The Lullaby of Polish Girls (8 page)

The little red light on Anna’s answering machine is blinking desperately.
It’s been blinking for weeks now. The world just won’t leave her alone no matter how much she ignores it. Anna presses the play button. Message after message pours out, from Paulina, Ben, her friend Veronica. From Frick and the cable company. She listens to each one for a few seconds before erasing it. The last message is from her agent.

“Anna, it’s me again, sweetie. We’re worried sick over here. Been trying to reach you forever. Forever! Had to pass on a great offer you got for an indie. Other stuff too. What gives, honey? What the hell happened? Someone die or something?”

Anna takes a small breath, stares at the boxes that surround her, at the gray walls that have survived hundreds of her cigarettes, and she presses delete one last time.

Kamila Wyandotte, Michigan

The front door is unlocked and Kamila lets herself in. She tries to tiptoe upstairs unnoticed, but she hears her mother call her from the living room. Zofia has always had freakishly acute radar.

“Why are you so late? We already ate
obiad
.”

Kamila doesn’t respond. She takes off her galoshes and unravels her scarf. Zofia drags her two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame toward the entranceway. “Your father already left for work. Want a plate?”

“No, thanks. I’m tired. Just wanna go to my room.”

“Unbelievable, that thing with Justyna. But I tell you, I’m not surprised.”

Kamila doesn’t want to discuss anything with her mother, let alone the death of her old friend’s husband. She starts walking up the stairs to her room.

“Were the kids good?” Zofia calls after her.

Kamila nods her head but, no, they weren’t good. Jack, the four-year-old, peed on the rug again. Jack is a toddler by day and a Dalmatian by night, eating his Honey Smacks cereal out of an aluminum dog bowl in the kitchen. “It’s just a phase, Kamila, and we go with it,” Mrs. Levicky explained when Kamila started. Today, Jack’s sister, Laura, asked Kamila why her nose was so big. “Your new name is Kamila Mar
jew
ska! Get it? Get it?”

Kamila was taken aback. How was a regular ten-year-old simpleton schooled in anti-Semitic insults?

She had wagged her finger in Laura’s face. “Your dad he is the Jewish, so you not nice for him.”

“What? I can’t even understand you! If you can’t speakie dee Eeenglish—go back to your own country!” Laura had sassed back. These
kids were the opposite of good. They were the low point in an already shitty day.

Their mother, Mrs. Janina Levicky (
call me Jan
), was Polish, but hardly spoke the language anymore. Her dwarfish figure flaunted firm boobs and toned triceps. “No chicken wings for me, Kamila,” she boasted, waving her arms about like a windmill. Jan was married to an American named Joey, who was of Polish-Jewish descent. Joey Levicky (born Jozef Herbert Lewicki) was a partner at an advertising firm. He was rich and never around.

Jack and Laura were spoiled, their expansive rooms overflowing with things—the latest gadgets, the trendiest clothes, mounds of high-end debris. But this did not concern Kamila. What concerned Kamila was the fact that the Levicky children had no clue from whence they came. They were oblivious to war, famine, ghettos, or holocausts, and their parents believed that was a good thing; victims were powerless. Jan and Joey felt there was no need to burden their children with macabre tales of barbed-wire walls. It was a decidedly American sentiment, this onward and upward stuff.

Kamila’s day had been spent cleaning up after those brats, and making sure they were at their usual station, in front of the TV. She scrutinized the neat to-do list that Mrs. Levicky had written down on the hanging chalkboard, all the while thinking about how she should call Justyna. Kamila folded the laundry, wiped down the crystal, and sorted and took out the trash. The chores had been mind-numbing and, for that, Kamila was grateful.

“Your husband called again,” Zofia rasps as Kamila makes her way up the stairs, her voice like an asthmatic’s.

Again, Kamila does not respond, even though her heart starts racing. Why couldn’t Emil just leave her alone?

“Did you hear me? Your husband called. Maybe it was about Justyna. You should call him back. Use a phone card.” Kamila doesn’t move until she hears her mother slogging back to the kitchen. America has made her mother into an oaf; she was big before, but now there is no end to her girth. When Kamila first laid eyes on her in the States, she had to turn her head away, to blink back the tears.

Safe in her bedroom, Kamila flops on her mattress and grabs a fistful of Werther’s hard candy from her nightstand. She stuffs three into her mouth. It has taken continous effort to maintain the weight loss she first attained with pills and laxatives, but today Kamila needs the comfort that only food can bring.

The phone buzzes and she shoots up. She lets it ring five times and then, almost as if possessed, picks up, right at the same time that Zofia does on the downstairs phone.

“Halo
.”

“Kamila? It’s me.”

She glances at her wristwatch still set to Polish time. It’s one
A.M.
; he always used to be asleep before ten.
“Kamila? To ja,”
in his plummy, sonorous voice, one of the best things about him. She’s missed that voice so much that it takes all her strength not to drop the receiver, scurry under the warm blankets, and never come out.

“I know.”
Wiem
. One word. Meek and dreadful. Ignorance is bliss, that’s what the Americans say, and there’s no Polish aphorism that echoes that sentiment but goddamnit, there should be.

Emil clears his throat. “Did you hear about Justyna Strawicz?”

“I did. Her grandmother called my dad yesterday.”

“Awful, right?” Emil says it quietly. Emil always liked Justyna. They went on double dates, occasionally, before Justyna’s mother got sick. Kamila bites down on the candy in her mouth and says nothing.

“I got the package.
Dziękuje, kochanie
.”

