Dukla Page 6

  There were three guys at a table, wordlessly drinking vodka. They were simply raising their glasses to their lips and tipping them. They paid no attention to each other.

  Before the halny blows, everything is quiet and alien. Sparks dance inside bodies, nerves grow taut and overheated, the skin stops protecting them and for this reason the boundary between everyday banality and madness grows slender as a single hair. People stop being able to distinguish between themselves and the world and mistake themselves for reality, whereas in fact it’s only that the mind is weakening, and instead of arranging the chaos around itself into some semblance of meaning, it thinks only about itself.

  The guys were just regular guys, drab and unshaven. They didn’t even look at me, but they sensed my presence like that of an unwelcome animal. A wet trail on the floor led to their table. Each of them was tapping out his own rhythm with his foot. A white sneaker, a tall zip-up black boot, and the tip of something that could have been an overshoe or a lined rubber boot. A clattering sound came from the back room. I knocked on the counter with my two-zloty coin. I had no desire to linger there. The barmaid came through, poured my drink as if I were transparent, and swept the money into the drawer without looking. I drank up and left so quickly I didn’t even taste the beer till I reached the vaulted gateway that leads from the market square into a small courtyard where in the summertime there’s a table and three chairs under a tree.

  There was still no wind. It’s always that way before the halny, like taking air into your lungs and trying to live with it for as long as possible. On the corner of Kościuszki a woman hurled something at the feet of a man in a green jacket and stomped off. The man picked the thing up, started to straighten it, push it out, fold it, then ran after her. To this day I don’t know what it was. It was brown. I walked over, but there was no trace on the sidewalk. The couple that had been arguing had already vanished into the Graniczna. There was nothing to hold on to. The mind and the gaze moved in every direction without encountering any obstacle. Matter and memory yielded before them and wherever you looked, whatever you thought about, there was nothing but the void of geography all the way to the borders of Krosno province, or the amorphous deep waters of all that had gone before, including even the birth waters. That’s how things look moments before the halny begins. Weightlessness, emptiness, and the slackening of the mind, you have the feeling of having swallowed the whole world, and there’s a hollow echo in your belly. Nothing but the misery of isobars, forms of existence swelling and overlapping, and transcendence getting in the way of immanence. At these moments the imagined mingles with the real and the mountain-dwelling Górals of Podhale clutch their temples in despair, blood is spilled in the Pod Cyckiem bar, and don’t even try to separate the guys doing the fighting. Suicides go looking for quiet spots to hang themselves, love turns to rape, and vodka consumed gathers in the organism without appearing to cause any harm; you sit up straight, stiff and bored, till in the end the brain explodes like magnesium and in the white light of madness the improbable becomes the ordinary. Snow slides from the shingles and the roof ridges glisten like blades. That’s how things should be.

  So I decided to try and find the house that R. and I had discovered when we were here in the summer. At that time dusk had been falling. We walked down Cergowska, turned into Podwale, then into Zielona. It was an inconspicuous cottage of blackened wood. It stood at the far end of an untended yard. A yellow light shone in the window. Five minutes later and everything would have been completely dark, but the remains of the daylight allowed us to take a look at this yard or lot. It was laid out in a truly curious order. Scraps, pieces, and torn lengths of rusty sheet metal had been arranged in a tidy geometrical pile. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to organize the misshapen pieces into an almost perfect cuboid. Elsewhere, rocks, rubble, and brick fragments lay in a pyramidal prism smoothed into an exact cone. Shards and pebbles had been stuck in the crevices between the larger pieces as precisely as a mason would have done. Whole and half bricks had been ordered in a neat hexagonal stack. In another place, leftover roofing paper and plastic sheeting had been gathered together, rolled up and aligned according to type and size. The tubes and rolls had been placed so neatly upon one another in a tapering pile that on the top there was one roll crowning the whole. Wood too had been sorted according to size and shape. Rotten planks in one place, short lengths of thick beams elsewhere in a cubic mound, like building blocks. Next to them lay scrap iron. A snarl of rusted shapes had been disentangled. To one side pipes, rods, rails, channel bars, in other words long thin objects; to another small irregular polyhedrons, old bicycle parts, kitchen fittings, tin cans, and God knows what all else. These items, whose shape prevented them from matching one another, had been tipped together to form a rounded semicircular heap, care being taken to make sure nothing jutted out to spoil the relatively even outline. Beneath the overhang of a shed built of sawmill offcuts, glass had been collected. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of bottles had been stacked on one another to form a wall of glass, necks toward the shed, bottoms facing out. Here too a rudimentary order had been maintained. Green, brown, and clear glass were each kept together, in addition to which the bottles had been grouped according to size and shape: flat ones were separate from round ones, while half-liter bottles were not mixed with quarter liters, or with one-liter cola or orangeade bottles. The scheme was exceedingly complex, since three colors and multiple shapes give a dizzying number of possible combinations. Then there were jars, also sorted according to their dimensions. A little farther still was an old tree with spreading branches, from which there hung loops of string, coils of electric cord, small and large lengths, and snippets, tied together, fastened tight, solid, dangling like horses’ tails. There were also stuffed plastic bags, over a dozen colored sacks filled with who knew what, but certainly something light, because they swung in the breeze. It looked like the creation of the world. A path had been trodden through the heaps of trash. It looked as if the creator of this order strolled around his work, admiring it, straightening it up from time to time.

