the border. Snap - the sky. Snap - the clouds. Then he found 1 t
hard t o breathe, a s if h e were abou t to su ffocate.
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He went higher still and reached the tourist trail, where some
young people with knapsacks greeted him as he wiped away the
sweat that was fiooding his eyes, and went on their way. He
actually felt sorry they had gone. He could have told them how
he came here when he was their age, how just over there on the
damp moss he had made love to a woman for the first time; or
he could have shown them where the Olbrichts' windmill had
stood down below, its restless arms a landmark for the village.
He tried to call after them, but there wasn't enough air in his
lungs. His heart was thumping away in his throat, making him
choke. To turn back now would have meant a lost opportunity,
so with a huge effort he went on another few hundred metres
and found himself at the very top, where the border ran. Up
ahead he could see some whitewashed border posts. He was
completely out of breath now; the thin air was clearly not good
for him. He had forgotten that it could be bad for lungs that had
become used to damp sea breezes.
He felt weak as he imagined the return journey. What if I
were to die here, he thought, as he staggered up to the posts. For
some reason this idea seemed funny. To have climbed such a
long way, to have come here half-way across Europe, to have
lived so many years in a port, produced two children, built a
house, loved and been loved , and survived the war . . . He
laughed ou t loud to himself and took a chocolate from his
pocket. He stopped and unwrapped it carefully from the gold
foil, but as soon as he put it into his mouth he knew he would
never swallow it. His body was otherwise engaged. His heart was
counting out a rhythm, his arteries were slackening, his brain
was busy producing the narcotic of a merciful death. He sat
down by a border post with the chocolate in his mouth, the distant circle of the horizon drawing his gaze. He had one foot in the Czech Republic and the other in Poland. He sat there for
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97
about an hour, slowly dying. His final thought was of Erika waiting for him in the car below, and sure to be worrying. Maybe she had informed the police by now. But even she seemed somehow
very far away, at sea level, quite unreal, as if he had dreamed his
entire life. He had no idea exactly when he died, because it
didn't happen all at once, but bit by bit, as everything inside him
gradually fell apart.
The Czech border guards found him as dusk was falling. One
of them tried to find a pulse in his wrist, while the younger
stared in horror at the brown stream of chocolate trickling from
his mouth to his neck. The first one took out his radio and gave
the o ther a quizzical look, then they both glanced at their
watches and hesitated. They were probably thinking about their
supper, for which they'd be late, and about the report they'd
have to write. And then, acting in unison, they shoved Peter's leg
from the Czech to the Polish side. But that wasn't quite enough
for them, because then they gently tugged his whole body northwards into Poland. And, feeling guilty, they went off in silence.
Half an hour later the Polish border guards' torches lit up
Peter. Jesus ! ' cried one of them, recoiling, while the other
instinctively reached for his gun and looked around. There was
total silence; down in the valleys the towns looked like thrown
away chocolate wrappers reOecting the stars. The Poles looked
Peter in the face and whispered to each other. Then, gravely
and silently, they took him by the arms and carried him O'er to
the Czech side.
So, before his soul had departed for ever, this was how Peter
Dieter remembered his death - as a mechanical mo'cment o ne
way, then the other, like teetering on the edge, like standing on
a bridge. And the very last image to appear in his mind as it was
lulled to sleep was the memory of the Christmas crib from
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painted landscape , performing their set mechanical movements.
The wooden people walk along, driving their wooden cows,
with little wooden dogs running by and someone giving a
wooden laugh; higher up a figure with a bucket waves, while
painted smoke streams up into the painted sky, and painted
birds fly blithely westwards. And two pairs of little wooden soldiers carry Peter Dieter's wooden body from one side to the other for all eternity.
R h u b a r b
Marta grows rhubarb behind the house. The small plot is on a
slope and the rows of plants are never straight - they run round
some large stones, and then line up with the rough boundary of
her property. In winter the rhubarb disappears underground
beneath the snow, twists its fleshy stalks and grows in the opposite direction, backwards into its own embryo, its own sleeping roots. Towards the end of March the ground swells and it is
born anew. This year as usual it was small, whitish-green and
soft as a new-born baby's skin. It grew at night, when we could
hear it rustling in the grass, producing tiny waves of sound,
waking the other plants. A day later the vegetable patches were
well established. Marta stood gazing at them with flushed
cheeks - it was as if a sleeping army had arisen, as if soldiers had
sprouted from underground in battle formation. First the crowns
of their heads appeared, then their powerful shoulders and erect
bodies standing to attention, from which a rippling green canopy
would finally unfold.
