Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  I ask for two beers. White moves his queen diagonally and says Check! Black takes my money and moves a knight. The queen withdraws. A woman customer asks for some of the honey-bread which has sweet candied oranges buried in it. Black cuts the slices and weighs them. White makes a careless move and realises it too late. He swallows hard, for he has an acid taste in his throat. Black takes a castle.

  Kraków’s Jewish ghetto, on the other side of the Vistula, outside the old city, is from here less than ten minutes walk over the Most Powstancôw bridge. The ghetto covered an area of 600m × 400m and was sealed off by walled-up buildings, blockades and barbed wire. In the autumn of 1941, six months after it was sealed off, 18,000 people were imprisoned there. Thousands died from disease and malnutrition each month. Only those fit enough to work as slave labour in the German armament or clothes workshops were permitted to leave for their stints of work. All other Jews found trespassing outside the ghetto were shot, as were any Poles who helped them to pass into Aryan Kraków or who hid them.

  Tyskie! Ken applauds when I return to the table. You chose the best beer!

  Early training! I say.

  He’s called Zedrek, Ken says, the man you were watching playing chess. He comes to play with Abram the grocer at least once a week. Zedrek could play a good game if he didn’t start drinking vodka so early. I don’t think he can stop though. Abram as a small boy survived the war in hiding.

  Ken taught me most of the games I know: chess, snooker, darts, billiards, poker, table tennis, backgammon. Chess we played in his bed-sitting rooms, the others in bars. Bridge, which I had learnt before I met him, we played with my parents or when we got invited to somebody’s house, which was not often.

  I met him in 1937. He was a replacement teacher in the lunatic boarding school to which I had been bundled. In front of the school assembly – fifty barekneed cowed boys, each trying to find, unaided, a sense to life – the apoplectic headmaster threw a dining-room chair at the Latin teacher and Ken, who happened to be between them, caught it with one hand in mid-flight. This is how I first noticed him. He set the chair down on the podium, put his feet up on it, and the boss continued to harangue.

  In the final day of that same term I invited him to a caravan my parents had on a beach near Selsea Bill in Sussex. Why not? he said. And he came for a week.

  My father was pleased, for, now making a foursome, we could play bridge together.

  Shall we play for money, Sir? asked Ken. Otherwise the bids don’t count.

  Agreed, but the stakes shouldn’t be too high, because of John here.

  Tuppence a hundred?

  I’ll go and fetch my purse, said my mother.

  Ken shuffled the pack and the cards cascaded between his two hands held far apart. Sometimes the cascade looked like a moving staircase, an escalator or a playing-cards ladder. Once, later, he said to me, when I was complaining of not being able to go to sleep: Imagine you’re shuffling a pack of cards! That’s how I go to sleep.

  Cut for deal.

  My father enjoyed the game, not only because he was a good player, but, more, because the game allowed him to recall certain easy moments with the dead, who otherwise haunted him. When the four of us were playing in Selsea, ’Six Diamonds Doubled’ took precedence over ’Five Mortars Lost’. He was playing with us, but also with a roll of infantry officers of which he was the only survivor after four years in the trenches near Vimy Ridge and Ypres.

  My mother quickly recognised that Ken belonged to what for her was the special category of ’people who loved Paris’.

  Watching the three of us playing quoits on the sand, she foresaw, I’m sure, that the passeur was going to take me a long way away and, at the same time, she didn’t doubt, I’m equally sure, that, give or take a little, I was capable of looking after myself. Consequently, she offered on Monday, Wash Day, to launder and iron his clothes, and Ken bought her a bottle of Dubonnet.

  I accompanied Ken to bars, and, although I was under age, nobody ever objected. Not on account of my size or looks, but on account of my certainty. Don’t look back, he told me, don’t doubt for a moment, just be surer of yourself than they are.

