The Winter Vault (33 page)

– Names were stolen while we slept.

We fell asleep in Breslau and woke in Wrocław. We slept in Danzig and yes, admittedly, we tossed and turned somewhat, yet not so much as to explain waking in Gdansk. When we slipped in between the cold sheets our bed was undeniably in the town of Konigsberg, Falkenberg, Bunzlau, or Marienburg, and yet when we woke and swung our feet over the edge of that same bed, our feet landed still undeniably on a bedside rug in Chojna, Niemodlin, Bolesławiec, or Malbork.

We walked the same street we had always walked, stopped for coffee in the same corner café whose menu had not changed in years, although where once we'd ordered
ciasta
, now we ordered
pirozhnoe
, which was served in the very same crockery with the very same glass of water. The coins we left on the marble tabletop were different, the table itself, the same.

Then there were the places that had changed everything but their names. After their obliteration, when the cities were rebuilt, Warsaw became Warsaw, Dresden became Dresden, Berlin, Berlin. One could say, of course, those cities had not completely died but grew again from their dregs, from what remained. But a city need not burn or drown; it can die right before one's eyes, invisibly.

In Warsaw, the Old Town became the idea of the Old Town, a replica. Barmaids wore antique costumes, old-fashioned signs were hung outside shop windows. Slowly the city on the Vistula began to dream its old dreams. Sometimes an idea grows into a city; sometimes a city grows into an idea. In any case, even Stalin could not stop the river from entering people's dreams again, the river with its long memory and its eternal present.

Europe was torn up and resewn. In the morning a woman leaned out her kitchen window and hung her wet washing in her Berlin garden; by afternoon when it was dry, she would have to pass through Checkpoint Charlie to retrieve her husband's shirts.

And what of the dead who'd once been lucky enough to own a grave? Surely, at least, if someone died in Stettin, his ghost had a right to remain there, in that past, and was not expected to haunt Szczecin as well …

The dead have their own maps and wander at will through both Fraustadt and Wschowa, both Mollwitz and Malujowice, both Steinau am Oder and Scinawa; through Zlín and Gottwaldov and Zlín again. Down Prague's Vinohradská Street, Franz Josef Strasse, Marshal Foch Avenue, Hermann Goering Strasse, and Marshal Foch Avenue again, Stalin Street, Lenin Avenue, and at last, once again, without having taken a single step and shimmering only through time, Vinohradská Street.

As for one's birthplace, it depends who's asking.

Over the course of the afternoon the coils of knots grew higher, mute and heavy on the floor under the table.

A soup was simmering on the stove. Ewa had brought a roast chicken to Lucjan earlier in the day and now it was crackling in the oven. The light was nearly gone. Lucjan made the fire and lit candles.

He sat on the floor in the “unconscious” half of the house, leaning against the wall, looking at the tangle of knots, their afternoon's work, from a distance. Jean was reading a textbook quietly at the kitchen table. With false drama, Lucjan whimpered:

– I'm hungry.

Jean looked up from her book.

– What are you reading? asked Lucjan. Is it edible?

– This chapter is about hybrid vigour. But, she smiled, you could say I'm reading about cabbage.

– That's more like it, said Lucjan.

He sat down next to her at the table.

– Did they teach you about the
koksagiz
widowers at school? When the Germans marched into the Soviet Union, they searched everywhere for rubber plants. Russian women and children were driven into labour camps to harvest the
koksagiz
fields so even tiny amounts of rubber could be extracted from the roots …

The big high-rise housing development in the southern part of the Muranów district in Warsaw was built on top of what had been the ghetto. There was so much rubble – thirteen feet deep – and we had no machines to clear it. So instead the debris was crushed even further, and the housing built right on top. Then grass was laid down and flowerbeds planted on this terrace of the dead. That's their ‘blood-and-soil garden.’

A few blocks from the School of Architecture, where Avery was working at a desk in the basement, Jean sat with Lucjan and Ranger in the Cinéma Lumière, waiting for the film to start,
Les Enfants du Paradis
.

Lucjan handed Jean a lumpy bag.

– Baked potatoes with salt, said Lucjan.

Ranger leaned over Lucjan and put his hand into the bag.

– It's long, at least a two-potato film, he told Jean, already peeling off the aluminum foil. I remember going with Mr. Snow and Beata to the Polonia, so hungry we could barely sit still. There was no water and no place to live but, four months after the war, there was a cinema. The Polonia sat like a stage set in the mess of Marszałkowska Street. Many times I lined up to watch a film and then afterwards lined up again down the street to fill my metal pail at the pipe that spurted water out of the ground. People carried containers with them wherever they went. There was always a clatter just before anyone sat down anywhere, people setting down their jars and flasks and pails at their feet.

– The clatter was usually followed by the rustling of newspapers, said Lucjan, as people took their
Skarpa Warszawska
from their pockets, a weekly magazine, Janina, that kept us up to date on the progress of the rebuilding. After the war so many newspapers sprouted up – right away, five or six daily papers. We couldn't hear enough about how well we were doing – two hundred thousand cubic metres of rubble removed by the horse-drawn carts, sixty kilometres of streets cleared of debris, a thousand buildings cleared of mines …

– Comrades, said Ranger, work has commenced on the market square, on the tin-roof of the palace, on the church on Leszno Street … The library has now opened on Rejtan Street!

