Krakow Melt (10 page)
Polska biało-czerwoni!
The Village People make a few bucks from this version of “YMCA.”
There are only sporadic fistfights as the fans stream out together. They do not tear the metal fence down and attack each other with blunt objects, as they normally do. The announcer says that this is an omen for trouble to come. Football matches are allowed to end nil-nil, according to the rules, but not the Holy War. Somebody has to lose.
Sharp cut to a deserted part of town.
Twenty men walk with purpose, swinging their arms as if carrying baseball bats. Their hands are empty. This is overtime, citizen-style. A camera operator is smart to follow them.
The microphone picks up bits of their conversation:
“We can’t be far from the faggot club. This is the corner where they catch taxis, always in twos.”
“Sometimes in threes. When [muffled] the third one has to go on top.”
“They will go to hell holding hands. We will send them there quicker.”
(Interlocutor speaks unclearly.)
“No, Cracovia takes it up the ass. That’s why they run slowly, because all the [muffled] is pouring out of them.”
“
Kurva
, you are making me horny to beat up a queer.”
“Just go home with them in the taxi. Say that you have a foreskin, and they will fight over you. My brother [muffled]. The hospital wouldn’t take them because [muffled].”
The hooligans walk through a parking lot to a red-brick industrial building, and then climb a metal stairway. The gay club doesn’t have a sign—there is never a sign—but someone has spraypainted four words that identify it quickly:
SOLIDARITY FOR POLISH QUEERS
We hear the thump of 1990s house. The men are about to tramp in and destroy human bodies, but then they freeze and turn around. They have discovered their shadow and look right into the camera. We suddenly see sideways footage of the city skyline. The sound is still running.
“
Kurrrva
. It’s a faggot.”
The camera operator has caught them visiting a gay nightclub.
“Do you want to die, motherfucker?”
Scuffling sounds. Shoes squeak.
“Let’s rape him.”
“The scissor kick. Wisła would have won if they did the scissor kick. Let’s show him how we score a goal. Now your face will become a football, motherfucker.”
“[Muffled] been born.”
May I call you that? I think the name suits you, not only for your crazy appetite, but also for the colouring of your hair. Hope you don’t find it too weird.
After some reflection, I realize I was being weak when I refused to answer your question fully while we were floating in the Baltic Sea. You know, the question about my interest in fire. I didn’t think I was ready, but you’ve since shown me that jumping head-first into something is the best strategy.
Here it goes.
When I was a little
dziecko
of six years old, my favourite toy was a green plastic
smok
. Dragon toys were hard to come by (this was before Communism ended), so I was lucky to have an American model with such exciting advanced features as movable jaws and interlocking scales. By itself, the toy would have been lifeless, but my favourite book—
The Legend of the Smok Wawelski
—gave it blood and teeth.
The
smok
and I had a love affair. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to play with him under the covers when my
matka
and
papa
had gone to sleep. I illuminated his cave—a tent under the sheets—with a tiny flashlight, and fed him his midnight snack of cookie crumbs. He always did as he was told, unlike his literary alter ego.
One time, my
matka
caught us awake. She turned on my bedroom light, and the
smok
instantly fell asleep.
“Radeki, lights out means lights out. A growing boy needs to rest.”
“I’m not growing anymore, I promise. I haven’t grown in a week. I even measured against the door to make sure.”
“My silly
smok
, you will grow for a long time.”
I loved it when she told me that. I was disappointed that my little green friend would never grow. Forever confined to the skeleton of a dwarf.
Jaka szkoda
. (Which means
quelle horreur
.)
“Anyway, I don’t want you playing with this flashlight,” she continued. “It has given your father some trouble in the past.”
The flashlight was not American like my best toys were. It was Soviet-issue, and it fizzled reliably. One time, the batteries leaked corrosive acid all over the inside, and we had to clean it out with baking soda and vinegar. In those days, it was hard to get new equipment unless you were well-connected. Either my
papa
didn’t know anyone important, or he was banking up his favours for something big.
