I walked over to the elevator. The bellhop, the doorman, and the two receptionists watched me spitefully. I took refuge behind the elevator doors. I saw my face reflected in the mirror, looked at the two dark eyes looking back at me, and told myself that this was a bad look, a face as sad as this would get you in trouble during the war. I saw my face diffracted under the influence of the alcohol and my fear, kurwakurwakurwakurwakurwakurwa, a face that came from somewhere else, one that would have been examined and scornfully itemized. One eye here, one eye there, a mouth that was too large; this was a face all on its own, and the loving look that rested on it—the only thing providing it with unity and meaning—would have been ripped away.
That night on the way back to my room, I realized that the city where I found myself, Warsaw, was the same city whose map I had learned in Paris, book after book. So, that night, as I leaned out my window looking at the Vistula pinned under the ice, I also realized that the familiar streets of my nights as a child were glimmering a few hundred yards away.
They shone in the night, behind the many buildings; they wound around somewhere behind the commercial spaces where cylindrical metal towers rose up, unreachable, and behind the oversized avenues invaded by the crazed herds of cars.
The next day I walked toward them. I held the map of Warsaw folded in quarters and I unfolded it while I stood under the winter sun. The sun warmed my cheeks, but I didn’t want to be warmed because I needed to cut through—without warmth, furiously, at the risk of no longer being able to move forward—the transparency of the air. On the map the streets were tangled; I mixed up Jeruzalémaká, Paríska, Dlouha, Bonifraterska. I stayed rooted where I was for a few long minutes to unknot the black routes, the parallel and perpendicular lines, the outlined curves. I couldn’t grasp anything on this map. The space depicted with dark strokes and colored spots—orange for monuments, green for parks—was impossible to transpose onto reality. I couldn’t imagine my body being there.
I passed a park, a deserted square where a man sitting on a bench was crying in the sun. I took a running start to cross avenue Jean Paul II and found myself at the foot of a building whose white and gray archways signaled the start of rue Anielewicz. A blue sign in the shape of an arrow pointed the way to the monument exactly three hundred yards away honoring the heroes of the ghetto. Under the archways’ vaulted ceilings, women wearing headscarves knotted under their chins were keeping watch over stacks of clear jars filled with honey and some kind of red jelly. All of the stores in the recesses of the archway were closed. Shots had been fired at the metal curtains forming rounded arabesque shapes. The emblems were in an old handwriting, black on a white background. I clung to the details, knowing I had crossed an invisible boundary. I walked more and more slowly. I arrived in a large square surrounded by modern buildings a few floors high. In the middle of the square were a garden, a few trees, benches, and off to one side I noticed the dead faces of an imposing bronze sculpture. On the empty streets between the buildings, I saw the names passing by: Miła, Zamenhof, Gęsia, Nalewki.
I felt the weight of every step; I was a diver or an overperceptive astronaut, but the planet I was discovering wasn’t the one I was seeing. The few silhouettes that were hurrying down the sidewalk, clipped out by the sun, were mirages: the woman with a dog, the child in the white anorak amusing himself by limping, the three teenage girls coming forward to greet me by holding their interlaced hands out in front of them. I had to push my gaze through them, as if they were made from the misty matter of clouds, as if they could be cut through, disintegrated, as if I could go and look beyond the buildings, beyond the silhouettes, to my topographies that I knew by heart, my old maps where if you took rue Zamenhof you’d run into rue Majzelsa, the maps where rue Gęsia led to rue Franciszkańska. I did my best to cross through the bodies and the buildings’ light plywood, to pierce the morning silence so that finally, finally, superimposed on the old streets, the dark movement of the crowd in its shapeless bustling would appear, so that, with beggars’ implacable strength, the details of a face or a shoulder in flight would latch onto my retina. And so that I would be among them.
But nothing came. The girls continued on their way and I heard the rumble of cars coming from allée Solidarność. Nothing, there was nothing. Only the buildings, the people passing, and the noise. I was gradually becoming Alice in Wonderland; I was shrinking. My legs were truly becoming minuscule.
