It was very dark in the cell, he went on quickly, as if not to get lost in that same darkness. And a man sitting beside me began to speak to me in Polish. Maybe he heard me saying Kaddish and recognized my accent. He was a Jew from Łódź. We were both Jews from Łódź, but I was from Żeromskiego Street, near the Źielony Rynek market, and he was from the opposite side, near Poniatowskiego Park. He was a boxer from Łódź. A Polish boxer. And we talked all night in Polish. Or rather, he talked to me all night in Polish. He told me in Polish that he had been there for a long time, in Block Eleven, and that the Germans kept him alive because they liked to watch him box. He told me in Polish that the next day they’d put me on trial and he told me in Polish what I should say during that trial and what I shouldn’t say during that trial. And that’s how it went. The next day, two Germans dragged me out of the cell, took me to a young Jewish man, who tattooed this number on my arm, and then they left me in an office, where I was put on trial by a young woman, and I saved myself by telling this young woman everything the Polish boxer had told me to say and not telling the young woman everything the Polish boxer had told me not to say. You see? I used his words and his words saved my life and I never knew the Polish boxer’s name, never saw his face. He was probably shot.
I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray and downed the last sip of whiskey. I wanted to ask him something about the number or about that young Jewish man who had tattooed him. But I only asked what the Polish boxer had said. He seemed not to understand my question, and so I repeated it, a bit louder, a bit more anxiously. What did the boxer tell you to say and not say, Oitze, during that trial?
My grandfather laughed, still confused, and leaned back, and I remembered that he refused to speak Polish, that he had spent sixty years refusing to speak a single word in his mother tongue, in the mother tongue of those who, in November of ’39, he always said, had betrayed him.
I never found out if my grandfather didn’t remember the Polish boxer’s words, or if he chose not to tell them to me, or if they simply didn’t matter anymore, if they had now served their purpose as words and so had disappeared forever, along with the Polish boxer who spoke them one dark night.
Once more, I sat looking at my grandfather’s number, 69752, tattooed one winter morning in ’42, by a young Jew in Auschwitz. I tried to imagine the face of the Polish boxer, imagine his fists, imagine the possible white pockmark the bullet had made after going through his neck, imagine his words in Polish that managed to save my grandfather’s life, but all I could imagine was an endless line of individuals, all naked, all pale, all thin, all weeping or saying Kaddish in absolute silence, all devout believers in a religion whose faith is based on numbers, as they waited in line to be numbered themselves.
Postcards
The naked isle. That’s how Milan titled the first postcard I received. Two acrobatic dolphins leaped in the foreground, inviting me to come visit them in some aquatic park in Florida. Milan had filled the blank space on the back of the huge card (maybe half a letter-size page) with microscopic print, so minuscule and scrunched up that the whole text looked as if it had been written by a child. A skilled child, but a child nonetheless.
Gypsy singer Šaban Bajramović was born in the Yugoslav city of Niš in 1936. At age eighteen he deserted from Tito’s army, and as a result the communist authorities sent him to Goli Otok, which means the naked isle: a giant, desolate rock on the Dalmatian coast where the prisoners died of dehydration, from so much sun, so much neglect. Šaban Bajramović had deserted the Yugoslav army for a woman. He managed to survive a year on Goli Otok (I am writing a letter and crying / I am dying in prison here / The years pass, flying / And they are not freeing me). There, on that rock, he learned to write. The other prisoners called him Black Panther. The other prisoners slashed his face and nearly disemboweled him: a huge scar runs from his chest to his pelvis. When he was finally freed in 1964, he recorded his first songs and used the money he earned to buy himself a white suit and a white Mercedes, both of which he lost in a dart game that very same night (When I had the money, I gave it all away / And now I have no money / I have no friends / So I implore the little snail to sell me his little house). Šaban Bajramović’s music is not Šaban Bajramović’s music. He’s never copyrighted it, never protected it. No one knows where he lives, where he’s traveling. All of a sudden, he’ll turn up at some Gypsy music festival in Sarajevo or maybe the Gypsy cafés in Budapest. All of a sudden, he’ll disappear again. And that, my dear Eduardito, is how one of the best Gypsy singers of all time lives. As if he were still a black panther. As if he were still the sole survivor on that inhospitable naked isle. Roving around, all alone, who knows where. No ties or responsibilities or boundaries of any kind. No boundaries.
