From Chicago to Warsaw is 7,559 km—a long way to travel for the dead. But that is what the protagonist of this Polish novel by Agnieszka Jelonek must do: her boyfriend, Shrimp, has just fallen to his death. To the tragicomic circumstances of his demise—the indefatigable Shrimp accidentally fallen from an open window trying to smoke a cigarette—are now added the bizarre indignities of life as an unwilling and unwelcome traveller, from an odious Polish couple who have assimilated into American life to the hostile bureaucracies of the hospital and the crematorium, capped off by the unexpected appearance of Shrimp’s “other” girlfriend. Translator Nasim Luczaj writes: “Jelonek’s style is a tequila shot. There’s salt, there’s lime, there’s at once delicious and painful heat. The main challenge was to preserve the simplicity of the writing and not succumb to the temptation to ‘clean up’ the frequent repetition or enforce any of the cold elegance often associated with reminiscence—this grief is messy and hot.” Read on!
There’s no difference between a November afternoon and a November night. The car journey lasted six hours. No one said a word, no one cried. Shrimp’s Dad held on to the steering wheel, while his other son kept himself glued to the window. We looked out at the A7, and no one wanted to be in that car, everyone would have preferred somewhere else, anywhere but here. None of us accepted what we’d been told. The information rode with us as a separate passenger, and it, too, stared quietly into the dark.
We parked in front of the tenement and waited in silence for some time. A woman’s shadow passed across the building. Women in Shrimp’s family are slight, girlishly built, and always look younger than they actually are. A hunched, frail aunt wrapped up in her coat got in the car and turned towards us as if to speak but seemed unable to come up with anything.
Then we reached Shrimp’s estate and got out of the car, each of us using their own door. Separately, but together, part of the same nightmare, from which I, for one, really wanted to wake up, but still I followed the pavement into the stairway and went up the stairs. Bannister, landing, doormat, peepholed door. That time the previous day I’d been sitting at home in front of the open fridge, wondering whether I needed to go to the shop and get some food. I decided I did, not that I went.
I think Shrimp’s Dad fumbled with the keys in the lock a little longer than necessary, as if to buy his wife time to turn from the darkness to us, her repulsive guests. As he was opening the door, she stood between the coat stand and the wall. The aunt walked up to her and then they were glued to one another, trying to make what must have been unbearable hurt just a little less.
Shrimp’s house was open to guests. In other flats, before slipping off into a friend’s bedroom, through a gap in the door, you could see some father semi-reclining on the sofa in front of the TV, a mother in rollers smoking at the window, a grandmother shrivelling up with longing for a world that didn’t exist, and the dog would bark, the mother shout for someone to do something about it, then eventually she’d lock the pet in the box room, and it would start to whimper and jump up to the doorknob, activating the father, who’d turn up the TV. You’d discover, totally by accident, that by no means do members of a household have to like each other; they might be forced into being together, like patients in a closed unit. But Shrimp’s place was different – as soon as guests arrived, everyone would drop what they were doing, everyone would ask a question. There was food to eat in the kitchen. His grandfather, big as a boxer, would walk around the house. The dog was happy with everything. Everyone talked to everyone at once, as if it were a Spanish bodega, a Greek wedding, a Turkish soap opera. But now we stood in the hallway like spare parts, and only the bitch, overjoyed with the visit, ran up to me, counting on caresses that she wouldn’t get. When I noticed the photo tucked into the corner of the glass cabinet, a photo I hadn’t seen, because he must have only recently sent it home, the sorrow simply knocked me out. That’s when Shrimp’s Mum said: Don’t cry, as if it were me who most needed consoling.
This may have meant: Don’t cry, there’s no need, it’s already happened, don’t cry, I’m with you, don’t cry, you’ll make it through, don’t cry, it’ll be all right, or simply: Don’t cry.
Suddenly, like it was the most natural thing in the world, with no effort whatsoever, I found myself on the plane, going in the one possible direction, as if it were the only plane in the world. I can’t remember who made the decision or when, or how I got the visa. Mum handed me some money and I took it, as if I were owed, without asking where she’d got it from or what it was for. I bought a ticket for the first possible date. I felt myself move down the tight tunnel of events, beads on a single thread, on some ghostly rosary. There were no options, no possibilities. Nothing could stop me because nothing else existed. I needed to fly there and find out what had happened, or rather, whether it really had.
A little rainbow slid down the cabin ceiling. People around me were reading, watching films or sleeping. I looked at the rainbow and asked it if it was true that Shrimp was dead. Its answer was soft and tender, though pretty firm: yes.
