Dukla Read online

  My grandfather was extremely religious. Something along the lines of Mary Month devotions took place at his house in May. In the main room a little altar was set up on the dresser: geraniums in pots wrapped in white crepe, paper flowers, thick metal candlesticks with yellow candles, and a dim, smoke-darkened copy of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. The womenfolk would gather. I never saw any men. They’d come in headscarves, wearing worn-down men’s slippers on their bare feet, or black sandals with straps. It wasn’t a big village, and so somehow or other there was room for them all in the living room. Plus, of course, not all of them came, certainly not the younger ones. Grandfather would light the candles, cross himself, say a prayer, then begin the litany. He was a stern, hard-working man. He was constantly in motion, always in dark blue drill overalls, forever engrossed in tasks that never had any beginning or end, because he probably didn’t remember ever being in a state of inaction. He was slim, with a lean, oval face. I liked him and I was afraid of his temper. I got the idea that brusqueness was a quality all old men had in common. Like the rugged, patriarchal tenderness he’d sometimes allow himself of an evening when there were no more jobs to do. He’d take me on his lap and laugh. He may well have been amused by the fact that something so small, frail, and useless could even exist.

  His denim overshirt was so thoroughly impregnated with all the smells of the world that he himself had become hard to separate out from it and I was unable to imagine him traveling away, crossing the gray-green frontier of the landscape. When he sat in the summer kitchen in the evening, his figure was saturated with the entire day that had just passed. He was followed inside by the dry dusty air of the barn, hot horse sweat, the stuffy ammoniacal odor of the cattle shed, the cold chill of the cellar, and the resinous mist of the pine grove if that day he’d happened to have been gathering firewood. All this mingled with the scent of places and objects my own skin had come into contact with: the dark walkway between the house and the fence, where the dense foliage let no light through even at noon, though if you pushed aside the vertical branches of lilac you had a blinding view of the neighbor’s yard, where unsuspecting people were bustling around. I knew them, but they still looked garish and strange, as if I were peering at the next world. The earth was sandy and chill. Then you turned right, the shade came to an end, the sun-warmed vegetable garden gave off edible aromas mixed with the metallic smell of the weeds that twined around the fence and were left to grow, so they rose higher and higher, encircling the garden in a ring of coolness. The gate was rickety. The glassed-in veranda concentrated the heat like a magnifying glass, but three steps away you could find the permanent cool of a wooden house in which the stove hadn’t been lit since spring. Geranium pots stood in the small windows, so there was a smell of semidarkness and decay, and the light was so rarefied that every object seemed to live only thanks to its own feeble glow. The mirror on the wall hung at an angle and never reflected what you thought it would. Likewise the wedding picture: it leaned over my six-year-old self, looking not straight ahead but slightly down from above. On the black bed there was a pile of bedding with a Gypsy woman in a sequined dress on top; one time I looked under the dress, but found only an overcast stitch along the seam of a little sack filled with sawdust. The floor creaked wetly and softly. The insides of the drawers in the shadowy dresser were unexpectedly light, planed, smelling of mothballs and whiteness, with a faint whiff of river mud, because the wind couldn’t entirely blow it out of the sheets. The air was still. The walls green. Even when people came in, nothing changed in that atmosphere formed once and forever.

  It was in that very room my grandfather conducted his miniature services in May. He would be wearing a white shirt. He’d kneel at the decorated dresser, and that position, so unnatural for his figure of constant motion, made me uneasy. His bronzed hands would poke from tightly fastened cuffs and do nothing. I listened to his rough voice, which on normal days issued instructions, grumbled, cursed. “O tower of ivory,” “Thou golden home,” “Thou Ark of the Covenant,” “O city of wisdom,” “Thou pure virgin.” He pronounced all these extraordinary, extravagant, exotic words in the same way he named things in the everyday world. Sternly, without inflection, as if indicating old, familiar objects. There were tears in his eyes. The women would respond with their loose, many-voiced “Pray for us,” moving toward the final syllable, which marked the rhythm. I would be kneeling by the wall, reflecting on the meaning of the images of tower, ark, city, and virgin. I was unable to resolve the contradictions. On my grandfather’s lips the words sounded frivolous, almost indecent. The splitting of his concrete existence and the fiction to which he lent his thoroughly material voice made me blush. I was simply embarrassed, because I’d taken him for a sober and serious man, while here he was, addressing something that was utterly nonexistent, and in addition was very clearly a woman. I felt I had been betrayed by reality.

