Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  I went to Rome. When the pope died, my friend and I slept on the lawn; both of us bundled up because the mornings can be harsh there. Firefighters gave us some boxes, but they were damp from the dew. And in the morning we drank coffee at a local bar. We were soaked and you could hear our teeth chattering and we beamed with pride. I went to Oława, where a man who had visions had founded a temple, because I wanted to see what a church for the excluded look like. They had clergy house, a chapel—everything. I remember I was walking there from the city, and in the road ahead of me were people—walking on their knees with their arms above their heads so it would be even harder. They were led by a man with a bicycle. He was holding the bike in one hand, and carrying a figure of Christ in the other. He wanted to switch hands, so I held his bike for him. He quickly embraced the figure of Jesus with his now-free arm and dryly said “thanks, brother.” I went to see their chapels, decorated with crutches and eyeglasses no longer needed, rejected; the caption under the painting said: Jesus said unto Mary of Szczecin: “Come to Oława. I heal, and so does my Mother.” During the service, women lay prostrated outside the church. When mass was over, the founder had some visions, which were meticulously tallied. They were already in the upper two hundreds back then. I saw his followers for the first time from the train to Wrocław. I saw a crowd gathered in the community gardens. They waited for him to come and preach by his gazebo. They would wait for health, better times—anything for a change. A dozen years later he had everything built and stable, and the visions occurred every Sunday. That’s what people came for; they couldn’t do without a miracle. Without his prophecies, these would merely be buildings by the road. He had to keep seeing and keep talking about what he saw. He spoke in the first person, as Mary, “My son, John Paul the Second, is old,” he would say, “and he will soon die. Keep praying for my son,” he would wail, his voice breaking, a bland man in a wrinkly suit, a former employee of the Rolling-Stock Repair Company who built his own temple. He would wail and people would sob. Women would shout at me, “Kneel when brother Domański speaks! On your knees!” Before he died, he went for confession and repented for his sins; and his church of outcasts came back to the Church.

  “I expect to see you tomorrow at the Orthodox temple,” said the priest. We were sitting in his office and he was sucking on a pipe that had gone out some time earlier; he blew through it, tapped on it; I kept cracking my knuckles. He sat there with his yellowish beard, silent almost the entire time. He wasn’t a great speaker. He was afraid of making mistakes when he spoke French, he’d rather keep quiet. He would show me French romances, crime stories lying around, mixed with church prayer books on the shelves behind his desk. Sometimes visiting women would interrupt. They would all come in, bowing, and quickly and quietly attack, “shu, shu, shu Father” and he would brush each one off with a commanding gesture, saying “Not now mother, come later. I have a guest.” We were sitting in silence, bored. I was staring at the worn carpet and the scuffed furniture. I was thinking what he must’ve been through before he came to sit here, comfortably, far away from his noisy wife, who kept ordering people, peasants, and deliverers around the house. The priest was nervous and kept chewing on his beard from all this stress. He kept composing mutilated sentences in French, sometimes covertly looking up something in a phrase book. It was because of me he kept carrying it around in his pocket. His wife was a violent perfectionist; her accent was cautious, and her French carried marks of former greatness, despite the fact that she was wearing a flower-patterned gabardine and had black dirt under her fingernails. She would buy fruits from the villagers to make preserves and for distilling. She sold homemade alcohol to the local restaurants. Often when I stayed with them, and was about to go to sleep, somebody would knock at the back door. You knew immediately that it was one of the neighbors coming to beg for a bottle. In the morning, she would put a loaf of white bread in front of me, a dozen hard boiled eggs, jams, sausages, speck; she would bring coffee or tea. She tried to shove as much food into me as possible. I would come back late at night, and she would often be already asleep, so she wanted to make sure I ate well in the morning no matter what. It made her feel better, she claimed, and I knew she’d tick off another box: yet another thing under control. From her dark kitchen—because the kitchen was in the basement and she was saving on electricity—she commanded her husband, their daughters, the Orthodox temple. She gave orders to wash the floor or put out flowers. She commanded her guests—she ran the village. “I have to look after everything,” she would say, “I’m the richest in the village,” as if she lived and ruled there all by herself. And when I’d ask how it happened that they made it through the dark years without losing anything, or maybe losing everything and rebuilding it all in an instant, she kept quiet. But I wasn’t trying to offend her. She would leave then, ringing her keys, her willingness to talk lost.