  Once, another drinker started swearing at me – telling me to get my bloody mouth out of his sight – and I suddenly broke down. Ken put his arm round me and took me straight out into the street. There were no lights. This was in wartime London. We walked a long way in silence. If you have to cry, he said, and sometimes you can’t help it, if you have to cry, cry afterwards, never during! Remember this. Unless you’re with those who love you, only those who love you, and in that case you’re already lucky for there are never many who love you – if you’re with them, you can cry during. Otherwise you cry afterwards.

  All the games he taught me, he played well. Except for his short-sightedness (suddenly it occurs to me, as I write, that all the people I have loved and still love were or are short-sighted), except for his short-sightedness, he moved like an athlete. A similar poise.

  Not me. I was clumsy, over-hasty, cowardly, with almost no poise. I had something else though. A kind of determination, which, given my age, was startling. I would wager all! And for the energy of that rashness, he overlooked the rest. And the gift of his love was the gift of sharing with me what he knew, almost everything he knew, irrespective of my age or his.

  For such a gift to be possible the giver and receiver need to be equal, and we, strange incongruous pair that we were, became equal. Probably neither of us understood how this happened. Now we do. We were foreseeing this moment; we were equal then as we are equal now in the Place Nowy. We foresaw my being an old man and his being dead, and this allowed us to be equal.

  He puts his long hand around the can of beer on the table and clinks it against mine.

  Whenever possible, he preferred gestures to spoken words. Perhaps as a result of his respect for silent written words. He must have studied in libraries, yet for him the immediate place for a book was a raincoat pocket. And the books he pulled out of that pocket!

  He did not hand them to me directly. He said the name of the author, he pronounced the title and he placed the book on the corner of the mantelpiece in his bed-sitting room. Sometimes there were several, one on top of the other, so that I might choose. George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London. Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. Katherine Mansfield. The Garden Party. Laurence Sterne. The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy. Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer. Neither of us, for different reasons, believed in literary explanations. I never once asked him about what I failed to understand. He never referred to what, given my age and experience, I might find difficult to grasp in these books. Sir Frederick Treves. The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences. James Joyce. Ulysses. (An English edition published in Paris.) There was a tacit understanding between us that we learn – or try to learn – how to live partly from books. The learning begins with looking at our first illustrated alphabet, and goes on until we die. Oscar Wilde. De Profundis. St John of the Cross.

  When I gave a book back, I felt closer to him, because I knew a little more of what he had read during his long life. Books converged us. Often one book lead to another. After George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, I wanted to read Homage to Catalonia.

  Ken was the first person to talk to me about the Spanish Civil War. Open wounds, he said. Nothing can staunch them. I had never heard the word staunch pronounced out loud before. We were at that moment playing billiards in a bar. Don’t forget to chalk the cue, he added.

  He read to me in Spanish a poem by García Lorca, who had been shot four years earlier, and when he translated it, I believed in my fourteen-year-old mind that I knew – except for a few details – what life was about and what had to be risked! Perhaps I told him so, or perhaps some other rashness of mine provoked him, for I remember him saying: Check out the details! Check them out first not last!

  He said this with a note of regret as if somewhere, somehow, he himself had made a mistake about details
that he regretted. No, I’m wrong. He was a man who regretted nothing. A mistake for which he had had to pay the price. During his life he paid the price for many things he didn’t regret.

  Two girls in long white lace dresses are crossing the far end of the Place Nowy. Ten or eleven years old, both tall for their age, both become Honorary Women, both, as they cross the square, stepping out of their childhood.

  La Semaine blanche, Ken says. Last Sunday kids across the whole of Poland took their First Communion. And every day this week they do their best to get to a church and take communion once more, particularly the girls, the boys too but they are less noticeable and there are fewer of them, particularly the girls, who want to step out in their white communion dresses once again.

  The two girls in the square walk side by side so they can scythe down the glances they are attracting.

  They’re going to the Church of Corpus Christi where there’s a famous Madonna in gold leaf, Ken says. All the girls of Kraków would like to take their First Communion in Corpus Christi because the communion dresses their mothers buy there are better cut, have a better length.