Since buying sedatives in the pharmacy, I didn’t cry nonstop, but with stops.
*
Sa sha was waiting at the airport. He said there was no way Shrimp would have wanted us to cry, and I really believed him. I stifled the tears and they stayed there in me until the funeral.
We drove to the apartment where Shrimp had been renting a room. There were people hanging out there, some swigging cans. They spoke in a crinkly tongue. They were trying to whisper, which made it sound as if they were chewing crumpled paper. Every so often one would say something louder or even burst into laughter, then quickly go quiet, embarrassed. I didn’t know who lived there and who had come purely out of interest. They reached their hands out to me, some chilled from the beer cans, but I couldn’t remember their names or faces. A girl offered me lunch. I thanked her, took a Budweiser out of the fridge and opened it.
Sasha and I sat down on the balcony, leaning our elbows on the railing, and drank our beers as if it were an ordinary afternoon. I stopped drinking six years later.
To call a death stupid feels a bit stupid. To call it an idiotic accident takes meaning away from the fact that he is no longer. All that’s left is to give in to the facts, however stupid, and keep to yourself what a dumb and spiteful death it was.
Sa sha was speaking to me but staring somewhere into the centre of my head. Said they were at a friend’s place. The usual party, some sat, some stood, others checked what was in the fridge. Sasha went home around midnight, he had work in the morning. Around two, Shrimp and some girl went for a smoke. Then she started screaming. Everyone ran out, but Shrimp wasn’t where he was supposed to be, that is, by the open window.
They called an ambulance. It came quickly. The doctor pronounced him dead.
Impossible, I say, and Sasha answers: I know.
Shrimp’s green sleeping bag was lying on the mattress in his room, and a navy hoodie hung from the chair. Jeans I knew well were lying on the floor. Whenever I took them out of the washing machine, they were really heavy and ended up breaking the balcony washing line. I sat down on the mattress, feeling as if all the objects were about to start staring at me, as if the whole room were heating up to fry me to a crisp, like Ro zal ka, the character shoved in a stove for the duration of a few Hail Marys. No chance of sleep, though Sasha and I had drunk hectolitres of alcohol; must have been non-alcoholic, alcohol for people who’d not had someone die on them.
I woke up and for a moment I had no idea why I could see a chair with his hoodie slung over its back. What do you fucking mean, fell onto the pavement? How? He’d done things a hundred times more dangerous than smoking fags at an open window. I got up. I wasn’t hungover, I had no body. I got a towel out of my bag, a clean t-shirt and underwear, and went to the bathroom. The girl who’d offered me lunch the previous day now handed me a mug of coffee.
‘Sasha’s on his way. He’ll go with you.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
She went to her room and I thought that was the end of the conversation, but then she came back with a plastic bag stuffed, I mean stuffed, with dollars.
‘Cremations are cra zy expen si ve. We made a fundraiser.’
After I’d washed, I scattered the money on the floor of his room to count it, though really I was still waiting for Shrimp to come back. I knew everyone else was, too. The food he’d brought from the shop a few days ago was still in the fridge, good to eat. So, with my coffee, I had an egg he himself may have bought, and a beer. I finished counting the money, took out clippers I’d found in his drawer, and waited for Sasha.
‘You sure.’
Pretty sure. At first, the rumble of the clippers was monotonous, then lower or higher in tone when the blades met with resistance. Sa sha tried to be gentle, cut slowly, and it took a long, long time. My dreadlocks dropped to the floor – yellow, plush tassels. I gathered them into a plastic bag, put them away next to the bag with the money, and gave myself a look in the mirror. My head was enormous, eyes puffy, nose red, skin pale, and there were pimples on my chin. I looked exactly how I wanted to look.
In the three-floor redbrick building, a bit Silesian, a bit Lego-style, there were two stairwells. The one that interested me was to the east, which Americans called east si de. The windows on the landings had no glass or bars, they were just holes in the wall. The Polish couple who rented out the flat had returned to Warsaw earlier than they’d originally intended. I didn’t know them. All I knew was that after the accident they stopped using these stairs and took the others instead. Wouldn’t go up these, even though they were closer. Shrimp had liked them, he’d run down them three or four steps at a time, grabbing hold of the banister whenever he took a turn.
I loosened the soil on the lawn with a stick, cleared away a few butts. I held them gently between my fingers and put them away in a pile, because after all they may have been his cigarettes that he threw out here. May have had his saliva on the filter. I dug a hole in the ground, threw the dreadlocks in and covered them up with soil, grass and sticks. Sasha and I lay some stones on top.
