CMENTARZ

The herbatka was bitter, just how we like it. Tea should never be a sweet affair.

Dorota sat in an armchair in the corner of my one-room studio apartment (millionaire I am not). She sipped her tea at intervals of exactly thirty seconds, surreptitiously watching me dress. I know when I’m being watched, a talent that has served me well in life.

She was reading a copy of Rzeczpospolita abandoned by the neighbours. The older folks in my building have given up on the national newspaper. They gripe that ever since Poland joined the EU the year before, the paper has become a political hand puppet. They don’t cancel their subscriptions, because there’s no refund policy in Poland; “bought” is bought. So copies pile up in my building entranceway and get mashed to a pulp by wet galoshes. Unless I read them.

I am a good tenant. I help clean up and digest the weekly tidbits before they’re completely illegible.

Rarely did I let anyone into my personal space. I thought about dismantling my Pink Floyd shrine before Dorota arrived (no one else had ever seen it), but in the end, I resisted the urge. It would be too complicated to reassemble and, besides, I wanted her to know more about me.

It was typical, as far as shrines go:

LP albums arranged left to right according to the band members’ favourites, starting with the most senior musicians

Papier-mâché models of the inflatable pig that floated loose during the Animals album cover shoot, suspended from my ceiling with threads of varying length, marking the ascent

Fan photos of reclusive founding member Syd Barrett transporting quarts of milk in the basket of his banana-seat bicycle

A re-creation of The Wall, made of real bricks, with the middle one missing and a picture of my face peeking through

She didn’t say a word about this stuff, even though it took up half a wall directly across from where she was sitting near the balcony.

My black jeans had faded to off-black and no longer matched my T-shirt. I never had this problem with my beloved corduroy overalls, but the evening’s activities called for a change of wardrobe. Dorota continued to watch me.

“I can’t go out like this,” I told her. “Can I try on your pants?”

Dorota put her newspaper down, maintaining her ruse of being absorbed in reading. “Yes, you ‘haven’t got a stitch to wear,’ just like Morrissey. Very cute. Just hurry up and tuck that sausage into whatever will hold it.”

“Do you like men or women?” I asked her. A point-blank kind of gal would have no qualms with a direct hit like this.

“I like body parts. Guys, mostly, but different people have the parts I like. I’m attracted to the ones who show them off. What kind of question is that, anyways?”

“I just want to know more about you.”

“Interrogating me isn’t going to help you. But I know you mean well.”

“Doesn’t seem that weird to me ... a really cool person walks into my life and I want to ask a few questions.”

“You’re talking too much.” She melted a bit in her chair, and gave me a smile I’ll never forget. “And actually, sweetie, you walked into my life. I was going to that gallery years before you even knew about it.”

Dorota continued reading and her smile faded. She pulled a pair of surgical scissors out of her purse and snipped out a rectangle of newsprint, violently crumpling the rest of the section and throwing it—unknowingly, I hoped—at my rare Dutch pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.

“Listen to this,” she said with a sneer, reading from the newspaper. “ ‘If deviants begin to demonstrate, they should be hit with batons ... a couple of baton strikes will deter them from coming again. Gays are cowards by definition.’”

“And what hero of ours said this?”

“Wojciech Wierzejski, Deputy of the Polish National Assembly. I’ll add it to the collection.”

“You have more?”

“An endless supply,” she said.

We finished our herbatka in silence. I was soon done fussing over my outfit.

We got off the tramwaj at Rakowicki Cemetery, and walked through the gates just after midnight. I felt a frisson. This was the Euro Disney of cemeteries, a necropolis. Death is done right in Poland, and I don’t mean that with any disrespect. I mean that angels are sculpted of marble, not granite, tombs are kept clean and accessible, the catacombs and columbariums pristine. Corpse names are written in fonts so sexy they make you want to cum. The architecture of remembrance is not left to lie fallow, not here. The parents of Pope Jan Paweł II were buried here, but that wasn’t why we’d made the trip.

Dressing in black to visit a cemetery is cliché, but when the purpose of your visit is to candle-bomb the place, it’s just practical. Stealth is prime in such situations.

Dorota carried the candles in a burlap sack, and I brought my lighter of choice. For our first gentle act of terror we chose the grave of Helena Modrzejewska, a female theatre star who, as not many people know, had occasionally played men onstage. She had fucked with the order of things, and now we would, too.

