Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  From the hills, all of Belgrade seems to be entirely white and waving; Belgrade, like a stone sea, luxury at its center, serving professionally brewed coffee straight from Italy, reading books in a coffee shop and eating cookies. Up close, Belgrade seems covered with filth, worn thin and cheap, even though it’s indisputably magnificent. Belgrade—you can see it when you wander between its buildings—is proud of its grandeur, shines with its massive bulk, and yet is falling to pieces at the same time. There’s a policeman standing by the pothole at the crossing, eating a pleskjavica bun filled with meat, and watching a high-voltage cable because the trolleybus pantograph has come off the wire. All the shoes at the shoemaker’s are the same—black—as if any other style was forbidden. There are new buses on the streets, but the red trams screech as if they were about to fall apart, still remembering different times, a different country. People meet by the river, recalling their glory days over beer, talking about the country whose citizens they used to be; a country that is now gone, and what’s left—nothing, pitiful remains. One says to me, full of bitterness and pride: “When I was a kid, you were the poor ones.” That’s what he says and he keeps drinking his beer. He keeps listing old privileges, benefits, “and now what?” And I don’t know what to tell him.

  I tried to tell my family how I wandered day and night around Delhi; I would begin at the edge of the merchants’ district and would go farther and farther, catching glimpses of the insides of the shrines, houses; inside offices, trying to communicate with people one way or another. I would walk around and keep asking myself the only questions I was interested in back then, mainly: what am I doing here, why did I come here, where in my head is the beginning of this journey? I walked in circles between the new and the old town. I went to see what was in the bookstores. There were books about the British legal system, several used Harlequin romance novels, a few out-of-date guidebooks, most likely supplied by the hotel owners—trash left by tourists; nothing interesting, but at least they were within the realm of the known. The rest of the city didn’t seem familiar in any way: walls splattered with red betel vines, as if it was blood; the days were too long, too sunny, I had vertigo and the fear of falling somewhere, unconscious, or that I would get lost for good. I hated this city, damn Delhi, an open sewer reeking of human waste, a rotting organism exposed to the sun. Back then, I didn’t know any other place more poisoned than this ant hill, and I was haunted by the fear of a place where everybody was too close to one another, glued together.

  In the old town the smells were more poignant, more stimulating, and nothing in-between: the sharp smell of ammonia, of rotting, of cooking oil, and on top of that various spices, chili, cumin, ginger, and the smell of poorly tanned leather, of shit, of ambergris, of incense. It was an endless parade of smells; after a while it all starts to flow together, it’s easy to forget which smells are good and which are bad. The new town was less dazzling: just exhaust, asphalt, and dust. The old town was dilapidating before our very eyes, but also as if it were tied with twine, glued with spit and word of honor, and covered with cow shit to better hold it together. Out there, people prayed with zeal, ate gluttonously all day long, bartered and slept on the streets. In the old town, skinny, muscled types kept running rickshaws and smoking hashish, shooting heroin, drinking local brandy—that was their fuel. They had no access to the new town because it was supposed to be modern and blocked poverty right at its gates.

  I was standing at the Connaught Place, in the heart of New Delhi, and reminiscing about my first airplane flight some twenty years before. I was flying on a ticket in my brother’s name; those were still the days before having to take off your shoes and belt. You simply showed your passport at one checkpoint, then your ticket at the gate, and you were ready to go. But flying was still a novelty back then, not like today when it became more like a ride on a tram. In Paris, there were announcements hanging on the “wailing wall” of the Polish church: three workers for tomorrow, this or that kind, a job off the books for people from the East. There were also offers: one ticket for a male, will sell by the end of December; by next week, a ticket for m and f, urgent—at the airport, it was enough if the genders matched. The interior of the plane smelled a little bit; “We apologize,” the stewardess said, “we had a rough flight this way,” as if the flight itself was a disease.

  That’s what I was thinking about at Connaught Place, the socalled jewel of the capital, but overgrown with betel, filled with hackers and spitters as if it was a hospital tuberculosis ward. This square was just like the airplane I had my first flight on—seemingly wonderful, but ultimately a smelly and corroded machine; the ugliest plane at the entire airport. Failed sparks of genius: a square like a palace inherited after the British, and a flying machine from our part of the world—that is what I had before my eyes and on my mind.

