The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [101]
We walked the same street we had always walked, stopped for coffee in the same corner café whose menu had not changed in years, although where once we'd ordered ciasta, now we ordered pirozhnoe, which was served in the very same crockery with the very same glass of water. The coins we left on the marble tabletop were different, the table itself, the same.
Then there were the places that had changed everything but their names. After their obliteration, when the cities were rebuilt, Warsaw became Warsaw, Dresden became Dresden, Berlin, Berlin. One could say, of course, those cities had not completely died but grew again from their dregs, from what remained. But a city need not burn or drown; it can die right before one's eyes, invisibly.
In Warsaw, the Old Town became the idea of the Old Town, a replica. Barmaids wore antique costumes, old-fashioned signs were hung outside shop windows. Slowly the city on the Vistula began to dream its old dreams. Sometimes an idea grows into a city; sometimes a city grows into an idea. In any case, even Stalin could not stop the river from entering people's dreams again, the river with its long memory and its eternal present.
Europe was torn up and resewn. In the morning a woman leaned out her kitchen window and hung her wet washing in her Berlin garden; by afternoon when it was dry, she would have to pass through Checkpoint Charlie to retrieve her husband's shirts.
And what of the dead who'd once been lucky enough to own a grave? Surely, at least, if someone died in Stettin, his ghost had a right to remain there, in that past, and was not expected to haunt Szczecin as well …
The dead have their own maps and wander at will through both Fraustadt and Wschowa, both Mollwitz and Malujowice, both Steinau am Oder and Scinawa; through Zlín and Gottwaldov and Zlín again. Down Prague's Vinohradská Street, Franz Josef Strasse, Marshal Foch Avenue, Hermann Goering Strasse, and Marshal Foch Avenue again, Stalin Street, Lenin Avenue, and at last, once again, without having taken a single step and shimmering only through time, Vinohradská Street.
As for one's birthplace, it depends who's asking.
Over the course of the afternoon the coils of knots grew higher, mute and heavy on the floor under the table.
A soup was simmering on the stove. Ewa had brought a roast chicken to Lucjan earlier in the day and now it was crackling in the oven. The light was nearly gone. Lucjan made the fire and lit candles.
He sat on the floor in the “unconscious” half of the house, leaning against the wall, looking at the tangle of knots, their afternoon's work, from a distance. Jean was reading a textbook quietly at the kitchen table. With false drama, Lucjan whimpered:
– I'm hungry.
Jean looked up from her book.
– What are you reading? asked Lucjan. Is it edible?
– This chapter is about hybrid vigour. But, she smiled, you could say I'm reading about cabbage.
– That's more like it, said Lucjan.
He sat down next to her at the table.
– Did they teach you about the koksagiz widowers at school? When the Germans marched into the Soviet Union, they searched everywhere for rubber plants. Russian women and children were driven into labour camps to harvest the koksagiz fields so even tiny amounts of rubber could be extracted from the roots …
The big high-rise housing development in the southern part of the Muranów district in Warsaw was built on top of what had been the ghetto. There was so much rubble – thirteen feet deep – and we had no machines to clear it. So instead the debris was crushed even further, and the housing built right on top. Then grass was laid down and flowerbeds planted on this terrace of the dead. That's their ‘blood-and-soil garden.’
A few blocks from the School of Architecture, where Avery was working at a desk in the basement, Jean sat with Lucjan and Ranger in the Cinéma Lumière, waiting for the film to start, Les Enfants du Paradis.
Lucjan handed Jean a lumpy bag.
– Baked potatoes with salt, said Lucjan.
Ranger leaned over Lucjan and put his hand into the