Here Is Where We Meet

8 The Szum and the Ching

We’ve arrived — if you are with me. We’re going no further. We’ve reached the house with no doorstep in what they call Little Poland.

I often thought the road-signs were telling a fairy tale: Double Bend, Leaping Deer, Cross Roads, Level Crossing, Roundabout, Falling Stones, Steep Hill, Wandering Cattle, Dangerous Corner.

The warnings offered, when compared to the risks of life, seemed to be of a reassuring simplicity.

It’s hard to say what changes in the sky when driving eastwards after Berlin. You begin to notice whatever is vertical against the flatness of the plain in a different way: the wooden fences, a man standing in a field, the occasional horse, the trees in a forest. The distance you see in the sky is no longer saying the same things as before; here it is announcing that, after another few thousand kilometres, the plain is going to become the steppe — and on the steppe distance becomes as dangerous and challenging as altitude in the mountains.

On the steppe trees grow tougher and smaller, just as certain trees do on mountains — the Carpathians to the south for instance — so as to resist the winter. There are birches on the steppe no taller than a dog. On the mountains the ferocious cold is due to the altitude; on the steppe it is due to the distances, the horizontal extent of the continent.

After crossing the Oder this extent, this extension, is promised, even if not yet there. The sky is making a new proposition to the earth.

I am heading eastwards on my bike along the main road, which joins Warsaw and Moscow. The traffic in both directions is heavy. In a few years’ time this will be a motorway. The road skirts or crosses many forests. Northern ones, in which the summer light is green and the trunks of the spruces as they grow taller become more and more a feathery orange colour. What coral is to fishes, the tops of these red spruces may be to birds.

The number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.

Young women are standing on the shoulder of the road, dressed to kill, hips thrust to the side, beckoning to the drivers coming westwards. A man driving an old, battered 123 Mercedes has stopped. The Poles call this car a beczka, which means a barrel. The driver, who is Ukrainian, also looks like a barrel. Most of the girls are Romanian. The services are paid for in dollar bills.

OK, she says, holding out her hand for the money.

Afterwards, he says, refusing to pay now. What’s your name?

In her backless dress, she shrugs her shoulders.

He points to himself, stubbing his chest with his thumb. Mickhail, he says, I’m called Mickhail. You?

She shakes her head and examines her face in the driving mirror.

Your name?

She replies with the English phrase, used in all situations when she reckons it’s best to withdraw. I dunno, she says.

Fed up, he opens the door of the car and she has to get out. Whereupon he drives off fast, making the tyres slip and throw up dust.

Another young woman walks out from behind the trees. She is holding the hand of an elderly man who is wearing a felt hat with a feather in it. The two girls work this little stretch of forest together.

Hi! Lenuta! the one with the old man calls out to the one who had no luck with the Ukrainian. Do you know what the bastards have done?

What?

They have pinched his car. I take him into the forest. I bring him back and it’s gone. A new BMW 525.

Is he blaming you?

He’s German and I fear he may have a heart attack.

He’s paid you? Lenuta asks.

The other one nods.

Then leave him!

The other one pulls a face and shrugs her shoulders.

So give him to me, says Lenuta, and go and see Janey — maybe Evgen knows something about the car.

The man sits down on the ferns. He stares at his boots and puts a hand on his chest. Lenuta takes off his hat with the feather in it and, holding it by the brim, fans him. It’s 40 °C.

An old woman accompanied by a small boy emerges from the forest. Her fingers and thumbs are stained purple. The boy is carrying a supermarket carrier-bag. They have been picking blueberries. And in a moment the boy will sit on the roadside with four one-litre jars, filled with the black fruit they have gathered.

I have a friend who is an ethologist. Not long ago she worked for years with the wolves in the Białowieƶa forest, about 200 kilometres east from here. Over many months, patiently and fearlessly, she sidled up to the wolves until they accepted her, until their curiosity became keener than their wariness. Her name is Despina. Early one morning the pack-leader, whom she called Siber, approached and showed her he wanted her to follow him. She complied. He led her slowly, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure she was following, through the undergrowth of the forest, to the lair in the earth, where his she-wolf had given birth to their cubs. By now they were two weeks old, and on the morning in question the mother was about to bring them out of the lair to introduce them for the first time to the rest of the pack, three other wolves who were there in front of Despina, waiting for the encounter. Siber and his mate called the cubs out. Yuuuer. . yuuer. . yuue. One by one they emerged, eyes searching. After they are three weeks old cubs become suspicious of any creature who is not recognisable as a member of the pack, so this was the moment for them to meet. And Siber wanted Despina to witness that moment.

Not too close to the girls, the grandmother warns her grandson with his jar of blueberries. Keep away from the Romanian girls, otherwise when there are women in the cars they won’t let their men stop.

Everybody in this land sells or tries to sell something. Men in their sixties stand on the kerb in the large towns towards evening, holding up a piece of cardboard on which they’ve written the word: POKOJE. They are trying to sell the guest room in their small flat or house for one night to a passing traveller.

Each jar of berries costs eight złoty.

The BMW has been recovered. The elderly German forks out several hundred złoty. He’s wearing his hat with the feather in it again and is minutely examining his car’s tyres — probably to make sure that they have not been changed.

The roads are straight, the distance between towns long. The sky is making a new proposition to the earth. I imagine travelling alone between Kalisz and Kielce a hundred and fifty years ago. Between the two names there would always have been a third — the name of your horse. Your horse’s name the constant between the names of the towns you approach and the towns you leave behind.

I see a sign for Tarnów to the south. At the end of the nineteenth century Abraham Bredius, the compiler of the first modern catalogue of Rembrandt paintings, discovered a canvas in a castle there.

’When I saw a magnificent four-in-hand passing my hotel and learnt from the porter that it was Count Tarnowski who had become engaged some days before to the ravishing Countess Potocka, who would bring him a considerable dowry, I had little idea that this man was also the fortunate owner of one of the most sublime works by our great master.’

Bredius left the hotel and made a long and difficult journey by train — he complained that for miles the train travelled at a walking pace — to the Count’s castle. There he spotted a canvas of a horse and rider, which he unhesitatingly attributed to Rembrandt, considering it a masterpiece that had been forgotten for a century. It was given the title of The Polish Rider.

Nobody today knows precisely who or what the painting represented for the painter. The rider’s coat is typically Polish — a kontusz. Likewise the rider’s headgear. This is probably why the painting was bought by a Polish nobleman in Amsterdam, and taken to Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.

When I first saw the painting in the Frick Collection in New York, where it ended up, I felt it might be a portrait of Rembrandt’s beloved son, Titus. It seemed to me — and it still does — a painting about leaving home.

A more scholarly theory suggests that the painting may have been inspired by a Pole, Jonaz Szlichtyng, who, during Rembrandt’s time in Amsterdam, was something of a rebel-hero in dissident circles. Szlichtyng belonged to a sect that followed the sixteenth-century Sienese theologian Lebo Sozznisi, who denied that Christ was the son of God — for, if he were, the religion would cease to be monotheistic. If the painting was inspired by Jonaz Szlichtyng it offers an image of a Christlike figure, who is a man, only a man, setting out, mounted on a horse, to meet his destiny.

Do you think you are going fast enough to get away from me? she asks as she draws up beside me at the first traffic light in Kielce.

I notice that she is driving with her shoes kicked off, her bare feet on the pedals.

No question of leaving you behind, I say, straightening my back and putting both feet on the ground.

Then why so fast?

I don’t reply, for she knows the answer.

In speed there is a forgotten tenderness. She had a way, when driving, of lifting her right hand from the steering wheel so that she could see the dials on the dashboard without having to move her head a centimetre. And this small movement of her hand was as neat and precise as that of a great conductor before an orchestra. I loved her surety.

When she was alive I called her Liz, and she called me Met. She liked the nickname Liz because during her life up to that moment it would have been inconceivable that she should answer to such a vulgar abbreviation. ’Liz’ implied a law had been broken and she adored broken laws.

Met is the name given to a flight navigator in a novel by Saint-Exupéry. Perhaps Vol de Nuit. She was much better read than I, but I was more street-wise, and perhaps this is why she named me after a navigator. The idea of calling me Met came to her while driving through Calabria. Whenever we got out of the car she put on a hat with a wide brim. She detested suntan. Her skin was as pale as the Spanish royal family’s in the time of Velásquez.

What brought us together? Superficially it was curiosity — almost everything about us, including our ages, was undisguisedly different. Between us there were many first times. Yet more profoundly, it was an unspoken acknowledgement of the same sadness which brought us together. There was no self-pity. If she had perceived a trace of this in me she would have cauterised it. And I, as I say, loved her surety, which is incompatible with self-pity. A sadness that was like the crazy howl of a dog at the full moon.

For different reasons, the two of us believed that style was indispensable for living with a little hope, and either you lived with hope or in despair. There was no middle way.

Style? A certain lightness. A sense of shame excluding certain actions or reactions. A certain proposition of elegance. The supposition that, despite everything, a melody can be looked for and sometimes found. Style is tenuous, however. It comes from within. You can’t go out and acquire it. Style and fashion may share a dream, but they are created differently. Style is about an invisible promise. This is why it requires and encourages a talent for endurance and an ease with time. Style is very close to music.

We spent evenings listening wordlessly to Bartók, Walton, Britten, Shostakovich, Chopin, Beethoven. Hundreds of evenings. It was the period of 33’’ records which one had to turn over by hand. And those moments of turning the record over, and slowly lowering the arm with its diamond needle, were moments of a hallucinating plenitude, grateful and expectant, only comparable with the other moments, also wordless, when one of us was on top of the other making love.

So, why the howl? Style comes from within, yet style has to borrow its assurance from another time and then lend it to the present, and the borrower has to leave a pledge with that other time. The passionate present is invariably too short for style. Liz, aristocrat that she was, borrowed from the past, and I borrowed from a revolutionary future.

Our two styles were surprisingly close. I’m not thinking about the accoutrements of life or brand names. I’m remembering how we were when walking through a forest drenched by rain, or when arriving at Milan’s central railway station in the small hours of the morning. Very close.

Yet when we looked deeply into one another’s eyes, defying the risks involved in this, of which we were fully aware, both of us came to realise that the times being borrowed from were chimera. This was the sadness. This is what made the dog howl.

