Dukla Read online

  *

  But now it’s midsummer, Dynów is coming up soon, and I’m remembering this road from a year ago when W. and I drove this way. Haystacks ascended the hills in single file, vanished over crests, and reappeared again on the next rise, till in the end they were engulfed by the green darkness. Because it was evening, Saturday evening into the bargain. Young men were swaggering along the side of the road, night was coming out to meet them and was so immense that each of them thought they’d see all their dreams come true. Under trees, outside little stores, or in orchards there were plastic tables and chairs. They looked like herds of diminutive skeletons. People were drinking Leżajsk beer or sticky fruit wine instinct with hotness. The women were sitting with their arms folded, the men were gesticulating, the children ate potato chips and formed their own circles—precise miniatures of the adults’ leisure time. White and red Prince parasols, blue and white Rothmans ones, crimson to the west, in the east a darkened blue. Dirt roads led down from the hills toward the main road. People were coming down them on their way for a night out. Their white shirts were bright as sails, or phantoms. We were driving slowly. The whole place must have looked like a moving map, it seemed like no one had stayed home, though windows were lit up with the gray glow of television sets. Perhaps the TVs were waiting alone in empty living rooms, like faithful dogs. Leżajsk beer and wine viscid from the heat. The young guys were disappearing in the darkness, girls stood for a moment longer in the ring of light then vanished too. Through the windows of stores the shop girls could be seen in their regular clothes. Their aprons had already been thrown in the laundry. It was a sultry twilight carnival, as the dark hour advanced from the bushes and orchards. That’s where night assembles before it heads out into the world, while they were entering into it, vanishing, passing through the gloom one by one, lighting the way with their cigarettes, and meeting up somewhere in its heart, far from view. The windows of the car were rolled down. I could smell that smell, I was like a dog that could think.

  The air stood still in the squares in front of churches. It was as if the entire emptiness of the world had gathered in exactly those places. A little mongrel ran diagonally across the dry, trampled earth, a church spire rose slowly into the sky, which was dropping lower and lower, and the dog, its living presence, seemed a caprice, a tiny piece of madness brought here from some other time. All around, in the depths of space that had been warmed during the day, people were burrowing passageways for themselves like worms in cheese, and in church courtyards the silence and chill were forming into something that resembled large, irregularly shaped aquaria.

  W. was driving cautiously, because Saturday evenings are filled with apparitions. People separate into their selves and their longings, emanate their own half-visible likenesses so the latter might try all forbidden things. The boys resembled their own dreams as they strutted along the side of the road on the lookout for girls, who were trying on dresses earlier that day, but in the mirror the fabric of their outfits became invisible and they found themselves looking at their own naked bodies. Moving at thirty miles an hour, we passed through air that was dense as water and filled with proliferating reflections, cloudy spots, and waves. Somewhere close to Dubiecko the sky finally joined with the earth and night fell for good.

  *

  All these journeys are like transparent slides. They’re superimposed upon one another like stereoscopic photographs, but this doesn’t make the picture any deeper or clearer. Light can’t be described, all that can be done is to keep imagining it afresh. A man in a drab shirt and denim overalls comes out of a house and heads toward the stable. Seven seconds. That’s it. We’re already further on. It’s quite possible that during that night he made a baby, it’s possible he’ll manage to lead the horse out to pasture and then, smoking his first cigarette of the day, he’ll die. An untold number of past beings came together to make up his existence, and each of them was the size of the whole world. Reality is nothing more than an indefinite number of infinities. Then the child in the womb adds its own and everything starts again from yet another beginning. Seven seconds before he disappeared around the red brick corner. The story is motionless and offers protection from madness.

  The shadows of early morning lie upon the earth as if the wind were blurring them. They’re black yet hazy, because the dew atomizes the light and refracts it at the edges. Even in the middle, the black is far from distinct—it rather resembles a reflection. Beyond Dynów the San touches up against the road with its crooked elbow. We have to flip down the visor, because the sun is shining directly in our eyes. It hangs there just above the road. The blacktop is peeling like old gilding. The river down below has the color of a mirror in an unlit room. For the moment the brightness remains high up in the air, and the future is probable but by no means certain. Before Dubiecko we pass a car. We see its black belly and four wheels in the air. It looks like an animal that wants to play. The cops have their hands in their pockets as if the whole business is over. The blue flashing light on the police car rotates helplessly in the luminous morning air. A few rubbernecks crane over the fence by the ditch. As they stare they smoke cigarettes, we see the blue smoke. This kind of stillness always sets in at a place of death. The sun is rising ever higher, so people can take a look at their world.

