Dukla Read online

Page 12


  Among people, among their bodies, the imagination dies away. They pass by like figures from sociology or psychology. Life takes on ready-made forms, reflecting and refracting light, and there’s nothing I can do. Faces, arms, breasts, buttocks—my analysis is a complete disaster. Cigarettes, outfits, jewelry, high heels, lace ruffles, cell phones on belts, bangles, the poor life, cheap crap or wholesale stuff, houses, apartments, the Virgin Mary, crystal, gleaming shelves carrying Chronicle of the Twentieth Century imitation leather couches, ferns on windowsills, the smell of bedrooms, crystal-clear displays of time and function, air fresheners in johns, linoleum, a Sacred Heart in a rococo frame, a black Panasonic, “extended payment plan available,” “St. Christopher, pray for us” by the rearview mirror, videotapes from the wedding, from the reception, videotapes from Spain, a crocheted doily on the record player, on that a glass dog, microwave oven, stove, rubber boots in the hallway, potatoes in a crate, baseball caps, earrings, Puma and Adidas knockoffs, alkaline batteries, a lightbulb in a lampshade made of newspaper, golden plastic ship’s wheels with barometers in the middle, bare walls reflecting the sounds of the television and the shadows of distant events, the murmur and damp of new houses, “where did you put the car keys,” Sunday, gleam of auto bodywork outside the church, bracelets, chains, Consul aftershave, Samson aftershave, Gillette antiperspirant, Spandex, calves, red fingernails, curls, pumps like Aldo Binets, pushed-up breasts, a curiosity shop of perfumes and accessories, old age, bone combs in gray buns, bamboo handles of square-cornered handbags, children washed and laundered and colorful, wedding rings permanently attached to arthritic fingers, men’s bellies, pride, wristwatches, moccasins with tassels, solemnity, satiety, as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever will be, glamour, Moorish arches, a cow right outside, drywall, cheap Popularny cigarettes, porn, hymns, the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption and of Our Lady of the Sowing, itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny tiny polka-dot bikini, Come Holy Spirit—the world is a counting rhyme. It can’t be understood any other way, because things push between ideas and tear at their delicate edges with sharp corners, and everything that’s general ends up on the trash heap, buried by details. Caro salutis est cardo.

  So. I’ve come here again. This time in a twenty-year-old dark blue Mercedes. The police were already blocking the roads, but we stuck behind a blue Volkswagen with its siren blaring and we managed to sneak through. Now evening’s falling and the light has turned golden and thick as blood. The towers of the Cistercian monastery are black. The red of the fire trucks has also dimmed. I look from the north to the south. To the right, over the cemetery the outline of a cloud is smoldering like a roll of paper. To the left is Cergowa Mountain, oozing darkness. The shadows dwell in the earth. They emerge out of it then return, like some immense breathing process. Children build a town from pebbles and empty bottles. They put up walls and raise towers. They make people out of sticks and refuse. Grown-ups cast long shadows over it all. They move, change place, shift about in the network of sectors enclosed by a double cordon of police. The men head for the nearby bushes. You can see their straightened backs against the wall of greenery. A six-foot-six photographer with a minute Leica on his chest is looking for praying crowds. A young priest has been standing by the barrier for several hours now. He hasn’t moved an inch. He’s holding a Praktica, aiming it down the dark maw of Węgierski Trakt. The boys spread out their jackets, the girls sit down. Couples stroll by. This is the young men’s only entertainment—to watch the girls’ swaying backsides and imagine a life together, conversations in the morning, apartments, dinner with the parents. Someone accidentally lets go of a red balloon. People stir for a few moments, till it disappears in the sky. A man in a beat-up motorcycle helmet has a big eagle on the back of his jacket, drawn in ballpoint pen. Its head is surrounded with a halo of glittering silver studs. The loudspeakers announce that Father Jankowski is here. Potbellied guys hold Klubowe cigarettes in huge hands and discuss who’s going to get the wood from the barriers dividing the sectors. “You could come for it at night,” one of them says. “It’ll be lit up,” says another. “Not tomorrow night, maybe.” “You never know with those people.” “It’s good stuff. Four-inch. Be great for rafters.” “Come off it—three-inch at the most.” “That’d do too.” They go take a look. There’s not one single dog. That’s why everything’s so still, even though people are walking around, looking for good spots. They clamber up higher, then come down again so as to be closer, but down in the front are the toughest folks, packed tight in a long line, immovable.

