The first time we met Pan Tupek, we were walking through the courtyard returning home from running errands. The weather had turned cold and though it wasn’t quite dinner time, it was dark. Thin sheets of snow covered the hedges lining the walkways and reflected the orange glow of the lamps. I was wearing gloves. I know because when I knelt down to pet Pan Tupek, a fat, white, black-nosed chihuahua, he tried to bite me. Pani Joanna, whose name I didn’t know yet, looked at me with serious eyes. She held his leash and said, it’s because you are wearing gloves. Gloves scare him. Her tone suggested that I had done something wrong to the dog, not out of malice, but out of ignorance. Her words were meant to enlighten, not admonish. She was an older woman. She wore a down coat with a beret. I smiled and apologized for my indiscretion, not because I thought I had done something wrong—she was also wearing gloves—but because I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to keep speaking Polish. Gina, not understanding a word that passed between the woman and me, stood admiring Pan Tupek. The dog was wearing a sweater.
To win over Pani Joanna’s trust, I told her that we loved dogs, that our dogs had died last year, that one had lived until sixteen, the other until eighteen, that we were going to get two new dogs as soon as we returned home. It was all true. She didn’t ask me where we were from. Since the end of thewar her family had always had dogs, shesaid. Their first dog was an Irish setter.Itwas the only time she mentioned the war.
Pani Joanna noticed that Gina wasn’t paying attention to our exchange and I noticed Pani Joanna noticing, so I said, she doesn’t speak Polish. Pani Joanna nodded and continued talking. Gina was still looking at the fat little dog. That’s when I asked Pani Joanna his name. Tupek, she said.
I checked the meaning when we got upstairs. I was right. It’s from the verb tuptać, to walk in small, tiny steps. When I heard his name I thought of a small child or dog walking. I imagined my mom mimicking my little dog’s steps by saying tup, tup, tup. I could hear it in my head. That’s how I often checked my Polish. I put it in my mom’s voice. So Tupek was a male who walked around in small, tiny steps, I told myself. A female would be Tupka, I think. A small boy dog goes tup, tup, tup, so he becomes Tupek. I translated it for Gina. It means something like tippy-tapper or tip-toer, I explained.
I wasn’t upset that Pani Joanna corrected me instead of the dog. Both Gina and I admired her loyalty. We had anticipated this relationship dynamic from our earlier observations. Since we arrived I had been regularly studying all life in the courtyard from our fourth-story window: the dogs, the old women, the children, the younger men who drank beer and smoked, the old man who sometimes drank beer with the younger men, the young women tired of watching their children. Gina was less interested in the people than I. Only Pan Tupek’s sausage-shaped body lured her to the window. She had a special affection for log-shaped dogs. By the time he tried to bite me that evening, we had already named him Pan Kielbaski, Polish for Mr. Sausage. From our window we admired his cocky waddle and his tendency to snap and bark at friend and foe alike. It’s not because we liked mean small dogs, although we did, but because Pani Joanna always turned a blind eye to his mean ways. She was a woman in love, something apparent even when she was just a silhouette we watched from above.
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Pani Joanna’s advanced age coupled with her spryness allowed us to imagine that Pan Tupek was her tiny husband, one she had taken late in life, because she had outlived her first, larger, two-legged man. This is probably why we addressed Tupek formally, first as Pan Kielbaski, then, after meeting him, adding his actual first name so that he became Pan Tupek Kielbaski, though more often, simply Pan Tupek. Politeness demanded that I never address Pani Joanna directly. She was always Miss Joanna, always Pani. Just as I would never call her only by her first name, I had to address her husband as Pan. The formality of address in Polish, however, didn’t just end with placing Miss or Mr. in front of a person’s first name. It required me to construct sentences that felt as though they could never touch the person I was addressing. A sentence like How are you today, Miss Joanna?, for example, would in Polish be stated in third person, literally How is Miss Joanna today? As if I were asking Pani Joanna about someone else in the courtyard. This distance I noticed became more pronounced if I didn’t know the addressee’s name. Whenever that was the case, the Pani or Pan felt to me even more formal, because in this situation I had to translate it in my head not as Miss or Mr. but as the Lady or the Gentleman. For this reason I liked not knowing the person’s name. It made Polish feel like an old novel. Let’s say I was standing in line to pay for my groceries at the Biedronka, the discount Portuguese supermarket chain around the corner from our apartment where the aisles were dirty and cramped, there was only ever one cashier, and all the older Polish people cut in line as if communism had never ended and in a few minutes there might be nothing left to buy. In this case if a pushy woman tried to squeeze her way past me, I didn’t say excuse me, ma’am, but I was standing here. Instead, I literally said, Excuse me, but the lady wasn’t standing here, but in Polish. The formulation always made the situation more enjoyably absurd, as if I were standing in the way of a baroness attempting to buy the last can of pig knuckles in aspic.
