Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  Let’s have an espresso first, Katya said, then go to the cemetery.

  She found a place fully in the sun. I sat in the shade. We heard clapping in the distance. Perhaps the bird had flown out. Who would believe us, she said, if we told the story?

  The cemetery had wide lawns and tall trees. A thrush was stepping fastidiously over some newly mown grass. We asked a gardener, who was Bosnian, for directions.

  We found the grave at last in a far corner. A simple headstone, and a rectangle of gravel on which was placed a wickerwork basket containing earth and a thick, small-leafed, very dark green shrub with berries. I must find out its name, for Borges loved exactitude; it gave him the possibility, when writing, of landing precisely where he chose. All his life he was scandalously or grievously lost in politics, but never on the page he was writing on.

  Debo justificar lo que me hiere.

  No importa mi ventura o mi desventura.

  Soy el poeta.

  I have to justify what wounds me.

  My fortune or misfortune does not matter.

  I am the poet.

  The shrub, according to the Bosnian gardener, was Buxus sempervivens. I should have recognised it. In the villages of the Haute-Savoie one dips a sprig of this plant into holy water to sprinkle blessings for the last time on the corpse of the loved one laid out on the bed. It became a holy plant because of a shortage. On Palm Sunday there were never enough willow leaves available in the region, and so the Savoyards started to use the evergreen box instead.

  He died, the gravestone announced, on June 14th 1986.

  The two of us stood there in silence. Katya had a handbag hanging over her shoulder and I was holding my black crash helmet into which I had stuffed my gloves. We bent down to crouch over the gravestone.

  On it was a low-relief carving of men in what looked like a medieval boat. Or were they on land and was it their warrior discipline that made them stand so close and steadfastly together? They looked ancient. On the back of the gravestone were other warriors, holding either lances or oars, confident, ready to cross whatever terrain or water had to be crossed.

  When Borges came to Genève to die, he was accompanied by María Kodama. In the early sixties she had been one of his students studying Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature. She was half his age. When they got married, eight weeks before he died, they moved out of a hotel in an archive street called the Rue de la Tour-Maîtresse, into an apartment she had found.

  This book, he wrote in a dedication, is yours, María Kodama. Must I say to you that this inscription includes twilights, the deer of Nara, night that is alone and populated mornings, shared islands, seas, deserts, and gardens, what forgetting loses and memory transforms, the high-pitched voice of the muezzin, the death of Hawkwood, some books and engravings? . . . We can only give what we have given. We can only give what is already the other’s!

  A young man with his son in a pushchair walked past while Katya and I were trying to decide what language the engraved inscription was in. The little boy pointed at a pigeon who strutted forward, and bubbled over with laughter, sure that it was he who had made the bird move.

  The four words on the front of the stela were, we discovered, in Anglo-Saxon. And Ne Forhtedan Na. Should Not Be Afraid.

  A couple approached an empty bench further down the cemetery path. They hesitated and then decided to sit. The woman sat on her man’s knees, facing him.

  The words on the back were in Norse. Hann tekr sverthit Gram ok leggr i methal theira bert. He takes the sword Gram and lays it naked between them. The sentence comes from a Norse saga that Kodama and Borges loved over the years and played games with.

  At the very bottom of the stela, near the grass, is written: From Ulrike to Javier Otárola. Ulrike was the name Borges lent Kodama, and Javier the name she lent him.

  It’s a shame, I thought to myself, that we didn’t bring any flowers to leave. Then I had an idea: instead of flowers, I would leave one of my leather gloves.

  The gardener driving his lawnmower was getting closer. I could hear the two-stroke engine and smell the newly cut grass. I know of no other smell which has as much to do with beginnings: morning, childhood, spring.

  The memory of a morning.

  Lines of Virgil and Frost.

  The voice of Macedonio Fernándéz.

  The love or the conversation of a few people.

  Certainly they are talismans, but useless against

  the dark I cannot name,

  the dark I must not name.

  I began to wonder. The glove will only look as if somebody has dropped it! A crumpled black dropped glove! It will mean nothing. Forget it. Better come back another day with a bouquet of flowers. What flowers?

  O endless rose, intimate, without limit,

  Which the Lord will finally show to my dead eyes.

  Katya looked at me enquiringly. I nodded. It was time to go. We walked slowly back towards the gate, neither of us speaking.

  You found the one you were looking for? asked the Bosnian gardener.

  Thanks to you, replied Katya.

  Family?

  Yes family, she said.

  Outside the theatre everything was calm and the door of the starling’s flight was closed. I had parked my bike next to Katya’s scooter. She went to fetch her helmet. About to put on my own, I pulled out the gloves. There was only one. I looked again. Only one.

  What’s the matter?

  There’s a glove missing.

  You must have dropped it, we’ll go back, it’ll only take a minute.

  I told her what had gone through my head as we were standing by the grave.

  You underestimated him, she said conspiratorially, gravely underestimated him.

  While we were laughing, I stuffed the remaining glove into my pocket and she climbed up behind me. Most of the lights were green and we were soon over the Rhône, leaving the city behind and taking the chicane bends up to the pass. The warm air rushed over my bare hands and Katya leant into the turns. I remembered how she had recently quoted Zeno of Elea in an SMS message to me: What is in motion is neither in the space where it is, nor in the space where it isn’t; for me this is a definition of music.

