Lena threw her notes on the floor and looked at the ceiling. Having ordered some Chinese food, she was spending time in her room and sipping cola from the can. Her still new IKEA furniture accompanied her in the difficult process of turning her thoughts into written material. She was intelligent, but she would rather write a couple of sentences than dozens of pages on one single boring subject, which she chose not entirely being at her senses. Now it was too late to do anything and she was stuck with materials she was sick and tired of from the start. She would rather learn a new language, watch a film or go to a concert. But of course!
She forgot that this weekend was the time when she was supposed to visit Cracov and check on Kieliszek’s activity. There was something that was to take her mind off her unbearable writing process. In the evening she packed her bag and first thing in the morning she left for Cracov.
She was on the same train, but this time she didn’t bother to follow her lecturer, as Lena knew that for sure Kieliszek was going to be there with her friends. Lena had her favorite music with her and a film on her i-pad. After a mild dose of entertainment, she dozed off in her compartment. When she woke up, they were entering Cracov.
Now she could deal with the city on her terms. Museums were out of the question and so were the galleries. She bought a sandwich in a nearby cafe and grabbed a coffee on the go. She also bought some chocolate in case she got hungry. She still had some time before her Spanish classes and she headed towards dorms to find her friend.
Monika lived in a three-person room on the third floor of the building. She was studying geology at the Jagiellonian University and it was also her final year. One of the beds in Monika’s room was empty because the girl was away at her family’s place. Lena could use the bed as long as there wasn’t any dorm inspection. In the past, you could bring guests, family members, and alcohol without limits. In time the security started to be stiffer and things changed. Now even family members had to sneak under the watchful eyes of the entrance administration. Even businesses collapsed. The eternal student who strolled the hallways with a backpack full of beer on demand had to squeeze cans in the legs of his trousers to pass unnoticed.
‘So now you rent a room? I’m jealous. I cannot focus on anything with these two. I should be writing my MA thesis and they are constantly getting on my nerves. I would do anything to get some peace and quiet,’ Monika complained about her roommates.
‘There’s no use of peace and quiet when you have nothing to write about.’ Lena summed up ‘I’m so tired of studying.’
‘You should have finished after Bachelor’s degree. Now you started the second level and it would be bad to leave it at this point.’
‘I know. I would be so much relieved if my only problem was work. And break - up.’
Then they talked about guys. Finding the right man was such a difficult thing to do. To start with, men studying humanistic subjects were in minority and Lena could never be sure if they were or weren’t gay. You couldn’t trust men who were overly interested in poetry, literature, arts or culture. Anton was just an example. It could appear that all male colleagues attending her seminar were gay, but no one admitted to that or didn’t know it yet. Once she graduated, she would like to have a connection with someone who also finished some studies. Or possibly liked English culture and language. But if this someone was supposed to be an engineer or an IT guy, what would they talk about? Hobbies and interests were a basis for a relationship. Similarly, they helped in falling in love. But she and Gabriel had shared interests and this didn’t help in maintaining their relationship. Maybe she was too young when they met? People now entered into serious relationships far later in life so maybe she and Gabriel were doomed from the start? Monika, on the other hand, was with the same boyfriend from high school and it looked as though after graduation they were going to get married.
‘Now even sex is better. I really feel safe. You know, we don’t have much. I’m not really sure, whether I will find any job in my field. But at least I’m sure that I want to be with him.’
Lena was only sure that she was supposed to be at the place Izabela Kieliszek was at that time.
But what fun it was to take part in classes of the language she knew nothing about. She took such pleasure in learning basic ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘what’s your name?’. Then there were numbers, colors, body parts, food and basic weather. What a difference it was to her stressful time at work and the nagging problem of finishing her studies. She had far more fun than kids whom she taught English. And even though she made so many mistakes and had a terrible pronunciation, for a couple of consecutive weekends in Cracov she was blissfully happy. Her partner in conversation and scripted small talk was a handsome pizza delivery guy who occasionally worked in Spain and wanted to learn some basics of the language. So Lena had time to flirt and forget that she was ever unhappily single.
It wasn’t until the middle of March that her main reason for staying in Cracov came to a turning point. To Cracov, she came early on Saturday. Unfortunately, Monika forgot to tell her that she would be spending the night at her boyfriend’s place and there would be no one to let her in the dorms. Lena couldn’t get into the dorms without a pass. To make matters worse, she even couldn’t sneak behind the beer-guy, as he had a pass and she did not.
There were three more hours until her Spanish class. Having nothing better to do, she decided to come early and wait at the school. It was rainy and she needed to go to the toilet, while the only toilet she knew about was the one at school. She rang the number on the intercom but the door didn’t open, highlighting the fact that no one was there yet.
Suddenly she heard a voice behind her:
‘On Saturday they open later.’
Lena turned around and saw a woman in her late sixties, wearing an elegant suit, flats, and an unbuttoned coat.
