He had, of course, seen Malcolm turn in the direction of the hotel a half block away. Likely he was trying to earn a few złoty at the same time as he practised his English.
‘You’ve picked the wrong man,’ said Malcolm. ‘You’re the prince. I’m the pauper.’
The young man did not understand. He blinked and, regrettably, his eyes were a pale, almost luminescent blue.
‘I haven’t any money to give you,’ Malcolm told him, straight out.
The youth muttered something and, stuffing hands into tight jeans pockets, kicked the wet ground. Malcolm walked on, the paper-clad bottle under his arm. The boy was following, he sensed even without looking back. At the door of the hotel, something made him turn, a silly fancy, and the boy, flashing his grey teeth in a beguilingly disingenuous smile, hurried to catch up.
‘What’s your name?’ Malcolm asked.
‘Waldemar.’
If he were going to pick an alias, Malcolm wished the boy would have picked one a little more melodious in English.
‘Would you like to join me for a drink, Waldemar?’ He raised the bottle and the boy perked right up. Ever chivalrous, Malcolm held the door for him.
The desk clerk handed him his key with the usual sour impertinence and a scathing look for Waldemar. Appalling rudeness in the service sector was not something Malcolm thought he’d ever miss, but after Vancouver, where you would have to run all over town to find a clerk or waiter to abuse you, he appreciated the nobility in refusing to grovel or even smile. So far, it had been the highlight of the trip—seeing how close they could come to actually telling you off. The girl, tireless in her effort to be friendly, seemed especially to provoke them.
He climbed the leafy staircase with the boy, so blond, beside him. ‘Are there a lot of thieves around now?’ he asked, referring to the loss of the boy’s imaginary suitcase. Maybe he really was a student. He was at least intelligent, for he grinned greyly at the irony of Malcolm’s question.
‘The state,’ he said, ‘no longer guarantees us jobs.’
Malcolm’s room was at the front of the hotel overlooking the opera house and the treed belt called the Planty. He opened the door for Waldemar who, now that they were alone, was putting on a different walk—big boots, but tiny steps, and buttocks tight as if he were carrying a dime between them. There was only the bed and the chair. Malcolm pulled the chair out for him to set the dime on. He unwrapped the bottle and turned the two glasses on the little table right side up. Vodka splashed the clear sides, oily.
‘Cheers, Waldemar,’ he said. ‘My name’s Malcolm.’
‘Malcolm, cheers.’
They threw back the drink in what Malcolm assumed was the Polish style. After a second shot, the room felt warmer and both of them removed their coats. The boy, who was wearing an old stretched sweater over a T-shirt grimy at the collar, took out a cigarette and came and sat next to Malcolm on the bed, keeping his eyes demurely lowered and smelling very headily of sweat.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing in Poland?’
‘No,’ said Waldemar. ‘I don’t care.’
‘Ah. A little nihilist.’
‘What is nihilist?’
‘It is what you are, darling.’
Waldemar sipped the vodka and leaned back on one arm, smiling and holding out the cigarette. ‘Do you have—?’ He searched for the word. ‘Cinder.’
Malcolm laughed, which made Waldemar pout. He got up, fished a matchbook from his coat pocket and lit the cigarette himself.
‘Tomorrow we are visiting the Auschwitz Museum,’ said Malcolm as Waldemar resumed his reclining position on the bed. ‘Have you been there?’
‘Of course.’ He exhaled smoke. ‘They take us for school trips.’
‘How is it?’
He shrugged. ‘I am tired of all that.’
‘Ah.’ Malcolm pressed his eyes. ‘Do you speak French, by any chance?’ When Waldemar shook his head, a lock flopped into his eyes.
‘Is your name really Waldemar?’
‘Is your name really Malcolm?’
‘It doesn’t suit you, that’s all.’
Waldemar lifted the cigarette gracefully and, between grubby fingers, offered it to Malcolm.
Three hours later Alison woke the opposite of refreshed—groggy, headachy, confused. She curled up tighter under the thin blanket. A hot shower would warm her better, but she didn’t want to go back outside with wet hair. When she finally did get up, she dressed herself in layers, in all the sweaters she’d brought.
