Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  There are quite a number of those museums, those collections full of other, groggier boredom, collections where I can’t recognize a single name and where not even a single work of art catches your attention. I can’t remember all of them; some were just an excuse to escape the city, to rest from walking. But a museum is not the best place to rest. I remember the National Museum of History of Moldova, also in Kishinev. It’s a large building with a statue of the Capitoline Wolf in front of the entrance so everyone knows that this country, this city, is no backwoods relative, but stems from the very epicenter of civilization. I went to see a forty-five by eleven-meter diorama depicting the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive, constructed by Nikolai Prisekin and Alexei Semonov. In the foreground, as is usually the case with battlefields, there are remnants of barbed wire entanglement, canons, shells—all of it original, collected off the battlefield. That’s what the woman at the entrance assured me. It was a female attendant again, sitting in her chair, because there are women in museums everywhere. It’s almost completely dark in the room because only the diorama is illuminated; the guard lady has to lean toward the hallway light coming through the slightly ajar door. It’s a late work of art. Created in the 1990, but still entirely in the vein of social realism. It tells the story of the victorious struggle of a Red Army soldier. A year after its completion, Moldova announced its independence, and two years later separatist fights erupted. But that’s a different story. This diorama that came too late and this entire museum that came too late, with its stucco rooms filled with exhibits from a different era, are somewhat exterritorial and outside of time. World War II rules here. Regardless, this war exhibit is just a Band-Aid for other infections. It’s easier to show that which is marked by indifference. I was observing the diorama and I recalled my school field trip, years before, to Wrocław to see the Racławice Panorama. It was 1985 and the panorama almost worked like an oxygen mask for the suffocating audience. It’s hard to believe, but people would go on a pilgrimage to see it. Just like they would go to get healed by those miracle makers, ones like Clive Harris, to whom I myself was once sent but without any results. Here, they come to see the diorama by the two Russian tinkers. They do it probably to forget that they can’t always make ends meet, spend some time away from their neighborhood. You can find plenty of reasons.

  I was travelling around Bukovina, the last remnant of an era in which the outside wall of a church was also a Holy Scripture. The winds and rains that haunt these parts are rough and have scoured off the paintings, leaving only something to be seen at the very top where the roof protected them. I stood in front of those churches, trying to decipher anything from that ancient science, but all I could see were pale outlines and nothing more. There were men and women in navy blue hassocks that they had rented from the nuns before entering the church, so they wouldn’t offend God, this shy creature. His servants don’t allow inappropriately dressed people, wearing T-shirts and cargo pants, to enter his temple. So now these people stand around in rented skirts and sheets, as if they jumped out of a barber’s chair for a short break, dressed up freaks having to raise their heads in order to see from under their capes.

  “And yet, my travels are more than wooden houses and boring, obscure collections,” I caught myself thinking more than once. The journey turns the entire world into a museum. Every half-ruined church was becoming an exhibit, like that Evangelical Parish in Sibiu where, since the floor was gone, you had to walk on planks laid over a sea of sand. Not much inside that church recalled its past glory. There were several hymn books and some pews piled up, and a yard with overgrown trees. I stayed in the presbytery. When I arrived on the first day, late in the evening, I woke the pastor. He was scared and kept asking what I was looking for, how I knew about the possibility to stay there overnight. He was calcified in the fear of a different era and hadn’t yet resurfaced from it. And I thought about my host as I lay in a room prepared by the German Society for Assistance, staring at a large metal key that looked like it belong to a different age, impractical and heavy but, because of that, impossible to lose. Now he was allowed to do anything. He could preach whatever he wanted in his temple. He was freed from his daily chores by young, smiling Germans looking at the world with a sense of love and guilt. Except he couldn’t preach anything anymore, didn’t want to. I’m not sure, anyway, what was stronger in him—the simple feeling of being discouraged or the feeling of being already dead inside. I kept visiting his temple, but he never came to it himself, he didn’t have the strength. We would eat breakfast together and he would smile pleasantly and remain silent, staring at the edge of the table and his own hand clenched tight around its edge. There was a feeling about the town of Sibiu, or Hermannstadt, as if it had been abandoned, though on the other hand it was happy and full of life.

  Elderly people from a homeless shelter were sitting together in one of the churches, because the shelter itself was right next-door. They sat in their pajamas in the few chairs that had been set out. Those people were the temple. Between these walls there was no divine pomposity left. The church had a worn-down dirt floor instead of a real floor, and wheezing old men with their filterless cigarettes. Where were they supposed to go for a smoke if not there. Where to sit if not on those chairs with woven seats; seats identical to those in the churches of France, or Germany, but with holes from devout sitting. Where they were supposed to go for a smoke? To the Brukenthal National Museum, the pride of the city? Their place was right there, among trash, on top of rubble. And the Brukenthal Museum, the pride of Sibiu, is worth visiting. They have a Crucifixion by Antonello de Messina—one of three, and probably the weakest. But its vista is mesmerizing despite all else, despite not being as clean or as audaciously aflame like its Antwerp counterpart. Despite the fact the bodies don’t hang as spasmodically as in Antwerp. The version in Brukenthal is full of cracks and bumps, and that’s what makes it moving. It evokes emotion as a testimony to the history of that city, that country, all those countries. It’s a coincidental map of destruction that burned out my pastor, even though he still came for breakfast at the same time, smiled, and even read the scripture. He was burnt out like millions of others just like him.

