“Postcard Home”
Lynn Barbera
We’ve spent four weeks in Utrecht, four weeks in Berlin, and three weeks in Prague. A weekend in Oloumouc, and four days in Copenhagen. One night in Antwerp.
We’ve spent August to November together, in cafes and classrooms, nonprofits, a comedy show. Eighteen of us—seventeen once Melanie got sick and went home. Three are my good friends, two once Mila was mean as shit to me, two and a bit when Ellen and I were hooking up, back to two again. We mostly are women and nonbinary, two men, Devon; he started off so annoying but grew up, I think.
By the time we get to Kraków, I just want to be alone.
#
Tourists and street vendors overflow into the intersection from the busy cobblestone streets bordered by tall buildings. So many people, so many white, blonde people, block the road that our driver has to pull over and shoo us and our luggage out in front of a pierogi store called Milk Bar—they serve steamed dumplings and fried dumplings, and, inexplicably, pancakes. In the pictures of Kraków, everything wasn’t so crowded.
Iveta, our abroad program director, leads us to our apartment—seven of us—she’s split up the group so that we’ll all have a place to sleep. I look back at Mila and Ellen and the others. My relief slows me down, and Iveta doesn’t wait. Fresh from her home country, her Czech accent had grown more pronounced. Her energy, as always, buzzes at a level where most of our excitement can only peak.
“Alright, now this is the square! We can visit later, once your bags are away!” From where she walks ten feet in front of me, bits of sunshine glint through the vast opening between different parts of the city, competing with the tall shadows of the cityscape. Wall-to-wall buildings outline the square—grocers, restaurants, tourist bureaus—but Iveta whisks us quickly through the crowds, and again, we fall under the building’s shadows. She turns a quick corner and keys open a wooden door.
“Alright, no elevators like in Prague. I’ll see you tonight for dinner!” She flies up the stairs with her bags. We stand at the bottom—me, Maya, Nadia. Josh, Kerrin, Devon, Shilin.
#
Our walk to class every day reminds me of that walk with Iveta. The narrow streets almost never open up to the sun, and we feel cold in the shadows. We also feel cold because it’s November, and we didn’t bring hats. A few days in, I dole out 60 zloty—which I think is about five U.S. dollars, but turns out to be 15—to buy a beanie in a souvenir shop. It does little to warm me, but it does cover my ears in such a way that I can ignore Shilin’s questions and Josh’s singing and Devon in general. Maya buys a hat too.
We are usually hurrying, because we are usually late. Class in Kraków begins earlier than in Prague, Berlin, or Utrecht, and class takes place far away in a crumbling apartment room turned activist meeting space. After we pass a pizza place that feels too posh for these old streets, we arrive at the stoop. We buzz a button next to the door, as though we are stopping by a friend’s, and wait for someone upstairs to let us inside.
The Polish woman who organizes the meeting space ushers us into a small foyer that could be the entrance to a home but actually feels more like a waiting room because of the small desk that she rushes behind to let us pass through to the converted living room where Iveta holds our lectures. The room is long, but narrow—at one end, the foyer; at the other, three small windows.
Posters surround us, advertising queer events that passed months ago. At the front of the room, a few shirts hang on a clothing rack, across from the heater. You can buy them—they say “Black Monday” in English, even though the women very much marched in Poland. The country has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world. At the time I pass by the shirts on my way to sit down, only Ireland and Malta beat Poland out in terms of European reproductive limitations. A few months later, in May, Ireland would repeal their total ban on abortion. Things in Poland would only get more difficult.
Iveta presses her back against the heater. Its reddish-brown paint, in textured swirls, does not peel like the white chipping off of the walls. The warmth is maybe the newest part of the room, but it really does not radiate far. Maya and Nadia walk towards the freezing windows and fold out two metal chairs, keeping their jackets zipped as they sit down. From her warm space a few feet away, Iveta calls to the Polish woman. As we’ve travelled further east in Europe, we’ve found fewer people who speak English, but Iveta has only grown more comfortable: like Czech, Polish is a Slavic language; the two are cousins, and our professor compensates for any difficult translation by waving her hands and raising her voice.
I watch her flailing arms and worry about what the women are planning—I don’t want to stay here in this small space with these people for long. I plan to leave the apartment with my earphones in, so no one will tag along, and walk to Kazimierz, the historical Jewish district where the buildings stack shorter and the sun can find you. I will go into the little shops and nod my head at the older women’s greetings. I will buy a döner kebab from a corner store and wish it were from Berlin. I will find the lady who sells enamel mugs and pots and bring Maya there when we both feel lonely.
