I remember against all odds. After all, I didn’t listen. I didn’t pay attention when they told stories. And yet, it all comes back to me slowly, there are voices coming from inside, whispers and hoots, tips from ghosts and from the living, and I see terrible images, even though it’s not right, even though I haven’t seen them before—the holy history of my clan.
And I see clearly that I myself, just like my nutty aunt, dreamt what will happen to her in her life. I dreamt her future, long before the terrible killings in Gaje, I dreamt of the men in her life, her father, husband, son, about Bandera’s people, and about one anonymous man, whose identity was not yet revealed at the time she told her dream to my father’s microphone. She repeated it just like she had many times before, and after that too, to anyone who’d listen, or not; to those who had no will to listen, in her own house and when visiting others, on trains, public transportation, at the market and at work, and, finally, on the streets—grabbing people, tugging at their sleeves, saying “I had a prophetic dream.” She would recount her dream and I wouldn’t listen until it finally got to me years later, and it became mine because I’m the only one who can keep telling it.
I am kept hostage in my own head. They should tie me up and feed me opiates, let some blood, place some leeches on me so they, too, could have their share before falling off. The exact same leeches I observed with curiosity and disgust in the jars lined on the windowsill at my, so-called, legless aunt. Although back then she still had her leg; she lost it later because of those leeches. My aunt raised the killers of her leg on her own windowsill, made an effort to keep them hardy, kept them in clean water until they got hungry and were ready for the task. Her befriended nurses kept bringing more jars. Leeches, I would learn later on, were classified in Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus, who at one time also visited Gotland and the neighboring island of Fårö, and just like me had some unfinished business with the local sea. He writes that, before they got to shore, “the waves were like furies and the ship was tossed around between the roaring chops. My fellow travelers got seasick. Our hearts were filled with despair.” That’s it for Linnaeus. Supposedly he was a sea coward and was terrified of water. But he reached Gotland in the end, and almost everything went according to his plan, except he didn’t find argil for porcelain production, which was his primary task. When he docked at the harbor of my Gotland city, the only one on the island, he found it destroyed by the Danish. I, however, was leaving it in order, even though I didn’t find what I was looking for in Gotland either.
My aunt applied the leeches to her leg herself, until the infection forced its amputation. And yet, despite the fact she became a shutin after that, she was one of the few family members who had left at one point, who moved around, though I don’t know when. She wanted to leave behind everything, of that I’m sure. Her albums were full of pictures cut in half. In the pictures: her and the abyss next to her, her half is slightly uneven and the cut too close to hide the fact that someone is missing. There had been someone, and later I even learned what he looked like; the man who was a speck of glue on cardboard under the fragment of a picture in her albums. The memory of him was reduced to ashes in the kitchen stove: a lover boy with a thin mustache who kept messing with the heads of the women in my family. The type of guy you’d meet at a café, wearing a fedora and with a cigarette always nestled between his fingers. She cut him out of her albums just like he cut her out of his life. She left because she had nothing to lose here. She lived in Canada and worked in a stocking factory. Already then the leg industry was giving her a hard time and zero happiness, although she never took it as a warning. She had no dreams; maybe her nights were empty, and maybe that’s how the first jar of Hirudo medicinalis showed up on her windowsill, only to take her leg later on.
