Oszka
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
Revised by Peter Josyph
We went into the house and the dog came to greet us. Tomasz had spoken to me about her. She was called Oszka. Tomasz and Dorota had adopted her from a shelter. The apartment was very small, in a street in central Lodz, next to the main railway station. Just one big room, ten by six meters, perhaps not that much, with a small cooking area against the wall farthest from the door, and the dining table, of a modest size, beneath the mezzanine resting on metal pillars. Up on top, a double bed. In the corner, the bathroom, without a window. It was a house where everything could be seen at a glance, heard from anywhere. In secondary school, a teacher told us that a philosopher in Ancient Greece, whose name I didn’t catch, had argued that a city should not grow beyond the point where an outcry sounding in the central square could not be heard on the outskirts. I have never come across this axiom in my reading, so I don’t know which philosopher it was. Have I been reading the wrong books? Dorota was away at work. The dining table was the only table they had in the apartment. I’m no good at figuring widths and lengths with my naked eye.
Oszka was a female Siberian husky—an Eskimo. Her tail was reduced to a shapeless stump, cut in half. They’d also cut off her ear, whose ragged edge had healed in a uneven line. In the shelter, no one could tell Tomasz and Dorota the dog’s story. That’s how she’d been found, calm and mutilated.
This building in Lodz dated from before the war, built by a very rich Jewish family that owned factories. I didn’t register the family’s name when Tomasz said it to me. It escaped my attention, just like the name of that Greek philosopher who thought our collective happiness depended on our paying attention to complaints, exclamations of jubilation and warning cries from our fellow men. The former owners lived on the first floor and rented out the rest of the building. Dorota’s grandparents had been employed as workers in a factory belonging to that family, in a town close to Lodz, a place whose name was formed by two words, the first of which was Wola and the second of which is unpronounceable to me. When they bought the apartment, Tomasz and Dorota didn’t know that the building had belonged to her grandparents’ old bosses. The coincidence only came to light later on.
I called Oszka, she came over, eyes lowered, although I’d spoken to her in Portuguese. There is a universal tone of affection which we all know how to use, whether we mean it or not. I stroked her head, noticing that she had an enormous wart the size of a blackberry growing out of her skin. Tomasz told me they couldn’t have it removed because Oszka was too old and the anaesthetic would risk cardiac arrest. He added that Oszka had suffered a great deal, without understanding why. They didn’t want to subject her to new torments, which would be as baffling to her as those of the past.
Tomasz asked me if I wanted a lemonade. I accepted. As soon as he pulled the knife for cutting the lemons, Oszka went and sat in silence in front of the balcony door. Tomasz hastened to open it for her, Oszka went outside and lay down behind the balustrade of carved stone.
“She doesn’t like the noise when we’re cooking, especially the knives. She prefers to go outside.”
A tram went past in the street. Oszka rested her muzzle on her paws.
The members of the Jewish family, the owners of the building and the factories, died in the Holocaust or spent the war in hiding. After the war the authorities in the New Poland nationalised the building, and each floor was divided into tiny apartments, with a shared bathroom on each floor. So that many people could enjoy a tiny slice of luxury. So tiny that it couldn’t be called luxury. Tomasz and Dorota bought one of these slices and completely remodelled it. One of the previous occupants had built a bathroom, and the apartment, already quite small enough, was divided into minute rooms. They preferred to start from scratch, begin everything anew. During the war Dorota’s grandparents took a small oak table of excellent quality from the mansion of the Jewish family in Wola. All the townsfolk went there to help themselves. Dorota’s grandparents wanted to buy the table and were prepared to pay a fair price for it, but it wasn’t possible to do business with people who were missing, hounded, condemned to death. I put the glass of lemonade on the dining table, the Jewish table that Tomasz and Dorota had inherited from her grandparents. One of the survivors of the family of Jews, a lawyer and university lecturer, returned to Wola after the war, but the authorities expelled him because he belonged to the capitalist class.
Noticing Oszka’s silence, I asked Tomasz if she wasn’t in the habit of barking. He drew a packet of special biscuits out of the cupboard and called her. The knife was no longer in view. Tomasz had already washed it and put it away in the drawer. Not everything was within sight in that apartment after all. It was also possible to spare others the sight of bad things. Oszka erupted in from the balcony, sat down in front of Tomasz, her body trembling with excitement. He shouted an order in Polish, holding a biscuit in his raised hand, she yelped then barked. She did it almost reluctantly, like someone who didn’t want to attract attention, like someone hidden in a hiding place who lets out an involuntary exclamation, then regrets it. I asked Tomasz what words he used. He said: “Give me your voice!”
Tomasz and Dorota will never find out what happened to Oszka, they’ll never know the nuances of human badness that converged to mutilate her in that way. While I was stroking her head again, I couldn’t stop imagining macabre scenarios. We try, a posteriori, to understand the origins of evil. When in gestation, however, perversity almost always catches us unprepared, because we refuse to accept that it can be genuine, that it can reach the limits of the intolerable. We are as helpless as Oszka. But objects and beings find ways to heal their wounds, to accept the unacceptable, to forget, to set the world to rights, if only a little. We shuffle the pack and deal again, we divide up what was indivisible, we demolish walls, we transfer the lavatory and washbasin from this corner to that. There are coincidences and ramifications that stage the possible happy endings, shortcuts that undo the Gordian knot and dissociate effects from their causes so that we can keep on breathing. Oszka found Tomasz and Dorota, her outcry was heard. The oak table found an oblique and implausible way to migrate to the townhouse of the original owners, the building now converted into a hive of minute Greek cities obeying the precepts of the philosopher whose name I’ll never learn.
We went out of the house, leaving Oszka lying on her cushion, following us with her eyes at the moment when Tomasz shut the door. While we were going downstairs, I asked him what Oszka meant in Polish. He explained that he’d seen a Russian film that he liked a lot, Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari, about twenty-three women whose names began, without exception, with the letter “o”. But one of them, called Oszanaj, unlike the others, never appeared on screen. She had gone far away, someone explained. All that could be heard was a poem that a lover had dedicated to her. Oszka was the shortened form of Oszanaj, the name of absence.
June 2023
