The Three Magi To Lech Dymarski They will probably come just after the New Year. As usual, early in the morning. The forceps of the doorbell will pull you out by the head from under the bedclothes; dazed as a newborn baby, youll open the door. The star of an ID will flash before your eyes. Three men. In one of them youll recognize with sheepish amazement (isnt this a small world) your schoolmate of years ago. Since that time hell hardly have changed, only grown a mustache, perhaps gained a little weight. Theyll enter. The gold of their watches will glitter (isnt this a gray dawn), the smoke from their cigarettes will fill the room with a fragrance like incense. All thats missing is myrrh, youll think half-consciously-- while with your heel youre shoving under the couch the book they mustnt find-- what is this myrrh, anyway, youd have to finally look it up someday. Youll come with us, sir. Youll go with them. Isnt this a white snow. Isnt this a black Fiat. Wasnt this a vast world. Along with the Dust (From The Housing Poems) Along with the dust on the books, the fingerprints on all the glass (fragile - do not drop), along with a ration coupon for sugar and a cross to bear (fragile - this side up), Im moving, along with the writing in my lap, the thousands of terms in my head (fragile - remember with care), with an extra thousand zlotys just in case (fragile - do not worry too much), along with a mask of self-confidence and a wound in my back, along with an empty promise and an ill- fitting hope (fragile - to not trust), along with maybe finally and quick hurry up, along with you can depend on it and Im sick to death (fragile - do not die), along with lets begin at the beginning and knock on wood and whats the use, and along with this love thats all that will stay with me for better, for worse, and forever, its fragile, you movers, and its all a lot heavier than it looks To Grazyna To remember about the cigarettes. So that theyre always at hand, ready to be slipped into his pocket, when they take him away once again. To know by heart all the prison regulations about parcels and visits. And how to force the facial muscles into a smile. To be able to extinguish a cops threatening yell with one cold glance, calmly making tea while they eviscerate the desk drawers. To write letters from a cell or a clinic, saying that everythings OK. So many abilities, such perfection. No, I mean it. If only in order not to waste those gifts, you should have been rewarded with immortality or at least with its defective version, life. Death. No, this cant be serious, I cant accept this. There were many more difficult things that never brought you down. If I ever admired anybody, it was you. If anything was ever permanent, it was that admiration. How many times did I want to tell you. No way. I was too abashed by the gaps in my vocabulary and the microphone in your wall. Now I hear its too late. No, I dont believe it. Its only nothingness, isnt it. How could a nothing like that possibly stand between us. Ill write down, word for word and forever, that small streak in the iris of your eye, that wrinkle at the corner of your mouth. All right, I know, you wont respond to the latest postcard I sent you. But if Im to blame anything for that, it will be something real, the mail office, an air crash, the postal censor. Not nonexistence, something that doesnt exist, does it. Dont Use the Word Exile Stand both feet on the solid ground of this moment when the paved street runs up aslant and then it strikes and stings your soles, and, slowing down, with a thud of sneakers inside your high-school briefcase, you swerve toward the curb (those three, exactly three steps), as the streetcar goes on, dragging and grinding, dark-green, along the tangential curve of the tracks, beyond the corner of Mielzyfskiego and Fredry. Hold on stubbornly with the whole surface of your palm to the door handle of the Nojewo railway station, in the summer that smells of rain and cow dung, dont lose your grip on its stout, cylindrical wood, made smooth by local hands, grasp it again and again, feel its looseness and springy resistance. And dont use the word exile, because its improper and senseless. The matter can be looked at from two points of intensive view. Either no one shoved you aside from the cobblestones on which you are still running, in an instant that has lasted until now, no one wrenched the door handle away from your hand that seized it for a second, forever, and you are still there. Or you yourself left them behind, selfishly forsaken even as you set foot on the curb or entered the station, because with every moment one chooses another life. A Second Nature After a couple of days, the eye gets used to the squirrel, a gray one, not red as it should be, to the cars, each of them five feet too long, to the clear air, against which glistens the wet paint of billboards, puffy clouds, and fire-escape ladders. After a couple of weeks, the hand gets used to the different shape of the digits one and seven, not to mention skipping diacritical marks in your signature. After a couple of months, even the tongue knows how to curl in your mouth the only way that produces a correct the. Another couple of months and, while tying your shoelace in the street, you realize that youre actually doing it just to tie your shoelace, and not in order to routinely check if youre not followed. After a couple of years, you have a dream: youre standing at the kitchen sink in the forest cottage near Sieraków, where you once spent vacation, a high-school graduate unhappily in love; your left hand holds a kettle, your right one reaches for the faucet knob. The dream, as if having hit a wall, suddenly stops dead, focusing with painful intensity on a detail thats uncertain: was that knob made of porcelain, or brass? Still dreaming, you know with a dazzling clarity that everything depends on this. As you wake up, you know with equal clarity youll never be able to make sure. After Gloria Was Gone After several hours showing off, the hurricane figured out that it makes no sense to perform on three channels at once as a whistling background for interviews with a local mayor from another disaster area, disrupted by dog-food commercials, and, at the same time, to put on a live show in our street. So much work for nothing? Behind our windowpane, crossed aslant with tape, we waited for the wind to get disheartened, to go on strike, to leave for the north, toward New Hampshire. The door opens to the smell of ozone, wet leaves, and safe adventure. We stop by the knocked-down maple tree that snapped the electric line while falling across the street in front of Mrs. Aarons house. Tapping her cane and still looking not that old, almost like the time when, because she was blond, the nuns were willing to hide her, Mrs. Aaron walks around and calculates the repair costs. On the nearby sidewalk, Mr. Vitulaitis examines the tree trunk thoughtfully, volunteers his help and electric saw for tomorrow, those years of practice in the taiga will come in handy, he jokes. Crushing sticks that lie on the asphalt, here comes the pickup truck of the new neighbor, whats his name, is it Nhu or Ngu, who brakes close to the tree and gets out, surely without recalling the moment when, on the twenty-ninth day, their overcrowded boat was found by the Norwegian freighter. In something like a picnic mood, we all share comments and jokes about the disaster. After all, it wasnt so fierce as the forecasts had warned, no big deal, no big scars; the harm it did to us is a reparable one, and tomorrow, first thing in the morning, therell be another expert visit from the electrician, the sunrise, the insurance inspector. Its time to go back home, remove the crosses of tape from our windows, though we cant do the same to our pasts or futures which have been crossed out so many times. The so-called pranks of nature, Mrs. Aaron sums up disdainfully, and she adds that whoever is interested may inspect the devastation-- as far as shes concerned, shes going in to make some coffee. Setting the Hand Brake In an empty suburban parking lot, setting the hand brake, he wonders what it actually was that brought him here and why on earth he was never able not to succumb to the clichés of sorrow, familiar to all who practice the invisible craft of exile. There always will be a homeland of asphalt under the chilly streetlamps, a homeland of rusty crossties under a pair of rails, which likewise can count on meeting in infinity only; a homeland that comes along and apart, that rushes forward with him in the canyons of floorboard cracks and lights in strangers windows, and his veins, and trajectories of galactic explosion. What is it that still holds him here, pins him down, encloses him in the circumference of this and not another skin, planet, suburban parking lot. And whence this arrogated, arrogant right to exile, as if it werent true that no one will fall asleep tonight on his own Earth. There will be a homeland somewhere: an involuntarily chosen second of awakening in motion, in the middle of a breathless whisper a comma placed by chance, by mistake, for the time being, forever. Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 07:24:14 +0000
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