I am going to stop just now. I am going to listen to a music programme on the radio. It’s old songs mostly, from when I was a boy. Very silly, I admit, but they give me comfort. It’s just the sight of M. in this moment. I think even he would understand it, were he to know that I am doing this and could see the picture that I have made before me. If someone is concentrating very hard on a small, intricate task, or angry that a bus driver has ignored them or is trying to have a conversation with their dog, this can be funny, this can be pleasurable. But this most unappealing spectacle of a man embarked on seduction – this just makes me miserable. How vainglorious they look, and how insincere. And how often I have been that way myself!
I take a small glass of beer, I listen to the songs. And then I return.
There was silence then – the only sound from the water moving over rocks, the stirring of leaves. Hanna was very still, her hands folded in front of her. M. wondered if her mind was in another place, if he had bored her.
‘Sometimes I think about a room,’ she said then. ‘I don’t know where it is. I don’t know very well what’s inside it. I know I’ve never been there. I’ve never had the feeling I know I could get if I was inside it. But still it seems very familiar to me. All around would be a forest. The room would be simple and clean. The walls and the floor would be made of wood. I can almost feel the peace I could get there. I don’t know how to get it. I never truly felt it. Maybe I’ll have to go a long way before I find this room. Maybe I won’t be young any more. I don’t know the way there or what the door looks like. But if I get there and I open it I’ll know that’s my room.’
She did not look at M. Perhaps she was embarrassed. Her eyes seemed to him still on the water, although he couldn’t see them because of the fall of her hair. The water rushed past. It was like mercury where the sun hit it. Where it was clear he could see the stones as though under a microscope, their veinwork, the streaks of pink and green. Her breathing was faster, like a startled child’s. He heard the ticking of the watch on her wrist. And then suddenly the words which would come to drive him alone along the roadways of Europe – ‘Maybe you will be there,’ she said. He took a breath, his heart pounding.
Two nuns drove by on bicycles, a large black bird called out from the sky and the sun dropped down behind the mountain. What remained of the day came flooding in. She looked at M. She stood. She smiled a little, maybe with a trace of pity. He watched the picture of the room in the forest drain from her face.
What can an old man do? I think of the friends of my grandfather who lay on the floor of our kitchen and told each other stories on winter nights. They told them because the nights were long and they were skilled at the telling. Then there is a different kind of story that will grow like a tumour in the teller unless he releases it. I like to listen to stories, though it is not so easy to find those who will tell them. They stop the time. They take me out of myself. And I like to tell them, though it is not easy to find those who will listen. What is the reason for telling them? Because they are there to be told. Who are they for? For the stories themselves. I must take out the words, one by one.
I am in a café in this small Polish city unimportant to anyone except those of us living in it, my hands around a cup of coffee made from waxed paper. I am sitting in a green plastic chair. People are alone at tables eating thin grey hamburgers, and teenaged workers run around in striped uniforms, their names printed on badges. The lights are insufferably bright. I look out the window through the swirling snow at the shoemaker in the shop opposite hammering a nail into a heel, the bells ringing in the tower of a church and a girl with the voice of a child singing a song in English on the radio. I go along with M.’s story now like an elderly widower walking his dog. I feel well and warm and, strange to say, somehow guarded by its company. I feel different when I wake. I used to hear the dripping faucet. I could be irritated at something, usually a transgression. There might be just a trace of nausea and nearly always vacancy. What way to fill the day? Now I wake sharp, clear. I have the wish for food. And there is the sense that I am carrying something, of the need to mind it well until I have the means of delivering it.
In my mind I go to places I’ve never been, pass time with people I would never meet. I don’t say this is such a poor life here. It suffices, surely. But it is made richer by this. Pictures arrive unbidden. Just now this little café breaks up and I see the dance hall in Barcelona where M. told me that he took Hanna on the night that everything between them changed. Such elegance! – the soft warm candlelight, the waiters with their brilliantined hair and white jackets, the twenty-four-piece jazz band, a tall, slender woman in a long leather coat and with red lipstick lighting a cigarette as she waits for a table. How fine I could be there, I think, and how far I am from it now. I like the shine on the waiters’ shoes, the smell of their cologne, the stories unfolding at each of the tables, the time stretching out like a tableful of food, ample and easy, the look of the drummer as he laughs to himself and shakes his head at some joke in the notes of the music, the rich, dark glow of the paintings in the candlelight, the look of eagerness on the face of a silver-haired man as he hands his coat in through the door of a cubicle, the single, merged voice of everyone rolling and gently breaking like waves against a shoreline.
