Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  Recently, in the outskirts of Kėdainiai, we faced the kind of winter that makes your knees crack and your face pucker. There was a roadside market; I look to see what they have. Frozen honey, “It’s tasty, please buy it!” the lady at the stand urges me. There’s one beetroot set out (the rest stay warm in the sacks in the back of a truck). There are other vegetables also on display, one of each: a carrot, a rutabaga, a potato, one bunch of parsley; and dried meat, smoked meat, pork fat. A woman wearing furs buys two slices of smoked bacon, thick as a finger. A farmer in overalls cuts it for her, his fingernails glistening with fatty dirt. They argue, she wants to buy less because it’s expensive, he—unfazed—cuts it thick. And there are products from a different era, hemp ropes big as a man’s arm, chains, overalls, leather belts who knows what for, old junk brought from someone’s home with the hope of seducing somebody, not because it’s pretty, but because it’s cheap.

  There’s a bar in the basement of a house near by. There are cascades of artificial flowers, peddlers keep coming in, and you can see their breath in the cold air. A man slurps his sauerkraut soup while watching TV. His hands are stiff from the cold, he can’t unwrap the spoon from the napkin, so he just balls it up clumsily. He has no time to wait for his hands to thaw. Women drop in to use the bathroom and take a shot. They sip it. There’s cabbage, potatoes, and ground pork on the menu. All of that topped with a spoonful of sour cream. They know winter, and they know the best medicine for it.

  I visit Šetenia, where Miłosz was born. In his prose these parts are heavily overgrown, barely traversable, and you have to wait for winter to finally settle to be able to travel by sleigh to the neighboring town. “But what do I care anyway,” I can hear my angry self again. This urge to rummage through other people’s memorabilia keeps sneaking up on me, the desire to visit places from other people’s lives. I keep celebrating memory—only it’s not mine. And now: several houses, and a man and his son fixing a car. Laundry has been hung out to dry, even though it’s negative fifteen Celsius outside. It’s hanging out because it’s Sunday—the day of drying—and neither war nor weather will change that. There’s nobody else except for these two by their car. All the dogs in the village look like they’re from the same litter: short, stumpy bowed legs, with that typical village bark. They run across the fields, through the fresh snow, just to catch the outsider and show him who’s boss. The Nevėžis River runs in the distance and ice has piled up on its banks. You can tell the river must’ve been wild under the ice. It takes only a few minutes to get to Krekenava via the asphalt road. And in Miłosz’s writing, eons separate villages, deep forests and languages collapse. His world has hatred and belching swamps. There, you can hear the splash of boots in mud; in Miłosz’s realm there’s peeping on women of the village, and ecstasy felt in the herb garden. But now it’s a little bit like everywhere else, reddish asphalt, clean and flat, and the vastness of snow. It’s empty. The real place can’t keep up with the memories. It just won’t.

  It was in the apartment where Grandpa Nowicki lay dying for so long that his body finally created a man-sized indent in bed. A year before his passing, he sat on that very bed talking to himself, broadcasting on his own wavelength, without paying attention to anything because he didn’t care whether he had an audience. He kept repeating the names of places from the old country, to which he never went back. There was nothing to go back to. Whatever he had left there was long gone, and he smuggled only as much as he could fit in his head across the border. He’d sit on his bed, head heavily propped in his hands, elbows resting on his knees, and kept repeating his mantra: “There was the Nevėžis River and the Šešupė and Širvinta. And there was the Žižma River.” That’s what he said. I’m repeating it here word for word, just like my father repeated it to me. He also told me that he didn’t cry after my grandpa died, but laughed because those names were beautiful, they whispered and swished, creaked like morning frost underfoot, thundered like water against the ice, and foretold the rustle of grasses and the coming of harvest.

