Agata

[primroseport]

Baligród Square

“What are you doing, you little brat? Think that’s funny, do you?”

The strange man wrenches your arm and shouts at you. His eyes are frightening. You see a bearded chin, spit-launching lips, the teeth of a villager. He’s holding a sharp hoe. You’ve done something terrible, broken some grown-up law, but you can’t figure out which one it was. All you were doing was hopping over cracks in the asphalt-paved square at the center of Baligród. You are five years old. This is your earliest living memory.

“Let her go! What’s the matter with you?”

Uncle has returned, a covered grocery basket in his hand. He pulls you to his side, away from the stranger. Keep your eyes down. See their feet facing off against each other. The soft leather of Uncle’s shoes, the coarse twine of the man’s sandals. See the cracks in Baligród square.

“You let her stomp on my father’s gravestone?”

“She was playing! My God! Shouting at a little girl, like that.”

“Trodding on the dead is playing, now? It’s always the same with you szlachta. We commoners catch the bullets and you szlachta don’t even have the decency to keep off our dead!”

“You’re raving mad! A crazed Jew!”

“I’ll show you a crazed Jew, you piece-of-shit traitor!”

The grocery basket knocks against skull, loosing jars of preserve. They smash open on the square. See broken glass in a pulpy ooze. Smell sugar, smell apricots, smell blackcurrant. Smell blood. Uncle is lying on his back, red ooze spilling from a crack in his head. His eyes and mouth are three big Os. The stranger is gone. He left his hoe on the asphalt. People have gathered. Hear them muttering.

“They’re Grzymała-Szczuka. She’s a Szczuka girl.”

Szczuka Szczuka Szczuka. Your name buzzes in the air like flies around a plate. Uncle gawks at the sky in surprise. Szczuka Szczuka.

This was the day you learned to fear strangers. It was also the day you learned you had inherited a legacy of hate.



Portait by Zhang Jingna

Wild Woman

No. Your earliest living memory was something else.

You’re three, maybe four years old. You’ve wandered away from the dwór, the manor, away from the eyes of your cousins. You’re lying on your back by a stooping tree. A bug is tickling your ankle, but you don’t care. Hold still. Don’t breathe. An Apollo butterfly has landed on your cheek. She slowly wafts her wings over your eyes. Wings thinner than snow flakes. Thinner than the skin on milk. Chalk white, frosted with silver. Black spots, like someone painted on her. Red spots. Even to your young eyes, the red spots look exactly like droplets of blood. They even gleam white.

Hold still. Hold still.

Something moves in the grass. The butterfly flutters away. Lift your head. Look.

A lynx, in full profile, its head turned away. See its tail float. See its ears swivel. Whiskers bristling out as if feeling at the air. There is no lynx. Now there’s a woman, crouching. Where did the lynx go? Where did the woman come from?

She stands up. She is not szlachta. She is almost naked. Her clothes are like chamoix bags and strips of paper. Her hair is like goat pelt. She seems old like Grandma, but when she turns her face, you see she is old like Mama. So dirty! Your cousins are calling for you. The wild woman smells the air and looks straight at you.

Hold still. Don’t breathe.

She runs away. Your cousins find you and lead you back to the dwór. They think you were lost, and they will not listen to your story about the lynx who turned into a dirty woman. They tell you never to speak to strangers.

"Strangers hate us!"

Grzymała dwór

Everyone lives in the dwór. There is nothing older than the dwór. Even the Bieszczady mountain range from which it juts like an outcrop seems young and fresh by comparison. Tall and square, rags of gray paint clinging here and there to its rain-darkened timber. It looks like the molt-off skin some living manor left behind, like the lizard molt your brother showed you, half-eaten. Its portico is a horse skull, missing teeth.

The road winds down to Baligród, a town you never visit. Papa and Grandpa go. When they go, they bring rifles. One day you are playing Fairy Princess on the road. A brown bear lumbers by, paying you no mind. Hold still. Watch its huge rump waddle away. Go back to playing.