M. had feared he wouldn’t be given another chance after the day in the mountains by the side of the river. But then she asked him if he would drive her to Barcelona. She had to deliver a document to a government department, she said. He waited for her in a high vaulted entranceway with angels carved into the ceiling and guards still as hay bales at the door. Finally she appeared. ‘Would you like coffee?’ he had asked her. ‘Yes,’ she said. She assented too to dinner and then a slow walk through the dark streets. They came then to a glass door and he led her in.
* * *
M. sat with Hanna in a red velvet booth, the seat hooking in the shape of a scythe around the table. They had a bottle of wine. The walls were green and gold. It was dark, just the yellow and orange of the candles on the tables lighting the undersides of jaws and brows. A mirror ran the entire length of the bar, two gold columns to either side of it twisting like ship’s cable up to the ceiling. The glass was imperfect, mottled black here and there.
M. sat close to her, looking just at her. He looked at the pattern of veins on the back of her hand and up her arm, the trace of pulse just visible on her neck, the way the lids dropped slowly over her green eyes, her fingers moving up the stem of her wine glass, the slow circling of her ankle acknowledging the music. He felt the aura of her beauty running over his skin. He leaned forward and poured wine into her glass, then into his.
In the first hour she looked twice at her watch, but another two had passed since and he ordered another bottle of wine without her objecting. Sometimes their shoulders touched and she did not move away. She was laughing more now, but very low and soft. When she spoke it was nearly in a whisper so that M. had to lean forward to hear her. Had anyone else there a sense of the power of these moments in his life? They did not, of course. They were in their own bitterness or gaiety. The booths were full and people were standing, smiling, talking. Dancers skipped from the floor, their faces reddened from the dance just ended. But the silver-haired man was collecting his coat and the woman with the red lipstick put out her last cigarette and drew on her gloves. How much time did he have? The music began again, slow and wondrous. She was looking down as she turned a matchbook around in her fingers. M. clenched his jaw and leaned forward and spoke to her. She leaned back and looked at him. She seemed amused by this little process of assessment of him and expected him to feel the same. He got to his feet. She looked at the hand he held out to her. What was she thinking? Maybe just the simple words, Why not? She took M.’s hand and followed him to the dancefloor. She moved towards him and settled as light as a mist against his chest. They began to dance. They danced more slowly than anyone else. She was in his arms for the first time and was going without demur wherever h
e led her. He looked down at the curve of her ear, the light moving through her hair. He felt her breathing, each foot taking her weight as she moved from foot to foot in the dance. Time, the waiters and barmen, the people in the booths and the world beyond left him. There was only him and her and the music. Currents moved like sheet lightning over his skin. He drew her closer, his leg moving against the inside of hers. She did not step away. She seemed suddenly lighter and a cloud of warm air rose from her neck. He drew back and her eyes rose to meet his. They held them. Where are we going now? he thought until the idea smeared and moved away. He saw her eyes close, her face lift to his, the lips moist, her mouth opening, and he moved down to meet it, the light going out as he lost himself within her. Of this place, he believed, there could be no end.
One hour later the band were packing away their instruments and the waiters were sweeping under the tables. M. and Hanna were still moving around the dancefloor, faces flushed, out of breath. A man in a tailcoat tapped M. on the shoulder and said he must lock the door.
He stepped with her out on to the pavement still wet from the roadsweepers and into his car. ‘Come with me,’ he said to her. She looked long into his eyes, and then away. ‘I can’t,’ she said. He drove out then to the town where she lived, her head against his shoulder, her arm around his neck. He walked with her to the red door. ‘This is everything to me now,’ he told her. ‘Yes,’ she said. She touched his face and went in. He sat in his car and watched a light in an upstairs room turn on, then off.