  And all those rivers were really there, they all exist. Let’s take the Žižma for example. I find in The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries among the left-bank tributaries of the Venta, a river in the Governorship of Kaunas and Courland. Its tributaries are as follows: the Avnova, Žižma, Virvytė, Wejszatis, Šerkšnė, Varduva, and Lūšis—and I’m skipping creeks, although their names are equally interesting. That’s the first thing I read; I find grandpa’s full list and after that I blindly step into the pages of the Dictionary, I drown head first in it because in that book of non-existent language I find the words of my ancestors, their names, their habitats. By accident I stumble upon an article about the parish of Antonowo in Maryamposlki County. That completely unexciting village of Antonowo composes the parish along with Armoliszki, Bobroliszki, Borsukinie, Budwiecie-stare, Brantas, Czysta-buda, Czujniszki villages. But there are also Egliniszki and Egłupie, Gajstry and Girnupie, and Giwałtowo and Gobiniszki, Grzesie and Jodbaryszki. That same parish also includes Kłampunie, Kojaćkiszki, and Kożliszki, and beyond them Krówieliszki and Kwiatkopusze. There are Mołupie and Muryniszki, Nendrynie and Ożnogary, Plople and Pocztaryszki. You’ll find Podziszki, Pokieliszki, Przygrażyszki, and Purwiniszki and Raczyliszki and Rudupie; you have Sanożyszki, big and small, Skuczyszki, Smolany-piec. Finally, Szaliszki, Szalniszki, Tartutyszki, Trakiszki-wielkie, Tymieńczyszki-małe, Wałajtyszki, and Witkiszki. You could run out of breath. I read other lists full of names sounding just as otherworldly and I can’t escape them.

  All those rivers mentioned before run through what my grandpa considered “their” land because, as a young man, he used to be an administrator of those estates and kept moving from one to the other. And when he would be done with one job, he’d pack up all his tools and move on to the next one. There have been a lot of estates, along with the rivers, he supervised through the years, there were Gieżguny, Jody, all the way to Michaliszki estate, which my father bought as his own property. Those were the same Michaliszki where mail would go first through Konwaliszki or Onżadowo, which the locals would pronounce differently than I do. Among his rivers, my grandpa never listed the one that was the most important to him—the Neris River—or any of the bigger and well-known ones. He mentioned only those that sounded like a wild love call, misfit rivers named in the their wicked dialects. He sat on his bed, his elbows propped firmly on his knees, and kept repeating the names, as if scared he would forget. Or, as if he had already forgotten that he had just listed them all, and he’d start over: “There was the Nevėžis River, there was the Šešupė and the Širvinta. And there was the Žižma River.” I could keep reading that sentence out loud forever. My grandpa kept repeating it as if only then, on his deathbed, he realized that what he had once lost, he was bound to lose again, and soon.

  At the house where the wolf skin used to reside, and where now there was nothing and nobody but bare walls, we would go outside as early in the morning as possible. So when I went to visit on my own many years later, I got up at dawn and started across the yard, even though I had no wish to do so. I passed the farm buildings, short and lined with swallows’ nests, then went through an unkempt orchard right along the barn wall. The barn was next to an old apple tree that I remember smelled strongly in the summer. I would walk under it’s branches heavy with apples, looking for the ripe ones. Now the tree was alien, in somebody else’s hands, and I kept wondering whose. Next I passed by the forgery, or so it was called, although it was just a stockpile of old plows and engines under a leaky roof. No one ever forged or even fixed anything in there. Farther along there were pastures, now empty, and paths dividing them into enormous rectangles. You could barely figure out their shape, but whoever heard my grandpa lecture on the subject of Dutch drainage methods applied to these fields that comprised a depression, would forever see any melioration canals as crossing each other only at the right angles. The canals were lined with willows, trimmed once a year
back in the day and now freely and strangely overgrown. Those who knew where to look could notice, and be amazed, by that perfect system, the ingenuity of which was imperceptible to an inexperienced eye. The waters flowing into those canals looked like a piece of lace crocheted over the old swamps as if to claim a piece of land for farming. That’s why the Dutch were brought in, that’s how the windmills got here, and with them came this undeniable charm, which was later drowned by concrete and the poverty of collective farming, until its unnatural beauty disappeared almost entirely. Now, many years after our family visited, and feeling a little lost around these parts, I remember I should turn left somewhere to get back to the asphalt road. We wouldn’t normally take the paths, their muddy ruts frozen rock-solid. Normally, we would cut through the pastures, helping each other over the barbed wire. Now, however, the pasture was surrounded by a decent electric fence because it was privately-owned land, and no longer in the hands of a mindless and ownerless institution, which is what the collective farms used to be. This new owner, who was universally hated by the locals because he preferred to buy modern machinery instead of hiring people, didn’t want anyone on his soil. He didn’t want alien boots on his grass, or rather, his field of incredibly tall burdock and other plants that didn’t normally flourish here because in the past they had been mowed down by the cows.

