The German soldiers had enforced a strict schedule of demolition, said Lucjan; each building, street by street, had been numbered with white paint. In this sense, the numbers painted on the sides of those buildings were like the tattoos on the arms of the camp inmates; one might say the numbers signified their date of destruction.
Across the Vistula, the Soviets waited patiently, while the Wehrmacht, with great efficiency, levelled the empty city. When the show was over, almost three months later, the Soviet army quickly threw a pontoon across the Vistula – the same river that throughout the uprising and the city's demolition they had declared “impassable” – and claimed Warsaw for themselves.
Suppose, said Lucjan, lying quietly next to Jean under the blankets, you wish to convince me of the colour of a man's hair. Would you show me a man who had a thick head of hair as proof? No, surely his hair could have been dyed, or the photo altered. No, instead you show me a bald man. You say, His hair used to be brown. We examine his complexion, his eyebrows. It is not so easy to tell. Finally, we concede, Perhaps, yes, the bald man's hair might have been brown. Some years later, you see the same photograph, the face looks familiar but all you can recall is that the man used to have brown hair …
Okay, said Lucjan. Suppose you wish me to forget the significance of a certain name … In a clearing in the forest near Minsk, the Soviets erect a national war monument to mark the place where the village of Khatyn had been razed by the Germans. Day after day, for decades, they send busloads of children to the memorial. Why is this site chosen for a national monument when there are so many other places where the dead outnumber those poor souls of Khatyn? Simply because there is a certain other clearing, in a forest near Smolensk, a place called Katyn. In this place, where one feels an invisible presence – at first one thinks it is just the effect of sunlight moving through the trees – hundreds of Polish officers were slaughtered and buried in a mass grave by the Soviets in 1939.
The Soviets tried to make the Germans take the blame for this, but in the end there was only one way to make us ‘forget’ Katyn and that was to make the war memorial at Khatyn. The events are confused until there is only one event, made true by the irrefutable evidence of one gigantic statue.
And when you sit down for a drink with that same bald man and he talks about loneliness, well, is it Russian loneliness or Polish loneliness, is it the loneliness of a Catholic or a Jew? Is it the loneliness of the true Marxist? There was even, incredibly, a Soviet boat docked at Warsaw in those years after the war called The Fairytale …
Often, Jean sat in the university library, waiting until it was late enough to walk to Lucjan's, 9 or 10 p.m., when she knew he would be finished in the studio. She emerged from the glaring brightness of the library stacks, from taxonomy, epiphytic genetics, Blaschka glass, and Minton wax replicas, into the dark November street, with its display of intimacies, amber windows filled with mysterious, ordinary, living. She and Lucjan had tea together, and if Lucjan had not quite finished working, he'd go back to it, rummaging for the right shape of metal, painting, soldering while Jean read. Then a last cup of tea, sometimes with a shot of something in it for Lucjan; and the climb to bed, where Jean lay in her clothes and each night for perhaps ten minutes Lucjan drew her face. There were now thirty or so portraits; quick, precise, loving. A record of his changing knowledge of her. Then the bedtime story that continued to unravel, both recognizing this for what it was, an agreement of trust. Egypt, Montreal, but mostly Warsaw, at Jean's entreaty. His words opened a dark radiance, phosphorescence in a cave. What was illuminated was not the world, but an inner darkness. Not the flower, but the tinctures made from the flower. Often they fell asleep still in their clothes, now not as if in a train station, but as if on a night flight; in the small bedroom window, snow falling like ash into the black Vistula.
One morning they woke and the house was cold, the windows feathered white. Lucjan went downstairs to start the fire. He used pages of old phone books as kindling, choosing a letter at random and declaiming names and addresses aloud before crumpling the pages. Jean watched, shocked.
– You feel tender even toward a phone book, said Lucjan. What am I going to do with you?
He squatted in front of the fireplace and looked at her.
– Why does it make you so sad?
– I'm not sure, said Jean.
She hesitated.
– Take all the time you need. We'll just sit here in the cold while you think.
I'm sorry, he said.
– It's as if there's a connection between those names that we'll never understand, said Jean quietly. As if something important is being disregarded.
Lucjan sat beside her on the floor.
