The Clarinet Polka (18 page)

There's a painting of Marshal Piłsudski, and I don't even know enough to know that's who it is. There's a Polish newspaper on the coffee table and about three or four issues of the
National Geographic
, and I'm thinking, yeah, Czesław Dłuwiecki is exactly the sort of guy you'd expect to subscribe to the
National
Geographic.
He's tall and skinny with bushy eyebrows—did I tell you that? I mean really wonderful, steel gray, industrial-grade eyebrows with hairs sticking out everywhere in forty-seven different directions. He's wearing a sports jacket, and he's still got his tie on. He smokes a pipe. We're having this absolutely wacko conversation.

“Bardzo miło że Janice tak często bywa u was na kolacji,”
he says.

“Oh, no problem. We enjoy having her.”

“A jak rodzice?”

“Oh, they're fine. We're all fine. Pretty much, you know, the same as usual.”

We go a few more rounds like that, with him speaking Polish and me answering him in English, and then he says, “You don't enjoy speaking Polish?” It was obvious, you know, that I was getting pretty much everything he was saying to me.

“With all due respect, Mr. Dłuwiecki,” I said, “if I was to speak to you in Polish, you'd be spending all your time correcting my grammar, and we wouldn't have much of a conversation.”

That must have been the funniest thing he'd heard in a year or two. When he quit chuckling about it, he asked me if I wanted a drink. A drink, huh? Well, maybe if you jerked my arm up behind my back and twisted it hard a couple times.

He didn't say a word to Perfect, but being perfect as she was, she got up and brought a silver tray with a crystal decanter and two tiny silver glasses about the size of thimbles. He poured us each a snort and it's
na zdrowie!
I don't know what it was, vodka or schnapps or some damn thing, but it must have been 140 proof—God knows, maybe 200—and my mood improved considerably. We shot the shit for a while—he'd switched over to English—and he offered me another one, and I just couldn't say no. He and Perfect walked me to the door, and he thanked me for stopping in and I thanked him for having me, and I staggered down the stairs and I was—well, I think the word you usually hear for this state is “reeling.” But the funny thing about that firewater he drank is that an hour or so later I'd be perfectly fine.

*   *   *

So I took to stopping in to see good old Czesław Dłuwiecki on Tuesday nights, and the craziest damn thing happened—I got to like him. He'd always ask how my family was doing, and I'd say they were doing fine, and I'd ask him about his family, and they were always doing pretty good too, and then once we got that out of the way, we'd move on to the real important stuff like the conduct of the Vietnam War, the gutless nature of the administration in Washington, the sorry state of affairs in Europe, and the way the wind was blowing in the Vatican these days. Well, gee, Mr. Dłuwiecki, I'm not really up on the Pope's latest pronouncement; perhaps you could enlighten me? And while you're at it, sir, no, I wouldn't mind at all another thimbleful of kerosene. Yep, you just keep talking, sir, I'm all ears.

And so he'd tell me his opinion of where the Church was going, or the U.S. government, or the younger generation—pretty much all straight down the tube—and Perfect is sitting there watching us, not saying a word. She could have been the cat for all the attention he paid to her.

Poles love to argue. Somebody who's not Polish listening to them would think they were just about to jump up and start duking it out any minute, but no, they're just enjoying themselves. It's like that old joke—you put ten Polish guys in a room and get them talking politics, an hour later you'll have ten different political parties. So I'd give him all the stuff Georgie Mondrowski was saying, how we're never going to win the war and it's not worth another American life and we never should have gone over there in the first place and who gives a damn if Vietnam goes Commie anyway? And he'd say that godless Communism was the greatest evil ever to appear on earth—well, the Nazis were worse, but not by much—and it was our moral imperative to stop Communism wherever it reared its ugly head.

