The Birch, Fall 2005

The Lvov Story

Katarzyna Kozanecka

The day my parents disowned me on account of my poems, I widened the back-slit of my pig with a borrowed knife and used the coins to buy a newspaper. In its gray help-wanted columns, I learned that the Polish Army was looking for a letter-writer.

I'll take it, I said. I'll fill the post. I put my poems about the undersides of leaves between my skin and dress of thinning wool and walked through Warszawa to the outskirts of the capital. By afternoon I had a new address and paper beyond the ungenerous margins of newspapers. I waited for the heads at the headquarters to give me memos or orders or battleplans to pound out on the typewriter, but they did not. For there was no war.

There was no war and still the Army called for men. Twelve months of mandatory service for males over twenty-one became two years for males over eighteen. Sweethearts, wives, and mothers worried; had suspicions; swore to vote for the opposition in the next elections. So the Army called for a woman, a woman to write letters home, letters embellished with bold patriotic threads, to allay fear, to boost morale, to empty of protestors the streets in front of the presidential palace.

I'll do it, I said. I'll be the letter-writer. The heads at the headquarters cut my long brown hair without unbraiding it first. They gave me khaki army garb - in their smallest size, for I am slighter than men - so that I might pass for a soldier; live among and know the uniformed; write plausible letters. When they introduced me to the company as Adam, the soldiers whistled; teased; shied away. I idled in the camp and accompanied them in khaki army jeeps while they patrolled the Polish-Lithuanian border in the unstable years after the Soviet Union splintered. Sometimes they roughed up the civilians who smuggled vodka, cigarettes, hosiery, and oranges between the neighboring countries. Sometimes they let them go without questions.

The soldiers were young like I. They were in the army for two years because they'd failed high school or because their parents had disowned them on account of their poems, paintings, or because they didn't limp, cough blood. At home the general sentiment was, Two years is a killer. All mothers tried to save their sons from this fate by inventing disabilities for them - hearts that missed beats, knees that buckled - as early as elementary school.

But some boys could not bear to lean out windows and watch while friends played football, and they gave away that there was nothing wrong with them by running outside, firing the black-white ball between the goalposts, and with their left feet, too. Years later the teachers of these boys testified as to their health and vigor, for teachers must eat but cannot unless they supplement their wages by informing on pupils.

These, these were the boys of which the army was made, the dry-tongued boys who sat with blank stationary pads teetering-tottering on their knees. To write that they all looked alike in khaki army garb and shorn heads, to write that they ripped the stuffing out of carseats while checking for oranges, hosiery, cigarettes, and vodka, to write that they'd lost their women's photographs to a gypsy fortuneteller who'd promised to return them upon payment, and hadn't - to write this without writing anything else would've been a killer, too. And they couldn't think of anything else. So at last they came to me, looking at the floor, stroking new chin-hair. I nudged them with questions, burrowed for details, for gossip, and took notes on what they said, and wrote letters in their voices.

One day, a soldier showed, a soldier with whom I'd never talked before.

He asked, Did you have a long heavy braid once?

I, whirling around, forgot to guard my secret and asked, How do you know?

Because when you whirl around, in anger, for example, you look as if you expected a braid to come flying, he said, and you're surprised when it doesn't. You're not Adam, he said.

No, I said.

After that, everyone knew that I was Katarzyna, and it was all right for me to wear my dress instead of the army garb. Naturally I didn't mention myself in the soldiers' letters to their wives and sweethearts. As Christmas approached, the line of men waiting for my services lengthened. I folded greeting cards out of precious colored paper; drew trios of wise men following stars to hidden baby Messiahs on treeless plains.

He was called Ilya, the soldier who saw my braid swinging even though it'd been cut off. He visited my corner of the camp often. He talked about bicycles and told to me to please save the material for one long letter, which he would soon send. I told him that I missed the yellow bicycle I'd owned in Warszawa, and he admitted that he was tired of the khaki jeeps and the roads tattooed with tank-scars. At last one day he dictated that long letter to his sweetheart, beginning with the word Dearest and ending with the word Love. It was about how he missed riding up behind her on his bicycle while she walked on the streets of Warszawa, about her surprise when he tugged her braids unexpectedly. He left me with this draft.

