The Unmade World: A Novel

The Unmade World

Steve Yarbrough

Unbridled Books

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events,

or locales is entirely coincidental.

Unbridled Books

Copyright © 2018 by Steve Yarbrough

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yarbrough, Steve, 1956- author.

Title: The unmade world : a novel / Steve Yarbrough.

Description: Lakewood, CO : Unbridled Books, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2017034089| ISBN 9781609531430 (softcover) | ISBN

9781609531447 (e-isbn)

Subjects: LCSH: Life change events--Fiction. | Grief--Fiction. |

Guilt--Fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3575.A717 U56 2018 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034089

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Book Design by SH • CV

First Printing

For Jill McCorkle

I have been so dislanguaged by what happened

I cannot speak the words that somewhere you

Maybe were speaking to others where you went.

Maybe they walk together where they are,

Restlessly wandering, along the shore

Waiting for a way to cross the river.

David Ferry

CHRISTMAS IN KRAKOW - 2006

You’re lucky I love Ella Fitzgerald, his daughter says. She’s standing on the chair he brought in from the kitchen, and she’s just positioned the angel atop the tree. They bought that ornament this morning at a stall in the enormous Cloth Hall, which dominates the market square, and they bought the tree yesterday outside Galeria Krakowska, and then he dragged it ten blocks through the snow and up five flights of stairs. He was still jet-lagged, and though he goes to the gym twice a week and is in decent shape, he had to pause on each landing. Somewhere between the third and fourth floors, in the offhanded manner in which the most contented among us entertain such notions, he realized that his wife, who’d grown up here with her brother, had been right a few years back, warning that one day he’d wish they’d swapped it for a flat in a building with an elevator. He doesn’t have that many regrets, but the lack of a lift may become one.

Anna cocks her head, looks hard at the angel, then reaches out and makes an adjustment. We’ve listened to this same CD three times since we started decorating. Did you realize that?

It’s a short disc.

Not that short.

And it’s the greatest ballad album ever recorded.

She tosses her blonde bangs. One could argue.

If one did, what might one propose as an alternative?

"Dexter Gordon’s Ballads. Clifford Brown with Strings. The Intimate Ellington. Alternatives do exist."

He’s having fun. He always looks forward to decorating the tree with her, but never more so than this year. They flew six thousand miles for the pleasure. We started with Ella, he says, so we’re staying with her. It’s important to maintain continuity when doing something as momentous as decorating your first Polish Christmas tree.

This tree came from Norway.

How do you know?

The sign above the booth where you paid for it said, ‘Norwegian Wood.’

I didn’t see that.

You weren’t looking. She puts out her hand, sticky from sap. I’m finished, she says. Help me down. I’m too mature now to jump.

He opens his arms. She steps into them, and as he lowers her to the floor, he gets a whiff of the scent she started wearing back in October after developing a crush on a kid who sits beside her in the string ensemble. She’s no longer a child. She has breasts, for Christ’s sake. What do you weigh these days? he wonders aloud.

I would’ve hoped that by now you’d know not to ask a person of the feminine persuasion such a question. But I’ll answer it anyway: a hundred and eight pounds, give or take an ounce. Gently, she pokes his stomach. What do you weigh?

About a hundred and five kilos.

Like many musicians, she’s also a proficient mathematician. "In other words, two hundred and thirty freaking pounds? Truly?"

It sounds a lot better in kilos.

You need to take it easy on the pierogi, Dad. Not to mention the goose-liver pâté.

A shade over six three, he’s got broad shoulders that suggest he might have made a good linebacker in his youth, though the only competitive sport he ever played was baseball. He can carry a good bit of weight. Yet he can’t deny that not long ago he had to let his belt out. He’s been eating and drinking a little more than he should. The last few months have not exactly been stress-free.

He covers Central California for the Los Angeles Times. He’s held that job for more than two decades, the only break coming seventeen years ago, when his Polish fluency brought him here to report on the revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe. Back in September, the Times’s publisher was ousted after protesting cuts proposed by the parent company. Then just last month, his editor-in-chief, a close personal friend, had also been forced out. What do you do if you can no longer do what you’ve done your entire adult life? Until recently, he hadn’t thought he’d ever have to ask himself that question. Even now, he’s not overly concerned. Still, when they return to Fresno in January, he’ll send out a few feelers, just to stay on the safe side.