  On the far side of the cemetery hill a golden fire is crackling, but here it’s already dark and cool. Figures lose their distinctness. They look like their own shadows. A portable radio is playing. Choirs sing in front of the monastery. Over there it’s brighter. Blotches of light can be seen, and something’s moving as though in a distant window. Some people tear their eyes from the highway and stare in that direction. They’re reassured by the loudspeakers. Now we look older and we’re all gradually starting to resemble one another. At dusk, space withers away, only time remains, and for that reason we huddle even closer together. Someone calls someone else’s name. Fathers pick up their children. Blackness is approaching from the direction of Cergowa Mountain. The lights of cigarettes can be seen. Matches held in closed hands are like lanterns of pink skin.

  I watched him from far off. He was white in the darkness, and barely moving. He was speaking to people who were walking away toward the town. His voice, magnified by the loudspeakers, was soft and frail. From that distance he resembled a baby bird in its nest. All around were shadows, only over there was the little patch of light. Night was beginning a few yards from him, and extending into infinity. People were going home to light their lamps and get something to eat. “I wish I’d gotten his autograph,” said a girl in a leopard-skin pattern top to her boyfriend. Other people were walking behind them and were also talking. They were carrying sleeping children. There was a tapping of heels and the sound of air being displaced by their bodies. Dukla had never had as many pedestrians.

  I had no wish to get closer. I mean, either way I wouldn’t go up to him. Ordinary people didn’t stand a chance, though it was probably for them that he’d come. But I wasn’t interested in paradoxes. I was trying to think about immortality and I was thinking about his body, his figure, the way it had been shaped, his material form. I was imagining him waking in the morning and feeling a tiredness that sleep is incapable of dispelling. His bones, muscles, blood are leaden and will not obey him. More and more they’re living their own life. This is a surrogate for proof of the existence of the soul—the awareness that our body is leaving us, moving away in its own direction. Waking, rising, bedroom slippers, the bathroom mirror and other objects no longer warm from their previous use. All human actions, eating, bread, tea, the everyday litany recreating life as such. I was imagining him without the crowd and without his robes. Alone, naked almost, in the wan light of early morning as he repeated the same movements as the rest of world at that time of day. He shaves, brushes his teeth, combs his hair, carefully measures out his sugar or goes without, just as he’s cutting down on fatty foods, hard-to-digest meat and white bread, just as he cuts his movements down to an essential minimum, avoiding stairs, slippery floors, and poorly lit places where it’s easy to trip. He guards himself from cold air, drafts, the sinusoidal curve of emotions, loud noise, sleeplessness, and bad news. I was imagining the moments in which he listened in silence to his own body.

  I’m reminded of my grandmother, who believed in ghosts. She often saw them. My grandparents’ house stood in an old orchard at the edge of the village. She’d tell about the things she saw in a completely calm, natural manner. They would appear both during the day and at night. They’d come into the kitchen, open the door just like that. They’d find her at her everyday chores in the kitchen or the farmyard. They were somewhat human, but made of a slightly airier substance. They usually looked like some
body from the family. Everyone believed these stories. I did too. It was true faith, because it was unsupported by any experience. Nor did it have anything to do with religion. In my grandmother’s stories the world of supernatural beings didn’t have anything to do with the world of the saints, the church, ritual. The former was an everyday matter, while the latter served as a measure of time, material for invocations and for a moment of respite on Sundays. The ghosts came as visible proof that in essence reality is indivisible, and that things are rather different than they appear. I was very fond of my grandmother. She was a mild-mannered, practical woman without a hint of excessive piousness, religiosity, without any inclination to mysticism. “He came in that way, he stood here, opened a drawer, the spoons rattled, but he left everything the way it was.” I was captivated by this specificity. These events always had their own time and their own place. “At six in the morning, I’d just woken up and I was sitting on the bed. But he didn’t come from the hallway, he came from the back room.” Her reports were entirely disinterested. They weren’t trying to prove anything or promise anything. To this day I believe them, and I’ve never since come across signs so plain and direct. The one concession to the miraculous that my grandmother would make would be to insert into her story an involuntary and rhetorical: “I really got a scare.” But her fear wasn’t actually visible. It sounded more like, “What a surprise,” or, “How do you like that.” Her friends and relatives were simply visiting her. They came from the past, stood a moment by the window or the white dresser, then went away, leaving behind them an open door that she had to shut herself, because there was a draft. Sometimes she’d even quote snippets of conversation, but I don’t recall they ever said anything that might have confirmed the unusual nature of their condition. I imagined to myself that they were dull gray in color, that they were a little more transparent than people, that they had no smell and wore regular clothes. And that was probably how it was. Grandmother never actually described them. She only spoke about what they’d been doing, how they had occupied space and time with their presence that was somewhat beyond both time and space.

