Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  I give the swing another push. It goes high, and when it returns, soars as high as my head.

  In Paris women fell in love with Mirek – Polish women who, after many tribulations, had settled abroad to earn a living independently, or pursue their careers. Some fell in love with him for a second time, for they had known him when he was a student. He took them fishing on the Marne at night. He cooked borsch for them. They spent whole Sundays in bed. They watched satellite Polish TV. When they were with him, it was as if he stopped danger existing.

  One by one, each did her best to persuade him to join her in Germany, in Switzerland, in Houston, USA, and stay for good. There are more Poles in Chicago than in any other city of the world after Warsaw. These women had sustained their courage alone and they knew they must refuse to look back: only look ahead. They still loved eating ice cream. And each, in her own way, sharply wanted Mirek at her side. None of them, however, could contemplate returning with him to Poland and having children who would go to school and fall in love there, and in their turn have to leave and say goodbye. Mirek, each one of them told him in her own words, you’re my dream, but you don’t understand women!

  And so, two years ago, Mirek looked at the swing as if it were a relic.

  A knock on the door. No vehicle has drawn up. I cross the porch whose broken windows have been replaced with dark polystyrene panels and open the sagging door. Bogena is holding out a bowl of eggs. For the sorrel soup, she says. Bogena, except for regular errands to Zamość and the occasional visit to Lublin, has never left the village. This is evident in the way she observes me standing in the doorway of this house she has always known. The uninhabited and visited house. The house without a doorstep. I thank her and she turns away, walking at a pace that hasn’t changed for years.

  I peel and slice the potatoes and cut the bacon into small pieces and wash the leeks. Their outer leaves pull off like satin sleeves and the ones disclosed glisten. Towards their heads, earth, as it always does, has infiltrated between the skins, so I make a short vertical cut and flicker through the skins like pages and wash out the irritating dirt. Cutting the leeks into round slices, the knife makes a ratchet noise, which is one of the oldest sounds I remember.

  Four days ago, Mirek married Danka. They’ll be here in an hour.

  Danka was born in Nowy Targ in Galicia. Under socialism there was a shoe factory in the small town employing over three thousand workers. It was the country’s largest shoe factory, established there because of the long-standing local tradition of working with skins and hides from the cattle of the nearby Carpathian Mountains. Now the factory is closed and the town poor. Nobody starves in Nowy Targ as they do in Milano or Paris, but there’s a pall of silence over the town for there are no projects to discuss. The town lives, like dust, from day to day. And its six or seven taxis wait discreetly, just off the main square, for the occasional fare, usually a foreigner. Danka is the youngest of five children. Her father worked in the factory. Her aunt has two cows.

  She left Nowy Targ nine years ago, at the age of eighteen, to go to Paris where she eventually found work as a maid. Paid like a cleaner, she in fact brought up the two children of her employers, who leased her a small room above the garage where they kept their cars. There she slept and there the children – when they were old enough – sneaked in to hear bedtime stories. Within a couple of years Danka spoke a fluent French.

  Mirek met Danka on a Friday night, her night off, at a birthday party of a mutual Polish friend in Paris.

  I’m turning the leeks and the bacon and the potatoes in a frying pan, and I’m inventing their love story.

  They both noticed one another that first evening. He was fifteen years older than she. She noticed how he talked. He talked like a horseman who had studied at some distant university, but she was not intimidated. He noticed her shoulders, neck and mouth; they shared a kind of insistence, the insistence of a goose in flight. At one moment he put his hand on her shoulder and she responded without a word. She spoke little; she preferred her thoughts to be read. At the end of the evening he offered her a lift home in his car, and on the way she told him about the children she was looking after, and he told her about his flat in Warsaw. Into the car stereo he put a CD of the Warsaw group, Budka Suflera (Prompter’s Box).

  When they reached her employer’s house, the car stopped, but she didn’t get out, and the car turned round to go to the other side of Paris where Mirek had his room.

  Red poppies already here

  beloved body already sore

  to our foreheads apply

  the cool salt of Wieliczka.

