Wroclaw notes

At the border between Poland and Ukraine, a man with no nose and an eye missing smokes a cigarette. The holes of his no-nose are small black slits over a gray mustache. Officers click tall boot heels. They have slick black braids under their caps, their uniforms fit close and neat-pressed, their beauty is some kind of fierce machine.

I am on the train all day. Another young American has the compartment next to mine. He has been hanging around Kiev, trying, inexplicably, to teach himself Ukrainian. This leads me to conclude that a great deal of the world’s money and time are wasted on foolish people. “You’re here for another year and a half? You are very lucky,” he says enviously. He may be right. But as a person who tends toward the selfish and melancholic, I probably will not understand how right.

…

Opening into a toothy dragon’s mouth, “a thing that vomits” (literally translated from Polish), a cylinder to purge rainwater from a tower’s drainpipe. Its metal eyes are sleepy and dopey.

Other small pleasures surface. In the main square, where the town hall imposes its golden sun-faced clock over market stalls, I see carved beasts crawling over each other. On one side of an entryway, a stone man slumps, beer in hand. On the other, a sharp-faced woman removes her shoe, as if preparing to beat him with it. Outside the Teatr Lalek (“Theatre of the Dolls”) we catch a puppet-show rehearsal. The puppets (wonderful, gangle-limbed, frog-eyed figures) clank beer steins and, Jacek tells me, sing about how much they love beer. I think we could be 500 years before ourselves, watching a Punch-and-Judy show.

It’s typical of Americans in Europe to remark, “There’s so much history here,” as if the New World’s millennia of civilizations don’t count as history. And yet I understand this feeling; we don’t live with that history. Even the spaces built in modern times are constantly giving way to malls, parking lots, other ghastly eyesores; "everything is torn down / Before," as James Merrill writes, "you have had time to care for it."

Old paintings and etchings show Wroclaw’s main square looking much as it does now: market stalls set outside orderly, warm-colored buildings, the Gothic church spires rising from every cobblestone street. But only in recent years has Wroclaw come back to resemble that past. Something like 60 or 70 percent of the city was destroyed in World War II. Inside the cathedral of John the Baptist, there’s a black-and-white photograph of its interior taken in1945. The vaulted ceiling is completely gone, reduced to rubble across the floor. Sanctuary walls meet a blank sky. A centuries-swallowing erasure in that sky.

It is difficult to imagine. Again, World War II is a history with which we don’t live. And I would rather turn from it to a history more lovely, and lovelier for having further passed: that of “Breslau,” the old Prussian city. Aula Leopoldina, the sumptuous university hall, is a riot of splendor, one is almost embarrassed for its ostentatious display. It wars for your eye. It tricks your eye. The trompe l’oeil ceiling feigns a celestial opening, flocked by robed and shapely allegorical figures for the arts and sciences. I want to strip the columns of their gold trimming and roll around in it, until I glitter as much as this place.

…

 “Where is the Wroclaw that drinks and then sings?” a young man demands of his friends. We hear their proud, proudly drunk, song carry on down the street. Another group of disheveled folk play guitar and sing in a tunnel. The words are Polish, but I recognize the melody as the one Ukrainian folk song I can sing, “Piedmenula, Piedvela.”

I’m really excited by this moment, and by the many cognates between Ukrainian and Polish. Tomato, pomidor. Bread, khleb. Ice cream, morozovo (we eat ice cream at least once a day). I communicate with Jacek’s grandmother in a slurry of Ukrainian, English, and wild gesturing. At one point I ask her if I may eat the soup in the kitchen. She says something to me kindly, nervously, then goes to Jacek in the next room. He tells me, “My grandmother is concerned. She thinks you want soup but isn't sure.”   

Jacek and I end each night in the square. Once there were fire dancers. They whip cords of flame around their bodies, and the flames taper into blue lines. Past midnight, a flower stand has its lights on, selling roses under a full moon. We talk and drink for a long time.

When I try to write down what we said to each other, it looks less true to the eye than it did in my ears. The words were lived and now are not content to be objects. I rarely talk to friends now except through email and letters. This depresses me a little. But I am, anyway, more comfortable with myself on a page.

We talk about words. To be able to conceive of something, we both sometimes need to narrate what’s happening to ourselves. On the train home, as Polish country whipped by and blurred itself, my brain called it all out into being, desperate to know it: Church. Green spire, rusted wall. Trash pile on fire. Orchard. Smell of pine. Smell of rain.