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Returning to Pan Tupek, I should say that my friend Joanna (not Pani Joanna, but another Polish woman) argued with me briefly about the grammar of Pan Kielbaski, the name we gave him before we knew his real name. As a native speaker of Polish, Joanna argued that Pan Kielbasa was the correct form, her reasoning being that Kielbasa was the singular noun form of sausage and because its gender was feminine (it ends with an a), even if it was referring to a man, it should retain the feminine form. She was, I think, assuming that I was making a simple grammatical error when I named him Kielbaski. She was reading the word as an incorrectly gendered diminutive form of the noun—as if I had wanted to call him something like Mr. Little-Sausage. If this had been my intention, it should have then been Kielbaska, keeping the feminine form despite Pan Tupek’s undeniable masculinity. But I was using my own last name as a template. Names ending with -ski in Polish are adjectival. The root of my last name Żuraw means crane, as in the bird, so Żurawska is something like lady of the crane, as if I came from a magical land of cranes. (Though I should note, in my case English ruined things, forcing both the men and women in my family to use the masculine form, Zurawski.) In any case, Pan Kielbaski could be translated as gentleman of the sausages, as if he had come to us from a wonderful land of cured meats, which his body suggested he had. That was my understanding and Joanna conceded.
One day Gina and I ran into Pani Joanna and Pan Tupek on the sidewalk in front of our building. Pan Tupek had a turd stuck in his butthole and was busily engaged in trying to get the stubborn chunk out. He was in a seated position and was using his front legs to scrape his anus across the pavement. The entire enterprise was giving him an erection despite the fact that he was visibly irate. Pani Joanna was in an especially cheerful mood that morning, as if she was unaware of Pan Tupek’s struggles. She simply stood there grinning and speaking sweet words to him, which he answered by growling at her. His responses caused her to giggle and turn to us while shielding her mouth from his view. Just like a man to always want the last word, she whispered to us before letting out a hearty laugh.
Right after Pan Tupek resolved his situation, the sweet black Pomeranian who lived in our building emerged on the sidewalk. Upon seeing him, Pani Joanna turned to us and said, Oh it’s Tupek’s good friend. That Pan Tupek had a good friend, of course, surprised me. The Pomeranian ran to Tupek, happily wagging his tail. Tupek responded by growling at him, then snapping. The Pomeranian shrank back. As all of this took place, Pani Joanna noted out loud, they really love each other, as if she had witnessed a completely different scene. At this point I crouched down, put my hand out with my palm facing up and called to Pan Tupek. He looked at me and bared his teeth, to which she replied, oh he’s scared of bare hands.
Over the next few months I usually ran into Pani Joanna in the courtyard when I was alone returning from the library. I always tried to speak with her as long as possible, both because I wanted to practice my Polish and because I hoped she would start talking about the war. Ever since I was a child, I listened to old people talk about the war. It was the only real thing that had ever happened.
To tell the truth, I was in Warsaw now because of a certain war story, one I had forgotten and only remembered recently—something an old Polish woman said to me when I was a child. When I remembered it, I went around telling people that I finally had something I could write about. When they heard the story, they agreed, yes, it was in fact something I could write about. The problem was that I didn’t know how to write about it, so I only thought about it for ten years, maybe more.
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When I was about five or six I was sent to spend a few days with my friend. It was summer and my friend and her mother lived near the beach on Long Island. Her mother, like my parents, was from Poland, and like my mother, her mother was a dentist. The communists made lots of women into dentists. Now, in America, both our mothers worked a lot. Like me, my friend had an old Polish woman who took care of her while her mother worked. One day the old woman took us on a walk to the small downtown near my friend’s house. The woman had an errand to run. On the way home, she bought us each an ice cream cone. I remember holding on to my ice cream and walking carefully along a crooked sidewalk, where the roots of giant old oaks had lifted and cracked the concrete slabs. The street was lined with houses nicer and older than the one my family lived in. Somewhere there the old woman started talking about being our age in Poland during the war. At some point she said, during the war we were so hungry, we ate our own shit. That’s the sentence I remembered recently, now over a decade ago. The old woman of course hadn’t said the word shit because she had said all of this in Polish and because she wouldn’t have used such language with us. When I remember how I felt when she said this, though, it feels to me like she said the word shit. The sentence hit my child ears hard. When the story came back to me recently, I wasn’t horrified, though. I was filled with something like glee because the sentence seemed to explain something.
