The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [82]
‘I'll have bread every day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just for carrying things?’
‘Yes.’
I came back into the room and ate the last bit of crust I'd left for him. I ate everything he had and left him nothing, not a crumb.
Those who had shoes worked in the debris. Those who didn't, helped to draw up plans. It was unspoken, yet everyone clearing the rubble and working on the reconstruction of the city felt it – that when Warsaw was rebuilt, the dead could return. Not only the dead, but mortal ghosts, ghosts of flesh and blood.
After the war it was decided that the oldest district, the Old Town, would be rebuilt – not just built up again but … an exact copy. Every lintel and cornice, every portico and engraving, every lamppost. You can imagine the debate. But in the end, there was agreement: even those who disagreed understood the necessity.
Biegański, Zachwalowicz, Kuzma, and the rest based their plans for this reconstruction of the Old Town – of the market and of Piwna and Zapiecek streets – on Canaletto's paintings of Warsaw in the eighteenth century, on photos, and on the drawing exercises made by Professor Sosnowski's students from the polytechnic. When Sosnowski died during the seige of 1939, the architecture school continued underground. Students crept into the streets to sketch a careful inventory of memorials, statues, and buildings. These sketches were hidden in the cellar at the university. And in 1944, when the university burned, the drawings were saved. They were hidden among a stack of legal papers and were smuggled out of the city and given over to the custody of the dead; that is, they were hidden in a tomb at Piotrków monastery. Professor Lorentz's students made night raids to the ruins of the royal castle and carried to safety anything with architectural detail – the panelled doors of the chapel, slabs of plaster murals and marble fireplaces, window frames – thousands of bits and pieces.
I know this because I was recruited. I was small and fast and I had no one who cared about me. Therefore, I was of some use. At night I went along on these scavenging hunts, and afterwards they fed me. I collected door handles, bits of ironmongery, and stone ornaments in exchange for bread and shelter. I learned a lot, listening to those students, about all sorts of things. Nobody paid any attention to me, I was only twelve years old. I overheard many conversations – about democracy and weight-bearing walls and what books to read and, ‘if a woman is present she must always be offered the first swig from the flask.’ There must have been a lot of useful suggestions about sex, if only I'd understood what they were talking about. When I lived among the students of the polytechnic, there were so many liaisons, the passions were so fluid, so messy, so adult; I watched it happening around me, only later, when I was older, did I take part in it myself. And much later, when I was in my twenties, I eavesdropped again, on Ewa and Paweł's theatre tribe – everyone trying to find a home. With the polytechnics, I usually sat in the corner listening and fell asleep as soon as they gave me my bread, and they never turned me out. I owe those students so much, many people whose names I never knew. They taught me everything. What to read and how to argue about what you read. How to look at a painting. An entire education.
But most important to me of all the polytechnics was a student named Piotr. His father was British, and everyone gathered around him to learn a few English words. I think everyone felt as I did – leaning forward to catch the scraps – hungry for a world outside. He taught us first of all the names of boats, because he loved sailing: skiff, yacht, rowboat, ferryboat, steamer. This was not Polish or Russian but a bitter, clean language of escape. One could pronounce almost any English word with one's teeth clenched. There were no jsz's and cj's or ł's to loosen one's resolve. Piotr's most valuable possession was a Polish-English