june 21st • sunday

A quick lunch in the town of the veterinarian and the nurse — I caught it again. The sweet, bitter, salty scent of home, of varnished wood, resinous nicks, old, slightly warped, painted-over doorframes, a scent warm even in winter — birch and soot, the dry throat of boards, everything that can't be aired out, because it has eaten into memory deeper than dust, sunk in deeper than nails so old they already look as if they've begun to melt.

The sheer curtains bear that smell most faithfully. White, with cascades of ruffles, painstakingly recreated by my mother, because she had seen such a pattern on one of her foreign escapades and came back sick with love. Afterward she combed the local fabric stores, looking for the plain, dense, one true netting, in an age of loud abundance and contempt for subtlety, when the shelves had stopped being empty, yet there was still nothing to be found anywhere. Not for those who preferred classicism over baroque. Not for us.

Here an ell, there a remnant, somewhere else another two meters or so.

She sewed for weeks, she sewed evening after evening, at the biggest table, breaking needles and her own brain over it. Nineteen windows, each one different. The machine's clatter meant intoxicating freedom, a brief escape from her bat-like hearing and dragonfly eye, because, bent over yet another template, she would forget about teenagers, tomato sandwiches, and the grave sins she was trying to prevent. You could hold a triangle ruler like a pistol and fire away, polish the cold marble floor with a denim-clad backside, lose yourself in trashy horror novels, give the concerts of your life before an audience of millions — imaginary halls know no limits. Łucznik — the thread-eater — cast so much shadow that it opened up its own Twilight Zone, and the skin, especially at the nape of the neck, all but screamed with excitement at the motor's first cough.

That smell is a phenomenon. Truly. Pine of various ages, most of it melancholy. Pine in many shapes. Age has its scent, and so does shape. Pine's sentiments, the patient calls of the stairs, the floors' monologues, the ceilings' anger, the indifference of baseboards, the joints of a house that has been fidgeting for decades, trying to find the most comfortable position — with creaks and pops like champagne corks. It loses its firmness, goes stale, and at the same time collects furrows, chips, telling scratches left by my lies and the arrogant sister's estrangement from me, the dogs' tournaments and family games, the nurse's high heels and the veterinarian's clogs, wandering furniture, dropped knives, slamming doors, our whole life, which somehow got it into its head that it was non-invasive and discreet.

In summer, that scent calls up clean, empty attics beneath roofs choking with heat, but without the characteristic note of beeswax — a bouquet tied with a chemical ribbon of oils and wood treatments, seemingly uninvited, yet exactly where they belong. In the linen closet, in that tiny, seldom-opened space, the ribbon draws tightest around the neck — to dive in there is an act of opiumism, an experience poised between the erotic and the oppressive — and the camel-wool blankets bound with it will always remain, for me, the archetype of absolute safety. Sometimes, too, a stray movement shakes the bouquet, and from the whitewashed wall a wisp of incense smoke comes loose, wraps itself around the copper trinkets and settles on the wicker baskets. In winter, furnace fumes bring their own bite, in spring — the tart sweat of awakened plants, in autumn — the pheromone of damp.

Raw timber, wood, beams and joists. The smell of surviving adolescence, and the bright name of the forest written on split birch logs, a forest that once had to die so we could live among knots, in orange rooms, rest our elbows on windowsills, listen at night as the house mutters curses, turning from side to side.

Whole meads of cornflowers. Not barely legible notes in the margins of the grain, written in blue ink, but livid faces with poppy flushes, a crowd of drowned women standing waist-deep in green sludge. Cornflower and poppy, the most Polish pair of flowers, one chronically oxygen-starved, the other hypertensive, its cheeks in a fever that never breaks. Together they look like escapees from a field hospital, the kind who take badly to enclosed spaces, even if it is only a tent divided by makeshift partitions. Seen from another angle, they are like the memory of all those school ceremonies where bespectacled children are made to recite poems about the fatherland, while a handful of parents, dying of boredom, half-heartedly pretend they still love this abstraction, that patriotism has not withered inside them like botanical evidence of guilt and cosmopolitanism. Unless, of course, a conservative daddy turns up — but today a conservative daddy attests to his love for the country on the Vistula not with Norwid, but with a baseball bat.

