Danuta Hinc: RUNNING • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Danuta Hinc
RUNNING

When you leave the place that named you, the world opens and closes at once. Your identity fades into the background of a perpetually expanding frame, balancing between awe and surrender, turning your life into a constant quest for home.

Now, I live among dark pines in the American woods. Red plums and green apples are always on my shopping list. As I wash them, water flowing down my fingers, turning the fruit, peeling off the stubborn stickers, my mind returns to the orchard of my childhood in search of the mysterious, hoping to catch the thread of my origins from before a needlepoint speck became me.

First, it is my great-grandfather’s sprint from the front door to the orchard behind the house. He does it often after returning from the battlefield, always dressed in his Polish Legions uniform, his rogatywka pulled down all the way to his eyebrows. On the days when he takes out the uniform from the storage trunk, everyone around him knows that he has to run.

His little girl, Aniela, who will become my grandmother, stands in the door he left open, with her hands over her mouth, as her eyes follow him running, bumping into trees, falling to the ground, getting up and running again. She wonders if he is running away or towards something. She knows that her father is blind from the mustard gas, but she is still too young to understand why he can’t stop running.

The day he breaks his nose, they tie him down to the guest bedroom bed, but Aniela frees him when others are deep asleep. She is old enough to understand cruelty—she saw horses whipped in the village and newborn kittens disappearing before they could walk—but still too young to understand more. His last summer, he escapes into the orchard two more times. The day is warm, the bumblebee bumps against the bedroom window.

As the plums and apples in my hands turn and turn like planets in the shower of meteors, tiny stickers accumulate on the edge of the sink, and I think of another sprint. This one happens in the middle of a moonless night, deep in the Piaśnica Forest. My grandfather, Aniela’s husband, is running. Before he jumps from the back of the Opel Blitz truck, he nods to the other prisoners, and peeks into the truck’s cabin where next to the driver, two Nazis are deep asleep.

He jumps shoeless, quietly, at the turn he knows well and sprints towards the dark pines. He doesn’t look back. In the best case he has two hours, in the worst, he is already dead. He runs for three kilometers, turning the math of time over distance in his head until everything is triple-checked. Then he stops, puts his shoes on and runs for another seven kilometers before he reaches his house. He tells his wife they have no time. After that, they don’t speak, just hurry. With a hefty basket Aniela runs to the orchard and with both hands picks as many apples and plums as she can.

They load their young children, Henryk and Genia, who will become my mother, into the horse cart along with other things, and Aniela whips the horse while her husband takes off his shoes to remove pine needles lodged into his skin all the way up to his ankles. Later, he takes the reins, and she climbs to the back of the cart where their wide-eyed children are surrounded by items that don’t belong there—feather comforters, pillows, blankets, suitcases and baskets.

I place the plums in a strainer while a wave of guilt washes over my chest, and I doubt that I can ever stop feeling this way. I didn’t believe the escape story until I was in college doing research in the Polish State Archives and discovered my grandfather’s name, Józef. I had to translate two words, “verhaftet” and “geflohen.” “Arrested,” and “fled.” The date is written in the European format, 20.9.1939, September 20, 1939. The Nazis kept detailed records.

Washing the fruit, a constant on my shopping list, I live in the past I never experienced. I live in a space that was never mine, but it’s me. I run the loop. In constant motion, in ebb and flow, I am here and there. I live the illusion of belonging somewhere.

I place the apples and plums on a linen kitchen towel, my mother’s from when I was a child, and I am back in the orchard. My grandmother stands in the door with a tray in her hands and yells, “The rhubarb compote is ready,” and my mother gets up from the blanket to get the tray. My sister, Ola, and I sit among mounds of colorful crepe paper, cutting long pieces for our summer hats, but when mother comes back, we make space for the linen towel on which she places cucumber sandwiches. I rearrange the sandwiches to make all the sides parallel to each other and all the spaces between them even. My mother smiles. When she makes our hats with Bristol paper and staples all pieces together, I am bothered that the staples are not parallel to the edges, but she says that the crepe paper will cover all imperfections. “But I will know,” I say. “Too much thinking,” she says and smiles.

My paper summer hat is orange, my sister’s is blue. Both are wide-rimmed and overflowing with crepe roses and lilies, tulips and chrysanthemums, abundant like in Dutch paintings. After that, Ola and I run through warm pools of light and cool pools of shade. As she stops at a slender plum tree and puts her hands on the trunk above the lime line, I know what she wants. I join her on the opposite side, and we shake the trunk as hard as we can. A hail of plums plummets our hats before we collect them in a basket and then run again.

Danuta Hinc is a Polish-American, award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. She is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She holds an MA in Philology from the University of Gdańsk, where her dissertation, Historia Literatury Jarosława Marka Rymkiewicza, won the Polish National Competition for the best dissertation in the humanities. She completed three years of postgraduate study at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and earned an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College, where she received the Barry Hannah Merit Scholarship in Fiction.