  I would wait till it was all over, then run down to the river. On the horizon, a thin green line attached the earth to the sky. The sand was still warm, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The blue air of evening was rising over the plain. Here under the immense sky things retained their places and their meaning. Two flat-bottomed boats lay motionless on the water. A cow was lowing somewhere. I peed in the sand and watched it darken. I was small, my little shorts didn’t even have a zipper. I walked directly east with my shadow stretched out in front of me. I wandered a long way, then suddenly got scared and came back.

  The sun had gone. It had disappeared behind the back of the village, which now stood there, black and two-dimensional, like a stage set. Somewhere in the distance a motionless fire was burning, illuminating nothing. I felt a dark fear, because I couldn’t make out any point of entry, no crack or crevice by which I might return. It was as if the entire landscape aside from me had turned into antimatter, and my grandfather, the house, the farmyard, and everything else had been imprisoned in it, or even worse, had actually become it. I knew I’d lost it all and I was unable to move. It was only when night moved away from the houses and washed over me like dark water that I started to run in that direction.

  Right now I’m trying to arrange the whole thing into some kind of sequence, though I remember only fragments, the imprint of objects on the space of those times, though of course not the objects themselves, with their unrepeatable texture of scratches, cracks, wrinkles. What comes to me now are only their traces, phantoms of originals that stop halfway between existence and naming. They’re like touched-up funeral photographs.

  In any case, I more or less made it through those last long vacations. The goose shit mixed in with the sand looked like greenish Plasticine. There was a smell of nettles in the narrow walkway behind the stables. The sun-warmed wall made the aroma intensify during the day, till by two or three in the afternoon it had the concentrated force of a hallucination. It was hard to distinguish the smell from the stinging touch of the leaves. I’d go there to watch two teenage girls. They lived on the other side of the fence. The younger one was white, fleshy, not yet fully formed. A little like she’d been born too soon and the air had fixed her unfinished features for good. She was entirely normal, just a little unshaped.

  The other girl had a dark, slim body. She was like a boy, or a crude drawing. Her silhouette against the bright expanse of the farmyard looked like a sketchy, mobile symbol. She wore a skimpy red outfit consisting of shorts and a halter top with thin shoulder straps. She would feed the chickens, carry firewood and water, quarrel with her mother. It wasn’t much. I’d observe her nimble body without really knowing why. No one ever caught me at it and explained the reasons. In some indistinct yet powerful way I associated it in my unformed and acquisitive mind with the rest of the world: my grandfather would be saying his litany. Scraped-off fish scales would be drying in the grass outside the door of the summer kitchen. The triangular net strung out to dry in the sun was hard and rough. The hazelwood fishing poles were propped in the cor
ner of the veranda, their green lines wrapped around them. When you scratched the dark lead of the sinkers they’d show through silver. The hooks were golden, like the “house” in the prayer. I couldn’t come up with any other rendering. “Ivory tower” forever remained something smooth, slender, beguiling. The mind sought refuge from atrophy by taking on a form that accorded with what it was taught about body and soul, while the vacuum of metaphors immediately sucked in various elements, kneading them and fashioning them in its own likeness. In this way the tanned girl next door incarnated the “pure and most wonderful virgin” so exactly that I found her features in the pictures that fell from black prayer books, of which there were five or six in my grandfather’s house. The red edges of the cards had the same color as her skimpy clothes.

