THE THIEF

It’s St. Nicolaus Day, and we must catch the train right after the TV recording because if we don’t, the next one will get us home at a quarter to midnight. In the 1980s, a trip from Gdańsk to Warsaw took four hours and passengers were fond of defaming communists’ incompetence in railroad matters; thirty years later the same trip drags from seven to eight hours with no one to blame.

The TV driver drops us in the middle of the crossroad, and we skip over ice blocks to the entrance of Warszawa Centralna looking still like a glamorous couple who appeared on Questions for Breakfast, a morning talk show on Channel 2: Lilly-Marie with a towering hairdo, I with a sleek one, and with enough make-up between us to pass for beauticians returning from a face-styling convention. We have only 10 minutes left, not enough to make it through the ticket line, so we hunt for a cash machine to be able to buy tickets in the train.

What made us risk this trip in the midst of train and airplane delays due to early snowfall was the promise of a rebound. A month earlier, a young upstart from a private network, a brunette with a TV-smooth face named Ola, had arrived at Elton from Warsaw to interview us about our dance classes; the result, featured on the same day following the evening news, showed us flapping our mouths like a rare breed of mauve angelfishes while a scary female voiceover ranted on.

“That’s not what you are supposed to do when interviewing a member of a minority group,” Lilly-Marie said.

Ola presented same sex dancing as a risky venture demanding that our personal data be kept secret for our safety. It transpired that we didn’t teach at Gdansk University, but at “one of the higher education institutions in Pomerania.” Apparently, we had no last names; I was featured as Iza Filipa, a fitting name for a cabaret performer.

“And they are a far cry from professional dancers,” the voiceover observed.

Our friends, including Pavko, liked the interview, which confused us even more. I kept listing insults and injuries until they politely agreed.

“Yes, you are right,” they nodded when I expressed my umbrage at turning us into a better kind of gay who venture into the minatory gay land occasionally, as the voiceover had it, to “talk with homosexuals.” No trace remained of Lilly-Marie’s cordial invitation addressed to all who wanted to join our Friday night class.

I worried that portraying us as famemongers would hurt our project and turn our community away from it, but I didn’t expect us to appear in an anti-advertisement.

“Yes, you are right,” they said to me noting how “niewidoma” was the only adjective applied to Lilly-Marie, not even to be alternated with “American.”

“Niewidoma” is a stout word; coined as politically correct under communism, it survived the fall of the iron curtain; not crude like English “blind,” or as clunky as “a person who doesn’t see,” it spurns stylistic fusions such as “in blind faith” and hesitates when used to label people.

“Sure, but think about Polish niewidomi,” Halina said on Skype. “They can’t even travel by bus on their own, and here is this person dancing.”

The truth was that no amount of dancing would make the city transit companies install voice recording in their buses, so Lilly-Marie couldn’t commute around town on her own either.

Our friends must have learned to treat a condescending poke attached to every piece of news that concerned them, like white noise. This was their survival technique, I told Lilly-Marie – if tuning out a voiceover helped people stay sane, then fine.
For someone born in the land of free speech, it was hard to conceive of why people train themselves not to listen. Didn’t they worry they’d miss something important in the process of tuning out?

But for me, this was familiar ground. “All throughout the early 1980s, the government-controlled TV ranted about the anti-communist resistance movement using the foulest of terms,” I told Lilly-Marie. “The only bit of news that mattered to people was that the resistance was still there.”

Still, many of our Elton friends could barely remember martial law, and Ola, the journalist from TVN wasn’t even born then.

“Ah, the greatest achievement of investigative journalism – we talk with homosexuals!” Lilly-Marie’s sighed. “So did she.”



We accepted the invitation to Channel 2 because it thrilled us to think this interview would be live: no one could twist what we said; we were going to have the last word.

The journalist who invited us to Channel 2 was closer to me in age; I remembered her presiding over drawing room-type literary discussions some years ago when such luxuries existed on TV.

