On Krakowskie Przedmieście by Kinga White
For my grandmother, my mother and my sisters
2007, From Lublin With Love
‘Congestive heart failure,’ my mother said. Granny had called her Dana and Dana called me to pronounce the direct cause of death. The sour milk of morning clouded my weak eyes.
1921, Lublin
The life of Stasia Jońska opens for me at the age of eight, when her mother Marjanna married for the second time. Stanisław Matusiak, who had been a husband before (to a woman 15 years older), now became a ‘father figure’ to a vast collection of children. Indeed, the gift of babies had come often to the family, irresistible to refuse. Only Stasia, the last to be born and the last to die, would remember them all.
There was Jerzyk Joński who had soup delivered to the hospital regularly. An eternal bachelor, whose life was spent mixing water and rye, who knew dawn like the inside of his pockets.
There was Mietek Joński. A butcher with a sharp tongue.
Kazia Jońska. A vague black branch of the genealogy. A broken tree.
Zygmunt Joński journeyed to Warszawa... Warszawa... Warszawa...
Zofja Jońska died aged eighteen.
Janka Jońska and her two tiny girls. One would overuse stomach acid relief and develop Alzheimer’s. The other would be proud of her children and die alone in the hallway of an overcrowded hospital. Lasieńka Jońska, the beloved sister. Stasia would rock her strong baby boys as if they were her own, a prelude to motherhood. Did they remember the aunt who had changed their cotton nappies and secured them with pins? Lives cut short, little time to forget. Lasieńka went to the photographer at Krakowskie Przedmieście to fix her life in sepia, an eternal memory. The rounded edges. The face elongated.
Born so late, Stasia Ewa Jońska; never learnt to cycle, never spoke French with a Frenchman, never had a pet.
Krótka Street, Number 3, Flat 25. The patched up family received a bargain of a life cherished
above all. With an occasional glimpse into an obscure future. Up the street, a travel agency selling promises, tickets to America – golden dreams. Stasia would pass it regularly. ‘Lot’ means flight and this was the only Polish airline cutting through the Iron Curtain. The Joński/Jońska children would only make it to Warszawa or Poznań.
And some sanatorium where the female patients were complemented by cardiac patients, geriatric men. Pale food was served in a canteen and entertainment on sickly evenings. They took delight in postcards from friends scattered around different parts of the new Poland.
*
At times the powdered light of morning exposed the high creature of creatures. Initially, a god of minor things. Jewish bagels sold on many corners of Krakowskie Przedmieście. Soft and round. Mastered by Hersz Lender in Lublin.1 Lender turned out to be lucky. New York welcomed his breakfast creations. Sad as poppy seeds and light as sesame. And there was soda water with juice which everyone drank from one glass. A glass was wiped, likewise tender stomachs. And more bagels shared with siblings.
When still a child and before medical predicaments, Stasia ate too much sugar and confessed. Poison for the teeth from the rotted West. She had reached the age of preparation for becoming part of the ephemeral body of god. She would have preferred a goddess. The taste could have been sweeter. ‘Is gluttony the new season for you? Kneel down and beg for forgiveness. You are a bad, bad girl’. She pretended to kiss the rustling purple and gold robe and left with her hands buried in the pockets of an old coat inherited from her big sister Lasieńka. The Lacrimosa of household poverty.
1931-1945, Lublin
The Order of the Holy Ghost nuns came to Lublin in 1922 and founded a private Catholic school for girls2 with an honourable mission: to educate the poor and unprivileged who lived in unheated flats with few dreams and aspirations. The Messiah was tucked between the narrow streets of Old Town. Stasia found her way here each day.
She walked along Krakowskie Przedmieście, churches on the right-hand side (ink-wounded fingers clutched at some notebooks tied with a strap) and churches on the left-hand side (her young heart would not remember much yet), sheltering in the half circle of the Krakowska Gate, which descended into the school building filled with whispers and shades. Wearing a modest uniform, Stasia appeared younger than she was. The pupils were told to sit, revise and pray. All three in changing order. Some failed trust for teachers and life resulted in two unsatisfactory marks in the first grade: mathematics and history. Swallowing her pride and applying herself, a satisfactory mark in French followed; Stasia mastered ‘Comme si, comme sa’.
The older sister was still there for her; Lasieńka, separated by just two years in age, but an ocean of experience, expectations and prospects, was still there for her. In the autumn of 1934, a candidate for marriage appeared and the girl with the elongated face became a wife and, soon after, a mother. Stasia, on receiving her ‘matura’ certificate (marks for very good behaviour, physical exercise, and hygiene), became an aunt, now proficient in cooking, sewing and cleaning. They had not taught Stasia about babies at the Catholic school. But Stasia ventured east, to Hrubieszów – a piece of Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Jewish land – to be close to her sibling, rocking the babies that were born as Lublin began to fill with ashes, rubble and a sour odour. A hint of angels and the murk of the unknown.
