rough enough off the press, this is the story (after 'Babi Leto, Babi Yar') that has taken the most time and emotional energy to write. It's also the most autobiographical and prone to the genre of travelogue literature--all good, but not in the total spirit of the volume. What is in the spirit of the volume is the hope to weave allusions with experience, prose with poetic license, authorial modesty with readership review. It's the thirteenth story in Stara Evropa, the fourteenth projected in Bulgaria and fifteenth in Slovakia, where we're headed in the next half-week. It has, in a sense, sapped my soul, as nothing should ever approximate the true sufferings of those who tred to Treblinka gas chambers or any other atrocities we rarely articulate, let alone lend eyes and prayers to. Rough enough that this is, I don't have any idea how I might revise, but that your reading can advise me so.
“There is nothing neither good nor
bad,” Hamlet says in some depth of disposition, “but thinking makes it so.”
Nietzsche turns that seminal premise into his treatise, Beyond Good and Evil. Beyond (not from) such moral vagaries, modern
history runs amok. Harold Bloom will not assign a ruling body for the
literature that follows his designations of the theocratic, aristocratic,
democratic ages. The ‘chaotic age’ may be his cop-out, a teen-age angst that a priori abandons a wisdom that can germinate
from patient experience, a hereafter to temper the here and now.
In
my own teen-age years I began to run for some notional sense of self. “So, what do you do?” asked the gorgeous girl
in ninth grade, and I had nothing to say. Joining the cross-country team might
have added mockery to the void, but I trained hard and eventually captained a
competitive team, if that was what we were. I ran a hundred miles a week to
oxidize my thinking and develop little symphonies—solipsistic stuff. I remember
being utterly lost on an early morning run some twenty-five miles outside of
Scobey, Montana. The gray sky melded indiscriminately with the amorphous
landscape, and not having seen a herd of cows or a telephone wire for well over
an hour, I hoped to find at least a fence and trace it to some source. Two hours later, that prospect availed itself
and serendipitously led me to back to civilization, which basically can be
defined as a place where one can stay alive.
There
was scant sense of that in Poland, 1943. To help me discern what various holocaust sites held for my
students who toured Terezin in tenth grade and Auschwitz in twelfth, I drove
north of Prague to revisit and visit anew and reflect and pray and ask
questions and walk silently through dozens of places, on and off maps. I had
the voices of Wiesel and Wiesenthal and Lustig and Levi with me; just as
indelibly, I resorted to
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Something is There”: the still, soft whisper that the
cave-bound Elijah strains to hear.
I
journeyed through the Baltics aiming for places like Salaspils—the ‘island
palace’ outside Riga—and the Paneriai forest west of Vilnius. Peaceful as they
seemed, by the few people strolling and listening to breeze and birdsong in the
trees, massacred bodies in countless proportions could not be extricated from
these grounds. I sought out conventional places of peace, to be sure: the hill
of crosses that John Paul II blessed against their bulldozing, Pühajärv, the Estonian lake of love that the Dalai Lama wanted to return
to, perhaps in the magic of a midsummer’s night swim. Broken lives could have
happened at these sites, too; restive souls must be everywhere on this planet,
but there is a difference when they’re rounded up and given no choice to live
on or die.
Having parsed out the modest Kroons, Lats, and
Litas that I had budgeted for this leg of the trip, I bolted toward Bialystok
and an eastern swing through Poland. I had driven carefully through these
countries and was doing so now, knowing that patrolmen would pull over foreign
cars for no particular reason; in this case, the evening drawing on and seeing
nothing for twenty minutes besides the back of a transport truck, I entered a
speed trap that deemed my 70 kilometers per hour too dangerous to let pass. The
truck I trailed continued on blithely at that pace, and when I mentioned as
much to my arresting officers, they had me step out of the car for further
aspects to investigate. I had spoken English, but theirs was lousy; Russian, I
realized, was a mixed bag in these countries, but for the next forty minutes
from the backseat of their Lada, I reasoned and even joked with them in
Russian. They didn’t want Zlotys to pay my fine—about $25 for speeding—and I
didn’t want to get Litas back in change for the $100 bill I had. To their
credit, they didn’t try to extort any more than their pre-established amount,
and also to their credit, they proposed a means by which I could draw the exact
amount of Litas from the Marijamplole bank, some ten minutes away (they’d be
happy to escort me there). Of course, being dusk and before the advent of ATMs,
there was little chance I could draw the strict amount or retain $75 as
non-Litas in return. In the end—a full hour’s work—the officers politely took
my greenback and made sure, by pointing at exchange rates I’d already known,
that the Litas they doled out in change was justified value. “But Poland won’t
exchange them so favorably,” I reminded them, to which they encouraged me to
stay an extra night in their fine country. “I’ve been camping at one-tenth this
cost,” I had them know, but still extended a hand to their patriotism.
