The Pilgrim of Łódź Erik Harper Klass (bio) From The Letters and Diacritics of East Central Europe: With Descriptions and Examples Ł Rachel says—said—the lowercase Polish ł looks like a funambulist, balance-pole angled exaggeratedly, tightrope invisible beneath the walker’s feet. Funambulist. Her word. But the pole is too short. The figure, somehow, too perpendicular (ł), too secure. She sees correction, balance. I see error, nullification. Its pronunciation, according to A New Polish Grammar 1 by Joseph Andrew Teslar, “should present no real difficulty to the English pupil . . . the majority of Poles nowadays pronounce this sound with the lips, exactly like the English w.”2 Useful drawings display the exact placement of the tongue. We practiced: ła-la—łu-lu—ło-lo—łe-le—łi-li . . . We’d refill our glasses with wódka and laugh nonsensically at our lips’ and tongues’ machinations. Łatwo, she said, her lips, tongue, perfect. It is easy. But I was a poor learner. Later, jetlagged, incoherent, I walked to her across the room, one foot directly in front of the other, my balance-pole angled exaggeratedly, tightrope invisible beneath my feet, and fell finally into the net of her arms. We should not be like this, here, she said, holding in her laughter, holding in her tears. She spun the spent cubes in her glass and looked around the room, looked into these hotel walls, as if she could see beyond them to the dark streets of Łódź. But by then we had to drink, we had no choice. Our dissolution had already begun. Further examples follow. ________ REYMONT, WŁADYSŁAW STANISŁAW (1867–1925), writer. “His first novels on wandering actors and the industrial life of Łódź3 were followed by a huge novel in four volumes, The Peasants (Chłopi). He earned the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924.”4 In his name we find three Polish ł s. Exceptional. [End Page 174] ________ Machine guns again. Somewhere to the west, the Jewish quarter. Distant and echoing across the city. With a white cloth he wipes the dirt from the window above the sink and leans forward and to the left, toward the square, where there is red—everywhere, red. Hanging from open windows the new red banners billow, either by the wind, in slow, somber beats, or by occupants who lean out into the November air with outstretched arms and wave the banners as if they were long carpets being cleaned. Women wearing skirts that stretch only to their knees have tied pieces of red cloth in their hair, and men—the few men still around, mostly older men with canes and tall hats—have placed in their breast pockets folded red kerchiefs, little triangles of color that look astonishingly clean and new against the ragged cloth of their lapels. Children have been dressed in suits, ornamented with red armbands made from ribbons, and there, beneath his window, they run and shout and shoot fake guns made from tree branches. Their wooden clogs clomp on the street like horse hooves. Red—everywhere, red. He hears the distant cries of the trains, coming in from the east, heading west, packed, he knows, with German soldiers leaving the front. These are the homecomers. The idea of movement plays in his mind like a wish. He wonders what it must feel like to have somewhere to go after the war. He positions his glasses a little higher on his nose, turns his head, looks to his right. A uniformed German soldier with an empty holster walks to the north. The soldier does not wear a field hat and his dark hair whirls in the wind. He looks once over his shoulder, not with concern, but with something more like relief. This, he thinks, watching the soldier, is something he might use someday. The soldier’s eyes are as blue as the sparkling Vistula just barely visible beyond the old alder trees that line the strand. On the last day of the war a German soldier wends his way through these broken cobblestone streets beneath the roiling November sky, he walks in the direction of his love, a Jewish girl with auburn hair...