Ola never told her mother what she did. “I thought there would still be time”

Aleksandra Kluczyk’s book “Long live whores. About sex work in Poland” will soon be published by WAB Publishing House. The author talks in an extremely honest and sometimes painfully brutal way about growing up as a child of alcoholics, struggling with her own addictions, experiences with sex work and the stigma she experienced. Thanks to the publisher’s kindness, we are publishing a fragment of the book in advance.

Since the first time I spoke publicly, I have been constantly told that I am a privileged Warsaw whore, part of the one percent satisfied with this job, who should shut up because she has nothing to say about “real” sex work in this country.

From birth, I lived in a Podlasie village near Białystok, until I was twenty years old in a house without access to running water. I washed myself in a bowl with water taken from the well with a bucket and boiled in a pot. I peed in a bucket in the kitchen and shit in the potty, and then in an outhouse by the road, a few meters from the house. I was raised by alcoholic parents. I shared a room with my brother, who was three years older than me. We were always short of money for basic needs. I didn’t even think about extracurricular activities or trips, English, clothes other than those from the no longer existing bazaar on Kawaleryjska Street or a rag shop. In winter, I returned to the usually cold house and sat for several hours in a sweater and jacket, covered with a blanket, waiting for my father to come back from the store and light the stove – which I was always afraid to do myself – if he was able to do it at all.

I didn’t start class until around 8 p.m., when I had already warmed up. I think about the amount of shame that has accumulated within me throughout this time. Giggling kids at school asking if it’s true that I don’t have plumbing at home, making up funny excuses about bathing and doing laundry in the river, hoping that if I laughed about it myself, they would leave me alone faster. Mother did the laundry. She manually pulled hectoliters of water from the well to wash my shitty pants. She started drinking when she got a job in a shop in the village where we lived. I was a few years old then. In my mind, it was during that time that everything changed. Earlier, even before I was born, she worked in a pizzeria, then took care of the house.

She met my father when she came to visit Aunt Wiola, who later became my godmother. I only know two stories from that period, and both of them consistently entertain me, although the second one may be a bit less so. I treat it as an analogy for their entire marriage. Once, my mother came to the countryside for a sleigh ride prepared by my father’s team, on a large sleigh. At minus twenty degrees, she was wearing a mini skirt and boots. She was as cold as ever, but she really wanted to make a good impression. One guy had his eye on her, but her father had his way, probably for the last time in his life. They arranged their first date at a bar with a separate room for dancing and a second one for drinking vodka and herring. For two days she sewed new trousers by hand, stitch by stitch, to impress my father, who didn’t even notice. She wanted to study management to work in trade. Then she worked in various types of stores – alcohol, grocery and butcher shops, as a cashier, with no possibility of promotion. Always beyond my own strength, always for crap money, without insurance and without a moment’s respite. When you’re working class, the first lesson you learn is that hard work doesn’t make you rich and doesn’t give you anything except a lack of will to live, a broken back, and worn out hands.

Instead of studying management, her parents sent her to a clothing school, which I later graduated from. They wanted her to have a job in hand. She never liked this profession. She was ambitious and hard-working, and ended up living in a shitty shack with her mother-in-law who hated her all her life, and they only reconciled with her when her grandmother was dying. When her father couldn’t cope, her mother changed her diapers, fed her, and took care of her as best she could. Grandma Alina thanked her for this a moment before her death and apologized for all the hell she put her through. Mom never said it out loud, but you could see how much it meant to her.

My mother was never satisfied or happy with anything, not even for a moment – like me. She shouted at us to clean up or do some work, and as soon as she managed to convince us to do so, she would tell us to leave it alone, because if she didn’t do it herself, it wouldn’t be done well – like me. She felt important then, she felt that something depended on her, she made sure at every step that we wouldn’t be able to cope without her – like me. Once, when she was drunk, she said she regretted giving birth to me. I can’t place it in time, I could have been eight, maybe ten, or I could have been twelve or fifteen. Trauma response. One of the earliest memories I have from childhood is my mother and my father arguing at night.

My brother and I slept in the next room, on beds placed parallel to each other. They were screaming at each other and brandishing knives. Finally, one of us called our maternal grandmother and grandfather, who arrived from town as quickly as possible. Grandma Teresa gave me Allegro milk chocolate from Biedronka, the kind with finely chopped peanuts. I was three years old then.

