‘How do you know this?’ M. asked.
‘He told me,’ she said. ‘He tells me everything – his regrets, his desires. When he doesn’t want to talk we play the machine together. It’s difficult for the machine to beat him. He can almost make enough money from it to eat.
‘He’s very kind, very generous. Yesterday he brought me a present, a book. He made it himself. He brought it in in a plastic bag and he handed it to me. It was quite big, like an atlas. The covers were made of wood which he had painted. There were shapes made from latex on parts of it and around the edges he had glued things. There were small pieces of rusted metal, the spine of a fish, also some skin from a fish. There were feathers mixed with the paint, and earth. There were tiny white things which he said were teeth from a snake. Some stones and pieces of egg. And there was black hair. He said it was from someone he knew who died. She was a very good friend of his, he said. She had bullet wounds in her side.
‘When you opened the book there were just ten pages of paper. Really beautiful paper, of an ivory colour. They were blank. He said I could write on them whatever I wanted. It was for me. His head was turned a little to the side, like a bird’s when it’s listening. His mouth was open. Poor man, he seems to forget about parts of himself. He can appear with only one shoe. You don’t see him smiling very much, but that’s what he seemed to be doing, the kind of smile that people can have when a thing shouldn’t make sense but somehow does and they want the other person to know this. Just a little twisted at the corners. The lips wet, like a simple person’s. One eye squinting a little and the other very big just then – dark, maybe black. You had to feel something for him when you looked into those eyes.’
She was quiet then.
She got up and put a little jacket on over her dress and told M. that she had to close the bar. She didn’t say good-night. He went out into the street and waited for her while she locked the door. She leaned over to the lowest of the locks. Her dress was short and moved up her leg. She pulled down at the hem. M. looked away so that she would not feel his eyes on her.
He found that he was looking at the place where the man in the wheelchair had sold him the lottery ticket just before he passed through the bead curtain of the bar with his newspaper and chocolate and discovered her standing in the light. He knew that as long as her opaqueness and beauty remained with her the men of the world would make offerings to her. How much of his destiny lay in that moment when he entered the bar? Could there be any peace there? Was he about to win his fortune? He could not know.
He walked along with her through the streets of the town. How would it be in that place? The howl of a cat, the insect-like whine of a motorbike, the sigh of an old man turning in his bed? A brief, hot wind loaded with the smell of wild herbs from the hills? I can’t sense this very well. I know this country where all these things happened to M. only from pictures and stories and what was told me by an old man in the Café Lara who spent half his life’s savings on two winter months in a hotel room high above the Mediterranean Sea. I see a light from a window fall on the long line of her leg as she takes a step. A pulsing, moonless sky. I see the bones move in her hand as she takes the hair from in front of her eye. Her skin has reddened a little from the sun. Her hands have a look of intelligence.
They walked slowly towards the edge of the town. She did not speak and neither did M. She was looking down, her face inclined towards his, as though waiting for him to speak. A breeze stirred in the branches of the palm trees and the air drifted past him. It had the feeling of silk.
They arrived at a tall wooden door, a wonderful door with deep red tones in a large house at the end of the street. She stopped. She seemed not to know what to do. She looked into the trees, then up at the sky. The air seemed so brittle to him now as to be made from glass. He looked at her from the side, this woman just on the verge of becoming herself. He tried to imagine the forces of her life that were making her as she was. ‘I love you,’ he told her in his mind. He looked all around him in silence trying to find a way to reach her. Then he heard her say, ‘Good-night.’ He turned and saw the big wooden door closing in front of him. She was gone.
When M. was alone he thought of her. He looked out over the rooftops of the city from his apartment and tried to take hold of some idea of who she was. Her face, her gestures, her voice, they were like stray notes from an unknown piece of music. He tried to fit them all together. But he couldn’t.
Here in this room I have the same thought. I am like M.’s ghost.