Matka
and I were recycling long before it became an official program, because we had no choice.
“The
smok
and I will make it our royal duty not to give trouble. We will eat in the dark.”
She reached under my pillow and removed two shortbread
muszelki
.
“No, you will eat at the table, and you will sleep in the dark. Tell your dragon that tomorrow is a very busy day. We are driving to Zakopane for an excursion with Brother Father. You know how he loves the snow.”
“I don’t have to tell him,” I said. “
Smok
’s ears are very good. He heard you.”
Brother Father was not my
papa
, but a priest who had been living with us for several years. He was a boarder who paid his lodging faithfully, and who helped us out with our spiritual troubles, as pedestrian as they were. We were a good Christian family, save for a few forgivable habits like drinking alcohol on Sunday (
Matka
), smoking on the toilet (
Papa
), and listening to the Beatles (
Matka
and
Papa
). Brother Father corrected us mildly and brought us closer to God, powered by my mother’s cooking and by coffee she fortified secretly with shots of cognac.
You might say this arrangement had the blessing of the church and was part of the
Out-of-the-Pew-and-into-the-Home
program, enforced mercilessly by the Communists. In other words, Brother Father had no church to go to, and we were his only parishioners.
“It’s not a secret,” my mother would tell me. “Just tell people he’s your uncle, and that he’s too sick to work.”
I wasn’t allowed to know his name, just in case I squawked. We called him Brother Father and nobody slipped up, not even once.
Or so I thought.
One night after lights out,
smok
and I were playing in his den without detection. The flashlight was giving off sparks and I was thrilled: fire breath in a convenient tube. With a simple fluke, I had vaulted twenty years ahead of the toy industry.
Park Jurajski
, eat my underpants.
But I’ll never understand why she let me keep the flashlight. I wish she had taken it away, and if I’d rebelled, I would’ve wanted her to lash me with a belt and flense my skin into strips. But no, she let me keep the damn thing.
I read from
The Legend of the Smok Wawelski
in a loud whisper, hoping to increase the heartbeat of my toy dragon to a rhythm approximating my own.
Magpie, I’ll try to retell the story as I remember it, but I’m warning you, my memory for literature sucks compared to yours. And you’ve probably already noticed that I get everything mixed up when telling stories (including places and dates).
I have, however, corrected spelling mistakes that I remember from the original book (the Russians never cared to learn Polish very well).
Chapter 1
Once upon a time, there lived a King in the Royal Castle on Wawel Hill. He ate piggishly and fucked fair maidens from near and far, orchestrating abortions in the dungeon when they got pregnant. What king would want a shoal of jealous sons lining up to poison him and steal the throne?
One day, terrible news rocked the city: someone had found a huge fire-breathing dragon nesting in a cave beneath the castle. Sheep, cattle, and chickens started to disappear, and the cityfolk realized that the Smok must be eating them to satisfy his voracious appetite, belching eyelashes and effluvium after every snack.
(Dorotka, I’ve drawn you a picture of the Smok Wawelski below, in colours with much better fidelity than in my Soviet-issue book. They made him brown. LOL.)
[Picture of a dragon in crayon. His body is an equilateral triangle, shaded emerald green and covered with striated tiles supposed to be scales. Rudimentary legs jut out. He has a Pac-Man mouth with yellow studs for teeth, and he’s exhaling blue smoke by the cheek-load.]
The pigs and boars and
kozy
were not enough to keep the Smok Wawelski happy. They were possibly not nutritious enough, or maybe too noisy, so the Smok—to the great horror of Kraków—began to target young virgin girls for breakfast. How do we know they were virgins? The fathers who lost their daughters gave detailed descriptions, while making the sign of the cross, of the intact hymens of their offspring: crescent-shaped bands from the two to eleven o’clock positions, no tissue at six o’clock, fimbriated perforations in the shape of praying hands. Whatever they said, it was convincing enough to nail down the Smok’s exact breakfast habits, and the King ordered little girls across the land to stay in their homes. And yet, the dragon always managed to get one, to suck the flesh from her bones, and to leave the skeleton in a neat, crumpled pile at the entrance to his den.
