A house with a thousand memories

Remembering things before and after The Iron Curtain

There is a house in Rabka-Zdroj, in the mountains in Poland, where my Babcia (grandmother) used to live.

It looks a lot different today to how I remember it as a young boy, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist rule in the country of my ancestors. It has been extended and refurbished a few times. You no longer have to walk past someone sitting on the toilet (behind a curtain) to get upstairs. A garage has been erected to the side of the house. The outside wall cladding is all white. I remember it all being green and oozing some sort of sticky resin-like substance in the scorching hot summers when we used to visit.

Some of the furnishings and interior dimensions of the house, however, have never changed. In the sitting room the large rectangular painting of The Good Shepherd, tending to His sheep, remains in place. It has faded a little, but still has its dominating presence.

I am not entirely sure if the current oven and stove top were used by my Babcia (although I suspect they were). But the kitchen is the same shape that it always was. When you stand inside it you only have to cast your mind back a few short years really, and there she is, standing in the corner, stirring a soup, or bending over to open the oven and take out a cast iron dish filled with beef rolls and gravy.

No matter how hot the summer days were, we would always get served a soup of some sort for obiad, the main meal of the day, served at some point between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. I would always hope that it would be my favourite, rosół, a chicken broth poured over a mound of pasta, flavoured with fresh herbs from the garden. After that we would have meat and potatoes, which were always generously sprinkled with the freshest, most fragrant dill. We would wash it all down with kompot, a juice made from fermented fruits such as a berries, water and about three tonnes of sugar.

Everyone would have to lie down for a little rest after eating, either in the cool of the shade or inside, on the sofa under The Good Shepherd after dinner. Our bellies were full and we were sleepy.

But before all that, the day would have started quite early, with Babcia banging on the door at the bottom of the stairs at the crack of dawn. After breakfast we may have spent the morning playing in the local park, or walking up one of the small mountain treks behind the house, or messing around by the river or going to the shops or markets to buy some things for Babcia. Sometimes my cousins were there too; our holidays would cross paths for a few days. When they were there we would sometimes go for walks together and do goofy things and make each other laugh until we cried.

We didn’t need much to keep ourselves entertained. We did not have video games, or a computer, or even many TV channels to watch. We maybe had a few toys and books and a couple of balls, and that was enough. When there was no set activity prescribed by our parents, then we were happy to run around the garden, or go around town, with no particular goal or destination in my mind. We just knew that we had to be back for obiad.

In the evenings we would have relatives and friends who came to visit. We would maybe light an ognisko (fire) in the garden. Sitting around the flames we would grill thick sausages, that were stuck onto the end of long sticks that we had gathered near the river and sharpened back at the house. We would smother the usually burnt sausages in mustard and eat too many of them.

The sky would darken, but on a clear night the stars would shine like they never did at home. You would sit back and look up at them, wondering how long they had been there and how many people had stared at those very same stars, from that very same spot.

The night would be dead, dead, quiet. Sometimes all you could hear was the crickets chirping away in the long grass.

And then our parents would tell us that it was finally time to go to bed and you would lie down in the bedroom, your hands still smelling from the smoke. And the adults would be laughing and singing outside or downstairs, sat under the picture of The Good Shepherd, reassuring you that you were safe.

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Progress report:

I continue to edit The Fragment from The Shroud.

I continue to tell myself that I will get some hefty chunks of the The Anchorite down on paper. It is currently still at 4,305 words.

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Take it easy. And thanks for reading.