PARAGRAPH 80

It's Saturday before noon. When the courier calls me on the home phone, I tell him to come right over. Then I remember that I haven't ordered anything recently, but it's too late. He'll be here in 15 minutes, and by then we have to come up with a plan.
Two days earlier, sitting in the kitchen with Lilly-Marie's assistant Jo, we tried to be practical about the bank matter. We had already contacted the Helsinki Foundation in Warsaw whose lawyer told us that paragraph 80 was under parliamentary consideration to be either changed or deleted. No one knew how long the process would take.
Even if we decided to take legislation into our own hands and start a private lawsuit, it would be unlikely to see the Constitutional Tribunal striking down the law within the next month.
Apparently, all we could do was cope. Jo checked the public notary fees for a signature authorization; it went for the price of a good coat or a pair of leather shoes. Outside the kitchen window sun rays frolicked in the snow covered garden. We looked unhappily at one another.
"You could set up a bank account online," Jo typed an entry into her mini laptop. "CertBank has an application on its website. It never hurts to try."
The system guided us through the electronic application form. The process, impersonal but welcoming, ended with the info that a hard copy of the contract should reach us within the next three days or so.
Jo looked up from the screen. "They send it through a courier."
Lilly-Marie looked anxious. "Do you have to sign the form in front of him?"
Jo nodded. "It's like you were going to the bank."
We didn't take it into account.

Lilly-Marie's new assistant Jo had spent the last five years in Britain. As this constitutes most of her adult life, her accent and daily habits are as British as they come. The first thing she does upon arriving here is to offer us a cup of tea. Although she tries to convince us that real British people could tell the difference, we are secretly amused by her Britishness and try to memorize, in good spirits, the funniest things she says.
“We were outside and Jo said, 'It's bloody snowing again',” I tell Lilly-Marie, and she giggles: “We were in the car, the snowstorm began, and she said, 'I want to go back to blinking England.”
This one really startles me. “Can you say it in real life?”

"Don't worry, you are halfway through," Jo said as she put the kettle on again.
"I don't know how we can possibly prevent the courier from noticing that I can't see." Lilly-Marie's face became set.
But soon we got our brains in gear. We decided that when the courier called, we'd ask him to return after dark. We'd keep the lights low and pretend that we are drunk. He'd arrive to the sight of three women having a rambunctious party; one of us would reproach Lilly-Marie for having too much to drink; the other would guide her hand; in the ensuing commotion the courier would miss the part that she had no sight.

The weekend after coming up with this plan, we go to the film screening at the humanities department. In an act of bravery, Gdańsk University decided to host an art show on the subject of the persecution of gay men under the Nazi regime. All films accompanying the opening are documentaries related to the infamous paragraph 179 which made homosexuality a criminal offense at the turn of the 20th century in Germany. The law was profusely used by dishonest individuals to blackmail gay men. In the lenient political climate right after Wold War I, gay life flourished in Berlin regardless of the law; however, once the fascist came to power, they used paragraph 179 to collect data about gay organizations, disband them, and lock up gay men in concentration camps. The saddest part was that once World War II ended, gay survivors of concentration camps never received compensation from the German government which claimed that what happened to them was in accordance with the law.
At first we indent to see only one or two movies, but in the end we stay for all of them: the documentary about Magnus Hirschfelt; an educational silent film made to support his lost fight against paragraph 179; and the most recent one, based on the interviews with gay prisoners of the camps. Few of them are still alive; the one who lives in Poland didn't agree to be interviewed.
"All these paragraphs get mixed up in my mind," Lilly-Marie tells me as we walk through the campus to the car. "I hear them saying paragraph one hundred seventy nine, and I think one hundred what? Eighty... Seventy... It feels amazingly close."
I too suffer from deja vues. We live in a country affected by the Holocaust; in the landscape and among the people whose mental makeup carries its history. We have democracy now, but what if the wrong people came to power? Once we are back home, I tell Lilly-Marie that in case we need to hide her, we'll keep her in the small room in the basement.
"Would you really hide me, dear?" she asks. "How would you keep the room from view?"
In the bedroom, the dark is never pitch black; thanks to fancy lanterns outside it is always a little gray.
"When I was in high school," she says, "I wondered about people with disabilities and the Holocaust. All I could find was half a sentence somewhere on line."
I can't bring myself to tell her what I know.
"We'd have a bookcase over the door to disguise a secret room," I say instead.
Within hours we seem to have fallen into overlapping history strands.
"Good. You'd have to give me some pastries to munch on while they look for me." She sighs. "But really, I'd be so worried about you, I'd come out to protect you."
"I know you would," I say.
"Or I hope you'd go into hiding with me. And then we'd flee to blinking England."

