The dead have their own maps and wander at will through both Fraustadt and Wschowa, both Mollwitz and Malujowice, both Steinau am Oder and Scinawa; through Zlín and Gottwaldov and Zlín again. Down Prague's Vinohradská Street, Franz Josef Strasse, Marshal Foch Avenue, Hermann Goering Strasse, and Marshal Foch Avenue again, Stalin Street, Lenin Avenue, and at last, once again, without having taken a single step and shimmering only through time, Vinohradská Street.
As for one's birthplace, it depends who's asking.
Over the course of the afternoon the coils of knots grew higher, mute and heavy on the floor under the table.
A soup was simmering on the stove. Ewa had brought a roast chicken to Lucjan earlier in the day and now it was crackling in the oven. The light was nearly gone. Lucjan made the fire and lit candles.
He sat on the floor in the “unconscious” half of the house, leaning against the wall, looking at the tangle of knots, their afternoon's work, from a distance. Jean was reading a textbook quietly at the kitchen table. With false drama, Lucjan whimpered:
– I'm hungry.
Jean looked up from her book.
– What are you reading? asked Lucjan. Is it edible?
– This chapter is about hybrid vigour. But, she smiled, you could say I'm reading about cabbage.
– That's more like it, said Lucjan.
He sat down next to her at the table.
– Did they teach you about the koksagiz widowers at school? When the Germans marched into the Soviet Union, they searched everywhere for rubber plants. Russian women and children were driven into labour camps to harvest the koksagiz fields so even tiny amounts of rubber could be extracted from the roots …
The big high-rise housing development in the southern part of the Muranów district in Warsaw was built on top of what had been the ghetto. There was so much rubble – thirteen feet deep – and we had no machines to clear it. So instead the debris was crushed even further, and the housing built right on top. Then grass was laid down and flowerbeds planted on this terrace of the dead. That's their ‘blood-and-soil garden.’
A few blocks from the School of Architecture, where Avery was working at a desk in the basement, Jean sat with Lucjan and Ranger in the Cinéma Lumière, waiting for the film to start, Les Enfants du Paradis.
Lucjan handed Jean a lumpy bag.
– Baked potatoes with salt, said Lucjan.
Ranger leaned over Lucjan and put his hand into the bag.
– It's long, at least a two-potato film, he told Jean, already peeling off the aluminum foil. I remember going with Mr. Snow and Beata to the Polonia, so hungry we could barely sit still. There was no water and no place to live but, four months after the war, there was a cinema. The Polonia sat like a stage set in the mess of Marszałkowska Street. Many times I lined up to watch a film and then afterwards lined up again down the street to fill my metal pail at the pipe that spurted water out of the ground. People carried containers with them wherever they went. There was always a clatter just before anyone sat down anywhere, people setting down their jars and flasks and pails at their feet.
– The clatter was usually followed by the rustling of newspapers, said Lucjan, as people took their Skarpa Warszawska from their pockets, a weekly magazine, Janina, that kept us up to date on the progress of the rebuilding. After the war so many newspapers sprouted up – right away, five or six daily papers. We couldn't hear enough about how well we were doing – two hundred thousand cubic metres of rubble removed by the horse-drawn carts, sixty kilometres of streets cleared of debris, a thousand buildings cleared of mines …
– Comrades, said Ranger, work has commenced on the market square, on the tin-roof of the palace, on the church on Leszno Street … The library has now opened on Rejtan Street!
Pilgrims converged at the same locations, the same square metres of rubble, each person mourning a different loss. The mourners stood together in the same spot and wept for their various dead – for Jews, Poles, soldiers, civilians, ghetto fighters, Home Army officers – dozens of allegiances buried in the same heap of stones.
– How does a city rebuild itself? said Lucjan. Within days someone sets out pots amid the rubble and opens a florist's shop. A few days after that, someone puts a plank between two bricks and opens a bookshop.
– In London after the bombings, said Jean, willowherb took root and spread throughout the ruins –
– Janina, said Lucjan, this isn't a romance. I'm not talking about wildflowers, I'm talking about commerce – that's how you rebuild a city. You can have all the wildflowers you want, but in the end someone must open up a shop.
