Original Side A Short Story: “The Hagiography of Agatka” by Zosia Koptiuch

The Hagiography of Agatka

I really did think you were a saint. In the Polaroid I took of you, you stand in someone else’s room, holding someone else’s newborn. White dress dotted with tiny blue flowers. Nothing but boxes in the background. Reaching out, the baby’s hand lazily touches your cheek. You look down at it, smiling, and I can’t see your eyes, as though they were closed in prayer. A ray of lazy light falls on you from the window behind us.

The Virgin Mary comes to mind.

If you don’t want to remember, I’ll make you: sometime during a hazy September, two weeks or so before college started, you moved in across the road from me in Podgórze, or, rather, right at the border between Podgórze proper and Zabłocie, surrounded by old, embellished stone buildings on one side and construction sites and small, scattered homes on the other; and you started going to the same church as me, the sharp, blood-red one, St. Joseph’s; and—the first miracle—we had some of the same classes. God is leading me towards you, I thought. Perhaps in some way this was true. I would see you at the local grocery store, picking out apples, and you would smile at me, and I would try to smile back. At church, I spent so much time staring at your mouth as you sang—you always wore lipstick, even to church—that your voice became the only voice.

Your voice: loud but gentle, always tinted with a particular sort of irony, like you knew something the rest of us didn’t. The first thing you said to me, in the college hallway on the first day: We already know each other, right? You laughed as you said it. Your name: Agata Agatka Agata agape agatka agape agatka agape—

And me? I’d just broken out of that town near Warsaw, out of my family’s small, overcrowded apartment. My new one was spacious and all-white, with curtains that fluttered like ghosts, so I bought plants and random trinkets in hopes of keeping the eeriness at bay. The space still felt strange. Back then, I was always haunted, always trying to escape something. I devoured old literary history textbooks. I stayed up until midnight browsing articles about dead white men. I was trying to learn Latin, for fuck’s sake.

Things in the apartment kept breaking. First a plate, then a chair, then the washing machine. The TV that I never used. The lock on the bathroom door didn’t work properly (not that I needed it in my loneliness). And the damn curtains. They kept me up at night. The cross my mother had given me hung above my bed, and praying helped sometimes.

In the dimly lit college hallway, you cocked your head as you waited for an answer. Yes, I said with a grin. We’ve met.

The first time we spent our free period together in the café on Floriańska Street, I couldn’t stop taking you in. Straight, blonde hair—looking back, it makes me think of Barbie dolls—that flowed all the way down to your waist. Eyes that seemed to change color from blue to gold, with an iridescent quality to them and a curious, innocent gaze. Long fingers. An opal heart pendant on your neck that you rarely ever took off.

And then I saw the stigmata: shapeless, getting darker at the center like poppies, seemingly shifting and growing and waning as I looked at them.

What are those? I pointed at them, my finger a little too close to your right hand, already feeling its warmth. You raised your eyebrows.

What?

The wounds.

Oh, those? I just tripped over the porch. You laughed. I laughed. The stigmata’s reddish-black centers, blood oozing from them, devoured me like a vortex. I wanted to touch them, to wipe all the blood with my own hands. Next to me, you smirked at an advertisement outside the window.

***

You always took notes in your beautiful, cursive handwriting. As per university tradition, you only ever wrote with fountain pens. Ballpoint pens lack romance, you told me. You had a collection of these fountain pens at home, all dripping with different-colored ink. The red ink was my favorite because it made me think of your wounds. Your favorite was purple, “just because.”

We used to doodle in the corners of our notes. Bubbles; hearts; witty remarks about something a professor said. Once, on a Monday morning, still drunk on the memory of Sunday Mass, I wrote who is this who looks down like the dawn, and after a moment of hesitation, you wrote beautiful like the moon next to it.

Bright as the sun

awesome as an army of banners

In my defense, we stopped by the bookstore on the way home that day and I bought The Poetry of Sappho. It was one of those flimsy, stock-photo-cover editions printed on thin paper, with a typo-ridden introduction by a man who seemed condescending even by the standards of the repressed, clueless nineteen-year-old girl that I was back then.

Wanna come study at my house? Of course I did. Your apartment smelled like fresh fruit and grass. It was tiny: a single bedroom, a miniscule kitchen and a bathroom. Candles and candy wrappers on the windowsill. A porcelain Virgin Mary statue that sometimes seemed to glow in the semidarkness. Flowers and floral patterns everywhere. You should hang some posters on that wall. You did. We made collages out of the old issues of pretentious culture magazines. Sometimes we read the articles—ironically, we’d insist. I only remember one of them: the one about Konopnicka and Dulębianka. You laughed as I read it out loud. I still wonder what that laughter meant.

