Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  Then I would leave the old lady and she would stand in front of the house, on the road, with a wad of money in her hand, helpless; she always preferred dollars to leu. I wonder if she ever exchanged them for anything. She had everything. She lived alone in two houses, the bigger house was meant to show off wealth. The white walls were decorated with holy paintings, from which hung embroidered towels. There was even a refrigerator in this house, although unused, and an unplugged TV. All of that just in case, useless—and with security blinds in the windows, never fully down, with a tiny crack at the bottom so that you can find your way in darkness. Everyone built houses like that. Those houses were the source of happiness and the source of anxiety. People were afraid of the aliens, burglars, but not of cutthroats and drunks because they were your neighbors, you could meet them in every village. When it got noisy outside the store down the street, the old lady wouldn’t hesitate to go and shout at the drunk herdsman and the lumberjacks. They were sitting on the porch, drinking beer and pálinka, they would drop by just for one drink and end up wasted, lose those funny hats that normally stuck to their heads God knows how. She would stand over them and threaten them with who knows what, because no police ever came to that village. There was one policeman, true, but he was also a neighbor and a drunk. She must’ve had some methods older than the apparatus of repression, because they would grow quiet and mumble their apologies.

  I would leave her and her vegetable garden and her pigs; her outhouse, the inconvenience of washing in a basin in front of the house when it got dark because there was no bathroom, or even a corner to hide in. There was always a cracked bar of soap, a basin, and a pitcher of cold water an the bench, gray from the rain and snow. The crickets would go nuts. The horses were coming back from pasture; you didn’t have to urge them, they would turn to their stables on their own. I could hear their hooves on the sand from far away. I was washing in the dark and the herdsman would cordially greet me from behind the fence. She wouldn’t go to bed because it was a disgrace to go to sleep before the guest. I would sit on the bench, already washed, staring into darkness and not wanting to go inside; it was damp indoors because she stopped heating the house—there was no one to heat it for. She put me in her old marital bed with her old comforter and a pillow; there were ten other pillows stacked on chairs. When I came in there for the first time, there was a pyramid of them to the ceiling. Two pyramids made of pillows: one for her dead husband, the other one for her—even though she had been living in the other house for a long time. Yet another sign of wealth, doesn’t matter that it was invisible for the outside world. I would leave, I would come back, and she remained, standing in front of her house with a bundle of banknotes in her hand, waving as long as you could see her. Then she would slowly go back to her house, I imagine, to boil some potatoes; she would boil them around noon every day, so she must’ve done it that day as well. One year I came and nobody was there, the gate was closed, both houses were empty. I stayed at the teacher’s house by the Orthodox Church, in the middle of the village; with plumbing and a running hot water. He had good wine, and his wife was a great cook. I spent two or three nights there. After that I never came back.

  That old woman’s home with its outhouse was my piece of this earth, my stronghold; the home of my anxieties and a temporary harbor. Because even when running from something, most likely from myself, I always had to find a place on solid ground though, as was always the case, I would later lose it. Nobody recognized me in this village by one of the Iza’s tributaries, but I kept coming back and it was my place because I chose it myself. And now there was nothing, there was nobody, no foster family. I could finally travel around without purpose. I didn’t need my barometer—this village, this woman, all of that which you had to take only one look at to see what has changed. I didn’t care anymore anyway. My moorings had snapped and I kept on going.

  Nothing Happens Here

  Lithuania had a presence in our house as long as I can remember. Lithuania was a wolf skin hanging at my Nowicki grandparents’ home, laid over the bed so that I could play or just rest on something soft. It had an air of danger with its glass eyes, wide-open jaws, exposed fangs. I remember I kept wondering if they had been lacquered, and one was cracked from its base all the way up. When my grandparents played with me they would scare me by saying it was still alive. My grandpa had it shot, out there where the wolves were and where you’d go to shoot them. I didn’t know where, but I understood one thing—it was a long time ago. Wolf, man’s best enemy, wolf the murderer, it deserved what it got and I didn’t feel sorry for it. I admired the hunter for being able to hunt down his prey, just like in Karl May’s novels, and later skin the dead animal. The pelt was steel-gray and I thought it was beautiful. And despite its jaws twisted in an angry grin, the wolf wasn’t really dangerous because the bottom of the pelt was lined with some green fabric, sort of merry. This skin was my object of desire back then. I wonder where it is now, and if moths have eaten it.