I leaned against a wall to draw out from inside me the traces left by the crowds of the dead. Those thousands and thousands of words I had stored up inside my head, nestled between my living cells, those words in which the faces, names, and bodies pushed over the bridge on rue Chłodna became packed together, sticking to one another. The texts that had been buried and found, all of those images in my sleep that I’d hoped would return to life—like cells in culture kept in a vegetative state until they’re plunged into the appropriate growth medium—spreading out as they broke through the peel of time to be reborn at last, out from within me.
I came across barbed wire and low-income buildings, and sprung up in their midst was a synagogue. It had been, the writing said, a synagogue and a stable and a hayloft and a merchandise warehouse. It had been renovated. It was green, it was pink, repainted; the doors were closed. It was green and pink, a leftover from the counterfeiters. I walked around the synagogue and was ashamed to be there, a solemn surveyor of the wreckage. After some time, I realized that on top of a brick building on the other side of the street, the photos of dead Jews were watching me. They had wobbled and then hoisted the photos against the windows, sticking them above the sidewalks, above the tramways and electric wires. A man with a beard was staring at me, as were the father, the mother, and the two children, and also a young girl. Dozens of photos on the façades displayed for everyone to see. The photo of the man with the beard was small; it had been made to be held in one’s hands or stuck inside the pages of an album, but it had become immense, a folklore relic, improperly scaled like those unending avenues where the wind marched by in gusts.
I entered the courtyard of one of the brick buildings and immediately recognized its dimensions: the narrowness of the courtyard, the red brick walls, the eight stories, the windows heaped on top of each other. A deep square vault. I raised my head and my chin pulled into alignment with my neck: far away, at the very top, was a fenced-in square of clear sky cut out between the bricks. The images slipped out of me like verses. They took possession of the courtyard, flowing smoothly to attach themselves to the four walls: specters of useless and abandoned objects, open suitcases, scraps of fabric, scattered papers. They slipped out of me or escaped from under the earth onto the sunken cement slabs and asphalt lids. They ran behind the silence and immobility of walls the light couldn’t reach, thickening the air and bringing the menace closer. The gray mothers, the gray children with no one to help them, the gray mothers, the gray children, I’m repeating myself, the gray mothers, the gray children, and this became a song and I took shelter behind its repetitions because I was afraid of the real apparitions right in the middle of the courtyard under the fenced-in sky. They were trapped in blurry clusters at the mercy of evil, no one to help them.
My vision fleeing, I put my hands in front of my eyes; it was invisible.
Outside, around the building, I climbed over small grassy mounds. At the highest point were structures from the fifties that had been built as rationally and evenly as barracks on top of the rises in the earth. I climbed up and down between the complexes. In the hollows under the hillocks, the paths were lined with trees and children passed on bicycles. I stopped to look at them and sat down, my back pasted against the slope. They looked at me, too, laughing. My mind was drifting, and night was falling. I suddenly stood up. I understood the meaning behind the mounds placed like anomalies in the midst of this city that was flat, so flat. I started digging with my toe. The children were no longer laughing; they watched me curiously. I began using my hands and kept digging. I didn�
�t need to go very far and quickly pulled up a piece of dirty stone. I removed the dirt, cleaning it with the sleeve of my anorak. It was red brick, the kind used in buildings before the war. The ruins—stones, debris, human remains—had not been smoothed away: they had stayed here, loose, just a few inches under the grass. The children started their arabesques on the path again.
I stuffed the stone into the pocket of my jeans and took off running back to the hotel. During my run, this time without me knowing, I had crossed the line of demarcation that brought me back, far away from the edge of the precipice. I bolted like a rabbit and the city continued to sink on top of the cemetery.