You talk about your old-country crap, well, Czesław was so deep in it he couldn't see daylight. It was a toss-up who he hated more, the Germans or the Russians, and there wasn't any bullshit about, oh, it's not the people, it's the governments—he hated Germans and Russians personally, right down to the last man, woman, or child. And there wasn't any forgive and forget now that the war's over—not only would he never consider buying a Volkswagen, he wouldn't even
ride
in one, and if a German person turned up anywhere he was, he walked out. He thought the carpet bombing of Dresden was delightful—it was just too bad they hadn't done more of it—and one of his main regrets about WW II was that it hadn't lasted long enough so the Americans could nuke out a few German cities.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not putting him down. It's just that he did have, I guess you could say, real strong opinions. But I learned a lot from him. There's all these things you think you know something about but you don't, not really, and he filled in some of those blanks for me—like about the Warsaw Uprising and the Katyn Massacre and how FDR and Churchill, those
zdrajcy
, had sold out Poland at Yalta. Yeah, they'd just laid down and let Stalin wipe his shitty boots on them. And he also told me things I'd never heard about—like how the Polish Resistance had been the first to get the word out to the Allies about what the Germans were doing to the Jews—the greatest crime in the history of the world, he called it—and they even told them exactly where the railroad lines were, you know, running into the death camps, but the Allies couldn't be bothered to bomb them. He wasn't too pleased with the Allies, and he wasn't too pleased with the Vatican, and when you came right down to it, he wasn't too pleased with anybody.

The funny thing about listening to him talk was that when it came to the war, he'd only go so far and then he'd stop. He never said one word about what
he
was doing in the war, or about what the war did to his family, and if I asked him anything about it, he'd slip off onto some other topic.

He did tell me about his hometown before the war, Krajne Podlaski, and he made it sound like paradise. Nice and friendly, and everybody knew everybody. Big quiet river running by there; in the summer they fished in it, in the winter they skated on it. You'd go out in the country, and there'd be peasant cottages and those wonderful, dignified big white storks making their nests on the thatched roofs. I asked him if it was mainly a farm community, and he said, oh, no, there was lots of trade, even a certain amount of industry. They had a big town hall and a good library. Krajne Podlaski, he said, was maybe half the size of Raysburg. By West Virginia standards, that's a reasonable-sized town, and I guess it is by Polish standards too.

He was, he said, a rough-and-tumble little boy, always in trouble. He loved to go to the market where everybody was haggling over everything, trying to make a deal, with horses, cows, chickens, and geese running around—people laughing and talking a mile a minute in Polish and Yiddish. The market was mainly run by the Jews. They'd lived there for hundreds of years and had their own separate community, but they got along okay with the Poles, anyhow up until the Endeks—that's the Polish right wingers—started making trouble.

There were only a few doctors in Krajne Podlaski, and his father was one of them—the best one, he said—so they were pretty well off, but his wife's family, the Markowskis, were what's usually called “gentry” in English, but Czesław said that wasn't a good word for them because it makes you think of England, and Poland was nothing like England. The Markowskis had lived on their land forever, and they didn't have a lot of money but they had a lot of pride. His wife's father lived in town and engaged in business—he ran the distillery—so he was looked down on by the other Markowskis. Most of them lived out of town on their estates. They were the kind of folks that the girls were spoiled and beautiful and a little bit nuts, and the men went off and hunted wild boar in the huge dark forests of Poland—primeval forests, Czesław called them. He said there were still a few Polish partisans hiding out in those forests fighting the Soviets all the way into the 1950s.

He went to the Józef Piłsudski University. That's in Warsaw. Then the Germans came in and closed all the schools because the Poles were supposed to be slave labor for the Reich, and slaves don't need an education. He'd been studying modern languages. English was his favorite, and he'd memorized a whole bunch of speeches from Shakespeare. He recited a couple of them for me, “To be or not to be,” and like that. He said if the war hadn't come along, he might have been a university professor.

When it came to the U.S. of A., Czesław was playing somewhere way out in right field, and he was always talking about the American
Republic
, and how, even though our freedoms were being rapidly eroded on all sides, it was still the greatest nation on earth. Where else could someone like himself accomplish everything he'd accomplished in such a short time? “The problem with these long-hair hippies or yippies,” he'd say, “or whatever the hell they're calling themselves, is they don't want to work. There's no excuse for them. It's a matter of
character
. If a man is willing to work in America, there's nothing he can't accomplish.”

