Wheel - a short story from the Polish Rail System
Sosnowiec station from the train
My short tale Wheel was originally published in Ambit in 1999. It was republished in 2021 in the magazine Good Works Review, but even I can't seem to access it online, so here it is, below.
It features in the Good Works Review 2020 anthology, in print and Kindle for $3.99, in company, of course, with a lot of other decent proseists and poets.
The flowers of the counter-revolution all dead, their scent fading with each new moon, I hear fortune at a distance, spinning its wheel. I walk through the streets of the new age among people blinded by things that glitter, afraid to think that one day the gold at the heart of the light won’t come to them.
My grandfather found a pebble of amber in the sand at Łeba, and sat on the dune cliffs looking at the Baltic Sea. He thought of the Prussian knights owning it and all that lay in it, owning the land, the labour of its people, even owning the glare that came in from the horizon.
He turned to the girl next to him, his sweetheart, my grandmother, neither of them knowing about the shabby dynasty they’d create, said, “Much good it did them, in the end.” The knights came again, of course, brought fire and misery, left ruins and ghosts. They didn’t know about that, either, though I once heard grandfather say he’d had a dread feeling all along that the Prussians would be back for their pebble. It sat hidden in plain pride of place in one of those pointless glass cabinets people go in for here. Throughout the Second World War, it was secreted in a cistern, then about grandfather’s person. From the Oświęcim death camp he walked a widower’s walk through the scarred and smoking country back to Warsaw, a city of broken stones, his pebble intact in his pocket.
“A symbol for him of the land,” I asked my father once.
He said, “What?”
“Or of the sea?”
“Eh?”
“Of the nation, the people?”
He said, “How should I know?” He swept a harried hand across his brow. “I can’t even finish the crossword.”
All the same, when he gave me the stone to keep, he said, “Promise you’ll take care of it?” I promised, and he read my mind, and said, “I don’t know why, but you must never lose it.” He had other preoccupations by then, was about to do that widower’s walk to the hospital to pester his last nurse. I held the stone, imagined it as the hard yellow stuff gripping his vital organs, killing him with its riches.
***
I have no riches, no money in the bank. “And I don’t believe capitalism will save us all,” I say to anybody who asks me. I have not much hair and old clothes and a chipped front tooth, a smile that will stay with me like grandfather’s amber. I have a face from before, young people tell me, made to last in these corner-cutting times.
I was a curious child thrown up by times of darkness and the grim mirth of those who sought to better themselves in a system in which all were meant to be equal. I got a life sentence; I will never forget the rituals that made me, church and school and party in a country that didn’t know what it wanted to be.
Out train windows I see that country, mountains, valleys, rivers, cities, towns, the midget houses built over allotments of fertile land on which nothing grows except the ugliest of vegetables, all fixed in time. I see a lit-up Christ over the engine-turning yards at Katowice, His fingers pointing out cattle-trucks slinking by in painful memory. Near Mława I see a line of trees upended, whose topmost branches will grow into the ground in a parody of roots. Giant churches rise out of the land as if rooted there in imitation of the factories and their cooling towers, their gas-burners that light the traveller’s night.
I met the only woman I ever knew on a train-ride made everlasting by the unfathomable logic of communism applied to railways. It was Gliwice to Lublin; she was thin and sickly with a face so pale the light seemed to pause inside it, she was headscarved, in a dowdy coat, and battered shoes, looking for something to eat, somebody to love. In Lublin we bought bruised apples and ate them as we walked, made jokes, laughed and choked. Lublin’s market streets were muddy underfoot and ruined, spoiled fruit stamped into them, wooden slats from broken boxes, an ugly wind blowing us the stench of dead flowers.
We sat on steps, knowing we’d live together and marry, buy a glass-fronted cabinet, and have babies. Life stretched ahead of us, some of its spaces filled in. I thought I ought to warn her that in my family the women we married died young. Instead I asked her name, which turned out to be Iza: Izabela, Catholic name, Gypsy name.
Just as Iza was a sweetheart going begging, Roma children make historic supplicating gestures, offer the sight of borrowed babies; the new era doesn’t seem to be doing them much good. The Roma know that democracy suits them no more than communism ever did, and that persecuted people are just as persecuted under climates of smiley liberalism. People say they have shoes really, that they get them back when they bring home gleaming coins.
