I was miserable in Poland.
I was sick, a burl of yuck in my lungs that kept me coughing, and coughing meant no smoking, and that made me miserable too. The cat who pissed on the mattress I was sleeping on made me miserable, and how my heart was broken but not yet officially—that was a special kind of misery, edged with stupid hope and paranoia. And I couldn’t distract myself with sex because the heartbreak was not yet official, plus I was so sick and lethargic with the ugly coughing—when your face stays in that prolonged contortion, honk honk honk. My miserable, heartbroken sickness sat on my face like a film, making me very unpretty. I had let myself get too skinny and my head sat upon my neck like a bobble toy, the wrinkles in my face deeper with no cheeks to plump them. I looked sad and I felt sad and I brought it all to Poland.
I arrived in Warsaw from Nice, where I had been vacationing with Olin, my boyfriend-not-boyfriend—he just didn’t like being part of a couple. As in, it really freaked him out that time we found ourselves both brushing our teeth in the bathroom at the same time; see also, the greening of his complexion when I once asked to wash myself off in his shower. He did not want to encourage acts that would allow one to get dreamy about possible future domesticity and yet had taken me on a cruise of the French Riviera. Mixed messages, yes, and I had packed my decoder, determined to make it work because he was so funny and well dressed and our sex was so good. I found his belly, which embarrassed him, kingly and the orange hair that furred his shoulders very animal. All of him was noble to me, even the tarred places within him that made him so skittish and terrible. I imagined I could lure him out of himself and into some new version that was generally happier and eager for love. This is a particular feminine fantasy, and it is odd how much I clung to it and even odder how oblivious I was to my own patterns, but that is the way of them, isn’t it? These gears that churn inside us and we barely notice them, no matter how many wooden shoes and metal hammers get tossed into the works.
We’d boarded the boat in Spain, a giant yacht that raised its sails to very dramatic music each night. You would be sitting in the hot tub and suddenly the soundtrack to a Viking ambush would blare and the white canvas would ascend. For one week, we were at sea. I would walk up to the deck for my morning coffee, excited to see what the morning’s view would be—look, a terra-cotta castle! It was grand, this was Europe, the Europe where fairy tales come from, rolling hills and the sky and the sea blindingly blue. It made me feel glorious; there is nothing more spectacular than traveling. Except love. Olin was moody, snappy, and mean, but I was in love with him. I experimented with being this way or that, timid or cool, exuberant, funny, intimate or aloof, all along shaking on the inside, and none of it having any effect whatsoever. At the end of the trip we would go our separate ways, him to Budapest, me to Poland. I had gotten an organization to give me a grant to teach writing to feminists in Warsaw.
I am English and had spent a week in London at eighteen, drunk, dancing all night in goth clubs, drinking shandies in pubs, and falling in love with everything, just like the psychic who’d told me I had lived there in a past life assured me I would. I am French and had spent three weeks in Paris, chain-smoking and eating cheese, involving myself in a ménage à trois and falling in love, as one does in Paris. And, I am Polish. How would I experience my Polishness in Warsaw? Not by getting drunk or dancing or smoking or eating cheese or falling in love. In Warsaw, I would suffer. Perhaps that was what one did in Poland.
My flight from Nice landed at night. The French sun was gone and would never shine in Poland anyway. How could it have been so warm and now be so cold? Was Poland so very far from France? Being American, I thought of it all as Europe. I wore a tight gray dress that wrapped across my chest, with no sleeves, made from the thick cotton of a sweatshirt. It was a good outfit for Nice, for turning my back on Olin as I hopped into a taxi, crying behind my shades like a real French lady. In Warsaw the dress was ridiculous. Night fell earlier in Poland; the airport was stark and roomy, yellow lit against the dark outside, pierced with the fleeting red and white lights of cars. My friend Anu was late to fetch me. Anu was a rogue, I knew, and I feared he would never come for me. What would I do? I would get a hotel room, I thought. In every city of every nation there were hotel rooms by the airport. I would check my emails, surely someone would try to find me. I would email Anu, email Agnieszka, whose queer organization had helped me get the grant to teach writing. If only they offered travel grants to the estranged daughters of alcoholic Polish men, so that they might learn how their own estranged Polishness operated within them. A grant to study the pieces of themselves that were Polish even when their Polish kin were unknowable, a grant to fund a pilgrimage to the inscrutable homeland of their deadbeat dad. But such grants do not exist, so one must teach writing to feminists.
