For Richard
There is a picture of Ala from happier days. She is thirteen with colt-thin legs and arms peeking out of a dark coat with shiny buttons. She is bent forward in what surely must be an accidental laugh, carrying a large wreath around her neck, the branches swallowing up her shoulders. It’s a giant horseshoe of greenery with a thick white ribbon tied into one of the brambles. I don’t know what it’s for but the scene is full of snow and happiness and Christmasery. In the picture, she still has both of her eyes. This is before you could cup one of her blue irises in your hand and pet it like a cherished marble.
My sister, Kasia, and I were never supposed to talk about Ala’s glass eye, even though we couldn’t help but stare at its wobbly glances. At night, Ala would pluck it from her socket and drop it in a baby food jar full of water. The Gerber glass sat on the bathroom counter and the bobbing eye would always right itself back in our direction, watching us take turns on the toilet. Ala would yell at us and shoo us out of the bathroom, holding up one of her talcum-powdered slippers as a warning. We’d look up into her pink socket that looked like a wilted rose, and scram. Steffa, our great grandmother, wore coke-bottle glasses that magnified her roly-poly eyes. Her cornices bumped against the lenses like bothersome bunions and filmed the scratched plastic with cloudy streaks. Steffa was my fortune-telling great-grandmother. A white teakettle always sat on the stove, a cornflower flame licking the rusty bottom, forcing out whistling steam. As Ala poured hot water into a pitcher full of teabags, she’d hold on to the thin strings by the square pieces of paper. She made sure the Lipton bags did not fall to the bottom where they couldn’t be reached without burning a finger.
When the water piqued into a rich shade of teak, it was poured into gilded teacups. My fingers would wrap around the porcelain and cover the pattern of rose buds blooming from a single brown branch. This was every day tea. Every day, three or four times a day tea. And then there was the other tea, the special leaves that were kept in a wooden box inside the walk-in pantry. My grandmother didn’t need to pull the string that popped on the light bulb. She could blindly reach into the dark cupboard and pull the box from its busy shelf. Like the things in my ghost father’s bedroom, this too had a fixed place. These leaves were kept inside a sachet sac and these leaves were for divining futures. Sometimes the cups were flipped over and wet clumps were dumped onto the saucers and the destinies were read. Other times the fortune seekers would tilt the cups towards themselves while asking questions and then tilt the cups towards my great grandmother who could see all the answers.
The grandmothers spent their days groping around the kitchen, reaching pell-mell for rolling pins and measuring cups and jumbling together myriad ingredients: bloody beets; acorn-sized breadcrumbs; silvery cuts of carp; spoons of soft-boiled eggs. Inevitably, they fed every item into the black pot on the stove, splashing up the rumbling water yellowed with melted butter. Ala and Steffa would plop down on vinyl chairs and throw their breasts onto the kitchen table, their heavy bosoms spreading across the cracked ice laminate. They’d watch the pot and listen to the wet sizzles and pops and they would begin to chop onions and pink potatoes and cube slices of pork belly. They’d sit beneath the holy pictures of God (Bóg) and Jesus (Jezus) mincing meat and words, gossiping about neighbors with gold teeth, and warning each other about thunder storms and strangers knocking on doors. Kasha and I would sit beneath the kitchen table listening and staring at the thick hairs poking through their nude knee-highs. A chubby old arm would reach under and pull us out by the scruff like a cat snatching up its kittens.
They’d put us to nap on top of a thick feather bed—a quilted red comforter with down peeking through the stitches—and begin the sleepy time story that began like most other fairytales. Once upon a time was rolled all into one Polish word, Raz, fiercely hushed from their peppery lips. There were no books in the Lawndale brownstone. The storytelling was oral and the tales changed according to the grandmothers’ and our needs. Some contained a terrible witch named Baby Yaga and others told of the devil (diabeł), hiding in sugar bowls or angels (aniołki) baking bread. There was one theme, however, that surfaced in almost every story. A child was lost forever.
What I remember of Ala and the rest of the family that lived in the brick house on Lawndale, is a gift wrapped in papery sadness. My family lived on the first floor and Pani Zosia, the landlady, lived on the second. Ala was my one-eyed grandmother, Steffa was my fortune telling great grandmother, Stanley was my autistic, pinhead uncle, and Edward was my grandfather—the only one who worked in the family, spending long days in the factory with his fingers dipped in machine grease. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment. My grandmother and uncle shared the bed in the pale blue room. And my great grandmother slept on the bed in the pink flowery bedroom. But Grandpa Edward slept in the cellar. So what about the last bedroom, the first one off the kitchen directly across from the bathroom? My dead father lived in this bedroom. Every article kept in place, just the same as the night he’d died. This room was for my father’s ghost.
