I went to the almost-empty restaurant, just me and two other young men in suits, from whose table an avalanche of stories about money kept rolling my way. The owner’s son played the role of waiter: he would approach to ask if we needed anything, but we only wanted to sit for a little while with our tea. The cook watched a game on TV in the back, the waiter was bored and soon fell asleep behind the bar; he’d wanted to close for some time now. I was overcome with pain; I could barely sit. I kept counting: how many steps left to the hotel, how many floors to the room, how many hours till morning. Outside there were no cars, no pedestrians—there was just a great silence covered in snow, interrupted only by seagulls. The artificial city, rebuilt in its own image, and wherever men lost their zeal to rebuild they left deep holes looming in the ground. They had been looming like that since I can remember. The snow-covered city waited for its Huns, who come back every summer to take possession of the streets. To kill time, they listened to the radio, and on the radio the city felt alive, as if they were talking about a completely different place. Anyway, at least nobody was in the downtown area; it was silent and you could hear only those seagulls. Taxi drivers kept listening about the accidents, road blocks, about this complex organism, a wild termitary. In the meantime, from above, from a plane, you could see empty spaces, land turning into sea, both gray and under a layer of snow.
I had come here every year since I can remember. We would walk the same streets, as if only to see what had changed. From the train station, through the underpass, on the right a music store, past the store a right turn, a deli, a tower; in the market hall we looked in awe at the smoked eels and all the merchandise from forbidden worlds, and finally the city made of reinforced concrete, not Danzig, or Gdańsk anymore, but its fairly faithful copy created out of the need for continuity. A lie made of concrete and brick, half a hole in the ground and half houses almost identical with the original, but flat like modern apartment buildings, with crooked carpentry, a mix of local baroque and social realism. The old town in my own city was the same, leveled to the ground in 1945 and later rebuilt.
“Rebuilding” is a key word in my part of the world, similar to other words like “war,” “besieged,” “murder,” like “liberation,” “exile,” “escape,” like “cemetery” and “displacement,” like “Regained Territories” and “post-German houses.” Here, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out to be fake, not original, a couple dozen years old at the most. Gdańsk was one of those spots on the map, also Wrocław—a field of rubble, Warsaw, of course, and later Berlin and Dresden, also Nuremberg. Or the castle on the island in Troki, a masterpiece of forgery, taller with every passing year, and newer. The first time I was there it was merely a ruin among the bushes; the last time I visited it stood tall and brand new in the middle of Troki’s frozen lake on which cars and horse-drawn carriages kept driving back and forth in the cold of March; so similar to Malbork and other places like that, rebuilt from scratch. These cities, those places need the cover of snow to hide their architectural absurdities. They came into being because of the belief in continuity, in a thread connecting then with now. That’s where my distrust of other cities comes from—cities better equipped with souvenirs, cities spared by misfortune or simply indifferent to the Middle Ages, taking down their remains without a blink of an eye—my distrust of Paris with its mad builder and demolition expert, Count Haussmann, with its crazy mayors, or to a lesser extent, my distrust for nineteenth century Krakow, leveling its moats, taking down its city walls and towers. There was an obligation in me, in us, to sit in all the churches until the last painting was seen and immediately forgotten. There was a need to ride across the world along the thread unwound by the Baedeker.
I came back to the hotel and spent the rest of the night in a torpor. On our way to the airport we didn’t see a single car. The taxi driver was listening to the blasting radio, and on the radio the city felt surprisingly alive again, completely different from what was outside our windows, impossible to recognize.
A thousand and a few odd years ago, precisely in the year 997 A.D., Christ’s juggernaut, the bishop of Prague, Adalbert, also known as Wojciech, visited Gdańsk, the name of which in the first recorded account was “Gyddanyzc,” and according to one of hagiographers of the nineteenth century, Father Piotr Pękalski, “doctor of the holy theology, canon, guardian of the holy tomb of Christ”: “The merciful God had blessed his arrival because the people crowded for the baptism and he, while conducting the mass, made an offering of Christ to God the Father, to whom he was soon to offer himself. From here, he decided to set out to Eastern Prussia; that is why the next day after the mass, with tears in his eyes, he bid farewell to the converted and, giving them a blessing, he boarded a ship with his retinue and headed toward the mouth of the Vistula River, toward the open sea, and soon disappeared from their sight forever.”