  I was startled by the same young priest as before. I hadn’t heard him come up. He stopped at the entrance to the side chapel. I think he was surprised to find me there. I looked neither like a tourist nor a parishioner. My hand was still touching Amalia’s shoe. He cleared his throat and raised his hand to his mouth. He was as embarrassed as I was. He waited for me to leave the chapel, then half closed the grate that separated it from the nave. Perhaps he used to go there to look at Amalia too. If I were him I certainly would have. I could feel his eyes watching me leave; I breathed a sigh of relief when I emerged onto the street. I crossed the roadway and to cover my tracks I bought a pack of Moldovan cigarettes from a Ukrainian peddler woman for one zloty. The red-and-cream box from Chişinău bore a warning in two languages: Fumatul dauneazasanatatis dumneavoastra, and kurenie opasno dlya vashogo zdarovia. The woman had traveled three hundred miles to be able to sit on the Dukla sidewalk. The world is filled with details that provide the beginnings of stories.

  I strolled over to the market square, sat on a bench, and took out one of the cigarettes. It was characterless and crumbly. Its taste reminded me of all those old cigarettes that grown men used to smoke. Wawels, Dukats, Giewonts with their low-grade paper, in packs that were like clumsy dreams about the faraway world. We used to steal them, or pick up unfinished butts. Around the edges they’d be sort of brown, and dark from saliva. Grown-upness had a very literal taste. Our spit mingled with the spit of men. It may well have acted like a vaccine, a kind of existential homeopathy, protecting us from a too abrupt fall into adulthood.

  But this was supposed to be about Dukla . . .

  For several years now I’ve been trying to figure out the nature of its strange pull. My thoughts sooner or later always end up right here, as if in this handful of little streets they were going to find satisfaction, whereas in fact they’re suspended in a vacuum. Cergowska, Zielona, Nadbrzeżna, Parkowa, Podwale, the market square. Three bars, two churches, two bridges, a bus station, a handful of stores, and the Museum of Brotherhood in Arms. A photography studio and two veterinary doctors. Just enough so human space retains its continuity, just enough for the traveler to feel he’s headed in a familiar direction, while pure geography barely shows through from under topography.

  So then, Dukla as a memento, a mental hole in the soul, a key that cannot be copied, a spirit overgrown with the glittering plumage of the real. Dukla worthy of a litany, Dukla with the moldering body of Amalia in place of a heart, Dukla filled with space in which images lie down and are overtaken by the past, while the future ceases to be of interest, and I could sit on the west side of the market square to the point of stupefaction, till utter dementia set in, like a village idiot, a bumpkin Buddhist, a jack of clubs tossed from the pack and out of context, like a drunk outside a bar window on which all the wonders of the world are being projected along with the stupidest ideas imaginable, ideas whose very existence no one would even have suspected an hour ago, while behind my back, along the street, in the shade of leafless maple trees, the citizens would be going about their business, trotting between the Kalwaria furniture store, the bookshop, and the market. Actually, that’s exactly how it was until I finished the Doina cigarette and decided to go back home via Żmigród, because I wanted to gaze at Cergowa from the rear window of the bus in the honeylike slanting light and do some thinking about Soracte and Lorrain and those tiny human figures under a vast sky, about the desperate defiance with which they clung to the landscape, though the landscape paid no attention to them, even though they were boring into it, digging, altering its shape, skinning it alive, honing the lines of the horizon.

  And that was what I did. Ticket inspectors got on in Głojsce. A kid in a fancy jacket put up some resistance, but they dragged him off the bus in Łysa Góra and bundled him into a Polonez that had been following behind. People made a fuss, though they didn’t budge from their seats. Loudest of all were the women. “That’s no way to treat anyone!” Someone timidly pointed out that the kid hadn’t had a ticket. “So what if he didn’t! Times are different now! I’m gonna report them. I took down their numbers.” But before we reached Żmigród everything was back to normal. Cigarette smoke drifted from the driver’s seat, and the distant ridges of Wątkowska Mountain had the same blue tinge as the smoke.