Julia Mirecka Brennan:

she’s forty-six, a year younger than he is in December of 2006, her hair as dark as their daughter’s is light. Her eyes are large, brown, and mildly convex, and they often roll out of focus when she’s on top of him and an orgasm ripples through her. During their years together, she’s taught Richard a great many things, one of which is to walk on her left, cantering along beside her like her personal Saint Bernard. If she decides to make a left turn, either to go around a corner or enter a shop where something has captured her attention, she drops her shoulder and nudges him in the proper direction. The single time he remarked upon it, she said, What’s a person my size to do when walking with someone like you? He told her she could just say, Hey, let’s go in there, or "Why don’t we walk down that street?" She responded that she liked how her approach was working, and he abandoned his inquiry because, basically, he did too.

Back in the ’80s, when the country was under martial law, she had carried an extra toothbrush everywhere she went in case joining a demonstration led to her arrest. She has never been fainthearted, nor has she ever been one to conceal her opinions. There’s a particular way her mouth twists when she thinks you’re full of shit. He doesn’t see that expression very often these days, but it’s definitely on display when she steps into the flat this evening, her cap and the shoulders of her sheepskin dusted with snow, and spots him and Anna standing there in the darkened living room, admiring the brightly lit tree, neither of them dressed for dinner. He’s wearing slippers and an ancient pair of red Boston University warm-ups.

Does either of you have the slightest idea what time it is? she asks. She sets her shopping bag down in the hallway, then shrugs out of her coat.

He and Anna exchange glances. They had promised to be ready at a quarter till seven, and he knows it’s at least six-thirty now. I don’t, he says.

Me either, says Anna.

Julia lays her scarf aside, then bends to remove her boots. It’s six forty. The reservation’s for seven thirty. You two are both hopeless.

But what about our tree? Anna asks.

Her mother pulls the boots off, stands them on the mat, then walks into the living room for a closer look. They await her assessment, pretending that it matters, even though all three of them know that this annual festive act belongs to him and Anna.

The tree, she finally concedes, is not hopeless. Unlike both of you, it appears to have a bright future, if only a very short one.

The Car 

is a ’79 Mercedes diesel that they bought several summers ago. For much of each year it rests under a tarp. Until yesterday, he’d never driven it in cold weather. Mostly white, it features a beige rear quarter panel from a salvage shop and is missing its back bumper. The upholstery is a fungal shade of green, and at some point in the distant past, somebody had deemed the dashboard lighter the perfect tool for artistic expression, using it on the front passenger seat to burn little rings in the vinyl arranged to spell the name Klaus. Mercedes or not, it’s a wreck, but it runs and is that rare European vehicle with an automatic transmission. He hates stick shifts. Truth be known, he can’t drive one.

Julia and Anna climb in while he brushes snow off the windshield and the back glass. Five or six inches have fallen. It’s coming down pretty hard now, but the forecast calls for it to quit by eight or nine o’clock.

He starts the car and pulls away from the curb, heading toward the Old Town. While he drives, Julia calls Monika, and from the conversation, he can tell that Stefan is still in the shower and that they’ll be late too, something you can generally bank on. He thinks the world of his brother-in-law, but if he had to hold a real job, his life would be ruined. Fortunately, he doesn’t need one. He’s a successful crime novelist, his work published in more than thirty countries.

In Krakow, with the exception of approved vehicles, automobiles are banned in the Old Town. So they have to go around it rather than driving straight through. Traffic is surprisingly heavy. Everybody must be doing last-minute shopping. Stores will be open again tomorrow—Saturday—but virtually everything will remain closed on Sunday for Christmas Eve. He finds the country’s transformation into a consumer culture both exhilarating and disquieting. Sometimes it seems that the profusion of color and the proliferation of choices have come at the cost of clarity.

We’re going to be pretty late, he says. You better call the restaurant. The reservation’s in my name. Ask for Mustafa and tell him who you are.

Who am I?

