13. What’s Polish For: ‘The Price We Pay’?

You can never tell when she is serious, she skirts around truth, not with me but with him, her husband, whom she’s supposed to be closest to. 
At the airport, when she left, I noticed the order when she kissed us goodbye. First me, in the centre, between the two men. Then her colleague, who had become her friend (and later, my lover). And lastly, on my left, her husband. And I thought: she loves me, most of all.
I know her. I really know her.
The last kiss was of course an acknowledgment of the husband, I know that too.
You leave the most important person till last.
Is it ridiculous to think a female friend could love you more than she loves her husband? Certainly she likes me more than she likes him. She shares things with me she has never shared with him. She has grown increasingly estranged from him and closer to me.
Now she is back, back from Poland, and I have brought The Lover by Marguerite Duras, it lies on their table, and we are talking about my lover, his name is Jean-Luc. Of course it’s not, not his name, I am under the influence of this French novel that is something between a novel and the real-life story of a young girl and her (secret, Chinese) lover.
“I didn’t really know him,” she says of my lover. As if she is responsible. He was her colleague, her friend, and she introduced him to me and he became, inevitably, my lover. As she had foreseen. Well, we had so much in common – poetry and literature, he a published writer, me wanting to be.
But now I am railing. I am raving and ranting. About him. Against him.
“I am surprised,” she says, in that strong Polish accent that lends everything she says a slight formality. “And you are surprised. You are disappointed. You thought he would be different.”
And she brings the conversation round – as it always comes around to, always comes back to – her and her marriage, her and her husband, her and her lover. Her.
When we hear the key in the lock, we are silent for a few seconds, and then we turn our talk to other themes.
And the husband comes in and asks after me, after Jean-Luc. ‘How is your love affair going?’ he asks me, and because I hesitate, she answers for me.
“Oh, everything’s fine, all is well,” she says, though I have arrived in an agitated state, saying, “I can’t live like this. This is impossible.”
My lover and I fight a lot – over money, over work, over domestic things. Over everything and anything. Her husband picks up the book I’ve left lying there, shrugs his shoulders, and tosses it back on the table.
She asks the husband if he would like something to eat, she has made spicy soup, still hot, he says maybe, maybe, maybe yes, yes, he would like some soup, and he sits at the table, and as she takes the ladle and pours soup into his bowl, he asks his wife – watching the soup, not looking at her – “And you? How is your love affair going?”
She doesn't even blink. There isn't even a split second before she says something. 
“Oh, it’s fine,” she says smiling. “Yes, yes, we have been discussing our love affairs.”
I stare at both of them, not knowing what to make of it.
“Oh, you two,” I say. “I never know when you are serious.”
“I forgot to tell you,” she says. “He found a letter, from my cousin. About my affair.”
She says he has done this before, opened her letters, many years ago, when she was thinking of leaving him. She has told me this before but she tells me again.
I am looking at the husband, who spoons soup into his mouth quickly, gulp after gulp.
He seems calm, casual, as if he couldn’t care less. “Yes,” he says. “So, she can go. She gets paid on Thursday and she can go.”
I turn to her. She is in front of the stove now, standing there looking at us, laughing. Yet she is also biting her nails, right in front of us. The skin is red, the nails are chewed back to the bone. I don't think she's aware she's doing it. Surely she would stop if she were.
“Is it true?” I ask her. “Is it true that–”
“She is not happy,” he says. “So she might as well go. What’s the point?”
She laughs again, still biting her nails.
I am biting my nails too, I realise I'm doing it when I see her doing it then I stop. My lover says I'm just like a sponge and here I am, being one. When I get home and I'm critical of him or distant, he will blame it on her and call it transference. It's the talk of his trade. Therapy. It's not so easy, talking (let alone arguing) with a therapist who's not your therapist.
I say I had better get going. It’s late. She is smiling, I am smiling, he is smiling, he flutters his eyelashes at me, all of us smiling, and I am squirming in my seat. I am not sure of these people. With their open secrets. Maybe it is something Polish, something European that I don't understand.
I pick up The Lover and hold it close to my chest. This has been the year of discovering The Lover. My lover introduced me to it, he has introduced me to many books I've never read or known about, until now. And now I feel like I never knew a world that existed without Marguerite Duras in it.
“I will lend it to you when I've finished,” I say, “I promise” – but actually, I have finished, I just don't want to let it go. Not yet.
She says she will walk out with me.
But instead we sit. We do not move.”‘I really must go,” I say again.
He says then he doesn’t know why, why this has happened, he’s done all he can. If she’s unhappy, then just leave it, let it go, there’s no point.  Maybe she should go back home to Poland.
“You left me this morning,” she says smiling. Whenever she speaks to him, or about him – no matter what she's saying – she smiles. She says, lightly, “Yes, you left me this morning. Alone. And that’s fine. I am used to it. But I find it offensive. I could have done something different, organized my day, gone somewhere, seen someone. But it’s always that way.”
