The Winter Vault (27 page)

– I slipped down between the stones, said Lucjan, into a neat burrow and found an oilcloth on the ground and a whole loaf of bread laid out on a wooden shelf. I picked up the loaf and started to climb out when I heard a voice.

‘I don't have much. Help yourself.’

The voice spoke without sarcasm. I turned around to see a man sitting cross legged on the floor in the dimness, leaning against the wall. His generosity made me so ashamed I wanted to knock his head off, knock him over. But instead I tore into his bread right in front of him, crammed it into my mouth, and left for him only a pinch of it.

Still he didn't move. He sat, watching me.

I really felt like giving him a clout. But I was curious too. So I stood there and watched him. Finally he said, ‘Are you going to stay here all night?’

‘What were you doing,’ I asked, ‘when I came in?’

‘Thinking.’

‘What were you thinking about?’

‘The city. Nowy Swiat Street.’

I began to climb out.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘You're as strong as an oxen – two oxen. Why don't you help us? I'll make sure you get fed. A whole loaf of bread and a coupon for shoes.’

I waved him off.

‘Don't you want to help? We'll rise again, you'll see. Are you so sure you don't want to help?’

He looked hard at me. And then suddenly he understood.

‘Are you a Jew?’

We stood looking at each other – a long time, maybe a minute. Until – disgusting! – tears came into my eyes. Tears came into my eyes, but still I wouldn't let go my gaze.

‘Ah,’ he said and finally looked away.

And that's when I felt what power it is to push people away. It gave me satisfaction and a hair-tearing sadness to watch him lower his eyes.

‘I'll have bread every day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just for carrying things?’

‘Yes.’

I came back into the room and ate the last bit of crust I'd left for him. I ate everything he had and left him nothing, not a crumb.

Those who had shoes worked in the debris. Those who didn't, helped to draw up plans. It was unspoken, yet everyone clearing the rubble and working on the reconstruction of the city felt it – that when Warsaw was rebuilt, the dead could return. Not only the dead, but mortal ghosts, ghosts of flesh and blood.

After the war it was decided that the oldest district, the Old Town, would be rebuilt – not just built up again but … an exact copy. Every lintel and cornice, every portico and engraving, every lamppost. You can imagine the debate. But in the end, there was agreement: even those who disagreed understood the necessity.

Biegański, Zachwalowicz, Kuzma, and the rest based their plans for this reconstruction of the Old Town – of the market and of Piwna and Zapiecek streets – on Canaletto's paintings of Warsaw in the eighteenth century, on photos, and on the drawing exercises made by Professor Sosnowski's students from the polytechnic. When Sosnowski died during the seige of 1939, the architecture school continued underground. Students crept into the streets to sketch a careful inventory of memorials, statues, and buildings. These sketches were hidden in the cellar at the university. And in 1944, when the university burned, the drawings were saved. They were hidden among a stack of legal papers and were smuggled out of the city and given over to the custody of the dead; that is, they were hidden in a tomb at Piotrków monastery. Professor Lorentz's students made night raids to the ruins of the royal castle and carried to safety anything with architectural detail – the panelled doors of the chapel, slabs of plaster murals and marble fireplaces, window frames – thousands of bits and pieces.

I know this because I was recruited. I was small and fast and I had no one who cared about me. Therefore, I was of some use. At night I went along on these scavenging hunts, and afterwards they fed me. I collected door handles, bits of ironmongery, and stone ornaments in exchange for bread and shelter. I learned a lot, listening to those students, about all sorts of things. Nobody paid any attention to me, I was only twelve years old. I overheard many conversations – about democracy and weight-bearing walls and what books to read and, ‘if a woman is present she must always be offered the first swig from the flask.’ There must have been a lot of useful suggestions about sex, if only I'd understood what they were talking about. When I lived among the students of the polytechnic, there were so many liaisons, the passions were so fluid, so messy, so adult; I watched it happening around me, only later, when I was older, did I take part in it myself. And much later, when I was in my twenties, I eavesdropped again, on Ewa and Paweł's theatre tribe – everyone trying to find a home. With the polytechnics, I usually sat in the corner listening and fell asleep as soon as they gave me my bread, and they never turned me out. I owe those students so much, many people whose names I never knew. They taught me everything. What to read and how to argue about what you read. How to look at a painting. An entire education.

