Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulcra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum
began the bass, Luigi Lablache, so warmly, so plaintively, that her anger abated. Then the tenor came in, and the alto from behind the curtains:
Mors stupebit et natura,
Cum resurget creatura,
Judicanti responsura.
Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.
Judex ergo cum sedebit
Quidquid latet apparebit:
Nil inultum remanebit.
Until finally she heard the pure voice of Graziella shooting up like fireworks, like the revelation of her crippled leg, of the naked truth. Graziella sang the best, that was clear, and her voice was only slightly muffled by the curtain; Ludwika imagined the little Italian girl straining, intent, head raised, the veins of her neck swollen – Ludwika had seen her in rehearsals – as she belted out the lyrics in that extraordinary voice of hers, crystal clear, diamond clear, in spite of the heavy curtain, in spite of her leg, to hell with the whole damn world:
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus
Quem patronus rogaturus.
A half hour or so before the border with the Grand Duchy of Poznan, the stagecoach stopped at an inn. There the travellers first freshened up and had a small meal: a little cold baked meat, bread, and fruit, and then they went off and disappeared, much like the other passengers, into the thicket by the side of the road. For a little while they just enjoyed the buttercups in bloom; then Ludwika took from her basket an ample jar with a brown piece of muscle and tucked it away into a cleverly woven leather pouch. Aniela meticulously tied the ends of the leather straps to the scaffolding of the crinoline level with the pubic mound. When the dress fell into place, it would be impossible to tell that such a treasure lay concealed under the surface. Ludwika turned away several times, covered herself up with her dress, and headed back to the carriage.
‘I wouldn’t get far with this,’ she said to her companion. ‘It’s bashing against my legs.’
But she didn’t have to get far. She returned to her seat and sat straight up, perhaps somewhat stiffly, but she was a lady, the sister of Fryderyk Szopen. She was a Pole.
When the Prussian gendarmerie at the border ordered them to get out of the carriage, when they carefully inspected it to make sure the women weren’t trying to slip something into Congress Poland that might encourage some ridiculous independent inclinations of the Poles, they naturally found nothing.
On the other side of the border, in Kalisz, a carriage sent from the capital was awaiting them, along with several friends. Friends and witnesses to that sad ceremony. In their tailcoats and their top hats, they formed a kind of hedgerow, their faces pale and mournful, their heads turning devotedly towards each package as it was unloaded. But Ludwika, with the help of Aniela, who had been let in on the secret, managed to get away for a moment and extricate the jar from the warm insides of her dress. Aniela, rummaging around in lace, drew out the jar safely and handed it to Ludwika with the gesture of someone handing a mother her newborn child. And then Ludwika burst into tears.
Escorted by several carriages, Chopin’s heart did ultimately make it back to Warsaw.
DRY SPECIMENS
Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim. This time in the details draped over oak shelves crowned with a beautifully calligraphed inscription:
Eminet In Minimus
Maximus Ille Deus
Here the so-called dry specimens of internal organs are collected. They are done in such a way that a given body part or organ is cleansed and then stuffed with cotton wool and dried. After drying, the surface of the specimen is coated in a varnish, the same kind used to conserve the surfaces of paintings. Several layers are applied. After the cotton wool is removed, the inside of the specimen is also coated in the varnish.
Unfortunately the varnish is unable to keep the tissues from ageing, so that with time all dry specimens acquire a similar brownish shade.
Here, for example, we have a splendidly preserved human stomach, enlarged, balloon-like, the lining thin as though made of parchment; meanwhile the intestines, thick and thin – I wonder what goods of the world were consumed by this digestive system, how many animals passed through it, how many seeds slipped through, how many fruits rolled through.
Next to it, as a bonus, there’s also a turtle penis and the kidney of a dolphin.
NETWORK STATE
I am a citizen of a network state. Occupied with moving around in various directions, I’ve lost my orientation in the political matters of my country in recent times. Conversations have gone on, negotiations, conferences, sessions, summits. Great maps have roamed over tables where flags have marked conquered positions, vectors drawn to show the directions of the next conquests.
Just a few years ago on the screen of my phone at the inadvertent crossing of some now totally invisible or conventional border, the exotic names of foreign networks would register, ones no one remembers today. We didn’t notice the night-time coups, the contents of the capitulation treaties were never released to the public. Of the movements of imperial armies made up of polite, obliging officials the public was not informed.
My phone, equally polite, immediately informs me as soon as I get off a plane which province of the network state I now find myself in. It also gives necessary information, offers help should anything happen to me. It has emergency numbers, and from time to time for Valentine’s Day or Christmas it encourages me to take part in promotions and contests. This disarms me, and my anarchist moods melt in an instant.
With mixed emotions I recollect one distant journey when I found myself out of range of any network. My phone in a panic first sought some sort of way back in, but couldn’t find it. Its messages seemed increasingly hysterical. ‘No network found,’ it repeated. Then it gave up and looked at me blankly with its square pupil, lo and behold, just a useless gadget now, a piece of plastic.