Another day, you are playing Queen of the Nile on the road. A man comes hiking towards the dwór.

Run and hide.



A Package for Grandpa

You are seven years old when a mail courier comes to the door one morning. You are still in your sleeping gown, sitting at the kitchen table with your brother and two girl cousins. Eggs are slimy. Ignore them, maybe they will go away. The milk soup is good, though. Swirl the bread mush around. Try to ignore Mama taking tangles out of your hair with a wire brush.

A rap on the door. That means a stranger. Wait and listen as Mama answers it. A man has brought something for Grandpa. Boring. Start swirling your milk soup again.

“I understand, sir, but he’s an old man. He’s sleeping, don’t you see? I assure you I’ll bring him the package.”

Ignore your eggs. Snap at your cousin for pulling at your hair. Papa is at the door now.

“What seems to be the trouble? --Let me handle it, dear. --Yes, Mister Grzymała-Szczuka lives here, he’s my father. Uh huh. Well, I’ll sign for him. What? Nonsense. I’m his son, surely I can bring him a package.”

Mama returns and resumes brushing your hair. Tells you to finish your breakfast. You talk back but she’s not listening. She’s not paying attention to what she’s doing and your scalp hurts. Tell her so.

“Listen here, can’t you understand my father’s asleep? You want me to drag an old man out of bed? Come back tomorrow, then. I said, come back tomorrow. I’m starting to lose my patience with you, you old coot!”

The brushing stops. Hold still. Hold your breath.

“You think I don’t know what this is? How long is this going to go on, huh? You leave my father alone. Leave an old man alone. You leave us all alone!”

You don’t remember the sound of the gun. Four children shrieking, one of them you, and Mama’s voice leading the chorus. Watch Papa come staggering into the doorway. Watch him pull back a chair and take a seat like he’s starving for breakfast. You don’t remember blood. You remember him laying his head down like he woke up far too early and he needs a nap right away.

Everyone chases the bicycle-riding courier. The car won’t start.



What We do

“Why do I always have to be German Scum?”

Your little brother is sulking. He won’t pick up his stick gun.

“We need someone to shoot at, stupid.”

You have only each other to play with. Some of you are in your early teens, too old for make-believe games, but there’s so little to do around the dwór other than farm work. So it’s the Polish Underground State versus German Scum, or sometimes the Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, the eastern border defense forces, versus the Soviet Reds. One cousin is seventeen. He once hiked by himself close to the new Ukraine border and saw a beautiful blonde girl wading in a stream, and now he always wants to be Soviet. He still fights for Poland, though, which makes no sense, but no one can get him to understand that.

Your other cousin, the mean one. He wants to play a different game. He orders everyone to help him tidy up the old run-down servants’ house. It looks like a giant nest of nail-studded planks and spiders, but you help. Whack the weeds away with your stick. Clear out the rubble. Bring in the table and chairs. Nobody knows what this new game is but it’s already fun, even though it’s more like work than play.

Finally, he says it’s done and he sits at the table. You all look to him for a clue.

Someone asks, “Who’s the Bad Guys?”

“There’s no Bad Guys.”

“No Bad Guys! It’s not a War Game? I don’t wanna play House.”

“It’s not House, it’s a War Game. There’s just no Bad Guys. We’re still Polish and German Scum and Soviet Reds.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We make deals.”

“This game sounds stupid and boring.”

“No it’s not. Watch, I’ll be German Scum.”

“What do we do?”

“You invite me in for dinner and we make deals.”

“Why?”

“So we can all win the war, stupid.”

“Your game is stupid, stupid! Who’d fight a war like that, anyway?”

“Szlachta would.”

“Nu-huh. No we wouldn’t!”

“Yah-huh. That’s what we do.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. We do not win wars by inviting German Scum over for dinner.”

“Yeah we do.”