Two weeks ago, without rhyme or reason, Kamila stopped into the local Gap on her way back from work. She quickly picked up two pairs of vintage wash jeans and some crew socks, boxed them up, and airmailed the package to Poland.

“They fit great. Wojtek’s too.”

Something is wrong because she has imagined this conversation every day, and yet she isn’t using any of the words she wants to. Words like
homosexual
and
liar
. Words like
how
and why.

“It’s late over there.”

“Yeah, I know. But I couldn’t sleep. Wojtek, on the other hand, he’s—” Emil stops mid-sentence.

“He’s there?”

She shouldn’t be surprised. When she left for the airport, Kamila left Emil a note on the kitchen counter, along with his set of the keys, which she had taken from him the day she found out about Wojtek.
Baw się dobrze
, she’d written. “Have fun.”

“Do you mind? His parents told him he was no longer welcome at their house.”

Kamila surprises them both by bursting into laughter. “Would it matter if I did mind?”

“Kamilka, when you come home, we’ll talk. The three of us.”

“There will never be a three of us. And anyway, I might not come home. What’s there to come home to? Wojtek in our bed?”

It’s as far as she’s ever gone to articulating what it is Emil has moonlighted in for all these years. When he and Wojtek, both crying, finally confessed their mutual ardor, she didn’t say anything. She doesn’t recall much from that afternoon, except for her silence.

Emil’s voice warbles. “I know you’re angry, Kamila. And I am waiting for you to come back, to walk up to me and slap me silly, because I deserve it. But then I want us to, I don’t know what I want.…
Kocham cię
, Kamilka. I always will.”

Kamila is afraid of what she’ll say. She’s afraid, and her tears are useless. She swipes at them frantically.

“Jesteś assholem,”
Kamila says finally, conjugating in her native tongue the most befitting of English slurs, the one that’s become her favorite. Her husband and their mutual lifelong friend had fallen in love. She never saw it coming even though it was there all those years, staring her in the face. Should she tell him now that when they were seventeen, Anna Baran pulled her aside and said, “Maybe Emil’s not the one for you. Don’t you think he’s … different?”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know, Kamila. He’s distant. And he says his
s
like
sssss
.”

“What’s his lisp got to do with anything?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

You just didn’t talk about the thing Anna was insinuating, not in Kielce. There were no lesbians there, only old maids. Guys acted queer but they were never
actually
queer. This was a part of Poland where most guys Kamila grew up with still exchanged nigger, retard, and fag jokes.

“Don’t call me again,” Kamila instructs Emil quietly and hangs up.

The next morning, there is a lavish breakfast on the table: hazelnut coffee and toasted croissants, assorted jams, scrambled eggs with fried
kiełbasa
. Kamila gingerly walks past the cholesterol-laden table and retrieves a banana from the fruit bowl. Zofia is standing at the sink, scrubbing a frying pan.

“There’s plenty.” She thrusts a wet rag toward the spread. In lieu of a response, Kamila quickly peels the soft, mottled fruit and takes a giant bite. Zofia watches her.

“Suit yourself. The more for your father.”

“He doesn’t need more,
Mamo
. He needs less.” Kamila’s father has given up his jogs, he’s given up lettuce and his morning ritual of black coffee and calisthenics. In fact, he’s abandoned all that he had in Poland, including his doctorate. Now, her father works the night shift at the Lubelski Bakery, where he manipulates dough till the sun comes up. His hands are eternally coated in a layer of flour and in another lifetime Kamila would have loved it, would have accompanied him to work every night just for the smell of warm, fresh loaves. But Włodek says he’s sick of rye bread, and every night he brings home a large pepperoni pizza. Every night he and Zofia eat the entire thing at an alarming pace. Her father’s American dream is nothing but menial labor and take-out.

“When you start cooking around here, then you can talk about what’s good for my husband. Worry about your own.” Zofia wipes her hands on her apron and stares at Kamila.

“I’m off,” Kamila says quietly, walking around her mother.

“Look at you! Nothing gets to you, Kamila? Your friend’s husband murdered, your husband …”

“
My
husband what?” Kamila asks lightly, but hurries quickly toward the foyer.

Zofia follows her. “We need to talk.”

Kamila fumbles with her coat, grabbing her hat and mittens. “I don’t want to be late. What do you want to talk to me about anyway? Huh,
Mamo
? What the hell could we possibly talk about? You never liked Justyna, always called her a slut. You never liked any of my friends, so what do you care?” She wants to stop talking, fling the door
open, and leave. But Zofia grabs her arm now, forcing her to turn around.

“I don’t wanna talk about Justyna. I wanna talk about Emil. I wanna talk about the fact that you married a queer.”

For a moment Kamila can’t move. Zofia’s face is close to hers, breathing heavily. Finally, Kamila twists her arm free and yanks the front door open. She runs out into the snow.

Justyna Kielce, Poland

In the rain, they huddle. No more than a dozen, all dressed in funereal best, black woolen coats that graze ankles, black felt hats, everything ironed and pleated, layers upon layers. Underneath Paweł’s old leather motorcycle jacket, Justyna is wearing a long spandex dress that hugs her like a second skin. She stands off to the side, dying for a cigarette, having to remind herself every so often why the fuck she’s here.

The funeral was held on short notice. Some people didn’t want to come. Too soon, they said.
Too soon for what?
she wanted to ask. To acknowledge Paweł’s death, or to look her in the eye? Too soon to shake hands with her sister? Too soon to have to face Damian, who no longer had a father? Maybe for them it was too soon, but for Justyna it wasn’t soon enough. At least planning the funeral had kept her busy.