Я беру пустяк: анекдот, базарный рассказ—и делаю из него вещь, от которой сам не могу оторваться.
Biore jakąś bagatelkę: anegdotę czy plotkę z rynku—i robię z niej rzecz, od której sam nie mogę się oderwać.
I take a trifle: an anecdote or bit of gossip from the market—and make of it a thing, from which I cannot tear myself away.
– Izaak Babel
Fall has arrived in earnest and my running shorts are a scandal with the bazaar’s elderly clientele. Pani Hania from the dairy shop, a matronly woman with a smile reaching so high up her cheeks that it’s more fixture than expression, has begun calling me “the hot-blooded gentleman.”
I feel particularly exposed in line at the newsstand, which is always slow in the mornings as people wait for their lottery numbers. Pan Grzegorz, the newspaper man, finishes with someone in front of me. “Maybe cigarettes? They’re two for one,” he says, as though perennially disappointed by his patrons.
A woman brushes past and mutters, “Just you wait. Sir will get sick, then we’ll see.”
“Nothing else?” P. Grzegorz asks sadly when I place a paper on his counter. A photo of the prime minister mirrors his hangdog expression under the headline, “Law and Justice silent as fourth wave spreads.”
In Andri and Lenya’s vegetable shop, Lenya is alone with a customer. Chatting with her and Andri over groceries has been my primary contact with the living world while working on my book here in Warsaw, and they’re the only ones with whom I’ve switched to the informal.
“Americans wear short pants all winter long,” Lenya tells her customer matter-of-factly, glancing over at me for confirmation. Her jet black hair is cut short on the sides with long diagonal bangs running across her forehead. Something about the way her eyes peep out from over her large glasses gives the impression of a child caught misbehaving.
“Well, not rea—”
“Oh, that reminds me! Would you consider helping me with English? Think it over, think it over. When I look for work, it’s always ‘English speakers preferred.’ Selling shoes, selling hats...” her voice drops to a conspiratorial hush, “...cleaning rooms, ‘English speakers preferred.’”
My initial impulse, as it has been with all potential obligations of late, is a blanket “no.” I’d come all the way to Poland in search of that most effective of excuses: “alas, I’m not in the country!” But having spent a lonely month or two as the pedantic autocrat of my own calendar, I tell Lenya I’d be glad to.
Andri is unloading crates from his truck in the back alley.
“Your wife mentioned English lessons...or perhaps your sister?” I stumble, realizing I’ve never gotten to the bottom of their relationship.
He blushes, “my mother.”
“Oh! she looks so—”
“Yes yes, everybody says so.”
“Well if you want to join...”
“I do. Yesterday someone came in and asked for ‘an onion,’” he laughs and holds up his hands in defeat.
Turning for home, I tiptoe past the other vegetable stand. On the rare occasions when I do my shopping there instead, the owner’s eyes follow me with mild contempt. Go back to your favorite, I imagine him saying, go back to the Ukrainians. Or perhaps it’s my clothes, or my selection: any idiot can tell those plums are out of season.
My aunt, as my great-grandma did when she was alive, always does her shopping there. The produce is, in fact, fresher and arranged in a more dynamic fashion. There’s more light from the street corner and the owner is wiry, quiet and always on his feet. He has a fine mustache and a kind of roguish charm common among working-class Poles:
“Let’s have some of those hotdogs I like,” I overheard him ask at the butcher’s once.
“Which ones?”
“You know,” he grinned, “the ones I like!”
He looks a decade or two older than his competitors, and there’s something about his and his wife’s guarded manner that recalls a different time; I can imagine my great-grandma asking a pointed question about the price of pickles. My aunt says he helps carry her groceries to the car, or will advise what’s not worth buying; “we don’t have cherries, today.” It’s of a trust more dearly bought, and it makes my rapport with Andri feel cheap.
But, one thing led to another, and my commitment to Andri and Lenya solidified. Once, I set out to buy tomatoes and those at my aunt’s favorite looked shabby; another time, Lenya waved me over and we started chatting; another time, I forgot cash and only Andri’s takes card—and now you see my predicament. When I asked my uncle why he and my aunt preferred one over the other, he shrugged, “someone went once, and then they went again.”
