Dukla Page 11

  Some time after that, we talked for the first time. I met her on top of a sand dune that separated the village from the river. She sat down next to me and toyed with some broken shells. Her skinny brown body never ceased to be in motion. She slipped her bare feet into the sand as if it were bedding, built a mound around them, dug them out again, then started making a deep hole. Her arm, which was like a smooth thin tree branch, bore into the ground all the way to the compact layer of wet earth. She told me about how one boy had cut his leg with a scythe down to the bone; he ran here, buried his leg in the sand, and when he took it out it was healed, without any trace of a wound. “The earth can heal anything,” she said. “Even lightning, even then you can bury whoever it is and afterward they’ll get up like nothing ever happened.” She sat there plunged up to her hips in a wave of loose sand, and it seemed as if she was sinking deeper and deeper. She looked like one of those gypsy dolls they put on the top of a pile of bedding during the day, except that instead of spread skirts she had sand, an entire hill of sand all the way to the riverbank. But it only lasted a moment, because she soon broke free of her new garment, knelt, rocked back on her heels and asked in an intent, lowered voice: “Did you know that when you go into a Baptist church you have to spit on the cross and step on it?” I didn’t know what Baptists were. She didn’t either, but fear had settled between us, the sky darkened, and I suddenly smelled the heat of her perspiration. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s true,” she said. She began poking about in the sand around herself. She found two sticks, made a cross with them and laid them on the ground between us. “So are you afraid?” she asked, while I sat at the ready like a dog, gripping handfuls of sand in my fists. At that moment a ball of saliva emerged from her mouth; just before it landed it swelled into a bubble. Then she jumped to her feet and finished the job with a bare heel. She burst into giggles and kneeled abruptly. She whispered right into my face: “But that doesn’t count, it wasn’t real, you know? It wasn’t from a church, it wasn’t blessed. It’s gone, see?” She scattered sand every which way. “See? There’s nothing there!” She got up, brushed off her hands and knees and looked down at me. I could only see her silhouette. “If you tell anyone I’ll say you did it too, I’ll say it was your idea.”

  And so things remained between us. We’d meet from time to time, but she was always aloof and indifferent. It was as if she had some power over me. I watched her from afar, running across her farmyard, feeding the chickens, carrying pails of water and snapping back at her mother; she was dark-skinned and angular as a boy, set apart from everyday reality, untouchable.

  From Levoča we went to Spišský Hrad, but the castle was too big, and the space around it too vast, to be able to even think about it. C. drove fast, so as to finally put behind him all those Slovakian wonders that had played such havoc with our minds, all the way down to the bare bone of our skulls. Široké, Prešov, and the whole of Spiš were suddenly behind us, along with all the renaissance façades of churches, which somewhere beyond Kapušany yielded to the flat roofs of collective-farm architecture, while the storks’ nests were replaced by loudspeakers mounted on telegraph poles. In Svidník, not far from an insane church shaped like a flying saucer, we returned our empty Kozel bottles and got a few full ones so as not to reenter Poland like total tourists. A few miles further on it already felt like home. Along the highway, various military objects were arrayed on dressed stone plinths. There was a cannon, a Soviet fighter plane, and a good old teddy-bear-like T-34. One particularly huge monument depicted a fascist Tiger tank being crushed under the wheels of a Soviet vehicle. The place smelled of Dukla and of Poland.

  III.

  to the memory of Z. H.

  And here I am again. The sky has a milky color and more and more people are arriving. They’re coming down Zielona, 3 Maja, Mickiewicza, and Sawickiej, they’re approaching on Węgierski Trakt, Żwirki, and Cergowska. The women are carrying plastic bags. They’re wearing knee-length stockings, flip-flops, or sandals. They climb out of buses, press together in tightly packed herds, they move toward the market square and it’s only there that they get their courage back, because after all it’s a village and it looks like the other villages they’ve come from. It’s going to rain. The light is barely able to filter through the air. Shadows are faint. The world is hopelessly old. Stall owners are spreading out their wares. Outside Mary Magdalene you can buy fluorescent rosaries, glow-in-the-dark Our Ladys, and Egyptian dream books, while meat is being grilled on Parkowa. There’s no wind. Traffic is slow. The bed of the Dukielka has been lined with rocks, but beyond the dam it flows the way it always used to. It smells of slow-moving water, decay, mud. The day is slipping across the surface of time. A tiny old lady in black is examining Blessed Johns in different poses. They’re lined up on a laminated plastic tabletop. They’re watched over by a guy with a cigarette and signet rings. Big ones are a hundred, little ones eighty, they’re all brown, there must be a good forty of them, and they’re still warm. The world is getting old and things are growing indistinct and imprecise. Soon they’ll all become indistinguishable and that’ll be the end of it. Only designations will be left.

