572
PARTISAN REVIEW
emptinesses of now. How to go on living in a world that has turned into
the enemy. With the fear stamped in the blood. With the constant para–
noia.
"Arbeit machtJrei."
How to live within the world and outside it. In the
flow of its life and in the flow of other life and eterni ty. How to go on
nevertheless believing in man, how to take the beloved head in the arms.
In the afternoon light, trivial thoughts pass through the head.
Impossible
to
pretend suffering; that would be hypocrisy. Impossible to go
back to the past-clinging or accusing-that would be the triumph of the
past. There is no escape from the constant questions to be asked now,
impossible to flee from them to the images frozen in the photos.
And in Warsaw, in the Ghetto, there aren't even any ruins where the
imagination can take hold for a moment. There are no stones that are
emitted outside of time. Only concrete blocks built a few feet above the
ground, above the ruins and the mounds of corpses that weren't even
cleared away. To hold your head in your hands and shout. Life goes on. Cars
in parking lots, a few poplar trees on the sidewalks. And that emptiness.
Only the lip service of a memorial with the pathos of socialist realism, and
a Jewish museum behind the building of the Communist party. The direc–
tor of the museum and his secretary, two Jews with bowed heads, show me
a building excavation out the window. "Here was the great synagogue of
Warsaw." And the cleaning woman smiles like an accomplice in a crime,
points at the exit to the guest book full of emotional comments. Gray
cement boulevards and gigantic statues of soldiers with forged chins.
Impossible to believe that there was once a different life here. Only in the
nationalized
Desa
stores are scores ofJewish objects. Hanukkah lamps, syn–
agogue menorahs, spice boxes. Objects with price tags. No, there is
nowhere to return. The whole thing is only a delusion. Deceptions of the
imagination. In my head, crushed fragments of all the artistic creations
resound, the assemblies, the recitations that tried to convey the other real–
ity to me, and they only increase the distance.
The rain doesn't let up. An awful cold penetrates the clothes, makes
you shiver. Warsaw-a gray horizon by day, and gray in the pale neon lights
at night. The trip back seems like an illusion, like opening the camp gate
and being outside. The unbearable loneliness, the unrelenting stifling.
Only the friendship of my acquaintances, Polish theater people, sup–
ports me in the hours before the departure. Figures between reality and
dream. Alicia in her theatrical clothes, waving her hands like a Chekhov
character. And Andrzej with ironical humor, in fragments of literary
French, with the credo from Communism to the surrealism of
Witkiewicz. Fervent confessions in small apartments, when tomorrow is
unknown, and only the dream is left. Like the awakening appreciation for
Bruno Schulz, thirty years after he perished, like worshipping the theater,