It’s a beautiful story, a prequel to all the heart-wrenching movies, St. Wojciech—Adalbert—my namesake and my patron, I hope, departs on a boat in the company of Brother Radzim and Priest Benedict, in other sources known as Bogusz, never to come back again. It is well known what fate awaits him. He dreamt his fate and the dream foretells the future, the truth, because his hand can heal others and his dreams become reality. He keeps on going, and says about himself: “I am a Slav. My name is Wojciech. Once, a bishop, now a friar, and by God’s inspiration your Apostle. Your salvation is the reason for my journey, so that you shall abandon your idols and know your Creator, who himself is the only God, and you shall have no gods before him; so that you believe in His name and live eternally and earn a reward in the eternal house of heaven.”
Not everyone, however, has ears for a speech so sweet, since, as the hagiographer claims, “Once Wojciech exclaimed those very words, the rabid plebeians started to hurl profanities, cursing him and God alike; the very God whom he had come to herald. Greatly aggravated, they threatened him with death; baffled, they beat their clubs against the ground, swung them above their heads and in rage they screamed: ‘You’re lucky, you’ve come so far without punishment, but if you don’t leave immediately you shall die here soon. Only one law and only one custom reigns over us and over this entire country, at the very end of which we live. You, who abide by a different law alien to us, if you don’t leave this very night you shall die tomorrow.’” And they stayed, and Wojciech died.
“But the vile perpetrators,” Thietmar, the unmatched Bishop of Merseburg notes, “committed a crime even greater, and earned a punishment from God of an even greater magnitude. Upon seeing Wojciech dead, they threw his holy corpse into the sea; his head they stuck on a pole to ridicule him and, cheering, returned to their abodes.” A similar fate met Bruno of Querfurt, toward whom I feel an affinity because, like me ten centuries later, he traveled in the valley of the Tisa and Mureș Rivers and on top of that has recorded the life of St. Wojciech. Thietmar recounts: “In the twelfth year of his pious, eremite life he traveled to Prussia, and with the seed of God tried to fertilize its barren soil, but the thorns made his toil hard. When on the fourteenth of February [of 1009] he was preaching the gospel of God at the border of this country and the Kievan Rus, the villagers forbade him, and when he kept on preaching, they captured him and for loving Christ, who is the head of the Church, they cut off his head, the peaceful lamb, and the heads of his eighteen fellow travelers.”
I came back to Gyddanyzc, a city I had remembered differently, which I thought was more blue collar and Eastern—after all, somebody had to fill in the gap left by the exiled, and who better for the job than my countrymen, always ready to squeeze into the void because they’re deprived of their own space. I found myself back in the city after a few years of absence; this time I rebuilt it my own way. I wove history, not stone. I enrich my Gdańsk with St. Wojciech, the burning torch, my patron saint, and with his arrival on the boat, along with about thirty armed men on their way toward death.
Bishop Wojciech was a Czech misfit who abandoned his herd because they wo
uldn’t listen. Thietmar notes in his chronicle that: “When toiling to make his sheep obey God’s commandments, he could not avert them from the sins of past barbarity, and thus excommunicated them all.” That’s how he was, my namesake. He would abandon an idea for, as he thought, a better one. One minute a bishop and a townsman, a shepherd of his herd and its leader, although against his will, and the next minute a pilgrim on the way to Jerusalem, then a friar on Monte Cassino, and then a bishop again, then a pilgrim once more, and on and on. His life wasn’t easy, although his biographers did everything to make it straightforward and snow-white pure.
Wojciech, later a martyr and a saint, came to Gdańsk by boat. He had to sail on the Vistula River, and I wonder what villages he passed by and how it looked back then. Water everywhere, everywhere I go, the Dnieper River, the Dniester and Ganges, the Cheremosh and Tisa, the Neman River and Oder, the Vistula, the După and Seine, the Neris and Vilnia, the Atlantic Ocean and Baltic Sea, a puddle and snow. Everything blends, waters run down. Travel by water, travel in the winter. We are sailing the same boat with the bishop, death awaiting us at the end.