  Outside the monastery, police uniforms intermingle with monks’ habits. The monks are clean-shaven. The police officers have mustaches. The heat embraces them all and holds them to its sticky belly. In the park it’s still cool. Three men are drinking wine there. They must have bought it yesterday, or today under the counter. As usual they’re smoking. The viscid water offers no reflections. Bicycle-tire tracks can be seen in the dark mud along the linden-lined path. People swing by here to take a leak. It’s a good place. Couples holding hands disappear into the bushes. The trees are marked with the dull-colored trails of Roman snails. It’s all going to happen on the far side of Węgierski Trakt, on the cemetery hill. Wooden fences divide the loamy slope into sectors. Hardly anyone is there yet. Clouds drift over the cemetery, vanish in some imperceptible fashion, and reappear goodness knows how. It’s as if they’re rising out of the depths of the sky. Guys swing by the tourist office bar without any special hope, and the barmaid shrugs helplessly—no alcohol sales today. The out-of-towners are drinking tea and eating egg sandwiches. Loudspeakers outside the monastery announce that “today, the whole world is watching our little Dukla.” The garbage men have new green overalls and a smart-looking truck. They’re standing by the ruins of the synagogue, which has been made into a repository for old curbstones and paving slabs. Children weave by on bicycles, and the new café in the town hall is serving Lavazza coffee with a free cookie. Everything is supposedly as it used to be. Small streams of visitors fall still about the town, looking like ornaments. Sizzling kebabs, hamburgers, soda machines stocked with Coke and Sprite, coaches, a whole array of license plates, cordons, ten new phone booths that take phone cards, red paving stones, banners and flags—it all gives off the sad smell of humanity. It’s proved impossible to demolish Dukla and build it again anew.

  So here I am again. It’s raining. People scurry by in transparent raincoats. The guys from the gas company are sitting in their van playing blackjack. I came early in the morning so as to observe it all. Now I’m sitting in my car listening to news from the outside world. It’s raining elsewhere in Poland too. I couldn’t resist. Things ought to end somehow or other. Like breakfast, a book, cigarettes. Pilgrims with umbrellas are carrying folding chairs. The flags hang vertically. The locals look like outsiders. The plastic bottles of mineral water have a gray-blue sheen. It all must be heading in a particular direction, like the blood in our bodies, like the air there, like all of the physiology that allows us to see everything and smell things. A white Hungarian truck moves cautiously among the pedestrians. The driver honks his horn. They look at him like he’s an intruder. In the store at the bus station they buy bread, cheese, canned goods. They’re dressed a little like boy scouts, a little like old-time tourists, and a little like they’re just going for an after-dinner constit
utional. The paradoxical boundary between adventure and everydayness. Camouflage jackets, backpacks, Sunday-best handbags, high heels, hunting knives dangling from belts, idiot-proof cameras that cost eight hundred at the toy store. Every second person has one. Outside the jeweler’s some guy has set up a stall selling film. Now he puts up a plastic awning and continues doing business. Yellow Kodak and green Fuji. Reality freezing in hundreds of sequences, thousands of split-second incarnations. I try to imagine the world before photography and I fail. It probably never really existed, it continually kept disappearing, swallowed up by unsated senses forever in motion, and nothing remained. Whereas now, the untold numbers of clicks, the mosaic, second after second, look after look, mom, dad, son, everyone making irreversible choices with their fingers, and if you try really hard not even a single drop of rain will escape, vanish, return where it came from. It’s entirely possible there’ll come a time when the whole world, and all time, will be reconstructed on the basis of compounds of silver. Frame by frame, roll by roll; and it’s entirely possible that this will be the only fulfillment and only end.

  After an hour or so it stops raining and people can come out again. Outside Mary Magdalene there’s a cardboard sign reading “Tickets for Dukla.” I pay one zloty and get Sector B2, but there’s still time, so I wander off to the mansion. My 150 is parked on the grounds next to a rusting abandoned greenhouse. Both objects look equally unnecessary. I walk about and watch people. They all look like my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, my father, like all the people I’ve known and seen in my life. Their shoes pinch, they limp, they sweat in their wrinkle-proof outfits, and examine the goods for sale at the stalls, medallions, white busts, colored prints, canvas beach chairs for four fifty; they sniff at the food on the grills, chicken breasts, sausage, bacon, dark glistening blood pudding. From time to time the sun comes out and captures their silhouettes in misty aureoles. Busy with their ice creams, Pepsis, mineral water, and children, they fail to notice this indifferent caress. They enter the strip of shade in the park and pass between a double row of firefighters toward the monastery. There, in place of my spurned cannon there now stands the figure of Blessed John. “He’s kind of all ragged,” says a girl with a video camera, and pans across the brown sculpture. Then she films a macabre cross with dozens of severed hands jutting from its base. But the cannon really was better—like anything, incidentally, that has no desire to be more than it actually is. Church dignitaries in snazzy cassocks emerge from a dark blue limousine. Sweat stains start to appear on the cops’ uniform shirts. A row of confessionals has been set up on the cemetery hill. People form lines. Then they line up for the brightly colored portable toilets. Three confessionals and three lavatories. Dark brown, yellow, light blue, and red. Except for the people in line, everyone looks like they’re just out for a stroll. They go as far as they can, turn back and return to town, then after a while they repeat the exercise. The day is passing quietly and monotonously. A chemical suspension of wet heat lifts bodies up like objects. It’s like a festival of presence, a parade about how to fill space, a display of ways to prove one’s existence. The bodies rub against each other, touch, join scents and thermic auras. The immense aquarium of the afternoon has its end somewhere beyond what is imagined, and if anyone’s watching us they must be feeling pity. After all, the only thing we’ve come up with to counter unbounded space is the ability to assemble, to gather together, to occupy the smallest possible area. So as to sense through our skin the existence of others, since we’re uncertain of our own. A police Land Rover from Ustrzyki pulls up in front of the monastery. The unusual nature of this day has the taste of concentrated ordinariness. It’s like perfume—we only become aware of it when there’s a lot of it. Someone’s filming the empty Krosno road as if empirically documenting a miracle. Light enters deep into the apparatus and dies there, just as images die inside our skulls, then later serve as excuses, justifications, explanations for any occasion. While they’re still alive there’s nothing we can do with them. It’s only once they become things that we know more or less how to make use of them. Now a Land Rover from Jasło appears, and an ordinary police Polonez with a silent siren on its roof.

