CAKE | 24 — Do you know the code?

Even when I used the right words, they sounded plastic. They came wrapped in a false accent that immediately sold me out. I lacked that certain pitch at the end. The reaction to the crackling noise I was making when speaking my native language was either amiable recognition or plain irritation. I didn’t know what to do with either and smiled like a tourist. Poland was my home country and I never felt more foreign.

Ordering at a restaurant was fairly easy. Unlike a conversation with a stranger, placing an order was a socially defined process. I did have to look up a few words on the menu beforehand, mostly food that wasn’t part of my diet when I was a child and hence not part of my register, but I delivered my order. The words all came to me and left my mouth in the correct form. But when proceeding to pay after the meal and placing my card on the machine I suddenly froze. I could not recall my pin code. I remembered the individual numbers but could not put them in the right order. With the waitress smiling kindly and looking at me expectantly as if watching a pet trying to perform a trick, I nervously patted my forehead. How could I have forgotten? I had used it a few days ago. And had been for years. And yet the pin seemed irreversibly gone. My fingers could not recreate the movement on the keypad. My brain refused to cooperate. There was only — a blank. I forgot the code.

I had decided to visit Chełmno on a whim. Berlin was the nearest I have ever lived to Poland, the country I was born in. Only six hours away by car. Maybe it was the war in Ukraine and the looming threat of an escalation and with it the mere thought of my hometown being destroyed before I ever had a chance to revisit that brought me there. Maybe it was a bout of nostalgia or the need for a break. Whatever the reason, after 30 years I felt it was time. I looked up the fastest route. I made a car reservation. I packed my bag. And I didn’t tell anybody in my family that I was going to spend one day and one night in the place I was born in and had abandoned when I was ten. I wanted to sneak back in. Years ago I had left Poland thinking I was going on a summer vacation. I was the only one in my family who didn’t know that we were never to return. I didn’t have the slightest idea that my parents were uprooting our lives for a flicker of hope that changed our trajectory but cost us dearly.

And then I did return after all and suddenly I was walking home from school again. The way was still ingrained in my body. Cross the street, follow along the narrow sidewalk, past the restaurant, take a left and cross the medieval town wall, pass through the gate and enter the seemingly never-ending cemetery and descend the stairs. Take a right at the end of the stairs and another right, go up the hill, then take a left and there was our housing development. It was built in the 70s and it looked it. Huge concrete apartment buildings stacked like monstrous Lego blocks but lacking the colors. Except for the fancy doorbell systems and the newly constructed parking spaces (owning a car was a luxury afforded to a selected few when I was little so there was no need for that), all the houses still looked the same, only so much smaller. Everything was much much smaller, everything but the church with its imposing altar and high ceiling. I had spent countless Sundays staring at it, bored out of my mind or fighting sleep or both. It was still infused with the same dread.

Wandering the streets of Chełmno things that were no longer there came back to me. The ice cream shop at the end of the only shopping street. The bookstore that closed. The house my best friend Silwia lived in. My grandma’s house and her eerily dark courtyard. The hill I used to slide down on my school bag on the way home in the winter, for which mom scolded me every time. The sheer delight in life. All those gone places reappeared before my eyes. But days later I could still not recall that goddamn code. My memory card was full.