Dukla Read online

  A completely separate line, then. Tickets can only be purchased from a conductor in a uniform with facings bearing Dukla’s coat of arms—three black-and-gold horns on a white background. The cars would absolutely have to be dark green, faded, and old. The locomotive could only be black, a little rusty, well oiled, with red spokes swollen from the effort, and decorated with the Dukla coat of arms on the front of the boiler. Everything as it once used to be, like in a transparent dream where ribbons of time and memory are superimposed on one another like a consolation for a too-short life. Cigarettes with a mouthpiece instead of a filter, in hard cardboard boxes with a sphinx on the lid, or with no mouthpiece, but pressed flat, like the Hungarian Munkás brand. Pants had to be pressed and appropriately wide, while in the pocket of your jacket there should be a flat bottle with an inscription on its bottom reading: Baczewski Distillery of Vodkas and Spirits, Lwów. And a Panama hat. What else? Probably the line should end in Dukla. Right next to the place where there’s a bakery kiosk now; the rails come to a stop at a huge wooden buffer on iron girders. Beyond that there’s nothing.

  It’s funny that, in wrestling with time, we usually end up returning to what’s past, to what already has shape, to a ready-made form. The imagination is incapable of inventing anything. When it’s suspended in a vacuum it plummets like a stone, or entertains itself, which in the end amounts to the same thing.

  I dreamed my sentimental, narrow-gauge, fin-de-siècle dream in the crowded bus to Jasionka. People gave off their smells. Two girls behind were talking about zits. “See, I just got it this morning.” “Then squeeze it.” “I’m not sure.” To the right, the historic derricks of Bóbrka stood on the hills. Then, somewhere near Równe, Cergowa Mountain came into view. From the north it looks like an animal: huge layered head and back arching as if it were about to rise to its feet. There’s no trace of gentle Soracte. You can’t help expecting a heavy grunt or a gasp. A legendary beast—indolent, temperamental, with a coarse coat of pine forest. “I mean, you can’t walk around with it all white like that.” A moment later there was a stop and they left by the rear door, so I didn’t get a look.

  The first thing I noticed was that the “one-fifty” was gone from in front of the Cistercian monastery. The immense forty-ton mobile gun had vanished along with its plinth. It had stood there for thirty years, and now it had disappeared without a trace. Where it had been, outside the monastery, bulldozers and backhoes were bustling to and fro. They’d taken a bite out of the cemetery hill. The bus drove on, but I promised myself I’d locate my cannon. Later on I found out it had been removed after a town referendum. Seventy-seven votes for removal, eleven against. A sorry end.

  There was scaffolding on the face of the building with the jeweler’s store. The place was being renovated. The sidewalks had been leveled out. Some were entirely new. Children were painting the school fence green. I felt like the ground was beginning to slip from under my feet. Opposite the ruined synagogue goats were grazing as before, but there too something was going on. Behind the chain-link fence that surrounded the temple there lay newly milled timber, planks, beams, as if someone was planning to build something. I walked around the perimeter of the market square, because it wasn’t like it usually was. It was completely different, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why. A poster announced that on Sunday there was going to be a game, tickets were two zlotys, reduced cost one zloty, “women and children free.” Alongside was a notice saying that in the cinema, at 10:00 a.m., there was going to be a recitation contest devoted to Blessed John of Dukla. In my guidebook I read that John “brought many dissenters into the bosom of the Catholic Church. In this way he was before his time, sensing as he did the need for ecumenicalism.”

  It was hot. I was looking for somewhere to cool down. I went to Mary Magdalene. Inside, children were having a rehearsal for their first communion. The parents were sitting in back, watching their boys and girls walk up to the priest one by one and light imaginary candles from the priest’s pretend flame. The cleric reminded them that on the actual day the flame would be real. I left the church. Outside the doorway a woman in a lilac-pink dress took a lilac-pink pack of Weston lights from a lilac-pink bag. I was restless. I’d clearly come at the wrong time. I hadn’t even glanced at Amalia.