Later, my assistant and I went to visit another former dissident who was living alone in a little house around forty miles from Warsaw. The assistant was chewing cloves; their nauseating odor invaded the car. I had spread out a map on my knees to find our way. At the end of a road tracing straight through fields, we entered a forest. All of the trees were covered in snow; it had started to melt under the sun. Drops shining with light fell regularly from the branches and were crushed on the windshield. Pic-poc, pic-poc. It could easily have been the enchanted wood in a fairy tale; the gaps between the trunks uncovered white stretches out of which a green patch would emerge from time to time, a tip of vegetation that had made its way through, fighting against the weight of winter. The air was sharp and light, as if each drop of melted snow were the cheerful harbinger of the thaw. But when we arrived at the end of the road where Karol Bielinski was waiting for us, the river behind him was covered entirely by an opaque layer of ice.
He smiled strangely, with either shyness or irony, probably both, as he approached our car. I got out clumsily, which made him smile even more. Very soldier-like, he leaned toward me and kissed my hand. Then we followed him toward a wooden shanty whose porch had been covered with a plastic tarp. There was a table surrounded by benches and we sat down. Bielinski and I were across from each other, and the assistant a little off to the side. We stayed wrapped up in our coats. Bielinski was wearing a thick jacket that was too big for him; the sleeves covered up half of his hands. He spoke French perfectly.
“So, what is it you want from me, mademoiselle madame?” he said very quickly, and immediately his mouth—which I saw in detail because I didn’t dare look him straight in the eyes—contracted into a teasing smirk. Almost instantly—and the transformation did not escape me, because I was staring as if through a microscope at the details of his faded lips—it turned into a facial expression that I had just enough time to tell myself was rather cruel.
I had just enough time because I had not yet been able to respond when another man appeared suddenly from inside the cabin. He resembled a huge animal torn from sleep. His knit cap was pushed halfway down his forehead and he was moving slowly. When he came to examine me up close, scrutinizing me like an inanimate object, I realized that he was disabled or insane. He was perhaps thirty-five years old. The black strands of hair escaping the hat framed a round, asymmetrical face that immediately produced a violent desire to get away from it, to turn one’s head.
In a very gentle voice, Bielinski began speaking to him in Polish. Without saying a word, the animal removed his eyes from me and sat down on the bench next to him. He sighed noisily, placed his head between his two hands, and started staring at me once more.
“This is Heniek, my son. We woke him up. He’s going to stay with us.”
The appearance of Heniek had at least given me a brief respite. Yes, what was it I wanted from Bielinksi? Why had I come all the way into the forest looking for him, interrupted his hermit routine, and woken up his son? What unsatisfied hunger nestled in my ribs (I imagined an insatiable and unmoving dark cavity amid the other moving organs) was needing to be fed, needing to be filled, that I should want nothing else except to have him tell me stories? That I should want to learn, as I did that afternoon—and I immediately felt the path this information took from my ear into the folds of my body where it eventually landed—that during the war in 1943, when he had been placed in an orphanage near Moscow with other children whose parents were at the Front, he had worn a military coat with gold buttons on the epaulettes that his mother had gotten for him.
“Her husband, my father, had been arrested, disappeared in the camps. Before the war she was a nurse, like Lara in Dr. Zhivago. She met the man whose name I carry, a Polish communist, Bielinski. I was a good little Soviet and arrived in Poland in 1947.” Bielinski was speaking like a telegram, though I knew from having been told that he had been able to leave crowds hanging on his every word when he spoke, an intractable rhetorician who used the same fierce intelligence to denounce the regime that he had earlier exercised as a Marxist-Leninist zealot.
“My adoptive father, in other words, my father, was the minister in the early fifties. I would see him at night in the big apartment; his face was gray, preoccupied. There were trials and suspects. One night, a kid’s story now, I was maybe nine, I tell him that somebody, a neighbor’s father, is very suspect, a reactionary enemy. His gray face turns white and he slaps me hard enough to knock over a bull. It was the only time; he’d never laid a hand on me and he never did again. And he was the minister of this government, the very person who locked away the reactionary enemies. My mother looked at me, pale, and took me in her arms. She had seen reactionary enemies arrested! She was a real Soviet woman, tough to crack. Later, when my father was already dead, I was serving my first prison term and she would come to see me. She had big, blue, innocent eyes, and she’d leave with little notes I wanted to get to the outside. She hid them on the inside of her houppelande sleeves and passed proudly in front of the guards. She had big blue eyes so they let her go. They were intimidated. Lara, I tell you.”
