The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [78]
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