Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  Those Saturday afternoons were the beginning of an undertaking my father and I shared until he died, and which now I continue alone.

  By the time I was ten and until he was seventy, he and I contested one another almost continually. There were truces during which we both abstained, yet they were rare and brief. Everything I did alarmed him about my future. Everything he believed in I wanted to overturn. He was trying to save me – to crawl out on his belly to a crater in no-man’s-land and pull me back to relative safety – and I, with all the arrogance and fear of youth, was trying to show him that it was possible to be what I called free.

  The fights were sometimes cruel and bitter and both of us were reckless. He wept more often than I, because the wounds I inflicted opened up older ones, whereas those he inflicted on me provoked the protective indignation that often accompanies youthful revolt. Nevertheless, throughout this long struggle, our mutual undertaking, which began wordlessly with the drawbridge over the Ching and which would never be openly declared, was never lost sight of and persisted. (I’m writing this with a worn pencil whose marks are so faint that I cannot reread the words in the evening light, for what I’m saying, twenty-five years after his death, can still only be said in a whisper.) And it consisted of what, this undertaking? An agreement that he could share with me, as he could share with nobody else, the ghost life of his four years of trench warfare, and that he could do so because I already knew them; they were, in the strictest sense of the term, familiar to me.

  We fought about my future with no holds barred and no exchanges possible, yet neither of us forgot for a second during the fight that we shared the secrets of another incommensurable war. By being himself, my father taught me endurance. By being myself, I reminded him that he was not alone.

  The Saturday afternoons were very long. Time seemed mercifully to stop. Lying here on the planks of the wide bridge over the Szum and closing my eyes, the sound of the two streams merge, along with the sound of the midges, of the distant dog barking, of the leaves of the tall trees. And in the current of the two streams there is the same indifference.

  My father had a pair of wading boots that he wore when he was standing in the water attending to the bridge. The water, deeper than I was tall, came up to the tops of his thighs. My mother came down to the river bank only when the gooseberries were ripe and she wanted to make jam. Otherwise, like pubs, betting-shops and billiard parlours, it was a strictly male area, measuring about ten metres by four.

  One Saturday I found a wading boot and stepped in with both feet; it came up to my head, it covered me and I hopped along the bank in it, laughing. My father laughed too. All of me was in one of his boots. And I knew where he had been in other boots. And he knew I knew whilst we laughed together.

  On 18th March 1917 he wrote in a letter to his father: I stood a moment wondering whether I ought to take thirty men through such an Inferno; just then my Sergeant came up from the dug-out and shouting into my ear at the top of his voice to make himself heard through the crash of guns and the bursting of the shells, he said, ’Excuse me, Sir, we will go through hell with you, Sir, if you’re thinking of us.’ That settled it. I would go. We start out into the open – we are lucky at first – their machine guns open on us and we jump into a trench – we are up to our waists in water – our ammunition is all wet – but still we plod along – the guns never ceasing for a solitary moment.

  We met stragglers coming back – some lost, some wounded, and many lay dead. Not knowing whether we could eventually get through, I shouted to my Sergeant to take charge and push on as fast as possible and I would try to go on in advance and see if the way was clear. My servant came with me and one other man. I then met an artillery officer who had lost his reason; it appeared that he could not get in touch with the infantry and he didn’t know whether his battery was shooting on trenches occupied by ourselves or the Hun. He blew out his brains with his revolver in front of my eyes.

  My men got stuck in the clayey trench and it took me one and a half hours to dig them out. My last drop of water was expended on a man who was wounded in ten places.

  A woman with a white scarf around her head is approaching the bridge over the Szum, carrying two buckets full of freshly dug potatoes. When just taken from the earth, potatoes glow. They glow like hen’s eggs. The woman is perspiring. I recognise her from my other visits. She is Bogena, who looks after Mirek’s garden and, in exchange, takes the vegetables and flowers she needs. Due to the river, the soil is richer here than in the village proper across the road. And so Bogena keeps chickens in her own garden and cultivates Mirek’s. In the room where I’ll be sleeping, I’ll hear, far away, her cock crowing before it is light.

  Scrambling to my feet, I ask whether I can have five or six potatoes. I’m thinking of the soup. Bogena puts down her buckets and takes my hands and pulls them out in front of me. Then she places potatoes in them, one by one, until I can hold no more. I am nearly twice her age yet the way she does this somehow refers to the child in me.

  If the river at the bottom of the garden in Gordon Avenue was my father’s happiness, mine was the house next door. It did not have a front door like the others in the road, but a side door, two metres away from the outside wall of our own house. This door was seldom locked. Front doors are by definition locked. I could slip into the house next door whenever I wanted.

  The door opened on to a small panelled room with a curved wooden ceiling which must have been added on to the original house, and perhaps once served as a drying room for the washing. Now its shape, its wood, and the fact that there was nothing in it except a bench against the wall and a low table, made it seem like an upturned boat. There was a window – in the stern – which gave on to the back garden where there was a pear tree. In the month of November, the low table in the upturned boat was covered with pears, carefully placed in rows, no two pears touching, by the man of the house.