  We went toward the ruins of the synagogue. Birch saplings had taken root in the top of a wall several feet above the ground. We could hear the rustle of young leaves. At this point R. said he really liked the place we’d seen, that the person in that wretched old shack, the worst house on a whole street of big, expensive, ugly houses, that that person was just trying to give meaning to his world, and that was fine, he wasn’t trying to change it, just put it in order a little, the way you organize your thoughts, and often that’s enough to stop you from going mad. That was what R. said, so I gave up on the idea of creation, because it seemed like R. was right.

  So now I wanted to go back there to have something my eyes and my thoughts could fasten onto, something straightforward and self-evident, something that had been done for its own sake. And I did go, but there was snow in the yard and the piles were hidden under little white hillocks. They looked like something accidental and natural. There were no footsteps leading to the door, nor was smoke rising from the chimney. A handful of faded plastic bags hung from the leafless tree. They looked like dismal fruits. I think they were filled with other bags. The first gusts of the halny came from the south and rocked them. I quickly walked away. The bus from Barwinek smelled of the wind.

  In the dictionary it says “dukla” means “a small mineshaft dug for exploratory purposes, in search of deposits, for ventilation, or as a primitive means of extracting ore.”

  That’s right. My method is primitive. It’s like drilling at random. In principle it could be done anywhere. It doesn’t make much difference, since the world is round. Like memory, which begins from a single point, a dot, then spins in layers and turns ever widening circles, so as to swallow us up and bring about our ruin in utterly unneeded abundance. At that point we begin to turn around, retreat, pretend we’ve walked into all this accidentally, by mistake, that in fact someone�
��s taken us for a ride, deceived us as if we were children, and now all we want to do is go to our mom, to hold onto her skirt and cry from shame and helplessness.

  That summer, as always, July turned imperceptibly into August, and despite the relentless swelter a reminder that the vacation was passing could be smelled in the air. The cowpats in the meadows dried in the twinkling of an eye. You could flip them over with the toe of your shoe. Metallic green beetles halted in the sudden glare, then quickly sought shade. Dust hovered permanently over the roadway. The willows along the river smelled as if they were on fire. The water level had fallen and sandbars emerged in the middle of the stream. You could wade out to them in water that only came up to your chest. Then you could lie there on your back, feeling the tickle of the river and the coarse sand yielding beneath the weight of your body. Some people even crossed all the way to the other bank and stood there proudly, hands on their hips, then a moment later they’d be taken aback by the sight of their own village, which they’d never seen before from that angle. In the evening, trucks carrying metal barrels would drive down to the river. People were taking water for their livestock. The wells were beginning to dry up. Horses stood to their bellies in the water and drank.

  That summer, for the first time I got so drunk I passed out. My pals dragged me to my uncle and aunt’s house and left me there. I woke up at dawn. I was wet from the dew. A red sun was rising over the black line of pine and aspen thickets. There was no wind whatsoever, yet the poplars along the road were rustling as always.