Unfortunately, presumed masculinity in monsters is a hallmark of children’s literature. In future retellings, and at your request, I will jam the signal with a more bent monster. (A girl, possibly.)
My book lit up when I got to the end of the chapter; the sparks from the flashlight had jumped onto the paper and turned to embers. The embers grew into flame, and the page I was reading blackened, curled, and floated away. A sheet of ash; spent words.
This, Dorota, is when it all began. Sorry it has taken me so long to tell you.
I dropped the book and ran to the foyer. I zipped up my winter jacket, threw on my boots and mittens, and ran outside. We were one of the unlucky families with a bungalow. You can only fit so many people into apartment blocks, we were told, so some had to live separately—medievally—without the conveniences of modern life. I suspected that our living situation had something to do with Brother Father (I wish I knew his name), even though we never told a soul about him.
I ran outside to the street and just stared at the house. The darkness was total. One of my mittens was on the wrong hand; my thumb wriggled without finding its sheath. The snow was deep, and it crept into my boots. I was waiting for my parents to run out in their winter clothes to comfort me, to rescue me from the fire I had already escaped.
What kid ever thinks their parents need help? You’re trained since infancy to believe that they hold the keys to medicine, education, law, opening jars, gardening, ripping off bandages, starting cars, and finding money. They are wizards with fire, and forbid you to know its secrets.
Certainly,
I
didn’t need to save
them
from anything. Besides, I was too little to fight a real dragon.
I knew something was wrong when they still weren’t outside after a few minutes, when the living room drapes exploded orange and melted into goops (I now know they were synthetic polymer). I peed my pants, sure that the Smok Wawelski had come to life and was going to eat my parents and Brother Father. I heard the dragon knock down the curtain rod with his arched back, and then smash the glass ornaments on our Christmas tree. Crushing my present, for sure.
Still, nobody came out, and I wondered if they were already dead. Icy armour crept over my leg; urine freezes quickly.
Then, my parents’ bedroom window flew open, and dear
Papa
fell naked through the blinds and into the bushes by the house. This was not the hero I was expecting. Thick grey smoke followed him and continued upward into the night.
Papa
ran barefoot across the snow-covered yard, cussing and screaming my name. His ass was bloody where the frozen bush-twigs had lacerated it. I could tell by the notes in his voice that he wasn’t angry. He was scared, like I was. I didn’t say anything, and he ran back into the house through the front door. Smoke pushed him out, so he got down on all fours and crawled inside. I wondered if the last I would see of my father would be his pendulous, hairy balls.
“Please save
Matka
and Brother Father,” I said, after he had disappeared inside. “
Matka
first. Don’t save me. I’m already outside.”
Dear Dorota, it is incredible how one can collect a lifetime of “why”s in the span of a few minutes. Maybe we’re born with a mechanism to create these questions, so that we can answer them later in life and have something meaningful to do. What do you think?
Now the house glowed cherry from all the windows, and I could hear the crackle of the dragon munching everything I loved. Pulverizing the family flashlight in his back molars, I was sure. He shattered glass in his teeth, and bashed holes in the roof with his thorny head. The whole house soon puffed smoke, puffed madness, funnelling into a monstrous pillar that twisted ugly into the night, its blackness sucking up shards of flame. Poland didn’t have tornadoes, I knew, but the Bible promised many impossible things:
And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night.
—Exodus 13:21
Was this the salvation that Brother Father was supposed to bring us? The heat had melted my frozen pee, and I remember thinking that I had nowhere to change. As if it mattered. I ripped off my jacket because the fire was heating the zipper like a branding iron. I burned my chin more than once.
Papa screaming my
matka
’s name
The fire truck screaming my house’s name
Me screaming my
papa
’s name
The neighbour screaming the name of God
The firefighter’s radio screaming that the water was shut off
God screaming the name of the beast