In Warsaw that spring when I was working in the library everyday, I tried to write about that sentence because it was the sentence that had brought me there. I had thought about the ice cream and shit for so long, it seemed time for me to start writing about it. By the second day, though, I wondered if it were true, if such things even happened during the war. I had been in Warsaw for six months already and had visited concentration camps, read several reports accounting for each day of a Nazi sea transport on which half the prisoners, including my great-grandfather, died of hungerand thirst whilesitting in their own filth, and also read several books on the bombing and destruction of Warsaw, none of which shied away from gruesome descriptions of rapes and murders. Nowhere had I encountered any accounts of starving children forced to eat their own feces. There were some reports of thirsty people drinking their own urine, but even some rich New Agers in California drank their own urine. Maybe my memory was wrong. When I googled: eating feces WWII, hungry children eating feces during war, or do starving people eat feces nothing came up. My memory felt like a memory, but I had already lived long enough to confuse memory with dreams and dreams with memories. Or maybe, I thought, my memory was correct but my child-self had misunderstood the woman’s Polish. That also seemed unlikely, though. If I knew any Polish well as a child, it was the Polish related to private matters, things not spoken in public—when my mother asked me if I needed to relieve myself, she always asked me in Polish.
I left the library and sat in a nearby park. I called Joanna, because she was a professor of Polish culture. I thought she could help me. I told her about the ice cream and the shit and that I couldn’t find any stories about Polish children eating feces during the war. Do you think my memory is wrong, I asked. She thought for a second and then said, perhaps it is possible that such a thing occurred but it is not a war topos I have ever encountered in my research. Then my memory must be wrong, I replied. Well, even if it isn’t true, you believed it to be true, she noted, so it is in some way true. I had been thinking the same thing. Somewhere in my mind I had always understood my own existence as a strange evolution from east to west, from shit to ice cream. And it was through old Polish women that I had gathered the details for this story.
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The first conversation that Pani Joanna and I ever had that had little to do with Pan Tupek took place toward the end of winter on a day when the air carried a hint of spring. I was returning home from the library when I saw Pan Tupek sniffing around in the bushes. Pani Joanna was on the pavement watching him. I had a strong urge to talk to her, to get into a conversation, so I approached with a loud and cheery and how is Pan Tupek this fine day? but in Polish. After brief greetings I used the topic of the weather to steer us into a more substantial exchange. I was hoping to arrive in the past. I was always hoping to arrive in the past. I told her my grandmother had been born in Warsaw, on the other side of the river in Praga. That her house was still there. It had survived the war. I told her this because she asked me if I was Ukrainian, which surprised me. How did she not know I was Polish? Did she not hear my American accent?
At some point she made a comment about her age. Something like, oh, but I’m an old woman or but at my age. I don’t remember exactly. I’m sure I politely contested this fact with something like, oh Pani Joanna, you are in such wonderful shape, though in Polish I probably would have used the word condition instead of the word shape. I would have said, oh Pani Joanna, you are in such wonderful condition. In any case, she looked me in the eyes and said, my dear lady, I am ninety years old. Yes, but you are so spry, I answered. Here I translated the English spry to the Polish sprytna, which wasn’t the best word, because the Polish can also mean clever or cunning, not just physical adroitness. I obviously made my choice because of sonic similarities. In any case she immediately answered proudly, my dear lady, I danced ballet for many years. And that has stayed with me. And then noted, I also read literature, real literature. She probably turned to her mental acumen because she couldn’t tell if I used sprytna to describe her physically or mentally. That’s when I asked her if she had read Miron Białoszewski. Of course, she stated. I knew then I could trust her. Because we had grown more intimate in this conversation, I formally introduced myself. I stated my first and last name and she stated hers. We each bowed slightly to one another and said, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Well, actually we said, it’s a pleasure to meet the lady. From that day on Pani Joanna was no longer just Pani but Pani Joanna.