  On Sunday morning the priest met me in the vestibule and simply said “Come in, please.” There was no escape, but I stood at the back, to make my exit as quickly as possible if need be. The service was just a cover up, there were trucks parked outside the temple. They loaded people in the back. Not everyone could fit. The Priest had one woman get out, and told me to get in instead. I didn’t want to. And he just said “Don’t be silly, sir, you don’t even know where we’re going.” We were driving on a road I already knew. Next to me, a young Orthodox priest eyed me suspiciously. All the women were wearing their Sunday dresses, surprisingly short, always black, and the older women wore white shirts and sheep-skin vests. There was a boy who didn’t see anything the entire trip because his head barely cleared my waist. He held his mom’s hand nervously. We were going through a village, later the houses ended, and so did the farms—only hills spotted with junk that always carries the same smell of rust and grease. You can smell it long before you see it. And then: nothing for a long time, only little springs coming from nobody knows where, their water caught by a piece of rusty pipe, collected in an old tire or a hollowed log. Above those springs you could sometimes spot signs, like the ones you’d expect to see in health resorts; for indigestion, hyperacidity, kidney stones—you could roam from one spring in the village to the next and be cured of almost everything. Only I couldn’t be healed, because there’s no water for my afflictions. No water coming from a pipe sticking out of the wall of an old farmhouse can help me, even if I came every day and drank from my cupped hands. (You couldn’t drink it otherwise. There once used to be a leaky cup hanging on a string—I know because I saw ones like them by other springs—a cup with a smallish hole, and though you could still drink, the little hole turns the cup into a worthless object. How desperate do you have to be to unwind the rusty wire and steal a leaky cup? How little do you have to feel the desire to steal an object like that?) Around those springs, water would collect in puddles, boots would smack, trouser hems would grow heavy; I had been by this spring the day before, drinking with hope, but nothing happened. Now we were speeding over the bumps and passing the springs; we turned many times and finally the truck stopped and we had to get out and walk.

  There was a chapel there that was being consecrated. There was a Patriarch and some nuns—all in black—their faces tightly wrapped in white cloth. There was a whole regiment of them. My priest wanted just that, he wanted me to observe that particular day. “I expect you tomorrow at the temple,” that’s what he had said, for the first time since I had started truly living with them, since I started eating their food, since we started saying good night to one another on the stairs. He spoke in a tone that did not take no for an answer. I was supposed to come and see that it was not his wife—educated in Bucharest, the daughter of a merchant—who ruled the house, the village; that it were his priestly matters that had brought the Patriarch from the faraway city, that brought the nuns who set up tables, made coffee, sliced bread, and, even before that, baked it at their monastery, who served water to the thirsty and provided shade for the clergymen—all before we had even arrived. The serv
ice took place under the open sky. My priest glowed with happiness; it was not his yellowish beard, but his sparkling eyes that caught the attention of others. People were kneeling and I could see their cracked feet. Drenched in sweat, we drank water from a single cup, we shared bread; my priest beamed like God the Father himself and afterward left together with the patriarch in a car. The nuns loaded everything back on the carts, people climbed back into the trucks, and I walked away through the hills.

  From my homes, and with homes in my head, I would leave and feel homeless. Because anything can happen when you’re traveling long and far; that’s what I’ve been taught. The road ends suddenly, even though it’s on the map. The overpass hangs suspended in the air and instead of the rest of it there’s a rusty road sign; instead of a road there’s only sand; or a group of gypsies in the middle of the road. The gypsies take of their sandals and dance as if they had an epiphany, with their arms thrust up high. It’s not an epiphany, but happiness about nothing in particular, inaccessible to me and the likes of me. A few plastic bottles of beer and everyone’s dancing with everybody else, and one elder lady dances alone because she likes it that way. And soon my companions and I dance too, and some young girl starts to yell, “Hey, you, give me your sapagi!” and she indicates that she’s barefoot, while I’m wearing shoes. But her sister hits her on the head to shut up and keep dancing. That’s what happens on the road; and I either dive right in, or tremble with fear.