The traffic light turns green. I overtake her and she follows. After we’ve left Kielce behind, I give a sign to announce I’m going to stop. We both pull up along the edge of another forest, darker than the last one. Her car window is already down. The very fine hair by her temple, sweeping back behind her ear, is delicately tangled. Delicately because to untangle it with my fingers would require delicacy. Around the glove compartment of the dashboard she has stuck different coloured feathers.

Met, she says, there were days on end, you remember, when we got rid of the vulgarity of History. Then after a while, you’d go back, deserting me, again and again. You were addicted.

To what?

You were addicted — she touches several of the feathers with her fingers — you were addicted to the making of history, and you chose to ignore that those who believe they’re making history already have their hands on power, or imagine having their hands on power, and that this power, as sure as the night is long, Met, will confuse them! After a year or so they won’t know what they’re doing. She lets her hand fall on to her thigh.

History has to be endured, she goes on, has to be endured with pride, an absurd pride that is also — God knows why — invincible. In Europe the Poles are the centuries-old specialists in such an endurance. That is why I love them. I’ve loved them since I met pilots from Squadron 303 during the war. I never questioned them, I listened to them. And when they asked me, I danced with them.

A wooden dray loaded down with new timber emerges from the forest. The pair of horses are covered with lather and sweat because the wheels sink deep into the soft earth of the forest track.

The soul of this place has a lot to do with horses, she says, laughing. And you with your famous historical laws, you didn’t know any better than Trotsky how to rub down a horse! Maybe one day — who can tell? — maybe one day you’ll come back into my arms without your famous historical laws.

She makes a gesture such as I cannot describe. She simply adjusts her head, so that I can see her hair and the nape of her neck.

Supposing you had to choose an epitaph? she asks.

If I had to chose an epitaph, I’d choose The Polish Rider, I tell her.

You can’t choose a painting as an epitaph!

I can’t?

It’s wonderful when there’s somebody to pull off your boots for you. ’She knows how to get his boots off’ is a proverbial Russian compliment. I pull off my own tonight. And, once off, being motorbike boots, they stand apart. They are different, not because they have metal in certain places as a protection, nor because they have an added piece of leather near the toecap so that they resist the wear and tear of flicking the gear pedal up, nor because they have a phosphorescent sign around the calf so that the rider is more visible at night in the headlights of the vehicle behind, but because, pulling them off, I have the feeling of stepping to the side of the many thousands of kilometres we have ridden together, they and I. They could be the seven-league boots that so fascinated me as a child. The boots I wanted to take everywhere with me, for even then I was dreaming of roads, although the road made me shit-scared.

I love the painting of the Polish Rider as a child might, for it is the beginning of a story being told by an old man who has seen many things and never wants to go to bed.

I love the rider as a woman might: his nerve, his insolence, his vulnerability, the strength of his thighs. Liz is right. Many horses course through dreams here.

In 1939 units of Polish cavalry armed with swords charged against the tanks of the invading Panzer divisions. In the seventeenth century, the ’Winged Horse-men’ were feared as the avenging angels of the eastern plains. Yet the horse means more than military prowess. Over the centuries Poles have been continually obliged to travel or emigrate. Across their land without natural frontiers the roads never end.

The equestrian habit is still sometimes visible in bodies and the way they move. The gesture of putting the right foot in a stirrup and hoicking the other leg over comes to my mind whilst sitting in a pizza bar in Warsaw watching men and women who have never in their lives mounted or even touched a horse, and who are drinking Pepsi-cola.

I love the Polish Rider’s horse as a horseman who has lost his mount and has been given another might. The gift horse is a bit long in the tooth — the Poles call such a nag a szkapa — but he’s an animal whose loyalty has been proven.

Finally I love the landscape’s invitation, wherever it may lead.

It has led to the village of Górecko in the south-east of what is named Little Poland, twenty kilometres from the Ukrainian border.

The village street is dust and stones. There are two shops, and along an overgrown path through the forest, a church. In the centre of the village, near a shrine to the Madonna, where wild asparagus grows in the spring, there is a small reservoir full of green water. The villagers dug and built the reservoir in the 1960s as part of a miniature hydro-electric plan drawn up by the local priest to bring electricity to the village. It didn’t work, but the fact that the Church was meddling with the formula Soviets + Electricity = Communism forced the authorities to supply the area, perhaps more quickly than they would otherwise have done, from the national grid system. Today, when a workhorse goes mad, the villagers stand the animal in the reservoir for several hours, until the animal cools down.

The houses are mostly wooden chatas of two rooms with a stove between them (in winter the temperature can be –20 °C) and a chimney in the middle of the roof. The four small windows are doubled — there’s often a pot-plant placed lovingly in the space between the two frames. The gardens are surrounded by wooden fences and in them grow beetroots, cabbages, potatoes, leeks. Some chatas have been enlarged, rebuilt, fitted with radiators, and given a portico with wooden columns. The plot of land, though, is still the same plot, and the money for improving the grandparents’ house has been earnt in Germany or Chicago.

My friend Mirek’s house stands apart from the village on the other side of the main road. For the last seven years Mirek has worked, as an illegal migrant, on building sites in Paris. By training he is a forestry engineer. I have learnt much from him in the forest.

Normally he walks fast, in the same way that he drives cars fast. He doesn’t take risks, for he’s aware there are too many anyway. With his large hands and shoulders, he’s not somebody you would think of pushing aside. His eyes, though, are unexpected, for in them there is a reflective, almost hesitant, questioning. Is it this questioning which explains his success with women? We need to make promises, he told me one day, without promises life is too hard for anybody, but if you make a promise you don’t believe in, it’s not a promise! Maybe this is why he prefers actions to words. As I say, he normally walks fast.

On that particular morning, he had reduced his pace and from time to time squatted to examine the earth between the pine trees. I want to show you the Lion of the Ants, he said, there ought to be one here. A sort of ant? No, a larva, a grub. About the size of a fingernail. When he gets wings he’s like a dragonfly, and silvery like satin. The soil between the pines where he was looking was sandy and in the sunlight. He couldn’t find one.

He approached a tree stump and touched the sticky, cut wood. Just the place for oprinka miodowa. They’re a mushroom, he said, that taste of the deep forest. If they knew how to cook, the wild boar would eat them! Boil them for a moment to get rid of a certain bitterness — don’t include the stalks, they’re slender but stringy — and serve them with fresh cream! He said this smiling. What makes Mirek smile most frequently is the pleasure of outwitting the routines and tired rules of daily life, and when his smile gets too big, he breaks into laughter. He has the eye and imagination of a poacher.

We walked on in silence for half an hour. Abruptly he stopped in his tracks, knelt and pointed at a small crater in the sand, the diameter of a saucer. It was shaped like a funnel that got narrower and narrower.

See his head and pincers? He’s hiding there in the sand, waiting for the next ant to slide down the funnel into his mouth! The Lion of Ants! He begins, Mirek explained, by making a circle on the ground, he makes it walking backwards — he can’t walk forwards because his hind legs have evolved into diggers. The sand he extracts he shovels aside with a quick toss of his head. Then he makes a second circle, a little narrower and a little deeper. And he goes on like this, circle after circle, till he’s at the bottom, where he hides. Once an ant lurches into that shifting sand, he can’t help himself. When he hasn’t eaten for days and is very hungry, the Lion will draw a wide circle so that more ants fall down the slope for him to eat. When he’s not so hungry, he draws a small circle. He writes his menu on the sand!

Mirek’s smile broke into laughter, then he looked up at the sky above the trees as if to acknowledge the mystery of why things have come to be exactly the way they are.

There is no other house like Mirek’s. Probably one can say that about any house if one knows it well enough. Anyway I know what to expect. I follow the grass track which leads off the road, I cross the bridge, made of wooden planks, over the stream, I pass the tree to the left of the door with apples the size and colour of dark cherries (incredibly bitter to taste), and I look for the key in my pocket. There are no steps leading to the front door — one has to step up fifty centimetres on to a concrete platform. The wooden door has two locks which I undo. It doesn’t open. Putting my fingers under the bevel of one of its panels, I succeed in lifting it. The door yields and swings open. I step in. The house smells of dust, wood-smoke and fern. I wander from room to room — there are six. In each there is at least one butterfly or moth, either flying around calmly, or fluttering its wings against a windowpane with the fast flicking sound of a banknote counting-machine.

The house was built more than a century ago. Only three of the eight dining chairs don’t collapse when sat upon. There is an image of the Madonna in every room. Nobody is clear about the house’s exact history, or perhaps everybody wants to forget a different chapter of its history. Doubtless it has served many purposes. The unhidden electrical circuit, with its wires, sockets, connections, points, fuses and switches all tacked to the walls, looks as if it was improvised in great haste, to meet some emergency forty years ago. Perhaps when electricity first came to the village?

Fix it! From next week we’re operating from here — day and night, summer and winter, understood? There’ll always be just one of us here. So fix it, you’ve got till Monday.

Or could it be that the house then belonged to an old woman living far away, one of whose local nephews, when the electricity came, seized the chance to pretend to be an electrician, and in exchange for the work done, demanded enough money to buy himself a mobylette?

I switch on the electricity. I put the bacon and the śmietanie I have brought with me on the kitchen table. I’ve promised to have some soup ready for them when they arrive. Within an hour and a half there’ll be hot water.

At about the same moment as the electricity was installed, the windows were changed. There are many more of them and they are far larger than they could have been originally. What lay behind this mania for windows?

A step towards modernity or another proposal by the nephew to the old woman? Unlike installing the electricity, creating and enlarging the windows must have taken many months of work and he would have earnt himself enough for a small second-hand car.

Or was it a Committee Decision?

If there’s plenty of light, we’ll use less electricity. No problem with getting the window frames, they’ll be delivered direct from the factory. Proceed room by room, we’ll be occupying the others! OK?

Only three of the twenty double window frames now open. Several have been painted over and are opaque, and a number have been broken and the panes of glass replaced by sheets of polystyrene. There are no curtains.

In the larder, which is a blind passage with a door leading off the kitchen (there is no refrigerator), I find a bottle of beer. It was brewed in the village of Zwierzyniec, which means place of the animals, twelve kilometres from here. I take the bottle into one of the front rooms where there is an armchair.

