by Paul Linczak
Five days per week, after ensuring her boys had oatmeal for breakfast, Aga took a bus to LaGuardia Airport, where she mopped floors and scrubbed toilets in the airport’s only terminal. The Catholic agency that had arranged both her arrival in the country and her lodgings in a small apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, had arranged this job, too. They had even explained to Aga’s new boss, a Polish-speaking man born in Brooklyn, why she had come to America. He told Aga, on her first day, that he was glad to meet her, and he seemed to mean it, looking at her with awe. After wiping mirrors, scrubbing vomit and fecal matter from toilet bowls, and cleaning floors of their mud and cigarette ash, she went home to prepare meals for her boys. On many nights, they ate store-bought pierogi.
By the time they arrived in the country, her sons, Józef and Krzysztof, had already missed most of a school year, but they still went, and they were surprised to find that, at their schools in Greenpoint, some teachers could speak Polish. Still, the Catholic agency arranged after-school English-language classes, and the boys began to learn the language their mother didn’t know.
Aga met few people. At Mass in the Saint Stanislaus Kostka Church, where the priest spoke Latin with his back to the congregation, other women looked askance at her. In their view, Aga knew, she was a blonde, blue-eyed vixen in obvious need of a man, fresh competition in the dating pool. But on most days Aga didn’t even bother to wear makeup. She did not buy new, fashionable clothes. Nor did she attend any clubs or events in the city. Instead, she spent her free hours in church, where she lit candles for her late husband and, under the vaulted grandiosity of the sanctuary’s colored glass and ornate adornments, tried, through prayer, to turn her pain into something small enough to lose.
***
At work one day in August, Aga rolled her custodian’s cart to a men’s bathroom. A man emerged, bumping into her. “Oh, I’m sorry!” he said in English. He was older than her, about the same height, and wore a security guard’s blue uniform. His face was broad, with a hard chin, downturned nose, and a dent between his full black eyebrows, giving him a pugilistic look. But then his hair, thick, deep brown, and combed back, conjured speedy drives in a convertible, as though he were an aristocrat. “Are you OK?” he asked.
“Excuse,” Aga said, trying out her only English. “Please.”
“Ah!” he said. “You don’t speak English?” Switching to Polish, he asked, “By chance is Pani Polish?”
They introduced themselves. His name was Gregor. Aga was leery and quiet, while Gregor seemed excited. He asked how long she’d been in the country, where she was from, where she lived now, and more. It was nice to meet another Pole working at the airport, he said. Maybe they could have lunch? To be polite, Aga smiled and nodded. Then she went and cleaned the men’s bathroom.
The next day, Gregor passed her as he patrolled the concourse. He said hello. The day after that, he sent her another friendly Polish greeting, “dzień dobry,” as he passed her in a gate area. On the third day, he caught her at lunchtime and asked her to join him. Aga, who normally ate a white-bread ham sandwich alone in a custodial room, agreed. They went to the plain, cinderblock-walled break room Gregor used.
He told her he had a PhD in economics from the University of Warsaw, and he had just started lecturing there when Germany invaded. His parents and younger sister had refused to leave the country. He’d fled to Bucharest, and he hadn’t heard from his family since, although he’d written letters. From Romania, he made his way to Paris, where he’d entertained staying permanently until it became clear the Germans wanted France, too. He requested asylum in the US, citing the Nazi removal of Polish academics. His uncle, who’d married an American woman and was an engineer at a Cleveland oil refinery, sponsored him. After Gregor arrived, his uncle convinced his employer—Sohio, the last remnant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Ohio—to make Gregor a machine operator. He took the job but hated it. He looked for openings in academia. But his English was not strong enough, nor could he publish in his native language, so colleges were not interested. He worked on his English, reading the local newspaper, listening to American radio, and chatting with neighbors. In 1948, Columbia University launched a Polish Studies department, where his English was good enough to handle administrative duties. He moved to New York, to a studio apartment in Washington Heights. He liked the work much better than the oil refinery, and he even helped to publish a professor’s book about the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, but in 1954 the department’s funding ended. He was let go. He still sent his résumé around, but he’d taken the airport gig to make ends meet.
“Do you still want to study economics?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I will get my foot in the door. I have to. Right now, I have a paper I translated myself about pricing behavior in oligopolistic markets under review at a prestigious journal. I wrote it when I had access to Columbia’s library. I hope the journal will publish it.”
“I hope so, too,” Aga said. “I’ll hold my thumbs.”
He smiled. “And was Pani able to go to school?”