In the lobby, the desk clerk told her where the tourist office was. ‘Across the Planty. Just down from the train station.’
The Planty, Alison discovered, was the green ring surrounding the old, walled part of the city. She walked through it, thinking that nothing seemed to be the matter with the trees. In fact, nothing had seemed to be the matter with any of the trees she’d seen so far, with the exception of the one outside her hotel window, which might simply be late to leaf. Something in the branches of one caught her eye. She strayed off the path to look, then hurried on when she saw the mutilated pigeon hanging there, crucified on the twigs.
She came to a concrete pedestrian underpass lined with vendors of leather slippers and bulky hand-knit sweaters, brightly painted wooden boxes, fat knots of pretzel. Two gypsies were begging—a mother and a child. Alison knew instantly that they were gypsies because they looked exactly like those in the pictures that she’d seen in the book. The mother, squatting on the concrete, cocooned in a dirty shawl, droned at passers-by while the girl flitted around tugging sleeves. Alison found herself staring at them, standing there and marvelling that they were still here. Nearly all the Jews were gone, the guidebook said.
The little girl skittered over, fluttering fingers in Alison’s face. When Alison tried to fend her off, the girl reached out and pinched her. ‘Ow!’ cried Alison, bringing her hand up to her cheek. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!’ cawed the girl, capering and mocking.
On the other side of the tunnel, she stood a moment, rubbing the stinging spot. The buildings here looked different, she noticed. They were discoloured almost to black. Overcast like this, too, it seemed that outside the city walls, Kraków was in black and white, while inside, where most of the tourists confined themselves, was in colour.
She crossed the street.
‘Miss? Miss? Pretty miss?’ Leaning up against the sooty stone, a chameleon in his black leather jacket, face blank as the wall. ‘Miss? I take you to Auschwitz. Four hundred and fifty thousand złoty.’
She kept on walking, her hand on her breast now, staring at the wet sidewalk, ignoring him. The next one droned the way the gypsy woman had, ‘Miss? Ausch-witz? Ausch-witz. Four hundred thousand złoty.’
In a long line at the kerb, the cabbies were milling, scavenger-like, waiting for the tourists to come out of the tourist office. Another followed close enough to touch her. ‘I drive you there. I drive you back. I give you a tour. Four hundred thousand. Three hundred fifty. Miss? A tour.’
She fled inside the office, got the bus information, but was almost afraid to leave. In the end, she simply pressed through the line of cabbies, keeping her head low and rushing past.
She did not return to the underpass where the little wasp girl was, instead walked through the Planty again and up another street, ending back in the main square. Here the cafés along the perimeter had set up tables and umbrellas and the arcades of the cake-like Sukiennice had become a promenade. At the closest café, she threw herself down. She was shaking. The waiter came over and she ordered tea and pierogi, the only recognizable items on the menu.
In the square, an old man emptying a paper bag of bread crusts onto the flagstones disappeared in an iridescent swirl of pigeons. Never in one place at one time had she seen so many people in religious costume. She started to count them—three nuns in habit, two priests in t
heir collars, a brown-robed monk on a bicycle. The church bell struck four, echoed by her teeth against the cup. The same tune they had heard earlier sounded from the tower, bittersweet. When it ended, the people sitting around the statue of the desecrated poet looked up and applauded. Way, way up, the trumpeter took a bow.
The waiter set before her the plate of pierogi, onions fried to translucence and giving off a warming redolent steam.
‘Have you been to Wawel?’ he asked, in English, naturally.
‘Where?’
‘To the castle.’
‘I didn’t know there was a castle,’ Alison said.
‘You must go. It is wonderful. It is medieval. Certainly, though, you’ve been inside,’ he pointed at it, ‘the Mariacki Church.’
‘Not yet.’
‘The altarpiece is very famous. They open it every day at noon.’
‘I wanted to go earlier. Maybe tomorrow. No.’ She winced. ‘Tomorrow I can’t.’
She ate and only afterward did she realize how hungry she had been. Stuffed now with dough stuffed with potatoes, she did not feel half so empty.
‘You are going to Auschwitz.’