When she called me on the phone, I talked her into postponing our visit till December (“We have to make room for our university schedule,” I said, my voice unrefined in contrast to the journalist’s pleasantly counterfeit one), and she picked the first Monday available. This turned out to be December 6th, St. Nicolas day, to which I gave no thought at the time, and probably so did she.

St. Nicolas day is an informal family holiday. She never tried to reschedule, though; I suppose she decided to be brave about it.



Once we arrive at the Channel 2 headquarters, the staff kindly ushers us from one room to another: our eyes acquire an extra shine, our hair an additional lift, and soon Lilly-Marie has enough wires circling her waste to turn her into a cyborg-like transmitter. Her translator hides in the studio’s attic and she hears him only through tiny headphones taped behind her ears; she says he sounds young and comforting, like an ally.

Once in the studio, we are seated apart to fit the camera setup. Our hosts look straight at a flat screen where I recognize Marta, the co-author of Forbidden Loves; she argues about something with interest in what looks like a prerecorded interview, but her voice is muted, and before I have a chance to ask why she’s there, the countdown begins and we are on the air.

Our hosts, a swank brunette and her polar opposite, a strikingly commonplace man, begin to introduce us. The woman makes sure to acknowledge my university affiliation, which is a relief after Ola's lapse, and then asks why we need our own space to dance. “Is it really that bad?”

She nods with relief when I tell her that it isn’t. Her companion in turn asks Lilly-Marie a few predictable questions, giving her a chance to say that she feels safer in Poland than in the United States. He is not curious why and leaves the audience to wonder how so.

We hope for the pleasantries to end and the interview to begin, but all of a sudden it’s over; the hosts lavish us with thanks, and the brunette extends her hand toward me with two chocolate Santa Clauses in silver wrapping.

“I hope you don’t mind them being men,” she says.

I take a breath and smile: “We need positive male role models in our lives.”

Later on, when we watch a recording of this interview on the internet, I notice that Lilly-Marie never knew of the host’s othering us with her final poke; the translator’s connection must have been cut off already, or else he was too embarrassed to repeat it. My answer isn’t aired either; the interview ends on the hostess’s last words.



The train is already waiting at the platform, and the conductor is right at her post. We hope she’ll guide us to a newer no-compartment car of which there is usually only one per train, but this particular train consists only of cars with compartments. Many travelers still find them cozier: in old cars you share a space with eight people at the most, but in the new ones you sit amongst an anonymous crowd as if a movie theater. We like anonymity in addition to automatic doors, space for luggage, and enough room to walk between the seats, but since this train has none, I opt for the first class and, to spare us from struggling down the hallway, we move into the first compartment with unreserved seats.

A round brunette with attentive hazel eyes, meticulously groomed and past retirement, is already sitting there. She looks like a volunteer from the ultra-conservative old ladies movement. Lilly-Marie smiles at her; we don’t expect her to speak English.

I watch the conductor gliding past our compartment and vanishing in the hallway. Then the door opens. A man gestures toward the place by the door asking if it is free. The church lady nods yes, and he staggers inside against the lurching boom and bust of the train.

His coat looks tattered and damp when he tosses it on the opposite seat, the smells of stale liquor and unwashed skin wafting off of him. When he settles at last, I notice his unmistakably black eye.

Right away, he strikes up a conversation with Lilly-Marie. First, he tries to make eye contact. When he realizes this is not going to happen, he stares at the glass door in an attempt to restrain himself. But nothing is happening outside. So he reconsiders.

“Jedzie pani daleko?” He speaks with a flair, only to determine that she doesn’t speak Polish.

This, however, seems to dishearten him only for a while.

As I watch the man hovering around, I decide to enlist myself as his conversation partner. I fear that if we tell him to go away, with our shiny looks and cosmopolitan air, he might retort with “I’m not good enough for you” and become unpredictable.

Later on Lilly-Marie says she learned to ignore strange people in public spaces. It’s a simple technique which makes them go away. A train compartment with its door closed, however, ceases to be a public space. It resembles a walk-in closet with no one from the outside to witness the succession of events. With the conductor nowhere in sight, I begin to calculate the safest option.