*
In the evening, storefront lights flick off one after the next turning the rosy cobblestone to a burgundy. The sun-washed Pepsi ad plastered over the awning closest to the street is barely legible, and the graffiti covering the other shops acquires a forbidding quality.
P. Hania puts her back into a crate of eggs and trades a joke with the woman from the neighboring stall in a tone that warbles the way brooks and gossip do. She throws me a sly grin when I pass and I laugh, though I didn’t hear what she said. Parked cars begin to grumble.
Andri and Lenya have packed all the produce inside and a stool is out waiting for me. They stand and fidget with the store’s loose ends, replacing a wandering price tag or clementine. We go over vegetable names and easy greetings. I ask how much the potatoes are, where the fruits are from. Andri is happy to fumble through in English, switching to Polish when the mood carries him.
“We opened last spring, right after the vaccines came out, so this’ll be our first winter...there’re more and more Ukrainian vendors at the wholesale market, and farmers too, maybe it’ll give us an edge.”
Lenya keeps an uneasy silence.
“I...” she looks at me ominously from under her glasses when I try to bring her in. “Am?”
“Am...” she glances nervously at a turnip.
“Happy? Sad? Cold?”
“You talk, you talk, I’ll listen. It’s like all the words have left my head. You talk.” As I get ready to leave, Andri calls me back.
How do you say,” he points to an eggplant. He and Lenya both look at me with expectant smiles. “Eggplant.”
They’re not satisfied.
“Well, the British call it an ‘aubergine.’”
“That’s the one, aubergine,” Andri says with relish.
*
My grandma sweeps up her coat and shoes in a bustling outward-bound crescendo: glasses, backpack, handful of vitamins, glance at the clock. She throws a light blue scarf over her sweater and pauses in the mirror to fix a curl; a smolder rises to the surface.
On the first day of her weeklong visit, she has planned lunch with two childhood friends, drinks at a gallery opening with a third, and dinner with a fourth. Her leather jacket flies over the threshold and the front door slams, casting a silence of the sort that follows when a TV is switched off after some time.
Pani Olena—whom my grandma hired to amend my imperfect cleaning efforts—quietly changes into a loose pair of pajama pants and plastic Adidas flip flops. She looks the apartment over with a practiced eye, examining the jars of nuts and dried fruit, absently polishing a splotch from the stainless-steel fridge, passing an investigative finger over the mold in the sink, taking inventory: Clorox, brushes, steel wool...
Spying from my desk in the next room, I feel like I’m both intruding on her impression of privacy and failing in my role as host.
“Could I offer some tea?”
“A large mug will do nicely,” she returns without missing a beat. “And could you find me a good rag? So, you’re a writer? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? Just like my Daryna. Should I clean these jars?”
I scramble like a junior officer, tea kettle in one hand, dish rag in the other. She purses her lips and runs it between her fingers as I bow out of the kitchen.
“I used to clean for Ryszard Matuszewski, the translator and writer—well more of a literary critic. And for his mother, she lived to a hundred and five. I cleaned for Kopalinski too— the one from the dictionaries—for his second family.”
My desk, I realize now, is within earshot of most of the apartment, and the old family photos I’d been pouring over start to blend together.
“His wife always had a certain professor, I won’t say his name, visit in the evenings. Between you and me, the daughter has no more Kopalinski blood in her than I do. Funny thing is though, she looks just like him. But that’s genes for you—so your girlfriend doesn’t clean?”
The sing-song vowels of her east-Slavic accent arpeggiate between hard Russian L’s and I miss the question entirely. She pokes her head into my room to follow up. “Oh! W-well—”
“You don’t have one, huh? These micro-fibers are great, I’ve never seen a mop like this.” I murmur my assent as she begins mopping my room.
“Not many friends either, huh?” Her phone buzzes. “That’ll be my Daryna asking what to make for dinner. Yes, that’ll be her—very attentive, my Daryna.” She peers over at my computer. “How does it work? With Facebook. You can just type in someone’s name and their picture comes up? I don’t know much about that sort of thing. You could just type in ‘Daryna’? How does it work?”
She hovers expectantly and I pull up Facebook.
“It’s: D-A-R-Y-N-A. No, no. Oh, that’s her! Pretty, no?”
I concur demurely and beat a hasty retreat to the shower.