  On the bench was a cushion which slowly over the years became mine. Their kitchen led out of the boat-room and the door was often open, so I sat and heard their voices talking in their language. Sometimes their dog, an Airedale who came up to my shoulder, would be lying on the floor and I would stroke him. He had wiry hair that smelt of a kind of tobacco. I have forgotten his name. If I could remember it, I’d be able to re-enter another room. On other days I looked at the pictures in the papers or books that had been left on the bench. Some of the books were children’s books, yet there was no child in the house. The daughter, tall and with very black hair, was in her teens, finishing her schooling.

  The mother noticed when I came in and let me be. Sometimes there was music playing on the wind-up gramophone in the sitting room, where the father, who was out of work, read newspapers. What enticed me to the house next door, whenever I could slip away, was the pleasure of waiting. The pleasure of waiting a long, long while with the certainty that, at the end, I would not be forgotten.

  Finally, the mother, with her kerchief tied very high around her head, would bring me, from the kitchen, if it was the afternoon, a saucer with a cinnamon cake on it and a cup of hot chocolate. If it was the morning, a pot of home-made yoghurt. At that time, in the early thirties, yoghurt – except amongst health-food freaks – was entirely unknown in London. She never kissed me. She looked at me kindly from a considerable distance. She treated me as if I had a mission in life which she knew about and prayed that I would fulfil. Perhaps the mission was just to grow up and become a man.

  Only Camellia, their daughter, spoke English easily. She took me on expeditions into Epping Forest. She showed me how animals die: It’s fallen, it’ll never leave the ground again. We both had knives for cutting. Tendrils, bines and worts. What she showed me was a secret. We might have explained, when asked, where we had been; we would never tell what we had seen.

  I did a drawing of an owl and together we hid it in the hollow of an oak tree that had been split by lightning. When we returned the next week the drawing had gone and the hollow was full
of feathers. We collected the feathers and Camellia said we could write with them. I thought she meant they were an alphabet. It could be that it is with them that I’m writing at this moment.

  Camellia’s family came from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, until the end of the First World War, included this bridge over the river Szum. I never found out exactly what disaster had forced them to emigrate. All I took in was their homesickness and the various ways they possessed of combating it – tisanes, sachets of dried lavender, records of Liszt, cheesecake, dried mushrooms, a certain way of pulling on their socks. Whatever their story – it was not a Jewish one – the father had been dishonoured in some way, this I could feel, and this was why he gazed into the middle distance and spoke rarely. He was waiting for a message to come which would rectify the error. It never, of course, came.

  I walk towards the field where the wild sorrel grows. I have left Bogena’s potatoes in a small pile on the planks of the bridge where they are glowing like eggs. I cut the sorrel plants with my pocket knife. They are about the size of young dandelions, but the green of their leaves, like their taste, is both sweeter and more acid. They grow in clumps together, so I sit down and spread out my handkerchief on the grass and place the cut leaves on it.

  The pictorial convention of using fig leaves to hide the human genitalia is comic – the leaves are too shiny and too heraldic. Wild sorrel plants would be far more appropriate, for their leaves feel like green skin when you touch them. Exactly like green skin. Exactly. I’ve picked enough and I remain sitting.

  There are no birds to be seen. The sporadic, loud trilling comes from between the leaves of the surrounding trees and bushes. I have the impression it is the foliage itself that is singing! I remember having the same sensation in Gordon Avenue. The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season. I wipe and close the knife.

  A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum.

  You asked me, Juan, to write something for you about pocket knives, pocket knives and boyhood. I told you I thought pocket knives went with torches. A knife in one pocket and a torch in the other! I never got round to writing anything. Then unaccountably you died.

  You are looking at me sardonically, as I hoped you would. Listen, here’s a knife story!

  I’ve held this knife in my hand and it was made in the village of Josefow. I’ve seen the grave of the man who made it. A very proud man by all accounts. He was a craftsman, perhaps a harness-maker or a saddler.

  He had three children, two boys and a girl, who was the youngest. Either because he knew she was probably his last child, or because of her fierce blue eyes and dark hair, or for his own reasons, he loved her particularly.

  This was in 1906, when everyone in Poland was waiting to see what would happen next, after the revolts and strikes of the previous year. The historians would later call it a revolution.

  The protests across the country had been about poverty, hunger, working conditions, and most of all about the Polish language, which was forbidden to be taught in any school, or used for any official purpose. The Russians, Prussians and Austrians who occupied the country wanted the language suppressed. Many men and women died in pools of blood fighting for the right to their own words. To die for a certain declension. A certain declension and certain names! The daughter’s name was Eva and her birthday was in May.

  After giving the matter considerable thought, the father decided that his birthday present should be a pocket knife, which he would make, especially for her, in his workshop. He had noticed how she was always pestering one of her brothers to lend her his pocket knife.

  Her knife should be small, not more than nine centimetres long when shut, and seventeen centimetres when open. The handle should be made from a ram horn, honey-grey, slightly translucent. He would find one at Romek’s store in Aleksandrow, split it, and with four brass rivets attach the two halves to the steel spine, slightly curved, mounting towards the tail. The steel blade would also curve and narrow to a point.