  Later, my grandmother died. I woke up in the next room, and my aunts, who’d been watching over her, said: “Your grandmother’s gone.” I loved her and I was sad. She lay stretched out. Her face had suddenly become terribly serious and stern. I stood very close and gazed at her, in the quiet of the early morning I could hear my aunts bustling around behind my back as if it were just another ordinary morning in a house in the village, and I had the feeling that this death, and maybe death in general, was somehow, how shall I put it, overrated. I felt that my grandmother was only partially gone. I was certain she’d slipped out of this room and this world, but that she was somewhere very close by, that she’d simply gone among those who used to visit her, and if she only chose to she’d appear in just the same way they had appeared. In other words, I knew she was alive. She’d simply been unable to take her body, which now lay upon the bed. In all probability she hadn’t needed it.

  That was why I wasn’t afraid. Neither then or later, when she was dressed in her Sunday best and laid in her casket, and I had to kiss her before the lid was closed. I felt foolish, because everyone was crying and I couldn’t. I knew none of it was true. They couldn’t have been listening to her carefully when she was alive. In the end I started crying too, but it was just because for the first time in my life I saw tears in my father’s eyes.

  It was only when the black mourning flag was stuck on the house that I felt true dread. It flapped in the autumn wind, and this was the breeze of truly dead death. I was utterly unable to connect this symbol to my grandmother’s living presence. It was an abstraction, the horror of emptiness, the black hole of the liturgy and the nameless infinity of oblivion.

  So. I’m standing by the park wall in Dukla and practicing the cult of the ancestors. I’m observing a hieratic ceremony taking place in the distance and trying to imagine my grandmother standing in this spot or a little farther off, by the post office, where the cordon begins and the guys in bulletproof vests are pacing back and forth. She always admired bishops and cardinals, but she saw their job as being entirely earthly, for example, appearing dignified and official. The world simply looked better when it had a prelate in it. She was never visited by saints, or priests, even though she’d outlived at least three of them in the village church. I think about her, her kind wrinkled face. The elderly women walking down the Trakt toward town multiply her image. Many of them have come from far away. They longed to behold his face, and now they’re returning, satisfied and sated or disappointed. The most commonly heard words in the crowd are “did you see him,” “I did,” “other people got in the way,” “just caught a glimpse,” “we were too far away.” They’d come to see his body, because that’s something almost as sure as touch, which functions even in silence and darkness. Words belong to wiseacres and lazy insomniacs. We sniff at each other like animals. There’s nothing wrong in this. It’s better than nothing.

  Beneath the horror-movie cross there’s a group of young monks. They’re touching the metal surface then rubbing their hands on their foreheads. They’re touching the cross and transferring its blessing to their heads as if they could massage it into their skin, under their skulls, as if it could be captured, stored away, or grafted onto them. The sight is grotesque and barbaric. I really ought to laugh, but in fact I’m not doing anything all that different myself, except I’m keeping my hands discreetly in my pockets and only using my eyes. They’re wearing sandals. They look as if they’re washing themselves, or patting face cream on before going to bed. In essence, it’s just a radical kind of photography, a sensual telepathy. That’s why I don’t even try to catch what they’re saying, preferring to reflect on his body and on what connects us in a way that can’t be undermined. We’ll experience the same thing as everyone else. In the same air, the same space that took all those who came before us in its stride. The leaves beneath the streetlamps glisten and tremble like bunting. Stall owners are closing up shop. I’m sore from walking and from sitting now here, now there. Cops in field uniforms can be seen in the lighted windows of the school. They’re lying on the tables resting. They smoke, flicking ash on the floor, and their lips are moving. His voice quavers, yet it rises and falls in calm cadences within an infinite solitude and bounces back off the dark hills. Cars turn on their lights and engines, inch through the crowd, speed up at the town limits, and disappear into the gloaming like red sparks. Everything has already happened. The space has swallowed up sounds and gestures. It’s closed in, grown over without a trace, the same way it’s closed in and grown over at every moment since the very beginning, and there’ll be enough of it for everyone till the very end. The charcoal in the grills by Parkowa Street burn their last in the warm dark air. Girls in white aprons put leftover potatoes into crates. A short guy is counting the day’s take beneath a yellow lightbulb. Tens, twenties, fifties, each separately. He thrusts the wads of money into the pocket of his sportsman’s waistcoat and into a shopkeeper’s pouch hanging from his belt. Two firefighters are eating the last kielbasa. One of them holds a lit cigarette in his free hand. There were no beggars today, nor probably any thieves.

