Dukla Read online

  For a long time now it’s seemed to me that the only thing worth describing is light, its variations and its eternal nature. Actions interest me to a much lesser degree. I don’t remember them very well. They arrange themselves in random sequences that break off without reason and begin without cause, only to snap unexpectedly once again. The mind is skilled at patching up, tacking, putting things in order, but I’m not the smartest guy in the world and I don’t trust the mind, just like a country bumpkin doesn’t trust city folks, because for them everything always arranges itself in neat, deft, illusory series of deductions and proofs. So, light. I quickly reached the end of the vehement dark green glow of the grounds, and set off toward the mansion across the graveled courtyard.

  Inside it smelled of turpentine, as museums always do. The lady at the desk sold me a ticket, while an aging dog sniffed at me without interest. I slipped on some felt overshoes and followed the arrow, dragging their long laces behind me. I wanted to track down the Lorrains.

  But there was nothing there, nothing but suites of rooms plunged in penumbra and filled with black oxidized weaponry. In the utter stillness and silence the guns looked like ideal and unused things. A yellowish light seeped from the glass display cases; its color recalled old wood, or a room where someone’s forgotten to turn off a night-light. A Goryunov heavy machine gun stood on its wheeled base. Its ribbed barrel widened into a comical funnel, while its two wooden grips were like the handles of old-fashioned flatirons. Next to it, on a spread bipod was a Degtyaryov with a butt like an oar split in half. I tapped the drum of the magazine. It was empty, and only slightly larger than a cookie tin. Under glass there were two Tokarev TT-33 semiautomatic pistols, so-called tetetkas, produced in Tula, where the samovars come from, though, unlike those objects, these ones were not in the least shiny. Gray metal showed through beneath the corrosion, and the star in the grip had lost its gleam from fearful or mortal perspiration half a century before. Next to the two Tokarevs lay a Luger, that is to say, a Parabellum P08 with a long barrel. This was the kind of pistol used by German artillerymen, and just as with the commissars’ Mauser C96, you could attach a wooden stock. But there was no stock here. The slight grooving of the grip formed a pattern that brought to mind a snake, or fishnet stockings. Next there was an automatic pistol reminiscent of a German Bergmann, then an MP40, and a series of drooping, scarecrowlike uniforms with holes where bullets had passed through. There were also antitank mines and personnel mines, mounds of helmets and bayonets, a Mauser 98 with bulging barrel, unexploded grenades, bullet-holed mess cans from which the smell of spirits had evaporated, ebonite radiotelephones veined like marble, a funny-looking MG34 with its binocularlike magazine and its butt like a fishtail, the green cases of radio units with white indicator-eyes whose needles had frozen at certain death-dealing or victorious frequencies, and a thousand other things that had served their purpose and were now to take their rest for all time in this warm and quiet sepulcher where the only sound was the shuffling of my overshoes.

  And as I tried to pull back the lock on the Goryunov, I suddenly sensed I wasn’t alone. By the doorway of the room, in the lusterless golden light, stood a woman in a dark dress. I expected a telling-off for having dared to touch one of the exhibits, but she merely asked:

  “Are you interested in Marshal Piłsudski?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to give an unambiguous answer, and the woman evidently noticed my hesitation, because she said:

  “In that case I’ll show you something else. Please, follow me.”

  We went out onto the staircase. The laces of the felt overshoes scuttled behind me like lizards. The small windows told me we were in the attic. The woman went up to a low, solid door and opened it with a key. I thought of Lorrain.

  The new room bore no resemblance to the dark labyrinth that preceded it. It was large and filled with light. Dozens of pictures hung on the walls. My guide stood to one side and observed me closely, waiting for my reaction. I went up to one of the gilt frames. The woman gave me a few seconds, then said: “It’s by Mr. —ski, a local master butcher. It’s lovely, don’t you think?”

  Blades of grass and loops of colored yarn had been shaped into an image of the Dukla town hall. It looked like a field of multicolored grass. A hairy blue sky bristled over the white edifice with its angular turret. Subsequent pictures depicted small apartment buildings, the market square, Mary Magdalene church, the Cistercian monastery, all in miraculous pastel shades, unblemished by any shadow, merely outlined in black in a few places, like in a Raoul Dufy, but purer, gaudier, and drenched in sunlight like a red-tinted meadow.

  “Are these all by the same gentleman?” I asked.

  “They are. Mr. —ski is retired.”

  Further on there were Orthodox churches and chapels scorched on wood, pictures assembled from straw or colored scraps of material, thick, uneven oil paintings, all showing the beauty of the Dukla region.

  The light in Lorrain’s pictures is horizontal, horizontal or diagonal. Its source is located somewhere near the skyline and before it reaches the place where the canvas ends and the world begins, it’s so weak that it seems to have exhausted itself, burned itself out in that Lorrainian reality. In “Landscape with Dancing Figures” the proscenium is plunged in shadow, making the human figures acquire a double materiality. Their bodies bear the color of the earth. In the depths of the scene the transparent air permeates the forms that are there and the boundary between visible and invisible, real and imagined, is preserved only because of the fallibility of our gaze, which has to be looking at something in order to perceive something. Everything the light falls on is moving toward its own ideal, toward a world made safe by the limitations of our senses. But this is a good thing, as otherwise we’d die of tedium while we were still alive.

