(Following on from last post.) Wilda as destination. Near-deserted streets. With their art nouveau facades, some being renovated, under wraps, flapping slightly, covering them like ball gowns, hiding the scarred surfaces before the renovation work is complete. For some the process is already finished, freshly painted and smoothed facades and in one – inside the hallway, the ceiling is painted in patterns resembling wood, different shades of wood, pieces fitted together like secret sliding boxes.
The stair banister is smooth unpainted wood, like a tree fresh from the forest, planed and shaped and it curls its way up the flights of stairs. The walls are light beige and someone has pulled finger marks down them in a darker shade of paint as if they had lost their balance and half slid down the stairs. Someone did that deliberately J says. But the stairwell and the whole block of flats is quiet, as if holding its breath. An absence of people. Then we see one person, one inhabitant, who passes us on the entrance steps and makes her way very slowly up the stairs, her hand on the smooth new banister.
Another street, more like a courtyard, though with a weed-filled, empty area just beyond. There is no through way so we walk to the end, and then back. Some houses look unoccupied. One has an outside stairway, the top balcony festooned with flowers. A woman stands at the top, beside her potted flowers, watching us as we walk back.
On the corner, a tall old building and beside it, an even taller tree. Next to it, a small fenced garden, untended, overgrown. The house is covered with a dull yellow ochre plaster, and the wall facing the tree is pitted and pockmarked. From the war says J. The front of the house looks out onto the street but to the back, there’s the weed-filled area, abandoned looking but probably, says J, earmarked for future building projects.
This ancient mighty house, which has seen so much, which has watched the tree next to it grow from sapling to close companion, spreading shade, turns its back on the scruffy weed-covered empty lot. But high up, some of the plaster has come away, revealing a small patch of half-timbered wood, among red bricks. Just a very small patch, just a glimpse of how it must once have looked, stately, almost austere because of its statuesque proportions. But thoroughly familiar and beloved by its occupants, each brick and wood-crossed path embedded in their minds, turning life into that jagged jig-saw pattern, the geometry of time and life. Anywhere more functional, less decorative, less beautifully crafted, which in later life they had to live in, must have left areas nestled into by memories, a soft regret, nostalgia like the ache of bones that comes and goes, weather-dependent, stiffening the limbs in winter cold, ah my nostalgia is playing up today, old darkened wood with its criss-crossing making diamond shapes of my childhood. And the red and sun-warmed brick, heating skin and heart, limbs and all the senses, though we didn’t know it then, you hardly ever do, until it’s gone.
The heat, beauty, geometry of childhood summers are dripped into our bones and there they stay. Other summers may be more ornate, with more variety of scents and foliage and sea, but the original geometry has settled like silt or sand, becoming the grit of who we are. On bitter winter days, nostalgia forms its crystals of longing on our bones and we ache on the present pavement of our lives, a red and yellow thread of brickwork and wood and heavy sunlight tugging at us, slowing us down on the flat pavements and the drab and starchy tight-fitting plaster covers over buildings. Plaster that is dulled and stained by age, and gouged by missiles in the war – bullets, shell fragments, who knows what kind of bitter missiles struck the house walls, broke the door frames, shattered windows.
The aches tend to disappear as we walk along, the stings and echoes of the past are drowned out in the traffic sounds, the rattle of the trams.
In our part of town too, there are preserved memories of the past. But I might never have seen them, could have walked past them without noticing, if J hadn’t pointed one out to me. In a strip of greenery between two streets, a public park, a concrete block, stained with time, tree and leaf shadows thrown across it so it vanishes into leaf-green, bark brown and grey lichen. Except for an arrow painted white, a straight line, then pointing downwards. With Luftschutz written above it.
And one day, when these air raid shelters are open to the public, J and I follow the arrow and go underground. Into a dimly-lit tunnel, a museum, with artefacts from the past, sometimes whole, sometimes incomplete. Posters and photographs from that time. Medicine cabinet on the wall, a row of hip flasks. Instead of shop window models displaying the latest fashions, here we have models wearing civilian clothes of the 1930s and 40s, or soldiers’ uniforms, gas masks and goggles over their faces. Cumbersome and, one imagines, heavy, these masks are strapped over the head, covering the entire face, sometimes with tubes from the nose and mouth like a foldable elephant’s trunk, sometimes ending with a flat snout to breathe through. Advertisement – exhorting the people to take care of their mask (it could save your life) – and for a handy shoulder bag accessory, to carry it in.
And the language. You go down some steps and find that underground, that past, speaks another language. How must you feel if you dig into your country’s past and find another language? Language may be neutral but this is the language of a past occupier. Does this preservation of the past mean it persists in claiming some sense of belonging? Is this language tainted with the rusted metal, the corroded fabric of the past? Or maybe it is preserved in specific places underground, allowed to remain there, perhaps as warning.
There are other versions of the past, linked to the pock marks on the mustard-grey walls, that are not plaster smooth with nostalgia but jagged and rough to the touch but you cannot keep your fingers from touching them, like the edge of a wound (but no closer) with dread of their return, like the thud-tramp of marching feet.
Cover your ears, then they won’t exist. From the open window in J’s flat I hear the pianist across the way, snatches and phrases of music, repeated, improvised – this music drifts across the heart’s landscape, calms fears, obliterates the memories of marching feet. This music brings melody and the best of the sunlit alleys of the past into this present, mixed with the rustling of linden and sycamore leaves.
*
Times dip, bob, surface, sink, melt into each other. The emptiness of Wilda’s rynek, the market square. The emptiness of gardens in front of a grand red brick building; yet they are full, full of trees and sunshine, but this ache now is not for the past but for the present, this emptiness and loveliness of trees.
And for this cloud filling half the sky, deep slate blue and purple, and the premonition of it, advancing like something that will smother you despite the sunshine and despite the deep green trees against the red brick church forming such harmony you would hurl yourself into it forever if you could.
So we walk towards the city, on through streets leading to the converted brewery, now a shopping centre, and this we find is where all the people are. The people who were absent from the streets, from the buildings being renovated, from the market place, from the green gardens and the graceful red and white building, they are all here, bees to the honeypot, bees to the swarm, for there are few solitary bees, who choose to live outside the hive, some yes, but only a few. This converted building is red and solid, angular brick and streamlined curving metal. We are with people, among people, a sudden breathless surge of people in this red ship waiting to set sail and inside, a circular wooden floor.
Have you ever seen a shopping centre like this? J asks. No, not even in dreams – this wooden floor, this burnt-red brick. We take the escalator to the top floor which opens out onto a terrace, dotted with cafe tables.
And whatever happened to the dark and slate blue cloud? The sky is clear blue, shimmering with light. The present has returned like a long awaited carnival. Absences of past have been stuffed with present flowers, those crevice fillers – yellow and pink, on their tufts of golden grass. The marigolds of memory, that help the air to fill the lungs, help us to breathe without fear.
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