The Lullaby of Polish Girls Read Free Page A

as if gossip were a vocation.
    Emil Ludek is far away. He is seven hours and seven thousand three hundred and twenty-two kilometers out of her reach, and she thanks God for it. It is two in the afternoon in Kielce, and he is probably still lounging in their bed—probably with his lover. She can picture the two men, one of them her husband, snuggling under her lavender duvet. In Wyandotte, Kamila’s hand shakes as she finally begins tapping the keys on her Remington.
Dear Emil, Why? Why didn’t you tell me you were g
—Kamila’s fingers freeze. She can’t do it. Just then the door to her room cracks open and her father, her mousy little father, pops his head in.
    “Kamilka? I just got a call from Poland. Some bad news.”
    Kamila’s heart thumps loudly in her chest. “From who?” She told Emil never to call her again.
    “From
Pani
Kazia.”
    “
Pani
Kazia?”
    “Yes, Kamila, remember? Justyna Strawicz’s grandmother. Weren’t you two good friends?”
    Kamila swallows audibly. Slowly, she pulls the unfinished letter from her typewriter.
    “We were.”
   
Justyna
Kielce, Poland
    The last twenty-four hours have brought a bloodbath upon the Strawicz home. They have brought the inevitable, but Justyna can’t see that now. All she can see is that overnight, she has become someone who will be whispered about. From now on, people will whisper that she’s too sad, or not sad enough. They’ll whisper accusations and apologies. And surely they’ll whisper if she ever finds another man, but who the fuck in this town will want to date an unemployed widow with a kid, anyway?
    On the way back from the police station, walking up Witosa Road, Justyna saw her neighbors staring out their windows and clustered on the sidewalk, stealing glances in her direction. She walked past, enjoying a smoke, trying to elicit eye contact so she could wave and make them fucking squirm, but no one bit. She was ambling through a nightmare, through a haze, and nothing seemed real.
    The kitchen sink is full of dishes. Rambo, her mother’s dog, has left two piss puddles in the hallway that no one has bothered to clean up. Her son, Damian, is getting antsy on her lap and asks if he can go outside to play. It’s cold and snowing, but Justyna pushes him off her.
And don’t come back
, she thinks, as he runs out of the kitchen.
    From the foyer, he yells, “Will
Tato
be back when I come home?” Justyna shrugs her shoulders.
    “We’ll see!” she shouts back.
    She lights another cigarette. Upstairs she hears her sister, Elwira, crying again. She hasn’t stopped crying and Justyna can’t blame her. Last night, Elwira’s boyfriend killed Paweł, killed him in the upstairs bathroom, cold-blooded, out of the blue, just like that.
    Celina, Elwira’s daughter, wanders into the kitchen, a naked Barbie dangling from her skinny hand. “
Ciociu
, the dog pee-peed by the stairs.”Justyna says nothing. “
Ciociu!
It stinks!” Justyna looks at her niece, at her big blue eyes, ratty hair like tangled straw, her pretty oval face.
    She hands Celina a dish towel. “If it stinks, then clean it up.”
    On the table, Justyna moves her ashtray around in a circle. She can still see Paweł’s body in her head, twisted and puffy, splayed on the coroner’s table. Had his last word been an angry
“kurwa!”
or a cry for her, a frantic
“Justynka!”
? No one gives a shit and Justyna doesn’t blame them. Her husband was just a carcass; she could see that in the way the examiners had poked at him. Paweł would never be someone who
used to be;
to them he had never existed in the first place. He was a corpse. Justyna had stared at his gashes, as if she too had no point of reference anymore, as if she was gazing at some unfortunate stranger and not at Paweł at all.
    Later, at the police station, Justyna smoked one L&M Light after the next. She stared at the puke-green walls and talked, while a middle-aged cop scribbled everything down. The cop, whose