Kraków, Prague, Switzerland, Italy
24
We took the night train from Berlin to Kraków, Poland. Poland had never been on my list of “must-sees,” but Raef assured us it was spectacular, and I had learned to trust Raef’s opinions about travel, restaurants, and jazz nightclubs. Kraków—the old city—was a World Heritage Site. It was, he said, the next Prague, meaning the next chic place to visit if you were young and mobile and in the mood for adventure. Jack had never visited Poland, either, and on the train we sat with Constance’s Lonely Planet guide on our laps and turned the pages slowly, each of us reading and pointing to things we wanted to see. Raef and Constance slept in the seats across from us. Constance’s head rested in the crook of Raef’s neck as if she were his precious violin. I took a few pictures of them; I wanted Constance to know how sweet they looked together.
We were couples. That was the new understanding. It was so natural and unassuming that I had to shake myself sometimes to understand fully what had changed. Constance and Raef. Jack and Heather. Even in the darkness, with the lights from houses and stations and lonely farms flickering past our windows for a moment, I felt aware of Jack. I knew his body now, knew it better at any rate, and I knew the weight of his arm on my shoulders, the heaviness of his hand as it wrapped around mine. It’s a cliché to say our edges blurred, that we became merged in some way, but it was true nonetheless. Everything felt accelerated as a result of our traveling together; we could not hide things or be slow to reveal our likes and dislikes. We traveled out of our backpacks, and the world was reduced to tiny instances of comfort and joy, of great, brilliant sights and sounds and smells. I saw with Jack’s eyes, and he saw with mine.
Near midnight Jack and I slipped into the dining car and ordered vodka from an ancient porter standing behind the bar. He was a short man with enormous muttonchops outlining his jaw. The muttonchops appeared translucent, a blurry aurora, as if someone had tried to get his face into focus but then abandoned the project. Or as if a dandelion puff had decided to smile. He had a large mole on the center of his forehead, and his hands, when they moved over the bottles and cups, seemed to crawl rather than lift and drop. I put him at about seventy years old. His eyes had lines of yellow that reminded me of small strands of twine.
He poured two streams of vodka into our glasses. We smiled and drank them down. The porter shook his head.
“Americans?” he asked in solid English.
We said we were.
“My uncle died in Chicago,” the porter said. “Long time ago.”
“Sorry,” Jack said. I nodded.
“I wanted to visit him, but never had. Is pretty, Chicago?”
“It can be,” Jack said. “I haven’t spent much time there. Have you, Heather?”
“No, sorry.”
“Lake Michigan,” the porter said and smiled. “My uncle, he always talked about Lake Michigan.”
“It’s a big lake,” Jack agreed. “A great lake.”
It was a pun. I liked Jack’s tenderness with the man. I liked his willingness to listen and to talk.
The porter, meanwhile, held up his finger and bent under the bar. He brought up a bottle of vodka and showed us the label. It was ?ubrówka vodka, a famous brand that we had just seen mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide. One of the travel tips was to consume ?ubrówka vodka whenever possible. Now seemed as good a time as any.
The porter poured out second glasses for us. He turned our glasses around one full rotation to bring us luck and to say good-bye to misfortune.
“Will you join us?” Jack asked. “We’d be honored to treat you to a round.”
The porter shook his finger at us.
“You cannot pay for this. Not young people like you. This is a gift. They say it is made of angel tears. You understand?”
“I do,” I answered.
“Good drinks are always sad. They bring us life, but they also remind us of dead. You agree?”
I nodded. So did Jack. The porter made a motion to tell us to drink. We did. The first glass of vodka had burned on its way down. These few ounces of ?ubrówka tasted like mountain water. I wasn’t close to being a connoisseur of vodka, or of any spirits, really, but I discerned the difference. The porter put the bottle back down on the shelf.
“That was lovely,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Smooth,” he said, standing straight again.
“Yes, very.”
“Once America was very good,” he said, his hands resting on the cups in front of him. “Now, too many bombs. Bombs everywhere, with drones, ships, just bombs. America never gets tired of bombs.”
“I can see how it seems that way,” Jack said. “We have funny ideas sometimes in our country.”
“Not so funny for the people under the bombs.”
“No,” Jack agreed. “No so funny for them.”
We paid. We left the porter a generous tip. When we returned, we found Raef and Constance awake. They had their feet on our seats and pulled them down when we squeezed back in place. Constance had the Lonely Planet guide on her lap, doubtless looking for saints to visit. She always excelled at planning activities.
“Did you guys drink without us?” Raef asked. “I smell vodka.”
“The good stuff,” I said. “The one that starts with a Z.”
“?ubrówka,” Raef said with pleasure. “That’s like finding an old friend is still alive. I had some good nights on ?ubrówka. It’s considered medicinal, you know.”
“It’s made of angel tears,” I said.
“Funny, I heard duck tears,” Raef said. “Tears when the wind blows water out of a duck’s eyes—only in winter.”
“I need to taste this vodka,” Constance said, not looking up. “These stories are too rich.”
Then Jack said he saw the northern lights.
“Balls,” Raef said, turning to look out the window where Jack pointed. “We’re at about fifty-five degrees. We’d have to get up to sixty at least to see them.”
“How do you know what latitude we’re traveling?” Constance asked, looking up with amazement.
“It’s a nervous tic of mine,” Raef said. “Does it freak you out? I always know the coordinates of where I am. I know it’s weird.”
“Not really. It kind of turns me on.”
It was a sweet interchange between Raef and Constance. Jack, meanwhile, lifted from his seat and tried to get a better angle on the northern lights. He kept squinting and putting his face closer to the window. Over his shoulder I could make out something, but it might have been just about any light source. Although I had never seen the northern lights, I assumed you couldn’t easily mistake them.
“It’s a gas station!” Raef said finally, his eyes on the same line as Jack’s. “It’s just neon lights!”
Jack turned around sheepishly.
“He’s right,” he said. “Isn’t that a life lesson about something or other?”