– However, Janina, my point is this. Who is to say that the rebuilt city was worth less or more than the original? Is desire the only determination of value? I don't know. Certainly bread is less important to the man who has just eaten. It is like the disagreeable irony of those German firebombs that succeeded in exposing the walls of the medieval town along Podwale and Brzozowa streets, an archaeological site no one had known about until those bombs exploded.
When the rebuilding of the Old Town was complete, people trembled at the sight. At first we stared into Krakowskie Przedmieście from the periphery, afraid of walking into the mirage and being swallowed up. But after a few had ventured forward and had not vanished, the spectators, all of us, poured into the Old Town. There was numb silence at first, and then a humming and a roar of euphoria. A nervous howling of crying and laughter.
No one could climb the steep steps of the reconstructed Kamienne Schodki Street or walk through the arches on Swietojanska Street or look up at the immaculately copied ironwork clock and the iron dragon and the stone ships engraved on the reconstructed walls and not feel they'd gone mad.
The old streets – every doorway and streetlamp and stoop – was familiar, yet not quite; somehow almost more real than we remembered. Then there were things we didn't remember at all, and we felt some piece of our brains had been knocked out. Everyone wandered the streets the same way, vaguely afraid, as if the dead father or mother, the dead wife or sister might suddenly jump out from behind a doorway. And at the heart of it all, a civic pride, a jubilation, and an unspoken humiliation, our need so open, and so inconsolable.
In Warsaw during the 1950s, people were desperate with hope. They would make the most extravagant claims: ‘For decades, physicists have been trying to figure out – if time can flow both into the future and into the past – why can't a broken eggshell become whole again, why can't shattered glass mend itself? And yet in Warsaw we are achieving exactly this! We haven't yet figured out how to raise the dead or regain lost love, but we're hard at work and if it happens anywhere it will be in reconstituted Warsaw!’ And while people ran about proclaiming such things, I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.
Lucjan tore a piece of paper from his drawing tablet and crumpled it into a ball.
– This is what the world is. A ball where everything is smashed together – collusion, complicity – those German plans for Egyptian dams you spoke of, and countless other examples …
He threw the ball of paper into the fireplace.
– I do not know, said Lucjan, if we belong to the place where we are born, or to the place where we are buried.
– You speak of the Old Town, said Jean, and of false consolation. That's what Avery could not bear about his work in Egypt – this false consolation.
She felt Lucjan's attention, felt the quality of the darkness change, though he hadn't moved. Whenever she spoke of Avery, Jean felt him drawing in all the power of his listening.
– I want you to talk about him, whispered Lucjan, because it makes our lying here together more real, because you are here with me partly because you love him. And to know you, I must know him. Please, keep on.
Jean sat up and drew her knees under her chin.
– It repels him, the idea of false consolation. In the end, he believed that's what the moving of the temple was. Because so many already believed the dam to be a mistake.
– I wonder what it means to save something, said Lucjan, when first we make necessary its need to be saved. First we destroy and then we try to salvage. And then we feel self-righteous about the salvaging. And who is to say yet that the dam was a mistake?
– What was lost is more than what was gained, said Jean.
– Maybe. Lucjan paused. And maybe that's what you feel about your own life, maybe your marriage too.
The injury of this travelled through her.
– Don't be angry, said Lucjan. It's old fashioned, but let's say there's a hierarchy – of suffering. We could open a stock exchange for moral value and trade shares in human ‘necessity.’ If anyone were interested. Then we could really compare what things are worth, without the ambiguity of currency. Just goods. A pound of Paweł's coffee in Toronto and a hundred sacks of grain in the Sudan. A bottle of whisky in Warsaw and an English book in Moscow by an exiled dissident. A car, running water. A temple, fifty villages, thousands of archaeological artifacts for the price of a dam. The loss of one child and the loss of three million children.
Jean held her head in her hands.
Lucjan sighed. He pulled her toward him.
– Everything we do is false consolation, said Lucjan. Or to put it another way, any consolation is true.
During the Uprising, children delivered messages, helped in temporary hospitals, ran weapons from cellar to cellar. Courage came to us, said Lucjan, in the form of a fly, a speck of life, a parasite, landing on your bare arm. It came to us as hunger.
Everyone harvested what they could from the rubble – knitting needles, picture frames, the arm of a chair, a scrap of fabric – it was the market of the dead. There was a use for everything, someone was always willing to trade for something …
He held Jean close.
– I haven't talked about these things for a long time, he said quietly. Not since my ex-wife, Władka, and I were young, lying on the deck of her father's apple boat, buried in the cold fruit, with only our heads sticking out.
