Here Is Where We Meet (16 page)

It would have given him pleasure if I had been able to remember the Latin name of just one of them, but there, in his living quarters, lessons were out of the question. So larkspur remained larkspur. In the Green Hut Tyler demanded work and obedience; the smallest sign of what he called slackness would be punished by a rap over the knuckles with a knotted yew branch that hung on a hook beside the cupboard where he kept the rulers and exercise books. In his two living rooms slackness was ignored and he demanded only quiet and company.

He spread honey – given to him by a beekeeping friend – on to a slice of toast, toasted in front of the gas fire, and he offered it to me on a hand-painted plate.

The plate was decorated by a friend of mine, he said. You recognise the plant?

Not yet, Sir.

The flower of the so-called Strawberry Tree.

Strawberries on a tree, Sir?

He didn’t bother to reply.

Tyler made drawings himself. Always with an HB pencil. Sketches of Tudor cottages, churches, driveways, willow trees, sheep, delphiniums. Some of his drawings he had printed on postcards.

Do you sell them, Sir?

I print them for my friends, like this I can offer them a little present.

Nobody can help him, I told myself, as I sat in the wicker chair before his gas fire, rubbing my chilblains and eating my toast and honey. He’s too old and he has too many hairs growing out of his body.

Pasiphae on her two sticks is crossing the reception. People make way for her, and, when she stops to regain her breath, they move around her as if she were a natural landmark. It is her effrontery which puts them at ease.

Did she die?

Who are you talking about? Tyler asked.

I nodded towards a photograph by his bed.

Never, never, talk, he said, about what you see on somebody’s bedside table. Study it if you want to – he picked up the framed photograph and put it in my hands – remember it if you like, but say nothing, for there’s nothing to be said. Nothing.

At last the TV star arrives. People have been standing in the street outside the hotel for almost an hour in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. She is tiny, even smaller than they thought, perfect, with tumbling black hair, wearing silver. Cameras flash on all sides. We all of us hope to find – in this impromptu unscreened moment – something beyond the fame, something which equalises. For example: the fact that she too farts like us. Meanwhile, we are also waiting for the opposite to happen: she has so much perfection, much more than any single person needs, so she could throw some to us!

Tyler takes a pad out of his pocket and begins to draw one of the palm trees in the hotel lounge.

It is at this moment, as he begins to draw, that I remember the weight of his solitude. Perhaps with me, given my age, he felt no need to mask or hide it. Anyway, his glasses magnified the solitude expressed in his eyes. The man who taught me to write was the first person to make me aware of irreparable loss.

Pasiphae is returning on her crutches from the Velásquez bar. Did she have a drink there? When she reaches her chair, she has the problem of lowering herself. Telegonus is at the ready, but it is safer to have a man on each side, so she glances at Tyler, who immediately comes and places one of his huge hands under her colossal elbow.

Are you an artist, Señor?

No, it’s a pastime, Señora.

The TV star, accompanied by a guitarist, has started to sing. The tune is both very young and very old. She sings simply, her eyes almost shut, her silver hips almost still, her lips almost touching the microphone.

On a tree trunk
a young girl jubilant
carved her name . . .
you are she who cut into my bark . . .

Tyler died in his fifties soon after the Second World War.

His death involved a story about a gas fire, or a house burning down, or an accident with a car left running in a garage with the doors shut. I have forgotten the details because they suggested that the methodical, tidy, gruffly shy man, who believed that quality mattered more than anything else in the world, died – or even put an end to his days – through indifference or carelessness. The details are better forgotten.

We’ll be leaving shortly, Circe whispers, standing at his elbow. It’s a big car and there’s plenty of room for your luggage.

I have very little, Señora.

So you will come and draw our horses? Pasiphae asks him.

When you shade a drawing, you do not scribble. Is that clear? You shade carefully, putting one line beside the next and the next and the next. Then you crosshatch and that way your lines weave the sketch together. The verb: to weave. Past participle?

Woven, Sir.

Juan comes up behind me, puts his hands over my eyes and demands: Who is it?

8

The Szum and the Ching

We’ve arrived – if you are with me. We’re going no further. We’ve reached the house with no doorstep in what they call Little Poland.

I often thought the road-signs were telling a fairy tale: Double Bend, Leaping Deer, Cross Roads, Level Crossing, Roundabout, Falling Stones, Steep Hill, Wandering Cattle, Dangerous Corner.

The warnings offered, when compared to the risks of life, seemed to be of a reassuring simplicity.

It’s hard to say what changes in the sky when driving eastwards after Berlin. You begin to notice whatever is vertical against the flatness of the plain in a different way: the wooden fences, a man standing in a field, the occasional horse, the trees in a forest. The distance you see in the sky is no longer saying the same things as before; here it is announcing that, after another few thousand kilometres, the plain is going to become the steppe – and on the steppe distance becomes as dangerous and challenging as altitude in the mountains.

On the steppe trees grow tougher and smaller, just as certain trees do on mountains – the Carpathians to the south for instance – so as to resist the winter. There are birches on the steppe no taller than a dog. On the mountains the ferocious cold is due to the altitude; on the steppe it is due to the distances, the horizontal extent of the continent.

After crossing the Oder this extent, this extension, is promised, even if not yet there. The sky is making a new proposition to the earth.

I am heading eastwards on my bike along the main road, which joins Warsaw and Moscow. The traffic in both directions is heavy. In a few years’ time this will be a motorway. The road skirts or crosses many forests. Northern ones, in which the summer light is green and the trunks of the spruces as they grow taller become more and more a feathery orange colour. What coral is to fishes, the tops of these red spruces may be to birds.