  In front of the Cistercian monastery two men in dog collars were arranging a visiting group of boys for a photograph. I passed to the side so as not to get in their way. Inside, there were two movie cameras going, and a monk in a brown habit was explaining something. One camera was pointing at him, the other roamed the ceiling, which showed scenes from the life of Blessed John. I went out into the courtyard. The sun-heated white flagstones smelled of wax and gasoline. The bulldozers and backhoes had fallen still. The workers were eating lunch and drinking from plastic bottles. Outside the post office there were new telephone booths that were bluer than the sky. The boys were getting into a bus with Rzeszów plates. I went slowly downhill. The only thing left was the bar at the tourist office.

  It was empty, empty as never before, and in some unprecedented way, because everything seemed to be in its place, as if waiting, yet the utter absence of anything whatsoever turned that expectation into something ideal, empty, and cold as a hieroglyph. I had the impression that even the dust had stopped settling, and the murmurs of the bar solidified in the air and lingered. I sat in the place where Andrzej Niewiadomski often sat. The lady brought my beer out to me, as though the bar had table service now. As usual in Dukla, I had a Leżajsk. The beer went down without resistance, but that was all that could be said for it. It hid itself in exactly the place where it ought to come out into the open. It was just a chill in the belly and an increasing heaviness, as if I were going to remain in that wooden hall forever, remain in Dukla, become part of it, its property, like the everyday shadows of objects, of the trees on the square, the houses, and the people hurrying to catch the morning bus to Krosno.

  And in the very middle of the bright day I suddenly felt the heresy of existence, a bizarre unsticking, the blister between the skin of the world and the self, which absorbs consciousness like the plasma left after a burn, and so the wound never fully dries, except perhaps while we’re asleep, but at those times we have no awareness of it. Sluggish and motionless, my thoughts fading, I was heading for materiality. I imagined myself cooling and irreversibly hardening, and the light beginning to take me over, like all other things that have assumed their permanent form. Entirely immersed in the grace of sunlight, free, devoid of any capabilities whatsoever, I remain at the table, my hand on the empty glass; I’m as empty as it is, and in two hundred years someone will find me here, to their chagrin, because they’ll have to weave a web of conjectures, patch together a story to fill out their own mind, to rid themselves of the inner echo, make use of what’s been given them, what they’re fated to have, while I am far beyond all that, beyond the need for any kind of alternative, I’m merely a thing that people have to deal with, just as now I myself have to quarrel with every moment, with the image and shimmer of the world at 3:15 p.m. in April, making use of any available means, because in reality not one of them actually exists.

  And then an old man in a stained gray jacket came in and sat at the next table. He did nothing else, didn’t order anything, and for sure he couldn’t have been meeting anyone there. He lit a cigarette and stared out the window through the smoke. He was one of those people who resemble mineral matter. Movement is not their natural state. They go from stillness to stillness. Just as though they’ve already accomplished everything and now they’re spending time in the purest sense of that phrase. They’re letting it pass them by, maybe even flow through them.

  So the old man sat there and the barmaid didn’t mind. At rare intervals he moved his lips to take a loud puff at his cigarette, which he held close up to his mouth. He didn’t look lost in thought. Stray images were likely coming to him from the past, flooding his mind and rescuing
it from the present. At moments of perfect rest we never see the future—imagining it requires an effort of will. Only the past comes unbeckoned, because old, transparent events are no longer capable of hurting the body. They protect it from an abrupt fall into the future.

  The sun moved across the sky outside the window. Its gentle golden touch reached the dull fabric of the man’s jacket, and soon his whole figure was suspended in space as if on the verge of vanishing. The past of recollections and the eternal present of light took him into their possession and gently annihilated him.

  So then, the magnifying glass of Dukla, an opening in the earth, in the body, in time. The dark space between the eyepiece and the lens of the telescope. The gloom in which events and objects solidify, then cast their reflection on the polished surfaces of beginning and end.