On the wall hang a pair of stag antlers, and opposite them an old framed photo of a hunter with shotgun and dog. The photo is difficult to date. Mirek doesn’t know who the man is. Probably at one time he was living here.

The antlers are in fact a joke: they are branches of a spruce, hung on the wall to give the impression of a pair of antlers.

Liane is a Romanian painter. She sent me a drawing she had made in the Berlin Natural History Museum. It showed a large tree trunk, with real antlers growing out of it on each side. She explained that a stag must have one day died beside the roots of a young tree, which subsequently grew around its skull and lifted them up and preserved them. I told friends who were going to Berlin to go to the museum and look at it and I showed them her drawing. Each reported back to me that they could find no such exhibit. Finally I asked Liane. Of course, she said, smiling, only I can find it. We’ll have to go to the museum together, maybe it’s gone now.

The hunter in the photo is wearing a cap. Today baseball caps, as worn by the young all over the world, with the peak pointing backwards, have superseded the traditional cap with its polished peak and its particular claims. The claims of the Polish cap were: an indestructible patriotism; a right to command; a willingness to serve; a familiarity with nature and all her extremes; a gift for secrecy and for bargaining; a very long experience of history.

Anybody could buy and wear such a cap. It was a thousand times easier than acquiring a passport. During the nineteenth century, when occupied Poland did not exist as a nation, the wearing of this cap bestowed and preserved a strange authority. The hunter in the photo might have been able to explain the mystery of the tree with the antlers.

A few minutes’ walk away from the house, there is another mystery. In the forest, surrounded by undergrowth and with no path leading to it, there’s a grave — well-kept, with a bouquet of artificial flowers placed on it. A soldier of the German Wehrmacht was buried there sixty years ago. And the bouquet is renewed every few months.

The soldier was shot on 31 December 1943 in this house. Perhaps he was actually shot outside near the apple tree with apples the size of cherries, but the decision to shoot him was taken here. The impulse which led to the act began in this room — perhaps decision is too unconfused a word. The German was barely eighteen years old. He had been conscripted at sixteen, and after a few weeks’ training was posted to the occupying army in this area. His name was Hans. After a few months he announced to a forester, whom he met secretly, that he wanted to desert from the Wehrmacht and join the Polish partisans. Some say he had fallen in love with a girl in the village, who lived in the house next to the one where the second shop now is. The girl, when she became an old woman and Hans was mentioned, would shake her head in such a manner that it was hard to be sure whether she was confirming or denying the story. Many weeks passed after Hans spoke to the forester. He was cross-questioned several times by two officers from the A.K., the clandestine partisan Army of the Interior, whose allegiance was not to the Russians but to the exiled Polish government in London. The partisan command had doubts about him. Eventually he was told he could work as a medical orderly in their forest hospital if he handed over his uniform, papers and rifle. He agreed. One of the wounded in the hospital began to teach him the rudiments of Polish.

On the night in question Hans accompanied, at their invitation, the A.K. colonel and several section commanders who came to the village, and more particularly to this house, to celebrate the New Year of 1944.

What happened after many vodkas is obscure. Did Hans, forgetting himself, start to hum a German song? Did he receive a message from the girl and try to slip out of the house, by the door in the kitchen, without saying a word? He was making progress with his Polish. Or did the colonel suffer a sudden vision of imminent betrayal?

He knows far more about us than we know about him. We don’t even know whether or not he can be trusted.

At that time one killing superseded another and thousands occurred simultaneously. On 1 June the entire population, including babies and grandparents, of a village twelve kilometres from here had been massacred by the German SS. The previous year 400,000 Jews had been rounded up and interned in the Warsaw ghetto to be dispatched to the extermination camps. In February 1943, the British government had taken the decision to give priority to the fire-bombing of enemy cities so as ’to destroy the morale of the enemy civilian population’.

A killing could provoke a momentary recoil, a second of confusion, but scarcely a regret. I doubt whether Hans fully realised what was happening when he was shot in the back of the neck, where the apple tree with the bitter fruit now grows. No struggle. Four men carried him into the forest and buried him. His corpse benefited from the doubt that he was perhaps not an enemy.

The mystery, though, concerns his grave not his death. In the early 1950s a wooden cross was suddenly planted at its head. No name, no date. Years later a stainless steel screw replaced the rusty original one which held the cross together. And always, laid on the mound of the grave, there is a bouquet of artificial flowers, while twenty metres away in the undergrowth lie the tatters, like confetti, of the discarded bouquets.

Everyone in the village knows who is doing this. The old woman who shook her head is dead. Yet the grave receives more regular attention than most graves in tended cemeteries. Is this because the attention given to it is secret, and, at the same time, acknowledged by all those who remember?

I once questioned an old villager about the grave. His reply was fox-like. A man died there, he said, so what could be more natural than to mark the place?

Paradoxically, a memory of a moment of confusion can be unconfused. Sitting in the armchair between the joke antlers and the photo of the hunter with his cap, such a memory comes to me. It is not mine, this memory of the impulse in this room to kill Hans sixty years ago. I decide it’s time to go and pick the sorrel for the soup I’m going to make.

In the open air the distinction between the kingdoms — mineral, vegetable, animal — seems blurred. There are leaves, curled up with dryness on the wooden planks of the bridge, which look like toads. A hornet on a sunflower — there’s a nest of hornets in the attic — could be mistaken for one of its seeds. I sit on the planks of the bridge, my legs dangling over the water, and watch the stream. The water is a little lower than usual because the mill upstream is working. When it stops at night or at lunchtime, the water rises by twenty centimetres. The mill turns an old circular saw, which cuts the trunks of pine trees into new planks. During the next ten years, in the forest to the north, where Despina was accepted by the wolves, it is being planned that one and a half million trees will be cut down and sold for quick profit. Not only the level of the water can change, but also its colour. This afternoon it is clear. At other times the stream is turgid and dark, the colour of water in a bowl in which dried mushrooms have been soaked. Why is sand seen through water so inviting? The stream has influenced the growth of every tree growing along its two banks, and a number of them are far older than the house. On the stream’s surface the traces of its current, and the circular ripples caused by the interruption of a stone or a fallen branch, remind me of cable stitching. Knit three, purl three. . I remember the needles.

As well as the blurring of the distinction between the three kingdoms, the distinction between past and present has become blurred. Here the river is called the Szum; there it was called the Ching.

The Ching flowed at the bottom of the small suburban garden of the house I lived in until I was six, in Highams Park, a downmarket east London suburb, twenty minutes by train from Liverpool Street. In the garden there was golden rod and pampas grass. There were also gooseberries and marigolds, the latter planted by my mother for they were her favourite flower. In Spanish the marigold is called maravilla, which means wonder, and in Mexico it is the flower of the great carnival of Death. Across the Ching, which, like the Szum, is about three metres wide, there was a drawbridge built by my father for me. Every Saturday afternoon when he didn’t go to the office, we went down to the bridge, which stood vertical on our bank, and lowered it, through a system of ropes and pulleys, until it was horizontal and rested on the opposite bank. Then we could cross with dry feet to the other side. Like the one I’m sitting on, the bridge in Highams Park was made of planks, and one could see the water between them, but it was much narrower, it was only as wide as my two five-year-old arms held out sideways. The bridge led nowhere. On the opposite bank was a field of allotments with a fence round it. We crossed simply to be on the other side, and to look back.

The Ching was my father’s river. For a few years it was the best thing in his life, and he wanted to share it with me. It cleaned the remembered wounds that would never heal. It dispersed the mustard gas. With lips wet like the Szum’s, it whispered names. (After the war ended in 1918, my father, who had served four years as an infantry captain, served for two more years in Flanders on the War Graves Commission.) The Ching could not bring back any of the countless dead but he could cross over the drawbridge to the other side and stand there for a minute or two, as if he were the man of twenty-five who in 1913 could not imagine a single hour of the four years of trench warfare to come.

When he lowered the drawbridge, he could borrow my innocence and so recall his own, which otherwise — except for those Saturday afternoons — was for ever lost.

All this, at the age of four and a half, or five, as I lay on my stomach and let the water of the Ching flow around my wrists, I knew in my blood. My dark blood.

Those Saturday afternoons were the beginning of an undertaking my father and I shared until he died, and which now I continue alone.

By the time I was ten and until he was seventy, he and I contested one another almost continually. There were truces during which we both abstained, yet they were rare and brief. Everything I did alarmed him about my future. Everything he believed in I wanted to overturn. He was trying to save me — to crawl out on his belly to a crater in no-man’s-land and pull me back to relative safety — and I, with all the arrogance and fear of youth, was trying to show him that it was possible to be what I called free.

The fights were sometimes cruel and bitter and both of us were reckless. He wept more often than I, because the wounds I inflicted opened up older ones, whereas those he inflicted on me provoked the protective indignation that often accompanies youthful revolt. Nevertheless, throughout this long struggle, our mutual undertaking, which began wordlessly with the drawbridge over the Ching and which would never be openly declared, was never lost sight of and persisted. (I’m writing this with a worn pencil whose marks are so faint that I cannot reread the words in the evening light, for what I’m saying, twenty-five years after his death, can still only be said in a whisper.) And it consisted of what, this undertaking? An agreement that he could share with me, as he could share with nobody else, the ghost life of his four years of trench warfare, and that he could do so because I already knew them; they were, in the strictest sense of the term, familiar to me.

We fought about my future with no holds barred and no exchanges possible, yet neither of us forgot for a second during the fight that we shared the secrets of another incommensurable war. By being himself, my father taught me endurance. By being myself, I reminded him that he was not alone.

The Saturday afternoons were very long. Time seemed mercifully to stop. Lying here on the planks of the wide bridge over the Szum and closing my eyes, the sound of the two streams merge, along with the sound of the midges, of the distant dog barking, of the leaves of the tall trees. And in the current of the two streams there is the same indifference.

My father had a pair of wading boots that he wore when he was standing in the water attending to the bridge. The water, deeper than I was tall, came up to the tops of his thighs. My mother came down to the river bank only when the gooseberries were ripe and she wanted to make jam. Otherwise, like pubs, betting-shops and billiard parlours, it was a strictly male area, measuring about ten metres by four.