And
though I didn’t want to play this card, I headed toward the Dzukijos woodlands
and a quirky statue museum commemorating the lugubrious death of the Soviet
Union. It wouldn’t be open at this late hour, but that wasn’t the question on
my mind. Finding food was, and south of the Merkys river a shashlik stand was
just about to close up. “We have no more borscht,” the proprietor said when I
requested that from the menu, “perhaps you’ll try krchik, just as good.” And it
was. I would have been content with that and one mutton skewer, but Avo, as he
introduced himself, insisted I dine well—“stay to meet the kids, they’ll be
back from training soon.” It’s what a little language and raison d’etre would
bring, with tacit questions whether this bottle of red wine (“on the house,
traveling friend”) would lead to vodka and scrapbook stories and diminishing
prospects I’d find a hotel that night. Avo assured me that wouldn’t be a
problem, “you’re in God’s hands here.”
His
wife brought out spinach- and cheese-filled byorek, “another taste of the
homeland,” he explained. Most of his extended family had been killed in the
Armenian earthquake of ‘89; those who survived had to deal with rubbled
realities. The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh only made the ensuing years worse:
Avo and his younger brother were conscripted to service there, even as so much
had to be reconstructed at home. Only Avo returned alive. After a joyless
wedding, he and his bride made their way to Vilnius and, eventually, this haven
in the woods. I explained I had only experienced the woods of Paneriai in this
country, and he nodded his head at the reference. “Here, we hope, is a happier
place. I run a track-and-field camp, believe it or not, through these trees.”
“Why
wouldn’t I believe that? I noticed the picture on the wall with Sergey Bubka.”
Avo
smiled and raised his glass in a sort of toast: “Bratislava, 1988, his fourth
vault over six meters. I was an alternate steeplechaser, and Sergey came over
to make friends. I warmed up, as per usual, but didn’t compete. He told me to
stick with the sport.”
“And
did you?”
He
refilled both our glasses. “I did until the earthquake. Then all my leaps and
runs away were far from an oval, rubber track. That’s probably why I set up
this camp, coaching kids to run in the middle of nowhere.”
It
was rather dark when the runners came in from their end-of-day 12K. Avo was
animated, twice the visage he had in the Bubka picture. He had them stretch and
debrief on their day, then introduced them to me, a fellow athlete (though I
had said nothing beyond the knowledge of Bubka). One girl, Natalia, was
presented as the top under-14 prospect in the nation in hurdles—“you can hurdle
out here?” I asked, and without looking at her coach for advice, Natalia responded
that she could hurdle anywhere. A younger girl, Yelena, was vying to be the
first female pole-vaulter of regional impact. A few boys shuffled around with
less to say—“they’re pure cross-country,” Avo supplied on their behalf, and
then told everyone to shower and be ready to eat in twenty minutes. I took this
as a chance to bid them all best wishes, but Avo cut me off and hastened his
crew to come back in ten minutes, in deference to me, their guest.
When
I reminded Avo I needed to hit the road to find a hotel, he shook his head in
disapproval and disbelief: “the night is beautiful and clear—I know I, for one,
will sleep at the campfire and that means one bed free. God has given me a full
house, but also athletes who’ll likely follow in my lead and sleep below the
stars. And you may want to, as well.”
I
met him halfway by setting up my tent in a grassy area about a triple-jump away
from the campfire ring. Avo saw my guitar in the open trunk and exalted in the
alignment of the night. His wife had prepared more byorek and liberal plates of
plov; Avo tended to new skewers of lamb and eggplant and sausage chunks. Their
little children ran with energy the enlisted athletes no longer had, but no one
was sleepy yet. I ate politely what I could and Avo was diplomatic about the
liquor he and I would quaff against the juice and herbal tea the kids would
take. As a matter of course, Avo continued to coach his athletes as they rested
and ate, reminding them of kinesthetic and mental moves to make his hurdlers
fly like peregrines and his sprinters dart like greyhounds and his jumpers
bound like antelopes, and his distant runners—“well, what would you advise?” he
turned to me.
Of
course I had no real time to think one way or another, but, as a cross-country
man, since after ninth grade at least, I ventured to say, “you run like no
animal has really run before. You cannot stop at a goal in sight, like anything
with instinct might. You’ve got to run beyond horizons, beyond presumption that
a prize is really there. You’ll run, maybe, like the jockey-driven horse,
pulling neck-even on any given curve because that feels intuitively right.