Your skin is so white. When you lie on top of me like this, with your legs all along mine so brown, and your tough little arms all along mine, you're like –
All her weight was upon him, and Lucjan felt her –
– Like snow on a branch.
There's a lot of work for children in a battle, said Lucjan. We were good at hide-come-seek, we felt we had nothing to lose. I darted down holes and found all kinds of things, all kinds of situations. Once, I found myself in the middle of a conversation among two men and a young woman.
The older man asked, ‘Are you really a rabbi?’
‘Now is not the time to pretend to be a rabbi,’ said the young man with the faintest smile. ‘Besides, that would be a sin.’
The older man looked down at the woman leaning against him, asleep.
‘We would like to be married,’ he said. ‘Could you do this? Here and now?’
Here and now. My childhood was full of those little words – zrób to w tej chwili.
‘Even in the dark,’ the rabbi said, ‘you need a canopy.’
The man took off his coat and asked me to hold it over their heads. Under his coat was nothing. His bare skin, his black hair. ‘But you can't be married without a shirt,’ I said. What a stupid thing to say, I don't know why I said it. The man looked at me with surprise and laughed. ‘I think God knows what I look like without my shirt.’
Until then, the woman had said nothing. Then she said, ‘You'll be cold without your coat.’
Everyone except the woman looked at his ghastly upper body, white as paper. The hair on his chest looked like black threads sewing his skin together. He handed me the coat and I held it as best I could over their heads.
Afterwards, there was nothing to eat or say or do. The woman was crying. The man put his arm around her. After a while, I fell asleep.
I remember thinking that I had fallen asleep many times to the sound of crying. I tried, as a method of falling asleep, but I could not count them all.
Within days of the Red Army's occupation of Warsaw, people returned. At their first sight of the city, many sat down at the edge of the rubble, simply sat down, as if suddenly forgetting how to walk.
I was hidden outside the ghetto when it was emptied, and when Warsaw fell I was running for the Home Army, and for Professor S., in and out of any s
ituation where I could eat. In the end I left the city with the others, and returned with the first to return, days after the Soviets moved in.
I'd helped rescue fragments of Polish culture, architectural slag. Now I worked to rebuild the city, stone by stone. I was a child and a Jew: you could say it was not my city, not my culture, and yet you could say it was. When your arm is in the water, you are part of it; when you pull it out, there is no trace of you left behind.
We lived in the ruins and hauled the rubble with our bare hands, loading trucks and filling holes. The city was a cemetery wired with explosives – thirty-five thousand mines were dismantled in the first weeks. And in the first months, seven bridges were constructed, and hundreds of thousands of trees were planted. Every Sunday, wagonloads of volunteers, whole families, came to the city to help with the digging and the carrying. And every July 22, the authorities staged a public celebration to officially open a newly constructed section of the city, to ensure we understood this miracle was not an achievement of Polish muscle and sweat but a feat of Soviet socialism. I went to every one of those July spectacles: the opening of the Poniatowski Bridge, the opening of the East-West Thoroughfare, the replication of the Old Town … and the inauguration of the Palace of Culture – for which the Soviets had torn down the only buildings that had survived the war.
One day I saw, sitting amid the rubble, the chemist who used to run the dispensary behind his high marble counter on Nalewki Street; I recognized him because I used to go there with my mother when she bought her headache tablets and her hand creams. Now he was crouched on his small suitcase on the mountain of destruction, still wearing his white coat, the angel who had always cared whether you took your vapours or dissolved your digestive powder, or used the right-sized spoon for your cough syrup, or mixed the paste to the proper consistency for your poultice – always so courteous and concerned about every particular, the size and pressure of the dressing, each small ache. Always he seemed to know just what to say to the man with a toothache or sore joints or bronchitis … and now there he sat, looking at the broken ground between his feet, without a word of advice.
And, in time, sitting in the ruins, all the old habits persisted, the ordinary gestures: mothers smoothed down the hair of their children and tugged at their jackets; men took out handkerchiefs and carefully wiped the bomb-blasted dust from the tops of their shoes.