  Entire families lived on the sidewalks at the edge of the new town. I kept passing one such family every day. She—in complete disarray; her kids unconscious, scattered all around. Her man worked as a rickshaw driver, but mostly smoked heroin; sometimes he would lie naked like a slab of meat. He had his eyes open, but he couldn’t see anything. That’s why he was smoking, to cut off the mental electricity and sail away. Mother India is extremely skilled at shutting down your higher sensibilities. It teaches you to get rid of an intruder, pass by families like that one quickly and without a word—the families who were stopped at the entrance to the wide streets and lawns as if by an invisible gate.

  “Mother India is a whore,” I kept thinking to myself, “What am I doing here anyway, where did I get this need to come here?” To get lost somewhere, to hibernate—that’s all I wanted at that point; to sleep, read for hours, not to think too much. I was standing at the Rajiv Chowk station and dreaming about disappearing for hours, shutting down; a restart. Poof, and I’m gone.

  In Sighetu Marmației—though the city has many more names, in German, Yiddish, Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, and Ukrainian; after all, Ukraine is right over the border—so, in Syhot—let’s stick with the Polish name—I stayed in many different places, and I don’t remember all of them. Most often I stayed in a hotel in the middle of the city—Hotel Coroana, formerly Tisa, and even earlier Korona—with faux leather armchairs on the landing, and ashtrays with fig plants right next to them. From the street level, or rather from the square—the main square of Syhot—city’s colorful; huge windows of the hotel’s restaurant, some repurposed barracks in the back, the cook’s assistants walking across a plank laid over a puddle of mud to go peel the potatoes. That’s how it is in Syhot, that’s how I remember it. From the street it still looks so-so, Mr. Fix-it is standing on a ladder, slapping paint all over the plaster wall; go through the gate, walk past the bumpy courtyard, and then the concrete begins; slanted balconies, overgrown gardens—as if it all belonged to everyone and to no one at the same time. Exposed to inclement weather, weeds grown into the stone, and moss and humidity are impossible to keep away. The city shrinks with every step. Right around the corner from the main square are communal blocks of flats with broken windows, children playing on an abandoned sofa. It was just like the city I used to live in; just like behind the basalt snake of Wiejska Street. Just like in its pre-war neighborhoods of houses, decent tenement houses with sturdy, but slightly dented floors; like in those apartments filled with fate’s rejects, drunkards unloading anger on their children, wives, and dogs; just like in those houses where there’s never enough money and the dominant smell is that of moldy and stale cooking oil. I knew all of that, but here—it was different, happier, and somewhat racy. There was firewood neatly piled for winter outside the blocks of flats. Tenants had knocked holes into the external wall to run the stove pipes outside; the whole wall was black from smoke. This is how you heat your apartment in the winter here because the walls are thin and windows are drafty. There’s a doghouse at the entrance to the stairwell. The dog barks at outsiders, its chain digging into its neck. In place of a lawn are shanties, little garages made
of wood and metal sheets. Between them are dumpsters, the garbage compressed under its own weight; stench crawls all over the city.

  I slept at the Ukrainian guy’s place, right by the station. He murmured slightly more comprehensibly; as a Ukrainian he was well-known there and he tossed rumbling words at everyone who approached the door: “And you? Want to sleep at my place? Who sent you? Got any money? Here, you pay up front.” He would piss into the bathtub, he must’ve forgotten what it was for; a boor thick with dirt and with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. I never saw him without a cigarette. “One bath,” he said and he showed me one finger. “Light goes out at ten,” and he spread the fingers on both hands. He ran this little business, a one story house by the train station, somehow always empty. He swore his was the cheapest place in town, that he basically robbed himself, but a price for one bed was like in a hotel with breakfast included, an actual shower, and a free folder with information about the city. But when there was a wedding party at the Hotel Coroana, and the other hotels were even more expensive, I would always end up at the Ukrainian’s place. I could smell his sweat a mile away, but I would stay anyway, wondering if the bed bugs would bite me again, if I’d catch some skin disease, if he’d try to screw me over for some extra cash. Because you have to be crazy to pay so much for one night—that was his reasoning—crazy to go around like this, without a clear purpose; so why not ask even more? He’d mostly sit inside the house, staring at the street through a yellowish curtain and mumbling; he had no better listener than himself. He sat and kept watch; and talked.