“Pretty girl” I hear her say to herself after I leave, and I hardly emerge from my steamy refuge before her voice finds me again.
“I love these kinds of old albums,” she says, dusting the pictures on my desk. “What’s with his hat? Must have been some sort of Turk.”
I drip over in my towel and relay with confidence that my great-grandfather was a Lithuanian farmer.
She eyes his hat apprehensively. “My brother and I were born in Siberia, my sister later once we got to Ukraine. I’m year of the horse,” she says as if that explains it, “we were born galloping across Europe—aren’t you cold in that towel?”
“I’ll go put on some—”
“Looks like you exercise, just like my Daryna—she started secondary school without a word of Polish, finished with top marks, top marks. Above a lot of the Poles even—door open or closed? Open, open” she urges with an endearing smile before I can reply.
*
Andri leans against the shop as he smokes a cigarette and plays with his hoodie, pulling it low over a pair of thoughtful eyes and sandwiching his cheeks. Though he can’t be much older than twenty-one, he nods and exhales with the self-assurance of a man in his thirties.
“Mom decided to practice her vocab more on her own, so it’s just you and me.” The wiry owner of the neighboring shop yells, “she’s stealing your car!”
Andri forces a laugh and shouts something back, then rolls his eyes and gestures to me, ‘yap yap yap.’
They’re the only two storekeepers left open aside from the woman at the salon, whose silver tools flutter over one last client’s nails. The glow from their windows pours over empty wooden fruit and vegetable racks, and tapers along the corrugated aluminum storefronts lining the alley: Anya’s Pierogi, Tailor and Seamstress, Kufta Kebab...
Andri tosses his cigarette and waves us inside. Setting the kettle, he describes the psychological battle he’s been waging against his competitor. “I try and open before him and leave my lights on later. He’ll start thinking, ‘fuck, he’s always here.’”
He places two mugs of instant coffee over a crate and offers me the stool as he perches next to the bananas. Another shopkeeper, with a sharp, hawkish expression pops his head in and fires a joke in Ukrainian.
Andri laughs and explains. I understand, “...English lessons...New York...”
His friend looks at me sardonically, “Coca Cola! Marlboro!” He nabs a grape.
“Hey, hey! Two złoty!”
Andri turns back to me still wearing a lopsided grin, and for a brief moment I see him as a young boy.
“We’ve been back and forth, but there’s no work at home. Politicians are all paid off... they’ve been rebuilding the road in front of our house for a decade; taxis refuse to drive up. We’ve been trying to get my grandma to come here but you know how old people are...all her friends, cousins. We had to sell the farmhouse when my grandad passed away. Apartments come and go, but a house like that should stay in the family.”
The woman from the salon waves as she heads home. “Maybe you’ll teach me next!” she winks.
Andri laughs. “Her dad was from the village next to my grandad’s, so I call her auntie now.”
His phone buzzes. “That’s my wife,” he says with a coy smile. It rings again. “Ah, and now my mom.”
*
My uncle delights in gestures of kindness and suffers the melancholy of farewells. When we take my grandma to the airport, he sinks into a quiet stupor. “I much prefer waiting in arrivals,” he murmurs as we watch her navigate through security.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” a stewardess grimaces in accented English at a man with a thick beard. He points insistently to a creased paper document and tries to press it into her hand.
“When one comes to the airport, one must have the correct identification.”
She picks up the phone. “Listen, can you grab someone from Emirates? I can’t understand a word this man is saying...I know, I know.” She eyes his duffle bag. “You got that right.”
By evening, my uncle has regained some of his humor and he entertains a small gathering for my aunt’s birthday.
“There was a live wire dangling over the river—“
“The Bug or the Narev?” my aunt calls from the kitchen.
“No no, on the Vistula—and some kind of sick impulse came over me...”
“Can you believe the idiot?” My aunt calls again.
He raises his arms and looks at us significantly, closing his two heavy fists over an invisible line, “hell of a kick!”
Talk turns to politics and Poland’s socio-economic potential.
“They’re filling ministry positions like a family business...‘how about your brother then?’”
“...Łukashenko packs the border with Iraqis and now we need the E.U...”
“...an agricultural economy falling straight into the third-world trap, which only South Korea...”
“Not to mention a third-rate education system...”
“As an educator of over thirty years...”