I understood I was English because I loved music and fashion, the weirder the better. I had two Union Jack T-shirts by the time I was thirteen; I lay in bed listening to Billy Idol’s growl and cried. I tried to feather my shitty hair like Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott. Later I would fashion it after Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux, and lie in bed listening to Depeche Mode and the Smiths and cry some more. I understood I was French because of Jean Genet and Violette Leduc, because of Anaïs Nin’s involvement with Henry Miller’s crazed wife June. Also, I loved to smoke cigarettes and cry. But Poland? I loved kielbasa. I called it “the sausage of my people,” making friends laugh. I loved the Polish eagle tattoo on my uncle Stashu’s bicep, golden crowned, claws flexed. My own heraldic pigeon tattoo, with its crown and claws, is an homage. Poland was founded by a man named Lech, one of three brothers, descendants of Noah—yes, the Noah, the one with the boat and all the animals. The three brothers were hunting, each following his prey in various directions, and Lech, in pursuit of the bow he’d sprung, stopped short when he came upon an eagle guarding its nest, huge and fierce. The setting sun lit her feathers gold, and Lech, sensitive to omens, decided to stay, called the place Poland, named the eagle Golden, and made it his protector. A hunting people, open to the mystical powers of feathers and sunshine. To allow such poetry to determine life’s direction. I always believed the witch inside me came from my mother, the alcoholic from my father. But maybe it is more complicated than that.
I met my friend Anu years ago at a queer club in Paris, where he was studying photography. I was in love with a blond boy named Killian whose girlfriend would not allow him to dance with me, and so I twirled alone in the hot pink light of the club until I found myself dancing with Anu. Killian was pained to see me dancing with Anu, and pulled me aside and begged me to stop, to not take him home. Home was the apartment above the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. I had meant to sleep inside the bookstore like all the eighteen-year-old boys, the Tumbleweeds in their velvet blazers and rumpled Rimbaud hairdos, rolling cigarettes on the stone steps outside. I had meant to sleep among them and write about it, but the owners learned I was a writer and gave me the writer’s apartment, a single room with a flat twin mattress resting on a board that rested on stacks of books. Books lined the walls too. Tumbleweeds left their diaries on the desk during the day, and everyone traipsed through to use the only bathroom. Of course I took Anu home, to spite Killian, who loved me, and also because he was very attractive—olive skin and dark hair—and Polish, which was exotic to me, more so than France even, because Poland was the mystery inside me.
I bought Anu beers from a café in the Latin Quarter and we sat outside, the stone buildings crowding us. He told me all about his family, that his father was a salt magnate and he was the heir to a salt fortune. After the fall of communism, his mother had opened the first Chanel store in Poland and Anu grew up looking at the photos from her stash of Vogue magazines. Anu’s tales seemed like lies, but lies tailored to my particular interests, so they were like little gifts from Anu to me. He told me he would write me a mermaid story about the mermaid tattoo on my belly; he would write me a bluebird story about the bluebird on my hand. He would send me a vial of pure Polish salt. Of course, it was only pillow talk. I smoked his cigarettes and took him back to the apartment, where he opened a Tumbleweed’s diary and wrote inside it. I was scandalized. I was already afraid I hadn’t worked long enough in the bookstore downstairs, hadn’t typed out my biography in the typewriter niche as requested, hadn’t impressed the White Witch, the Irish poet who presided over the weekly tea party in George’s apartment, where the bookstore’s elderly owner lay on his twin bed that he shared with a pan of cat litter and a small black-and-white TV, his dresser overrun with papers and old food and at least one cockroach. Perhaps I was pushing the boundaries of the bookstore’s hospitality bringing someone back for sex on the scrawny bed, both of us freezing mid-grope, feigning sleep when Tumbleweed boys crept in to use the bathroom. And now here was Anu, gleefully vandalizing their diary. He did not vandalize my body. He was very gentle, turning it like an artifact in his palms, studying my tattoos, fascinated. I played PJ Harvey and the Smiths, and he hadn’t heard of either of them, nor had he heard of Patti Smith. I didn’t understand how this attractive, genderqueer person who had danced so well to M.I.A. in the club did not know this music, but later, when I came to Poland, I understood better.
