Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

“We aren’t in Denmark! This is not Hamlet!”

“We are in Denmark,” Horatio speaks up stonily, meeting your irate gaze. “I have lived in Elsinore’s arms my entire life, and I will die in them.”

“How could we be in Denmark?! None of us are speaking Danish!” you retort, ticking off your arguments on your fingers. “We’re all speaking modern English, with American accents! You’re experiencing a...a mass hallucination, or something.”

“How else would we speak?”

I don’t want to clutch some stranger’s hand while I bleed out on a supermarket floor and beg them to get my grandparents to safety and tell the cop everything that happened—to swear on God (the capital G for Jesus one, not the lowercase one we throw around for emphasis at home) in my most perfect English that I didn’t do anything but exist between the oranges and apples and maybe glance the wrong way with my chinky eyes, and please, officer, we’re just out getting groceries and our parents are waiting at home and our grandparents don’t speak English very well, I’ll translate for them—

Disclaimer: extraordinarily rambly and somewhat offtopic review. I hope I am not offending Polish and/or European and/or non-European people with this review!

I'm from the US and have never been to Poland. There's a part of me that badly wants to travel to Poland, or to another European country, or to any other country really. For a long time I've been fascinated by how people in different countries live. I'd love to see every country in the world before I die, though that's an unrealistic and prohibitively expensive goal, dangerous depending on the country, and probably not worth it, since traveling to a place is hardly the same as living there. Visiting an area as a tourist who doesn't understand the language is the opposite of being a local. The real shame is that just by being born in a certain place, you're locked out of the vast majority of the world, and you'll never be able to really communicate with the majority of humans who only speak languages you'll never be fluent in.

Anyway. To a loser American like me, Poland and other European countries have a certain sophisticated aura... of history, of rich culture and tradition, of bygone medieval kingdoms and such... not to mention the history of Poland itself, which has gone through periods of subsumption by various empires before arising yet again like a glorious phoenix from death and alright these previous sentences are laying it on thick, so I will add that I may or may not have gone through a "countryball" phase in school and this may or may not be relevant. (Don't search up "countryball" if you value your opinion of what "the kids these days" are doing with their free time.)

Also I will add that I know every country does all kinds of heinous things. And that Europe gets to be known as a mystical land of sophistication in part due to the legacy of European colonialism. (British colonialism is why I'm even writing this post in English, if you think about the history of the US.) And that people in other countries are just people and there's nothing particularly special about them at the end of the day just because they exist somewhere. And that every place has problems and we shouldn't put any particular country on a pedestal, or glorify what shouldn't be glorified. I probably don't get out enough, and should touch grass and stop fantasizing about international travel. I probably won't.

Since travel costs too much time and money, is reading a story from someone who lives in a certain country a substitute for traveling there? Can it provide you with the experience of really being a local? I've never been to Poland, but reading this story felt like being there, if only for a few short minutes. We have trains where I live in the US, too, which aren't so different from Polish trains. I think. Tracks going off into the fog, mournful calls in the night and all that. But at the same time, there's an extra level of mystique for me because these are Polish trains. Inheritors of Polish history, imbued with that Polish "aura"... If I saw them, would they have Polish text on the sides? And the people within would talk in Polish about Polish problems, as they travel to and from faraway cities I'll never touch in my lifetime, etc...

For me, stories about life in other countries are fun because they can teach you about places you've never been and never will go to. Particularly if these are countries you might never visit, particularly if these stories focus on history, culture, politics, and all the things that make up a different society. This story is about the specific experience of being stuck in rural Poland during Covid, and has details specific to that. Musings on the difference between village life and city life, and how rural hometowns (home villages in this case, I guess) can suck you in until you find it difficult to return and are relegated to watching the trains pass you by, thinking about the life you could've had. Nothing I've ever experienced or will experience, though I've heard of how isolated North American hometowns can trap people, and reading about the Polish equivalent fascinates me. This was a pattern for me with this short story: seeing details that remind me of things I've seen in the US, but more alluring because they're Polish. How much of this is myself projecting my own deranged European obsession onto the story, I don't know. There's also a detail highly specific to Poland, made all the more special because the previous details could be generalized to rural railroads internationally but this is highly localized: a mention of "decaying farming machines that remember Soviet Union". For obvious reasons, we don't have Soviet farming machines in the US. The combination of familiar and unfamiliar things is breathtaking. It evoked for me the feeling of international travel, the strange wonderousness of seeing things almost but not quite familiar. Seeing the great unity and diversity of humanity (insert spiel about the beauty of humanity here). I want to go to Poland and see the old Soviet remnants. I want to travel to places that have been touched by a different kind of history. I'm fantasizing about international travel again.