  It was in the Old Met Music Hall on the Edgware Road, sitting beside him, that I first learnt how to judge claims to style, learnt the rudiments of criticism. Ruskin, Lukács, Berenson, Benjamin, Wolflin, all came later. My essential formation was in the Old Met, looking down from the gallery on to the triangular stage, surrounded by a noisily receptive and unforgiving public, who judged the stand-up comics, the adagio acrobats, the singers, the ventriloquists, pitilessly. We saw Tessa O’Shea bring the house down, and we saw her booed off stage, her hair wet with tears.

  An act had to have style. The audience had to be won over twice a night. And to do this, the non-stop sequence of gags had to lead to something more mysterious: the conspiratorial, irreverent proposition that life itself was a stand-up act!

  Max Miller, ’The Cheeky Chappie’ in a silver suit with his hyperthyroid eyes, played on the triangular stage like an irrepressible sea lion, for whom every laugh was a fish to be swallowed.

  I’ve got my own studios in Brighton, and a woman came to my house on Monday morning – she said, ’Max, I want you to paint a snake on my knee.’ I went dead white, honest I did. No, well I’m not strong, I’m not strong. So, listen – I jumped out of bed, see . . . no, listen a minute . . . so I started to paint the snake just above her knee, that’s where I started. But I had to chuck it – she smacked me in the face – I didn’t know a snake was so long – how long’s an ordinary snake?

  Each comedian played a victim, a victim who had to win the hearts of all those who had bought tickets, and who were also victims.

  Harry Champion came downstage, hands out, begging for help, on the verge of tragedy: ’Life is a very hard thing – you never come out of it alive!’ When he said this on a good night, the whole house put itself in the palm of his hand.

  Flanagan and Allen rushed on, as if on urgent business and late. Then they showed, at high speed, that the whole world and its urgencies was based on a profound misunderstanding. They were young. Flanagan had soulful, naive eyes; Ches Allen, the straight one, was dapper and correct. Yet together they demonstrated the decrepitude of the world!

  If I could sell my taxi I’d go back to Africa and do what I used to do.

  What’s that?

  Dig holes and sell them to farmers!

  The microphone is going to kill their art, Ken whispered to me in the gallery. I asked him what he meant. Listen to how they use their voices, he explained. They talk across the whole theatre and we’re in the middle of them. If they use a mike, this will stop and the public will no longer be in the middle. The secret of music hall artists is that they play defenceless, like we all are. A player with a mike is armed! It’s another ball game.

  He was right. The music hall died during the next decade.

  A woman, carrying a basket of wild sorrel, passes the table in the Place Nowy.

  Could you make us some sorrel soup? Ken asks me. We could have it tomorrow instead of borsch.

  I guess so.

  With eggs?

  That I’ve never tried.

  Well, he shuts his eyes, you prepare the soup, serve it, and in each bowl, you put a hot hard-boiled egg. You have made sure that beside each bowl there’s a knife as well as a spoon. You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away.

  Of home?

  Certainly not, not even for the Poles.

  Of what then?

  Of survival, perhaps.

  It seemed to me that Ken always lived in the same bedsit. In reality, he moved often, but the moves were made when I was away at school and on returning and going to see him, I would find his same few possessions piled up on a similar table at the foot of a similar bed, behind a door with a key, which opened on to a staircase, overlooked by a landlady, worrying in the same way about the lights being left on.

  Ken’s room had a gas fire and a tall window. On the mantelpiece above the gas fire he stacked our books. On the table by the window was a large portable wireless (the word radio was rarely used) to which we listened. 2 Sept. 1939: the Panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht invaded Poland without warning this morning at dawn. Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were going to lose their lives during the next five years.

  In the room’s wardrobe he kept not only clothes but food: oatmeal biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, a pineapple, coffee. Attached to the gas fire was a gas ring for heating water in a saucepan that he kept on the windowsill. The room smelt of cigarettes, pineapple, and lighter fuel. The toilet and washbasin were on the landing either above or below. I tended to forget which, and he would shout after me: Up not Down!