Lucjan took Jean's arm in the street. It had started to snow while they were in the cinema, in nineteenth-century Paris, and by the time they reached Amelia Street, all was white and quiet.
They lay in the bath together, watching the snow fall past the kitchen window.
– That's a wretched ending to a film, said Lucjan. A man pushing his way through a crowd to reach the woman he loves and, for all eternity, never catching up to her.
He looked at the piles of rope around them.
– It's almost finished, said Lucjan. When there's too much and it's too heavy to move, it will be done.
This makes me think of my grandfather, my mother's father, who was a cabinet maker. My mother once told me that he'd made a magnificent piece of furniture – the most distinguished desk ever created in the world, fit for an emperor – but the one thing he hadn't considered was the door to the room, which was too small, and they had to cut a bigger hole to fit it through. She said I was to take this as a lesson in humility. She also told me about an enormous, curved display case he'd made for a shop – the wood shone like amber, the top was heavy glass with bevelled edges that looked, my mother said, like the watery edge of ice forming, and inside were wide, shallow, velvet-lined drawers for stockings and lace and silks. Each drawer opened with a tiny brass knob. He'd boasted that it took ten men to lift it. The cabinet had elaborately carved corners – wooden vines trailed thick and lush to the floor. The drawers slid, smooth and soundless, and the shopgirl would pull out the whole drawer so the customer could see the small silk things shining like pools of coloured water on the dark velvet.
This cabinet brought my grandfather many commissions for custom work.
My stepfather's people were from Łódz; they owned a hosiery factory. He had been sent to Warsaw to distribute the family wares. It was for this shop that my grandfather built one of his famous cabinets and that is how he met my mother. She was so young; the milk and cinnamon of her soft skin and thick hair, the sweetness in her face. She was nineteen years old.
I remember a tram stop with a clock next to it where, before the war, my mother and I used to wait. The clock had little lines instead of numbers. It disturbed me so much that there were no numbers on that clock, just anonymous little dashes, as if time meant nothing and simply lurched on endlessly, meaninglessly, anonymously. I used to try to predict when the minute hand would jump forward. I tried to count the seconds, to guess when it would suddenly seize the next little line, but it always got ahead without me. While we waited at that stop for the #14 tram, my mother would comment that it was really a very foolish place to put a clock because it always reminded you how overdue the tram was and how long you'd been waiting and how late you were. I remember the feel of her wool coat against my cheek as I stood beside her, her sure fingers around mine. That little hand on the clock jumping forward without me is the symbol for me of how my mother disappeared …
A wall does not separate; it binds two things together.
In the ghetto, a woman came to visit my mother. She was an old schoolfriend or a relative; I don't remember, yet for my mother the nature of this relationship would surely have been the heart of this story. I do remember her hat – a pie-plate contraption tilting over her ear – which she didn't remove all through tea. I waited for it to fall off and land in her cup. I sat on the chair in the corner next to a little woode
n table with my cup of ‘fairy tea’ – hot water and milk. The woman gave my mother some photographs taken when they were children. After she left, my mother and I sat together and looked at them. The season in the photographs was summer, yet outside our window that afternoon it was snowing. I remember thinking about that fact, the first time it occurred to me that weather was preserved in photographs. And because the sun was so bright, there were many shadows. In one photo in particular my mother's shadow was very pronounced beside her and I couldn't keep from looking at it, that shadow lying across the pavement almost as tall as she was. And in another, there was the shadow of someone who had obviously been standing near to her, but who was outside the frame of the picture. I couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards, that my mother had stood next to someone – a quarter of a century before – whose identity I would never know and yet whose shadow was recorded forever.
Photos from those years have a different intensity; it's not because they record a lost world, and not because they are a kind of witnessing – that is the work of any photograph. No. It's because from 1940 it was illegal for any Pole, let alone a Polish Jew, to use a camera. So any photo taken by a Pole from that time and place is a forbidden photo – whether of a public execution or of a woman reading a novel quietly in her bed.
