Page 1 of The Storyteller of Krakow

1

JANUARY 2014, KRAKÓW

Willa Nadziej (Hope Villa residential home)

Bogdan was dead. They took him out this morning, toes first on the stretcher, still in his blue and white striped pyjamas and a thin yellow knitted blanket covering him. Agnieszka from two doors down cried when she saw his grey face wheeled past, his mouth open as if he were in the middle of a sentence when he went. They inched that yellow blanket up to cover his face, leaving me watching his gnarled toes disappear down the corridor.

Kasia, one of the care assistants, went to Agnieszka and took her into her room, whispering words of comfort. No one said anything to me, and I was the one who found him. Not that I let it bother me.

Because Bogdan was dead, there was a flurry of excitement in the home. Some of those who never came to breakfast were all of a sudden making their way to the dining hall, their slippers slip-slapping on the emerald vinyl flooring. That was good for me as it meant I could leave without having to sign out and spend an interminable amount of time with Joanna, the manager, who would warn me of the dangers of going out alone at my age, of how I had to be back within an hour otherwise someone would come looking for me and if not found, I would be in a lot of trouble.

Trouble? Really, at ninety? The trouble Joanna was referring to was not that it impacted me, but that it impacted her. Her order, her day, her job.

Anyway. Bogdan was dead so I was free to escape unnoticed.

I went to my café on the square. I always did when I could get away with it. The Old Town was a place where no one looked at me like I might topple over if the wind changed.

From Willa Nadziej to the square was not far if you didn’t stop and if you didn’t let the world fuss over you. The home was all doors and schedules and people telling you what was ‘safe’, as if safety was the same thing as living. By the time I reached the old town my lungs were burning and my hands were numb, but my head was clear. No one had counted me. No one had timed me. For an hour, maybe less, I belonged simply to myself.

The food at my café was good, the coffee better. They only gave us lukewarm decaffeinated at the home, and I still had that craving for a thick coffee, black, no sugar, letting it course down my throat like toffee.

‘Lena!’ Leon smiled at me as I arrived and pulled out a wicker chair, and handed me a blanket. Not because I am old. But because it was a thing now that these cafés did at this time of year. A blanket for each customer so you could still sit outside and admire the view. I expected some tourist had demanded it.

‘Leon,’ I said, taking my seat. ‘Bogdan is dead.’

Leon raised his eyebrows at me, the way people do when they’re not sure if they’re meant to be sorry or simply surprised.

‘Have I not mentioned him before?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘A friend?’ he asked.

‘A fellow inmate,’ I said. ‘Next door to me. He could be a grumbling old bastard, and he snored like a train, but he’d been there a long time. That counts for something in a place like that. Some of the others will miss him.’

‘Not you, though, Lena?’ Leon said, smiling.

I shrugged. ‘I will. He was a good dancer,’ I said. ‘Not with me. But I saw him on the odd night when someone put on music, and the rest of them remembered they once had good knees and tried to pretend they still did. It was only he who had a lightness to him. The others, all awkward. It’s strange, what you end up missing. Good knees.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Leon said.

‘I’m used to it at my age.’

‘Usual?’ Leon asked.

‘Indeed.’

Leon swiftly departed, and I was glad of that. We had built up a relationship of sorts over the past few years, and I enjoyed that our conversations were brief and never veered towards sentimentality. I had noticed that other customers, tourists again, became irritated by Leon – how he would simply take their order without asking how they were or where they had come from. And why should he? I mean, why should he care one jot where these people had come from? He was there to take an order, bring it to their table and move on to the next.

Leon brought me my usual. Large coffee, thick as soup, and one paczki, filled with strawberry jam.

‘If that’s the diet that will keep me as young as you at ninety, I must try it,’ Leon had once remarked. And I’d told him, it wasn’t the diet that kept me moving, kept me limber, and kept my faculties somewhat intact; it was luck. Pure damned luck.

As I sipped at my coffee, I watched a family, mother, father and two young children who both wore yellow raincoats, stop and throw a coin into the fountain.

The smaller of the children, perhaps a girl, I could not tell from the distance between us, became upset that her coin was gone and began to reach in to retrieve it. The father quickly scooped them up, bent down and got the money back.

I was annoyed that he had. Not because the coin mattered, but because the moment did. A wish was a small, ridiculous thing until you decided it wasn’t, and then it was a choice, and choices had a habit of sticking. Once you made them, you didn’t get to pretend you hadn’t. I knew that all too well.

But it wasn’t my child, wasn’t my place. I’d never had any children of my own to lecture, and it wasn’t because I hadn’t been told often enough that I ought to. I simply didn’t. I kept myself to myself, made my choices and lived with them, which was more than you could say for plenty of people. Still, I wouldn’t begrudge a child their wish. Let them have that. The world took enough away without me joining in.