  The next time they met, they showed one another photographs and he cooked for her.

  Where did you learn to cook so well?

  I’ve been teaching myself for twenty years.

  She said it would be better if he slept with her in her room for then they wouldn’t have to get up so early.

  And the patronne? he asked.

  I pay her rent for my room, she said, you can sleep in my bed all day long if you like.

  I’m slipping everything from the frying pan into a saucepan of salted, boiling water.

  After two weeks Danka announced that, ideally, she would like to have at least two children.

  Two?

  One after the other, quick, so you’re not too old!

  Me too old!

  Not now – but in ten years when you’re teaching them to fish, or when you’re climbing Mount Trzy Korony with them for the first time!

  Have you climbed it?

  With my brother when I was a kid. We saw some mouflon. Ouch! Men never get used to undoing hooks. Let me.

  I’m cutting up the sorrel leaves with my pocket knife. Finely and not too finely. It should look like green confetti.

  When it was confirmed that she was one and a half months pregnant, they agreed to get married after the baby was born.

  In a few weeks we’ll know, he said, whether it’s a boy or a girl.

  A wedding in Nowy Targ! she said. No, she wouldn’t dream of getting married in Paris!

  In Paris they will buy a wedding dress.

  Choosing a wedding dress is unlike choosing any other garment. The bride, when dressed, has to appear to have come from a place where nobody present has ever been, because it is the place of her own name. The woman to be married becomes Bride the moment she is transformed into a stranger. A stranger so that the man she is marrying can recognise her as if for the first time; a stranger so she can be surprised, at the moment when they make their vows, by the man she is marrying. Why are brides ritually hidden before the ceremony? It is to facilitate the transformation whereby the bride appears to have come from the other side of a horizon. The veil is the veil of that distance. A woman who has lived her whole life in the same village walks down the aisle of her village church as a bride, and to all those watching she becomes, for an instant, unrecognisable, not because she is wearing a disguise, but because she has become a newcomer being greeted on arrival.

  Danka, after much delicious hesitation, chose her dress of arrival. It had a scooped neckline, bare shoulders with lace trimming, a sheath bodice with a thousand silver threads, and a satin skirt with flounces and twelve white roses of organza. It cost the equivalent of four months of her wages. Don’t think twice, Mirek said. A Parisian dress in lace and satin and with flounces as wide as a bed – selling it when we get to Warsaw will be child’s play!

  So we can leave it to Olek? she asked. By now they knew she was carrying a boy.

  Their plan was to move into the flat in Warsaw, which they would later exchange for a slightly larger one. Mirek would start a business installing bathrooms, jacuzzis, saunas, etc. He didn’t want to work like a mule on building sites any more; he’d become an ablutions specialist. And in the larger flat, when they found it, Danka would run a nursery looking after other babies as well as her own.

  I put on the eggs to boil. From over the shallow sink to above where the logs are stacked be
side the kitchen stove runs a clothes line for drying linen. Since the house has been empty for months, nothing is drying on it; all that hangs there is a soup ladle whose bowl has been reworked and pinched together in such a way that it has a throat and a lip to pour from; it has been transformed into an improbable multipurpose utensil for distributing soup, serving custard, and pouring steaming jam into pots. In one of the stories I do not know of this house without women, men too must have made jam.

  Olek weighed 4.2 kilos at birth. He was delivered in a hospital in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris. Danka’s employers arranged for her to have papers and a work permit so that she wouldn’t have to leave them before they found someone reliable to replace her. She’s irreplaceable! said the man. Everyone is replaceable, said the woman.

  When Danka returned to her room above the garage, the expression of plenitude on her face had not diminished. Instead of listening to herself, she listened, day and night, to the sounds that came from her boy. Within a week she restarted work, taking Olek everywhere with her. The daughter of the house, aged five, declared she wanted a baby. A baby like him. She was watching Danka breastfeed Olek. After she said this, she let her head fall against Danka’s shoulder, as if sharing the worries of motherhood.

