happens to belong to an old, um, dead lady.  I was trying to figure out what it was about J’s place that was so delightful, and in the morning, when I woke up with a mild headache and phlegm in my throat from breathing in dust all night, I realized that her flat’s the best museum I’ve been to in all of Poland.  There’s at least six decades of history stored in it.  J and her husband were intellectuals and lived through both world wars as well as the post war years – communism, transition to democracy and capitalism, renewed purges, all of that.  There were hundreds of yellowing books on psychology and politics and history in Polish, English, and French.  Her husband was an author and had his own shelf of published books.   J had a stack of journals, complete with annotated newspaper clippings and increasingly shakier, more spider-like handwriting.   Photos everywhere, and a scrapbook that contained pictures of the family dating back to 1895. 

The three omnipresences were God, skiing, and Solidarność (Solidarity – the anti communist social movement in the eighties).  There were several photos of J’s husband meeting Jan Paweł II, a bust of a languishing Christ in the corner.  J’s husband was an athlete, somewhat of an anomaly in the intellectual community, as his son informed me, and there were skis and ski paraphernalia even in the bathroom – an old set of skis hanging out next to a red mop and bucket. The memorial for his death was a cross country ski trip – I think in the Zakopane mountains.  And finally, Solidarity pins, a poster of a Socialist movement anniversary, a letter from a German writing a book about Communist era social movements.

J died sometime in January, I think.  The refrigerator and television had been unplugged, but a tomato lay rotting on the window sill and unwashed dishes sat in the sink.  When I asked, jokingly, if there were ghosts in the apartment, her son said, “No,” then his wife said, “Well, at least, we don’t know yet.”  The ceilings are thin, and the above neighbor’s dog scampers around a lot.  When it moves, the sounds seem to be coming from J’s kitchen.