He lets out a short laugh which winds down and stops as though the current which powered it has been cut.
‘Even so,’ I say.
We look out over the room with its heavy colours of purple and pewter and deep brown. We watch the pianist turn slowly from his piano, a waiter turning off the illuminated sign in the window.
‘This place is going to close,’ says Jacob.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Shall I get the coats?’
‘All right,’ he says.
We walk out into the street, the brittle snow crunching under our feet. I would dearly love to remake the last quarter of an hour, but of course I can’t.
‘Are you tired, Jacob?’ I say. ‘Would you like a beer?’
He smiles down at me.
‘Good idea,’ he says. ‘Where shall we go?’
‘I’ve got some at home,’ I say.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Let’s go there.’
We turn down a street by Mrs Slowacki’s shop, cross the empty square, and then pass through a narrow corridor between two buildings, Jacob just behind me.
‘She must have had something very unusual,’ he says as we emerge.
‘Who?’
‘The one who has your friend so crazy.’
‘Oh her, yes.’
‘Did he tell you what it was?’
‘He talked about her all night. There was her beauty, certainly. I’ll show you the pictures when we get to my home. But she had something else going on too.’
‘What?’
‘She told stories.’
‘True stories?’
‘That’s what he doesn’t know.’
‘That’s dangerous for your friend.’
‘Yes. He understands that now.’
I look around. The streetlamps and the buildings seem indistinct.
‘In some ridiculous way I seem to be getting drawn in too. I find I’m thinking about her all the time. It’s like I’m falling for her.’
He laughs.
‘Let me see the pictures,’ he says.
‘All right,’ I say.
When we get to my home I take out the photographs and place them on the table. We study them together in silence.
In the first, black and white, she is sitting on the deck of a boat, half in profile, her hair straighter and blonder than in the others. She is young here, around twenty, I think. Her lower jaw is pressed forward as though she’s thinking, but self-consciously, for the camera. She is pretty, confident, accustomed to being looked at, I would say, and lacking in knowledge of herself. She is on the way, not yet fixed. There is a pale mist rising from the water and it floats around her so that that it seems we are seeing her through a fine gauze.
In the next it is winter. There is snow, a dazzling sun. She is standing on the street in a city wearing a turquoise jacket with a white scarf tied under the chin and is smiling and squinting into the sun. Behind her an old dark tower and a statue. The light has obliterated her features. She could be anyone. You cannot find her.
In the last we are brought closer to her. We can see each line of her face, the glow of her skin. The hair, a little darker than in the first of the photographs, falls in two crescents to her neck, a few loose strands trailing across her eye. The eyes are green the colour of stone rather than of something growing from the earth. They rise a little at the corners. Two wells that are without end. She is smiling faintly, a little crookedly, the whole of the face just a degree out of alignment, as though she is dazed, hypnotised, just awake. We see her bare shoulders, the shadows in the hollows between neck and shoulder. Just at the bottom of the photograph there is a blue line along the top of her breasts. Some piece of clothing, a sheet? What event has led to this moment? Who has held the camera? Was it M.?
‘You were right what you said,’ says Jacob.
‘What?’
‘About if she was a dentist.’
‘Sorry?’
‘And wanting for all your teeth to ache.’
‘Oh yes,’ I say.
He looks a little longer at the photographs, and then leans back in his chair. I reach to take them but he stops me so that he can look again at the one with her standing in the snow. He draws it close to his eye.
‘There’s something familiar here,’ he says.
He holds the picture up then for better light, his finger moving across the dark buildings. There is a little pile of snow like a conical hat on top of the bronze head of the statue behind her.
‘What is it?’ I say.
‘I’m not sure,’ he says.
8
Certainty
THE GREAT ASTRONOMER-PHYSICISTS were driven by their reverence for God. They wanted to explain the whole of His creation in numbers.
Copernicus put the sun at the centre of the planetary system because he thought the existing picture a kind of monster, and therefore offensive to God. Johannes Kepler, who thought geometry was God Himself, nearly drove himself insane over a period of eight years before discovering that the orbit of Mars was not a circle, as had been previously believed, but an ellipse. This amended the most significant flaw in Copernicus’s work. When Isaac Newton built on what they and Galileo had done and discovered the equation for the universal law of gravity and put forward his three laws of motion, the physicists believed that all questions as to how and why things moved were finally answered. Now there were numbers where before there had been mystery.
As the discoveries of Newton became known to the world, the French mathematician Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, wrote,
‘An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists – supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis – would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms, nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be before its eyes.’
9
The New Man
I REMEMBER JERZY and I standing still in a little street in Naklo. It was the second summer following the end of the war. I had just received my school certificate. We had jobs cleaning away what was left of Pan Kazimierz’s house after it was broken into pieces by artillery shells. We worked with hammers and shovels. It was slow work, the dust rising around us all day, the rank smell of mould from the drenched, buried wood and the carpets. The scavengers had been over and back many times since the last soldiers passed through, probing and sifting and picking with their fingers, so there was little left but powder and stone. But sometimes the blade of the shovel pressed and lifted and I found a mangled spoon, the sleeve from a nightshirt, a tin of asparagus, a slide rule, the ear from a marble bust of one of Pan Kazimierz’s forebears. I felt nothing there. I found lace made by my grandmother, one of my own shoes, but I didn’t foresee anything, I didn’t look back and I didn’t think. We were clearing the site and when we finished the work a foundation was to be laid for a factory that would crush stones to be laid over the land to make a bed for railway tracks. Maybe that was to be the job I would do next. I didn’t care. Jerzy looked into the future and thought. I was doing what was put in front of me to do.