  Actually, I’m not doing anything other than describing my own physiology. Changes in the magnetic field recorded by my retina, fluctuations in temperature, differing concentrations of scent particles in the air, oscillations of sound frequencies. That’s what the world is composed of. The rest is formalized madness or the history of humanity. And as I stand here across from the post office in Dukla, smoking and watching heavyset guys in shiny boots, it occurs to me that existence has to be a fiction if we’re to have the slightest chance. That flesh, blood, light, and everything else that’s self-evident has to turn out one day to be merely a curious illusion, because otherwise something just isn’t right and it’s good-bye Norma Jean, thanks but no thanks, we open again at 1:00 p.m. tomorrow. This is precisely the naïve thought that comes to me now in Dukla, whose stillness makes it possible to daydream about how things might be. Magic lantern, camera obscura, a crystal ball in which snow gently falls, a slide sequence of last hopes, a metaphysical peep show.

  The tiny old lady in black appears now here, now there. She’s alone and alert. She stares at the town as if seeing it for the first time, though she’s from here. The world has suddenly come to her and it’s like a journey to distant lands, with all these bishops, habits, gleaming limousines, flags, choirs singing over loudspeakers, prelates, sidewalks of new red brick. It’s a sudden, overnight materialization of holiness, a little as if she were moving around in paradise, like a child in a toy store, like a prisoner on his first day of freedom, or a bride in her wedding dress. She’s wearing small men’s shoes with a polished black sheen. She pauses here and there, tiny as a little girl and just as timid, trying to see something through the throng of idling, inquisitive, self-confident onlookers. She resembles a little black bird or a character from a fairy tale. Her arms are folded on her stomach and pressed to her body as though she were striving to occupy as little room as possible. Some young monks scuttle past with a swish of their habits. To move even faster they hike them up and you can see their trousers. Their faces are like the faces of young professionals in the city. One of them is carrying a Yamaha keyboard, another a stylish attaché case with a digital lock. The faces of the firefighters, on the other hand, are from early Forman. When I was here two years ago they were marching in a funeral procession. Now they stand in their cordon and look on helplessly as the crowd seeps through the uneven dark blue chain of their uniforms. From time to time they spread their arms as if they were trying to embrace someone, but these are only gestures of resignation, and to save face they light cigarettes and wait till the cops come to their rescue.

  One adolescent girl with a completely shaved head is wearing a T-shirt that says in English: “I hate religion.” The word “religion” appears right over her small breasts. In this crowd of fathers with children, women with handbags, couples in white socks and flip-flops, her figure is just as small and helpless as the old lady in black. The jingling things around her neck, her Doc Martens, and the stubborn gravity of her sixteen years swathes her existence here in an extraordinarily beautiful melancholy. She walks along the wall of the park as though naked, yet no one pays any attention to her.

  Two guys in jackets are sitting on a wire cage containing pigeons, under a tree. They’re smoking Popularnys, chatting, passing a bottle of Wysowianka mineral water back and forth. The bottle shuttles between them, and each time before they drink they raise the plastic container as if they’re toasting one another. A matron in a pink dress and purple jacket is examining some white china busts. She picks each one up in turn, flips it over, weighs it in her hand, like she was looking for the heaviest. In the end she chooses one of many identical copies, pays, puts it in her shopping bag and says to the lady running the stall: “At last he’s coming here as well. He’ll clean out that Jewish stink.�
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  There are also some plumpish girls with chunky calves. They have backpacks and knee-length camouflage pants, hiking boots, guitars, and large crosses on straps. They’re looking for some shade so they can sit and sing a bit in a safe circle. Their short hair is stuck down with perspiration, and their blouses are dark and wet under the arms. They find a cool spot, take out some yellow sheets, and begin a song: “Model of life, teach us virtue each day. May caution bring light to our nation, and troubles not fall in our way.”