I pinned the postcard to my studio wall, dolphin side out, right between an alleged photo of a now-aged Thomas Pynchon walking the streets of New York with his son, and Lía’s only orgasm sketch that wasn’t done in her almond-colored notebook, a sketch that could have been of the trajectory of some South American river, with tributaries and rivulets and everything, drawn one cold rainy afternoon after we made love (placid yet uncomfortable, of course) in the bathtub.
His big obsession, Milan had told me at some point, was postcards. He liked sending postcards, not receiving them. In fact, he always refused to give me his own address. I don’t have one, he said jokingly, or on second thought, perhaps seriously. He said: I live on the lungo drom, which in Romany means the long road, with no set destination and no turning back. He said: I travel in a caravan of one. He said: On the road, for my friends, I leave a trail of patrin, which in Romany means signs placed along the way, like a branch broken in a certain fashion, or a handful of twigs tied up in a blue handkerchief, or goat bones sticking out of the ground. He said: Postcards are my patrin.
Lía told me that a long time ago she’d seen a movie in which different Gypsy caravans communicated by leaving those kinds of markers along the way, markers that were interpreted as witchcraft and necromancy by the inhabitants of a small, anachronistic town in Spain. One night, when a local girl suddenly died after having played near some Gypsy markers that afternoon, the town’s inhabitants became a frenzied mob and set out with torches and sickles and hacked to pieces every Gypsy they found sleeping peacefully among the trees. Men, women, and children. Lía couldn’t remember whether or not that was the end of the movie, but she thought it was.
The next postcard didn’t say anything, or at least it didn’t say anything in writing. I knew it was from him because of the minuscule block letters my name and address were printed in. Plus, who else in their right mind still sends postcards? According to the postmark, it was sent from Washington, D.C. It was a reproduction of a Chagall painting, or perhaps just a detail from the painting. At first, I thought there was no connection between the Chagall painting and Milan; then I thought that perhaps there was, and I spent several days trying to unravel it, to find in the image some meaning that would allude to the life of the Serbian pianist. It wasn’t until much later, though, when perhaps it was already too late, that I understood what Milan, by not saying anything, had said.
I got a postcard from Denver of an horchata-colored mountain, full of tiny black dots, which I took to be conifers or possibly giant skiers. Milan wrote: Once upon a time there was a king who was in possession of the Romany alphabet. And because in those days there were no bookshelves to hold alphabets, the king wrapped it up in lettuce leaves and fell asleep beside a gently flowing stream. After a while, a donkey came along, drank a bit of water from the brook, and ate the lettuce leaves. And that’s why we Gypsies have no alphabet.
I got a postcard from Boston of a bay by night, all lit up. Milan wrote: We Gypsies, Eduardito, have three great talents. Making music. Telling stories. And the third one is a secret.
Doll, in his Lilliputian block print, was how he’d entitled the next postcard, also enormous, sent from Mexico City. On the front was a collage with mariachis and tricolor
flags and white sand beaches and, right smack in the middle, as though reining it all in to or radiating it all out from her beautiful golden aura, a flamboyant Virgin of Guadalupe. Milan wrote: Her real name was Bronisława Wajs, though everyone knew her by her Gypsy name, Papusza, which means doll. Like the majority of Polish Gypsies at the turn of the century, Papusza came from a family of nomads. A family of harpist nomads. When she turned fifteen, Papusza, of course, married a harpist nomad. And on her later travels, somehow, perhaps while the caravan was stopped in various settlements for a few days, or perhaps while everyone was holed up in the village until winter passed, Papusza learned to read and write. Even today, Eduardito, three out of four Gypsy women are illiterate. She wrote long ballads she called simply, “Songs from Papusza’s Head.” In the summer of 1949, by sheer coincidence, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski heard her sing and immediately began to copy and transcribe and translate some of her songs, which he published in a journal called Problemy. Papusza was forced to appear before Poland’s highest Gypsy authority, who, after brief deliberation, deemed her mahrine, or contaminated, for having collaborated with gadje, or non-Gypsies. She was sentenced to permanent expulsion from the caravan. A few months later, Papusza was discharged from a psychiatric hospital (No one understands me / Only the forest and river / That of which I speak / Has all, all passed away / Everything, everything has gone with it / And those years of youth), and she lived out the rest of her life in the most absolute solitude and the most absolute silence. Like a marvelous fucking doll, ragged and abandoned, that ends up rotting in some box in the attic. Isn’t it incredible, Eduardito, how in the end Gypsies always live up to their nicknames, as if they were providential orders or divine mandates? So what do you think my nickname will be? What will my divine mandate be? Papusza died in 1987.