One Saturday I found a wading boot and stepped in with both feet; it came up to my head, it covered me and I hopped along the bank in it, laughing. My father laughed too. All of me was in one of his boots. And I knew where he had been in other boots. And he knew I knew whilst we laughed together.

On 18th March 1917 he wrote in a letter to his father: I stood a moment wondering whether I ought to take thirty men through such an Inferno; just then my Sergeant came up from the dug-out and shouting into my ear at the top of his voice to make himself heard through the crash of guns and the bursting of the shells, he said, ’Excuse me, Sir, we will go through hell with you, Sir, if you’re thinking of us.’ That settled it. I would go. We start out into the open — we are lucky at first — their machine guns open on us and we jump into a trench — we are up to our waists in water — our ammunition is all wet — but still we plod along — the guns never ceasing for a solitary moment.

We met stragglers coming back — some lost, some wounded, and many lay dead. Not knowing whether we could eventually get through, I shouted to my Sergeant to take charge and push on as fast as possible and I would try to go on in advance and see if the way was clear. My servant came with me and one other man. I then met an artillery officer who had lost his reason; it appeared that he could not get in touch with the infantry and he didn’t know whether his battery was shooting on trenches occupied by ourselves or the Hun. He blew out his brains with his revolver in front of my eyes.

My men got stuck in the clayey trench and it took me one and a half hours to dig them out. My last drop of water was expended on a man who was wounded in ten places.

A woman with a white scarf around her head is approaching the bridge over the Szum, carrying two buckets full of freshly dug potatoes. When just taken from the earth, potatoes glow. They glow like hen’s eggs. The woman is perspiring. I recognise her from my other visits. She is Bogena, who looks after Mirek’s garden and, in exchange, takes the vegetables and flowers she needs. Due to the river, the soil is richer here than in the village proper across the road. And so Bogena keeps chickens in her own garden and cultivates Mirek’s. In the room where I’ll be sleeping, I’ll hear, far away, her cock crowing before it is light.

Scrambling to my feet, I ask whether I can have five or six potatoes. I’m thinking of the soup. Bogena puts down her buckets and takes my hands and pulls them out in front of me. Then she places potatoes in them, one by one, until I can hold no more. I am nearly twice her age yet the way she does this somehow refers to the child in me.

If the river at the bottom of the garden in Gordon Avenue was my father’s happiness, mine was the house next door. It did not have a front door like the others in the road, but a side door, two metres away from the outside wall of our own house. This door was seldom locked. Front doors are by definition locked. I could slip into the house next door whenever I wanted.

The door opened on to a small panelled room with a curved wooden ceiling which must have been added on to the original house, and perhaps once served as a drying room for the washing. Now its shape, its wood, and the fact that there was nothing in it except a bench against the wall and a low table, made it seem like an upturned boat. There was a window — in the stern — which gave on to the back garden where there was a pear tree. In the month of November, the low table in the upturned boat was covered with pears, carefully placed in rows, no two pears touching, by the man of the house.

On the bench was a cushion which slowly over the years became mine. Their kitchen led out of the boat-room and the door was often open, so I sat and heard their voices talking in their language. Sometimes their dog, an Airedale who came up to my shoulder, would be lying on the floor and I would stroke him. He had wiry hair that smelt of a kind of tobacco. I have forgotten his name. If I could remember it, I’d be able to re-enter another room. On other days I looked at the pictures in the papers or books that had been left on the bench. Some of the books were children’s books, yet there was no child in the house. The daughter, tall and with very black hair, was in her teens, finishing her schooling.

The mother noticed when I came in and let me be. Sometimes there was music playing on the wind-up gramophone in the sitting room, where the father, who was out of work, read newspapers. What enticed me to the house next door, whenever I could slip away, was the pleasure of waiting. The pleasure of waiting a long, long while with the certainty that, at the end, I would not be forgotten.

Finally, the mother, with her kerchief tied very high around her head, would bring me, from the kitchen, if it was the afternoon, a saucer with a cinnamon cake on it and a cup of hot chocolate. If it was the morning, a pot of home-made yoghurt. At that time, in the early thirties, yoghurt — except amongst health-food freaks — was entirely unknown in London. She never kissed me. She looked at me kindly from a considerable distance. She treated me as if I had a mission in life which she knew about and prayed that I would fulfil. Perhaps the mission was just to grow up and become a man.

Only Camellia, their daughter, spoke English easily. She took me on expeditions into Epping Forest. She showed me how animals die: It’s fallen, it’ll never leave the ground again. We both had knives for cutting. Tendrils, bines and worts. What she showed me was a secret. We might have explained, when asked, where we had been; we would never tell what we had seen.

I did a drawing of an owl and together we hid it in the hollow of an oak tree that had been split by lightning. When we returned the next week the drawing had gone and the hollow was full of feathers. We collected the feathers and Camellia said we could write with them. I thought she meant they were an alphabet. It could be that it is with them that I’m writing at this moment.

Camellia’s family came from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, until the end of the First World War, included this bridge over the river Szum. I never found out exactly what disaster had forced them to emigrate. All I took in was their homesickness and the various ways they possessed of combating it — tisanes, sachets of dried lavender, records of Liszt, cheesecake, dried mushrooms, a certain way of pulling on their socks. Whatever their story — it was not a Jewish one — the father had been dishonoured in some way, this I could feel, and this was why he gazed into the middle distance and spoke rarely. He was waiting for a message to come which would rectify the error. It never, of course, came.

I walk towards the field where the wild sorrel grows. I have left Bogena’s potatoes in a small pile on the planks of the bridge where they are glowing like eggs. I cut the sorrel plants with my pocket knife. They are about the size of young dandelions, but the green of their leaves, like their taste, is both sweeter and more acid. They grow in clumps together, so I sit down and spread out my handkerchief on the grass and place the cut leaves on it.

The pictorial convention of using fig leaves to hide the human genitalia is comic — the leaves are too shiny and too heraldic. Wild sorrel plants would be far more appropriate, for their leaves feel like green skin when you touch them. Exactly like green skin. Exactly. I’ve picked enough and I remain sitting.

There are no birds to be seen. The sporadic, loud trilling comes from between the leaves of the surrounding trees and bushes. I have the impression it is the foliage itself that is singing! I remember having the same sensation in Gordon Avenue. The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season. I wipe and close the knife.

A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum.

You asked me, Juan, to write something for you about pocket knives, pocket knives and boyhood. I told you I thought pocket knives went with torches. A knife in one pocket and a torch in the other! I never got round to writing anything. Then unaccountably you died.

You are looking at me sardonically, as I hoped you would. Listen, here’s a knife story!

I’ve held this knife in my hand and it was made in the village of Josefow. I’ve seen the grave of the man who made it. A very proud man by all accounts. He was a craftsman, perhaps a harness-maker or a saddler.

He had three children, two boys and a girl, who was the youngest. Either because he knew she was probably his last child, or because of her fierce blue eyes and dark hair, or for his own reasons, he loved her particularly.

This was in 1906, when everyone in Poland was waiting to see what would happen next, after the revolts and strikes of the previous year. The historians would later call it a revolution.

The protests across the country had been about poverty, hunger, working conditions, and most of all about the Polish language, which was forbidden to be taught in any school, or used for any official purpose. The Russians, Prussians and Austrians who occupied the country wanted the language suppressed. Many men and women died in pools of blood fighting for the right to their own words. To die for a certain declension. A certain declension and certain names! The daughter’s name was Eva and her birthday was in May.

After giving the matter considerable thought, the father decided that his birthday present should be a pocket knife, which he would make, especially for her, in his workshop. He had noticed how she was always pestering one of her brothers to lend her his pocket knife.

Her knife should be small, not more than nine centimetres long when shut, and seventeen centimetres when open. The handle should be made from a ram horn, honey-grey, slightly translucent. He would find one at Romek’s store in Aleksandrow, split it, and with four brass rivets attach the two halves to the steel spine, slightly curved, mounting towards the tail. The steel blade would also curve and narrow to a point.

The father made it. The knife is small and feminine — like a barrette for a massive head of black hair. When shut, if you hold it in your right hand, the blade of the knife glints like a moon in its final phase after the last quarter. It’s small, but one could gut a trout with it, peel a pear, cut wild sorrel, open a letter, remove a stone from a goat’s cleft hoof — if the goat was calm. The knife, however, has one peculiarity.

Who knows at what moment during its making the father made his decision. Was it when he first imagined the knife? Or was it only towards the end, after he had made the handle, and before he fitted the blade that is held by a single clamping pin?

The peculiarity of the knife is that the cutting edge of the blade is as thick and as rounded as its back edge. It is a knife perfectly made not to cut. It has a cancelled blade. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the year 1906, when revolutions and troops firing into crowds were the order of the day throughout central and eastern Europe, a man made a knife like this so that his beloved Eva would be less likely to cut her finger.

When you open it, Juan, it occurs to you it’s a Hamlet-object you’re holding. It contains a recognised desire and, running parallel, the fear which that desire provokes. A knife of indecision. Open or shut, the blade is always one of regret.

Yet is that all? This Hamlet-object, which has survived its century against all the odds, speaks of something else: of the wish that a loved one has everything, but everything!

I decide to pull two leeks from the vegetable garden. I need a fork because the earth has baked hard. There should be a fork in the portico, along with an axe and a pick. I find it, pull the leeks, and shake the parched earth out of their white roots. The leeks smell of violets and nickel.

Back in the house, I go into the room next to the one where the hunter and antlers are to wind up the clock that is there and set it at the right hour. There’s a piece of furniture in this room the like of which I’d never seen until I came here.

Probably it hasn’t been used as it was intended to be for close on a century. On the odd drunken night women may have teased men with it. Perhaps, once, a woman climbed on to it naked and the men gasped as she went higher and higher. Otherwise it stood there unused and untouched. And, although it takes up a good deal of space — on the floor it covers an area of one metre by three metres and it’s over two metres tall — nobody has thought of dismantling it. To do so would be easy, a question of undoing a dozen nuts.

It commands a kind of awe; it has a precision and lightness which imply that it was imagined with great care and then patiently constructed according to detailed drawings. It’s made of slender lengths of polished beech wood, and its form is that of the letter A, except that it’s in three dimensions — or four if one includes the rhythm of its soaring.