Buying Time

Grandma complains about the family having become farmers, but it doesn’t bother you. She’s sixty-six years old. You’re fourteen. It’s all you’ve known. Rubber boots, leather gloves. Chickens scurry around you in the coop. Collect the eggs. Stop. Hear people coming up the road, lots of people. Hurry to the portico, feathers in your hair.

You’re shooed into the dwór by Mama, who has a shotgun. Go on inside. How many are out there? A dozen? More? There’s shouting. Go to the third floor for a better look. Crouch down. Peek through the window so old the glass has begun to pool at the bottom, warping the images of the mob. They’re lighting torches.

“How long you arse-fucking Szczuka think you could get away with it? You think we’d forget? All you done is buy yourself some time.”

Mama is stalling them, talking them down. Her voice is firm but quieter. You can’t hear what they’re saying, now. Go down to the second floor. Dash to a window. But you stop. Grandpa is standing in his room. He never stands anymore. He looks at you with the eyes of a little child. You’re not sure how to explain what’s happening, or if he would even understand. How old is he?

“What else could I do?” he asks. He needs an answer. You think maybe he’ll cry if you don’t have one.

The crack of gunfire. Screams.

You are speechless. You are an orphan.

Erosion

The ravaged molt of the dwór is scorched on one corner, but it stands. Your parents are buried side-by-side near the spot where the uncle who took you grocery shopping in Baligród lies. An aunt joins them soon after, infection taking her following a bad fall. Her two children, unable to shake a cough, are the next inhabitants of the growing cemetery. A favorite cousin of yours, now a man, is stabbed during an altercation in town and walks all the way home only to perish on the steps of the portico. A doctor might have saved at least three of them, if anyone had bothered to call for one. None of you do. Ever since the police refused to come to the aid of the Grzymała-Szczukas, you make no pleas for help.

You were nobles, and now you live like savages trying to remember old herbal remedies and defending your land with rifles made thirty or forty years earlier. Rifles with German etched on their stocks.

No gravestones mark your dead. Better to forget where they lie than to invite desecration.

The pride afforded by nobility can only withstand so much erosion. To have no wealth or power is bearable, to have no respect can be grudgingly suffered, but to lack basic dignity is intolerable. One by one, the dwór empties. Most leave on foot, setting off with suitcases to the big cities, to live among common people who have never heard of the Grzymała-Szczukas, perhaps to work for some of them and live on their lands. A few more are carried to the secret cemetery. You elect to stay behind with Papa’s parents, caring for the two whom you owe a life of alienation and fear. They will not assent to abandoning their land, their isolation. They seem happier now that they have so little family left to lose, as with a jug, nearly empty, that one finds so much easier to carry.

Spend your days in silent toil, feeding and clothing them. Love them, still.



Portait by Zhang Jingna

Rafał

One day you are picking berries in the woods when a strange man appears above you on a high bluff. You have surprised each other. He peers down curiously, seeing your basket and the rifle on your back. He bids you a good morning. Say nothing. He goes out of sight and begins to find his way down the slope.

Listen to his steps. Think about whether you can shoot a man. He is not really a man, more of a boy about your age. By the time he reappears, you are holding the rifle, not the basket. Though he is scared and shows his empty hands, he still smiles with such geniality that you become bewildered. You have never seen a stranger smile. He must be mocking you. Check your rifle for a catastrophic malfunction only he has noticed.

“I’m Rafał. What’s your name?”

Now, you understand the smile. He doesn’t know your name. Consider keeping it hidden. Consider lying. Will a lie anger him? He looks peaceful. Blond, rather pretty, though his nose is like a block of wood. His Polish has an accent. You have never heard it yourself, but Mama used to imitate it to make people laugh. It was her North Poland accent.

His hands are still up. “What’s the matter, Miss? Don’t you have a name?”

“Agata.”

“Nice to meet you, Agata. Can I go, now, or will you shoot me in the back?”

How dare he accuse you of being violent. It is they who are violent, always the strangers. You must make an insulted face because he laughs brightly and back-pedals, his hands still up. When you lower your gun, he turns and makes an unhurried retreat. Watch him go.

