along the street, the dark hallways, and smelly courtyards. In the middle of Broad Street, where the commercial area gives way to the harbor district—to shady dives, dingy bars, and rooms for rent sheltering the scum of the city—there stands a rectangular wooden barn, an old firehouse perhaps, now turned into a food market. During the day it is full of life and the moist smells of fresh vegetables, freshly baked bread, and Polish smoked sausage. At night it becomes a shelter for tramps, where drunkards lie on the fish and meat counters until a policeman’s nightstick chases them away. Błażej liked to go there and always bought something—a chicken (but only if freshly killed) or a loaf of bread—ever mindful not to overpay. To tell the truth, he would go there more to look and to talk than to buy. They knew him there.
“Ho, lookee . . . ,” they would say. “Here comes Twardowski.”
And the butcher would say, “Any sausage today, Twardowski?”
“Yahh,” Błażej would grunt. “And how much would you want for that tiny little piece over there?” And no matter what price the butcher quoted, he would clutch his head in distress.
“All that money, all that money . . . ,” he would shake his head, which, despite his age, had not a white hair on it. He refused to buy. He did not want to spend any money on himself.
“Why be so stingy, Twardowski?” they would say.
“It does me no good. I can’t eat it any more,” he would answer. He went to the food market to talk and to look. Others might go to a museum, to an art gallery, to the theater, or to the movies. Błażej went to Broad Street. He knew the story of every house and every store on his stretch of the street the way a museum custodian knows his exhibits.
Błażej was a conservative. He had no patience for changes and innovations. He was the first to object to Wieniawski’s new office. That afternoon he picked his way down the uneven stairs of the hallway and out to St. Agnes Street, as he had daily for the past ten years, ever since he had retired from the steel mill. He stretched, yawned, and his feet carried him as if of their own will onto Broad Street.
. . .
Jan Wieniawski could not get used to Broad Street. It galled and irked him, and its steep incline seemed to him a symbol of his own downhill slide. “If anyone had told me before the war that I would have to earn my living on Broad Street, I would have slapped his face or hanged myself,” he often exclaimed.
To tell the truth, it was all talk and nothing else. Were it not for Broad Street, what would he do? Anyway, Wieniawski was a grumbler. He would have grumbled no matter where in the world he found himself, except, perhaps, in the old country or among understanding friends. But here he was alone, damn it, completely alone. He grumbled more to bemoan his own loneliness than anything else, and Broad Street just happened to be there to provide a handy target for his abuse. He thought it squalid, noisy, stinking, and tawdry. He deplored having to live in such degradation amid uncomprehending strangers. Wieniawski’s life had begun and developed in the old country. Unlike Błażej, he talked about the old country with genuine emotion, never failing to add that it was the West and its politics that were to blame for his own forced migration to the United States. He always stressed the fact that he was a political émigré, crushed by an evil whim of fate and forced to vegetate on Broad Street, of no use to either the old country or the new.
“And those people . . . ,” he sighed, thinking of the “bread immigrants” who clustered along Broad Street. “Those people . . . God have mercy! Mistrustful, suspicious, hostile. Back in Poland, I knew the peasants. Knew the workers, too. They were my people. I could always talk with them. But here . . . They are so changed in America, it is as if they have come from another planet.”
He was probably right. For if Błażej represented the peasants from the old country, Wieniawski—though citified and educated over some generations—had evolved from the same stock, with unsevered bonds of deep attachment to the soil that had nurtured them both.
Both men had been washed up onto Broad Street by the waves of the bay. Błażej had accepted this philosophically, matter-of-factly, and had adapted himself and even grown fond of his new surroundings. But in Wieniawski there seethed an unending rebellion and bitterness. What would have become of him, though, were it not for Broad Street and his newly opened travel office, the Albatross?
On a warm spring afternoon filled with sun and promise, Błażej walked along St. Agnes Street, thinking he’d maybe stop at the food market, buy a chicken, and cook a pot of chicken soup to last him a week. He stopped in front of the market, shaded his eyes against the sun, looked at Broad Street . . . and blinked. He thought his eyes were failing him. He took his glasses out of his breast pocket and looked again. On the left side of the street, just past the bank, near the Polish Home, he saw a man on a ladder, painting a sign. Twardowski forgot all about his chicken. He shuffled toward the ladder, tilted his head back, and tried to make out the letters the man was painting. Failing at that, he lowered his head and looked at the freshly washed store windows in front of him.
“See that? . . .” he muttered.
There was a bilingual sign in the windows:
PACZKI DO POLSKI—PARCELS TO POLAND
“How did that happen? When?” Błażej was annoyed. Just a while ago, it seemed, there had been a hardware store here. And now? He came up closer to the windows and tried to look inside, but he couldn’t see anything. Cautiously he opened the door a crack and took a look. Inside there were two men he didn’t know. One was talking on the phone, and the other was sitting at a desk, writing.
“See that . . .” murmured Błażej again. He grew angry at this invasion.
“When did they come here?” he wondered.
He went on quickly to the Polish Home, pushed the door open, and hobbled along the dark corridor to the bar. He put his elbows on the counter. It had been a long time since he’d had his last beer here—the doctor had told him that he had not long to live and that drink could kill him—but they still knew him there and remembered his name.
“Those guys . . . ,” he asked the barman, “Who are they?”
“What guys?”
“Over on Broad Street, in the hardware store.”
“Some new people.” The barman made a face. “The man’s name is Wieniawski, or something like that.”
“What’s he doing here?” pressed Błażej.
“How would I know? I heard people say he writes letters, sends parcels to Poland.”
“And if one came to him with a letter, would he read it? Can he read Polish?”
“Go and ask yourself, if you want to know.”
“Not me. I don’t trust that guy. Most likely all he wants is to line his pockets with other people’s dollars, that’s what.”
For a full week Błażej circled around the store. He was upset. Were it not for the letter, he probably never would have gone inside. It was a letter from the old country, but not an ordinary one like those others that Błażej usually threw out unread, not very curious about their contents. This one was a registered letter. The mailman had brought it to Błażej and made him sign for it. The old man twirled it in his hand, considered it carefully, opened it, and tried to make out what was in it, but failed. He decided to go to the Polish Home and ask someone there to read the letter to him.