My aunt’s beautifully manicured fingers arrange pineapple, cheesecake, chocolates, and an experimental chia-mango moose on the table—my uncle catches one of her hands, like he might a leaf from the air, and presses it to his lips.
Don’t be ridiculous” she waves him away, fighting a smile. She’s an editor for a leading Polish dictionary; when I ask about work, she sighs, “I’m almost through with ‘E.’ Twenty-eight more to go.” Sometimes I’m not sure if they speak the same language.
“...I’m just glad our grandparents aren’t alive to see the country now,” someone’s voice cuts in.
“Don’t say that—how can you say that?” my uncle interjects and my aunt looks over at him fondly.
*
A house has a way of telling you when it’s time to leave. Sometimes it’s a smell. A poem has a way of telling you when it wants to be written—in a dark movie theater or after you’ve lent your pen to someone on a plane, when you’re late or as a train roars into the station... Sometimes your passions whisper, a friend told me once.
Standing in line at the pharmacy to buy Vitamin D (which normally comes from the sun), I wonder if I’m listening carefully enough.
There’s a word in Polish for the greyness of early winter. I’ve canceled on friends and stopped going to the movies. I deleted my uneventful foray in Polish dating apps and, to the credit of these noble sacrifices, spent many fidgety hours a day at my desk.
I know the airy sound the doors make before they slam in the draft, and where to catch every mirror on the way from my room to the kitchen.
One of the pharmacists is on the phone: “it comes to 79 złoty and 8 cents. Yes. Yes. Yes...with the Echinacea it’s...”
In his historical handbook for aspiring Poles, Norman Davies writes that harsh winters helped foster isolated and self-sufficient Polish communities.
I imagine my great-grandma growing old alone. I imagine finding her in the night, like I used to when I was a child, her ancient body with its sharp bones and long skin stooped in prayer, muttering, “oh Lord, take me from this world.”
“Next!”
I ask for Biotin and earn myself a sideways glance; if your hair falls out and no one’s around to see it, are you still going bald?
“...alright Magda, dear, be well.”
*
Andri’s the first person I’ve talked to all week when I swing by for English practice in the evening and I eagerly plumb his company. It’s too cold so he’s drawn a map for how he’ll organize the fruits inside.
“What do you think?” Rain drizzles from the apples as he sets the crate on the rack.
He’s wearing a thick waterproof jacket and checks his phone with an exasperated sigh. “Another case in school—he’s only had a few weeks total because someone keeps getting sick. They say COVID, but they don’t have a rug—can you explain to me what kind of preschool doesn’t have a rug? They probably let them run around barefoot too...” he grumbles, pulling his beanie over a skin tag on his left eye, then laughs, suddenly remembering a story:
“I went to the flea market the other day to buy my wife a winter coat. It’s mostly Chinese, Turkish, and African folks over there, lotta Ukrainians too, but they’re all shopping. Anyway, one of the Chinese women is calling me over. I tell her I just spent my last penny on the coat but she keeps calling and calling: ‘Just come. I need to tell you something.’ So I walk over and lean in; she whispers, ‘socks are three for ten.’”
He chuckles then catches someone’s eye through the window. “Ah, Panie Darku! I think you owe me a cigarette—maybe even two!”
We step outside to smoke. Pan Darek raises his lighter at the timorous pace of old age, concentrating all his energy on keeping a steady hand until a cloud billows from beneath his low- fitting cap.
Someone mentions soccer; the boys need a win.
“How about these Russians lads on the border?”
“My grandma didn’t mention anything—reporters dramatize,” Andri replies. “You know Ukraine makes one of the strongest tanks in the world—I’m serious!—but they sell them off. You’d think we’d keep at least a few for ourselves.” He laughs and excuses us, adding “I’ll have the groceries over in thirty.”
When I look at him curiously, he shrugs, “not bad to get a few deliveries in at the end of the day...also, I like him. You know how most people are...nice and pleasant, but deep down they see me as a foreigner. He has a heart condition...I want him to live a little longer,” he smiles. “Need a lift?”
*
Like the Ghibli, which blows off the Libyan highlands and dusts the Mediterranean with sands from the Sahara, the polar Zonda, whose white winds cover the Andean glaciers in drifts, or the Chinook, which waters the Pacific rainforests and Rockies before raking its dry tongue across the Great Plains—the Halny has left century-old scars among local highlanders, the górale of the Polish and Slovak Carpathians.