  North of the city’s border runs the Tisa River, a bundle of waterways with islands of gray stone that serves several European countries—a benefactor river, supplying the Danube with water. People occupy its banks on Saturdays and Sundays. Long ago they would come on foot, now they drive cars and park almost in the river itself, gently maneuvering among the rocks. They drive their cars there, but do the same thing they did before. They stay for the night; they drink and roast a ram. The shore is sprinkled with jawbones, ribs; sometimes you can find a whole skull. It looks as if an earthquake displaced some underground layers, as if, from underneath the rocks, it exposed a cemetery of wise—and beautiful in their wisdom—animals that used to come to this one place to die. But that’s not the way it is. This is a stage for uncontrollable gluttony, giggles, promiscuity under the open sky; this is the ripping off of clothes in a hurry because you can’t wait any longer. They eat their fatty ram, down it with beer and pálinka and hiccup; and then they wrestle on their blankets. In the morning they get emotional, they look at the water, in each other’s embrace. They smoke shivering in the faint light, right before dawn. That’s where I walked to from the city, stopped by farmers wearing only pants, a remnant of their fancy Sunday suits, stopped by bare concave-chested peasants in hats who were convinced that I was lost, or planning something sinister; as if the thought never left their minds that someone will take away the corn they’ve saved for their cattle. Or I would be stopped by rugged border patrol soldiers. We would stand in a cornfield, them checking my documents to kill time, giving warnings in an alien tongue, repeating “border,” as if I was committing a crime just by getting close to it. I would go for walks by the Tisa and stare at its waters. I would watch people wearing high galoshes and rubber gloves, dragging spools of cable from their houses and dropping the end into the river; and the fish would surface, belly-up. They would collect them, laughing as if they were just out to cut some grass for the cattle. They just came to get some fish for dinner, maybe a little bit to sell. But people here didn’t like fish that much. They only ate them sometimes because they were free.

  And then came that one year, an even number—the year two thousand—when I went by the same river, but in a different city, and the water smelled like a city dump. The shore looked as if it had torn up by heavy machinery. I hadn’t wanted to go to Baia Mare, Romania—I was running away from that city; we had some unfinished business. But instead it came to me. A tailing dam at the Baia Mare gold-processing plant had broken, spilling cyanide into the water and killing the fish. I was still in Bucharest when I saw the news report on this wild river and its dead fish. It was an unsettling year. A month later, a different mine poisoned the Tisa, this time with heavy metals. A cocktail. “Insufficient safeguards,” the commentators sighed and kept preaching about a deluge, a great catastrophe that cannot be undone, just like Chernobyl. And now I was standing on a shore that only a year ago was covered with the bones of sheep, signs of human activity, of a brotherhood between man and the river. What seemed irreversible back in Bucharest, like the death of the river, here—on this shore—looked like the mere workings of an accident. Kids played with the dead fish. Farmers scratched their heads, wondering if the corn would be all right—it was slightly inundated, a little rotten, but all this talk of heavy metals didn’t affect them. They debated in the streets over beers, but didn’t see any reason to despair.

  They knew that all would be reborn. In order to understand that, all you have to do is look at Syhot. This city is alive, even though it almost perished once. I walked around it, as if I was drunk, through the park in the city center where it was enough to sit down on the bench for someone to immediately join you with urgent business; with an urgent question, for example, if I was British, if I was an Arab, do I have any dollars for sale? “No,” I kept replying patiently, and those answers allowed them to drag on the conversation. My speakers ranged in age from twelve to eighty. Just in case, they kept praising my country, or remained elegantly quiet, would simply sit with me for a moment and then leave. I felt good among them. There were nuns standing by some wall, one with a paper sign on her chest: Be kind and make a donation for the Orthodox Church. White face, dressed like a crow. Farther down the street—peasant women with turkeys for sale. They hold those giant birds in their arms all day, to display them better, to have something to do. If they didn’t use their hands, they would feel useless. There was life in Syhot, even though not so long ago it was a sad city, a prison city; a city with a void after the Jews, a city on the border, and fearful of it.