My sister and I were allowed to sleep in the room and we’d play with the plastic animal zoo that lived on the dresser. Miniature elephants and horses napped on crocheted doilies, waiting for our poking fingers to wake them. We’d move the animals about, pulling tails, making toothy howls and neighs, but at bedtime, Ala would insist that the creatures were put back on their sacred lace.
In the corner of the room sat a two foot-high Christmas tree that stayed year round and the empty red, blue, green, gold foil boxes, sat beneath the boughs, a pile fit for a mouse family. The thimble-sized white holiday lights would twinkle-twinkle and my sister and I would lie on the fold out couch, whispering to each other, unable to fall asleep. The house would quiet with only the sound of the refrigerator or the peck-peck of a cockroach scurrying and about once an hour a rickety door would creak open and a car would slip inside a garage off the alley. My sister and I would hug each other. We were scared that our father would come back. That he’d spirit into the bedroom and crawl under the sheets, pinching our toes, and demand to know why we were in his bed. Or worse, he’d ask us what happened to him and we didn’t know because no one would tell us. We just knew he was dead and that was as far as the story had been told.
The kitchen smelled sweet, like porridge grouted the quilt-cream tiles running halfway up the walls.
This was my ghost father’s house. and that’s where our ghost dad’s family still lived. And my mother would remind us; we had obligations to our dead father and his relations.
We attended St. Hyacinth’s church with my grandparents and sometimes played inside an empty white church that had an old nursery full of toys, and for some reason my father had the keys. We made up stories about the children that had once owned these teddy bears. They were members of a gang we called, the lost kids.
The grandmothers had warned Kasha and I about Baba Yaga, how she would appear if we didn’t finish our blood sausage—a mixture of buckwheat and pig’s blood—or stuffed cabbage (gołąbki), equally horrific for little girls. Watery yellow leaves were bad enough, but in Polish, the word for stuffed cabbage is also the diminutive form of the word for pigeons. My sister and I would stare at the rows of soggy lumps both hungry and sad. We’d poke at the meat and say prayers, making cross signs over the little birds we were about to eat. We had no choice. Baba Yaga would come and steal us away if we didn’t finish our food. The grandmothers led us to believe she was around every corner watching for us to make a mistake, but they never told us how the witch had found us in the two-flat in Chicago or where she’d come from.
One theory of her origin, given by Vasilii Levshin, proposes that the devil wished to concoct the most perfect essence of evil, so he cooked twelve nasty women together in a cauldron. As the pot boiled, he gathered the steam in his mouth and then spat it back into the cauldron without thinking. Out of this mixture came Baba Yaga, the most perfect evil (Johns, 13).
You can imagine my worries when I read this. My grandmothers were always stirring something inside their black and white speckled pot and the smell was foul and devilish. Were they secretly boiling a witch?
It was she, the witch from childhood who served as a warning, who lived as a means of discipline. Kasha and I had searched for her in the hole in the bathroom’s pearl blue wall and in the small door in the yellow pantry. We’d crept together, holding a wooden spoon and a candle, peeking into dark corners and finding the fiery hiss of the water heater and sweaty copper pipes. We thought we spotted her once, in a runny yolk glow, a shriveled face hiding beneath a cherry-colored babushka.
Did you see her?
I did.
Me too.
We were children. We lied.
Inspired poetry gives description. Nikolai Nekrasov’s narrative poem describes her horrible appearance. Baba Yaga arrives in a cloud of smoke, wearing a toad-skin cap and a snakeskin coat. She has fangs and nostril hair that hangs down to her breasts. Her ears are huge and she has horns on her forehead and holes instead of eyes.
Etymologically, the German word for witch, Hexe, is connected to the German substantive Hag, meaning fence. A witch is a ‘fence rider’ crossing borderlines, existing between regions that are human and demonic. She lives between the realm of consciousness and the unconscious, inflaming hearts with excessive love, eating men and riding broomsticks (Jacoby, 201). Curses on her for crossing into my sleep. I woke up damp and frightened and mumbling: I’m not the witch. The children are safe. I wouldn’t. I’m the bear. I’m momma bear. No one was there to hear, just the women in the tapestry and the branches scraping on the window.
