He added that when we are in motion, there’s no time for such idle meditations. Which is why to people on trips everything seems new and clean, virginal, and, in some sense, immortal.
And when he got out at Mikulec, I repeated to myself his strange-sounding name. Ne-boy-sha. It sounded exactly like the Polish ‘Nie bój się’: do not be afraid.
DAY OF THE DEAD
The guidebook maintains that this holiday lasts for three days. When it falls in the middle of the week, the government rounds out the length of the holiday’s duration, and schools and public offices get a whole week off. Radio stations broadcast without interruption the music of Chopin, since it is thought that this favours concentration and serious reflection. It is expected that every inhabitant of the country will visit in this time the graves of their dead. Since the country has over the course of the last twenty years gone through an unprecedented boom and industrialization, this means that almost all the residents of several of the large modern cities set out for distant provinces. All the flights and trains and buses have been reserved for months. Those who weren’t quick enough before will now be forced to drive to the graves of their ancestors in their own cars. On the eve of the holiday the roads out of the cities are already congested. Because the holiday is in August, sitting in a traffic jam in high temperatures is not much fun. Therefore people, anticipating all sorts of inconveniences, come equipped with small portable plasma TVs and coolers. If you close the tinted windows and turn on the AC, you can get through those few hours, particularly in the pleasant company of family or friends, with a travelling buffet. This is a time people make phone calls. Thanks to the fact that mobile phones are being used everywhere for video connections, you can make up the distances in social contacts. You can even, sitting in a traffic jam this way, connect with your friends through videoconferences, gossip and make plans to meet up after everyone gets back home.
To ancestral spirits one brings gifts: cookies baked especially for this purpose, fruit, prayers written on pieces of material.
Those who remain in the cities experience very strange sensations: the giant shopping centres are closed and even the huge screens with advertisements are turned off for this period. The number of metros is reduced, and some stations are completely shut down (for example, University and Stock Exchange). Fast food restaurants and nightclubs are closed. The city is so empty that this year the authorities decided to stop the electronically controlled system of city fountains, which is expected to bring massive savings.
RUTH
After his wife died, he made a list of all the places that had the same name as her: Ruth.
He found quite a few of them, not only towns, but also streams, little settlements, hills – even an island. He said he was doing it for her sake, and besides, it gave him strength to see that in some indefinable way she still existed in the world, even if only in name. And that furthermore, whenever he would stand at the foot of a hill called Ruth, he would get the sense she hadn’t died at all, that she was right there, just differently.
Her life insurance was able to cover the costs of his travels.
RECEPTION AT LARGE FANCY HOTELS
In a rush I enter and am greeted by the polite smile of the porter. I look around as though I’m busy, as though I’ve come to meet someone. I put on an act. I glance impatiently at my watch, and then I collapse into one of the chairs and light a cigarette.
Receptions are better than cafés. You don’t have to order anything, you don’t have to get into any disputes with the waiters, or eat anything. The hotel extends before me its rhythms, it’s a whirlpool, and its centre is the revolving door. The flowing stream of people pauses, turns in place for a night or two, then continues.
Whoever was supposed to come won’t come, but does that undermine the ethos of my waiting? It’s an activity similar to meditation – time flows and brings little in the way of novelty, situations repeat (a taxi drives up, a new guest gets out of it, the porter takes their suitcase out of the boot, they walk up to reception, with the key to the lift). Sometimes situations double up (two taxis arrive symmetrically from two opposing directions, and two guests get out of them, two porters take out two suitcases from the two boots) or multiply, it gets crowded, the situation gets tense, chaos looms, but it’s just a complicated figure, hard to see at first its complex harmony. At other times the hall becomes unexpectedly empty, and then the porter flirts with the receptionist, but only absent-mindedly, half-heartedly, remaining at full hotel readiness.