“Pani nie mówi po polsku,” I say. “And you, how far are you going?”

Conveniently, he welcomes interaction.

“Do you know that I was bad this weekend?” He says.

I decide not to look concerned, but sympathetic. “How so?”

“I’ve done certain things in my life which can never be undone.”

“I see,” I say. We are going to be fine, as long as I keep him occupied.

I relax and let him set his own pace.

“When a guy like me wants to apply for a job, let’s say, and everything looks fine and dandy, so he goes for an interview, and they tell him all right, we want you, but you need to get this additional forklift training, so once he admits that he spent time in jail, this job isn’t open to him anymore.”

“Ah,” I say. “That’s terrible.”

“But that’s sure the truth.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Can I translate this?”

He nods. I translate our travel companion’s monologue as I understand it. “This man must have spent time in jail,” I tell Lilly-Marie. “He’s released now, but finds it hard to get a job, so he’s somewhat bitter about the whole thing.”

Lilly-Marie shifts uncomfortably. This makes me cautious in turn; I’m still concerned that any noticeable sign of our fear may set him off. I translate to her everything the thief says; yet, I haven’t been sharing my concerns with her – that is that I’m scared of the thief turning dangerous. I don’t want her to seem upset since she’s sitting between him and me. Staying cool is of utmost importance.

I turn my attention to the man.

“I wonder what the lady sitting next to you thinks about it,” he says.

“Well,” I pass Lilly-Marie’s words to him. “The lady says you must be going through a hard time.”

Suddenly, he looks defiant. “I’ve always been my own man, I dare say.”

He urges me to translate his impromptu declaration of independence, but Lilly-Marie remains unimpressed. He shrugs and shifts, then abruptly relaxes.

“I’ve always been a lazy bum,” he says. “I only went as far as the 8th grade.”

I tell an abbreviated story of the thug’s struggle with education to Lilly-Marie and realize that keeping this translation project going gives us a chance at survival; it slows things down.

I notice the man likes it, too. He shifts his attention from Lilly-Marie to me.

“I’m not a free man,” he says. “I’ve spent 5 years in jail, and I’m going to spend there 3 more.”

He watches intently how I respond to the word “jail,” so I nod.

And this is how we proceed: he smiles at me at times, but I never smile back.
I don’t ask his name, so that he won’t ask mine. He calls me pani; I am calling him pan, and we don’t try to deepen our familiarity; anyway, passengers seldom share their names in a train compartment.

In the meantime, I process – Ah, the forklift example didn’t come from his own experience! If he’s been in jail for the last five years, the disappointing job search is what he and his friends expect will happen to them once they are out in the world. I become suddenly aware of my TV make up; I hope it doesn’t start pealing off my skin. Perhaps there is nothing authentic about our travel companion, either; we are no more than an audience in a provincial theater. The thug repeats the lines he must have rehearsed in the company of likeminded fellows to be pulled out at moments like this.

”I wouldn’t work for small change,” he declares. “Fifteen hundred z?otych per month, or whatever people make here.”

Ironically, the sum he mentions is what I‘m left with after a small home repair loan is taken off my wages, but I prefer to spare the thug this knowledge so he wouldn’t take me for a loser.



The church lady sitting opposite us reaches into her purse and retrieves her cellphone. I learn she will stay with us for most of the trip.

“Could you keep your voice low for a moment?” I tell the thug and he consents.

I take the opportunity to chat with Lilly-Marie. The thief, on his end, uses this time to collect his thoughts to start a new chapter of his story. As soon as the church lady ends her call, he begins:

“Sometimes I’m doing things that I know are going to end badly. But I do them anyway, and I don’t know why.” He eyes me earnestly. “I was supposed to report back on the 3rd of December, but it’s the 6th already, and I’m finally on my way.”

Until now it wasn’t entirely clear to me how someone could be in jail and travel by train at the same time. “Are you on some kind of a leave?”

“Yeah, I went to see my folks, but then I hung out with my friends, and things got a little out of hand.”