One last note: There are a few "Polish-isms" in this writing that are really charming to me, like omitting "the" before "Soviet Union". As one of those US citizens who are so commonly mocked for only being able to write in one language, I have great admiration and respect for the author who can write in English, presumably Polish, and possibly even more.

A story that is actually seven stories, intertwined. You are Bluebeard's eighth wife and walk around his home accompanied by the ghosts (literal talking heads) of his previous wives. Each has a story of how she came to meet and marry the husband who would kill her, and each story is compellingly told.

It made me think about the institution of marriage as a whole. I saw some feminist critiques of marriage a while back, arguing that it's a forced labor contract where the man has all the power and the woman has none and must do unpaid domestic work at his bidding. This is especially true of marriage in historical times, and most of these wives don't seem to be from the modern world.

A woman who marries someone is traditionally expected to go along with his wishes, accompany him wherever he wants and defer to him for judgement. If he wants you to leave home and go with him, you go. If he wants you to clean house and play hostess, you do, because he gave you everything, didn't he? If being an old and single woman isn't socially acceptable, you have to bear with it. And if the marriage turns bad and divorce isn't allowed, there is really no escape. As a side note: In the US, banks could prevent women from opening their own bank accounts independently, without a signature from their husbands, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974. And today, of course, there are still countries in the world where the status of women's rights is quite miserable.

WIFE #3

...[T]here were matters that needed to be tended to at the estate, he told me. We would have to travel back. My heart dropped. I had forgotten that we were now one entity, and in all the dreams I had of this moment, he was the one telling me that he had to leave, not that we had to leave. I opened my mouth to protest, but already I knew it was futile. Behind me, my sisters trailed up from the ocean, silently watching our conversation unfold. I told myself I would not let myself cry in front of them, but in all honesty, I was too angry at him and at myself to cry.

WIFE #2

When we were married, we paraded through the streets of my small village, the dress he chose all but swallowing me up. I held my head high as we passed by in the carriage, looking each person who had referred to me as a devil in the eye. Still smiling as he waved to the villagers outside, he had asked me which of them I would like to punish for wanting me dead. My mouth opened and closed in part-astonishment, part-fear. There was no need to reply now, he had said. Think about it and let me know if there are any names. You own them now.

There were a few days before our honeymoon began in earnest, and the question kept me awake at night like a hot coal burning in my chest. I lay awake long after Bluebeard had begun to snore softly. I had the power to destroy them now, but did that mean I should? I thought back to the year, how the comments and barbs directed at my parents had at first been subtle, then more pointed, until they became bolder and bolder, to the point where my father returned home with bruises and scrapes after getting into a fight at the tavern, and my mother was snubbed by all our neighbours. I unfurled the list of grievances in my heart, and made my mind up.

The day before we left on a tour of the mainland, I whispered the names into his ear. He reacted as if I were merely giving him the names of flowers I liked. Smiling, he patted my hand and said that he would take care of it.

I had almost forgotten about it completely by the time we returned. As our carriage drove through the village, we passed by the big gates that led to Bluebeard’s estate. Like a welcome parade, there were the villagers I had named, tied spread eagled, nude, to the thorny brambles that surrounded the chateau. Their cries for us to be merciful were like a symphony to my ears. I turned to Bluebeard, who had grinned at me. I hope my wife has enjoyed her welcome, he said. The gates closed on the villagers’ cries.