Matwiejczuk i Żurek – Schmrodek / fragment

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But everything changed when I met Her. Of course at first I wasn’t able to understand it: after I met Her, I started to feel strange in my home village, like I was suffocating, trapped in this prison of voudechka, potatoes, stupid cousins, dogs barking with their asses and literal shit holes. This day began like many other days: Mateo asked me to come with him to Kielce to the bookstore where a famous Polish writer was about to give a lecture on her latest book. Mateo wasn’t interested in this lecture or in the writer herself – he knew that the bookstore will be overcrowded and this will make his plan of stealing books much easier (he wanted to sell them and buy some drugs called dhopalache). While Mateo was busy, I sat in front of the writer to hear what she had to say. The writer begins to speak. Everyone around me grabs their pens and writes down her words; I am fascinated by the fact that they are so important to these people in the room. The speaker confesses that from her earliest childhood, her talent distanced her from her family and those around him (and I add silently: just like you). She says that she had to run away and how her transformation into a famous but very humble novelist allowed her to see reality from a different perspective (and I add: just like you). I felt something growing inside me, but I didn’t know what it was yet. I listened to her talking, and suddenly I thought: I wish I could be like her, I wish I could be her – why didn’t I run away as far as she did?

After the lecture Mateo disappeared with the stolen books, but I stayed in the bookstore to have a little talk with this writer. I was stressed: my hands were sweating with onion sweat, I checked my dirty shirt if it was dirty in an acceptable way (I wasn’t sure). When I finally managed to get close to her, she shook my hand and said: “Hello, my name is Olga Tokarczuk^¹, and what’s yours?”. “S-Shm-m-rodek, madam”, I stammered. “Oh, please, don’t madam me, I’m Olga – normal human being just like you”, she said with the most beautiful smile, the smile that could end the war. I was so overwhelmed by her kindness that I couldn’t say a single word, and the silence between us was more powerful with every second. Finally, I almost shouted: “I am just like you, I really liked what you said today”. She nodded, smiled again, thanked me and invited me for a beer. And we talked all night. I told her about my babushka, her weird transformation, my alcoholic dad, the tragic death of my sister; she told me about the struggle to kick out the freeloaders from her tenement house and to negotiate a decent deal with her publisher. We had so much in common, it was crazy. I even showed her I have blood on my face, and this time it’s not fake by Chivas^² and White 2115^³ and – to my complete surprise – she was absolutely absorbed by this song. “«I feel chills./I know where I’m from, and I don’t want to (everyone around you is fucking you over)», that’s very powerful, that’s pure poetry, it is exactly how we, underdogs, feel”, she said with her voice trembling. Just before we said goodbye, I told Olga that my story resembled her story, or rather that I would like it to resemble her story, to which she replied with a smile: “So do it, change your life”. But how?

Years passed by. Mateo ended up in prison. I skipped lhiceum and mathura and started working in a local Dino store. My supervisor – this old cow Bożenka – ridiculed me, just like my vouyachek, my mother and my dumb cousin whenever I tried to read books during my shift. For a moment, I was writing some stuff on my computer, but everything I wrote sounded fake.

I was so angry. In my rage I started aggressively looking up what is in every folder in my cousin’s computer. After a great amount of fancy looking photos of animals and people in fancy positions I found the folder with three icons: wallet.dat, blocks and peers.dat. I remember that my cousin once told me that he invested in Bitcoins and everybody laughed at him, because Bitcoins then were a stupid thing for smelly nerds. He gave up that idea because of Polish social stigma. Nowadays Bitcoin is a really big thing, even in smelly Poland. There were three Bitcoins. Fucking three bitcoins. I was trembling. Fucking motherfucking three Bitcoins! I’m a fucking Pole… a fucking RICH Pole now! With three Bitcoins my Class Advancement can get real!!! There was no time. Quickly I called the most wise person that I know, that’s Olga Tokarczuk. I shouted to phone “FUCKIN’ TREE BITCOINS” (because of my nerves I mispronounced some words) and she answered happily: “You fucked a tree? That sounds great! But you previously asked for consent, right?”. I corrected myself and I shouted one more time: “I HAVE FUCKING THREE BITCOINS”. Now she understood very well and she was still happy, but a little bit less. I asked her what I can do now with that money. She told me that I have to get a business plan. And she would write something like that for me but I had promised her that I would give her 20% share of my earnings with her business plan.

I was in euphoria.

Because of that my lifeplan would boost. Olga contacted me with some nice banker who was mainly involved in real estate and alternative sources of clean energy and he offered to turn my three fucking bitcoins into a wallet of mostly safe but at the same time high return investments which would make me a very rich man for the rest of my life. At first, I was suspicious. Me, a humble Shmrodek from Poland (that is: from Nowhere), talking with some suits from the banking industry? „He will screw you up, bro”, I heard my cousin’s voice inside my head, „he will take your hayhs (money) away from you! Once again, you will become gholodouphiec (bare ass), because that’s what you are – gholodouphiec, nothing less, nothing more”. So I said that I have to think about his proposition and I will decide tomorrow, but in my heart I was ready to say „no” and just forget about this whole Bitcoin crap. Later that day Olga called me to check how the meeting went. „Good,” I said. Of course, Olga – being a psychologist that she is – sensed that something was wrong and I had no other option but to tell her about my doubts. After I finished my monologue, Olga was silent for a minute or two. The silence was so deep that I thought „oh no, the rats bit my phone cable again!”. But just when I was about to hang up, Olga said:

– Listen to me carefully, my friend. For centuries your people were traumatized by the people in power. Serfs were treated unfairly by lieges, peasants were treated unfairly by the landowners, the Polish nation was treated unfairly by the bloody communists. For centuries your people were deprived of the most important thing in man’s life: symbolic power and cultural capital. Thankfully, now we live in democratic liberal country, where everyone can heal their trauma and reclaim the cultural capital that was once stolen from them. So with all this in mind: how dare you question your right to change your life?! You’ve been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to reclaim your culture from the oppressors – the state, the bad people – in the name of your grandparents, grandgrandparents, grandgrandgrandparents etc. And you still hesitate! Remember: it’s not just your life we’re talking about here. Every oppressed person from the horrible past is looking at you right now and she already knows what’s the right decision.

She was right. I cried. I cried in the name of my grandparents, grandgrandparents, grandgrandgrandparents. And in the name of Polish soil, which had drunk more blood, sweat, and voudhechka than any earth should bear.

1 Olga Tokarczuk is a great polish writer with a Nobel prize in literature for 2019. She taught Poles about integrity with nature and to rethink Polish history with a dose of magic and respect to Others.

2 Chivas is a Polish rapper and songwriter known for his emotionally charged, often melancholic lyrics and melodic trap sound, active in the country’s hip-hop scene since the late 2010s.

3 2115 is a Polish hip-hop collective and music label founded by rapper Bedoes, known for its trap-influenced sound and popular albums in Poland.