THE WAR STORY

By Katarzyna Kozanecka

We bathed in milk, Grandmother says, and sets the small clock near my plate. Watch the time so you’re not late for school. 

I’m visiting Poland’s oldest city. Ptolemy the Greek mentioned it by name in his Geography of the World. It is American mid-winter break, but here the schools are open.  I go one day as an experiment and the kids think I’m there to stay forever. I go back the next day, pretending I think so, too.

Mornings, Grandmother is a bard. She tells stories while she paves my bread with butter, slabs of cheese. She is blind like Homer, like Borges, but when I try to scrape the butter off, she notices, stops the story. I want to hear it so I bear with the butter. She picks it up again. 

Grandmother also gives me an apple every day. I’ve no room for them. The days are short here and dinner is at three. At school they don’t have lunch periods, only ten-minute breaks during which I cannot eat because I talk. Apples collect under my bed. I know she will find them soon, though she is blind like Homer, like Borges. 

Grandmother says Germans took Grandfather Julian away. They needed his back and hands on their farm. Once he stole eggs from under warm hens; hid them in his bed under a blanket; forgot about them; slept. Later, the German housewife, peeling sheets off beds, found shells splintered like ice in yolk rivers. She figured it out. The hens had roosted in Julian’s bedroom. She closed the window to prevent a repeat.

This was before we bathed in milk, Grandmother says, before the war ended and the Germans ran away without their cows. Who was supposed to drink all that milk? she asks. The Russians, I offer, but she’s not thinking of the Russians. She’s thinking of Quixote, who was not blind, who saw more than existed, who saw giant armed monsters where windmills stood. She’s thinking of Grandfather. Julian was twelve, she says, when Germans took him in a truck. On the farm, Julian carried bags of grain between mill and road. He liked to hug the mill. It was an orphan like himself.

One windy day, he stood in the wrong spot, Grandmother says, and one of the vanes caught Julian by his jacket-hood. Before the cloth tore, he wrapped his arms and legs around the vane, as if he’d been climbing a tree and had stopped. He thought throughout the first full rotation. During the second, he hollered, eyes closed to the flat gray country, the poplar trees like sentinels on the horizon. The laborers came. Leaning on shovels, they watched the boy on the ferris wheel that was not a ferris wheel. The next time the vane approached the ground, Julian let go. The men caught him, one limb each. The housewife scolded him; prodded him in the backside with her boot; confided to her stove that if left alone, Poles would bathe in milk instead of drinking it. The next day, Julian stole the eggs, says Grandmother.