Some birds have been taken out of their cages and are being expertly examined by the pigeon fanciers. Their crops are being lightly pinched between two fingers, the length of their legs measured, the flat tops of their heads gently pressed by a thumb, their flight feathers extended, and all the while they are being held close against the men’s chests, like trophies.
It’s hard, don’t you think, says Ken taking my arm, to imagine sending news of a total catastrophe by carrier pigeon? The message could announce a defeat, or it could be an appeal for help, but in that gesture of throwing the pigeon up into the sky, so that it heads for home, isn’t there inevitably some hope? Sailors from Ancient Egypt used to release pigeons from their boats on the high seas to tell their families they were on their way home.
I look at the beady red-pupilled eyes of one of the pigeons. He is looking at nothing, because he knows he’s held and can’t move.
I wonder how the chess game is going, I say. The two of us stroll to the other end of the market.
There are sixteen pieces left on the board. Zedrek has king, bishop and five pawns. He is looking up at the sky as if seeking inspiration. Abram looks at his watch. Twenty-three minutes! he announces.
Chess is not a game you can hurry, comments a customer.
He has one good move, whispers Ken, and I bet he’s not going to see it.
Move the bishop to C5, is that it?
No, you idiot, his king to F1.
Tell him then.
Dead men don’t move pieces!
Hearing Ken say these words I suffer his death. He, meanwhile, takes his head in his hands, and with them he turns the head left and right, as if it were a searchlight. He waits for me to laugh as I often did at this clown act of his. He doesn’t see my anguish. I do laugh.
When I came out of the army at the end of the war, he had disappeared. I wrote to him at the last address I had, and there was no reply. A year later he sent a postcard to my parents – the postcard came from somewhere improbable like Iceland or Jersey – asking whether we might all spend Christmas together, which we did. He came with a woman war-photographer who was, I think, Czech. We played Christmas games, we laughed a lot, he teased my mother about buying all the food on the black market.
Between the two of us there was the same complicity. Neither of us looked away or took the slightest step back. We felt the same love: simply the circumstances had changed. The passeur had delivered his charge; the frontiers were crossed.
The years passed. The last time I ever saw him we drove all night with my friend Anant from London to Genève. Driving through a forest near Châtillon-sur-Seine, we heard Coltrane on the radio playing ‘My Favourite Things’. It was during this journey that Ken told me he was returning to New Zealand. He was then sixty-five. I didn’t ask him why because I didn’t want to hear him say: To die.
Instead I made believe that he would come back to Europe. To which he replied: The best thing there, John, down under, is the grass! There’s no grass as green anywhere else in the world. He said this forty years ago. I never knew exactly when or how he died.
In the Place Nowy, among the stolen hairdryers, the honey-bread with its candied orange peel, the woman who chain-smokes and hopes to sell dresses, Jagusia with her basket now almost empty, the black cherries that have to be sold and eaten quickly because they won’t last, the barrel of salted herring, the voice of Ewa Demarczyk on a CD singing one of her defiant songs, I suffer his death for the first time.
I do not even glance at where Ken is standing, for he will not be there. I walk alone, past the barber’s, past the soup kitchen, past the women sitting on their stools.
Something pulls me back to the pigeons. When I arrive a man turns towards me, and, as if guessing at my distress – is there another country in the world more accustomed to coming to terms with that emotion? – he hands me, without smiling, the carrier pigeon he is holding.
Its feathers feel slightly damp – like satin. The small ones on its breast have a parting in the middle, as on an owl. It weighs nothing for its size. I hold him against my chest.
I LEFT THE Place Nowy, and found, after asking two passers-by, the bankomat. From there I returned to the pension in Miodowa Street and lay down on the bed. It was very hot, hot with the uncertain heat of the eastern plains. Now I could weep. Later I shut my eyes and imagined shuffling a pack of cards.
I SOMETIMES HAVE a dream in which I am my present age, with grown-up children and newspaper editors on the telephone, yet nevertheless have to leave and pass nine months of the year in the school where I was sent as a boy. In the dream, I think of these months as a regrettable exile, but it never occurs to me to refuse to go. In life, I ran away from that school when I was sixteen. The war was on and I went to London. Between the air-raid sirens and amid the debris of bombing I had a single idea: I wanted to draw naked women. All day long.
I was enrolled in an art school – there was not a lot of competition; nearly everyone over eighteen was in the services – and I drew in the daytime and I drew in the evenings. There was an exceptional teacher in the school at the time, an elderly painter, a refugee from fascism named Bernard Meninsky. He said very little and his breath smelt of dill pickles. On the same imperial-sized sheet of paper (paper was rationed; we had two sheets a day), beside my clumsy, unstudied, impetuous drawing, Bernard Meninsky would boldly draw a part of the model’s body in such a way as to make clearer its endlessly subtle structure and movement. After he had gone, I would spend the next ten minutes, dumbfounded, looking from his drawing to the model and vice versa.
Thus I learnt to question with my eyes the mystery of anatomy and of love, whilst outside in the night sky, I heard the RAF fighters crossing the city to intercept the German bombers before they reached the coast. The ankle of the foot on which her weight was posed was vertically under the dimple of her neck … directly vertical.
When I was in Istanbul recently, I asked my friends if they could arrange for me to meet the writer Latife Tekin. I had read a few translated extracts from two novels she had written about life in the shantytowns on the edge of the city. And the little I had read deeply impressed me with its imagination and authenticity. She herself must have been brought up in a shantytown. My friends arranged a dinner and Latife came. I do not speak Turkish, so naturally they offered to interpret. She was sitting beside me. Something made me tell my friends – no, don’t bother, we’ll manage somehow.
The two of us looked at each other with some suspicion. In another life I might have been an elderly police superintendent interrogating a pretty, shifty, fierce woman of thirty repeatedly picked up for larceny. In fact, in this our only life, we were both storytellers without a word in common. All we had were our observations, our habits of narration, our Aesopian sadness. Suspicion gave way to shyness.
I took out a notebook and did a drawing of myself as one of her readers. She drew a boat upside down to show she couldn’t draw. I turned the paper around so it was the right way up. She made a drawing to show that her drawn boats always sank. I said there were birds at the bottom of the sea. She said there was an anchor in the sky. (Like everybody else at the table we were drinking raki.) Then she told me a story about the