Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  As we talked of this and that, our eyes wandered towards Danka, not because she was making herself prominent, but because of the whiteness and extent of her dress. A rising moon. Maybe it had something to do with the silver threads of her sheath bodice. But it was also to do with her hands and pale arms as she sat there at the table. Her hands had recently learnt two sets of gestures, those of lover and those of mother. Both sets are imbued with tenderness, yet are strictly opposed. Maternal gestures reassure and calm; amorous gestures provoke and rouse. Her hands, relaxed on the tablecloth, almost looked as if just the afternoon before they had been making pastry! Her fingers though gave the game away. Danka’s fingers shimmered more than the moon-silver threads, it was they who made her shine.

  Children began to dance, pretending to an innocence they did not possess. Nobody who dances to music is innocent. Glancing at the children some of the middle-aged remembered how, when they were young, what was desired kept a certain distance; whereas now, even when unobtainable, the to-be-desired was too close. To change that distance – and this was the unending provocation of the music’s rhythm – to change that distance, one only had to to get to one’s feet and dance. Which is what some couples did.

  The talk at the tables, where the eating had begun, was the talk of travellers returned home for a brief visit to the Polish Kingdom. After a vodka or two, I had the impression that the horses of a hundred riders might be tethered outside along the edge of the forest.

  They were speaking about jobs, deceptions in love, cousins in Chicago, the health of Karol Wojtyła the Pope, prices, the diseases of trees, ageing, and the songs they would never forget. Whenever a topic could be turned into a game, they did so and played it.

  The dishes came like good news, one after another. After each one there was an interval for drinking and dancing and measuring the improbability of so much good news. Everyone gathered there knew that news of a catastrophe comes all at once.

  The Clarinette sang. Most of the songs in the world are sad. All are about stories that have finished and ended. And yet there’s nothing more present and defiant than singing.

  Hair the last veil

  before everything

  a hair’s breadth

  before nothing.

  Hair the farewell

  before light

  the endlessly black

  before white.

  Find in me

  find in me for you

  my brightness.

  When she stopped, the first to speak were those who found the silence hardest to bear.

  I taste the soup, add a little salt and peel the eggs. The shells come off like brown clowns’ noses.

  It was time for Mirek to dance alone with Danka. Olek was asleep in his carrycot. He would only remember the wedding through photographs. Who knows? His parents walked alone on to the threshing floor. Everyone watched. The satin roses on Danka’s shoulder-straps were waiting to slip from her shoulders, the roses of her flouncing skirt were kept flying by the air-rush of her turning. Everyone watched. The sight of the pair of them roused many memories and often the same question. Was what time has changed an illusion? The music gave its own answer. The chattering voices another.

  The bride was no longer meadow. Her neck rose straight from her full breast, her outstretched wings swept the floor. She was snow goose. Her whiteness grew larger. When at last they stopped dancing and, glistening with sweat, returned to their table to continue the feast, many guests were impatient for the music to start up again so they too could dance and share the music’s answer, rather than that of the chattering voices.

  At a certain moment I left my table and made my way across the barn. I passed the musicians, felt the rhythm of the percussion, went outside and walked between the trees on the edge of the forest. There were no horses tethered there. A man with a saxophone approached me.

  Good evening, comrade, he said.

  It was these words which made me recognise him. Felix Berthier.

  He was a member of the brass band of the village in which I live. By trade he was a house painter who worked by himself. He addressed everybody he met as comrade – the curé, the mayor, the baker who voted fascist, the undertaker, a kid on his way to school. The greeting was offered with a smile, not mockery, as if he had lifted up the encountered one and transplanted him into another time and place where the assignation would fit.

  Each month of May, on the Thursday of Ascension Day, the brass band goes to play outside the houses of one of the outlying hamlets of the village. There is a rota, so that the music comes to each hamlet once every five or six years, and the inhabitants prepare refreshments to be consumed when the concert is over. Because the trees are not yet in full leaf, the music carries a long way over the fields. The tunes played are traditional and familiar.

