Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  The equestrian habit is still sometimes visible in bodies and the way they move. The gesture of putting the right foot in a stirrup and hoicking the other leg over comes to my mind whilst sitting in a pizza bar in Warsaw watching men and women who have never in their lives mounted or even touched a horse, and who are drinking Pepsi-cola.

  I love the Polish Rider’s horse as a horseman who has lost his mount and has been given another might. The gift horse is a bit long in the tooth – the Poles call such a nag a szkapa – but he’s an animal whose loyalty has been proven.

  Finally I love the landscape’s invitation, wherever it may lead.

  It has led to the village of Górecko in the south-east of what is named Little Poland, twenty kilometres from the Ukrainian border.

  The village street is dust and stones. There are two shops, and along an overgrown path through the forest, a church. In the centre of the village, near a shrine to the Madonna, where wild asparagus grows in the spring, there is a small reservoir full of green water. The villagers dug and built the reservoir in the 1960s as part of a miniature hydro-electric plan drawn up by the local priest to bring electricity to the village. It didn’t work, but the fact that the Church was meddling with the formula Soviets + Electricity = Communism forced the authorities to supply the area, perhaps more quickly than they would otherwise have done, from the national grid system. Today, when a workhorse goes mad, the villagers stand the animal in the reservoir for several hours, until the animal cools down.

  The houses are mostly wooden chatas of two rooms with a stove between them (in winter the temperature can be –20° C) and a chimney in the middle of the roof. The four small windows are doubled – there’s often a pot-plant placed lovingly in the space between the two frames. The gardens are surrounded by wooden fences and in them grow beetroots, cabbages, potatoes, leeks. Some chatas have been enlarged, rebuilt, fitted with radiators, and given a portico with wooden columns. The plot of land, though, is still the same plot, and the money for improving the grandparents’ house has been earnt in Germany or Chicago.

  My friend Mirek’s house stands apart from the village on the other side of the main road. For the last seven years Mirek has worked, as an illegal migrant, on building sites in Paris. By training he is a forestry engineer. I have learnt much from him in the forest.

  Normally he walks fast, in the same way that he drives cars fast. He doesn’t take risks, for he’s aware there are too many anyway. With his large hands and shoulders, he’s not somebody you would think of pushing aside. His eyes, though, are unexpected, for in them there is a reflective, almost hesitant, questioning. Is it this questioning which explains his success with women? We need to make promises, he told me one day, without promises life is too hard for anybody, but if you make a promise you don’t believe in, it’s not a promise! Maybe this is why he prefers actions to words. As I say, he normally walks fast.

  On that particular morning, he had reduced his pace and from time to time squatted to examine the earth between the pine trees. I want to show you the Lion of the Ants, he said, there ought to be one here. A sort of ant? No, a larva, a grub. About the size of a fingernail. When he gets wings he’s like a dragonfly, and silvery like satin. The soil between the pines where he was looking was sandy and in the sunlight. He couldn’t find one.

  He approached a tree stump and touched the sticky, cut wood. Just the place for oprinka miodowa. They’re a mushroom, he said, that taste of the deep forest. If they knew how to cook, the wild boar would eat them! Boil them for a moment to get rid of a certain bitterness – don’t include the stalks, they’re slender but stringy – and serve them with fresh cream! He said this smiling. What makes Mirek smile most frequently is the pleasure of outwitting the routines and tired rules of daily life, and when his smile gets too big, he breaks into laughter. He has the eye and imagination of a poacher.

  We walked on in silence for half an hour. Abruptly he stopped in his tracks, knelt and pointed at a small crater in the sand, the diameter of a saucer. It was shaped like a funnel that got narrower and narrower.