We stood in the street on a Sunday in Naklo before a shopfront. The window was covered in dust, a long crack like a lightning bolt running over it. It must, I thought, have been years since anything happened here.
Jerzy pushed hard on the door with his foot. It gave.
‘What are you doing?’ I said. I whispered as people do in moments of transgression, though there was no one there.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve been here before.’
We walked through the silent grey room, our feet leaving prints in the dust. There was a table, some broken tools with sharp metal points, rugs stained brown. In the back was a kitchen with an empty tin of soup stood next to the sink and a black coat draped over the back of a chair. The remains of a stairway hung from the floor above.
; ‘Do you know this place?’ said Jerzy.
‘I can’t remember it,’ I said.
‘Reuben Zamenhof made cabinets and chairs here. He especially liked inlaying wood. The more complicated the pattern, the better. Pan Kazimierz said he’d seen better work, but no one so dedicated. He could get to the end and then dig it out and start all over if it wasn’t right. Don’t you remember him? Small, with round glasses, pink cheeks. He had to shave twice every day to keep from looking wild.’
‘You know your memory is better than mine,’ I said. ‘And you got around more.’
‘His voice was out of control like a boy’s during puberty.’
‘Oh yes!’ I said. ‘Prominent teeth. Always singing.’
‘That’s him.’
Jerzy leaned over to a wooden chest and lifted the rounded top.
‘Look,’ he said.
I moved around to the far side of the chest. There was something long and dark stretched out among old newspapers. I couldn’t see it very well. I leaned over, and then jumped back. The thing that was lying in the chest was an artificial leg.
‘Holy Mary!’ I said. I started to make a sign of the Cross but something about this irritated Jerzy and he stopped me.
‘It belonged to his brother Emmanuel,’ he said. ‘They lived together upstairs.’
‘But where is this Emmanuel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He wouldn’t get very far without his leg.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the mystery. Maybe he didn’t have time to get it. Or maybe somebody carried him away.’
He closed the chest.
‘Reuben was very sensitive,’ he said. ‘There didn’t seem to be anything controlling what he felt. If something good happened to you and you told him about it you could see tears in his eyes and he raised his hands in blessing. The same if you suffered. It seemed he felt it more than you did. He came from a little farm. He said he had to get away from there because his father and mother could understand nothing about him.’
‘Do you know what happened to him?’
‘He went out into the country when the war came. He hid in barns. People wanted money to keep him and he had to come back here to get things to sell so that he could pay them. Then it was too dangerous. For the last year he stayed in a graveyard.’
‘How do you know this? Did he tell you?’
‘He wasn’t able to tell me. I heard it from others. He came back here after the Russians passed through. He thought he was safe. When he saw the people who were still alive he embraced them and kissed them and asked them how they managed. Then he told them about himself. Just then he saw his friend Stanislaw, the baker, whose shop was just two doors away from his own. You must remember him.’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘Reuben ran up to greet him, weeping. He was so happy to see him alive. What he didn’t know was that Stanislaw had lost his seven-year-old son and his two daughters, nine and two. The only one to survive was his wife, and she had publicly betrayed him with a German engineer who was supervising the construction of a warehouse. “You!” shouted Stanislaw when he saw him. “You brought this on us. You and your brother and all the other Jews.” He was out of his mind. He lifted a stone the size of a small pig and brought it down on the top of Reuben’s head. A clear liquid came leaking out of it. The people could see his brains. His eyes blinked for a while and then they stopped.’
‘Jerzy, why do you tell me this?’
‘It’s there to be told,’ he said.
He stared at me. In silence, it seemed a long time. I could see the flecks of black and grey in his blue eyes.
‘People spoke about how Reuben should be remembered. Well some didn’t care, they said many had died, what was one more? But there were others who made suggestions. A collection of money to be sent on behalf of the village to his parents. A memorial with the Jewish star. It was said that a stone should be dropped on the head of Stanislaw, but nobody else was interested in that. A song should be written, flowers, prayers in the church. Something must be done, they said. It was wrong what happened.’
He turned then to stand directly in front of me, quite close.
‘What would you have said? You would have had the right to vote. What would you say was the best way for Reuben to be remembered?’
Again the blue eyes. It seemed he did not blink at all as he looked at me.
Of what is Jerzy’s power made? Why, even now, would I be extremely careful in my choice of words if I thought of making fun of him, lest he take offence? Why, were he to direct me, must I go where he tells me, and why am I always fearful when with him of letting him down somehow? These are questions which it would be fair to ask. Well, it would grieve me to lose him, were I ever to offend him. And then there is the way I felt about him from the moment he brought Feliks to his knees after he sent me flying into the tree in the field on Pan Kazimierz’s land where we were racing. But that does not explain it.