When I returned to the apartment I calculated that Pani Joanna had been born in 1933. She was six when the German tanks rolled into Warsaw, ten when the Nazis razed the Jewish ghetto, and eleven when they leveled the rest of Warsaw during the Uprising and all she had said so far was My family got a dog after the war, an Irish setter.
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One morning I bumped into Pani Joanna and Pan Tupek in the courtyard on my way to the store. Oh Tupek isn’t doing very well today, she announced. I could hear the worry in her voice and I could tell Tupek wasn’t himself. When I looked at him, he didn’t bark at me, just gazed at me with sad eyes. I felt sorry for him. I learned that he had thrown up all through the night and didn’t want to eat or drink. He’s young. He’s only ten. That’s young for a small dog, she reasoned.
The next week I was away from the apartment. I was in the north of Poland on the Baltic coast, visiting the concentration camp where my great-grandfather had been a prisoner. When I came back I looked out the window often, hoping to see Pani Joanna and Pan Tupek. For several days there was no sign of them. Then one evening at dusk through our window I saw a small dog emerge from behind a tree on the other side of the courtyard, a dog I hadn’t ever seen before. A mini pinscher. The person holding the lead never came fully into view before disappearing down the street, but I told Gina that I thought Pan Tupek was dead. Two weeks later on a warm and sunny day on my way back from the library I finally ran into Pani Joanna in the courtyard. She was wearing a sun hat and a long linen dress. She was holding the mini pinscher on a leash.
What happened to Pan Tupek, I asked. Heart attack. She was wearing large sunglasses that hid her eyes, but I could tell from her voice that she was on the edge of tears. She moved slowly and carefully as if her body were made out of porcelain, as if she thought she might break. She was a woman in mourning. The new little dog, she told me, was from her son. He didn’t want me to be alone, just sitting in the house, she explained. Lola, the new dog, was young, happy, and loved everyone. She greeted neighbors from the building as we talked, jumping into their arms. Pani Joanna I could see had affection for the dog, but her emotions were muted by great heartbreak. Her laughter disappeared. We, the cats and I, were all with him when he died. The vet said there wasn’t anything to do, except make him comfortable. I told her that it was good that his family had been with him. I had chosen the word family purposefully. Yes, that’s right, she said, latching on to it, the family was with him.
After Pan Tupek’s death, Pani Joanna was a different woman. No longer alive with the joy of her tiny husband’s existence, she moved slowly through the courtyard and across the sidewalks, stunned by the cruelty of the world. One afternoon when I stopped to chat with her, she at first appeared to be in slightly better spirits. I thought this because she had begun extolling the beauty of her cats, detailing for me the exquisiteness of their coloring and their coats, describing for me their majestic breed. Though I was mostly indifferent to the charm of felines due to allergies, I feigned an intense enthusiasm. I worked hard to demonstrate the kind of interest I would naturally take in a dog. I wanted to help perpetuate the grieving woman’s good mood and I knew these cats had been by her side during the final moments of Pan Tupek’s life. I smiled, nodded my head in assent, and asked questions.
Once I no longer knew what to ask about the cats’ appearance, I turned to their origins.
How had she gotten the cats, I asked. This is when her mood shifted. She looked over my shoulder off into the distance, then stared blankly at the ground for a few seconds. When she turned to look at me again, she said, I have a small cabin in the countryside, not far from Warsaw. She gazed off into the distance again, and continued her story. There along the road one morning I found the cats. Her face tensed. Someone had thrown them from a car, she added. They ride down these country roads in their Mercedes and BMWs—so they have the money but not the heart—and toss kittens to the side of the road. She paused to look away again, People are terrible. Yes, I agreed. And this is where I made my error. I always wanted to keep Pani Joanna talking, hoping she might start talking about the war. This time was no different. Wanting to extend our conversation, I started telling her about my dog Jack, who before I adopted him had been kept mostly in a cage. With this needless information I agitated Pani Joanna, erased the last of her almost-good mood. Our conversation ended then with her bitter words. And these people call themselves Catholics. They call this a Catholic nation. If they could at least keep the ten commandments this world might be different.
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The next time I saw Pani Joanna outside the building she was near tears and shaking. It was sunny and I had just left the apartment to run errands. What’s wrong, I asked abruptly. I hadn’t even wished her a good day. There’s a dog tied up in front of the drugstore. I must have looked at her strangely, because people often tied up their dogs outside the drugstore when they went in to buy something. She started to explain. I saw him there yesterday evening too. He’s been there all night. This last sentence made her shake more. I don’t know what to do. He looked at me with such sad eyes. What could I do? To be honest, I didn’t know what to make of the story.
