The Handwriting Test

My cousin Ewa cannot sign her name the way our grandfather signed his. She has tried, apparently, more than once — at family dinners, with a ballpoint pen on a paper napkin, while everyone watched and someone timed her. She always curves the capital E too far to the right. This is considered a minor failure, the kind that gets brought up gently, the way you might mention someone has spinach in their teeth.

I found out about this test only last spring, when I was thirty-nine days into living with my aunt in Nowa Huta while my apartment was replumbed. I had not known, until then, that the test existed. Apparently you learn about it when you are considered old enough to take it, and the age changes depending on who is deciding.

My aunt showed me his signature on the inside cover of a dictionary — the big Polish-Russian one that no one uses, which she keeps on the shelf anyway because he bought it in 1962 and the act of keeping it feels like faithfulness to something. The signature was small and unhurried. The Z in Zygmunt went left before it went right, which is unusual. The whole thing looked like he had thought about it once, long ago, settled on that particular arrangement of lines, and then never reconsidered.

She handed me a pen.

I wrote Zygmunt Wierzbicki — his name, not mine — on the back of a receipt from the pharmacy where I work, and I did not curve the Z wrong, I curved it correctly by accident, and my aunt made a sound like a small door opening. She took the receipt and looked at it for a moment and then put it in the dictionary, next to his.

I did not know what I had passed or what it meant that I had passed it. I asked her. She said it means you have his hands. She said this the way you'd say someone has their father's temper — as a fact, not a compliment, not quite a warning either.

The thing is, I never met him. He died four years before I was born, and the people who knew him have each preserved a different version: my mother's version is serious and reads novels; my uncle's version fixes engines on Sundays; my aunt's version signs his name in a particular way and bought a dictionary in 1962. These versions do not contradict each other exactly. They just don't add up to a person I can picture clearly.

And now, apparently, I have his hands.

Ewa called me two weeks later. She had heard about the receipt. She was not angry — or she was not only angry — she was also genuinely curious about what I had done differently. I told her I hadn't done anything differently. I had just written it. She was quiet for a moment and then said, well, that's annoying.

I laughed. So did she.

The thing neither of us said, but which sat in the pause between us, was that this is how families work. Some resemblance skips a person, lands somewhere unexpected, gets discovered on a receipt from a pharmacy in Nowa Huta thirty years after everyone stopped looking. Ewa got his stubbornness, which is actually more useful. She runs a construction business and argues with suppliers until they give her the right price. That takes something I don't have.

But I have his Z. I have his unhurried left-before-right.

I went back to the dictionary once more before I moved back to my apartment. I opened the cover and looked at both signatures side by side. His, in blue-black ink that had faded unevenly. Mine, in ballpoint on paper that was already starting to curl at the edges.

They were not identical. He had more patience in his lines, or more practice, or simply more time. Mine was close but newer — a version of the thing, not the thing itself. Which is probably accurate. Which is probably how it should be.

I closed the dictionary and put it back on the shelf, Russian-Polish side facing out, the way my aunt keeps it.

She was watching from the hallway. She nodded once, which meant nothing, or meant everything, or meant: yes, you are one of us, we have just been waiting to confirm it.

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