The mountains all gone sideways.
* * *
—
Now to the song, a few months in, in the evening, in the guesthouse.
The moon against the glass.
The date was her father’s birthday.
In the East, name days were given more significance back then, but out of country, you felt things harder. She’d let it slip, to one of the women.
They had no wódka, but there was always plenty of schnapps in that place, and a tray came out with glasse
s. When they were handed around, the owner held his own glass up, and looked at Penelope, in the parlor. A good dozen or so people were there, and when she heard the words, in her own language, “To your father,” she looked up, she smiled, and it was all to keep herself together.
At that moment, another man stood.
Of course it was Tadek, and he started, very sadly—and beautifully—to sing:
“Sto lat, sto lat,
niech zyje, zyje nam.
Sto lat, sto lat,
niech zyje, zyje nam…”
It was all too much now.
Since the early days of her phone call it had been storing up, and she couldn’t hold it any longer. Penelope stood and sang, but inside her, something collapsed. She sang her country’s song of luck and companionship and wondered how she’d left him. The words came in great surges of love and self-loathing, and when it was over, many of them wept. They wondered if they’d see their families again; should they be grateful or condemned? The only thing they knew for sure was that now it was out of their hands. It was begun and had to end.
As a side note, the opening words from that song are these:
A hundred years, a hundred years,
May you live one hundred years.
As she sang, she knew, he wouldn’t.
She would never see him again.
* * *
—
For Penelope, it was hard not to relive that feeling, and become it, in all her remaining time there, especially living in such ease.
Everyone treated her so well.
They liked her—her quietness, her polite uncertainty—and they referred to her now as the Birthday Girl, mostly behind her, and at the sides. Every now and then, the men, especially, would say it directly, in various tongues, when she cleaned up, or did the laundry, or tightened the shoelace of a child.
“Dzieki, Jubilatko.”
“Vielen Dank, Geburtstagskind.”
“Dekuji, Oslavenkyne…”