*
And so the tremendous unknown morphed into the visible. 1939. Aeroplanes, aeroplanes; a sinister buzzing, blackening and the cruelty of progress.
Chopin Street, with its ornaments of secession visible from Krakowskie Przedmieście, and which Stasia had passed so many times, was now carved and cut. Chopin buried under flying debris. A musical prelude to blackness poured from broken windows. Ears perforated by steel and blood wished they were deaf. People grew eyes like deer. The tenderness of exposed flesh. The pandemonium of misfortune.
*
1939. Krakowskie Przedmieście, Narutowicza, Kapucyńska, Kościuszki, Chopina, Bramowa: all were now moveable targets for the Luftwaffe.
When they were young they played at killing. Friends died and rose again; repeat, repeat, repeat. As they grew up others convinced them to play some more, with teeth grinding and fists clenched on control panels, tearing buildings and bodies. Boys played at killing while girls bandaged wounds; two sides of the war story.
An early casualty was Józef Czechowicz, Lublin’s only famous poet. Killed while he was at the barbers, a Polish-German dictionary tucked in his pocket. Tufts of hair, brittle pages and the roar of aeroplanes overhead.
The Town Hall was a favourite target. The hum of rustling Polish was about to be silenced when the cleaner Jan Gilas hurried outside and fell, curled like an embryo, clutching a bomb nearly half his size and weighing around 50 kilograms. He had carried it out of the crowded building on pay day as many queued. The bomb never detonated, but it made Jan’s heart stop beating.3
1945, Warszawa
The May victory of 1945 turned promptly into a defeat of another kind. The war was all over. Was it over? The Red Army ‘liberated’ us...
But on 17th October 1945 the capital of the new socialist-realist Poland acquired a very precious heart. This heart would be returned to the pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross on Krakowskie Przedmieście. Chopin’s body was buried in Paris, at the Père Lachaise cemetery, but his heart was kept by a sister and smuggled back into Poland in 1850. Stilled life nested in a jar. Bigger than usual, it had already been imprisoned for 39 years in the fragile cage of Chopin’s ribs. As there are always two sides of the story, it is not established who guarded the heart later; whether the barbarian Nazis known also for their taste in classical music or the National Army soldiers protecting the symbol of distant romanticism. The swollen human paraphernalia was sacred. Warszawa with its broken ribs of buildings and a firm voice of the new Polish Radio reporter:
‘Warszawa is experiencing sublime moments. The heart of our great artist is returning now to the capital’.4
1945-1947, Lublin
152 kilometres from Warszawa, should one draw a straight, imaginary line on the map, which changed so many times people did not know whether any order would prove temporary or final. A train would take its time, as if reluctant to pull itself out of this one-star town, a town on the eastern border that had been punished severely and was now on its way to a doubtful recovery. Here April snow mingled with bloodless dirt, clotting Stasia’s clothing. Nightmares still came, teeth felt like silent stones that Stasia fought to spit out. Relief never arrived.
The maternal shape of the hotel bore a balcony. Once Grand, then Deutsches Haus, and now Bar Centralny on Krakowskie Przedmieście,5 offering vodka shots, grey pieces of herring curled like oppressed tongues and ‘cold legs’, pork leftovers drowned mercilessly in dull jelly. Delicacies of the new, coward’s world. At intervals, Stasia was mourning it, but something else burdened her mind.
She had been there almost an hour, recalling forgotten French words: ‘C’est la vie, comme si, comme ca’.
Pale, dry lips and dark hair elegantly pinned up by her own steady hand. A protest in a place where any form of difference was unwelcome. ‘C’est la vie, comme si, comme ca,’ interspersed with a mastery of gastric ventriloquism. For breakfast, she had one piece of rye bread layered with sweaty lard. For dinner the cookery book advised ingenious recipes:
Fish soup without fish:
60 grams of potatoes
2 big onions
4 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
salt
optionally: a glass of milk or 10 ml of cream.