  The story of Lviv’s own painting, entitled The Payment of Dues, is also complicated. It changed owners and locations several times. Even its authorship was contested. The first entry into the collection ledger stated: Geraldo della Notte, or Gerard (or Gerrit) van Honthorst. Finally, somebody spotted a signature with “La Tour” and parts of a date, but it’s impossible to decipher it now. Georges de La Tour, son of a baker, peintre ordinaire du roi, born in Vic-sur-Seille and died in Lunéville in Lorraine. The period during which the painting was made was also debated. Some pointed to the beginning and some to the middle of the artist’s career. It’s not a big painting, one meter by one meter and a half, horizontal. It depicts a night scene: six people, a table, money, papers, a dagger, a ledger, all by candlelight

  My path to finding that painting was a complicated one as well. It begins in the Louvre, where I stood for the first time in front of a different painting of La Tour’s—The Cheat With the Ace of Diamonds—one of those incredibly designed and executed flashes of painterly virtuosity, the brilliance of colors moving from gold to gold through dark and yellow ochre, silver, olive, cinnabar, and black. The background of that painting is black like the curtains in a theater, creating a black box. And just like in the theater it reinforces all the other colors, lights, and the suspect card game and the spectrum of facial expressions. On the right is a young nobleman, beautifully dressed and entirely immersed in the game. There are two women in the center. One is sitting and playing, the other is standing, ready to pour more wine. On the left is the cheat, pulling cards out from under his belt behind his back, including the ace of diamonds, which will win all the gold from a noble shmuck. A simple story. The cheat and the standing woman turn their eyes to me, the viewer. The woman with the cards watches the cheat. Only the nobleman being cheated has his eyes do
wn. He, poor soul, believes it’s just a game of cards.

  I once again go over what I saw when I went to the Lviv National Gallery for the first time: cracked paneling, water stains, and damp patches on the walls and ceilings. Paintings were hanging under the most certain sign of hopelessness ever invented by our civilization—flickering fluorescent light. I found La Tour’s painting by accident; it wasn’t as much a painting as it was a black, cracked, and convex rectangle barely recognizable at that point. I couldn’t leave. La Tour’s nocturne was covered with an extra layer of patina. Beyond the painter’s history and my encounter with his work, there was a story of painting’s own tribulations. It went through a lot, tortured on many occasions, until it finally cracked under the weight of its darkened varnish and was ready to fall off the canvas. I saw the painting under that dark net, I observed the chaos of looks between depicted figures that reveal not only the violent character of that painting style but also, once again, its well thought out structure. The La Tour in the Lviv National Gallery perfectly resembles the history of the city that stores it. In the corner of that room with dirty-green walls and water stains was a painting worth travelling for. The closest window, in the next room, looked out onto the museum’s yard—a garden, more specifically—and was wide open. There was a broken-down truck parked permanently among the wild apple trees, and a heap of coal sprinkled with lime rose nearby. Even local museums felt as if sick with gangrene, a disease corrupting them from within, inducing fear in visitors, rude in the way they welcomed you.

  That’s how museums in my part of the world are—full of damaged pieces, secondary and weaker works, sketches or paintings done by students from a master’s workshop, but stubbornly attributed to the great master. “The museums aren’t the most interesting things,” I thought to myself while in my narrow bed in the Gotland town of Visby. It’s with great pride that the town’s museum exhibits skeletons excavated from the ancient graves. In my parts the living dead are the most interesting things—those old men sitting out of illness and boredom in old churches. Or, in a different country, the entire city of Skopje is the center of interest, curating the memory of its own demise and a failed attempt at rebirth, the time shown on the clock tower frozen at the hour of the 1963 earthquake that erased bridges and old and new houses alike. Even now, half a century later, the city is still half in ruins. On the one hand, there are major investments, huge public service buildings from the 1960s and 1970s—and next to them are empty lots with unrealized plans. Four fifths of the city were demolished, and even after so long it’s still easy to spot that destruction.