I sit like this for about an hour, no longer. I see those coming out of the lift and rushing off to a meeting, late by nature, sometimes in their rush they spin around in the revolving door as though in a mill that will grind them into dust in a moment. I see those who shamble along, dragging their feet, as though forcing themselves to put one foot in front of the other, lingering before every movement. Women waiting for men, men waiting for women. The women wear fresh make-up that the coming evening will wipe off completely, and over them a cloud of perfume, a sacred halo. The men act out complete freedom, but in reality they’re tense, living somewhere in the lower floors of their bodies today, in their lower abdomens.
This waiting periodically brings lovely presents – here a man is escorting a woman to a taxi. They get out of the lift. She is small, petite, dark-haired, dressed in a tight short skirt, but she doesn’t look vulgar. An elegant prostitute. He walks behind her, tall, greying, in a grey suit, with his hands in his trousers pockets. They don’t talk, and they keep a distance; it’s hard to believe that just a moment ago their mucus membranes were rubbing against each other, that he was thoroughly investigating the insides of her mouth with his tongue. They walk side by side now, but he lets her go first again into the mill of the revolving door. The taxi is waiting, notified. The woman gets in without a word, at most just a slight smile. There is no ‘see you later’ or ‘this was nice’, nothing of the kind. He leans into the window just a little, but I don’t think he says anything. Maybe a completely superfluous ‘goodbye’, perhaps still bound by habit. And she’s driven off. He comes back, meanwhile, with his hands in his pockets, light and content, there’s even the hint of a smile on his face. He’s already starting to come up with plans for the evening, has already remembered email and phones, but he won’t go to them just yet, he’ll keep enjoying this lightness for a bit, perhaps he’ll just go out for a drink.
POINT
Passing through these cities, I do know that at some point I will have to stay in one of them for longer, maybe even settle down. I weigh them in my mind, compare and evaluate, and it always seems to me that each of them is too far, or too near.
Which means there must be some fixed point around which all of my perambulations revolve. Too far from what, too near to what?
CROSS SECTION AS LEARNING METHOD
Learning by layers; each layer is only vaguely reminiscent of the next or of the previous; usually it’s a variation, a modified version, each contributes to the order of the whole, though you wouldn’t know it looking at each one on its own, cut off from the whole.
Each slice is a part of the whole, but it’s governed by its own rules. The three-dimensional order, reduced and imprisoned in a two-dimensional layer, seems abstract. You might even think that there was no whole, that there never had been.
CHOPIN’S HEART
It is widely known that Chopin died at two o’clock in the morning (‘aux petites heures de la nuit,’ as French Wikipedia tells us) on 17 October 1849. By his death bed were several of his closest friends, among them his sister Ludwika, who attended to him munificently until the very end, as well as Father Aleksander Jełowicki who, shaken by the quiet, animal deceasing of a thoroughly ruined body, by the drawn-out battle that was every gulp of air, first fainted in the stairwell and then, under the rubric of some rebellion he wasn’t altogether conscious of, thought up a better version of the virtuoso’s death in his memoirs. He wrote, among other things, that the last words of Fryderyk
Chopin had been, ‘I am already at the source of all happiness,’ which was a very obvious lie, although certainly beautiful and moving. In fact, as Ludwika recalled it, her brother said nothing; in fact, he had been unconscious for a few hours. What actually escaped his lips in the very end was a stream of dark, thick blood.
Now Ludwika, freezing and exhausted, is driving off in a stagecoach. She’s nearing Leipzig. It’s a wet winter, and heavy clouds with black bellies are coming up on them from the west; it will most likely snow. Many months have passed since the funeral, but yet another funeral, in Poland, awaits Ludwika now. Fryderyk Chopin had always said he wanted to be buried in his native land, and because he knew perfectly well that he was dying, he had planned his death quite carefully. And his funerals, too.
