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“Kurwa mać, ja pierdolę, chuj jebany kurwa!” A loud scream woke me sometime during the night, making me immediately shot up to a sitting position despite the sharp pain that made itself at home in my abdomen and its companion that wreaked havoc in my head.
There was only one person who could wake me up in the dead of the night with a stream of curses in what I dimly recognised as Polish.
“Boris? What happened?” I called out after clearing my throat as I blindly slipped from under the covers and made my way to the door of the bedroom, his bedroom.
“It’s nothing Potter, go back to bed” His voice came from the small living room so I directed my barefoot steps in that direction, unable to fight my curiosity.
“Влять” I heard him whisper under his breath right as I entered the living room. The small space was illuminated by a simple lamp standing in the corner. Everything was lit by a warm yellow-ish light, the kind that made any place look more welcoming and safe. However, it did not help me feel better now, when I saw an abandoned, used bandage on the floor, the intense smell of alcohol, a new, clean bandage not yet brought to use and the figure of Boris, who was sitting on the couch, clenching a bottle of vodka in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.
“The fuck?”
“Didn’t mean to wake you, please go back to sleep” He lifted his head from where it was resting, his forehead supported on the top of the glass bottle. I noticed how dark the circles under his eyes were, even more pronounced in the shadows cast by the lamp, “also, you’re not really creative at swearing”
“What are you doing?” I asked from the lack of better options, couldn’t just stand there looking at him for hours, even if the open vulnerability of the scene before me was not something I expected. It was so uncommon for Boris to drop his guard, always talking, always lively in that manic way of his that drove me to insanity sometimes. Now I saw that he was tired.
Boris shrugged slightly, lifted up his hand in which he clenched the scissors and pointed it at his other shoulder with faint resignation. I knew what I’d see, yet it still shook me a little to find a wide, angry red wound. I could see the black threads of stitches, and after taking another glance at the table, a pulled out one resting on the tabletop.
“Tried taking them out. Disinfected it first. Hurt like a bitch, jebana kurwa” He informed me as I was slowly making my way to the couch, moving his legs to make space so that I could sit right next to him.
“Disinfected with what? Alcohol?” There was no spite in my voice. The fever must have burned away all my anger and fear, all the defenses that would help me distract myself from the slight worry that settled itself deep inside my gut the moment I heard someone enter the garage.
“There’s nothing a good flaszka wódki can’t fix, you know it Potter” No matter how much he tried he couldn’t pour enough conviction into his words. I watched as he took another sip of vodka and then took to examining his shoulder, now in a much better light. I could see the light pink colour of the freshly grown scar tissue that just began to hold the wound together. I was in no way a professional but even I knew the stitching was an ugly, sloppy work.
“Isn’t it too early? Won’t it open again?” I asked Boris, looking at his profile from where I leaned forward to get a better sight. He turned his face towards me, locking his deeply brown eyes, almost black in this light, with mine. For a few seconds we just stayed like that, it felt almost like eternity, before he remembered to answer. Not only to answer, but also to put his shield back up, to start the performance again.
“Nah, better now than later. Can’t let them become-” He leaned away from me, pretending to look for the right word while gesturing with the scissors in a circle like motion, “wrośnięte? kurwa. Ingrown! The wound can heal on its own, I don’t have time to wait”
“Do you want me to help?” I asked without much thinking.
“You know how to take out stitches?” I heard and felt his wide grin, without even needing to see it.
“Just tell me what to do and I can do it” My words didn’t sound convincing even to my own ears but Boris handed me the scissors and positioned his shoulder in a way that would give me a good view. I gripped the cold metal and tried not to think about the fact I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do.
I helped Boris many times, during our time in Las Vegas. When he came to my house with a nasty cut on some part of his body and I tried however I could to help, even using Xandra’s godawful, strong perfumes. But I thankfully never had to deal with a stitched bullet wound before.
“Ja pierdolę, Potter, just get on with it” I inhaled deeply and tried to keep my hands steady when I slipped one thin blade under one of the threads. I cut it and used my other hand to pull gently on one of the ends. The stitch came out smoothly through his skin and Boris hissed sharply and cursed under his breath, “Scheiße”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, finding the situation funny despite the grim circumstances, or maybe because of them “What language is this?”
“German” He stated simply, taking another sip from the bottle.
“You know German?” This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to me anymore at all.
“Ja, ein bisschen. Ich lernte, als ich in Berlin wohnte. Und auch als ich mit Horst gearbeitet habe” A new language on his tongue. Speaking words I didn’t understand, but was still amazed by. It sounded somewhat harsher than his English, surprisingly softer than Polish but less smoothly melodic than Ukrainian or Russian.
“Alright, don’t show off” Even though I knew he never took his multilingual abilities as a point of superiority or pride. It was just a part of who he was, every language he spoke.
I went back to work on the stitches, carefully trying not to touch the tender flesh with cold metal, which of course I didn’t succeed at. Boris flinched under my hands and grunted a sharp and short 'kurwa'.
“Talk to me,” I suggested in an attempt to distract him even a little from my clumsy work. My abdomen was still throbbing with pain but I could think way more clearly than the last couple of days. With the returning ability to do so all memories of what went down in Amsterdam came back too, but I pushed them as far back into the corner of my mind as I could and tried to focus on what was before me.
And what was before me was the very much alive form of Boris, who I thought dead in the dreadful days in my hotel room.
“I’m talking to you all the time,”
“In some other language, I don’t know, I guess it might help” I clarified, sighing to myself when I didn’t manage to get under the stitch once again.