The courier should be over any minute since it didn't occur to me in time to give him the wrong directions to the house. It's before noon -- too early for a party, and Jo is not even here yet. I walk upstairs with no plan.
Lilly-Marie is barely out of the shower. I knock on the bathroom door and it occurs to me that when the courier arrives, she must stay put. "I'll start calling you from downstairs to come out. Then you just have to keep saying no, you are not ready."
The bathroom door opens, and my accomplice girlfriend looks attentive. "Why don't I run water when you call me first, so it will be like I couldn't even hear you."
"At some point though, come out onto the hallway; make some racket so it'll sound like you are a real person, not a recording. Talk about whatever, but no matter how much I insist on you coming downstairs, don't."
We barely manage to talk it over when the bell rings. I let the courier in. He is young and pleasant, and I have fleeting qualms about fooling him. He seems the kind of person who goes out of his way to help little kids cross the street.
As soon as the courier takes out the folder with bank documents, I call Lilly-Marie to come downstairs. She starts running water right on cue.
"Come downstairs!" I keep calling. "The man with your bank papers is here!"
I hear her opening the bathroom door. "I can't hear you!" She yells back.
The courier smiles at me reassuringly. "I'll wait."
The point is, I don't want him to wait too long.
"Lilly-Marie, what on earth are you doing?" I walk up a few stairs. "Can't you just come?"
"I can't find my towel! Have you thrown it into the wash?"
I look at the courier with sheer exasperation. "Can't I bring this form upstairs for her to sign?"
He is suddenly alert. "Can I see her passport?"
In an instant, I reach for Lilly-Marie's purse. "Where do you have your passport?" I yell to her.
"In the side pocket!"
I sense the courier's brain busily processing. We are making him do something he's been advised against a hundred times at his job orientation. I find the passport before he can change his mind. He looks at Lilly-Marie's picture, at her visa, then back at his form. Apparently there is no trick he could possibly imagine. All he sees is a typical family situation. A nice girl all tangled up getting dressed on a Friday morning. At last, he loosens up.
"Her passport and visa numbers match the numbers I have here." He points to the document. "Make sure she signs with her full name - here, there, and initials all the pages."
I rush upstairs, and we make more fuss with signing the pages. I believe the courier deserves to have a glimpse of Lilly-Marie for all his trustworthiness before he leaves. The light on the staircase is low, but my girlfriend hesitates about coming into view.
I return with the signed contract. The courier doesn't return my smile, but he lets me have our copy.
After he's gone, I run upstairs to see Lilly-Marie, and we can't believe that it worked.