  See his head and pincers? He’s hiding there in the sand, waiting for the next ant to slide down the funnel into his mouth! The Lion of Ants! He begins, Mirek explained, by making a circle on the ground, he makes it walking backwards – he can’t walk forwards because his hind legs have evolved into diggers. The sand he extracts he shovels aside with a quick toss of his head. Then he makes a second circle, a little narrower and a little deeper. And he goes on like this, circle after circle, till he’s at the bottom, where he hides. Once an ant lurches into that shifting sand, he can’t help himself. When he hasn’t eaten for days and is very hungry, the Lion will draw a wide circle so that more ants fall down the slope for him to eat. When he’s not so hungry, he draws a small circle. He writes his menu on the sand!

  Mirek’s smile broke into laughter, then he looked up at the sky above the trees as if to acknowledge the mystery of why things have come to be exactly the way they are.

  There is no other house like Mirek’s. Probably one can say that about any house if one knows it well enough. Anyway I know what to expect. I follow the grass track which leads off the road, I cross the bridge, made of wooden planks, over the stream, I pass the tree to the left of the door with apples the size and colour of dark cherries (incredibly bitter to taste), and I look for the key in my pocket. There are no steps leading to the front door – one has to step up fifty centimetres on to a concrete platform. The wooden door has two locks which I undo. It doesn’t open. Putting my fingers under the bevel of one of its panels, I succeed in lifting it. The door yields and swings open. I step in. The house smells of dust, wood-smoke and fern. I wander from room to room – there are six. In each there is at least one butterfly or moth, either flying around calmly, or fluttering its wings against a windowpane with the fast flicking sound of a banknote counting-machine.

  The house was built more than a century ago. Only three of the eight dining chairs don’t collapse when sat upon. There is an image of the Madonna in every room. Nobody is clear about the house’s exact history, or perhaps everybody wants to forget a different chapter of its history. Doubtless it has served many purposes. The unhidden electrical circuit, with its wires, sockets, connections, points, fuses and switches all tacked to the walls, looks as if it was improvised in great haste, to meet some emergency forty years ago. Perhaps when electricity first came to the village?

  Fix it! From next week we’re operating from here – day and night, summer and winter, understood? There’ll always be just one of us here. So fix it, you’ve got till Monday.

  Or could it be that the house then belonged to an old woman living far away, one of whose local nephews, when the electricity came, seized the chance to pretend to be an electrician, and in exchange for the work done, demanded enough money to buy himself a mobylette?

  I switch on the electricity. I put the bacon and the śmietanie I have brought with me on the kitchen table. I’ve promised to have some soup ready for them when they arrive. Within an hour and a half there’ll be hot water.

  At about the same moment as the electricity was installed, the windows were changed. There are many more of them and they are far larger than they could have been originally. What lay behind this mania for windows?

  A step towards modernity or another proposal by the nephew to the old woman? Unlike installing the electricity, creating and enlarging the windows must have taken many months of work and he would have earnt himself enough for a small second-hand car.

  Or was it a Committee Decision?

  If there’s plenty of light, we’ll use less electricity. No problem with getting the window frames, they’ll be delivered direct from the factory. Proceed room by room, we’ll be occupying the others! OK?

  Only three of the twenty double window frames now open. Several have been painted over and are opaque, and a number have been broken and the panes of glass replaced by sheets of polystyrene. There are no curtains.
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  In the larder, which is a blind passage with a door leading off the kitchen (there is no refrigerator), I find a bottle of beer. It was brewed in the village of Zwierzyniec, which means place of the animals, twelve kilometres from here. I take the bottle into one of the front rooms where there is an armchair.

  On the wall hang a pair of stag antlers, and opposite them an old framed photo of a hunter with shotgun and dog. The photo is difficult to date. Mirek doesn’t know who the man is. Probably at one time he was living here.

  The antlers are in fact a joke: they are branches of a spruce, hung on the wall to give the impression of a pair of antlers.

