Paweł (double bass) wore a buttoned-down shirt and a thin houndstooth sportsjacket, Tomasz (trombone) wore a shapeless cardigan that dripped into a pool at his hips; Paweł had long hair, Piotr had no hair. Tadeusz (saxes), who was called Ranger – short for arranger – always wore a plaid flannel shirt, winter and summer. Ranger had been in Canada the longest and had learned his erudite English from a professor of Slavics who considered herself to have had two great insights, first to have married Ranger and then to have divorced him.
The first time Jean heard the Dogs, they were rehearsing at Paweł's café, after hours, a broken-down dirge. It tormented the air with its clockwork irregularity, a mechanical breakdown of stops and starts, notes grinding, grating, surging, limping. It was the music of revellers too old to be staying out all night, too dwindled to walk another step. Impatient and sad. A tonal meagreness. One by one the players dropped away until there was silence. Jean listened, mesmerized, the way one watches a fallen bowl circle round and round on the floor, waiting for the inevitable stillness.
She thought of dangerous rocks cascading intermittently down a slope, of stalled traffic, of conversations that stop and start not lazily, but instead signalling the end of everything.
– At night, said Lucjan, I lay in my melina listening to the stone rain. Pieces of brick or plaster that had been balancing precariously somewhere in the ruined darkness would reach their moment to fall – by wind, gravity, a soldier's boot. Gradually I became accustomed to it, there was no choice except to go mad waiting for the next sound that never came until I was almost asleep and was woken into waiting again. I used to feel how far it was from listening to the rain with my mother in the spring evenings on Freta Street, when I had only the problem of deciding which fairy tale to read before bed, or which dessert to choose that evening, apple cake or poppyseed cake.
– Now I understand, said Jean, what the Stray Dogs play … the stone rain.
The only (erstwhile and unofficial) member of the Stray Dogs who had not known the others from Warsaw was Jan, a Lithuanian from Saskatchewan who, late one summer night on his way home from playing lounge piano in a hotel, had come across Lucjan sitting on a curb contemplating a huge metal bedframe, wondering how he could transport it home. Jan offered to take one end and Lucjan took the other. They sat until daylight in Lucjan's studio drinking iced peppermint tea and vodka. Then Jan took it upon himself to spread green onions on the bottom of a pan and pour Lucjan's last three eggs on top of them. “Thus,” Lucjan told Jean, “are friendships sealed.”
The Stray Dogs met regularly at Lucjan's to settle matters, financial and otherwise. They maintained they met there on the first Thursday of every month, but the day was always changed at the last minute and so far, in ten years, it had never been a Thursday. That was as close to a schedule as they ever came – the Never-Thursday Schedule. “It's important to maintain delusions,” said Lucjan, “for the sake of order.”
Paweł always brought along to these meetings his little white dog with the pointed snout – a white cone ending in a black plug. Jean watched as the dog ate daintily from Paweł's hand. One certainly could not call Paweł his “master,” for in every gesture the man revealed his solicitude. In cold weather the dog wore a dignified navy-blue knitted coat. In summer, Paweł carried a flask of water and he cupped his hand so the dog could drink.
It was this little dog, their mascot, for whom the men named their orchestra, also referring to a certain café in St. Petersburg frequented before the wars by outlawed poets. It was their sad little Soviet joke; another way of hiding; a dilapidated homage; a wave across the abyss. It sat uncomfortably, just the way they preferred things. For a time they considered keeping the name they were known by in Warsaw, the Hooligans, but in the end it made them too sad and they left, like everything else, the name behind.
Lucjan and Jean walked through the darkly glinting, rain-soaked streets to listen to the Stray Dogs at the Door with One Hinge, a club open only on Saturday nights.