Misha
On a sunless day in 1971, Basha walked down the cement stoop to buy mielone mięso, not having the strength or time to crank the meat grinder. She strolled down Milwaukee Avenue in a brown fur coat, soft as a suede eraser. Extra shag pooled from the wrists. I was in her stomach. It was March. She kept me hidden behind a row of buttons and rubbed me for good luck, knowing things could not get worse. My father, Richard, had been dead for almost two months but she kept borrowing his socks and tucking them back inside his half of the drawer.
It was snowing lightly and the flakes melted just as they reached the sidewalk. Some flakes wet her widow’s peak and glistened the top of her tarnished spoon hair. She’d dyed it silver for the funeral and it sat, now, on her head, the blond coming out to breathe in big gulps and messing with the second-place strands.
Nosy Rosie was already inside the butcher shop, more than likely buying peppery sausage for her mother, Rosemary. Basha looked into the steamy glass and spotted Rosie’s long black hair and her rotten purple coat, shifting in front of the butcher’s glass case. The hem kicked up to reveal lining that was shiny oyster and spotted with daffodils that struck like yellow stars. Big deal. The first time Rosie’d flaunted the coat, she’d turned it inside out, showing off the silky material.
No one’ll even see it, Basha said.
But I know it’s there, Rosie said and hunched up her shoulders and the fabric gathered under her nose, and she smelled it with dumb glee and the expectation of a fresh bouquet. Basha blinked the memory away as she watched the back of the blue-violet coat start to turn, but before Rosie could stir sawdust from the floor, Basha walked past the butcher’s door and continuing walking up the block.
It was getting dark and the cars growled in her ears, angry that the snow was starting to take hold. She stopped in front of the pet shop. The windows were covered in one large and fantastic mural that showed people and animals dancing together. She brushed her hand against a zebra and one of its painted stripes flecked off in her hand. Basha stepped inside, into the aisles full of plastic castles and dusty fake ferns and she walked to the very back, to the jungle land where they kept the exotic breeds alongside the domestics. Parrots squawked and a monkey screeched. She stood in the center of the wild room and looked up at the wall in front of her. A cheetah slept, stretching its spots against the black bars of the cage. She looked straight ahead and spied an ostrich with one big eye closed. She looked to the left at the cages of floppy puppies trying to chew their escape, and then, to her right, where kittens meowed and pushed their paws out to shake. Amidst the crying cats, there was one green cage that was set off to the side and stood alone. Basha stepped closer. Could it be? An animal as cuddly as a child. It was a Misha, but to know how cute it was, say it again. Say it right—mee-shaw. The price tag read $650.00, Baby Sloth Bear.
Can I hold? Basha asked the woman wearing a light blue smock with a patch bordered in gold thread: a lime parakeet, a calico cat, a brown puppy with a white chest, a turtle with a cursive-bumped shell, and a small white mouse all sat together under a tree, sewn to the woman’s chest. She gave Basha one of those sour pickle looks, brine salting her face.
Well, I have to clean its cage, she said as if her compliance was a noble gesture, and she pulled out the furry little thing, back first. The woman ignored the low whimper and handed the animal to my mother.
Basha reached out and took the cub from the woman’s hands. The woman pressed her red barrettes into her scalp and then began to sweep shavings into a black garbage bag. Basha stood there holding the baby bear. She pressed the misha into her fur coat, into me, and the little thing licked her ear. She whispered something precious that I was too young to hear. Knowing her, she was making promises: I bring you apples. I make you nalesniki. I cut your toenails.
I don’t have money now, but I could pay and take baby home, my mom said. She continued rocking the bear, rocking me, and singing us a lullaby:
Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah,
kotki dwa.
There were once two little kittens.
Ah-ah-ah, two little kittens,
They were both grayish-brown.
Oh, sleep, my darling,
If you'd like a star from the sky I'll give you one.
All children, even the bad ones,
Are already asleep,
Only you are not.
She wanted the Misha to come home with us, to come sleep in the bed and take up the empty space my father had left behind. But stuff like that only happens in fairytales. Folklorists categorize such tales of desire as The Search for the Lost Husband—AT425 (Bacchilega, 72).
Baby, Basha said, kissing the bear’s neck and not wanting to put it back in the cage. But she didn’t have the money. She was a widow. She was 18. She lived in Logan Square with the grandmothers, who’d lost their son and grandson, and were reluctant to let her stay. They loved Kasha but I was a ghost child. When we look at her, they said, we see Richard’s grave.
