Stamps and Spadek

     At the post office the other day, the extroverted guy who’d been in line in front of me (who had shamelessly flirted with the cranky-looking woman behind the glass window, by the way) came over and fired a question at me in rapid Polish.  

     I stared dumbly at him for a minute before stammering out,“Przepraszam, nie mówię dobrze po polsku. ” (Excuse me, I don’t speak Polish very well.)  

     He looked at me as though I were some kind of alien for a second and then said, “Nie mówisz po polsku?!?  (You don’t speak Polish?!?)  Where are you from?” (In perfect English, of course.) 

     I smiled sheepishly and said, “America.” 

     For him, that seemed to explain it all.  “Ooooh.  America!  But you’re Polish, right?  Your family is Polish?” 

     “Yes.” 

     “I could tell.  You look Polish.  Why don’t you learn the language, though?  You should learn the language.  It’s your roots, your spadek.”

     I thought he was trying to have a go at me, there in the post office, for being some stupid American who couldn’t even be bothered to learn the language when I was in the country of my fucking spadek.  I could feel my hackles starting to rise.  Why was the post office always the place where these things happened to me?  I was never going to set foot in a Polish post office again.  
     Then he said, “Uczysz się po polsku?” Are you learning Polish?

     Well, yes, of course.  “Oczywiście, ale…”

     He was smiling now.  “Ah, jest skomplikowany.”

     ‘Skomplikowany’ was a brand new word for me.  I’d never heard it before.  But when he said it, if you try to say it, it seems obvious.  It means what it sounds like: ‘complicated.’  I nodded enthusiastically and tried the new word.  “Tak.  Jest bardzo skomplikowany.”

     We laughed, we smiled and said our goodbyes, he wished me luck, and I went on my way.  But of course the whole experience made me more eager than ever to learn the language.  To get it down, once and for all, and to be able to really talk to people.  Really be a part of society here.  It occurred to me that just being able to order coffee or beer or say good morning to the woman in the store was not enough of an accomplishment for me anymore.  I was dying to really talk to people.  I’d been called out as an imposter, a foreign Pole, and I didn’t like the feeling.  I wanted to be a real Pole.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen just like that, just because you want it to.  I’ve been working hard at it, but it’s still going to take ages.

     I walked away light-hearted, though, because he really hadn’t been meaning to lecture me; he was just interested.  Light-hearted, because there was something about his bluntness that felt real and good, compared to the nice baristas who were always pretending my Polish was so lovely.  And it obviously wasn’t.  But I thought about how far I’d really progressed.  From the flight over, when I was too afraid to say the word for “chicken,” to the flight attendant, even though I knew it, and I resorted to English with her,  to this moment in the post office, when I’d been able to have a conversation about my spadek and my Polish education, about 1/2 of which was actually in Polish.  Probably not very pretty Polish, but Polish nonetheless.  And I can’t really expect more.  After all, it’s skomplikowany.

     I smiled so hard my cheeks hurt.  I’d been confronted with my deficiencies, had seen the long road curving ahead of me.  But I could also see how far I’d come.  I’d had a small victory, there in the post office.  And moments like that, they are exactly why I came here.  I am in the right place.