She was before him at the bar, her eyes down. She placed the top of a bottle of beer into the mouth of an opener, then pushed down slowly. Her arms pressed into her sides. Her long neck opened to him as her body moved down against the bottle, her feet splayed, veins erupting briefly in her forearm and neck. Her eyes moved up, fixed on his, and then moved on.
She left him there for a long time. He drank his beer slowly.
‘Another?’ she said then, moving past him. One brow was a little arched.
She shuffled and dealt from a deck of cards, her hands like a chef’s opening oysters. When she sensed that M. might have an advantage in the game they were playing she stiffened a little and concentrated. Sometimes she bit her lip just at the corner of her mouth. He watched the flesh sink beneath her tooth. When she held the advantage, which was nearly all the time, she pressed ahead and looked at M. with a trace of sorrow.
The men sat in a corner of the bar growing hysterical in front of a television broadcasting a football match. M. and Hanna played twelve hands of cards and M. lost eleven. He would know later that there was not a game involving memory at which he could defeat her.
He told her a story about a mathematician attending a conference in China. One night the mathematician had to speak with the professor who was chairing the session the following morning. A woman answered the telephone at the professor’s house. She could not speak Farsi or English, which were the mathematician’s languages, and he could not speak Chinese, which was the woman’s. The mathematician said the professor’s name and she replied at some length without him understanding a word. Nevertheless, he was able to memorise everything she said, syllable by syllable, telephone a bilingual colleague and repeat what he had heard. In this way, he discovered the whereabouts of the professor.
Hanna seemed to like this story. She had a laugh when she liked something, brief and quiet, which started in her chest and finished high.
‘What is the first thing you remember?’ M. asked her. He had hoped to catch her in a moment when she would answer without thinking. When finally he said it it sounded strange, as though in the wrong language.
She looked up at the ceiling, then at him. She smiled. He saw again that distance and serenity he had noticed before and recognised somehow as inimical to him, even if he could not understand why.
‘I remember my mother dancing through trees,’ she said.
The men got up from their chairs and came to the bar to order drinks. They were in surly humour, their hands flying upwards, all of them speaking at once. She watched them.
‘In a forest?’ M. asked.
‘What?’
‘Where your mother was dancing.’
She put a hand on his arm.
‘Wait,’ she said.
She poured drinks then for the owner and his wife, for the car dealer and a customer with whom he was trying to ingratiate himself and for a young mechanic M. hoped she would not linger before. She poured drinks for the men until they forgot the lost football match and began to tell jokes about the mayor. Their voices rose, and then fell. Finally they went.
She lit a candle in the corner of the bar and sat before M.
‘They’re getting used to you,’ she told him.
‘You think so?’
‘Yes. I saw them say hello to you.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘And don’t laugh.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ he said.
‘Good. Do you think the whole of a person’s life can turn on a single moment?’
She looked at him. He could not tell if she was serious. He would have liked the answer to this question to be yes, but he did not say so. He did not say anything.
She told him then the story of her past.
3
Two Convicts and a Virgin
I TURN ON the light. The Virgin with her gold celestial halo looks like she will drift out from the frame and enshroud me in her blue robes. My sister Renatas little granddaughter Basia gave me that. I could not refuse to place it where she directed. The Virgin’s eyes are wide and sleepy and a little delirious. The mouth has a slight twist in one corner. The salt of irony. Was the painter having a little joke? On the table next to the bed are two bottles of pills, one for dyspepsia and the other for circulation. A spoon serving no purpose. Three newspapers, a pile of books and a radio. I must put some order there. Across is a piece of furniture with drawers made by Czechs lacking measuring instruments. Above the bed a dark circle on the wall where my head rests when sleep is hopeless. I pad out into the living room in my slippers. They drag a little. The sounds of old age. There are times when I fill with contempt for myself. But they pass.
There’s my teapot, my umbrella ready beside the door. On the wall a map of Europe and a photograph of the Polish national football team of 1974. I could not have brought M. here. I would not bring anyone unfamiliar with the claustrophobia of this life. It would be like opening my shirt to display a surgical wound.