The following day we call Jolanta Kramarz in Warsaw. I first notice her name in the Helsinki Foundation lawyer's note. One paragraph mentions the woman who won a lawsuit against a supermarket chain Carrefour when they didn't let her enter the store with a guide dog. The lawyer quotes this as a successful example of challenging the status quo. I google her and find out that Jolanta is the president of Vis Maior, the foundation she created to support the rights of people who can't see.
"Paragraph 80 is about to be repealed," Jolanta asserts what the Helsinki Foundation lawyer told us."It's just passed through the Senat. If the president doesn't veto the change, it will be gone. However, any legislation needs six months to be implemented." Lilly-Marie and I are huddled in the living room with the phone on speaker between us.
"The majority of people without vision are used to discrimination and cannot imagine their lives any other way," Jolanta says. "However, they all complain about the bank law."
"Good," Lilly-Marie nods.
Jolanta doesn't feel comfortable speaking in English, so I translate what she says and leave time for Lilly-Marie to ask questions.
"The law particularly affects couples where both people have no sight," Jolanta continues in her warm, self-assured voice. "Because the law makes your signature invalid, so there always has to be a third party involved."
"How do you manage the foundation then?" Lilly-Marie asks.
"Many institutions avoid this problem by not putting people without sight on the board. Our foundation however, has only people with no vision or limited vision in decision-making positions. Whenever we go to an office and sign documents, clerks advise us to bring a sighted person along. But we return and do the same thing again."
At times, I must interrupt Jolanta to translate. As she talks, I'm afraid I'll lose or obliterate certain things due to their awfulness.
"It isn't only a legal hindrance," Jolanta continues. "It's a social issue as well. When I appeared in a TV program, I was supposed to sign a release. The TV people handed the document to a sighted woman who accompanied me to sign. They were surprised when my companion proceeded to read the document to me."
I notice Lilly-Marie fidgeting next to me.
"I understand that you wanted to speak about the banks," Jolanta says.
We decided not to mention our most recent development with CertBank and focus on Citibank instead. We have already written to Jolanta about how Citibank demanded that Lilly-Marie produce a plenipotentiary to bank with them.
"Many banks and other institutions expect a person without sight to have a plenipotentiary," Jolanta says, "even though Polish law doesn't require it. The legal responsibilities are designed to be shared equally on paper; however, once a plenipotentiary is established, no one pays attention to the person without sight anymore."
Caught up in translating, I can't even react.
"Last year I bought an apartment, the wanted to established a plenipotentiary for me as well! Only when I threatened them with the Helsinki Foundation, did they give in. The general consensus is that a person without sight shouldn't buy an apartment on her own."
Lilly-Marie looks sick.
"The person who negatively affected the situation of sightless people," Jolanta continues in her clear, even tone, "was the president of Związek Niewidomych, the Union of People Who Can't See. Some time back in the 90s, he defrauded large sums of money. He was eventually charged and claimed he didn't know what documents he signed."
"He should be shot," Lilly-Marie mutters.
"Basically, he took advantage of the already existing prejudice in this matter," Jolanta says. "The court believed him and he was let off with a warning."
Jolanta seems used to public speaking. A psychologist by profession, she became interested in law as as a tool for affecting accessibility. She has a vision of people without sight promoting their own representatives in the Polish parliament. She is dismayed to hear that there are no such politicians in the US Congress. Her most recent project is to create Academy of Leaders through her foundation in Warsaw, to teach networking skills and train future representatives for parliament.
Jolanta also wants to apply legal pressure to institutions. This, she believes, should happen with the banks.
"Paragraph 80 existed for so many years and no one paid attention to it. People without sight opened bank accounts with no problem," Jolanta says. "Only when it became known, did the banks begin to abuse it."
"Why would they do this?" Lilly-Marie asks.
"It's quite a recent phenomenon. They have just grown meaner. Out of all of them, CertBank is the worst."
Instead of translating, I gasp. "CertBank?"
"Although their internet website is the most accessible, they have already refused to open bank accounts for at least two people without sight."
I make myself translate this despite my brain going numb. "Refused? Just like that?"
"A person without sight fills out the application on line. Then a courier delivers a bank contract to her house..."
"Right," I say.
"A courier is obliged to report anyone without sight trying to open an account."
"Oh," Lilly-Marie squeezes my hand.
"Even if such a person signs the document in front of a courier, she never gets to open an account. As to the third person, CertBank opened her account and then blocked her access to her own funds!"
We try to sound interested but detached. "Really?"
"And she had two salaries coming to her account! In the end, CertBank settled with her outside of court and gave her a small reimbursement."
Jolanta seems particularly happy to hear from Lilly-Marie. She wants to know about everything: laws, accessibility, the perception of people without sight in US society.
"People here often ask me how issues such as mine are perceived in the West," she says. "I tell them that even if I faced just as much discrimination in the West, the point is to fight."

After the conversation ends, we sit on the couch for a while without moving.
"So our kind, helpful courier was in fact obligated by CertBank to report you," I say. "How dreadful."
"I was sorry I didn't want to show myself to him," Lilly-Marie says. "But I feared that if I had my face at the wrong angle, he'd guess something was wrong and tell me to come down."
"You begin to sound like a Jew," I notice.
"Why?"
"I remember hearing about this in many stories from the war, like a refrain." We sit in the living room facing Edward Munch's poster; it shows a woman vampire bending over her victim. The painting exudes the fear of the feminine but it has good proportions. "Someone would be afraid to come out into the light because their face would appear at the wrong angle and someone else might guess they were Jewish."

A few days later, I receive an email from Związek Niewidomych, the Union of People Who Can't See. I must have emailed them before speaking to Jolanta, but I'm glad to hear from them because their email answers another one of our concerns. Paragraph 80, the email explains, applies only to documents establishing new legal entities, like bank accounts. But it doesn't apply to all instances when a signature is required to confirm somebody's identity, such as picking up mail at the post office.
In addition, it is comforting to find out that we haven't actually broken the law by signing the contract with CertBank.
"Flouting Paragraph 80 is not a criminal offense," I share my most recent insight with Lilly-Marie. "It belongs to the Civil Code."
Jolanta confirms this further at our most recent conversation.
"You are under no legal obligation to reveal that you have no vision," she tells Lilly-Marie. "There is no law that makes you do this."
Still, due to CertBank's reputation, it feels like we are winning.