It is a swing, an indoor swing. The seat of polished slats (the horizontal stroke of the A) is high off the ground. It was made not for a child but for a woman, perhaps when she announced she was going to have a baby. A throne, a rocking chair, a nursing seat, a swing, a perch. I undo the cord attachment and gently push the seat. It soars, comes back, soars. . I hear the clock ticking. I remember the first time I was here and how I helped Mirek move the swing from the room where we ate into this room with a bed in it. I remember how he looked at the swing when we had placed it in its new position. He looked at it as if it were a relic.

Mirek has the talents of both poacher and innkeeper (the lean and the well-fed man) and these serve him well for the clandestine jobs he finds and performs in Paris: building chimneys, laying tiles, constructing verandas, mending roofs, installing central heating systems, building duplex apartments, or repainting a bedroom with a specially chosen colour, for Parisians. He is strong with sharp eyes and the methodical intelligence of an engineer. He has something else too, his own way of planning each job, for no two jobs are the same.

When he was at school and living in his mother’s small house in Zamość, his mother’s brother, Zanek, lived with them. Zanek was almost totally paralysed. He could not speak and he noticed everything!

Everything — that’s why I loved him. After school I would go and talk with him, for we invented a language between us, a language like no other, neither Polish nor Russian, nor Lithuanian, nor French, nor German, a language in which we could say what nobody else said; maybe every love invents a vocabulary, a cover to shelter under. With him I discovered something I’ve never forgotten.

Zanek spent the days alone in the house in Zamość because his sister went to work. Before she left, she arranged the day’s newspaper for him. He read everything in it and couldn’t turn the page. In December 1970 Polish soldiers in Gdansk were ordered to fire on Polish workers, who were on strike in protest against rising prices and the lack of food, and that morning Zanek asked his sister to leave the radio on. Usually his days were silent.

Mirek pondered all this while he was at school. He started making diagrams and eventually he built a radio with a control system whose switches his uncle, lying immobile on the bed, could operate with his nose!

No two jobs are the same.

In Paris Mirek learnt how to work and remain unnoticed — taking a painter’s ladder out of a car or dumping sacks of gravel into a street container at the wrong moment can lead to questions and speedy repatriation. He discovered where to buy materials and to pay for everything on the spot with cash. He got used to insisting in his elementary French and not answering back, listening, waiting and making certain that he was paid as promised. With the money he earnt and hid away, he dreamt of what he would one day build at home. He bought, after five years in Paris, a two-roomed flat in Warsaw. He had further dreams. He became another Polish Rider but older. Meanwhile he lived with what fitted into two suitcases and with a few dozen Polish songs, including several that his uncle loved to listen to on the radio.

I give the swing another push. It goes high, and when it returns, soars as high as my head.

In Paris women fell in love with Mirek — Polish women who, after many tribulations, had settled abroad to earn a living independently, or pursue their careers. Some fell in love with him for a second time, for they had known him when he was a student. He took them fishing on the Marne at night. He cooked borsch for them. They spent whole Sundays in bed. They watched satellite Polish TV. When they were with him, it was as if he stopped danger existing.

One by one, each did her best to persuade him to join her in Germany, in Switzerland, in Houston, USA, and stay for good. There are more Poles in Chicago than in any other city of the world after Warsaw. These women had sustained their courage alone and they knew they must refuse to look back: only look ahead. They still loved eating ice cream. And each, in her own way, sharply wanted Mirek at her side. None of them, however, could contemplate returning with him to Poland and having children who would go to school and fall in love there, and in their turn have to leave and say goodbye. Mirek, each one of them told him in her own words, you’re my dream, but you don’t understand women!

And so, two years ago, Mirek looked at the swing as if it were a relic.

A knock on the door. No vehicle has drawn up. I cross the porch whose broken windows have been replaced with dark polystyrene panels and open the sagging door. Bogena is holding out a bowl of eggs. For the sorrel soup, she says. Bogena, except for regular errands to Zamość and the occasional visit to Lublin, has never left the village. This is evident in the way she observes me standing in the doorway of this house she has always known. The uninhabited and visited house. The house without a doorstep. I thank her and she turns away, walking at a pace that hasn’t changed for years.

I peel and slice the potatoes and cut the bacon into small pieces and wash the leeks. Their outer leaves pull off like satin sleeves and the ones disclosed glisten. Towards their heads, earth, as it always does, has infiltrated between the skins, so I make a short vertical cut and flicker through the skins like pages and wash out the irritating dirt. Cutting the leeks into round slices, the knife makes a ratchet noise, which is one of the oldest sounds I remember.

Four days ago, Mirek married Danka. They’ll be here in an hour.

Danka was born in Nowy Targ in Galicia. Under socialism there was a shoe factory in the small town employing over three thousand workers. It was the country’s largest shoe factory, established there because of the long-standing local tradition of working with skins and hides from the cattle of the nearby Carpathian Mountains. Now the factory is closed and the town poor. Nobody starves in Nowy Targ as they do in Milano or Paris, but there’s a pall of silence over the town for there are no projects to discuss. The town lives, like dust, from day to day. And its six or seven taxis wait discreetly, just off the main square, for the occasional fare, usually a foreigner. Danka is the youngest of five children. Her father worked in the factory. Her aunt has two cows.

She left Nowy Targ nine years ago, at the age of eighteen, to go to Paris where she eventually found work as a maid. Paid like a cleaner, she in fact brought up the two children of her employers, who leased her a small room above the garage where they kept their cars. There she slept and there the children — when they were old enough — sneaked in to hear bedtime stories. Within a couple of years Danka spoke a fluent French.

Mirek met Danka on a Friday night, her night off, at a birthday party of a mutual Polish friend in Paris.

I’m turning the leeks and the bacon and the potatoes in a frying pan, and I’m inventing their love story.

They both noticed one another that first evening. He was fifteen years older than she. She noticed how he talked. He talked like a horseman who had studied at some distant university, but she was not intimidated. He noticed her shoulders, neck and mouth; they shared a kind of insistence, the insistence of a goose in flight. At one moment he put his hand on her shoulder and she responded without a word. She spoke little; she preferred her thoughts to be read. At the end of the evening he offered her a lift home in his car, and on the way she told him about the children she was looking after, and he told her about his flat in Warsaw. Into the car stereo he put a CD of the Warsaw group, Budka Suflera (Prompter’s Box).

When they reached her employer’s house, the car stopped, but she didn’t get out, and the car turned round to go to the other side of Paris where Mirek had his room.

Red poppies already here

beloved body already sore

to our foreheads apply

the cool salt of Wieliczka.

The next time they met, they showed one another photographs and he cooked for her.

Where did you learn to cook so well?

I’ve been teaching myself for twenty years.

She said it would be better if he slept with her in her room for then they wouldn’t have to get up so early.

And the patronne? he asked.

I pay her rent for my room, she said, you can sleep in my bed all day long if you like.

I’m slipping everything from the frying pan into a saucepan of salted, boiling water.

After two weeks Danka announced that, ideally, she would like to have at least two children.

Two?

One after the other, quick, so you’re not too old!

Me too old!

Not now — but in ten years when you’re teaching them to fish, or when you’re climbing Mount Trzy Korony with them for the first time!

Have you climbed it?

With my brother when I was a kid. We saw some mouflon. Ouch! Men never get used to undoing hooks. Let me.

I’m cutting up the sorrel leaves with my pocket knife. Finely and not too finely. It should look like green confetti.

When it was confirmed that she was one and a half months pregnant, they agreed to get married after the baby was born.

In a few weeks we’ll know, he said, whether it’s a boy or a girl.

A wedding in Nowy Targ! she said. No, she wouldn’t dream of getting married in Paris!

In Paris they will buy a wedding dress.

Choosing a wedding dress is unlike choosing any other garment. The bride, when dressed, has to appear to have come from a place where nobody present has ever been, because it is the place of her own name. The woman to be married becomes Bride the moment she is transformed into a stranger. A stranger so that the man she is marrying can recognise her as if for the first time; a stranger so she can be surprised, at the moment when they make their vows, by the man she is marrying. Why are brides ritually hidden before the ceremony? It is to facilitate the transformation whereby the bride appears to have come from the other side of a horizon. The veil is the veil of that distance. A woman who has lived her whole life in the same village walks down the aisle of her village church as a bride, and to all those watching she becomes, for an instant, unrecognisable, not because she is wearing a disguise, but because she has become a newcomer being greeted on arrival.

Danka, after much delicious hesitation, chose her dress of arrival. It had a scooped neckline, bare shoulders with lace trimming, a sheath bodice with a thousand silver threads, and a satin skirt with flounces and twelve white roses of organza. It cost the equivalent of four months of her wages. Don’t think twice, Mirek said. A Parisian dress in lace and satin and with flounces as wide as a bed — selling it when we get to Warsaw will be child’s play!

So we can leave it to Olek? she asked. By now they knew she was carrying a boy.

Their plan was to move into the flat in Warsaw, which they would later exchange for a slightly larger one. Mirek would start a business installing bathrooms, jacuzzis, saunas, etc. He didn’t want to work like a mule on building sites any more; he’d become an ablutions specialist. And in the larger flat, when they found it, Danka would run a nursery looking after other babies as well as her own.

I put on the eggs to boil. From over the shallow sink to above where the logs are stacked beside the kitchen stove runs a clothes line for drying linen. Since the house has been empty for months, nothing is drying on it; all that hangs there is a soup ladle whose bowl has been reworked and pinched together in such a way that it has a throat and a lip to pour from; it has been transformed into an improbable multipurpose utensil for distributing soup, serving custard, and pouring steaming jam into pots. In one of the stories I do not know of this house without women, men too must have made jam.

Olek weighed 4.2 kilos at birth. He was delivered in a hospital in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris. Danka’s employers arranged for her to have papers and a work permit so that she wouldn’t have to leave them before they found someone reliable to replace her. She’s irreplaceable! said the man. Everyone is replaceable, said the woman.

When Danka returned to her room above the garage, the expression of plenitude on her face had not diminished. Instead of listening to herself, she listened, day and night, to the sounds that came from her boy. Within a week she restarted work, taking Olek everywhere with her. The daughter of the house, aged five, declared she wanted a baby. A baby like him. She was watching Danka breastfeed Olek. After she said this, she let her head fall against Danka’s shoulder, as if sharing the worries of motherhood.

