Jean carried their cups to the sink and rinsed them. Then she crossed the room and picked up the toy train she'd glimpsed on the windowsill. The silver paint was scratched but still bright; and she saw, on the side of the engine, a swastika and the double lightning insignia of the ss. Immediately Jean put it down. She stood very still. From across the room, Lucjan watched her.
He looked at her and suddenly she felt a great fear.
– I'm sorry, said Jean. I think I should go.
– Then go, he said.
Jean put on her coat and scarf and stood at the door.
– Do you think I'm a simpleton? he asked.
She opened the door.
– That engine, said Lucjan, I've had it since I was a boy. I loved that train, it was my first real toy, something store-bought, not home-made, not carved out of an old table leg or stuffed and sewn from scraps. It came from Piotrowski's on Krakowskie Przedmieście, plucked right from the shop window. My stepfather and I saw it together. We went in and he bought it straightaway. He knew something was about to happen, and it was a reckless, extravagant thing to do, to spend the money on something that would surely have to be left behind. For a few days' pleasure. But he did. So those ugly letters, that ugly symbol means something to me, yes.
Jean stood quietly, her eyes on the floor.
Without looking at his face, she came back into the room and sat down on a kitchen chair, though she did not take off her coat.
– You're very beautiful, Lucjan said. I'm sorry you're so afraid of me.
He sat at the table. He reached across and slowly pulled her handbag from her lap and with a startling gentleness set it beside her on the table.
In the mornings, Avery was woken by the family that lived upstairs. He heard the children on their tricycles as they rode around and around the dining room table, their father shouting at them to stop, the running up and down, the thump of the front door slamming.
The laundry room was in the basement and Avery knew that, when their mother was sorting the washing, sometimes the children explored his flat. Often they left toys or books behind (once, Tibor Gergely's Animal Orchestra – “the grey seals barked and lifted their fins and tweedled upon their violins …”). Avery did not mind the children's idle browsing among his things; in fact, he was disappointed to come home and not detect their trail. Finding the children's possessions among his own seemed to confer permission, confirmed his place; there, where he did not belong.
Avery lay with the empty house above him. His fellow students were fervent about the design of museums, malls, skyscrapers, mixed-use piazzas, entirely rebuilt urban cores. They were ardent and combative about urban fabric and infrastructure, crowd management and traffic flow. Avery listened to the noise of ambition around him and found himself alone, aching to learn what simple humanism might be possible, against all odds, in an industrial building, Aalto's Sunila or the Olivetti factory at Ivres. He was beginning to realize what it meant to build structures of the humblest and most straightforward disclosure, frank and spare, without irony; capable simply of both sorrow and solace: a house that understands that the entire course of a life can be altered, for better or for worse, by someone walking across a room. A room able to focus all its stillness in a single pear, sliced in half on a plate by a window. A school classroom so beautifully formed and situated that it is an idea. Playgrounds that children could continually redesign themselves, with movable pieces to make forts and shelters. Office buildings with alcoves for reading aloud, and big work spaces (space to think). Why were schools in particular so ugly, so barren, so bereft of aspiration or inspiration, the antithesis of the qualities one would wish to instill in students; cinderblock walls, sickly linoleum, dead light, dreadful basements, institutional fixtures, without self-respect … He knew one could spend just as much money building something lifeless as building something alive … It was not enough to make things less bad; one must make them for the good.
Has evolution moved the bone in our throat to allow for speech, have we learned to stand erect, to measure, to worship, to plant and harvest, to manipulate the atom and explore the gene, to thread needles – philosophic and otherwise – with our prehensile, self-conscious brains, to utter the world in paint and language, because we have no destiny as a species?
These thoughts were attached to the sound of the children running up and down the stairs, to the brief moment of silence when he imagined embraces before they all flew out the door, to the insurmountable fact of the happiness of others, as innocent as a child's name carefully printed in the flyleaf of a book.
For almost a month, Lucjan drew Jean. The velvet dress, the heavy sweater. She did not know if she would take her clothes off for him if he asked, if he moved across the room to her; but he did not. He looked at the way material gathered or stretched, glimpses of weight and bones. The comprehension that exists before touch makes one blind.
Lucjan's glance was painful; at first, Jean could barely tolerate his scrutiny of each part of her, even though they were parts visible to any stranger in the street: her face, the soft places between her fingers, behind her knees, the curve of her neck. Each afternoon his eyes travelled the same passage, the next day and the next, with increasing depth of knowledge, and after a few days she began to look at him as he drew, making the same slow journey of his body.
To be made visible by the sight of another.
Many nights that first month, they sat across from each other at Lucjan's table, or Jean on the painted carpet and Lucjan on the edge of the bed, two travellers on two separate journeys, waiting together in an empty train station, encouraged by circumstance into an awkward intimacy.
– Do you know the story of Kokoschka and his life drawing class? asked Lucjan from across the room. His students were painting from a model. He thought their renderings pathetic, feeble, dull. How could he bring their sight to life? One day he took the model aside before class began and whispered in her ear. Partway through the hour the woman collapsed and Kokoschka rushed to her side. ‘She's dead!’ he cried. The students stared at the suddenly lifeless flesh in horror. Then Kokoschka took the model's hand and helped her to her feet. She resumed her pose. ‘Now,’ said the master, ‘draw her again.’
