Clever Swine

"His bedroom light's off."

I pulled back the curtain to get a better view of my house. All was quiet on our street. Not much ever really happened living on a cul-de-sac. We didn't get street traffic and our neighbors kept mainly to themselves. It was typical American suburbia filled with the sounds of lawnmowers in summer and leaf blowers in fall. Once the streetlights came on at night, everybody seemed to vanish, retreating into the comfort of their own homes. In places like this, people only talked about each other, not to each other.

Rościsław's bedroom light had been extinguished and I couldn't tell whether he was in there, brooding in the dark and wearing out his records until they gave up and stopped playing entirely, or he was lurking about the house in the shadows, devouring half-eaten cold leftovers from the refrigerator and smoking behind the shed in the backyard so nobody caught him.

"So?" Valerie said as she pulled her shirt back on. "He's probably in bed."

"Ros doesn't sleep at night. He's nocturnal. He goes to bed at six in the morning and wakes up at four in the afternoon. The little freak's up to something."

"You worry too much about him."

"If he was your brother, you'd worry too." I turned to her. "You know, I caught him eating condensed soup cold and out of the can the other night. The boy's not right. All he does is listen to the Smiths and map out distances on that stupid globe of his."

"Who're the Smiths?"

"Another one of his depressing British rock bands." I tried peering through his window at another angle, but the view was the same. "They suck."

She giggled. "Woj, come away from the window. He's fine."

If only I could count the number of people in my life who have told me Rościsław is fine, that I shouldn't worry about him, that I need to leave him be because he's okay on his own and I need to learn to trust him. If I could count all those people and remember all their faces, I'd go to them now with photographs, with letters home, with a never-ending list of bad habits and their outcomes, and ask, "Is this your definition of 'fine'?" 'Cause it's surely not mine.

I felt her hands on my shoulders as she came up behind me and pressed herself to my back. Her fingertips slid down my arms and all my thoughts were in the wrong place at that moment. I wasn't concerned with the pretty girl placing kisses along the side of my neck. I was consumed by gypsy magic nagging at my overwhelming sense of responsibility that just wouldn't shut up. Life must've been so easy for Kacper when we were young. He was never held accountable for anyone but himself.

"It's getting late." I slipped away from her. "I've gotta go."

I quickly grabbed my shirt off the floor and made sure I had my keys in my pants pocket. I just didn't want to turn around and see that letdown look mixed with annoyance that I knew was on her face. It always was when I was around.

"Do you have to?" she asked, although I knew she damn well knew the answer by now.

"Yes," I said as I slipped the last bits of my discarded clothes back on and buckled my belt. She was looking glum and made no effort to meet me halfway when I leant down to kiss her. "I love you."

I held onto her waist as I kept kissing her, trying to get any sort of reaction. She finally slipped her hands around my neck.

"Say it in Polish," she whispered against my lips.

I let go of her. "No."

"Come on," she whined. "You know I like it when you do."

"And you know I hate it. It's stupid. It sounds like shit. What d'you like about it so much?" She simply shrugged in response. 
"I'll call you later, alright?" She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Alright?"

"Yeah, fine."

"Goodnight."

When I tried to kiss her again, she turned her head, leaving me to peck her on the cheek. I couldn't figure out whether Valerie was just a frustrating girlfriend, or I was a lousy boyfriend. Perhaps both, and, in combination, we were a recipe for constant disappointment.

Truthfully, I didn't feel like going home, but I had no option to stay. I like to think she knew if I could, if I had the freedom to make my own choices, like I do now as an adult, that I would've stayed. Over the course of our relationship, I would've risked my neck to wake up next to her in the morning. I would've devoted more of my time to her. I can sit here at this point in my life and say I would've done this differently looking back on it, or I wouldn't have done that at all, and it's entirely pointless because there's no changing what's happened. I don't get to go back and be better than I was, I can only be better in the future because I wasn't so great in the past.

And I was by no means great in my past.

I froze at the end of Valerie's driveway, trying to hold off crossing the street as long as I could because of what was waiting in front of me.

There she was: the Grim Reaper sat perfectly ladylike on the porch swing, her hands folded across her lap with that black ring of skin around her finger drawing attention to itself as she patiently waited in silence.

My attention was not on her though. My boiling anger was for him so tauntingly sat, lounging on the railing between two of the columns, his back pressed to the one behind and his bare feet against the one in front. What I wouldn't have given at that moment to shove him right off his comfortable perch.

She stood when she saw me come up the path and he sat up, dropping his legs over the railing so he was now straddling it.

"This is not my fault," he said before I had a chance to yell at him.

"I ask you to do one thing. One thing, Rościsław, and you can't even do that."

"She woke up on her own. What do you want me to do? Knock her out with the table lamp?"

"You owe me ten dollars."

"Woj —"

He stopped speaking when Nanni moved to the top step to look down on me. I wasn't afraid of her. That's what I tried to convince myself anyway. Everyone else may have been afraid of her, but not me. I felt neither fear, nor respect, just disdain.

