A History of Forgetting (30 page)

‘Excuse me?' he said. ‘May I speak with you a moment?' and Malcolm marvelled at how they always seemed to know who spoke English.

He began to tell a long story in formal, heavily accented English, evidently learned at school. All the while he kept his eyes coyly lowered, but betrayed himself with a pair of dimples that kept appearing and disappearing, as if he were trying not to laugh. The gist of it was that he had just arrived by train from a place called Katowice; in the station, someone had stolen his bag with everything he owned in it. He was just a poor student from Kraków University. He looked up at Malcolm and, dimples vanishing, put on an expression that reminded Malcolm of Grace.

He had, of course, seen Malcolm turn in the direction of the hotel a half block away. Likely he was trying to earn a few
złoty
at the same time as he practised his English.

‘You've picked the wrong man,' said Malcolm. ‘You're the prince. I'm the pauper.'

The young man did not understand. He blinked and, regrettably, his eyes were a pale, almost luminescent blue.

‘I haven't any money to give you,' Malcolm told him, straight out.

The youth muttered something and, stuffing hands into tight jeans pockets, kicked the wet ground. Malcolm walked
on, the paper-clad bottle under his arm. The boy was following, he sensed even without looking back. At the door of the hotel, something made him turn, a silly fancy, and the boy,
flashing his grey teeth in a beguilingly disingenuous smile,
hurried to catch up.

‘What's your name?' Malcolm asked.

‘Waldemar.'

If he were going to pick an alias, Malcolm wished the boy would have picked one a little more melodious in English.

‘Would you like to join me for a drink, Waldemar?' He raised the bottle and the boy perked right up. Ever chivalrous, Malcolm held the door for him.

The desk clerk handed him his key with the usual sour impertinence and a scathing look for Waldemar. Appalling rudeness in the service sector was not something Malcolm thought he'd ever miss, but after Vancouver, where you would have to run all over town to find a clerk or waiter to abuse you, he appreciated the nobility in refusing to grovel or even smile. So far, it had been the highlight of the trip—seeing how close they could come to actually telling you off. The girl, tireless in her effort to be friendly, seemed especially to provoke them.

He climbed the leafy staircase with the boy, so blond, beside him. ‘Are there a lot of thieves around now?' he asked, referring to the loss of the boy's imaginary suitcase. Maybe he really was a student. He was at least intelligent, for he grinned greyly at the irony of Malcolm's question.

‘The state,' he said, ‘no longer guarantees us jobs.'

Malcolm's room was at the front of the hotel overlooking the opera house and the treed belt called the Planty. He opened the door for Waldemar who, now that they were alone, was putting on a different walk—big boots, but tiny steps, and buttocks tight as if he were carrying a dime between them. There was only the bed and the chair. Malcolm pulled the chair out for him to set the dime on. He unwrapped the bottle and turned the two glasses on the little table right side up. Vodka splashed the clear sides, oily.

‘Cheers, Waldemar,' he said. ‘My name's Malcolm.'

‘Malcolm, cheers.'

They threw back the drink in what Malcolm assumed was the Polish style. After a second shot, the room felt warmer and
both of them removed their coats. The boy, who was wearing an old stretched sweater over a T-shirt grimy at the collar, took out a cigarette and came and sat next to Malcolm on the bed, keeping
his eyes demurely lowered and smelling very headily of sweat.

‘Aren't you going to ask me what I'm doing in Poland?'

‘No,' said Waldemar. ‘I don't care.'

‘Ah. A little nihilist.'

‘What is nihilist?'

‘It is what you are, darling.'

Waldemar sipped the vodka and leaned back on one arm,
smiling and holding out the cigarette. ‘Do you have—?' He
searched for the word. ‘Cinder.'

Malcolm laughed, which made Waldemar pout. He got up, fished a matchbook from his coat pocket and lit the cigarette himself.

‘Tomorrow we are visiting the Auschwitz Museum,' said Malcolm as Waldemar resumed his reclining position on the bed. ‘Have you been there?'

‘Of course.' He exhaled smoke. ‘They take us for school
trips.'

‘How is it?'

He shrugged. ‘I am tired of all that.'

‘Ah.' Malcolm pressed his eyes. ‘Do you speak French, by any chance?' When Waldemar shook his head, a lock flopped into his eyes.

‘Is your name really Waldemar?'

‘Is your name really Malcolm?'

‘It doesn't suit you, that's all.'

Waldemar lifted the cigarette gracefully and, between
grubby fingers, offered it to Malcolm.

 

Three hours later Alison woke the opposite of refreshed—groggy, headachy, confused. She curled up tighter under the thin blanket. A hot shower would warm her better, but she
didn't want to go back outside with wet hair. When she finally did get up, she dressed herself in layers, in all the sweaters she'd brought.

In the lobby, the desk clerk told her where the tourist office was. ‘Across the Planty. Just down from the train station.'

The Planty, Alison discovered, was the green ring surrounding the old, walled part of the city. She walked through
it, thinking that nothing seemed to be the matter with the trees. In fact, nothing had seemed to be the matter with any of the trees she'd seen so far, with the exception of the one
outside her hotel window, which might simply be late to leaf. Something in the branches of one caught her eye. She strayed off the path to look, then hurried on when she saw the mutilated pigeon hanging there, crucified on the twigs.

She came to a concrete pedestrian underpass lined with vendors of leather slippers and bulky hand-knit sweaters, brightly painted wooden boxes, fat knots of pretzel. Two gypsies were begging—a mother and a child. Alison knew instantly that they were gypsies because they looked exactly like those in the pictures that she'd seen in the book. The mother, squatting on the concrete, cocooned in a dirty shawl, droned at passers-by while the girl flitted around tugging sleeves. Alison found herself staring at them, standing there and marvelling that they were still here. Nearly all the Jews were gone, the guidebook said.

