Vera (11 page)

  
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WARSAW UNIVERSITY

R
obert comes to Byron Bay, to my house. He flies up from Melbourne, and drives to Byron from the airport. He wants to talk to me face to face. Good. When I talk to him on the mobile, what can I say? I need to see his face when I'm talking.

His questions are usually intelligent: not always. Sometimes I want to say, ‘Robert, my dear, I can't be bothered answering that. It's a stupid question.'

He asks me, ‘Did you love Viktor?'

He means my husband. Of course I loved him! We were incompatible, but that doesn't mean I didn't love him. There were affairs, but so what? I admired him. That's much better than feeling desire for him, which I didn't after a time. Anyway, questions like that are ridiculous.

Fortunately, most of Robert's questions are okay. Sometimes I can't recall the sort of details he's asking for, but does it matter?

‘The lecture hall at Warsaw – what did the lecture hall look like where you listened to Kołakowski?'

What does any lecture hall look like? It looked like a lecture hall: it had seats, a blackboard, something like that. Kołakowski strode up and down. Or maybe he stood still. Who cares?

Such a crazy business, this answering questions about your life. I'm supposed to give Robert the impression that I understand who I am, what I have done – but who can understand her own life, or his? Another person's life, maybe, but your own? It's like talking about a dream. I recall all the big things, but a dream is a thousand things, and most of them can't be put into words, or only in an approximate way.

When I read this book that is taking longer to write than
War and Peace
, I know what I will think. I'll think, ‘Yes, I did that, but so much more, and the so-much-more isn't here.'

Robert will write in my voice, ‘I marry Viktor; I meet him outside on the street near the university and we decide to marry.' Something like that.

But on that day when I meet Viktor, the sun is shining in a way that is unusual, and before I notice Viktor's face, I notice the buttons on his coat, and before the buttons on his coat, I notice his hands, and before I notice his hands, I am thinking about something else altogether. What it was I can't recall, only that I was thinking about it and that the light was unusual, very bright, as if the sun was burning more powerfully that day.

What can I say when Robert asks me what I first thought when I met Viktor? In the time between then and now, a baby was born, I became a journalist, I took a ship from Bremerhaven to Melbourne, Eichmann was hanged, I fell in love maybe fifty times, started work in television, watched Gough Whitlam read his famous ‘It's Time' speech at the start of the 1972 election campaign: all this and a million other things.

Maybe, outside the university, I said to Viktor, ‘Do you have a light?'

I might have noticed his hands then, as he lit my cigarette.

I might have said, ‘We have met before. Do you remember?'

Everything that should be in the book won't be there.

Not all the buildings of Warsaw University have survived the war intact. Here and there, some bomb damage still remains, seven years after the war. But it is nothing like the destruction in other parts of Warsaw: many blocks of the old city have been bombed to pieces, and the pieces still remain where they fell. The destruction looks as if giant hands have taken hold of buildings and dashed them to the ground in a fury.

The whole of the campus is crammed between four boulevards – Karowa to the north; Browarna to the east; Krakowskie Przedmieście to the west, and Oboźna to the south. Among the most striking buildings are Kazimierz Palace, a beautiful rococo monster on Browarna, and the Old Library, at the heart of the campus. There are lawns and trees everywhere, and up on Karowa an elaborate park with fountains and statues, where you can lie on the grass while your boyfriend unbuttons your blouse.

I walk to the campus on my first day, feeling as if I've arrived in a place that has been waiting for me the whole of my life. I think, ‘Vera, Werunia, you clever girl. The Germans couldn't kill you, and here you are at a great university and your brains will make you famous.' Birds – lapwings, wrynecks and cuckoos – are singing in the trees. I think, ‘Werunia, you are beautiful, too – many adventures await you.'

Do I think that? Maybe not. Maybe I only think it now when I look back. But it is true that my heart is full and that I have a sense, on this day, that all the things that would have been lost to me if I had died in Lvov are now crowding around me, like the flowers of a garden, so many colours reaching for me in their brilliance.

I think, ‘A university is our greatest invention.' I am full of brains and beauty. How many times in your life do you feel this: that you are where you are meant to be? I think of the books I will open, of the smell of their pages. I will spend hours and hours and years of hours in the library of the university, with such a silence spread around me, a silence like a type of honey that you draw in through the pores of your skin, sweet and nourishing. No-one will come to where I sit and say, ‘You are a Jew. Get out of here.' Other students will watch me with my head over a book, breathing in the smell of the pages, drinking in the honey of silence, and they will say, ‘I wonder what she's reading, that beautiful girl; by the look on her face, you can see she is clever.'