He stares at the soup. He holds the spoon in the air.
“You can’t help it,” she says. “You are like that, your whole family is like that.”
She’d cried, she'd told me (before her husband came home), she'd cried after he’d left to go to work, cried to her lover on the telephone. I've never seen her cry, never even heard her talk about crying before now. She prides herself on being unemotional. Her mother was always hysterical, she says, and she, my friend, is nothing like her mother. Or so she says. So we all say. Though sometimes we say something different too.
“I know you will find it difficult to believe,” she says, “but I cried after he left.” She says it as if we are still alone, just her and me, and her husband isn't there. But he is. He's here now.
Her husband puts down the spoon and stares at the table.
“You see – he blames me,” she says. “He says since I’ve come back from seeing my parents, we have no money. He had to go to work. He always has to work.”
“Is it true?” I ask. Was it true, did he have to work? So much?
“No,” she says. “It’s always been like that.”
No one says anything, her husband is still staring at the table. She is looking at me as if she’s waiting for me to say something.
“I really need to get going,” I say, getting up from my chair.
Her husband doesn’t look up, doesn’t even nod.
She gestures that she will walk me to the door and we walk out together. She walks beside me along the long driveway, slowly, as she always does.
She is shivering but she is determined to talk. To say the things she did not say when we were inside.
“Did it really happen?” I say. “He knows about you and–”
“Yes, I neglected to mention it,” she says. “It was a week ago.”
“He really found out?” I say. “So what did he say?!”
“He sounded strange on the phone. I called him from work, to say I’d be late. And I knew. I knew straight away. Soon as he said it. There was a letter. A letter from Poland, he said. I knew.”
When she came home, he'd showed her the letter. She'd skimmed over it, her eyes speeding across the pages. She’d been dismissive. She denied it.
“Oh, that,” she’d said.
But the cousin had spoken of unhappiness, her cousin said she should leave the husband, even if the love affair were over.
“She didn’t mention the name,” she says. “My cousin didn't say who it was.”
This seems very important, she keeps saying it. ‘She didn’t say who it was. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know who it is. Someone in Poland, when I was away, or someone here, he doesn’t know.'
“But what did he say after he read the letter? When you spoke on the phone?” I say.
“He said he regretted ever meeting me and he would have nothing to do with me when I got back home,” she says.
The husband has heard the name, has written it down for her, has taken messages for her, has spoken courteously to a voice that he thinks belongs to one of her colleagues.
We’ve reached her letter-box now and as she leans over to reach for any mail, I say, “But what does he–”
“He knows nothing,” she says again. “It could be someone in Poland or someone I met when I went to Chicago, someone at an airport, or someone I met on the way to Poland, or on the way back.”
“But what has he said?” I say again. “I mean now.”
What I am really asking is: what is going to happen?
“He has said nothing. Until now,” she says. “I was surprised. It’s the first time he’s mentioned it. While you were here. Otherwise, he says nothing.”
Perhaps it was the book, lying there on the table. The title.
I tell her this. I almost say: perhaps it was my fault.
She says again she wants to read that book, I must remember to lend it to her.
“Well, it belongs to Jean-Luc,” I say, “but I’m sure he won’t mind.”

Jean-Luc has told me my Polish friend flirted with him, when Jean-Luc's lover – the lover before me – left him.
Jean-Luc said that she’d suggested weekends away, the beach, the sea, the country. Other countries.
I remember saying something like: “She is like that, she says that to everyone. She jokes around, she says all the time – we should do this or we should do that. We should go to Paris for a week, why not? You take her too seriously.”
Still, I went to her, I told her what Jean-Luc had told me: “Jean-Luc said you said many things about me, after he’d first met me, he said you even tried to turn him against me, you both did, you and your husband.”
She said she had been joking and Jean-Luc took her too seriously.
But I felt betrayed. Both by my Polish friend telling him private things about me, and by him, telling me about it.
I told Jean-Luc he shouldn’t tell me things like that, not unless he was going to say everything. He told me some things but not others. He’d start to say something then stop. I pressed him but he refused. He said it wouldn’t be constructive. It was very clear he hadn’t told me everything.
“Don’t tell me at all then,” I told him.
“I want to be honest with you,” he said.
“But truth isn’t truth, if it’s so selective,” I said
I said nothing about her, her whom I’d trusted, her whom he knows, professionally, I tell him nothing of what I know, of her and her life. Of her lover. 
She tells me it wasn’t like that; everything she told him about me, she has told him before. She speaks of her friends as if they are her cases, her clients, she tells me their personal lives, she discloses private information.