Banks Use Morse Code These Days

There are certain rituals that go along with getting settled in any new place. In Poland, one of these consists of getting your zameldowanie, a piece of paper issued by City Hall showing your official place of residence. Getting this thing was a breeze—pop into City Hall, and a few minutes later here I am, officially a resident at Izabela’s family home.
Another ritual involves opening a bank account. Before trying to open one for me, Izabela had done some in depth research. We needed a bank with an automated phone system, English-speaking representatives and, preferably, one that issued checks. We eventually gave up the check requirement when it became clear that in the process of the democratic transition banks lost interest in them.
Citibank looked like the perfect solution. Izabela banked with them too, and had only good things to say about the people who worked in our small, local branch. They seemed friendly on the phone, and I looked forward to all the mundane banking tasks which had bored me in the States, but here would provide me a measure of independence I craved. I had only been in Poland a couple weeks, but already I was missing the simple freedom of being able to speak for myself in public. I couldn’t wait to start banking right away.
As Izabela had promised, pani Marta at Citibank was the perfect mix of friendliness and professionalism, the kind of banker who could walk you through a complicated lone application without a hitch. If Izabela and I ever thought of opening a joint account, or buying another house, I planned on working with her. It was only after chatting away for ten minutes in English when we hit a snag.
“I don’t know whether we can accept your signature since you can’t see,” said pani Marta, “at least, not without getting it notarized.”
“Notaries are expensive here,” said Izabela to me. She turned to pani Marta, “Are you sure this is required?”
Pani Marta had a quick conference with her supervisor. She returned, seeming anxious. “I’m so sorry to be telling you this, but I’ll have to ask you to come back tomorrow if that’s convenient. My boss doesn’t know the answer to the signature question either, and I’ll have to make some phone calls.”
I could see she was embarrassed.
“But you could read me the documents,” I said. “That’s how they do it in the States, and it works fine.”
She took a breath about to talk, and I felt that something was brewing. In the end, we agreed to meet at 1 the next afternoon.

As soon as my assistant Ola and I walked through the front door of Citibank the next day, Pani Marta rushed out to meet us. She must have been keeping watch and sounded as if she wished she could usher us right back out again.
“I’ve been trying to call you,” she said. “I was hoping to reach you to tell you there was no point inconveniencing yourselves by coming in.” Her tone shifted from frantic to apologetic as she talked.
Then she switched to Polish, speaking to my assistant at length. Why was she doing this? What made her forget her English all of a sudden?
“Pani Marta is saying that Citibank can’t accept your signature,” Ola translated at last. “To have an account here, you would have to sign a release in front of a notary, giving someone else permission to sign your bank documents for you.”
I felt disoriented. All of a sudden I was facing an alternative: either I'd be dependent on the whims of someone else for the rest of my life, or I'd never have a bank account. There was no question I'll choose the latter. But this decision instantly set me apart from everyone else, bankless and alienated. I'd be walking down the streets and looking normal; and no one will guess that I'm a different species.
An alien or not, it wouldn’t do me any good standing here. Feigning composure, I turned to pani Marta. Maybe Ola had translated wrong. Maybe I’d missed something. Pani Marta would tell her news to me.
“So you’re saying that in order to bank with you, I would have to visit a notary, with someone else, and give her permission to sign everything related to my account? And I’d have to bring that person along every time I came in here. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
I paused. “And even if someone did agree to this, would the bank pay for the notary?”
“No. I’m sorry.”

When Ola and I got home and told Izabela the news, she called the bank to confirm. Pani Marta, who had been kind until now, finally turned shappish saying that such was the law in Poland and there was nothing she could do about it.
The law? So it wasn't just the whim of Citibank. I had known I’d meet with new challenges in Poland, but that premonition didn’t make what Citibank had said any less surprising. The question of whether my signature is valid had never been raised before, and, as I knew full well, would never pass the scrutiny of the many disability rights groups in America.
But here paragraph 80 was meant to trip me up. If this was Polish law, it meant that I really couldn’t have an account anywhere. So what would happen when I got a job? There would be tricky to explain this situation to a boss.