In return, Jean told Lucjan about Hans Weiditz’ woodcuts, the first illustrations of plants in a printed book. Suddenly, throughout Europe, apothecaries, herbalists, doctors, mid-wives could look at the same plant and identify it indisputably. Perhaps the same could be said of the first drawing of a human face. And from then on, Jean said, botanical drawing became an art; da Vinci's meticulous studies of tree bark and the serrations and veins of leaves. Albrecht Durer's watercolours – so realistic – his irises, folds and flaps of papery purple skin …
– All flowers are watercolours, said Lucjan.
Lucjan made a late supper. He threw all the ingredients into one pan, the vegetables, the meat, the eggs; he crushed and rubbed the dust of the herbs over the puckering oil and afterwards tipped the pan, spilling everything onto two plates.
Jean watched him. No one had ever sat her in a chair and cooked for her, in all the years since her mother died. She had not known that this had hurt her. The first time they sat to supper together, she wept as she ate, ordinary food more delicious than she'd ever tasted, and he let her cry, only taking her hand across the table, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, this gratitude. To eat and weep.
After supper Lucjan said, Whisper in my ear.
– All right, little Jean – Janina, said Lucjan as they sat fully dressed next to each other on his bed. The first bedtime story. If we're honest, there is only one. You wish me to speak first …
There are many degrees of solidarity. One who risks his career and one who risks his life; one who risks because his friends have, who can't bear the shame and loneliness of being a coward. The friend who helps you when you need it, and the friend who helps you before you need it.
We must learn the value of each other
's words, what they cost.
Under her sweater, on her belly, Jean felt the bandaid on Lucjan's hand, she felt the buttons of his shirt, she felt his watchband. Never again would she feel indifference to such objects.
– There were thousands of us, Robinson Kruzoes, living in the debris …
The silence of ruins is the breathing of the dead …
It was the first time I'd ever been woken by the feeling of snow on my skin …
We are born with places of suffering in us, history is the proof of them …
I can only speak if you are lying next to me, he said, as close as my voice, my words throughout the length of your body, because what I am going to say is my entire life. And I have nothing really but these memories. I need you to listen as if these memories are your own. The details of this room, this view from the window, these clothes heaped on the chair, the hairbrush on the bedside table, the glass on the floor – everything must disappear. I need you to hear everything I say, and everything I can't say must be heard too.
It is terrifying to listen this way, leaving everything behind. Maybe I ask something impossible …
Smoke forced people out of the cellars, pushed them through doors of fire. The sound of the ‘bellowing cows’ – the machines that cranked the mines into place – then the explosion. The rubble rats would say, ‘Don't worry, if you hear the explosion, then you're not dead …’
A crowd stood at the edge of the ruins. No one had yet dared to step forward. High above them – their heads leaned back in disbelief – smouldered the frozen tidal wave of rubble. Somewhere a man said, ‘Put one foot in Poland and you're up to your knees in horse dung.’ The crowd, seething, craned necks to see who dared say such a thing and to take a swipe at him. But when people turned around they saw the old man was crying …
Within days of the German retreat, there were twenty thousand of us living in the ruins, and within weeks there were ten times as many of us Robinson Kruzoes; many, many children who knew no other place and were afraid to try their luck elsewhere, who needed to be where they last saw their mother or their father …
When my stepfather came back to Warsaw after the war, we were sitting with others on a heap of stones that was once Krakowskie Przedmieście, the same street where we had, it seemed so long before, bought that toy engine. He grabbed the arm of an old man, a stranger, and showed me the man's tattoo, because he was so full of pain himself and he had no scar to show for it.
It was as if the sky had been made of stone and had crashed to earth: an endless horizon of rubble.
Snow laboured down, through smoke and stone dust. No stars could be seen through the thick atmosphere. The black river flowed north over exploded bridges.
The snow fell peacefully on seven hundred and twenty million cubic feet of rubble. It clung to the masticated, wrenched, shattered till of wainscotting, roofs, glass, metal bedframes, entire libraries, on the remains of kindergartens and trees, and on ninety-eight thousand land mines.
In the midst of this devastation was the crumpled city square, Plac Teatralny, once the point of intersection for every major trade route across Europe – from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from Paris to Moscow. In the centre of that city square, a slender stone column still stood, untouched, its tip barely visible, an engraved compass needle upright among the incomprehensible debris, marking the place: Latitude 52 degrees 13′N, 21 degrees longitude. Warsaw.
The air was charged and solid; it shuddered, as if walls were rising out of the ground at an accelerated pace. After a few minutes of terrified observation, Lucjan realized the sun was rising and the spectral walls were merely the effect of dawn making its progress up through the smoke. Sunlight passed through walls of dust where real walls had stood only a few hours before; the city, an afterimage. When the dust settled, this glowing flesh dissolved, leaving only the skeletons of the buildings, sharp piles of stone, ventilator shafts, mangled iron beams, shredded wooden beams, cobblestones, chimney pots, eaves, shingles, pantry cupboards with their round wooden knobs, glass and metal doorknobs, different kinds of twisted pipe, electrical wire, disintegrated plaster, cartilage, bone, brain matter. Floating fibres of upholstery and singed hair floated in the January wind; scraps of wool dresses, melted buttons, and the greasy smoke of still-burning, avalanched bodies. The air glinted with infinitesimally small particles of glass.