  The metal etching of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn cast onto a piece of marble was from that same source—a source not of my past, but of Lithuania’s. The stories too. They would play cards, have some tea, slowly, laughing. They would talk about things alien to me, about places from the past, far away. They would say “Well, in Michaliszki, ho ho, you could find some fine saffron milk caps, catch some good fish,” just so they could start talking about how to get to Dziewieniszki, and then again onto something else, and on and on like that, immersed in themselves. I barely remember anything, mainly the backs of the chairs they sat on with secession-style flower prints because I’d sit behind them and stare. I remember the tea they sipped endlessly, the homemade honey, and the centrifuge standing in the corner. It was summer and it was used constantly. I remember challah baked in an electric baking pan. In The Issa Valley there are many words impossible to understand, lifeless. Miłosz describes unknown activities. Everything in that book is—except for Tomaszek, his fears and discoveries, except those of dying and madness—as if extracted from the woodshed, taken from an old dictionary. Miłosz’s entire entourage looks like a meticulously reconstructed country cottage in a Vilnius museum. Not even a cottage anymore, more like a stage set. And so that’s how their card games, grandma’s electric baking pan, and challah turn into a set.

  And they played cards, talking, slowly taking a piece of challah and a spoonful of honey. They would recall old neighbors. She, my grandma, had a Borderlands beauty: weather-beaten face, dark eyebrows, gray hair. From behind you could see her bun. He, my grandpa, was already massive and stocky back then. But I remember him vaguely and mainly from the time when he had already started the business of dying, when we would visit him at the hospital or when he came back home and kept moaning, half-conscious, with his face to the wall. He lay on the sofa that had a man-size divot in the middle (every year, he or my dad would stuff the sofa with sea grass; in the summer the bedroom smelled of hay). There was something Tartarish in Grandpa’s face. They said that he used to be as strong as a bull when he was young, that he could climb a ladder with a sack of grain under one arm. My parents, my uncle, they would play cards with their own grandparents too because back then everybody played—it was a fad, now I remember. What else are you going to do in the evening in the countryside, if you already went for a walk by the Vistula River, sunbathed, and waited your turn in a grocery store line for a loaf of bread. You’re done with garden chores and the family is all together. Nothing left but to play cards. But what they played, I never remember.

  As an adult, I went to visit where they came from and where they never wanted to return. They waited anxiously for reports from those family members who had decided to take this one trip. And after hearing them out, they were still convinced of their convictions. They heard only bad news from them, “It’s not the same,” they’d say, “there’re Soviets there now.” So, in their place, I got on the bus—because that’s how you travelled back then. I remember the smells of my journey rooted into
the bus seats, food in plastic bags. I recall, and this might be only a hallucination after so many years, luggage inspections, piece by piece, at the border, them searching through my backpack and questions about everything, as if we were trying to sneak into paradise. This was back when the border was a solid object, covered with barbed wire. And then it was the city at dawn, losing my way despite the map and the streets, alleyways, walking up up up and loosing my breath, and then zooming down because the whole city is like that: up and then down. Vilnius—or rather, the Russian city of Vilnius with the old Polish “Wilno” blended into it—a fossil from a different era. I don’t know what I remembered better: communal bathrooms in repurposed dormitories, digging out scraps of my Russian to communicate with the lunch hall monitor, or the city that was like a flower, but sentenced to rot and then saved at the last moment.