In May Marta cut down her soldiers with a sharp knife, as if
ordering them to 'stand at ease'. They must have seen her
coming down at them, a large, imposing old woman with a knife
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99
in her hand. I can imagine the rasp of the knife across the firm
stalks, the sour juice on the steel blade.
Marta took bunches of equal length to the vegetable market in
Nowa Ruda and sold them for the first spri ng compote or
rhubarb pie, much missed all winter long.
I helped her tie up the bundles. We set aside the imperfect ,
damaged or too short stems, and later baked a cake on my little
Ukrainian stove.
C o s m o g o n i e s
My favourite philosopher is Archemanes. According to
Archemanes the world was created as a result of the synergy of
two primal forces. He understood these powerful forces to be
both eternal and universal. Their synergy would best he
described as never-ending consumption - one devours the other,
ceaselessly - and the existence of the world is dependent on
this. The first of the two forces is Chthonos, which keeps reproducing, continuously burgeoning and proliferating. The aim of its existence is creation, which it achieves not only by multiplying itself, but also hy producing elements that are not like it, or are even its opposite. So within Chthonos there is constant
growth, blind and automatic - the cannon fodder of existence .
The other force is Chaos, which engulfs Chthonos, completely
consuming and devouring it. Chaos is immaterial; it is a pri nciple of nature that dissolves Chthonos's space as if preying on it.
Without Chthonos it could not exist, and vice versa . Chaos
destroys Chthonos, reducing it to nothi ngness.
The conn ection between these two forces is u n usually
i ntense, and from it arises Chronos - the principle o f nat ure
that could best be compared to the eye of the storm. rt the heart
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of all this consumption, annihilation and destruction, it appears
as an element of calm, like an oasis, almost mirage-like , characterized by constancy, regularity, order, even a certain harmony that brings the world into being. Chronos puts a brake on the
process of consumption and gives it a certain form. On the one
hand it filters the generation of things produced by Chthonos,
grouping them into little islets ordered by time, which is the
essence of Chronos, its fundamental principle; on the other it
weakens the impact of the destruction wreaked by Chaos. At this
point the world and its basic energies come into being.
Chronos gives birth to all kinds of gods. Their fundamental
feature is love (philia). They shine brightly with love, which is
the force they use to try to overcome the hatred (neihos) of the
elements, in order to realize the unified, indestructible, spiritual
nature of the world. To this end they create people, animals and
plants, and endow them with the potential for love.
I told Marta all this while we were tying up the bundles of
rhubarb. When we had finished, Marta told me something like
this: whenever people say 'everything', 'always', 'never', 'every',
you should watch out, because they're really only talking about
themselves - in the real world such generalities don't exist.
I shrugged.
W h o w ro t e t h e l ife of t h e s a i n t a n d
h o w h e h n e w i t a l l
Paschalis stayed at the Martan sisters' convent to write the history of their secret patroness. He was given a separate cell in the farm building, at a distance from the rest of the convent. The cell
was large, warm and comfortable, and had a high window covered at night with wooden shutters, and a broad, heavy writing
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desk with a special hole for an inkwell. Paschalis's window faced
south, so as soon as the winter clouds had floated away, a broad
shaft of light settled in the room, alive with particles of dust and
restless flies. Whenever he felt cold at his desk he stood in the
rays of sunlight and warmed his chilly body. He could see the
chain of gentle mountains that seemed to be rippling in their
own imperceptible dance, and he soon knew every curve of that
unusual horizon, every dip and rise .
Twice a day the nuns left food for him at the door - bread and
boiled vegetables, and wine on Sundays and holy days. Once
every two or three days the prioress came to visit him. They
asked about you,' she said at the start , when he wasn't yet sure
how to set about his work. They asked, so I said you had gone
off alone. Then they said something nasty must have happened
to you on the way, that you must have been attacked by wolves,
and I said no one had seen any wolves round here for years, and
that you must have run away, gone off into the mountains . . .'
'Why did you say that, Mother?' asked Paschalis in amazement.
'I'd rather see you run away and break your vows than lie dead
and bleeding on the ground.' 'I don't know how to start my
work,' he said sadly. The prioress showed him a small book that
was lying on the desk. 'First read this carefully, and you'll come
to know the woman who wrote it. Keep reading it until you
have a detailed awareness of her - what she looked like, how she
moved, the sound of her voice. Then it will be easier fnr you to
understand how to write something similar, and what the reader
wants to know.'