"The wife of the guy who wrote an article about his establishment for the L.A. Times. If Brad Pitt ever eats there, it’ll be because of me."

She pulls out her cell, and from memory he rattles off the number. It used to amaze her that he could recall such minutiae, but she long ago accepted it as a by-product of his profession.

While she’s on the phone, they pass the café where they met. It’s called Bunkier and is attached to an art gallery that represents the purest example of Brutalist architecture in the city. Open to the air in warm weather, it’s presently protected from the elements by clear plastic drop panels. The heaters must be turned up pretty high. Icicles hang from the eaves, and steam is rising off the roof. He’s promised Anna they’ll stop by for dessert tomorrow afternoon. They’ve logged many an hour beneath that canopy, whenever possible sitting at the table where he met her mom, whom he’d gone to interview for an article about women in the Solidarity movement. A couple of summers ago, while they waited there for their order, Anna rapped the tabletop. So, she said, drawing the syllable out, this is where the idea that resulted in me began to get a little traction. Right? She told him later that he looked like a figure in a Renoir, with a scarlet splotch on each cheek.

Julia ends the call. They’ll hold our reservation, she says. Your friend Mustafa’s exact words were ‘Please inform refulgent Mr. Richard that upon arrival he will receive supreme justice.’ If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d think he was threatening to execute you.

You probably should’ve spoken English to him.

Why? Is his English better?

No, but it’s considerably less florid.

They cross the Vistula, then start west on Monte Cassino. Once they reach the outskirts, traffic begins to thin. Before long, they’re traveling through the countryside on a two-lane highway. A lot of the nouveau riche have built villas along this route, many of them with four or even five stories. Interspersed among these new constructions are traditional Polish farmhouses.

Twenty kilometers from the city, he slows down. They turn onto the narrow blacktop and drive up the hill, where they finally see the sign. He takes a left onto an even narrower road and drives another half kilometer, and they find themselves in the snowy parking lot.

The popular dining spot is housed in a pseudo-alpine castle built by the Nazis, originally as a vacation site for Luftwaffe pilots. By the end of the war it had become a Wehrmacht hospital, and under the Communists it had served as the Institute of Forestry. Now it belongs to a wealthy Kurdish family who fled Saddam in the ’90s, then bought and remodeled the rundown structure and established a Polish-Kurdish restaurant. The idea was disjunctive enough to make it wildly appealing, which explains why even on a night like this, the parking lot is jammed. He eventually locates a place between a Maserati and a Land Rover, the latter displaying a Croatian license plate. Someone else has come a long way for dinner.

Bogdan Baranowski is sitting on one of the checkout counters in the dimly lit grocery, watching it snow. The store occupies the ground floor of a dingy gray block that was purchased eighteen months ago by a young developer. So far he’s succeeded in evicting over half the tenants from their flats. He plans to renovate the property and turn it into luxury condos.

Around a quarter past eight, a silver BMW pulls up to the curb and blinks its lights three times. At first, Bogdan can’t believe it, so he doesn’t move. Fifteen or twenty seconds pass. Then the lights blink again. "O Jezu, he says. Matko boska."

He reaches under the counter and grabs the sack of kielbasa. Then he puts on his coat and sticks his hand in the pocket to make sure the balaclava is still there. It’s black and made of wool and has holes for the eyes and mouth. When he tried it on in the bathroom, he immediately began to itch. He’s always been allergic to wool, but this was the only one he could find. In the mirror he looked like a Chechen terrorist.

He steps outside, locks the front doors, lowers the security grating, and locks it too. Then he walks over to the gleaming sedan and opens the door. Is this your brother-in-law’s car? he asks, lowering himself into the passenger seat.

Marek grins, his teeth white and perfect. Unlike Bogdan, he still has a head full of dark hair only slightly shorter than it was in his teens. Nice, huh?

Bogdan reaches for the door but hears a faint whooshing sound as it slowly closes itself. Did you tell him what you planned to do? he asks. If you did, admit it right now, and I’ll get out. I’ll probably get out anyway.