  The firefighters had called off the outside dances and taken their Tonette tape player back into the firehouse. The nights were cold now. One evening they threw a proper bash, indoors. There was a buffet with vodka and beer, and taped music was only played in the breaks when the accordion player and the guitarist and drummer were temporarily exhausted. Yellow dust swirled in the firehouse air. The dancers were drenched in sweat. Some time before midnight a police car pulled up and two uniforms came in to look for someone. They found him, but he got away. He even took a swing at one of the cops, I saw a cap with an eagle badge lying on the floor. The guy ran off into the darkness between the barns. The dogs barked after him. The other cop took out his gun and fired into the night. That summer was the first time I heard a real shot.

  One day we were kicking a ball around on the volleyball court. In the end it rolled into some bushes and stayed there. Nothing was hanging on the porch of her cabin. Another empty Mistella bottle stood next to the first one. We dispersed lethargically in search of shade. We were tan and bored. We were thirsty. I didn’t have a penny. I moved off toward the concrete bunker that housed the washrooms and showers. Inside was a cool semidarkness. Light seeped in through the narrow windows up by the ceiling and came to a halt there as if it lacked the strength to continue down. I took a drink, trembling from the chill. On the nearest faucet there was a bundled-up towel. At the far end was a hallway that led to the showers. From there came the noise of running water. At moments it sounded like a dry crackle. I splashed water on my face. The running water stopped and I heard someone call: “Kryśka! Hand me the towel!” Then a second later: “Kryśka!”

  I picked it up. It was damp. I took it and walked toward the showers. The small rectangle of window at the end of the hallway was blindingly bright, though it didn’t illuminate anything. The plastic curtain moved in the last stall. I didn’t see it, I just heard the rustle. I walked with the towel held out in front of me. I came to a stop very close, and then the semitransparent hanging opened completely. When she took the towel she had to tug it slightly from my hand. What I’d seen was the merest outline of a figure, a dark silhouette against the golden glare. Her hair was almost straight now. It lay on her shoulders, heavy and wet. I thought to myself that I’d finally get a look at her face, but all I could see was light, streams of sunlight filtering through the dirty pane, then refracting around her head.

  She said: “You’ve been following me around.” She shifted slightly, and with her moved the warm, close air that was saturated with her scent, the metallic smell of water, and the aura of the wet wall. I was enveloped in a stifling, palpable cloud, and it was as if I’d found myself within her, as if I were touching her skin from inside. I could feel the springy, yielding integument of the world and I was afraid to move, because every gesture, every tremor returned to me in the form of an infinitely pleasurable, mortal caress. I was breathing deeply. The air stole through my veins. It was permeated with her being. She touched my cheek, her hand slipped down to my neck and I felt droplets of water trickling down my back. Then, somewhere far off we heard the lifeless clatter of clogs. She withdrew her hand. I turned and ran outside. Blinded by the sun, I didn’t stop till I was in the middle of the village. An old woman was hanging a bucket on the fence. To the west, a small white cloud had drifted over the old cholera cemetery, but a moment later it was gone.

  Dukla, then. It’s a strange town, from which there’s no longer anywhere to go. Farther on there’s only Slovakia, and even farther the Bieszczady Mountains, but on the way you pass through the back of the proverbial beyond and nothing of any importance is going to happen, nothing, there are just frail houses squatting by the roadside like sparrows on a wire, and between them windswept pastures inevitably ending in a sky that rises then curves, hangs overhead, and comes to rest on the opposite rim of the horizon. That’s right—Dukla as the overture to empty spaces. Where can anyone go from Dukla? From Dukla you can only return. It’s the Hel Peninsula of the Carpathians, an Ultima Thule in the form of a town. Beyond here there’s nothing but wooden Lemko cottages and the concrete remnants of Le Corbusier’s bastards—which is to say, things that present no challenge to the landscape. There are never more than two buses waiting at the bus station at any one time. Long-haul trucks from Romania slow down for a moment, for half a mile, then at the Cistercian monastery they floor it again.