The flood of 1997 robbed the Opole zoo of its animals. Even the hippopotamus drowned. I read about it in the newspaper and it was one of thousands of pieces on the great deluge and the losses, about the heroism and misery, all kitschy and in the same grim tone, to the point where even the world sports sections seemed to belong to a universe in the midst of a cataclysm; to the point where you wanted to wall yourself off and stop listening. This one hippopotamus seemed to me like an unnecessary casualty. All around you could hear people complaining, the people who built their houses in the areas known for flooding, residents of the blocks of flats built on floodplains, as if surprised that the river took that particular area. The hippopotamus was different, he drowned on the sidelines, just like that. He drowned even though he was an aquatic animal.
I imagine a different version: if the hippopotamus were to survive and keep swimming, freed from his enclosure by the water, his terrifying bulk—terrifying now since he’d no longer be sequestered behind a moat and iron bars, looking like the living dead, evoking pity and disgust—swimming and baring his yellow teeth, like he used to do in his outdoor enclosure, there would probably be a huge hunt for him—firemen, hunters, and veterinarians would board a ship, the same tour ship with a puppet show I used to go on as a child, on a mission to tranquilize him or kill him, depending on the circumstances. From the mourned-over hippopotamus, he would turn into a killer beast that needs to be immediately tracked down and shot for the sake of safety. TV stations, radio, and the newspapers would abandon their teary tone and report as if it was a safari. But that never happened. The hippopotamus drowned in his cage on Bolko Island, named that way for everybody to remember that these grounds are of Piast decent, and the hippopotamus’s bloated body confirmed the zoo’s downfall, just as the heaps of rags, furniture, and rotting plants releasing an asphyxiating stench confirmed the downfall of the city, its suffering and suicidal shortsightedness.
That trip completely washed away the menagerie of my childhood, the island of unhappiness that I liked to visit. I observed peacocks with their fan-like tails, strolling along the paths. I drew tapirs with their weird noses curled down like trunks, and monkeys in their concrete bunker with shelves and an old tire-swing on a chain, where there was always someone cleaning in vain because the stench was unrelenting. I watched the zookeepers moving from cage to cage, bringing in food, just a simple technical supervision over the matters of animals; that was their role and nothing more.
The flood was the second death of that zoo. The first—and total one—happened, unsurprisingly, during the war. (The zoo died once from the fire and once from the water—a fair balance). The first death never even crossed my mind; I simply didn’t pause to think about the history of that real-life bestiary. I thought it was there forever. I know only some basic facts and I can only imagine the rest.
The year the flood came, the summer was hot and everything rotted exceptionally fast. The city was under the threat of plague, so the ground in front of houses was sprinkled with lime, and smoke rose everywhere from hastily burned belongings, from rotten furniture and wallpaper peeling off the walls. The fetor clogged the noses, stuck to bodies and wouldn’t go away even after a bath. Strangers showed me their most intimate wounds: empty rooms, once filled with furniture, the water line sometimes close to the ceiling of the first floor and the void which filled them. Piled in front of the blocks of flats were jars with jam and compote, zealously gathered in basements, but now waiting for the garbage collectors. The entire city was rotting and rusting, useless boats stood on almost dried up streets; there was a camping trailer lying on its side at the evangelical cemetery. The Oder River and Ulga Canal were much broader than during even the rainiest summers; huge pieces of driftwood, roofs, and carcasses kept floating down. In the middle were two lines of trees. They looked like posts marking a mountain path when there’s a heavy snowfall. Where the trees were, there used to be riverbanks.
It reminded me of a flood from years before which, back then, was called the flood of the century, but the next flood in the same century was soon to take over that boastful title. We were camping, it rained every day, and life grew limited to patching holes in the tents, and moving to the higher, semi-dry spots. We were awaiting the end of rain, which refused to come. Puddles grew into ponds with grass rotting at their edges. The kitchen stood right next to the creek that had momentarily turned into a river. The water took away a little bridge and there was no passage to town or anywhere else. Then the pond turned into a muddy sea and people wondered not how to find water, but how to escape it. Although there was an abundance of water, you couldn’t use any of it. As a sign of ultimate defeat in the place of an old ford, where only a week earlier you could safely cross, was the carcass of a dead goat stuck in some tree branches, bloated to its limits like bagpipes mockingly overfilled with air.