Marek throws the car into gear and pulls away from the curb. Of course not. They flew to London to spend Christmas with their son and his family and asked me to feed their cats. I borrowed it for the evening. His wife’s brother launched a small brewery around the time he and Bogdan founded their grocery chain. Five years ago Heineken bought it. Now his brother-in-law has a big house here, a smaller one in Zakopane, and a BMW.

It does happen. It just doesn’t happen to Bogdan. What model is this? he asks.

Seven sixty something. Under the hood, there’s a V-12. If we need speed, we’ve got it. But we won’t need it.

How many of these cars do you suppose there are in the whole country?

"More than you’d ever guess."

The emphasis doesn’t pass unnoticed. Despite everything that’s gone wrong for both of them, Marek has maintained his sunny outlook. He’s been like that as long as Bogdan has known him, all the way back to elementary school. He’s enough of a realist to admit he’s never had a truly great idea but too much of an optimist not to think he’ll have one eventually.

As a rule, Bogdan finds perpetual good cheer grating. But lately, the presence of a hopeful friend, no matter how deluded, may be the only thing stopping him from walking into the frozen-food locker, lying down, and closing his eyes. The truth, which he’s incapable of admitting, is that he needs Marek. Almost everybody needs a Marek, if only to resent his existence.

Since we’re stealing your brother-in-law’s car, he grumbles, why don’t we go over to their house and rob them instead of some stranger?

Their business losses can be traced to the arrival of heavyweight Western retailers like Carrefour and Tesco, with huge inventories and cutthroat prices. They owned four stores in ’99, three in 2003, two in 2005. Now they’re down to one, with a rent payment due on January 15 that they lack the funds for. They’re in trouble with their suppliers too.

In all fairness, he and Marek aren’t complete fools. Both of them have been to Western Europe, and Marek once visited relatives in the U.S. When they first started out, they knew what Western supermarkets looked like: bright colors splashed everywhere; countless versions of the same product, all packaged differently and positioned at various price points, the label on each item fronted with military precision; aisles as broad as the Champs-Elysées so shoppers can roll their carts past one another without toppling floor displays. They understood what was coming and believed they could counter it. They took over formerly state-run shops and made few if any cosmetic changes. They offered Polish products, kept prices low, and retained the employees who’d worked in the stores when they were owned by the state. This last practice produced the first hiccups.

In a country where nearly everything belonged to the government and nearly everybody viewed it as corrupt, cheating was tolerated. Bogdan never did it, but back when he managed the warehouse, he knew that the guys who loaded and unloaded produce took a little bit home. A few apples here, a few pears there. As long as it didn’t get out of hand, he looked the other way.

The people who worked the checkout stands in the first stores he and Marek opened were mostly women in their forties and fifties. They’d learned the appropriate survival tactics. Initially, they skimmed a few zlotys from the cash registers, but he put a stop to that by switching the drawers out several times a day. So they began overcharging the customers or shortchanging them, and complaints escalated. Finally, he called a meeting. Listen, he told them, things aren’t like they used to be. You just can’t keep cheating our customers. It has to stop.

A woman who reminded him of his grandmother asked, "Why do you care? It’s not your money."

If you steal from the customers, they’ll quit shopping here. They’ll go someplace where they don’t get cheated. It’s really pretty simple. Even as he made the statement, he knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t simple for her, and it wasn’t simple for lots of others. The world was changing faster than they could. Once people accept the notion that an old car ought to cost more than a new one because the old one is readily available but you can acquire the new one only by paying up front, putting your name on a list, and waiting ten years, it’s hard to sell them the opposite reality. If you’ve lived your whole life upside down, living right-side up is like walking on the ceiling.

I don’t want to work here anymore, the woman said. He realized tears were on the way, and he prayed they wouldn’t flow right there in front of him and the other employees. She pulled her apron off, flung it on the counter, grabbed her coat, and walked out. He stayed awake a long time that night, drinking vodka and feeling like a predator. Now he’s become prey himself. And by this time tomorrow, if he’s not dead, he’ll be a thief as well.

Marek hangs a left, bound for the Grunwald Bridge. The snow is falling harder, in defiance of the forecast. You know how this guy we’re about to pay a visit to got started? he asks.

How?