M. sat in his home, all the windows open. He watched the light come in, a sea-blue early morning light. He could see everything, every particle.
Could it be that now she was his? He could not know. But he felt a rising power and glory such as he had never felt before, yet which he seemed to know intimately. Ahead of him, his life was opening. He would ready himself for it. He would not move too fast. He would say nothing that was false. He would take everything she offered him. He would love her with all that he had, all that he had known. It was to be a feast that would have no end.
M. stepped from his car with an armful of roses. The last of the day’s light flowed orange and red over the stones of the buildings. On the air he seemed to catch her fragrance. The bead curtain at the entrance to the bar billowed, then stilled.
He walked through the curtains and stood where he had first seen her. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and wondered how she would look at him now. But even before he could see, he sensed a difference there. The air was vacant, the men were solitary over their drinks and anticipating nothing. As the light slowly came back into his eyes he saw that the distant moving shape behind the bar was not Hanna but rather a woman with long black hair hanging around her face like curtains in an abandoned house. She was wearing a blue velvet dress bulging with the rolls of her fat and was moving a cloth slowly over a beer tap, a lit cigarette in her other hand.
M. stepped further into the bar. The men who had so loathed him did not lift their heads. He watched the bar’s owner come out from a back room in a white apron. He took a chair from beside one of the tables and stood on it, then began to push a bulb into a socket.
M. stood beneath him. He asked him was she coming in to work that day.
‘What’s that?’ said the man.
‘Hanna,’ said M. ‘Do you expect her?’
‘She’s left,’ he said.
He looked down.
‘Their visas ran out.’
‘They?’ said M.
‘Her and that lame friend who came to visit her.’
M. stared at him.
‘The one she pushed around the park every evening in his wheelchair,’ said the man. ‘You must have seen him. Round, badly cut hair, red-brimmed hat.’
The man squinted back into the socket to find a way to fix the bulb.
M. felt the smile he brought in with his roses still locked on his face. He walked back through the doorway into the evening light.
5
Something Cold and Undeniable
YEARS LATER, AT Naklo, Jerzy told me what had happened to him during the time I was on the farm in Germany.
When the Russians came to his village he was sleeping in a field of potatoes. From far away the sounds of tanks and marching feet reached him through the ground. He lay flat among the leaves and the white flowers. As the first light broke he saw the columns arrive. Nothing so big as the tanks, nor so many men in uniform, had ever been seen in the streets of the village. ‘Even if we had known about it for weeks, even if we had been shown film of exactly how it would look, still we would have been surprised,’ he told me. He watched the lights go on in the houses. In one window he saw a woman place a photograph of Joseph Stalin and arrange around its edges a scarf of red silk. He moved forward a little. He was trying to arrive at a point where he could see his own house. That he did not see this, nor the round wooden table where he did his lessons, nor the painting of his mother in her long green dress, nor his father the village doctor ever again was because just at that moment two Russian soldiers moved to the edge of the field where he was hiding in order to urinate. Jerzy crawled back towards where he had been. He did not stop. He moved along the furrows past the leaves and the white tubers of the potatoes, over a low wall, into a field of long grass and finally into a forest.
When I heard the story I imagined us together in that forest, two men of legend, on the run, wild and free. During those years in Pan Kazimierz’s school I had become a kind of secretary to Jerzy. On the lawn in front of the big house it was he who could lift the greatest weight, could run the fastest, had the most golden hair, knew words in French, dazzled the girls, could recite the periodic table and set the discus sailing furthest through the sky. And he did all of it naturally, easily, without a word of a boast.
One day a boy named Feliks who had teeth like a mule’s put his foot out just as I was making a turn in a race. I went through the air and lost a tooth and blackened an eye when I went straight into a tree. All of us who were smaller were afraid of this Feliks. He’d make a fist with just the one middle finger protruding and hit us on the shoulder whenever he felt like it. He sent us on errands. He made us steal cigarettes for him. Even now when I think of him I cannot wish him well. What he didn’t know was that just at the moment that he was putting his foot out to trip me Jerzy was parking his bicycle in the lane by the field where we were racing. As he stood laughing at me lying at the foot of the tree with blood running out of my mouth Jerzy tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, but before he could even draw breath Jerzy had him with one hand by the throat up against the trunk of the tree and with the other slapped him half a dozen times very hard across the face.
