Krakow Melt (9 page)
The tram to the beach took forty-five minutes. The sun was already starting to wane, and we had run out of food, but the sight of white sand and blue water quelled our appetites and made us happy again. Dorota stripped two hundred metres from shore and bolted for the sea. Nobody wears clothes at the wet lip of the Baltic, especially not the sick. We all need some kind of healing.
I stripped, too.
The city does not feel like this. There is no salty mist coating your body like you’re a potato chip. Your scrotum does not shrivel, and your nipples don’t swell in the cool wind. You do not walk through clusters of people without seeing them, without assuming they are sand-dune formations.
We swam together for a while, in opposite directions, until we couldn’t see each other anymore. I lost Dorota’s head in the sun’s reflection; I mistook her for a whitecap several times.
I swam to where she was floating, and together we stared at the beach, just one of the horizons to look at.
“Why do you suppose you’re so interested in fire?” she asked.
“I like you a lot,” I said, “but I don’t like your question. It’s slanted. You’re asking me for a hypothesis, but you know full well I have a real answer.”
“Please, let’s not fight out here.”
“Then where?”
We weren’t far from Westerplatte, where the Nazis had first invaded Poland to kick off the war, turning what was then called the Free City of Danzig and subsequently, the rest of Europe, into Silly Putty. I mentioned this fact to her.
“You think too much,” she said, then dipped her head momentarily under the waterline. “And you don’t make it easy to be your friend.”
“Sorry ... I’m being stupid,” I said. “Nobody has ever asked me before, that’s all. They just think I’m trying to get attention or that I’m a psycho, but they really have no idea.” The water was loosening me up, massaging me as it would wash undulations into a sand bar. “It started when I was a kid. There was a huge fire the colour of crayons. Yellow, red, orange. Red-orange. It turned a house into a volcano and it scared the shit out of me.”
She was stretched out on the surface of the sea, as flat as a stingray. Her lips were blue. I felt numb.
“Whose fire was it?”
I bit my tongue. Fire belongs to everyone. That’s why I could hold Chicago to my chest; I would never have been able to burn something that wasn’t mine. Still, I knew what she meant. I would tell her someday, but I didn’t want to think about death and melting toys and death and frantic neighbours and death and screams and having to start a new school, not there where I was pleasantly discovering conch shells by shuffling my feet.
“A little boy’s,” I said, and we left it at that.
There must be a word for this: speaking of fire in the middle of the sea. What is it?
“Time to go,” Dorota said. “We might burn out here, and besides, the online messageboard said that the action starts around dinner-time.”
We bought some corn-on-the-cob from a friendly older couple, slathered it with
smalec
(you don’t want to know) and chomped down through the fat as Dorota led us west, to an isolated part of the beach.
I had gotten dressed after drying off, though I was surprised that Dorota let me. She was walking with lead feet, kicking up buckets of sand. Amber hunting? Quite possibly. She had nice tits and a wonderful thatch of wayward pubic hair. Rebel child, from the toes up.
We passed a
szopka
made of driftwood. It was a mini log cabin protecting carvings of Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus from the elements. The Three Magi were hanging out in the sand behind the cradle, working out my fate.
Then I saw a penis. Then two. Big suckers, too. Men were playing hide-and-go-seek with each other, fucking and sucking on blankets hidden in the bluffs and behind tufts of reeds.
Dorota’s toe found a used condom, lubed and sand-speckled. “We’re here,” she said, and led us deeper into the bluffs.
We found two men giving each other head, an awkward 69 on tiny tea towels. They were naked except for two yellow sports watches, the giant waterproof ones with chronometers. They jumped when they saw us, likely because they didn’t expect to see a naked chick.
“Please continue,” Dorota said. “We just want to watch because Radeki here has never done this.”
We sat down beside the men in the sand and ogled them from close up. The sounds were getting me hot, the ones they drown out in porn videos: when you’re sucking, you pull your mouth away a millimetre too far, and your lips flap in the sudden vacuum ... or the uncensored fart, harmless and human.