No sooner had he died than Solange’s husband had arrived. He arrived so promptly it was as if he had been waiting in his overcoat and his boots for a knock on his door. He appeared with all his equipment in a leather bag. First he coated the lifeless hand of the deceased in fat, placed it deliberately and respectfully upon a small wooden trough, and poured plaster over it. Then with Ludwika’s help, he made a death mask – they had to do it before the lines of his face had stiffened unduly, before death had intervened in them, for death renders all faces similar.
Quietly, with no fuss, Fryderyk Chopin’s next wish was fulfilled. The second day after his death a doctor recommended by Countess Potocka asked that the body be undressed to the waist and then, having lain an armful of sheets around the body’s bare rib cage, opened it with his scalpel in a single swift movement. Ludwika, who was there for this, felt that the body had trembled, and had even let out a sort of sigh. Later, when the sheets were almost black with blood clots, she turned to face the wall.
The doctor rinsed the heart in a basin, and Ludwika was surprised at how big, shapeless, colourless it was. It barely fit into the jar filled with alcohol, so the doctor advised they get a bigger one. The muscular tissue must not be compressed nor touch the walls of the jar.
Ludwika dozes off now, rocked by the regular clatter of the carriage, and in the seat opposite her, next to her travelling companion, Aniela, a lady appears, someone she doesn’t know, but someone she might have known a long time ago, back in Poland, wearing a dusty mourning dress like the widows of the 1830 uprisings, with an ostentatious cross on her breast. Her face is swollen, made ashen by Siberian frosts; her hands, in worn-out grey gloves, keep the jar. Ludwika awakes with a moan and checks the contents of her basket. Everything is fine. She pushes her hat back up; it had slid down onto her forehead. She curses in French: her neck is so stiff. Aniela wakes up, too, and draws the shades. The flat winter landscape is strikingly sad. In the distance there are some hamlets, human settlements bathed in a wet grey. Ludwika imagines herself crawling along a large table, like an insect under the attentive gaze of some monstrous entomologist. She shudders and asks Aniela for an apple.
‘Where are we?’ she asks, looking out the window.
‘We have a few hours left,’ says Aniela soothingly. She hands her companion one of last year’s wrinkled apples.
The funeral was supposed to take place at La Madeleine. They had already arranged the mass, but in the meantime the body was displayed in the Place Vendôme, where hordes of friends and acquaintances kept coming to pay their respects. Despite the covered windows, the sun kept trying to sneak in to play with the warm colours of the autumn flowers: purple asters, honey-toned chrysanthemum. Inside the candles had exclusive sovereignty, giving the impression that the colour of the flowers was profound and succulent, and the face of the deceased not so pale as in daylight.
As it turned out, it was going to be difficult to fulfil Fryderyk’s wish that Mozart’s Requiem be played at his funeral. His friends had managed, through their numerous contacts, to assemble the finest musicians and singers, including the best bass singer in Europe, Luigi Lablache – an amusing Italian who could impersonate whomever he wished in a manner found impressive by all. And in fact, on one of the evenings when everyone was awaiting the funeral, he had done such a perfect impersonation of Chopin that the whole company had roared with laughter, not really knowing if they ought to – for the deceased was not yet even underground. But in the end someone said that after all it was really a proof of love and remembrance. And that in that way he would remain with the living for longer. Everyone remembered how Fryderyk could so proficiently and maliciously parody others. One thing was certain: he had been a man of many talents.
In essence, everything got complicated. Women weren’t allowed to perform solos – or even to perform in the choir – at La Madeleine. Such was their age-old tradition: no women. Only men’s voices, at the most the voices of eunuchs (to the Church even a man with no balls is better than a woman, as the situation was summarized by the woman in charge of the sopranos, an Italian singer, Miss Graziella Panini), where were they going to find eunuchs in that day and age, in 1849? How could they sing ‘Tuba mirum’, then, without the soprano and alto parts? The parish priest at La Madeleine told them that the rules could not be changed, not even for Chopin.