Agnieszka was chosen to host me in Warsaw because she had the nicest apartment. It is true that the building sat on very green grass. The neighborhood seemed sedate. Inside, it felt like public housing. Isn’t all housing public under communism? Agnieszka’s sturdy panelák was surely built by the state after the war, after the Nazis had burned the whole of the city to the ground and the Soviets brought it back. Housing. What could be more of a uniform, human need, so why not create these uniform blocks? Agnieszka had a tremendous number of locks on the door, like a joke about old New York City. “Don’t let the cats out,” she requested. And don’t let them into the room I was given to sleep, because they would pee on my things. I forgot many times and would rush into the room, urgently smelling my suitcase, relieved that they hadn’t pissed there, until, of course, they did.
There was no beauty inside me at that time, and it was hard to connect with Warsaw’s beauty, so unlike other places I’d seen. I had thought myself expert at locating difficult beauty, a happy consequence of growing up in my slummy New England town, but here I’d become an ugly American, the worst, my heart cold to the brutalist buildings punched into the city. The heavy gray skies, the directive from Anu not to smile at strangers, lest they think I was simpleminded, a fool, or else gearing up to rob them. I found it very hard to board a train car, pass an old woman on the street, and not reflexively smile. Olin, too, had had a problem with my smiling; my relentless positivity had aggravated his depression. This insanity had hurt my feelings, but later, with distance, I could see my happiness for what it was: aggressive and manipulative, as if the radiance of my personality could burn away his sadness like a fog. My mother had employed a similar tactic with my depressed Polish father, and wasn’t Olin so very much like my father with his chronic grumpiness and his cigarettes and alcohol? Did this weaponized positivity, calibrated to offset cynicism and despair, drive them both away?
What was brilliant about Warsaw was how the Polish resistance fought the Nazis for sixty-three days. Ordinary people fueling the uprising. These are the people I liked to imagine myself descended from, not the other, evil Polish, who killed their neighbors and moved into their homes. The Warsaw Uprising was urban combat, espionage, and sabotage, the largest armed resistance in World War II. The Polish Home Army raided a military prison that had been turned into a concentration camp, freeing almost 350 Jewish prisoners. Women fought, were involved. Like Anna Smoleńska, an art student who won a sort of contest to design an emblem for the resistance. The Kotwica is all over Warsaw, a P growing out of the middle peak of a W resembling an anchor. Anna was a girl scout at the time, and in Warsaw, the Polish boy and girl scouts comprised the Gray Ranks. Anna was twenty-three then and she looked queer. Short hair slicked sideways across a broad forehead, a pleasant, open face, sweet. Wearing a necktie. She engaged in sabotage and worked for a resistance newsletter. The Nazis wanted the editor but found Anna, and took her and all the women of her family to Auschwitz. A photo shows a shadow of the stout lesbian she would have grown into had she been allowed to live. Her round glasses, her bloody nose. A virus infected her chest there, and she died.
Certain things give my body dopamine. Sex, shopping, smoking. Text messages. Possibility, anticipation. I recently learned that talking about yourself triggers a dopamine release, and my entire adult life made a sad, new sense. I am an alcoholic, and I think that this grasping for sensation, this need for dopamine, for a high, is what turned my drinking sour. I don’t know if I have less dopamine than you have or if I am simply greedy. Having taken away alcohol, I’ll lunge toward fucking instead or find myself dizzy, sweaty, from the sight of a perfectly designed shoe. I’ll eat cigarettes. In Poland I had nothing. I got little bolts of something from the iron Kotwicas bolted into the bricks of buildings here and there, marking the place where the uprising was fought. Mystery gives me dopamine too, and history, sometimes, and revolution. I thought about the mermaid Syrenka, said to protect the city of Warsaw, what a shitty job she had done. I imagine it was beyond her capacity. The Soviet army was meant to join the uprising, but had stopped short on the other side of the river Vistula, allowing the Nazis to destroy the resistance in hope that the Polish would later need Russia. And they did. And they did. I imagined Syrenka, a dark-hearted, tangle-headed mermaid gone furious with grief.
While I was in Poland, Olin’s plan was to explore Budapest with an old friend, a long-ago girlfriend. The two of them stayed with mutual friends, a couple, both of whom had eating disorders and so had little energy to show their guests around town. The old girlfriend was terribly mean to Olin, and he’d had a moment, stuck inside her bad temper, when he wondered if that was what it had felt like for me, traveling with him.
