In the main room of the communal flat on Bishop Square lived two brothers from Bielsko-Biała and their wives. The older brother's wife was the prettier of the two. Her name was Bożena, and she was from the rubble that used to be Warsaw, so she was only too grateful for a stove to cook on and a husband whose head was so full of love and loyalty for her that there wasn't room for much else. The five Half-Villagers got along well with the older brother and Bożena, and their interactions were full of the small kindnesses and considerations required to live nine people to a toilet. The younger brother, on the other hand, was bald and pushy, and his wife, a small, pointy-nosed woman named Gosia, felt it her marital duty to transfer his pushiness to the rest of the world.
At first, Gosia tried to establish her authority in the flat by passing herself off to the Half-Villagers as a grande dame of Krakow, with her proclamations of how it used to be before the war, before the Germans and the Soviets and the swarms of refugees had taken over. But one day, as she was in the middle of a story about Jan Matejko and Stanisław Wyspiański and the mural at Jama Michalika, Bożena innocently exclaimed that she had never known her sister-in-law had lived in Krakow before, and Gosia was forced to sheepishly admit that she had been born and raised in a modest village outside Bielsko-Biała. For a week afterward, she tried to pass herself off as landed gentry, the land tragically and unfairly ripped from the family, in the manner of nineteenth-century novels, but her maiden name and her manners did not support the plot, and it was not long before she herself ran out of momentum for telling the story. As each day passed, as even her imagined superiority over her flatmates dribbled away and the other three women grew closer, she began grasping for anything, at first trying to leverage her connections—impossible when you had the Pigeon on your side—then her attractiveness—laughable next to a true beauty like Anielica—then her intelligence and wit, which her shallow reservoirs could not support for long.
In the end, there was only one thing left to use. It seeped out slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, tucked into the conversations with the other two women while Marysia was outside with Irenka. First, there were only sighs and clucking, then reactive grumblings, then more audible mutterings of "some people." How some people didn't discipline their children, how some people didn't pull their weight around the flat, how some people used other people's soap, pilfering their way straight to the devil, how some people did not clean their hairbrushes or brush their teeth or change their sheets often enough. How some people should marry other some people and other people should marry other other people. It was clear that she was talking about Marysia, but Marysia, always seeing the best in people, never noticed, even when she was in the room. And Anielica did not tell her.
She did not tell Marysia that Irenka had asked why her grandparents had killed Jesus, or that she had caught Gosia on the shared balcony, peeping in the window as Władysław Jagiełło was dressing. She did not tell her that Gosia's some people were also Hitler's some people, the same six million some people who had been gassed and incinerated, torn sibling from sibling, forced into cellars with the rats, and finally and magnanimously allowed to leave their homelands for countries with the o's crossed out.
But in protecting her sister-in-law, Anielica had to bear the brunt of the attack every day, and so she reverted to the strategy they had used against the Germans. Act as if. Act as if you didn't see them, and they didn't exist. Act as if you didn't understand their language, and they were rendered babbling idiots. Act as if you couldn't feel Hauptmann Schwein or his lackey on top of you as you made love to your husband, and the images shriveled up immediately. Didn't they? And so Anielica persevered in her silence, which she saw as diplomacy necessary for survival, but which pointy-nosed Gosia wrongly extrapolated into acquiescence and even agreement. As the summer wore on, Gosia began to speak even more directly, sharpening her words on the stone of her ill will, for it turned out in the end that she was looking to replace the Half-Villagers with another couple they knew from Bielsko-Biała.
"It's a wonder how some people get placed so quickly by the Housing Authority. It must be nearly impossible if you are not even married. And how can you be married in God's eyes if you are of the race who killed His son? We know a couple who has been waiting for five or six months, pure Polish on both sides. Not a crumb of challah between them, and they arrived in March and are still doing odd jobs, still sleeping on cots like Gypsies, all because some people keep cutting ahead of them in line."
Anielica eventually talked to the Pigeon about it in one of their whispered conversations late into the night, and after going around and around, they finally agreed that it was all talk, that the Pigeon had better connections than they did, that Bożena and the older brother were still sympathetic to them, and that it was easier to ignore the other two than załatwić another space on the housing list. And so it continued.
