Cutouts
I received these gifts on my wedding day:
a card with a picture of white lilies, lace leaves glued to their gilded stalks,
a postcard with English words For my friend calligraphed carefully in black ink,
an eraser made in China, scented with bubblegum
a pair of fluorescent shoelaces,
a portrait of my best friend, Ziuta, drawn in pen on a piece of cardboard,
a photograph of my husband cut out from Bravo.
I gathered the gifts and began to arrange them carefully so they would appear in their full splendor: I placed the card on the right, the postcard and the portrait on the left, then set the eraser underneath the postcard, draping the shoelaces around it. In the center of the whole composition, I placed the image of my husband. I stepped back to judge this display from a distance. Dissatisfied, I undid it all and arranged the gifts once on the green top of my desk. Then I repeated my acts of gathering and spreading out, and repeated them again, and yet again, and each time the gifts joined in new fascinating constellations. Each time I remembered to place my husband’s photo in the center. This was my most precious gift, an object so sacred that I barely dared to touch it.
Two of my guests rose from the pull-out sofa, setting their plates with the crumbs of the wedding cake down on the carpet of the living room, which also served as my parents’ bedroom.
“Mom told me to be home by seven,” said one of them. Soon, they were both in the hallway, putting on their snickers and ortalion jackets. I glanced back at my husband’s picture in the center of the desk again, then I took the plates to the kitchen, and showed my friends out onto the staircase of my apartment block. Once there, they drew me closer and whispered:
“Koza is the only one left. Who does she think she is?”
“She has to pick a husband or she’ll spoil the whole game.”
The terrazzo floor leading to the stairs was smudged with brown water stains. The walls, covered with plaster pretended to be limestone. Nearly the whole metal surface of the elevator door was covered with black scrawls: Dick. Cunt. AS+PW =Love 4ever. The scribbled words wound their way even through the painted sign: “Caution! Check for the car before entering.” The plastic elevator button also sported a hem of black graffiti. I pressed it. Through the glass pane in the elevator door, I watched the thick cables pull the car up. Slowly, with a quiet hum, it stopped on my floor.
Soon, the two girlish faces were behind the glass, and I managed to wave them good-bye before they disappeared down the shaft. Once the glass went dark, I rushed back to the apartment and clutched my desk. I sighed with relief; the photo of my husband was still there. My two remaining guests, Koza and Ziuta, watched me with understanding.
“You have him now,” whispered Ziuta and hugged me so tight that she scratched my face with the coarse wool of her sweater.
“Yes,” I looked absent-mindedly at her outmoded outfit; then I leaned over my husband’s image again. Even though I held it in my hands, I still felt anxious I might lose it.
In the picture, my husband George Michael reclined on a wooden floor, propping his head up with one hand. The earring in his left ear glimmered against his tan neck like a votive jewel on the Black Madonna icon. His legs in tight leather pants were parted slightly. I did not dare to rest my gaze on the spot where the leather appeared to bulge, tauter than elsewhere. Quickly, I shifted my eyes to his chest, where his open shirt revealed a mass of thick hair. I traced my nail along the light stubble on his chin. The glossy paper creased under my touch, so I froze with fear of tearing my precious cutout. I held it flat in my palm for a while, trying to calm my breath. I turned the picture over: on the reverse a big-haired teenage girl breathed white bubbles filled with incomprehensible German words. I flipped the cutout again and caressed my husband’s carefully-styled hair with my fingertip. Finally, with hesitation, I pressed the image to my chest. I turned to Koza, who sat cross-legged on the sofa, holding the scissors that just a half-hour ago moved along the contours of my husband’s body.
“I’m not sure I like his new … image,” I said in a low voice, though I pronounced the foreign word louder, proud of having memorized it. I heard it for the first time on a Saturday night as I listened to the weekly Top Thirty on my favorite station Trójka. George Michael’s great comeback! The popstar launches his solo career with a new song and a new i m a g e! Only when I saw the videoclip in the Teleexpress news service did I understand what this word meant. A new image meant to shake one’s leather pants in such a way that a thirteen-year-old’s thoughts fluttered nervously for a moment like butterfly wings, and then closed up in embarrassment. A new image meant low hiccup sounds and the sentence I want your sex repeated over and over without regard how crudely these words might translate in less audacious languages. I knew the meaning of each English word -- “I” and “want” and “your” and “sex,” – but I put them together reluctantly. The Polish translation dragged in my head knocking against prettier phrases I had gathered there before, the romantic “gave,” “you,” “my,” “heart. Once I fell in love with a golden-hair boy who pulled on the ropes of a boat at a poetic dusk, despairing about his careless whispers. Now the boy had a new image.