In mid-February, just after it sweeps through the Tatras, the storm lands in Warsaw and I find the bazaar a-titter over a car accident. One of the butchers is on the phone, “...it just went up in flames, luckily the brigade came before it really got going...”
She and her partner wear matching red aprons with a battle-ready bearing appropriate to the profession. “The second he heard the sirens, lad ran off, yep, yep—listen, I’ll call you back...”
By the time I get to the vegetable shop, I’m caught up in the excitement.
“Oh yes,” Lenya replies quietly, sorting the oranges and avoiding my eye, “right in front of our store too. I don’t mind a bit of rain or snow you know, but when it’s windy like this...”
On my way to family dinner in the evening, a message alert warns to “remain indoors, if possible.” A gust slams my uncle’s front door behind me.
“There it is!” he exclaims.
“Just a draft...” my aunt replies dryly. “The air pressure in the house is different from the one outside,” she explains as we sit to eat.
“Air pressure’s an awfully big word for wind,” my uncle smirks, reaching to serve her plate.
“Can you just worry about yourself,” she snatches it back and turns to me, “salad?”
“Growing boy needs more noodles,” my uncle argues.
“If he wants more, he can serve himself.”
As we wash the dishes, I mention this sort of weather can affect peoples’ moods.
“Yes,” my aunt nods sympathetically, “some people are particularly susceptible to meteorology.”
*
The following Thursday, another phone alert announces that Russian troops have marched into Ukraine, North from Crimea, West into Donetsk and South toward Kiev. My mom calls, “maybe it’s time you come home, huh?” People I haven’t heard from in a long while send curious texts.
I go to check on Andri and his mother. They’re video-chatting with family and attending a long line of customers with a sleepless, transactional numbness. Someone in line gently asks the question on all our minds.
“We’re telling them, ‘go to the basement, take some blankets, and cans’—or you know, food that will keep for a few days” the words spill from Lenya and her accent is thicker than usual. “Sirens are going off in our village—who knew we had sirens?—they might be in the line of Russian advance.”
A teary voice calls her back to the phone and she switches to Ukrainian.
The line instinctively clusters nearer the register. An elderly lady pockets her change and lingers by the clementines; a teenager holds one long carrot.
“It’s hard to know...how,” Andri tries to satiate our hungry silence, “it’s hard to know how to help.”
“Raspberries?” he suggests, gesturing to the dull berries with a sheepish smile as I’m paying. “Oh—and listen! Let’s postpone English for a couple weeks, yeah? With all this...”
*
Cellphone footage from Kyiv shows civilians lining up for arms and basic military instruction. A woman rushes by with long pink fingernails. A student steps away with a rifle that’s longer than his torso. It lies across him, in the way guns do, and changes his gait to the recognizable swagger that is the signature of armed men.
The store is packed even though the produce has a day-old tarnish. Someone in line asks about collection.
“Yes, I’ll have more information in the next few days,” Lenya answers briskly, not for the first time. “We’ll be distributing to twenty families or so...”
A man in line raises his eyebrows as his wife hands him a bag of half-sour pickles, whose deep green suggests they’re rapidly becoming ‘full-sour.’
“They’ll be fine,” she hisses, slapping him lightly on the chest.
“Andri found some day-work,” Lenya tells me at the counter, fixing her glasses with one hand and reaching for my groceries with the other. “You know, construction, whatever pays—I don’t ask. So I’m alone.” She surveys the crowd wearily. “Of course, now the store’s busier than ever...”
She weighs my tomatoes. “He’s shouting at me, tells me he wants to go fight—and, you know, I’m...” she corrals an apple onto the scale. “I’m his mother...” She looks up at me and adjusts her glasses with the corner of a knuckle. “I ask him, ‘what are you going to do?...you’ve never held a gun in your life, what’re you going to do?’”
I nod as she looks back down to punch in the key codes, “anything else?”
“Maybe a pineapple...”
“They’re delicious, help yourself—I tell him, ‘you can help from here, every little bit counts,’ help from here.’” She sighs as she hands me my change. “But, then again, if they were fighting in our village, I don’t think anyone could stop me.”