You’ll run, more likely, through scenarios unseen, because nothing—nothing—of a
cross-country race is ever eminently decreed.”
Avo,
graciously, broke in as I breathed for more to ramble, and declared the day a
celebration. He sang a song in Armenian and led the campers through some songs
in Russian and even one in Lithuanian, which intrigued me most of all. After
all due translations, he pointed me to the guitar, and so, as if naturally, I
played Pete Seeger’s version of “If I Had a Hammer”, which roused the campfire
more than I thought due, and “Annie’s Song” and “Wish You Were Here”—a blur of
the limited range I knew and the ‘fill up my senses’ that fostered little or no
transliteration. Avo was good to segue everything right, and Natalia, the
indisputable captain of her crew, spoke in strophes I could barely decipher—my
head full of Lithuanian and Russian and Armenian spirits. Other songs ensued,
and I chimed in where I could; I was asked for a ‘kumbayah’ when all eyelids
drooped, and I complied with “Danny Boy” (not to center anything on self—in
fact, I had morphed the song to the name of my first-born son back at home, not
to center all on him). The embers in the fire burned conscientiously, it
seemed, beyond the last look from my tent flap and the retirement of all
athletes, young and old.
There’s
little to say about how I left the place, dawn renewing the crepuscular
activity from Avo’s kitchen and subtle, zealous runs to wake the next day’s
training. Against all invoicing, I placed the equivalent of seventy dollars on
Avo’s counter, leaving next-to-nothing for a statue museum that made little
sense today. Avo’s wife came in as I was writing a note: ‘but come you back,
when summer’s in the meadow…’—scratched out, for the ambiguity. I was glad
instead to tell her directly that the food way I came here and stayed, nourishing
the soul of an exquisite evening. I said I was more honored to have met Avo
than, if fate allowed it, Sergey Bubka himself had vaulted into my life. I
wished Natalia and Yelena and all cross-country runners well. Avo’s wife,
fumbling about like I was, packed me a bundle of byorek and bid me go, in God’s
grace. And so I did.
Whatever
I saw of sculpted Soviet personae, or (as was more memorable) some chainsaw art
in Druskininkai, my mind constantly trailed back to the nurture of Armenians
and the anomaly of track and field in the woods. The route through eastern
Poland was labyrinthine due to heavy flooding that year—I would be among the
last cars allowed to cross the Sandomierz bridge, for instance—and so the
detours had it that I drove upon a railway trestle to reach Treblinka. Besides conferring
with a few villagers to get directions, I encountered no one at the death camp,
no other car in the parking area, a strange stretch of day bereft of humanity.
Treblinka
has a static march of tombstones which do not remotely enumerate its victims; any
ghetto that surrendered five thousand or more souls has a single stone,
waist-high or smaller, yet their collection stretches unimaginably. My attempt
to read every name was earnest, if naïve, and the fact that the sun had sunk
below the distant treeline meant I had to decide what next to do. As with other
prison camps I’d visited, I wanted to see the musicians’ barracks. Of all the
images that had engrained themselves in my readings of Wiesel (along with adumbrations
of Shostakovich) most indelible was the
“pitch dark. I
could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek’s soul were the bow. He
was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings—his lost
hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never
play again.”
Such barracks were cynical in their
pragmatism: ploys to survive compelled a contradictory reason to enact an
aesthetic process. ‘Play for your life, even as life is snuffed in your
strains’… ‘Glide on the strings of a bluntly rigged fate against any
wire-walker’… Orchestrate a counterintuitive, cultural doom… in the name of
your art. Wouldn’t any true artist bash the instrument against the ground, or
(why not) against the Kapo’s cranium? Non-musicians at Treblinka’s peak
survived two hours, musicians and Sonderkommandos
perhaps three days. Commandant Kurt Franz, blissful in his sadism, forced
prisoners to memorize his lyrics, to become “one with Treblinka in no time at
all.” Probably this anthem played more emphatically than any indigenous chorale
from the composers of Poland or Belarus. November 10, 1942, was unconscionably
busy, with more than thirty transports disembarking more than 66,000 souls that
could scarcely fit any space of the expanding Aufenglager; masses became ‘one with Treblinka’ no matter how it
was defined, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What place for musicians? I had
Leonard Cohen’s “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin” in my inner ear
as I sheepishly walked the remnants of ‘The Tube’, the path Franz and others
declared a Himmelfahrstrasse to
reinforce that some unhuman heaven immanently awaits. “We want to serve,” as if
this were a labor camp, “to go on serving until a little luck ends it all.
