Suitcase of Oranges

By Ada Charytoniuk

We didn’t have oranges back in my day, laughs my grandmother, you’d have to wait ’til Christmas. She peels massive potatoes with a knife, wrinkled fingers well-attuned to the same dance she has done for years. The room smells of the last few segments of orange I have devoured, seeping into the white lace curtains and ancient wooden benches. It’s a sunny, pink evening, and the last vestiges of light from outside cover us in a warm glow. I fly back tomorrow.

I have missed so much. Poland is at once so intimately mine and yet so mournfully foreign.

Every time I visit I hear the same stories, of my childhood or theirs, because we are frozen in time in the face of my absence. And yet they know I have grown. You cannot ignore the filled-out limbs, the height. I have their eyes, their chin, their nose. I am not a bright-eyed, wobbly child anymore.

So they share new stories. I ask about family members I never met, about our history, about their present, and we talk into the evening, glasses refilled with kompot until their rims have stained a foamy purple.

I think of my parents, adamant that the best toys of their youth were sticks and stones, that creativity died in the long-legged, shiny Barbies I clung to. They tell me they didn’t get to learn English in school like I did, that Russian was mandatory instead. I think of my mother eagerly signing up for English electives at university. I think of my grandfather growing his hair out as a teenager, rebelling against a communist state. I think of myself shaving my eyebrows as a teenager and attempting to rebel against a capitalist one. I think of the punishments they had to endure, of the punishments that their parents had to endure. Of the punishments that never seemed warranted.

I think of my great-grandmother, waking up every midnight just to ravage bowl after bowl of porridge, half-asleep, elbows shaking at the table. It could be her last meal in that sickly kitchen. All she knows are raw, shrivelled potatoes split carefully between ravenous children in fields from a blurry far away. She doesn’t know what to do with a full fridge.

Poland Is Not Yet Lost, boasts my national anthem. Our history is one of victimhood, of survival in the face of aggression. It rings true in church bells, uniform towering blocks, verdant landscapes, my grandmother’s full fridge. It rings true in meeting with friends and all knowing what life was and what it isn’t anymore. That shared pride that we are still here and can call ourselves what we are and no one can deny it.

And yet nothing feels prideful in seeing uniformed men march through the streets of my hometown, chanting for Poland’s ‘rebirth.’ Perhaps they imagine if they chant it enough they will return in time to the days when they weren’t so angry, when their mothers made them kotlety every night, when they didn’t know what inflation was. Perhaps they don’t realise the irony in urging for a Polish ethnostate.

But maybe there is no irony. In school, we never discussed our role as perpetrators in the same atrocities we were victims of. We are scared of erasing past suffering. We cling to it like it will save us. Like it will undo all that was done.

What victim am I? Whose grasp have I struggled out of? I am overcome with gratitude for who I get to be. I will never know the pain of those who passed down my round features, those who must have blessed me with a slow metabolism. But the nation knows the pain. It slowly metabolises too.

They have painted over the brutalist blocks in oranges and blues. The pigeons flock around the cobbled streets, colourful townhouses in a stand-off. They even have signs in English all over my hometown. I watch a family buying ice cream in the same spot I always begged my father for one. The river glistens in the sun, beating down on me resolutely. My grandmother goes out every summer night on the town, twirling with glee in my grandfather’s arms, the same dance she has done for years.

Maybe I’ll stay for good one day, armed with optimism and a suitcase full of oranges.

Image Credit: Adrian W Stewart via Unsplash