Waiting Underground (Transitions)
by Natasza Goerke

Copyright © Natasza Goerke, translation copyright ©W.Martin, reproduced by kind permission from Twisted Spoon Press

The moment Virginal Patience felt the tickling between her third and fourth ribs, the bed grew fragrant with the smell of grapevine, a crow flew off the windowsill, and a pencil slipped out of a hand asleep on an abandoned rebus and struck a light bulb, causing a circuit to short. So the delivery took place by candlelight, and the fact that the girl emerged from her mother’s side was interpreted generally as a hallucination caused by the darkness. The darkness was likewise credited with a host of other phenomena accompanying the birth: hieroglyphs falling like rain from the ceiling; the smell of loose-leaf notebooks roasting; a willow’s heart-rending sobs; the whinnying of a winged pony, and the reveille a sad elephant played on its trunk, which ended abruptly the moment the doors to the chamber opened and the on-duty doctor walked in.

        “She’s a heavy one,” the doctor said, weighing the baby in his hands.

        “And a March baby, too,” sighed the midwife.

        “But for that, she’s exceptional, unique, the most beautiful child under the sun, the smartest and most capable, too. She was created for a purpose neither of you can ever dream of!” Virginal Patience thundered, snatching the girl away from the doctor. “I’m naming her Mousy Wousy,” she declared, “and someday she’ll be a pharmacist, just like me.”

        The moment Virginal Patience uttered these words, the girl’s fingernails curled into talons, her eyes flashed, and from her mouth erupted a geyser of profanities so precise in their metaphors that they withered the doctor’s heart, while the midwife’s face lit up with a curious, thoughtful grin.



Where there’s a name, an identity can’t be far behind.

        Mousy Wousy’s unfortunate name saw to it that she was a plump, rosy-cheeked, and suspiciously well-behaved little girl. She had big eyes, long eyelashes, and blonde locks whiter than cotton. Like a paté-fattened goose she meekly gulped down the protein supplements forced on her, and without a shadow of disgust allowed herself to be kissed and pinched by slobbering aunts and ladies from the neighborhood. In short, Mousy Wousy was a perfect little doll, and her future was looking more pastel every day.

        It was only through love that the miracle of her transformation ever came to pass. And it was a first love, too — something that always differs from its successors the way one May differs from the next.

        Mousy Wousy got paler and skinnier; a black devil soiled her blonde locks and her soul. As she turned through a world that for all its low protein levels made even less sense, she looked at her anemic, cherubic self in the mirror and declared: “As of today, I’m Patti Smith.”

        “And as of today, I’m Elvis,” a boy said. “Elvis Costello.”

        Thus they concluded their alliance. Not long afterwards, Patti Smith wrote her first poem. The word darkness occurred in the poem eight times; why occurred five; ass, three (in the locative); and never and always thirteen times each. The poem was titled “Love,” and Elvis Costello wrote music for it that drowned out all the words.



To be dissatisfied with dissatisfaction is the blindest of alleys, and that’s why, in one particular century and one particular cultural context, the safest option for rebellious (as well as mechanically inept) children has been either psychology, sociology, or the noble discipline of Polish philology. Such a desperate choice is as salutary as it is ruinous. The children are prevented from sliding into the abyss of marijuana abuse, and they also cease to associate with controversial artistic elements, such as painters, poets, psychiatrist-gurus, owners of poppy plantations, fashionable schizophrenics, cultural innovators with pedophilic tendencies, or punk rock musicians. Mornings in the Old Town suddenly stop seeming so cool, the guitar begins rotting in the garage, and the awful question as to whether Sid Vicious could even read and write threatens with the power of ridiculousness to shake the old world from its foundations. What takes its place isn’t so much a more perfect world, as this one’s new and sophisticated negation.

        Public enemy number one: a poorly defined nothingness brings its hazy countenance into focus, the rebellion finds its object, and those who were children not long before vent their fury onto this most concrete of opponents. Dissatisfaction with life’s shallowness gives way to dissatisfaction with phonemes — it’s the gender of rhymes that irritates, and sestinas, triolets, and Sapphic strophes that instigate battles. The notion that a poem of Tuwim’s is in iambic tetrameter with feminine line endings, and that the lines (also tetrameter — a first) in Konrad Wallenrod are dactylic, can make the delight in reading poetry disappear for years, leaving in return only sadness, glasses, and the yearning for a lost paradise.



Patti Smith was happy in her unhappiness. Nothing repulsed her more than library reading rooms. With hands yellowed from wringing, she would leaf through volumes yellowed from age, but their contents interested her less than the rapt faces of her studious friends. These friends — the bright future of academia, the hope of literature and the bane of up-and-coming writers — drowned their rare moments of doubt in the ocean of tea they drank over books. During reading breaks they would devote themselves to learned debates, the contents of which disturbed Patti Smith far more than they amused her, and inspired her, as she lay curled up under the table, to write her next line: Waiting underground.

An underground is a mirror for the city.

        The Dalai Lama is the king of Tibet. He has no crown, but he has a palace from which he escaped forty years ago. The Dalai Lama is an ordinary monk whose extraordinariness lies in his having repeated for forty years a single sentence: I’m waiting underground.