Cornflowers and poppies outside the train window, on the way from the town of the veterinarian and the nurse to Wro. Wro, to which I deny the right to masculine gender, because it is neuter, like milk, a rib, or an echo, and which seems to regard me as its own, though the feeling is hardly mutual.

And inside, a young guy with Courage the Cowardly Dog tattooed just under his ear. He sits sideways, baring the nape of his neck, sharing a card from his private tarot. The Magician, I think, because that paranoid beagle had an extraordinary nose for all kinds of folk magic, hexes, and illusions. As an introvert, it's beyond me how readily intimate mythology blooms on skin, so susceptible to salt and vinegar. People write picture-letters on their own bodies to caprice, daring, horror, fascination, death, longing, a sense of humor, and the absence of meaning, and then carry that correspondence with them to a fast-food joint, the dentist, and church. Or onto a train. In summer, which is a season without envelopes, the epistolography of tattoos spreads across the world.

Outside the window, the malachite-sea phase is underway. The grain crops have not yet ripened, but they are already posing as grown-ups — curves flaunted, muscles flexed — preening and lying about their age, though they are still full of imagination's sweetish sap and naive dreams. Here and there among these vibrating throngs lie golden roulades of barley straw or hay bales from the first cutting of grass. They are like sticky candies for giants, spilled from a bag torn open too violently and rolled away into the farthest corner, into the warren of dust bunnies shedding their fur.

Oleśnica — that unpleasant aunt whose calls I don't take — greets me, reservedly, with the mold-touched bread of an industrial dump. A rack of iron scrap in a storeroom of curiosities and a chaotic Dürer of weeds — no cress! — where every scraggly stalk marked by original sin has survived the apocalypse and attained redemption. This is no pretty little view, but a register of misguided decisions. Sheet metal, concrete, grass with sand in its teeth, rusted machinery waiting for reincarnation in the vestibule of Akasha. Oleśnica does not open its arms to me — it sticks out its tongue, coated with the residue of factories, depots, sidings, and unspoken exhaustion, sets a dirty glass on the table, points to the least comfortable chair. It does not sit down. It waits for me to leave.

Certain things have remained unchanged for three decades. The deserted platform kiosks — the ancient ones, wooden, dark-chocolate brown, and the younger ones faced with tiny colorless tiles, as if someone had ground up scraps of limewashed stairwells and set them into a mute mosaic. They stand shuttered, unbelievably patient. They look like the conning towers of submarines run aground in the shallows of the tracks, stripped of newspapers, orangeade, rainbow lollipops, plastic toys, and pens — indispensable trifles, little litanies to the god of travel, because who knows how the journey will end? Will we even get there, my good sir? And the once-tight railway junction gradually loosens, frays, falls apart, despite the varnish of modern conveniences.

Then fields again. Broad-hipped sugar beets, fledgling corn-girls, wheat slowly paling, rapeseed that has just stopped dyeing itself a provocative shade of blonde and is trading its neon-yellow highlights for mousy roots. They are firming up lazily, without enthusiasm, with the nonchalance of a woman over forty falling asleep unshowered but still in clip-on earrings. Birch groves flicker like musical scores released into the wind, flood polders tend the memory left by water that is, for now, uninterested, hushed, taciturn — yet all it takes is a whim of rain, a complaint from the river, a few wet weeks, and memory turns back into presence.

Overpasses before Wro. The gateway to an outlying district. If you'd behaved yourself, a graffiti buddy got you into the gallery of his pals — huge portraits on the support piers. Fame will not last forever, only as long as the preparations for a major overhaul. One morning, the butchers of Plainfield will take your face off, but I saw it, blurred by heat and speed. I know it was there — and a dozen or so others. 2012, Cornelius claims. I take this route after one hundred sixty-eight months of desertion.

And that is that. And Nadodrze. And the tram. And the present-tense home.

Poland in June, not yet dulled, slightly out of breath, all strawberries and thick braids. You won't meet her like that in the city.

(photo credits — kristina tochilko • ryan schram • vlad ionita)

(character credit of courage the cowardly dog — john r. dilworth)