Her room was filled with memorabilia. Her entire past was there; the best part of it hung across from the door, on the best walls, to remind her who she used to be—a traveler in a Canadian paradise, even though she spent all those years in a factory. There was a trunk from the M/S Batory cruise liner standing by the wall, a companion and a witness to her journey and her return; a steel box painted brown, a true transoceanic piece of luggage most definitely not designed to be carried around on one’s own. During travels back in those days there still wasn’t a need for luggage you could carry. When the Canadian branch of my family—people completely unknown to me—came to visit my grandparents, these people dressed in a peculiar way and acting strange, their luggage was the same. They had these huge, bulky, square valises filling the house instantly and almost spilling outside into the garden. My aunt spent the latter part of life in this room with its souvenirs from a failed attempt to escape; a room with a tiny kitchenette behind a little curtain, with fading pictures of movie stars, and a trunk from an ocean liner. At first, she used to walk around the apartment with great difficulty and pain, and she became unbearable to be around. After the surgery, her personality soured more with each week. She scared people away with her madness, with her looks. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, she got better and started jumping around like a one-legged kangaroo, though still with difficulty. She was a terrifying old being, with her hair and thoughts in shambles. It was scary, visiting her for her name day; a name day at a legless aunt’s with a perfect cake, because in terms of cake baking she was unparalleled.
All of these old aunts and quiet uncles have crowded me since forever; they’ve been on the road with me at all times. That was the wild bunch I carried with me at all times. When I was lying in my Gotland bed and thinking about my travels, my entire family, and wishing I could fall asleep just for a little while they were there with me. I had by my side a calm uncle with one leg and his equally quiet wife—Aunt Emma—as well as their son, who had died suddenly. I had the company of my legless aunt, patched with leeches for good health, even though leech-therapy didn’t end well for her. Also by my side were Uncle Dudek and Aunt Walercia, who used to live by the train station. He had a smaller frame and was forever old, and had a big bald head and the sad face of an accountant, and whenever he heard a train whistle go off he would take out his pocket watch and check if it were on time. He knew the train schedules by heart. In his basement he kept a shovel or, in his old tongue, a ryskal, brought for back there, their paradise to which the gates have been shut forever. He kept it for when they would go back—back home. They lie with me, and their dead children, shot and buried in the orchard, lie with us all as well, and keep wriggling like I do too. I won’t even mention my four grandparents, or my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Gardian, who one day stopped being Ukrainian and never mentioned it again. They are all here and I’m with them, even though I don’t want to be. I grow restless in bed and they start shifting as well, they hide their heads under the pillow and I hide mine too. Where they go, I go, and it’s becoming unbearable.
In this cramped bed on the island of Gotland, I recalled a day when I went back to Ternopil, the city listed in my mother’s identification documents as her place of birth. I was driving through Berezovytsia again; again I set foot in Gaje. These were their places, not mine, but I felt something of an obligation to go back, except that we were always rushing off to the next destination. Soon after passing the city limits I realized I didn’t remember anything from that first trip. Besides, everything changes here, just like it does in the rest of the world, in the old republics and satellite countries. It used to be gray here; my memories are built on color tones, I can’t remember a single color, and the only sign of anyone tending to the surroundings was the women who would be going out in the morning, carrying brooms made of birch twigs and buckets of water, which they would sprinkle over the road, going slowly left, right, left, even though the road was lined with dried mud. After few minutes, everything they had managed to swipe away was back on the road again. And yet, Castle Street, Russian Street, Shevchenko Street—these I recognized immediately, probably because of the heightened memory of that first trip abroad, because of that expectation fo
r everything to be different. And everything was different, even though my aunt’s house stood surrounded by a garden just like ours, and there were apple trees, chives, carrots—it was all the same. My aunt would send me to bring some in, “go by the fence” she’d say, “you’ll find it there,” and whatever I’d been sent to get was there, identical to our yard. Again I found myself in Ternopil, a city I didn’t want to go back to because it wasn’t mine and I had nothing to do with it. And anyway, I didn’t want to seek out places that had changed, and that don’t fit the memories of, well, others. “What now?” I triumphed over my own stupidity, “You laughed at them, at your own clan, that they didn’t want to come here, that they spent their lives on their asses, as if they were bolted down. You laughed at their fears, and now you’re repeating all their gestures.” These were sermons I kept preaching at myself until I reached the city and the point of no return.
