But things were looking up.
* * *
—
The first momentous event was that she found herself a job.
She became a certified unskilled laborer.
The camp was linked to what was then known as the CES—the government-run job center—and when she visited their office, she was fortunate. Or at least, fortunate in her usual way. After a long interview and a sea of governmental forms, she was granted permission for the uglywork.
In short, it was public amenities.
You know the ones.
How could so many men piss with such inaccuracy? Why did people paint and smear and decide to shit anywhere but in the toilet? Were these the spoils of freedom?
In the stalls, she read the graffiti.
Mop in hand, she’d recall a recent English class, and chant it into the floor. It was a great way to pay her respects to this new place—to get amongst its heat, to scrub and clean its filthy bits. Also, there was a personal pride in knowing that she was willing. Where once she’d sat in a frozen, frugal storeroom, sharpening up the pencils, now she lived on hands and knees; she breathed the breeze of bleach.
* * *
—
After six months, she could almost touch it.
Her plan was coming together.
Sure, the tears still welled up each night, and sometimes during the day, but she was definitely making progress. Out of sheer necessity, her English was forming nicely, although it was often that calamitous, jumbled-up syntax of false starts and broken endings.
Decades later, even when she was teaching English at a high school across the city, she sometimes summoned a stronger accent at home, and always we couldn’t help ourselves, we loved it, and cheered, then called for it. She never did manage to teach us her original language—it was hard enough practicing piano—but we loved that ambulance could be umboolunce, and that she told us to shurrup rather than shut up. And juice was often chooce. Or “Quiet! I can’t even hear myself fink!” Somewhere in the top five, also, was unfortunately. We liked it better as unforchantly.
* * *
—
Yes, in the early days, it all came down to those two religious things:
The words, the work.
She wrote letters to Waldek now, and called him when she could afford it, realizing, at last, he was safe. He confessed all he’d done to get her out, and how standing on the platform that morning was the highlight of his life, no matter what it cost him. Once, she even read to him, from Homer, in broken English, and was certain she felt him c
rack; he smiled.
What she couldn’t know was that the years would pass by, almost too quickly, in that way. She would scrub a few thousand toilets, and clean chipped tiling by the acre. She’d withstand those bathrooms’ felonies, and work newer jobs as well, cleaning handfuls of houses and apartments.
But then—what she also couldn’t know:
That her future would soon be determined, by three connected things.
One was a hard-of-hearing music salesman.
Then a trio of useless piano men.
But first, it was a death.
The death of the statue of Stalin.