But most important to me of all the polytechnics was a student named Piotr. His father was British, and everyone gathered around him to learn a few English words. I think everyone felt as I did – leaning forward to catch the scraps – hungry for a world outside. He taught us first of all the names of boats, because he loved sailing: skiff, yacht, rowboat, ferryboat, steamer. This was not Polish or Russian but a bitter, clean language of escape. One could pronounce almost any English word with one's teeth clenched. There were no jsz's and cj's or ł's to loosen one's resolve. Piotr's most valuable possession was a Polish-English dictionary. It was the size of a small brick, and everyone wanted to borrow it. He could have traded it for an exorbitant price – an overcoat, an apple. But instead he came to where I was sleeping on the floor and slid it under me. I woke to feel it digging into my back. In it a note, in English: ‘Do not stop running until you learn every word.’ When I went to thank him, he pushed me off, gently, like an older brother. He said, ‘I want Polish now, only Poland,’ and nodded in the direction of a girl. That glance was my first real stammer of sex, I felt it in him, the angry longing, the insatiable humility of it – insatiable: page 467. I memorized the page numbers of many words – a double assurance they would not be lost. Doubly remembered. A few days later, Piotr and his girl were killed in a raid on the castle, carrying a piece of stone between them. Another boy had been there too and had run off; when he returned to the spot, they were still there. He ran back to the hiding place and told the others, twisting his hands with guilt,
‘dalej tam leżały, dalej tam leżały
.’ At night the dead were strewn, scattered, ‘
still there, still there,’
sometimes in the darkness without a drop of blood visible, as if the moon itself had struck them down. Each day after that I read one-half of a page of that thick English book – a little memorial I was making. Every word I speak, every English word chipped off that brick of a dictionary – and so I try to take care – remembers him. It's in the drawer beside you, said Lucjan, leaning over to the bedside table and placing the dictionary in Jean's lap. At first Jean, deeply lost in the story, could hardly believe it was true – conjured like a magician's trick – but she held the solid book, with its broken spine and its ordinary, grimy, colourless cover, and felt the small shock of it – as if Lucjan had produced a branch of the burning bush or a stone from Nineveh.

– However, Janina, my point is this. Who is to say that the rebuilt city was worth less or more than the original? Is desire the only determination of value? I don't know. Certainly bread is less important to the man who has just eaten. It is like the disagreeable irony of those German firebombs that succeeded in exposing the walls of the medieval town along Podwale and Brzozowa streets, an archaeological site no one had known about until those bombs exploded.

When the rebuilding of the Old Town was complete, people trembled at the sight. At first we stared into Krakowskie Przedmieście from the periphery, afraid of walking into the mirage and being swallowed up. But after a few had ventured forward and had not vanished, the spectators, all of us, poured into the Old Town. There was numb silence at first, and then a humming and a roar of euphoria. A nervous howling of crying and laughter.

No one could climb the steep steps of the reconstructed Kamienne Schodki Street or walk through the arches on Swietojanska Street or look up at the immaculately copied ironwork clock and the iron dragon and the stone ships engraved on the reconstructed walls and not feel they'd gone mad.

The old streets – every doorway and streetlamp and stoop – was familiar, yet not quite; somehow almost more real than we remembered. Then there were things we didn't remember at all, and we felt some piece of our brains had been knocked out. Everyone wandered the streets the same way, vaguely afraid, as if the dead father or mother, the dead wife or sister might suddenly jump out from behind a doorway. And at the heart of it all, a civic pride, a jubilation, and an unspoken humiliation, our need so open, and so inconsolable.