  So it is. But all this is barely a suspicion. Later, though, when I studied a reproduction of “Landscape with Dancing Figures,” the original of which is in some museum in Rome, I noticed that Mount Soracte, which closes the composition, has the exact same shape as Cergowa Mountain. Especially when you’re coming from Żmigród. The highway climbs and falls, and with each rise Cergowa emerges higher and higher over the surface of the landscape. It looks like a peak that’s straining to tip over. Its north slope is extraordinarily steep, whereas the other faces drop away gently in the usual way of the Beskid mountains. It looks like it’s crawling northward, dragging its lumbering, flabby body behind it like a seal, or a man pulling himself along by his elbows.

  So then, Cergowa and Soracte, which Lorrain painted many times, and which many times served as the last and most important word in his story. Distant, gray-blue, and irregular like the rest of this world, in which existence is always a caprice of the light.

  But it was only much later that I discovered this resemblance. Back in the mansion, we walked along the line of those homespun absurdities in which naïveté mingled with innocence, love with ineptitude, utter barbarity of form with absolute tenderness of content, and I was thinking as usual about time, in other words about a banal and ubiquitous thing, about the bizarre transformation that had swept Lorrain aside and replaced him with a Goryunov, a Shpagin submachine gun, and pictures burned on wood and made with colored threads. And I couldn’t figure out what was true, I couldn’t fathom the final destination of time, which in Dukla had begun perhaps four hundred years earlier, when it was acquired by the Mniszechs of Moravia, one of whom, George, had even been father-in-law to the tsar. True, it had only been the pretender Grishka Otrepyev: George’s daughter Marina had married that mad monk, and then when he was murdered she married False Dmitriy II, swearing by everything holy that he was the miraculously saved False Dmitriy I. When the second Dmitriy was also killed, she took up with the next would-be Emperor of All the Russias, Ivan Zarutsky, a Don Cossack ataman, but that was the end of her monarchical ambitions, because they impaled Ivan, drowned her, and hanged th
e usurper’s three-year-old child. A hundred years later, the mansion at Dukla became home to Maria Amalia, née Brühl, daughter of the Brühl who controlled the scepter of August III and made both Poland and Saxony quake; the daughter equaled her father in intrigue and in deed, dividing her interests equally between Rubens, the theater, and assassination—it was rumored she had had a hand in the drowning of Gertruda Komorowska in the Huczwa River after Gertruda improvidently married Szczęsny Potocki, whom Amalia had picked out as a son-in-law for herself and a husband for her daughter Józefina. That was how it was.

  A trace of this madness remained in Maria Amalia’s tomb, at Mary Magdalene. Her figure, carved in pink marble, reposes upon the black case of a sarcophagus. Amalia is lying on her back, but her head is tipped to the right as if the dead woman were only sleeping. Her marble clothing is arranged into fanciful, lifelike folds. It looks like crumpled bedding. This Rococo death has something of the boudoir about it. It’s quite possible that beneath the pleats of stone Amalia is still warm and that her body has retained the living firmness that comes from a long sleep. In the black sarcophagus upon which the figure rests, her bones are gradually turning into powder, into something ever more mineral, suffused with eternity; they are turning into eternity itself, because in the end the only thing left will be dust rising into the interstellar spaces. But who cares about this dark box, filled with condensed death, even if this death were to manifest itself in the form of the eternal?

  I left the mansion and found myself at Mary Magdalene. The church was empty, quiet, and cold; I stood at the tomb and I was in fact fairly sure that beneath the marble covering of her shoes her feet were still warm, and that blood still pulsed under the hard smoothness of her fingernails. After all, this figure hadn’t been formed around a lifeless skeleton, no, it had covered the living image of Amalia, her being, which had moved through the mansion at Dukla, plotting, yielding to pleasures and hatreds. This stone had enclosed all the gestures that constituted her from the moment she woke in the morning till the moment she fell asleep at night, all her actions, her sins, and everything else, all the countless places she occupied in space day after day.

  So then, I had a desire to touch this cadaverous and at the same time unsettlingly live substance, enter into it, just as one enters the organic integument of a human being by means of violation or love, but I heard steps behind me and an extremely young priest in glasses said softly:

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closing.”

  “What if someone wanted to visit right at this moment?” I asked, but he just lowered his eyes and repeated what he had said. He began turning off the lights. I walked away and left the church.

  The wind was still blowing. I passed a closed newspaper kiosk. It stood with its back to the church. Copies of Cats and Playstars, girlie magazines, lay behind the glass. The women’s bodies were shiny and still. Their mouths had frozen in “ahs” and “oohs,” halfway between mockery and surprise. Death had caught up with them and then immediately abandoned them, as if it didn’t have the time, and that was probably why the naked women’s eyes were still wide open. A kid with a raspberry-flavored ice cream was staring at them. A trickle of pink had run down the cone and was about to reach his hand. He jumped like someone woken from sleep, glanced at me, and moved over to where there were cosmetics, combs, washing powder. I headed toward the bus station. I examined the yellow sign listing departures. For the next hour there was nothing I could use.