  When a concert was finished, Felix would knock back two glasses of gnôle, adjust his bandsman’s cap to a more jaunty angle, and wander between the barns and outhouses, or around a little chapel, playing Duke Ellington style. He proceeded slowly like a sleepwalker, and it was hard to decide whether people made way for him, or whether he found his own way along passages opened up by his playing. He seemed to be walking in that other place at that other time. This is why his eyes smiled. Undoubtedly he was, in his own way, playing for those present. The rest of the band took pains to disassociate themselves from him. The bandmaster would raise his eyes to heaven in exasperation, but occurring as it did on Ascension Day, he put up with the problem.

  Felix, I asked him, can you play tonight at my friend’s wedding?

  Comrade, why do you think I’ve come? He was already stooping over his saxophone.

  Fifteen years ago, on a Saturday night, Felix was playing his way home and a car knocked him over in the main street of a neighbouring village and killed him.

  With the passing of the years, some of the houses he painted and the rooms he papered, needed to be redecorated, and this involved stripping down what he had done. And so it was discovered that, on many occasions, before he started papering or sticking on new panels, he scrawled messages on the walls with his large house-painter’s brush: PROFIT IS SHIT. THE POOR GO TO HEAVEN. VIVE LA JUSTICE!

  After midnight I heard Felix’s alto-sax.

  The music, like the young priest a few hours earlier, was searching for a purity. Not, of course, the same one. The music was searching for the purity of desire, of what passes between a longing and a promise: the promise of consolation that can outlast – or anyway outflank – the punishments of living.

  To shoot you

  they’ll have to

  shoot thru’ me.

  The Clarinette’s voice touched outer space, and the music attained the purity that staunches wounds.

  Everyone in the barn was reminded how a life without wounds isn’t worth living.

  Desire is brief – a few hours or a lifetime, both are brief. Desire is brief because it occurs in defiance of the permanent. It challenges time in a fight to the death. And dancing is about that challenge.

  There was only one bride there and one groom, but there were several hundred weddings; remembered, real, regretted and imaginary.

  In the small hours the voice of the wedding party changed – it became younger. The older guests looked older – myself included. Some of the children were asleep on benches against the walls. Olek did not stir in his cot, fingers unfolded. The crate of empty vodka bottles grew heavier. The dishevelled musicians became the governors of the night. A waiter on his way to the kitchen took time off to dance.

  Everywhere there was more white. Men had taken off their jackets and ties. Several women had kicked off their shoes and were barefoot. Mirek, in his spotless shirt and pearl-coloured suit, remained immaculate. Danka stood before the iced wedding cake, which, on its stand, was as tall as she. Then, with the same authority with which, each morning in Paris, she drew the blinds in her employers’ bedroom and placed coffee on their bedside table, she cut the first portion of her own
wedding cake. And as each guest ate their slice, everything that was white shone brighter.

  It was at this moment that twelve men with their hands held out approached Danka and fetched Mirek. They were Gurali, sturdy men from the Tatra Mountains. Who knows, perhaps it was because of them that Danka had insisted upon being married in the unemployed town of Nowy Targ? They began to sing together; by a common accord the musicians fell silent. They sang in unison, deep chanting voices.

  Put behind the bitterness

  Now’s the time to embrace.

  While singing, they lifted Mirek and Danka off their feet and laid them across their arms, as though they were reclining on a shelf at shoulder height.

  Now’s the time . . .

  With these words and a jerk of their arms, they threw the couple high into the air. We craned our necks to watch. They were close together. Their hands could touch or reach each other’s sex. Her skirt billowed in the form of a nimbostratus cloud and covered Mirek’s feet. One of Mirek’s hands, beyond his head, searched to turn down the sound. Imperceptibly, the two of them descended together into the waiting Gurali arms, there to be gently received, before being launched once more. They hung in the air a little longer each time.