Peel potatoes and cut into squares. Cut the onions and cook in 1 and ½ litre of water adding crushed peppercorns and a leaf. Add potatoes and cook. Serve immediately. The soup is not that different in flavour from the fish broth.6
Working at an office, where dark hours of the new Poland were devoted to bookkeeping (and siphoning scraps off unfortunate, vulnerable people), Stasia persisted. Izba Skarbowa7 was a neat building, shelved with records, precisely kept, in which Stasia’s pre-war education paid off. She walked once again the same route as years before, every day through Krakowskie Przedmieście, which was waking up slowly, concealing its bruises and open concrete wounds. The Jewish bagels Stasia had been raised on were replaced with things to come, black mouths of destroyed shops needed to be stoppered urgently. But strengthened by meticulous working-through-the-numbers, she chose to continue.
One cannot underestimate the convenience of neutral mathematics, its provision of safety; a luxury for others. Office work came with a price at times – Stasia bit her mother tongue while listening to colleagues, those mannequins of decent beings. In a cold, musty washroom she rinsed ink from her fingers and comforted another girl; encouraged her to resist the demons of male harassment. The girl was losing this crude game, but Stasia could talk back.
She was winning. Anywhere. Anytime. Teeth would not break like stones. The office chit-chat of villagers forced to move to towns could not hurt. So many escapes to the unknown; so many times had she witnessed instincts worse than those of animals. No job could imprison. What could imprison Stasia more than the constant need to help others, to fight for food and coal, then fight some more?
She still did not have a room of her own. Girls the shape of Stasia could bear it easily. Girls of Stasia’s spirit would never break, they would always find a solution. At least there was no longer a need to wash the monthly impurity from her cheap work clothes. Instead, the waist was altered, secretly let out in the morning before nausea licked her throat.
Bones felt like they were made of chalk, and the weather’s rawness would crush them before the man she was waiting for would arrive at Bar Centralny. Its neon shone with the dull light of an economic system, offering modern life to the tormented. This short, fragile, dignified man whose eyes fed on a black diet of poor ink, failed to notice his woman at first, the smile drawing slowly across her face. Hot glasses filled with weak tea that danced softly against the crudeness of a waitress. He approached the table, took her hands, gently kissed the fingertips with their traces of grey laundry soap and whispered (with an inconspicuous exclamation mark):
‘I‘ve got the place, dear. I did exactly what you told me to do.’
Soon, they were both drowning in a silvery evening. On their way to their first home.
1982, Lublin
The new Poland sunk in the lurid summer. Dust swirled inside the red trolley buses cutting through Krakowskie Przedmieście and settled on seats that bore the tired souls of an internal and eternal polityka. Two women hurried to the taxi rank.
‘You’ll make it!’ Stasia always accepted things the way they were and got on with them promptly. It had started, they both knew.
‘To the hospital...’
New Poland crawled on scabby knees after the war Stasia had experienced, but Dana did not yet know that in the maternity ward there was constant conflict of another kind, a secret pact of midwives against frail ballooned bodies. A burgundy, livid, jaundiced slaughterhouse, not for the innocent – they all deserved what they were getting, the staff was convinced. No mercy, had they failed to cooperate or to devote their bodies, stretched like rosy jellyfish for the noble cause. When everything was rationed, including decency, the whole system depended on a suspicious state. The national attribute– ‘Polishness’ – was pushed out of the female bodies with great effort. Dana was in the splattered vacuum with her mother on the other side. There was nothing even Stasia could do, except wag her finger at a sulky midwife and fail to make her see sense. Dana thought why would one waste time?
The nurses were further agitated by the busy doctor in a non-iron fluorescent RFN shirt (a gift from the grateful director of a meat factory), who had to be bothered to perform an operation on one of the women. The midwives’ tireless faces, cheap powder between the premature wrinkles, stretched as they ranted.
‘Don’t you have any milk?... You’ve got more than you think... Your fault... Bad attitude... Didn’t you manage to push out the baby... Caesarean section for the lazy ones... Well, not real women...Did you make that noise with a man... Hysterical drama queen...’
So Dana became one of the Polish queens and did not dare to admit she was a trainee doctor herself. All the women in her family gripped their luscious dark hair and pulled it, transferring the pain to the roots of organic matter. Dana’s own curls were pulled back and secured with a lilac polyester band for the sake of inheritance of gestures. Every sip of stewed raspberry drink (‘kompot’) scolded her dry lips.
Forced to wear the obligatory birth uniform (too short and too coarse, like a dead animal fur on which she placed her royal-blue-boxed Nivea-scented hands), Dana thought of her mother giving birth – when all you could do was to get over it, because that was your unquestionable duty, to produce another citizen of the scarred country. Stasia did not approve of cosmetics, hard work cutting through your skin was something to be proud of! Dana’s father would say: ‘I don’t wish to interfere…’
(At this particular moment, Dana’s intellect is turning to mud and her heart to a pulp, she is a corpse stuffed with black froth and white cotton balls. A lesson from her pathology classes.)
