Wide World In Celebration and Sorrow

by Leon Rooke

Nowadays, from his aerie, the bird could awaken in the mornings to shouts of skiers as far away as Zakopane on the Czech border, scarcely one hundred kilometres as he would fly it. Without lifting wing, he could see on clear days the mountain’s highest peak, Gerlachovki, at nine thousand feet and by lifting wing scarcely a feather’s token, might allow himself an indulgent float over the glaciated region’s countless hanging valleys, lakes, streams, moraines. Nearer at hand was the ring of parkland gardens known as the Planty, encircling Kraków’s centrum in close delineation of the town’s original Old City walls. Here beneath the bird’s nest lay Ryneck, the city square by St. Mary’s Cathedral, Staszewskiego Street rimming the Planty before pouring its cargo into Starovislna Street leading down to Podgórze Bridge and the ghetto where fifteen thousand Kraków Jews had been driven from their homes, shot on the spot, removed to Plaszów labour camp three kilometres along the road, or shuttled onto the Otobahn’s cattle cars bound for the Oswiecim-Brzezinka (Auschwitz) death camp sixty kilometres west. In those days, to lay claim to a five-hundred zloty reward, all a decent Pole had to do was inform the SS, (Sicherheitsdienst), their own OD, the Field Police, or any earnest Rottenführer, of the whereabouts of any Jew hiding in a forgotten attic or behind a fake wall. Kraków was to be Judenfrie, a concept scarcely less attractive to many Poles than it was to the occupying force. This, of course, was before the Poles came to understand that their destiny too lay with the forced labour camps, the Zyklon B ovens at Auschwitz or elsewhere. By the bird’s calculation, which coincided with that estimate of the Pole’s post-war Commission on Nazi Crimes, eighty thousand had perished from starvation, disease, and by mass execution at Kraków’s camp, Plaszów, their bodies burned by the Waffin SS or buried in mass graves on the piney slopes of Chujowa Gorka. Ash of the burning dead floated over Kraków, settling on the rooftops and streets, the Vistula waters, the backsides of the horses in Bednarskiego Park. As ash settled on their shoulders in their glasses, officers of the Third Reich headquartered in Kraków, gathered for drinks at the sidewalk tables at Krakovia Hotel, would have to move inside, cursing the Jews for their nasty ashes as they went.

  During whimsical, melancholy moments, when weighted down with incipient senility, plagued by mange, ticks, lice, a bad case of the hives, or while tucking head under wing in acknowledgements of a paranoia or manic depressiveness of exhaustion so severe suicide seemed the only recourse, the bird liked to think of his aerie in the Wawel as civilization’s last remaining Abode of Truth. Menschheit’s final outpost.

  The nest, this abode, over the centuries had evolved into a vast assemblage of smelly, decomposing sticks, mud, twigs, feathers, rags that extended to the very depths of the Wawel tower. Which explained why the castle’s wardens were ever having to go to immense expense in the shoring up of that one tower’s blackened limestone walls.

  At the Wawel, the bird was not and never had been a favourite. Included in the nest’s decomposing muck was an assortment of relics, artifacts, mementos, curios, for somewhere along the way a deep sediment of sentimentality had seeped into the bird’s bones. The plunder of forgotten missions. Nyet, nyet, prashoo, the bird thought. No, don’t tell it, please don’t. Leave an old bird his little hang of dignity. Here in his nest, then: a precious gem from the Sandomierz crown of Casimir the Great, which one day he must remember to return; a hinge from St. Leonard’s twelfth-century crypt; a bolt from that same century’s famous Gniezno Doors; a lamb’s ear belonging to the statue of St. John the Baptist at Wroclaw Cathedral, 1160; a stone from the Monument of Three Eagles at Majdanet in Lublin; the right thumb of the Madonna of Kruzlowa, 1410. And more still: stained-glass slithers, sarcophagi detritus, fossilized bones, warrior anklets, chains, marble fragments, a yellowing, once white robe with red cross and shield worn six hundred years ago by a Livonian Brother of the Sword; worm-eaten woodcuts, gold-threaded capes worn by kings, hair from the very head of Ladislaus the Short. A thousand buttons, a dead soldier’s rags, a dead gypsy’s sweat-scarf, a kit bag, a peasant’s formless shoe – a disintegrating page from Goethe’s diary, blown from Germany, the bird supposed, by an uncaring wind.