I sit on the sofa and turn on the television. Across from me is a table with a drawer and if I had anything at all to remind me of Angelina – a letter, a photograph, a gold chain – it is here that I would keep it. But of that time nothing remains. Sometimes I can think I’ve nearly forgotten her. A long time seems to pass without my thinking of her at all. But then again later it will come rushing in, her voice, her touch, the way she put on shoes. Still I turn the whole story of what passed between us over in my mind. These barren exercises. I am like the old men who tomorrow will be sitting under the falling leaves in plac Pilsudskiego filling time with such questions as, What if Sikorski had suddenly appeared in Tehran? What if the English had acted, as promised, when the Germans stormed across our border? What if the Citadel sappers’ bomb had detonated where Jerozolimskie Avenue meets Nowy Swiat just as Hitler’s car passed over it as he made his entrance into Warsaw? I sit on this sofa lit by the light from the television screen and I think, What has she been doing all these years while I moved across the world running from the thought of her? Does she ever think of me? Sometimes I call out, Why did I not know you better? Where are you now? It startles me when I do it. A human voice in these rooms is rare.
I ask the questions, but I never think to answer them. I can see now that I have not asked them for the purposes of discovery. I have asked them because they confirm me in my private grief. Grief is an agony and then if it goes on long enough it is a consolation, for if we are in it we need look for nothing else. It is company, it is complete, it is certain. I have chased certainty as a child chases an escaping balloon. I chased it in dark churches as I stared at the crucifix looking for the communion with God that so transported the saints and made them willing to die in order to stay living in its light. I chased it in Berlin in debates and manifestos and righteous slogans. When Angelina went away I stopped all that because I had grief for my company and it was enough as I went about from place to place like dust being blown about in a wind. An unexamined life, all the while.
Am I in time to examine it now? Well, no one is asking anything else of me. No one is watching. I’m fit enough still, I suppose, to attempt the task.
I will imagine that after I left M. in the pre-dawn in Krakow his car would not start. I will imagine that when I walked out from Renata’s the following evening to take a Zubrowka in the Stary Rynek I found him again at the corner table. I will imagine that he would have found it curious that an old Polish man sat before him for eleven hours, listening piously as his story fell like clotted blood from his mouth. I will imagine him asking the question, What was the source of your interest?
Then I would tell him all about Angelina. I would try to bring him to the sand at Miedzyzdroje, the light on the water, the feeling as she went into me, stitch by stitch. I would try to bring him to the room where it all happened. And just as he could not answer my polite question about the book by Werner Heisenberg he was reading in the Café Voltaire without telling me of the frail figure of his father or his dream in the lay-by or his search for a cure for his grief in the world of atoms, so I would answer him by taking him not only to the foot of the stairway in the lodging-house in Berlin where I first saw Angelina, but also along the road of Polish debris and bone and ash that led me to it. Maybe he would find some comfort there, were he to hear it. And if I follow him and his beautiful girl, if I mark each step, will I find a way out of this tiny world of memory and old age that has me turning as if on a spit over the past? What else have I to do?
I shop. I eat. I pray. And I ride the trains.
Since returning home from Krakow I have been restless and when I am restless I get on a train. I like to see the round, wide-eyed faces on the embankments swivelling as we pass, farmers at their labours, guards pushing barrows, that woman in sunglasses and a fur collar whose name or movements or secrets I will never know sitting motionless on the platform on a bench. The gentle drift of the coach, the click of the wheels on the track soothe me. Something is stirring. I can’t settle. Faces rise up in my mind as though from graves and clamour. I feel Angelina moving through me like a poison.
I would not have gone to Berlin had I not first gone to Naklo, so it is to Naklo that I travel by train on this dank autumn morning.