Pilgrims converged at the same locations, the same square metres of rubble, each person mourning a different loss. The mourners stood together in the same spot and wept for their various dead – for Jews, Poles, soldiers, civilians, ghetto fighters, Home Army officers – dozens of allegiances buried in the same heap of stones.

– How does a city rebuild itself? said Lucjan. Within days someone sets out pots amid the rubble and opens a florist's shop. A few days after that, someone puts a plank between two bricks and opens a bookshop.

– In London after the bombings, said Jean, willowherb took root and spread throughout the ruins –

– Janina, said Lucjan, this isn't a romance. I'm not talking about wildflowers, I'm talking about commerce – that's how you rebuild a city. You can have all the wildflowers you want, but in the end someone must open up a shop.

Lucjan took Jean's arm in the street. It had started to snow while they were in the cinema, in nineteenth-century Paris, and by the time they reached Amelia Street, all was white and quiet.

They lay in the bath together, watching the snow fall past the kitchen window.

– That's a wretched ending to a film, said Lucjan. A man pushing his way through a crowd to reach the woman he loves and, for all eternity, never catching up to her.

He looked at the piles of rope around them.

– It's almost finished, said Lucjan. When there's too much and it's too heavy to move, it will be done.

This makes me think of my grandfather, my mother's father, who was a cabinet maker. My mother once told me that he'd made a magnificent piece of furniture – the most distinguished desk ever created in the world, fit for an emperor – but the one thing he hadn't considered was the door to the room, which was too small, and they had to cut a bigger hole to fit it through. She said I was to take this as a lesson in humility. She also told me about an enormous, curved display case he'd made for a shop – the wood shone like amber, the top was heavy glass with bevelled edges that looked, my mother said, like the watery edge of ice forming, and inside were wide, shallow, velvet-lined drawers for stockings and lace and silks. Each drawer opened with a tiny brass knob. He'd boasted that it took ten men to lift it. The cabinet had elaborately carved corners – wooden vines trailed thick and lush to the floor. The drawers slid, smooth and soundless, and the shopgirl would pull out the whole drawer so the customer could see the small silk things shining like pools of coloured water on the dark velvet.

This cabinet brought my grandfather many commissions for custom work.

My stepfather's people were from Łódz; they owned a hosiery factory. He had been sent to Warsaw to distribute the family wares. It was for this shop that my grandfather built one of his famous cabinets and that is how he met my mother. She was so young; the milk and cinnamon of her soft skin and thick hair, the sweetness in her face. She was nineteen years old.

I remember a tram stop with a clock next to it where, before the war, my mother and I used to wait. The clock had little lines instead of numbers. It disturbed me so much that there were no numbers on that clock, just anonymous little dashes, as if time meant nothing and simply lurched on endlessly, meaninglessly, anonymously. I used to try to predict when the minute hand would jump forward. I tried to count the seconds, to guess when it would suddenly seize the next little line, but it always got ahead without me. While we waited at that stop for the #14 tram, my mother would comment that it was really a very foolish place to put a clock because it always reminded you how overdue the tram was and how long you'd been waiting and how late you were. I remember the feel of her wool coat against my cheek as I stood beside her, her sure fingers around mine. That little hand on the clock jumping forward without me is the symbol for me of how my mother disappeared …

A wall does not separate; it binds two things together.

In the ghetto, a woman came to visit my mother. She was an old schoolfriend or a relative; I don't remember, yet for my mother the nature of this relationship would surely have been the heart of this story. I do remember her hat – a pie-plate contraption tilting over her ear – which she didn't remove all through tea. I waited for it to fall off and land in her cup. I sat on the chair in the corner next to a little wooden table with my cup of ‘fairy tea’ – hot water and milk. The woman gave my mother some photographs taken when they were children. After she left, my mother and I sat together and looked at them. The season in the photographs was summer, yet outside our window that afternoon it was snowing. I remember thinking about that fact, the first time it occurred to me that weather was preserved in photographs. And because the sun was so bright, there were many shadows. In one photo in particular my mother's shadow was very pronounced beside her and I couldn't keep from looking at it, that shadow lying across the pavement almost as tall as she was. And in another, there was the shadow of someone who had obviously been standing near to her, but who was outside the frame of the picture. I couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards, that my mother had stood next to someone – a quarter of a century before – whose identity I would never know and yet whose shadow was recorded forever.

Photos from those years have a different intensity; it's not because they record a lost world, and not because they are a kind of witnessing – that is the work of any photograph. No. It's because from 1940 it was illegal for any Pole, let alone a Polish Jew, to use a camera. So any photo taken by a Pole from that time and place is a forbidden photo – whether of a public execution or of a woman reading a novel quietly in her bed.

German soldiers, on the other hand, were encouraged to bring their Kine-Exakta or Leica with them to war, to document the conquest. And quite a few of those photos survive in public archives, such as those of Willy Georg, Joachim Goerke, Hauptmann Fleischer, Franz Konrad … Others remain in family albums, photos sent home to parents and sweethearts: the Eiffel tower, ghetto streets, the Parthenon, public hangings, an opera house, a mass grave, gas vans, and other signs of German ‘tourism’ … These photos were sent home, where they were kept next to the family photos of weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties, lakeside holidays. Although there were certainly photojournalists whose job it was to shoot for propaganda, many of the photosoldiers remain anonymous, their snapshots part of the great pile of images that make up the twentieth century …