  His two suitcases, which he left open on the floor, were never entirely unpacked. At that time nothing was unpacked, even in people’s heads. Everything was in store or in transit. Dreams were kept on luggage racks, in kitbags and in suitcases. In one of the cases open on the floor there was a jar of honey from Brittany, a dark fisherman’s sweater, a volume of Baudelaire in French, and a table-tennis bat.

  Give you a lead of fifteen plus service! he proposed. Ready? Serve! Fifteen, love. Fifteen, one. Fifteen, two. Fifteen, three. He was beating me like that in 1940.

  By 1941 he was still beating me two games out of three, but he was no longer giving me a lead.

  He was now working in some capacity, about which he would say nothing, for a foreign service at the BBC. He often came back to the room after work in the small hours of the morning. The bedcover was damasked.

  In the mornings we usually took breakfast in a barricaded café near Gloucester Road. Food was rationed. Those without a sweet tooth gave their sugar rations to others. Ken and I drank tea, as it was better than the coffee essence. Over breakfast we read newspapers. Each consisted of four – or at the most six – pages. 9 Sept. 1941: Leningrad cut off by German troops. 12 Feb. 1942: Three German cruisers sail unimpeded through the Straits of Dover. 25 May 1942: The Wehrmacht take 250,000 Soviet prisoners at Kharkov. The Nazis, Ken said, are making the same mistake as Napoleon: they underestimate the power of General Winter. He was right. In late November General Paulus and his 6th Army were surrounded at Stalingrad and in February they surrendered to General Zhukov.

  One morning in the middle of April 1943, Ken told me about a London radio broadcast, made the day before, by General Sikorski, the Polish prime minister in exile, who was appealing to Poles in Poland to support the ongoing uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. The ghetto was being systematically annihilated. Sikorski said – Ken spoke slowly – that: ’The greatest crime in the history of mankind is taking place.’

  Only during moments of forgetfulness, when thinking about nothing, did the enormity of what was happening make itself felt. The enormity was then present in the air, under the spring sky, addressing a seventh sense which I still cannot name.

&nbs
p; 11 July 1943. The British 8th Army and the American 7th Army invade Sicily and take Syracuse.

  I think of you as a beginner, Ken whispers, leaning across the table in Kraków, and I suspect that if I read you today I might be disappointed.

  About mastery there is something sad, indescribably sad, I reply.

  I see you as a beginner.

  Still?

  More than ever!

  With you as teacher?

  I didn’t teach. You learnt. There’s a difference. I let you learn! And there were a few things I learnt from you!

  Such as?

  Dressing quickly.

  Anything else?

  How to read well out loud.

  You read well out loud yourself, I say.

  In the end I discovered how you did it. The secret of your reading out loud. You didn’t read the end of the sentence until you got there, that was your secret. You refused to look ahead.

  He takes off his glasses as if he has seen and said enough. He knew me well.

  Beneath the damasked bedcover, during nights punctuated by air-raid sirens, I sometimes felt a burning in Ken’s erect member. The tumescence came unasked and waited like a pain, a pain that had to be staunched, low down in the middle of his long body. Soon afterwards, in the bed damp with spunk and tears from his eyes without glasses, sleep came swiftly to the two of us. Rippled sleep, like sand when the tide is far out.

  Let’s go and see the pigeons, Ken says, polishing the thick lenses of his glasses with his tartan handkerchief.

  We walk towards the northern end of the market. The sun is hot. One more early summer morning added to the pile on the century’s desk. We watch two butterflies who came to the centre of the city with the garden vegetables fly upwards in a spiral. The clock on the city cathedral strikes eleven.

  Every day, hundreds of Polish visitors climb the spiral stone staircase in the bell tower of the cathedral to look across the Vistula and to touch with a finger the massive tongue of the Zygmunt bell, cast in 1520 and weighing eleven tons. Touching it is said to bring luck in love.