It was hard for Olin to enter bodies of water. He would go slowly, wincing. I would jump in, like a dolphin or mermaid. I would splash and frolic, and if I were to be honest, I would admit I was also performing the part of a free-spirited young woman, at one with the elements. I knew he was not like this, and I hoped my spirited splashing would cheer him. I thought maybe it could jolt him out of his dour state, a revelation, Yes, I can jump in the ocean too! and he dives in, peeling off his depression like a T-shirt. Olin had metal rods where his shinbones ought to have been. The cold of the metal immersed in the seawater was terrible. Years ago Olin was in a car accident and everyone died. Olin died twice, but was the only one to live. He recovered at home, on morphine, slowly becoming addicted. He was fourteen years old. I leapt from the sea, droplets shooting off me like crystals.
In a smoky bar in Poland, filled with interesting-looking people chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping drinks, Anu asked if I was faking my happiness. Was I really like this all the time? Was I putting on a show? I didn’t know how to respond. I was miserable, but I didn’t need to talk about it. Anu knew I had just ended a terrible trip and that my heart was broken. I had sadly told him that I would not be able to sleep with him because I felt so ill, a presumptuous thing to say; he may well have had enough of me in Paris, plus I wasn’t looking pretty and he had a new girl, young and plump-faced and devoted. They wore matching leopard socks and Anu wrote love notes on her skin with a marker. I can be miserable and happy at once, I explained. Once, when I was newly sober but had no recovery, nothing to help me navigate the mindfuck of life without alcohol, the writer Mary Woronov also asked me if I was always happy. She was not curious like Anu, but a bit more scornful. There is something dopey about happiness, as the Poles know. Woronov is a Slavic last name; Russia was founded by Lech’s brother, Rus. “Are you on Prozac?” Mary demanded. I explained to her that I had just quit drinking and I wanted to die, but I didn’t see the point in making it anyone else’s problem. She laughed. “Well, of course you want to die. Life is miserable without drugs.”
In Warsaw Anu pointed to the Palace of Culture and Science. They called it the syringe because of the decorative spire on top, 150 feet tall. The building used to have “Stalin” all over it; a gift from Russia, it had been named the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science, but after Russia began its de-Stalinization, Poland too wiped the brute’s name from its buildings.
The year of my visit was the fortieth anniversary of Solidarność, and the scrawled red logo radiated from a banner draped over the palace’s facade. My Polish father was a union organizer, and he loved Solidarność; I had a pin of that logo when I was nine. It was the first time workers in a Soviet country had come together to form a union; it was Warsaw’s latest uprising. Over nine million people joined; it was more than a union, it was a resistance, and it toppled communism. Possibly my father too wondered how Poland lived inside him, and with Solidarność he felt an answer, a shared and raging blood, fighting for freedom. First there had been the Polish pope, Pope John Paul II, who I also had a pin of—a large round pin of his face dangling from a purple ribbon—from someone who had gone to Boston to watch him pass in a parade. Born Karol Wojtyła, he’d resisted the Nazis in Kraków doing guerrilla theater, working at a chemical factory by day. The day he was shot my depressed Polish father was even more so. “What is this world, when someone shoots the pope?” A spring day, his sadness bathed in sunshine as he unlocked the door to the home he would soon kick us all out of, my mother, my sister, and me. His heavy trudge up the stairs. I was maybe excited that the pope had been shot. I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between excitement and anxiety, and have wondered if my body enacts a strange alchemy on my emotions, turning one into the other, maybe fusing them into a whole new chemical. It made me proficient at stressful relations, the excitement of infatuation morphing to a nearly identical, persistent panic. My capacity for love had always amazed me, but now I see that it was only generalized anxiety disorder. Medication helps.
I didn’t visit the Solidarność exhibit at the Palace of Culture and Science. I had to manage my nostalgia for a father who was not dead, but was in fact working at a health-food store in Clearwater, Florida.