I also remember my mother cutting her wrists with a kitchen knife and running to her friend who lived across the street. I remember my father and I coming back from my grandfather’s house and something moved him to buy her a rose, probably for the first time in her life. She shouted at him that yellow was the color of betrayal. Or when he and my then friend, the neighbor’s daughter, were cooking dinner to surprise her, but we didn’t finish everything before she got home from work, so she yelled at us for making a mess, which of course she would have to clean up, because we will only eat more. I remember when she was sad because she thought she would cook us a special dinner, according to an old recipe, i.e. a hard-boiled egg in a minced cutlet, and I didn’t appreciate it. I remember that before leaving, she always asked: “Kid, what are you wearing, are you going to leave the house like that?” I remember that she didn’t remember my birthday and that she couldn’t come to the show in which I played I don’t know who, but she bought “Witch” magazine to make it up to me.

I remember that the couch in my parents’ room, which also served as the living room, was always soaked with her piss and that it smelled terribly. I remember that I once brought jeans to a rehearsal for a performance, and they were also stinking because she had hung her piss-stained pants on the stove where they were drying. I remember airing these jeans outside the window, blaming it all on the cat and praying that my friends would stop laughing and finally believe me. I remember she cried in the kitchen every night, lit cigarette after cigarette, drank and listened to the radio every fucking night until she passed out. When I couldn’t stand it and came to hug her and comfort her, she kept repeating that she only loved me and could always count on me. That I was different from my brother and father, whom she blamed for all the evil in the world, and blamed me for all the harm in this world. I remember that she called me when I moved to Warsaw and complained constantly about the same thing – the job, the boss, and recently about the Ukrainian and Georgian women who were supposed to make her lose her minimum wage job, this time in a cold store.

I remember being able to smoke cigarettes with her when I was a teenager and talk about stupid things. That while watching “A Time to Kill” together, she taught me what anti-racism is. She showed me that there’s nothing wrong with being gay when she watched Brokeback Mountain with me. I remember that some time ago, when she asked if I had a fiancé, I was trying to expose her a little, or maybe just piss her off a little or check her reaction, so I said maybe not my fiancé, but my fiancée. I remember her answer: “the most important thing is that you are happy, child.” I remember how we talked about men, sex, her long-term affair and how she saved me with money and shopping when I left home after an argument with my father. Or how she helped clean a bug-infested apartment in Białystok just before moving. And how I took her to Maleńczuk and Bajor concerts. How she brought me things when I was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Choroszcz for detox. And how she took time off on purpose to go to the performance based on “Chernobyl Prayer” by my beloved Sviatlana Alexievich, in which I performed. I remember her sitting in the front row.

She died on August 10, 2022 after several days in the hospital. I woke up on July 23 with dozens of missed calls from my grandfather. He said that my mother was yellow and hadn’t gotten out of bed for several days. I asked why they didn’t take her to the hospital and he said they were ashamed because it stinks. I started screaming and told me to call an ambulance as soon as possible. A few hours later I was in Białystok, but I could see her only the next day. She was swollen, yellow, blue and practically toothless. I couldn’t recognize her.

The last time I saw her was in November 2021, and in May I wrote that I hated her because she and my father wereted my life. She apologized to me, as always, making herself look like a victim – just like me. We reconciled via text message on her birthday, which was June 30. She had cirrhosis of the liver, jaundice, stomach ulcers, esophageal ulcers, and ten thousand other conditions resulting from drinking every day for the last fifteen years. I came to see her every week. I couldn’t stay at my grandpa’s house because of the bedbugs, and I didn’t want to stay at my family home because of the mess. I couldn’t afford hotels, so I did what I could, taking the cheapest options or staying with a friend. During her stay in the hospital, I reconnected with my brother, who now lives abroad, and learned that she was expecting a child. She said that she was tired and that enough was enough, that she wasted her life and that there was never enough for her, so it was her own fault. I kept saying that it was fucking capitalism that didn’t give her a chance from the very beginning. We talked about bullshit, I helped her with washing and the nurses with changing diapers. I had never told her before or even then that I was a sex worker. I thought there would be time, but there wasn’t a good opportunity. She was never there. And the father? Let’s move on. Yes, I am privileged. Privileged whore – what a beautiful oxymoron.