  You drink a beer at the Graniczna, walk out onto the market square, and your imagination swells like a balloon in a physics lesson when it’s put in the chamber of a vacuum pump. And at that moment Dukla becomes the center of the world, omphalos of the universe—the thing from which all things begin, the core around which are strung the successive layers of mobile events that are turned irreversibly into immobile fictions: One-horse dorozhka from Iwonicz 3 crowns, two-horse dorozhka 7 crowns, stagecoach one crown fifty. The stagecoach departs at 6:00 a.m., 7:30 a.m., and 2:00 p.m. One may spend the night at Lichtmann’s inn for one crown fifty, and eat in Henryk the Musician’s breakfast room. Three thousand inhabitants, of whom two and a half thousand are Jews. The year is, let’s say, 1910. Taken together, the whole thing resembles a sepia photograph or an old celluloid film still—the one and the other both burn easily and leave an empty space behind. It’s as if time itself had been burned up. When things that exist in space go to ruin, they leave a vacuum that we fill with other things. And how is it with time? In all probability it fuses together like something organic and continues on its way, because we’re accustomed to continuity, which is a little like immortality. And what if Baroness Mniszech, the Jews, and the dorozhkas left some space behind them, some unoccupied places, holes, like the ones left by cigarette burns in your best suit?

  When I keep revisiting Dukla, then, I don’t care about the stagecoaches, or the Jews, or any of that. I’m only interested in whether time is a disposable item like, say, a Povela Corner paper tissue from Tarnów. Only that.

  Not long after that, she left. The cabin was locked up. The curtain was gone from the window—they must have brought it with them. The pane shone blackly. The empty bottles had vanished from the porch. The clothesline had disappeared. The resort was dying down. The green-painted plywood canoes had been dragged from the beach up to the shed where all summer long a guy with one pinned-up shirtsleeve had rented canoes and oars for two zlotys a time. The only thing left at the dock was a white laminated plastic boat tied up with a chain. We us
ed to sit in it sometimes. The chain was a long one, but the current would nudge the boat toward the shore. We’d smoke there. Sometimes drink wine. I did it furtively. Now all I needed was the bitter taste and the warmth in my belly. A hundred yards downstream some wooden scows were moored. Slightly older boys would go there and unbutton the girls’ blouses. At dusk you could hear giggles. The water carried the sounds a long way. We’d listen in on their conversations. I didn’t understand much of it. Next to the scows, on the shore there were big piles of opened mussel shells from the river. The other boys told me people used to feed mussels to the pigs.

  One day very close to the end, to my departure, I went back there. Water was dripping from one of the faucets. I turned it off. I wanted everything to be completely quiet. All I could hear was the squeak of my rubber soles on the dry floor. I went into the last stall and closed the plastic shower curtain behind me. Just like before, the sun was shining through the narrow horizontal window. The cracked tiles gleamed like semitransparent gold. It looked as though something lay behind them, that another world began there. The place smelled of wet wall and of the sadness of somewhere where so many strangers had stood naked. It was a little like their reflections had frozen still and been abandoned here. Greasy water had pooled in the drain, with a white flake of soap and a clump of hair. A memento of everyone. The wooden platform was light gray and almost dry. No one had been by here in a long while. In the corner there was an empty yellow sachet of shampoo. I picked it up. Inside there was only air and a faint scent. I was afraid. Someone passed by on the other side of the wall and said something to another person. It didn’t occur to me to take my clothes off and pretend I was taking a shower. Or rather it did, but the idea seemed too bold to me. I somehow didn’t imagine a thirteen-year-old could go into someone else’s shower, just like that. But I was even more scared by the thought that I could recreate her existence with my body. I stood in that pathetic cubic space and allowed myself only to touch. The tiling was cold and stuck to my fingers. The cracks and gaps were filled with shadow. This black network or map resisted the light. I had no need to strain my imagination. I knew the water had fallen on her from above, flowing over her shoulders and breasts, that individual drops had splashed onto the walls, that some of them had been absorbed forever into the porous structure of the material; I knew that before the water finally disappeared down the disgusting rectangular hole of the drain it must have touched the wood, soaked into it, and left some elementary particles there. After all, her body was like memory, collecting invisible yet real particles from the world, absorbing them during the sweltering days and sultry nights, saving them with her sweat, gathering them somewhere deep inside and assimilating them till they became her herself: dust, looks, someone else’s touch, pollen, the smell of bedsheets, the stuffy air of the village, other people, light, even the landscape, images of objects she used and those she walked past—all this entered into her, passing through her springy, acquisitive skin, then later, transformed and no longer needed, it would reappear on the surface in the form of dirt and tiredness, and flow away as it did that day in the golden glare of the afternoon, dispersing and returning to the world, which happened to have taken on the form of a shower cubicle, because after all the world has to take on shapes that are accessible to the mind and the senses, otherwise we’d die of longing without ever actually comprehending why we’re dying.