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.
You're such a dreamboat!!!
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