CAKE | 25 — Back where we came from

And there he was. Though at first I assumed he was a she. He was sitting on the deck, right in front of our glass door looking inside, tilting his head to the side. A black cat, seemingly only two or three months old and very hungry. A stray. His black fur was the reason it took me a while to confirm his gender. He was dirty, tiny and immediately snuggling up to me as soon as I opened the door. He weighed nothing, his ribs showing through his fluffy fur. And yet he seemed tough and determined. He decided I would feed him and I complied. I named him Witold, Witek to friends. A sovereign name, a fitting one for a tenacious Polish cat and a name with no equivalent in English or German. Apparently it means ruler of the forest. Witek visits me every day. We’ve become vacation buddies. He comes over whenever he feels like it. He purrs and sleeps in my lap, on my shoulder and while hiding from the sun under my deck chair. He devours the food I bought him at the local supermarket. He hunts for mice while we are barbecuing. And he leaves when it’s time to. I imagine he’s got places to go and things to see.

When I immigrated from Poland to Germany I was a child and utterly naive. Everything I knew up until then had either lost its meaning or its value. And I was too young to comprehend what leaving entailed and that I would never fully arrive. I had an awfully displaced ponytail and no idea what was happening to me or my parents and it took me years to fully realise the extent of the identity crisis I had to dig myself out of. Still digging to this day. Germans have considered me as the other and refuse to stop doing so, despite no discernible markers but my name to prove their point. To many of them I am a Pole. Most of them have no idea how it feels to be on the outside, recreating myself from the pieces immigration left me with. I learned their language, integrated into their culture, acquired their habits and attitudes, joined into their complaints and learned their common phrases while feeling with every fibre of my being that this is neither me nor my country.

And so here I am. Back where I came from. After over 30 years abroad I slipped back in and am staying in a tiny village in a rental with a spectacular view of the mountains and forests of southern Poland. It’s almost as if I’d have never left. Except that I clearly am visiting. But the familiarity is staggering. Walking through the nearest town I realise that these are the people I come from. And we’re not even related. They have the same face, the same look in their eyes. When they order their food, when they talk on the phone, when they tend to their cows or walk to the store, when they talk to me. They look like me. We carry the same weariness and insecurity, served with a touch of disregard for etiquette, rules or even apparent logic. We excel at improvisation. And most of the time we somehow make it work and manage to laugh if we don’t. We seem harsh but aren’t. But a harsh look is a good way to face the world with. Especially if historically most of it tends to be indifferent to us and our needs. 

I have always been good at leaving. I am not scared of making mistakes. Well, that’s not entirely true. I am scared of many things including mistakes, yet I do them while scared. I adjust easily. After all, I have been adjusting all my life, navigating level after level, hoping to some day reach 100%. I don’t like being laughed at but it never stops me from trying new things. It hurts immensely when it happens but I’ve gotten good at pain. I seek the most challenging environments because I excel at operating them. It took me a while to figure that one out. Adjusting is what I can do best. Learning Japanese or moving to the US stimulates my senses; to find myself in a strange country whose language I cannot speak and whose culture I cannot even remotely comprehend makes me feel oddly alive. It takes me back to the trauma and I am immediately in operating mode. Only this time I felt the exact same thing the moment I was forced to speak to a native Pole that I felt trying to convey a simple request to a Japanese person or arriving in Germany all this time ago. A brief possibility of utter failure. A moment of not-knowing. But in Poland that feeling vanished in an instant and now words appear out of nowhere, descending on me from all directions like ladybugs settling in a field. Some of these words I haven’t heard of or used in years and yet I immediately know their definition. I translate them into German or English, whatever language is more handy to convey their meaning to my German husband. They sound a bit off coming from me and sometimes my brain needs a second or two to decipher and enunciate the countless consonants correctly but they are familiar. And in an odd way they make me feel in command.

I have decided to stop arriving. Like Witek I too will come and go as I please. And I am reclaiming what is salvageable after so many years of disassociation and absence. It’s not much but it’s a start. I’ll be going back to Poland this winter to stake my claim. I am taking up space in a country I know little of and feel so much for. Just like I am finally taking up space mentally in Germany, a country I’ve lived most of my life in, know so much of and feel surprisingly little for. I figure I will forever be straying. Poland will probably never again be my home. It‘s been taken from me a long time ago but it remains the place where my story began. Wherever I roam, the gravitational pull towards Poland remains. I can recognise Polish faces anywhere in the world from several meters away. I can immediately make out Polish near me within a cacophony of German and English or other languages. I finally realized I will forever be tethered to the country I lost that fateful summer of 1988.