The Winter Vault (25 page)

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 piece 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.

The German soldiers had enforced a strict schedule of demolition, said Lucjan; each building, street by street, had been numbered with white paint. In this sense, the numbers painted on the sides of those buildings were like the tattoos on the arms of the camp inmates; one might say the numbers signified their date of destruction.

Across the Vistula, the Soviets waited patiently, while the Wehrmacht, with great efficiency, levelled the empty city. When the show was over, almost three months later, the Soviet army quickly threw a pontoon across the Vistula – the same river that throughout the uprising and the city's demolition they had declared “impassable” – and claimed Warsaw for themselves.

Suppose, said Lucjan, lying quietly next to Jean under the blankets, you wish to convince me of the colour of a man's hair. Would you show me a man who had a thick head of hair as proof? No, surely his hair could have been dyed, or the photo altered. No, instead you show me a bald man. You say, His hair used to be brown. We examine his complexion, his eyebrows. It is not so easy to tell. Finally, we concede, Perhaps, yes, the bald man's hair might have been brown. Some years later, you see the same photograph, the face looks familiar but all you can recall is that the man used to have brown hair …

Okay, said Lucjan. Suppose you wish me to forget the significance of a certain name … In a clearing in the forest near Minsk, the Soviets erect a national war monument to mark the place where the village of Khatyn had been razed by the Germans. Day after day, for decades, they send busloads of children to the memorial. Why is this site chosen for a national monument when there are so many other places where the dead outnumber those poor souls of Khatyn? Simply because there is a certain other clearing, in a forest near Smolensk, a place called Katyn. In this place, where one feels an invisible presence – at first one thinks it is just the effect of sunlight moving through the trees – hundreds of Polish officers were slaughtered and buried in a mass grave by the Soviets in 1939.

The Soviets tried to make the Germans take the blame for this, but in the end there was only one way to make us ‘forget’ Katyn and that was to make the war memorial at Khatyn. The events are confused until there is only one event, made true by the irrefutable evidence of one gigantic statue.

And when you sit down for a drink with that same bald man and he talks about loneliness, well, is it Russian loneliness or Polish loneliness, is it the loneliness of a Catholic or a Jew? Is it the loneliness of the true Marxist? There was even, incredibly, a Soviet boat docked at Warsaw in those years after the war called
The Fairytale …