One day, when I go back to my hometown, I’m going to dig up a box of miniDV tapes that rests somewhere in my mom’s house, next to a defunct camera that waits for the dawn of the digital era to come again. I’ll be looking for footage I hope is still there - footage of Maka, maybe at my apartment, maybe in a home renovation store. She was measuring the future counter with a tape measure, telling me what would and wouldn’t fit. A regular counter wouldn’t fit in that tiny space, she said, and advised me to have one made to order. Sure, it would be more expensive, but it would save space and make the kitchen feel bigger. It was a brilliant solution - one no one else had thought of. The custom-built kitchen furniture in my apartment is, to this day, a monument to her ingenuity.
I was filming back then because that was how I took notes. It was a time of fun and adventure. In a few months, I’d take that same camera and head off to shoot a documentary in Africa. I was still young. The world was full of possibilities. We had been kicked in the teeth a few times, but we hadn’t been knocked out.
Maka was grand.
She walked back into my life after twenty years on another planet. While I was in South Africa and Australia, she and her husband were going through the turmoil, opportunities, and losses of the Polish economic transformation after the fall of communism. She still looked sophisticated, stylish—she hadn’t yet put on all that weight. They’d already lost the house, but her husband hadn’t killed himself… yet, and she was still fighting. There was a jaded sadness in her eyes from all she’d already seen, but also energy, and the hope of someone who still believes they might turn things around.
She’d been a bright spark in the gloom of my primary school. She took us to the theatre. We did silly, wonderful little plays with her. She showed us a world we couldn’t have imagined, opened doors to something that changed many of us forever. I was lucky. Even my parents, busy with the struggle of being an underpaid and undervalued engineer and doctor in communist Poland, couldn’t have given me that back then.
I hope there’s still that footage of us somewhere: measuring counters, checking out showers and toilets, laughing, joking around. Back then, I thought I was just making visual notes for a renovation. I had no idea I was recording something that should be preserved forever. But at least it’s vividly recorded in my head.
If there’s an afterlife, I hope it looks something like that building materials store. I hope we can look down the white porcelain of all the available toilets to see which one fits perfectly on the existing pipe without extra drilling. I hope we can laugh and joke and talk about the future that’s still ahead, the meaning of life, and the disjointed timelines of Philip K. Dick novels. I hope time can stay still, just for a while.
I miss you, my friend.
I know that when I return to my hometown, this loss is going to hit me hard. I’ll dig for those tapes. Maybe I’ll find them, maybe I won’t. I know I’ll cry either way.
Picture: Japanese print Kitchen and the Spring Wind by Onda Akio, circa 1960s.