I was telling him how, back in school, I lost consciousness in the gym once. I woke up in the hospital, surrounded by pregnant women and elderly people, waiting patiently like only they can wait. Not much time passed and soon I woke up again, above me were the basketball hoop and my P.E. teacher, telling the paramedics to hurry, screaming that he’s here, right here, and why won’t they fucking move?! At the hospital, they said people faint sometimes, but to make sure they ordered some additional tests. I remember how the doctor said “Well, unfortunately, our suspicions turned out to be correct,” and when I heard that, everything came crashing down.
There were ups and downs. The tedious run to catch a morning train, too much or too little of something, and I’m already gone. I open my eyes, but I can’t see anything. Someone talks to me, and I go “Eh, eh.” I begin to understand that there are pipes and fluorescent lamps running above my head and someone says “Hold it,” and something cold lands on my forehead. I lay on the ground, under the blanket, still in my winter jacket and boots, terrazzo tiles pressed against my cheek. White dots, black dots, gray. I can see somebody’s hand hanging off the stretcher. A lady leans over me and says “Don’t cry, what’s your name, tell me your name,” and I can’t remember. Later, my father shows up, “You blacked out on the bus, they found your ID and called home.” He helps me get out of bed and I’m like jam from a broken jar pouring out of my backpack onto the floor. This is how it was, more or less. This is how I kept trying to run away, tripping all the time, from my first city.
Where I live now, everyone knows everybody else, and when people pass each other on the street, they say “Hello,” because they are either related or at least went to school together. This is my town, historical, built on bones. This town will always be praised because it praises itself. And in the city I come from there’s almost no history left, just a few sandstone tombs and one tower. The rest was either destroyed, flooded, or the wood rotted and didn’t last. Two sandstone tombs and a tower, a few decrepit cars in the museum’s basement, “and the rest is German leftovers” people whispered. People from Opole talked about the history as if only bits and pieces were preserved, only little islands of memory, as if only the Piast dynasty ever reigned there. And if it was a Piast ruler it must’ve been a Pole. Apart from that, only a few moments in history are worth one’s attention: a German, who by definition is an invader, later the Red Army—always victorious—and back to us-ness and to our Poland. That was the official version of history at the time of my escape.
Back in school, we used to go out with our P.E. teacher to wash the monument commemorating Soviet soldiers, to wash their gravestones in return for their saving this hyper-Polish city of Oppeln from the German invaders. Whenever I go to visit Ukraine, to immerse myself in me, when in truth I immerse myself in mendacity, I look at it with a peculiar kind of calmness. I know all the lies by heart, straight from the cement-mill city, the capital of bullshit, where all was of Piast decent and Polish. That’s what they taught us. But in the Silesian plebiscite, and it’s worthwhile to take a closer look at the numbers, over ninety percent of my city said they stood by the Germans, with a little less in the countryside—over seventy percent. No wonder they had to push this bullshit in the schools and newspapers. And so, when I travel to Ukraine and I hear: “Poles, the masters,” “Poles, the butchers” and I see heirs of Stepan Bandera in their black uniforms, marching in the streets, raising their banners with the trident, I know that my grandmother, all my aunts, my grandfather, and his family shudder in their graves, whispering curses. And with them, all of their children and their siblings murdered in Gaje Wielkie shudder and curse too. There are young men in boots, marching with banners bearing something resembling a swastika, always more menacing when speaking in an alien tongue. I see them and I feel ill, but I know that this is how it has to be. To form a nation they have to obliterate all other nations, they have to tell the same, simplified version of history, where you have room only for your own people. They march with their banners and tell the story of a nation that went from rags to riches.
I feel calm when I see this, because I myself used to go with a scrubbing brush to clean bird shit from the monument with the red star. With a circular motion, I soaped the gravestones in the only cemetery in the city that no one in a right mind ever visited. Only the party members paid visits, always on a particular day of a particular anniversary; the anniversary of the liberation of the city, or the Great October Socialist Revolution. And we had to scrub those gravestones and throw away last year’s wreaths, so they wouldn’t be celebrating in a pigsty. “Let’s pay tribute . . . for tomorrow, bring cleaning supplies, detergent, a scrubbing brush, and a bucket.” But in reality, the party chose us because the labor was free, and our school was the closest one.