Past the Palace of Culture was the saddest H&M in the world. It was as if a post-Soviet collection had been designed especially for this location, and the store had agreed to sell those and only those clothes. I was hoping to buy a coat, I was freezing, but I couldn’t. Later Agnieszka would take me to a thrift shop, because I was sure that a country whose history was so close to the present would have wonderful secondhand shops full of old lace and artifacts, but I simply did not understand communism, or history. I found a pair of striped pants that tapered nicely at the ankles, and a strange old makeup bag. We went back to Agnieszka’s, me hacking my Polish cough. We passed tiny fruit and vegetable stands, where people bought whole heads of sunflowers and carried them home, plucking the seeds to eat along the way. I was careful not to smile at anyone. Inside her home I waited for my nose to adjust to the stink of cat piss. I petted the animals and boiled frozen pierogi. Inside my room I read the New Yorker. A man had written in to comment on an article about dying. He wrote that his wife had died of cancer and briefly described what it had been like to sit at her bedside and love her as she passed over. I burst into tears. All I want, I thought wildly, is to be loved. I want to be loved so badly. The thought humiliated me but it was true. I allowed myself to weep for it. I wanted someone to die with. Probably it wouldn’t happen. Every time you think that it is going to happen and then it doesn’t actually happen it deconstructs your heart a little, until something once lush and scarlet has the brutalist architecture of a formerly communist country. I signed my computer onto Agnieszka’s shaky internet to see if Olin had sent me a missive from Budapest; he hadn’t. I did have an email from my friend Peter. I had visited Peter in New England at the start of the summer; we’d gone to Provincetown and played bingo with townies, rode bicycles through the cemetery, shopped at Marine Specialties with its barrels of glass balls and discontinued airline plates and German army shirts. I had bought Olin a magnifying glass, the handle an animal horn. “I just want to be loved so badly,” I typed to Peter. It embarrassed me so horribly, this need. It seemed the only way to fix that was to tell someone.
I visited the mermaid statue in Warsaw’s Old Town Market Place, an exact replica of the original town square the Nazis blew up. I went there with Anu and his sweet-faced girlfriend, with Agnieszka and another Agnieszka, this one a schoolteacher who was recently fired for being a lesbian. Someone let rats inside her classroom so that when Agnieszka returned to gather her things she was faced with the rodents and their shit and the damage they had done. It was very hard to be gay in Poland. It didn’t use to be so, at least not legally. Whenever Poland was free and self-governing, queerness was allowed, but the country was always being invaded and partitioned and overtaken, and homosexuality would be outlawed. When the communists took over it was illegal again, with the state taking down the names of all queer and queer-adjacent individuals. Queer activists have petitioned the Institute of National Remembrance, the body that prosecutes crimes committed under communism, to begin an investigation into crimes against queer people, but they declined.
The mermaid in the square was small-breasted and thick-waisted, with a sort of leafy drapery growing down from her hips and unfurling onto her scaled tail. Anu told me they called this statue the toilet because the fountain released its water with a sound not unlike a toilet flushing. The water flowed weakly, which seemed an insult to the power of the bronze mermaid, her countenance placid, noble even, as she raised her sword above her head and brandished her shield. I liked her as much as I liked any mermaid or armed female, but I looked forward to visiting the bigger statue on the banks of the Vistula.
On my last night in Nice my Olin spoke to me cruelly, and so I stuffed my New Yorker into my bag and stormed out of the hotel. The hotel was around the corner from the ocean; for a fee you could rent one of their loungers and lie there, sardine-packed against the other guests on their own blue-and-white striped towels. I thought this was bullshit and had resolved to simply lie on the beach like a normal person, until I saw that the beach was made of rocks, smooth gray rocks with distinct white bands. The people who tried to rest upon them looked poor, miserable. I knew Olin would pay for our loungers, as well as the inevitable lunch and drinks we could order, and I couldn’t allow this with the vibes so bad between us, which meant I would have to pay, and I couldn’t pay for only mine, that would be too dramatic of a statement, one I was too scared to make for I was still hopeful, somehow, that things weren’t as bad as they were, and so I would have to pay for us both, and I cringed at the cost.
