Polish Suits[1]

POLISH SUITS Ricardo Finocchiaro

Legend holds that there is a hotel in Warsaw, in the Stare Miasto or old town, with a small room from which one can see unbelievable things: the passing of weary troops, tiny people singing in the street and toasting with vodka, red dogs running in circles, and a tailor selling suits that belonged only to heroes, so abundant here in Poland. I am on the train to Lodz, and I read what I’ve just told you in an article in the Dziennik. I could have gone to Krakow, to see the Visla from the wind-blown walls, the ghetto’s dark history still on show, or the medieval libraries teeming with nuns and novices. But I am going to the city of cinema; old Piotrek called me from the Widzew neighborhood there. He will show me the land of Wajda and Polanski, the city that retains as emblems its empty factories, its dilapidated neighborhoods, its clusters of desperate and bored young people. Small towns go by one after another on either side of the railroad tracks; rural folk stand by with their hay until the train has passed. Some wave, their reddened cheeks challenging the cold. Others sit in their rickety wagons; the horses snort, and vapor covers their heads. I go on perusing the newspaper and stop at one item, a sad and intimate tale. A story without heroes, where everyone loses, an injustice one might say, or a sad mistake as the case may be. It’s about one of the first criminal trials of the democratic period. Many of those cases had their origins in the earlier, elephantine system. In a small town near Katowice, a woman asks her husband, during the Communist years, to buy some milk for their baby who won’t stop crying. The man goes by bicycle to the grocery. There, he waits a few minutes until the lady grocer at the counter, a solid and taciturn woman, finishes attending the requests of a loud, drunken soldier. Several of the soldier’s mates come in, shouting and making uncouth jokes in the little shop. The man who was there for the milk, who we could call Lech 1, says “Excuse me” and puts in his order. The soldiers get mad and push him and say they’re going to get their beer first, and that he’d better wait his turn. The man answers that he was there before them. They tell him to shut up and show due respect for their uniforms. The arguments get heated and a scuffle breaks out between Leszek2 and the soldiers. The disturbance reaches the ears of the military police making their rounds at the time. Leszek ends up beaten, thrown in the back of a truck, and locked in a cell in a neighboring city. The bicycle waited two days in the grocery’s doorway for its owner. No one talked about what had happened. Leszek’s wife looked for her husband in the town, crying and cursing. Ten years passed. Leszek returned to his home-town after confinement somewhere in Russia. Democracy was making its first inroads. He knocked at the door of the house that had been his. He waited a few moments. The radio could be heard: music 1 2

In Spanish, the Polish name “Lech” is similar to “leche,” milk. In Polish, Leszek for the name Lech.

with violins and accordions. A man opened the door; he was the second husband of –let’s call her now Gosia3, like so many others in Poland –, a mild-mannered carpenter who had come to replace Leszek with the passing of the years. Leszek greeted him, introduced himself –so his later testimony assures—, looked around the house, recognized details and did not recognize the new smell that inhabited it, like sawdust and varnish, both at once. He breathed deeply, sobbed for a few instants, then from the fireplace took one of the tools for scraping coals aside and beat the head of the carpenter who, surprised, died with his eyes open (for that reason we shall call him Mirek4 from now on). Leszek turned himself over to the authorities immediately, and was two years before getting a trial. The train stops in Brzeziny. A family gets on with their bags. The father is missing a leg. The smallest son is wearing a black anorak. His hair is blond, almost white, and he is eating a chocolate bar. The mother shouts the classic przepraszam! so people will make way for them in the narrow aisle. Leszek’s murder trial was short. When Judge Kucharczyk asked him to relate the facts, Leszek answered with the following: that after ten years of unjust imprisonment, he only wanted to see his wife and his son and take his boots off by the fireplace; that the door was opened by a man he did not know; that he started to look at the house remembering some things and not recognizing others. That among the things he saw, one made him lose his mind; it was a photograph in a wooden frame on a shelf and he could not restrain himself. The photo was of Mirek entering a church dressed in a suit—Leszek’s only suit, which he’d inherited from his father –and he could not bear it. That a man would get married in his suit. His father’s suit. The train slows its pace, and the rural countryside grows tenuously more urban until it is reduced to alleys and tunnels, bridges and avenues. Neither Leszek nor Mirek had ever been to the hotel in Warsaw with the window from which one can see the tailor who sells the suits of heroes. I think about how time bends, and how certain instants mark an entire existence. The train and its orchestra of squeaking wheels arrive at Kaliska, the station in Lodz. I wait until the students, the workers, and the little old ladies get off with their bags and handkerchiefs. The little boy in the black anorak smiles at me and licks his chocolatestained lips. I fold the newspaper and put it in my backpack. From the platform, Piotrek greets me, smiles, and goes to get the car. He’ll take me to drink beer, and he’ll tell me for the nth time—while pounding me on the back – the joke about the pit-digger with a discount for delivery jobs.

In Spanish, the Polish name “Gosia” sounds similar to the verb “gozar” which means “to enjoy or to have sexual pleasure.” 4 In Spanish, the Polish name “Mirek” sounds like the verb “mirar” which means “to look.” 3