  The father made it. The knife is small and feminine – like a barrette for a massive head of black hair. When shut, if you hold it in your right hand, the blade of the knife glints like a moon in its final phase after the last quarter. It’s small, but one could gut a trout with it, peel a pear, cut wild sorrel, open a letter, remove a stone from a goat’s cleft hoof – if the goat was calm. The knife, however, has one peculiarity.

  Who knows at what moment during its making the father made his decision. Was it when he first imagined the knife? Or was it only towards the end, after he had made the handle, and before he fitted the blade that is held by a single clamping pin?

  The peculiarity of the knife is that the cutting edge of the blade is as thick and as rounded as its back edge. It is a knife perfectly made not to cut. It has a cancelled blade. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the year 1906, when revolutions and troops firing into crowds were the order of the day throughout central and eastern Europe, a man made a knife like this so that his beloved Eva would be less likely to cut her finger.

  When you open it, Juan, it occurs to you it’s a Hamlet-object you’re holding. It contains a recognised desire and, running parallel, the fear which that desire provokes. A knife of indecision. Open or shut, the blade is always one of regret.

  Yet is that all? This Hamlet-object, which has survived its century against all the odds, speaks of something else: of the wish that a loved one has everything, but everything!

  I decide to pull two leeks from the vegetable garden. I need a fork because the earth has baked hard. There should be a fork in the portico, along with an axe and a pick. I find it, pull the leeks, and shake the parched earth out of their white roots. The leeks smell of violets and nickel.

  Back in the house, I go into the room next to the one where the hunter and antlers are to wind up the clock that is there and set it at the right hour. There’s a piece of furniture in this room the like of which I’d never seen until I came here.

  Probably it hasn’t been used as it was intended to be for close on a century. On the odd drunken night women may have teased men with it. Perhaps, once, a woman climbed on to it naked and the men gasped as she went higher and higher. Otherwise it stood there unused and untouched. And, although it takes up a good deal of space – on the floor it covers an area of one metre by three metres and it’s over two metres tall – nobody has thought of dismantling it. To do so would be easy, a question of undoing a dozen nuts.

  It commands a kind of awe; it has a precision and lightness which imply that it was imagined with great care and then patiently constructed according to detailed drawings. It’s made of slender lengths of polished beech wood, and its form is that of the letter A, except that it’s in three dimensions – or four if one includes the rhythm of its soaring.

  It is a swing, an indoor swing. The seat of polished slats (the horizontal stroke of the A) is high off the ground. It was made not for a child but for a woman, perhaps when she announced she was going to have a baby. A throne, a rocking chair, a nursing seat, a swing, a perch. I undo the cord attachment and gently push the seat. It soars, comes back, soars . . . I hear the clock ticking. I remember the first time I was here and how I helped Mirek move the swing from the room where we ate into this room with a bed in it. I remember how he looked at the swing when we had placed it in its new position. He looked at it as if it were a relic.

  Mirek has the talents of both poacher and innkeeper (the lean and the well-fed man) and these serve him well for the clandestine jobs he finds and performs in Paris: building chimneys, laying tiles, constructing verandas, mending roofs, installing central heating systems, building duplex apartments, or repainting a bedroom with a specially chosen colour, for Parisians. He is strong with sharp eyes and the methodical intelligence of an engineer. He has something else too, his own way of planning each job, for no two jobs are the same.

  When he was at sch
ool and living in his mother’s small house in Zamość, his mother’s brother, Zanek, lived with them. Zanek was almost totally paralysed. He could not speak and he noticed everything!

  Everything – that’s why I loved him. After school I would go and talk with him, for we invented a language between us, a language like no other, neither Polish nor Russian, nor Lithuanian, nor French, nor German, a language in which we could say what nobody else said; maybe every love invents a vocabulary, a cover to shelter under. With him I discovered something I’ve never forgotten.

  Zanek spent the days alone in the house in Zamość because his sister went to work. Before she left, she arranged the day’s newspaper for him. He read everything in it and couldn’t turn the page. In December 1970 Polish soldiers in Gdansk were ordered to fire on Polish workers, who were on strike in protest against rising prices and the lack of food, and that morning Zanek asked his sister to leave the radio on. Usually his days were silent.

  Mirek pondered all this while he was at school. He started making diagrams and eventually he built a radio with a control system whose switches his uncle, lying immobile on the bed, could operate with his nose!

  No two jobs are the same.

  In Paris Mirek learnt how to work and remain unnoticed – taking a painter’s ladder out of a car or dumping sacks of gravel into a street container at the wrong moment can lead to questions and speedy repatriation. He discovered where to buy materials and to pay for everything on the spot with cash. He got used to insisting in his elementary French and not answering back, listening, waiting and making certain that he was paid as promised. With the money he earnt and hid away, he dreamt of what he would one day build at home. He bought, after five years in Paris, a two-roomed flat in Warsaw. He had further dreams. He became another Polish Rider but older. Meanwhile he lived with what fitted into two suitcases and with a few dozen Polish songs, including several that his uncle loved to listen to on the radio.