Falls from such a height had definitely happened before, and led to a broken arm, leg, or both legs. He could have even fractured a shoulder or rib. Could have been worse, he’d have said later, during physio. As it happened, he would have been absolutely right. Sasha and I sat down on the steps in that stairwell and stared at the window. No one came down, no one came up.
‘Why did they go out here?’
‘For a smoke?’
‘With that girl?’
‘I don’t know her too well.’
‘Why with her? Who even is she?’
He’d written to me about her, said he’d met someone special. The step was digging into my spine. I must have lost weight in one fell swoop.
‘Did he tell you I was gonna come? I’m sure he did. We almost had an arrangement. He asked me to come.’
Sasha was silent, then suddenly said, directing his words somewhere towards the ceiling:
‘They were together. Him and that girl.’
I needed a beer.
The rain immediately went for it, without any warning. I left the shop with a paper bag, and in it two beers and a bottle of tequila. Someone ran past, trying to cover their head with their hands. People always protect their head. Shrimp should have, too. Why did he forget that you need to protect your head?
A squirrel stopped in the middle of the road. It stood calmly, maturely, for a squirrel, and looked me in right in the eye, I swear, then walked in front of me for some time, occasionally glancing back, more like a dog now than a squirrel. It so happened that the squirrel, the rain, the sky, the whole street – everything around me was Shrimp.
I don’t think the people in the flat recognised me straight away, because when they’d left for work, I’d still had hair. I went to his room, shut the door behind me, took the tequila out of the bag. I cast off my wet things and dried myself with his towel. Now that my head was shaved it went quick. I took the navy Fruit of the Loom hoodie off the chair and started to put it on. But before my head could dive back up through the opening, I realised I was trapped. I could smell Shrimp so distinctly it was as if he’d suddenly materialised and said something out loud, right by my ear. I began to writhe around, unable to find my way out, but Shrimp wasn’t letting up; he kept me in his poisoned clothes and wouldn’t let go. I thought I’d never make it out, but finally I managed and hurled the hoodie at the floor. Picked it up after a moment. I did this over and over, throwing it down and picking it up. I smelled it, I bit it, I blew my nose. Maybe, I thought, if I agree to him having another girlfriend, if I agree to it a hundred times over, then the whole thing will be called off. Shrimp will go to the beach with her and I’ll go to the airport.
Everything that day weighed a tonne or six.
Ter ri bly sor ry, miss, said the man in the suit, with such sadness, as if Shrimp had been his best friend. The office design was sad, the wall colour was sad, the desk was sad, and the carpet was very sad. Sad models of urns sat behind glass. I sat down in the armchair, clutching my backpack, and the owner of the funeral parlour handed me the catalogue. The urns looked like containers for flour. I took the plastic bag of dollars out of my backpack. I’d made a neat pile, but still they scattered a little. I added the envelope with dollars I got while still in Poland, and the whole thing looked like property recovered by the police, then eaten and thrown up. Handing the plastic bag to Sad, I noticed I still had soil from the North Campbell lawn behind my nails. I told him the precise and unrounded sum I had in cash, Sad said that with such funds he’d be able to offer a very basic model, and only if he added a discount, very much appropriate for this situation, well, that is, let him see, he took out a calculator and divided, and subtracted, until, what were the chances, he ended up with the exact sum I’d proposed. Sorted. Sad added that he’d also need the death certificate. I had no idea how to get it, but I said no pro blem. I’ll find Shrimp’s death certificate somewhere in this city; after all, it’s only Chicago, it must be somewhere.
Before we left his office Sad’s face switched to a look of total indifference just a second too soon. Deep down in his heart, he didn’t care one bit, and maybe he was even disgusted by that measly hundred-and-something dollars from a Polish plastic bag.
America, you sucked.
Shrimp’s brother flew over the next morning, and seemed instantly relieved that our rule was: he wouldn’t have wanted us to be upset. We drank in his name all the time, and we went to the places Shrimp liked: to the beach, to the park, to the bar, and took care of all the formalities on the fly. We didn’t sober up and we almost never slept. This was mourning, our comforter. Shrimp’s family in Poland were in a stupor, awaiting our every message, while we sat in Casa del Juan and waited for the best tacos in town. The dive was dingy. The tables looked gnawed on by dogs and were all taken. We were just finishing our third beer.
Sa sha told us how, to pass the taxi driver exam, he and Shrimp had to learn the map of the city by heart. And when Shrimp’s first client got in the cab and rapped out the address through diamond teeth, and Shrimp tried to guess what he’d said, only of course he couldn’t, the guy was raging, but then by some miracle Shrimp managed to befriend him and sure, the client was happy to pay for a longer ride.