“Don’t take the photo then.” Koza aimed the scissors at my husband’s head.
“Nooo!” I jumped and carried the picture away from the threatening blades. Ziuta came to my aid, holding her hands out like a shield.
“Easy! I was just kidding.”
I shivered, rocking my husband in the palm of my hand. He was mine -- I wouldn’t let anybody hurt him. I’ll learn to love the new image.
These glossy cutouts from Bravo were the reason we invented the wedding game. My three best girlfriends and I. Each picked her popstar-husband, sent out invitations, and prepared a pretend wedding party at which the husband’s music played out of portable Grundig tape players only as loud as the parents allowed. Koza came to these gatherings with a solemn expression of a master of ceremonies. She sat silently on the sofa, posing like a fashion model long enough for us all to admire her new acid wash jeans that her father had sent from West Germany. Then she would open her Mickey Mouse-themed book bag and pull out a stack of Bravo magazines, also from her father’s packages. The magazines’ pages shone like water. Their colors seemed fuller than those of Austrian markers that occasionally graced our Polish stationary stores. And their rich smell of ink evoked all the printing presses of Western Europe. Koza would spread the miraculous pages all over the floor and start to cut. The blades moved just once or twice, yet it was enough to free the image: the groom’s picture for the happy bride. The rest of the page fell to the floor in long paper ribbons. Koza would cut out only the smallest pictures, from pages where popstars crowded on top of one another like saints in the altar wings. As for the large insert posters, she would unfold them for us, let us examine them up close, even press our cheeks against their life-size faces. But then she would fold them again and slide them back between the glossy pages. She kept them all for herself. The large posters covered the walls of her small bedroom like a wallpaper, overlapping and poking one another with their edges. She taped some of them to the doors of her wardrobe and cabinets; she wrapped her schoolbooks in some. She had all of our husbands, nailed, taped or folded up. And for our wedding gifts, she would give us the small pictures. Almost as precious.
My husband was safe now, out of the reach of Koza’s scissors. Her interest had turned unexpectedly to black-and-white photo stories of teenage girls and boys, with serious faces, discussing some mysterious matters, kissing, crying or shopping in stores with shelves so stocked up with products it stretched our credulity. Koza cut out a scene after scene and changed the sequence of events with a mischievous smile: first, the girl runs out of the café, throwing a rose into a trash can, then the couple fights, then they kiss, then the girl puts her make-up on, preparing for a date.
I caressed my husband’s face the size of my pinky nail. Around his body, the tawny boards of the wooden floor intersected in triangles. If this picture was published in one of the Polish papers, I wouldn’t be able to tell that the floor was wooden. Probably, I wouldn’t even be able to tell the line between his shirt and the floor. His head, his neck, his hands would just emerge ghostly from the blurry darkness. Yet in the picture from Bravo I could clearly see the edges of his leather-clad hips against the wood. I could see exactly where the leather rose and fell gently over the landscape of his body. Suddenly, I felt the sour, burnt elevator smell rise up to my throat from the pit of my stomach. I sighed. On the wall of my room, above Koza’s head, was the only life-size poster of my husband I owned. It came from the colored insert of the weekend edition of Dziennik Ludowy, and to buy it, I had to stand in line to the neighborhood kiosk for two hours one Saturday morning. In the poster, posed against the background of a foreign night sky, George Michael held on to the white ropes of a sailboat with all the anguished force of his imperfect love. But the Polish newspaper turned his golden hair into a heap of hay, blotches of ink stained his smooth skin, his fingers blended oddly with the ropes, and the paper was rough and stiff and tore easily.
“You have the same poster at home, don’t you? From Bravo?” I looked at Koza, with a desperate plea in my eyes.
“Of course!” She played with colorful bands at the end of her blond braid. Her father must have sent her these too.