The Polish woman pulls Iveta from her post at the heater, and they begin to set up a projection screen in the middle of the room. The rest of the group—from the other apartment, Mila’s and Ellen’s—buzzes in, so class will start soon. I settle my computer on my lap and bounce my legs. To use the room’s wifi, I would have to find the little ethernet box where someone taped the incredibly long password for the already incredibly long network name, clearly never changed from when the original tenants bought it. The Polish woman can only pay for a certain number of hours per month, though, and I don’t want to waste that time. The other groups—the youth and the organizers and the abortion seekers—need those hours. I just need to be somewhere else.
I look at the pictures saved on my computer from Utrecht, the beginning of the trip: Melanie grinning through the hostel window, apple in hand. Me and Maya and Mila dropping fresh raspberries into our flutes of champagne. Ellen opening her mouth to a sandwich from our favorite shop, Bigoli. We wore t-shirts, not coats, in the September sun.
#
In the bathtub, I glare at the washing machine. It tumbles and tumbles someone’s clothes around. I pull my body up to perch where the rim of the tub meets the wall behind me. After two weeks of seven bodies bathing, a ring of dark orange is creeping up the sides, and gritty sand and slimy dirt muddy the drain. I turn the water hot and hold the shower head away from me. In its reflection, my hair is wet and long, and my fingernails blue, the ring in my nose lopsided. Outside the door, I can hear Maya watching Bones on her laptop. I imagine the big beer in her hand. She’s in bed, a twin size, with thin sheets and a deflated comforter. Maybe two feet away, Josh lies on their side, asleep. I spray the water on the bottoms of my feet before I step out of the tub, wrap myself in my towel, and turn off the light.
I close the door behind me and let my towel sag a bit—everyone has seen everyone’s nipples by this point. To my left, Bones has ended, so Maya’s scrolling for something else to watch before dinner. The Sodispar Apartments offer us great wifi, and there’s a TV downstairs, too.
I remember the beginning of the program, when Iveta took us through the ethics of our living—“In Utrecht, no, but those of you living with younger white families in Neukölln will be part of gentrification! Prague, not so much, in the city center, but Kraków, certainly you’re part of pushing people out.”
Some native Polish people still live in the Sodispar Apartments, but only the ones with the money to afford the climbing rent and the stubbornness to refuse the Luxury Apartment companies trying to buy them out.
I sit on Maya’s bed, absorbing her company before I get dressed in my room with the one double bed and a small red light. When we got here, I asked for the single and got it. I told Maya she should switch with me halfway through our stay, but she said she didn’t mind being in the room with everyone else, though she sometimes rolls her eyes at me when I walk past her before bed. She rolls her eyes now, too, when I complain about the clothes in the wash. She hears them too, running all night, trying to keep up with all of our underwear and outerwear and the socks we keep losing. In Prague, our bathroom had a washer, too, but in Berlin, in Neukölln, it lived in the kitchen next to the dishwasher, and you could take your clothes out and hang them up on the balcony to dry.
#
That night, we go—the seven of us—over to Iveta’s next door. Me, Maya, Nadia, Josh, Kerrin, Devon, Shilin. The others live closer to Milk Bar, the pierogi place with the pancakes, so we wait for them—Mila, Ellen, Olivia, Emery. Emilee, Josie, Halle. Ashley, Abigail, Liv. Melanie, in spirit, from back home in California.
Iveta had planned a big night for us. She spent the day running up and down the streets of Old Town buying little trinkets from souvenir shops. She wants us to play trivia. She and Nadia quiz us about feminist theory and infamous events from the past three months—they ask about the bedbugs, the puking, Judith Butler. If you get a question right, you can choose a trinket to find a place for in your overstuffed luggage. I choose a tiny wooden box with the cityscape etched into the top, in red. It’s like the pictures I saw before I got here. No people crowd the streets on the little wooden box; no women wearing black and asking for their choice. When I am home, I will use it to store the foreign coins I find in the different pockets of my jeans. Euros, korunas, zloty.
Towards the end of the night, we all sit in a circle and roll up our pants to see whose leg hair has grown the longest. Maya raises her eyebrows at me. She knows I will win. Iveta fights me on this, insisting “My hair is light-colored, so you can’t see it like yours!” Mine is thick and dark, and longer, so I win a little wooden doll with yellow yarn for hair. Her triangle skirt says Kraków.
We are loud, and the tenants a room over bang on their walls.
We leave for home in the morning.