  This weird culture of growing burdock was just another attempt to forget the Dutch, to eradicate them from the history of Żuławy Wiślane. Now this culture stood in my way, blocking the view. I couldn’t spot the only point of orientation I remembered, the last Dutch windmill in all of Żuławy. The fence guarding the weeds reminded me of brand new fences, still shiny, from the forest of Chantilly. The forest was divided into lots, and the shining fence stood as a symbol of the sanctity of private property. It also reminded me of similar fences along the border between Lithuania and Belarus. While other countries kept tearing down walls, here they were still building new ones. Hardware stores where finally supplied with the beloved merchandise of all border patrolmen: seemingly gentle, but incredibly resilient and strong steel-wire mesh. That’s what is used to fence off a huge part of Lithuania, guarding it from being overrun by the Belarusians. Specifically the part of Lithuania my father was from. Although, maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was Belarusian mesh. Property, land, my country, my weeds, all of it has been properly fenced off. And when I see how solid these walls are, I can’t stop thinking about the old barbed wire, that fence against cows, not people.

  I walked among the weeds all the way to the crossroads, where there used to be a narrow-gauge railway station. I wanted to experience that rhythm of old-timey trains, to sit on an old wooden bench, and hear the sound of ticket puncher. I was hoping to experience waiting under the station’s roof in the middle of nowhere. But there was no roof, just some broken legs from the missing bench. Even the rusty railway tracks became a blurry image over the years and then disappeared completely, partly fading in the memory, and likely to the benefit of metal scrap collectors. I guess that’s what I was expecting in the end.

  From that station you would go to Nowy Dwór. Once in Nowy Dwór, you’d have to go from platform to platform to find the one with a train to Sztutowo, and then wait in an empty car that would gradually fill up and leave. It would fill up with workers, housewives coming back from grocery shopping, people from surrounding villages, and vacationers like myself. And I kept imagining how life must’ve been in those villages where there’s nothing. I wondered how it must be to wait every day for a train by that one bench—a train that was usually late. I tried to imagine it, feel it, but I never succeeded.

  Iwent to the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History, only a few blocks away from the main intersection in Kishinev, a street named after Stephen III of Moldova, father of Bogdan III the Blind, also known as One-Eye, and a friend of Vlad the Impaler. There is a street named after him in every city around here; in Kishinev he also has a park, a high school, a police academy, and even a motorized infantry unit bearing his name. The museum is located in a Moorish style palace with a ticket booth next to the entrance. From the very first exhibition room I could feel the breath of one of the museum employees on my back, one of those ladies who walks behind you step by step. They could make the visitors’ invisible leash a little longer, but I guess they don’t know how.

  I have a few favorite spots in this particular museum. I go straight for what I’m looking for. I pass all the taxidermied animals in their glass cases. They’re kept that way so they don’t collect dust. Then I pass by the birds in the bird rooms, where even a swan looks like a tempest of white feathers, protected from curious hands by a red sash. The local taxidermist isn’t one of the world’s finest, and I’m not sure if they didn’t have glass panels big enough or if they wanted to demonstrate a bird marriage in crisis, but the drake is in its own case, separated, and staring at the duck through a double glass wall. Nobody turns the light on in the basement floor for me, but I keep leaning over a picture and staring at it: fine cattle in Kishinev city square, which, in the nineteenth century, was like Tiraspol’s twin—wooden and muddy. Today it’s different, blocks of flats up on the hill and blocks of flats down in the valley. The police patrol everywhere, but everybody’s doing whatever they want anyway. In the pictures the roofs are broken, caved-in, smiling people wearing rags for clothes—after all, back then a visit from a photographer still meant something, but now nothing like that ever happens, unless there’s a car accident. Weather-beaten faces with a dark smear of blush on their cheeks, framed by messy beards and with distinct noses, growing out in every direction almost like a big mushroom hat. I stare for too long. The security lady is now stuck to my back. Finally, something’s happening. To her it’s entertainment.