– In Warsaw, said Lucjan, kicking along the gutters gleaming with wet leaves, Paweł and Ewa had their own theatre. It was in their flat, a show once a week, and they were raided all the time. That was before such incredible theatre companies as Pomarańczowa Alternatywa, Orange Alternative. Ewa and Paweł were the vanguard, with all their escapades – street theatre with entire plays that lasted only five minutes and dispersed before the police came, or epics that took place in a series of pre-arranged places throughout the city over the course of a day. Now Ewa designs sets for all the small theatres here. Sometimes I paint for her. Some people are outsiders, no matter how long they've lived in a place, and no matter what they achieve, and others simply find the current and step into it no matter where they are; they always know what's being talked about, who's thinking what, where the next thing is coming from. Ewa's like that – an iconoclast supreme. When Warsaw was being rebuilt at top speed, she organized a monthly beauty pageant for the most attractive building, a model of which was crowned the new “Mr. Warsaw” at a ceremony staged every month in their flat.
Ewa enlists not only her husband, Paweł, but all the Dogs to help her. For a production of Godot, we made more than fifty trips to the ravine collecting bags of autumn leaves; for days Paweł drove back and forth from the park to the theatre – a room above a printer's shop – his Volkswagen bug crammed full. Their children helped empty the bags onto the floor of the theatre and they ran about with hair dryers until the leaves were bone-dry and brittle. By the time the play opened, the theatre was waist deep and the whole room trembled with each step. An eternity of leaves from Beckett's two bare trees in the middle of the room. For Brecht's Chalk Circle, Ewa used stones that Paweł, the Dogs, and I hauled from the lake. All the small theatres love Ewa because her sets never cost them a cent.
Lucjan and Jean would start out at 10 or 11 p.m. to meet up with the Stray Dogs, who would be starving after a night's work. Until it became too cold, they liked to picnic on the bourgeois billiard-table lawn of the Rosehill reservoir, with a view of the city in every direction. They'd eat cold potatoes and cheese, sweet bread and sour plums. Ewa and Paweł would come after one of Ewa's plays, with Paweł's little dog, who darted, a firefly, through the dark grass. Platters of food were passed from hand to hand, flasks of tea. The men stretched out and looked at the stars. Jean lay there too, in the green chill of the grass. In the darkness she listened to the stories, the resentments, the regrets … the enticing glance a woman gave, in passing, fifty-five years before, on the train to Wrocław. The cold beer on the boat from Sielce to Bielany The women, the women, the women: the shape of a calf as a fellow passenger reached for her luggage overhead on the boat, how that singer-from-Łódz's buttocks clenched with muscle under her silky dress when she sang the high notes; how many one-minute love affairs these old men had enjoyed, full, not of simple lust, but of complicated passion and promise, and never enacted, not so much as a wink, so there was never the burden of an unhappy ending. Never unrequited, always possible except “under the circumstances.” On this particular subject, the wives had stopped listening to their men thirty years ago and they lay together, their dresses spread out around them or tight across their majestic flesh, talking about one another's children and grandchildren, the toothaches and remedies, the talents and accomplishments.
Jean felt a scarecrow among these women, the Polish harem, just as she had among the Nubian women.
She listened to the men's political close calls, the romantic escapades, the concerts in pigsties and coffee houses across Poland and France, as they worked their way to the sea. All this in the park at midnight, the men and women sprawled and still across the grass, “like the dead,” said Lucjan, “gossiping on a battlefield.” Jean listened with Lucjan's hand finding her; she felt he could touch every point of her at once, with one hand. He wound his thick belt around her waist, pulled it tight and buckled it. He pulled her hair taut until every part of her was aching upwards, her mouth open. All this
in the cold night grass. The night was voices and in her submission Jean felt the murmuring of Lucjan's friends on her body.
Lucjan carried a watermelon; he'd painted it to look like a large white cat curled asleep. Jean carried a cappuccino pie – the Sgana Café's specialty – wrapped in ice. They came to a row house on Gertrude Street.
From Ewa and Paweł's front porch, Jean could see right through the narrow house and out again to the tiny back garden. The front hall was crammed with stage props, eccentrically decorated bicycles, children's toys, and oversized sketchbooks leaning against the walls. Even the street was cramped, cars lining both sides, houses split in half, sharing a single porch, a single front yard. Each owner had made his small attempt to distinguish his side of the property according to his superior taste. The houses were at the very limit of what one could make of them, inside and out. Before she had even stepped past the door, Jean felt the pull of a new affection.
