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Kalinosie
For Janina Nowosielska
The women on the Kalinowska side of the family have tended to be beautiful; mother, grandmother, great-grandmother a lovely procession dating back as far, at least, as the earliest photographs show. Amazing—those poor farm families, working for the minimum food and clothing, struggling through two wars, trampled by German and Russian armies, the village of Grodzisk once apparently forming a temporary border between Poland and Germany – and nevertheless there are photographs. They form a bridge across time and continents.
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One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother, my Babcia , who was compelled to illustrate the margins of every pictureless storybook that she read to us. Babcia loved to tell stories, their origins in Northeastern Poland 's soft fields and lush forests, echoing in war-torn churches. She smoked and drank shots of vodka on special occasions and was a terrible cook, which may be why mom is a wonderful one (and why I'm a bad one). Mom's expertise in the kitchen stems from an early preference for the indoor chores like cooking, sewing, and – perhaps more significantly – a fear of the cows that my Aunt Zofia, now a far inferior cook, ended up herding in mom's place. They're all tied to the land, though; they feel its comfort under the feet. Babcia gardened for survival while mom does so for the love of flowers. Both have always moved a bit faster than real-time. Babcia would be pulling up vegetables for chicken soup and hurling a doomed chicken onto the chopping block while the feed she had scattered for the rest of the flock was still seen arcing overhead. |
Mom invades my apartment and, while despairing over the fate of her wayward daughters, packs my freezer full of pierogi and gulasz and reorganizes my closet. “You're just like your Babcia ,” she lectures, “everything tidy on the outside but pull out one drawer and…DISASTER.” Even before she got sick, Babcia liked to squirrel things away in cupboards, drawers, pockets, periodically forgetting where she had put luxuries like hard candy and necessities like her false teeth.
Though mom only lived on the farm as a child, she has the same curve to her fingers as Babcia . Their hands don't know how to be gentle; they cannot wipe your face without poking and a pat on the head always results in an aching skull or boxed ears.
There's a nervous energy in the force of their touch; those awkward hands of Babcia's once brought me a jar of sugary raspberries as I waited for the city-bound bus, and mom's hands hem all of my pants and put the delicate edges on pierogi . There's no patience in their expertise: “you will screw it up,” mom concludes when I offer to learn how to sew. There's an oblivion, a lack of empathy, for others' shortcomings: “yes, your teeth are lopaty (shovels) now, but your face will grow into them,” mom offers optimistically as I cry over a particularly awful fourth grade photo. Babcia , with lovely thick hair dyed auburn well into her seventies, which none of us inherited, brushes our fine-haired heads without mercy. “Owwwwww,” the children complain; the hands wielding the brush are stronger than they appear.
Babcia , an identical twin, was married off before she turned twenty to my philandering musician grandfather; mom was barely twenty when my father, a divorced surveying engineer ten years her senior, swept her off to Warsaw . Deep into her Alzheimer's, Babcia began to sing old folk songs that tended to reference lost love and deception. I remember a family gathering, Babcia breaking into song periodically - nie wróci nie wróci, i wrócic nie moze. Dwa serca zlaczone - klucz rzucony w morze (it will not return, it will not return, and it cannot return. Two hearts joined - the key thrown into the ocean) - and I recollect my grandfather, Dziadzius , growing pale: “I am paying now for the past.”
Babcia continued to sing.
Mom continued to love her engineer even as he imagined her to be attracted to everyone else; on nights when they played bridge and smoked packs of American cigarettes bought at the Pewex store with illegal dollars, even dad's friends were suspect. Years after his death, I intuit that my wannabe-pragmatic mother's great love was my father.
These women who precede me - loud, brutal, lovely, tending toward vanity and senility, falling into religion and superstition as they age - meet my gaze in old photographs and come at me through the telephone receiver in accented English.
They are something I can't shake, but without them I lose my context.