  We made a sort of music until we reached the Col de la Faucille.

  There we stopped and got off to look down at the lake, towards the Alps, and at the city of Genève with its multitude of lifetimes.

  3

  Kraków

  It was not a hotel. It was a kind of pension where, at the most, there were four or five guests. In the morning breakfast on a tray was placed on a shelf in the corridor: bread, butter, honey and slices of a sausage which is a speciality of the city. Beside the tray, packets of Nescafé and an electric water heater. Contact with the severe and serene young women who ran the place was minimal.

  In the bedrooms all the furniture, made of either oak or walnut, was old and must have dated from before the Second World War. This was in the only Polish city which survived that war without serious destruction to its buildings. In the pension, as in a convent or a monastery, there was a sense inside each room that the two windows which gave on to the streets had been contemplatively looked through for several generations.

  The building was situated on Miodowa Street in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Kraków. After breakfast I asked a young woman behind the reception desk where the nearest bankomat was. She regretfully put down the violin case she was holding and picked up a tourist map of the city. On it she marked in pencil where I had to go. It’s not far, she sighed, as if she would have liked to send me to the other side of the world. I bowed discreetly, opened and shut the front door, turned right, took the first right again and found myself in the Place Nowy, an open market-square.

  I have never been in this square before and I know it by heart, or rather I know by heart the people who are selling things in it. Some of them have regular stalls with awnings to keep the sun off their goods. It is already hot, hot with the blurred, gnat heat of
the Eastern European plains and forest. A foliage heat. A heat full of suggestions, that does not have the assurance of a Mediterranean heat. Here nothing is certain. The nearest thing to certainty here is a grandmother.

  Other sellers – all of them women – have come from the outlying villages with their own produce in baskets or buckets. They do not have stalls and are sitting on stools they brought with them. A few stand. I wander between them.

  Lettuces, red radishes, horseradishes, cut dill like green lace, small knobby cucumbers which in this heat grow in three days, new potatoes, their skins, with a little powdered earth on them, the colour of grandchildren’s knees, stick-celery with its cleansing toothbrush smell, cuttings of liveche, which the men, drinking vodka, swear is an incomparable aphrodisiac for women as well as men, bunches of young carrots swapping fern jokes, cut roses mostly yellow, cottage cheeses, which the rags pegged to the clothes line in their gardens still smell of, wild green asparagus that the children were sent to look for near the village cemetery.

  The professional traders have naturally acquired all the trading tricks for persuading the public that golden opportunities never come twice. The women on their stools, by contrast, propose nothing. They are immobile, expressionless, and rely on their own simple presence to guarantee the quality of what they have brought to sell from their own gardens.

  A wooden fence around a plot and a two-roomed house made from logs with a single tiled stove between the two rooms. These women live in chatas like this.

  I wander between them. Different ages. Different builds. Eyes of different colour. No two women wearing the same kerchief. And each one of them has found, as she bends down to cut chives or pull out dog-tooth weed or pick red radishes, her own way of protecting, of favouring, the small of her back, so that its intermittent aches do not become chronic. When they were younger it was their hips which absorbed the shock of events, now it is their shoulders which have to do so.

  I peer into the basket of a woman who is standing without a stool. The basket is full of pale golden pastries, little pies. They look like carved chessmen, more specifically, like castles, castles that could be stood either way up, their regular embrasures always at the top. Each one is ten centimetres tall.

  I pick up one of the castles and realise my mistake. It is far too heavy to be made of pastry.

  I glance up at the face of the woman. Sixty years old, blue-green eyes. She looks back at me severely, as if at an idiot who has once again forgotten something. Oscypek, she says slowly, repeating the proper name of a cheese made from the milk of mountain sheep and smoked in the chimney between the two rooms. I buy three. Then, with the smallest gesture of her head, she suggests I get on my way.

  In the centre of the square stands a low building, subdivided into small, round shops. There is a barber’s with just enough space for one chair. Several butchers’. A grocer’s where you can buy pickled cabbage from a single barrel. A kitchen for soup with a cast-iron stove, and, outside on the paving stones, three wooden tables with benches. At one of the tables sits a man with slightly dejected shoulders, long hands and a high forehead made higher by the fact that he is going bald. His spectacles have thick lenses. He looks at home here this morning, although he is not Polish.

  Ken was born in New Zealand and died there. I sit on the bench opposite him. This man, sixty years ago, shared with me what he knew, although he never told me how he learnt what he knew. He never spoke about his childhood or his parents. I had the impression he left New Zealand for Europe when he was young, before he was twenty. Were his parents rich or poor? Maybe it makes as little sense to ask that question of him as it would of the people in this market at this moment.

