Mom’s book, our cloud
Look, a cloud!
This, this is living in L.A.
Look, a cloud!
This is what Mom says when she wakes up this morning and looks out past the leaves of the palm tree that brush up against her bedroom window, looks out and up to that sliver of visible sky. “Jas,” she says, “This cloud is for us. This means it will be a good day.”
A break in the weather. The relentless summer sun and heat here in the San Fernando Valley. A cloud.
~~~
Slowly my paintings were becoming light, pastel. I was in love with Southern California, light was so transparent here and being close to the Ocean brought comfort.
~~~
By this point in my mother’s story, her book, she’s painting with pastels, with sun and some freedom in her soul, and playing further with fragments. Fragments of the canvases she’s cut away from previous, full paintings. Fragments of other art forms, like poetry. She’s even sleeping in fragments — fragments of other people’s homes, their guesthouses, the rooms they agree to rent her. She’s also fragmenting her name, as Polish people in America so often do: to some she’s Anna, to others Ania; sometimes she goes by variations of her middle name, Katarzyna: Kasia or Kate. One day she signs her work Anna G, and the next she tries Anna Kate G. Or just Gajewska for lack of deciding the rest.
Fragments of survival jobs: when she first gets to California, she works for a Polish man who has a small printing company in Orange County, but later she applies for work as a substitute teacher in public and private schools in L.A.; being a school sub had been one of the better survival jobs a friend had gotten her into back in Houston, and here she’s deciding to try it again, hoping for one district to give her consistent enough work to settle into, to feel secure enough. All whilst she moves about the city, fragment to fragment.
Oh, and there is one other little big thing complicating her matters: a dog. The family dog, a little, funny looking mix of a black lab and dachshund, a dog with a passion for tennis balls and who answers to the name Rocky, lands in L.A. from Houston also. This is the dog Anna’s (or Ania’s or Kasia’s) two sons had tricked her into adopting from a shelter years earlier, when they were all still under a single roof. But when Anna (or Kate) first leaves for California, Rocky stays back and is cared for by her younger son Jas, who is then still going by Jas. But when Jas goes to college (where he will begin calling himself Josh), Rocky can’t come along with him into those dorms, so Rocky joins Mom in California, for lack of a better option. (Briefly Rocky also goes to Austin, where Anna’s older son Bohdan, who is now calling himself Bo, or sometimes Paul, has now settled, finishing business school.)
Fragments. Between them, between Anna or Kasia, Jas or Josh (and later Jan); between Bohdan Bo or Paul; between this little dog Rocky and his funny ears; between these individuals and their many names, this one family has broken off into these fragments, these places, searching for some home, some identity. And their existence becomes marked by semesters as much as seasons. By who can take care of Rocky, and when. By their individual pursuits of art, and writing, and business. By life’s infinite fragments.
Summer hits. Another summer when school pauses for each of them, and during this time the two boys decide to get together and travel to Poland, to visit their grandparents whom they haven’t seen in too long; their mother in California, meanwhile, needing something to make up for the absent substitute teaching opportunities, gets work as a caretaker, visiting the sick or the dying in their homes. She brings these people food. Their medicine. Helps them go to the bathroom. She talks to them, listens to them. Listens to their stories, their own struggles and fragments.
One of these caretaking jobs is by the ocean in Santa Monica, and there she will meet a well-known Polish writer who’d once emigrated to America, like her, who’d survived and worked at his craft, who’d sometimes taught classes to young students, like her, and who was now dying, like her, like all of us one day.
~~~
I lived by the gas station. I listened to the street noise, inhaled the smell of gasoline but had a view beyond that: a view of the hills and birds sitting on power lines. Nature is naturally my first love; with its stillness and beauty it is our divine refuge from the world’s problems. But it is hurt and is kept hostage by our civilization, these powerful people who exploit and neglect nature, as well as individuals who just don’t care.
