The Lullaby of Polish Girls (22 page)

“What the fuck is that?” Elwira starts creeping toward Justyna, who holds out her hand.

“Don’t!”
Justyna blurts out, and Elwira immediately shrinks back.

There are no locks on the windows in the house. The balcony doors on the second floor don’t close all the way, and no one’s bothered to repair them.

“Run upstairs and check on the kids. Right now.”

Elwira scrambles upstairs, crying. Silently, Justyna strokes Rambo’s
torso, her hands hold his paws. She knows she shouldn’t touch the victim, shouldn’t fuck with the fingerprints, but she can’t help it because Rambo was her mother’s dog and now he’s gone, just like Teresa’s gone, just like Paweł is. One by one, everyone is dropping like flies.

In a daze, she walks back to the kitchen, and she picks up the telephone. The line is dead so she redials the police station. “Yes,
halo
. Tell Officer Kurka that the person who murdered my husband came back last night, while we were all sleeping—and that includes two kids, miss. Our dog has been butchered and left with a plastic bag tied around his neck. Tell Kurka that I will personally drive myself and my family to his house tonight, right now, and we will stay there, camped out on his fucking
wersalka
, until the police stop jacking off and start doing their job. Do you understand what I am saying? Have you been writing this down? I fucking hope so.”

Elwira comes running into the kitchen as soon as Justyna hangs up.

“They’re fine.
O Boże
, Justyna. What is it?”

Elwira is sobbing, the fear in her eyes is astounding. Justyna lights a cigarette and points toward the dog.

“He was here. And he left us a gift.”

Elwira shuts her eyes and shakes her head. “Let’s call
Tata
. Please. We’ll tell him he has to come back. I can’t be here alone anymore. I’m scared.”

“Don’t be pathetic, Elwira. It’s embarrassing.” Justyna stares at the remains of the dog. Someone will have to move him, bury him. It would be a job for Paweł, just the kind of thing he was good at, taking care of stuff that no one else wanted to do, like changing lightbulbs or cleaning up the trash bins.

“I want you to go upstairs and pack bags for Cela and Damian. I’m calling a cab, and you are taking them to
Babcia
’s and you are not to leave there till I tell you to. Don’t tell
Babcia
what happened, tell her we had a fight.”

“What about you?” Elwira asks.

“I’m staying.”

“No! Justyna, please,
proszę cię
! Oh my God, why would he come back? Do you think he knows I talked to the police?”

“He’s fucking crazy. That’s all.”

“But you don’t come back to the scene of the crime unless you wanna get caught, right?”

“I don’t fucking know, Elwira! Maybe he’s trapped, or it’s cold as fuck out there, or he just couldn’t help himself, so he came back. I’m not a fucking criminal psychologist! Point is, he was here.”

“So, does that mean he’ll come back again?”

“I don’t know. But next time, I’ll be ready for him.”

“Stop it! Who do you think you are, for fuck’s sake, Kojak? He snuck in here during the night and
killed our fucking dog
. You’re coming with us. We’ll call the police and they can stake out this house and wait for him.”

“And what? They’ll cuff him and haul him off in a van and we’ll live happily ever after? The police give fuck all about what happened to Paweł, and what happened to our dog, and what is going to happen to you and me. You’re scared and I don’t blame you. I swear I don’t blame you but I’m not scared.”

“Yes, you are. Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“
I’m not
. I’m not scared. I’m not
anything
. There is nothing left in me, nothing left to even properly take care of my son. Do you understand that?” Justyna sits at the table and reaches for her pack of cigarettes. She offers Elwira one.

“So, what? You’re gonna stay here and wait for him and have it out?” Elwira smokes the L&M, taking quick puffs one right after another.

“If I’m next, so be it. I don’t care. But I want to look that psycho in the face, I want to—”

“You’re sick. You’re in denial. You just went insane at the thought of Damian knowing what happened to his father so don’t tell me you don’t care. Please, Justyna, fucking on my knees, I beg you, just come with us!”

Justyna looks down at the kitchen table. Every morning before school she’d come down and her mother would be sitting at the head of this table, filing her nails and smoking a Marlboro.
Eggs or eggs, ptaszyno
? Every morning, the same, calling Justyna her birdie, scrambling half a dozen
jajka
in gobs of butter, serving it up on rye bread. Every fucking morning.
Eggs or eggs?

“Remember the summer we all went to the Croatian sea,
na wczasy
?
The first day we went to the beach, the waves were so high. Mama dared us to jump in the water. And you stood by the shore, crying. You wanted to jump, but you just couldn’t do it.”

Elwira speaks softly. “I remember how you dove in and went under. You swallowed a ton of water, and we thought you had died, and then Mama told you you were stupid for actually jumping in, that she’d just been kidding.”

“The thing is, I don’t think she was kidding. I still believe that she wanted me to jump in. And I’m jumping in now, Elwira. And I don’t expect you to join me. I don’t want you to. But I have to do it.”

Elwira walks up the stairs. In a few minutes, Justyna hears the kids waking, hears Elwira gathering their things.
They’ll be fine
, thinks Justyna, and she dials the number for a taxi.

Anna Kielce, Poland

After another three-year absence, Anna arrived in Poland that August with zero fanfare. Her cousins Hubert and Renata had made lives for themselves in Dublin and Naples, respectively, and her aunts only came by once in a while.
Babcia
had been happy to see her again. “You look like a woman now, Anna,” she said, wiping away tears.
Babcia
, on the other hand, looked old. She’d apparently given up on her dentures, and the sight of her toothless mouth threw Anna. “Why,
Babciu
?” Anna asked, and
Babcia
just grinned wider. “Oh,
córciu
! They click and clack and it doesn’t feel natural. Besides, I’m not afraid of growing old.” For the first time ever,
Babcia
Helenka’s apartment seemed huge and empty.

