Ten się śmieje, kto ma zęby

Zyta Rudzka’s new novel is narrated in the first person by Wera, a former men’s hairdresser, whose husband, “The Jockey”, has died. As she heads into the city to find shoes for him to wear in his coffin, she is guided by the thought expressed in the opening sentence: “It’s hard to find shoes for a cadaver.” She goes to see former lovers, male and female, digs

up old love affairs – and digs into them again. She knows life from both sides, light and dark. She doesn’t make a great fuss, but she doesn’t let herself be pushed around either. If she so chooses, she swims against the tide. Her element is change, motion – this involves her body, her thoughts and words, whether spoken aloud or kept to herself. As Wera goes on her journey into physical space, she also goes deep inside herself. She’s like a mythological character travelling through the lands of life and death. She wanders the modern city like Odysseus. Is this city Warsaw? She could be wandering through many cities, or any city perhaps. She has conversations with various characters, sometimes as part of her plan and sometimes by accident, with people she encounters by pure chance. But she never stops conducting an internal monologue, in which she takes her words and thoughts down some obscure paths.

The strength of this novel lies in the language in which it is expressed: vivid, colloquial and poetic all at once, full of surprising metaphors, as direct and formidable as its speaker as she strides forwards, “stepping over the bodies”. Because life goes on, and Wera still has an appetite for it. To tell a story of this kind one must be a connoisseur of people, and an expert in the potential of not only literary language, but also street language, the language of everyday, real-life stories, and thus the most fascinating, made of flesh and blood. Zyta Rudzka has a great talent for finding them.