Krakow Melt (16 page)

Kurva
.

We came to another impasse, still stuck in Nowa Huta. A crowd gathered around Arka Pana—The Lord’s Ark—the first church in our dear Soviet suburb. The driver could’ve jumped the parking lot median and slipped out the exit on the other side of the crush, but it was clear he wanted to watch for a few minutes.

Watch, I thought, but told him, “Go.”

[It is midnight, 1960, in the City without God. Bishop Karol Wojtyła stands in a barren field, his arms stretched heavenward, giving a midnight Christmas mass to no one, speaking the liturgy in foggy puffs. Behind him, the residents of Nowa Huta are afraid and peer furtively from the windows of their apartment blocks. The bishop knows that the cold may paralyze his throat and that the police may ask him to leave. Still, he continues.]

Tinnitus is often described as a ringing in the ear corresponding to no external sound, but it can be much more. It can be the slooshing of the ocean or an insistent breeze, the chirping of a grasshopper you can’t seem to kill. It can also be much less: an occasional click. Church bells can touch off a variety of sounds, long after they quit swinging.

But the bells were still raising thunder, and we darted down a side street to look for another way downtown. People were now draping their windowsills with yellow and white Vatican flags garnished with a single black ribbon to signify mourning. Behind the flags, pictures of Karol Wojtyła ripped from photo albums and picture frames and
magazyny
, printed dot matrix from the Internet, and painted lovingly in oils. Few pictures showed him wearing vestments; now that he was dead, he was allowed to be human again. People were allowed to scream and tear the hair off their arms and beat recycling boxes with trash cans.

You could tell that they had been craving this national communion for decades.

The Polish word
osoby
has a much different feeling than its English equivalent, “people.” It’s more of a collective than a collection. So tough to explain.

[Midnight Mass, 1966. Still outside in the field, but somewhat formalized with a portable podium and altar, and a microphone and speakers hooked up to a diesel generator. Archbishop Wojtyła no longer addresses only God, speaking instead to the thousands assembled before him. “
Nie bój si
. Nie l
kajcie si
!
” But Nowa Huta is long past the point of fear, now that the community has hired a professional architect to draft blueprints for an illegal church. “It is real now that it is on paper,” says a man in the crowd.

“No,” the Archbishop counters, “it is real when you gather out here in the cold. You are the rock on which Peter built his church.”

“Peter’s rock is a political machine, and it is going to crush their skulls,” the man says, blowing cigarette smoke into the sky. This mass is being hijacked by people who would later become members of the
Solidarno
movement. They were hoping to give each other the best Christmas present ever—a revolution.

Now we were parked in the middle of Tyniecka Street, surrounded by
osoby
gathered to see the house where Karol once hid from the Nazis.

Witaj Królowo nieba i Matko lito
ci

Witaj nadziejo nasza, w smutku i z´ało
ci

You typically heard this chant when your
babcia
died. Your family would go hoarse repeating it, to keep the sobs at bay. Swallow. You heard this when sadness and emphysema took your
dziadek
, when they told you, in every possible grammatical way, so there would be no confusion. Exhale.

But I never heard this hymn when my mother died. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear a fucking thing in the days and weeks and years that followed.

It sounded as if Radio Maryja had turned its mics to the window to broadcast the sound of mourners spilling into the streets in greater numbers, shuffling, roaming aimlessly. Refrains dropped off and resumed again out of nowhere. The sound of thirty-eight million people destined to get lost in each other’s grief.

The announcer didn’t dare play any recorded music. Who could presume to choose the right soundtrack for a night like this?

“Turn here,” I told the driver. We were in Kraków, but still nowhere near the gallery. The meter was running up a fortune, and with this one deft move, I knew we could bypass St Stanislaus, St Michael, St Florian, St Francis of Assisi, the Papal Stone of the Blonia Commons, and anywhere else troublemakers were likely to gather that night.

“That will be worse,” he said, glancing at me in a rearview mirror choked with plastic rosaries. “You’re telling me we’ll be able to get within a kilometre of St Mary’s Basilica?”

He had a point. It’s national lore that when young Karol finished a work day at the quarry mines, he would stop by St Mary’s to soak up the stained glass. It’s no secret he was a Queen of Poland junkie.

“Just do something,” I said. “We can’t go straight.”

“Why not, Mr GPS?” The driver was miffed, and popped the clutch on purpose, jerking us both forward.

“Because that’s where the Solvay chemical factory was,” I said. Where Karol had bottled poison as a young man. Kraków is crows, but it’s also nostalgia. We were navigating through a landmine of sacred sites.

“Give me a better reason.”

“Because you’re not getting a fucking
grosz
from me if you go straight.”

“Then I’ll take you right to the police station.”

It was 8:45. If my gallery audience hadn’t dispersed into the slipstream of mourners, they would still be waiting for me to set London ablaze. Frustration was making me peel my lips with my teeth.

It wasn’t the taxi driver that was getting to me. It was the noise. You could hear that this death was going to change things permanently.

Medically speaking, subjective tinnitus makes no sense.

Researchers give these sufferers of phantom crickets and whistles a sample sound to listen to, a gauge to measure the buzz that’s slowly driving them
zwariowane
. Here lies the contradiction: patients focusing on the sample can often hear it below five decibels, rendering their internal hummingbirds and cicadas undetectable, but when focussing on the tinnitus and ignoring the sample, the same
osoby
claim insect symphonies of seventy decibels—as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

Do you see what I mean? Tinnitus is impossible to measure.

It may sound strange, but even with this din, there was still too much silence in my life. Missing speech. To this day, it kills me not to know all that my mother screamed from the fire. “Tell him.” Maybe she’s behind every inferno I plan, a wraith wrapped in a bed sheet, a spook in a shawl of embers. Invisible and mute, with a swatch of duct tape over her mouth. It’s almost as if I’m waiting for her to make an appearance and to shout a little louder this time. What did she want to tell me? I’m a child in Lourdes, with my sister, waiting for Mother Mary to materialize in a rainbow blur and take us by surprise. But most of all, I need to know if we’re alone in this world. I need to know if the apparition can ever happen or if it’s just a stupid dream.

And I need to know if the sister—Dorota, I mean—is for real.

Do we really need relationships if they end up causing us agony? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’re merely conversations with fellow travellers carried on for far too long.