The ta cos weren’t arriving. The beers did.
Radu and his wife sat opposite me. She was apparently very religious. He now worked as a painter-decorator and had two children, which seemed amazing, because we were all still basically children. They drank their lemonades at the other side of the table, the other side of life, sober, adult and ‘shaken’. Sasha tried to chatter away our difference in units.
‘Or when Shrimp and I went to our buddies’ picnic. Open windows, of course the aircon isn’t working, it’s hot as hell. Suddenly the car starts pulling to the right, Shrimp slows down and pulls over. We get out. The front tyre’s fucked. And of course we have no spare, I can see the whole fucking picnic drive away, hadn’t had half a day off in two weeks, I’m so pissed. About five miles to the nearest town, I’m cursing my head off, I wanna kick the hell out of that fucking car. And Shrimp? Nothing, just takes the food and a pack of beer out of the boot. We’re hitching, he says. I thought he had a screw loose.’
Just then our tacos arrived, and we each got another beer.
‘…so he says we’ll hitchhike, I’m like, no one hitchhikes in the States, people just don’t stop, they’re too scared. But what do you think happened? Of course they stopped for us! Some couple from Wisconsin picked us up and drove us to the picnic right away, and Shrimp even persuaded them to come with. I wanna cry but I’m not going to. We had so many favourite hangouts…’
Ra du looked across the table at me with the face of someone who thought that was the cause of the tragedy. I answered him by reaching for my bottle of beer, looking him in the eye and downing half of it just like that. Shrimp always did what he wanted. I wasn’t there to understand what had happened, but to meet up with my boyfriend again. If that meant I couldn’t ever sober up, then oh well. Ra du drank my mute performance down with lemonade while Sasha kept going:
‘So for example we’d go to this Greek guy’s joint every Sunday. The Greek’s quiet, but he has a wife and two daughters and they argue all the time. Absolute fiasco, they all scream over each other. We pigged out on that stuff.’
I wondered if Sasha was going to burst into tears after all. Radu’s wife said she’d pray for Shrimp’s soul. I lifted my bottle again. Che ers!
Go fuck yourself, Radu. You and your marriage.
I picked up the death certificate from the hospital and called Sasha from a phone booth. I asked him for the exact time of the accident. Sasha said it may have been three, maybe a little earlier. The document said: 4.05. I read this around two hundred times, trying to get the meaning of these numbers.
When I called Sasha again, he almost barked down the phone: I was wor ry ing! Whe re are you? I looked around. It was dark and I was still rooted to the same spot opposite the hospital, I’d not moved an inch. Sasha came half an hour later and took me back to the flat. On the way I drank whisky.
Sad called from the funeral parlour and asked how are you, and I said fi ne. Then he asked if I’d like a last viewing. He said the package included the option, but only for closest family. I assured him I was closest family. I intended to see Shrimp, even if I had to print myself a false passport. Out of all the pairs of eyes that wanted to see him, I wanted to be the last. Of course it was Sasha who gave me a lift to the parlour. I got the sense that we’d started talking about Shrimp as if he were our shared boyfriend. Sasha told me he’d made too much coffee again that morning. Shrimp would always drop by before work and Sasha had forgotten that today he wouldn’t.
‘It just went out of my head, you know?’
He parked in front of the funeral parlour and told me he’d wait in the car.
Sad hadn’t asked about the degree of kinship, didn’t check my passport. Maybe he believed me, maybe he couldn’t be arsed not believing. We went to a windowless room, the walls of which were padded with red plush, as if we were to shoot a scene from Twin Pe aks. A TV hung from the ceiling, and the wall opposite had a banister installed. Sad disappeared behind a plush door, and I walked up to the banister, leant on it and waited. I wondered if I should go any further or if they were going to bring the stretchers in. I tried to breathe deeply or not at all.
Then some guy walked in and asked if I was here to see Shrimp, whom he named by name and surname. It sounded alien, this name and surname pronounced with a random-ass American accent.
The guy pointed to the TV suspended from the ceiling. He wasn’t going to tell me to watch TV now? I wanted to follow him, but he pointed to the TV again and said that was where I’d see what I wanted, or rather what I didn’t want, to see.
‘But I have to really see him.’
To which he said he was sor ry, but that was against procedures.
