Other Parts of the Universe

Monika Zaleska

Magdalena arrived in London on a tourist visa thanks to a person she had never met, an émigré friend of her English tutor who had agreed to write her a letter of invitation for the summer, the only way to leave Poland for a trip to the West.

“You understand the letter is just to get you over there,” her tutor had explained months earlier over tea—one long hand stirring in the sugar, diamond ring glistening. “You’ll have to find a job and a place to stay. But money will be worth it.” 

“You have to think ahead,” the English tutor continued, brushing a loose gray hair off her face, a gesture she repeated each week during their lessons. “University may be free, but there’s rent and books for the fall term. And you’ll have to feed yourself.” 

“I may not even get in,” Magdalena reminded her.

Magdalena took the university entrance exam just days before leaving, but the results wouldn’t be posted for several weeks. She kissed her mother at their train stop, nothing more than a concrete platform in the middle of a wheat field. She thought of the many times her father had picked her up there, from journeys that went no further than the town center, just a hundred kilometers west of the Soviet border. If it was warm, they would walk home along the well-worn path. If it snowed, he would come with the car and his good-smelling leather jacket and they would drive the long way, the world outside flat and white as good paper. Until arriving in London, she hadn’t known there were places where the sky was blacked out by city light, where you didn’t have a view of the other parts of the universe.

She found a job at a hotel where the manager took one look at her tourist visa and winked, knowing that he was hiring her illegally, and for almost nothing. The hotel was small and cheap, full of men with filthy boots and black cigars,  making everything dirty as soon as it was cleaned. Besides Magdalena, there were two Hungarian girls and a Ukrainian named Kateryna, who had a thick braid she could sit on. The four of them wore uniforms of cotton pinafores and oxford shoes. Magdalena was their de-facto leader, as she spoke the most English, asking for their extra days off, extended curfews on Friday nights, and on a few occasions, a little advance pay to send back home. The manager, a small man with a rough mouth, liked to have fun with the girls, offsetting his little favors with early morning window washings or midnight street sweepings in front of the rowdy nightclub crowd. On her days off, Magdalena walked everywhere, toward neighborhoods where women wore boots above the knee and slick men smoked candy-colored cigarettes. She ate fish and chips wrapped in yesterday’s paper, soaked in vinegar that smelled of the sea. Unable to afford Oxford Street or even Portobello, Magdalena frequented charity shops. She didn’t buy much, consciously saving up for school, a sundress for a day in Brighton, a pair of cheap tennis shoes for walking, and then one day, the novel.

That day she had gotten lost on her way back to the hotel and found a used bookshop. She had never seen so many titles in English before, some of them brand new and others coated in a fine fur of dust. She scanned them until her eye caught the spine of an acid green volume with no jacket. Tomaszewski. It was her own last name. She pulled the book out and turned to the author’s page. Piotr Tomaszewski was a Polish writer who emigrated during the interwar period. Though his correspondences were written in his native tongue, his fiction was always composed in English. She had never heard of him before. She bought the novel on a whim and then walked through a little park, the city rising up above her. To be in the middle of all that motion, black cabs and changing street lights, and yet for it to be quiet, there was something aberrant and delicious about it, like standing in the eye of a storm. 

Afterward, in the room that she shared with the three other maids, she was dismayed to learn that she could only understand fragments of the novel’s trailing sentences. It was a feeling that struck her over and over—the fear that the English she had studied all those years in preparation for some unknowable future moment —was some kind of simulacrum. If she hadn’t scored high enough on the entrance exam, she would have to wait another year to reapply to the Institute of English Studies, a year in which she might find work, fall in love, or accept what felt like the smallness of her life thus far, and the thought that it might go on and on like that, without expanding or taking off, made her feel like a train forever stopped at its last station. One of Magdalena’s friends was getting married in the summer, others were preparing for jobs at the shoe factory or for weekend courses that they could take while working. Suddenly she missed the orderly corridors of their high school lives.

