The whole of time converged in the backseat of a taxi in southeastern Poland. The sorrowful, tear stained past. A muddy, unspeakable present. The hoped for, unseen future.

But first, there was the train trip from Torun, the city of heretics and schisms, where I’d gaped at the glossy patina of Copernicus’ wooden astrolabe. Then swift, sad goodbyes, a change of trains, and a panicked rush for seats at the Warsaw station.

Now a tall, thin young man with the chiseled features of Slavic nobility was haggling with the short, stout conductor who had a pock marked face like Stalin. The prince was trying to persuade the bureaucrat to open two cordoned off compartments.

“Nie, nie,” the official insisted. Those seats were being saved on orders from higher ups. Nothing to do with him, you understand. He made a vague gesture in his own direction. People would have to stand. His stubby hands appeared resigned.
Incomprehensible foreign words flew past my ears like startled birds. Zlotys were in the air, too. Then the sound of doors sliding open. People elbowed each other, claiming a spot. I pushed my way to one of the remaining seats.
The fellow who’d arranged it all stood in the narrow hallway, smoking a cigarette, staring pensively at the passing countryside. I imagined this latest hero turning toward me and whispering, “I want you, Amerikanska. Follow me. To my flat. We’ll listen to our hearts beating until dusk.”
It would never happen.
I recalled how I’d been forced to stoop beneath the dark wooden beams at Copernicus’ house. Mikolaj must have been a midget to get around in that place.
Once giants were supposed to walk the earth, little people, too. The Irish weren’t the only ones to tell tales about leprechauns, so did the Eskimo.

Maybe the tribe of Goliaths had shrunk.
Adaptation. Survival. That was how the world worked, wasn’t it?
Who was Copernicus after all, but a man with a dangerous idea, who, like the people of his time, walked upright in the cramped rooms of his home. A guy who liked it that way, too, I had a hunch.
Sun-blazoned fields rolled past. It was early August and the earth spun on its journey around the distant sun. The light was thick and yellow like butter. Ham armed women retrieved sandwiches wrapped in brown paper from wooden hampers. The sour odor of rye bread filled the compartment. Ripe tomatoes changed hands like another currency. Jedz , the women urged, offering food with the authority of a priest at the transubstantiation.

A drunk sprawled across a seat, sleeping off Saturday night. The fly of his trousers gaped open.

I took out a map and sought her destination Modliborzyce which meant ‘prayers to God.’

Copernicus probably never heard of the place. It had been wild forest and river plain where wolves wandered freely and bears slapped salmon out of the cold waters of the San River into the hot sun.
What shape would Mikolaj’s prayers have taken?

Dear Lord, deliver me from stupidity and flame.

Direct and to the point. I was sure of it. You could tell a lot about a person from the house he lived in.

The line of track on the map veered away from where I wanted to go, but I wasn’t troubled. My life was often like that. One way streets, dead ends. Feet to the flame, refusing to recant.

Better to bite your tongue than have it cooked inside your skull, food for the crows. Let me go home, check my figures. I’ll get back to you on that earth around the sun bit.

The index finger of a hand spun a sphere. God’s hand or Kopernick’s?

I’d get off in the outskirts of Lublin and find another way.
The train rocked on the track like a cradle. No, it wobbled like a fat pig waddling back to the barnyard. Or on its way to the slaughterhouse.
Not even clever Kopernick knew the answer.

It was 1986, not 1502, or 1942, and this was a sleepy train headed for the eastern provinces.

Unfenced fields and meadows blooming with flowers I couldn’t name basked in the sun. A cow was tethered here and there, sheep, too. The beasts were small planets circling the stake that fixed them to the earth.
I knew how it felt to be at the end of a rope. So did my guy Mikolaj.
Everything the cows and sheep in the golden fields, the pijak sprawled and snoring in his seat, the houses with lace curtains pulled across their collective windows was familiar. I had stepped into someone else’s memory, my father’s, and recognized the landscape through his eyes.
Gazing at the fat, billowing clouds, the benign sunlight, the hallowed ground, I was unable to detect the death and destruction scattered across the skies over Poland, Russia, Scandinavia, the Balkans.
Clouds of radiation had kissed the sunny boot of Italy.
France, too. All those grapes.
The whole lot contaminated.
The tiny, succulent strawberries I’d greedily consumed at the university cafeteria in Krakow might as well have been stamped with a death’s head. Still, I’d savored the berries, knowing I might be swallowing my doom.
But when, exactly, would radiation kill me? I could step out into the path of a speeding car, a tipsy pedestrian like the grandfather I never knew.
This luscious summer of Chernobyl was a hit and run in the collective family. Everyone had taken a hit with each sip of milk, every dab of butter, each toothsome wild berry.
But where to run? Even the guys driving the nuclear engine didn’t know where to go. Marie Sklodowska Curie, just look what you started!
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
That was what the Egyptians proclaimed at banquets presided over by skeletons. Those people were on to something. Maybe that’s why Isaiah stole their material.

