The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk Page B

Anka, I gotta go. Tell your mom and dad
cześć
. And maybe one day you’ll come to Kielce again, right? I’ll tell Elwira you said hi.
Trzymaj się
.”
    Trzymaj się
. “Hold on to yourself,” a casual Polish farewell, like
take care
, but it calls to mind so much more. Anna hangs up when she hears the dial tone.
    The little red light on Anna’s answering machine is blinking desperately.It’s been blinking for weeks now. The world just won’t leave her alone no matter how much she ignores it. Anna presses the play button. Message after message pours out, from Paulina, Ben, her friend Veronica. From Frick and the cable company. She listens to each one for a few seconds before erasing it. The last message is from her agent.
    “Anna, it’s me again, sweetie. We’re worried sick over here. Been trying to reach you forever. Forever! Had to pass on a great offer you got for an indie. Other stuff too. What gives, honey? What the hell happened? Someone die or something?”
    Anna takes a small breath, stares at the boxes that surround her, at the gray walls that have survived hundreds of her cigarettes, and she presses delete one last time.
   
Kamila
Wyandotte, Michigan
    The front door is unlocked and Kamila lets herself in. She tries to tiptoe upstairs unnoticed, but she hears her mother call her from the living room. Zofia has always had freakishly acute radar.
    “Why are you so late? We already ate
obiad
.”
    Kamila doesn’t respond. She takes off her galoshes and unravels her scarf. Zofia drags her two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame toward the entranceway. “Your father already left for work. Want a plate?”
    “No, thanks. I’m tired. Just wanna go to my room.”
    “Unbelievable, that thing with Justyna. But I tell you, I’m not surprised.”
    Kamila doesn’t want to discuss anything with her mother, let alone the death of her old friend’s husband. She starts walking up the stairs to her room.
    “Were the kids good?” Zofia calls after her.
    Kamila nods her head but, no, they weren’t good. Jack, the four-year-old, peed on the rug again. Jack is a toddler by day and a Dalmatian by night, eating his Honey Smacks cereal out of an aluminum dog bowl in the kitchen. “It’s just a phase, Kamila, and we go with it,” Mrs. Levicky explained when Kamila started. Today, Jack’s sister, Laura, asked Kamila why her nose was so big. “Your new name is Kamila Mar
jew
ska! Get it? Get it?”
    Kamila was taken aback. How was a regular ten-year-old simpleton schooled in anti-Semitic insults?
    She had wagged her finger in Laura’s face. “Your dad he is the Jewish, so you not nice for him.”
    “What? I can’t even understand you! If you can’t speakie dee Eeenglish—go back to your own country!” Laura had sassed back. Thesekids were the opposite of good. They were the low point in an already shitty day.
    Their mother, Mrs. Janina Levicky (
call me Jan
), was Polish, but hardly spoke the language anymore. Her dwarfish figure flaunted firm boobs and toned triceps. “No chicken wings for me, Kamila,” she boasted, waving her arms about like a windmill. Jan was married to an American named Joey, who was of Polish-Jewish descent. Joey Levicky (born Jozef Herbert Lewicki) was a partner at an advertising firm. He was rich and never around.
    Jack and Laura were spoiled, their expansive rooms overflowing with things—the latest gadgets, the trendiest clothes, mounds of high-end debris. But this did not concern Kamila. What concerned Kamila was the fact that the Levicky children had no clue from whence they came. They were oblivious to war, famine, ghettos, or holocausts, and their parents believed that was a good thing; victims were powerless. Jan and Joey felt there was no need to burden their children with macabre tales of barbed-wire walls. It was a decidedly American sentiment, this onward and upward stuff.
    Kamila’s day had been spent cleaning up after those brats, and making sure they were at their