Stick those procedures and your whole bloody American television up your arses. You band of idiots, you wanna show me Shrimp on the screen, you really think that if you see something on TV, it’s the same? May all your Hollywood stars go and die, all your national parks dry out, your rats eat up your Big Apples, your arses not fit in your pants, your dollars and your barrels fall beneath the worst lows. May your democracy shit itself big time right in the middle of the Washington lawn. May all the corpses of all the indigenous inhabitants rise and may you have to look at what parts you cut off them and where you hammered in, may midnight strike for you at noon and noon at midnight, may all your slaves stone you, may Columbus sell you as slaves to some leader who’s better at torture, who’ll civilise you. You’re all robots, your hearts are all made of TVs, fake hearts, plastic, preprogrammed, you make me sick, you American asses, I hate you.
Shrimp appeared on the screen. He was asleep. He rarely slept on his back, so it all immediately looked suspicious. He seemed tired. He’ll need a lot of coffee when he wakes up. And aspirin, I thought. Scrambled egg will be best, scrambled egg, rolls, coffee. The image disappeared. I grabbed onto the handrail and told them it hadn’t been long enough, could they turn it on again. No one answered. American bastards. You turn that TV on. The plush-padded walls perfectly insulated all sound. They’d shown him for ten seconds. That’s what was included in the package.
Two days later, just as I was getting the feeling I might be able to fall asleep, they called to say the urn was ready for collection. I picked up the jar, bulgy, dark (the basic model, no embellishments). It fit perfectly in my small city backpack. I flung Shrimp over my shoulder, he weighed no more than three kilograms, and we went for a walk along the lake we once saw for the first time, together. From time to time, I sat down on a bench, laid the backpack beside me, took out cigarettes and a bottle of mineral water. If I rubbed the side of the urn, would Shrimp appear, like a genie? I only really had one wish – for him to wake up, crack his knuckles and ask:
What the fuck’s going on here?
We got the urn to Warsaw in our cabin baggage. I can’t remember security, though they must’ve scanned that backpack. I don’t remember worrying, didn’t sort out any permits or certificates, no one asked a thing.
His parents and aunts were waiting at the airport. The aunts hugged each other, crying and crying, then hugged me, crying and crying. Shrimp’s Mum ran her hand over my shaved head. What did you do that for, she asked. Then they took my Shrimp, and I went home and silently lay down in bed at my parent’s house. I listened to them eat dinner, watch the news. Mum would check in on me, bringing and taking away untouched sandwiches. I didn’t know how to sleep, as if it were something you could unlearn under stress. At night, I got up and switched on the computer. The modem squealed as I connected to the internet. I hadn’t checked my inbox since the accident. There were a few unread messages, including one from Shrimp, sent just before he’d left the house that night. I stared at it, utterly shocked. Shrimp was asking what to do – whether to go back to Poland. I’m going out now, he wrote, I’ll call tomorrow, come.
Fuck.
How are you gonna call if I’ve just left you to be buried in a pit.
My Dad designed a gravestone in the shape of a discarded, empty backpack. Shrimp’s Mum probably wipes it with a wet soapy cloth, though she’d rather be rummaging the pockets and shouting from the bathroom:
‘Can you check there’s nothing in there? So I don’t find anything I’d rather not know about.’
‘I always carry my drugs and weapons on me,’ Shrimp would have answered.
‘Very funny,’ she’d have grunted, then said: ‘You’d better take that dog out.’
But you can’t machine wash a stone backpack, there’s no setting for giving a proper wash to a gravestone.
Translated from the Polish by Nasim Luczaj
Agnieszka Jelonek (b. 1976) is the author of short stories, novels, TV scripts, and the blog tylkospokojnie.com. She is the winner of a Henryk Bereza Literary Award and a Literary Award of the City of Radom, and was twice nominated for the Gdynia Literary Prize. She has published reportage and interviews, often concerning works by women, as well as the following books: Koniec świata, umyj okna [The World Is Ending, Wash the Windows] (2020), Trzeba być cicho [You’ve Got to Be Quiet] (2022) and West Farragut Avenue (2024). Jelonek’s works, which critics have described as restrained and eye-opening, touch upon topics related to anxiety disorder. The author herself says she has ‘a black belt in fighting anxiety’.
Nasim Luczaj (b. 1997) is a Polish—English translator and poet based between London, Glasgow, and rural Poland. Her translations of Polish poets have appeared in The Atlanta Review, and excerpts from the novel Snake Charming on Hot Evenings by Małgorzata Żarów were published in La Piccioletta Barca. She was mentored by Sean Gasper Bye as part of the 2024 NCW Emerging Translator Mentorship. She is the winner of the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and is currently working on tang, her first full collection of poetry, as part of a Poetry London Apprenticeship with Pascale Petit.