To Lucjan, Toronto was a place of used-up, worn surfaces for painting – hidden fences, old traffic barricades, the backs of billboards hanging over the edge of the ravine. On the “Caveman's” tour, he and Jean squeezed their way between buildings that opened into other passageways, loading docks, transit sheds, abandoned train stations, brick walls painted with faded advertisements for shops that had gone out of business forty years before, silos hidden among trees, rail-tracks ending in scrubgrass. Lucjan scavenged for materials as they roamed, his eye keen for castaway plastic and wire, masonry, wood. Old doors, broken chairs, the detritus of renovations. Once, they dragged home a six-foot beam still bearing children's heights and ages; once, a box of first volumes of thirty or so encyclopedias – Encyclopedia of Mammals A-B, Geography A-B, British History A-B, North American Trees A–B – a whole library of subscriptions cancelled after the first free sample in the mail. “Imagine only knowing the world of things beginning with A or B,” said Lucjan, and so Jean did imagine – anemone, aster, bass-wood, box, bigtooth aspen – as they carried their finds back with them and piled them in the little studio.
Afterwards, the dishwater still on his hands, Lucjan soaping her back under her straps.
Sometimes Jean or Lucjan would choose a painting in a gallery – Rembrandt's Lady with a Lapdog – or a specific book in a library – Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog or Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre – and meet there. Jean favoured meeting via Dewey Decimal, like the coordinates of a map. Sometimes they would choose a building or a remnant of a building – the last Dominion coal chute, a small wooden door cut into the hillside for waterworkers to enter the reservoir, the church on Kendal Avenue that had been left unfinished during the Second World War, half a transept dangling.
They passed other sites of lost hopes, sites of amputations and scars; vacant lots strewn with the debris of a building that had been torn down so long ago the rubble was overgrown with grass, an abandoned bank leaning over the edge of the ravine. Lucjan was an expert at identifying Hydro Houses, small electrical power stations scattered throughout the city with false facades each built in the style of the neighbourhood – from the outside, perfectly innocent looking houses, but if one opened the front door one would stand face to face with two storeys of gleaming machinery, dials, and coils. These houses were hard to detect, and gave themselves away only by a vague aura of uninhabitedness, windows permanently shut, a lack of a garden, no porch light. They explored an alternate city of laneways – sheet metal garages and wooden sheds. They sought out all the streets leading to railway tracks, where night trains rattled back-garden fences and the scream of light tore across bedroom walls.
– You had at least two good rivers flowing through this city and what have you done with them? said Lucjan. You've covered them over and siphoned them off and turned them into expressways. Instead you could have had boats to ride to work! And water markets and flower barges and swaying cafés and shops. You could have walked down your little residential street to your little neighbourhood dock and taken the ferry to another stop around the city – to work, to school. You could almost still do it …
One autumn afternoon, the trees bare and black against a white sky, they walked through the back door of a hardware shop and out into the silence of a hidden Catholic cemetery: the final destination of immigrants who'd fled the Irish potato famine, now a square of grass concealed behind storefronts. They had met there several times before, under the chestnut trees, amid fallen gravestones with names now melted, only an undecipherable indentation, Jean thought, like the line a finger makes in sand.
No noise of the street leaked into this hidden place; the long grass grew so thickly tangled around the plinths that, even if one were to fall, it would not make a sound; only the trees clattered in the wind. The ground was cold and wet but, nevertheless, they spread the square of blanket Lucjan had brought with him and they leaned against the shelter of a limestone wall of a small octagonal building – beautifully proportioned – with deeply set shutters, closed tight and hooked fast.
– When ground is too frozen for the digging of graves, said Lucjan, the dead wait in these winter vaults. There is always a dignity to these buildings – whether made of brick or stone with expensive brass fittings or just a humble wooden shed – because they are built with respect for those who will lie within their walls.
But in times of war or seige, he continued, when there are too many civilians for such vaults, other makeshift shelters must be found. In Warsaw during the bitter winter of 1944–45, the dead rested together in root cellars, in mine-blasted gardens, amid the rubble of the streets under sheets of newspaper. During the seige of Leningrad, along the road to the Piskarevsky cemetery, thousands were heaped, so high the ice-encased dead formed a tunnel through which one passed in terror. Crowded trolley cars stood immobile in the ice and snow, tombs that could not be moved until the spring. The dead were wound tenderly in shawls, towels, rugs, curtains, wrapping paper bound with twine. In cold apartments, bodies were placed in the bath, left in bed, lain on tables. They clustered the pavement, doused with turpentine. In the thirty-degree-below-zero weather, the ground was, like the hymn says, hard as iron, and a mass grave could only be made by dynamiting. The frozen bodies were then thrown, clinking together, into the pit.
The winter dead wait, said Lucjan, for the earth to relent and receive them. They wait, in histories of thousands of pages, where the word love is never mentioned.
The Winter Vault Page 19