  There was only one man who didn’t know that the city had come back to life. A skinny, stringy patient from the local hospital stood at its gates and looked around frantically. He kept running away, running straight ahead. He’d beg for a cigarette, ten leu, matches, anything. He would snatch whatever I was ready to hand him and run, looking behind him, even though no one was chasing him, no one was looking for him. He was free to go. He kept tripping in his felt slippers. He was free, just like the people of my clan were free, but they didn’t do much with their freedom. He was free, but became insane; only he didn’t know it.

  I wandered, I talked, and I ate with the pilgrims. I can’t quite remember now what for. I do remember how one night there were prayers taking place in the monastery where I was staying; I was in the attic room, wide awake. The attic was as big as a town, with a few light bulbs on an exposed wire that were the only source of light. I couldn’t sleep because it was freezing. The friar had given me a blanket and a straw mattress like everybody else, and I was lying dressed in everything I had—my winter coat, my hat, and gloves—and waiting for the attic to warm up from the collective breath, from the snoring of people who had stripped down to their long johns, neatly folded their clothes, and put them under their heads so that no one would steal them. They would pray the Rosary; you could hear lung-wrenching coughs, children’s cries, and sleeptalking—conversations conducted as if nobody was around. I couldn’t sleep. I was annoyed by everything: noises, cold, the musty smell of the mattress. I would go down the stairs at night, where the smell of wood and dust vibrated in the air, and watch those sleeping in the church. They looked as if they had been sculpted by Veit Stoss: twisted, sick, supporting one another. Their faces were concrete, the skin leathery, their fat fingers unable to grasp small objects. The pages of their prayer books resisted them. They sat, snoring, behind the altar, in stalls, and in confe
ssionals. They lay piled in galleries, the more vigilant ones opening their eyes whenever someone passed by. It was torment, not sleep. God’s people in beds made of sculpted wood; worn out jackets, the women’s heads covered with brown-and-gray checkered scarfs. The church, even though baroque, filled up with people reminiscent of the middle ages, people coming on a pilgrimage and sleeping under the roof of a temple. The divine roses, reds and blues of the paintings couldn’t help; the basilica smelled of sweat, manure, bad breath. I would go outside and read the names of countrymen who had passed away on a plaque: Fidelis, Angel, Kapistran, Servacy. But these men were just like those in the church, peasants from the nearby villages, whose mothers christened them John, Klemens, Edward. And they went to the monastery and picked beautiful names that nobody here ever heard of before. It was the middle of the night, and groups of pilgrims holding candles kept passing by me. Just like me, they were lost in the dark, bundled up in fur coats, Sunday’s best hanging in the wardrobe for forty years. And they kept praying, illuminated by those candles. One read from a notebook, the rest would repeat. At night, they were phantom-like and quiet; in the morning they would come back to life. Smacking their lips, they ate thick slices of bread and opened their canned preserves with knives. Those better off would go down to the church cafeteria for tea, and every zloty spent was like showing off in a casino. Those less well-off went to the fountain outside to down their bread with water, and were ready to go. There was still snow on the road and under it was deep mud. We walked single-file, and when someone fell down the rest would follow.

  I’ve been traveling like this for years, I can’t even remember the names of towns anymore. I traveled, I took pictures. The camera was always a great excuse to hide from people or to start a conversation. In Barda you walk up the mountain carrying stones in your hands to make it tougher, to commemorate the suffering. I talked there to an older man walking next to me one year. He was hacking as if his throat were being cut open, and he kept spitting. When we finally stopped, he stepped aside and lit a cigarette. “Jesus,” he said, “I can’t do it anymore, I have only one lung, I walk for health.”