I’m amazed by my own confidence. There is no revelation he could make that would throw me off track. Still, I don’t want him to share details of his recent badness with me. I feel as collected as if I could steer his mind one way or another.

“I’ll be 29 when I get out of jail,” he says. “What am I supposed to do then? How am I supposed to live? I want to start a family.”

I catch myself staring at him. To my amazement, he’s surprised me after all.

“Yes, I want to have a family. I’m normal, right?” He says it as a challenge. “I’m normal. I want to have a family and kids. But I don’t know if I should. I don’t know if I can give them a good life.”

“Let me translate this.”

“Sure.” He beams. “I wonder what the lady will say to this.”

“He’s using ‘normal’ as a synonym for ‘straight,’ the way men do here,” I tell Lilly-Marie. “He wants to have a family but is concerned about how he’s going to supports his kids when he gets them.”

“Does he have anyone he wants to start a family with?”

“Not really, and this doesn’t seem to upset him. I suppose he thinks a wife will turn up one way or another.”

“So why does he want to start a family at all?

“It’s a matter of status to him.”

“I don’t think he should start a family until he sorts himself out,” Lilly-Marie says.

“The lady suggests you might want to work on your issues first, before you start a family,” I say to the thief.

But he happily goes on troubling himself about how to support his offspring. “How am I going to feed them? Well, not from the salary like these people get.” He raises himself on his seat: “So I am going to steal. Yeah, that’s only fair – I am going to steal to support my kids!”

Again I catch his well-rehearsed tone of voice. Jailbirds must have a lot of time on their hands to discuss their life options; they must have veritable support groups. I decide to put a stop to this.

“Could you stop behaving as if you had no agency in your life? You can make your own choices as we speak.” I hear my voice crescendo. I am no longer scared of the thief. “I know how it feels when people assume only one thing about you, when you are stuck, when you feel your life will never change. I emigrated at 26, and I had no useful skills to support myself in the world either. But I created my life the way I want it, and so can you.”

“That’s why you speak English not like people here,” he says. “Like you know it real good.”

“Well, this wasn’t easy either.”

I turn to Lilly-Marie: “I’m trying to tell him that he’s responsible for his own choices. I’m perfectly sick of him, too.”

The thief gestures for my attention, then points at Lilly-Marie: “Could you tell her that she looks like an angel?”

“He is telling you that you look like an angel,” I tell Lilly-Marie.

“I think she is really beautiful.”

“He calls you beautiful.”

“I wonder what this lady thinks about me.”

“He wants to know what you think of him.”

“Well, I’m less concerned than I was, bur I still don’t feel comfortable this man staying here,” says Lilly-Marie.

“The lady is a little concerned,” I say to the thug.

“Oh! But there is nothing to be afraid of,” he declares. “I’m not a pervert; I’m just a common thief!”

“That’s a relief,” Lilly-Marie says flatly when I translate this to her.



Another hour passes, and the thief, still sitting next to us, looks radiant, pleased and excited.

“This is such an important day for me!” He exclaims over the syncopated rumble of the train. “I didn’t like this day at first; I didn’t like the idea of returning to the facility; I thought it was going to be another unpleasant day. But it turned out to be so good, so surprising! I am always going to remember it.”

He closes his eyes, opens them and decides he is going to smoke a cigarette out in the hallway. Having said that, he leaves. But he plans to return – his coat is still on the seat.

As soon as he is gone, I make eye contact with the church lady who has been sitting opposite us for the whole time.

“Wasn’t that something?” I speak to her in Polish.

“Especially when he said he wouldn’t work for fifteen hundred zlotych a month,” she answers.

If she is lucky, her retirement is just over half of the salary our thief spurned.

“What are you two talking about?” Lilly-Marie asks.

“We are discussing the highlights of our thief self-presentation.”

“And highlights they were, most certainly,” says the church lady.

It turns out the church lady speaks English – hesitantly at first, but she had a good vocabulary. She must have understood most of what we said.

