Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

I was particularly sensitive to the want of money among other female writers in the group. Take, for instance, Yevgeniya from Ukraine, who was on the same minibus to Minneapolis. In spite of her august name, she was a genial, down-to-earth woman who told one obscene joke after another and shook her small, slightly rotund body as she laughed. One day, on another of our excursions, during a pit stop at a gas station I saw Yevgeniya holding some gloves inside the adjoining convenience store. She was contemplating whether to buy them for her sons, as if she had all the time in the world to make the decision.

She turned her serious gaze toward me as I stood nearby and asked, “What do you think of these?”

I could not very well respond, “They look cheap. I wouldn’t buy them.” The thickness of the gloves told of the severe winters in Ukraine.

One evening, as the two of us were walking back to the hotel, she looked at the streetlights, sighed, and said, “Kiev is a sad town. It’s dark. And miserable.”

But the times when I became distressingly aware of my own good fortune were not when I was with someone like Yevgeniya, who heartily shook her body as she laughed. They were when I was with someone like Ligia, a writer from Poland. Ligia is the name of the beautiful daughter of a deceased king in the famous novel Quo Vadis —written in 1895 by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz — that I’d read as a girl; I secretly gave her this name because she had all the makings of a princess. She was a philosopher who never showed up without perfect makeup, looking rather regal among us. On that day of my first excursion with the other writers, as we arrived at the hotel in Minneapolis, we were told that we were to share rooms, and I learned that Ligia was to be my roommate. I went pale. I had enough difficulty sleeping by myself, and now I had to sleep alongside a stranger? And a foreigner at that? At my age? If only I could discreetly tell Chris that I would pay out of pocket for a single room! But I feared creating a reputation as a spoiled Japanese. Matter-of-factly, I took the card key and put on a smile toward Ligia, who also smiled back at me. What did she think of sharing a room with me, I wondered.

I was unpacking in the bedroom when I heard Ligia cry out as she opened the closet near the entrance.

“Look! Look! Someone’s left a robe here!” One can always tell a woman’s voice of envy when she finds something beautiful.

As I approached, Ligia touched the sleeve with one hand and whispered, “It’s silk.”

“Oh, that’s mine,” I said awkwardly.

It was an ash-gray coat that I had bought after much hesitation nearly ten years earlier and had cherished ever since. Both the exterior and the lining were silk, and it had heavenly light down padding. It stained easily, however, and I always tried to take off the stain with benzene only to end up spreading it even more, whereupon I would rush to the cleaners — something I’m usually too lazy to do. When part of the lining wore out, I took it to the store where I’d bought it, and though they no longer had the exact same fabric, I had them mend it nonetheless. It was easy to wear, and despite its simple cut, it had a rather grand appearance. That Ligia called it a “robe” rather than a “coat” seemed somehow appropriate. In anticipation of the colder Minneapolis climate, I had packed the coat in my overnight bag, and as soon as I entered the room I’d hung it up to get rid of the wrinkles.

On its own, not draped around the mid-size (here in the United States, the child-size) body of a middle-aged woman, the silk coat had regained its aura and hung in the closet looking elegant and dignified.

Ligia was a pretty woman. By some trick of the genes, white people tend to age faster than Asians, and though still at the peak of womanhood in her mid-thirties, she already showed a flower’s subtle signs of fading. But even that added to her charm, and she exuded the characteristic self-awareness of an attractive woman. Of the two of us, she would have been the more appropriate owner of the “robe.” I could not help feeling that she must be thinking the same thing as she murmured, “So beautiful!”

The dreaded night came quickly.

With a glass of water and all kinds of sleeping aids at my bedside, I waited primly in bed, wearing my pajamas. For a long time, I heard water hitting the washroom sink. Then Ligia emerged. To my astonishment, the regal lady was wearing a babydoll — a fluffy, translucent mini nightgown. She also had a big, white bath towel wrapped around her head, like those beauties in American soap commercials I used to admire as a child, back in the golden years of babydolls. It seemed too much for someone who had only been washing her face. (Couldn’t she have just put on a shower cap, I wondered. Or used a hair band?) Oblivious of my bewilderment, Ligia then went straight to the dresser, sat on the chair in front of the mirror, and started putting gobs of cream on her face. Her face immediately began to shine. I watched, mesmerized: in this day and age, is there a cream that you slather on like that after washing your face? I thought of my own tiny jar of expensive “night cream,” which I use only sparingly. Was it possible that the historical development of eastern European women’s makeup was still stalled at the stage of “cold cream”?

It was amusing, after all, sharing a room with a stranger.

As Ligia got into the bed next to mine, we started to talk, a bit out of courtesy. The one Polish person I knew was a poor and alcoholic former Solidarity member named Henryk whom my sister used to date in New York. I told Ligia that my sister, now also back in Japan, was still in touch with him and that both my mother and I, along with my sister, sent him some money when he lost his job and was on the verge of having his electricity cut off. At this point in the story, Ligia suddenly sat up. “So typical!” she cried out. “That’s why I hate Polish men. They grow up completely spoiled by their mothers and sisters, and they come to believe they’re some kind of geniuses, and yet in the end, they can’t even manage to make a living. It’s terrible!” She directed her fury at the ceiling, glaring up and menacing it with clenched fists. “Oh, how embarrassing! I’m so ashamed!” It was as if a disgrace of the entire Polish nation had been exposed halfway around the world. I was shocked myself. My sister’s boyfriend Henryk indeed grew up completely spoiled by his mother and sister and had come to believe he was a genius poet. But how could she have guessed all that?

Ligia had a brilliant mind, as a philosopher should, and an outstanding command of English, having grown up speaking it at home because of her grandfather, who was a great Anglophile and once a man of property. Either he or his wife was half-Jewish, and the family seems to have gone through layers of trouble to avoid the concentration camps during the Nazi occupation. Born after the war, Ligia only heard about this family history. What she does know firsthand is the Soviet oppression that followed. “In the sense that it lasted much longer, it was worse than the Nazis,” she reflected, her shining face still turned toward the ceiling, though she now lay quietly, flat in bed. She and her family were made to share with strangers a stately manor her grandfather had built long ago. Ligia was someone who could have and would have appreciated all the luxuries money can buy, but instead, tossed about by the vicissitudes of Poland’s destiny, she did not even own a coat that befitted her.

As our parting approached, she looked gloomier, the shadows under her eyes turning darker. “When I go back to Poland, I have to teach at the university again. You won’t believe how low our salary is.” She lived with her cat in a Warsaw apartment.