She started and looked up at the waiter holding out the bill. Like all the others, he seemed to be condemning her to go.
She would go into the church now, she decided, getting up and crossing the square. Down three worn steps, she stumbled into darkness and, when her eyes had adjusted, she saw walls and pillars covered with faded frescoes, patterned as on the painted wooden boxes sold in the streets. The front wall, where the guidebook said the best of the stained glass would be, was entirely covered with scaffolding and sheeting.
In the carved pews on either side of the main aisle people hunched in prayer. She passed gloomy little side chapels, then came to a painting of a black-faced Madonna above a small altar, lit all round with votive candles. The famous high altar was set in a chapel at the back of the main body of the church, but the windows there were also draped and the wood so dark it was impossible to make out any details in the carving. The entrance roped off, she couldn’t get up close.
She sat down in a pew. Before her Christ hung on a stone cross, sinews, joints and tendons grotesque with straining. His crown was a twisted branch with finger-long thorns, though no less fearsome was the halo. The hair lying on his breast was wavy, so at first glance the crimped spikes of the halo seemed to be hair too, raised terrifyingly and electrically around his head. A bronze background, a bas-relief of a crooked medieval city, a fulminating sky. Staring at it, Alison was reminded once again how the force of suffering knocked the world off-kilter.
By the time she left the church, it was just beginning to drizzle. The street lights were coming on, but, few and far between, they shed about as much light as a votive candle.
The desk clerk didn’t look up, even when Alison was right there asking for her key. She went right on leafing through her papers, deliberately ignoring Alison. Suddenly too weary to care what they thought of her, Alison said, ‘You know, I’m paying almost two hundred million złoty to stay in this hotel. I think you should try a little harder to be nice.’
The clerk looked up. ‘Pardon me? Someone is not nice?’
‘You’re not. Nobody is.’
‘But we like you very much. This afternoon, I was talking here to Magda. We were saying you have such pretty hair.’
‘Oh,’ said Alison dully, quite sure she was about to cry, though really, what did she have to cry about but her broken circadian rhythms? The clerk turned to get the key and handed it over just as the telephone rang.
Alison was halfway up the stairs when the clerk called to her. ‘Did you find the tourist office?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Do you want to go to Auschwitz?’ Cringing, Alison nodded.
‘As I thought. My brother can take you. He makes a tour. I will tell him to come in the morning.’
‘No,’ said Alison. ‘Please don’t.’
On her way down the corridor, she paused at Malcolm’s room and, first looking left and right, put her ear to the door. She heard a faint percussion to which she added her light knock.
‘Malcolm?’
No reply, but when she put her ear to the door again, the sound had stopped.
He turned over on his side, opening his eyes. Had something barked? Had someone called him? The girl, he thought. He sat up groggily, retrieved the glass from the floor. Denis? He looked around the room. Alone.
They’d finished half the bottle, Malcolm on an empty stomach. He’d grown unused to alcohol. It was too pricey a vice. Sloppily, he served himself another now, raising the glass to toast this vestige of Communism, cheap vodka, and Poland. Outside the window, the rain was coming down in smearing streaks.
He had to relieve himself, badly. He set the glass on the night table, attempted to stand, tried again and succeeded. Unsteadily, he staggered to the door. It was unlocked, but the prospect of stumbling down the hall to the toilet did not cheer him. Instead, he felt his way sideways to the sink and urinated in it.
Circumambulating the room to make use of the wall’s support, he stopped, remembering. Felt his back pocket for his wallet which, naturally, was missing.
The bed was spinning. Clumsily, he chopped at the pillow, leaned back half propped up, his chin in the glass to catch his drool if it came to that. One hand he kept on the night table trying to still the gyre—uselessly. The night table, too, started turning, spinning down.
The room was dark when he woke again. He woke because he thought he heard someone pounding on the door. ‘Who is it?’ he called. ‘What do you want?’
He had shouted out in French.