He looks back once. Twice. They are not nervous looks, but the looks of someone who wants to catch a last glimpse of something he likes.

Two days later you answer a knock at the door only to find Rafał standing there, smiling as if he had anticipated being greeted at the end of a rifle. His boots and hands are dirty, his nose red-nipped from the cold. He opens a cloth-lined satchel filled with so many wild-growing berries that you can only guess at the hours it took him to gather them all.

"Peace offering," he announces, and extends the basket to you.

"How did you find me?"

"I asked some roe deer if they know where a pretty girl lives."

You feel silly pointing a gun at a boy who has no hatred in him, a boy who has been out all day picking berries for you and is trying to make you blush. Go outside with him, leaving behind your rifle. Take him around the side of the dwór where you both sit on the canvas-covered family car that has not rolled a meter since you were a toddler. Talk. Eat berries. Save most for grandparents. Answer few questions but ask him many. He laughs and tells you your teeth are black from eating berries. You hop off the car, hiding your mouth. Tell him you must care for your family, now.

He returns several times, and each time he brings a gift, things he gathered or got from the market. They are for your whole family to enjoy, except for the last gift, which is a wreath of wild flowers. Violet and blue gentians, with pink ones spaced around it like jewels. This gift is only for you. He places it on your head and remarks that you look like a crowned queen. He says your cheeks are redder than the gentians.

Take off the wreath immediately.

Soon, he is tired of chasing a girl who will not let him inside her house and will not speak about herself. He explains to you where he lives and asks you to come visit. Make the trip once. It is a long way, and thinking about the many times he has hiked the distance to spend perhaps a half-hour with you puts a twist in your stomach. Locate his house. Hide in the tall grass and wait for a long, long time. See him walking along the road and disappear.

Sneak away. Never come back. Neither does he.

Wolves in the House

One dusk during the rainy season, you slog your way back from the stable to find the front door swinging on its hinges in the lantern light. Your heart pumps cold in your chest. Run. See the muddy paw prints on the deck. Wolves in the house.

Follow the tracks up to the second floor. Hear the scraping, the snarling. Anger and guilt propel you into Grandpa’s room with reckless determination, straight into a gathering of soggy-furred wolves. They wrangle over Grandpa, dragging him off the bed with their teeth, snapping and growling at one another. Scream. Punch, kick, sink your fingers into matted hackles and rip. You forget there’s a rifle slung on your back, you slip and fall, you’re descended upon by beasts, trampled.

The wolves scamper out together and leave you. Sit up, bruised and scratched. Across the floor, a muddy arabesque carved by a hundred claws. Grandpa is dead. In the next room, you find that his wife has accompanied him. She lies peacefully in bed, pale-skinned but undamaged.

Burying them is a two day ordeal of rain-drenched digging, attended by wolves just out of lantern light. They watch you fumble and slip into a swampy grave. Crawl out sobbing. Scream obscenities at the lurking pack. Swing your shotgun. Dare them.

Shout, “What are you waiting for?”

The next morning, a grey morning drowning in rain, there is a wolf in your path. You stare at each other. Drop the bucket. Bring the shotgun to bear, slowly, carefully. Level it. Fire. Nothing! The gun is water-logged, a heavy club. The wolf advances on you. You swing, smash the stock on its skull. It cries and finds its footing, and it skulks away.

You are twenty years old. You live alone in the dwór.

Habits

Surround yourself with traps. Surround yourself with snares. Break up tables and chairs you don’t need and use the planks to board up the lower windows. Listen to flourishes of howls. Wait for the wolves, but they never come.

Learn to catch rats with stale bread and biscuits, first. Later, you catch hares, marmots, squirrels. Steal wandering sheep to replace your dead goats. Shoot a brown bear before even stopping to think how you will transport the carcass all the way home. It turns to look at you. Shoot it again. It hurries off, greatly vexed. Decide brown bears are not for eating.