Izabela then spoke to the banks manager, who, to our relief, was supportive, and appalled at the situation. He suggested that we write a letter of complaint addressed to him, which he would send on to Citibank’s main office in Warsaw. The next day, I did just that.
In my letter, I started from the beginning and treated the unpleasant experience as a story. I told Citibank I had chosen them because they could assist me in English; I explained how the armory of the notaries and the plenipotentiary came into view instead; I concluded by telling them why my having an account there wasn’t feasible as long as these policies were in place.
I also included the information that after examining paragraph 80 of the Civil Code, the law upon which Citibank’s policy is apparently founded, I discovered that a plenipotentiary is not, as Citibank stated, required by the Polish government for me to maintain a bank account. Instead, the law only necessitates that an individual without sight, upon opening an account, must have her signature notarized.
In the end, I requested that City Bank reconsider its policy regarding customers without vision. I said: "Though it may have been designed to protect a customer who cannot see, it leaves the same person legally incapacitated in terms of her own money. It also invites financial abuse of her by the person serving as power of attorney. Furthermore, the policy, in my case and in that of others I am sure, is outmoded." I said that as a self-supporting, productive member of society, I was entitled to exercise my own discretion with regard to money as any other working person would. Again, I requested that Citibank reconsider.

The bank manager had told us to expect an answer within three weeks to a month. When, after five weeks, we still hadn’t heard anything, we wrote again. We also sent a letter to the Helsinki Foundation, who handles cases of discrimination. It was only then that Citibank in Warsaw, who must have decided I might not have given up, picked another bank, or left the country, got in touch.
The woman who called my cell phone said that the bank had sent a reply to my letter, and that I could expect it within two days. I thanks her and wished her a happy holiday. Christmas was less than a week away, and this banking debacle wasn't personal.
When I arrived home that same afternoon, Izabela told me Citibank had phoned the house too.
Sitting at the kitchen table, I thought back. No, I hadn't given them our home phone number.
“They phoned to talk to me,” said Izabela. “I told the man he needed to talk to you and he said, ‘but didn’t you sign the letter too?’ I told him that yes, I had signed the Polish copy as a translator, but that this was your financial business and he should speak to you. He said, ‘I need to speak to her?’”
I couldn’t help laughing in spite of the situation.
“Next time,” I said, “you should tell him that no, speaking to me won’t work, he should just communicate in Morse Code. That aught to make things easier for everybody.”
Another ten days passed before the promised letter arrived.

Surprised by how nervous I was when Izabela finally brought the letter in from the mailbox, I folded my shawl over the back of the kitchen chair.
Whenever I get particularly nervous, I force myself to think of something funny about the situation. There had been a girl named Emma in my class at school whom we hadn’t liked because she was a tattle tale. Her mom had worked at Citibank, so whenever we passed the place as kids, we all made silly, kid-like comments. “Okay,” I told myself. “This letter is nothing to worry about—it’s just a piece of mail from the place Emma’s mom works—no big deal.” Sitting at the table, Izabela opened the letter and began to read:


Dear Madame, we respectfully inform you that in accordance with Bank Law, the contract regarding the bank account has to be signed in the written form.
In addition, it is necessary to explain that according to the Civil Code, when a person who cannot read has to give a statement of will in writing (which, in this case, is the bank account contract), it has to be given in the form of the public notary act.
As a result, Citibank in Warsaw offered to sign a bank contract between the bank and the person with no vision under the public notary act.
There also exist a possibility of establishing a plenipotentiary by a person who cannot see, who, in the name of the patron, will sign a contract with the bank under the public notary act. This means that a person who cannot see can endow the plenipotentiary with the right to sign a bank contract without giving him access to the account itself.
We hope that these solutions will satisfy your expectations.
Sincerely, signed and dated December 14, 2009

At first, I was too stunned to catch the meaning of the words. Luckily, I wasn't alone. Izabela held me, sat me down, and handed me hot spiced cider pouring it into my favorite, depression glass cup. I studied the rough and smooth texture of its flowers, glad that this beautiful thing had come all the way from California.
It was ten minutes before I was able to channel what we had read. The letter contained two important facts. First, Citibank had lied. In person, they had insisted that the plenipotentiary would have to continuously sign documents related to the account, Here, they claimed that it was only a matter of signing a single bank contract. Second, and most crucial, they defined me as illiterate. Now, I know that talking computers and audio books are new inventions, relatively speaking. But Braille has been around for over a hundred years. I have read Braille since the age when other kids started reading print. Within minutes, I laughed.
“Well, Izabela, sorry to tell you—you have an illiterate for a girlfriend!”
Izabela tucked the letter into the special Citibank folder. "I wonder how you got a Master's in English."