So Paschalis began by reading the book. At first he found it
boring, and he didn't understand much of it, because his Lat i n
wasn't too good. But then h e noticed with amusement t hat the
saint's Latin left much to be desired - there were Czech, German
and Polish words stuck in it, like raisins in the nuns· cakes.
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Gradually he began to nnd in Kummernis's writing the same
longing that he bore in his own heart - the yearning to become
someone else - and that heartened him.
The book was strange, because it could be read from both
ends at once. In one direction it was entitled Hi laria, but if
turned upside down it began again as Tristia - joys and griefs. In
the middle of the book, between the two parts, there were some
extra pages written in a different colour of ink, entitled Teachings
for prayer.
There was another reason for Paschalis's lack of concentration - he was drawn to the life of the women on the other side of the wall. Sometimes he could hear their voices and the patter
of their sandals. At mealtimes he would stand by the door and
listen for the moment when the gentle tap of crockery against
the Oagstones announced that there was a woman on the other
side of it. Yet he never had the courage to open it. He only left
his cell at night when the echoes of life in the convent had died
down. He was allowed to do this and to walk along one authorized route - from his cell to the chapel housing the picture of the crucified Kummernis. Gradually the saint's fair, naked breasts
started to arouse desire in him. He dreamed of nestling his face
between them . Sometimes he dreamed of something more
painful too, something to do with Celestyn, which he knew to be
sinful and forbidden, and he would test out these fantasies on
himself at night, cuddling up to the coarse blanket and investigating his own hesitant body.
In Hi laria the first fragment to capture his attention read: 'I
could lie down on the ground and spread my arms and legs
wide, and thus lie waiting until Your sky was filled with sunlight
which would fall upon me, caressing my belly and breasts.'
That was how he first imagined her, lying on a gentle, grassy
mountain slope behind the convent among the brightly blooming
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sow thistles, whose colour dazzled Paschalis. He wiped away the
image. Now she lay surrounded by grass and a vast, clear sky. Her
body was like a cross laid out on the hillside, like a sign that said,
'Look, look over here ! ' Down below people were walking along
the road, driving oxen, dogs were running about, a man burst into
sudden laughter, the little bells tinkled on the sheep's necks,
higher up a man carried a hare he'd caught; he waved. Smoke
from the chimneys drifted into the sky, and birds new blithely
westwards, Paschalis could see all this.
He thought about what it would be like to lie down on top of
; someone who is defenceless on the ground with their arms and
legs spread wide, to press his entire weight against that body, to
fall on it and snuggle into it . . . And then what? Paschalis didn't
know. At night he rolled the blanket up into a long bolster, laid it
on the ground and imagined that there was a woman's body lying
beneath him, filled to the brim with warmth, soft and hard all at
once, alive and trembling. He would carefully climb on top of it,
his breathing becoming shallow and fitful, as if he were suddenly
deprived of air, and lie there, feeling no relief. All he could think
of was to pin this body to the ground. Afterwards, as he lay in bed
getting his breath back, he thought about Kummerniss father and decided he must surely have felt the same way.
'What nonsense,' the prioress said indignantly next day and
,
Paschalis felt ashamed that he had been so bold as to confide in
her. 'I didn't give you refuge and food for you to invent such
things. When you feel hungry, eat. When you feel lonely, pray
Have you read the Teachings for prayer yet ?'
Yes, he had read them , but he could n't understand them.
What did it mean, not to think of anything, he wondered . How
was it possible? He stood at the window in the shaft o f light and
inspected his thoughts. They seemed to be everywhere. commenting on the landscape he could sec outside the window.
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remarking, Oh look, a cloud, trees, mountains, see what a
shadow they cast on the grassy pastures. And when he closed his
eyes, his thoughts changed, but went on coming: I'm hungry, is
it time for my meal yet, what's that noise from above, is someone
running, who's the tall nun who milks the cows in the evening?
Or else he saw images: the prioress's attentive face, the faint
moustache on her upper lip, her big toes sticking out of her
sandals, the curtain in front of Kummemis's picture, the body on
the cross, a dead fly in the holy water. How can you not think?
Sometimes Paschalis fel t like a prisoner in his cell. H is legs
craved movement, and he gazed longingly at the mountains outside. He was sorry he had never seen cities or palaces, or churches that seem to touch the sky. Far away to the south the
Pope was busy holding council with the synod on how to save