  Amongst their Polish friends in Paris, Olek was passed from hand to hand, the men’s hands often swollen or bruised, roughened by cement, the women’s hands sometimes over-pink as if over-licked from the incessant work of ironing and washing. Everyone agreed that the baby looked like Mirek, the same wide hands, the same blue-grey eyes. And look! Look! He has the same ears. Perhaps Mirek, with a father’s pride, was trying to look like his son.

  Were I to have another life, born on another continent, there would, I believe, be one kind of gathering which, should I ever come across it, I would unerringly identify as Polish, even if I didn’t know where Poland was!

  A small room. People seated on chairs, a stool, a click-clack bed, backs to the wall. In the middle of the crowded, small room, on the floor, a baby asleep in a carrycot. They are talking, knitting, telling stories, cutting a sausage, discussing prices, yet the gaze of them all repeatedly returns to the carrycot as if it were a fire whose flames draw their attention. Every so often one of them gets up to look closely at the baby. The fire has become a home-movie that they can only watch close-up in the camera’s viewfinder. If the baby is not asleep, they pick it up and hold it against their breasts. The men do this as confidently as the women, one of their huge calloused hands totally covering the baby’s swaddled torso. Italian Madonnas are regal, their bambini adored. Here the celebration is different. The circle of illegal migrant workers sitting with their backs to the wall are marvelling at a faraway victory. Of course the baby’s birth is no surprise and has been awaited. But time after time, and life being life, a victory is never assured until won. Those who haven’t yet drunk take the occasion to drink, eyes a little damp. And all are equally astounded by the news of a victory from far away.

  Olek, his small hand pressing against Danka’s breast, drank and drank and put on weight. So did the parents. Nourishment somehow became a promise for the three of them.

  One day Mirek said: You and I must go on a diet!

  Why?

  So you can get into your wedding dress!

  She blushed for she knew it was true.

  Give me three months, she said.

  The vegetables are cooked and I put them through a mixer – one of those that turn by hand. I found it in the dining-room cupboard behind the soup plates. I hold the feet of the machine, which straddles a dish, firmly on to the kitchen table with my left hand, and I turn the handle with my right. It was my mother who taught me the technique when my hands were small and the practice more difficult than I imagined. Wait till you’re bigger, she said.

  At weddings guests are usually expansive so that they seem more numerous than they really are; the opposite happens at funerals. Nevertheless at Nowy Targ there were in reality a hundred guests.

  Danka was still and calm. She looked as if she had stepped out of her bath into her dress and then into the church. She exuded freshness, a cunning freshness that had taken days to attain. Her hair was plaited with long leaves and the tiny pointed locks woven together to create a crown like a lark’s nest in the grass. Everything about her when she entered the church – it would change in a few hours – was meadow.

  Mirek was wearing a very light-coloured suit with a stand-up Indian-type collar and had the air of a croupier stepping out of a casino to enjoy the sunshine.

  I wondered, as the pair of them walked down the aisle, how many weddings, regardless of century or place, walk past the same moment: the moment of water being drawn from a well? (The two rivers which flow through the unemployed town of Nowy Targ are called the Black Dunajca and the White.) The bride, having drawn water from the well, carries it in a pitcher on her shoulder. The bridegroom may be aware of this, but on no account should he look. The pitcher never appears in the wedding photographs because it’s only visible from behind and for a five-hundredth of a second. I think we saw a pitcher sitting on Danka’s shoulder for an instant.

  The priest was young. The population of the town is 40,000 and it has ten priests. Unless forced by necessity, couples don’t marry during Lent or Advent, nor in November since the month is said to bring matrimonial bad luck. Weddings are traditionally on Saturdays, so the celebrations can last as long as possible. The young priest officiated, I’d guess, at thirty or thirty-five weddings a year.