Words in Love are Sneaky
The family did a good job keeping my father’s death shrouded in mystery. It was the tale no one wished to tell. They never spoke of him. My sister and I wanted to know what had happened, where he’d disappeared. All of the grandmothers’ stories were centered around the loss of a child but they never directly named our father, even though they’d probably told us a thousand different ways how he’d died, but nothing factual, nothing real. Nothing like the Coroner’s Certificate of Death. Birthplace—Poland. Citizen—Poland. Occupation—Machinist. Death caused by—Multiple Injuries Extreme.
My sister and I needed to know more and we were fascinated with death because no one would tell us where people go when they’re no longer sitting at the kitchen table. We weren’t even shown pictures of his face or what he might have worn to Christmas dinner. Sadness lived in every corner of the brick house and though Richard’s death was ever present in every moment, the vestiges of his existence were invisible. We thought if we turned invisible we might bump into him in a secret angel hallway, somewhere our hands could accidently brush symbols of wished claps and wanted patty cake.
Once on the Ground
I would give anything to speak with my father. I’ve created fantasies of time travel and M-theory, building instances in looped air where I’m sitting down and having coffee with Richard as we both dangle from superstrings, our kava trapped in smaller layers. All I can do is turn back and see the world as if he’s still in it. I go to places he’s rumored to have been and I take thoughtful steps, imagining—you are here, and you are here. I search for him in old movies, frames without sound and full of grainy thread.
Wednesday. I think I see him one day, almost, while watching an ancient weather report and scratchy footage that my professor has spinning on a giant reel, that clicks off round and round in my course on Chicago history. There’s a man who is poorly dressed for snow. He runs towards the camera, wearing a scarf and leather jacket, without gloves, and shoes that are too short and shiny for a blizzard. His eyes shrink into staples as he moves closer into frame. He is fiercely squinting. And then he’s gone. But my heart doesn’t leap. It’s not him. I’d know.
Thursday. I check out a recommended video and continue watching bygone news at home. I can’t help but think of my mom wearing cotton blue t-shirt with I survived the Blizzard of ’76, and laugh. I find some of my old favorite newscasters—John Drury and Fahey Flynn and immediately miss them and think back to hearing their soothing voices every night; how I’d imagined them really digging my mom and how I wanted them to date her instead of the pharmacist.
I fast-forward and find a scene cutting away to the man on the street. Boy, it’s cold outside. Wind chill factors are expected to get dangerously cold tonight, 75 below, so if you don’t have to travel, it’s best to stay inside where it’s warm and keep off the roads. And then it cuts to grainy footage. Look. There they are, on the old news reel, my grandparents trudging through hip deep trenches walled with plowed ice, carrying a paper bag full of—what did they always buy? Buttermilk & potatoes & onions & snaky sausage—minced tumescence with pickled and curdled balls of tiny marrow—the size of a BB. Ala is wearing a babushka, beneath a fur-trimmed hat, a fuzzy halo. I know it’s them, Babcia and Dziadza, grandma and grandpa. Look at the warm bear coats covering their backs. They’re no longer a failing memory, there they are, creeping, holding each other up, the bag with tall bread teetering off to the side. I play it again and again, believing it is so. Not wanting to know if it’s real but I have to find out so I drive to my mom’s and play her the tape and warn her—it’s them.
I can’t tell, she says. It could be, why not. They look like the same people.
We are sitting on her bed. She leans over to her nightstand full of Woman’s World magazines and glasses of water and reaches for the bottom drawer. She pulls out a dusty manila envelope and hands it to me. The paper is faded and the color has turned from yellow to delicate flesh.
You can have these, she says.
What is it? The envelope is the weight of a dissertation.
They’re your father’s papers from school, when he was a kid.
I’ve never seen my father’s handwriting, practiced on browned sheets of paper in soft cornflower ink. I leave with the packet wrapped in a plastic bag, in case the weather changes, and drive home. I don’t look inside. I want to take my time. I leave the package on my dining room table and turn the television on. Still no snow.
Friday. It’s the next morning, a cold day in November. I wake with the yearning for snow. The city is flat and gray with a pinch of green sky, perfect conditions. I stand on my balcony and I can see a thick layer of clouds and steamy breath rising from the people fifteen stories below. The street glistens with salt and the sparkle of damp asphalt. And I want it to snow, for everything to be covered in white cake, up to the heads of parking meters, so that with every step I take, I’ll sink. I drink coffee with cream from a white porcelain cup and I sit down and write in my journal:
I want it to snow. Really, really snow.