“La-ra-i-tell-you,” Heniek repeated phonetically. He had a very unpleasant high-pitched voice, “la-ra-i-tell-you, la-ra-i-tell-you.” Still watching me, without even turning toward him, Bielinski had taken his son’s hand in his own and was gently tapping a rhythm on the table in time with the meter of the words: “laraitellyoularaitellyou.” With each syllable he thumped his son’s hand and his own on the wood the way he would have with a two-year-old child. He smiled and then started speaking again, while Heniek continued his chant, and the two voices wove together like the two hands. “Yes, prison, several times, years. One had to be heroic! What I mean is, one was supposed to be heroic, like Daddy and Mommy. The genes … If you think about it, for them there had been Spain, the war, all of that. It was our turn to be the heroes! But heroes weren’t so tragic. Prison was just prison, there was no death at the end of it. There was a guard, always the same one, who used to greet me warmly whenever he saw me coming back. ‘You again, Pan Bielinski. Back home again? Come in, come in, we were waiting for you.’ When he left for retirement, he came to see me in my cell. He was almost sad; he knew that I’d come back and that he would no longer be there to see me. He was right. I came back a few years later, two years, and he wasn’t there anymore.”
“Hewasntthereanymore,” Heniek burbled, “hewasntthereanymore.” It was the bastardized echo of Bielinski’s voice, a senseless repetition that matched the house deep in the forest and the banks of the frozen river where Karol Bielinski’s life had come to collapse.
“Heniek is hungry,” Bielinski suddenly announced. He stood up and arranged blue plates on the table along with six serving dishes he had filled with herring, meatballs, small meat crêpes farcies, pickles, beets, and eggs. Heniek began eating like a sprinter, his head lowered, eyes almost closed. He had already pushed away his plate, grunting with contentment, when Bielinski came back to sit down next to us and started eating. We chewed in silence. We heard the sound the plastic tarp made as it was lifted up by the wind. There were also bird calls, some very near, on our side of the water, and others that answered distantly from the opposite riverbank. The presence of the shrill cry and its imprecise double, struggling to pierce the air, was the full scope of this landscape and the width of the river transp
osed into sounds, and Bielinski’s wooden shack seemed even smaller within it. We were four silhouettes leaning over blue plates, four lost points that were barely visible, ready to be swept away, unmoving. Beyond the woods, the old world and the new world, the one of phantoms and the one of the living, were spinning furiously.
It was a relief when, after Bielinski had cleared the table as meticulously as he had set it, he asked my assistant with the cloves to keep an eye on Heniek, who was swaying gently, and led me farther down from the shack to the muddy riverbanks. I felt the presence of his moving body next to me. He walked with his hands in his pockets, stopped, and looked at the small islands formed in the middle of the water by patches of reeds. He grabbed a stick, pushed it into the ground, observed the hole it had made, and threw the stick back into the water, where it floated for a few moments on the surface before disappearing. He stopped and took my two hands in his.
“I have nothing to reveal to you, mademoiselle madame, nothing to leave with you, nothing to pass on. Well that’s not entirely true, maybe later, a package for my friend Jan in Paris. I’ll give you his address. You will be the one delivering something, madame mademoiselle.
“I feel good here. I walk with Heniek, we lie flat on our backs and look at the clouds. The clouds around here are Baudelaire’s kind. Heniek laughs, I fall asleep with my back against the ground. We get cold, we go back to the house, and we eat some soup. Tomato, a Polish specialty. I feel good. In a manner of speaking, that is, if I want to be emphatic about it. And you like emphasis, don’t you? I would say I have stopped crossing over, and now I am being crossed over. Crossed over by the water, by my halfwit son, by the seasons, by the clouds. You find this sad, but you can’t imagine how good it is to give up your future. It’s just wonderful. I’m serious! I’m serious!”
The Department of Missing Persons Page 8