– I remember my stepfather getting up early to light the fire in the sitting room where we ate our breakfast, said Lucjan. I never knew my real papa, who died before I was born. I was two years old when my mother remarried. She was so beautiful. Educated, refined, assimilated. She embodied an era, a moment, the first and last of the Jewish debutantes in Poland. My stepfather, who was not Jewish, stayed outside the ghetto and joined the Home Army because he thought it would save us. Those years when my mother and I were alone together, she talked to me all the time. We crawled under the blankets to keep warm and she told me stories, everything she could remember about when she was a girl and what it was like when she met my stepfather, always stroking my hair and making me laugh. After the war when he came back and found me, I could see the disturbance in his face – all the things he made himself do for us – for what. It was really only for my mother and now she was gone. He'd hardly seen me in almost seven years … We went through the debris, we carried half the city between us in our hands, stone by stone. He refused to believe we would not find her. He dragged me from place to place. We stood in front of one pile of rock after another, day after day. I was always crying. Until finally he shook me and told me to shut up. I must have been driving him mad. He said he was going to Kraków. He told me to wait for him. In the end I don't know whether the Red Army picked him up before he could return for me or not. For a long time I thought that single fact mattered more than anything. But many months later there was a moment when I understood he'd never intended to come back. I was working in the New Town, helping to empty truckloads of broken houses into the riverbed. It was raining. A man was nearly crushed under a load. He called out and his voice in the rain was the saddest sound I've ever heard. If rain had a voice, it would be that voice. At that very moment, soaked through, hearing that man cry out and out, I felt something fly from the very centre of me. My stepfather – the brave, noble, gentleman-soldier my mother had persuaded me to love – suddenly I was free, perfectly free of him. I can't express the relief such despair can be. Some time I'll tell you the end of the story … Don't look at me like that – that look of pity.
– It's not pity, said Jean.
– Well, it looks like pity to me.
– Would you recognize a look of pity?
For a long time, Lucjan said nothing. He sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, very still.
– No one has ever said that to me. You happen to be right. What experience do I have with pity?
– Please don't burn the phone books, said Jean. Perhaps it's foolish, but I can't bear to see those names burning. It's as if no one will be able to find anyone again. It's like breaking a spell.
Lucjan pushed the book across the floor into the corner.
– It's cold in here, he said.
– Come with me under the blankets, said Jean, please.
He climbed in and she drew his face close to hers. They lay quietly and after a while Lucjan said:
– You're right, Janina. All those names in a book as if they belonged together. As if the whole city was one story.
Avery's classmates, after their initial probing, lost interest in him. They turned their attention to intellectual domination in the classroom, the ascertaining of like minds, the acquisition of lovers; it did
not bother him that he did not signify in any of these categories.
He felt ambition now. He had a keen memory for buildings he'd seen with his father and, from years of work, a pure, distilled instinct for stress, balance, shadows cast. Books towered around his bed on the floor. He slept with the lamp on and when he woke in the middle of the night he deliberately pushed the heat of Jean from his mind.
He lived on cereal, bread, and tea. For dinner, Avery set the teapot, the foil brick of butter, and the loaf on the table. The weather, the light, would awaken referred pain, details of her. The feel of her forearm up his spine, her hand between his shoulders. The warm curve of her, mornings she'd woken before him, lying contentedly on her side reading, his awareness of her absolute gentleness, even before he opened his eyes. At these moments, fear pressed him to end the separation. But, like two halves created by a single blade, there was a second fear informing his actions, which compelled him to forbearance, the fear of wasting his last chance with her.
In late November, during an afternoon of high wind and winter rain, Avery waited for Jean at the Sgana, a tiny café in a parking lot at the edge of the lake. He sat by the window watching as the old kitchen chairs and tables that had been left out since summer toppled against one another on the patio. No one brought them inside. The lake slapped against the concrete embankment. The café windows were glazed with water, and the wind came through the edges of the glass. Then she was at the door, her coat dripping, her wet hair under a wet scarf. As soon as Jean reached the table, Avery could see – though there was no outward alteration, he felt it at once – that someone else, another man, had changed the very look of her, changed her face. He had wished for this for so long, the hopelessness to be lifted, drawn away, and now it had happened, or was beginning to happen, the thing he had been unable himself to do.
They did not say much or stay long. It was unbearable to be so close to her and to feel this transformation. Avery could not describe it to himself. She was more beautiful to him now almost than he could bear. It seemed as though she had taken off something invisible and was, in every part of her, new and incomplete. She waited for him to speak. She asked, finally, close to tears, “Can't you tell me, what is it, what is it we should do?” “Not yet,” he said, “I don't know. No.” The smell of her.