  I go to the main floor, to the very last exhibition room. I glance over the placards: cross-section through the soil, explanations, half-life, empty cans of DDT. I came here to see an exhibit-cum-accusation, like a finger pointed at one’s heart. Conjoined calves. There are two heads and eight legs on one body. The two front outer legs stand firm on the ground; the two front inside legs are up and squeezed between the two heads as if raised in some idiotic gesture of greeting. And my guard lady, new one for every room, drops her knitting and runs to turn on some extra light, remove any obstacles in my way. She grabs my hand and pulls me onto the exhibition stage, among the calves and other deformed freaks, so that I can take a closer look at that cabinet of wonders. She points to the cans of DDT in case I didn’t understand the accusatory tone of the entire exhibit. She assumes a foreigner may not be familiar with the story of a chemical that kills weeds and deforms humans and animals. This entire museum is silent, a house of mute corpses beneath glass. But the worst of them all, a combination of circus and science, still seems very much alive—the conjoined calf twins making a grotesque salute that could be in the Moldovan coat of arms.

  During his war peregrinations at the end of November 1942, Ernst Jünger arrived in Stavropol. On that date he notes: “Before noon I visited the municipal museum, established still before the times of the tsar and carrying mostly zoological exhibits. . . . My attention was caught by two pairs of two-headed animals—a goat and a calf. The goat’s deformation brought to mind Janus’s head. The calf, despite having two heads, boasted only three eyes, of which the third was placed on the forehead, as if in the image of Polyphemus. This particular combination had a certain aesthetic elegance: it seemed like an intelligent design, not so much zoological as mythological.”

  “So, the interest in collections balancing between circus, science, and pornography is not my vice exclusively,” was how I kept cheering myself up in my tiny Swedish bed, waiting for the storm to pass, summing up all my travels, my utter contempt for all of them growing. “What I,” was my thinking “say through photographs and stories, Jünger says through references to mythology. That’s the difference between us. Conjoined animals, bearded women or men with tails, the tiniest of midg
ets, and people suffering from hypertrichosis, their faces or hands entirely covered with hair. Basically, no longer human beings, but objects displayed in circus tents—that’s what fascinated Jünger, Sobieski’s father, Pepys, and me, just like it has fascinated travelers and diarists of all eras. That, but also severed heads, mutilated bodies, dangerous psychopaths chained to their beds, or even regular crazies enjoying relative freedom.

  I looked at those fused animals, about which Jünger wrote that they were more like neighbors in a chain gang rather than allies, and it’s difficult not to agree. They’ve been sentenced to life in this crooked body. From afar, lying in my ill-fitting Gotland bed, too small for a normal-sized man, I begin to understand in a flash of epiphany that I’m just like those conjoined calves. I keep carrying with me the people I’ve been running from. I stumble and I run, but there is this giant polypore growing on me, an enormous fungus that cannot be removed. Or maybe it’s the reverse, maybe I’m the one growing on it. I can see it now from the distance, from the darkness of a sleepless night. I’m not staring at the calves’, but at my own conjoining. And it’s about time to do something about it, to stop and take a closer look. It can’t go on like this.

  Countries that are on the outskirts of the world museum are just different. They still allow entertainment that was quietly banned everywhere else. These are not vast halls displaying half of the Parthenon, are not a bombastic Louvre; this is a Fort Knox of art with marble canvas instead of gold, and where people stop only at the command of the voice in their headphones. If they don’t stop, after all, their trip was for nothing. Even smaller museums in the better parts of the world are still enormous, with halls full of obligatory canvases by the masters—but they’re somehow boring. These Rubenses with a herd of little piglets, these oil canvases where half-women, half-pigs float in the air. What can I do about the fact that I can’t handle Rubens? He hits me like the flu. I can’t handle him like I can’t handle many others. The museum becomes a place of obligation, of oppression. Here you have to nod politely before the paintings spanning acres, before the signatures, before the names. And these small, dusty collections on the fringes of civilization, in rarely visited cities, are less pampered and show things elsewhere yet unknown: a collection of ties, glasses, and Siamese twins. They are the essence of the country that brought them into existence, beginning to dig itself out of the mud of history.