When I step into Anya’s Pierogi, I see a phone lying beside every pair of hands along the flour-powdered countertop. The woman carrying trays of freshly-folded dumplings to the vat of boiling water balances hers in the crook of her neck between her headscarf and shoulder.
Pani Anya takes a call outside. She holds a cigarette in one hand and presses the back of her palm to her forehead.
In the evening, I get a text from a friend in New York, “Yo, have you seen any refugees? Must be wild.”
*
“Yes, it’s horrible, my brother’s dead.” P. Olena’s monologue streams into the apartment as if she began speaking on the stairs up. “Not from the war, he went to the basement for some jam and on the way back up—blood clot or something—I won’t be able to go for the funeral.”
“S-so sorry to hear,” I stumble.
“Only sixty-five, might’ve lived a while longer,” she reflects while taking off her coat and changing into her work pajamas. “My older daughter and her two kids, just arrived from Lviv and the kids started school last week, twelve and thirteen. They put them back a year—the fuss they made! Nikolay’s a good kid—lots of Ukrainians here already, you know, so he made friends, but Daryna—what am I saying—Danya, she sits off by herself. And my god already with the makeup. She spent too much time with her father.”
“But do they speak any Polish?” I ask, fighting to keep apace.
P. Olena laughs, “‘good morning’ and ‘goodbye.’ That’s it. Yesterday Danya asked me what chemistry means. In Ukraine we call it, ‘chimia,’ here you say ‘chemia.’ If she can’t figure that out. ‘Why didn’t you go ask the other Ukrainians?’ I said to her. ‘Make some friends?’— Nikolay was always my daughter’s, Danya was her father’s.”
“It must be difficult.”
“It is, it is. But my youngest, Daryna—you looked her up on the internet last time— started without a word of Polish, and finished with top marks. This is her here” she says pulling out her phone. “Oh wait no, these are the flowers she bought me. She swipes. Here’s an old tree...tree again—I like that sort of thing—here I am,” she giggles. “Oh, here she is. And here she took me to dinner,” she zooms in, “pretty girl...looks like my mother.”
She swipes again and a picture of a shelled apartment building pops up. She shuts her phone off quickly. “They were sending pictures from Kyiv...I-I don’t know why they keep downloading onto my phone, I can’t look. All bombed up, can’t recognize a thing—I spoke with my uncle in St. Petersburg, he says—you don’t speak Russian do you?”
“No.”
“He says, ‘don’t worry, it’s just a special operation to displace the Nazi regime.’” She taps her head. “It’ll end up like North Korea over there, I’m telling you.”
I hand her a cup of tea and a slice of cake with walnuts, imagining myself quite the gentleman.
“Not bad! I’ll tell Daryna, ‘Victor, knows how to make breakfast all on his own,’” she nudges me with a wink. “Eh? Or should I say Witold? My grandparents used to call me ‘Alena’—that’s Byelorussian for Olena—in those days there were, Poles, Byelorussians, Russians of course too, all mixed together. For example your grandmother has that Turk for a father.”
“Lith-Lithuanian” I stammer, all gentlemanly composure lost.
P. Olena gives me a dubious look and begins scrubbing the sink. “Well, there you go.”
*
Streaks of grey hair and crow’s feet place my driving instructor, Pan Marek, over a certain threshold of youth. But he says goodbye to the young woman before me with a boyish energy, laughing with the whites of his eyes and squirming in his seat like a dog hoping for a treat.
The car, in which I’m acting out my own boyhood desire of learning how to drive stick- shift, has the dank smell of vaped tobacco and a large “L” announcing my incompetence from the roof. After my prettier counterpart leaves, P. Marek assumes a more dignified air, rolling off homely instruction that veers toward a rhyming meter like a shopping cart favoring its right side.
“Foot on the brake, foot on the clutch, into reverse. Turn on your signal, look out your window, now put us in first.”
I hiccup into the right lane.
“Second, now third, mind the curb.”
“So, how’s business been during COVID?” I venture at a red.