  In that part of the aerie where the bird was likely to defecate, to leak his bladder dry, to storm and rage and puke his bile, were scattered more recent acquisitions; he had lately been applying the eagle-researcher’s eye, following leads. Roaming afar, smitten with a collector’s zeal. His holdings now amounted almost to a specialty – his holocaust wing, as he thought of it. Nazi paraphernalia, anti-Semitic tripe, by and large. The racist tracts, books, diatribes, memorandi, doggerel of the true cartographers of bile. Chamberlain, Gobineus, Stöcker, Bernhard Föster, Julius Langbehn, J.F. Fries, Alfred Rosenberg, together with the urine-soaked, rotting words of Dr. F.K. Günther, Hitler’s major theorist and apostle for racial purity. A tooth from Mengele’s jaw, taken by force from that silver-haired merchant of death. Calcimined pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purporting to be the proceedings of a Jewish congress in which was plotted an international conspiracy meant to overthrow Christianity and terminate with the whole civilized world under Jewish control. A 1905 work of the Soviet secret police, but since revised at irregular intervals by Aryan legionnaires for dispersement around the globe. Hitler’s favoured paper Volkischer Beöbachter, complete with doodles.

  The city bird at the moment, however, is not in his nest in the Wawel’s high tower. Today he has taken to the country. An excursion borne out of despair and fatigue and pure fancy. He has come here to Messkirch – this little burg in Germany – on a whim, and against his better judgement. Call it, he has said to himself, a dare. Tell me I have not lost all my marbles.

  He has arrived in Messkirch, where Heidegger, the famous philosopher, is today being buried.

  Immediately upon arrival, the bird has invited trouble. The moment he entered the German skies, he cried out in full voice: “Poland! Eternal Poland! You Volkspeöple! Psssst! A plague of boils on your house!” And laughed so hard he all but piled into a haystack when a pair of German civilians – farmers, from the look of them – tooting along a road in an open car, shouted a slew of obscene Polish jokes up at him.

  Humiliating, these three-point landings.

  Hard on an old guy’s beak.

  Someone on his way to the philosopher’s funeral, spotting the eagle nursing his wounds by the haystack, had given the old bird a second glance and yet a third. Is that a chicken or is it an eagle? It came to this person how appropriate it would be to bury the bird with the old Nazi in his coffin. After all, Heidegger was something of an eagle himself. He had pounced where others did not, had invented his own language, recast his field’s traditional laws, founded new schools, flaunted his powers – had flown above all others.

  Come along then, this person told the eagle, if you’ve nothing better to do.

  Meanwhile, not far from the crowded site where the old philosopher would soon be lowered into the cold ground, a dog – certainly a Deutschland dog – was moving through the cemetery, stopping to piss upon every leaning stone. Marking, in its daily way, its territory, and gradually expanding that terrain in graduations befitting its own imperialistic doctrines. With faint regard for how many other dogs, or lesser infinities, might have pissed there. A thinking dog, even a philosophical dog, aware, perhaps of its own mortality and destiny.

  Moss. Moss, the dog found, was so attractive.

  The bird watched the dog, feeling a kinship of sorts. The eagle knew the dog’s eventual destination. It admired the dog. The dog took a similar trail each day, often twice a day. The dog must visit her dead master’s grave, being that kind of dog. So in this way at least, at some level, the dog was aware of her own mortality, though without setting any great store by it. The dog nosed the stones, paused to hike a leg and splash its water. The eagle understood this. The dog was his kind of dog. The dog did not return each day to her dead master’s tomb in the expectation that the old fool would be risen from the grave, to rub the dog’s head and thump t
he dog’s belly. The dog wasn’t a fool herself, but a creature of habit, and habit, in this instance, was but the route to her ultimate destiny.

  The dog, in turn, regarded the eagle. This big, ugly bird. And eyed the streaks of – what was it, red gravy? – that leaked from the old eagle and dabbled onto the bough of the tree where the bird now rested. Aromatic stuff, I’ll have it à la carte, the dog thought. Garçon, a table, please! Yes, it would be nice to lap at something. Essence of Pole would be what that was. On second thought, maybe I’ll pass. Essence of Pole might be asking too much of a Deutschland dog’s fickle stomach.