Some habits persist. Bathe. Brush and trim your hair. Go clothed and shod. You cannot imagine life without these habits. The well-bred part of you thinks, “Anything else would be un-szlachcian.”

Go through the dwór sometimes, telling yourself you’re looking for something useful, some spare clothes. As you wander room to room, talk to yourself as if there are people there to listen. Hold conversations. Bicker. In your grandparents’ room, find the paintings and photographs. The finery. The coat of arms. The evidence of your nobility. No evidence of farming. Expect to find photographs of Grandpa dining with German Scum, but there are none of those. Wander the rooms.

Talk to yourself all day and night to keep yourself company.

Eight years later, you’ve stopped speaking.

Invitation

Awaken to wolves at your door. They scrabble and scrape at the boarded-up windows, and pace outside. You see nothing but you hear their whines and their growling, smell their urine. At once the wolves go silent. Stand on the stairs and hold your gun. Hold still. Did you imagine them?

There’s a knock on the door.

It is a long while before you open. You expect an old man with embers of revenge in his eyes, but you find a savage woman. A mane of dew-darkened hair. Leather and cotton rags. In some ways she looks younger than you, in others older. Try to say you remember her, but you have to find your neglected voice. You croak and cover your mouth.

The savage woman smiles. It’s as if she recognizes the accent of solitude. She steps back and invites you outside, as though you are the one out in the damp outdoors, and she is in her proper abode, offering you hospitality. Graciously accept the invitation.



Portait by Zhang Jingna

Night Madness

Your next memories are a smear of moonless nights. Nights so dark you grow claustrophobic, crushed between walls of darkness. A cold so unremitting and permeating you forget the sensation of your own skin, and finally you forget what cold feels like. You don’t shiver. You stagger in a stream of meltwater and find it does not shock your senses. You are the temperature of meltwater. Nothing quenches your thirst. Nothing ends your hunger. Your stomach tears itself inside-out in protest and overthrows the rule of your mind. Hunger becomes your mind. Hunger is every thought.

Branches and brush whip your face and body for hours. Dimly you realize you are running blind in a forest. You feel you are in a race with madness. You push yourself faster but madness overtakes you, sweeps you up and carries you faster.

Madness carries you to a goat standing in twilight. Before dawn you have slaked your thirst and lie on its cooling flank. The savage woman returns, or she has never left. Small as she is, she picks you up and slings you over her shoulder, and carries you to a place where night never ends.

You dream of an Apollo butterfly, chalk white wings, frosted with silver. On each wing, the black eyes of a goat. Droplets of blood gleaming with starlight.

When you wake, your black hair has become thick and coarse like a horse's tail.

Orsola

Her name is Orsola. She speaks German, French, Italian, and something she calls Romansh. Her Polish is broken. For a short time she is talkative, babbling, hopping from one language to another. You piece together that she was some kind of natural historian, but the subject agitates her. Soon she will not speak of it. Soon she will not speak at all. This does not bother you. You have company now. For months, words are not needed.

Do not ask what you are doing, where you are going. You have begun a trek together. She has allowed you to take a suitcase with clothes and some mementos of your parents. Holding that suitcase gives you the strength not to cry in front of her when you look one last time at the ancient dwór.

She weens you off beasts. She teaches you how to waylay shepherds and hikers. You prowl villages. You prey on drunkards and travelers. You stalk the sleeping. She wraps herself in shadow and goes unseen, even by you, but you feel her presence. She wraps herself in animal forms and slips through the night-shrouded hills while you walk with your suitcase alone on a road. Car headlights beam at you. People stop to lend aid to the woman lost in the mountains. Use your best manners. Slake your thirst.

You cannot wear shadows and animal shapes as a cloak, not yet, but you have dresses. Go unseen where people gather, go into their taverns and squares. Make up names for yourself. They accept you. Look tired. Look lonely. Women try to find you a bed. Men try to bed you. Either way you go away sated.

Instinct

Orsola breaks the long silence to chide you.