  Distances never daunted him. Wellington, New Zealand, Paris, New York, the Bayswater Road, London, Norway, Spain, and at some moment, I think, Burma or India. He earned his living, variously, as a journalist, a schoolteacher, a dance instructor, an extra in films, a gigolo, a bookseller without a shop, a cricket umpire. Maybe some of what I’m saying is false, yet it is my way of making a portrait of him for myself as he sits in front of me in the Place Nowy. In Paris he drew cartoons for a newspaper, of this I am certain. I remember distinctly the kind of toothbrushes he liked – ones with extra long handles, and I remember the size of shoe he took – an eleven.

  He pushes his bowl of borsch towards me. Then he takes a handkerchief from his right trouser pocket, wipes the spoon and hands it to me. I recognise the handkerchief of black tartan. The soup is a clear, deep, red, vegetable borsch, with a little apple vinegar added to it, Polish-style, to counteract the natural sweetness of the beetroot. I drink some and push the bowl back to him and hand him back the spoon. Not a word has passed between us.

  From the bag slung over my shoulder I take out a sketchbook, for I want to show him a drawing I made yesterday from Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine in the Czartoryski Museum. He studies it, his heavy glasses slipping a little down his nose.

  Pas mal! Yet isn’t she too upright? Isn’t she in fact leaning more as she takes the corner?

  On hearing him speak in this way, which is so indisputably his, my love for him comes back: my love for his journeys; for his appetites, which he set out to satisfy and never suppressed; for his weariness; for his sad curiosity.

  A little too upright, he repeats. Never mind, every copy has to change something, doesn’t it?

  My love for his lack of illusions comes back too. Without illusions, he avoided disillusionment.

  When I first met him I was eleven and he forty. For the next six or seven years he was the most influential person in my life. It was with him that I learnt to cross frontiers. In French there is the word passeur – often translated as ferryman or smuggler. Yet there is also in the word the connotation of guide, and something of the mountains. He was my passeur.

  Ken flips backwards through the sketchbook. He had deft fingers and could palm cards skilfully. He tried to teach me Find the Lady: You can always make money with that! he said. Now he puts a finger between two pages and stops.

  Another copy? Antonello da Messina?

  Dead Christ supported by Angel, I say.

  I never saw it, only in reproduction. If I could have chosen to have my portrait painted by any artist in history, I’d have chosen him, he says. Antonello. He painted like he was printing words. Everything he painted had that kind of coherence and authority, and it was during his lifetime that the first printing presses were invented.

  He looks down again at the sketchbook.

  Not a trace of pity on the angel’s face or in his hands, he says, only tenderness. You’ve caught that tenderness, but not the gravity, the gravity of the first printed words. That’s gone for good.

  I did it last year in the Prado. Until the guards came to chuck me out!

  Anyone has the right to draw there, no?

  Yes, but not to sit on the floor.

  Then why didn’t you draw standing up!

  When Ken says this in the Place Nowy, I see him, tall, stooped, standing on the edge of a cliff making a sketch of the sea. Near Brighton, the summer of 1939. He always carried in his pocket a large black graphite pencil called a Black Prince, which, instead of being round, was rectangular like a carpenter’s pencil.

  I’m too old now, I tell him, to draw for a long time standing up.

  He puts down the sketchbook abruptly without glancing at me. He abhorred self-pity. The weakness, he said, of many intellectuals. Avoid it! This was the only moral imperative he ever imparted to me.

  He fingers one of the cheeses I have bought.

  Her name is Jagusia, he says, nodding towards the woman who sold me the oscypek, and she comes from the mountains in Podhale. Her two sons work in Germany. Black labour. Hard for them to get work permits, they’re forced to be illegal. Néanmoins, they’re building a house, a house larger than Jagusia has even dreamt of, not one storey but three, not two rooms but seven!

  Néanmoins! French words cropped up in his sentences not out of aff
ectation but because the years he had lived in Paris before coming to London and the Bayswater Road, were the happiest of his life. It was for the same reason that he sometimes wore a black beret.

  Yet Jagusia will refuse, he prophesies, to move out of her chata, with the cheesecloths on the line in the garden.

  This was the man who made me believe that together we could find music in any city in the world.

  What about a beer? he says now in Kraków, pointing towards the far end of the market building, beyond a clothes shop belonging to a fat woman who is sitting smoking in an armchair, surrounded by dresses.

  I get up and walk towards her. As she smokes, she tells the story of what happened when she arrived in the Place Nowy; every morning she does this, and every morning the man who sells dried and pickled mushrooms listens to her, his face expressionless. When all the dresses and trousers she has on display are folded up and stacked in the little shop, there is no space for her. On the inside of the door there is a long mirror, since customers sometimes use it as a changing room. Each morning when she opens the shop, she sees herself in this mirror and each morning she is surprised by her size.

  I spot the cans of beer on a stall with dried beans, Polish mustard, biscuits, honey-bread and tinned meats. There is also an open chessboard and a game in progress. The grocer behind the stand is playing Black, and a man who looks like a passer-by is playing White. Several pawns, a knight and a bishop have been taken.

  The grocer studies the chessboard from a distance, then turns away and gets on with his job until the other one has made his move. The other one hovers above the game and rocks forwards and backwards on his feet, as if he were one of his own bishops, already lifted very slightly off the board between the fingers of a giant player who is cautiously trying out possible moves, being careful not to relinquish the piece until he is certain.