Where I lived the sights of neglected animals and their cries in my immediate area were disturbing, so I painted a series of paintings dedicated to animals and their rights. This is written with a small font since some people find it offensive when you talk about animals instead of them.
What we won’t embrace
The oceans blue
In a morning mist
The cranes the pelicans
Silver sparkling fish
Penguins, turtles, whales and seals
What we won’t embrace will not exist
Earth breathing soil
Rivers like veins
Sounds of horses
Running through plains
Earth watched by eagles
Shaded by trees
What we won’t embrace will not exist
~~~
Fragments. Fragments of conversations between us then: How’s school? How’s the writing? Are you happy? Healthy? Are you eating well? Yes Mom, fine, I’m fine. How about you? And how’s Rocky? Are you painting? Oh yes, yesterday Rocky and I went to our favorite street. You remember how I told you about Beachwood? Rocky just loves this place. I look at the Hollywood sign, and Rocky smells the flowers. Oh, and did I tell you the guy at Starbucks last week gave Rocky a Frappuccino? This is his new thing. Are you sure you’re eating well there? Oh. I loved the article you wrote! Can you send me some more?
~~~
Navaho
Making pictures
from sand
Brown - for East
yellow - for West
North - black hole
with stars
Navaho Indians
have no word
for “Artist”
No signature
on sand
Sweeps it all back
in a pile
Let the wind blow
It is energy
that flows
Respect for
nature
and for all Good Things
Goodness
Not for sale
Not recognized
as beauty
Not recognized as art
~~~
The writer in Santa Monica has a failing heart. He can’t sleep. This means that neither can Anna, because she’s spending some nights there too, not just afternoons, and Rocky the dog is actually out in her car, parked in a covered parking lot, because Anna just can’t leave him alone for that long, he needs food and water and walking too, and the writer’s assistant says the dog can’t come into the home. So Anna is always sneaking off on little breaks to go take Rocky for little walks, making sure he pees, he poops, he has enough food and water and a comfortable temperature. And Rocky is incredible: he never fusses or pouts. Somehow he’s just always happy to be there, always wagging his tail; somehow he seems to understand she has her work, and after their little walks he obediently jumps back in the car and then sniffs at the cool ocean air for awhile through the cracked windows, before rolling back up into a ball again and taking a nap.
Back inside, the Polish writer — his name is Jan, like Anna’s son — still can’t sleep, and in his insomnia he asks her now to tell him about her life, her fragments; how she came to be here in California, in this room, with this job, with him.
So she tells him. Tells him of all that’s happened since she left Poland some thirty years ago now, aboard a set of airplanes that carried her from Warsaw to New York, bound for a dream there, a husband, a new life in America. Of how that became Houston, and later here, this room, with that little dog out there napping in the car. She says to this man in his bed, this writer from Poland, “You know, I sometimes think that maybe, with all of this, that I have material for a book.” And he looks up at her and says, “No Ania, this is not material for one book. This is material for three.”
He asks her then for some more nitroglycerin, the medicine he takes for pain. He asks also to see some of those fragments — asks that she bring him samples of her work the next time she comes over, some pictures of her paintings.
~~~
Fragments. Fragments of conversations between us now: How’d you sleep? How’s the pain? Do you need the Oxy now, or do you want to wait? How about you, Jas? How did you sleep? Did Snowy bother you? You know, I don’t think you’re sleeping. I woke up and could see that your light was on, so late. I slept fine, Mom. How about a movie? Oh yes! Van Gogh again? Can we? Yes. Yes of course. Let me just go finish with the dishes, and the cats. Fillow needs his eye drops. Can I get you anything else? Maybe some bubbly, or some juice? You know what yes, that sounds good, and put them together. A mimosa. Nice, ok. Coming right up. So Van Gogh in maybe 15 then? Yes. Yes!
