Chapter 3: Instead of sleeping with my Mom, I wanted to die in her beloved Poland (1)
The older and more mature I became, the more I loved the soft, cranky, melodic, motherly, sexy and somehow also very unsexy and forlorn sound of Polish, the language that should have become, but never became my mother-tongue, my non-mother-tongue, bound to be never ever learnt by me, and therefore never ever to be explored by me.
Yes, ladies and gentleman, those Poles or Polish, however u wanna call them, they were the reasons I came here, not those goddamn perverted death-camps, the Nazis had implanted on their polish soil. And they did not disappoint me. (I mean the Poles, not the death-camps). I loved them from the very moment on, I entered their impoverished communist state. I loved the police-officer at the border, whose eyes went glassy and sad and full of hope and desire, when somebody in our group mentioned the word Vodka or Lady. During the evening, wandering through their streets my incredulous eyes witnessed the obnoxious phenomenon of literally crowds of very normal, civilized, every-day-life, standard grown-ups, being now, when the sunlight of the day had gone, drunk like soft horse-shit after the rain. When I stole away from my travel-group, walking lonely, forlorn, depressive and sad, but curious through the dark streets of Warsaw or Cracow I saw them weaving and staggering through the evening-lights of their street – and I loved it. Out of hope, but filled up with proudness about their obvious nothingness, they just did the right thing, I thought to myself with a grim smile, getting rid of any false hope, losing it all with alcohol and – drunken Polish dignity. I loved it. And I loved their tango-music from the 20s and 30s, I heard in this record-shop and bought the record right away, that made me again hallucinate of my Mom when she was young and beautiful, and not broken by her life and a sense-less war. I loved their heavy, overcooked and too sweet food and was obsessed by the very odd feeling, that this food would have been the actual and real resource for the breast milk, I never received from my Mom, since she was not able to provide me with this most important, healthy and nutritious nutrient a baby may get. I stuffed the stuff into me like some obese neurotic psycho, suffering from bulimia, all the time thinking, that my Mom would have possessed the ability to breast-feed, had this sense-less war not made a sense-less person out of her.
(To be continued tomorrow…)