She and Jean-Luc actually have a lot in common. This analysing of people around them as if they are cases, speaking of them critically. She, a social worker who doesn't believe social work solves anything, doesn't believe that people ever really change, doesn't even believe in counselling, a social worker who is in policy and has never practiced social work; and him, a therapist who believes therapy is a saviour and most people should be in it. Even though they seem so different, they are actually very similar. I can imagine her telling him what she thinks of me, turning a cool, critical eye on who I am and where I come from. Even though, like Jean-Luc, she loves me.
And I love her.
I love him too but he is hard to live with.
I love her differently, of course. You can't compare the love of a friend and the love of a lover. Can you?
I have known her a long time now. We met on the train, we got off at the same station. We live in the same suburb. On the same street. We are neighbours, we practically live next-door. We are friends, we are close, we tell each other everything. We talk about our relationships, our lovers past and present, we keep each other’s secrets. But yes, I can imagine her telling him what I am really like – what she knows about me and my life, where I come from, my family, my fears, anything and everything she knows about me and my past relationships and what that might mean for the future. She loves me but that doesn't mean she doesn't look at me with a critical eye. She looks at everyone that way, herself most of all. My lover says being critical doesn't mean lack of love, it means you care enough to want the person to change. Still, I feel betrayed when Jean-Luc tells me some of what she told him when I wasn't with them.
Still, I think of a while back, it was my birthday and she came to see me – with her lover – holding out towards me a crimson-red box with a perfect, long-stemmed red rose on top. And I opened the box and there was the most exquisite chocolate cake with tiers and turrets of chocolate and gold letters on top of the cake which say: For my best friend on your birthday.
Of course I love her.
And he, the husband, loves her, or says he loves her, and wants to be with her, always. And the lover, he loves her too, he wants her to live with him.
As we stand there in the driveway, she keeps looking back towards her house, as if she expects her husband to suddenly appear. She speaks in an undertone, though there’s no way the husband could possibly hear her. She tells me she will leave, she has wanted to leave her husband for a long time. And she will. One day. But for now, she has no money. It has all gone on the trip overseas, a trip taken for thinking, for reflective time and space. Away. Far away. From her husband. From her lover. From here.
The husband has gone back to longer hours, to three jobs.
There's the mortgage. Her clothes. The trip overseas.
Which he gave her.
“So he thinks it’s not true?” I ask her, looking back, as if I too fear we will be overheard.
She shrugs. “I told him it’s not his business. That letter. He shouldn’t have opened it. See, he has been punished. It was my letter.”
“Can I see the letter?” I ask.
“It’s in Polish. Besides, I threw it away.”
“You threw it away?!”
“Yes. Yes, I threw it away, after I read it. I told you, I read it very quickly, and I said, oh, it’s nothing. I tore it up. I threw it away. You can believe what you want, that’s what I told him. I refused to discuss it.”
“You refused to discuss it? But what about him? I don't understand how he–”
“It wasn’t his business. My letters are nothing to do with him. I refuse to discuss it.”
I stand there as if I think she has something else to say but there’s nothing.
I don’t understand it. I don't understand them.
Jean-Luc and I are volatile. We erupt into furies at the slightest hints of other romantic possibilities in each other's life.
I think of Jean-Luc in the earliest days of becoming my lover, reading my diaries in his car, when we went to the country, I think it was in Castlemaine, and I spent the afternoon walking around alone, looking at churches. Jean-Luc had said he would stay in the car. And sleep.
But there he was, sitting in the car reading my journal, which is essentially my diary. I write in little exercise books, I take them with me everywhere, and now here was my most recent in Jean-Luc’s hands.
I’d cried, standing there in the rain.
I had gone from visiting churches to climbing hills, and here I was now, standing at the window, and he had his head down and my diary open. I had caught him and he had seen some of my secret self.
When we argued about it, he said it was a post-modernist exercise really, reading the diary. I should understand that, given my love affair with The Lover. I said he was full of shit. And I seriously thought about ending it. How could you stay with someone you couldn't trust?
But then, I admitted to myself – if he had a diary, I'd read it, as voraciously as I read Marguerite Duras. I'd often wished he kept a diary. It would make things so much easier. I would know where I was.

She says it’s cold, she had better go in, the husband will be wondering what she’s talking about.
Yes. Yes, I say. Then as she heads down her driveway, I call out after her: “But what will you do?” But she doesn’t hear me.
I walk home, my question reverberating in my head, the do elongated, crying out in the silent street.  

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Gayelene Carbis lives and works on the lands of the Boonwurrung people. Her poetry book, I Have Decided to Remain Vertical (Puncher & Wattmann) was awarded Eyelands Writers’ Choice Award 2025 and Eyelands Poetry Book Award 2024 (Greece). Her fiction, short films, poetry and plays have won various awards, and been widely published in Australia and overseas. Gayelene teaches Creative Writing and works as a writing mentor and manuscript assessor.