Here Is Where We Meet (10 page)

Two girls in long white lace dresses are crossing the far end of the Place Nowy. Ten or eleven years old, both tall for their age, both become Honorary Women, both, as they cross the square, stepping out of their childhood.

La Semaine blanche, Ken says. Last Sunday kids across the whole of Poland took their First Communion. And every day this week they do their best to get to a church and take communion once more, particularly the girls, the boys too but they are less noticeable and there are fewer of them, particularly the girls, who want to step out in their white communion dresses once again.

The two girls in the square walk side by side so they can scythe down the glances they are attracting.

They’re going to the Church of Corpus Christi where there’s a famous Madonna in gold leaf, Ken says. All the girls of Kraków would like to take their First Communion in Corpus Christi because the communion dresses their mothers buy there are better cut, have a better length.

It was in the Old Met Music Hall on the Edgware Road, sitting beside him, that I first learnt how to judge claims to style, learnt the rudiments of criticism. Ruskin, Lukács, Berenson, Benjamin, Wolflin, all came later. My essential formation was in the Old Met, looking down from the gallery on to the triangular stage, surrounded by a noisily receptive and unforgiving public, who judged the stand-up comics, the adagio acrobats, the singers, the ventriloquists, pitilessly. We saw Tessa O’Shea bring the house down, and we saw her booed off stage, her hair wet with tears.

An act had to have style. The audience had to be won over twice a night. And to do this, the non-stop sequence of gags had to lead to something more mysterious: the conspiratorial, irreverent proposition that life itself was a stand-up act!

Max Miller, ’The Cheeky Chappie’ in a silver suit with his hyperthyroid eyes, played on the triangular stage like an irrepressible sea lion, for whom every laugh was a fish to be swallowed.

I’ve got my own studios in Brighton, and a woman came to my house on Monday morning – she said, ’Max, I want you to paint a snake on my knee.’ I went dead white, honest I did. No, well I’m not strong, I’m not strong. So, listen – I jumped out of bed, see . . . no, listen a minute . . . so I started to paint the snake just above her knee, that’s where I started. But I had to chuck it – she smacked me in the face – I didn’t know a snake was so long – how long’s an ordinary snake?

Each comedian played a victim, a victim who had to win the hearts of all those who had bought tickets, and who were also victims.

Harry Champion came downstage, hands out, begging for help, on the verge of tragedy: ’Life is a very hard thing – you never come out of it alive!’ When he said this on a good night, the whole house put itself in the palm of his hand.

Flanagan and Allen rushed on, as if on urgent business and late. Then they showed, at high speed, that the whole world and its urgencies was based on a profound misunderstanding. They were young. Flanagan had soulful, naive eyes; Ches Allen, the straight one, was dapper and correct. Yet together they demonstrated the decrepitude of the world!

If I could sell my taxi I’d go back to Africa and do what I used to do.

What’s that?

Dig holes and sell them to farmers!

The microphone is going to kill their art, Ken whispered to me in the gallery. I asked him what he meant. Listen to how they use their voices, he explained. They talk across the whole theatre and we’re in the middle of them. If they use a mike, this will stop and the public will no longer be in the middle. The secret of music hall artists is that they play defenceless, like we all are. A player with a mike is armed! It’s another ball game.

He was right. The music hall died during the next decade.

A woman, carrying a basket of wild sorrel, passes the table in the Place Nowy.

Could you make us some sorrel soup? Ken asks me. We could have it tomorrow instead of borsch.

I guess so.

With eggs?

That I’ve never tried.

Well, he shuts his eyes, you prepare the soup, serve it, and in each bowl, you put a hot hard-boiled egg. You have made sure that beside each bowl there’s a knife as well as a spoon. You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away.

Of home?

Certainly not, not even for the Poles.

Of what then?

Of survival, perhaps.

It seemed to me that Ken always lived in the same bedsit. In reality, he moved often, but the moves were made when I was away at school and on returning and going to see him, I would find his same few possessions piled up on a similar table at the foot of a similar bed, behind a door with a key, which opened on to a staircase, overlooked by a landlady, worrying in the same way about the lights being left on.

Ken’s room had a gas fire and a tall window. On the mantelpiece above the gas fire he stacked our books. On the table by the window was a large portable wireless (the word radio was rarely used) to which we listened. 2 Sept. 1939: the Panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht invaded Poland without warning this morning at dawn. Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were going to lose their lives during the next five years.

In the room’s wardrobe he kept not only clothes but food: oatmeal biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, a pineapple, coffee. Attached to the gas fire was a gas ring for heating water in a saucepan that he kept on the windowsill. The room smelt of cigarettes, pineapple, and lighter fuel. The toilet and washbasin were on the landing either above or below. I tended to forget which, and he would shout after me: Up not Down!

His two suitcases, which he left open on the floor, were never entirely unpacked. At that time nothing was unpacked, even in people’s heads. Everything was in store or in transit. Dreams were kept on luggage racks, in kitbags and in suitcases. In one of the cases open on the floor there was a jar of honey from Brittany, a dark fisherman’s sweater, a volume of Baudelaire in French, and a table-tennis bat.

Give you a lead of fifteen plus service! he proposed. Ready? Serve! Fifteen, love. Fifteen, one. Fifteen, two. Fifteen, three. He was beating me like that in 1940.

By 1941 he was still beating me two games out of three, but he was no longer giving me a lead.

He was now working in some capacity, about which he would say nothing, for a foreign service at the BBC. He often came back to the room after work in the small hours of the morning. The bedcover was damasked.