The number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.

Young women are standing on the shoulder of the road, dressed to kill, hips thrust to the side, beckoning to the drivers coming westwards. A man driving an old, battered 123 Mercedes has stopped. The Poles call this car a beczka, which means a barrel. The driver, who is Ukrainian, also looks like a barrel. Most of the girls are Romanian. The services are paid for in dollar bills.

OK, she says, holding out her hand for the money.

Afterwards, he says, refusing to pay now. What’s your name?

In her backless dress, she shrugs her shoulders.

He points to himself, stubbing his chest with his thumb. Mickhail, he says, I’m called Mickhail. You?

She shakes her head and examines her face in the driving mirror.

Your name?

She replies with the English phrase, used in all situations when she reckons it’s best to withdraw. I dunno, she says.

Fed up, he opens the door of the car and she has to get out. Whereupon he drives off fast, making the tyres slip and throw up dust.

Another young woman walks out from behind the trees. She is holding the hand of an elderly man who is wearing a felt hat with a feather in it. The two girls work this little stretch of forest together.

Hi! Lenuta! the one with the old man calls out to the one who had no luck with the Ukrainian. Do you know what the bastards have done?

What?

They have pinched his car. I take him into the forest. I bring him back and it’s gone. A new BMW 525.

Is he blaming you?

He’s German and I fear he may have a heart attack.

He’s paid you? Lenuta asks.

The other one nods.

Then leave him!

The other one pulls a face and shrugs her shoulders.

So give him to me, says Lenuta, and go and see Janey – maybe Evgen knows something about the car.

The man sits down on the ferns. He stares at his boots and puts a hand on his chest. Lenuta takes off his hat with the feather in it and, holding it by the brim, fans him. It’s 40° C.

An old woman accompanied by a small boy emerges from the forest. Her fingers and thumbs are stained purple. The boy is carrying a supermarket carrier-bag. They have been picking blueberries. And in a moment the boy will sit on the roadside with four one-litre jars, filled with the black fruit they have gathered.

I have a friend who is an ethologist. Not long ago she worked for years with the wolves in the Białowieƶa forest, about 200 kilometres east from here. Over many months, patiently and fearlessly, she sidled up to the wolves until they accepted her, until their curiosity became keener than their wariness. Her name is Despina. Early one morning the pack-leader, whom she called Siber, approached and showed her he wanted her to follow him. She complied. He led her slowly, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure she was following, through the undergrowth of the forest, to the lair in the earth, where his she-wolf had given birth to their cubs. By now they were two weeks old, and on the morning in question the mother was about to bring them out of the lair to introduce them for the first time to the rest of the pack, three other wolves who were there in front of Despina, waiting for the encounter. Siber and his mate called the cubs out. Yuuuer . . . yuuer . . . yuue. One by one they emerged, eyes searching. After they are three weeks old cubs become suspicious of any creature who is not recognisable as a member of the pack, so this was the moment for them to meet. And Siber wanted Despina to witness that moment.

Not too close to the girls, the grandmother warns her grandson with his jar of blueberries. Keep away from the Romanian girls, otherwise when there are women in the cars they won’t let their men stop.

Everybody in this land sells or tries to sell something. Men in their sixties stand on the kerb in the large towns towards evening, holding up a piece of cardboard on which they’ve written the word: POKOJE. They are trying to sell the guest room in their small flat or house for one night to a passing traveller.

Each jar of berries costs eight złoty.

The BMW has been recovered. The elderly German forks out several hundred złoty. He’s wearing his hat with the feather in it again and is minutely examining his car’s tyres -- probably to make sure that they have not been changed.

The roads are straight, the distance between towns long. The sky is making a new proposition to the earth. I imagine travelling alone between Kalisz and Kielce a hundred and fifty years ago. Between the two names there would always have been a third – the name of your horse. Your horse’s name the constant between the names of the towns you approach and the towns you leave behind.

I see a sign for Tarnów to the south. At the end of the nineteenth century Abraham Bredius, the compiler of the first modern catalogue of Rembrandt paintings, discovered a canvas in a castle there.

’When I saw a magnificent four-in-hand passing my hotel and learnt from the porter that it was Count Tarnowski who had become engaged some days before to the ravishing Countess Potocka, who would bring him a considerable dowry, I had little idea that this man was also the fortunate owner of one of the most sublime works by our great master.’

Bredius left the hotel and made a long and difficult journey by train – he complained that for miles the train travelled at a walking pace – to the Count’s castle. There he spotted a canvas of a horse and rider, which he unhesitatingly attributed to Rembrandt, considering it a masterpiece that had been forgotten for a century. It was given the title of The Polish Rider.

Nobody today knows precisely who or what the painting represented for the painter. The rider’s coat is typically Polish – a kontusz. Likewise the rider’s headgear. This is probably why the painting was bought by a Polish nobleman in Amsterdam, and taken to Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.

When I first saw the painting in the Frick Collection in New York, where it ended up, I felt it might be a portrait of Rembrandt’s beloved son, Titus. It seemed to me – and it still does – a painting about leaving home.

A more scholarly theory suggests that the painting may have been inspired by a Pole, Jonaz Szlichtyng, who, during Rembrandt’s time in Amsterdam, was something of a rebel-hero in dissident circles. Szlichtyng belonged to a sect that followed the sixteenth-century Sienese theologian Lebo Sozznisi, who denied that Christ was the son of God – for, if he were, the religion would cease to be monotheistic. If the painting was inspired by Jonaz Szlichtyng it offers an image of a Christlike figure, who is a man, only a man, setting out, mounted on a horse, to meet his destiny.