While reading about the hippopotamus, I remembered that monstrously bloated goat and wondered how this hippo looked after a few days in the sun.
We were on our way to Zhytomyr, a convulsive ride on the back roads and then farther south, to Moldova. The town of Rivne was on our way, and was just like all the other towns there, filled with numb people standing at the bus stops with bouquets of flowers and bags of sunflower seeds for sale. Just outside town was a zoo, which is always good for entertainment if there’s nothing interesting around for hundreds of kilometers and all there is to do is to make sure people coming back from the store at night won’t suddenly jump in front of your car.
The path in the Rivne zoo immediately reminded me of how, many years earlier, somewhere in India, but I can’t recall the name of the city now, I went to another zoo. It was one of those scorching hot days with no hope for rain, when rivers shrink to the size of creeks and you don’t really know what to do with yourself. Sweat runs down your face and burns your eyes with salt. The only thought you have is to go back home, immediately, or at least to a hotel. I went to the zoo because I was bored and because in my mind crossing the country turned into a vast network of connections, rides on the train and bus, and a chain of cheap hotels. All the rest—landscapes, people—evaporated. I also went there because I was curious, because everything there was different from what I’d known, although what about their caged animals could be different from ours, what could be the difference between visitors here and there?
There, in India, I often felt as if I were the one on the other side of the bars because there would be an elephant crossing the street, or a rattlesnake stopping in the middle of the path in the park, or camels running in the south of the country; running on their thin, spidery legs with that bulge in their joints, their legs so different from any other legs—and so they would run, dragging a cart, climbing sand dunes, rising up and then coming down, as if riding on a wave. And I stood frozen on the train tracks and couldn’t hear the train coming, so it had to whistle at me and
brake. In their zoo the paths were flat, only beaten ground, not a single blade of grass, and many more people than animals. Everyone was smoking, eating, throwing trash and cigarette butts into the cages. Apathetic animals lay far away, as far away from humans as possible. Everyone wanted to take pictures, show the animal to a child, but there was no way because the cages were small, like a rabbit hutch, and only two or three people from the entire crowd could see anything. And the inside, even though there was so little space, appeared almost empty. Someone managed to find a broom and kept poking the puma to take a picture of if with a child—a live puma and not some dead one by the wall. The noise was penetrating. I didn’t even want to watch, I remember, I wanted to sit on a bench, but there were no empty ones. I left. I kept telling myself that it was so completely different in my city. I found consolation in that. These sights are for somebody without experience, like the first visit to a slaughterhouse, when the mechanics of animal insides still seem dark and repulsive.
And yet, years later, in Rivne, so close to home, it looked exactly the same. Only the surroundings were more familiar, because the grass was green and there were hills instead of a desert-like landscape. But the small zoo was identical, and there were too many people, equally loud and throwing lumps of dirt at the animals to bring them back to life for their home movies, because back there it was the time of photographs and here it was already the time of video cameras. Teenagers were wearing knock-off Adidas sneakers, sweats, beige pants with a prominent crease; young boys left alone to run free made noise with their toy guns, but the raccoons and foxes ignored them. They were sprawled on the ground as if their spirit had abandoned them. Newlyweds paced the lawns for their wedding videos because there is nothing more interesting in all of Rivne; Rivne is the capital of provincial numbness, so they go and shoot their video at the zoo. They stop by the pines in their shiny suits and meringue-like dresses and kiss shyly, following the directions of the movie guy who shouts “One more, one more time, now to the left, not this way, that way, by the birch!” and behind them in cages, the animals. It’s not about the animals anyway. I know because I’ve seen movies like that, there are plenty of them on the Internet: the movie is about the people and their costumes. Sometimes the cages in this zoo were peculiarly fragile, more like goat or sheep pens, but instead—they held a predator. And sometimes the cages were built as if for a rhinoceros, double walled, and a bear, clearly mad from the heat, from people, would pace in circles, not paying attention to anything, ready to crash against the wall, but always turning around at the last moment. The other bear would be sitting inert. It did not react to being sprayed with sodas, to cigarette butts thrown down from the path. It just sat, hostage to this bullshit correctional house for animals. And the more insane the animals acted, the better you could smell their near end on them, and the more vicious people got.
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