I was vividly reminded of an old engraving of a wanderer who had reached the edge of the world. Excited, he threw out his travelling bundle and was now looking out, beyond the Network. That traveller from the engraving can consider himself a fortunate man: he sees the stars and planets, spread out evenly across the firmament of the sky. And he hears the music of the spheres.
We’ve been denied that gift at the end of our travels. Beyond the Network there is silence.
SWASTIKAS
In a city in South Asia the vegetarian restaurants are generally indicated with red swastikas, ancient signs of the Sun and life force. This makes vegetarians’ lives much easier in a foreign city – all you have to do is look up and follow that symbol. There they serve vegetable curry (the vegetables vary greatly), pakoras, samosas and kormas, pilafs, little cutlets, as well as my favourite rice sticks wrapped in dried algae sheets.
After a few days I’m conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs – I drool at the sight of a swastika.
VENDORS OF NAMES
I saw on the street some tiny shops where names are sold for children who will be coming into the world soon. You have to go in early and place your order. You have to give them the exact date of conception, as well as a copy of the ultrasound – because the sex of the child is extremely important when choosing a name. The salesperson records this information and tells you to come back in a few days. During this time they prepare the future child’s horoscope and dedicate themselves to meditation. Sometimes the name comes easily, materializing at the tip of their tongue in two or three sounds stuck together by saliva into syllables, which the expert hand of the master subsequently turns into red symbols on paper. Other times the name is resistant, unclear, in outline; it puts up a fight. It’s hard to enclose it in words. Then helping techniques are deployed that will, however, remain the secret of every name vendor.
You can see them through the open doors of the shops covered in rice paper, Buddha figurines and h
and-painted prayer texts, drudging away with a brush in their hand aimed at the paper. Sometimes the name just falls from the sky like a blot – surprising, clear, perfect. In such circumstances nothing can be done. It does happen that the parents aren’t pleased, would prefer a gentle name filled with optimism, like Moon Glow or Good River, for girls, or for boys, for example, Always Going Forward, Fearless, or He Who Has Achieved His Aim. The explanations of the vendor that the Buddha himself named his son Fetter are for naught. The clients leave unsatisfied, and, huffing and puffing, head to the competition.
DRAMA AND ACTION
Far from home, at a video rental shop, rummaging around the shelves, I swear in Polish. And suddenly an average-sized woman who looks to be about fifty years old stops beside me and awkwardly says in my language:
‘Is that Polish? Do you speak Polish? Hello.’
Here, alas, her stock of Polish sentences is at an end.
And now she tells me in English that she came here when she was seventeen, with her parents; here she shows off with the Polish word for ‘mummy’. Much to my dismay she then begins to cry, indicating her arm, her forearm, and talks about blood, that this is where her whole soul is, that her blood is Polish. This hapless gesture reminds me of an addict’s gesture – her index finger showing veins, the place to stick a needle in. She says she married a Hungarian and forgot her Polish. She squeezes my shoulder and leaves, disappearing between shelves labelled ‘Drama’ and ‘Action’.
It’s hard for me to believe that you could forget the language thanks to which the maps of the world were drawn. She must have simply mislaid it somewhere. Maybe it lies wadded up and dusty in a drawer of bras and knickers, squeezed into a corner like sexy thongs acquired once in a fit of enthusiasm that there was never really an occasion to wear.
EVIDENCE
I met some ichthyologists who were not at all bothered in their work by the fact that they were creationists. We were eating vegetable curries at the same table and we had a lot of time before our next flight. So we moved from the table to the bar, where a young man with eastern features and a ponytail was playing Eric Clapton’s hits on his guitar.
They were talking about how it was God who created their beautiful fish – all those trout, pike, turbot and flounder, along with all the evidence of their phylogenetic development. To complete the set of fish, which he called into existence on the third day, he also prepared their excavatable skeletons, their bold imprints in sandstone, their fossils.
‘To what end?’ I asked. ‘Why create this false evidence?’
They were ready for my doubts, so one of them answered:
‘Describing God and his intentions is like a fish trying to describe the water it swims in.’
Another added after a moment:
‘And its ichthyologist.’
NINE
In a cheap little hotel above a restaurant, in the town of X, I was assigned to room number nine. The porter, handing me the key (made of ordinary patent silver, with the number attached on a ring), said:
‘Please be careful with the key. Nine gets lost the most.’
I froze with the pen raised over the form I was filling in.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked in a state of internal alert. He couldn’t have aimed better, this man behind the counter – me, a homegrown detective, a private investigator of signs and coincidences.
He evidently noticed my unease because he explained soothingly, almost amicably – it means nothing. Simply by the eternal laws of coincidence the key to room number nine gets lost most often by distracted travellers. He knows this for sure because every year he replenishes the stocks of keys and remembers that he has to order the largest quantity of nine. Even the locksmith was surprised.
I was careful with the key during my entire four-day stay in the town of X. When I’d return to the hotel, I would always put it in some visible place, and when I would leave, I handed it over to the safe hands of the receptionists. When once I unintentionally took it with me, I placed it in the safest pocket and made sure it was there with my fingers over the course of the day.
