When Katie met my wife Kasia, they were so alike. Katie’s full name was Katarzyna, like Kasia’s was. Like Kasia, she’d been born in Poland, and both of them had left Poland as children (Katie at eight, Kasia at thirteen). Katie also spoke Polish at home with her family, and they had both learned English to native fluency as teenagers.
“We can switch to Polish if you want?” Kasia asked her.
Katie declined. She said she had a language processing difficulty, which made switching a challenge.
Like Kasia, she had started going by Katie in school (for Katie, here in the USA; for Kasia, in Ireland—switching back to her Polish name at university). Katie had worked as a teacher like Kasia. She had memorized poetry in school like Kasia; had foraged for mushrooms in the summers like Kasia; she had family living in Lviv, where Kasia’s grandmother came from. While my wife and I switched to Polish to communicate secretly around others, Katie did the same with her sister around her nephews. Unlike many grads on the program, Katie bought a house with her own saved money, not her parents’, like Kasia. Katie treasured her Polish amber jewelry like Kasia; drunk barszcz out of the bowl like Kasia, and remembered the taste of it from her childhood, like Kasia; cut her hair short like Kasia; wrote her first year paper on the historical impact of a Polish poem on Polish nationalism like Kasia; pivoted her studies from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Hapsburg Galicia to the image of the Polish nation in the nineteenth-century press like Kasia. When Kasia found out she was pregnant, Katie missed her period, and experienced strange stomach cramps, like Kasia. There was all sorts they had in common. In Poland Kasia is such a common name.
Like all friendships built on a close affinity, it grew quickly, and soon I met Katie and befriended her too. Katie became our dog-sitter, even being willing to stay over (it had been a nightmare to find someone who would). She was our closest friend locally; we gave her the code to our front door. We often had her round for dinner, our only regular for a year and a half.
All that time, we’d never been to hers, but one day she did invite us over, for dinner and a game of Diplomacy. “Games of Diplomacy are known to ruin friendships,” I said, and we laughed.
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