Snow that forces flakes into my mouth, tearing into my eyes
Snow that thunderously drums like kernels in hot oil, snow.
Snow so hard it will take me back to 1976, before life unfairly locked
into periods and field trips.
These trembled stars I will keep, this snow.
I finish writing my plea for wintery weather and look over at my father’s mysterious papers, still packaged. The gummy seal has lost all its stick, and the contents slide out onto the dark wood of the dining room table. I touch the boyish pages. His name is scrawled over and over again, with excruciatingly neat penmanship and official stamps leftover from the Communist era. Pretty purple seals are embossed on report cards and everything is scripted in Polish slants, a crooked tongue. One page catches my eye because it is messy and not as official as the rest. The writing is freer, as if my father were sitting in class, caught in a daydream, and skywriting with his pen.
On November 11th, 1964, behind a school desk in Room 214 in the town of Szczecin, Richard wrote:
When year equally.
Hoarse-voisem, hour, second, after, halfnight, everywhere reign deep, quietly. (to break off) only distant scum) ostentatiously
(snow storm
And that’s how it’s left off, without a closing bracket or period. Just an open-ended parenthesis starting before the word snow, a fragment without end, nothing after storm. It took my entire life, 36 years to wake to the exact moment in time, to beg the god’s for a blizzard, to open a package hidden from me all of those years, to discover the few documented details of this boy’s life, a father I’d never meet.
The Story I Want to Tell
This is what I know. Richard J. Niebelski died on January 30, 1971 at 12:10 a.m. He’d decided to join his friends, who’d already been out to the bar, who’d already been drinking. They came to the house on Lawndale to pick him up and he went, despite Grandma Steffa’s warnings. She’d begged him not to go. She’d read his leaves that morning, in his teacup, and the signs were not good. Not good at all. She cried as he stepped out the door and he shooed her away, lifting his arm, dismissing such nonsense, and saying, I’ll be home soon. I won’t be late.
Four friends went out that night. My father sat in the backseat, listening to the radio. His favorite song was playing, Duke of Earl. At the first bar stop, my father had a coke (he wasn’t much of a drinker). They left and headed to a pool hall. My father changed seats and agreed to sit up front. Snow began to fall. The coroner’s certificate lists: was Passenger and nothing more.
The roads were slick. The driver was drunk and as he veered off the exit for Father & Son’s pizza on Milwaukee Avenue, he lost control and the car hit a light pole. The metal post snapped and fell and this part gets a little fuzzy. There was no autopsy. Again, the report only lists: Accident--Multiple Injuries Extreme. My mom says the pole took off his head, a clean sliced whack that left his face intact. A head that lopped off to the side and dangled by the thinnest skin of ripped flesh. I don’t know if I believe her. His funeral was open casket. Do you? For whatever reason this is how the story played out, bit by bit, over the years. This is how she remembered it and who am I to say otherwise[1]. Everyone’s a storyteller, spinning tales to keep afloat.
Oh, Daddy, if I Try
I see my father with his green eyes closed and his brown hair spilling across his forehead in a sharp angled wedge. He is humming as the lights come closer and closer and he’s smiling. He doesn’t know what’s to come or how he’s about to leave everyone behind. He’s bopping to Gene Chandler’s song, thinking how good his life is and wondering about his growing family, his unborn child. His foot is tapping on the wet car mat and his fingers are drumming on the dashboard, and he’s crooning along to his favorite tune and in his last moment of life, he is happy. He’s got himself a girl:
As I-I walk through this world
Nothing can stop The Duke of Earl
And-a you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, a-I, oh, I'm gonna love you
Oh, oh
Come on let me hold you, darling
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
[1] What Basha remembers from the night of his death: My bones ached so I decided to take a warm bath. I fell asleep in the tub and had a bad dream. I saw your father walking barefoot in a junk yard. He was shaking his head, no, wearing a bright red scarf around his neck. Crows landed on his shoulders. He said, I’m so sorry. I jolted awake. The water level had reached my nose, starting to spill over the sides. I put on a robe and wrapped my hair in a towel and I just started crying. The doorbell rang. The police arrived with John who was sobbing and spitting up. He vomited. He had a small cut bleeding into his eye. I knew. He was crying so sorry, so sorry. I knew Richard was dead and I dropped to the floor.