We washed other monuments, symbols of the Polish Spirit, too. For punishment, or as a reward, they would send me to the park in front of the post-German church. Back then, people said things like that openly, everything was post-something, only lately has language become so impossibly polished, so oily. I was sent there for misdemeanors never proven, so technically, nonexistent—for some vulgar writing on the wall with a crayon. I was sent to scrub Adam Mickiewicz. It was a little bust, but what a shit-magnet. I went there with the same brush, the same bucket I took to tackle the Ruskies. The janitor lady handed out the equipment from her house by the school soccer field. I remember the layout of the place, but I check Google Earth anyway. In a picture taken from space, there’s no janitor’s house anymore, but I can see the windows of the classrooms where I took Polish, chemistry, physics, and geography classes—the last three without success.
And so I get hooked on spying from space, obviously, and I look at Mickiewicz’s bust from above and can see that he is still bothered by the birds. Guano runs from the tip of his head, leaving a white trail that meanders by his nose, turns under his eye and freezes on his cheek. But compared to the old days, he’s relatively clean. “In the memory of the nation’s bard” is what it says on the pedestal. This bard was placed facing the street, with a church in the background. And it’s no coincidence at all as he was supposed to separate the city from the temple.
This was supposed to be my city, because I was born here. But my folks claimed otherwise. They worked, they labored to make ends meet, but neither of them was born here. Every member of my family came from somewhere else, was uprooted and planted again. Post-German hospital, post-German church—I remember the mute rage of our people—people from the East—when they started having church services in German. For many, even several dozen years after the great carnage, it was outrageous. And we’re not talking about masses dedicated to the Waffen-SS, but to our neighbors from around the corner. My people—people from nowhere—settled on the bones of another nation, on the streets and squares named after the heroes of a class warfare that was meaningless to them. There was a street named after Rosa Luxemburg, and other small and quiet streets filled with tenement houses and courtyards—before the war named Damaschkestrasse, and now Lviv Eaglets street, or Lenin’s Square. There were streets named after Julian Marchlewski, Lucjan Szenwald, and the favorite of the masses—Felix Dzerzhinsky. There was a street dedicated to the Red Army, which they cleverly renamed to praise the Home Army. Liebknecht stepped down and Eichendorff stepped in. And Michurin’s street changed to I don’t even know what.
For them, it was a great orbiting of the planets, an endless universe. They left their little patch of land, stepped off the cattle-train cars and stepped onto the streets with German plaques, with houses still filled with Germans, or Silesians, whom they equally disregarded. And then again, once more, everything had to be renamed. There came a parade of Lenins, Michurins, lasting for almost all of their adult lives.
Our people’s attics were spacious and clean—empty spaces without a past. You only entered the attic with good reason. It’s where you’d find coffers reminding of unsuccessful travels, and laundry was dried there on the rainy days.
Silesians’ attics were full, goods were stored in woven baskets, objects spilled over the rims. I could list them for hours, items like the Brockhaus Encyclopedia—mint condition—a sign that things used to be different around here. And it wasn’t about the Germans, but about the era in which the household of C, in whose attic I leafed through the encyclopedia, was a household where people read. Even more, it was a household that felt the need to possess artifacts of the printed word. Multiple prayer books, all in German, useless now, all in different states of decomposition. But you don’t throw things like that away. You can burn them, but it seems like C’s family didn’t dare. No one made use of them since the grandmother died—the last one in the family to speak German and to the very end furious with her grandsons who, even when encouraged by beating, never learned even a few sentences in the language. The posthumous victory of the grandmother, however, was colossal. All thanks to the younger, less talented, grandson. That was the same boy who, two years after a slightly delayed graduation from primary school, came to the school soccer field on his motorcycle and, in an act of revenge for all his humiliations, took a brick and smashed the window of the physics classroom. Both the window and the soccer field I can still see from space. That’s how Waldek was—stubborn. He was the one who would soon present his late grandmother with eternal satisfaction. In the end, he immigrated to Germany and learned to stutter a few sentences in their alien tongue. He didn’t need much more, his work required more muscle than linguistic proficiency.