In Warsaw during the 1950s, people were desperate with hope. They would make the most extravagant claims: ‘For decades, physicists have been trying to figure out – if time can flow both into the future and into the past – why can't a broken eggshell become whole again, why can't shattered glass mend itself? And yet in Warsaw we are achieving exactly this! We haven't yet figured out how to raise the dead or regain lost love, but we're hard at work and if it happens anywhere it will be in reconstituted Warsaw!’ And while people ran about proclaiming such things, I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.

Lucjan tore a piece of paper from his drawing tablet and crumpled it into a ball.

– This is what the world is. A ball where everything is smashed together – collusion, complicity – those German plans for Egyptian dams you spoke of, and countless other examples …

He threw the ball of paper into the fireplace.

– I do not know, said Lucjan, if we belong to the place where we are born, or to the place where we are buried.

– You speak of the Old Town, said Jean, and of false consolation. That's what Avery could not bear about his work in Egypt – this false consolation.

She felt Lucjan's attention, felt the quality of the darkness change, though he hadn't moved. Whenever she spoke of Avery, Jean felt him drawing in all the power of his listening.

– I want you to talk about him, whispered Lucjan, because it makes our lying here together more real, because you are here with me partly because you love him. And to know you, I must know him. Please, keep on.

Jean sat up and drew her knees under her chin.

– It repels him, the idea of false consolation. In the end, he believed that's what the moving of the temple was. Because so many already believed the dam to be a mistake.

– I wonder what it means to save something, said Lucjan, when first we make necessary its need to be saved. First we destroy and then we try to salvage. And then we feel self-righteous about the salvaging. And who is to say yet that the dam was a mistake?

– What was lost is more than what was gained, said Jean.

– Maybe. Lucjan paused. And maybe that's what you feel about your own life, maybe your marriage too.

The injury of this travelled through her.

– Don't be angry, said Lucjan. It's old fashioned, but let's say there's a hierarchy – of suffering. We could open a stock exchange for moral value and trade shares in human ‘necessity.’ If anyone were interested. Then we could really compare what things are worth, without the ambiguity of currency. Just goods. A pound of Paweł's coffee in Toronto and a hundred sacks of grain in the Sudan. A bottle of whisky in Warsaw and an English book in Moscow by an exiled dissident. A car, running water. A temple, fifty villages, thousands of archaeological artifacts for the price of a dam. The loss of one child and the loss of three million children.

Jean held her head in her hands.

Lucjan sighed. He pulled her toward him.

– Everything we do is false consolation, said Lucjan. Or to put it another way, any consolation is true.

During the Uprising, children delivered messages, helped in temporary hospitals, ran weapons from cellar to cellar. Courage came to us, said Lucjan, in the form of a fly, a speck of life, a parasite, landing on your bare arm. It came to us as hunger.

Everyone harvested what they could from the rubble – knitting needles, picture frames, the arm of a chair, a scrap of fabric – it was the market of the dead. There was a use for everything, someone was always willing to trade for something …

He held Jean close.

– I haven't talked about these things for a long time, he said quietly. Not since my ex-wife, Władka, and I were young, lying on the deck of her father's apple boat, buried in the cold fruit, with only our heads sticking out.

Your skin is so white. When you lie on top of me like this, with your legs all along mine so brown, and your tough little arms all along mine, you're like –

All her weight was upon him, and Lucjan felt her –

– Like snow on a branch.

There's a lot of work for children in a battle, said Lucjan. We were good at hide-come-seek, we felt we had nothing to lose. I darted down holes and found all kinds of things, all kinds of situations. Once, I found myself in the middle of a conversation among two men and a young woman.

The older man asked, ‘Are you really a rabbi?’

‘Now is not the time to pretend to be a rabbi,’ said the young man with the faintest smile. ‘Besides, that would be a sin.’

The older man looked down at the woman leaning against him, asleep.

‘We would like to be married,’ he said. ‘Could you do this? Here and now?’

Here and now. My childhood was full of those little words –
zrób to w tej chwili
.