Buses and Backpacks: A Year in Poland

Dorota invited me in for coffee before she knew my name.

I expected the village—population: 300—to be empty at sunrise.

But Dorota was awake. She spotted me from her front gate perch, waving and interrupting her neighbor who’d hung his head out the window just to say good morning and that there was going to be a barbecue that night, was she going?

“Pani chcialaby kawa?”

I stammered. The tips of my ears got hot, tingled.

“Oh, you’re not from around here? I speak English. My husband, Bill, he’s British. He works a few towns over. You’re probably here visiting the castle, popular time of year for that. Would you like coffee?”

She’d unlocked the gate before she finished talking.

A flash of white fur charged the gap. I squeezed the side of my messenger bag, seeking the familiar bulge of my wallet. Still there. Always there. Once, as a kid, I’d gotten lost in the bread aisle of the supermarket. I’d hunched in the corner, too paralyzed to ask for help. Don’t talk to strangers! Kindergarten warnings popped from some remote corner of my subconscious. Never talk to strangers.

“Whiskey! Get down!” Dorota stifled the dog’s leaps with her leg, his tail thumping the ground beneath her body block. I followed them inside.

“This house was built in the 1850s, an old German house. Your houses in America probably aren’t so old.” Dorota chatted freely, dumping Nescafe into a mug with a powdery puff. “Last year, a German lady came to visit. First time back in 60 years. This village was German, you know.”

I knew. All of Lower Silesia used to be German. But borders are malleable, changing with empires and conquests and the Second World War. It’s Polish now.

“She told us about how she used to pick mushrooms as a girl.”

Bill padded in on my second cup. “Nice to meet you,” he mumbled, offering a cigarette as if it wasn’t the first time he’d been introduced to a stranger in his kitchen so early on a Saturday.

“There’s Janko!” Dorota announced, grabbing the Nescafe as a knock rattled the door. “Do we need to buy any of his eggs this week, Bill?”

A tousled-haired Janko sank next to me on the couch. Sun shifted through a screen-less window, poking a thousand holes in the crocheted curtain as Dorota and Bill analyzed the BBC headlines flashing across the TV.

I left Dorota’s kitchen later that morning feeling light. She snapped my picture. “Don’t be a stranger next time!”

Whiskey bounced beside me as I continued down the street, following his fence til it ended.