The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [93]
Paweł always brought along to these meetings his little white dog with the pointed snout – a white cone ending in a black plug. Jean watched as the dog ate daintily from Paweł's hand. One certainly could not call Paweł his “master,” for in every gesture the man revealed his solicitude. In cold weather the dog wore a dignified navy-blue knitted coat. In summer, Paweł carried a flask of water and he cupped his hand so the dog could drink.
It was this little dog, their mascot, for whom the men named their orchestra, also referring to a certain café in St. Petersburg frequented before the wars by outlawed poets. It was their sad little Soviet joke; another way of hiding; a dilapidated homage; a wave across the abyss. It sat uncomfortably, just the way they preferred things. For a time they considered keeping the name they were known by in Warsaw, the Hooligans, but in the end it made them too sad and they left, like everything else, the name behind.
Lucjan and Jean walked through the darkly glinting, rain-soaked streets to listen to the Stray Dogs at the Door with One Hinge, a club open only on Saturday nights.
– In Warsaw, said Lucjan, kicking along the gutters gleaming with wet leaves, Paweł and Ewa had their own theatre. It was in their flat, a show once a week, and they were raided all the time. That was before such incredible theatre companies as Pomarańczowa Alternatywa, Orange Alternative. Ewa and Paweł were the vanguard, with all their escapades – street theatre with entire plays that lasted only five minutes and dispersed before the police came, or epics that took place in a series of pre-arranged places throughout the city over the course of a day. Now Ewa designs sets for all the small theatres here. Sometimes I paint for her. Some people are outsiders, no matter how long they've lived in a place, and no matter what they achieve, and others simply find the current and step into it no matter where they are; they always know what's being talked about, who's thinking what, where the next thing is coming from. Ewa's like that – an iconoclast supreme. When Warsaw was being rebuilt at top speed, she organized a monthly beauty pageant for the most attractive building, a model of which was crowned the new “Mr. Warsaw” at a ceremony staged every month in their flat.
Ewa enlists not only her husband, Paweł, but all the Dogs to help her. For a production of Godot, we made more than fifty trips to the ravine collecting bags of autumn leaves; for days Paweł drove back and forth from the park to the theatre – a room above a printer's shop – his Volkswagen bug crammed full. Their children helped empty the bags onto the floor of the theatre and they ran about with hair dryers until the leaves were bone-dry and brittle. By the time the play opened, the theatre was waist deep and the whole room trembled with each step. An eternity of leaves from Beckett's two bare trees in the middle of the room. For Brecht's Chalk Circle, Ewa used stones that Paweł, the Dogs, and I hauled from the lake. All the small theatres love Ewa because her sets never cost them a cent.
Lucjan and Jean would start out at 10 or 11 p.m. to meet up with the Stray Dogs, who would be starving after a night's work. Until it became too cold, they liked to picnic on the bourgeois billiard-table lawn of the Rosehill reservoir, with a view of the city in every direction. They'd eat cold potatoes and cheese, sweet bread and sour plums. Ewa and Paweł would come after one of Ewa's plays, with Paweł's little dog, who darted, a firefly, through the dark grass. Platters of food were passed from hand to hand, flasks of tea. The men stretched out and looked at the stars. Jean lay there too, in the green chill of the grass. In the darkness she listened to the stories, the resentments, the regrets … the enticing glance a woman gave, in passing,