Amongst their Polish friends in Paris, Olek was passed from hand to hand, the men’s hands often swollen or bruised, roughened by cement, the women’s hands sometimes over-pink as if over-licked from the incessant work of ironing and washing. Everyone agreed that the baby looked like Mirek, the same wide hands, the same blue-grey eyes. And look! Look! He has the same ears. Perhaps Mirek, with a father’s pride, was trying to look like his son.

Were I to have another life, born on another continent, there would, I believe, be one kind of gathering which, should I ever come across it, I would unerringly identify as Polish, even if I didn’t know where Poland was!

A small room. People seated on chairs, a stool, a click-clack bed, backs to the wall. In the middle of the crowded, small room, on the floor, a baby asleep in a carrycot. They are talking, knitting, telling stories, cutting a sausage, discussing prices, yet the gaze of them all repeatedly returns to the carrycot as if it were a fire whose flames draw their attention. Every so often one of them gets up to look closely at the baby. The fire has become a home-movie that they can only watch close-up in the camera’s viewfinder. If the baby is not asleep, they pick it up and hold it against their breasts. The men do this as confidently as the women, one of their huge calloused hands totally covering the baby’s swaddled torso. Italian Madonnas are regal, their bambini adored. Here the celebration is different. The circle of illegal migrant workers sitting with their backs to the wall are marvelling at a faraway victory. Of course the baby’s birth is no surprise and has been awaited. But time after time, and life being life, a victory is never assured until won. Those who haven’t yet drunk take the occasion to drink, eyes a little damp. And all are equally astounded by the news of a victory from far away.

Olek, his small hand pressing against Danka’s breast, drank and drank and put on weight. So did the parents. Nourishment somehow became a promise for the three of them.

One day Mirek said: You and I must go on a diet!

Why?

So you can get into your wedding dress!

She blushed for she knew it was true.

Give me three months, she said.

The vegetables are cooked and I put them through a mixer — one of those that turn by hand. I found it in the dining-room cupboard behind the soup plates. I hold the feet of the machine, which straddles a dish, firmly on to the kitchen table with my left hand, and I turn the handle with my right. It was my mother who taught me the technique when my hands were small and the practice more difficult than I imagined. Wait till you’re bigger, she said.

At weddings guests are usually expansive so that they seem more numerous than they really are; the opposite happens at funerals. Nevertheless at Nowy Targ there were in reality a hundred guests.

Danka was still and calm. She looked as if she had stepped out of her bath into her dress and then into the church. She exuded freshness, a cunning freshness that had taken days to attain. Her hair was plaited with long leaves and the tiny pointed locks woven together to create a crown like a lark’s nest in the grass. Everything about her when she entered the church — it would change in a few hours — was meadow.

Mirek was wearing a very light-coloured suit with a stand-up Indian-type collar and had the air of a croupier stepping out of a casino to enjoy the sunshine.

I wondered, as the pair of them walked down the aisle, how many weddings, regardless of century or place, walk past the same moment: the moment of water being drawn from a well? (The two rivers which flow through the unemployed town of Nowy Targ are called the Black Dunajca and the White.) The bride, having drawn water from the well, carries it in a pitcher on her shoulder. The bridegroom may be aware of this, but on no account should he look. The pitcher never appears in the wedding photographs because it’s only visible from behind and for a five-hundredth of a second. I think we saw a pitcher sitting on Danka’s shoulder for an instant.

The priest was young. The population of the town is 40,000 and it has ten priests. Unless forced by necessity, couples don’t marry during Lent or Advent, nor in November since the month is said to bring matrimonial bad luck. Weddings are traditionally on Saturdays, so the celebrations can last as long as possible. The young priest officiated, I’d guess, at thirty or thirty-five weddings a year.

His voice when he spoke was intelligent. He had keen eyes, and repetition had not so far made him complacent. He knew each marriage at which he officiated had been agreed upon within an intricate web of calculation, desire, fear, bribes and love, for such is the nature of the marriage contract. Each time, however, the task he set himself was to try to locate what was pure in this web. Like a hunter going into the forest, he set out to stalk a purity, to entice it out of its cover and to let all those present, and particularly the couple involved, acknowledge it.

Not an easy task, and it wasn’t necessarily simpler on the rare occasion when the woman and man were wildly in love, with scarcely any other interest, for then he risked to glimpse how desire, when mutual and passionate, is more often than not, a conspiracy of two against the cruelty of the world, apparently abandoned by God. Shreds of the purity he sought were of course always present, what made his task difficult is that a purity, when disclosed, invariably goes back into hiding. It is hard to sidle up to purity as Despina did with the wolves. Chopin succeeds in some of his mazurkas, Sappho in her few fragments of verse.

The young priest last Saturday in Nowy Targ, accomplished his task; at a certain moment he was radiant. Perhaps the purity he located, the purity which did not run for cover, resided in the ten-month-old Olek. Olek, dressed in white like his mother and father, lay awake and totally calm throughout the long ceremony in the arms of Danka’s elder sister, who was sitting, smiling towards the altar, at the back of the church.

I run the water from the cold water tap over the hard-boiled eggs and I roll them between the palms of my hands so that the shells will come off easily.

The cortège moved off, the bride and groom in the first car with white pennants flying from the radio aerial and door handles. Danka, beside Mirek on the back seat, with Olek on her knees, opened the window a little to have some cool air. The drivers of the cars that followed klaxoned, impatient for music and dancing. Most of Mirek’s friends had already been married for twenty years, and were familiar with the difficulties, the silences of conjugal life. Music would soon remind them of its promises.

The reception was to be held in what had previously been the canteen of the shoe factory. Some guests had proposed to walk there, for it was only a couple of kilometres away, it was sunny and there was no hurry. Amongst the walkers was a thin woman with black eyes, whose name was Jagoda, which means Berry, and she was humming a tune from her youth, ten years ago. One of her companions snapped off a branch of leaves which she waved as a wand, and accompanied Jagoda with the words of the song.

The cars came to a standstill before a barrier, which was like the red and white pole of a frontier-post. Three of the frontier guards had the marionette movements of elderly alcoholics; the other three were young men, unemployed, learning how to hassle. Hold-ups and jokes are not so different at their beginning.

Mirek got out of the car, opened the boot, where there were eighty bottles of vodka, and handed over two. One more! No question. Grins on both sides. And behind the grins, an awareness of the abyss that can claim anyone.

I scatter the cut sorrel into the soup which turns green.

Two of the musicians were playing when the newly married couple and the first guests arrived. The place was as large as a barn with a dozen tables arranged in a horseshoe at one end, and the four musicians — piano, drums, guitar and singer — at the other. Between was a dancing space the size of a threshing floor. The singer with bare shoulders and wearing trousers was as slim and short as the letter i; her voice was famous for being as wide as a horizon. Some guests as they entered glanced at her and without opening their mouths pushed forward the tips of their tongues, as if secretly testing the reed of a wind instrument whose music they hoped would accompany them all night long. Her nickname in Nowy Targ is Clarinette. She would only start singing with her voice that quivered when all the guests had arrived, not before. In the meantime she was dancing with the drummer who came from the Tatra Mountains. He was a large man and their dance gradually changed their sizes; Clarinette became as tall as a capital I, and the massive drummer became slim. This act of theirs represented the first transformation of the evening.

There was champagne to drink. There were polythene sacks like saddle bags lying on their sides with their spigot taps which, when turned forty-five degrees, let wine flow abundantly. Beer, from the village of the animals, was ordered from the waiters and served in tall steins. On each table were four open bottles of vodka and these would be replaced throughout the night whenever one was empty. Each bottle had in it a spray of dark green bison grass, which gives off a flavour a little like vervain. Mirek had been looking after the vodka for the wedding for a week.

As we talked of this and that, our eyes wandered towards Danka, not because she was making herself prominent, but because of the whiteness and extent of her dress. A rising moon. Maybe it had something to do with the silver threads of her sheath bodice. But it was also to do with her hands and pale arms as she sat there at the table. Her hands had recently learnt two sets of gestures, those of lover and those of mother. Both sets are imbued with tenderness, yet are strictly opposed. Maternal gestures reassure and calm; amorous gestures provoke and rouse. Her hands, relaxed on the tablecloth, almost looked as if just the afternoon before they had been making pastry! Her fingers though gave the game away. Danka’s fingers shimmered more than the moon-silver threads, it was they who made her shine.

Children began to dance, pretending to an innocence they did not possess. Nobody who dances to music is innocent. Glancing at the children some of the middle-aged remembered how, when they were young, what was desired kept a certain distance; whereas now, even when unobtainable, the to-be-desired was too close. To change that distance — and this was the unending provocation of the music’s rhythm — to change that distance, one only had to to get to one’s feet and dance. Which is what some couples did.

The talk at the tables, where the eating had begun, was the talk of travellers returned home for a brief visit to the Polish Kingdom. After a vodka or two, I had the impression that the horses of a hundred riders might be tethered outside along the edge of the forest.

They were speaking about jobs, deceptions in love, cousins in Chicago, the health of Karol Wojtyła the Pope, prices, the diseases of trees, ageing, and the songs they would never forget. Whenever a topic could be turned into a game, they did so and played it.

The dishes came like good news, one after another. After each one there was an interval for drinking and dancing and measuring the improbability of so much good news. Everyone gathered there knew that news of a catastrophe comes all at once.

The Clarinette sang. Most of the songs in the world are sad. All are about stories that have finished and ended. And yet there’s nothing more present and defiant than singing.

Hair the last veil

before everything

a hair’s breadth

before nothing.

Hair the farewell

before light

the endlessly black

before white.

Find in me

find in me for you

my brightness.

When she stopped, the first to speak were those who found the silence hardest to bear.

I taste the soup, add a little salt and peel the eggs. The shells come off like brown clowns’ noses.

It was time for Mirek to dance alone with Danka. Olek was asleep in his carrycot. He would only remember the wedding through photographs. Who knows? His parents walked alone on to the threshing floor. Everyone watched. The satin roses on Danka’s shoulder-straps were waiting to slip from her shoulders, the roses of her flouncing skirt were kept flying by the air-rush of her turning. Everyone watched. The sight of the pair of them roused many memories and often the same question. Was what time has changed an illusion? The music gave its own answer. The chattering voices another.