  DUKLA

  I.

  We got there in the afternoon. People were standing on the street corners waiting for something. It was quiet, there was hardly any traffic; the men were smoking and the women talked in subdued voices. A policeman in a white shirt told us it was the funeral of a long-serving firefighter.

  Whenever I’m in Dukla, there’s always something happening. The last time it was that frosty December light at dusk. There was an intense blue drifting in the air. It was invisible but tangible and firm. It descended onto the rectangular market square and solidified there like frozen water. The town hall was embedded in a block of fine ice that sharpened the edges of its tower and topmost story, and the people had had the foresight to go elsewhere. After all, what lifeless stone can bear may be harmful for the body. The shadows passing from time to time along the walls belonged to drunks. The shadows were warm inside and so were in no danger. But all the same, none of them dared to take a shortcut, crossing the market square diagonally and entering that glassy, sonorous zone.

  And now this funeral. The procession came up Cergowska Street, brushed against the firehouse, and turned into Węgierski Trakt, where it spread out in the sun like a colorful, indolent snake, an anaconda, or like a gigantic centipede. A black church pennant fluttered at the front; then came other colors; the dark casket swayed on the shoulders of six firefighters in gold helmets. It’s hard to recall the order, but after that I believe there came the priest, the altar boys, and a band with trumpets glinting like the helmets; the trombonist had a long ponytail tied with an elastic band dangling beneath his fireman’s cap. That’s how it was. Oh, and the widow following behind the casket, with the family and the dignitaries. And then a caravan of fire trucks: Żuks; Tatras with three ladders; Jelczes; UAZs, all red as the hottest fire; and at the very end a Star 25, an ancient model from perhaps thirty years before, but still alive, bright and plucky. It looked like a toy that had grown up. When they crossed Mickiewicza, the bells of Mary Magdalene and of the Cistercian monastery started up, and the vehicles turned on their sirens. The two laments, sacred and secular, intertwined, unraveling only when they were high in the sky, and it was so sublime and beautiful that D. and I stood dumbstruck, not saying a word, though I’m certain that like me he was thinking how good it would be to have a funeral like that one day. The plaintive wailing hovered over the town; cars pulled over onto the sidewalks and police officers instinctively and spontaneously stood to attention. Behind the cavalcade of fire trucks there were just regular citizens. And if the town of Dukla numbers about two thousand inhabitants, at least half of them were accompanying the casket to the cemetery, while the ot
her half watched the procession. Because the market square was once again deserted and sweltering, and only the dust and a single cyclist were attempting to do something with that rectangular void covered by a light blue lid of sky. This was around the beginning of May. Then we drove off toward Komańcza, the sun shining at our backs.

  And I keep going back to Dukla to observe it in different kinds of light and different seasons. For example, the time in July when the sky was enveloped in the oppressive milky glow of stormy weather. The bottle of beer I drank in the tourist-office bar instantly made itself felt on my skin. I was alone, and I thought to myself I’d take a good close look at it all so as to finally grasp the spirit of the place and capture the scent that I was always sure existed, because places and towns give off smells like animals; you just have to keep looking till you hit on the right trail and find its hiding place. You have to attack it at different times of the day and night and when tedium throws you out the door, you have to try from another direction, through the window or along the road from Żmigród or from Bóbrka, until there’s the kind of miracle that makes light bend in the uncanniest way and eventually weave into a transparent fabric that for a split second blocks out the world; at such times you stop breathing as if before death, but no fear comes.