Ewa and Paweł's living room was full of children and Dogs. Guests perched on the arms of chairs, in laps, sat cross legged on the floor.
The wall in the hallway was covered in children's paint – butterflies, flowers, a big yellow sun.
– The children paint the wall any way they like, said Ewa. Then every month we paint over it and they can start again.
Ewa disappeared and returned with a tray of tea and cake. She gave it to Paweł, who offered it around.
Jean and Lucjan followed Ewa into the kitchen. Someone said, “It's Lucjan's girl,” and then Jean was surrounded. The women fingered her hair and stroked her arms, they felt her appraisingly, as if she were fabric, or an expensive handbag or a necklace, or a prodigy on display. Jean almost swooned with their scents and their softness and, most of all, their cooing approval. Now she was sitting down at the kitchen table with a glass of wine in her hand and the women's voices a spell around her. She saw Lucjan watching, amused, from across the room.
– Lucjan tells me you recognized him by his work, said Ewa. She laughed. He enjoys what the newspapers like to call ‘local notoriety.’
Jean smiled.
– I enjoy it, said Lucjan, only because no one knows who I am, and I never face my public.
– Not unless someone catches you in the act, said Ewa.
– Yes. He frowned. That's why I only come out to paint at night.
Ewa and Paweł's children, five and seven years old, climbed into Jean's lap and began to have their way with her. Jean sat still as they investigated her attributes, examining her hair, poking with their fingers. They made cherry earrings and hung them from her ears, where they bobbled like plastic marbles.
– Do they want to be doctors or hairdressers? Jean asked, laughing.
– One of each, naturally, said Lucjan from the doorway, taking obvious pleasure in Jean's initiation.
Jean soon learned that at Ewa's parties there was always a project on. Huge rolls of brown paper were unfurled and everyone painted a mural; a sheet was tacked to the wall and a film projected while the Dogs played, sewing together a melody out of silence and the whirring of the projector. Actors gathered in the middle of the living room and, with nothing more than a spoon or a dishtowel, transformed reality – having a Sunday row on a pond or floating in a lifeboat on the North Sea; suddenly they were lovers on a picnic blanket, or thieves, or children on a swing. Jean knew these actors had worked together for a long time, a bodily history among them. She had seen Avery perform loaves and fishes with objects, with stones on the beach, with rulers and wooden blocks, creating bridges, castles, entire cities. But his magic was solitary and intellectual compared with the instantly complex communication between these bodies, the moment continually changing, deepening into humour or sorrow. And sometimes this pathos was intense, and a hole opened, and everyone watching from the edges of the room found their own sorrow pouring into it. Crack! the earth of the scene split open and down everyone tumbled together into the wreckage of memory. And then the actors melted back into the party, and the food and the bottles were passed around again.
Jean's hair was pinned up in a knot, gently unravelling. She had Lucjan's sweater over her shoulders.
– You radiate happiness, said Ranger.
Ranger sat down next to her.
– Does Lucjan talk to you? he asked.
Jean looked at him, startled.
– Yes, Lucjan talks to me.
Ranger stretched out his legs.
– I'm drunk, he said.
He leaned his head on Jean's shoulder.
– What if, Ranger said, the most important, the most meaningful, the most intimate moment of your life was also the most important, the most intimate moment for hundreds of thousands of others? Any man who's lived through a battle, the bombing of a city, a siege, has shared the same private moment with thousands of others. People pretend that's a brotherhood. But what belongs to you? Nothing. Not even the most important moment of your life is your own. Okay, so we understand this. But what about what happens between a man and a woman in the dark, in privacy, in bed? I say there's nothing intimate about that either. You hold her hand in the street, everyone knows what you do at night. You have a child, everyone knows what you did together.
Jean was silent. She felt the damp weight of Ranger's head against her, a terrible sadness. Then she said, in a gentle voice, Do you mean to say that all women and men are alike, that one woman is exactly like another? Or do you mean to tell me that Lucjan has had many women? If so, don't worry, he's told me himself.