She stayed up nights with the novel, a scarf thrown over her lamp to dim the light. She had a small dictionary and read with it by her side, sometimes looking up ten or fifteen words per page. She took notes on the margin with a pencil, stopping every now and then to stretch her tired arms. It was an English she had never encountered before, neither the dull commands of her exercise manual nor the drawing room talk of old novels. It was modern, fresh. A young writer away from his homeland, a life in pubs and on the streets, filled with characters smart and sad as Chekhov’s. Moreover, it was a language she was choosing to learn for herself, murky and intimate, full of her own misunderstandings. She wondered about the writer—why had he chosen to leave? How did a person make a choice like that, to quit one country for another, forever?

One hot morning, the manager called them into the alley behind the hotel kitchen. Trash bags leaned against the dumpster, their mouths gaping with refuse and lost socks gathered from under beds. The manager explained that he wanted the girls to take turns climbing into the dumpster and crushing the bags down so that more would fit. The two Hungarians started whispering to each other. Kateryna turned to Magdalena and, in the mixture of Polish and Ukrainian they had been using all summer, asked her to explain. He repeated himself, hopping up and down as though he were making wine like a Greek. 

“With our foot?” Kateryna asked in English.

“Yes, with your pretty foots,” the manager said.

Magdalena turned to Kateryna and said, “Nie, nie możemy. What he wants us to do, it’s demeaning. It’s unsanitary.” Kateryna began fiddling with her braid. Magdalena turned to the Hungarians and said, in English, “This crosses the line.” They hesitated, but when Magdalena gestured that she would take the blame, the trash was left as usual. Her hope was that the manager’s mood would change, as it often did, and that he would forget the whole thing. But the next day, as they hauled the heavy bags out into the alley, he appeared.

“Who wants the first dance?” 

Magdalena felt the three girls step into her shadow, starched aprons touching.

“Come on now.”

“We cannot,” Magdalena said, in her best British accent. 

“You cannot?” The manager mimicked, his voice sliding up an octave.

“We have been working here for weeks,” Magdalena said. “And we never do this.”

He took three slow steps until his nose was level with Magdalena’s chin.

“It’s the same thing every summer,” he said. “A few weeks of London living and you forget how lucky you are to be here, making good money. That’s what they teach you over there, that life’s free?”

The three maids looked at Magdalena, but her English failed her. With his sharp words it had faded back into a blurred thing, a mass of letters and sounds that could offer no protest. She thought of her parents’ fronting the money for London despite their better judgment. Her mother taking on work at the radio plant, when she wanted to be in the garden, pruning the fruit trees. But she didn’t have the words to speak.

So she let the Hungarians lift her over the brim. Under her shoes, the bags crackled, expanding and deflating as if alive and breathing. Her nose filled up with familiar smells. Coffee. Overripe fruit. Then she stomped harder and a new smell rose up from the bottom, rotting and saccharine, like something soft and dead. Heat rose up and sweat pooled at the snug waist of her apron. She thought of Tomaszewski’s novel, about loitering in London alleyways just like this one, waiting for a girl, getting wasted. “This, too, is an adventure,” Magdalena reminded herself. Smoothing sheets until the coarse cotton rubbed her fingertips raw and avoiding guests at the hotel bar. The one who followed Kateryna upstairs and pounded on their door, the four of them slipping a chair under the knob and standing still in their nightgowns, listening. Magdalena gripped the brick wall of the hotel for balance.

The manager watched each of them have a turn, his limp frame relaxing into the kitchen doorway. As Kateryna pulled the carrot peelings off the bottom of her oxfords, Magdalena imagined a hinge big enough to crush him whole. He looked up, met her gaze, and looked shocked by the anger he saw on her face.

Perhaps that was why, returning from a break, she found her own tired suitcase in the lobby. On the front desk was a letter from home. She had just picked it up when he came over and took her by the elbow.

“Fun’s over, love,” the manager said, dragging her to the guest entrance. “Don’t need a revolutionary taking out the bins.”

Then, she was out on the sidewalk and someone was whispering her name from the side alley. It was Kateryna, holding the rolled-up sock where Magdalena kept her summer money. She had grabbed it just as the manager came upstairs to throw all Magdalena’s things into the suitcase. Everything, she realized later, except the Tomaszewski novel. She hugged Kateryna and told her to say goodbye to the Hungarians, who wouldn’t risk being seen with her.

Magdalena picked up her things and walked a long way from the hotel before remembering the letter in her hand. It was her mother with news from the Institute. She was in.