I attend my first lectures, relishing the company of the students around me. Are we not here in the same endeavour?

I am studying, within the journalism course, economics, Western philosophy (including Marxism), modern history, ancient philosophy and logic. I love every subject – every hour of study of every subject. I walk into lectures as if I have come from the sea and my lungs are full of the most bracing air on earth.

A few years earlier, Warsaw was one of the worst hells we had ever made on our earth, and now look at what has succeeded it.

I sit, whenever I can, close to the best-looking young men. Also close to the brightest. Sometimes the brightest and the best-looking are one and the same. So much the better for me.

My lecturers, most of them, I adore. My logic teacher is Professor Tadeusz Kotarbiński, who already has a fine reputation in the world of philosophy. He is seventy years old when he becomes my teacher, and is tall and still fairly slim, with receding grey hair and a handsome moustache, more gorgeous than Stalin's. His great contribution to logic is his ‘reism' theory. What I am expected to grasp – and I do – is that we must think of three categories of names. First there are singular names, such as ‘Vera Miller', which is a grammatical subject and refers to people or things, such as me. Second, there are general names – ‘woman', ‘chair' – that are subjects in what, he explains, are universal propositions, when we mean ‘every A is B' – meaning, ‘every woman is a woman', ‘every chair is a chair'. And this category obviously allows for any number of chairs, any number of women, but each chair is a chair and each woman is a woman. Are you following this? Concentrate, because it's actually quite thrilling. And finally there is the category Kotarbiński calls ‘empty names', such as ‘gorgon' and ‘harpie', which do not exist and cannot be the subject of any true proposition, since nothing true can be said about something that has no objective existence – including ‘God'.

Studying logic helps me to understand how to think, and what thought is. Much of what we study in logic is completely abstract, but it fills me with wonder. It does so despite the monstrous irrationality of what I have lived through. To know that people continue to be fascinated by the abstractions of logic even when the world is burning – that is good.

Another wonderful teacher is Leszek Kołakowski, whose subject is the history of philosophy and political philosophy, mostly French rationalism. Kołakowski is much younger than Kotarbiński – only eight years older than me, a brilliant man. He has a long, lean, naked face, high Polish cheekbones, a tall forehead for a skull full of brains, eyes that he can narrow and make mysterious, and a manner both ironical and entirely serious. He always wears a tie, and very often a sleeveless pullover under his suit coat. In his coat pocket, you can see the tip of a white handkerchief protruding. But he never looks dapper. His clothes are well worn, as if they go through the same rigour that his brain goes through, the worn look of his clothes recording the hard process of thought that goes on behind that tall forehead.

Like me and a million others, Kołakowski struggled to educate himself during the Nazi occupation of Poland. He struggled more than I did, and more successfully. An underground education system was in operation throughout the Nazi years, and Kołakowski went in secret from location to location to meet with teachers or with couriers. At these clandestine classes, books would be exchanged – novels, poetry, philosophical texts. Kołakowski continued reading all through the war. Think of that! Above ground, the Nazis in their madness were attempting to create a world that nobody would wish to live in; below ground, dedicated people with a vision projected beyond the war, beyond the Nazi frenzy, quietly furnished the ambitions of people who wanted a world of learning and objective enquiry.

So Kołakowski lived through the frenzy, and after the war studied at Łódź University, and then at Warsaw University, where I was enrolled. He was a communist all through the war, when it was a death sentence if the Nazis got their hands on you, but after the war, as a member of the Polish United Workers' Party, when the communists were on top, he began to question the foundations of Stalinism. This came after a trip to Moscow in the early 1950s. He looked around and hated what he saw. Marx's political philosophy suggested one future only for the state, but that future was not totalitarianism.

Kołakowski became critical of Stalin, while still remaining a communist, but in Poland at that time it was unacceptable to say anything about Stalin that was not complimentary.

Do you know what the great defect of Stalinism was – aside from the propensity of Stalin himself to murder people by the millions? The Stalinists wanted robots: machine men and women who only say what is written on a block of steel and hammered inside their heads. In the ideal world of the Stalinists, subversion could never exist. What is important to me – love, mischief, getting drunk at midday and spending the afternoon in bed with an interesting man – that was poison to the Stalinists. They didn't want human beings, in all their madness and stupidity and genius and foolishness; that sort of thing made them sick.

Fortunately, human beings remain as ridiculous as they are no matter what system of government they live under.

Kołakowski wants a ‘humanist Marxism'. Maybe such a thing isn't possible, but that's what he wants. He makes the authorities nervous. He makes many people nervous. But not me. I adore him. He has the sort of charisma that gives a handsome man the power to see you naked even when you're fully dressed.