Summer of ’90, he begins hanging around the Auschwitz train station. This is before you had all those fancy tour buses ferrying visitors around from one concentration camp to another, giving them the Zyklon B tour. When he sees some Americans waiting on the platform for a train to Krakow, he ambles over and tells ’em the train’ll take nearly three hours, that the bathrooms are filthy and smelly and there’s no soap or toilet paper, and then he offers to deliver them in under an hour for fifty dollars. You know how impatient and finicky Americans are. A couple of times a day, all summer long, somebody accepts his offer. He converts the dollars on the black market, and come September he’s got enough to start his construction business. Next thing you know, he’s the go-to guy if you’ve made a bundle and want to build your own private swimming pool.

They’re crossing the Vistula. Right in the middle there’s a sheet of ice, though the water’s still flowing on either side. How rich can you get, Bogdan asks, building private swimming pools in Poland?

Did it ever occur to you that if you’ve got enough money and a big enough house, you can put the swimming pool inside? With a gloved finger Marek thumps the steering wheel. He can only stomach so much defeatism. Even if you think the world is shit, why not call it manure? It leaves a better odor. No, it didn’t, he says, shaking his head. Besides, that’s not all he does.

So what else does he do?

Builds hot tubs, saunas, and heated doghouses. He’s got branches in Warsaw, Gdansk, every major city. By the way, you didn’t forget the kielbasa?

No, I didn’t. Did you get your stuff?

Marek pats his coat pocket. Right here.

I hope you’ve got the dose right.

I guarantee you I do.

I don’t know how you can guarantee that when you’ve never laid eyes on the creature.

The average weight of a German shepherd is thirty to forty kilos, and my cousin says this one’s just regular-sized. To be on the safe side, I’m estimating forty.

The safe side for who? Us or the dog?

We’re people. It’s a member of the animal kingdom. Besides, if it gets a little extra juice, all it’ll do is sleep a bit longer.

Bogdan loves dogs. He’s always loved them. As a boy, he wanted one more than anything, but his father said no. He and Krysia had to put down their chocolate Lab three years ago, and they’ve never gotten another one because they can’t afford to take care of it. He’d rather starve to death than harm a dog. You’re sure about that? he asks.

Totally.

How do you know?

I asked the vet.

"What vet?"

The one who sold it to me.

This is not a good sign. You said you were getting it from a farmer.

I had to say that to keep you from backing out. See? You’re scared now.

"Of course I’m scared. We’re driving around in a snowstorm, in a stolen BMW, on our way to commit a crime. And you’re telling me you bought a controlled substance from a vet . . . and asked his advice about how to tranquilize a guard dog? Stop this car right now. Let me out."

Relax. The vet’s in Rabka.

In the mountains? What were you doing down there?

Going to see the vet.

And telling him what?

When you know Marek Ficowski as well as he does, you can tell when inspiration pays him one of its not infrequent visits. His face, young beyond its years, becomes even more boyish. In the greenish dashboard glow, the corners of his mouth have advanced with wide delight. He looks as happy as he did in fifth grade when they slipped away at recess with a bottle of vodka they’d stolen and drank it behind the wall of the Jewish cemetery. Bogdan got sick that day, and he’s feeling sick right now. This night could end badly. It will end badly. He can all but guarantee it.

"The vet wasn’t really a he, Marek announces. It was a she."

I don’t care if it was a plow horse. What did you tell him, her, or it?

Funny you should mention a plow horse. Because the day I went to see this vet, her foot was in a cast. She’d been trying to vaccinate a horse the night before, and it stepped on her and crushed her instep. I told her I needed to knock my dog out for several hours because we were having our kitchen painted and a couple of years ago he’d bitten a plumber. This poor young woman was in terrific pain, and she just gave me what I needed, no questions asked. She was drugged herself and probably didn’t remember the encounter an hour later. I felt pretty bad for her. I hugged her before I left, and the way she pressed herself against me . . . well, I’ll be honest. If she’d offered to give me a rabies shot, I would’ve seized the chance to drop my drawers. You’ve got to take that first step somehow.

He probably walked into the closest veterinary office, greased the palm of some assistant with access to the medicine cabinet, and walked out with a syringe and a vial of liquid. Bogdan will just have to hope that he didn’t say enough to become memorable. Because the truth is that if they don’t come up with somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand zlotys in the next few days, their last store will go the way of all the others. And then what?