They came here, I realized, for the same reason I hid in the Sportowe boiler room: to get on (get off?). The trouble is that neighbours, strangers, and family are always on the lookout for faggot activity. You live in perpetual fear of a crowbar smashing your skull and of death coming before you can feel the cum run out from your lips.
You want to experience every sensation, especially if it’s your last.
Dorota stuck her hand down my pants and held my nuts, weighed them. A seagull screamed over us. I laughed because their shadows were much warmer than the ones cast by the crows of Kraków.
She undressed me, and I fumbled to keep up. It was more motherly than sexual, and I basked in the comfort her touch brought me. She laid me down in the sand and buried me one scoop at a time with her little dumptruck hands. She stopped to inspect my foreskin, thumbing it from the inside as if cleaning the rim of a glass. I didn’t think, I felt; I felt like a sea creature, perhaps a coral or an urchin.
I guess she judged me sensitive enough to warrant protection, because she wrapped my cock in a gingham handkerchief before continuing the burial work. Soon only my face was exposed. By showing me how to be naked under the safety of sand, Dorota gave me freedom, and there’s no way you can repay someone for that.
Our men spasmed, I could see, and their leg muscles hardened to steel. They emptied cum into each other’s mouths and when they spat, they spat sand, and nothing else. Filtering each other impeccably.
“I’m Michał,” one of them introduced himself, wiping his lips.
“Can you two uncover Radeki?” Dorota said.
“Is he a gay?” Michał asked. Just looking at his facial scruff gave me perineum tingles. He was a curious fellow, and he poked at my sarcophagus. I festered in my pile of sand, I tell you, and it was absolutely
cudowny
.
“When you get to the bottom, you’ll find that he is many things,” Dorota told him. “My one request, in exchange for giving you this honour, is that you denude him a few grains at a time, but no quicker.” She turned to me and petted my chin. “It’s much slower than taking off your clothes, darling.”
And then she was gone, a metre away from me, hopelessly lost in a book. She sucked on her hair and I could smell the sweetness of it. It looked like strands of licorice, but probably tasted like lavender conditioner.
The waves got louder as the sun settled into a comfortable orange. These sadists took their time. Michał asked me question after question, fascinated by my tales of “the South” (he had never been to Kraków). I found out that they were boyfriends, and that they both lived with their parents.
I felt Michał scratch on my gingham dick sack. My skin emerged slowly, dusty with salt and utterly at their mercy, for my limbs had fallen asleep beyond the point of needles and tacks (needles and pins?). I was rock hard.
Michał gestured at the throbbing handkerchief.
“Excuse me, madam, perhaps this belongs to you?”
Dorota held out her hand. The boys ripped it off me and gave it to her. She then returned to her reading, which I found ridiculously sexy. A book lures you into a state of bodily comfort and then, once your limbs are placed just right, finger-fucks your insides. I wanted to be the book, stretching her open a little wider with every pithy sentence.
I didn’t feel shame, nor did I hear any priestly voices reciting scripture. I wondered if this was a trick, if I was being saved by mere distraction. Did it matter? Instead of shame, I felt Michał’s tongue trace figure-eights on my belly until it generated more electricity than I could bear. I wanted him to knife my gut open and drink its contents— semen would flow too slowly from my dick.
Then my own legs turned to steel and I thought of the shipyards, the workers pouring decades of anguish into perfectly constructed hull girders.
Dorota looked up from her book, turned to me, and said nonchalantly, “The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.”
She kissed me on the lips, and I came. It was an epic shudderfuck.
She stared at the pool of goo on my stomach, and I wondered if she had been watching me the whole time, waiting for it.
“Miłosz?” I said.
She nodded.
Then Dorota taught me that orgasm is not the end. She made me burn two pages of the Bible and scatter the ashes in the water. I didn’t even have to read them to know what they said:
If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
—Leviticus 20:13
In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received on themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
—Romans 1:27
I forgot the sound of the apostle Paul’s voice that very day, but now I hear Czesław Miłosz every time I cum.