Besides
Babcia
, nobody seems to care that Anna is here. Nobody has called since her return a week ago. Kamila is in Warsaw with Emil, spending the summer at some seventeenth-century villa. “We’ll try to come back before you leave, Aniusia. It’s been ages, hasn’t it, darling?” Kamila had sounded so cosmopolitan and grown up on the phone. When Anna called Justyna, she said she was busy with kid stuff. “He’ll shit anywhere in the house: the carpet, on the balcony, in our fucking cactus planter, but not in the goddamn toilet!” But she promised to see Anna before the summer was over.

“I’m only here for two weeks this time, Justynka.” The whole conversation made Anna’s heart sink.

Szydłówek is a ghost town. In the mornings, Anna gets up late, eats a
parówka
dipped in mustard for breakfast, and goes jogging around the
zalew
. In the afternoons, she sits on the curb by the church, watching traffic. She saw Kowalski once, from a few blocks away, recognized him by the silk shirt he had on, the one he used to wear in 1995. Anna had to stop herself from calling out his name. She’d wanted to apologize
for their last exchange, for the way she had spoken to him on the train. But instead she looked away and prayed he wouldn’t notice her.

When it rains—and it’s been raining the whole week—Anna spends her days on her grandmother’s balcony, staring past St. Józef’s steeple, hoping someone will see her sitting there and spread the news that she is back, but no one does. When the rain lets up, Anna goes on walks, mining information from the neighbors. When she ran into
Pani
Nowacka by the
trzepak
a few days ago Anna called out to her.

“
Pani
Nowacka! Where is everyone?”

“Oh, you know, probably in the
skwerek
, getting drunk. All your old pals, they’re criminals now, stealing in broad daylight. You had better tell your
babcia
to hide your dollars, that’s all I’m saying.” But
Pani
Nowacka had continued, gleefully informing her that Lolek had just been released from prison, after serving time for aggravated assault. “That’s what his father says anyway, but there’s another rumor floating around.…” Anna had given
Pani
Nowacka a hasty wave goodbye and hopped onto the rug beater. She didn’t want to hear any more.

Anna’s seen Lolek a few times. Standing around the neighborhood, smoking and swigging malted beer with the same group of local guys she recognizes from her youth. They’ve grown up to be the kind of guys that she’d never associate with in the States—guys who don’t read books, or discuss current events, guys with corroded teeth and black fingernails. The very same guys she’d been buddies with for all those years now made her cringe when she waved hello but hurried past them, feeling all kinds of sadness. When she was fourteen and handed out clothes and candy to the beholden post-Communist children, there was magic and power in it. When she was sixteen and rallied her girlfriends to follow their dreams, she was their ally and, more importantly, one of their own.
“My Polaki,”
she’d say. She
was
one of them. But she was better, and until this summer, she never felt there was anything wrong with that.

Anna began to notice things this year that threatened to collapse her idea of Polska. The neighborhood bums—who huddled around lampposts at all hours of the day, passing bottles of home brew around—bugged her. The desperate wives and mothers, who had to search behind bushes for their wasted sons, bugged her. People who
cut the line at the local
warzywniak
bugged her. Everyone seemed dismal, hurried, and hungover. Had Anna always been this blind? She felt utterly alien, as if Kielce was a place she no longer understood.

Today, the most exciting thing Anna did was help
Babcia
move the credenza. At four o’clock the phone buzzes and Anna leaps up from her dog-eared copy of T. C. Boyle’s
Water Music
.

“
Dzieńdobry
. Is Anna there?” a deep baritone voice inquires and Anna’s curiosity is instantly piqued.

“This is Anna. Who’s this?”

“Guess.”

“I have no idea.” Anna laughs, scrambling to figure out who the voice belongs to.

“That’s a shame. But I’ll give you a break.
Będziesz moją dziewczyna
.”

Anna’s mouth falls open. “Sebastian?”

“Ja, das ist Sebastian.”

“I, I thought you lived in Germany,” Anna stutters.

“Moved back two years ago.”

Anna is silent for a beat, surprised and thrilled.

“Can I take you out for a drink?” he asks.

“Tak.”

Sebastian tells her he’ll pick her up in an hour and Anna hangs up grinning like a fool.

Two hours later, Anna hears a car honk and peeks through the kitchen window. There’s a beat-up old truck—one of those Star 200s from the eighties—parked in front of her grandmother’s building. When she walks out of the stairwell, Sebastian Tefilski is leaning against the driver’s side door, smoking a cigarette.

“Did someone call for a limo?” Sebastian jokes.

“You look like some kind of Adidas ad,” Anna tells him. He’s tall and sporting an Adidas baseball cap, Adidas polo shirt, and black Adidas sneakers. He’s also more handsome than Anna had imagined. Sebastian laughs, showing his white teeth, which throw her, because white teeth like that are definitely not a Polish thing. He eyes her up and down.

“My, my. The
Amerykanka
’s all grown up.” He flicks his cigarette and smiles. “Get in.”

They drive past Staszica Park, on their way downtown, past the lake that’s teeming with ducks and swans. At a red light, Sebastian turns to her. “Did you know that swans mate for life?”