The first time I touched the stigmata was also in your apartment. It was late in the evening on a Friday; we had nowhere to hurry. You had a DVD of Grease, and I had a borrowed DVD of some Godard movie, and we’d argued over what to watch first. Eventually, I gave up, and now we sat on your bed as Summer Nights played on your grainy TV screen. All I could see was your wounds, their aching redness, and the flesh of your palms.

Slowly, I reached out and brushed my pinky finger against your hand. My fingers found their way to your skin in the dark. You didn’t even flinch as I touched your stigmata; you just rubbed circles into the back of my palm, and it felt good. The Virgin Mary watched us from your nightstand.

I came home that day with your blood all over my hands, not knowing what it was that had overwhelmed us, or maybe knowing but refusing to admit it—either way, I didn’t want to wash the blood off. I did it anyway. Maybe this is where you and I are the most alike.

***

I still wonder how you knew I needed you to come that day. Maybe it was the way I’d looked yesterday, with glass, porcelain-doll eyes. My voice was flat and quiet, my movements graceless and slow. There was something moving inside me: a tired, tiny thing, or maybe multiple things, devouring me from the inside. Acedia. I thought it was the Devil. In retrospect, I was reading that one culture industry chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Adorno has been known to have that effect on people.

Somehow, you saw it in me. It was a Saturday in February; the sunlight was gray and cold, a faded, lethargic color; you were at my door. My first instinct was to ask if you wanted some tea. I started crying as I brewed it; the tears dripped into the mug and ran down its side, and I wondered how much I could cry, if crying a river like that boy in the Lesley Gore song was really possible. The stupidest possible thought at the stupidest possible time.

The things inside me stirred awake and crawled all over my body—a kind of paralysis that locked me in alone with them to slowly disintegrate. The first thing I felt after that were your arms around my waist. Your head on my shoulder. Somehow, we ended up sitting on my bed. I was crying, and you were patient like a marble statue. You were always patient back then. I’d never met anyone like that before. To me, you were infinity. Your fingers ran up and down my neck and combed through my long, dirty, tangled hair. Your palm steadied my spine.

And then the spiders came crawling out of my mouth, and you just let them crawl all over your back. I didn’t realize at first how many of them there were: a whole avalanche of spiders, crawling up my throat and out through my lips, suffocating me. You just closed your eyes as they made their way over your shoulders.

I don’t remember exactly how long we remained like that, but when I pulled away, it still wasn’t enough. You had awakened a hunger in me—I supposed that was the price of purity, of being free of spiders. With insects all over your body, you smiled gently and asked if I was okay.

Let’s get out of here, so we crossed the bridge to Kazimierz. We walked past the cafes and vintage clothing stores with the strange mannequins, and bits of sunlight got caught in your hair, and I pulled them out gently. Graffiti, food trucks, the bookstore with the strange opening hours (by some miracle, it was open, and you bought one of these notebooks with pictures of Budapest inside). There was old music coming from a third-floor window, and we danced on the cobblestone pavement, hand in hand, your blood on mine, spinning into a dreamlike state—now that’s what I call mysticism. I nearly stumbled in my high heels. You caught me. We ran towards the Planty, and for once running felt good. You chased me and threw yourself at me, and all I could think of was your floral scent. Lavender, maybe. Or lilies.

It was so obvious, but we still had no name for it, no dream of a common language. It was as if my tongue was broken.

I really did think you were a saint.

Somehow, our flânerie became a tradition. You were at my house every Saturday morning, and by midnight, I was at yours. In between was the carnival of the city, coffee shop after coffee shop, nearly getting run over by horse-drawn carriages, the Vistula boulevard of your palm lines, the Planty reminding me of the collar of your green jacket, flags fluttering like your eyelids, the mall near the train station. It was already dark when we walked home, and the air was cooler, thicker; you once gave me your jacket as we crossed the bridge. After that, we read poetry at your house, my head on your shoulder, your voice everywhere, echoing. The TV was on in the background; All the Things She Said came on the local music channel, and you hesitated for a mesmerized moment before turning it off in disgust.

***

Spring; sometime around Easter Sunday. You took me all the way to the fields on the other side of the river. You in the spring, with your sunflower glow, you under the blooming apple tree, haloed with light. In the fields, we picked some flowers and pressed them inside your Medieval Literature textbook right where the chapter on the Ars moriendi began (you, you with your hands, tender and careful as they closed the book). A week later, they started growing, planting their roots through the pages, tearing through the paper, breaking out of the book and reaching around it until the cover disappeared behind them.