God, the plagiarist.

Or was it like what Shakespeare had written, “There’s nothing new under the sun?” That scribbler didn’t know about radiation, did he Madame Curie?
The train was slowing for the last stop before Lublin. I gathered up my things. A few clothes in a small travel bag. A fifth of spiritus and a box of chocolates, gifts for my relatives.

My purse from the rynek in Krakow smelled the way new leather always did, rich and full of promise. Tell that to the poor animal who’d lost its skin. I traced the embossed letters. Body Bag.

The Pole who’d tooled the hide may have been ignorant of the grim connection. Or he might have reveled in the macabre irony.

A man laughed. A dry, wheezy cackle, as if centuries of spider webs were crammed down his throat. The Americans will like this. Ha. Ha.

My cousin came home from Vietnam in a body bag. He’d never made it to Poland. I was carrying him to this strange, yet familiar land, too. I rarely traveled light. No matter where I went, near or far, my mother and father, who were alive, but just barely, and my dead cousin weighed me down.

If I could fly through the sky over the wide ocean at the speed of light, I would have been in Modliborzyce years ago. Long before the lethal air of Chernobyl had done its dirty work.

Mikolaj, what do I do now?
Stepping off the train into the sun, I blinked back the glare like an owl. The station was blue and cool inside like suddenly plunging under water. The odors of beer, tobacco, and sawdust mingled. Rusty gates were pulled across the wooden counters: the ticket booths were vacant.

Pushing the heavy doors open to the light again, I noticed a taxi sign across the street. There wasn’t a taxi in sight, but I didn’t have long to wait before an old, battered American cab pulled up. The driver, a middle aged man with bad teeth, grinned at me. In my halting Polish, I told him where I wanted to go.

His blue eyes widened, but he nodded, “Tak, tak,” jumped out, and opened the door to the back seat.

Getting in I quickly thumbed the dictionary I carried for the words I needed. The man at the wheel spoke little English and my Polish was like a child’s first steps.

The narrow strip of blacktop cut through miles of golden fields toward the wide sky. How had Copernicus ever found his way around the universe, peering at the heavens day and night, writing everything down?

The sun, there, at the center of it all. I’m sure of it.