  People who lived here in the past, or their descendants, come to visit. They boss others around, speaking Polish, certain that not much has changed. They walk the streets with books, their Baedekers guiding them around the non-existent city from the past. They hold close their Jerzy Remer guidebooks, published three quarters of a century ago, where only the marvels of architecture have been marked. They arrive with pocket maps where just a tiny bit of the city of Vilnius exists. They look as if they don’t want to see it because they truly don’t. They came to visit their memories and to see how poorly those memories are doing in the new world: their bright childhood pasts, now surrounded by darkness, by ugly places that have no place in their minds because they were built fifty years after their exile. They stare at the skyscrapers made of blue glass and they can’t see that their own houses were poor. They look at Russian blocks of flats and can’t see that their own lack in beauty as well.

  Even though alien—that’s true—they too possessed the ability to see the city in a less supernatural manner. The newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Dostoyevsky stop by on their way to the casinos, to their promised fortune that will turn into ruin this time as well. Anna will note: “We arrived in Vilnius. The butler from the Hotel Hahna near Wiejska Street approached us immediately, seated us in his carriage and took to his establishment. At the hotel we were toured around, shown suites of all kinds, but all of them were filthy. Fyodor wanted to go and find a new place, but finally we found a suite that was decent and got settled. Service turned out to be rather unusual: you can ring for them all you want and they could not care less. And one more peculiarity: two of the staff were missing their left eye. Fyodor imagined it’s because the impaired get paid less. And it probably was the case.”

  I push the Dostoyevskys aside, they don’t like anything anyway and the world is a black ball, a septic tank with one golden nugget adrift—Russia. Vokiečių gatvė, that’s where my aunt’s family is, her yellow house. Now there’s a new one there, but also yellow. Žaliasis tiltas—that’s where, carried on the shoulders by my grandpa, my father could see the city’s skyline. And where were they going? Probably to the market, to Šnipiškės. “They named it all that way to spite us,” is what the tourists say, tightly gripping their Remer’s guidebooks, “as if there were no beautiful names for all those places, our names for all those streets and squares. Vokiečių gatvė sounds so alien, so idiotic and, after all, it’s simply ulica Nimiecka—German Street. Žaliasis tiltas sounds so much worse than Zielony Most—Green Bridge—now decorated with Soviet sculptures slowly consumed by rust. Even the bridge itself is different, a successor to the old one. And finally, Śnipiszki, you can’t say Śnipiszki anymore? Won’t pass through your mouth? Why did you come here anyway, kike, what are you staring at? Are you happy none of it is ours anymore?”

  It’s different in the countryside. Roads are dusty and it’s green. It seems flat, but if you take a closer look at the bushes, you’ll notice they’re filling up little valleys. If you take a closer look at the forest, you’ll see it grows on a wavy, semi-flatland. Sand, rivers cutting into the soil: Neris—Wilia, Nemunas—Niemen, Nevėžis—Niewiaża. That’s where all the tributaries meet, where they cut into the ground like a leather strap into skin. Then again, it’s completely different in the winter. Snow calms everything. It covers everything, you can see only the villages, the rest is white and even and only the blackish-yellow water of the river stands out. You can only spot it in the bends, where the water breaks through the ice, escaping for a moment to the surface. Locals sit on the ice on metal boxes and fish through holes. “Why did you come here?” they ask, but without anger. It’s the countryside, nothing much happens there, so they want to know.

