14
Babel

The self is a metaphor. We can decide to limit it to our skin, our person, our family, our organization, or our species.

—Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self

Peter, the man I’d met by chance in an art gallery for disabled artists, had enlisted a friend to help me find an apartment. Martha worked for a TV station, had a car, and spoke excellent English. The third apartment we looked at was on the tenth floor, not too far from Piotrkówska, and only a twelve-minute walk to school. When I stepped inside, something said, “This is home.”

The apartment had a bedroom, living room, kitchen with newish green cabinets, and a WC with the toilet in one room, sink and tub in another. Furnishings included two funky chairs, a pine dresser missing most of its handles, and a laminated table with wobbly legs. Things one would find beside a “free” sign, in America. But the walls were freshly plastered and painted white, and I loved the silhouette of downtown Łódź in the distance under the open sky.

The owner, who lived in Sweden, had agreed to provide a bed. On the day I was to move in, Martha took me shopping for sheets, blankets, and towels. Danuta, the neighbor who managed the apartment, joined us saying the owner would pay for those as well. I should pick out a bed and also a desk. In addition, she purchased a small kitchen table and two stools. Money didn’t seem a concern.

That night, I arrived with my suitcases to find three men assembling my bed and a woman cleaning. She mopped the floors, but since they hadn’t been swept, she only distributed the construction dirt and plaster dust more evenly. A broom arrived the next morning, along with a handyman who communicated with me in German. He was to install new tile in the hallway outside the apartment and mentioned that new light fixtures were on their way. Apparently, the owner had intended to continue upgrading the apartment, but no one had told me.

The next evening, Danuta came to my door with a lamp, a microwave, and a toaster. I delighted in the unexpected abundance as more improvements kept appearing, and wondered if Danuta was being extra kind to me. My gratitude dissolved when two men and a jackhammer arrived early one morning, unannounced, to replace the bathtub plumbing. I had no place to bathe for three days. Meanwhile, the kitchen sink stopped draining; a shallow lake formed on the floor nearby, and I discovered that the refrigerator wasn’t working. Renovations and repairs continued for three weeks, funded by my rent. Still, I had a place to sleep, and my ability to function improved each day.

Perhaps I was gaining resilience from all these situations; more likely I was simply getting used to how things worked.

My five-month Polish language course began on the second of March, on the second floor of an eleven-story building that was the armpit of the University of Łódź. Most of the students were from third-world countries, and the administration apparently deemed that a third-world environment was therefore acceptable. Across the street, a sleek new library gleamed with 21st century metal and blue reflective glass.

Many students lived in dorms on the upper floors of the tall, orange building that swelled with noise and graffiti, and reeked of neglect. Navigating the crowded hallways during breaks, I would hold my breath and walk faster to avoid the cigarette smoke and body odor. I often yearned for a psychic bath as I walked home after class, exhausted and half brain-dead. The building was nicknamed “Babel.”

We numbered twenty students that first week—from Yemen, Turkey, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Ireland, Iraq, and China, among other countries. I was the only American and, at 56, old enough to have mothered most of my classmates. Thankfully, our teacher was my age.

Eva had a quicksilver mind and a fiery spirit. Bronze highlights adorned her chestnut hair and long earrings dangled against her jaw where the skin sagged slightly, the only clue to her years. Though she amused us, she was prone to quick judgments and sudden outbursts. We all feared her those first few days. On the second day of class, she exploded at a spindly young student from Taiwan.

“What the hell are you? A man or a woman? How can anyone tell since you are Chinese?”

“Please, Pani Eva, I’m not Chinese. I’m from Taiwan.” The wiry young woman could only deal with one problem at a time.

I was especially shocked because of the example Eva was setting for the student teacher observing from the back of the room. How could racial slurs be tolerated in this international classroom? A Turkish classmate was similarly upset and approached me during the break, his cousin at his side.

“She calls us Arabs, but we’re not. She thinks all Muslims are Arabs.”

We sipped coffee in the smoky snack bar while I received a quick lesson in Turkey’s racial and ethnic groups. Two African women joined us, nodding with gentle eyes. I wondered to what extent we were drawn together by our fear of Eva. Her toughness reminded me of my mother. You didn’t want to mess with either of them. By comparison, I was a paper doll.

Still, it upset me that Eva reduced people based on race or culture, just as I’d hated any hint of this growing up. It didn’t matter that my mother had her reasons.

“You are really American?” my Turkish classmate asked me. “You look like one of us. I want to talk to you in my language.”