Aga explained that she hadn’t been allowed to finish high school because of Nazi policy. “I wish I knew more about economics,” she said. “I don’t even have a bank account.”
Gregor put his thermos down, flabbergasted. “We will have to fix that,” he said.
“They will let me do that here?” Aga asked.
“Yes. I know of a bank that will gladly serve you.” After a pause, he asked, “Did Pani come to the US alone?”
Aga lost her smile. “I came with my two sons,” she said. “My husband was killed in the Poznań protests last year.”
Gregor, who viewed the dead from the protests as martyred heroes, put his hand on his chest. “I’m very sorry.”
Yes, she said, so was she, and then she noted the time and insisted on getting back to work.
They kept seeing each other throughout the terminal. Gregor used the more casual “cześć” instead of “dzień dobry,” and he swapped the formal “Pani” for the informal “ty.” He was cheerful, whereas no smile could mask Aga’s sadness.
Two weeks after their lunch, they arranged to meet at a bank in Greenpoint. Wearing a suit, Gregor translated as Aga opened her first checking account. She deposited what little money she’d scrounged. Then they went to a diner for coffee. As Gregor talked, Aga’s eyes wandered to a display of cakes and pies on the counter, and he asked her about Poland. She described long lines for bread, eggs, and butter, the difficulties of the black market, the wage cuts that had made steelworkers like her husband protest. After her husband’s death, which she glossed over, police from the Department of Security searched her home, and that was when she knew she couldn’t stay. Using fake passports procured from a priest, she and her boys went to East Berlin and took the S-Bahn to a new life. Gregor said, “Well, here you are. They say anything is possible in this country.” Winking, he added, “Maybe you will become President of the United States!” Aga laughed. He bought them each a slice of apple pie, and after eating—such sweet abundance, Aga noted aloud, so easily had—they left. At Gregor’s subway stop, he faced her. “Maybe,” he said, squeezing his hands together, “some Saturday or Sunday, while it’s still warm outside, we can go for a walk in Central Park and have ice cream? Have you been to Central Park yet?” She shook her head, smiling wanly. “It’s really lovely,” he continued. “You should see it. I would love…” He paused, self-conscious. “I would love to go with you.”
Aga looked down. “I will think about it,” she said.
***
A few days later, as Aga’s morning bus moved through Queens, passing neon shop signs and Marilyn Monroe blowing a kiss from a billboard, raindrops smacked her window. Pedestrians opened umbrellas, a borough-wide blooming of black flowers. She, however, had forgotten her umbrella. When the bus pulled up to LaGuardia, she hustled. Entering the terminal, she began brushing at her bare arms and then froze, looking down at herself.
Gregor approached from the security desk. “Agnieszka! Good morning!”
Aga looked at him in his blue uniform, then back down at herself.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I just walked through the rain,” Aga said, “and I didn’t get wet.”
Gregor looked her over, then glanced outside. “Well,” he said, “it’s not raining hard, and you’ve been standing inside now for a minute—”
“No,” Aga said, “I didn’t feel any drops hitting me when I was outside. I’m telling you, something extraordinary has happened.”
Gregor looked into her eyes, knowing the dismal odds of what she was claiming.
“You don’t believe me,” Aga said.
“Agnieszka,” he said, “it’s just that…it’s really not raining very hard.”
“But why shouldn’t it be extraordinary?” Aga insisted.
Gregor scratched his chin. “Come,” he said, gesturing toward the entrance, “why don’t you show me? We can both go outside.”
“No!” Aga said. “I can’t go back out there. It’s terrifying.” She looked at her arms as if they swarmed with nuclear tendrils like the surface of the sun. “It’s terrifying.”
With a gentle hand on her back, Gregor led her to a staff room. He fetched her a glass of water. After she insisted she was OK, he left with a disturbed look.
“I really think,” Aga said the next day, “something miraculous happened.” Gregor had found her wiping windows, and she spoke guardedly while she worked. “There is a Biblical story about men who walked through fire without getting burned. Shouldn’t it also be possible for a woman to walk through water without getting wet?”
“But those are just stories,” Gregor said. “Don’t you think?”
Aga paused, took a breath, and appeared to think.
“What do your sons think?” Gregor asked.
“I haven’t told them,” Aga said.
“Why not?” Gregor asked.