I wonder what law governed the number nine key, what cause and what effect. Or maybe the receptionist’s spontaneous intuition was right – that it was a coincidence. Or maybe it was the opposite – it was his fault; he was choosing without realizing it for room number nine particularly distracted guests, untrustworthy, susceptible to suggestion.
After a rather hurried departure from X because of a sudden schedule change, several days later, I was shaken to find the key in the pocket of my trousers – meaning I had inadvertently taken it with me. I thought of sending it back, but, to tell the truth, I no longer remembered the address of the hotel. My only consolation was that there were others like me – a small group of people leaving the town of X with a nine in their pockets. Perhaps even unconsciously we create a kind of community, the aim of which we cannot guess yet. Perhaps in the future it will be explained. The porter’s prophecy, however, did come true – he would once again have to order the key to number nine, to the unceasing astonishment of the locksmith.
ATTEMPTS AT TRAVEL STEREOMETRY
A man awakens from an uneasy sleep on a big intercontinental plane and puts his face to the window. He sees below a massive dark land. Only here and there do weak groups of lights make their way out of that darkness – those are big cities. Thanks to the map illuminated on the screens he figures out that this is Russia, somewhere in central Siberia. He wraps himself up in his blanket and falls back asleep.
Down below, in one of those dark spots, another man is just walking out of his wooden home and raising his eyes to the sky, checking the weather for tomorrow.
If we were to pull a hypothetical straight line out of the centre of the earth, it might turn out that for a fraction of a second both of these people found themselves on that radius. Perhaps for just a second their gazes fell on it together, this beam perhaps linking their eyes.
For a brief moment these men were vertical neighbours; what is, after all, eleven thousand metres? Barely more than ten kilometres. That’s a lot less than the nearest settlement for that man on earth. It’s less than the distance dividing the neighbourhoods of a big city.
EVEN
Driving, I pass billboards that announce in black and white, in English, ‘Jesus loves even you’. I feel uplifted by the unexpected encouragement; I’m only slightly alarmed by that ‘even’.
ŚWIEBODZIN
After several hours of walking along the steep banks of the ocean among the sharp leaves of yuccas, in the blotches of shade we go down onto the rocky coast. There is a small shelter there with a fresh water intake. In this great wilderness stands a roof atop three walls. Inside it are benches to sit and sleep on. On one of them – strangely – lies a notebook in a black plastic cover and a yellow Bic pen. It’s a guestbook. I throw down my backpack and maps and read it greedily, from the beginning. Columns, styles of handwriting, foreign words, the laconic basics of all those who by some twist of inscrutable fate have found themselves here before me. Number, date, first and last name, the Three Pilgrim’s Questions: country of origin, last place visited, place of destination. It turns out I am the hundred and fifty-sixth to come here. Before me were Norwegians, Irish, Americans, two Koreans, Australians, Germans, but there are Swiss people here, too, and even – would you look at that – Slovakians. Then my gaze stops at one name: Szymon Polakowski, Świebodzin, Poland. I gaze hypnotized at that unhurried entry. I say the name out loud: Świebodzin, and from then on I have the impression that over the ocean, yuccas and steep path someone has placed a milky film. That funny difficult name, against which the undisciplined tongue rebels, that soft perverse ‘ś’ that immediately brings a vague sensation, something like cold oilcloth spread over the kitchen table, a basket of freshly plucked tomatoes from the country garden, the smell of the fumes from the gas stove. It all combines to make Świebodzin the only real thing. There’s nothing else. The rest of the day hangs
over the ocean – a great fata morgana. And although I’ve never been in that small town, I see somewhat indistinctly its streets, bus stops, butcher shops, church tower. At night I am overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia, unpleasant, like a contraction of the intestines, and half-asleep I see a stranger’s lips flawlessly arranging themselves in that astonishing ‘św’.
KUNICKI: EARTH
Summer’s closed its door to Kunicki. Slammed its door. He is just settling in now, switching his sandals for slippers, his shorts for long trousers, sharpening the pencils on his desk, putting receipts in order. The past has ceased to exist, becoming just life’s scraps – no sense in regrets now. So what he feels must be a phantom pain, unreal, the pain of every incomplete, jagged form that by its nature longs for wholeness. There is no other explanation.
Lately he can’t sleep. Or rather – he falls asleep in the evenings, is exhausted to dropping, but he wakes up around three or four in the morning, as he did years ago, after the flood. But back then he knew where the insomnia was coming from – he’d been terrified of the disaster. Now it’s different. There is no catastrophe. And yet a kind of hole has opened up, a rupture. Kunicki knows that words would mend it; if he were to find the appropriate quantity of sensible, correct words to explain what had happened, the hole could be patched up, there wouldn’t be a trace of it, and he would sleep till eight. Sometimes, rarely, he thinks he hears a voice, one or two words, piercing, resounding. Words ripped from both the sleepless night and the frenetic day. Something sparking off between his neurons, unidentifiable impulses that leap from place to place. Is this not exactly how thought happens?
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