Gently, with an acupuncturist’s steady hand, I pinned the postcard to my studio wall.
I’d made several attempts to track Milan down. A few phone calls. A few e‑mails. Always halfheartedly, of course: without really wanting to track him down. I wanted to talk to him and to ask him things, but I also wanted to respect his desire to be untrackable, unreachable, almost missing, peregrinating, with no roots or ties. He’d adopted, as far as possible, the life of a nomad, but a modern nomad, an allegorical nomad, a postcard nomad, an ululating nomad in a world where being a real nomad is now forbidden.
I got a postcard of a mauve desert dusk, sent from Arizona. Milan wrote: Many centuries ago, a Gypsy was traveling with all of his family in a covered wagon, an old covered wagon pulled by a feeble, skinny nag. The more children the Gypsy and his wife had, the harder it got for the poor nag, and the whole covered wagon lurched this way and then that, and cups and frying pans rattled, and from time to time one of the Gypsies’ children went flying out of the covered wagon, barefoot. And that’s how Gypsies came to be scattered all over the world. All over Europe and India and the Middle East and Africa and North America and South America and Australia and New Zealand. Millions and millions of Gypsies, Eduardito, all children fallen from that same ramshackle wagon.
I got a postcard from New York entitled Yusef. It was a black-and-white photograph (a perfect photograph, according to Lía) of four jazz musicians standing in front of the famous fifties jazz club Minton’s Playhouse: Teddy Hill, Roy Eldridge, Howard McGhee and, of course, as his wife called him, Melodious Thunk, but a symbolic Melodious Thunk, if there are such things as symbols, a metaphorical Melodious Thunk, if metaphors are anything more than tiny ants crawling furiously between your toes. Milan wrote: They called him Yusef. No one knows if that was really his name or even what country he was from. The old people say listening to Yusef’s accordion was like listening to a siren’s sweet song. The old people say listening to Yusef’s accordion was like listening to the cries of Christ on the cross. The old people say Yusef managed to survive four years in Chelmno Nazi extermination camp, on the shores of the river Ner, playing at German officers’ parties every night. The old people say Yusef, night after night, played one piece for every Gypsy killed that day in the gas chamber. The old people say Yusef, during those four years, played 350,000 pieces. Twenty-five a night, more or less. The old people say when he was freed after the war, Yusef unstrapped his accordion and left it on the green grass of Chelmno.
I got a postcard of a bikinied blond with huge tits and huge lips who was straddling a Harley. Postmarked New Orleans. Milan wrote: My father says Yusef the accordionist never existed.