“Alright,” He agreed and I tried to focus on the scissors instead of the energy his voice gained when he began talking, “I guess I could tell you about swearing. It’s ‘przeklinać’ in Polish and I’m fluent in doing it in at least four languages. My personal favourite is ‘kurwa’. It means something like ‘whore’ but it’s completely universal and not really translatable to English. In Russian ‘Блядь’ and Ukrainian ‘Блять” means the same. They sometimes use it more often than commas. In Spanish they use ‘coño’ but it’s slightly less vulgar than ‘kurwa’. more like ‘cholera’, which is maybe like ‘damn’ in English. You must have heard about Spanish ‘puta’ or ‘Hure’ in German but you use it more like English ‘whore’, so it doesn’t come close. The German equivalent of ‘kurwa’ or ‘Блять’ is ‘Scheiße’, it literally means shit.
Norwegian and Swedish are similar, because you know, they’re both Nordic languages. Like Polish, Ukrainian and Russian are Slavic. Their counterpart for ‘fuck’ sounds almost the same, really. ‘Fy faen’ and ‘Fy fan’”
Boris proceeded to point out the difference in pronunciation of the two words. There must have been one but I could not, for the life of me, hear it.
“Another personal favourite is ‘jeb się’ or ‘idź na chuj’. In Ukrainian it’s ‘пішов на хуй’ which means literally the same.There are a lot of alternatives of course, ‘wypierdalaj’, ‘spierdalaj’, ‘wykurwiaj’, ‘іди в сраку’, ‘Трахнуть тебя’. It’s funny because ‘chuj’ is a penis. So translating literally is something like - go onto the penis. ‘Fuck yourself’ or ‘fick dich’ just doesn’t quite hit the same, you know? In Spanish it’s ‘vete a la mierda’. In Swedish you’d say ‘dra åt helvete, in German ‘verpiss dich’, ‘fick dich’ or ‘hau ab’. Oh, and in Norwegian it’s ‘faen ta deg’”
“When the fuck did you learn Norwegian?” I cut into his tirade, throwing another bloodied stitch onto the table.
“Don’t interrupt. Let me get to offending people” He took a long gulp of the vodka and resumed his monologue, “For example ‘kurwo’, ‘chuju’, ‘pizdo’ - by the way ‘pizda’ is a woman’s vagina. In Ukrainian it’s really similar and in Swedish ‘fitta’.
In German you’d say for example ‘die Nutte’ - again a word meaning ‘whore’, or ‘du Arschloch’, ‘du Schwanz’. You could also say ‘ty skurwysynu’, in Polish it applies to both men and women, the same for ‘Hundesohn’ or ‘Hurensohn’. Or my favourite in German - ‘der Fickfehler’ it means a mistake in reproduction.
In English you say ‘I don’t fucking care’ or ‘I don’t give a fuck’ - boring! ‘Mam to w dupie’ means I have it in my arse. ‘Mam w to wyjebane’ or ‘wykurwione’ is something like I fuck on it? ‘Me suda la polla’ means the same as Polish ‘lata mi to koło chuja’ though it means something a bit different in literal translation. The first one is ‘my dick is sweating’ and second ‘it flies around my dick’ but they both mean the same old boring ‘I don’t fucking care’. Fuck is really, really not creative, English is shit at swearing. Though the Brits are slightly better at it than you Americans”
Even if it wasn’t the middle of the night I probably still wouldn’t understand much from his tirade, a multilingual stream of consciousness that it was. Nevertheless I welcomed the long-missed sound of his voice, the energy and passion behind his words, even though the topic on which he decided to monologue would have seemed ridiculous and childish to anyone else.
“A lot of bad words in Swedish and Norwegian come from religious words, because ‘helvete’ means ‘hell’, ‘fan’ or ‘faen’ means ‘devil’ and ‘jävla’ is something like ‘devil-ish’. In Polish they also say ‘idź do diabła’ - ‘go to the devil’, but it’s not really vulgar”
“Is Polish your favourite to swear in? You mention it a lot” I asked when he stopped for longer. My work at his shoulder was nearly done but his talking did great at distracting me from the thoughts that threatened to flood my brain at any moment. We both knew he was speaking to distract not himself but me.
“It’s the most creative. The supply is neverending” It was also his mother’s language, I suppose that fact was not totally unimportant. For all Boris talked about never belonging anywhere, never needing a country to be from, I suspected losing his mother at a young age led to some painfully human desire to feel somehow close to her, “Many people I work with are Polish. What I didn’t know before I learned from them. Also I lived in Poland for a while”
“Yeah?” I asked half-mindedly, finally breathing with relief when I took out the last stitch and dropped it beside the others. There were only five of them but due to my lack of experience taking them out took quite a bit of time.
“Yeah. We should go there sometime,” Boris noticed I was done and turned around to face me, flashing me one of his signature grins that just failed to reach his eyes. Then he expectantly handed me the clean bandage and I wrapped it tightly around his bicep, “Thanks for the arm Potter, now go back to sleep”
“I think I’ve had enough sleep” That much was true. While still sleepy when woken up, now I felt completely awake, the remains of the fever gone.
“Glad you’re getting better, wystraszyłeś mnie skurwielu”
“I don’t think you’ve told me about that one,” Now that I was quite healthy, not delirious with fever and didn’t have anything to do with my hands I found myself feeling surprisingly awkward, which was untypical to how I usually felt with Boris.
“Skurwiel? Something like ‘son of a bitch’. ‘Skurwysyn’ means the same,” He explained and tried to get up from the couch in one smooth motion, failing miserably. I watched him drunkenly stumble and hit his shinbone on the low table, “Ja pierdolę! Kurwo jebana w dupę ruchana, pies by cię jebał ty szmato pierdolona”
Even after the night’s long lesson at cursing I understood nothing.