  The path across those countries is a trail of museums that pass out protective felt slippers for you to put over your shoes before entering. And nobody knows why you have to do it anymore, since word got out that the Renaissance floors were laid by the boys from a nearby village and they could redo them at any time. In those countries, in those museums, you’ll always encounter some kind of obstacle, a little humiliation, so that there’s no way you’d feel like royalty. In Budapest, the walls burn with heat and it’s hard to breath inside. The women guarding the halls fan themselves with newspapers, but it still looks like they’re about to pass out. In Bucharest you have to wear felt slippers, and once you’ve glided through all the rooms it turns out the visit was for nothing: there’s maybe one sculpture by Brâncuși that makes the ticket price worth it. I wandered around the museum with hopes for something to happen, but nothing ever did. No epiphany. There was only this empty palace, as if for a tyrant, full of objects that left me indifferent. So, instead of wasting my time in more museums, I walked around the parks of Bucharest; instead of paying attention to art I ate meat and drank beer in public gardens, or lay in bed in my room, wasting time. I walked around orthodox churches that had mysteriously escaped destruction, and I tried to buy train tickets to a different city. But mostly, however, I observed people, the inhabitants of the train station, its parasites, hanging out in McDonalds, on benches, everywhere they could. I rode the subway back and forth to see the suburbs. It was useless, but I did it anyway, and spent my time in tiny bars drinking coffee with too much sugar, or Ursus beer. I watched the streets throb heavily with activity. Next to a block of flats, a man had chained some coffins to a sycamore tree. It was a showcase of his handiwork. Dacia cars with flat tires gradually sunk into the asphalt between the buildings. The dogs chained to the entrances of stairwells could smell a stranger in their sleep, and when I passed by you could hear their barks echo off the concrete. I thought everyone was watching me because I was invading their lives and they knew it. That city, these cities—they were like one big museum. “Museum” became a term with a shifting meaning and concerned the entire space, people, their customs, their scents, faces, even vistas. And I, wearing my felt slippers, glided through their streets convinced it would stay like that forever. Those museums weren’t more beautiful, or more interesting than the grand museums of the world. They were different.

  I remember that a few years after that trip full of sleepy boredom, after sightseeing blocks of flats identical to those everywhere else, I saw—for the first time—bales of hay wrapped in blue plastic in the fields of Banat. Up to that point there were only haystacks blackening under the open skies. That’s when I understood the era of the museum was slowly coming to an end. Something else has already happened—simply life, same as anywhere else. An era of new cars, fast Internet, the latest cell phones, credit cards, and young leftist artists has begun. And me, even though I’ve been observing the symptoms of that change for a long time, I missed all of it happen. That’s how I feel about it, anyway.

  I’m awake when I travel, but am in fact closer to the borderlands of a dream. A kind of movement, a whirling or simple dance, sometimes sneaks into that dreamy journey. Just like that time in Moldova on the road ahead of a some collapsed bridge, where people started dancing with their hands up in the air, clapping, surrounded by a cloud of dust. Or this other time in a bar named “Gnome” in Transnistria, a country that doesn’t really exist, which is why no one should be buying flowers at the market there, or think about owning a better car. In general, it shouldn’t be possible to have a normal life there since normal lives have been banned, not to mention dancing, which, after all, isn’t needed to sustain life. And yet, I was sitting in a bar in Tiraspol and the bartender wouldn’t come over to wipe the table even though it was grimy. She was too resigned. I was sitting there watching how, in a tiny square of space free from tables and chairs, a young girl—unquestionably a family member because there were no other clients inside—swayed to the music of her own misery. She balanced on the edge of being and non-being. A young and beautiful nymphet, the embodiment of melancholia, a sad-drunk angel, and, like all the girls around here, in a skirt too short, heels ridiculously too high, and Band-Aids on her heels. It was almost one in the morning and she kept swaying, gently crossing her arms over her chest as if she was cold. She danced like that for nobody because there were only few of us in the bar: her mother the bartender, me, and some people she called Aunt and Uncle. They stared at the TV screen, listening to reports about how good things are and how much better they’ll get in the future. They stared through the bar’s windows at the streets, which were still visible even at night. But they didn’t see anything, even the girl dancing with her most faithful partner—sadness.

  It was in Lviv that I first realized that people dance not out of some social obligation, but for pure pleasure. I was walking down Horodocka Street, somewhere between Odessa and Vovchok Streets. They had different names before the war, but it didn’t really interest me. I was there to get drunk on life, not to evaluate and control. It was early evening, but it was already completely dark because the city couldn’t afford the electricity. When it gets dark in Lviv it’s a little scary because the potholes in the street are so deep it’s a miracle if you make it across—otherwise you find yourself brooding knee deep in asphalt, or polished basalt cobblestones. I saw it in a bar, one of those
places where they serve cutlets and fried fish for breakfast starting at six in the morning; the vibe was mellow. Men in striped shirts and creased trousers sat with their women, drinking sparkling wine and Georgian brandy. “Those goddamn knockoffs,” these men would say, “No shame. Everything is fake.” And then one of the guys pulls his girl up from the chair and his friend, not wanting to stay behind, grabs his as well and both women, like Siamese twins, smooth out their skirts and surrender their bodies. Couples started whirling awkwardly. I stood only a couple steps away, but hidden in the darkness of the street and invisible from the inside. I was in a different world, watching them glow, turn—an eternal peeping Tom from a different world. I observed the two couples framed by the entrance, a few stairs above street level. I stood surrounded by the noise of a tram passing in the dark, that very noise being the warning for people who couldn’t see it. I can see all of that but I have no idea what kind of music was playing that night.