The city has a lake and a park. I remember the lake. There is an amphitheater in the park, and deep inside that park is a pool hall—a small box made of metal sheets and with two pool tables, a little furnace, and a heap of coal. A woman wearing valenki was managing the business, dressed warmly because, despite the summer, you could feel winter breathing from inside. She kept staring at newlywed couples from her door. They were wandering around the park that day, a dozen or so couples, two every half hour, as if they were coming off a conveyor belt. They came from the direction of downtown, took pictures with trees in the background, in the grass, and then would go to the harbor and catch a ferry with a photographer in tow. I too watched them walk around, as if they were advancing to another level in one and the same board game, because you know that in the end they’ll reach the same goal—get married—and half a year later she’ll leave for work or he’ll start drinking heavily. The wedding venue was on the other side of the street, but there was a limousine parked at the park gates anyway. At the top of the stairs was a weeding cake waiting, and it was crowned with a figurine of the newlyweds made of sugar, a pale representation of the actual couple—this combination of a meringue-like wedding dress and the snake skin quality of a suit because here, for a celebration, they like to dress with class.
I don’t know why I stopped there. I roamed around in alleyways at first and then in the city streets. I don’t know why I followed the young couple that kept looking over their shoulders nervously before running away. Everything here is unfulfilled, it’s all different than it was supposed to be because I imagined, or rather hoped, that it would be a kind of continuation, that something would happen, that those buried will come back to life; that the uncles who drowned themselves in alcohol and the aunts scattered all over the world would assemble for a single moment. But nothing happened, as usual, like everywhere, as in this city and every other city in the world.
I was lying in my Gotland bed thinking about the journeys that led me nowhere, and I’m not sure that they were supposed to lead me somewhere; at least not to where they took me, not to those places. I was expecting some conclusions, results, some knowledge, anything, but certainly not for the travels themselves to be the outcome. I didn’t expect aching legs and corns on my feet to be it. I go on a pilgrimage with their burden on my back, and get nothing in return. I go around carrying their fear, in their name, even though nobody asked me to. On the contrary, they always begged me to stay, but I didn’t. I hear the wind when it blows, I smell the ozone when thunder strikes but no celestial being appears before me, everything is small and earthly. There’s no transcendence in it whatsoever.
I woke up and sat up in a bed as uncomfortable as the Swedish one, covered with mosquito netting through which barely anything was visible. A river of sand and mud was flowing through my room, my feet were immersed in slush, and ants trailed directly over my bed, as if the net was non-existent. They simply walked over me, some over my arm, others over my thighs; my skin itched. When I was falling asleep the room had been dry and relatively clean, maybe with exception of my bed sheets. Now it was a swamp, and the ants saved themselves on me like on Noah’s Ark. I had slept through a hurricane.
Once I saw a picture taken in this town, a fishing settlement outside a major city. Back then I thought that the photograph was brilliant, but I’m not sure I’d stand by that claim now. And yet I went there, though I don’t know why—I guess to prove to myself that, just like the author of the photograph, I could accomplish something there. It also was a winter trip; except winters there are different than ours. I followed a faint trace, I was lead by a single photograph and I landed on an island-bed and became an island for ants. I stayed in that village, although I didn’t know why. I froze, slightly passive. I can’t recall all of what I did there, only some of the activities. I ate my breakfast on the beach. I watched fishermen summon good weather, making circles in the sand, butchering a chicken and throwing its head into the ocean. (How many decapitated heads have there been already across my travels). A dog would run after the head and jump into the water. For hours I watched people dragging their canoes; how they mounted the paddles and pushed into the sea. In the end, I helped them because they couldn’t do it on their own. I watched how they squatted and shat on the beach. Water carried in and took away everything there. I did nothing. I wandered day after day hoping something would come out of this, but nothing ever did; absolutely nothing.