The children see my smile, and try to soft-touch me. “You have no heart,” one of them said to me once.
I said to her, “I have plenty of heart, but no money.”
There are easy livings to be made, I know, but somehow when the free market came to me, I didn’t know how to rise to the occasion and make one. Others get rich overnight, if they don’t get caught first. “They must have a secret,” people say, but the simple matter is that they’re dark in the heart with ambition minus talent. I ride the length of this country of ours, see them scattering the new currency behind them, happy to watch, that smile on my face. “I have no gold,” I tell the other rail-riders I meet, young Antipodeans, fresh-faced Scandinavians, haughty Latin girls with matchstick bodies, and at the time in their lives in which our paths cross they’re impressed by this, don’t know that they will one day turn into their parents and have babies and buy cars and glass-fronted cabinets. “Let the others have the gold,” I say, and they back up their agreement with fists punched in the air.
***
The Prussians got the gold, but they didn’t find every piece of it. Heading for Łeba and the sea, I walk my widower’s walk to the station, and am reassured by the glow in the sky of the north. Tomorrow’s a prospect like any other, I remind myself, pregnant with disasters, so I take precautions, pull out grandfather’s pebble and, slowly, carefully, hold it up to the light.
It features in the Good Works Review 2020 anthology, in print and Kindle for $3.99, in company, of course, with a lot of other decent proseists and poets.
The flowers of the counter-revolution all dead, their scent fading with each new moon, I hear fortune at a distance, spinning its wheel. I walk through the streets of the new age among people blinded by things that glitter, afraid to think that one day the gold at the heart of the light won’t come to them.
My grandfather found a pebble of amber in the sand at Łeba, and sat on the dune cliffs looking at the Baltic Sea. He thought of the Prussian knights owning it and all that lay in it, owning the land, the labour of its people, even owning the glare that came in from the horizon.
He turned to the girl next to him, his sweetheart, my grandmother, neither of them knowing about the shabby dynasty they’d create, said, “Much good it did them, in the end.” The knights came again, of course, brought fire and misery, left ruins and ghosts. They didn’t know about that, either, though I once heard grandfather say he’d had a dread feeling all along that the Prussians would be back for their pebble. It sat hidden in plain pride of place in one of those pointless glass cabinets people go in for here. Throughout the Second World War, it was secreted in a cistern, then about grandfather’s person. From the Oświęcim death camp he walked a widower’s walk through the scarred and smoking country back to Warsaw, a city of broken stones, his pebble intact in his pocket.
“A symbol for him of the land,” I asked my father once.
He said, “What?”
“Or of the sea?”
“Eh?”
“Of the nation, the people?”
He said, “How should I know?” He swept a harried hand across his brow. “I can’t even finish the crossword.”
All the same, when he gave me the stone to keep, he said, “Promise you’ll take care of it?” I promised, and he read my mind, and said, “I don’t know why, but you must never lose it.” He had other preoccupations by then, was about to do that widower’s walk to the hospital to pester his last nurse. I held the stone, imagined it as the hard yellow stuff gripping his vital organs, killing him with its riches.
***
I have no riches, no money in the bank. “And I don’t believe capitalism will save us all,” I say to anybody who asks me. I have not much hair and old clothes and a chipped front tooth, a smile that will stay with me like grandfather’s amber. I have a face from before, young people tell me, made to last in these corner-cutting times.
I was a curious child thrown up by times of darkness and the grim mirth of those who sought to better themselves in a system in which all were meant to be equal. I got a life sentence; I will never forget the rituals that made me, church and school and party in a country that didn’t know what it wanted to be.
Out train windows I see that country, mountains, valleys, rivers, cities, towns, the midget houses built over allotments of fertile land on which nothing grows except the ugliest of vegetables, all fixed in time. I see a lit-up Christ over the engine-turning yards at Katowice, His fingers pointing out cattle-trucks slinking by in painful memory. Near Mława I see a line of trees upended, whose topmost branches will grow into the ground in a parody of roots. Giant churches rise out of the land as if rooted there in imitation of the factories and their cooling towers, their gas-burners that light the traveller’s night.
I met the only woman I ever knew on a train-ride made everlasting by the unfathomable logic of communism applied to railways. It was Gliwice to Lublin; she was thin and sickly with a face so pale the light seemed to pause inside it, she was headscarved, in a dowdy coat, and battered shoes, looking for something to eat, somebody to love. In Lublin we bought bruised apples and ate them as we walked, made jokes, laughed and choked. Lublin’s market streets were muddy underfoot and ruined, spoiled fruit stamped into them, wooden slats from broken boxes, an ugly wind blowing us the stench of dead flowers.
