Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  Let’s take it off, said Mirek, though I’m not going to unpack it – it’s full of stuff for Warsaw, nothing else.

  They intended to pass a long weekend in the house without a doorstep and then drive through Lublin to Warsaw, where they would begin their new married life as planned.

  Danka, with her son in her arms, walked around the house. Nothing in it seemed to surprise her. She took her time. She tried to open a window and failed. Eventually, returning to the room with the photograph of the hunter, she announced: It’s big.

  Olek wanted to be put down on the floor. Once there, he held on to her hands and walked a few steps, chuckling with satisfaction as if each unsteady step was a point of arrival. They saw a night butterfly. Olek stumbled and would have fallen if she hadn’t been holding him. Slowly, she murmured, slowly, one step, slowly, two steps . . .

  When he was sitting on the floor she caught the moth in her hands and showed it to him before putting it out of the front door. Cma! she said, Cma!

  Danka had acquired another sense of time since the wedding. She could imagine looking back at the present from what, until a few days ago, was an impossibly distant future. She could imagine Olek being a father and Mirek and herself being grandparents. She was looking back at herself from a point in the future, and she was asking a question. I’m not sure to whom.

  You haven’t forgotten have you? You remember? It was five days after Mirek and I got married. We drove all the way from Nowy Targ and we arrived at the house I’d never seen. Mirek had talked about it as though it belonged to another life before I was born, and it was dark when we arrived, and John had prepared some soup, and Mirek was making up our big bed in the room where there was an ostrich egg in a wickerwork basket, and it was the first time for ten days that Mirek and I were going to be alone. I realised how much lay ahead, and I was happy, doubly happy, one woman stepped into my wedding dress and two stepped out – my hair was curly and auburn, remember? – and I was going to love Mirek as he deserved, I knew how much he deserved, at that time it was one of the deepest things I knew, and Olek was healthy and very strong, I was proud, one morning when I was dressing him he accidentally gave me a biff and I had a black eye, that’s how sturdy he was at ten months, I was proud, and I was walking through this house I was seeing for the very first time and I said to myself, I don’t care, I don’t care how long it takes and how much I have to work, and if we have to move from room to room over the years, working on room after room until the house is at last finished, it won’t matter – is a house ever finished? – what I know is that I want to live here straight away and always. Remember? I can’t say what made me so confident that evening, maybe you told me it would be all right, maybe that’s what gave me confidence.

  I’d better change him, she said out loud and picked up Olek.

  I’ll set the table, I said.

  The table was very long, a table for committee meetings, not for meals. Two-thirds of it was encumbered with what had been casually left on leaving the house, or abruptly deposited on arrival: clothes, hand tools, a coil of rope, basins, paper bags, a cap. The end nearest the kitchen was clearer and covered with dust. I wiped it, and laid out the garlic bread, raw herring and pickled mushrooms that Mirek had brought. I fetched the ladle and steaming saucepan from the kitchen, and the eggs. Then I served the soup into bowls with the ladle, and into each bowl put two halves of an egg.

  The Poles call Ken’s soup szczawiowa. It is one of the most elementary soups in the world, and maybe that’s why, as well as nourishing, it provokes dreams. For example, if you’re cold it warms you and at the same time is refreshing. The acid sorrel makes the vegetables taste volatile and sharp. The eggs, which are larger than anything you usually find in a soup, have a rounded, solid taste. The sour cream, added at the last minute, permeates both. Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker who sold woollen gloves and lived a little to the west of Wroclaw in the seventeenth century, proposed that the world comes continually into existence by passing through seven phases. The first is Sourness, the second Sweetness, the third Bitterness, the fourth Warmth, and after Warmth, according to him, comes Love, to be followed by Sound and Language. I would place zupa szczawiowa somewhere between Warmth and Love. When you sip it, you have the impression of swallowing a place. The eggs taste of the earth of this place, the sorrel of its grass, the cream of its clouds.

  We ate in silence for a moment. Danka blew on her spoon to cool it before testing whether Olek liked the soup. He did. After each spoonful he chortled and Danka wiped his mouth. Then Mirek said: You know what my dream was for a long while? It started in Paris, often when I was snarled up in the traffic, driving from one building site to another. Sometimes I thought of it when painting a ceiling. My dream was to run a little restaurant. Nothing big, twelve tables, in Zamość under the arcades, serving traditional dishes and new ones I’d introduce, using vegetables and fruit grown here in this garden, made larger for keeping chickens and rabbits too. I made up menus in the traffic jams! Crazy!

  Danka put down her spoon and turned towards him with her full goose authority. If you don’t try to carry out that dream now – she spoke slowly, her dark green eyes screwed up – you never will!

  Mirek didn’t reply. We finished the soup and chatted about other things. When nothing was said, I could hear the clock in the next room.

  Olek wanted to get out of his feeding-seat and Danka took him in her arms and fed him pieces of apricot. Mirek unfastened the seat from the table and, leaving the door open, went into the room with the swing. There he attached Olek’s seat to the cords, higher up than the beech-slats. He tested it, made the knots tighter and then came back to fetch the boy.

  Put into the seat, Olek grasped the two cords in his tiny fists and Mirek with his huge hand gave him a gentle push. He was swinging. He went higher and higher and was more and more full of delight.

  The way Danka, who had left the table to watch, the way she stood there, watching her son soar away and come back, whispered to me that within two or three months she would be pregnant again.

  Each time the seat came towards him, Mirek held it for an instant in his hand, raised it a little higher, and let it go once more. The house had changed as never before in Mirek’s lifetime.

