The microphone is going to kill their art, Ken whispered to me in the gallery. I asked him what he meant. Listen to how they use their voices, he explained. They talk across the whole theatre and we’re in the middle of them. If they use a mike, this will stop and the public will no longer be in the middle. The secret of music hall artists is that they play defenceless, like we all are. A player with a mike is armed! It’s another ball game.
He was right. The music hall died during the next decade.
A woman, carrying a basket of wild sorrel, passes the table in the Place Nowy.
Could you make us some sorrel soup? Ken asks me. We could have it tomorrow instead of borsch.
I guess so.
With eggs?
That I’ve never tried.
Well, he shuts his eyes, you prepare the soup, serve it, and in each bowl, you put a hot hard-boiled egg. You have made sure that beside each bowl there’s a knife as well as a spoon. You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away.
Of home?
Certainly not, not even for the Poles.
Of what then?
Of survival, perhaps.
It seemed to me that Ken always lived in the same bedsit. In reality, he moved often, but the moves were made when I was away at school, and on returning and going to see him, I would find his same few possessions piled up on a similar table at the foot of a similar bed, behind a door with a key, which opened onto a staircase, overlooked by a landlady, worrying in the same way about the lights being left on.
Ken’s room had a gas fire and a tall window. On the mantelpiece above the gas fire he stacked our books. On the table by the window was a large portable wireless (the word radio was rarely used) to which we listened. 2 Sept. 1939: the Panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht invaded Poland without warning this morning at dawn. Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were going to lose their lives during the next five years.
In the room’s wardrobe he kept not only clothes but food: oatmeal biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, a pineapple, coffee. Attached to the gas fire was a gas ring for heating water in a saucepan that he kept on the windowsill. The room smelt of cigarettes, pineapple, and lighter fuel. The toilet and washbasin were on the landing either above or below. I tended to forget which, and he would shout after me: Up not down!
His two suitcases, which he left open on the floor, were never entirely unpacked. At that time nothing was unpacked, even in people’s heads. Everything was in store or in transit. Dreams were kept on luggage racks, in kitbags and in suitcases. In one of the cases open on the floor there was a jar of honey from Brittany, a dark fisherman’s sweater, a volume of Baudelaire in French, and a table-tennis bat.
Give you a lead of fifteen plus service! he proposed. Ready? Serve! Fifteen, love. Fifteen, one. Fifteen, two. Fifteen, three. He was beating me like that in 1940.
By 1941 he was still beating me two games out of three, but he was no longer giving me a lead.
He was now working in some capacity, about which he would say nothing, for a foreign service at the BBC. He often came back to the room after work in the small hours of the morning. The bedcover was damasked.
In the mornings we usually took breakfast in a barricaded café near Gloucester Road. Food was rationed. Those without a sweet tooth gave their sugar rations to others. Ken and I drank tea, as it was better than the coffee essence. Over breakfast we read newspapers. Each consisted of four – or at the most six – pages. 9 Sept. 1941: Leningrad cut off by German troops. 12 Feb. 1942: Three German cruisers sail unimpeded through the Straits of Dover. 25 May 1942: The Wehrmacht take 250,000 Soviet prisoners at Kharkov. The Nazis, Ken said, are making the same mistake as Napoleon: they underestimate the power of General Winter. He was right. In late November General Paulus and his 6th Army were surrounded at Stalingrad and in February they surrendered to General Zhukov.
One morning in the middle of April 1943, Ken told me about a London radio broadcast, made the day before, by General Sikorski, the Polish prime minister in exile, who was appealing to Poles in Poland to support the ongoing uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. The ghetto was being systematically annihilated. Sikorski said – Ken spoke slowly – that: ‘The greatest crime in the history of mankind is taking place.’
Only during moments of forgetfulness, when thinking about nothing, did the enormity of what was happening make itself felt. The enormity was then present in the air, under the spring sky, addressing a seventh sense which I still cannot name.
11 July 1943. The British 8th Army and the American 7th Army invade Sicily and take Syracuse.
I think of you as a beginner, Ken whispers, leaning across the table in Kraków, and I suspect that if I read you today I might be disappointed.
About mastery there is something sad, indescribably sad, I reply.
I see you as a beginner.
Still?
More than ever!
With you as teacher?
I didn’t teach. You learnt. There’s a difference. I let you learn! And there were a few things I learnt from you!
Such as?
Dressing quickly.
Anything else?
How to read well out loud.
You read well out loud yourself, I say.
In the end I discovered how you did it. The secret of your reading out loud. You didn’t read the end of the sentence until you got there, that was your secret. You refused to look ahead.
He takes off his glasses as if he has seen and said enough. He knew me well.
Beneath the damasked bedcover, during nights punctuated by air-raid sirens, I sometimes felt a burning in Ken’s erect member. The tumescence came unasked and waited like a pain, a pain that had to be staunched, low down in the middle of his long body. Soon afterwards, in the bed damp with spunk and tears from his eyes without glasses, sleep came swiftly to the two of us. Rippled sleep, like sand when the tide is far out.
Let’s go and see the pigeons, Ken says, polishing the thick lenses of his glasses with his tartan handkerchief.
We walk towards the northern end of the market. The sun is hot. One more early summer morning added to the pile on the century’s desk. We watch two butterflies who came to the centre of the city with the garden vegetables fly upwards in a spiral. The clock on the city cathedral strikes eleven.
Every day, hundreds of Polish visitors climb the spiral stone staircase in the bell tower of the cathedral to look across the Vistula and to touch with a finger the massive tongue of the Zygmunt bell, cast in 1520 and weighing eleven tons. Touching it is said to bring luck in love.
We pass a man selling hairdryers. One hundred and fifty złoty each, which means they have probably been stolen. He is demonstrating one of the dryers and calls out to a passing child: Come here, sweetie, and I’ll make you cool! The girl laughs, agrees and her hair fluffs up, billowing. Slicznie, she cries.
I’m beautiful, Ken translates, laughing.
Further on I see a crowd of men huddled together. If it weren’t for their craning heads and the silence in the air, I would say they were listening to music. When we get closer I understand that they are in fact gathered round a table on which there are a hundred pigeons in wooden pens, five or six to a cage. The birds vary in plumage and size, although all have a glint of bluish slate in their colouring, and in this glint there is something of the sky above Kraków. The pigeons on the table look like sky-samples brought back to earth. Maybe this is why the men seemed to be listening to music.
Nobody knows, Ken says, how homing pigeons find their way home. When they are flying in clear