The stadium lights cast four shadows for every player on the nuclear-green pitch. Nobody, however, is watching the match.
Zoom in on a guy in a blue tracksuit climbing a steel fence and unfurling a flag. Someone on the other side throws a bottle at his head and he falls. The Holy War has begun. This is Wisła Kraków versus Cracovia. The city is riven in two because good fans don’t mix. When there are two home teams, nobody wants to be the “visitor.”
Someone is bound to get hurt.
The match has barely begun, and the announcer is already hoarse.
A Wisła striker feints a pass.
Cracovia wastes a slide tackle on nothing but air.
The goalkeeper gets hit in the head with a plastic cup. He flips the bird, but doesn’t know where to aim his middle finger because he can’t find his assailant. The camera pans to the nearest grandstand, which is quite far away. There must have been a rock taped to the inside of the cup for it to travel such a distance.
Cracovia takes possession. The grandstand is composed of two trenches separated by a chain-link fence three metres high: a tangle of barbed wire, coach effigies with noose necklaces, and scraps of torn clothing. We hear two chants crashing together into cacophony, laced with obscenities. This ritualized hatred is what keeps the city together. Nobody hears the whistle.
The referee calls an obstruction on Wisła.
He flashes a yellow card to the offending player and awards Cracovia an indirect free kick. Pan to the crowd cheering and booing him in equal measure. This Holy War has been rehearsed for exactly 100 years, and everyone knows what part they play.
The Cracovia striker spits for luck on the penalty mark, kisses his fingers, and touches them to his cleats. His hair is wet, likely with beer.
A banana kick takes everyone by surprise.
A midfielder leaps to make a header.
The ball misses the net and soars into the stands. The player’s head must be warped.
Kto wygra mecz? Wisła, Wisła
Kto wygra mecz? Wisła, Wisła
The fans do not demand technical excellence. They demand a goal, even if it means they have to snipe the goaltender, threaten the referee with cash and bribe him with death, or jump on the field to take care of business themselves.
The real action is in the stands, not on the pitch.
The TV station hasn’t properly adjusted its cameras for the blaze of fireworks that suddenly lights up the crowd. An electric, tangerine flash obscures the stadium. The picture comes back into focus on a sky filled with billowing red smoke. The camera zooms in on two men, ecstatic, with burns on forearms that they hold out proudly. Pyrotechnics char tracksuits like sheets of looseleaf. Faces, no matter how animated, do not reveal the divide between pain and defiance.
This video will be played to grandchildren. “I’m the one shaking my fist in the air. See?” Everyone wants history to catalogue them as the agitator that stung like horseradish in the nose. The players have it easy because they don’t have to fight.
Kto wygra mecz? Cracovia, Cracovia
Kto wygra mecz? Cracovia, Cracovia
The Pet Shop Boys get royalties from the Holy War, because most of the chants are set to the melody of their hit “Go West.”
A throw-in from the sidelines, and it lands among dangerous feet. What appears to be a Wisła defender gets a taste for blood and runs afield, running way past his assigned territory. He’s wearing leather gloves.
He fakes out an opponent with sleight of foot and meets himself on the other side of the centre line. Makes it to the penalty arc and passes to a teammate. The ball bounds right back to him. This has turned into a personal mission.
The crowd is now finally watching the match. They tumble over bleacher seats trying to get closer.
We see that the Wisła defender is actually the Wisła goalkeeper, come to make his nemesis piss his shorts. One net is empty and the other is nervous. The score is nil-nil.
The announcer screams that never has a Polish goalie scored a goal. He would make history. The crowd unites for a few seconds, cheering the goalie. Hatred melts in a common hope.
Poles are addicted to history.
But then a rear defender makes an illegal charge, the attacking goalie does a somersault and loses the ball, and the game ends in a tie. History is denied a photo-finish. Six riot vans storm the field and prepare to blast the crowd with water cannons. But tonight, they don’t need to; the fans are strangely peaceful, and they leave the stands chanting:
Polska biało-czerwoni!