“You write. I’ll light,” I said.

Dorota placed the cylindrical, windproof candles like widely-spaced dominoes, taking her time to form the letters. I gave them life. When she was redoing the elbow of a K, I noticed how the light carved shadows into the hollows of her face, making her look like a Jack-o’-Pumpkin. I was following her too closely to read the words (I was a little scared, so stayed close for protection).

“Windproof” is about as solid a concept as “fireproof.” On that breezeless night, I managed to blow a bunch of candles out with my excited talking. “How long do these candles last? Will they be visible by daylight? We should be taking pictures. Next cemetery!”

When we had finished the first word, Dorota laughed like a crazy abka and hugged me close, pressing her mouth to my neck. I was about to put her into a playful headlock, but she grabbed my hand and ran. We tore through the obstacle course of nagrobeks, tripping over ivy tentacles and kicking flower planters like footballs, blind in the dark but headed, our ankles told us, toward higher ground. We were sinning, and it was delicious.

We turned around to see Helena’s grave, lit up prettily by Dorota’s imagination and my steady hand:

SUCK THIS DEVIANT COCK IN THE INTERMISSION

Cemeteries usually only saw mass candle activity on All Souls’ Day, a compulsive keening for the dead you might recognize as Halloween. That was months away, so we knew our texts wouldn’t get drowned by other lights. Our accents would flicker crisply, and I hoped this activity would lead to bigger fires together.

“Who’s next?” I said.

“You mean which dead body?”

“Which bigoted asshole.”

She reached into her purse, slung across her torso commando-style, and fished out a swatch of news clippings.

“Take your pick,” she said. “Either ‘homosexual practices lead to drama, emptiness, and degeneracy,’ or ‘if a person tries to infect others with their homosexuality, then the state must intervene in this violation of freedom.’ I’m leaning toward the second one, because it’s from Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. The prime minister.”

“The first one is more poetic,” I said.

“But the prime minister is a swine.”

“Art before activism.”

“You’re impossible,” Dorota said.

We found a magnificent tomb encased in green moss. This time I chose the wording (rather long, and taxing on the lumbar muscles), and Dorota lit the candles. The firelight eroded a bit of the cemetery’s soft, sepulchral charm, sharpening moon shadows into right angles. You can’t get anywhere, I reminded myself, without disturbing the peace.

Radeki. Dorotka. Using diminutive names was the hot, new trend. I was sure the prime minister would accept our raspberry kisses:

KASIO, BE NICE TO US. DON’T BE A DRAMA QUEEN

Cemeteries are made for parkour. Yes, that’s what I said about Nowa Huta and Kraków, but this time I really mean it.

Tombstones make the perfect hurdles, especially if commissioned by a poor family (not too high). Some of them are staggered diagonally in Rakowicki, so there’s enough room to Breakfall after you clear one. Although it gets a lot more fun when a security guard is chasing you.

We got lucky.

“Ditch the candles,” I said to Dorota. “You’ll be able to run faster and focus on your movements. Just follow my lead.”

We performed lazy vaults over unimposing stones, but had to switch to time-consuming sauts de précision when we ran into old money, a minefield of graves so big I almost twisted my ankle in the inscription letters. Even so, we put a comfortable fifty metres between ourselves and the guard.

“Id do diabła!” he screamed at us, giving up the chase when he reached a fence too high to jump.

“That’s funny,” I said. “We’re going to hell anyways.”

The glory of parkour was leaving people like him, folks who don’t know the body language of freedom, behind.

We stopped running, however, when we saw sprays of light illuminating the grass in front of us, and turned around. Back at the crime scene, the bastard was kicking over all our hard work, jumbling the letters, rendering our messages wonky and dyslexic. The security guard wasn’t the target of our messages; we had bigger ryby to fry. I hadn’t planned for this kind of failure.

Dorota held out the bag of candles.

“You didn’t get rid of those, like I told you?”

“I’m not sure why you think I should listen to you,” she said. “And just so you know, Pink Floyd isn’t that good. They write okay songs but the instrumental solos are ... well, too long.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

We spelled our last fragment of the night. It wasn’t our best, but I went to bed hoping it would crawl across the country on the lips of the disobedient and the curious:

SOLIDARITY FOR POLISH QUEERS