The bride was no longer meadow. Her neck rose straight from her full breast, her outstretched wings swept the floor. She was snow goose. Her whiteness grew larger. When at last they stopped dancing and, glistening with sweat, returned to their table to continue the feast, many guests were impatient for the music to start up again so they too could dance and share the music’s answer, rather than that of the chattering voices.

At a certain moment I left my table and made my way across the barn. I passed the musicians, felt the rhythm of the percussion, went outside and walked between the trees on the edge of the forest. There were no horses tethered there. A man with a saxophone approached me.

Good evening, comrade, he said.

It was these words which made me recognise him. Felix Berthier.

He was a member of the brass band of the village in which I live. By trade he was a house painter who worked by himself. He addressed everybody he met as comrade — the curé, the mayor, the baker who voted fascist, the undertaker, a kid on his way to school. The greeting was offered with a smile, not mockery, as if he had lifted up the encountered one and transplanted him into another time and place where the assignation would fit.

Each month of May, on the Thursday of Ascension Day, the brass band goes to play outside the houses of one of the outlying hamlets of the village. There is a rota, so that the music comes to each hamlet once every five or six years, and the inhabitants prepare refreshments to be consumed when the concert is over. Because the trees are not yet in full leaf, the music carries a long way over the fields. The tunes played are traditional and familiar.

When a concert was finished, Felix would knock back two glasses of gnôle, adjust his bandsman’s cap to a more jaunty angle, and wander between the barns and outhouses, or around a little chapel, playing Duke Ellington style. He proceeded slowly like a sleepwalker, and it was hard to decide whether people made way for him, or whether he found his own way along passages opened up by his playing. He seemed to be walking in that other place at that other time. This is why his eyes smiled. Undoubtedly he was, in his own way, playing for those present. The rest of the band took pains to disassociate themselves from him. The bandmaster would raise his eyes to heaven in exasperation, but occurring as it did on Ascension Day, he put up with the problem.

Felix, I asked him, can you play tonight at my friend’s wedding?

Comrade, why do you think I’ve come? He was already stooping over his saxophone.

Fifteen years ago, on a Saturday night, Felix was playing his way home and a car knocked him over in the main street of a neighbouring village and killed him.

With the passing of the years, some of the houses he painted and the rooms he papered, needed to be redecorated, and this involved stripping down what he had done. And so it was discovered that, on many occasions, before he started papering or sticking on new panels, he scrawled messages on the walls with his large house-painter’s brush: PROFIT IS SHIT. THE POOR GO TO HEAVEN. VIVE LA JUSTICE!

After midnight I heard Felix’s alto-sax.

The music, like the young priest a few hours earlier, was searching for a purity. Not, of course, the same one. The music was searching for the purity of desire, of what passes between a longing and a promise: the promise of consolation that can outlast — or anyway outflank — the punishments of living.

To shoot you

they’ll have to

shoot thru’ me.

The Clarinette’s voice touched outer space, and the music attained the purity that staunches wounds.

Everyone in the barn was reminded how a life without wounds isn’t worth living.

Desire is brief — a few hours or a lifetime, both are brief. Desire is brief because it occurs in defiance of the permanent. It challenges time in a fight to the death. And dancing is about that challenge.

There was only one bride there and one groom, but there were several hundred weddings; remembered, real, regretted and imaginary.

In the small hours the voice of the wedding party changed — it became younger. The older guests looked older — myself included. Some of the children were asleep on benches against the walls. Olek did not stir in his cot, fingers unfolded. The crate of empty vodka bottles grew heavier. The dishevelled musicians became the governors of the night. A waiter on his way to the kitchen took time off to dance.

Everywhere there was more white. Men had taken off their jackets and ties. Several women had kicked off their shoes and were barefoot. Mirek, in his spotless shirt and pearl-coloured suit, remained immaculate. Danka stood before the iced wedding cake, which, on its stand, was as tall as she. Then, with the same authority with which, each morning in Paris, she drew the blinds in her employers’ bedroom and placed coffee on their bedside table, she cut the first portion of her own wedding cake. And as each guest ate their slice, everything that was white shone brighter.

It was at this moment that twelve men with their hands held out approached Danka and fetched Mirek. They were Gurali, sturdy men from the Tatra Mountains. Who knows, perhaps it was because of them that Danka had insisted upon being married in the unemployed town of Nowy Targ? They began to sing together; by a common accord the musicians fell silent. They sang in unison, deep chanting voices.

Put behind the bitterness

Now’s the time to embrace.

While singing, they lifted Mirek and Danka off their feet and laid them across their arms, as though they were reclining on a shelf at shoulder height.

Now’s the time. .

With these words and a jerk of their arms, they threw the couple high into the air. We craned our necks to watch. They were close together. Their hands could touch or reach each other’s sex. Her skirt billowed in the form of a nimbostratus cloud and covered Mirek’s feet. One of Mirek’s hands, beyond his head, searched to turn down the sound. Imperceptibly, the two of them descended together into the waiting Gurali arms, there to be gently received, before being launched once more. They hung in the air a little longer each time.

A few hours later, at 11 a.m., the just-married and thirty wedding guests met in the main square. Most of us were licking the ice-cream cornets which are famous in Nowy Targ. Then we set off to look at a lake that is called the Eye of the Sea. Morskie Oko.

What happens is more surprising than what’s invented.

In Nowy Targ during the early eighties two friends were working in the shoe factory. The family name of one of the men was Bieda, which means poor, and that of the other was Bocacz, which means rich. One day, after a trade union meeting — Solidarność was just beginning — they were picked up by a Zomo patrol. Zomo was the counter-insurgency police. They were asked their names. Bieda declared his and was smashed over the head for insolence. It was Bocacz’s turn. Name? I don’t have a name. So you don’t have a name, eh? And he was smashed over the head for insolence. Give me your name! Bocacz. I see, so you’re in this together, both of you, it’s clear, said the Zomo sergeant. Poor and Rich! And they were put in a cell until they told the truth.

The walk through the forest up to the lake took three hours. Because it was summer, many people of all ages were making the same walk. When we arrived, we sat on boulders by the edge of the lake and gazed across the very still water towards the peaks. In the direction we were looking there was nothing man-made. The thousand people around us were very quiet — as if attending a performance. We munched sandwiches. Danka fed Olek. Mirek pointed to where he thought it would be possible to tickle trout. Under those rocks, he declared in his poacher’s whisper. Everybody had the air of being made happy by what they had come to see. Which was what exactly? Was it the Jurassic mountain range and its reflection in the lake? Or was it the stillness of the water with its lips at the edges which never quivered?

I ask myself this as I empty the śmietanie, the sour cream, into a bowl in the kitchen. The sourness of śmietanie makes it taste less of milk and more of sex. I think we all went to Morskie Oko to look at what time does without us.

The following day, on the grassy banks of the White Dunajca, we built a fire and buried potatoes in the earth to bake them, in the same way that clay bowls, which last for centuries, are baked. The potatoes we ate hot with salt from Wieliczka and horseradish from Danka’s mother’s garden.

Night’s falling. Something must have delayed them. I could telephone Mirek on his mobile and I don’t. I prefer to wait, as this house without a doorstep does. I move into the room with the swing and the armchair.

With a little psst! the reading lamp on a table in the far corner goes out, probably the bulb, which I won’t be able to replace. On the table are a pile of yellowed newspapers, some of them dating from the 1970s, a hand-compass that Mirek perhaps used when he was starting out as a forestry engineer, and a coffee tin, with nails in it. The table has a drawer and I open it with the stupid hope that I may find a light bulb, which I’ll try in the lamp. There are only books, Polish novels. Underneath them, at the bottom of the drawer, is a thin pamphlet with a photograph of a woman on its cover. I naturally recognise her, her eyes with their expression of looking through an opaque wall at what lies behind it, their expression of surprised pain and sustained determination. I see the slight limp of her walk, and I hear her voice, speaking in Polish, German, Russian, the voice of the eighteen-year-old who fled Warsaw because she was going to be arrested by the Czarist police, the young voice she never lost, even when her words were like those of a venerable prophet. Rosa Luxemburg. She was first introduced to me when I was sixteen, more than twenty years after her death. She was born in nearby Zamość where Bogena goes to argue with the authorities (in vain) about her father’s pension.

Who knows how the pamphlet, entitled Centralism and Democracy, ended up here? To add to the improbability it’s in French. Yet she, her writings, her imagination were accustomed to clandestinity and clandestine travelling. They expected to be hidden in remote drawers.

The last paragraph of the pamphlet, written in 1904, argues like this: For the first time in history, the workers’ movement in Russia has the chance of really becoming the instrument of the popular will. Yet look! The ego of Russian revolutionaries has made them lose their minds and talk yet again of an almighty historical leadership residing in His Highness, The Central Committee. They stand things on their heads and don’t realise how the only legitimate subjectivity for any revolutionary leadership today is the ego of the working class, who want the right to make their own mistakes and to learn for themselves the dialectics of history. Let’s be clear. The mistakes made by a revolutionary workers’ movement are historically infinitely more precious and fecund than the infallibility of any so-called Central Committee!

Outside it is entirely dark and I hear, in the distance, the chattering of a nightjar. Seated on the swing, wearing black high lace-up shoes of thin leather, could be goatskin, with heels that are not flat — some German comrades found her choice of footwear odd — Rosa makes the swing oscillate with the regularity of a tall clock’s pendulum, covering the same minimal distance of twenty centimetres back and forth, no more.

To recall and recall again the circumstances of her death. In the last days of December 1918 she and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party. Two weeks later they were arrested in Berlin and taken to the Hotel Eden where they were interrogated, beaten up and bundled into a vehicle supposedly to be transferred to the prison of Moabit by cavalry guard officers. In reality they were taken to the Berlin Zoo and slaughtered. She had her head smashed in, and her body was thrown into the Landwehr canal.

I glance at the swing, and her abundant thick hair.

The Berlin Zoo is not far from the Botanical Gardens. From a prison cell in Wroclaw, seven months before her death, Rosa wrote to Sophie Liebknecht.

