Our Enemy Tells the Same Story

 

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Round 1, NYCM: Historical/Narcissism/Protestor

Osiek, Poland, 1546

near the border with Russia

 

My grandmother's tales always begin so far in the past, they didn't speak Polish yet. Which is a trick, seeing as how she spits every time my brother's wife curses in Russian. Not because of the cursing (my grandmother does her fair share of that herself), but because as far as she is concerned, Polish is the language of beauty, art, poetry, and hard work. Russian is for soldiers and girls who ought to hold their tongues.

"Ja-ja," my grandmother barks, rapping my knuckles with the rolling pin.

"Aysh!" I cry, jumping back from the kitchen table. "No fair, Babcia, I was listening!" I'm lying. I've heard this story so many times in my fifteen years, I even know where Babcia will pause to make the audience lean forward, or whistle the sounds of the wind, or tap-tap out the horses' hoofbeats on the nearest surface. I've dreamed this story, and most of the other stories too.

Babcia grunts and goes back to rolling out the dough, looking at me sideways out of her eye. "Lie too much and Baba Jaga will come steal your teeth in the night to feed her chickens. Come back here, you have half this barrel to go."

I plop back down on my chair and reach for a stalk of rye, methodically skipping the rye berries out of their pods with my thumbnail. Ping, ping, into the pan. Beside me, Babcia starts again. From the beginning. My hands settle into a rhythm with the ups and downs of her voice.

Years ago, when the borderline snaked so close to the valley you could cross it in a day, there was a village called Slos, set up on the side of our mountain. My grandmother's grandmother grew up there, tending rock goats with her six sisters. One day my grandmother's grandfather opened the door to his smith and found her and one of her younger sisters, half-burned and bloody in the snow. The Russians had torched Slos in the night -- and the goats, the other five sisters, and every living thing with it.

And Babcia warns me about lies. The Russians aren't stupid, and they fear God more than we do. Maybe they stole the goats and the girls, but they certainly didn't devour an entire village and leave behind a clearing of ash and ruins in the middle of winter. They have stomachs too.

When I pass this story to my own granddaughter, I will say it was demons. Demons make more sense, and anyway the Russians already get credit for everything that goes wrong in our valley. Last year, when Lazar Potorov lost half his little finger to Hanchar Rawilga's axe, Hanchar insisted a Russian witch put a curse on the whole northeastern forest. More like, Hanchar put too much vodka in his cup for breakfast.

Babcia was only a little older than me the last time the war between kings spilled into our valley, and now I'm not sure she remembers that Russians aren't demons.

When the snow traps us in our houses for days at a time, my grandmother beats this into my head, over and over: "Jadwiga, the women keep the memory of what Russia steals." Babcia had only sons, and I have six older brothers, so the stories belong to me now. My little cousin Tula, the only other Marapoy girl, just turned two, and she can barely recite the alphabet song in the right order, much less two hundred years' worth of resentments.

We have to remember every slight, Babcia always says. The Russians killed this many, burnt this many, maimed this many. This village was captured, those woods were hunted to silence, these cattle were stolen, these people were starved, whipped, sold, blinded, raped, burned to death locked in their houses. My youngest brother, Kaz, ran off to join the Polish army three years ago and when he came home last autumn, what words I could coax from him make me certain that somewhere across the Vistula, a Russian babushka is telling her granddaughter the exact same stories about us Poles.

Babcia finishes rolling the dough out into a thin sheet and begins cutting it into squares.

"Babcia," I interrupt, not looking up from the rye stalk. "Why do I have to learn these stories?"

"We keep the memory --"

"Yes, yes, but why? The stories go so far back we didn't even speak Polish. We were Russian. Osiek was days from the border, in Poland, when Vera came from Gdansk and married Tag Marapoy. Did Poland capture us before Vera started keeping the stories? What if we're remembering the wrong things? But then -- all the battles, the burning of Slos, and the fight on the banks of the Vistula when all the Novot brothers perished, and when we pushed back until Stalowa was in Poland again, what does it matter if I remember? The war comes and goes, it has for so long we don't even know when it started!"

Babcia takes a breath, wipes her hands on her apron. "Jadwiga. My Ja-ja." She pauses, sighs. "Oh, my kochanie," she whispers, leaning across the table to take my hand out of the rye tin. "Don't you know by now? Kings have lead men to war since Kain and Abel. What's between Moscow and Krakow? Half the world, and they both want to be the one to draw the lines on the map. I don't know who we were before Vera started the storykeeping tradition, but I know who we are now, and that's Polish."

"Why does that matter? Maybe in another two hundred years we won't remember that, maybe we'll be Ottoman by then! I'm tired of the stories, Babcia. I can recite each one by heart, and in every one of them someone dies, or soldiers steal our winter stores, or we defend the village but half the men are crippled. If our sins are to be tallied, shouldn't that be God's job?"

Babcia's grip becomes painful, her rough nails digging into the skin on the back of my hand. Her eyes pierce mine, and I can't look away. "We keep the memory, Jadwiga, because no one else will. God may judge souls once they rise to meet him, but here on earth no one else will think of us. Outside of Osiek, your family, your village, everyone you ever cared about, they are nothing more than a dot on a map. Do you think that King Vladislav considers this valley when he is planning where to send troops? Do you think that Czar Ivan thinks of his people, on the other side of the mountain? Knowing your story, where you come from, that is the only thing that keeps you from being a forgotten farm girl. Kings make war with us in the middle, because that is what kings do. You are a woman of Osiek, one who remembers the blood that has watered this land. Maybe we will be Ottoman in two hundred years, who knows? Only God sees the future. But the stories tell us the truth, so even if your granddaughter's granddaughter lives beneath the heel of the Emperor, or the King of France, or God Himself come back to Earth, she will stand up and say, Poland is my mother. And she will say it in Polish, not in Russian."

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