‘Apologise,’ he said.
‘But you and I are friends,’ said Feliks. Blood and mucus bubbled from his nose, and he was crying.
Jerzy hit him again, harder, with his open hand across the face.
‘Beg the boy’s forgiveness,’ he said.
And Feliks did it, on his knees, in front of all of us. He had to. We stood smiling there on the grass like vagrants invited to a feast. From that moment I imagined myself in a pact with Jerzy, as though he had saved me from drowning. I stayed close to his side.
For six weeks after the arrival of the Russians in his Lithuanian village Jerzy lived on the fruits of the forest, what he could find in the fields and the graciousness of strangers. He walked mostly. Sometimes people took him in their cars. He got through much of Belarus in a train. In the middle of a road near Kobryn he saw a crowd of people fighting over a liver they had cut from a dead horse.
Finally he came to Lwow. In this city at this time Professor Rudolf Weigl was preparing his vaccine for typhus. The French Nobel Prizewinner Nivelle had discovered that typhus is caused by body lice, and Weigl was developing his vaccine from bacteria which he bred in the intestines of these small animals. There were more than one million and a half of them kept in small wooden boxes covered with gauze. The first time Jerz
y entered the laboratory he saw over forty women standing still with expressions such as people have when waiting for buses, their stockings rolled down and their bare legs pressed to the boxes. The lice were drinking their blood through the tiny openings in the gauze. Some of the lice were healthy, others were infected with typhus.
Jerzy had been given a bed by a porter in the university buildings and he went to work for Professor Weigl. His job was to place mature lice under the lens of a microscope, press down on their heads while inserting a tiny glass tube into their anuses and then to discharge a drop of the typhus bacteria into them. There the culture grew while the lice fed on the blood of the volunteers who were immune to the virus. The lice then lived for just another five or six days. They grew pink, then red, and then finally were placed in a bath of carbolic acid. It was at this point that Jerzy performed the second part of his job – to insert a tiny hook into the dead lice and extract their intestines. These were then ground into a white pulp in a sterile glass mortar, suspended in distilled water and finally packed into ampoules before being sent to typhus-infected regions all over the world. While he worked, Jerzy asked questions of the laboratory staff, and sometimes of the professor himself, about biology. Weigl’s vaccine halted epidemics in Chile and saved the lives of missionaries in China.
By this time Jerzy had learned to live with the cunning of the dogs made homeless by the slaughters and transportations. He began to move towards Warsaw.
What he did not know then was that on the night the Russians came to his village his father had been called to assist at the birth of a child. It was a boy. Afterwards he went home, and it was just as he was pouring himself a vodka before returning to bed that he heard the knock of the soldiers on the door. He and his wife and Jerzy’s sisters were given one half-hour to take what they could carry and then go by cart to the railway line. A train was waiting there. A soldier for ever remembered by Jerzy’s mother placed her sewing machine in the cart with them as they were moving away. ‘This could help you,’ he said. She didn’t understand why. She thought they were only going as far as Wilno. The train carried two thousand Poles in thirty-five goods wagons with shelves to sleep on, an iron stove in the centre and a hole in the floor for use as a toilet for the journey across Russia to Siberia. It took them a month. When they got there Jerzy’s father was sent eight hundred metres below the earth to mine for gold. He died before the spring. Jerzy’s mother and sisters earned their money in the labour camp by making clothes with the machine the soldier had placed on their cart and were transferred to Palestine after the Germans went to war against the Russians. Jerzy escaped the fate of the others in his family because for the previous week he had been practising for the invasion by sleeping in the fields. The boy whose birth Jerzy’s father assisted that night later became a military cadet and was already an officer in the Polish army when General Wojciech Jaruzelski seized power in September 1981 – an event I remember reading about on a bus on the way to a baseball game in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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