  In the dark shelter that resembled a ruined arcade there was a family sitting and waiting for their bus. No one was talking. The children copied the stoical gravity of their parents. The only thing moving were the little girl’s legs, which swung rhythmically above the ground in their white stockings and shiny red shoes with golden buckles. In the emptiness of the Sunday afternoon, in the stillness of the bus station, this motion brought to mind the helpless pendulum of a toy clock unable to cope with the burden of time. The girl had slipped her hands under her thighs and was sitting on them. The glistening red weights of her feet were rocking in an absolute vacuum. Nothing was added or taken away by the swinging. It was pure movement in an ideal, purified space. Her mother was staring emptily ahead. A yellow frill bubbled under her dark blue top. The father was leaning forward, his arms resting on his spread knees, and he too was peering into the depths of the day, toward the meeting point of all human gazes that have encountered no resistance on their path. The woman straightened her hands where they lay in her lap and said, “Sit still.” The girl froze immediately. Now all of them were gazing into the navel of the afternoon emptiness, and it was all I could do to tear myself from that motionless slumber.

  It was then I promised myself I’d never again go to Dukla on a Sunday, when everyone is spending the afternoon at home, while inertia creeps out onto the market square and the streets, and matter manifests itself in its most primal, indolent form, filling every crack and crevice, emptying them of light, air, human traces, even driving time from them in those few hours before evening, before the bars fill up, because in the houses the afternoon has started to make the men feel sick.

  Two Slovak cars were lumbering toward Barwinek. Old Skoda one-oh-fives with sagging rear ends. I crossed the roadway and plodded through the gravid Sunday atmosphere. Even the wind was slowly easing off. There was no sign of holiday debauchery. Nothing but a taut, condensing expanse. It embalmed the town, submerged it in transparent sap, as if it were to remain that way forever as a marvel of nature or an educational demonstration of what happens when time is utterly wasted. The only exception was a black mongrel with a tucked-in tail trotting along, blithely unaware it was Sunday. It dragged its shadow along behind it, and both vanished down Kościuszki as quickly as they had appeared.

  I sensed that my accidental presence here was a scandal, that it played havoc with the established order of things, just as my body was disturbing the space, which swelled with self-sufficiency, and from which everyone hid in their homes, because otherwise they’d be distended and torn apart along with it, because Sunday had taken away their feeling of being needed, their bustle, the simple sequence of cause and effect. You only have to leave a place for seeds of madness to sprout there instantly, and a place like the Dukla market square becomes just like the human soul. A void takes over both the one and the other in exactly the same way, and at such a moment thoughts and walls crumble under their own weight. It was for that reason I went immediately to the bar at the tourist office. In there it always smelled of men, stale smoke, and beer. The tables had been cleared. They gleamed darkly, waiting for the evening. I ordered a Leżajsk and sat by the lilac-colored wall on which someone had painted yellow-green rushes and a silvery stretch of water. The barmaid said no more than “Two twenty” and disappeared into the back room. I peeked out of the half-open window. The lace curtain stirred in the breeze, revealing a part of the market square then immediately covering it again. The place was empty, quiet, cool. I was waiting for someone to emerge onto the sun-drenched square, the way you sometimes wait for a passerby who’ll go ahead of you and cross the path of a black cat that just ran over the sidewalk.

  Nothing but events, then. Yet some of them proliferate in the body like insistent thoughts, with time taking on an almost material form. They crystallize, precipitate, like salt. Subtle entities, among which we should include both thoughts and the images that memory has preserved, enter into unpredictable relations with one another, and the nature of these relations may never be fathomed. Because what real things could possibly link Dukla with that village from twenty-odd years ago, aside from the letter u that both have in their name.

  That summer, in the village they started holding dances in the open air. It must have been a Saturday. A greenish gloom prevailed around the small square surfaced with paving stones. From time to time a traveling cinema showed movies here. Moths would gyrate in the stream of light from the projector and cast immense shadows onto the screen;
the shadows were then fully entitled to take part in the action, because the films were usually black and white. But now a dance was in full swing. The teenagers stood where the shadows began. There were flashes of cheap church-fair belt buckles bearing bull’s heads, colts, or mustangs. Large colored combs—the status symbol of the early seventies—poked out of the back pockets of jeans. Heat rose from the cement dance floor. We drew it into our nostrils and shuddered. Men put their arms around women in garish bouclé blouses, and the mixed smell of river air, sweat, perfume, and hot weather radiated like ripples on water, sweeping over us and engulfing us; at times I found it hard to breathe. The Tonette tape recorder, hooked up to an amplifier, was probably playing something by Anna Jantar or Irena Jarocka, while we circled the margins of the brightness like wild animals around a distant campfire, and like wild animals we understood nothing of the language of gestures, the pantomime of desire, resistance, acquiescence, and clandestine arrangements. But the smell needed no understanding. It entered into us; it filled our blood and our brains, in which there arose no questions, only an acrid, compelling amazement that was equally like shame and like rapture.