Later, once Olin had joined me, I lay on my lounger and stared at the breasts of the women in front of us, a mother and daughter, the mother’s breasts large and wide, the daughter’s taut and round, both of them deeply tanned and hung with gold jewelry. I enjoyed looking at them. I thought about taking off my own top, but I feared my breasts were odd, blobby triangles with no real shape or allure. Having grown up in America, one has to muster a sort of bravado to remove one’s top in public. This is easier at a protest or pride march or queer disco than at an upscale beach resort in France where one already fears they are a bit of a dirtbag, plus has low self-esteem due to romantic troubles. I wondered aloud what to do. “Take off your top if you want to,” Olin said without looking at me, and went back to reading Just Kids. After this day at the beach, Olin spoke cruelly and I flung myself outside, stopping at a café to buy a pack of cigarettes. I walked and walked until even if he were moved to find me I was beyond where his legs could comfortably take him. I smoked and drank espresso and limonata and read about the fine-dining scene in Las Vegas. Tourists came and went. Across the street was a Petit Bateau and I was thankful it was closed because I would have liked to soothe my anxiety with clothes I couldn’t really afford. Down the street, an elderly woman played a violin and sang in French, a giant rock of amethyst somehow pinned in her thinning gray hair. She was clearly insane, but touched, and I considered becoming her, considered ruining my sobriety of seven years by getting drunk at the café, following the path of ruin wherever it took me. Ultimately, to my golden years where I serenade the public, soliciting coins, stones stuck to my head.
Every now and again I would look up to see if I had caught the imagination of anyone handsome, the way women alone in public often can, but nobody cared. I left the café and wandered down narrow streets, stopping at a restaurant for some food, sitting outside with my book and my magazine. I ate swiftly, eager to smoke again. The thought of Olin weighed on me. He would be hungry. The fight, if I remember, was about where to dine. Low blood sugar probably had made a contribution to the day’s misery. I ordered him a pizza and walked it back to our room. He knew he didn’t deserve it, which was nice. He asked if I was going to stay elsewhere, but we were leaving so soon that it didn’t make sense. Plus, I hoped we’d have sex again, and we did. I didn’t know if it was me, or him, or us together, but something happened when we had sex. How can he loathe me so and yet—this. It didn’t make sense. So, of course he didn’t loathe me. It was something else. A mystery, eking dopamine from my brain like water from a rock.
I taught writing to the feminists in Getto Żydowskie, the old Jewish ghetto, the brick buildings pockmarked with gunfire. Much of the neighborhood was destroyed, the new one built right on top of the rubble, but some original buildings were still standing. We wrote together at a bar that hadn’t opened yet, out in a courtyard where sausages were cooked on a grill nightly and plants grew from brightly painted industrial containers. When we got cold we moved inside, sitting on armchairs in the ghost haze of old cigarettes. When I say I taught, I more mean that I inspired. Created a space where the feminists’ stories mattered, where the only thing to do was write them and so they were finally forced to do so, rather than cleaning their house or jumping in the shower or turning on the television or whatever anyone does instead of writing their memoirs. Once upon a time, when I was twenty-three years old, I believed powerfully in the importance of telling your story, and I told mine with vengeance and did what I could to encourage everyone else—well, the girls, anyway, the poor people and the people of color, the queers—to tell their stories as well. That was seventeen years ago, and anyone would get sick and tired of doing the same thing for seventeen years. When memoir is what you’ve been doing, it means you’ve become horribly sick of yourself, of your narrative, and I had. I was sick of excitedly telling everyone to write their stories, and as bad as it felt to be so annoyed with my own tale, this was worse, to be bored with an activity I still knew to be powerful and important. But knowing and feeling are two different things. Even as I felt such affection for the women who came, and did love their stories, wanted them to write them, some part of my heart was missing. I tried to overcome it but still longed for the workshop, the official point of my visit, to be over.
The bar kicked us out sooner than they’d agreed. Everyone was upset. It seemed maybe the space didn’t value feminist art or females or girls or gay people. Everyone decided to meet back at Agnieszka’s to share work and drink wine, and I got a ride with an older lesbian who told me about the days of rations when she was a child, how mothers would stand in line for theirs and then send their children later, for more. Children could earn coins standing in ration lines on behalf of various adults. In the seventies, the average Polish person spent over an hour in lines each day. Later, when I tell my mother that I found Poland depressing, she laughs and wonders what I’d expected. My father’s family would sew secret pockets into their coats when they went back to visit, so when they were inevitably mugged the thieves wouldn’t find their money. But of course I couldn’t have known this. I didn’t know these relatives, I had nobody to tell me to sew secret pockets into my clothing, to warn me not to smile, to tell me I would connect with some ancestral sadness in the clouds that sit on top of the city.