It is the strength of his mind, so easy to see, and the severity of judgement which he imposes on himself. These make him a leader. And his courage, which has brought him to places and events and people I would never have known. This has made him for me a witness. And his suffering. It is not just all that happened to him, and that he endured it, that makes me think of him in this way. It is that I would not have been capable of feeling as strongly as he did.
Some time after he told me the story of Reuben Zamenhof and on a day when I was pounding and scraping and digging in the foundations of Pan Kazimierz’s house beyond where the scavengers could reach, prayerbooks and a shawl and little silver bells bubbling up on to the surface of the rubble like things released from an underwater cave, Jerzy threw down his tools.
‘We’re wasting our time here,’ he said.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Just think for a minute. They’re building roads and hospitals and houses and steelworks. New schools, theatres, gardens. A whole new life for everyone, and a part for everyone to play. It’s like the beginning of time all over again. And what are we doing? Crawling around in the dust.’
‘But they’re going to make a new factory here.’
‘There’ll be machines for doing that work. And anyway for us this place is different. There’s a time for archaeology, and a time for building.’
We got on to a bus the next day and headed for Elblag. We went into an old stone building there and told a man sitting at a desk near the entrance that we were there to submit our applications to the Union of Polish Youth and that we were ready to assist in the building of socialism. He led us down a hall to a white room. Inside it was a woman maybe eight years older than me. She was wearing trousers like an American. Her voice sounded like she smoked cigarettes one after the other. I heard, or maybe would like to have heard, some kind of invitation in it. Her eyes were half closed and she seemed to find everything vaguely amusing. I was unable to stop looking at her.
She asked me questions and she got a picture of how I could best be used. I knew German. I had been away from Poland and Poles throughout the war. I had had some kind of recognition for my essays at school.
Then Jerzy. He had had experience with weapons. He had used codes, he knew something of logistical organisation. He was a Pole from a place soon to become part of the Soviet Union but nothing filled him with such contempt as did nationalism. He was strong, fit, intelligent. She said she felt she did not need to ask him if the taking of another’s life for a good reason would trouble him.
We were ready to serve, we told her.
We left the white room and sat down together in a bar in Elblag to have a beer together. It was something we had never done before. We did not know it then, but the steps we took that day were to separate us yet again. Jerzy was to return to the East, beyond where he had come from, to the military academy in Moscow, and I was to attend university in Berlin. This would bring to him the only threat to the stability of his mind known to me, and it would lead me to Angelina.
It would be thirty years before we saw each other again.
As we drank our beers Jerzy pointed across the square.
‘Look at that man there,’ he said. ‘The one with the rag holding his shoe together. Is there a way of knowing whether he was a landlord, a criminal or a digger of potatoes? No. So you see? Everything has been flattened. The ground is prepared. Time is beginning to move.’
A photograph taken in the sunlight in Naklo, Jerzy and I by the side of the road before he went his way and I went mine. He has on a sensational suit the colour of milk, wide trousers flapping in the wind, one hand gripping my arm, the other in his pocket, the left foot forward like a boxer’s, smiling at the wide open way before him. I have on a shirt and a badly knotted tie, the slender back part hanging below the wider one in front. Shoulders hunched up like a marionette with his strings being pulled. Hair carefully combed, trousers too high. I am squinting but Jerzy is not. Why is that? I am the boy from the farm landed down in the city, except that I am not. It’s just that I am cursed with that look.
I don’t know how much pondering I would need to do in order to enter just a few millimetres into the mind of the person that I was then. Maybe more than I have time left for. The posture, the way the head is inclined, the setting of bone in flesh, they all look wrong. Where are you, boy? Still being formed, grain by grain, though I suppose I did not know it at the time.
From the military academy in Moscow, Jerzy wrote me letters. He wrote about his studies, about his plans for marriage and gave his impressions of the world around him. But mostly he wrote about the creation of the New Man. The New Man, he said, puts clarity in the place of superstition, the common good in the place of personal comfort. He knows the nobility of work and sacrifice, and the purification inherent in conflict. He knows the rank smell of decadence and the light of historical truth. He can see further than has ever been seen before.
Jerzy told me that we must not be left behind. The world that was had turned to dust. All was there to be remade. We must seize the time. It was in our power to make a world with everyone equal and free, uninfected by the rancour of class or religion or ideas of race. If he needed to be reminded of what greed and corruption and nationalism could bring to us he had only to travel back to Poland to the home of Marysia, his future wife, and look at the red scar that swung from one ear to the other and at her mouth which opened and closed and yet could say no words. We had to be in the front line, he told me. We had to inhabit our places of learning just as long ago the monks inhabited their monasteries, but in the place of the murmuring of Latin syllables we had to put hard, clear thought, thought that could break up, penetrate and reveal. If we did not cease in this task, if we were vigilant and purposeful, surely we too would see it – the cold, beautiful truth, as clear as numbers. The burden would be heavy. The road would be hard. But what was the choice? he asked. The sleep of idiocy and superstition? Running after baubles? Permanent nausea?
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