You, standing there in your doorway with the book in your hands (was it even a book anymore?), like Saint Dorothea with the flower basket. The Bride of Christ, I suppose.

It was at some point during that spring that you gave me the gift of fire, or, rather, as I thought at the time, God gave it to me through you. Maybe it was that night when we were coming back from the book club meeting I dragged you along to. Someone in my Posthumanism class had been persuading me to go for months, so I went. At the club meetings, which usually had surprisingly little to do with posthumanism and sometimes also surprisingly little to do with books, we discussed Deleuze and Guattari and lay on tables and read aloud passages about performativity and went outside to smoke. An alternate universe to me back then, and yet I gravitated towards it. I listened to conversations about Derrida on Fridays and prayed to the Virgin Mary next to you on Sundays. There really is no out-of-context.

I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to invite you there. I probably just felt your absence, like I always did (and perhaps always will). You sat there awkwardly, squeezing my hand, frowning and pursing your lips occasionally. You looked shockingly small. In church, you spread your arms like wings, or held them out like a peace offering—or wrapped one of them around my waist. Your voice reverberated through the room, taking up all the space it could, ringing everywhere. But in that classroom, you just slipped the fingers of your hand between mine under the table and placed the other one on your lap like a schoolgirl. Back perfectly straight, feet on the ground.

So that was … interesting, you said with an uncomfortable chuckle after we walked out. It was, I replied, especially the ecriture feminine bit. (Cixous was my favorite because every time I looked at pictures of her, I felt a certain je ne sais quoi, something similar to what I felt for you but not quite, and it never dawned on me). But you, of course, couldn’t differentiate ecriture and eclairs if your life depended on it—a natural consequence of taking Intro to Latin instead of French—and so you listened with discomfort, occasionally nodding with a dissatisfied facial expression.

You kissed me that night on Rynek Główny. You kissed me that night on Rynek Główny, leaning against one of the columns of the Sukiennice, one of your hands on my neck, the other on my back, like a jealous God, like God calling me back to Him, back to Her, back to You, all tangled inside two warm bodies, for the wages of sin is death but the gift of god is eternal life, begging me to choose and not seeing how the choices were all bleeding into each other, the two of us bleeding into each other, blessed are you among women, God saying believe in me, you begging believe in me, believe me, I really believed that you were a saint, that God was somehow in your lips, in your bloodied palms, I could feel him pulsing in your neck, I could feel it: agape agape agape agape, Agatka, I said out loud and you said my name, and then you pulled away and we went home like nothing had happened.

At home, the flowers in the textbook crawled towards the golden Bible you’d given me, ripping through the thin pages and planting roots, blossoming through Deuteronomy and sprouting through Romans until the book became a corpse. I set the curtains on fire that night.

***

Burning the curtains was like seeing a butterfly hatch was like giving birth like time frozen time burning time disappearing like seeing the entire universe through the crack in the wall and I just stood there doing nothing.

There. You and I had exorcised the demons from my room.

Then I cleaned up the ash from the floor and went outside to smoke.  

I sat on a bench, breathing the smoke in too deep and coughing it up, partially because I was still new to smoking (Wika from the book club had tried and failed to teach me) and partially for some reason I couldn’t quite name. I stared at your window across the road, wondering if you would appear behind it and see me, truly see me in that divine way of yours, see the power of your sainthood scorching your name into my skin.

I burned my Latin notebook. I burned the tablecloth. I left scorched black spots on towels. Lying there on the newborn grass, I killed it with my fingertips. You never noticed, and I never told you. That’s the thing about sainthood, right? The innocence of it, the humility. You just give in and let God do the miracles for you while you just hold me on your bed with Amy McDonald playing in the background (back to the moment the very start from the very first day you had my heart). I burned a tiny hole through your blanket with one hand while my other hand pressed you to me.

Agatka? (You said my name.) What kind of God …?

I didn’t have to finish the sentence, and you didn’t have to answer. I ran my hand through your hair and kissed your forehead. There was a faint smell of smoke hanging in the air. At that point, I didn’t care what was burning as long as it didn’t set off the fire alarm (you, of course, didn’t burn).

***

It was Corpus Christi, and I waited for you on the church steps. My Sunday best back then: a white dress, floral patterns on the sleeves, Pange lingua on my tongue—I believe I imagined myself with a veil and real flowers in my hands, waiting for someone I refused to call by name. I saw myself walking down an endless aisle, bathing in the light of the stained-glass windows, always reaching out to touch the figure at the altar but always failing, over and over and over like The Creation of Adam.