The shape of our eyes and color of our skin were indeed similar, but there was a connection and warmth that went beyond nationality.

Babel reminded me of my childhood in Montreal, an immigrant melting pot like New York, except that we had Queen Elizabeth and 80% of the population was French Canadian. Riding the bus, a pleasant cacophony of Greek, Italian, Russian, and Hebrew would fill my ears.

When I was eight, my parents bought a brick duplex with a red front door at the crossroads of three different neighborhoods. Renters lived above us. Jews were in the majority on our street near the railroad tracks, but tensions existed even there.

Across the street, several commercial buildings gradually took the place of vacant lots. One became the home of a Hasidic yeshiva. Hasidic Jews moved into the surrounding houses, and a Jewish bakery opened in the same building as the yeshiva. My parents weren’t friendly with the Hasidic Jews. The air between them seemed perpetually frozen.

My best friend came from a Hungarian family who lived in a small, upscale apartment with wood floors and Persian rugs off of Boulevard Cotes des Neiges, bordering the forested part of the mountain for which the city was named. Beatrice was an only child and a gifted pianist. She and her parents were always laughing and telling jokes in funny voices—things we never did in my family. They often spoke Hungarian because her grandmother, who lived with them, spoke no English. Although Jewish, they seemed completely secular to me. While my parents weren’t religious, there was a distinct difference—as if my parents’ Jewishness went deeper. Jews were not all the same.

As my classmates pointed out, I was lucky because English was my native tongue. Whatever was too difficult to explain in Polish was explained in English. Unfortunately, one young Armenian woman understood not a word of it.

One day, Eva presented us with a simple exercise. We were to work in pairs. One person was to ask a question; the other was to reply. The exercise was simple, but the young Armenian woman couldn’t grasp what Eva wanted. Eva stood in front of her, repeating her instructions as she wagged her index finger forward and back. But the girl had become deaf and dumb. Eva leaned closer, her measured words beginning to smolder. No one moved as we awaited the inevitable explosion. Abruptly Eva turned to me, her eyes like loosed arrows.

“You try.”

We all breathed in relief, but now it was my turn. I wanted so much for the girl to succeed that every fiber of my being held only that intention. It was just like Kyudo where the target was not really a target, but a mirror of the heart. Instantly the girl responded to my prompt. I bathed in the glow of success, but later wondered if Eva’s retreat had simply unfrozen her brain.

The day ended well because I’d helped someone, but it had started out badly. Unable to light the stove that morning, I’d experienced a sudden loss of well-being; I felt hopelessly small and inept. Such momentary chasms seemed to appear from nowhere. During a mid-morning break, I wandered into the modern biology building next-door where innumerable pieces of paper were posted on bulletin boards. I searched for any recognizable words but couldn’t find one. The gaping hole was waiting for me and, again, I plunged in.

It was the most disturbing of feelings, like an implosion of negative space, almost ordinary, yet not. The intensity of these black holes frightened me and made me ashamed. Were there people who lived with such feelings constantly? Suddenly I wondered if these experiences of radical diminishment were not mine but theirs.

I didn’t share these feelings with anyone, nor my speculation about their source; they didn’t seem human enough to share. If I did, someone might say how brave I was, and that type of solace did not interest me. I was more interested in whether I could explore this darkness from a neutral place since I didn’t seem completely lost in it. It entered my system through some inner gate, and thankfully, was usually short-lived.

Oddly, my morning plunge into worthlessness seemed directly linked with my ability to help the Armenian girl later on. It had to do with embracing something I couldn’t logically explain. It had to do with not avoiding the darkness.

A few late arrivals joined our class before the week was out, among them an East Indian woman with eyes like rich, black earth and a Chinese couple, hopelessly challenged by Polish pronunciation. The young man had coiffed hair, a fake fur-trimmed sweater, and purple and gold sneakers. His plump girlfriend wore red suede high-heel boots.

The high point of the week came Friday with Eva’s announcement of our imminent division into two classes. Half the group would stay with Eva. When she read the names, I was glad to be grouped with my friends, but perplexed that the other group included both the most advanced and least advanced students. After class, my Turkish friend and I conferred.

“She chose the people she wanted for herself,” he said. Silently, I suspected the same thing.

By Monday, the composition of the two classes had mysteriously changed. My Turkish friends were leaving Eva’s group, which now included several Arabic-speaking men from Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.

