566
PARTISAN REVIEW
Your letter, which reached me just before the trip, was a lifeline in
moments when the dizziness intensified; in moments when there was
only a definite absence of my imaginary picture of those places, when
instead, there were only the long lines in gray raincoats; in moments of
awful loneliness, when there was no one to shout at; in moments when I
didn't believe I could finally get on the train and leave that madness
behind.
How
to
tell, and wasn't there any chronology? How to live that over
again?
Wroclaw. A dreary city and a theater festival. I was ejected into the
darkness in the heart of an empty field. That's how it began. Night in the
hotel. An enormous radio, and voices from Russian, Polish, Czech, and
Hungarian stations. Stifling heat from the furnace, the chambermaid, a
blond Gentile woman, fills the bathtub for me. In the soap box and in the
closet are roaches. A strife-torn night in dreams and a grayish morning.
The outside was stopped by the curtains. Crowds of people with rubbed–
out faces. A few old cars. Awful cold. Fog.
How to leave the room and go into that reality? How to be a "tourist"
in it?
Wroclaw. In the display windows rows of laundry soap in coarse pack–
ages. Cooperative restaurants smelling of cabbage and sweat. In the festival
offices full ashtrays, organizers with sleepless faces. And then a writers' cafe,
in Kosciuszko Square, and it was as if I had come to a kind of Jerusalem
before I was born, from the thirties, a Jerusalem I lived from books. With
that blend of provincialism and culture. Waitresses dressed in black with
starched aprons, newspapers in wooden frames, cigarette smoke, grave dis–
cussions about art, literature, politics, metaphysics. The soft tones of a
language that is so familiar, so close. The intonations, the gestures, the
exci ted seriousness.
An international festival-a few days of devotion to joy, before the
regime returns to its everyday gray.
And
I,
a stranger at the celebration. Only an "alibi" for another mis–
sion, which no one in fact has assigned to me. Yes, a few addresses for it's
impossible-not-to-accept-wi th-a-Ietter-to-take before setting out. Backs
of houses, yards, covered with trash and rubble. Staircase supported by
boards. Number 72, apartment 9A. Two old people in the doorway. A
kitchen black with soot. Examining me, the letter, with a scared look.
Sneaking back to the ongoing celebration. Just so they won't find out.
It's only because of sloppiness that they haven't yet arrested me.
And then, early one misty morning, wrapped in a coat, at the railroad
station. Among hundreds of people in a line. Buying a ticket to Krakow
with black market Zlotys... to the regions of my real trip.
