Things That Are Hard to Forget

Faye was the type of person who was always watching television at three in the morning, not because she couldn’t sleep, but because she didn’t want to.   But that day in early April when the Polish air force plane crashed in Russia, she noticed the newscast because unlike most things, it had a direct connection to her.  She thought, I have to call Anna.
+++Anna was the first friend she made in college, and she was from Poland.  Faye told herself they were still good friends three years later; they had just grown apart.  Friends were supposed to be there for each other the most when bad things happened. But it was 3:20 in the morning and she knew Anna would be sleeping; she was the type to go to bed by midnight and fill her days to the brim.
+++She waited a few hours before dialing the first few digits.  Within those few hours she had already started to doubt her immediate urge to call Anna because they hadn’t spoken in over a month, and even that exchange was brief.  She put the phone down and decided it might be better to go over in person.  She told herself it would mean more.
+++Faye drove to Anna’s apartment and knocked on the door.  It was on her way to work, so even if she wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be a waste of time.  She was just trying to help. But Anna was there and Faye immediately hugged her, even though Anna was in her bathrobe and had leftover toothpaste on the side of her mouth.  Anna was so surprised by the intensity of Faye’s embrace, that she didn’t reciprocate and instead asked, “Why are you here?”
+++Faye said in a hurried, sympathetic tone, “I’m so sorry for you,” but quickly realized that Anna had no idea what she was talking about.  “You should turn the news on,” she said. “I have to go to work,” and then she left.
+++Anna turned on her computer to read the newspaper online because she still hadn’t called Comcast to fix her cable.  And on the front page, under BREAKING NEWS, there it was: 96 dead, including numerous Polish delegates, in fatal plane crash over Russia.  She read the whole article, filled with a vague sadness for the people who were technically her countrymen and women, because their president was dead.  She wondered if sixty years from now they would ask each other where they were when Lech Kaczynski crashed in that plane.  She wondered if anyone would ask her, and she immediately felt guilty because she’d been sleeping.
+++But if she was going to be honest, she didn’t understand why Faye’s visit had seemed so urgent.  Anna hadn’t lived in Poland since she was two years old.  The most she knew about Poland’s government was the president’s name, and although she could legally vote in elections, she had never taken the time to become informed enough.  That day, she received so many calls and pats on the back, people saying I’m sorry to her as if a close member of her family had passed away.   To them she was just the girl they knew was completely Polish – not just partially, like on one grandparent’s side.  But even so, even though this overwhelming sympathy (real or not) confused her, she decided she should probably call her mother.
+++And yes, her mother had heard of the tragedy by that point in the day, but even though she had grown up in Poland, she felt similarly to her daughter – not well-informed, somewhat ambivalent, not sure how to react.  She didn’t know what democracy felt like in Poland, didn’t really understand the idea of presidents in the country that used to be her home.  She had only ever told Anna stories about the meaning of day to day communism – about waiting in long lines to get her family’s bread ration, about never having enough butter for baking.  These were things that were hard to forget even when the regime did change, even when things were supposed to be better.  It became even harder after she left that new democracy for a very old one, the one that every other country either hated or strived to emulate.
+++She told her daughter it was OK to be sad about something you didn’t know much about.  It was alright to feel disillusioned with the world because planes crashed and people died and countries went through revolutions. And after she hung up because her daughter had to go to class, she had to repeat this to herself.  She started thinking negatively, like maybe when she and Anna and her husband flew to Poland for their annual visit that year, they would take separate planes.  Because if one crashed, the other two would survive, and that would be better than if they were all lost like every one of the ninety-six members of the government dead at once.  What was her country going to do? she thought as she dialed long-distance to her husband’s mother in Poland, the only one of Anna’s grandparents still alive.
+++“How are things there?” she asked, and she could tell the whole country was mourning by the sound of her mother-in-law’s voice.  Zofia had always been dramatic, so when actual tragedies happened, she tended to take them hard.
+++“The television just keeps showing pictures of the plane, samolot, samolot,” she said.  “And they keep saying the word fog, mgła, mgła, but, you know, some people think it’s the Russians.  I try to tell them, we are supposed to be over all of that by now.  This is our democratic president dead.”
+++And Anna’s mom nodded, and then realized Zofia couldn’t see her, so she hummed apologetically into the receiver.
+++Zofia kept repeating those words to herself all day, samolot, mgła, prezydent, and she didn’t have an answer about what the country would do now.  She was just an old woman, what did she know about the big offices where government happened?  She stayed up all night in front of the television, her husband not alive to stay up with her, her children all moved away to the other side of Poland, or the other side of the ocean.  She stayed up until at least three in the morning, she couldn’t remember anymore, and even though it wasn’t what she stayed up for, that’s what it felt like later – felt as if she had been specifically waiting for the list of names of all the deceased.
+++When they released the names of everyone, they showed each man separately on the screen, along with a picture, either in a suit or a uniform from a time when he was younger, his title in italics under the photograph.  And then the one that made her heart stop, made her eyes widen, after a whole day of watching television was Wojciech Staroski, along with the words senior advisor to the president and her high school sweetheart’s taupe photograph from before he joined the military and left without saying goodbye.  And she felt as if she had to call her son and his wife in America, call everyone, to tell them that this had to be the connection she was waiting for – this had to be the reason she stayed up so late, feeling so sad.
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Diana Filar was born in Poland, grew up in Connecticut, and now attends Emerson College in Boston and lives in Cambridge. She is the editor in chief of the Emerson Review and is forthcoming in Fractured West.