In the mornings we usually took breakfast in a barricaded café near Gloucester Road. Food was rationed. Those without a sweet tooth gave their sugar rations to others. Ken and I drank tea, as it was better than the coffee essence. Over breakfast we read newspapers. Each consisted of four – or at the most six – pages. 9 Sept. 1941: Leningrad cut off by German troops. 12 Feb. 1942: Three German cruisers sail unimpeded through the Straits of Dover. 25 May 1942: The Wehrmacht take 250,000 Soviet prisoners at Kharkov. The Nazis, Ken said, are making the same mistake as Napoleon: they underestimate the power of General Winter. He was right. In late November General Paulus and his 6th Army were surrounded at Stalingrad and in February they surrendered to General Zhukov.

One morning in the middle of April 1943, Ken told me about a London radio broadcast, made the day before, by General Sikorski, the Polish prime minister in exile, who was appealing to Poles in Poland to support the ongoing uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. The ghetto was being systematically annihilated. Sikorski said – Ken spoke slowly – that: ’The greatest crime in the history of mankind is taking place.’

Only during moments of forgetfulness, when thinking about nothing, did the enormity of what was happening make itself felt. The enormity was then present in the air, under the spring sky, addressing a seventh sense which I still cannot name.

11 July 1943. The British 8th Army and the American 7th Army invade Sicily and take Syracuse.

I think of you as a beginner, Ken whispers, leaning across the table in Kraków, and I suspect that if I read you today I might be disappointed.

About mastery there is something sad, indescribably sad, I reply.

I see you as a beginner.

Still?

More than ever!

With you as teacher?

I didn’t teach. You learnt. There’s a difference. I let you learn! And there were a few things I learnt from you!

Such as?

Dressing quickly.

Anything else?

How to read well out loud.

You read well out loud yourself, I say.

In the end I discovered how you did it. The secret of your reading out loud. You didn’t read the end of the sentence until you got there, that was your secret. You refused to look ahead.

He takes off his glasses as if he has seen and said enough. He knew me well.

Beneath the damasked bedcover, during nights punctuated by air-raid sirens, I sometimes felt a burning in Ken’s erect member. The tumescence came unasked and waited like a pain, a pain that had to be staunched, low down in the middle of his long body. Soon afterwards, in the bed damp with spunk and tears from his eyes without glasses, sleep came swiftly to the two of us. Rippled sleep, like sand when the tide is far out.

Let’s go and see the pigeons, Ken says, polishing the thick lenses of his glasses with his tartan handkerchief.

We walk towards the northern end of the market. The sun is hot. One more early summer morning added to the pile on the century’s desk. We watch two butterflies who came to the centre of the city with the garden vegetables fly upwards in a spiral. The clock on the city cathedral strikes eleven.

Every day, hundreds of Polish visitors climb the spiral stone staircase in the bell tower of the cathedral to look across the Vistula and to touch with a finger the massive tongue of the Zygmunt bell, cast in 1520 and weighing eleven tons. Touching it is said to bring luck in love.

We pass a man selling hairdryers. One hundred and fifty złoty each, which means they have probably been stolen. He is demonstrating one of the dryers and calls out to a passing child: Come here, sweetie, and I’ll make you cool! The girl laughs, agrees and her hair fluffs up, billowing. Slicznie, she cries.

I’m beautiful, Ken translates, laughing.

Further on I see a crowd of men huddled together. If it weren’t for their craning heads and the silence in the air, I would say they were listening to music. When we get closer I understand that they are in fact gathered round a table on which there are a hundred pigeons in wooden pens, five or six to a cage. The birds vary in plumage and size, although all have a glint of bluish slate in their colouring, and in this glint there is something of the sky above Kraków. The pigeons on the table look like sky-samples brought back to earth. Maybe this is why the men seemed to be listening to music.

Nobody knows, Ken says, how homing pigeons find their way home. When they are flying in clear weather, they can see thirty kilometres ahead, yet this doesn’t explain their unerring sense of direction. During the siege of Paris in 1870, a million messages to the city’s inhabitants were delivered by fifty pigeons. It was the first time that micro-photography had ever been used on that sort of scale. The letters were all reduced, so that hundreds could fit on a tiny film weighing only a gram or two. Then, when the pigeons arrived, the letters were enlarged, copied out and distributed. Strange how things come together in history – colodium film and carrier pigeons!

Some birds have been taken out of their cages and are being expertly examined by the pigeon fanciers. Their crops are being lightly pinched between two fingers, the length of their legs measured, the flat tops of their heads gently pressed by a thumb, their flight feathers extended, and all the while they are being held close against the men’s chests, like trophies.

It’s hard, don’t you think, says Ken taking my arm, to imagine sending news of a total catastrophe by carrier pigeon? The message could announce a defeat, or it could be an appeal for help, but in that gesture of throwing the pigeon up into the sky, so that it heads for home, isn’t there inevitably some hope? Sailors from Ancient Egypt used to release pigeons from their boats on the high seas to tell their families they were on their way home.

I look at the beady red-pupilled eyes of one of the pigeons. He is looking at nothing, because he knows he’s held and can’t move.

I wonder how the chess game is going, I say. The two of us stroll to the other end of the market.

There are sixteen pieces left on the board. Zedrek has king, bishop and five pawns. He is looking up at the sky as if seeking inspiration. Abram looks at his watch. Twenty-three minutes! he announces.

Chess is not a game you can hurry, comments a customer.

He has one good move, whispers Ken, and I bet he’s not going to see it.

Move the bishop to C5, is that it?

No, you idiot, his king to F1.

Tell him then.

Dead men don’t move pieces!

Hearing Ken say these words I suffer his death. He, meanwhile, takes his head in his hands, and with them he turns the head left and right, as if it were a searchlight. He waits for me to laugh as I often did at this clown act of his. He doesn’t see my anguish. I do laugh.