And then there was you. You, running through the street, jumping over some of the steps and pulling me into a hug. You smelled like incense. You smelled like every perfume you ever owned. You said my name, laughing. The warmth was already tingling on my fingertips.

Someone else came up, and then someone else, and they all looked identical, and I couldn’t recognize any of them, even though I was sure I knew everyone. You talked, and they talked, and I just stared at your wounds, my palms heating up, aching a little in a strangely pleasant way. The stigmata moved and escaped my comprehension: a cloud, then a void, then everything at once.

You walked into the church, skirt flowing and swaying around your hips, and I followed. I bumped into two people along the way. The doorway, that sharp-toothed mouth of a dragon—its suffocating breath hit me as you pushed the heavy door open. It reeked of incense and gold, of metallic first kisses, of smoke, yes, of smoke—

Someone pushed their way between us on the pew. I didn’t realize how easily wood burned. I didn’t think about how churches burned. A cloud, then a void, then everything at once.

And then you, walking out of the church, coughing, or maybe not, a halo glowing around you. For a moment, you became all light, a silhouette, a shape the fire molded itself into, and all I could think was: this is what a martyr looks like.

***

Instead of reading Irigaray, I scroll through your Instagram account. Pictures of your husband and kids, her children rise up and call her blessed, pastels, I, too, was once in the lifestyle, banana bread recipe, trust in the Lord with all your heart. I resist the urge to respond, Jesus wept. I study your children’s faces. I smile at the eldest’s doll-like face, your only daughter’s silky blonde hair. I mourn the cheekbones and broad shoulders they got from their father. I don’t want to blame you, but I can’t help it.

(It is as if my tongue is broken.)

Perhaps it’s better this way, I think. At least now your body won’t be sold for parts after you die, like the blood of Pope John Paul II you can buy on Allegro for ten złotys. I imagine it: your bones, your teeth, your hair, all just relics sent to churches around the country to rot in solitude. Maybe that’s what you’re doing now, selling yourself for parts to a deity that has no use for broken agape.

The night after I got my PhD, I woke up with a warm ache on my palms. The stigmata were already in full bloom, bleeding slowly, getting darker at the centre like poppies, shifting and growing and waning as I looked at them, just like yours. They made me think of the last thing you said to me: I have to live for God now.

I haven’t managed to escape. Even now, with my title and with my published articles (read Queering Disco Polo in the latest issue of Teksty Drugie, my Twitter bio reads), I am still haunted by you.

I used to think you were a saint. Now I know what you are.

Mini-interview with Zosia Koptiuch

HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?

ZK: It’s paradoxical, but the moments that shape me the most are the writer’s blocks, or at least the times when I’m not writing per se. I especially value flânerie as a practice that is inherently tied to literature and the process of creation. The last time I stopped actively writing really shaped my style, because that entire time I was meditating and processing the world around me so I could produce creative output.

A more specific moment is being on Wattpad when I was a kid. The account is still out there somewhere. The stories and poems are embarrassing, and I can’t say reading Wattpad stuff taught me good taste, but I had just decided to become a writer and actively creating and posting something for others to see made me feel empowered.

HFR: What are you reading?

ZK: An Apartment on Uranus by Paul B. Preciado. Provocative, queer, and inspiring essays by an author I look up to. His voice is fascinating as well, the way he blends personal experience with broader theoretical reflection.

HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “The Hagiography of Agatka”?

ZK: I think the first thing that started to inspire me was reading the letters of Hildegard of Bingen. The intersection of sainthood and love, of obsession and shame—these things fascinated me, especially in the context of queerness. Of course, I was also trying to experiment with antiheroes.

HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?

ZK: I’m currently trying to write a longer piece, something akin to a novel or novella. I’ve often struggled with finishing anything longer than a short story, so we’ll see how this goes, but so far, I’m feeling fairly motivated. It’s kind of a spiritual successor to “The Hagiography of Agatka,” actually. A lot of the same themes, except it’s much more hopeful.

HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?

ZK: Oh my God, so much. First of all: free Palestine! But also, cherish art, because it is our last bastion of resistance against the tyranny of capitalist realism and common sense. Now, more than ever, we need to learn to imagine utopia.

Zosia Koptiuch is a writer of Polish descent from Ukraine. Born and raised in Kyiv, she is currently studying in Kraków. Her work has been featured in Popshot Magazine, SAND Journal, and other publications.

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