Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time. That industrialization and capitalism would require such a transport of men on an unprecedented scale and with a new kind of violence was already prophesied by the opening of the slave trade in the sixteenth century. The Western Front and the First World War with its conscripted massed armies was a later confirmation of the same practice of tearing up, assembling and concentrating in a ‘no-man’s-land’. Later, concentration camps, around the world, followed the logic of the same continuous practice.
If, as Berger writes, ‘to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments’, then we are all in great need of new maps.
Tom Overton, 2016
IT WAS NOT a hotel. It was a kind of pension where, at the most, there were four or five guests. In the morning breakfast on a tray was placed on a shelf in the corridor: bread, butter, honey and slices of a sausage which is a specialty of the city. Beside the tray, packets of Nescafé and an electric water heater. Contact with the severe and serene young women who ran the place was minimal.
In the bedrooms all the furniture, made of either oak or walnut, was old and must have dated from before the Second World War. This was in the only Polish city which survived that war without serious destruction to its buildings. In the pension, as in a convent or a monastery, there was a sense inside each room that the two windows which gave on to the streets had been contemplatively looked through for several generations.
The building was situated on Miodowa Street in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Kraków. After breakfast I asked a young woman behind the reception desk where the nearest bankomat was. She regretfully put down the violin case she was holding and picked up a tourist map of the city. On it she marked in pencil where I had to go. It’s not far, she sighed, as if she would have liked to send me to the other side of the world. I bowed discreetly, opened and shut the front door, turned right, took the first right again and found myself in the Place Nowy, an open market-square.
I HAVE NEVER been in this square before and I know it by heart, or rather I know by heart the people who are selling things in it. Some of them have regular stalls with awnings to keep the sun off their goods. It is already hot, hot with the blurred, gnat heat of the Eastern European plains and forest. A foliage heat. A heat full of suggestions, that does not have the assurance of a Mediterranean heat. Here nothing is certain. The nearest thing to certainty here is a grandmother.
Other sellers – all of them women – have come from the outlying villages with their own produce in baskets or buckets. They do not have stalls and are sitting on stools they brought with them. A few stand. I wander between them.
Lettuces, red radishes, horseradishes, cut dill like green lace, small knobby cucumbers which in this heat grow in three days, new potatoes, their skins, with a little powdered earth on them, the colour of grandchildren’s knees, stick-celery with its cleansing toothbrush smell, cuttings of liveche, which the men, drinking vodka, swear is an incomparable aphrodisiac for women as well as men, bunches of young carrots swapping fern jokes, cut roses mostly yellow, cottage cheeses, which the rags pegged to the clothes line in their gardens still smell of, wild green asparagus that the children were sent to look for near the village cemetery.
The professional traders have naturally acquired all the trading tricks for persuading the public that golden opportunities never come twice. The women on their stools, by contrast, propose nothing. They are immobile, expressionless, and rely on their own simple presence to guarantee the quality of what they have brought to sell from their own gardens.
A wooden fence around a plot and a two-roomed house made from logs with a single tiled stove between the two rooms. These women live in chatas like this.
I wander between them. Different ages. Different builds. Eyes of different colour. No two women wearing the same kerchief. And each one of them has found, as she bends down to cut chives or pull out dog-tooth weed or pick red radishes, her own way of protecting, of favouring, the small of her back, so that its intermittent aches do not become chronic. When they were younger it was their hips which absorbed the shock of events, now it is their shoulders which have to do so.
I peer into the basket of a woman who is standing without a stool. The basket is full of pale golden pastries, little pies. They look like carved chessmen, more specifically like castles, castles that could be stood either way up, their regular embrasures always at the top. Each one is ten centimetres tall.
I pick up one of the castles and realise my mistake. It is far too heavy to be made of pastry.
I glance up at the face of the woman. Sixty years old, blue-green eyes. She looks back at me severely, as if at an idiot who has once again forgotten something. Oscypek, she says slowly, repeating the proper name of a cheese made from the milk of mountain sheep and smoked in the chimney between the two rooms. I buy three. Then, with the smallest gesture of her head, she suggests I get on my way.
In the centre of the square stands a low building, subdivided into small, round shops. There is a barber’s with just enough space for one chair. Several butchers’. A grocer’s where you can buy pickled cabbage from a single barrel. A kitchen for soup with a cast-iron stove, and, outside on the paving stones, three wooden tables with benches. At one of the tables sits a man with slightly dejected shoulders, long hands and a high forehead made higher by the fact that he is going bald. His spectacles have thick lenses. He looks at home here this morning, although he is not Polish.
Ken was born in New Zealand and died there. I sit on the bench opposite him. This man, sixty years ago, shared with me what he knew, although he never told me how he learnt what he knew. He never spoke about his childhood or his parents. I had the impression he left New Zealand for Europe when he was young, before he was twenty. Were his parents rich or poor? Maybe it makes as little sense to ask that question of him as it would of the people in this market at this moment.
Distances never daunted him. Wellington, New Zealand, Paris, New York, the Bayswater Road, London, Norway, Spain, and at some moment, I think, Burma or India. He earned his living, variously, as a journalist, a schoolteacher, a dance instructor, an extra in films, a gigolo, a bookseller without a shop, a cricket umpire. Maybe some of what I’m saying is false, yet it is my way of making a portrait of him for myself as he sits in front of me in the Place Nowy. In Paris he drew cartoons for a newspaper, of this I am certain. I remember distinctly the kind of toothbrushes he liked – ones with extra-long handles, and I remember the size of shoe he took – an eleven.
He pushes his bowl of borsch towards me. Then he takes a handkerchief from his right trouser pocket, wipes the spoon and hands it to me. I recognise the handkerchief of black tartan. The soup is a clear, deep red, vegetable borsch, with a little apple vinegar added to it, Polish-style, to counteract the natural sweetness of the beetroot. I drink some and push the bowl back to him and hand him back the spoon. Not a word has passed between us.
From the bag slung over my shoulder I take out a sketchbook, for I want to show him a drawing I made yesterday from Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine in the Czartoryski Museum. He studies it, his heavy glasses slipping a little down his nose.
Pas mal! Yet isn’t she too upright? Isn’t she in fact leaning more as she takes the corner?
On hearing him speak in this way, which is so indisputably his, my love for him comes back: my love for his journeys; for his appetites,