Krakow Melt (21 page)

Dear Magpie, smoke is the gift of memory. A fire at St Mary’s would give us so much to remember. Think of the altarpiece burning for days, plumes and plumes of gold paint blackening the sky over all Kraków. It would be such a sight, or as you say, it would be “
ekstra
.” How else could we possibly preserve all that we’ve been through?

How would it live on?

Please reconsider the plan.

That’s all for now. Sorry you got this letter so late. I didn’t have a stamp.

Your Radeki

THE SMOK WAWELSKI

I had finally found a cave that suited me, but no matter which way I crawled in the darkness, the drops kept hitting me in the head. The worst part is that they smelled like gasoline. I’m a girl who doesn’t need gas in her hair. Not even painful twists of the spine could manoeuvre me out of the way. Less flash-blind, and I would’ve been able to see.

I wasn’t yet feeling right in my skin, in the bones of the new creature I knew I was becoming.

I did not leave Radek lying on a hospital gurney in Gda
sk. I had taken him with me—inside me—and he would live as long as my pH balance didn’t snuff out the last of his embers.

But it was in that cave, the unlit concrete hollow beneath where the D
bnicki Bridge leaves land to span the Wisła River, where I first began to lose him. Feeling the crags in the nape of the steel anchorage, looking for the can of
barszcz
soup and the tin of
ledz
´ I’d picked up running away from the Stare Miasto and past the Sheraton Kraków, I couldn’t even picture his face.

If I hadn’t been so rushed, I could’ve found a better hiding place. At first, I ran away from the town square towards Wawel castle, certain I could find a derelict stone corner full of piss and anonymity. But there were too many tourists with cameras, so I ran toward the Wisła, guided by the fading glow in the sky.

Kraków became strange to me. This was not my city anymore, even though I’d just transformed part of it into a more inhabitable space. Then again, if I had ever been in love with Kraków, I wouldn’t have touched a single brick.

I am writing this so you will understand why I did it.

My hiding place under the bridge wasn’t as secure as I had originally thought. I could feel air sluicing through invisible holes in the ceiling, and I reached up to feel them. I slid my bony fingers up through the embrasures, the spaces between the interlocking metal teeth that reinforced sections of the asphalt deck. Such a small detail that you’d never notice it.

Radek never would have described my fingers as “bony,” or noticed my calluses. His words? Surely “milky necks of baby swans” or something similar. What a psycho. I smiled and touched my swans, savouring the moment.

It had begun to rain. A car whooshed inches above my head, splashing water down onto me.

I was starving. I walked down to the river and smashed my can of
barszcz
against whatever sharp rocks I could find in the dark. It took a while, but I eventually made a few nicks and dents. When the can grew lighter, I read it as a sign of my growing strength, but I was really losing soup with every thrash, until almost nothing was left.

Rain started to dimple the water. I sat down on the gravel at the river’s edge and peeled open my tin of
ledz
´
.
The smell repulsed me. Herring should never be drowned in tomato sauce and lemon juice— I don’t care
how
I preferred them in a past life. They should swim free and fresh and dead, their eye glaze clearly visible.

Like a good dragon, I washed the fish off in the river and had my first meal of the day.

I need to tell you about the embrasures.

Castles have embrasures. Wawel is full of them. They’re the bevelled slats you shoot arrows through, wide on the inside and narrow on the exterior. You strike and your enemies can’t strike back unless they have much better aim than you. It’s a one-way assault.

When I noticed that my cave had these, I celebrated by writing my new name in gravel at the edge of my nook:

HOME OF THE SMOK WAWELSKI

It has always disturbed me that no one ever questioned the Smok’s gender. Dragons can’t all be guys. But I have bigger preoccupations. Why did Radek, the fire monomaniac and lifelong Kraków resident, never once talk about Kraków’s Great Fire of 1850?

It hurts my brain just to think about it.

Go to the Dominican Church of the Holy Trinity, and sit wherever you like. You’ll notice complete stillness. Even during the busiest mass, nothing moves. Look up. The nave is an almost endless indigo sky, with a skeleton of gilded piping. The lattice-work of God.