        The Dalai Lama’s underground is a mecca for diplomats, artists, and politicians who crave the light. They enter the kingdom of the mind with their ties on, because it’s only the highlanders in Poland who cut off their guests’ ties after they enter their houses. They simply don’t like them is all, and what’s more, these days they can afford the extravagance. Polish highlanders take pride in their pride and are shrewd about marketing it, and their music and folk dances guarantee that Bavarian or American tourists allow their ties to be cut off without a word of protest, afterwards even tapping their feet to the fiddles and eagerly drinking mead from hand-painted mugs. Tibetan highlanders have much in common with their Polish counterparts and are similarly good at business. Both the Pope and the Dalai Lama are great for sales. There’s only one difference. While the highlanders of a free Poland sell hand-painted eggshells, Tibetan highlanders use their colorfully painted shells to smuggle out messages. These messages read: “Free Tibet.” Tourists are held in high esteem there, just as in Poland under Soviet rule tourists from the other side of the so-called iron curtain were held in high esteem. Who can say what a “Free Tibet” will actually be like. Maybe when Tibet is finally free, the formal differences will disappear as well. They’ll have a so-called normal life, a thriving business of hand-painted eggshells, a parade of desires awakened after long slumber, and an exuberant snipping-off of ties all around.

        And the Dalai Lama, quietly meditating underground.



“Your name will be Transcendental Happiness,” the Elder Lama said. He threw a white scarf around her neck, set a figurine of the Buddha on top of her head, and whispered: “Write, and remember that all beings, even the critics, were once your mothers.”

        Transcendental Happiness felt her heart fill with transcendental happiness and wrote a story for the occasion. It was an extremely short story, rhythmical, and so condensed that it could be read only in installments, a word at a time, at bedtime.



Traveling in the imagination isn’t the only way to grow, and although an American transcendentalist would have cast his veto on this point, Transcendental Happiness wanted to prove this to herself empirically.

        Smuggling the relics of a certain Too Difficult Love in her heart, she walked out of Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, plunged into the motionless air, and along with others came to a standstill in the stagnancy of bodies standing still. She was not waiting for anything and she had no plans. And as she had no map, either, she did not know where she was; and as she did not know that tigers eat people, she was not afraid of the tiger. The ground really was, as she imagined it would be, red, but other than the color of the ground, nothing agreed with her Rabindranath Tagore-inspired image of India. When she had had enough of watching the motionlessness, Transcendental Happiness wiped her damp forehead with the sleeve of her t-shirt, threw on her backpack, and began moving in the direction of what she correctly surmised was a bus. The bus had neither windows nor a driver, but it did have metal seats, and after squeezing into the narrow space between a portly Sikh and a goat, Transcendental Happiness sat down on a white-hot skillet. What better way to heal the soul’s affliction than through that of the body! How negligible the wound in the heart becomes when one’s butt is being consumed by fire! Transcendental Happiness accepted the pain with the dignity of a wizened ascetic, and since she also took a lively interest in landscapes, she pulled out the little bottle of gin she’d gotten on the airplane, exchanged it for the seat beside the window, and with her heart growing ever lighter, she looked out happily on the future.



Tell me what you think of India, and I’ll tell you who you are.

        “India is my personal affliction,” lamented the monk Thomas Merton.

        “India is Maitreya,” blushed the writer Mircea Eliade.

        “India is a land of art, poetry, dance, and music, of experiences equally new and fascinating, like Japan,” beamed the diplomat Octavio Paz.

        “India is a region alien to our Mediterranean culture,” grunted Józef Pszczoła, occupation: Pole.

        “Avoid contact with children; disinfect the chairs; secure yourself to your bed at night with a chain; by day go out only in groups; and under no circumstances return a smile,” Transcendental Happiness read in her German guidebook, and realized that her days were numbered.



Wanda Rutkiewicz, R.I.P., was once well known in the Himalayas. She scaled the 28,000-footers one after the other, but for certain reasons she was never well liked in Poland. Her Polish Himalayanist colleagues taught the nomad children how to ask for candy: “Say ‘Wanda pussy’ and the candy’s yours, kid.” After that, the children would yell “Wanda pussy, Wanda pussy” at the sight of any white woman, and maybe Wanda Rutkiewicz herself even heard it. But no one will ever know, for the sentence has outlived her.

        After she returned from India half a year later, Transcendental Happiness wrote her next story. By no means was it an account of her Travels in the Orient. It was a short story about how Wanda made a painting. The painting was very colorful at first, but later all the red in it faded away, then all the green, then the blue, and the black, and in the end even the white. What remained was emptiness, an inviting space through which forms and contents, dreams and intentions, wonder at the ephemeral nature of existence, and the ephemeral nature of that wonder, all flickered.

        “Where are you from?” asked the scrawny waiter in the little hotel in Darjeeling.

        “From Poland,” Transcendental Happiness proudly replied, to which the waiter held out his hand and whispered entreatingly: “Wanda pussy . . .”



Wanda is a name that in the land of the inheritors of Mediterranean culture is associated not only with a tragic Himalayan mountain climber but with a tragic princess in a certain tragic Polish legend. Transcendental Happiness, being a typical Pole, identified with both tragic figures.

        “I’m Wanda Wanda,” she realized, and with dignity accepted her tragic fate.

        “I’d sooner drown myself than marry a German,” she cried, quoting Princess Wanda, and like her predecessor threw herself into the Vistula. But she immediately regretted her decision. The water was cold, and her fiancé, who was standing on the bridge, cried out: “Wanda pussy! Haven’t you read Heraclitus?”

        We’ll assume that the mortified Wanda Wanda got out of the water, married the German, and established a wonderful precedent in Polish-German history.