ZAGAJEWSKI
401
the city from disaster-although reason forces us to confess that it's had
its share of disasters . The stone's inner thermostat broke, and it submit–
ted to long years of a gray dictatorship kept in place by bureaucratically
gifted Communists.
The birth of a writer: a young man raised in the Catholic faith expe–
riences a dazzling revelation. While praying, he suddenly realizes that he
doesn't necessarily have to repeat what's printed in the missal. He can
invent his own prayer. He can make up his own words.
I
COULD WRITE A GUIDEBOOK
about this city, this fallen city. Street by
street, house by house, church by church. What happened in this build–
ing, who was betrayed, and by whom, in this apartment, who waited for
whom on this street corner. And why the person never came. I could
even play the judge for this occasion and condemn certain acts, censure
certain people. I wouldn't lack for material; if need be, I could head for
the archives and rummage through dusty files in search of compromis–
ing documents. I would be a zealous, incorruptible accuser.
But when I think of years past, when I picture that city, see its inhab–
itants, the passersby crowding its streets and squares, scurrying or sim–
ply strolling, leaping at the last moment onto a moving streetcar or
lounging lazily on park benches or in the Planty gardens on a balmy
April day, I see myself among them. I was there, too. In the Market
Square, on Florianska Street, on Dluga Street; in the old university's lec–
ture halls, in the editorial offices of local journals; I went to theaters, to
the movies (most often to the movies, they were exterritorial, Plato's cozy
caves and, at the same time, the cheapest travel agencies around, expe–
diting worldwide trips for pocket change), met girls, made a living (just
barely). I lived in this city, in Communism, I hopped onto streetcars-as
long as they weren't moving too fast. I wrote poems and stories, I started
publishing books and anxiously awaited the reviews, I wrote reviews of
other people's books. (Young writers behave like public prosecutors
hastily appointed by the revolutionary authorities who itch to give
respected writers of the older generation the hiding they deserve for their
various criminal errors and distortions: all this just in order to survive.
It's easier to outlast the trying period of literary youth in a prosecutor's
toga than in the defendant's box.)
In the sixties, and later, in the seventies, when I had completed my
studies (not without regret), and had to get by somehow, I was fortu–
nate: I wasn't put on trial or thrown into prison, I wasn't harassed by
