Short story: The Free State of Danzig

“You look Polish,” she said. “Are you Polish?”

“What?”

“Are you Polish?” she asked.

“Half German,” I replied. “Bavaria.”

“Danzig,” she said, “Freie Stadt Danzig.”

“Of course,” I said. “What I would have expected.”

I had no idea about Danzig, or free state ports on the Baltic. I was sitting in a bar on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley on a warm, sunny Wednesday afternoon, enjoying a top-shelf bourbon on the rocks, waiting for my cell phone to be repaired.

The problem with having your phone repaired is they can’t call you to tell you it’s fixed and to come pick it up. The repair guy said check in every hour. The repair place was just down the block. Hopefully, it take two bourbons to fix it.

“My boyfriend is Algerian,” the woman said.

“Algerian boyfriend” I said, to validate his nationality and her relationship status.

“My girlfriend is delusional,” I said, but she didn’t hear me.

“My boyfriend likes the oysters from here,” she said. “I’m not cooking tonight, so what do I care?”

“I’m not cooking tonight either,” I said, raising my glass of bourbon. The bartender saw me raise an almost empty glass, and asked if I wanted another one, but I waved him off.

His name was Isaac, but you might have guessed that already.

This Danzig woman was about my age, or my ex-wife’s age, probably born in 1962, which seemed like a year that might have been cloudy the entire time; no rain, but clouds. The years seemed to get sunnier around 1965 in my imagination, and have remained so for almost fifty years.

She was dressed in black crepe, head to toe, curvy shape with blond hair. I might have been attracted to her, except for the Algerian boyfriend and the take-out order of oysters that Isaac was bringing to her from the kitchen.

“We used to live in San Francisco, in Russian Hill,” the Danzig woman said, staring at me from the darker part of the bar.

The sunlight and the glare was behind me. The door was open and sometimes street people wandered in, until shoo’d away by the manager.

I must have reminded this woman of someone she knew growing up. It must have been my nose in side profile.

“We got priced out of that place, and now we live here,” she said, motioning to the bar, but meaning somewhere close by in downtown Berkeley, at probably three-quarters the monthly rent of Russian Hill; a trade-off of sorts.

I pictured the Algerian boyfriend, probably a decade younger than her, getting impatient for his food while she nattered on to me.

There was a loneliness and sadness to her. Within a year, they would get priced out of Berkeley as well, and would move to, where, Phoenix or Boise? That’s how people did it now.

Once you left the Bay Area, you kept going, one or two states over. And soon enough you were in Wichita, which used to be an inland sea millions of years ago, which made everything flat on the prairie, and the soil rich for crops.

The Danzig woman took her oyster to-go order and walked out, leaving a $5 tip for Isaac.

I wondered if my phone was ready. Someone might have tried to call me.

“She’s in here every Wednesday,” Isaac said.

“I don’t think there’s an Algerian boyfriend,” I said to Isaac. “I think she comes in to talk to you and anyone who happens to be sitting here at the bar.”

This story appeared in The Avocado Wars (2023)