A mother’s patient journey toward entering her daughter’s world
Back as a student at the Lidzbark Primary School, I went on walks in the woods with my mother and the dogs. With the white female, Patch, and Ares, the neighbours’ black mongrel. Despite his name, Ares was not a fighter, but an awful coward. Bulky and bumbling, he would let himself be guided by the instincts of his diminutive female companion. At the first peal of the hunter’s horn – like a whistle at the start of a race – he lurched forward, only to get tangled up in his own legs. His whole body went cross-eyed, while Patch’s stumpy legs dashed along the track only just carved out by a hare, the scent of fur and the adrenaline of the sprint. The smaller dog, who owed her name to the brown spectacle-patches circling her eyes, lived from one hunt to the next. By day quiet, wary, and lazy as a cat, she was a slave to the call, like a natural born child of the forest. ‘Anananana, anananana, anananana!!!’ chanted dozens of times, in a high voice, was for the little-girl-me proof of the onset of the Uncanny. I could feel a powerful echo of that song in me. The sight of their little bodies possessed by the demon of the hunt changed our walks into a mystery play of nature. The chase buoyed Patch, but it also set the bar too high for her heart and her paws. I feared she would not withstand the pressure. The score of the chase is highly demanding for such a delicate instrument. With his physique, Ares would have been suited to it, but the heavy lifting was left to the pint-sized female.
Her heart was about to go, exhausted from many hours of snuffling about the forest after the thread of a scent, until it finally broke.
Father said she ‘must have been a cross with a terrier’. All this seemed strangely improbable when it came to the young mongrel, left by her previous owner near the fence outside the veterinarian’s, beaten hard enough to have lost all her trust in people. The nerve that trusts can, it seems, be irreparably damaged. We rehabilitated her enough to gain a warmly sceptical observer of our everyday activities. Even better, she learned to emulate a greeting: she could smile. The other dogs in my life would race up to greet you, ramming into you with their nose and paws. Whereas here, all of a sudden, instead of an orgy of greetings, there were these discreet theatrics. She stepped out to meet us, waited a while, and after some time, came primly trotting forward, with a toothy grin, wagging her tail. I often ran to greet her first. I always was her dog.
I wondered if my daughter would notice the doggy smile, if she’d be surprised. Patch was not long for this earth, and it was clearly an effort for her to smile. And even though sometimes I did hear some giggling from the pram, I saw no connection between my babbling and the sudden happy eruptions from within. You couldn’t count the seconds between them, as with lightning and thunder. I wanted to catch their rhythm, but there was no way. Was it my voice, the bark of a dog, the low of cows, her own thoughts? It was equally possible that any one of these things – myself, the dog, the cow, or the thought – could have prompted her to laugh.
Translated by Soren Gauger
A mother’s patient journey toward entering her daughter’s world
Translation rights: Magdalena Hajduk-Dębowska, debowska@karakter.pl
Here is an autobiographical novel that poses an important and oft-ignored question. Is parenting the art of preparing a child for ‘normal life’, or does it mean teasing out the things that make a child unique? In other words: Ought the parent to try to enter the child’s world as far as possible, or rather do their best to make the child step into the parent’s world?
Eliza Kącka’s book frames a story about child-rearing as a detective novel. The reader figures out along with the narrator how to navigate her daughter’s unusual behaviour, and for much of this story we are invited to join her in deciding just how neuro-normative her child, who is on the autism spectrum, is and whether this should be seen as a concern or a blessing. The antagonists – including a watchful neighbour and a stern preschool teacher – come down hard on the side of normalising the child. Meanwhile, Kącka, through excursions into her own childhood and applying earlier lessons to her experience now as a mother, is inclined to give as much value and respect to the needs of children – and animals or plants – as she does grown-ups.
A project for a translator who enjoys being loose and creative with language, Yesterday You Were Green with Anger is a book that will speak to anyone who has experienced their own slapdash adventure of parenting and worried, even for an instant, whether they were getting it all wrong.
Soren Gauger
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