  A few hours later, at 11 a.m., the just-married and thirty wedding guests met in the main square. Most of us were licking the ice-cream cornets which are famous in Nowy Targ. Then we set off to look at a lake that is called the Eye of the Sea. Morskie Oko.

  What happens is more surprising than what’s invented.

  In Nowy Targ during the early eighties two friends were working in the shoe factory. The family name of one of the men was Bieda, which means poor, and that of the other was Bocacz, which means rich. One day, after a trade union meeting – Solidarność was just beginning – they were picked up by a Zomo patrol. Zomo was the counter-insurgency police. They were asked their names. Bieda declared his and was smashed over the head for insolence. It was Bocacz’s turn. Name? I don’t have a name. So you don’t have a name, eh? And he was smashed over the head for insolence. Give me your name! Bocacz. I see, so you’re in this together, both of you, it’s clear, said the Zomo sergeant. Poor and Rich! And they were put in a cell until they told the truth.

  The walk through the forest up to the lake took three hours. Because it was summer, many people of all ages were making the same walk. When we arrived, we sat on boulders by the edge of the lake and gazed across the very still water towards the peaks. In the direction we were looking there was nothing man-made. The thousand people around us were very quiet – as if attending a performance. We munched sandwiches. Danka fed Olek. Mirek pointed to where he thought it would be possible to tickle trout. Under those rocks, he declared in his poacher’s whisper. Everybody had the air of being made happy by what they had come to see. Which was what exactly? Was it the Jurassic mountain range and its reflection in the lake? Or was it the stillness of the water with its lips at the edges which never quivered?

  I ask myself this as I empty the śmietanie, the sour cream, into a bowl in the kitchen. The sourness of śmietanie makes it taste less of milk and more of sex. I think we all went to Morskie Oko to look at what time does without us.

  The following day, on the grassy banks of the White Dunajca, we built a fire and buried potatoes in the earth to bake them, in the same way that clay bowls, which last for centuries, are baked. The potatoes we ate hot with salt from Wieliczka and horseradish from Danka’s mother’s garden.

  Night’s falling. Something must have delayed them. I could telephone Mirek on his mobile and I don’t. I prefer to wait, as this house without a doorstep does. I move into the room with the swing and the armchair.

  With a little psst! the reading lamp on a table in the far corner goes out, probably the bulb, which I won’t be able to replace. On the table are a pile of yellowed newspapers, some of them dating from the 1970s, a hand-compass that Mirek perhaps used when he was starting out as a forestry engineer, and a coffee tin, with nails in it. The table has a drawer and I open it with the stupid hope that I may find a light bulb, which I’ll try in the lamp. There are only books, Polish novels. Underneath them, at the bottom of the drawer, is a thin pamphlet with a photograph of a woman on its cover. I naturally recognise her, her eyes with their expression of looking through an opaque wall at what lies behind it, their expression of surprised pain and sustained determination. I see the slight limp of her walk, and I hear her voice, speaking in Polish, German, Russian, the voice of the eighteen-year-old who fled Warsaw because she was going to be arrested by the Czarist police, the young voice she never lost, even when her words were like those of a venerable prophet. Rosa Luxemburg. She was first introduced to me when I was sixteen, more than twenty years after her death. She was born in nearby Zamość where Bogena goes to argue with the authorities (in vain) about her father’s pension.

  Who knows how the pamphlet, entitled Centralism and Democracy, ended up here? To add to the improbability it’s in French. Yet she, her writings, her imagination were accustomed to clandestinity and clandestine travelling. They expected to be hidden in remote drawers.