  White chickens were poking about on the market square in Żmigród. They wandered among the feet of the people waiting for the Jasło bus. An old man dressed in black with a long gray beard was feeding them breadcrumbs. Before that he’d said hello to everyone. He bowed and shook hands. The children giggled. The old man looked like a real gentleman. Six months earlier I’d seen him in the village of Łosie, thirty miles west of here. At that time he’d been going into a store, greeting people formally in the same way and asking whether anyone had a horse to sell. The guys in berets and rubber boots shifted their weight from one foot to the other and explained apologetically that they weren’t farmers, and that generally speaking horses were hard to come by in Łosie. He made quite an impression on people, that elderly gentleman who looked like Walt Whitman and wore a black velvet ribbon in place of a necktie.

  This time he sat down on a bench, tipped his hat back on his head, the chickens forming a wreath around him, and an old guy in a cap started up a conversation:

  “You come far?”

  “From Krempna. Went looking for a horse.”

  “They didn’t have one.”

  “They did. But it was a gelding. I was after a mare.”

  “There’s not many horses these days. Time’ll come there won’t be any at all.”

  “What kind of time will that be, do you think?”

  But he never got an answer. He’d also run out of bread, and the chickens wandered away from the bus stop to peck around under the benches on the market square, among some young people who had nothing for them. The boys were giving the girls a drink from their green bottles of Sprite and flicking away their cigarette butts, which the chickens didn’t even look at. Leśko drove by in his silver Chevrolet, but he didn’t notice me there and I didn’t manage to wave to him. A broad band of shadow had appeared on the western side of the square. It gave off a chill. The old guy and the elderly gentleman were arguing about whether a world without horses could even exist.

  One day it turned out it wasn’t a real river. Grandfather and I had rowed to the far side and gone in among the willows. The ground was boggy, warm water standing in stagnant pools. The willows blocked my view, but they only came up to my grandfather’s shoulders so he led the way confidently, walking in a straight line. He just glanced back from time to time to make sure I hadn’t disappeared in some miry hollow. The tops of his rubber boots knocked against one another with a gentle slap. Dark sweat stains marked his pale blue shirt. My eyes were at the level of his cracked brown belt. Then I caught sight of the glistening mirror of the water, and it was the most boundless thing I’d ever seen in my short life. I was blinded by the immensity of the silvery expanse. I stood at the bank like I was on the edge of a precipice. Birds hovered in the air’s vacuum. Seeing them, I felt my head spin. The sky had receded to undetectable heights. I couldn’t even
see it. This was what a true river looked like. The one I’d been going down to before now was only a narrow arm separated from the main channel by a low willow-covered island. It ran on by itself for a few miles before it rejoined the real stream. It was known as the “Break,” you’d say you were going down to the Break. It never shone. It trailed by, greenish and lethargic. The actual river was sprightly, luminous, afire, though in fact its vast size prevented you from seeing whether it was flowing, because the trembling boundary between water and air could only be marked in the imagination. Grandfather pointed and said that that was where he’d been baptized. But I couldn’t see anything except vibrant quivering light. The place he was indicating had no beginning and no end. It was filled by an atomized glow. I thought my grandfather must mean the sky, or something like it, and I wasn’t even that surprised, because someone that led women in prayer and worshiped extraordinary objects couldn’t be an ordinary person. I tried to follow his finger, but it didn’t satisfy him. He didn’t believe me. He kept asking if I could see. I nodded, but evidently I wasn’t convincing, because in the end he exclaimed: “Not there, over there! Over there!” A moment later he realized why I was having trouble. He pulled me to him abruptly and picked me up. It was only now that I could see a distant, thin strip of land. My eyes strayed along the livid line, and finally, at the end, encountered the outline of a church steeple like a sharpened pencil. It was barely there, no different in color than the indistinct ribbon of the horizon. “There?” I asked. “There,” he replied. “That was where I received holy baptism,” he added emphatically. After a long pause, as if he wanted to reward me, do something special for me, he added almost cheerfully, “They took me there by boat.”