“Could I just borrow it for a few days? Just for our honeymoon?”
Koza shook her head sternly without looking at me.
“Please! You know I like this old image better.” My voice was shaking, and I could see the room around me and the faces of my friends change their shape, distorted by my tears.
Koza shook her head again. Her thick braid hit twice against her shoulders.
“You don’t even like him, and I love him so much!” I looked at her reproachfully.
Ziuta leaned towards me and put her head on my shoulder.
“I actually like this new image,” she took the picture carefully from my hand. It’s okay. It’s okay – I calmed myself. She is my best friend. Let her touch him.
“Pull yourself together!” Ziuta raised the paper against the bright window. The bubble breathed by the German teenager on the reverse enclosed my husband’s head like a halo. “It’s me who has a real problem. My Sting is married to another woman.” She sighed. “But I’ve forgiven him. I love him too much.”
“I’ll never get married. Michael Jackson is only my boyfriend.” Koza snickered, cutting glossy scraps of paper into snowflake pieces. “And I’m getting bored with him. I’ll probably dump him for Limahl. Or … for Marek from the seventh grade. He’s crazy about me!”
Ziuta and I looked at her in disgust. I picked some scraps of paper from the carpet.
“You’re making a mess.”
“So what?”
Ziuta placed my husband back in my palm and hugged me reassuringly. Then she pressed “Play” on the tape player, and pearly music poured out of the small speaker, followed by my husband’s sweet voice: Time can never mend the careless whispers of a good friend.
“Tell us how you two met.”
I would make up love stories as wedding gifts for all of my friends. Now they expected me to create this gift for myself. I did not start speaking right away. I sat silently for a while absorbed in my husband’s words about dying music, my eyes, and a silver sea. These sounds calmed me down. I covered the picture with my other hand, enclosing it as if in locket. I called in distant images.
“I was sitting in a coffee shop on Trafalgar Square, studying for my English classes, when all of a sudden I saw HIM walking in. He ordered an apple pie and tea with milk …”
Never without your love.
“Tea with milk! Ugh!” Koza stuck out her tongue and pretended to throw up.
“In England everybody drinks tea this way!” I turned to her indignantly. “Didn’t you pay attention in class?”
“I did pay attention, but it’s still disgusting!”
I ignored her.
“So … he was drinking tea with milk and writing in his notebook. A pretty one with golden rims. I wondered whether he was composing a new song, when suddenly he raised his head and our eyes met.”
Please stay.
“And?” Ziuta stared at me, engrossed.
“I walked over to his table … my legs were shaking … and I almost forgot all my English. But then I remembered the two most important sentences: George, I love you. I cannot live without you.”
I recited the two sentences in English, and Koza repeated them mockingly, but I found reassurance in Ziuta’s awestruck look. Just in case, I translated the words for her. Her parents couldn’t afford the extracurricular English classes.
“He asked me where I was from and was impressed to learn I came from Poland. He said it was a long way for love to travel. Then, he added that my English was pretty good. I looked him in the eyes and said that I learned it just for him.”
Craaa… Tam-ta-Raa-raa
“Liar! You’re studying English because your Mom made you!” Koza got bored with sitting on the sofa. She was now jumping and dancing, pulling herself up on the window sill.
“That’s not true! I’m taking these classes for him!” The picture in my hand soaked up my body’s heat. I had a strange sensation that the paper was warming my skin. The music quieted down, and its final waves rocked against the walls of my bedroom. I was on the boat with him. Full of forgiveness.
“And then?” Ziuta tugged at my shirt.
“We went for a walk,” I spoke faster because my husband was also singing faster, exclaiming Bang! Bang! and calling me his baby. “He took me to the Westminster Abbey, then to the Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament…”
“Did he show you the Statue of Liberty?” Koza was waving her arms rhythmically to the music, and with every Go, go! she threw a handful of paper scraps out of the window.
“No…” I said uneasily, avoiding Koza’s eyes. I glimpsed the name Statue of Liberty in the intermediate English textbook. But we were not at that level yet. Better to stay off the subject.
“But we walked along the Thames. There are sky-scrapers all along the bank, much taller than our bloki, each a hundred-floor high. Their walls are made of glass, and they reflect everything around them. We walked inside one of them and took the elevator all the way to the top. We could see the panorama of London, all lit up because it was nighttime. It was then that he proposed to me.”