  And so, when the day ends I fall in love with a hotel. I need a hotel, a motel, a temporary home, anything; a place to collect my thoughts and catch my breath. I need a shower, or at least a sink, and a bed. I need a TV that speaks another language—everything’s always more interesting in a foreign language, even though I know the movies and all the shows, even though women in the same makeup make serious faces and announce catastrophes on the news, even if it’s not the season for tragedy and they need to make an entire circus around fifteen people protesting against stray dogs, or about a temporary power shortage, or a council of old men in worn-out suits. You need that when you travel, you need to immerse yourself in that; you need to fall asleep while watching. And you need a hotel restaurant, even if just to reject it in the end, because there’s nothing more disgusting than a hotel restaurant.

  Only road signs pointing to Hotel Naţional will lead confidently to Kishinev’s downtown. There are plenty of those little guideposts, everywhere, as if they were leading to the center of the Sun City, the only place worth visiting. And when the pot-holed asphalt rumbles beneath your wheels—it’s night and almost thirty degrees Celsius—you want something to be there, at the end of those guideposts; you want a bed and warm water, not another hour in the car. So we follow the tracks leading to the Naţional, we become powerless and blindly follow the lead. At the end of the line is a black monolith backgrounded by a dark sky. There’s no light in any of the windows. The multistory, gray concrete building is empty. Glued to its side is a smaller building—a restaurant according to its boastful neon. But there is no restaurant. There is a hotel casino, though. It’s the only thing that is what it claims to be: pasted all over with pictures of slot machines and lucky numbers, the casino glimmers with lights. The guideposts lead to the city’s only hotel, which was closed long ago.

  These are the moments when I feel discouraged, I feel like going back, or sleeping in a car. Let it happen in Kishinev or anywhere else where there is a receptionist who lets you know it’s time to grease the hand, or that she’s done with everything—like in Bańska Bystrzyca, a hotel the size of a cruise ship, another concrete block with dark windows where a blonde bimbo behind a glass screen (I don’t even remember her face) told me there were no available rooms. And there were maybe five cars in the parking lot. It’s night and she would have to lock up the reception, go up few flights, maybe change the sheets, or at least call up the maid. And she’s sleepy and has no strength left, so she says: “there are no vacancies” and shuts her screen. You have to move on.

  I know hotels that are spotless, with huge swimming pools and urinals like sculptures; with quiet—when needed, multi-lingual—service personnel. And I often sleep in places where a beefed-up guy with an open shirt offers you prostitutes without embarrassment; “If you want girls,” he says, “girls are nice, skinny, young.” That’s in Tiraspol, at Hotel Ajst by the Dniester River, where at night the city is covered with a sheepskin of moonlight, and there’s a deadly battle resonating in the room next door; shrieks and hacking. They rented the room together. I saw them at Café Eilenburg on Sverdlov Street, a small fellow in a red shirt open all the way to his belly button and his bear-like friend—his muscle. The little guy had dark hair, slick with hair gel, and a trimmed mustache—a comical character, you could say, but he’d blow his money and never go anywhere without his bodyguard. They were sitting on a terrace, at a plastic garden table, being served by a busty waitress; you could tell the owner had a good eye for detail. The little man had a cheap camera; it didn’t really fit someone who’d spent two paychecks on a dinner. He grabbed the waitress, turned around and asked me to take a picture. He shouted, “Oh sweetheart, what an ass you have, and those titties, fuck me, heavenly!” She laughed and put her arm around him, his head reaching her armpit. He put his face between her breasts and loudly inhaled their smell. Click, picture taken. He emerged from between them and said: “Hi, I’m from Hungary—and you?” The conversation didn’t last, just a few sentences, and I finally asked what exactly it was that he was doing there. “Well,” he waived his hand, “business, in general.”