  His voice when he spoke was intelligent. He had keen eyes, and repetition had not so far made him complacent. He knew each marriage at which he officiated had been agreed upon within an intricate web of calculation, desire, fear, bribes and love, for such is the nature of the marriage contract. Each time, however, the task he set himself was to try to locate what was pure in this web. Like a hunter going into the forest, he set out to stalk a purity, to entice it out of its cover and to let all those present, and particularly the couple involved, acknowledge it.

  Not an easy task, and it wasn’t necessarily simpler on the rare occasion when the woman and man were wildly in love, with scarcely any other interest, for then he risked to glimpse how desire, when mutual and passionate, is more often than not, a conspiracy of two against the cruelty of the world, apparently abandoned by God. Shreds of the purity he sought were of course always present, what made his task difficult is that a purity, when disclosed, invariably goes back into hiding. It is hard to sidle up to purity as Despina did with the wolves. Chopin succeeds in some of his mazurkas, Sappho in her few fragments of verse.

  The young priest last Saturday in Nowy Targ, accomplished his task; at a certain moment he was radiant. Perhaps the purity he located, the purity which did not run for cover, resided in the ten-month-old Olek. Olek, dressed in white like his mother and father, lay awake and totally calm throughout the long ceremony in the arms of Danka’s elder sister, who was sitting, smiling towards the altar, at the back of the church.

  I run the water from the cold water tap over the hard-boiled eggs and I roll them between the palms of my hands so that the shells will come off easily.

  The cortège moved off, the bride and groom in the first car with white pennants flying from the radio aerial and door handles. Danka, beside Mirek on the back seat, with Olek on her knees, opened the window a little to have some cool air. The drivers of the cars that followed klaxoned, impatient for music and dancing. Most of Mirek’s friends had already been married for twenty years, and were familiar with the difficulties, the silences of conjugal life. Music would soon remind them of its promises.

  The reception was to be held in what had previously been the canteen of the shoe factory. Some guests had proposed to walk there, for it was only a couple of kilometres away, it was sunny and there was no hurry. Amongst the walkers was a thin woman with black eyes, whose name was Jagoda, which means Berry, and she was humming a tune from her youth, ten years ago. One of her companions s
napped off a branch of leaves which she waved as a wand, and accompanied Jagoda with the words of the song.

  The cars came to a standstill before a barrier, which was like the red and white pole of a frontier-post. Three of the frontier guards had the marionette movements of elderly alcoholics; the other three were young men, unemployed, learning how to hassle. Hold-ups and jokes are not so different at their beginning.

  Mirek got out of the car, opened the boot, where there were eighty bottles of vodka, and handed over two. One more! No question. Grins on both sides. And behind the grins, an awareness of the abyss that can claim anyone.

  I scatter the cut sorrel into the soup which turns green.

  Two of the musicians were playing when the newly married couple and the first guests arrived. The place was as large as a barn with a dozen tables arranged in a horseshoe at one end, and the four musicians – piano, drums, guitar and singer – at the other. Between was a dancing space the size of a threshing floor. The singer with bare shoulders and wearing trousers was as slim and short as the letter i; her voice was famous for being as wide as a horizon. Some guests as they entered glanced at her and without opening their mouths pushed forward the tips of their tongues, as if secretly testing the reed of a wind instrument whose music they hoped would accompany them all night long. Her nickname in Nowy Targ is Clarinette. She would only start singing with her voice that quivered when all the guests had arrived, not before. In the meantime she was dancing with the drummer who came from the Tatra Mountains. He was a large man and their dance gradually changed their sizes; Clarinette became as tall as a capital I, and the massive drummer became slim. This act of theirs represented the first transformation of the evening.

  There was champagne to drink. There were polythene sacks like saddle bags lying on their sides with their spigot taps which, when turned forty-five degrees, let wine flow abundantly. Beer, from the village of the animals, was ordered from the waiters and served in tall steins. On each table were four open bottles of vodka and these would be replaced throughout the night whenever one was empty. Each bottle had in it a spray of dark green bison grass, which gives off a flavour a little like vervain. Mirek had been looking after the vodka for the wedding for a week.