Driving a car is like a journey on a boat going downriver. It’s me—St. Wojciech—I go down that river to encounter what’s inevitable, to encounter a wild tribe that believes something different than I do and buries its dead differently than my people do. I sail in my car like on a boat among barrows, sepulchers, among other languages of which I know only scraps of words for the gas station: “please,” “thank you.” I understand the prices on the shelves in local supermarkets. I understand words like bread, wine, fish, and olive oil. I need them the most, so I learn them the fastest. Villages and cities keep zooming by—quick frames—there’s no time to take a closer look. It’s the same thing on the train, and that’s why I prefer cars. I don’t drive, though, so I can look around as much as I want and can always say “stop.” Unexpected images fly by. There are no such views in my country. The night escapades of drunks, who end up sleeping in the middle of the road, might be the worst thing of it all. There is the fear that, in the end, someone will cross your path, just like that dog we hit in Serbia, and his or her skull will crack on the asphalt with a splat; that someone will end up just like the two bodies in my former city, lying next to each other, ripped open and dripping their fluids. I flow down the road, wherever the current will take me, and there are girls standing on the shoulders in outfits too light for that time of the year because, yes, they are a dream, a trap set for those craving a break from the monotony. They stand in the forests, or by the gas stations, glimmering from afar—but stiff up close and with dead eyes.
All of my people brought bad aura with them—a tragic miasma. They engrain it into their children and grandchildren, shared it with their friends. And they do that with an earnest smile on their faces. “And why would you go there?” my grandma would ask, surprised. Later she would ask questions about what it’s like out there because she wanted to know, she was curious; mostly to confirm her own fears and justify them for the nth time. They kept sitting in their gardens, cucumber tentacles kept spreading in abundance, the pear tree heavy with fruit; only a cherry tree had to be cut down because it dried up. They sat on benches outside their homes, or on their post-German garden chairs under a plum tree, and everything around them was theirs, forever, until the end of the world. And they continued being amazed by anyone who, like me, would go on a journey in a boat, but forget journey’s purpose once on the road. They would inquire politely, demand information, but interpreted it on their own—as treason and a loss.
And so I sailed in my boat, and foreign tribes kept swarming on the shores, busy with themselves. “Why are you going there, huh?” those who occupy my head kept asking, speaking with an accent I hear only when I tr
avel to Lviv. “Why? Why? Why?” But did they know, on their death beds, what the bleached-red of the roofs in Pristina, with their minaret towers shooting up from between them, look like? They never went to Trepçë, didn’t drive on a mountain road along the river and through the tunnel. Gray blocks of flats everywhere, people on welfare, someone throwing garbage directly into the river. “There are great riches here, plenty of gold,” the locals used to say, truly believing that was the reality, “Mountains made of pure gold.” But my people couldn’t hear that either.
My family, following the example of a certain homegrown historian specializing in misfortune, would gladly list three hundred sixty ways in which the Polish population has been tormented and murdered; all of them observed by the aforementioned historian during the Volhynia massacre. They would recite them quietly at first, then raise their voices and “one, hammering a long and thick nail into the skull; two, scalping; three, being hit over the head with an ax handle.” It would be still pretty quiet at this point, but soon after they would speak up, my grandfather in a growl because he was deaf, my grandmother melodically, but rather flat, even though she could muster silver notes with her voice if she wanted. “Thirteen, piercing the inner ear with a long, sharp wire, all the way to the other side and out through the other ear; seventeen, slitting the throat and pulling the tongue out through the opening.” Until they almost lost their voices, but they’d keep going because nothing mattered more than memory. “Fifty-one, inserting a red-hot steel rod into a woman’s vagina; fifty-two, inserting pine cones into a woman’s vagina, the narrow end first; fifty-three, inserting a sharp, wooden dowel into a woman’s vagina and pushing it through, all the way up and out through the throat; fifty-four, ripping open a woman’s body with a pair of garden shears, from her vagina up to her throat, and leaving all the entrails exposed; fifty-five, hanging the victims by their entrails; fifty-six, inserting a glass bottle into a woman’s vagina and breaking it; fifty-seven, inserting a glass bottle into the anus and breaking it.”
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