  One day, in the summer, we were driving through the back-road dust; this was before I got to see winter in Lithuania. We were driving and we kept getting lost again and again because the roads here are all the same. The sun was scorching. It happened before the visit to Joga, or maybe right after, near Mejszagoła. It’s a small village, Joga. And, there won’t be any Lithuanian names here because these are places from a different order, these names exist only in my own language. And it’s not about Polish, but about an internal tick-tock. So, before Joga, or after, we stopped somewhere at a crossroads, uncertain. There were kids standing by the road, deeply tanned from the sun, with hay-blond hair and an evil eye from another century. But their clothes were from a thrift store, shirts with the Chicago Bulls logo peeling off, a trademark of the countryside. And only a “Ukraine” bicycle, too big for any of them, linked them to that current reality. Our conversation with them was dragging. Getting an answer was like pulling teeth, “Left? Right? Or are we going the wrong way?” And finally a big storm cloud came and a disc-shaped shadow appeared on the ground. We were in the sun, they were in the shade, and between us a border sharp as a razor.

  Physical inventory from my travels. Sounds like the notes of a madman. So, photos of a bush and a bunch of trees in the middle of a field—that’s the most important spot because there used to be a house between the trees and the bush. Not important for me, the house wasn’t mine. My father lived in it with his parents. The house still exists and it stands somewhere else, precisely about half of it still stands. And inside is a woman, whose husband died or went somewhere, I can’t recall now. Doesn’t make a difference to me, anyway. I’m simply there with my father and he’s visiting the museum of his past. She, the lady of the house my father knew as a child, is afraid, but offers us a cup of coffee anyway. It’s the stench of old sugar in a can, trapped in humidity and lumpy. That same humidity feeds the mold on the wall. It’s difficult to call this room a house, this wooden, almost-barrack filled with fear. She fears we’re here not on a sentimental journey, but to take it all away from her. A different place, on a different day: two old men, one of them in a broken wheelchair, in front of a house with a columns. To reach the house you have to pass by a pile of huge concrete rings for drainage, make your way through the bushes, through the rubble of the fallen farm buildings. It used to be a kolkhoz, but a few years after it shut down it kind of disappeared off the face of the earth. And that wooden, mansion-like house, now roofed with asbestos tiles, is still standing, and those two old men sit in front of it. At least that’s what they’re doing in the picture I took; I don’t know if they’re still alive. They tried to save the building from utter ruin with pieces of linoleum and some old rags. There’s an icehouse behind the main house, wooden doors that lead underground, but the view from there is of the fields because the house is on top of a hill.

  Those fields I saw in the distance were like a flashback to the evenings card games, to my parents, grandparents, and my uncle sitting there with their backs facing me. I can see the floral patterns on the backs of their chairs, the play is slow, and the tea grows cold in their cups. All they talked about back then was catching crayfish at night, in bucketfuls, the fish so abundant. And now I’m standing behind the cottage with its thick, wooden columns. Where there are now fields there used to be fishing ponds, that’s where they used to go catch the crayfish of their youth. They still catch them, on and on, and they’ll keep on like th
at until the end. But now everything is flipped, twisted. Back where I had seen the holy bush that marked the sacred family house and the trees with a clearing beyond the house, there was now a homestead. Where there had been a forest, now there was a field. Where there had been nothing, now there was a hill with a machine ripping up gravel from the ground for construction. Everything is upside down, everything is shifted around, everybody’s dead.

  Back at that crossroads. Kids with hair bleached white by the sun stand in the middle of the road, beside them a forsaken bike. The cloud has arrived. They are in the shade, we are in the sun. Finally they give an answer, some clue, and we’re back on the road. In the following order, or maybe not: furniture store, where room dividers and mirrors stand leaning against a wall. A lake, and around the lake are cars parked among the bushes because when these people see water nothing else matters and they go swim. They eat by the water and shed their thin, urban veils, leaving cities they came from behind. My father, I understand now, is one of them, one of the ones going into the lake to swim. Then, we stop by a restaurant, there’s wind, and heat. We study maps and wind keeps ripping them out of our hands. The cemetery in the forest is different in yet another way, rustic. There are too many of those cemeteries. There’s a grave to visit in every village, every city. You get all the names confused, the causes and effects intermingle. In the end we’re drinking in Vilnius, we stagger back to the hotel. The next morning is heavy with a hangover.