The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [77]
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,