He’s forty-eight years old, with thinning hair and a potbelly. Sometimes in the morning, while they move around the kitchen making their separate breakfasts, he catches Krysia staring at him. She’s quick to look away, but there’s no mistaking her expression. It’s not distaste, it’s not disappointment, it isn’t even pity. It’s astonishment. How can someone who used to do so many things so well suddenly become incapable of doing even one thing right? When they were young, had almost nothing, and were still sleeping on the folding sofa in her parents’ small flat, all he needed to do was lay his hand anywhere on her body—even someplace supposedly nonerogenous like her kneecap—to make her quiver. Now, if he touches her, she stiffens. He can’t even recall the last time they kissed.

Marek turns off the highway, and they soon start to ascend, the road snaking past the occasional brightly lit villa that looks like it must’ve been transported here from Disneyland. When Bogdan was young, his grandmother lived out in this direction, in a two-room farmhouse that she’d once shared with his long-dead grandfather. Though there was always plenty to eat when he visited, Bogdan never quite understood where the food came from. For a while she owned a cow that she milked twice a day, had several chickens, and apparently sold eggs in a nearby village, though that was never talked about. At some point in the early ’50s, as a result of remarks she’d made about the local collective farm, she’d been sent away for reeducation. After that she kept her business to herself. She got by. That was all that mattered.

You ever wonder who lives in these new houses? he asks.

Marek shrugs. Folks like our pool builder. He gets tired of the cold, so he and his young wife fly off to spend Christmas in Fiji. He has imagination. We’ve got imagination too, but so far we haven’t tapped into it. When we get past this next little hurdle, we’re going to have to innovate. Either innovate or deteriorate—that’ll be our new slogan.

The snow falls harder, and they climb higher, finally cresting a big hill and then beginning their descent into a valley. You can see several clusters of lights down there, each one distant from the others, all of them gauzy, as if viewed through a layer of cheesecloth.

Leaning back, Stefan Mirecki pats his stomach. With his wild shock of salt-and-pepper hair and matching beard, he looks strikingly like Jerry Garcia and is, appropriately, a devotee of the Grateful Dead. I just ate a meal, he announces, worthy of a German field marshal. By the way, did you know one of them died upstairs, Rysiu? In ’45, right before our liberators arrived.

Richard is still working on his duck. Roast duck with apples is his go-to dish in Polish restaurants, even one offering the potential for exotic fare. Stefan thinks that since his mother was a Polish immigrant, this must have been his favorite meal growing up and that he orders it in homage. Richard knows this is what his brother-in-law believes because he’s read all his novels. In the most recent, a minor character clearly based on Richard appeared in a couple of scenes. When he ordered his duck, he was assigned a point of view for all of two paragraphs, solely so the reader could learn just how mawkishly sentimental a certain type of Polish American could be. The reality, at least in Richard’s opinion, is more revealing than the fiction. His mother never cooked Polish food. His father, north-of-Boston Irish, doesn’t like much of anything except roast beef, fried cod, lamb stew, and boiled potatoes. Richard never got to eat roast duck until he came here back in ’89, and the first time he had it, he was with Julia. And now she won’t cook it either, because she’s worried about his cholesterol. He orders the goddamn duck because he loves it. That’s why most people choose one dish over another.

I guess I didn’t know that about the field marshal, he says. Which one was it?

His brother-in-law rolls his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling, admiring the inlaid crystals. The Jaziri family spared no expense when it came to renovation. The enormous ivory chandeliers must have cost many an elephant life. Von Hötzendorf, I think.

Stefan has his own personal relationship with truth, and it seldom involves adherence to fact. Right now he’s probably trying out the field marshal business because he likes the atmosphere and is thinking of setting a scene here. Generally, Richard lets these moments glide by, but sometimes he can’t resist calling him out. Von Hötzendorf’s from the First War, he says. He died eight or nine years before Hitler took power.

"Well, then, it must have been some other von," Stefan says cheerfully. He turns to Franek, who’s laboring over his wild boar and hasn’t said