Krakow Melt (5 page)
“It’s by Czesław Miłosz.” She read it to me.
At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.
“What is that from?” I said.
“Fucked if I know ... but the old fart just died, so I figured it was appropriate.”
“Harsh.”
“His work is good, but I’m sure he was a rat, like the rest of us.”
Just so you know, Człowiek Obcy, the name of the gallery, means “outsider.” I know Polish is confusing, but please try to keep up.
May Day 1983, Warszawa
Black screen.
They gather in the Old Town. The crowd slowly thickens with bodies as people stream through the archway like meat through a sausage machine. Zoom in on a man with glasses, batting away the red and white
Solidarno
flag. He can’t see. There is nothing to see yet. The crowd is too calm.
Zoom out. The young are dressed in red and white, the colours of the revolution. The old are wearing grey or blue or beige. They want the revolution, but it will not disrupt their dressing routines. Nor should it.
Static.
All Poland is with us.
The crowd begins to chant. Out of focus, a man with a moustache echoes the words a split second before we hear them. He gets hit by a white balloon, but we don’t see who has thrown it. Perhaps a child.
Nie ma wolnoci bez Solidarnoci.
Nie ma wolnoci bez Solidarnoci.
No freedom without Solidarity.
The camera zooms out a bit too far, then readjusts. There are many balloons, only they are not balloons but white rubber batons the police are flailing. A woman falls to the ground as the police beat people back through the archway. The batons sometimes bounce back, like in a cartoon, but the officers are wearing helmets with visors to protect themselves.
From
themselves. The fallen woman collects the contents of her purse on the cobblestone. We see a change holder for
grosze
and keepsakes. One of her high heels is broken. It lays dismembered at her side.
We want the truth.
They are inchoate, but everyone knows what the other is starting to say. Words they never thought possible. Never thought Polish.
We want the truth.
The visors are smoke-coloured. The police always see smoke and never know when it’s real.
A stampede. The crowd crushes through the stone gate. Solidarity flags coil around them like taffy. Blinding and tripping them. The camera fixes on officers beating their riot shields. An old man approaches them, shaking his fist.
All Poland is with us.
All Poland is wet. Water everywhere. The police turn hoses full blast on the crowd who cannot escape fast enough. The water hammers their heads. Their hair is soaked and matted, and their faces turn purple. They look like newborn babies, but this is not yet a new country.
A stampede. The crowd crushes through the stone gate. Solidarity flags coil around them like taffy. Blinding and tripping them. The tape loops. We see the same activities. It is always the same.
All Poland is with us.
We want the truth.
Try chanting with water spraying the back of your throat. See how it feels.
Nearly all the demonstrators have left. Zoom in on an old woman who remains. The old remain the longest. It is their nature. In Poland, “old” is not a bad word.
She is the brightest of all in a crimson cardigan. She is holding her hands over her ears to block out the mayhem. She must hear far more than we do. The riot police approach. Another woman—a younger one—pleads with her, tries to pull her hands off her ears. But the old woman’s arms have locked. The younger one pulls and pulls. One gnarled hand comes loose, hesitates in the air.
The country waits.
Blood comes out of the old woman’s ear. She was trying to hold it in all this time. She just didn’t know what side was bleeding.
Nobody knows which side is bleeding more.
All Poland is with us.
We want the truth.
You fucking bastards.
Fade to black.
Cut to red and white.
The
herbatka
was bitter, just how we like it. Tea should never be a sweet affair.
Dorota sat in an armchair in the corner of my one-room studio apartment (millionaire I am not). She sipped her tea at intervals of exactly thirty seconds, surreptitiously watching me dress. I know when I’m being watched, a talent that has served me well in life.
She was reading a copy of
Rzeczpospolita
abandoned by the neighbours. The older folks in my building have given up on the national newspaper. They gripe that ever since Poland joined the EU the year before, the paper has become a political hand puppet. They don’t cancel their subscriptions, because there’s no refund policy in Poland; “bought” is bought. So copies pile up in my building entranceway and get mashed to a pulp by wet galoshes. Unless I read them.
I am a good tenant. I help clean up and digest the weekly tidbits before they’re completely illegible.
Rarely did I let anyone into my personal space. I thought about dismantling my Pink Floyd shrine before Dorota arrived (no one else had ever seen it), but in the end, I resisted the urge. It would be too complicated to reassemble and, besides, I wanted her to know more about me.
It was typical, as far as shrines go:
LP albums arranged left to right according to the band members’ favourites, starting with the most senior musicians
Papier-mâché models of the inflatable pig that floated loose during the
Animals
album cover shoot, suspended from my ceiling with threads of varying length, marking the ascent
Fan photos of reclusive founding member Syd Barrett transporting quarts of milk in the basket of his banana-seat bicycle
A re-creation of
The Wall
, made of real bricks, with the middle one missing and a picture of my face peeking through
She didn’t say a word about this stuff, even though it took up half a wall directly across from where she was sitting near the balcony.
My black jeans had faded to off-black and no longer matched my T-shirt. I never had this problem with my beloved corduroy overalls, but the evening’s activities called for a change of wardrobe. Dorota continued to watch me.
“I can’t go out like this,” I told her. “Can I try on your pants?”
Dorota put her newspaper down, maintaining her ruse of being absorbed in reading. “Yes, you ‘haven’t got a stitch to wear,’ just like Morrissey. Very cute. Just hurry up and tuck that sausage into whatever will hold it.”
“Do you like men or women?” I asked her. A point-blank kind of gal would have no qualms with a direct hit like this.
“I like body parts. Guys, mostly, but different people have the parts I like. I’m attracted to the ones who show them off. What kind of question is that, anyways?”
“I just want to know more about you.”
“Interrogating me isn’t going to help you. But I know you mean well.”
“Doesn’t seem that weird to me ... a really cool person walks into my life and I want to ask a few questions.”
“You’re talking too much.” She melted a bit in her chair, and gave me a smile I’ll never forget. “And actually, sweetie,
you
walked into
my
life. I was going to that gallery years before you even knew about it.”
Dorota continued reading and her smile faded. She pulled a pair of surgical scissors out of her purse and snipped out a rectangle of newsprint, violently crumpling the rest of the section and throwing it—unknowingly, I hoped—at my rare Dutch pressing of
Dark Side of
the Moon
.
“Listen to this,” she said with a sneer, reading from the newspaper. “ ‘If deviants begin to demonstrate, they should be hit with batons ... a couple of baton strikes will deter them from coming again. Gays are cowards by definition.’”
“And what hero of ours said this?”
“Wojciech Wierzejski, Deputy of the Polish National Assembly. I’ll add it to the collection.”
“You have more?”
“An endless supply,” she said.
We finished our
herbatka
in silence. I was soon done fussing over my outfit.
We got off the
tramwaj
at Rakowicki Cemetery, and walked through the gates just after midnight. I felt a
frisson
. This was the Euro Disney of cemeteries, a necropolis. Death is done right in Poland, and I don’t mean that with any disrespect. I mean that angels are sculpted of marble, not granite, tombs are kept clean and accessible, the catacombs and columbariums pristine. Corpse names are written in fonts so sexy they make you want to cum. The architecture of remembrance is not left to lie fallow, not here. The parents of Pope Jan Paweł II were buried here, but that wasn’t why we’d made the trip.