AS I STOOD OVER THE TOILET, I saw that despite being slightly drunk I had a limp erection. There was a dark puddle at my feet. An old lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The wall in front of me, behind the only toilet, was full of colorful graffiti — words and sayings and names and drawings and even poems. My eyes immediately searched for anything crossed out, anything forbidden, and I recalled the canvasses of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who wrote words on them and then crossed some out, so you’d see them more, he said — the very fact that they were obscured, he said, made you want to read them. I washed my hands, thinking about my grandfather, about Auschwitz, about the five green numbers tattooed on his forearm that throughout my entire childhood I’d believed were there, as he himself had told me, so that he wouldn’t forget his phone number — his way of crossing them out, I suppose, of forbidding them. And I thought about Łódź, about his apartment in Łódź on the first floor of a building on the corner of Zeromskiego Street and Persego Maja Street, number 16, near the Zielony Rynek market, near Poniatowskiego Park, in which he and his girlfriend Mina and their friends were playing a game of dominoes when the German or Polish soldiers captured them all one afternoon in November of 1939. And I thought about the way my grandfather’s face looked both cynical and disappointed every time I told him that I wanted to visit Poland, Łódź, the Zielony Rynek market, his apartment on the corner of Zeromskiego Street and Persego Maja Street, where that afternoon he saw his siblings and his parents for the last time, and where, in November of 1939, after that game of dominoes was interrupted, he’d never returned. What do you want to go to Poland for? he used to say. You shouldn’t go to Poland. The Polish betrayed us.
FAMILIJNY MLECZNY BAR. That’s what I saw in another city, outside another bar, painted in gold letters on the glass of the front door. Milk bar, I remembered having read someplace before traveling to Warsaw. Classic Polish cafeterias. Very communal. Very cheap. Vestiges of another time, a time more austere and less globalized. I was standing on Nowy Swiat Street — which means New World in Polish, I later learned — freezing in pink in the premature night, watching diners through the enormous front window: them too mostly vestiges from another time. The last bastion, I thought. The last refuge of the old world, I thought, right here in the middle of this strange new world. Everything inside was glowing in the night. Everything looked warm, and comfortable, and delicious. I could see that the menu, written on one wall, was only in Polish. Suddenly, a young couple walked in. I acted on impulse and walked in with them.
The line moved quickly — first to the window where a redheaded woman, void of any expression whatsoever, was taking orders and payment; and then to a second window, which opened directly onto the kitchen, and through which customers took their plates. I tried to read the enormous menu written on the wall, but I couldn’t decipher or even recognize the name of anything. We kept moving. In front of me, the two young people were taking off their gloves and scarves and caps and preparing to order. I turned to the tables and noted that everyone was eating quickly, in silence, with near-mechanical movements and expressions. Maybe they were enjoying their dinner, but they seemed determined not to let it show. Briefly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pink ghost in the glass, and it took me a moment to realize that I was that ghost, still wearing the pink coat. The young couple finally reached the first window. They ordered their meals and paid the woman. Now it was my turn. I didn’t know what to do, or what to order, or what to say. I leaned over to the couple and asked them if they spoke English. A bit, said the man, and I felt less nervous. I asked him if he could order for me. He stood staring at my huge pink coat, perhaps thrown by my huge pink coat, and I sensed the increasing anxiety of the old people behind me waiting their turn and found myself on the verge of shouting to the man that I was hungry, that my damn suitcase had gotten lost. But luckily all I said was that I didn’t speak Polish. He consulted with his partner. They both had shaved heads, were dressed in black, had tattoos on their arms and necks and rings in their lower lips. What do you want? I told him that it didn’t matter, that he should decide, that I’d have the typical. Soup? Yes, of course, soup. And maybe a kielbasa? Yes, that too, a kielbasa. And black tea? Yes, thank you, black tea, and I listened to him order it all from the redhead at the first window. I also ordered you some dessert, he said. You’ll like it, he added. Naleśniki z serem, that’s what it’s called, and he smiled. I thanked him again and they moved up a few steps toward the second window. The redheaded woman said something to me that I didn’t understand but took to be the grand total of what I owed her for my dinner. I gave her a few bills, a few złotys, and she, still tight-lipped, and still wearing no expression whatsoever, and as stiff and automatic as her old cash register, handed me my change.
I sat down between two old Poles, without taking off my pink coat. I thought they both looked a bit like my grandfather. I tried not to see them as traitors, not to judge them, not to condemn all old Poles. I made a futile attempt to forget my grandfather’s words. And warming up as I ate dish after dish (the best one: that dessert, which turned out to be a Polish version of crepes or blintzes), I finally realized that my entire dinner had cost a little less than two dollars. The great mathematics of socialism.
BOB DYLAN’S VOICE WHINED in the background. Tamara was singing. Yael had filled my glass again and was now flirting with a guy who looked Scottish and who quite likely was the owner of the bar. I kept looking at Yael. She had a silver belly-button ring. I pictured her in military uniform, toting a huge machine gun. I turned and looked back, and Tamara was smiling at me as she sang. Her, I could only picture naked.
I took a long swallow and emptied my glass. An old indigenous man had walked into the bar and was trying to sell machetes and huipiles. I told Tamara that I was running late but that we could meet the following day. Can you come back here from the capital? she asked. Sure, I’d love to, it’s only thirty minutes by car (I’d parked the Saab out on the street). All right, she said, I get out of class at six. Should we meet here? Ken, I said, which means yes in Hebrew, and I gave her a half smile. I love your mouth, it’s shaped like a heart, she said, and then she stroked my lips with her finger. I said thank you, and told her that I really liked my lips stroked with a finger. I do too, Tamara whispered in her bad Spanish, and then, still in Spanish and baring all her teeth like a hungry lioness, she added: But what I like even more is having my nipples bitten, and hard. I wasn’t sure if she really understood what she was saying or if she’d said it as a joke. She leaned into me and made me shiver with a kiss on my neck. I wondered what her nipples looked like, if they were round or pointy, pink or vermilion or maybe translucent violet, and standing up to leave, I said in Spanish that it was a shame, because when I bite them, I bite them soft.
I paid for all the beers and we agreed to meet right there, at six o’clock. I gave her a tight hug, feeling something that has no name but is as loud and clear as the white smoke from the Vatican on a dark winter night, and knowing full well that I wouldn’t be back the next day.
Surviving Sundays
It was raining in Harlem. I was standing on the corner of 162nd and Amsterdam, my coat already damp, my old umbrella barely holding out against the sudden gusts of wind. It was almost four in the afternoon, and already starting to get dark. I didn’t know Harlem. I didn’t know which way to walk. I didn’t know which direction would take me to Edgecombe Avenue, in Washington Heights. I just stood there looking up the street as if I might be able to recognize something in the rain and the wind and the premature December dusk. I hunched under the umbrella. With some difficulty, I managed to light a limp, rain-specked cigarette.