~~~
She brings him the fragments. Shows the writer a little catalogue of her work, and even more proudly shows him some of the articles her son had written for the newspaper, clipped and sent her in the mail. He flips slowly through all of it. Reads the articles. Studies the photos of the art. Then stops. This one, he says. Do you have this painting still? She says sure, this is one of the new ones, something I just did. Ania, he says, I need to have this.
What?
~~~
Far, far away, in the country his parents came from, and in the apartment his mother grew up in, Jan, or is it now Josh, is engrossed in a book. It’s the book his roommate had given him for that long flight to Poland, a book his roommate couldn’t believe his friend never read. Catcher in the Rye. On the plane ride over, and then in Warsaw, Josh loses himself in this book. Or finds himself in it. One or the other, or both. Anyway, something’s changed. Shifted. He thinks: this. This what I’d like to do. Write something like this. And so all the while his mother is there bragging about her sports writing son to a Polish writer a world away, he’s here now, in the home she grew up in, thinking to himself no no, this. Something bigger than some game. Braver. Something really meaningful. One day.
~~~
One day, years into the future, Anna will write just a little bit about the writer in Santa Monica. She will even illustrate him, and them together with her dog, with her pen. She will write about how this writer began coming outside to join her and Rocky on some of those little walks when he was feeling better, or how they even sometimes took rides in her car out to the Marina, to see the sailboats coming and going. The moment she illustrates is the moment Rocky licks this writer’s face, and how she tells Rocky to stop it but the man says no no, it’s ok, I will die anyway, does he really like me!?
All of this will be placed well inside of a kind of children’s book Anna will one day create, except that it’s not really a book just for children. It’s a book for everyone. For families. Animal lovers. Perhaps for wanderers of all forms. It will be called Rocky: A Dog’s Dream of Home and will be be hand-drawn, handwritten. It will be an idea borne out of love, for her little constant companion, but also out of frustration, for just how discriminatory the vast majority of apartment complexes in Los Angeles are against pets, and especially against dogs. So she will write this whimsical, beautiful book about a struggling artist and her funny little dog traipsing around L.A. and looking for the simplest things: a place to live, a decent street to walk on, to smell some flowers, to pee, to breathe a little air. And her son will find this one day among the many things in his mother’s overstuffed apartment, he will open this book and smile, will laugh.
He will then come to his mother, very dramatically, and tell her it’s the best thing she’s ever created, and she will just laugh at this enthusiasm, say no no, there were problems with it. And he will say no no, it’s perfect, just perfect, and that just as they both talked of how Julian Schnabel must have been placed on this earth not for his paintings but so he could create that movie about Van Gogh, the marvelous At Eternity’s Gate which is the film they’re now watching again and again — yes, just like that, Mom, I’m pretty sure you were placed here so you could write that book, about you and Rocky. And again she will laugh. It’s a book she never published. That she gave up on. Put away in that same plastic bin in the other room along with two other unpublished books — yes, that Polish writer from Santa Monica was right: this woman did end up having material for three books, not one. But she’s now asking her son to please, please don’t ever read the third book; it’s total crap. And he’s the one laughing now, but saying also OK, OK Mom, but the Rocky book, it needs to be seen. I’ll get it published one day, even if I have to do it myself.
~~~
One day.
One day is what we always tell ourselves.
~~~
One day, the son will try writing a book too. About going to Poland and becoming obsessed with a book — not Catcher, no no, but this will be about a book he finds on some other trip to Poland years later, and how this accident opens up into coincidences of all kinds, into conversations with his grandmother about their family history. And about art.
The writer who first sets all of this in motion, really, is the old Polish author named Tadeusz Konwicki. He’s the one who long ago writes the book Jan eventually finds — Jan who by now has decided to drop Jas or Josh for his actual, given name — and this Jan becomes obsessed with this old author’s words, his stories, with the energy between his pages and also by those coincidences he keeps finding. Among them, he comes eventually to a page of another of Konwicki’s books where the author writes of a time when another Polish writer who’d once emigrated to the U.S. returns to Poland for a brief trip. And of how Konwicki is tasked to show this writer a good time while he’s in Warsaw, and of how they move about the city one night, filled with drink. He calls this writer Jan K. from Stony Brook, which is the American university where this writer sometimes teaches, and this coincidence leads Jan G., who is now reading this, to call up his mother on the phone, long distance, to confirm that this Jan K. is the same one she once took care of by the ocean.