"Wyjaśniaj," she demanded.

I looked over at Ros. "What'd you tell her?"

"Nothing."

"Liar."

"I didn't say anything!"

"Wojciech," she called my name, still waiting for an answer.

The only problem is I didn't know how to answer her. Not in the way she wanted. She wanted me to be like Rościsław, able to switch back and forth between languages and be a master of both. Perfectly poetic Polish boy reciting Byron and Keats. What a scholarly young man putting others of less considerable talent to shame in comparison.

I hated her favoritism. She only liked him because he didn't despise her as much as the rest of us and that was only out of pity for the amount she had suffered in life.

I motioned to him. "Well, go on, Ros, tell her." He narrowed his eyes at me, like a warning not to push him. "No, really, tell her."

Before he could say anything, she spoke up and I knew what she was saying. I didn't need anyone to translate like usual. I could pick out enough words to know she wasn't speaking kindly of me and that only added fuel to my burning fire. The funny thing about language is, even if there's a barrier between two people, one oddly enough doesn't need to speak the tongue of the other to understand their feelings. That's a universal language.

"Nanni, proszę —" Ros interrupted her.

But I had already understood her. I heard what she was saying loud and clear. She was as tired of me as I was of her and she didn't want to take it anymore either.

"I understood that," I told him. "She's talking shit about me not being able to speak Polish. I got that."

He hushed me. "Don't swear in front of her."

"Why? She can't understand it. She's only lived in America for seven years and hasn't bothered to learn English so what do I care? She's the one yelling at me for not speaking Polish in a country that doesn't even speak it when she can't speak the language we do speak here."

"Woj, calm down."

"No! This isn't Poland. We're not still living in Łódź. She needs to wake up and realize that or go home. Go back to Poland and leave everyone alone 'cause no one wants her here."

"Wojciech, don't —"

Body language and tone speak louder than words ever could. They transcend language altogether, because, despite there being almost two hundred countries in the world today and thousands upon thousands of languages spoken all over the globe, we are all human and we all understand emotion. We can tell when someone is angry like I was at Nanni and like she was at me. That's just something we know and we're receptive to that before we even develop the ability to form words in life. In essence, language isn't a necessity for communication; we just like to think it is.

She started talking over Ros and me, her voice raspy from age and decades of smoking. Ros eventually told me that he didn't know what to do in this moment. He couldn't defend me without offending her and there was no chance of being the voice of reason in a screaming match between two people fed up with each other. She was yelling at me in Polish about Valerie and my priorities being out of order while I was yelling at her in English to get off my case.

It was all just noise. A very loud exchange of indistinguishable noise that Rościsław was suspiciously silent throughout until she pushed me too far with one little word that's the backbone of my Polish vocabulary.

Kurwa.

I was stunned with disbelief. Had she really just used that word? My eighty-eight year old great-grandmother called my girlfriend a whore and even Ros seemed surprised she'd use it to speak of Valerie that way. The girl was no angel, but she was still my angel. If she was a whore, it's because I made her that way.

That was the last straw for me. Everything that had been stewing inside me finally boiled over. Seven years of frustration and anger. I spent seven years in America feeling like I had lost my home and never found another one. I spent so much longer than that feeling like a stateless man. I couldn't go back and I couldn't move forward. I was trapped in limbo with no way out. As much as I wanted to be American, I knew I couldn't be, and I couldn't be Polish anymore either. I was nothing.

So where in all of this mess do I belong? I'm stuck between two nationalities and neither represents me. We lived about forty minutes outside of Chicago. We were part of the largest Polish community outside of Poland itself. These were the people who were supposed to understand us and Nanni rejected them. These people walking around downtown speaking Poglish and washing down their kishka with a Coke, this is what I was supposed to be and she made me feel ashamed for it. She made everyone feel ashamed and impure.

So who do I get to blame for feeling this way all those years? Who do I get to blame for my identity issues that have never stopped haunting me?

Nanni.

Nanni, the nineteenth century relic that belonged in a museum more than she belonged in our home. If she didn't like the way I was living my life, the life I had not actually chosen for myself, I only had one thing to say to her.

"Padaj trupem!"

And then everything fell silent. There were no sounds of passing cars or buzzing insects to be heard. There were no indications of life on the street. Everything went quiet and all I could hear was the sound of my own unsteady breathing. She didn't say anything. She didn't even move. She just stood there, staring at me, and I didn't know what to do. I wasn't even entirely sure those words that were still hanging in the silence, daring anyone to speak, were in fact mine.

Rościsław wouldn't even look at me. He had hidden his face behind the column with his arms wrapped around it like he was afraid to let go. It was the only thing offering any protection from the explosion that had just detonated in our front yard. He was a poor bystander that I was about to make a casualty of this war with Nanni. I can't even remember when it started, or how long I had been living with her absolute rule and silently defying her in the shadows when she wasn't watching. Longer than we had been in America is all I know. I felt like the workers back home on strike. I had lived like this long enough and I wanted change. I had been deprived of a normal existence and I was tired of being hushed by everyone who feared Nanni when I spoke out against her.