Often the nights when Jean was not with Lucjan, the phone would ring and she would lie with Avery's voice pressed against her ear. He would talk only about what he was learning. But he spoke as if there were not a handful of city blocks between them but a mountain, an ocean, time zones, making every sentence count. When they hung up and silence descended, Jean ached from trying to understand what was important, whose need was greater, an excruciating inability to grasp the moral imperative, her task, the organizing principle of this derangement and longing. Some gardens are organized by taxonomy, some by geographic origins, some by feature. She knew that anyone overhearing their conversations, so steeped in context, would understand nothing Their urgency would seem, to a stranger, to be anything but; instead … almost desultory.
All through that autumn, Jean and Lucjan met late at night at the house on Amelia Street. Sometimes he undressed her in the doorway, at first, only for a moment, like a parent whose child has just come in from playing in the snow. His hands through her hair to release her beret, unwinding her scarf. Her sweater pulled over her head. Jean, who had known no other man but Avery, was compliant, resting her hands on Lucjan's shoulders as he rolled her tights down her cold thighs. The hot bath was waiting; music filled the darkness. When she stepped into the invisible water, it was like stepping into a voice. She did not know the names of the singers nor understand their words. But she felt the heat of it, women singing of love, every broken piece of it. The voice was the city, it was the Polish forest, complicated earth. It was the lanterns brought to the true grave at Katyn, it was a meeting on the fire-stairs, it was the silk that smelled of her, it was a hotel room in Le Havre, it was the last time. The almost unbearably hot water, the dark chocolate of a woman's voice. Lucjan's hands never asked any questions. He knew and he touched. He renamed her with her name.
The music was the boy with stones in his mouth, it was a woman on stage whose nakedness is her disguise, it was the black gargara, it was the ominous, body-sized, paper moth-bags draped over the arms of the sellers on Marszałkowska Street, the paper shadows, the paper souls, it was the smell inside a hat, the smell of gas leaking across the rubble, it was cloves and nutmeg before the bitter coffee, it was the smell of coffee in the dark, it was the stench of the karbidówki, it was the silk that smelled of her.
– I slipped down between the stones, said Lucjan, into a neat burrow and found an oilcloth on the ground and a whole loaf of bread laid out on a wooden shelf. I picked up the loaf and started to climb out when I heard a voice.
‘I don't have much. Help yourself.’
The voice spoke without sarcasm. I turned around to see a man sitting cross legged on the floor in the dimness, leaning against the wall. His generosity made me so ashamed I wanted to knock his head off, knock him over. But instead I tore into his bread right in front of him, crammed it into my mouth, and left for him only a pinch of it.
Still he didn't move. He sat, watching me.
I really felt like giving him a clout. But I was curious too. So I stood there and watched him. Finally he said, ‘Are you going to stay here all night?’
‘What were you doing,’ I asked, ‘when I came in?’
‘Thinking.’
‘What were you thinking about?’
‘The city. Nowy Swiat Street.’
I began to climb out.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘You're as strong as an oxen – two oxen. Why don't you help us? I'll make sure you get fed. A whole loaf of bread and a coupon for shoes.’
I waved him off.
‘Don't you want to help? We'll rise again, you'll see. Are you so sure you don't want to help?’
He looked hard at me. And then suddenly he understood.
‘Are you a Jew?’
We stood looking at each other – a long time, maybe a minute. Until – disgusting! – tears came into my eyes. Tears came into my eyes, but still I wouldn't let go my gaze.
‘Ah,’ he said and finally looked away.
And that's when I felt what power it is to push people away. It gave me satisfaction and a hair-tearing sadness to watch him lower his eyes.
‘I'll have bread every day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just for carrying things?’
‘Yes.’
I came back into the room and ate the last bit of crust I'd left for him. I ate everything he had and left him nothing, not a crumb.
Those who had shoes worked in the debris. Those who didn't, helped to draw up plans. It was unspoken, yet everyone clearing the rubble and working on the reconstruction of the city felt it – that when Warsaw was rebuilt, the dead could return. Not only the dead, but mortal ghosts, ghosts of flesh and blood.