We sat on steps, knowing we’d live together and marry, buy a glass-fronted cabinet, and have babies. Life stretched ahead of us, some of its spaces filled in. I thought I ought to warn her that in my family the women we married died young. Instead I asked her name, which turned out to be Iza: Izabela, Catholic name, Gypsy name.
Just as Iza was a sweetheart going begging, Roma children make historic supplicating gestures, offer the sight of borrowed babies; the new era doesn’t seem to be doing them much good. The Roma know that democracy suits them no more than communism ever did, and that persecuted people are just as persecuted under climates of smiley liberalism. People say they have shoes really, that they get them back when they bring home gleaming coins.
The children see my smile, and try to soft-touch me. “You have no heart,” one of them said to me once.
I said to her, “I have plenty of heart, but no money.”
There are easy livings to be made, I know, but somehow when the free market came to me, I didn’t know how to rise to the occasion and make one. Others get rich overnight, if they don’t get caught first. “They must have a secret,” people say, but the simple matter is that they’re dark in the heart with ambition minus talent. I ride the length of this country of ours, see them scattering the new currency behind them, happy to watch, that smile on my face. “I have no gold,” I tell the other rail-riders I meet, young Antipodeans, fresh-faced Scandinavians, haughty Latin girls with matchstick bodies, and at the time in their lives in which our paths cross they’re impressed by this, don’t know that they will one day turn into their parents and have babies and buy cars and glass-fronted cabinets. “Let the others have the gold,” I say, and they back up their agreement with fists punched in the air.
***
The Prussians got the gold, but they didn’t find every piece of it. Heading for Łeba and the sea, I walk my widower’s walk to the station, and am reassured by the glow in the sky of the north. Tomorrow’s a prospect like any other, I remind myself, pregnant with disasters, so I take precautions, pull out grandfather’s pebble and, slowly, carefully, hold it up to the light.
Katowice station, September 2025, neater and tidier than it ever was in the 90s
Very obviously influenced by my 4 years in the Poland of the 1990s, Wheel takes an ambitious look at some of its history and modern realities - the amber trade run by the Prussian knights' medieval mafia, the aftermath of the both the Second World War and communism, told through the eyes of an old traveller. All slotted in to about 1100 words...
In the 1990s, old people were given a free rail pass, and, it was said, may used to just get the train for the hell of it and travel the length of the country simply because they could. I met a few of them, and accosted others who, it turned out, had more or less legitimate but mundane business to be rail-riding - all were interesting to exchange a few words with, or a cigarette or, once, a large, pungent sandwich. I am now older than some of the old fellows I had in mind when I wrote this, back in Poland in 1995.
If you are interested in my writing on Poland...
I couldn't have written these four books unless I knew Poland from living there and making friends and reading the history and a thousand other factors.
Two relatively hapless Americans hare around Poland in search of a woman, with some bitter truths accompanying them. A story primarily about friendship. Laikonik Express was my first published novel.
A shiftless opportunist winds up the Silesian city of Gliwice after a few mishaps. Unfortunately, his problems are just beginning. The Exploding Elephant is alas out of print at the moment, but I have hopes to get it republished at some point.
A young man escapes the bullets of the Russian Revolution, but finds more bullets in Prohibtion-era America. The Émigré Engineer is a prequel to my latest published novel, The Last Thing the Angel Said, which looks at the trials, tribulations and triumphs of a small community of people from the Slavic diaspora in the US in the 1940s.
Two relatively hapless Americans hare around Poland in search of a woman, with some bitter truths accompanying them. A story primarily about friendship. Laikonik Express was my first published novel.
A shiftless opportunist winds up the Silesian city of Gliwice after a few mishaps. Unfortunately, his problems are just beginning. The Exploding Elephant is alas out of print at the moment, but I have hopes to get it republished at some point.
A young man escapes the bullets of the Russian Revolution, but finds more bullets in Prohibtion-era America. The Émigré Engineer is a prequel to my latest published novel, The Last Thing the Angel Said, which looks at the trials, tribulations and triumphs of a small community of people from the Slavic diaspora in the US in the 1940s.