  Ah, me.

  Another long boring day.

  The dog took a quick 360-degree turn in place, swinging her tail if only for the hell of it. Swish, swish. Then plopped back to her haunches – nosing, licking the grass. “That dasien fellow’s passed on to his reward,” the dog suddenly said. The wind wrinkled the dog’s nose. A-choo! she said.

  “What? What’s that? Speak up.”

  Up at the funeral site affairs were moving along. Work in a eulogy or two, the dog thought, yeah, yeah. Bow-wow. She flicked her ears, hearing a cough from her old master below. Ten years under solid earth, ten years with the rot in him, and still her master had that ragged cough. Too many cigarettes, too much schnapps, too much coffee and cake. Too much stress hiding his Jew origins, the dog supposed. “Yes,” the dog said. “That dasein rogue who put this burg on the map, he’s gone.” Stillness, silence, from below. The faint whisper of creaking bones. The old coot was listening, sure enough. It would take his mental powers a while to come around. A lot of rot in that brain.

  The dog didn’t know why it was that she seemed always to address her remarks to her old master’s feet. Maybe because in her lifetime she’d seen so much of them.

  “That philosopher fellow, you know,” the dog said. “Not much else worthy of report.” There was a great deal more she could say, but the master’s interest was confined solely to activities on German soil. That the Palestinian situation was heating up would make him snore. So, too, the military coup in Argentina, the assassination of the U.S. ambassador in Beirut, the South African police killing hundreds of blacks in Soweto.

  “Who?”

  Well, by God, at last the lump had got his senses sorted out.

  This excited the dog, who jumped to her feet and took another complete turn, all the while barking at the ground. Wake up, wake up, do you think I’ve got all day? Then she settled down as before. She’d be slow to respond herself, locked up under wet earth for a decade.

  “Who?” the dog heard. “Not that Nietzsche fellow?”

  Oh, get your wits about you, the dog thought. In the next breath correcting herself. Manners, manners. Mind your manners now. Patience was required. No cause to be so querulous with the fool.

  “I’m listening,” the dead man said. “Give me the full details.”

  So the old rotted one was feeling good today. In his palavering mood, it seemed. It was entertainment his old spirit required.

  “You do remember, don’t you,” the dog said, “what Nietzsche’s dying words were?”

  “Nein. Can’t say as I do. You know how damp and cold it is down here.”

  “‘I am sleeping,’” Nietzsche on his death bed said. ‘“Go away!”’

  The dead man laughed. The dog licked a front paw contemplatively, grinning along with him.

  “Hegel now… you know Hegel?”

  The dead man snorted. Hegel? Of course he knew Hegel. Had Jewish blood, did Hegel. “All power to the state.” Wasn’t that Hegel?

  The dog grimaced, gnawing dirt encrusted on a shin bone.

  “Hegel’s last words were, ‘Only one man ever understood me… and he didn’t understand me.”’

  Chortles from beneath the earth. His dead master was having a good time. Others in their graves were lending their attention to this dialogue. Hegel’s parting words had personal meaning for them, and why should it not? They would not be averse to having epitaphs crooned into their ears all afternoon. But she was a busy dog, much on her burners, for all her dandified posing of leisure.

  The dog watched a butterfly, monarch it was, flit by indecisively, then settle on a nearby stone. A pretty thing.

  “Or there was this dog I knew. We put this over his stone: ‘Never young, never old, never smart either. Now just dead.”’

  His dead master said nothing to this. Around him, the dog felt the rest of the dead relax back into their timeless comas. Dog stories did not interest them. They had brief attention spans. The wind blew. Damp. Likely it would rain before nightfall. The dog looked to find the monarch but the monarch was gone. Monarchs had no interest in dog stories either. They were interested in other monarchs and this one was likely caught up in the derringdo of the ten thousand mile migratory flight it soon would be induced to take. Such flimsy things. You’d think they’d hardly be able to reach the corner store.

  There was wailing up by the funeral site. Elfriede at full-throttle.

  Well, the dog thought, grief will out.

  “That’s it?” the dog heard his dead master say. His voice sounded like coins rattling in a tin cup. “That’s all you have for me today? That’s all that has transpired of consequence? You’re telling me I’m not missing much.”

  They chortled together for a time over that. The dog’s old master, alive, had not been unknown for his garden-variety jokes.