I look at his old house from space, I glare from above. Waldek himself wouldn’t recognize the place. The old house has evolved into a monstrous manor a couple times larger than what we explored together while lost in the attic, staring at the Bible written in German Gothic, discovering (me—with astonishment, him—with laughter) Hitler’s portrait and his family’s military uniforms, neatly folded: souvenirs of service in the Wehrmacht; discovering old photographs, tired Silesian headscarves—this whole massive collection that clearly stated it was me and all of my people who were alien to the place. And once the time is right, we would be thrown out again.
I remember the soil. It seems a little strange to remember soil, but what can I do? All around the house, the ground would keep exuding scraps, already digested and no longer disgusting. Although peeled of all their meaty pulp after being buried for so long, you still could tell our house was built on top of something. “I brought over so much good, dark soil,” my father kept saying, “and just look what’s going on here!” And so we would pick up whatever it was, or poke it with a stick—the thing found under the apple tree. Among the things we found were bones of farm animals, which I thought was normal, because we always found them, but my father was perpetually surprised, always shaking his head, uneasy and fearing that it would never end. Rags, pieces of clothing bleached colorless, parts of—I don’t know—furniture, wood and metal shrapnel polished by the subterranean undertows—it was all expelled from the organism, as if underground frictions pushed everything up to the surface. We stood by my neighbors’ fence, right where the compost box used to be in this not yet perfect, empty garden. It was a garden that years later would become exuberant with artificial ponds, covered with little rocky, flowery hills. It would spread and would be constantly limited from spreading too much. We stood there and before us was a bone, cleaned by something of all its meat. Sometimes, the edge of something buried would stick out, and later a larger part of what it was would be revealed, some handle maybe, a part of a washbasin, the metal bucket’s bottom with a crown of rust. Glass was the worst because you could get cut. There was no grassy carpet yet to protect your feet from broken bottles the color of pale green or dirty brown, camouflaged and hidden between lumps of soil. Father kept bending over, always bending over, to collect those objects spat out by the earth. “Look” he said, counting all the horse-carts of soil he traded for vodka or money. “Here, I dumped half a meter, or maybe even a meter, I don’t remember, there was so much of it. And look! Things still come out.”
Our house is built on what used to be a dump, right behind the last garden of German houses in the new town. Those who came afterward, as if to be ridiculed, had to live on a dump, in the Oder River floodplain, or right by the cemetery. The city expanded, devouring villages and fields. And beneath our house all was busy, buzzing, and I kept imagining what richness had gathered, over time, under the concrete slab of our foundations. I thought about the day when all of it would finally flex its muscle, the surge would rise and rip the concrete, barging inside the basement; a wave of trash on which my parents built their lives, or rather had their lives built by a collective of drunks, thieves, and sons of bitches. I imagined these tensions, pressures under the thin skin of the earth, effects of which I’ve seen every day in the garden. “Why on the dumpsite?” I kept asking, “Wasn’t there any better place?” They mumbled some excuses. I didn’t understand yet, that it was all there was, that any other choices were only in my head. That was all they had. And they were happy with it, my father, my mother—children of the displaced, the displaced themselves. That was their journey, from dreams about the better future, commenced back in the East, through the bloody harvest in Aunt Janka’s room, through cattle cars filled with belongings lost along the way, to the slow growth of the roots in the ground, which wasn’t even ground, but a landfill mix of rotting particles covered by a thin layer of soil. Other members of my clan ended up inhabiting the old apartments—shells—still warm from the exiled German snails. “Is it really surprising?” I thought to myself in my narrow bed on a narrow Swedish island, over the beating of the wind and rain on my not-so-tightly sealed window. “Can anyone really wonder about their calcification? Can I really be surprised they invest all the money they make in their houses on that dump; houses which they’ve turned into an oasis?”