Agnieszka’s gloomy apartment was enlivened by the feminist writers. One woman, with the plucky, un-Polish energy of a young Renée Zellweger, set up a tiny phonograph spinning Elvis, turned out the lights, and delivered her piece in a storm of glitter, dancing around in a vintage slip. She had gone to school in London and so spoke English with a perfect British clip. Another woman was more traditionally gloomy, with the long, beautiful face of a silent movie star. She was also the bass player for a popular all-girl metal band, and the rest of the workshop whispered excitedly about her presence. I wrote too, as I always do when I teach, to stress that we are all just writers among writers, but my piece was terrible, the worst, all about Olin and my heartache, who cares. These women had real problems. Romance, yes, but also they lived in the ashes of communism, raised by defeated people, in a country scarred with atrocities and failed resistance. They were fired from their jobs for being gay. Abortion was illegal. This didn’t inspire me to count my blessings; it just brought me a little lower.
I met a gay boy photographer at Czuły Barbarzyńca, a bookstore that made me think I simply hadn’t been seeing the right parts of Warsaw. It was minimalist and brainy, intellectual and cool, with good coffee. I had feared the coffee of Poland, and so I had brought my own French press and two bags of Blue Bottle coffee with me. This had made the narrow cabin on the ship stink like a coffeehouse, but once at Agnieszka’s I was glad I’d been so obsessive, for she drank only tea. I was working on my computer, and when the photographer came we walked together to the Vistula to see the statue of the Syrenka Warszawska, the mermaid of Warsaw. I don’t know what he was taking my picture for. When you travel as a writer people often ask you to participate in various things, visits and lectures and parties and interviews, and I tended to say yes to everything. We walked through Powiśle to the gunmetal sculpture, where a bride in a fat white dress was having her picture taken. We waited for them to leave and then I scrambled awkwardly across the statue, posing like this and that, my hair scraped up, my face bony and creased, my mouth too big. Thick wool tights pulled under the cutoffs I’d worn in the Mediterranean.
The mermaid was powerful. Thick and angular, with a hint of a smile, as if she took delight in her power. Maybe it’s a smirk. Surely she’s defiant. It’s the face of Krystyna Krahelska, changed somewhat because the artist didn’t want her to feel too embarrassed or exposed, her face the face of Warsaw’s eternal protector. It’s true the mermaid’s eyes are wider, with a different cast than Krystyna’s; her nose is sharper, to correspond to the angles in the design. But I believe the defiance is hers. Krystyna Krahelska was a poet. Her songs were the songs of the Warsaw Uprising. Like Anna Smoleńska, she was twenty-three, a girl scout who had become part of the Gray Ranks. Like Anna, she reads queer to me in photos. Maybe Polish women just strike me as queer. In my favorite photo her hair is pulled back into two braids, and she looks deeply into the camera, sexy and sure, her eyes burning, no smile on her face, and a necklace pulled tight against her throat. In another she sits very close to a friend, almost cuddling, her hair stuck under a cap, butch to her companion’s femme, whose head is covered with a fringed scarf. Krystyna was a messenger and a nurse; she transported weapons and taught other women how to treat battlefield wounds. Rushing to help a soldier, she was shot in the chest three times by Nazis. She lay down in a field of sunflowers, afraid to rise lest she give the other fighters away. She waited for nightfall, and died.
The day I left for home I dropped my French press in Agnieszka’s bathroom sink and it smashed. It had served its purpose and was done. I swept up the glass, worried about the cats and their tender paws. I applied lip gloss in the bathroom mirror and was glad I was returning home to the rest of my clothes. It took a day or so to see Olin and know he truly did not belong to me. We met outside a coffee shop, and shamelessly I tried to go back to his house for sex, because in sex everything made sense, my anxiety obliterated by the force of it. He said his stomach was upset. The person you love just avoided having sex with you by faking diarrhea, I told myself, just to make sure I was getting it. That it was over. At home I sat on my back porch and smoked cigarettes. My illness was gone and I could smoke again. In Poland I’d eaten a last meal of kielbasa and potatoes and the lines in my face had softened. A flirtatious Gchat would soon turn pornographic; I would have another person to get dopamine from. “Don’t use people to get high,” my AA sponsor had told me. I would get on medication and it would be easier. I would try to call my father in Florida and his line would be disconnected and I would never talk to him again; even when he was dying and I found him, he would decline my call. I would write a book about the Warsaw Mermaid and another one and another one. Above my head, a flock of pigeons blacked out the sun with their flight.