The little girl skittered over, fluttering fingers in Alison's face. When Alison tried to fend her off, the girl reached out and pinched her. ‘Ow!' cried Alison, bringing her hand up to her cheek. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!' cawed the girl, capering and
mocking.

On the other side of the tunnel, she stood a moment, rubbing the stinging spot. The buildings here looked different, she noticed. They were discoloured almost to black. Overcast like this, too, it seemed that outside the city walls, Kraków was
in black and white, while inside, where most of the tourists
confined themselves, was in colour.

She crossed the street.

‘Miss? Miss? Pretty miss?' Leaning up against the sooty stone, a chameleon in his black leather jacket, face blank as the wall. ‘Miss? I take you to Auschwitz. Four hundred and fifty thousand
złoty.'

She kept on walking, her hand on her breast now, staring at the wet sidewalk, ignoring him. The next one droned the way the gypsy woman had, ‘Miss? Ausch-witz? Ausch-witz. Four hundred thousand
złoty.'

In a long line at the kerb, the cabbies were milling, scavenger-like, waiting for the tourists to come out of the tourist office. Another followed close enough to touch her. ‘I drive you there. I drive you back. I give you a tour. Four hundred
thousand. Three hundred fifty. Miss? A tour.'

She fled inside the office, got the bus information, but was almost afraid to leave. In the end, she simply pressed through the line of cabbies, keeping her head low and rushing past.

She did not return to the underpass where the little wasp girl was, instead walked through the Planty again and up
another street, ending back in the main square. Here the cafés along the perimeter had set up tables and umbrellas and the arcades of the cake-like Sukiennice had become a promenade. At the closest café, she threw herself down. She was shaking. The waiter came over and she ordered tea and
pierogi,
the only recognizable items on the menu.

In the square, an old man emptying a paper bag of bread crusts onto the flagstones disappeared in an iridescent swirl of pigeons. Never in one place at one time had she seen so many
people in religious costume. She started to count them—
three nuns in habit, two priests in their collars, a brown-robed monk on a bicycle. The church bell struck four, echoed by her
teeth against the cup. The same tune they had heard earlier sounded from the tower, bittersweet. When it ended, the
people sitting around the statue of the desecrated poet looked up and applauded. Way, way up, the trumpeter took a bow.

The waiter set before her the plate of
pierogi,
onions fried to translucence and giving off a warming redolent steam.

‘Have you been to Wawel?' he asked, in English, naturally.

‘Where?'

‘To the castle.'

‘I didn't know there was a castle,' Alison said.

‘You must go. It is wonderful. It is medieval. Certainly, though, you've been inside,' he pointed at it, ‘the Mariacki
Church.'

‘Not yet.'

‘The altarpiece is very famous. They open it every day at noon.'

‘I wanted to go earlier. Maybe tomorrow. No.' She winced. ‘Tomorrow I can't.'

She ate and only afterward did she realize how hungry she had been. Stuffed now with dough stuffed with potatoes, she did not feel half so empty.

‘You are going to Auschwitz.'

She started and looked up at the waiter holding out the bill. Like all the others, he seemed to be condemning her to
go.

She would go into the church now, she decided, getting up and crossing the square. Down three worn steps, she stumbled into darkness and, when her eyes had adjusted, she saw walls and pillars covered with faded frescoes, patterned as on the painted wooden boxes sold in the streets. The front wall, where the guidebook said the best of the stained glass would be, was entirely covered with scaffolding and sheeting.

In the carved pews on either side of the main aisle people hunched in prayer. She passed gloomy little side chapels, then came to a painting of a black-faced Madonna above a small altar, lit all round with votive candles. The famous high altar was set in a chapel at the back of the main body of the church, but the windows there were also draped and the wood so dark it was impossible to make out any details in the carving. The entrance roped off, she couldn't get up close.

She sat down in a pew. Before her Christ hung on a stone
cross, sinews, joints and tendons grotesque with straining. His crown was a twisted branch with finger-long thorns, though no less fearsome was the halo. The hair lying on his breast was wavy, so at first glance the crimped spikes of the halo seemed to be hair too, raised terrifyingly and electrically around his head. A bronze background, a bas-relief of a crooked medieval
city, a fulminating sky. Staring at it, Alison was reminded once again how the force of suffering knocked the world off-kilter.

By the time she left the church, it was just beginning to drizzle. The street lights were coming on, but, few and far between, they shed about as much light as a votive candle.

The desk clerk didn't look up, even when Alison was right there asking for her key. She went right on leafing through her papers, deliberately ignoring Alison. Suddenly too weary to care what they thought of her, Alison said, ‘You know, I'm paying almost
two hundred million złoty
to stay in this hotel. I think you should try a little harder to be nice.'

The clerk looked up. ‘Pardon me? Someone is not nice?'

‘You're not. Nobody is.'

‘But we like you very much. This afternoon, I was talking here to Magda. We were saying you have such pretty hair.'

‘Oh,' said Alison dully, quite sure she was about to cry, though really, what did she have to cry about but her broken
circadian rhythms? The clerk turned to get the key and handed i
t over just as the telephone rang.

Alison was halfway up the stairs when the clerk called to her. ‘Did you find the tourist office?'

‘Yes. Thank you.'

‘Do you want to go to Auschwitz?' Cringing, Alison nodded.

‘As I thought. My brother can take you. He makes a tour. I will tell him to come in the morning.'