“Why you hunt like this?”

“Hunt like what?”

“With make pretty eyes and pretty walk,” she says, and struts around pretending to be you in a crowd of people.

“It works doesn’t it?”

“My way works! Your way slow. Walk with you so slow!”

As if to prove her point, she dashes away along the hills, fleet as a bird diving to Earth and just as quiet. It takes you all night to catch up. As you run, think of ways to explain. How you’re doing what you feel. How you’re letting your instinct take over--no, you’re letting their instincts take over. You smile, they laugh. You sing a note, they sing a song. You make a step, they dance a dance.

“Orsola,” you say. “You pretend you’re an animal. I pretend I’m a person! You wait for them to turn their backs, I wait for them to put their arm around my shoulders. You wait to catch them alone, I lure them away from their friends. Don’t you see? It’s the same! We do the same thing.”

She grunts at you. The great silence has settled over you both again, only now it’s a heavy silence, like a rug.

There are other reasons for your methods, reasons she cannot understand. How you’ve grown up sheltered from strangers, knowing only your family, speaking only to them. How in your entire life, the only stranger who looked at you with anything but suspicion or hatred was Rafał. How no one but him ever looked at you with desire. How close contact with strangers gives you a thrill, fills you with a sense of risk and power. How taking the sustenance they unwittingly offer makes you feel like a noblewoman again. A szlachcianka.

Sometimes she punishes you for your methods by disappearing and leaving you to wander alone until you panic at the encroaching of dawn. Only then does she return and lead you to shelter. Together, you follow the Carpathian ranges into lands where people speak Czech and Slovak, Ukrainian and Russian. Without her assistance, you learn to find shelter in buildings, and you prefer it. At your silent insistence, you both come further down the mountain to where the population is denser. Along the way, you sense that a divide is growing between Orsola and you. She keeps her distance, such that some nights you find yourself trekking alone in the same direction as the night before. Sometimes you hitch car rides just to see if she’ll be there when you arrive at the next town. She always is.

There are happier times, times of running and laughter. Chase her high up where the goats only tread, slip on rocks, clutch at weeds and roots. Rip your dress to tatters trying to keep up. Call rodents and bats, cry at them to find her. Send your critters in pursuit, laughing.

Zigzagging your way along the Carpathian crescent, you go through lands where people speak Romanian. Pick up the languages as you go, enough to lure people in. Accept the clothes people give you, steal the rest. One early morning you are alone with a young man. He should be in his father’s bakery, doing his job, but he is with you in the darkness behind the building. Cloistered as you were with your family, you don’t know how to seduce, but you know you are pretty, despite your horse mane. And you have learned the signals. Let your hunger glint in your eyes. Let him talk himself breathless. Smile. Patience. Wait for the moment.

Orsola attacks him viciously.

He’s left faint and bloody on the ground. She points at him and glares, as if saying, “Do you see? Do you see?”

The next night, she starts the slow trek back north. You stay behind.

Refugee

In the next two decades, you learn there are others like you, some different, some more like family. Some despise you, many are indifferent. There are families and nations, and some of these nations approach you. One you mistrust immediately. Too close, too zealous. Their motives don’t interest you. Another nation has few laws, but they always fight, always shout. You see no reason to join them. A third is friendly with you until they run out of patience. Then they chase you out. Abandon Iaşi, Constanta, Bucharest. Abandon Romania.

Take refuge in Serbia. The same three nations are here. Stay somewhere until you’re not welcome. Move on. One of your night cousins teaches you about putting a bit of yourself in someone. It keeps them on a leash. Now you have a young woman who stays with you like a dog. She knows current events. She knows fashion. She teaches you things and keeps you pretty. She fetches, she begs. You throw her scraps.

In Belgrade you find the town square, called Trg Republike by the locals. Feel dangerous. Feel liberated. Feel young again. You hop over cracks in the square, laughing, surrounded by city birds who heed your call.

Pretend you’re stomping on the dead.



Portait by Zhang Jingna