5
THROUGH ME ENTER THE CITY OF WOE
THROUGH ME PASS INTO ETERNAL PAIN
THROUGH ME COME AMONG THE PEOPLE OF LOSS
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER
The bus suddenly stops at the start of a long road between two high brick walls. Confusion, a babel of tongues, faces pressed to the windows, but no one moves. There is a sign, but what does it mean? The driver pulls a lever and the door opens with a slap, or maybe it’s just the way he bawls out the name of the place. Everyone getting off stands, gathers up guidebooks, bags, ineffectual umbrellas, and stumbles down the aisle—the quiet couple up front whispering Swiss Italian, the clean American boy naive in face and socioeconomic theory, the two distressed Dutch girls he’s been expounding to for the entire hour-and-a-half ride through the green acid-and-history-tainted countryside, the young Canadian woman with long dark hair, travelling with—an uncle? The driver had yelled at her when she could not understand him asking in Polish if she wanted a return ticket. You all climb down and in a dark blast of instantly wind-dissipated diesel the bus continues on towards the centre of town with only downtrodden Poles aboard.
Much windier here than in Kraków. Briefly, spontaneously, all of you turn inward in a circle, almost as if to commune a moment or pray, the Canadian woman’s hair lifting and for a second staying lifted around her head. But you are only zipping jackets and wrapping scarves tighter and when the gust rallies again, it lashes the hair across her surprised face. Her mouth is open and hair fills it like a gag. No one makes eye contact, not even, it seems, those who have come together. At once the circle breaks, dispersing, and only you and the sour dandy of an uncle are left looking at the sign.
MUZEUM, it reads. MUZEUM.
He says something, recites it, but not to you.
Join the trudging, windward-canted line. Across the road, all that can be seen of the convent behind the wall are rooftops and a metal cross on a brick tower. Pass the Canadian woman holding her hair at the back of her neck as she turns to see what is keeping her uncle. The Dutch girls hurry ahead, trying, it seems, to shake off the American. They round the wall and disappear, and when you reach the same point you see that the w
all ends where the road meets a parking lot, half full, mostly with tour buses, placards propped up behind windscreens: Auschwitz-Birkenau. The sidewalk makes a right angle. Ahead is THE STATE MUZEUM IN OŚWIĘCIM, its banal brick-and-glass and concrete entrance just across the parking lot, beyond the taxi stand.
First you must pass a row of little shops. You enter the last one, where books and pamphlets are on display across a long counter, covers grimly illustrated with barbed and twisted wire, train tracks, guard towers in silhouette. The American boy is just now paying for a set of postcards and making a joke about the absurd denominations of the bills, but the woman behind the counter, stolid, potato-fed and dour, only blinks. It is you who laugh, out loud, so the boy turns to you and grins. Mistaken, his conspiratoriality. You are laughing because of his lecture on the bus—how the Poles have to change, have to learn that in a market economy people expect to be served promptly and with courtesy, just as they are at Disneyland. Suddenly pictured: the woman handing him in a plastic bag a T-shirt that reads MY BOYFRIEND WENT TO AUSCHWITZ AND ALL HE BROUGHT ME WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT and still not smiling.
The wind is waiting just outside the door. As you pull the handle towards you to leave, the wind shoulders up against the glass, shoves the door open and storms in past you, straight for the books. It riffles through them, contemptuously—a denier—and the woman behind the counter barks. Close the door, she’s saying in Polish. Close the door!
As you approach the entrance a tour bus draws up. It disgorges passengers, a long silent file driven forward by the truncheon blows of wind. Where are the men in black boots? Where are the dogs? Last is a priest, wind swelling his cassock and whipping it about his ankles, trying to make him dance. He holds the door for you, gesturing, ‘After you.’
On the walk to the station, Malcolm spoke at last. ‘We are leaving the first circle,’ he said and Alison, looking back over her shoulder, wondered if the curved remnant of the medieval wall was what he meant. They managed to find which bus to board. Alison stumbled down the aisle and took the only empty seat, sliding in first so she wouldn’t have to suffer Malcolm thudding his head against the window all the way. Almost immediately the bus pulled out, so maybe the driver had yelled at her because they’d made him late. Incomprehensible, his fury. It did not subside; every time she glanced up at his reflection in the rear-view mirror, she saw his lips still moving, forming curses.
A History of Forgetting Page 23