Now imagine a creeping roar filling the church from transept to transept and cavity to cavity, rotting the silence. The stained glass glows white and hot. Red cancels out green cancels out blue.

Saint Casimir melts.

Saint Ursula winks away a flame.

Saint Melchior Grodziecki dies again.

Saint Stanisław’s forehead shatters.

The Five Holy Martyrs of Miedzyrzecz become one, as many worshippers already knew they were.

The church itself remains silent; all noise is the fire’s.

Bricks crash from the ceiling until there are holes to heaven. You are immune to all this and stare right through the destruction. The lattice-work catches fire, brilliant licking yellow silhouetted against the black sky. The flaming ribcage of an animal on a spit. Then, a miracle happens. The church makes its first sound since it was built in the thirteenth century.

It sighs, knowing it has lost.

This fire of 1850 was
ekstra
. I can assure you that it was started by someone like me. Accidents don’t happen that perfectly. There’s always an architect behind them.

Ever since, bonfires have been prohibited in Kraków. You know, the kind of marshmallow parties that Radek staged at his gallery shows. It’s as if he refused to honour the fire that had made his art illegal, even though it was probably the one he wished most to replicate. When you think about it, Kraków 1850 was the only fire that ever could’ve mattered to him.

But he never said a word about it, the bastard.

From my cave, I heard the watery shish of a car on the wet road approaching the bridge. Diesel, yes, but the engine didn’t sound mercenary enough to be a bus or tank. I strained to listen, my ear pressed up to the embrasures, my body nearly upright but for a mild hunch. A few centimetres of me didn’t fit. I saw the headlights waver as the car dipped on the uneven road.

It couldn’t have been more than a hundred metres away when I heard the driver kill the engine. That is to say, the wheel splash got louder while the engine muffled to a choke (choked to a muffle? My English will never be as good as Radek’s was).

Then there was no air, no light, and no sound. My nose filled with rust, the smell of the chassis. The car had rolled over my cave, sealing me in with a roof. I couldn’t see the slick tires, but I could smell them.

Dragons, in case you didn’t know, recognize rust as the smell of spilled blood oxidizing.

The passenger door opened, and then the driver’s. Boots hit the pavement. I was ready with my knife—my tin can cover—and my specialized dragon weapon.

In my delirium, I made some last-minute hypotheses ... maybe it was just a few fishermen looking to skim easy kill from the surface of the Wisła. Rain brings out the gullible ones, whole schools of them ... or maybe it was Michał and that other boy from the Baltic, come to take me across the border to Prague for a few months ...

But no, these were nothing but literary fictions, tricks of the mind that the weak play on themselves. Play on their friends.

There’s something I always wanted to tell Radek but never had the chance.

I used to believe we could change the world through literature, no matter what. We would till hearts slowly, a page at a time. But I’ve learned that books are useless in times of war: nobody has time to read them. What would I have done with Czesław Miłosz’s
Piesek
Przydro
ny
, there under the bridge? Spit poetry at my pursuers? What bison shit.

I lit my blowtorch.

I heard the sound of footfalls on the gravel, coming from the side of the bridge. Flashlights played shakily down the embankment. Two cops came into view, guns drawn and pointed at me.

“Dorota Kubisz,” the closest one said, “may God have mercy on you. Turn off the torch.”

“He’s dead,” I said. “I am no longer afraid.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Radek.”

“Did you kill someone, too? We have orders to shoot you.”

“I
didn’t kill him
,” I said, showing my teeth. I opened the propane valve further and the blue flame turned orange and ragged. “You did.”

“I could end your life with one bullet, you whore.”

“But you won’t do it. You want me in prison, so every priest in the fucking country can come to paint a picture of hell on the cell wall.”

“I said
turn it off
.”

“Tell me, how is the church of our mother?”

“You will never see it again.”

“Because it’s not there?”

He said nothing, and gave me a smug smile.

He must’ve known how painful his silence was to me. I was dying to know if the fire was still gutting St Mary’s, or if my afternoon fire spree had been for nothing. Radek’s last letter had eaten through my layers of niceness. I had to honour his final wish, or it would have continued chewing through my life until there was nothing left. Plus, I began to crave the smell of smoke. It was either the church or my own apartment.