After the war it was decided that the oldest district, the Old Town, would be rebuilt – not just built up again but … an exact copy. Every lintel and cornice, every portico and engraving, every lamppost. You can imagine the debate. But in the end, there was agreement: even those who disagreed understood the necessity.
Biegański, Zachwalowicz, Kuzma, and the rest based their plans for this reconstruction of the Old Town – of the market and of Piwna and Zapiecek streets – on Canaletto's paintings of Warsaw in the eighteenth century, on photos, and on the drawing exercises made by Professor Sosnowski's students from the polytechnic. When Sosnowski died during the seige of 1939, the architecture school continued underground. Students crept into the streets to sketch a careful inventory of memorials, statues, and buildings. These sketches were hidden in the cellar at the university. And in 1944, when the university burned, the drawings were saved. They were hidden among a stack of legal papers and were smuggled out of the city and given over to the custody of the dead; that
is, they were hidden in a tomb at Piotrków monastery. Professor Lorentz's students made night raids to the ruins of the royal castle and carried to safety anything with architectural detail – the panelled doors of the chapel, slabs of plaster murals and marble fireplaces, window frames – thousands of bits and pieces.
I know this because I was recruited. I was small and fast and I had no one who cared about me. Therefore, I was of some use. At night I went along on these scavenging hunts, and afterwards they fed me. I collected door handles, bits of ironmongery, and stone ornaments in exchange for bread and shelter. I learned a lot, listening to those students, about all sorts of things. Nobody paid any attention to me, I was only twelve years old. I overheard many conversations – about democracy and weight-bearing walls and what books to read and, ‘if a woman is present she must always be offered the first swig from the flask.’ There must have been a lot of useful suggestions about sex, if only I'd understood what they were talking about. When I lived among the students of the polytechnic, there were so many liaisons, the passions were so fluid, so messy, so adult; I watched it happening around me, only later, when I was older, did I take part in it myself. And much later, when I was in my twenties, I eavesdropped again, on Ewa and Paweł's theatre tribe – everyone trying to find a home. With the polytechnics, I usually sat in the corner listening and fell asleep as soon as they gave me my bread, and they never turned me out. I owe those students so much, many people whose names I never knew. They taught me everything. What to read and how to argue about what you read. How to look at a painting. An entire education.
But most important to me of all the polytechnics was a student named Piotr. His father was British, and everyone gathered around him to learn a few English words. I think everyone felt as I did – leaning forward to catch the scraps – hungry for a world outside. He taught us first of all the names of boats, because he loved sailing: skiff, yacht, rowboat, ferryboat, steamer. This was not Polish or Russian but a bitter, clean language of escape. One could pronounce almost any English word with one's teeth clenched. There were no jsz's and cj's or ł's to loosen one's resolve. Piotr's most valuable possession was a Polish-English dictionary. It was the size of a small brick, and everyone wanted to borrow it. He could have traded it for an exorbitant price – an overcoat, an apple. But instead he came to where I was sleeping on the floor and slid it under me. I woke to feel it digging into my back. In it a note, in English: ‘Do not stop running until you learn every word.’ When I went to thank him, he pushed me off, gently, like an older brother. He said, ‘I want Polish now, only Poland,’ and nodded in the direction of a girl. That glance was my first real stammer of sex, I felt it in him, the angry longing, the insatiable humility of it – insatiable: page 467. I memorized the page numbers of many words – a double assurance they would not be lost. Doubly remembered. A few days later, Piotr and his girl were killed in a raid on the castle, carrying a piece of stone between them. Another boy had been there too and had run off; when he returned to the spot, they were still there. He ran back to the hiding place and told the others, twisting his hands with guilt, ‘dalej tam leżały, dalej tam leżały.’ At night the dead were strewn, scattered, ‘still there, still there,’ sometimes in the darkness without a drop of blood visible, as if the moon itself had struck them down. Each day after that I read one-half of a page of that thick English book – a little memorial I was making. Every word I speak, every English word chipped off that brick of a dictionary – and so I try to take care – remembers him. It's in the drawer beside you, said Lucjan, leaning over to the bedside table and placing the dictionary in Jean's lap. At first Jean, deeply lost in the story, could hardly believe it was true – conjured like a magician's trick – but she held the solid book, with its broken spine and its ordinary, grimy, colourless cover, and felt the small shock of it – as if Lucjan had produced a branch of the burning bush or a stone from Nineveh.
The Winter Vault Page 18