I put the greatest care into filling it out at the hips. I drew sentences from my folder of notes on Ilya: tales of old Tours de France; lucky jerseys of red admiral and screaming yellow; long legs that pumped most in the final stretches and won by nine seconds. It was my best letter to date, a poem really. I gave it to the soldier the next morning so that he could copy it over in his own hand. He read it slowly; merely added names to it; handed it back.

Is something wrong? I asked before I looked, before I saw that Katarzyna followed Dearest and Ilya followed Love.

It's for you, he said redundantly.

While winter uncurled without snow and the boreal trees stood quietly, I read Ilya's letters to me, pretending that I had not written them to begin with. I wrote back.

There is a shortage of brides in the Ukraine, my country, he said.

What city are you from? I asked.

Lvov, he said.

Lvov is not in the Ukraine, I said, so that I would not have to marry him.

Prove it, he said.

It was New Year's Eve. We drove to the forest that straddled the Polish-Lithuanian border, he in khaki garb, I in my dress of thinning wool and a ground-sweeping coat.

Lvov is on the other side of the forest, I said.

It's not, said Ilya. It's very much to the south, in the Ukraine.

Wait, I said, pulling off my gloves with my teeth, stuffing them into the right pocket. Hairs of yarn stayed on my lips. In my left pocket I made a fist around a small thin cardboard box.

Ilya asked me what I was doing, but he did not wrestle with me.

I struck a match to each of the nearest trees. In the night, with moon, without snow, the burning kept us standing and unmoving. I thought of my poems about the undersides of leaves, the frames of bicycles, the points of stars. I thought that I should've stayed in Warszawa with the empty pig, the unlasting coins, the newspapers without generous margins.

In the morning, with pale sun, without snow, we could not see the lights or roofs of the city beyond the forest of black stumps.

You were wrong, said Ilya. Lvov is not in Lithuania.

But it was, I said, before it burned with the forest.

What do you mean? he asked.

In order for something to be destroyed, it must first exist, I said. I burned Lvov, so that its ruins might be proof of its existence. And because the present lack of roofs and lights means that Lvov used to exist in Lithuania, Lvov did not exist in the Ukraine. Therefore Lvov never suffered from a shortage of brides, and there was no reason for you to press me to marriage, I said.

Very well! he cried. Except that Lvov was not here to begin with. I'll take you to the Ukraine right now, you'll see the road signs announcing it, and at the city gates the guards will say, Welcome to Lvov.

They won't, I said. It's the first of January. The guards will be at home with their bottles.

You are different in your letters, Ilya said. In your letters you don't reason like a monster. He jumped into the khaki army jeep, leaving me without the lights or roofs of Lvov. I followed the same road he did. He didn't look back. Thinking about letters of courting and the shifts of lines on maps drawn by humans, I made a wrong turn and deserted.

The Army ran another ad in the paper; very possibly they have not found a replacement yet.

In New York in another century, I again wrote poems about the undersides of leaves, but I did not answer anyone's letters, and my hair did not grow. Fires interrupted the very germina- tion, of buildings. Uniformed men landed in the city: when they were not drawing water from the Hudson or shoveling rubble into buckets, they roamed Chambers Street. They took advantage of the signs that hung in the windows of the bars and eateries, signs announcing a fifteen percent discount for anyone in khaki army garb.

One day I stood on the corner across from the Municipal Building, the building crowned by a gold lady, the building in which people married. A soldier with a bride on his arm asked me in Ukrainian to take a photograph of them. I asked him what country the city Lvov was in, and he said, Not Lithuania.

I cried then and it rained. The lights inside the Tweed courthouse blazed; the glow of street lamps marked the sidewalk slabs like bright chalk; the soldiers' khaki darkened. All over the southern end of Manhattan, a boreal forest grew, quickly, pines and firs and spruces, larches and birches, aspens, to the Hudson and to the East.

The morning the rain relented, peasants showed on the outskirts of the forest nearest the rivers. Kerchiefed women with baskets looked for mushrooms under leaves, their hands red, their stockings tight on their lower legs. I eavesdropped and shadowed them. Their voices rambled in Lithuanian. Their feet avoided the beginnings of foundations that peeked out from amidst the undergrowth of the forest furthest from the rivers. I knew that with more regret on my part, with more rain, the burnt city and its surrounding forest would return. To make myself cry, I chose a corner unclaimed by any newspaper seller, by any blue mailbox. Tweed and the forest was at my back as I watched the khaki-white pairs coming out of the Municipal Building, two and two and two, and two.