Once our class was divided, Eva’s ethnic and racial insults abruptly stopped and her behavior became more predictable. We were instructed to speak only Polish in class, and chastised for speaking English, the supposed common language. The Arabic speakers, however, continued in Arabic as if they were exempt from the rules, and conferred with each other, like a single organism, before answering questions. Though Polish was expressive and rhythmic, they read it in a monotone, inserting “eh” between words, which made it hard to distinguish their Polish from their Arabic.

It bothered me that they kept to themselves so much. I wondered if the rest of us were excluding them in some subtle way, and whether I could do anything to change that. One morning, I sat directly between the two youngest men in their group. They carried on loudly in Arabic as if they didn’t see me, just as usual. Was I invisible? With their banter filling my ears, I could barely hear the teacher. Later it hit me. I wasn’t just from a different culture—I was a woman.

Shaken after class, I paid a visit to the school’s academic director. An elegant man about my age, he greeted me warmly and motioned to a grey leather chair across a glass coffee table, then sat down and crossed his legs in the matching chair opposite.

“So tell me about your Polish class. How is it going? Do you enjoy it?”

“Well, yes, but I have a problem, or a question. I don’t understand why the Arab students aren’t asked to follow the same rules as the rest of us. We’re not allowed to speak English at all, but they can speak their language as much as they like. It makes it impossible for others to concentrate. Why do you allow that to go on?”

“Once, when I worked in the Middle East, I tried to influence them,” he said shaking his head. “But I found it is useless to try to change them. It’s just how their culture is. I gave up a long time ago.”

“I can understand that it might be difficult, but it doesn’t seem right to give up on them. And it’s not fair to the other students.”

“Perhaps,” he said, and thanked me for coming in.

Apparently, my complaint resulted in a message to Eva. For a day or two, she swiftly yet politely reprimanded them each time they spoke Arabic. But she soon tired of the extra energy it took, and the old behavior resumed. I had learned my lesson. From then on, I took my place in our horseshoe formation: five Arab men on one side of the room facing three women and two men from five different countries on the other, with one Yemenite at the head. I could handle the incessant cacophony as long as I wasn’t surrounded by it.

Still, I couldn’t fathom why they were so separate from the rest of us and so immune to influence. The differences between us—language, culture, and religion—provided richness, color, and depth. But in the end, they were like costumes to me, not to be taken too seriously. Something inside me wanted to scream, “Don’t you see we’re all the same?”

Learning Polish was harder than I expected. The academic director had pointed out that its initial learning curve was much steeper, but that English was harder to perfect. One day, I noticed a stack of purple flyers in the snack bar, announcing summer classes at the Babel: “Close the span of 60 years of activities has hosted several thousand foreigners from over 60 countries,” it read.

Thinking this was an unfortunate advertisement for a language school, I offered my assistance to the director of marketing, a bright young man who assured me that his friend, a native English speaker in Toronto, had approved the copy. Knowing that was impossible, I persisted. To placate me, he finally feigned interest in how I would re-write the sentence.

Not only was English hard to perfect, but people were attached to what they believed, despite evidence to the contrary, even about language.

As I walked through the city, I noticed how Polish advertisers had latched on to certain English words and used them excessively without regard to meaning. Exactly what did “Extreme Pizza” and “Extreme Auto Skola” have in common? “Non-stop” was also very popular. While amusing, it bothered me to see English so misused. My irritation masked a deeper pain—for it was challenging not to understand, and not to be understood.

My apartment was a refuge from the challenges of school and city life, except for a few odd details. There was no towel hanger in the bathroom, so I would step out of the tub only to remember that my towel was hanging on a rack in the living room. It was symbolic of the circuitous way things happened in Poland. Nothing was straightforward and no one expected anything else.

The letter indicating “hot” on my sink faucet was a C on the left side. “Cold” was indicated by T on the right. To increase the challenge, the faucets were reversed in the tub, so C (hot) was on the right and T (cold) was on the left. After a while, it took less time to remember which was which. It was like learning a new alphabet. Certain Polish letters and sounds came even slower, but gradually they were seeping into my aging brain.

I was proud of each small victory—a successful interaction with a shopkeeper, or the acquisition of a new word or phrase—as if each one was a missing ancestor or a secret revealed. Verbs were the hardest. There seemed to be millions of them, distinct in meaning, yet disguised in waves of indistinguishable consonants that whispered just below the threshold of comprehension, armies of consonants that rustled uselessly in the wind around the all-too-few lonely vowels, like women holding babies on a battlefield.