Bang! Bang!
“And then you had sex!” exclaimed Koza, poking her head out the window, screaming “Sex!” in the direction of my neighbors’ balcony.
“Shut up!” Ziuta blushed.
“But that’s what he’s singing! Sex, sex, sex. Listen!” Koza pushed the “Forward” button on the player and threw the open Bravo magazine straight at me.
I parted my hands in defense, and my husband’s picture fell on the lyrics of his first solo song. I knew the song well, but I had never seen the lyrics printed; here they were in two black columns -- one English, one German – laid out over a steel-gray background. The tape started playing again and, suddenly, the word rang in my ears and I spotted it on the glossy paper. It appeared in both columns, spelled exactly the same, as if it danced with the music, jumping from one side to the other. Ziuta tried to turn off the offensive song, but Koza grabbed her elbow and twisted it back. Ziuta’s shrieks mingled with my husband’s rhythmical panting, but I couldn’t help her now. I focused intensely on the lyrics printed in front of me, using all my knowledge of English to decipher the meaning. In a moment, the curtain lifted from the signs. Some of the vocabulary looked like Polish words with certain parts amputated and others engrafted: It’s natural. It’s chemical. It’s logical. I stopped at the word habitual and saw a long, dark habit of a nun. Sex is something that we should do. Sex is something for me and you. The words revealed themselves one by one, like single entries in a dictionary, and then joined together in one undeniable sense. Sex is natural. Sex is good.
Ziuta and Koza were wrestling on the floor, pulling each other’s hair and scratching each other’s faces like cats. Colorful hair bands were scattered beneath the window, and the sun filled Koza’s loose hair with wild sparks.
“Turn it off!” Ziuta’s voice was scratchy from screaming.
“I won’t!” Koza tried to outshout her. “You’d better listen! When you have a husband, you have to have s e x!”
We got off the elevator on the hundredth floor. Holding each other’s hands. We looked down at the panorama of the nighttime London. His soft lips parted slightly, ready for a confession of love. Deep feeling showed in his face. His unshaven face. The leather of his pants stretched taut.
Sex with me
Sex with me
Have sex with me
“Stop it, both of you, or Mom will kick you out!” I shouted.
I picked the cutout of my husband off the Bravo page and pressed it to my lips; my kiss covered his diminished body completely. I wanted him to disappear, to melt like a holy wafer into my saliva. But since he was not disappearing, I had no choice. “Good-bye,” I thought with sadness, looking into his microscopic eyes. Then, I slowly crumpled the picture in my fist.
“This is a stupid game!” I declared when my friends finally stopped fighting. With a theatrical gesture, I threw the crumpled paper out of the window. For a split-second Koza and Ziuta looked at me with confusion, not understanding what I had just done. Then they jumped to the window. We still managed to see the paper drift from the height of the seventh floor, along the gray concrete walls of my apartment building, down to the intersection of paved walkways, lined with hedges. There were other apartment buildings, standing around mine, forming a shape of a giant star, and behind them peeked more buildings of the same type, and then more, and still more, like reflections in endless mirrors. In the distance, in the opening between buildings I could see the triangular tower of the newly built church, topped with a white concrete cross. The sun, almost ready to set, lit the cross up. It glowed with orange hue like the neon sign of the shopping mall that would arrive in this spot in ten years. On the walkway a group of girls were drawing hopscotch lines with chalk. Two boys I knew from school kept destroying their efforts, passing a ball between each other, and then letting it hit deliberately right in the middle of the unfinished picture. The girls threw aside their chalk and chased the boys, who outran them, screaming and giggling, past swings and sandboxes into the stretches of unkempt lawns. The taller boy took off his shirt and wiped his flushed face and sweaty hair. He tied the shirt loosely around his neck, and waved his thin, pale arms teasingly at the girls, who stopped at the edge of the grass, catching their breaths. The clatter of a tram passing two blocks away mingled with their laughter, a dog barked on the balcony a few floors above, and the roar of a vacuum cleaner came from the apartment next door. And I thought I could see clearly the crumpled picture of the Western idol, lying six floors below me on the uneven pavement, like a fragment of something that fell from some other world.