She resumed wiping. Rather than tell her boys, Aga had spent the evening of that rainy day looking at photos of her husband, Władek. He had been a poet and a steelworker. He had joined the resistance during the war, after Aga’s father had forbidden their romance, believing Władek was not good enough for his daughter, and they were married in Warsaw before the city was destroyed. He had been tall and lean, with dark hair, an easy smile, and a Mediterranean complexion. He had been her first and only love.
“What about your priest?” Gregor continued. “Maybe he could tell you if it was really a miracle? I assume priests know about such things.”
Aga shook her head. “I can’t tell my priest.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
Aga paused her wiping. “Imagine,” she said. “He will tell his superiors. They might investigate, and if they think it is something, they will tell their superiors. And that’s how word will get out. People will visit from all over. They will hound me whenever I am outside. They will take my picture. They will try to touch me, ask me to bless them. They will ask for demonstrations. There will be reporters. It will become impossible for me to come to work, to feed my children.” She shook her head. “I can’t risk that.” Then she looked alarmed. “You haven’t told anyone, have you?”
“No,” said Gregor. “I haven’t told anyone.”
Aga nodded, relieved.
Gregor went back to work looking bereft. Ice cream and a walk with Aga in Central Park seemed the furthest things from his mind.
***
Two days later, from the terminal’s rotunda, Gregor saw rain falling thick and fast. He hurried to find Aga, who was mopping the concourse. He said, “I’ve been thinking. In economics, when you want to prove your thesis, you have to repeat your experiment, or gather lots of data, to show that what you found was not a fluke.”
Aga stared at him, uncomprehending.
“It’s raining now,” he explained. “If you go outside, you can find out if you’re truly incapable of getting wet. If so, great, and we can keep it to ourselves. But if not, then you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Do you understand?”
Aga looked toward the rotunda as if she might see crowds waiting for her. Then she looked with pity at Gregor’s earnest face.
“Please,” he pleaded. “Let’s just try. Quickly, before the rain passes. I’ll be there with you, I promise. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Reluctantly, she leaned her mop against a wall and followed Gregor to the terminal entrance. Floor-to-ceiling windows showed rain pounding pavement outside. She stopped. Gregor stood in front of her and grabbed her arms. “It’s OK,” he insisted. “If you’re truly touched by God, wouldn’t you want to know? I would want to know.”
Swallowing her hesitation, Aga went outside. Gregor followed, standing under an overhang. Facing away from the building, Aga stepped into the rain, holding her arms out at her sides.
After a minute, her custodian’s smock and apron soaked, hands and hair dripping, she turned and looked at Gregor with delight. “You see?” she yelled, breathing hard, rain spattering her face. “Not one drop!” She reached her hands toward him. “Not one drop!”
Gregor looked as if he had just watched a plane crash. Composing himself, he motioned for Aga to get out of the rain. With an arm around her shoulders, he led her inside, shoes squeaking on tile. In a supply room, he draped her in towels and told her, over and over, that he was sorry.
After that day, whenever Gregor passed Aga in the terminal, he said a quiet “dzień dobry” and kept walking. Looking pained, Aga focused on her work.
***
One day, Gregor approached Aga while she was mopping. He had a paper in his hands. After a brief, timid exchange of pleasantries, he said, “Agnieszka, I’m going back to Cleveland. My uncle has had a stroke. Other than his wife, I’m his only family in this country. I have to go help take care of him.”
“Oh, my,” Aga said, concerned. “Is he in a hospital?”
“For now, yes,” Gregor said. “But he will be released in the coming days, and I’ll be needed.”
Aga was at a loss for words. Finally, she managed, “And what about work?”
Gregor smiled bravely. “There are plenty of colleges and high schools. I’ll see what I can find.”
Aga nodded. Gregor cleared his throat and handed her the paper.
“This is my uncle’s address,” he said. “If you ever need help, or if you ever find yourself in Cleveland, you should be able to reach me here.”
Aga thanked him. They shook hands and wished each other luck. With a pang in her heart, Aga watched Gregor walk into the rotunda, where other workers shook his hand and an Eastern Airlines ticket agent hugged him.
In the weeks after Gregor left, the terminal seemed a colder place to Aga, where men only spoke to her to point her toward messes that needed cleaning. For her first Thanksgiving, a holiday her boss had to explain to her, she saw reunions all over the airport, old couples meeting their adult children, young couples passionately back in each other’s arms. It had an impact, the way that reading a letter that wasn’t addressed to you drove home that no one wrote to you at all.
***
Józef was fourteen, with a pimply forehead and black hairs above his lip. He’d entered a long, awkward molting into adulthood, gangly and halting, his voice hitting surprise cracks on the road to expression. And Krzysztof, at eleven, was not far behind him.