German soldiers, on the other hand, were encouraged to bring their Kine-Exakta or Leica with them to war, to document the conquest. And quite a few of those photos survive in public archives, such as those of Willy Georg, Joachim Goerke, Hauptmann Fleischer, Franz Konrad … Others remain in family albums, photos sent home to parents and sweethearts: the Eiffel tower, ghetto streets, the Parthenon, public hangings, an opera house, a mass grave, gas vans, and other signs of German ‘tourism’ … These photos were sent home, where they were kept next to the family photos of weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties, lakeside holidays. Although there were certainly photojournalists whose job it was to shoot for propaganda, many of the photosoldiers remain anonymous, their snapshots part of the great pile of images that make up the twentieth century …
I used to spend many hours watching from the window in our corner of the ghetto, and, once, I saw an old man put down a wooden box on the pavement and painfully kneel next to it. An instant shoeshine enterprise. At first I thought this was as ill-chosen as setting up a kiosk to sell matches at a fire; who in all the starving city would pay to have their worn-out, barely held-together shoes polished? But incredibly he earned himself some supper that day. And he polished German soldiers' boots – they took a lot of boot-black and they took it for free. It made me hold my breath to see the soldier's boot so close to the old man's head.
The places where people were killed often showed no mark; within moments the bit of pavement looked exactly as before. From my window I kept looking for a trace of the old man's murder, but there was none.
My stepfather eventually found a hiding place for my mother and me – much harder to find someone willing to take both of us. There were holes in the ghetto wall for such transactions and people were killed halfway through, with their head or their feet sticking out. A few days before we were to make the attempt, I sat looking out the window to the street below where my mother was waiting to meet someone to make a trade for food. She was standing in the street because of me, to feed me. That is how my stepfather thought about it afterwards and why he never forgave me … That and the fact that my mother and I always had our heads together, leaning over a book or a drawing, laughing over something so small we could never quite explain it to him … I looked away from the window for a moment – no more than a few seconds – or maybe I was just daydreaming – and when I turned my eyes back again, my mother was gone, simply gone, just like that. I never saw her again. I still feel sure that if I hadn't turned away my eyes just at that moment, nothing would have happened to her.
A simple-minded, childish revelation – that we can die without a trace.
At the bottom of the ravine, a thread caught the light; the river had been peeled of snow and drizzled with water from a tin pail. One of the Dogs each day came to renew its frozen varnish. The gleaming ice of the river looked liquid in the lantern light, even reflecting the lanterns hanging in the trees, as if a spell had been cast upon the water preventing it from freezing. So unnatural was this mirage that Jean held her breath as she watched the first skater place his foot on the surface, as if he might sink in his heavy skates, swallowed without a sound by the river's enchantment.
– Go ahead, say what you're thinking – Breughel's peasants. Jean looked at Lucjan in surprise.
– You mouthed the words, smiled Lucjan.
– It's the deep colours of their jackets against the snow, I think.
Then Jean watched as Ewa appeared in her pink fake-fur coat, her pink scarf, her thin black legs ending in pink skates. Jean laughed.
– A flamingo, said Lucjan, who always seemed to know what she was looking at.
– Is it all right to say I love Ewa although I've only met her twice?
– We all love Ewa, said Lucjan seriously.
Jean saw Ewa pointing and knew she was shouting orders. A board appeared and trestles and in a moment the table was covered with pans of cake and flasks of every size. Jean smiled at the theatricality of the scene – the feast, the enchanted river, the ice-coated branches clattering in the night wind, the lanterns like drops of yellow paint between the trees.
Jean and Lucjan stood at the top of the hill, looking down at the skaters. The scene reminded Jean of Marina's palette, which was so married to texture – patches of woollen scarves, shawls, quilts, dresses, the fur of a wet dog; each colour – soil, night sky, northern lights, ice, figs, black tea, lichen, the bogs of Jura – each lick of paint a distillation of a thought, a feeling.