We were driving through Budapest; somewhere past Kecskemét we started anxiously looking for a rest stop, for strong coffee. It seemed like it was going to be an all-night drive. At first the road was empty, but suddenly the surge of cars washed over us and we found ourselves in the middle of a giant shoal. You could spot plates from Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria, but they were clearly traveling together. It felt like a reunion of people from the same village who happened to meet in the middle of a highway and decided to keep each other company—everyone with a car completely loaded up, with chairs and tables on their roofs. Three generations, sometimes four, traveled together in one car. All Turks. They were headed home, I guess, because it was hard to call it a holiday destination. Regardless of their passports, their home is always there and if my family would’ve lived in different times, modern ones, they would probably do the same: go back and forth between the new home and the old one. But now what? All they are left with is pacing sadly from wall to wall, from house to garden, trapped, as if in a jar stored at the bottom of an old wardrobe.
We tried stopping at different gas stations, but we couldn’t stop at any of them because there was not a single empty spot, as if Hungary had become too small, as if they’d ran out of space for even one more car, as if that would take it over the limit. The Turks parked randomly, according to their liking, and usurped every parking space, every pit stop. Even the truck drivers couldn’t fit, so they parked on the highway. They not only took over the parking lots, but parked right next to the gas tank, at the exits, on the lawns, everywhere: three, four, five rows of cars. They took over the cafe, restrooms, those lawns, and playgrounds. Collectively, they occupied the bathrooms, they shaved and brushed their teeth, they stood in their T-shirts in front of splashed mirrors. An old man raised his foot to the sink with both hands, his leg plowed thoroughly with varicose veins. You could tell he was on the cusp, that he wouldn’t make it much longer. They prayed on their little carpets, between the restrooms and a dumpster. Two women wrapped in towels smoked cigarettes and scolded their children in German in the beer garden. The Turkish women of a new era, raised in German freedom, among dozens, hun
dreds of other Turkish women dressed all in black. Others gathered inside the bar, pulling out food from containers, pouring coffee from thermoses, and the service people had long ago given up. They stopped cleaning, stopped making remarks—there was no point. This Turkish deluge was like a wall. It was here and had no intention of moving anywhere else or assimilating. There were hundreds of bundled-up people, mostly elderly, resting on the lawns. The younger generation gathered around their cars. In the past they probably gathered around their horses, patted them on the side, praised their virtues, how they shined, their color, appreciated how well kept they were, how their teeth were still white and not yet abraded. Now they were sitting all together, puffing their pipes, a Turk from Germany helping a Turk from the Netherlands, and while according to the passports it’s a German helping a Dutch, it’s a sham and they know it. These are all Turks sitting around their cars, praising their own rides, checking the suspension, because something’s dented and screeching. They are like neighbors from the same village, neighbors separated only by a short fence, even though in reality they are separated by a number of borders. Even when in Turkey they live on two different continents.
Those who were thrown among the Turks by accident kept warning one another. They would call each other from the border and say: “They’re here, run, the customs officer said 30 kilometers up north it’s still clean.” Massive bird migrations, locusts, only these come to mind. Black, screaming flocks of birds hovering over cities when it’s cold. They circle the city and have nowhere to land. These Turks look the same, freezing before dawn, exhausted, they push forward to their distant villages in cars that they prepped to look like new. But even in the dark of night you can tell they aren’t. So they ride and when they stop to rest they pray for safe travels, and there is a lot to pray for. That’s why they feel better as a group, as if they were afraid to be on their own. So they go, the Turkish court, the Turkish nation in exile. And they carry their mosque inside them, or maybe they’ve already forgotten about their mosque. They go till they can’t go anymore. They build huge camps on the borders, and the closer they get to home, the more anxious and impatient they get. The customs of migratory species always evoke awe and astonishment. It’s enough to say: “Sargasso Sea” and the perpetum mobile of imagination is unleashed. It’s a peculiar sea anyway, always on the move, without concrete land borders, locked between currents. It is a prison on a vast open expanse, so naturally it invites myths like no other place. Here, similarly, the highway and its infrastructure are the sea and it’s enough to step aside to see the kingdom on the move, the sultanate of outcasts loaded with tourist equipment and blue portable refrigerators. This is how Turkish eels swim back to their sea, to their nest.
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