The Clarinet Polka by Keith Maillard

Author:Keith Maillard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466872110
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

FOURTEEN

Janice and her brothers grew up on stories of Krajne Podlaski in Poland. I guess you could say they were just shoved into that place up to their eyeballs. “It was a real town to us,” she told me. “In some ways it was more real to me than Raysburg—but it was real like a fairy tale.” When she was little, it was all kind of blurred together in her mind, so she didn’t know the difference between her parents’ lives and the stories in those picture books her mom read to her.

The woods where Little Red Riding Hood had to walk to her grandmother’s house, and where Hansel and Gretel got lost—well, those were the dark scary woods outside of Krajne Podlaski, and she knew that her daddy had escaped into those same dark woods and lived there like Robin Hood and fought against the bad Germans. There were some mines not too far from Krajne Podlaski, and that’s where the Seven Dwarfs worked, and that’s also where some of the partisans hid out near the end of the war. One of the Markowskis—some distant guy in her mom’s family—was called Prince Markowski, and so naturally he was the prince in Rapunzel or Cinderella. And you know how many princesses they’ve got in fairy tales? Well, her mother, Marysia Markowska, and her mother’s beautiful cousin, Krystyna Markowska, had to be real princesses because all they ever thought about was fancy balls and what they were going to wear to them, and going to Warsaw—which Janice was sure had to be a magical place with castles in it—and the clincher was Janice’s mom used to say, “Krystyna really could feel the pea under all the mattresses—poor Krystyna.”

There’s a river running right by Krajne Podlaski, and in the summer the river’s like glass, and you could walk from the church right down to the river, so Janice thought it was the Ohio because she thought “like glass” only meant you could see your reflection in it, and you could walk from St. Stans down to the river, and it flooded sometimes in both Krajne Podlaski and South Raysburg, so of course it had to be the same river. If you went from Edgewood to South Raysburg—“That’s a huge trip if you’re five years old,” Janice said—you were going to a place where only the old people spoke Polish, but if you kept on going, you’d come to Krajne Podlaski in Poland where everyone spoke Polish. She used to say to her parents, “Let’s go to Poland,” and they’d laugh and say, “Maybe someday, Janusiu.” She thought that when she was old enough to go to school with the nuns, they could go on down the river to Poland.

Every Sunday night their family read Polish poems and stories to each other, and some things they’d read over and over—like this long poem called Pan Tadeusz—and when Janice was little, it was just a bunch of big words flowing along that’d put her straight to sleep, and she’d always wake up in her bed and not know how she got there.

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