In Naklo my grandfather tended the orchard of the family of Kazimierz Kuron, known to my grandfather as Jasny Pan, Illuminated Lord, and to the rest of us as Pan Kazimierz. That family had 740 hectares, a stableful of Arabian horses and a palace of forty-two bedrooms, but when my grandfather was about to be married this young nobleman arrived with his father and two brothers and a cartload of wheat and two small pigs as gifts and they set about building with their hands a house for my grandfather and his new wife. When my grandfather moved to take one end of a beam they were carrying they asked that he sit in the grass and enjoy the sun while they did their work. They gave him a bottle of beer and a hunter’s sausage. They asked him to sing a song from Kotlina Biebrzanska. I knew Pan Kazimierz as an old man, and I can see him now just as though he is walking towards me across his wide lawn – tall and bony, a big grey moustache, hair sprouting on the top of his head like the leaves of a carrot and his one finger pointing to the sky while he explains something. He ran a school in the house and taught mathematics and the violin himself. He’d bring out an armful of violins from a room that had hundreds of them, it seemed, put on a black hat and teach wedding tunes to the children. I think he was without vanity or self-importance, though he especially liked to wear a long dramatic coat made of seal pelts. He wrote poems which he recited to the workers during harvest season. I don’t remember how they were, but my friend Jerzy tells me now that the principal topics were religious tolerance and the psychology of the eagle.
It was here at Pan Kazimierz’s that I met Jerzy. He was a pupil at the school. He had come from the east, from Lithuania, and I from near our western border. At that time wherever he walked he bounced a tennis ball out in front of him while dispensing his thoughts. He could rhyme without effort. I thought he was the most intelligent person known to me who was not an adult. When I first saw him he was throwing a discus on the lawn.
Later, Jerzy married a woman who could not speak. Something was happening to him in those years which he could not control. He had been the brightest student at the military academy in Moscow, but when he returned there to deliver a lecture he stood paralysed at the podium. They had to carry him away. No one knew the reason at the time, but I knew it was because his
faith in the Party was breaking and he couldn’t bear it. He had been and still is my guide through many of the turnings of my life, but when he was troubled and maybe needed me I was not there for him. I was in Berlin, thinking of myself.
Now that he is older he is more calm. You can see in his eyes that he has found peace in the licence granted to grandfathers. His mind sits easily and powerfully in him again. It’s something fierce. You feel looking at him sometimes that it could ignite a pile of straw at the far end of the room. On Tuesdays a group of us meet for bridge. We take walks by the river.
It was because of Jerzy, and what he had seen, that I went to Berlin.
* * *
Always at Christmas and during the summer we travelled here to Naklo to be with my grandfather and grandmother. Then one August evening when I was ten my mother told me that I was to stay here and be a student in Pan Kazimierz’s school and live with my grandparents. I didn’t mind. I rode horses in the evening. I became a disciple of Jerzy. And each day my grandmother would sit me on a chair in the kitchen and clap her hands and cry and say that with my fine brow and noble fingers I was sure one day to be the saviour of our nation. If only she could live to see it.
At each Christmas in the house of my grandparents my grandfather’s brother Zenon would recite the death scene of Prince Poniatowski as he battled against the Prussians and Russians at Leipzig. This could come at any time – when Aunt Zofia was tying a bow in the hair of her daughter, when a new baby was being examined, when the radio was delivering a message from the Cardinal in Warsaw. It always started with a low rumbling, like movement under the earth. Then it would build into a wild, high-pitched incantation. Huge tears would run from his dark eyes and down into his moustache as he recounted the heroic sufferings of Poniatowski and of our great nation, symbolised by the eagle, a nation so often erased from the map of the world but never forgotten by its people, the nation of Chopin, Copernicus, Mickiewicz and Curie-Sklodowska, that nation that against all the odds held our Holy Mother the Church closest to its bosom. ‘Even Dostoevsky was part Polish!’ he declared. ‘And now we are a nation again, and no Prussian, no Austrian and no Russian will take it from us, for we are the friends of France and England, we are the heart of Europe, and defending us we have our own valiant warriors, the most valiant of all the world!’
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