‘I work at the Portuguese Embassy. I can let you in. We share a key.’
Lena thanked and followed the woman. She held a bunch of keys held together by her key ring and after a moment she found the one with which she could open the door of the Spanish school.
‘I have keys to each of the offices. Guess who is here at the earliest? When there’s the gas control, they always ask me, each time there are students waiting in front of the building, it’s me who lets them in. It’s me, not this secretary who is always late. No, she won’t even bother to wake up on time. Even in Kafka, there’s no one in the office when they conduct the gas and electricity check-up. I work the longest and they always put on me the responsibility for any maintenance works.’
Lena said something consoling to the woman and processed the information. So the woman working at the Embassy had access to each and every office in the building, including Kafka. And she held all this access in one ring of keys which she hung on the hook next to the entrance.
Lena followed the woman along the corridor of the school and observed that the Portuguese Embassy was just as big as, if not bigger than, the Spanish school itself. It had rooms, offices, separate bathroom and a kitchen.
‘I didn’t realize it was so big,’ Lena admitted ‘All this time I thought that there’s just a single room.’
‘Oh, no. The whole building is built in this way. But who can afford to rent the whole floor? Maybe bigger companies. We certainly can’t afford it. We share with the school. I’m actually annoyed by this fact. The school is always busy. And there are so many people using this Xerox place, especially during the weekend. And the music there is so loud. It gets on my nerves. Thank God I have my own little xerox machine and I don’t have to be there. Each time I want to copy something, they tell me it’s out of order. So I asked my boss for my own.’
The woman offered Lena a cup of tea and Lena made use of the toilet.
‘I have a few more hours till the beginning of the class. I think I’m going to grab something to eat. Would you like anything?’
‘Oh, really? This is so nice of you. At the end of the street, there’s a lovely bakery. I’d love a piece of apple pie. Wait a moment, I’ll give you the money.’
The woman disappeared into another room and Lena soundlessly took the keys from the hook and put them in her pocket. When the woman left, she took the money and, coming out of the office, she took her phone to google the closest place in which she could get the replica of the keys.
‘All of them?’ the man working at the place was astonished.
‘Yes, as soon as possible.’
As soon as possible wasn’t really that possible and the key maker was suspicious. Lena didn’t have many hours to wait so she resigned from the service, entered one of the stationery shops and bought two boxes of modeling clay. She pressed each of the keys on both sides in the clay and placed the pieces in the box so that each color corresponded to an individual key. Then she ran back to the bakery and bought two pieces of apple pie.
When she returned, she gently hung the keys on the hook.
‘Here you are,’ she handed the woman the pie and the change.
Ten minutes later she was sitting at her classes with a box of modeline in her bag, learning Spanish animals and present tenses.
A very fortunate animosity between two biggest cities in Poland was helpful in accomplishing her aim.
Lena entered a small white cottage-like building in the Praga district of Warsaw with the box of modeling clay and explained the situation.
‘We have just one set of keys. I couldn’t leave them at that place and they didn’t want to make copies from the original...’ she complained in a femme fatale fashion.
‘Motherfuckers.’ the man in the Warsaw key-making office summed up ‘Once, I was in Cracov at a kebab place. See, no Turkish people. Two Polish blokes ran the place, three Polish ones were at the table eating kebab. They asked me where I was from. I said Warsaw and they smirked under their noses. I asked for the kebab and the man said that they run out of meat. And I see this twenty kilogram mass of lamb behind the guy. ‘And this?’ I asked pointing at the meat. And the son of a bitch, believe me, turned around and said that he couldn’t see anything. They were choking from laughter. I hate this place. Sure, I will do what I can with these clay shapes.’
Later that day, Lena was holding the exact copy of keys the woman at the Portuguese Embassy was in possession of and was surprised that Warsaw people anywhere else than in Warsaw were treated with the same hostility as her peers at school shared for her half-Mongolian features. But as a newcomer from a town outside of the capital city, she had a sense of not fitting in from the day she put her foot in the door.
The earnings placed the people of capital cities in the world of different services available, different customs and social behaviors, often times making them little snobs. At the same time, people born in these cities had a very misleading perception of being the best of the best, the most cultured, educated and fortunate. While people all over the world, just outside capital cities, enjoyed cleaner air, bigger houses, nicer gardens and slower and healthier pace of life, being very often no less educated, cultured and fortunate. All this came to the people of capital cities as a surprise and equally as a surprise came the fact that anywhere else but in the capital city they weren’t really that liked. City people didn’t like villagers, villagers weren’t fond of city people, those living in the center perceived themselves better than those living in the suburbs. A little label on your shoes could upgrade you to a different category of humans, the price for a square meter of a flat guaranteed you certain friends and the place for your everyday shopping depended on how you were perceived. But considering it seriously, did the fact that you drank a Starbucks caramel latte or a simple black coffee brewed at home in your old mug make a difference on what a human being you really were?