Yes, yes that’s him, she says. And now her son, in Poland, puts his mother on speaker phone and records the rest of this conversation with a tape recorder. And he finds this moment a little poetic — because she’s the one who first bought him a tape recorder, years ago. Yes, back then, back when he first mentioned any notion of being a writer, a journalist, someone who wanted to find out about other people; back when he first uttered this idea and his father called it “pie in the sky”, his mother went out out and spent some of her survival-job money on a recorder and two batteries, giving this to him as a present. It remains the best present he’s ever received.
The conversation on this particular tape, with his mother’s voice on it, will contain this:
“No, I didn’t have a full grasp of who he was. I thought he was just writing about Shakespeare, and that was amazing, because I never understood Shakespeare. But the things he did besides that — I would have talked to him more, there is so much stuff we could have talked about, not just stupid stuff. But he liked stupid stuff, so he preferred talking about me, my dog, things like that. But I missed out. I could have talked to him about so much more.
“I was hired for this job by his assistant, a Polish woman. I got it because I knew Joanna. Do you remember Joanna? A beautiful Polish artist, she always had these kinds of jobs too and she knew me, so she told me about this one. It was nothing, really. Just light caregiving. He was continent, he would go to the bathroom, so then, that’s just basic caregiving — me giving him food and whatever, talking to him, helping him go from chair to chair, to his bed, that kind of thing. There was this nice view of the ocean, and it was a nice neighborhood. The best was when he was talking about his trips to Japan, or to Tibet. He used to travel a lot so there were these fragments of really interesting travels.
“I remember he always said, ‘There are no returns.’ Because I asked him once, ‘Did you regret not going back to Poland, like Milosz did?’ And he would say again, ’There are no returns.’ And I would say, ‘But why?’ But then he would just say something small and quick and that would be it, and here he said, ‘There are no returns.’
“Some days, when he was feeling better, we would drive in my car. I would take him to the Marina, and we would just sit there in the car looking at the sailboats, you know, going in and out. And you know, I was keeping Rocky in the car, because I had no choice. And he liked Rocky, and Rocky liked him. We would sit in the car, looking at the boats, and Rocky would lick his face and he would say, ‘Well, I’m going to die soon, anyway.’
‘And you remember what I told you, that I showed him your writing? It was an article or something you’d written in school, I don’t remember what it was exactly, but he read it and said, ‘Oh, he’s a genius.’ … No, no, no, he wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t lie just to flatter me or something. He was very honest. Oh. He loved the sunsets, watching them through the window. And he really was very sensitive to nature. I always had Rocky in the car, and I would go, ‘OK, I have to go walk him now,’ and he would even go out with us once in awhile. It was his assistant that wouldn’t let Rocky come into the apartment, but he liked Rocky, and I really liked that. …
“The painting? Well, he had it right by his bed, on the right side of his bed. Later, after he died, it was shipped to Poland, in some kind of diplomatic plane. I have a catalogue of this exhibit they had for him in Torun, and the painting was there. I have this catalogue. It was a very minimal painting. He liked it because it was, like, sort of Japanese in style. He paid me $1200 for it, he was very generous, and then it was always on the right side of his bed.
