There was a particularly ominous feeling that evening. It was a brief respite from the cold snap of that winter: it was only minus four celsius after weeks of minus fifteen, twenty, so for the first time in a while it was bearable stepping out of the car onto Katie’s street, trying to find which was her house. There’s that silly line in chapter two of The Great Gatsby we used to snicker at in school for its outdated reference and twee ring: “this fella’s a regular Belasco.” A creator of film sets. Katie lived on a beautiful street that belonged in a horror movie. Big houses with big garages, plenty of space between them, somewhere quiet on the edge of town. The street’s spotless footpath led to the side of a highway. Other cul-de-sacs branched off, and your eyes stretched glancing down them, and they curved at the ends in a way that hid the last houses. The clouds pressed low. A fistful of trees shivered and coughed behind one distant house, and I thought I heard a wooden gate slow-clap our arrival. I felt puny. Something horrible was off.
(Then it hit me. It was just that the road was wide enough for three cars to drive on at once. It left so much space between everything that the whole street seemed built for giants or quarterbacks or whatever mythical beast belonged to the Great Plains. It had all been no more than a bodily reaction to American excess—silly me!)
Katie welcomed us warmly: we stepped through into her spacious living room, where comfortable sofas and armchairs lined the entire wall towards the open-plan kitchen. The centre of the lounge was empty; one’s eyes focused either on the bare parquet floor, the sweet lit-up Christmas tree tucked beneath the staircase spandrel on the opposite wall, or the distant Katie making us tea over by the sink.
My wife Kasia went to the restroom. Recently Katie had had a conflict with her housemate, and I wanted the gossip—but I didn’t know whether the housemate was in. I asked Katie in Polish, so that the housemate wouldn’t hear:
“Czyli—czy twoja znajoma tu jest, na górze, czy na zewnątrz?” (So—is your friend upstairs, or outside?)
Katie replied “Taaak, taaak!” (Yes, yes!) with a thick American accent.
She’d misheard. I wondered whether I should repeat myself. But there’d been an odd look in her eyes, flaring slightly as if to signal that the housemate was right behind me.
Surely the housemate couldn’t even hear me?
Before I worked out how to respond, Katie switched back to English and abruptly changed the subject. Like I’d spoken out of turn.
No, but she had pretended to ignore the question, choosing to pointedly breeze past a sentence in which I’d embarrassed myself. It felt rather like she was performing the role of a condescending upper-crust New-England mother from a period drama. Katie often had this odd way of holding back her emotions: an austere courtesy that suddenly turned rigid, as if to endure a disagreeable opinion. Talking with her I was frequently left with a vague feeling of guilt.
But the error this time wasn’t mine, so that was irritating.
Later on, while setting up the game of Diplomacy, Katie mentioned that her housemate was out of the house, mid-conversation. This made it weird. My Polish hadn’t been that bad. And if she’d misheard, she would’ve asked me to repeat. No—she hadn’t remotely understood the question.
But Katie returned to the Diplomacy game, and we moved on. She told us about the one she’d played a few days ago as I helped set up, popping the counters out of their cardboard holders for the first time.
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