On her back, in her loneliness, like her mother.
Dying was easy. She was hollow.
‘It’s a girl!’
She was yet to discover the infant would smell like sour pineapple, had she the opportunity to sample this fruit from behind the iron curtain of ruthless economic rules.
For now, Dana survived, but it was not over. After Stasia discharged her from the State Maternity Hospital, Lubartowska Street, her daughter felt an unexpected cramp in her tender belly. Stasia’s words jingled in the air:
‘What I’ve told you? C’est la vie, my child’.
Dana’s father carried her new flesh and bone, her darling baby. Dana stopped, still protected by his vulnerable arm and bad eyes. She looked down. Shoes were filled with blood and the concrete pavement was blossoming like poppies.
1984, Lublin
I am two and I stick a finger in my newborn sister’s eye. She is a baby doll and I am a doll and my granny’s hands bleed with beetroot; she is peeling it for soup and the scream makes her run out of the kitchen. She smacks me (‘You little hooligan!’) with a wet tea towel, so I will remember that I have done wrong. I see knives of light.
1990, Lublin
They tell me I stuck a finger in my little sister’s eye.
Someone has opened a new shop. ‘Delicatessen’, it is called. This is the first time I see shrimps. Fat fingers resting on the blocks of ice. This is the first time after Pewex8 that a shop can stock so many wonderful things. A carton of juice with a straw, how ingenious! And Kouou Roukou, a wafer with cocoa and Donald Duck bubble gum. Mum doesn’t like it when I stick it to the desk that I share with my sister. Mum likes our room tidy. And we cannot touch our face with our hands. And our hair neat, no tangles allowed.
All our friends have a dad. We have each other.
I love jigsaw puzzles. I spend a lot of time matching all the pieces up. I don’t like it when I can’t find a piece. It upsets me.
My granny says ‘No need to cry, my child, you’ll cry when your mother dies, not now!’
And I guess she’s right. The carpet is stiff and hurts my knees. I look at them and see a flower which looks like a flower on a carpet.
1994, Lublin
My grandmother’s fingers are dirty with the first cherries’ juice. She uses a safety pin to get to the stone heart. ‘Stuk, stuk’ dropped into a ceramic bowl with zigzags of red. It takes a lot of time. Mum doesn’t have this time. She wanted to be a heart doctor, but she has us.
My grandmother also makes the best pickles: peppers, zucchini (which she says is Italian and I think it is a bit like cucumber, but better). They have a lot of vitamins for strong bones and good eye-sight. Summers are short and she is always busy in the kitchen. Winter is coming and winters here can be as annoying as flu. So we play games: countries, cities, animals, colours. We learn new words: list as many words as you can starting with a particular letter of the alphabet. We’ve got only five minutes. ‘B’ is for a brush (she often brushes my long messy hair) and for babcia, granny.
1997, Lublin
Our muddled eyes. We go together with my granny for eye appointments. We walk cutting through Krakowskie Przedmieście. My school route. I hold her arm, she seems apprehensive of the cars – before the war there were never so many cars in Lublin. Churches however, stand firm. I count them.
We enter the waiting room first (someone’s wet fur that smells disgustingly of mothballs). Meat disgusts me, too. My mother never cooks pork. Pork smells human, like a corpse. She says it is because pigs’ blood resembles our blood, their organs work like our organs. Pigs adjust to different environments, they can be trained; but once something snaps, they will go back to their old habits. Just like us. I believe if you eat pork, you eat a pig’s fear. That’s why I gag when I smell it. I would throw up fear as fast as I can. Fear also feeds on the sweets that I desire. And it manifests when I need to speak to people. My granny does not understand it.
Inside the stuffy waiting room Stasia talks to everyone. About her physical condition, her son in America and, finally, her war. An old man has been waiting for hours. Murmuring to himself (his daughter glued to the chair and her own thoughts), he calls divine names and whistles with a shortness of breath.
‘Are they going to see me at all, I’ve heard one can destroy this part of an eye by looking at the sunlight, hahaha, I was hanging out in the sewers, who was staring at the sun?’
2006, Lublin
This is the last time I see her. She is still able to stand on her own. I grew on fruit-filled dumplings and tangy vegetables and now I am taller than her. A papier-mâché of a granny pressed against the high ceramic stove (installed in an attempt to heat spacious apartments in the early 20th century). We used to throw our milk teeth behind it, I wondered whether they were still stored there. There was no Tooth Fairy in Poland.
In the morning I help her to bathe. There is only one thing she requests help with. She asks me to scrub her back.