She was talking about the Rossmann on the corner not far from our house. I thought about the Rossmann drugstore often because I passed it several times a day—on my way to the tram or the bus or the park—and it was a branch of a German drugstore chain. This branch stood just inside the boundaries of the former Jewish ghetto. Sometimes while I was buying some toothpaste or shampoo I would notice the autobiography of Dirk Rossmann, a paperback book on the stand next to the self-checkout detailing the story of the self-made German millionaire, then I would think about what it meant that I could buy that book here in this drugstore, on this corner. Probably it meant nothing, I would think, because Dirk Rossmann had been born after the war. Still I kept thinking about it. Especially because this Rossmann stood here now, in the part of the ghetto where the very last Jews in Warsaw rose up against the Nazis and fought for nearly a month. In order to stop the uprising the Nazis finally decided to set the ghetto and the last of its people on fire. When they were done, the ghetto—so most of the north center of the city of Warsaw—was reduced to stone, looked like the surface of the moon.
I read in a book that people on the so-called Aryan side, specifically people on the street where I lived now, on Świętojerska Street, could see the last of the ghetto’s residents jumping to their deaths from the burning buildings. I know for a fact that I could have seen it, because when I had read the sentence that stated that people on Świętojerska Street could see the ghetto’s inhabitants jumping to their deaths, I was reading in bed, so I stood up, went out onto my balcony, and looked toward the corner where the Rossmann drugstore now stood. I could see clearly into the ghetto. If it had been May 1943 I would have been able to see people inside the ghetto jumping to their deaths. Sometimes I wouldn’t think about all this when I passed the Rossmann, though. For instance, if there was a dog tied up outside the drugstore, anxiously peering through the glass window, waiting for its person to finish shopping and I wasn’t walking alone, but was returning from somewhere with Gina, I would just joke and say look, a Polish dog wondering if the Germans will let its person back out!
At the moment, though, Pani Joanna wasn’t thinking about the fact that the Rossmann drugstore was a German drugstore. She was too upset about the dog she had seen tied up outside. I told her I would look into the matter myself. And I did. When I got to the drugstore, though, there was no dog outside. There was no dog outside the supermarket either. Maybe she had seen the same dog two days in a row because its owner had gone to the drugstore two days in a row? Or maybe she had seen two different dogs similar in appearance, each tied in front of the drugstore for a few minutes each time she passed? Or maybe there had actually been a dog cruelly left but another person had taken care of the animal in the time that it took Pani Joanna to walk down the street and tell me the story? In any case when I got back to the building, Pani Joanna was no longer in the courtyard.
I suspect that Pani Joanna had always been especially sensitive to the cruelty in the world around her, but that Pan Tupek had stopped her from dwelling on the terrible things surrounding us. Now, after his death, she may have felt these cruelties more, but she also refused to tolerate them. I know because the next time I saw her she and Lola were just returning from a morning walk. As soon as we greeted one another, Pani Joanna, visibly agitated, launched into a story. My dear lady, Lola and I were just out walking not far from here. We were in front of a church and these two women . . . but she didn’t use the Polish word for women. She didn’t use the word for ladies either. She used the word babi, a word that, depending on its context, could be either derogatory or playful. For example, a stara baba is an old hag. If I were to call a relative that, there would be trouble in the house. On the other hand, if I say someone is a kawał babi, literally a piece of woman, she’s a lot of woman in a good way. She’s fierce. She’s a brickhouse. But the way that Pani Joanna called these two women babi, and it was her tone that communicated everything, it was the closest Pani Joanna could get to calling them bitches without demeaning herself in the process. These two babi, I overheard them . . . they had just left mass and were standing in front of the church. I heard one of them say to the other: The Jews are coming back to Poland. Soon they will be lording over us again. So I went up to them and said, My dear ladies, weren’t you just in church kissing the feet of your Jewish God? And then I walked away.
I stood there in the courtyard at a loss for words, impressed with Pani Joanna’s fierceness. She looked off into the distance and shook her head. Finally, feeling as though I had to say something to mark my allegiance to her without overstepping our courtyard boundaries of polite conversation, I just said, How can someone even say that, knowing what happened here? But she didn’t pay my remark any attention, as if she had always stood here where everything had happened.