The look on Aga’s face at the dinner table each night betrayed the nerve-racking questions she asked herself. Am I really going to teach these boys how to shave? How to handle their own bodies? How to talk to girls? Will I kick a ball with them in a park? Am I the example they’re looking for?
After Aga confessed her worry, her priest, a skinny man with gray temples and a big freckle in his left eye, offered to teach Józef how to shave. She invited him over for coffee, and the priest, mindful not to embarrass the boy, said that he had just bought a new shaving kit and wanted to try it out. Though Józef’s upper lip emerged smooth, and he had gained confidence from learning to do a manly thing, the experience left Aga disappointed. The priest was a man, but he was not her man. The boys addressed him as “Father,” but that was not what he was to them.
It snowed. Christmas approached. Aga looked at her situation—a single mother of two who spoke almost no English, living in a tiny apartment in a city she had not come to love, a job cleaning up after people, the only Christmas gifts she could afford for her boys were chocolates from a drug store—and thought, who else would want this? She looked at the paper with Gregor’s Cleveland address on it and went to bed troubled.
After the calendar flipped to 1958, she revealed her decision to her boys over a dinner of potato soup.
“Boys,” she said, “do you like it here, in this city?”
Krzysztof shook his head. “I miss the tram, like we had in Poznań,” he said.
“There are things I like,” Józef said, “and things I don’t like.”
“How would you like to move to Cleveland, Ohio?” she asked.
“Where’s that?” Krzysztof asked.
“It’s a place in America,” Aga said.
“Do they have a tram?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Aga said.
“What do they have there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Józef added, “why Cleveland?”
Aga looked into her bowl. “This might be difficult for you to understand,” she began. “At work, there was a man named Gregor. He was also from Poland. From Warsaw, in fact. He was very kind to me. He helped me to start a bank account. And he always said hello and stopped to talk with me.” She looked at her boys’ confused faces. “He can never replace your father. No one ever can. But he moved to Cleveland to help his uncle and…I miss him. And he said that he would always help if we needed it. And I think he would like it very much if we came to live near him.”
Józef wrinkled his brow. “He’s…a boyfriend?”
“No,” Aga said, embarrassed, “don’t ask such questions.”
After reflecting, Józef asked, “Why don’t we go for a visit? We can see what kind of place it is.”
“I don’t have money to go back and forth,” Aga said. “If we go, we go.”
This news settled on everyone. Krzysztof asked, “Does he know about us?”
“Yes,” Aga said, “he knows about you.”
After getting her boys on board, Aga found pen and paper and wrote a letter:
Dear Gregor,
How are you? Has your uncle recovered? I truly hope so. I have said prayers for you both and will continue to pray for you.
I am writing, first, to say how sorry I am for my behavior before you left. You were so kind to me, and I was a dunce. There are many reasons I could give to explain myself, but my parents taught me never to make excuses. I remember my behavior and am simply ashamed. Please believe me—I know that the only miracle I have experienced is that my sons and I are alive, and there have been those, like you, who have shown kindness to a poor soul like me.
And second, I have decided to move to Cleveland. I know some months have passed. Perhaps this news will not be welcome to you. Yet I find New York too difficult. It is loud and dirty and coarse. I don’t understand how people do things here or what is expected of me. I believe my sons feel the same way. My youngest misses the trams of Poznań! My oldest sometimes cries in his room at night. He doesn’t know I can hear him. If your generous offer of assistance is still available, I hope to accept it. I think we will be able to make the journey in one month. I will send a telegram once I have the details. Will you come to greet us at the station? It will be wonderful to see you.
Until we meet again, I remain,
Yours sincerely,
Agnieszka
Carefully, she folded the letter into an envelope, onto which she copied, in her neat hand, the address Gregor had given her. She asked Józef to take it to the post office.
***
Because his English, by then, was better than anyone else’s in the family, Józef led the transition. The only people Aga informed of the move herself were her boss and priest. The priest seemed melancholic but smiled when, at Aga’s request, he made the sign of the cross over her. Otherwise, with Aga in tow, Józef informed his school and his brother’s school that they would withdraw. Over the phone, he told the Catholic agency and their landlord that they would move out. At the bank, he was Aga’s translator as she withdrew her meager funds and closed her account. On the day he turned fifteen, he went to Penn Station, a Greco-Roman temple, and studied schedules to identify which train to take. When Aga needed to send a telegram to Gregor with their arrival info, he went with her to a Western Union office.