’Harder!’ she shouts. The skin is dry, with discolouration in the form of tiny islands. A memory of sun and time. ‘Harder, harder, girl!’ the brush presses firmer and firmer. She is becoming a curled form rooted in this old bath with its black plague of cracks.
But now, now she is standing against the high stove. Arms folded, she wears a cardigan. She is so cold. It is so brown. Colour of fermented amber. Matching her watercolour eyes, her once-chestnut eyes.
My sister says the cardigan was blue.
2007, Lublin
You had some rehearsals of which I am aware. Running away from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) soldiers: ‘What’s the rush for, miss?’ And ‘Get away from the hospital, the Nazis are throwing newborns out of the window!’ Lubartowska Street cracked. Respectively: two childbirths, one stomach perforation.
Hearing goes first, but it is also the first to come back. You would recognise Chopin and forget Chopin. There are no familiar voices around you, but how do you define familiar when you are fading? On your night table: a cotton handkerchief and the prune juice provided by your absent son. You check obsessively whether you have enough bread and toilet paper.
There are no familiar faces. Sisters and granddaughters, they all merge into one. You no longer remember. I wish I had asked you about many things, but youth has its own ignorance.
You have short, dark hair with touches of white. You suffer from bulging veins and wear thick stockings. Your fingers, resembling tiny branches of an extraordinary tree, are clutching a blanket.
But the frozen cocoon of a bed swallows you whole.
2017, various locations
When you were my age you married and had your first child growing under your heart. Classical music calms babies suspended in the invisible underwater; and you could have been listening to piano strokes and rocking to nocturnes with your swollen body and remembering the Polonaise from your school graduation ball before it was too dangerous to perform Chopin’s music.
It is impossible to understand this tormented Central European country without Chopin. The admiration was so intense that we cherished his precious heart, preserved in a jar, human remains pickled. Two lives, as any immigrant’s life doubles, one heart, and many speculations on the cause of death (cystic fibrosis among others). The crystal jar filled with cognac did not open. The floating organ appeared yellowish, as if worn out and aged, unknown terra of fortunes and misfortunes. It was so efficiently preserved that thorough observations (taken by a medical team under Professor Tadeusz Dobosz) established the ultimate diagnosis: tuberculosis compromised the heart muscles.9 When a weakened composer and a great aesthete was fading, he kept saying ‘Swear to make them cut me open, so I won’t be buried alive.’10
Stasia used to announce: ‘Make them burn my body, so I won’t be eaten by worms!’ She is now resting in an uncertain place. Mostly in my recurring dreams.
On Krakowskie Przedmieście by Kinga Elwira Cybulska first appeared in Hinterland Issue 2 Summer 2019 / hinterlandnonfiction.com
1 T. Pietrasiewicz, (2014). Esej o bajglach i cebularzach. Retrieved 1 November 2017 from http://www.jemlublin.pl/tomasz-pietrasiewicz-esej-o-cebularzach/
2 Rybicka, (2013). Historia VIII LO. Retrieved 15 November, 2017 from http:/lo8. lublin.pl/content/historia-viii-lo
3 W. Białasiewicz, A.L. Gzella, Bronili Lublina. Wrzesień 1939, Lublin,1994, p44.
4 Śmierciak, K.. Trudne losy serca Chopina. Przyjechało w słoiku, 20 lat przeleżało w rupieciarni. 17 September 2014. Accessed 1 December 1 2017, from https:// tvnwarszawa.tvn24.pl/informacje,news,trudne-losy-serca-chopina-przyjechalobr-w-sloiku-20-lat-lezalo-w-rupieciarni,142718.html
5 Polskie Radio. Fryderyk Chopin: Zabierzcie przynajmniej serce me do Warszawy. 17 October 2018. Accessed 1 December 2017 from https://www.polskieradio.pl/39/156/ Artykul/957269,Fryderyk-Chopin-Zabierzcie-przynajmniej-serce-me-do-Warszawy [translation by author].
6 E. Kiewnarska, 109 potraw.Warszawa, 1941, p12. [Translation by author].
7 An equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce
8 A shop where desirable Western goods (including jeans and Coca-Cola) could have been obtained for Western currencies
9 A. Quinn, (2017). Chopin’s Heart Pickled in a Jar Offers Clues to His Death. Retrieved 9 December, 2017 from http://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/arts/chopin-heart-tuberculosis.html.
10 Wprost. Polscy naukowcy odkryli przyczynę śmierci Fryderyka Chopina. 1 November 2017. Accessed 9 December 2017, from https://www.wprost.pl/ kraj/10084137/polscy-naukowcy-odkryli-przyczyne-smierci-fryderyka-chopina.html