  I drink coffee from a small white mug and watch the rhythm of the story fading away. It’s all over now. Doors close and lights go out. Tomorrow it’ll be like nothing ever happened. There’ll just be ten new blue public phones, and a red walkway. The men will sit themselves back down in the tourist office bar, at the Graniczna, the Gumisia. When it comes down to it, events differ only slightly from the moments they take place in. Even when you know where they’ve come from, it’s hard to say where they’re going. New ones constantly have to be made.

  That evening, or night really, I went into Mary Magdalene. It was open, deserted, and only dimly lit. Amalia lay in shadow. The mirrors caught the dull glow of the streetlamps, but for some strange reason they failed to pass it on into the interi
or of the chapel. It remained in their silvery surfaces, heating them up coldly, without making anything brighter. Quite the opposite: the gloom intensified, congealing above the supine figure, entering into her fanciful marble gown, seeping in deeper and deeper and assuming the contours of her sleeping body. It was as dark and stuffy as in a bedroom. The foliage outside the window was in subtle motion, making the shadows restless. Flakes of semidarkness were trembling, spinning, flickering like will-o’-the-wisps between the relative brightness of the mirrors and the deep black of the air. There was no one around. From time to time a stray car headlight passed across the windows of the chapel and the place was enlivened with a dead, hyperreal clarity.

  There inside were her remains, and they were occupying my thoughts: dust at the bottom of the black sarcophagus, a handful of phosphorizing minerals, calcium, salt, potassium, basic elements, and the remains of the lace in which she had walked about while she was still alive, and in which she’d been buried. Now it all took the form of a dry powdery substance only a little heavier than air, a substance that was almost spiritlike, because the wind could whip it away like an apparition, like the transparent contour of who knew what.

  I tried to see my reflection in the mirrors. It wasn’t there. All that could be seen were snatches of shadow, different kinds of darkness, airy phantoms. And then I heard a rustle and I saw Amalia sit up on her bed. I felt the air move, and a warm smell penetrated the ancient aroma of the church. She stretched. Her cap fell off and her long hair spilled onto her shoulders. She tossed it back, leaned her hands on the edge of the bedding, and turned her face toward the narrow window where the glow of the special day was fading. I wanted to say something, but I had the impression she couldn’t see me. Occupied with herself, still sleepy, she was gradually fixing her outline in the depths of the June night—her magnetic skeleton attracting elementary particles out of the surrounding space and reassembling her body of old. People in Dukla and in the world beyond were falling asleep, slipping between the sheets and tumbling to the bottom of time, while she was emerging out of it, sitting on its rim listening intently to the rising pulse of her blood, the thickening warmth of matter, from her small feet, up her calves, thighs, through the middle of her belly and her spreading arms, right to the top of her head. Everything I had seen in life, everything others had seen, was entering into her and assuming shape. She was growing, acquiring strength, taking on substance and heat like the physical form of an obsessive thought or the answer to the oldest question. She was swelling with the deepest-held suspicions. They gave her an ideal, complete form, into which one could enter without leaving a trace. She was like a black sky poised over the earth, where space ceases to exist and all sounds fall silent. A resurrection has to consist of something. It was like air that had attained the density of flesh. All the dead, all things that have passed forever, the lost and gone shards of the world, parings of time, once-upon-a-time views from windows, everything that once was and will never be again, was now being transformed into her body. Death was withdrawing, pulling back like a glove, like the cracked casing of the everyday, and there, underneath, inside, memory and hope, imagination, and all the other weightless, invisible, and nonexistent phenomena were solidifying into living, palpable particles. Amalia was not a ghost or a phantom. She was the condensed presence of that which was always absent. She was a picture that was moving back toward its model so as to exceed it. The shoe slipped from her foot and fell to the floor with a thud. I could hear her breathing, hear the illusory matter of the world entering into her and being turned into flesh as soft and smooth as eternity. She excited desire. I could smell her scent: heavy, solid, firm. It touched me from every side, the way thought can touch an object—without either tenderness or cruelty, with the indifferent graciousness of inexhaustible things. Her skin glistened in the dark. It recalled the damp stone that formed the arcs of her shoulders, hips, thighs. Dukla was ceasing to exist beyond the wall. It had entered into her along with all the other events I’d lived through; I watched as they moved away one by one to their tranquil annihilation. And at no point did I ever think of a way to revive them, none except memory—that bastard of time over which no one ever has any power.