She hadn’t received a response to her letter by then, but she didn’t let it trouble her. Gregor was trustworthy, she reasoned, so she focused on checking off boxes on a list, trying not to forget anything now that her plan was in motion. The fact that he remained silent was one detail in a flurry of details.
Two days before Krzysztof turned twelve, Aga and her boys left the city. New York and Cleveland were a day’s journey apart by train, although Aga noted, at one point, that the scenery, all of those American fields and forests, passed by her window so quickly. She was pleasantly surprised to learn that no one checked identity documents at state borders, after Józef asked a conductor for her.
“What will we do when we get there?” Krzysztof asked as they passed wide, green farmland.
“We’ll find a place to live,” Aga said.
“What if we can’t find one?”
“We will,” Aga said. “We found one in Poznań, we found one in New York, and we will find one in Cleveland.”
“Will your friend meet us when we arrive?”
A worried look overtook Aga’s face. “I don’t know.” Then she thought better of her answer: “I’m sure he will.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
Aga responded patiently, though her eyes said she really wanted the boy to leave her alone. “Don’t worry so much, Krzysziek. I have his address. Everything will be fine.”
And yet, when they walked into Cleveland’s Union Terminal, blinking, yawning, stretching their long, cramped journey from their joints, Aga looked around like a lost child. It wasn’t just the size of the station—though it was big, existing at the foot of the second-tallest building in America. It was that, amid all of that limestone, granite, and brass, she didn’t see Gregor.
Instead, she saw an older woman, fashionably dressed in a gray overcoat, wearing what appeared to be black sneakers and holding a black handbag, her head adorned with round, dark-rimmed glasses and a fuzzy flower-pot hat, also black. This woman stood with difficulty from a nearby bench and shuffled over, holding an envelope in the air.
“Excuse me,” she said in Polish with an American accent, “is the Pani Agnieszka Krasko?” She showed Aga the envelope: Western Union, addressed to Gregor.
Aga nodded.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said. “I received this telegram last night, and I sent a response this morning but…but here you are.” She looked at the boys with a sad smile. “I am Gregor’s aunt, Dolores. Your earlier letter got mixed in with the others. We thought it was…something else. My husband and I didn’t read it until last night. I’m very sorry…”
“Where is Gregor?” Aga asked.
The old woman, fear all over her face, placed a hand on Aga’s arm. “My dear,” she said, “I am so sorry. Gregor died six weeks ago.”
Shocked, Józef and Krzysztof looked at their mother.
“Died?” Aga said, shaking her head. “That can’t be! What do you mean? How?”
Dolores, with wet eyes, glanced at the children. “Perhaps your boys would like to take your luggage toward the exit there?” She pointed.
Aga agreed, and nodded at the boys to go. They dragged their suitcases toward a large clock in the center of a concourse. From there, they couldn’t hear Dolores tell Aga that Gregor had helped to nurse his uncle back to health while working, once again, at the oil refinery, but then his paper was rejected and he started drinking, and when he didn’t respond to their phone calls in the days before Christmas, they called the police, who found him in his apartment, in bed, beside two empty bottles: whiskey and barbiturates. They watched their mother burst into tears and lean into the comforting arms of the old woman. The boys couldn’t hear their mother say it was her fault, she hadn’t been ready and now she was too late, nor could they hear the old woman assure her she was wrong, it was no one’s fault, it was simply the world they lived in. Both dabbed at their eyes and noses with kerchiefs as they approached the boys.
“What are we going to do now?” Krzysztof asked.
Aga looked at her boys and then at the station’s tall ceiling and gleaming walls, the embellishments carved into its cornices. To one side was a newsstand, closed now, and next to it a hallway leading to bathrooms. Through the exit she could see flame-colored lamplight wavering from rain. This was Cleveland, a place in America. She couldn’t have found it on a map until recently, but it was where they were now—and where they would remain. In Aga’s eyes was a weariness at finding herself on her own once again in a strange new city, with nothing to her name, grieving her cruel fate. There was much she would have to do to take care of herself and her boys.
She turned to Dolores. “Perhaps you can help us find a hotel?”
Dolores, with a kind look, gave Aga’s shoulder an affectionate rub and said to the Kraskos, “Come. My husband is waiting in our car. You can stay with us.”
.
About the Author:
Paul Linczak is the author of Świnica and Other Stories, which won the 2025 Iron Horse Prize from Texas Tech University Press. His stories have appeared inThe Carolina Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Fiction International, Meridian, and other journals. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University, and he is partial to Gala apples.