  The last paragraph of the pamphlet, written in 1904, argues like this: For the first time in history, the workers’ movement in Russia has the chance of really becoming the instrument of the popular will. Yet look! The ego of Russian revolutionaries has made them lose their minds and talk yet again of an almighty historical leadership residing in His Highness, The Central Committee. They stand things on their heads and don’t realise how the only legitimate subjectivity for any revolutionary leadership today is the ego of the working class, who want the right to make their own mistakes and to learn for themselves the dialectics of history. Let’s be clear. The mistakes made by a revolutionary workers’ movement are historically infinitely more precious and fecund than the infallibility of any so-called Central Committee!

  Outside it is entirely dark and I hear, in the distance, the chattering of a nightjar. Seated on the swing, wearing black high lace-up shoes of thin leather, could be goatskin, with heels that are not flat – some German comrades found her choice of footwear odd – Rosa makes the swing oscillate with the regularity of a tall clock’s pendulum, covering the same minimal distance of twenty centimetres back and forth, no more.

  To recall and recall again the circumstances of her death. In the last days of December 1918 she and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party. Two weeks later they were arrested in Berlin and taken to the Hotel Eden where they were interrogated, beaten up and bundled into a vehicle supposedly to be transferred to the prison of Moabit by cavalry guard officers. In reality they were taken to the Berlin Zoo and slaughtered. She had her head smashed in, and her body was thrown into the Landwehr canal.

  I glance at the swing, and her abundant thick hair.

  The Berlin Zoo is not far from the Botanical Gardens. From a prison cell in Wroclaw, seven months before her death, Rosa wrote to Sophie Liebknecht.

  Sonitschka, your letter gave me so much joy and I reply immediately. Now you see the pleasure and comfort a visit to the Botanical Gardens can give! You should do it more often. I share your pleasure when you describe so vividly your impressions. Yes, I know those wonderful catkins of pines that are ruby-red when the trees are in flower. Those red catkins are the female flowers from which the cones are born, the cones that become so heavy they drag the branches down towards the ground. Beside them are the less obvious male flowers of a pale yellow, from which comes a golden pollen. Unfortunately, from my window here I can only see the foliage of some distant trees, can just glimpse their tops on the other side of the wall. I try to guess by the colour and the little I can see of the form, what kind of tree each one is, and I believe that, on the whole, I hardly make a mistake.

  The swing is totally still now and the slatted seat hangs at an angle to the floor, as if it had never moved or been sat upon.

  Tomorrow I will do a drawing of a clematis which climbs up a pear tree behind the house. Its p
ears, when ripe, are reddish, and their flesh tastes slightly of juniper berries, their skins of slates in the rain.

  Rosa loved birds – particularly the urban starlings who fly en masse above the streets and over the roofs. She herself was a linnet. Hänfling in German. A name suggesting tenderness and sharpness. I noticed the clematis a couple of hours ago, when I went out to hang a dampish eiderdown on the clothes line. Its flowers are particularly large and of a blue that verges on black, with a touch of purple. I’ll do the drawing with black ink and spit and salt, which brings out the red in the ink. The drawing, if it’s any good, I’ll leave between the pages of the pamphlet, which I have just replaced in the drawer with the novels on top.

  A beam of light illuminates the garden on the other side of the track, at first high up at the level of the tall bean-sticks, then descending to the beetroots. It extinguishes itself. The darkness is blacker. Then the beam reappears, brighter: the headlights of a car. They have arrived.

  When the three of them entered the house, it immediately became larger. The roof spread its wings. Houses shrink when lived in alone, and even more so when uninhabited. Danka was carrying Olek in her arms and as she crossed the threshold from the creaking portico-hallway into the dining room, they both smiled as if their two faces were expressing a single feeling which neither could have explained.

  Mirek and I began to unload the car. There were cardboard boxes, shopping bags, a folded pushchair, a cot, suitcases, a thermos box, a crate of apricots, and, last of all, the wedding dress, hanging from a hanger inside a polythene bag. Fixed to the roof of the car was a ski container, shaped like something halfway between a coffin and a kayak. It had been thrown away and left on the street in Paris and Mirek had recuperated it.