Without a word, she straightened her posture, smoothing out her dress as she did. She finally took her gaze off me, looking anywhere, everywhere, at the ground, at the tree in the front yard, at Ros sat straddling the railing, attempting to blend in with the column, lest he suffer what was surely coming for me as well. She just couldn't look at me anymore and I didn't blame her. I find it hard to face my reflection in the mirror somedays knowing all that I have done.

"Nanni," Ros said so softly it was nearly a whisper. "Wszystko dobrze?"

She didn't answer him. I don't think she had an answer. There isn't one. Yes is a lie. No is an understatement.

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. My words overpowered everything and stole hers away. Her body remained in her rigid, proud stance, but her sniffles betrayed her. She stood like a statue, but on the inside she was crumbling and it would surely crack through her hardened exterior soon. I fixed my eyes on the ground so I didn't have to see her cry and know that my insensitivity was the cause.

Then, unexpectedly, both to my relief and horror, sound broke the silence that had consumed us all. The soles of her shoes on the wooden porch hurried as fast as they could, running away to the safety of her bedroom before she broke down right there for the whole street to see.

"Nanni!" Ros called after her.

I felt hollow, like when God made me, he forget to fill me with blood, with organs, with compassion and a heart. I was empty on the inside and it felt all too comforting to feel nothing at all.

I thought I heard him run after her, but I looked up to find him on the steps staring at me.

The most fascinating thing about Rościsław would always be his eyes. Those vibrant blues that looked over-saturated compared to the rest of his pale complexion were mesmerizing. They told everything: every emotion and lack thereof, every less than pure intention, every dark secret, every hidden pain. Everything anyone ever needed to know about Rościsław they'd find in his eyes. They just had to look for it.

In that moment, all I found was disappointment and the struggle not to let all respect he had for me fade away.

He spoke quietly and deliberately. "What have you done?"

"Ros —"

He raised his voice as he cut me off. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" As I looked up at him standing on the porch, any hint of pity he held for me was gone, replaced by disgust and pure anger. It was his turn to yell finally. "She's gonna tell Grandpa and I'm not gonna even try to protect you when he beats your ass! You've got another thing coming if you think I'm going down on your sinking ship. You can drown by yourself for this one."

I tried to push him aside to go inside. "Leave me alone."

He grabbed my arm. "Wojciech, słuchaj —"

Something in me snapped in that moment. He wasn't going to speak to me in Polish. He wasn't going to chide me in that ugly slavic tongue I despised with every part of my being. Not my brother, not Nanni, not anybody anymore. I had enough. Nie jestem polski. I denounce it. I will gladly be nothing and I will embrace it. It's better than being a Polak.

"I said leave me alone!"

I don't even remember pushing him. I don't remember having control over my arms as my hands reached out to make contact with his chest. I don't remember seeing him hit the pathway that led to the porch as he fell off the steps. All I remember is I turned around to tell him off and he was on the ground, the whole underside of his right forearm scraped and bleeding, with me confused as to how he got that way. I was genuinely confused as to what had just happened for a brief second before my brain made the connection that it was me. I had happened. I had pushed Ros. I was out of control and instead of helping him up, I left him there to run upstairs and hide in my bedroom like the scared little coward I was, willing to cause everyone pain, but not apologize for it.

Inside, I heard her. Creeping down the hallway ever so cautiously so she wouldn't know I was there, I heard her. I saw the light escaping from the crack she left open in her bedroom doorway and I stopped to listen, my body pressed against the wall to avoid being noticed. Through the tears, she was praying. I heard her ask Jesus for forgiveness. I distinctly remember it, from what I could make out at the time, that she was not asking for herself; she was praying for me.

In my lifetime, my actions have been more shameful than I care to admit and the regret greater than I can swallow. I have no pride, just enough sins to spend eternity inside a confession box and never be forgiven for everything. Not that I deserve forgiveness. Not that I seek it either. I am what I am. I've done what I've done. I cannot change that. I can only live with it and hopefully, one day, perhaps when I'm eighty-eight myself and a burden to my own great-grandchildren, I can fully come to terms with the fact the last words I ever said to my great-grandmother were drop dead and think, being in her shoes, that she knew I meant no harm with my impetuous words. I was just angry. I still am, only better controlled than I was before because I am now aware of the damage I can cause.

I had to learn that though. I wasn't born understanding the depths of my cruelty and what I, as a human being, am capable of doing. I had to learn that from Nanni and that warm summer night in 1987 on the front porch of my parents' house at the corner of Gallant Fox and Seabiscuit. God had to teach me to be good before I didn't have the choice to be anymore.

I need this. I need to believe that there is a reason God destroys and God is cruel, even if I cannot see it. I need to believe that tragedy strikes for some greater good. I have to. I just have to, otherwise I killed my great-grandmother for nothing.