“Never better!” The puppy is back in an instant. “Suddenly everyone wants a car. But, you know, this whole pandemic...” he shakes his head. “Who’s making a buck? You’re telling me everyone in the hospital has COVID—know how much a COVID bed costs? Three thousand a day, feel me? Three thousand—left turn signal, check the window—I read an article about euthanasia, they ran out of beds in Germany. I mean it’s a calculus they have to make, right? You need ten beds, ten old people disappear, it’s a calculus.”
“Well hospitals have been overwhelmed...” I say pathetically, as my multi-tasking brain tries to sort the calculus of three mystifying pedals.
“Notice how no one’s talking about it now? The war started and COVID disappeared— into third, mind the curb—who’s talking about anti-vaxers now?"
“Maybe they all died off,” I suggest curtly, raising my foot from the clutch too fast and sending us skipping past the Palace of Culture.
He laughs. “Traffic is slowing, so we’re shifting down,” he glances out the window “second then first...we’re moving through town.” He completes the rhyme like an afterthought while packing his vape.
Refugees in bulky winter jackets cluster around white tents near the central train terminal. A middle-aged woman in a practical pair of sneakers rolls on the balls of her feet and holds a plastic bag stretched to transparency with clothes. Children offer stuffed animals and other colorful tokens of friendship to a volunteer dressed as a unicorn.
“Here we are then,” P. Marek says, taking a long drag and furrowing his brow as though urging his verse to higher reflection, “carefully translocating, peacefully arbitrating, and...” he pauses for effect, “mindfully, finding ourselves.”
“Following yesterday’s attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant,” a newscaster on the radio announces, “stores have been cleared out of Lugol’s fluid.”
“Do they know something we don’t?” I joke as he turns it up.
“...we’d like to remind listeners that consuming Lugol’s fluid as a prophylactic can have serious side-effects...”
“Remember what happened with a little place called Chernobyl?” P. Marek asks. “Foot on the clutch, foot on the break—WWII was Hitler and another guy too, Stalin. Feel me? U.S gave it to them good. We’ll see what happens this time around.”
“I don’t think Biden would ever put troops on the ground.”
He turns back to the window and repacks his vape pensively. Twilight mingles with headlights as traffic begins its evening descent into a melancholy wonder.
“What’re you learning stick for anyway?” he asks as we pull back into the lot. “Engine off, handbrake up, and don’t forget the lights.”
“Quick getaway” I laugh “...maybe a road trip in the summer.”
“Ah,” he nods sagely, “bit of careful translocation, huh?”
*
The forsythia dance merrily from the fenced lots in the alleys as I jog to the bazaar. It’s not quite eight o’clock, and a handful of customers weave among the shopkeepers still setting out crates of apples and pears alongside trays of early berries. A boy flaps his arms trying to keep the straps of his Spiderman backpack over his shoulders.
“...we need a playmaker, not just a star...”
“...Kefir is up to 6.99, farmer’s cheese 11.99, Greek yogurt...”
“...he’ll catch his death in those shorts, mark my...”
A tall cart with shelves of fresh bread, sweet poppy-seed buns, and rose donuts rolls by. I buy a discretionary sample of each and head to Andri and Lenya’s to see about some vegetables.
It takes me a moment to realize that Lenya, standing absently by the register, is at the root of the space’s unease. The door shuts behind me before she looks up.
“Victor! How are you, did Andri call?”
“No...I don’t think so.”
“He said he’d call...he probably hasn’t had time.”
“I...is-is everything alright?” I say taking closer notice of her pale face and reading in her swollen features the markings of an unkind night.
“He’s on his way back” she says in a dry voice, “crossing the border today...or tomorrow.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Yesterday, he—sorry, I haven’t slept, and then picking up the produce this morning—”
Her knuckles are white on the countertop and I help her into a stool. An acidic unease settles as I cross the fourth wall of clementines and tropical fruit that has separated me from the register these past months.
She sits and her breath comes in short, halting stutters. “My mother’s not well...I hardly got out of bed this morning...but there’s credit on this place after all...”
“Calmly, calmly. I’ll put on some tea?”
“My sister has been calling...then the news from Mariupol...”
The electric kettle rumbles good-naturedly. “Let’s take a breath, in through your nose...”
She obliges but the words tumble out again when she exhales. “A friend was driving down with donations so they gave him a lift—it was a chilly morning, I wonder...”