Well, yeah, and it helps if you come from a well-off family back in Poland like he did, instead of, you know, being a peasant, and it helps if you've got a good education and speak good English. I figured if work is what we're talking about—like busting your sorry ass eighty-some hours a week at Raysburg Steel for chickenshit money and every day running the risk of getting turned into an ingot—then both my grandfathers could have taught him a thing or two. They'd had plenty of
character
all right, and where had that got them? But I kept my mouth shut. As much as he liked to argue, I didn't think he'd enjoy arguing that particular point with me.

*   *   *

So I slipped on through the fall in my little routine, and things weren't too bad, and the winter was starting to sneak in on us, and then something happened that flipped me around about Janice Dłuwiecki. One Tuesday night it was raining to beat hell—one of those icy, driving rains that blows damn near sideways—and she and Linda came back from the church looking like two drowned rats, and I figured I'd better get Perfect home before she melted.

Well, I'm driving up Highlight Road, and the rain's hammering the car like sixty-five fire hoses, and I'm creeping along at about thirty because I can't see dickshit and I've got Czesław Dłuwiecki's kid in my car. She says to me, “Are you scared?”

That pissed me off—almost everything she did pissed me off—so I kind of snapped at her, “No, honey, I'm not.”

She says, “I can't see anything. Can you see anything?”

“Probably more than you can. The windshield wipers on your side are kind of shot,” but then I'm thinking, hey, Koprowski, she's just a kid, and she doesn't know you very well. Maybe she's thinks she's riding that thin edge of death.

“Look, Janice,” I said, “I've driven this road a thousand times, and we're going at a snail's pace, and if anybody's coming down, I'll see his headlights. Don't worry about a thing, okay?”

“Okay.” Then after a minute, she says, “What scares you? What are you afraid of?”

Oh, God, I think, she's such a little kid. “I don't know,” I say. “Dying before my time, I guess.”

It was just a dumb thing we used to say in the service. Somebody would say, “Anything bothering you, Jimmy?” and you'd say, “Not a damn thing except dying before my time.” And then it hit me that the guy who used to say that all the time was Ron Jacobson. Yeah, it was Jacobson's line.

“You don't have to be like that,” she says. “I was just trying to get you to talk to me. You could be serious, you know.”

All of a sudden I'm so mad at her I feel like squashing her like a bug. “Yeah?” I say. “Well, I am serious. The guy who used to say that all the time got killed in Vietnam.”

Of course that stopped her. But after a minute she says, “I'm sorry. What happened to him?”

Well, the last thing in the world I want to do is tell her what happened to Jacobson. I should say something, but I'm so mad I can't think of a thing. We're up the hill by then, and I turn onto Edgewood.

“Oh, I give up,” she says. “I know you don't like me. I don't know what I did, but I must have done something.”

“You didn't do anything.” And I'm thinking, oh, for Christ's sake, now I've hurt her feelings. Now I've got to try to fix things. I don't need this shit.

I was all set to tell her a whole bunch of lies—not big lies, just the little piss-ass lies you tell to somebody to make them feel better—like, oh, it's not that I don't like you, Janice, it's just that I've been kind of preoccupied, got a million things on my mind, or whatever the hell I was going to say. I don't know what I was going to say, but I turned and looked at her and I couldn't say any of it.

She had a way of looking straight at you that felt— It was, I guess, an honest way of looking at you. All of a sudden, I didn't want to be driving. I pulled over. “Aw, hell,” I said, “I was pissed off because of you asking about Jacobson. I don't feel right talking about him.”

It was still raining like crazy. I rolled the window down and lit a cigarette. It's funny, but saying that it didn't feel right talking about Jacobson, somehow that made it okay. So I told her about the night raid in Da Nang, about him and the other guys getting killed. Guys I'd been stationed with at Carswell. Jacobson getting his arm blown off, and part of his face, and hanging on till the next day.