‘How long are we supposed to keep the body? Are we going to have to turn, for the love of God, to Rome for an answer?’ cried Ludwika, who had been driven to despair.
Because October was quite warm that year, the body was transferred to a chilly morgue. It was overlain with flowers, and it was practically invisible underneath them. It lay in semi-darkness, slight, gaunt, heartless; a snow-white shirt concealed the set of not particularly painstaking stitches with which the ribcage had been resealed.
In the meantime the rehearsals continued for Requiem, as well-placed friends of the deceased negotiated delicately with the parish priest. In the end it was decided that the women, the soloists as well as the members of the choir, would stand behind a heavy black curtain, invisible to churchgoers. Only Graziella complained, no one else, but in the end it was decided that in this particular situation such a resolution was still better than none.
While waiting for the funeral, Fryderyk’s close friends came every evening to his sister’s or to George Sand’s to remember him. They would dine together and exchange the latest society gossip. Those days were strangely peaceful, as though not belonging to the ordinary calendar.
Graziella, petite and dark-complexioned, with a tempest of curly hair, was a friend of Delfina Potocka, and both women had come to visit Ludwika on several occasions. Graziella, sipping liqueur, mocked the baritone and the conductor but was quite happy to speak about herself. As artists always are. She limped with one leg because she had been mauled the previous year in Vienna during the street fighting. The crowd had overturned her carriage, no doubt in the conviction that it contained some wealthy aristocrat rather than an actress. Graziella had a weakness for pricy carriages and an elegant toilette, probably because she came from a family of cobblers in Lombardy.
‘Can an actress not travel in a sumptuous carriage? Is it wrong, when one has attained successes, to allow oneself a little pleasure?’ she said in her Italian accent, which made it sound like she was stuttering slightly.
Graziella’s misfortune had been to find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crowd, with its revolutionary inclinations, not daring to attack the Emperor’s palace which was surrounded by guards, began to ransack his collections. Graziella watched them drag out everything that could be equated, in the mind of the people, with aristocratic decadence, luxury, and cruelty. The raving crowd threw armchairs out of windows, ripped apart canapés, tore the high-priced panelling off the walls. With a crash they broke the beautiful crystal mirrors. They destroyed, too, the glass cases containing archeological treasures. Hurling fossils out onto the pavement, they shattered the windowpanes. In no time they had plundered the semi-precious stones; they then took to the skeletons and the stuffed animals. Some sort of spokesman of the people called for all the stuffed humans and other mummies to be given a proper Christian funeral, or at the very least for thes
e proofs of the authorities’ usurpation of the human body to be destroyed. A great pyre was built; they burned everything they came across.
The carriage landed in such an unfortunate position that the wires of the crinoline wounded her leg and obviously severed nerves, because the limb was left somewhat lifeless. As she was recounting these dramatic events, she raised her skirt and showed the other ladies her leg, immobilized by a leather sleeve with whalebone, held in place by the hoops that also held up her dress.
‘Here’s what crinoline’s good for,’ said the singer.
It was the singer’s gesture – whose voice and performance were much appreciated at the funeral mass – that gave Ludwika the idea. That gesture: lifting up the bell-shaped dress and revealing the mystery of the complicated dome that extended along whalebone and the wires of a parasol.
Several thousand people came to the funeral. They had to redirect cab traffic from the route of the procession. All of Paris came to a stop because of the funeral. When they began the ‘Introitus’, prepared with such diligence, and the voices in the choir struck the vault of the church, people began to cry. The ‘Requiem aeternam’ was very powerful, and everyone was very moved by it, but Ludwika could no longer feel any sadness, having cried it all out already – but she did feel anger. Because what kind of miserable, pathetic world was this, where you die so young – where you die at all? And why him? Why that way? She raised a handkerchief to her eyes, but not to wipe tears, just to be able to clamp down on something as hard as she could, and to cover her eyes, which contained not water, but fire.
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