– In the dark of winter, the Robinson Kruzoes went down to the Vistula with lanterns and shovels. The frozen river was scraped clean to its grey gleam. Bone scraped of its marrow with a spoon. There were enormous skating parties. Street orchestras, children, dogs. Vendors selling coffee sprang up on the banks. Pastries in waxed paper. They even came from the nightclubs when they emptied at two or three in the morning, sobering up under the moon, in the sudden cold. That's where I met my wife, said Lucjan.
I met my husband on a river too, thought Jean. Though it was not frozen. And contained no water. And perhaps was no longer a river.
– A few nights after we met, Władka and I sat on the river-bank. There was a freezing wind. The Vistula was neither solid nor liquid; huge chunks of ice buckled and swayed, bumping open seams of black water, then sealing them shut again. Then we heard a huge cracking sound and right before our eyes the bridge near the Citadel came apart and began hurtling toward us, downstream, huge pieces of it banging against the ice, dipping into the blackness and bubbling up again. In an instant the two banks of the river were separate. Władka said later that ‘if the bridge had not fallen right before our eyes maybe we could have learned to stay together, but with a symbol like that …’ Władka had a very peculiar sense of humour.
One night, years before Władka and the bridge, I was lying in my burrow, listening to the rats. After a while I blew out the candle. But, like tonight in this snow light, it was not quite dark. I could see my hand in front of my face. Was something burning? I got up and looked out. There was a dim haze of light. There was the noise of a crowd growing louder. But there was no smoke. I climbed over the rubble toward the glow. Targowa Street had electricity! Hundreds of people were wandering about, disoriented, like survivors of a crash …
Do you remember when we met, you told me about a church that seemed to grow in size when you went inside? I can tell you a story about a church that moved, all by itself, said Lucjan. I was working with a crew building a road, the East-West Thoroughfare, and someone looked up and noticed the dome of St. Anne's was smiling. We didn't think much about that first crack in the stone, but the next day there were many cracks and they were growing wider and suddenly the whole n
ortheast end of the church wobbled and broke off like a baby tooth. All the crews rushed to reinforce the rest of the church with steel, and we even tried Professor Cebertowicz's electro-osmosis idea, but St. Anne's and the earth continued to move, the belfry bending as much as a centimetre a day. Eventually the earth came to a halt …
Jean and Lucjan began to descend the hill.
– What happened, asked Jean suddenly, to that architect, the one who gave you bread?
When he did not answer, she looked up and felt she had never before seen such cold sorrow in his face.
– People disappeared. Sometimes they came back, but most of the time they didn't. There were reports of stojki – ‘standings’ – for months, with a lightbulb burning an inch in front of the prisoner's open eyes, who was being kept awake with injections. When someone died from torture, they said ‘he fell off the table.’ Ordinary words, banal words a child learns to spell in first grade. ‘The man fell off the table.’ Perhaps that was not his fate precisely, but … Unsuspecting people were trapped in ‘cauldrons’ – anyone who happened to visit a suspect in their apartment was arrested – that's what the Germans did and that's what the Soviets did. He survived the war, but he didn't survive the Soviets.
The Dogs joke about the Thursday-night meeting, but it is an old habit, an old intuition, not to show up where you are expected.
They heard Mr. Snow's voice through the trees.
– Let's listen to Mr. Snow sing, said Lucjan. He has a voice like a hatchet. The Dogs saw and wheeze and when they pass on you can be sure they'll rattle their bones.
If I have learned anything, it is that courage is just another kind of fear. And, Lucjan said, slapping his abdomen, if you are anti-fascist, you must have an anti-fascist belly and not an anti-fascist head. An appetite is more useful than a fever.
Lucjan slung his skates over his shoulder like a hunter carrying home a brace of birds and strode back through the ravine. In the distance, in the darkness, Jean could still hear the sound of blades on the hard ice. The Stray Dogs were almost always there before them and stayed on, almost always, after them. Looking back, Jean saw their breath in the dark. The ravine itself glistened like white breath, enclosed by the snowy embankments, the snow-laden trees, and moonlight that softly circled their faces as they skated across the ice. The air was cracking cold, the ice glinting and hard. She knew there was heat inside their clothes from their swinging legs and arms, and painful cold on their faces and in their lungs.
The Winter Vault Page 23