The dead were invisible and pervasive; in another dimension where they would never be found.
Emerging from the wreckage were objects left astonishingly undigested by the toppling walls and the fires: a hairbrush, the wheel of a cart, a finger. A window frame jutted out, its curtain still attached; flowers of pale yellow cotton drifted listlessly in the air, searching for the vanished kitchen.
Cities, like people, are born with a soul, a spirit of place that continues to make itself known, emerging even after devastation, an old word looking for meaning in the new mouth that speaks it. For though there were no buildings left and there was waste farther than the horizon, Warsaw never stopped being a city.
In the darkness one could see tails of smoke twitching in the wind, rising from cracks between the stones. Then one knew there was a cellar there, big enough for an underground fire. Only at night could one see how many lived in the ruins.
Often the entranceways to these melinj, these burrows, these tunnels into the rubble, were marked with a pot of flowers. Geraniums. A blurt of red, a spurt of blood among the bones.
– Once, a woman, probably the wife of a journalist – there were crowds of them in the city during the first weeks after the war – offered me a square of chocolate, said Lucjan, wrapped in a scrap of foil. The scent of her face powder, from the inside of her handbag, clung to the shiny paper. I remember looking at it for a long time – for me, the first chocolate since before the war. When I finally put it in my mouth, I felt the heat shoot throughout my body and, looking at that woman with her fur coat and the golden clasp of her shiny handbag, I longed to rest my head against her softness. Instead, in return for her kindness, I gave her a good long look, as though I hated her, and moved off fast before she said a word.
I dug down to find a room almost perfectly intact and, while I was out looking for food, someone else took it for themselves. I lowered myself into a hole and found a man covered with blood – it was everywhere, you could even see his footprints. I stared at him. ‘Don't look so worried,’ he said. ‘It's only a head wound.’ Once, I fell asleep in a place I found just as it was almost dark. When I woke, I was lying face to face with a doll sticking up awkwardly from the stones. But it wasn't a doll … Once, I found a cellar of a shop still filled with cartons of shoes. I did some useful bartering before someone else discovered that cellar of shoes too … You have another pair of shoes or a second coat. You stand in the street and hold out your arms and you are a shop … I learned quickly that a hole with nothing to offer was best, and no one bothered me. I had a blanket, a bowl. Sometimes a head would poke down, see me sitting there, and disappear.
Once, a girl came. She must have seen my candlelight seeping from the cracks. I was already asleep and she shook me awake. She was, at the very most, twelve or thirteen years old. She asked if she could stay until morning. A large wooden cross on a string dangled over her narrow chest, the arms of the cross stretching over almost the entire width of her. Before I could answer, she was behind me, lying with her forehead against my back and her arm across me, and within one minute she was asleep. I was terrified by the touch of her. I could barely breathe for the pain of her thin arm resting on my coat.
Once, scrambling over the rubble, I spotted a piece of calico tied around a woman's throat. That bright piece of patterned cloth was saturated with life. Not the woman, no pulse in her neck; but the strip of cloth, red and blue in the snow. At first I thought her forehead was glistening with sweat. But it was ice.
As people returned to Warsaw there appeared, more and more often, sticking up here and there out of the wreckage, a branch with a pi
ece of paper jammed through; marking the place where someone had thought their house or shop had been, where they'd last seen the person they were seeking …
Add to this the smell, the shrieking stink of the karbidówki, the carbide lamps that reeked each morning when they were cleaned out …
Once, I overheard an old couple making their accommodation in the scrap heap. The man was clearing a space for themselves when suddenly he called out: ‘Look, a glass, unbroken – not a scratch. Incredible! Now we can drink!’ ‘No,’ his wife said, ‘let's put flowers in the glass. We can still drink from our hands.’
People have an instinct to leave flowers in a place where something terrible has happened, by the roadside where there was an accident, in front of a building where someone was shot. It's not like bringing flowers to a grave where the body has been laid to rest. Those flowers are not the same. Someone dies a horrible death and suddenly the bouquets appear. It's a desperate instinct to leave a mark of innocence on a violent wound, to mark the place where that last twitching nerve of innocence was stilled. The very first – the very first – shop to open up in the ruins of the city, during the very first days following the German occupation, perched on top of the rubble, in the snow! – was a florist's shop. Even before the abandoned half-wrecked tram that contained the first café, selling soup and ersatz coffee – there was the florist. All the foreign journalists marvelled at it – such a sense of life, such fortitude, such spirit – all the drivel those journalists spluttered. Blah blah blah! Etcetera etcetera etcetera! But no one said what was surely simple and obvious: you need flowers for a grave. You need flowers for a place of violent death. Flowers were the very first thing we needed. Before bread. And long before words.