  Liane is a Romanian painter. She sent me a drawing she had made in the Berlin Natural History Museum. It showed a large tree trunk, with real antlers growing out of it on each side. She explained that a stag must have one day died beside the roots of a young tree, which subsequently grew around its skull and lifted them up and preserved them. I told friends who were going to Berlin to go to the museum and look at it and I showed them her drawing. Each reported back to me that they could find no such exhibit. Finally I asked Liane. Of course, she said, smiling, only I can find it. We’ll have to go to the museum together, maybe it’s gone now.

  The hunter in the photo is wearing a cap. Today baseball caps, as worn by the young all over the world, with the peak pointing backwards, have superseded the traditional cap with its polished peak and its particular claims. The claims of the Polish cap were: an indestructible patriotism; a right to command; a willingness to serve; a familiarity with nature and all her extremes; a gift for secrecy and for bargaining; a very long experience of history.

  Anybody could buy and wear such a cap. It was a thousand times easier than acquiring a passport. During the nineteenth century, when occupied Poland did not exist as a nation, the wearing of this cap bestowed and preserved a strange authority. The hunter in the photo might have been able to explain the mystery of the tree with the antlers.

  A few minutes’ walk away from the house, there is another mystery. In the forest, surrounded by undergrowth and with no path leading to it, there’s a grave – well-kept, with a bouquet of artificial flowers placed on it. A soldier of the German Wehrmacht was buried there sixty years ago. And the bouquet is renewed every few months.

  The soldier was shot on 31 December 1943 in this house. Perhaps he was actually shot outside near the apple tree with apples the size of cherries, but the decision to shoot him was taken here. The impulse which led to the act began in this room – perhaps decision is too unconfused a word. The German was barely eighteen years old. He had been conscripted at sixteen, and after a few weeks’ training was posted to the occupying army in this area. His name was Hans. After a few months he announced to a forester, whom he met secretly, that he wanted to desert from the Wehrmacht and join the Polish partisans. Some say he had fallen in love with a girl in the village, who lived in the house next to the one where the second shop now is. The girl, when she became an old woman and Hans was mentioned, would shake her head in such a manner that it was hard to be sure whether she was confirming or denying the story. Many weeks passed after Hans spoke to the forester. He was cross-questioned several times by two officers from the A.K., the clandestine partisan Army of the Interior, whose allegiance was not to the Russians but to the exiled Polish government in London. The partisan command had doubts about him. Eventually he was told he could work as a medical orderly in their forest hospital if he handed over his uniform, papers and rifle. He agreed. One of the wounded in the hospital began to teach him the rudiments of Polish.

  On the night in question Hans accompanied, at their invitation, the A.K. colonel and several section commanders who came to the village, and more particularly to this house, to celebrate the New Year of 1944.

  What happened after many vodkas is obscure. Did Hans, forgetting himself, start to hum a German song? Did he receive a message from the girl and try to slip out of the house, by the door in the kitchen, without saying a word? He was making progress with his Polish. Or did the colonel suffer a sudden vision of imminent betrayal?

  He knows far more about us than we know about him. We don’t even know whether or not he can be trusted.

  At that time one killing superseded another and thousands occurred simultaneously. On 1 June the entire population, including babies and grandparents, of a village twelve kilometres from here had been massacred by the German SS. The previous year 400,000 Jews had been rounded up and interned in the Warsaw ghetto to be dispatched to the extermination camps. In February 1943, the British government had taken the decision to give priority to the fire-bombing of enemy cities so as ’to destroy the morale of the enemy civilian population’.

  A killing could provoke a momentary recoil, a second of confusion, but scarcely a regret. I doubt whether Hans fully realised what was happening when he was shot in the back of the neck, where the apple tree with the bitter fruit now grows. No struggle. Four men carried him into the forest and buried him. His corpse benefited from the doubt that he was perhaps not an enemy.

  The mystery, though, concerns his grave not his death. In the early 1950s a wooden cross was suddenly planted at its head. No name, no date. Years later a stainless steel screw replaced the rusty original one which held the cross together. And always, laid on the mound of the grave, there is a bouquet of artificial flowers, while twenty metres away in the undergrowth lie the tatters, like confetti, of the discarded bouquets.

