The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk Read Free Book Online

and her short stature won’t look so cute when she’s sixteen.
    “Where are you going?” Elwira demands.
    “
Dzieciaku
, what do you care? You can go back to your pillow and dream a little dream. I got better things to do.”
    And with that Justyna reaches for her miniskirt, grabs her sandals, cracks their bedroom door open, and vanishes.
    In the living room, Justyna’s mother, Teresa, and her father, Bogdan, are lying on the orange pullout
wersalka
, watching TV. She sees her mother’s legs entwined with her father’s. They’re always touching each other, always smooching, pulling each other in for a quick embrace. Justyna thinks it’s mildly gross, but doesn’t really care. When she clicks the bedroom door shut behind her, her mother glances up and, for a minute, they lock eyes. Teresa obviously knows what Justyna is up to, but she won’t come storming into the hallway now. Later there will be a fuck-filled tirade about curfews, but Justyna’s mother never follows up on her threats.
    The July night is unusually crisp. She should have grabbed a sweater but the walk to the Relaks is a short one. It’s only nine-thirty and, already, most of Szydłówek is dark. The streetlights are shutting off, one after another, like dominoes.
    Across Klonowa Street, the benches lining the walkway to the Relaks are occupied by older men from the neighborhood. The Relaks Café has become a clandestine meeting place for local drunks and for young men who aspire to be the next generation of local drunks. But they don’t get their liquor from the overpriced establishment; they merely use the area as a gathering ground, bringing their own bottles of bathtub-brewed moonshine and sour, cheap wines.
    Back in the sixties and seventies, the bar was busy all summer long. Families and tourists flooded the place on weekends, lounging on blankets, renting kayaks, and taking strolls uphill to the Relaks for cold beer and French fries that were served in cone-shaped napkinswith tiny plastic forks. But that was back when the reservoir water was clean and you could actually swim in it. Now, people claim that the
zalew
is full of sewage and corpses from a cemetery on the other side of the bay that flooded a few years ago.
    As she makes her way closer to the bar, she can see Norbert “Lolek” Siwa and Mariusz Kowalski sitting on some benches, their cigarette tips glowing like fireflies. As she walks by them, Lolek calls out to her, “Hey, Zator, I didn’t know this was slut turf!” Justyna casually gives him the finger. “It’s not, Lolek. I heard it’s pig country, so I thought I’d venture and see for myself. Guess it’s true,
chrum chrum
.”
    Kowalski cracks up and Justyna is pleased. Lolek is a neighborhood wiseass, who has a violent temper if you cross him on a bad night. He’s a recent high-school dropout but he looks way older than seventeen. Lolek walks like a rooster, his fiery red hair is always slicked back into an outdated bouffant, and he never shaves his sparse orangey mustache. He is always borrowing money for beer and porno magazines, but he never pays it back. Last summer he brought a Russian prostitute to Kowalski’s eighteenth birthday party and had her wank off the entire group, at a discount price. Lolek is a legend. And Kowalski, his sidekick, is the object of many girls’ affections, even though he is as short as he is good-looking. In the land of guys in their twenties who are already losing their teeth, Kowalski, with his wide smile and pressed jeans, is a catch.
    Justyna strides right up to them and grabs a wine bottle from under their bench. Without missing a beat, she takes an impressive swig, hands the bottle to Kowalski, and says, “Cheap shit,” before sauntering past them. She can still hear them howling as she rounds the corner.
    Sebastian Tefilski is waiting for her, just where he said he’d be. He is sitting on top of the hill that leads down to the water, listening to headphones. She sits down