“And in again,” I interrupt, glancing over the countertop. A ribbon curls out of the price gun and sticks to a puddle around a half-sliced watermelon. The cash drawer, just ajar, reveals a muddle of coins and paper bills. A laminated file of key codes reads: “...14 aronia, 45 quince, 162 canned horseradish...”
Lenya takes another deep breath as a petite woman rolls her shopping cart into the store.
“Kilo of brussel sprouts please, a few carrots, cucumbers, radishes—are these tomatoes Polish?”
Without thinking, I reach for a bag and make for the sprouts as Lenya jolts out of her stupor.
“Yes!” she replies, “and they’ve just started taking this beautiful red. How many would you like?”
“Four, if you please, and which potatoes do you think will do best in a broth? I’m here with the cart,” the lady explains.
“That’ll be the Orliks.” Lenya bustles over to the potatoes as I estimate how many fistfuls of sprouts make a kilo. “Just picked them up today, nice and firm—like so?”
“Maybe a couple more...”
“Anything else? Some watermelon?” Lenya asks amiably. “This little slice comes out to twenty flat.”
“Well...I suppose the kids might...”
“I caught my baby grandson with half a melon—” Lenya laughs, turning to me, though her eyes remain fixed on the woman—“hiding in the shower, all sticky, spitting seeds left and right...”
“Go on then, go on,” the lady concedes, “I’ll get Paweł to help me drag this thing up the stoop.”
Lenya places the cling-wrapped melon in the cart and I hand over the sprouts like a hard- won treasure.
The kettle clicks off and Lenya fills two mugs.
“Forgive me. Between the wholesale market, and setting up here, I haven’t had time to process. My mother fell ill. The stress or...I don’t know, she’s older now. I was going to get her—you know, women are allowed to cross in and out—I should have realized he was planning something, didn’t say a word all day.”
“But surely he isn’t planning on fighting?” I ask.
“I don’t know. For now he’s just checking on my mother.” Lenya swirls her teabag once and tosses it in the trash.
“I’m sure...I’m sure he’ll be alright.”
“But what was he thinking,” she snaps, glaring up. “His wife and child...”
A man comes in with a baseball cap curved low over his brow. “Do you sell blenders?...Or a food processor?”
“Yes, we have one right up...Victor, would you mind?”
“Think I could throw kale in this thing?” he asks, turning the box over along with several months’ dusty dew.
“Oh yes,” Lenya replies gravely, “though you might give the leaves a soak first.”
“And how are you managing?” I probe, as the man leaves, box under his arm. “With the crates and what not...the apples?”
“I’m used to heavy lifting...during tourist season in Odessa, me and the girls would load up like packhorses,” she shakes her head wistfully. “Once we started making a bit of money, we hired a boy.”
“Well, if you ever need someone—”
“That’s very kind,” she says, wiping the melon juice from the counter and looking away.
“And-and how does selling clothes compare?”
“With a shirt, at least you know where you stand. At least it won’t start rotting in the back of your store. And if you do sell it, you might actually turn a bit of profit—know how much I bought those apples for? The lettuce, peppers, sprouts too—they’re really just to round out the selection—radishes, sometimes, if you sell them all. You make a little on potatoes, onions— things that can sit around. And the oranges, pineapples, berries...Andri has a nice way of offering the fruit.”
A woman in a dark suit places three pears on the counter. “I’m really here for the honey,” she whispers, “nothing too sweet.”
“That’ll be willow then, good for circulation, builds the immune system...”
“And delicious,” I add tentatively.
The woman acknowledges my comment with a nod, and Lenya beckons me behind the counter as she types up the receipt. “This way if I do need you, at least you’ll know how—Oh, that’s Pani Małgorzata in the back there, she’ll want two kilos of loose oats...”
I jump to help, and the better part of the morning soon slips away in the bazaar’s mild ebb and flow. I crane for cans of tomato paste and chicken stock, and learn the distinguishing features of regional fudge.
“Such tall handsome boys you always have helping you,” an elderly woman says with a twinkle.
Lenya forces a laugh, “yes, well...we have to maintain a standard!”
I blush and hand her a misprinted receipt.
**
Nicolas Vivas Nikonorow is a writer and cellist who received his BA in English from Yale University and is currently studying Musicology at the University of Warsaw.
Great text, Waiting for more! Bravo Nicolas.