Chapter 25
Tomasina
T omasina sat at the table in the small but functional kitchen of the home she shared with her mama and Klusek, the cat, in the apartment bloki on the edge of town. The black cat was curled up where the late afternoon sun reached the armchair, oblivious to Tomasina’s increasing anxiety. She was supposed to be stuffing the cabbage leaves with mince for their evening meal, which Mama would barely touch, but her hands were clasped tightly under the table. Golabki was her favourite dinner, but she knew it would taste like cardboard tonight. Her mama’s back was to her at the stove, unaware of her daughter’s inner turmoil as she stirred the tomato sauce.
Tomasina considered abandoning her task and scooping up Klusek, whose name meant Dumpling. She was the only one he’d tolerate cuddling him, but she stayed where she was, feeling her nails making indents in her palms, unsure how to find the strength to say what she had to. Klusek. She rolled his name in her head as an excuse not to think about what she must tell her mama. It wasn’t her who’d named him. She’d have given him something more befitting his haughty demeanour if she had. Something like Antek, perhaps. It was short for Antonio, but not Leon. Never Leon.
Klusek had come to them when Mrs D?browski, who’d lived at the end of the hall, had died. Her son, in his well-cut suit, had knocked on all the fourth-floor resident’s doors asking if they’d take the cat in because he had a terrible allergy to pet dander and couldn’t take him home. Tomasina didn’t believe this for one minute. He’d barely left the big city where he lived to come to visit his mama over the years and struck her as too selfish to care for an animal. Poor Klusek, she’d thought, worried about his fate if no one agreed to give him a new home. Her pleas to be allowed the cat had been met with resistance but, in the end, her parents said he could stay so long as she fed him and emptied his litter tray. He’d also need to earn his keep and see off the mice that plagued their apartment when the weather began to cool.
She’d kept her end of the bargain. Klusek had not. Neither had her father, her tatús. He’d told her he would always be there for her and Mama then he’d died.
Tomasina could hear Mrs Joswiak tormenting her family through the paper-thin wall as she sang along to the radio while cooking as she did each evening. The woman was a terrible singer, something her tight unit of three – mama, tatús and herself – used to laugh about. Their building was old, but it had no charm and was full of secrets or so Tomasina thought. It harked back to the days not spoken about by the older folk still living here. A time when the country was under the influence of the Soviet Union and had become a communist state dictated to by Moscow.
When Tomasina tried to imagine those years, she could only see them in shades of grey like the buildings framing her town left behind to crumble as a reminder. This here, however, was her home. She knew no different. And, while it was plain and filled with hand-me-downs, it had also once been filled with life. Now, the colour was gone. Her beloved tatús had dropped dead outside the factory where he worked a few months earlier and sucked the oxygen from their apartment in his absence. Her mama told her he’d had a heart attack like his own father before him. Tomasina blamed the factory, not a congenital condition. He’d followed in his father’s footsteps right through those factory gates upon leaving school, where he toiled six days a week. So, no, it wasn’t a pre-existing condition but rather the back-breaking, mind-numbing work that had made her tatús’ heart give up.
As she tossed the handful of soil onto his casket the day they buried him, she’d promised herself, once of age, she'd leave their town. In the moments before the earth swallowed him up, she whispered, ‘I’ll find a better way of life, Tatús, and I will look after Mama for you.’
How was she to keep her promise now? She’d ruined everything by giving in to Leon instead of keeping her legs crossed. She’d wanted to feel loved, though, if only for a few precious moments, and Mama was so tightly wrapped in her own grief that she didn’t seem to see Tomasina these days. She would see her in a few moments, she thought, taking a deep breath and finding her voice.
‘Mama, I’m pregnant.’