  He seemed reckless with money, but he wouldn’t go overboard. He and his bodyguard stayed in one room; they slept in a king bed together and washed their own socks. The nocturnal shrieks also had a simple explanation; it’s cheaper to have the same prostitute. One smokes on the balcony while the other wrestles in bed with a woman who’s vocally gifted and makes sure they’re happy. The river is wide at this point, and the silence has a dimension punctuated by sounds that carry like a heart beating in an echo chamber. You can hear the clinking of bottles from miles away, from all over the city. The river’s current carries distant barks. The woman gives a high-pitched moan and then silence. Finally, a break. Then the cigarette smoke starts wafting into my room. They smoke, and a languid conversation begins. The little guy, finally less excited, and the girl; she speaks in a hoarse voice, as if she aged thirty years all of a sudden. “Sleep, Christ, fall asleep” I say to myself, because they will soon start again. The bodyguard is next in line and I can’t close the window, the room is like a tin can—it has no ventilation. The chill won’t come before morning.

  I have known these places only in passing. “The Dniester River gorge,” I read the caption on the back of a photograph; “The După River gorge,” the caption on another. An old box, and in it—pictures from the past: torn-down bridges, grape picking, grapevine celebrations. All from here. Dniester, a typical river of the plains, cutting deep into the earth. Bridges thrown over it like spider webs, God knows how. But the Dniester is wide, broad. Tiraspol, out of thriftiness, was built only on its northern shore: one bridge is enough, one ferry will do. That’s how it is today still.

  In our hotel by the Dniester River, the day starts at 6 A.M. with the penetrating roar of a drill and a housekeeper’s laughter. Time to wake up. It’s enough to show your face around the reception desk for the watchmen to start chatting. He has his own little room, he oversees the parking lot, collects tips from the drivers; he has his own little herd of women that put out with his blessing and for a cut of their profits. So he approaches us, hands in his pockets, “Hi guys, if you need anything, you know . . .”

  The next day, in the capital city of Kishinev, I find his brother and soul mate: a janitor at a sister hotel—Hotel Turist. Go anywhere you want, be it Odessa or Minsk, and you’ll be always stay in the same room. There will be the same red pone in the hallway, you’ll meet the same mean housekeeper. Identical hotels are all over the old republics.
So the watchman, with his hands in pockets, starts a conversation under the cloak of night: “If you need anything, come see me.” And an hour later, the door to the neighboring room will creak open; first, a crooked, tired high heel shoe will emerge—it walked a long way—and then a fat leg, and finally, in the light of the incandescent bulb, the drunk face of a hotel prostitute will appear, layered with eternal make-up. Behind her is a shadow; a clone of the watchman from the hotel by the Dniester River. Not so friendly anymore, not so open. At the sight of a stranger he will hit the light switch. The darkness will fall and he will dissolve into it like a rat.

  And there are two fold out beds in the room I’m in, one broken. There is some dirty winter bedding—even though it’s the middle of summer—some worn out towels, two landscape paintings, a chandelier, carpeting, and hot water only in the mornings and in the evenings. Everything is itemized, except the water, on a list nailed to the door with a round stamp at the bottom. There is a desk, although nobody knows what for. A stifling heat has accumulated in that room, in all of the rooms, so it’s time to run. We have to go to the bar next door to let it all out, to drink it over, and the receptionist informs us in a serious tone that we have to check out in the morning because there’s no more room for us at the Turist.

  In those moments, when you’re being thrown out of a hotel, not even rage can help. Images come to mind of other hotels, on different latitudes, pampered to a point of ridiculousness and overprotectiveness; images of chocolates found on the pillow every evening, of newspapers from all over the world, and monogramed slippers. You can hear the echo of the masseuse’s voice and the hissing of the espresso machine in the air-conditioned lobby. And here: a group of Americans wanders around the lobby in the morning—a whole group lost in a typically American way—and the whole group is, in a typically American way, cautious. I observe their way of dealing with Kishinev’s hotels. They bought checkered Chinese bags, twelve packs of Coke and water, and now split the rations among themselves, right under the plastic clocks showing time in the capitals of the world without clear purpose. And the old lady polishing live plants with the window cleaner watches them closely. One room, two people, two Cokes, two bottles of water—and faith that it will help them survive in a city they consider savage. The hotel expelled us in favor of them, rightfully assuming that we’d make it work somehow.