"Some people don't know their place."
"Some people try to jump higher than their heads."
"Some people should consider themselves lucky to still be alive."
Some people, indeed.
Going to the Old Theater every night to sew costumes was the best part of Anielica's day. It was only a short walk from Bishop Square, and she and Marysia had time to stop home for a quick supper and to tuck Irenka in. They arrived just after the show ended each night, as the actors were leaving for Jama Michalika. Backstage among the props and scenery, they would work in peace for three or four hours on two old Singer sewing machines.
When they left the flat each night, it was obvious that Bożena wanted to go with them, that she was tired of spending the late evenings with her sister-in-law. She had no sewing skills to speak of, but they offered her a few złote of their pay to press and steam the costumes, their least favorite chore, and she happily agreed.
Anielica would always talk fondly of those nights backstage at the theater, laughing and talking. Bożena would stand at the ironing board, singing songs from Old Poland at the request of the other two women. Anielica would listen, hunched over her work, and try to imagine the people who had raided the wardrobe closet during the war, walking the streets in corsets and knee boots and knickerbockers, confirming the Germans' notion of the Poles as primitive and backward.
Over the months, the songs Bożena sang became weighted with meaning as more and more of them were banned by the communists—subversiveness they called it—and the night the actor who played Iago in Othello returned through the back door to retrieve a hat, they nearly fainted from the shock.
"Which one of you was that just singing?" he asked, appearing suddenly from behind a rack of costumes. "Someone was just singing 'Flow, Wisła, Flow.'" The three women froze, and Bożena looked to the other two before answering.
"It was me," she said in a voice that was barely audible.
They held their breath, waiting for him to denounce her, but instead, he began to praise her voice, calling it the chirp of a songbird, the flutter of an angel's wings, and other platitudes that sounded odd coming from a man they had only heard reciting Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the following week, Bożena found herself singing for a small audience of other actors who had stayed back from the café, and there was talk of incorporating her into a new cabaret that was forming.
Gosia always made sure she was cleaning something when they came home at night, as if to make the point that they had been out merely gallivanting and she had been tightening the slack in the rope for the rest of them. She was envious enough when they told her about the job sewing costumes, and she grew downright jealous whenever they talked of seeing this or that actor, but hearing that Bożena had been invited to sing in front of an audience was too much, and new wrinkles stitched themselves into her forehead and around her lips.
"She was singing for the actors?"
"Yes, isn't it wonderful?" Marysia gushed, actually expecting Gosia to be happy for Bożena.
"Subversive songs?"
"Well, who says they are subversive?" Anielica protested. "There has been no official decree."
Gosia's face reddened, and in that moment, it was hard to see what even her husband, ugly little man that he was, saw in her.
"This" she said. "This is the last sprout on the potato. I have been diplomatic. I have treated you as members of my own family, but I will not tolerate this. I will not allow them to make my sister-in-law an enemy of the state. It is one thing for some people to scandalize themselves, but when they begin to corrupt other people, that is a different story indeed. You think we don't know who you are? That your husbands are mercenaries? You think we don't know that she is Jewish? Where will it end? Who will keep them in line now?"
She would have slammed a door if it had been possible, but in a communal flat, it is difficult to find a door to slam, a dramatic exit to make, unless you want to be locked out. Instead, Gosia sat down on her mattress and crossed her arms defiantly.
The other three women looked at each other. All of them, even Marysia, had finished Gosia's sentence in their minds. Now. Now that Hitler was only a mass of black, sticky ash and his ideas swept under the rug of history. Now that the camps were closed and the Kommandanten were being hunted down and marched to Nuremberg.
They all went to bed uneasy that night, and even when the men returned and the sun came up, the greasy film of Gosia's words clung to everything in the flat. They could not eat or clean or wash up without being reminded, and the film seemed to spread, coating the lightbulbs and the windows of the flat, so that each day, the sun seemed to rise a little later and set a little earlier, the shadows of the inhabitants lengthened, and the dark circles under their eyes grew more pronounced.