Awakenings

Putting their historical differences aside, the Russians and the Poles have launched a joint two-front offensive against me and my efforts to convince my fiancée to abandon her lovely Upper East Side nest for my somewhat-rundown basement apartment in Polish-Occupied Greenpoint—or at least to spoil our pleasant mornings together....

I.

On Sunday morning while we were still in bed speculating about the thunderous new tenant upstairs, E’s telephone rang. It was Volodya, her real estate broker, and he wanted to show the apartment. “I be over in ten minutes!” E was able to talk him up to a half hour, but our morning idyll was nonetheless spoiled. We scurried about, pulling on clothes and tidying the apartment for the prospective tenant, and Volodya arrived exactly thirty minutes later.

He burst into the room with the prospect, a man looking at places for his daughter and her friend. In the Russian style, Volodya was wearing a sweater that zips with nothing beneath it but flesh and hair. He barely finished introducing the helpful father before he excitedly told us about the new tenant upstairs.

“She is daughter of great Russian Writer! Edward Radzinsky! “Big biographies: Stalin! Rasputin! Alexander II!” he exploded.

“Oh, that’s really interesting,” remarked E. “This is my fiancé, Kevin; he translates Russian poetry.”

"Really?” said Volodya. “Who? Which?”

“Osip Mandelshtam,” I replied, a little worried that he was going to start speaking to me in Russian, something that E has never heard me do, and hopefully never will.

“PBHPBHPBSHSHSHSH…!” A rush of airy vibrato squeezed out from between Volodya’s heavy lips. I took this to mean that he was impressed.

“He is very good,” declared the realtor, while E, reluctant to leave her home of four years, was left to show the apartment herself. “A Russian genius!”

“Yes, he’s great,” I said.

“There are no more Russian geniuses,” Volodya lamented, “The last were Pasternak—you know, of course, he translated your Shakespeare--and Joseph Brodsky, the dissident. But Americans don’t know these—just Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Chekov…not Pushkin, Lermontov… pbhpbhpbhpbhshshsh….” The rush of breath slipping past his lips took on a melancholy note. “I believe it is because there are no good translations.”

“They know Nabokov, too-- and he translated Pushkin into English,” I tried to lift his spirits. And it worked!

“Yes! PBHPBHPBHPBHPSHSHSHSH…! He is Russian Genius…and American Genius! Nabokov, Mandelshtam, Brodsky…”

I heard E flitting about the apartment, pointing out its virtues and noting its shortcomings to the father while Volodya and I talked literature, and I thought it odd that the realtor was letting her complain to a potential renter about how unbearably hot the place could get and about the varieties of cockroaches thriving in the steamy atmosphere. Had she let Volodya distract me while she tried to convince this would-be renter not to take the apartment?

“…Stalin! Rasputin!” I was drawn back to our conversation just in time to hear Volodya listing some of the most notorious names in Russian history! How had he gotten from Mandelshtam and Brodsky to the Mad Monk and The Hammer? I thought it an outrageous leap until I realized he had returned to the topic of Radzinsky and his lumbering daughter upstairs. “She is friend of mine.” He sounded quite proud.

Meanwhile, E had finished showing the apartment and the two gentlemen left, leaving us with no choice but to make the bed.

II.

E and I won’t be spending Christmas together this year, so we decided to take the following Monday off to enjoy the typical New York holiday spectacle: the skaters at Rockefeller Plaza, the Windows at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdales, etc. But first, after waking up rather early, we decided to relax in bed awhile in my Greenpoint apartment.

Suddenly, I heard my apartment door open and the ominous tread of boots in the hallway. Next, the low mumbling of two men speaking Polish was heard. The Poles had broken into my apartment and didn’t care whether I heard them or not! With my fiancée covering herself with the blankets, I had no choice but to confront them.

I quickly threw on some clothes and approached the voices in the hallway. “Hello?” I began weakly, but realized this was the first time the woman who would soon become my wife was watching me try to protect my family--how I responded could make or break the relationship “Excuse me? Who are you?” I raised my voice but it cracked nevertheless.

A tall, imposing young man with his head shaved in the Polish style stared back at me for a moment--neither surprised to see me nor the least bit intimidated--and then continued busying himself with the fuse boxes. For all I knew, he was cutting the power so his partner, a middle-aged man in a serial killer’s overalls, could butcher us under cover of darkness.

“Oh, hello!” said the older man, also neither surprised nor intimidated by my being there.

“What are you doing?” I snapped, the fear had left my voice, only to be replaced by annoyance. I remembered that my landlord, who was away, was having work done upstairs, so these guys must be the contractors. But no one had told me that they’d need to get into my apartment!

“We fix floors,” the man responded cheerfully pointing at the ceiling as his brooding friend continued to dissect the fuse box.

“Why didn’t you ring the bell? Or knock?! We were in bed!” I asked, incredulous.

“Because I have key!” He smiled congenially as he displayed a copy of the key to my apartment.

“But this is an apartment. You have to knock first. I LIVE HERE.” I tried to spell it out for him but he had already turned and walked out of the apartment. His big friend, however, remained behind, perhaps to finish me off. It seemed clear to me now: Good Pole, Bad Pole.

“How long are you going to be here?” I demanded, turning to the youth, but he just looked my way and continued fiddling around with fuses. “I said, ‘how long is this going to take?’”

“We work all day,” he replied blandly.

“All day?! You’re going to be in my apartment all day?

“Maybe we come and maybe we go,” he answered with a hint of annoyance in his voice.

“You can’t come and go all day. I live here,” I said.

But this time, he didn’t reply. Our conversation seemed to have exhausted his vocabulary, something that tends to happen to the neighborhood Poles when confronted with difficult people who are not Polish themselves.

“I said, ‘you can’t work in here’.”

Silence.

“How long will it take?”

Silence.

"I said, 'How--'”

“I get him,” the Pole interrupted, clearly annoyed as he turned around and left the apartment, returning a moment later with his partner.

“How long is this going to take?” I demanded again, expecting the same stony response.

“Oh, just couple minutes we be done! Thank you! You have no problem,” he beamed at me. And he and his partner began picking up their tools, readying themselves to leave.

Despite being somewhat shaken by the event, E and I got ready and left for our Christmas in New York and shared an otherwise perfect day together.

The next morning, as I busied myself preparing to go to work, thinking fondly of the day before--of the happy ice skaters and the friendly man who volunteered to take our picture at Rockefeller Plaza--I heard a key slide into my lock and the apartment door open. The younger, sullen Pole walked in. I was so shocked by the audacity of this—the fact that after what happened yesterday, and seeing how upset I was and having assured me that they would be done with my apartment yesterday morning, that they would have the nerve to come back without ringing the buzzer! But he just walked past me as if I wasn’t there.

“You can’t come in here!” I was furious and this time my voice wasn’t cracking. It’s a shame that E wasn’t here to see me, to hear the anger in my voice, the sound of a man willing to stand up and defend his home. “This is my apartment. You can’t just walk in here like this,” I repeated like a broken record.

“But we have key,” was all he felt necessary to say, knowing full well that he had defeated me with such logic. And, really, what was there to say after that? Perhaps it is better that my fiancée wasn’t around to see how I had defended our home and stood up to the Poles.

Comments

[spin sycle]

Man, good thinr they aren't in Texas....they'd have been shot.