to our foreheads apply
the cool salt of Wieliczka.
The next time they met, they showed one another photographs and he cooked for her.
Where did you learn to cook so well?
I’ve been teaching myself for twenty years.
She said it would be better if he slept with her in her room for then they wouldn’t have to get up so early.
And the patronne? he asked.
I pay her rent for my room, she said, you can sleep in my bed all day long if you like.
I’m slipping everything from the frying pan into a saucepan of salted, boiling water.
After two weeks Danka announced that, ideally, she would like to have at least two children.
Two?
One after the other, quick, so you’re not too old!
Me too old!
Not now — but in ten years when you’re teaching them to fish, or when you’re climbing Mount Trzy Korony with them for the first time!
Have you climbed it?
With my brother when I was a kid. We saw some mouflon. Ouch! Men never get used to undoing hooks. Let me.
I’m cutting up the sorrel leaves with my pocket knife. Finely and not too finely. It should look like green confetti.
When it was confirmed that she was one and a half months pregnant, they agreed to get married after the baby was born.
In a few weeks we’ll know, he said, whether it’s a boy or a girl.
A wedding in Nowy Targ! she said. No, she wouldn’t dream of getting married in Paris!
In Paris they will buy a wedding dress.
Choosing a wedding dress is unlike choosing any other garment. The bride, when dressed, has to appear to have come from a place where nobody present has ever been, because it is the place of her own name. The woman to be married becomes Bride the moment she is transformed into a stranger. A stranger so that the man she is marrying can recognise her as if for the first time; a stranger so she can be surprised, at the moment when they make their vows, by the man she is marrying. Why are brides ritually hidden before the ceremony? It is to facilitate the transformation whereby the bride appears to have come from the other side of a horizon. The veil is the veil of that distance. A woman who has lived her whole life in the same village walks down the aisle of her village church as a bride, and to all those watching she becomes, for an instant, unrecognisable, not because she is wearing a disguise, but because she has become a newcomer being greeted on arrival.
Danka, after much delicious hesitation, chose her dress of arrival. It had a scooped neckline, bare shoulders with lace trimming, a sheath bodice with a thousand silver threads, and a satin skirt with flounces and twelve white roses of organza. It cost the equivalent of four months of her wages. Don’t think twice, Mirek said. A Parisian dress in lace and satin and with flounces as wide as a bed — selling it when we get to Warsaw will be child’s play!
So we can leave it to Olek? she asked. By now they knew she was carrying a boy.
Their plan was to move into the flat in Warsaw, which they would later exchange for a slightly larger one. Mirek would start a business installing bathrooms, jacuzzis, saunas, etc. He didn’t want to work like a mule on building sites any more; he’d become an ablutions specialist. And in the larger flat, when they found it, Danka would run a nursery looking after other babies as well as her own.
I put on the eggs to boil. From over the shallow sink to above where the logs are stacked beside the kitchen stove runs a clothes line for drying linen. Since the house has been empty for months, nothing is drying on it; all that hangs there is a soup ladle whose bowl has been reworked and pinched together in such a way that it has a throat and a lip to pour from; it has been transformed into an improbable multipurpose utensil for distributing soup, serving custard, and pouring steaming jam into pots. In one of the stories I do not know of this house without women, men too must have made jam.
Olek weighed 4.2 kilos at birth. He was delivered in a hospital in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris. Danka’s employers arranged for her to have papers and a work permit so that she wouldn’t have to leave them before they found someone reliable to replace her. She’s irreplaceable! said the man. Everyone is replaceable, said the woman.
When Danka returned to her room above the garage, the expression of plenitude on her face had not diminished. Instead of listening to herself, she listened, day and night, to the sounds that came from her boy. Within a week she restarted work, taking Olek everywhere with her. The daughter of the house, aged five, declared she wanted a baby. A baby like him. She was watching Danka breastfeed Olek. After she said this, she let her head fall against Danka’s shoulder, as if sharing the worries of motherhood.
Amongst their Polish friends in Paris, Olek was passed from hand to hand, the men’s hands often swollen or bruised, roughened by cement, the women’s hands sometimes over-pink as if over-licked from the incessant work of ironing and washing. Everyone agreed that the baby looked like Mirek, the same wide hands, the same blue-grey eyes. And look! Look! He has the same ears. Perhaps Mirek, with a father’s pride, was trying to look like his son.
Were I to have another life, born on another continent, there would, I believe, be one kind of gathering which, should I ever come across it, I would unerringly identify as Polish, even if I didn’t know where Poland was!
A small room. People seated on chairs, a stool, a click-clack bed, backs to the wall. In the middle of the crowded, small room, on the floor, a baby asleep in a carrycot. They are talking, knitting, telling stories, cutting a sausage, discussing prices, yet the gaze of them all repeatedly returns to the carrycot as if it were a fire whose flames draw their attention. Every so often one of them gets up to look closely at the baby. The fire has become a home-movie that they can only watch close-up in the camera’s viewfinder. If the baby is not asleep, they pick it up and hold it against their breasts. The men do this as confidently as the women, one of their huge calloused hands totally covering the baby’s swaddled torso. Italian Madonnas are regal, their bambini adored. Here the celebration is different. The circle of illegal migrant workers sitting with their backs to the wall are marvelling at a faraway victory. Of course the baby’s birth is no surprise and has been awaited. But time after time, and life being life, a victory is never assured until won. Those who haven’t yet drunk take the occasion to drink, eyes a little damp. And all are equally astounded by the news of a victory from far away.
Olek, his small hand pressing against Danka’s breast, drank and drank and put on weight. So did the parents. Nourishment somehow became a promise for the three of them.
One day Mirek said: You and I must go on a diet!
Why?
So you can get into your wedding dress!
She blushed for she knew it was true.
Give me three months, she said.
The vegetables are cooked and I put them through a mixer — one of those that turn by hand. I found it in the dining-room cupboard behind the soup plates. I hold the feet of the machine, which straddles a dish, firmly on to the kitchen table with my left hand, and I turn the handle with my right. It was my mother who taught me the technique when my hands were small and the practice more difficult than I imagined. Wait till you’re bigger, she said.
At weddings guests are usually expansive so that they seem more numerous than they really are; the opposite happens at funerals. Nevertheless at Nowy Targ there were in reality a hundred guests.
Danka was still and calm. She looked as if she had stepped out of her bath into her dress and then into the church. She exuded freshness, a cunning freshness that had taken days to attain. Her hair was plaited with long leaves and the tiny pointed locks woven together to create a crown like a lark’s nest in the grass. Everything about her when she entered the church — it would change in a few hours — was meadow.