“You know, I even wrote a poem about him. I remember doing that. It was so sad, watching someone dying who is still holding onto life and is unfortunately not very spiritual, so he’s dying without hope. I’m not sure if he was scared, but he probably was, and that’s probably why he didn’t let me sleep at night. He was scared, probably. …
“You know, he was so observant. He once said to me, ‘You know, you have a great talent but you have a problem with concentrating, with focus, you don’t have focus. And how great was that observation! See? So he could really summarize a person well. So he knew how to observe, he said this before I ever analyzed myself and then realized that I really am like this, that I have this ADD, it really is a big problem and always was, but he saw it first. It made me think, ‘Oh, I think he knows something about me. Really.’
“He had a great eye for art, because for someone to appreciate this painting, you really have to have a keen eye, a trained eye, to choose this particular one. So he was not an average person, no. …
“This painting, no, I don’t know now. I know it was sent there to the Archiwum Emigracji in Torun for this exhibition. I have the catalogue. Hold on, I’m looking for it. Oh. Here. No, there is no contact, I don’t see any phone number listed here. …
“Yes, yes, I’ll find this poem somewhere. I’ll look for it. I’ll e-mail it to you.”
~~~
One day, Jan G. will travel by train from Warsaw to the medieval town of Torun, and he will find the Archives of Polish Emigration, a kind of museum holding the works and mementos of famous Poles who emigrated abroad. He will find his mother’s painting there, recognizing her mother’s style and strokes from far away, from through a window even before he goes inside and gets close enough to read the signature there, Gajewska 2000, on the corner. This painting remains a part of the held collection of Jan K., the writer and theater critic. It’s kept among some of his writings and valuables because he cherished it. Because he hung it up near his bed as he was nearing death, and when he looked over at it, it gave him calm. Calm enough, sometimes even, to sleep.
~~~
WINDOW IN THE RAIN
I sit by the dying man
His body dry from the pain
It is wet outside, the ocean's rain
Makes veins on the window
The sound of breathing
From the oxygen pump
The man used to write about theater
Now is the final act
Nobody is talking
Just listening
Just looking
The water veins still alive on the window
The oxygen breathing from the pump
Ocean's rain
~~~
One day, she will be the one in bed, struggling often to sleep. She will have her own oxygen tank, except that it’s still dormant downstairs, still unnecessary. But on the bed beside her, there will be a book. It’s called Lustro, and it’s written by that Jan K. she once took care of.
In Polish, Lustro is the word for Mirror. On the dedication page, in memory of his sister, Jan K. writes in Polish, I’m reflected in the mirror, but I cannot touch it. The book is published in the year 2000.
~~~
One day, this same summer day in the year 2023, the mother will finally be convinced by her son to go outside, to breathe some fresh air. They go just down to the patio downstairs. After all it’s evening now, and there is this break in the heat, there is still this cloud. Only now the cloud has stretched, it’s bigger, it’s a mix of white and blue and gray, with the sun just now beginning to make a final dip somewhere there behind — behind the cloud and their patio walls, behind the leaves of a little tree that grows out of the sidewalk just on the other side of the wall, yet with two branches dipping down into the patio, as if to eavesdrop on conversations here. And now the tree hears this:
How can anyone not believe in God, the mother says, looking at all this. A breeze comes through, and the son makes a comment about how this is his favorite sound, a little wind through leaves, and the mother says, “I got lucky. I’m the lucky one here. I have the trees.”
She means the one here, dipping down into her patio, as well as the little palm on the other side of her apartment, the one planted by her front door and with leaves up above that brush up against her second-floor window.
When she’d looked past those leaves in the morning, she’d been right: this was going to be a good day. There was a cloud there. And here it is, still. And it will go from this blue-gray to orange to even pink, will stretch on a bit further, like a smear on a fragment of canvas.
And they will enjoy it together, mother and son, watching this from within these walls, from below suspended lines, and the mother will lean further back, will feel the wind and be the one to eavesdrop now on the leaves. She closes her eyes and keeps them closed for a while longer. Nobody is talking. Just listening. Feeling. Breathing.
Archives of Polish Emigration, Copernicus University, Torun.
Poems and paintings by Anna Gajewska