  Dukla then, a handful of crisscrossed streets, one church, one monastery, and the shell of a synagogue in which stunted birch trees cling to the wall several feet above ground level. It was Sunday and in front of the church of Mary Magdalene the priest was blessing a bevy of freshly washed cars. A short distance away some Ukrainians had spread out their wares on the hoods of dusty Zhygulis and, arms folded, were regarding this pagan ceremony. Their vehicles covered great distances without any benediction. Their goods were shoddy and the elegant faithful passed them by with an air of superiority. On Sunday, objects become a little less real, and temptation trots at your heel like a dog. They were mostly tools—drills, hammers, saws, metalworking implements—so it was hardly surprising that right after High Mass they looked a little blasphemous. No one was buying anything and the people from Lviv or Drohobych stood there immobile, immersed in the milky glare of the unseen sun, lost in their waiting like true easterners who suspect that time has no end, so you need to be sparing with the gestures life is performed with, to make them last as long as possible.

  I walked along 3 Maja. A chalky light sprinkling from above blurred the shadows. People were separate, solitary, quiet. Before a storm the air is dense and soft. In the greenish waters of the Dukielka nothing was reflected. To the right, stacked on one another were gardens, sheds, and the rear walls of small apartment buildings, which on the side overlooking the market square were smooth and pastel-colored, calling to mind a confectionery contest. Over there, pink, greenish pistachio, faded gingerbread brown, and custard cream took on the shapes of bay windows, ornamental borders, cornices, and curved, sagging balconies. But on this side nature had run rampant and despite the fact that it was July the colors of the flowers were vivid as flames, as raspberry juice and sulfur, perhaps because a tongue of river chill licked this special spot in the middle of town. Men in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves could be seen through the open windows. They were sitting down at tables to have a drink and stare into the green depths of the mansion grounds on the far side of the creek, where field artillery and cannons warmed their olive-green armor plating in the half-visible sun.

  That was how it was. But this time too I left with nothing.

  Just as twenty-some years before I’d left with nothing from my summer vacation, bloated with heat, swollen from the vastness of sky-blue space strung across the plain of the Bug Valley like a trembling, rippling parasol; and it’s only now, twenty-some years later, that I’m digesting it all like an old snake, dissolving it in my soul, breaking it down with the juices of memory into its constituent parts, so as to experience their taste and smell; because time is the opposite of space and through its veil things can be seen more and more distinctly, if only because they can never be touched again.

  That time we’d been sitting on the hill behind the wooden church. The river down below was gray-green, like a meadow toward the end of summer, and on its other bank, far away at the edge of the sandy flatland, something was on fire in the village of Arbasy. The afternoon weighed heavily on our heads, and the garish brightness prevented the fire from forming into a cockscomb. In the glare-bleached expanse it was little more than a reddish pinprick. Fire’s no match for weather. It glowed like a tiny lump of coal, the wind lacked the strength to blow on it and it only carried the distant moan of a fire siren. A black horse was grazing across the river and didn’t so much as raise its head. It was a long way off, but I could have sworn its sweat-soaked skin was glistening with the reflected light of the sun. As far as the eye could see there wasn’t a single tree. Only on the horizon was there a ribbon of green marked by the pulsing red dot of the blaze.

  Then later, in the evening, the mayflies came out in swarms, the place looked like a snowstorm. Millions of creatures swirled around the few streetlamps in the center of the village. The mercuric light dimmed as continual white waves of bugs flew in from the river. The living matter thickened around the glow and eventually a huge, trembling sphere hung around each lamp. The dark air was filled with shadows. It was impossible to tell people from magnified specters of insects. Everything stank of fish and silt. The mayflies danced then fell to earth. Soon, every footstep made a crunching sound. The road looked like it was scattered with living snow. It was only beyond where the streetlights stood that the night had its regular feel and smell.

  I remember all this ever more vividly. The distant red point of the fire expands, spreads across the landscape, the faraway space begins to char like paper and from under its flimsy black ash other events show through. They stretch into infinity, like a suite of rooms in a dream.

  That night I went back to my uncle and aunt’s house. The sandy lane led by an empty place where there’d once been a windmill, though for me it was still there, made from the darkness of the wind, towering over the dusty road, and it would remain there always, though the world would probably turn a good many somersaults, just as it did now when I turned from 3 Maja into Dukla’s market square, and just like now, when I’m trying to describe it all, and those onion layers accumulate in the body and in the mind, one showing through beneath another like a shirt under a threadbare sweater, like the skin of someone’s backside under well-worn pants. Because the present is weakest of all, it spoils and disintegrates faster than anything.

