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PARTISAN REVIEW
raises her head wrapped in a turban to us: "Yes, Groner, saw it once...maybe
there."
r
still hold on, persist in reading the names, seeking under piles of
leaves. But the limping doorman and the gatekeeper behind him are
already hurrying out. We didn't find. No maps. No books. No witnesses.
Mission impossible. Only a delusion of a mission. And time is limited.
Meanwhile on the bench the number of idlers and "rabbis" waiting
for the "American delegation" has grown. According to the doorman, they
are already in Krakow and will arrive very soon. Maybe you can find out
in the hotel when they'll arrive? No, impossible to know.
r
break away
from the doorman, tell him
I'll
come back in a little while, he should beg
the rabbis of the delegation to wait, and
r
hurry to Wawel Castle, for the
visit that was arranged. On the streets people in gray coats, buses, trams.
You can even eat an apple. The body goes on functioning over the abyss
between the worlds. And when I come back from the royal palace, from
the halls with waxed floors whose walls are covered with embroidered
tapestries of feast and forest, devoured by torments of treason, I run down
the slope carpeted with fallen leaves, back to Kazimierz, to my Jews. From
the end of the street, the doorman stumbles toward me. He drops his hands
in a gesture of dismissal: "Well, the American delegation.. .a call came that
they didn't leave America. Well, the fog, they didn't leave America."
Empty. No one there. Even the idlers who were waiting on the bench
have gone home.
Entrusted with the last mission, the doorman rushes me into the com–
muni ty organization offices. Second floor, a smell of boiled potatoes, a few
old people with tin plates and spoons. Even the bright light filtering from
the shutters doesn't bring the scene in the room any closer. Around an
enormous table sit the activists of the "congregation," their chins leaning
on their hands, and their crutches leaning on the chairs. A few old portraits
on the walls. At the head of the table, Mr. Jacobovitch, an irascible Jew,
head of the community organization. The mutual curiosity dies out after
a few sentences, and after
r
am given the travel arrangements, I slip out
impolitely. I also flee from the kosher meal of mashed potatoes on a tin
plate and the ritual washing of the hands in a stained sink, to Sukiennice
Square, to the light, to the fancy cafe wi th red velvet chairs and torte pow–
dered like the cheeks of the Polish women. Here you can shout aloud that
maybe everything is a delusion, that maybe there never were Jews here.
And it was as if a shout burst out of me in the evening, at the perfor–
mance of "The Night of November Ninth" by Wyspianski, directed by
Swinarski. Mythic characters singing against a background of a burning
horizon. The tricolored flag of the revolution waves over the stage, and the
audience is galvanized. A moment of naked yearning for freedom is
revealed, of metaphysical emotion, a moment of a personal world despi te