  I pulled myself together and left the bar. The heat-swollen afternoon was splitting in places, and early evening shadows were beginning to appear in the cracks. People were coming out of apartment buildings just like that, with no obligations, simply to chat, have a smoke, and take a look at how their town had changed since the morning or the day before. After-dinner fullness, open windows with music playing on the radio, and the calm stooping figures of winos huddled on street corners in whispered consultations concerning Bieszczadzkie wine with the sideways picture of the black bear on its label. I was drawn to Amalia.

  This time I was lucky. There was no one else there. The empty church still smelled of children, but the air had already returned to its place in the recesses of the ceiling, and it abided there like still waters. The wooden pews were the color of ivory.

  She was lying there as always. Delicate, small, submerged in frills, sleeping. She could actually have been taken for a little girl, if it weren’t for the slender, adult shape of her shoe. Two large mirrors on the walls of the chapel reflected her as though someone had once taken fright at such a tangible female presence and decided to render her a little less real, more sleepy. For a place of worship, this proliferation of images was decidedly too worldly. It hinted at an error, an illusion, or simply a mild form of madness. I thought to myself that with its patroness, its reflections, its fictions, and its Amalia, this church was more human than it might appear.

  Yes indeed. I touched anything that aroused my curiosity. I was alone. The light from the high window, the reflected glimmer in the mirrors, and the fragrant penumbra of the nave deprived my movements of any realness. The black marble of the sarcophagus was warm and smooth.

  And then I recalled all the churches I’d ever been in. Clearest of all I saw the ones furthest back, the first ones, those where mystery had been given visible form. Our Lady in blue, with a pink indifferent face, in the church on Szembek in Warsaw: this was the first image of a woman that I remembered as an image. It was also my first image of a supernatural being. In my six-year-old mind those two things became combined in the strangest way, creating a heady mixture that used to numb me during the tedious sixty minutes of Mass. The half-naked alabaster figure of Christ hung there in absolute calm. The few delicate wounds on his sculpted waxen body confirmed my conviction that His death was a gentle, almost elegant act.

  Streetcars drove up and down Grochowska. Balconies rusted above street level. The bodywork of cars was matted. This world and that were made of similar matter. They differed only in execution. A manifold, proletarian version of the Holy Spirit as a dove rose into the air over the shacks of Kawcza, Osiecka, and Zamieniecka Streets. Guys with rags on the end of sticks stood on the roofs of the dovecotes, driving their flocks from one end of the sky to the other. At that time everything took flesh once and for all, and no thought today could separate those things, not even the cleverest sophistry could alter it, this blood of blood and bone of bone, because reality had swallowed a symbol, and the symbol had grown the plumage of reality. And standing there at Amalia’s tomb, in a split second I understood that back then, in that first of all times, all invisible things had been crammed into wooden or stone forms along with space and color, and everything that followed was merely fiction threaded over the core of the real the way cotton candy is wound around a wooden stick, and when all is said and done it’s only the stick that’s left, and in your belly there’s only a sweet emptiness. And when all’s said and done everything comes down to the most intimate forms, to your own body and its variations in the bodies of others, and no other form of expression can be found, because it would be unbelievable or incomprehensible.

  The church on Szembek, then, was made of the same thing as everything else. When you walked out of it you entered a space that was somewhat more rarefied, but identical. This blasphemous unity was the condition for everyday wonder. On top of everything, the sensuality of this religion made it accessible to animals and plants, with that strange rhythm of warm and cold stretches in the nave of the temple, with the slow and ceremonious alternation of light and dark as Sunday passed over Grochów. Signs descended from heaven and sought entry into the human body. So it was.

  We’d go home on foot. We’d drop by the cake shop, where the walls bore pictures of muscular brown men. Black slaves on a cocoa plantation, perhaps, or maybe sand diggers by the Vistula. This question has been bothering me for thirty years. Whenever I eat a doughnut, I see a sulfur-yellow wall and those chocolate-colored figures. I’ll never know who they really were.