Sonitschka, your letter gave me so much joy and I reply immediately. Now you see the pleasure and comfort a visit to the Botanical Gardens can give! You should do it more often. I share your pleasure when you describe so vividly your impressions. Yes, I know those wonderful catkins of pines that are ruby-red when the trees are in flower. Those red catkins are the female flowers from which the cones are born, the cones that become so heavy they drag the branches down towards the ground. Beside them are the less obvious male flowers of a pale yellow, from which comes a golden pollen. Unfortunately, from my window here I can only see the foliage of some distant trees, can just glimpse their tops on the other side of the wall. I try to guess by the colour and the little I can see of the form, what kind of tree each one is, and I believe that, on the whole, I hardly make a mistake.

The swing is totally still now and the slatted seat hangs at an angle to the floor, as if it had never moved or been sat upon.

Tomorrow I will do a drawing of a clematis which climbs up a pear tree behind the house. Its pears, when ripe, are reddish, and their flesh tastes slightly of juniper berries, their skins of slates in the rain.

Rosa loved birds — particularly the urban starlings who fly en masse above the streets and over the roofs. She herself was a linnet. Hänfling in German. A name suggesting tenderness and sharpness. I noticed the clematis a couple of hours ago, when I went out to hang a dampish eiderdown on the clothes line. Its flowers are particularly large and of a blue that verges on black, with a touch of purple. I’ll do the drawing with black ink and spit and salt, which brings out the red in the ink. The drawing, if it’s any good, I’ll leave between the pages of the pamphlet, which I have just replaced in the drawer with the novels on top.

A beam of light illuminates the garden on the other side of the track, at first high up at the level of the tall bean-sticks, then descending to the beetroots. It extinguishes itself. The darkness is blacker. Then the beam reappears, brighter: the headlights of a car. They have arrived.

When the three of them entered the house, it immediately became larger. The roof spread its wings. Houses shrink when lived in alone, and even more so when uninhabited. Danka was carrying Olek in her arms and as she crossed the threshold from the creaking portico-hallway into the dining room, they both smiled as if their two faces were expressing a single feeling which neither could have explained.

Mirek and I began to unload the car. There were cardboard boxes, shopping bags, a folded pushchair, a cot, suitcases, a thermos box, a crate of apricots, and, last of all, the wedding dress, hanging from a hanger inside a polythene bag. Fixed to the roof of the car was a ski container, shaped like something halfway between a coffin and a kayak. It had been thrown away and left on the street in Paris and Mirek had recuperated it.

Let’s take it off, said Mirek, though I’m not going to unpack it — it’s full of stuff for Warsaw, nothing else.

They intended to pass a long weekend in the house without a doorstep and then drive through Lublin to Warsaw, where they would begin their new married life as planned.

Danka, with her son in her arms, walked around the house. Nothing in it seemed to surprise her. She took her time. She tried to open a window and failed. Eventually, returning to the room with the photograph of the hunter, she announced: It’s big.

Olek wanted to be put down on the floor. Once there, he held on to her hands and walked a few steps, chuckling with satisfaction as if each unsteady step was a point of arrival. They saw a night butterfly. Olek stumbled and would have fallen if she hadn’t been holding him. Slowly, she murmured, slowly, one step, slowly, two steps. .

When he was sitting on the floor she caught the moth in her hands and showed it to him before putting it out of the front door. Cma! she said, Cma!

Danka had acquired another sense of time since the wedding. She could imagine looking back at the present from what, until a few days ago, was an impossibly distant future. She could imagine Olek being a father and Mirek and herself being grandparents. She was looking back at herself from a point in the future, and she was asking a question. I’m not sure to whom.

You haven’t forgotten have you? You remember? It was five days after Mirek and I got married. We drove all the way from Nowy Targ and we arrived at the house I’d never seen. Mirek had talked about it as though it belonged to another life before I was born, and it was dark when we arrived, and John had prepared some soup, and Mirek was making up our big bed in the room where there was an ostrich egg in a wickerwork basket, and it was the first time for ten days that Mirek and I were going to be alone. I realised how much lay ahead, and I was happy, doubly happy, one woman stepped into my wedding dress and two stepped out — my hair was curly and auburn, remember? — and I was going to love Mirek as he deserved, I knew how much he deserved, at that time it was one of the deepest things I knew, and Olek was healthy and very strong, I was proud, one morning when I was dressing him he accidentally gave me a biff and I had a black eye, that’s how sturdy he was at ten months, I was proud, and I was walking through this house I was seeing for the very first time and I said to myself, I don’t care, I don’t care how long it takes and how much I have to work, and if we have to move from room to room over the years, working on room after room until the house is at last finished, it won’t matter — is a house ever finished? — what I know is that I want to live here straight away and always. Remember? I can’t say what made me so confident that evening, maybe you told me it would be all right, maybe that’s what gave me confidence.

I’d better change him, she said out loud and picked up Olek.

I’ll set the table, I said.

The table was very long, a table for committee meetings, not for meals. Two-thirds of it was encumbered with what had been casually left on leaving the house, or abruptly deposited on arrival: clothes, hand tools, a coil of rope, basins, paper bags, a cap. The end nearest the kitchen was clearer and covered with dust. I wiped it, and laid out the garlic bread, raw herring and pickled mushrooms that Mirek had brought. I fetched the ladle and steaming saucepan from the kitchen, and the eggs. Then I served the soup into bowls with the ladle, and into each bowl put two halves of an egg.

The Poles call Ken’s soup szczawiowa. It is one of the most elementary soups in the world, and maybe that’s why, as well as nourishing, it provokes dreams. For example, if you’re cold it warms you and at the same time is refreshing. The acid sorrel makes the vegetables taste volatile and sharp. The eggs, which are larger than anything you usually find in a soup, have a rounded, solid taste. The sour cream, added at the last minute, permeates both. Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker who sold woollen gloves and lived a little to the west of Wroclaw in the seventeenth century, proposed that the world comes continually into existence by passing through seven phases. The first is Sourness, the second Sweetness, the third Bitterness, the fourth Warmth, and after Warmth, according to him, comes Love, to be followed by Sound and Language. I would place zupa szczawiowa somewhere between Warmth and Love. When you sip it, you have the impression of swallowing a place. The eggs taste of the earth of this place, the sorrel of its grass, the cream of its clouds.

We ate in silence for a moment. Danka blew on her spoon to cool it before testing whether Olek liked the soup. He did. After each spoonful he chortled and Danka wiped his mouth. Then Mirek said: You know what my dream was for a long while? It started in Paris, often when I was snarled up in the traffic, driving from one building site to another. Sometimes I thought of it when painting a ceiling. My dream was to run a little restaurant. Nothing big, twelve tables, in Zamość under the arcades, serving traditional dishes and new ones I’d introduce, using vegetables and fruit grown here in this garden, made larger for keeping chickens and rabbits too. I made up menus in the traffic jams! Crazy!

Danka put down her spoon and turned towards him with her full goose authority. If you don’t try to carry out that dream now — she spoke slowly, her dark green eyes screwed up — you never will!

Mirek didn’t reply. We finished the soup and chatted about other things. When nothing was said, I could hear the clock in the next room.

Olek wanted to get out of his feeding-seat and Danka took him in her arms and fed him pieces of apricot. Mirek unfastened the seat from the table and, leaving the door open, went into the room with the swing. There he attached Olek’s seat to the cords, higher up than the beech-slats. He tested it, made the knots tighter and then came back to fetch the boy.

Put into the seat, Olek grasped the two cords in his tiny fists and Mirek with his huge hand gave him a gentle push. He was swinging. He went higher and higher and was more and more full of delight.

The way Danka, who had left the table to watch, the way she stood there, watching her son soar away and come back, whispered to me that within two or three months she would be pregnant again.

Each time the seat came towards him, Mirek held it for an instant in his hand, raised it a little higher, and let it go once more. The house had changed as never before in Mirek’s lifetime.

I come outside to have a pee and the nightjar is singing. Kutak-kutak-kutak. Only night birds sing so long without stopping. He’s much nearer than before and may be in one of the trees by the bridge. I walk down there, for I’ve never in my life seen a nightjar, I’ve only heard them. The first time I heard one was in the Epping Forest with Camellia. He eats insects all night long, she told me, and he opens his beak so wide, it’s like a train tunnel! One of the toes of his foot, she went on, has a saw-edge, nobody knows why.

On each outing with Camellia in the dark or daylight I learnt names. What is this furry thing? The larva of a White Admiral. This moss? Silk wood. This knot? A clove hitch. And this? You know very well — your belly button!

There was much that could never be named. In the room of the upturned boat I told myself that the wood-grain of the varnished walls was a kind of map of the nameless, which I tried to learn by heart, in the belief that it might one day be useful. The realm of the nameless was not shapeless. I had to find my way about within it — like being in a room with solid furniture and sharp objects in pitch darkness. And anyway, most of what I knew, most of my hunches, were nameless, or their names were as long as whole books I had not yet read.

Kutak-kutak-kutak. .

I am standing so still under the tree the nightjar is in, he starts to chatter again. And standing here under the tree, I remember a few of my hunches.

Everywhere there’s pain. And, more insistent and sharper than pain, everywhere there’s a waiting with expectancy.

The nightjar falls silent and another, further down the stream, replies.

Counting is a way of secretly approaching something other than what is being counted.

The Szum has the same voice as the Ching.

Liberty is not kind.

Nothing is complete, nothing is finished.

Nobody said this, yet I knew it in Gordon Avenue.

The nightjar above me flies out of the tree to join his companion and in the filtered moonlight I glimpse the white band on his tail-feathers.

Smiles invite to happiness, but they don’t reveal of what kind.

Of human attributes, fragility — which is never absent — is the most precious.

I point up to the sky in the direction in which the nightjar flew. And this? I ask.

That’s Andromeda, Camellia replies, I’ve told you many times.

I strolled back towards the house. Unless panic sets in, darkness tends to reduce hurry. There is more time. There were no lights in the windows.

I stepped up on to the concrete platform and found my way through the creaking portico-entrance. I did not switch on the light.

The door to the bedroom was ajar. The little light coming through the window trawled like a grey net over the bed. The three of them were asleep. Olek lay against his father’s chest, his hand up to his mouth and Danka was cupped around Mirek’s back. A moth touched my hand in the darkness. Cma! Only the human body can be naked, and it is only humans who long and need to sleep together, skins touching all night long. Cma.

Within a week, Olek, with his determination, will learn to walk here, and Danka will ask Mirek to build a doorstep to their house.