We did not visit Poland often. Only when someone died. I have not been able to bring part of my mother’s ashes to Poland yet because of the pandemic. They sit in my living room, waiting to join my other dead relatives in her village of Bedoń.
I live in California, 3,000 miles away from where I grew up, and when my mother couldn’t sleep she’d call me. I always picked up.
“I think I know how I got sick,” she said once.
My mother had an aversion to being sick and to anyone knowing about it. Her father had tuberculosis and had to be sent to a sanatorium to recover. My mother, her brother, and my grandmother would visit him as he was quarantined. No one in her village would play with her or her brother afterward. They would taunt them that they were sick too. To be sick, my mother learned, was a humiliation. When she became sick this final time, she isolated herself so much that she stopped seeing or talking to her friends, except for a handful of emails I found. Her business associates didn’t even know she was sick. I had to tell them she was dead and listen to their shock and grief. She had worked until a week before she died. 99.6 pounds.
On the phone, late that night, she recounted how her father was vigilant against things like bedbugs. She whispered to me that he would come into her room and spray everything down with DDT. She said he’d even spray down her pillows and sheets. She recounted, with wonder, how the spray looked in the morning light.
“Or maybe I got sick because they made us get X-rays when I was in puberty. To make sure I didn’t have tuberculosis too,” my mother countered.
How would I know for sure? Now that she's gone, I would never know anything at all. There was no finding the truth. There were just stories.
When I asked my mother why my grandfather was orphaned she told me his mother had died when he was young and his father had remarried a woman who didn’t want him or his two sisters. They were shipped off to different orphanages. Later, in his early twenties, he reunited with one of his sisters and even rekindled a relationship with his father. My mother told me that my grandfather had said that at a wedding for his half-sibling after the war, the entire family was poisoned by black market vodka, which my grandfather had taken only a few sips of. They all died except my grandfather. He was left with no one again.
These were the stories of Poland that I grew up with. Fantastical, breathtaking. When I asked my mother why she was so tough — really, a hard-ass — she said that it was because the family had a car. There were maybe only a few other families with cars; they only had one thanks to my grandfather’s job as a mechanic. But the village boys thought my mother, just in elementary school then, was putting on airs. They were all poor but my mother didn’t want to be. So each day they followed her home and harassed her. She learned to run, to take different streets. And she balled up her fists and learned to fight. No one would ever get anything over her, she said. She glared at me. As if I made her remember something painful that she had been intent on forgetting. But I wanted more. I’ll never get to hear more now, at least from her.
My mother hated dwelling on the past: “There was too much sadness there.” And so she concentrated on the future. Except, in the years before her death, she’d started calling me to say things like: “I don’t think we should have left Poland after all.”
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