“Please don’t think that I was sitting here like a statue. I watched all that was going on carefully. I didn’t interfere because you were handling this man so well on your own.” She adds looking at me. “Another person would just complicate matters.”

I’m both relieved and concerned to see my fears confirmed.

“I didn’t want to leave the compartment even when my girlfriend called me on the phone only because I felt my presence was necessary and created some kind of protection for both of you. I believe I acted like…”

“Like a chaperone,” says Lilly-Marie.

The church lady smiles shyly. We both nod to express enthusiasm and thank her profusely.

“It’s obvious why this young man couldn’t succeed,” she continues. “He is from a pathological family, he didn’t get enough education to support himself, and his financial ambitions are greater than his earning capacity.”

I want to say, “That’s sounds just as if you were talking about me.” But I suppose the church lady would think it was a joke.

“I figure construction work would be great for him,” the lady continues. “There he could start with no experience and learn on the job. And jobs are always there.”

“That’s a fantastic idea,” I tell the lady.

“Perhaps you could suggest it to this young man,” she says to me.

“I will,” I nod earnestly. “As soon as he comes back.”

“And you and I are going to pray for him,” Lilly-Marie says to the lady.



When the door finally opens, we jump, but instead of the thief, a tall man enters our compartment. He moves about with a grace of a former boxer.

When he asks which place is free, both the church lady and I point to the one formerly taken by the thief.

I give him a preliminary scan: once his navy blue coat has landed on the upper shelf with his flat leather suitcase, I see that he wears a black turtleneck and black trousers. His clothes look expensive but not ostentatious, as if their point was not to draw attention to themselves.

His neatly trimmed crew cut, rectangularity of his features, and whatever else of him reminds me of professional fighters from James Bond type of movies, begin to worry me. With our Santa Clause inspired luck, I sincerely hope we didn’t exchange a hapless petty thief for a successful member of the mob.

Alarmed, I search for his eyes and am relieved to find them kind.

Then I make eye contact with the church lady. “Should we tell the gentleman what’s going on here?”

Her expression is noncommittal, and I find myself growing impatient with her. Only a moment ago, I saw the thief passing right outside our door.

“I’m going to tell him anyway,” I say.

“We have a situation here,” I tell the crew-cut man. “Another guy’s traveling in this compartment; he is a thief serving his sentence in prison. He looks like he’s been beaten up; he’s probably still drunk. He seems unpredictable at times. It may appear to you that I am on friendly terms with him – but I’m not. I’m just talking to him to protect us.”

“Tough luck for him,” the crew-cut man says, “because I work for the prisons.”

I stare at him, then laugh in disbelief. “Do you?”

The man nods, and we pass onto him the highlights of our encounter with the thief.

“He took a great interest in the lady here.” The church lady points at Lilly-Marie.

I translate this to Lilly-Marie who nods.

“He told us that women always fell for him,” the church lady chimes in. “He must have had an inflated idea about his personal charms and seemed pressed to prove them, which must have been most troubling for the lady.”

Lilly-Marie sighs. “Well, he was a lose cannon for sure. What’s going to happen to him when he returns to prison?”

I ask this question of our new travel companion.

“Considering that he missed the deadline, he’s going to lose his privileges, including leave and mailing privileges. In addition, due to his black eye, an inquiry will be forwarded to his local precinct to conclude whether any illegal actions were committed during his leave.” The man’s voice remains decisive yet kind. “This is meant to prevent incidents, when after a period of time, on the basis of evidence, a man is discovered to have committed a crime, while, to all appearances, he was doing his time in prison.”

“We were talking to him as if he was one of us,” the church lady says. “Especially pani here.” She points at me.

I turn directly to the crew-cut man.

“I admit I really wanted to know one thing. If he’s aware that some things are going to turn out badly, what force makes him repeat them?”

“You realize they never tell you the truth,” the prison worker says.

“But you can always determine something even from the way people lie.” Whenever pressed by my questioning, the thief would rant about corrupt politicians and how they mishandle public money. With such people at power, whom was he supposed to look up to?

