For a while Kasia had some fun laying traps, which Katie ran at full-tilt, as if relishing the opportunity to lie again. This seemed to have been therapeutic for Katie, because invites suddenly began appearing again for Kasia, as well as regular messages and baked goods. It took Katie too long to notice the heightened frequency of dangerous questions, even though Kasia wasn’t remotely discreet, and she gave too much extra evidence away.
But while this was funny, it ultimately became crushing. Being able to spot lie after lie after lie: it’s continual, endless, like being used and craved as someone else’s drug. Every other sentence is now an insult, and the friendship has turned to ash.
Reality has caught up now that some time has passed. We’ve finally cross-referenced with others, and worked out how deep it goes. Katie created an entire private Tumblr page imitating Kasia online, going by my pet name for her, “Kaś,” and quoting her extensively. She successfully submitted a PhD dissertation proposal modeled directly off of Kasia’s, changing her entire topic over the last few years to mirror Kasia’s focus, archival sources and method. She will likely finish first, which will make Kasia look like the one copying Katie. But nothing can be done about this.
Kasia eventually followed up final leads on Bertha / Bronisława’s story through Polish genealogy websites. From this she was able to confirm a birth year of 1895 in Ulanów, a village right the other side of Kraków from Czernichów (closer to Lublin). Her mother’s name, Franciszka, was the middle name she gave to her daughter Marja Franciszka W——, as is Polish tradition; while her father, Jan, had the same name as her future husband. It felt likely that Katie would have mentioned Ulanów if she had known about it—so seemingly she didn’t. But this was exactly it: as an academic, if she’d actually approached her heritage with curiosity rather than the desire to appear more exotic, she could have known this too.
And in a way, this was the real injustice of all of this: the true story of Bronisława that had been hidden by some nonsense about Czernichów. In deceiving one Polish woman, Katie buried the existence of another: the brave seventeen-year-old who left her village and crossed Europe all the way to Antwerp, probably without any other languages; who arrived in New York without any English either; whose name was finally called in a hall on Ellis Island with a ceiling like snakeskin—no, like rich, rich crocodile leather—by a smartly-dressed immigration official who questioned her for five minutes from a sheet of paper so large it spilled over his desk like the Book of Life; a name she learned to change for simplicity, at first to Bridget, given to the man conducting the 1920 census who spoke rapid English to her and her Jan; and finally settling on Bertha thereafter. A woman who was more than an exotic country of origin, but was a person, from a place, unique as any other. She was the real woman Kasia found at the bottom of this.
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