  “How’s the wife and children,” the dead man asked. “They getting along?”

  The dog shuddered, having no reply for this. His dead master’s memory was memory of a convenient sort. He’d turned his wife over to the Gestapo for being a Jew. His children as well. He hadn’t known she was a Jew, he claimed, when they had wed. They had all been ovenized at Auschwitz. For the husband’s trouble, and his fidelity to the Reich, he had been fitted with a brown suit and, later on, sent to the front, there acquitting himself well.

  “That’s it,” the dog said. “Not much bone in this day.”

  “Yah. The same here.”

  The dog scrambled up, looking around. The wind was rising. Off to the North were storm clouds.

  “My fleas are worse,” the dog said. “If that’s any news. On the flip side, my mange is on the mend.”

  “Hold on now. It’s Nietzsche who’s dead, you say? God knows we don’t need another existentialist in the cemetery.”

  “Nope. Heidegger, this one is. The Being and Time man.”

  “Oh well. No doubt about it. Soon we all will be crowded out. But at least these hallowed grounds are Judenfrei.”

  “Oy! Only you,” some dead voice said, “stinking Jew bastard!” A chorus of other dead German voices joined in the outcry. Even in the grave their racism persisted. But their rage was without steam and silence soon ensured.

  “Auf Wiedersehen, then.”

  “Auf Wiedersehen. Regards to your wife and children.”

  The dog loped away, heavy of foot. The old guy didn’t even remember his faithful cur was a bitch.

  Elfriede presented difficulties. Elfriede, with her clear vision, beheld at once that the bird was little more than a common chicken. A filthy clucker. The clucker was overly large for a chicken, true. And its arrogance was undeniable. Quite unlike a chicken. But the large size, the elaborate beak, was likely explained by the presence of a glandular condition. Since the war, nothing looked like itself any more, not even a chicken. The dear departed, her precious Martie, he had not looked like himself either.

  Elfriede would not allow a common chicken, venerated though it might be in the eyes of some, to share the master’s coffin; that the chicken thought itself an eagle, and some accepted this, did not soften her view. She examined the chicken, or eagle, closely, finding definite Jewish features in the bird’s horny beak, the fractured eyes, the dingy coat, the filthy, monstrous talons. “Take it away,” she said.

  It was with this statement that the real trouble then started.

  Her sons, arriving to remove
the bird, looked up at their mother in alarm when the bird’s beak spurted blood into the palms of their hands. Likewise staining their crisp white sleeves and dribbling over their polished boots.

  Blood? Everyone crowded in, wanting a look at what the general cry said was blood.

  A trait, only, of the Polish eagle. Ergo, what the eagle spewed was the blood of the Polish people.

  This upset more than a few in the assembly, since a Pole’s blood, to speak metaphorically, was on their hands. Or, rather, on Nazi hands, but who here (other than Elfriede, who still was) had been a Nazi? Were they not all innocent? Hadn’t all the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, been carried off by elves? Still, they were German, so the charge could be scarcely viewed as theoretical.

  “Just kick it away,” Elfriede told her sons. “Your father was not overly fond of birds to begin with. I doubt he ever was drawn to note their existence.”

  The boys kicked, and in a show of temper the bird spat blood up and down their new funeral suits. The boys – adult men they were now – picked up sticks, swinging these at their victim, but the old eagle caught the sticks in its jaws, standing pat. They then tried stoning the bird. Despite the crusts over its ancient eyes the bird easily thwarted these attempts, somehow finding strength in its ancient legs, its deformed talons. Some in the crowd knew from this that the chicken truly was an eagle, and a force to be reckoned with, whether Polish or not. An eagle, to some in their number, was a noble bird deserving of respect. They wanted to save it from Elfriede who was scurrying away now, in the securing of a pistol she knew to be hidden under the church floor – having stashed it away there herself during the dark recesses of the war, after Hitler’s death in the bunker, when she and Martin had discussed the benefits and disadvantages of a joint suicide. It had been determined at that time that she would fire the first shot, into his brain, and then turn the weapon on herself. They would do this in a closet, to minimize the mess and spare the children. She had in fact argued that the children should be included in the pact. Martin, on this point, had been clear and upright in his view. The present had less claim on the children, he said. They would mourn, but everyone mourns.