“The supposed grand-scale theft by men in power justified his petty thefts. He said he lacked positive role models. At last he added, ‘including my own father.’ This sounded true and allowed me to ask about his father.”

The thief’s father was a drunkard and a violent man. “Who knows how many times I had to fight, and I mean, physically fight with my father to protect mother,” the thief said not long before leaving the compartment. “When I went to prison and mother came for the first visit, I watched her crying. I was no longer around and father messed her up.” His father died within a year, and the thief visited his grave only once.

But when I wanted to know how his father’s badness made him do things he regretted later on, he regressed into his corrupt politicians rant.

“Perhaps he really didn’t know how to express it,” Lilly-Marie says.

Grateful for the coincidence, we feel compelled to repeat all the thief’s woes to the crew-cut man.

“He was surely bent on proving that he wouldn’t be able to support his family on fifteen hundred zlotych a month,” the church lady says. “He made it sound like it was an impossible feat to earn enough and live honestly. But for now he doesn’t have any family to speak of!”

“Prisoners tend to live in this kind of fantasy,” the crew-cut man says. “It keeps them from having to address their behavior.”

He isn’t detached or cold; at the time, he just seems to have seen it all.

“An eight-year sentence seems so long,” I say. “And just for theft.”

“That’s what they usually get,” the man says. “For more elaborate crimes.”

I want to ask the crew-cut man if indeed ex-cons are supposed to embark on returning to society without any transitioning. If the thief lives in a fantasy land, then what is the realistic alternative? With eight years of jail and no job history it could quite possibly be hard to find work.

“On the subject of ex-prisoners, I recently heard a story of this kind,” the crew-cut man says. “The prisoner in question grew up in a family where everybody worked in law enforcement. At twenty, he was caught driving a stolen car and got a short sentence. Once he went home for the first leave, all the guys in his family beat him bloody. He needed to recuperate for a week after that. Then he returned to prison and made friends with other prisoners who were part of a drug trafficking ring. Once released, he started working for them. He bought a house, made a cushy life for his wife, and eventually got caught. Recently, I spoke to him in prison. He said he was going to return to drug trafficking first thing after he’s released.”

I translate the prisoner’s story to Lilly-Marie.

“This just proves the thief’s point about role models,” Lilly-Marie says. “The prisoner in the story grew up in a family which endorsed domestic violence, so in the end his choice was between people whom he knew and who were going to continue to abuse him and drug traffickers who offered him ways to become independent.”

Before I have time to translate, the church lady chimes in. “Our thief also told us how important for him was to be his own man,” she tells the crew-cut man. “He didn’t want us to pity him for his troubled childhood. He perceived himself as a hunter!”

“But as far as we can see he is still prey,” the crew-cut man says.



When at last the conductor appears in the hallway, the crew-cut man who sits closest to the door, watches the thief’s futile attempts to avoid her. Since the thief doesn’t have a ticket, we expect him to hide. But when the conductor at last comes through our door, the thief resurfaces as well. He pretends to be seated in another compartment. He says he’s just come back to pick up his coat.

The conductor takes one look at him and decides not to pursue the matter any further. When the train stops a few minutes later, we expect the thief to leave, but to our surprise we see him in the hallway, talking to another lady.

“You see what I mean,” Lilly-Marie says. “He didn’t have to stay with us. If we asked him to leave, he would have found someone else to talk to.”

“Surely,” I agree.

“He said this conversation meant a lot to him, and he was always going to remember it,” the church lady says.

“Prisoners do remember for a long time, that’s true,” the crew-cut man agrees. “From such encounters they learn how it feels to be us.”

“It must matter that someone relates to them as human beings,” the church lady says.

“Yes, and they go to great lengths to match our expectations, talk the way we talk, blend in.”

I notice that the thief never asked Lilly-Marie and me about the purpose of our travel.

Nor do we find it fitting to reveal it to anyone else.

At last the train stops and we see the thief walking past our window down the platform; with his coat collar high against the icy wind and a shawl around his neck, he strides ahead without giving us another look.



Photo copyright by Konrad Pustoła