  Everyone in the village knows who is doing this. The old woman who shook her head is dead. Yet the grave receives more regular attention than most graves in tended cemeteries. Is this because the attention given to it is secret, and, at the same time, acknowledged by all those who remember?

  I once questioned an old villager about the grave. His reply was fox-like. A man died there, he said, so what could be more natural than to mark the place?

  Paradoxically, a memory of a moment of confusion can be unconfused. Sitting in the armchair between the joke antlers and the photo of the hunter with his cap, such a memory comes to me. It is not mine, this memory of the impulse in this room to kill Hans sixty years ago. I decide it’s time to go and pick the sorrel for the soup I’m going to make.

  In the open air the distinction between the kingdoms – mineral, vegetable, animal – seems blurred. There are leaves, curled up with dryness on the wooden planks of the bridge, which look like toads. A hornet on a sunflower – there’s a nest of hornets in the attic – could be mistaken for one of its seeds. I sit on the planks of the bridge, my legs dangling over the water, and watch the stream. The water is a little lower than usual because the mill upstream is working. When it stops at night or at lunchtime, the water rises by twenty centimetres. The mill turns an old circular saw, which cuts the trunks of pine trees into new planks. During the next ten years, in the forest to the north, where Despina was accepted by the wolves, it is being planned that one and a half million trees will be cut down and sold for quick profit. Not only the level of the water can change, but also its colour. This afternoon it is clear. At other times the stream is turgid and dark, the colour of water in a bowl in which dried mushrooms have been soaked. Why is sand seen through water so inviting? The stream has influenced the growth of every tree growing along its two banks, and a number of them are far older than the house. On the stream’s surface the traces of its current, and the circular ripples caused by the interruption of a stone or a fallen branch, remind me of cable stitching. Knit three, purl three . . . I remember the needles.

  As well as the blurring of the distinction between the three kingdoms, the distinction between past and present has become blurred. Here the river is called the Szum; there it was called the Ching.

  The Ching flowed at the bottom of the small suburban garden of the house I lived in until I was six, in Highams Park, a downmarket east London suburb, twenty minutes by train from Liverpool Street. In the garden there was golden rod and pampas grass. There were also gooseberries and marig
olds, the latter planted by my mother for they were her favourite flower. In Spanish the marigold is called maravilla, which means wonder, and in Mexico it is the flower of the great carnival of Death. Across the Ching, which, like the Szum, is about three metres wide, there was a drawbridge built by my father for me. Every Saturday afternoon when he didn’t go to the office, we went down to the bridge, which stood vertical on our bank, and lowered it, through a system of ropes and pulleys, until it was horizontal and rested on the opposite bank. Then we could cross with dry feet to the other side. Like the one I’m sitting on, the bridge in Highams Park was made of planks, and one could see the water between them, but it was much narrower, it was only as wide as my two five-year-old arms held out sideways. The bridge led nowhere. On the opposite bank was a field of allotments with a fence round it. We crossed simply to be on the other side, and to look back.

  The Ching was my father’s river. For a few years it was the best thing in his life, and he wanted to share it with me. It cleaned the remembered wounds that would never heal. It dispersed the mustard gas. With lips wet like the Szum’s, it whispered names. (After the war ended in 1918, my father, who had served four years as an infantry captain, served for two more years in Flanders on the War Graves Commission.) The Ching could not bring back any of the countless dead but he could cross over the drawbridge to the other side and stand there for a minute or two, as if he were the man of twenty-five who in 1913 could not imagine a single hour of the four years of trench warfare to come.

  When he lowered the drawbridge, he could borrow my innocence and so recall his own, which otherwise – except for those Saturday afternoons – was for ever lost.

  All this, at the age of four and a half, or five, as I lay on my stomach and let the water of the Ching flow around my wrists, I knew in my blood. My dark blood.