was beside himself. And he was beside a UK
Daily Mail
journalist when he said, “We didn’t pay thirty-seven million
złotych
for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant.”

Only they
did
.

Grze
hadn’t planned on building a shrine to the biological basis for same-sex attraction, but that’s how it turned out. And they could spray all the peanut extract in the world, but Ninio would still be a fag.

I planned to whisper into Ninio’s ear never to lumber away from a 93.3 millilitre ejaculation of semen. That the fastest way to male pachyderm orgasm was a prostate massage through the anus.

The macaws tore a complaint as we passed them. A wake of buzzards were gnawing on a pile of rat carcasses.

Aside from Ninio, I was excited to visit the namesakes of the songs on Pink Floyd’s
Animals
album. Unquestionably, 1977 was a good year for disobedient “Sheep,” “Dogs,” and “Pigs on the Wing.” Yes, these are farm animals, but far from ordinary. I couldn’t wait to point out their quirks to Dorota.

A float of crocodiles chattered their teeth. Capybaras brayed. Really? I probably had the sounds mixed up.

When I was a kid, my wind-up Animal See N Say went wonky all the time. The recorded animal sounds rarely matched the pictures. “The pig says ‘moo.’ The dog says ‘ribbit.’” I pulled that cord thousands of times and learned again and again that life in the animal kingdom was a fluid affair.

We continued walking through the menagerie of tourists and found the sheep pen. I was lucky the zoo was proud to showcase barnyard specimens because we caught the woolly bastards in full rut. The rams were tearing each other into pieces of souvlaki, fighting over the right to mate.

“Dorotka, look. They’re wearing marking harnesses so they can draw on their fucks with a crayon. The keepers have to know who did who.”

“How stupid and territorial,” she said.

“Think of it as art.”

Granny Smith Apple green means, “You’re my slut-hole.” Wild Blue Yonder means, “I like looking at the sky when we fuck,” and Razzle Dazzle Rose is, “Love you, too.”

A gulp of cormorants flew overhead, shitting on strollers and stealing ice cream sandwiches. The
małpy
were picking
wszy
out of each other’s fur. Baboons flashed Crayola ass shows of Hot Magenta and Cerulean.

The sheep says “meow.”

There were no dogs not posing as timberwolves.

We passed the pigs. I was about to explain to Dorota that a pig tongue has triple the taste buds a human’s does, and that if a pig were to fly, other pigs wouldn’t be able to see it. Swine, the darlings, are incapable of looking up. But I kept quiet, unsure if she believed even half of what I told her.

“Where would Ninio go if he escaped?” she asked.

“He’d probably wander southeast to Moldova, and then the Ukraine forest. Fossils show that the Tiraspol species comes from the area.”

“How do you know all this?”

“That’s what the tabloids say. They propose that the zoo kick him out.”

“What if we
break
him out?” she said. “You have a lot of experience with fire.”

“You want to see me in jail, don’t you?”

“No, but we have to take action before someone poisons him.”

It thrilled me that she was getting infected with my love for fire. I ached to know exactly how much, but you can’t just ask someone that question flat-out.

“Are you proposing a controlled blaze?” I said.

“Don’t be gutless. We’re not here to do half-assed work.” She dangled her complicity in front of me like a piece of
gorzkiej czekolady
. “As long as we don’t kill any animals. Let’s survey the area first, then discuss the details.”

“Unless you’re going to scope your way out of a rescue mission.”

“Sweet Dorota, I’m not afraid of fire, and if you want me to prove it to you, I’ll light your hair like a fuse, right here, right now.”