  I come outside to have a pee and the nightjar is singing. Kutak-kutak-kutak. Only night birds sing so long without stopping. He’s much nearer than before and may be in one of the trees by the bridge. I walk down there, for I’ve never in my life seen a nightjar, I’ve only heard them. The first time I heard one was in the Epping Forest with Camellia. He eats insects all night long, she told me, and he opens his beak so wide, it’s like a train tunnel! One of the toes of his foot, she went on, has a saw-edge, nobody knows why.

  On each outing with Camellia in the dark or daylight I learnt names. What is this furry thing? The larva of a White Admiral. This moss? Silk wood. This knot? A clove hitch. And this? You know very well – your belly button!

  There was much that could never be named. In the room of the upturned boat I told myself that the wood-grain of the varnished walls was a kind of map of the nameless, which I tried to learn by heart, in the belief that it might one day be useful. The realm of the nameless was not shapeless. I had to find my way about within it – like being in a room with solid furniture and sharp objects in pitch darkness. And anyway, most of what I knew, most of my hunches, were nameless, or their names were as long as whole books I had not yet read.

  Kutak-kutak-kutak . . .

  I am standing so still under the tree the nightjar is in, he starts to chatter again. And standing here under the tree, I remember a few of my hunches.

  Everywhere there’s pain. And, more insistent and sharper than pain, everywhere there’s a waiting with expectancy.

  The nightjar falls silent and another, further down the stream, replies.

  Counting is a way of secretly approaching something other than what is being counted.

  The Szum has the same voice as the Chi
ng.

  Liberty is not kind.

  Nothing is complete, nothing is finished.

  Nobody said this, yet I knew it in Gordon Avenue.

  The nightjar above me flies out of the tree to join his companion and in the filtered moonlight I glimpse the white band on his tail-feathers.

  Smiles invite to happiness, but they don’t reveal of what kind.

  Of human attributes, fragility – which is never absent – is the most precious.

  I point up to the sky in the direction in which the nightjar flew. And this? I ask.

  That’s Andromeda, Camellia replies, I’ve told you many times.

  I strolled back towards the house. Unless panic sets in, darkness tends to reduce hurry. There is more time. There were no lights in the windows.

  I stepped up on to the concrete platform and found my way through the creaking portico-entrance. I did not switch on the light.

  The door to the bedroom was ajar. The little light coming through the window trawled like a grey net over the bed. The three of them were asleep. Olek lay against his father’s chest, his hand up to his mouth and Danka was cupped around Mirek’s back. A moth touched my hand in the darkness. Cma! Only the human body can be naked, and it is only humans who long and need to sleep together, skins touching all night long. Cma.

  Within a week, Olek, with his determination, will learn to walk here, and Danka will ask Mirek to build a doorstep to their house.

  8½

  Why did you never read any of my books?

  I liked books which took me to another life. That’s why I read the books I did. Many. Each one was about real life, but not about what was happening to me when I found my bookmark and went on reading. When I read, I lost all sense of time. Women always wonder about other lives, most men are too ambitious to understand this. Other lives, other lives which you have lived before, or which you could have lived. And your books, I hoped, were about another life which I only wanted to imagine, not live, imagine by myself on my own, without any words. So it was better I didn’t read them.

  I risk to write nonsense these days.

  Just write down what you find.

  I’ll never know what I’ve found.

  No, you’ll never know. All you have to know is whether you’re lying or whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer . . .

  Acknowledgments

  ‘We can only give what is already the other’s’ – Jorge Luis Borges. For this book I deeply thank: Alexandra, Andres, Anne, Arturo, Beverly, Bill, Bogena, Colum, Dan, Gareth, Geoff, Gianni, Hans, Iona, Irene, Jean, Jitka, John, Katya, Leticia, Liane, Libby, Lilo, Lisa, Lucia, Maggi, Manuel, Maria, Marisa, Michael, Mike, Nella, Paul, Pierre-Oscar, Pilar, Piotr, Ramon, Robert, Sandra, Simon, Stephan, Tonio, Victoria, Witek, Wolfram and Yves.

  The following quotations from Borges’s poetry appear in the book. They are taken from Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999) and are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

  Page 69: ‘Debo justicar lo que me hiere . . . ,’ three lines from the poem ‘El cómplice’ (p. 448). Copyright © Maria Kodama, 1999. Translation copyright © Hoyt Rogers, 1999.

  Page 70: ‘This book is yours, María Kodama . . . ,’ from ‘Inscription’ (p. 461). Copyright © Maria Kodama, 1999. Translation copyright © Willis Barnstone, 1999.

  Page 71: ‘The memory of a morning . . . ,’ six lines from ‘Talismans’ (p. 365). Copyright © Maria Kodama, 1999. Translation copyright © Alastair Reid, 1999. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

  Page 72: ‘Oh endless rose . . . ,’ two lines from ‘The unending Rose’ (p. 367). Copyright © Maria Kodama, 1999. Translation copyright © Alastair Reid, 1999. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by John Berger

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Berger, John.

  Here is where we meet / John Berger.

  p. cm.

  1. Europe—Social life and customs—Fiction.

  2. British—Europe—Fiction. 3. Travelers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6052.E564H’.914—dc22 2004060207

  eISBN : 978-0-307-42621-5

  www.vintagebooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  v1.0

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  I - Lisboa

  2 - Genève

  3 - Kraków

  4 - Some Fruit as Remembered by the Dead

  Melon

  Peach

  Greengages

  Cherries

  Quetsch

  5 - Islington

  6 - Le Pont d’Arc

  7 - Madrid

  8 - The Szum and the Ching

  8½

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ALSO BY JOHN BERGER

  Copyright Page