Maybe we don't think, don't live, except in language. Much postmodern theory tells us so. Is it then self-delusion, to think we may access a reality beneath words? That such a reality does indeed exist? I am uncomfortable with the idea of “reality” in its generalness, its claims to objectivity and, thus, truth. It often constitutes the world of images, and the image already tyrannizes our hold on truth. This tyranny is subtle and manipulative because all images claim to be self-evident.

So I stand by the reality of words. If it is even possible to “stand by” a thing that is no thing, that shapeshifts, reflects, refracts, doubles and triples in meaning, evades me.

Borderland

Heat moved visibly over the dirt. In a field we sifted among cornhusks for old iron. One piece contained a hardened slick of it, a black and liquid curve. Sometimes people find remnants of ancient Scythian weaponry, said Viktor, one of the leaders of this camping trip. Elsewhere we hunted Scythian barrow grounds, but found none. Just red poppies, and a row of red-rusted tractors. They sat impotent and huge as dinosaur bones.

For two days I camped with a group of 11 schoolchildren and four other adults, touring our region’s countryside. We walked for hours each day and only saw a few people the whole time. A farmer, shirt off and gray feet bare, brought us pails of wellwater to fill our bottles.

History, seen and unseen, passes through everything. To me, every field is a swath of bright nowhere; to Viktor, they are sites of skirmishes between Cossacks and Tartars; a deep impression in the forest floor was caused by a WWII bomb. He talks about history constantly. He was my school group’s guide at Kholodnee Yar, the monastery near Kirovograd, and I came on the trip at his request. A self-described nationalist, he’s in fatigues and combat boots – the modern-day “Cossack” style. He loves Mel Gibson and traditional Ukrainian music; hates Russia and the current president. “He wants to bring Ukraine back to Communism,” he told me as we rested under a tree.

You can better understand ardent nationalism in Ukraine if you consider the past century here. It ravaged Ukraine, repeatedly. Even before the devastation of World War II, millions died in the Great Hunger of 1932-3. The famine was less a “famine,” the word implying natural disaster, than a genocidal attack executed by Stalin on rural Ukraine. Historian Robert Conquest estimates 7 million dead as a result of collectivization (5 million in Ukraine, 2 million elsewhere in Soviet Union), with another 6.5 million killed in political repressions beforehand. That’s more than double the Holocaust.

This information stunned me. Considering how little recognition it receives in the West, it makes sense that many Ukrainians feel hostility toward Russia and a sense of victimization.

To be honest, though, Viktor’s profusions of nationalism began to annoy me. Not only that, they made me nervous. “I really think Ukraine is preparing for civil war,” he said. And later: “I and my friends would die for our country.” His voice was eager, proud. Flies and heat and nausea buzzed in my ears.

Last month on Victory Day, commemorating defeat of Nazi Germany, fighting broke out in Lviv. Members of the nationalist Svoboda party were angered by public displays of the Soviet flag – a popular historical symbol of the Soviet 150^th Infantry Division. Reportedly, they attacked a pro-Russian activists with rocks and smoke bombs. Someone with the pro-Russians fired a gun with rubber bullets. Sixteen were injured, none seriously.

I can’t judge Viktor for this group’s violent actions. And really, I’m not entitled an opinion about any of this; this is not my country. But there’s often a subtle violence, I think, in borders – how they’re formed, how they’re defended. Ukraine’s physical boundaries have shifted for centuries. After so much oppression, many people understandably want to glorify Ukrainian culture. But “culture” is never static, never solid. Russia is inextricably intertwined with Ukraine, in the people’s fused pastiche of language, in their shared history.

Ukraine’s name comes from the word for “borderland.” A more productive way of living in a borderland, rather than exchanging bullets or smoke bombs, is to exchange a closed brain for a flexible one. 

"The struggle is inner," said Gloria Anzaldua, writing about mixed identity in her (amazing) book,  Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. "Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”  

The camping trip was to last four days, but I decided to leave a day early. My skin was seared red, my lip weirdly puffy, and I just felt strange. I’d had to share an impossibly tiny tent with Viktor, and waking up next to him was somehow more than I could handle. He walked me to the bus stop in a town a few miles from our campsite. We left at dawn, the lake steaming. I ran my hand along growing wheat. It was all soft sticky brushes.

We sat in the grass at the bus station, across from a statue of Lenin. Viktor snorted and glared. “Ukrainian people are silly. Lenin was a bad man.” He went on to talk about immigrants, then about Mel Gibson again. I pulled up grass and tied it into knots. I said, “Viktor, Mel Gibson hates black people,” and then I said nothing more.

…

“Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting, and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.” - Anzaldua