– And what do details matter? continued Ranger. Her father, his father, her mother, his mother, the deprived childhood, the happy childhood … Even the particulars of our bodies – at the moment of passion, at that precise moment, she is any body, any body will do.
– Have you never been in love?
– Of course I have. I'm seventy-four years old. But the experience of love – what you feel – it's always the same, no matter who the object of that love is.
Lucjan came with Jean's drink.
– Jean, is he scaring you? Ranger, I wish you wouldn't – that's my job.
Ranger bowed his head and held out his hand for Jean's glass.
– No, said Lucjan quietly. Language is only approximate; it's violence that's precise.
– No, said Ranger, raising his voice. Violence is a howl – the ultimate howl – inarticulate.
– No, said Lucjan. Violence is precise, always exactly to the point.
– It's just a philosophical argument, said Ranger. Have a drink.
– Are you mad? shouted Lucjan.
Lucjan took hold of Ranger's shoulders and was about to shake him. But he looked at Ranger's hopeless face and kissed him on top of the head instead.
– You make me sick, said Lucjan.
– Me too, said Ranger.
Suddenly Ranger turned to Jean.
– Fresh blood, said Ewa, nudging Lucjan.
– What do you say, Jean? You're my last chance.
– I have to think about it.
– Ha, said Ranger.
– No, she means it, said Lucjan.
So they gave her ten minutes' peace. Jean left the din of the party and wandered upstairs to the children's room and sat on a small bed.
Beside her on a little table was a box brimming with metal bottlecaps. There was a stuffed cat and a drawing of a heart with wings floating over the ocean. The heart also had an anchor chain that disappeared into the waves. It made her head ache to think about it.
Violence is a form of speech. Violence is a form of speechlessness. Of course it is.
– You still want to believe in something, said Ranger. You still think there are such qualities as selflessness, or neighbourliness, or even disinterest. You still think someone will step forward with a plan! You still believe a man's beautiful books or beautiful songs are written out of love and not a way to brag of all the women he's had. You still think that love is a blessing and not a disaster. You still believe in a sacred bond sealed during a n
ight of soul-searching love, in tastes, scars, maps, a woman's voice singing of love, the hot kiss of whisky between her legs, a sax solo played by an old Pole in a sweater with a voice like a mistake. You still believe a man will join his life with a woman after a single night. You still believe a man will dream about one woman for the rest of his life. I believe in taking what I want until there is nothing left. I believe in sleeping with a woman for what she can teach you. I believe in the loyalty among men who know they will slip away from the others the first better chance they get. I believe you can only trust someone who has lost everything, who believes in nothing but self-interest. But you, he said, waving his hand across all assembled in Ewa and Paweł's living room, still step into the street with the possibility that something good might happen. You still believe you will be loved, truly loved, past all frailty and misjudgment and betrayal. I've seen a man say goodbye to his wife with a look of such penetrating trust between them you could smell the breakfasts and promises, the sitting up with the sick child, the love-making after the child has fallen asleep, the candy smell of the children's medicine still sticky on their hands – and then that same man drives straight from that bedroom to his lover, who opens her legs like a hallelujah while the wife scrubs the pots from last night's dinner and then sits down at the kitchen table and pays the bills. As soon as a war is over we revive the propaganda of peace – that men do terrible things in extremity, that men are heroic out of nobility of soul rather than out of fear or out of one kind of duty or another, or simply by accident. Men honour promises out of fear – the fear of crossing a line that will rip up their lives. Then we call this fear love or fidelity, or religion or loyalty to principles. There's garbage floating even in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from any land. Men shoot chemicals into a human corpse and put it on display and no one arrests them! When you take away the human body's right to rot into the earth or go into the air, you take away the last holiness. Do you understand me? The last holiness. People picnicked in the ruins. Poles stepped over dead Jews in the street on their way to lunch. We were afraid to open a suitcase in the rubble because it might contain a dead child, the infant a mother carried, the suitcase banging against her legs, all the way from Łódź to Poznań to Kraków to Warsaw, waiting to die herself. Children betrayed their parents to the state. Two filthy words: military occupation.
The Winter Vault Page 21