The driver told me how lucky I was that he’d found me. The stand was usually closed on Sunday, but he’d gone to check out the station after the only train that day, hoping for a fare. He didn’t say, “I could use the money.” Everyone in this country could use money and we both knew it. Like a wolf he’d sniffed my zlotys out. Was I Little Red Riding Hood then, on my way to grandmother’s house?
Both of my busias were long buried. This was a different forest, another fairy tale.
I stared at the stalks of wheat, barley, hay, buckwheat, oats. Pszenica, jeczmien, siano, gryka, owies. The unfamiliar names were an incantation on my tongue.
The monotony of plenty was broken only by an occasional tree, gnarled and ancient, green leaves dulled by the dust of late summer. A slender sapling in Copernicus’ day.
Here, in this part of Poland, farmers owned their few hectares, but not too long ago the land surrounding me had been a vast, feudal holding. The tsar had granted the komorniki the plots they’d slaved on, and then the Soviets and Tsar Stalin, too.
My great grandfather had refused to sign his name to any deed. What the tsar granted, the tsar could also take away.
Where was the manor lord? Up to no good, most likely, harrying some poor fox or harassing his serfs. Maybe he was reciting Pan Tadeusz or hunting mushrooms in the forest. Or picking his nose like any peasant. There was no time to waste on the scoundrel now.
I was on her way home. Do domu. A place I had never been, except in his memory, that man so far away 7,000 miles! staring out of my eyes. Moja ojciec.
The driver’s thin cotton shirt was dark with sweat. I leaned forward and whispered in his ear, Pierwszy ras . He turned toward me, eyes wide and repeated, Pierwszy ras.
I was a virgin again. A girl with a body like a straight stick. A young sapling.
All my worries flew out the window and danced a krakowiak across the fields where some people toiled with scythes and piled hay into a wagon pulled by a solitary horse, nodding in the heat. The worries of strangers joined mine in a mad frolic across the golden land. What a whirlwind they kicked up, stamping their feet in the deadly sun!
Like the grotesque dance of the living during the Black Death. Today we dance. Tomorrow, the very next moment, we die.
The taxi roared past a roadside shrine. Bouquets of humble blossoms piled at her bare feet, the Blessed Mother gazed at the sunny day, and at me, a prodigal daughter on the way home.
“Modliborzyce,” my escort announced.
The inhabitants of the small village were under the spell of a Sunday somnolence, just like Bruno Schulz had described it. The late summer sun bathed deserted streets. Shafts of afternoon light climbed pastel walls and gilded roofs.
Wave after wave of light and no one to greet me.
I showed the driver a piece of paper with my family’s address. “Ah, Felinow!” he shouted, and shifted into first, circled around a small plaza, then headed out onto another road.
I imagined the town on market day. Brightly painted Gypsy wagons. Horses hobbled in the scented shade of pines. The acrid odor of cooking fires. Jews in black caftans, sidelocks bobbing as they bend over to feel the haunches on a cow, or stare at the inside of a horse’s mouth.
A good buy.
Maybe.
A fair price.
Perhaps.
Peasant women haggled over eggs, apples, butter, fresh kielbasa, buying, selling. Jewish matrons peddled poppy seed cake still warm from big tile ovens. Gypsies were willing to risk a journey into the future if you paid them in groschen for their present trouble.
Barefoot, laughing children chased hissing geese.
The shoemaker’s wooden mallet tap tapped a boot sole. The blacksmith’s hammer struck iron, ringing straight and true, missing the beast’s tender quick. The church bell tolled. The priest’s voice was harsh and grating above the friendly din. Laughter turned to taunts.
Zyd. Zyd. Brudny zydow. Brudny cyganki.
But not him. Not him.
Watching the boy who would be my father walk out of the one room school with the Jewish children who were not allowed to be present during the prayers the priest was intoning, I noted his dark eyes and dark hair. My Papa could be one of them. A Jew or a gypsy’s son.
Wladislaw moves through a dim hallway with the others into the sunlight. His shoulders, his hands and feet speak. To hell with that priest.
Modliborzyce. Prayers to God.
The bitter sound of women weeping, forced to part with homes and household goods.
A treadle sewing machine. Mended pots and pans. Treasured Passover plates. Feather quilts. Take this. Take that. I won’t need it anymore. Tying up a bit of bread, some tea, a few lumps of sugar into a warm shawl.
The Gypsy carts broken and abandoned by the side of the road.
The terrible screech of the train on the track glittering in the setting sun. The western road. The abode of the soon to be dead.
The lamentations of the murdered.
That other life gripped me on the long taxi ride through the August fields, breaking me open like a loaf of bread.
Jedz. Eat.
The driver screeched to a stop in the middle of the tarmac and ran out into the field; his skinny legs scrambled in the hay, the wheat. I stared after him. The cloudless sky was an aloof, Polish blue. The sun, a child’s ball tossed from the parapet of a medieval castle.
“Kowalski,” I heard him shout at the startled peasants.
Back in the cab, driving at breakneck speed, he reassured me, “Zaraz, zaraz.”
Soon.
A sudden left; a rutted, dirt track. A grassy tree lined lane strewn with fallen apples. From his apple trees. I inhaled the tangy odor of fruit crushed beneath the taxi’s tires. Sixty years he’d waited for that scent.
“I hope you’re happy,” I whispered.
A house. A flurry at the window. A lurch of the engine. My heart.
Was this home?
Tak, yes, the driver nodded, holding the door open for me.
Then a skinny old crone with familiar eyes, blue and sharp like broken glass glinting, embraced me, moaning my name like a litany. Krysia, Krysia.
My father’s sister reeked of sweat and rotting apples. I sucked my teeth, searching for a crumb or two of bread. I could feel her ribs through her dress.
The taxi driver was grinning as if he’d brought me to this insignificant spot in this provincial Polish backwater all the way from America. Had Charon smiled like that after ferrying the souls of the dead across the Styx?
I put a hand in my pocket, pulled out a wad of zlotys, and thrust the money into the man’s palm.
“Dziekuje, pan, bardzo dziekuje.”
A month of fares! His cab blasted off, belching black exhaust.
There were thick slices of tomato, red and ripe, fresh bread and butter, hunks of ham and kielbasa on platters in the kitchen.
Jedz. The women of my family spoke in a single voice.
Later, I sipped sweet, hot tea, and recalled the poisoned land basking in the sun. How the earth revolved in all that light, unafraid. I tried to recall the floors in Copernicus’ house creaking beneath my weight. A sharp, high pitched squeal? Or a low murmur like distant thunder?
Peering through white lace curtains, I welcomed the blue certainty of twilight.

“At the Center,” short-listed 1999/2000 Fish Short Story Prize.