  That night I clambered up to my little attic room in the dark. There was a smell of resinous wood. The boards were radiating the heat they’d absorbed during the long day. I turned on the light. Black ground beetles hid themselves in the cracks of the floorboards. They looked like mobile drops of tar. I could smell them in the heated air.

  It’s a strange thing that I don’t recall any of my thoughts or feelings from that time. I don’t remember any of the things that actually were dearest to me, so I have to imagine them to myself. It’s exactly as if I were nothing more than an extraneous addition to the world. I don’t remember fear, pain, joy. All that comes into my mind are events that could have evoked one or another of these emotions. That’s all. Nothing more.

  But I ought to go back to Dukla. It appears like an admonition whenever I start thinking about myself too much.

  This time was in summer too, August I believe. There was a northerly wind. Swift-moving white clouds were crossing the sky. The air had the kind of cold transparent hue that offers nothing for the eye to fix on. The cone of Cergowa Mountain looked as if it rose immediately beyond the garden fences, and every little bush, every tree on the crest was as clear as a paper cutout. The clouds alternately hid the sun and uncovered it. Because of this people acquired a double existence, since their shadows kept appearing then vanishing again, and each figure would stand now with a patch of black at its
feet, now entirely alone. You had the irresistible sense that the wind was blowing away the dark impressions of bodies from the roadway and that the light, or rather the lack of it, seemed as material as sand. It wasn’t just the people, the whole town was given over to this restless, yet, when it came down to it, monotonous transformation. It kept dividing into two, then reconstituting itself again. The play of disappearing shadows revealed the duality of the world with such power that I was expecting the market square to disappear, and with it the squat apartment buildings, the two drunks leaving the hotel bar and entering directly into the emptiness of the afternoon, the town-hall tower, all solid matter, and nothing would remain but the black absence of light, the other side of reality that ordinarily marks only its edges, but now was spilling out, submerging everything in a confusion of shadow that was reaching for what belonged to it like a banished son from a fairy tale returning home after many years, and the town of Dukla would disappear in a crack between dimensions, or the place where the five human senses lose their power and all that’s left is a presentiment that the profound, vivid everyday landscape might suddenly turn inside out.

  But I saw a sign reading “Kalwaria Furniture” and everything continued on its regular man-made tracks. I cut diagonally across the market square and found myself by the creek, marveling once again at the size of the glassed-in wooden veranda at the back of the building that houses the jeweler’s in front, while behind is this miraculous thing the size of a railroad car, suspended over the greenish stream like a rickety hothouse. That day I had a yen to see the mansion. It stood amid greenery, so bright it was almost white, crowned with its black roof. I walked around it, coming from the direction of the playing field that had been abruptly turned into a sodden park. The viscous water of the ponds had probably been there for centuries. A few ducks were trying to swim in it, but they were barely able to move across the stodgy surface, and they left no trace whatsoever of their passage. Darkness condensed in the avenues of lindens. The sun was shining over the area, but here the light disappeared. In the farthest corner, where the wall twisted to the left and mounted the hillside, I met the only person in sight. He was as restive as only an animal can be in a park—squirrel, rabbit, or magpie. He was poking around in the bushes, and even at my discreet remove I could hear him mumbling. I observed his back in its dull-colored jacket for a full minute before I finally realized what he was doing. He was looking for empty plastic Coca-Cola and Sprite and Mirinda bottles, unscrewing their colored caps and sticking them in his pocket. Because at that time you could win a fortune if you found the two matching halves of an amulet. The man cursed every time he found a bottle without a cap. In his right hand he carried a plastic bag filled with these treasures. He noticed me and shuffled off toward the edge of a pond where the wind had gathered a whole flotilla of bottles in a little bay. One of his shoes was black, the other brown. For my part, I was recalling how, two hundred years ago, Jerzy August Wandalin Mniszech issued a decree that imposed upon the good citizens of Dukla the obligation to educate their children. I also remembered that paintings by Lorrain had hung in Mniszech’s mansion. I set off in that direction. I passed the chapel, I passed the mansion’s cold room, which was now no more than a pile of rocks. From Węgierski Trakt came the hum of cars driving to Krosno or coming back.