  Then we’d enter the yard outside our building. I’d change out of my Sunday best and I was free till lunchtime. The dumpster, nooks and crannies, soot-blackened lids of the coal chutes, rubble, odds and ends of junk, weeds, the swelter of a city summer under a light blue covering of sky. The same sun shone on Szembek, on the church, and on the wooden john in the corner of the yard. It passed through the stained glass windows, and through our skin. The same sun brings to life Amalia’s body in my mind, the same glare smears events on the slide of memory, mixes them like drops of colored liquid from childhood games: green was made with grass, blue out of paint scratched from the wall, yellow from sand.

  So I was alone. The heated silvery sheen of the mirrors mingled with the dense afternoon light. Warm shadows were gathering in the folds of her gown. Steps rang out near the entrance and immediately fell silent. Someone had knelt down or sat in a pew. The taut soft space conveyed sounds unaltered. They were like objects. The foot in its gray shoe was so small I could almost have enclosed it in my hand. I thought to myself that in a few days, in May, when the leaves on the trees outside the chapel will have opened, every gust of wind would change this interior: glassy little shoots of chiaroscuro, trembling veinlets of sunlight, stretching into the warm mottled air—all this would multiply the unreal aura of brilliance and death to the very limits of illusion, where the truest desires are born. That’s right, one more week, I thought. In May it would all be different. Even more deceptive and alluring. Just like those days thirty years ago when my mother and I would climb a metal ladder into a tarpaulin-covered truck somewhere on Wileńska. It was called a work car. At daybreak, Lublins and Stars would gather men from Radzymin and Piława and Wyszków and take them to work at the FSO automobile plant, then in the afternoon they’d be driven back to their villages. You sat on wooden benches without a backrest. The truck bounced and jolted, it smelled of gasoline and sweat and cigarettes. In an hour we were there.

  For the longest time I thought I was walking by a real river. I’d stand on the bank and stare over to the other side, which was overgrown with willows. My bank was the edge of a huge sandy flatland. The closer it got to the water, the more desertlike it became. Far off in the distance all the cows from the village were grazing, there must have been a meadow there, but by the water there were only sharp knifelike grasses that cut till you bled. The village lay beyond the dune hills. Some of the houses were perched on the hillside. They were wood-built, brown, some were thatched. On hot days the water gave off a marshy, fishy smell mingled with the acrid tannin aroma of the willows. A row of g
iant poplars at the edge of the village regularly attracted lightning. The hot, loose sand turned every walk into a laborious trek. From the farms came the scent of pine and aspen smoke. It joined with the damp air from the river and lingered permanently in long horizontal skeins, even at night, after all the stoves had been put out. You had to climb a hill, pass by fences of black paling that guarded the heroic vegetable gardens, and you’d come out onto the main road of the village, with its hot draft of air that drew in the smells of all the farmyards, of decay and animals and living things, stirred them together, macerated them, and even at noon, when emptiness and stillness prevailed on the highway, it was impossible to avoid the presence of all the people, the livestock, the objects, that occupied the houses and yards. It spread, pushing between sky and earth and the irregular buildings like a ponderous, replete, invisible serpent.

  My grandfather was a firefighter. He had an antique gold helmet with a crest. He also served as chairman of the village council. There was a red sign that hung on the house. As a reward for exemplary discharge of his duties he was given a big fat book entitled The Paris Commune. It contained a multitude of illustrations. They were stippled with mold. The same went for the raspberry-red cloth binding. The book lay in the woodshed. I never saw my grandfather reading it. I was the only one that looked at it. It’s quite possible it was never honored with a place on the shelf where other books were kept. There were very few of them, and I don’t remember any of the titles. I remember pretty much everything, or at least I’m able to imagine everything. But not those books, though they were definitely there. They evidently lacked a sufficiently distinct smell.