I got a giant postcard sent from Hawaii, though the photo, for some reason, was a cosmopolitan-looking aerial shot of the city of Philadelphia. VISIT THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE said a yellow neon sign whose huge letters actually seemed to twinkle. Milan wrote: The Gypsies’ origins, Eduardito, are eminently musical. This is how it happened: Around the year 428, the Gypsies arrived in Persia when Bahran Gur, the Shah, wishing to please his subjects, imported twelve thousand musicians from India. No. That’s not how it happened, Eduardito. This is how it happened: One day, God put a violin on Saint Peter’s shoulder. When the people began to demand that he play them a tune, Saint Peter became frightened and ran off to find God, and God calmed him by saying that he’d given him the violin so that his music might make the people happy and forever keep their spirits up. Then Saint Peter told God that if that were true, there should be many more musicians in the world. God asked him who they should be and Saint Peter, as he played a jaunty tune, replied: the Gypsies. But no, that’s not how it happened either, Eduardito. This is how it happened: Once upon a time there was a very beautiful girl who was in love with a tall, strong, hardworking peasant who never noticed her. One afternoon, as the girl was walking in the forest, feeling sad and lonely, there appeared before her a huge man with purple eyes, dressed in red, with two horns on his head and hooves for feet: the devil, stroking her lips with his long, sharp nail, promised her the young peasant’s love if in exchange she would give him her entire family. The girl agreed gladly. She gave the devil her father, and the devil turned him into a violin. She gave the devil her mother, and the devil turned her into the bow and her long gray locks into the bow hair. She gave the devil her four brothers, and the devil turned them into four strings. Then the devil taught the girl to play the violin, and she learned to play so sweetly and so tenderly and so beautifully that when the young peasant heard her, he immediately fell in love. And they married and lived happily together for many years. But one day, after playing and dancing in the forest, they both went off to pick raspberries and left the violin behind on the forest floor. Upon their return, they could no longer find it. Then, from a cloudy sky, the devil descended in a chariot pulled by four black horses and carried off the unlucky couple forever. For a long time, the violin lay there in the forest, hidden beneath dry leaves and moss and more dry leaves. But one night, some Gypsies camping in the forest sent a boy in search of firewood for their bonfire and, when he kicked a pile of leaves, the boy discovered the violin. He stroked it with a twig and the violin produced the most perfect sound ever heard. The boy picked up the violin and the bow and headed back to his caravan. And that was how the Gypsies discovered music.
I got a postcard of a tuna flying in the middle of a market in Seattle, Washington. Milan wrote: In Wales there lived a Gypsy they called Black Ellen. She was an expert storyteller. They say that she could spend all night telling just one story. They say that out of the blue, just to test her audience, Black Ellen would suddenly stop in the middle of a story and shout tshiocha, which means boots in Romany, and if her audience did not shout back cholova, which means socks in Romany, Black Ellen would get up off the floor, shake out her skirt, and leave without finishing the story.
Sounds like Scheherazade, said Lía, in bra and panties and painting her toenails cherry red.
I got a postcard from Cleveland. It was a black-and-white portrait of a guitarist, seated, cigarette in mouth, sporting a thin mustache like Humphrey Bogart, or actually more like Fred Astaire. Milan wrote: Django Reinhardt w
as born in Belgium, though he just as easily could have been born in any country his Manouche Gypsy caravan was passing through. His father was a musician and his mother was a singer. As a boy, Django displayed the following talents: stealing chickens; finding and cleaning World War I bullet cartridges, whose casings his mother then reworked and sold as jewelry and brass finger cymbals; catching river trout just by thrusting his bare hand into the water and tickling them with his fingers until, contented and spellbound, they simply let themselves be grabbed; and finally, of course, the guitar. At the age of twelve, with his family living in a Gypsy camp just outside of Paris, Django was already playing guitar at every bal-musette in the city. At the age of eighteen, after a fire his wife, Bella, had started accidentally, he was left with a deformed left hand, almost a hook, yet somehow he managed to change his technique (using only two fingers now) and continued to play, eventually becoming the greatest jazz guitarist in the world. And yet always, when it came down to it, a Gypsy guitarist. Andrés Segovia heard him play once and was so impressed that he asked to see the score, but Django just laughed and told him that there wasn’t one, that it was a simple improvisation. Jean Cocteau said of Django: He lived as one dreams of living, in a caravan, and even when it was no longer a caravan, somehow it still was. Although his legal name was Jean Reinhardt, he’d been called Django since he was a boy. Django, in Romany, means awake, or more precisely, I awaken. It’s a first-person verb. I awaken.
The Polish Boxer Page 8