Hurrah!”
God. There’s no one here now, and those 66,000
(times thirteen, at least) have to quash
the conception of ephemerality. In certain ways I could not take a step or
justify why I was here, why I had come. All previous imperatives and
invitations flaked off as the Himmelfahrstrasse
came to an empty end—no gas chamber anymore—and the late summer air converted the
balsam breeze to an insidious chill. Some kilometers away (I had seen by the large
map near the parking area) the musicians’ barracks remained in some raw
foundation. Silently, I tread the dirt road that utility vehicles over the
years had worn, like any bucolic scene. With no sense of pace—my own, the
setting of an unseen sun in overcast skies—I wound up in a woodland clear with
rudimentary placards over unweeded rubble that assuredly heard some laments and
the semblance of Juliek’s violin.
Oh
let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me
feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show
me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance
me to the end of love
Dance
me to the end of love
Rapidly,
dusk descended as if to spite any endeavor for enlightenment. Perhaps an
on-site guide or an efficacious itinerary would have helped; I was utterly
alone in the depths of this camp, imagining from this fetal stage of a new
millennium (the twentieth century having run its course) a time beyond
comprehension. Silence and a lack of celestial light imbued the isolation: I
hadn’t prepared and began to fret that without any kind of compass, I wouldn’t
see my way back. Scobey, Montana, then, was not for nothing—the flickering
candle that was Moshe the Beadle also came to mind. The grooves of the path I
found through my sweeping feet and then, self-consciously, I began to stride
into a blind run—an unseemly spectacle for no one in particular.
Cross-country
skills are empirically subtle. The physiology of swinging arms, breathing clinically,
pacing on four dimensions can all be fully read; metaphysical mindplay, on the
other hand, is inscrutable. Runners in the wild can conjecture a tackler’s dive
at any split second, a phantasmagoric stand of hurdles that beguile the
regularity of a steeplechase; runners in the modern wild pose problems to the
paradigm of ‘fight or flight’ and render a Manichean universe inane. What was
Hercules in all his strength? What would Hermes run today? What reality bends or
benefits from any atavistic source? Questions therein, as well as a thousand
strains unnamed, become the consummate pace of runners in the wild. And
conditions of luxury may have it that the questions are curtailed whenever one
sees fit; and conditions otherwise may have it that questions come and go
without control.
I
had now no bearing of the path. Slowing and extending my arms like tendrils, I
realized the grooves of the ground were more likely to twist an ankle than
guide a straight line. And nearer to the parking area, this very path would
veer into deeper woods. But I wasn’t near the parking area anyway; I decided to
stop, gather what was left of my bearings and walk feelingly, nuzzling my feet
against the groove. Some animal noises in the distance invited a sense of fear,
but those were easy to laugh away. What was palpable now, however, was the
sense of fear that I could never fully feel from those who travelled this very
ground in ’42 and ’43. Juliek would have been contained to the unforested Auschwitz,
but his path—night or day—would have some resonance to this one. I had to stop
again to clutch the thought of that, and ridiculously I began to feel afraid
for myself as if I were someone else (yet consciously still myself). ‘Run, you fool! What consequences worse than
what has loomed from first intuition? Run into these fortuitous woods—embrace
the prospect of a wolf, join in the call of the mournful owl. Run beyond
bullets, especially in this dark. Make their self-absorbed Waldeinsamkeit an
outcry of their distance to the rest of us—humanity that matters, even as
fascists forever will, with teleological zeal, convolute: humanity, what
matters, forests, freedom, fear of the fucking unknown.
Sometimes
there is no rational definition to anything that’s going on. Shostakovich banks
on this no-man’s land in his Symphony #7. Rationally, he benefits from Ravel’s
‘Bolero’ and the harrowing sense that Leningraders—whom he left with heavy heart
in October ’41—were necessarily devoid of anywhere to run. Instead, they
fortified themselves against a siege for the ages, one that had to adumbrate
the fading hopes of those in Sarajevo five decades later. Why should Sarajevo,
Shostakovich occupy my thoughts when I’m groping in the dark? Where and when
should I begin to crawl—four legs better here than two—to the sanctuary of a
parking lot. Instead, I resurrected an instinct to run, gathering a valuable
kilometer in whatever outrageous fumbling of feet, and as that stride
consolidated false confidence, I fell into a wayward groove and met the cool
earth with my nose and mouth, dispersing scrapes and pain from there to the
culprit of my feckless left foot. Sprawled upon the starless path, wherever it
now remained, I calculated its strange comforts to the prevailing thoughts of
Juliek, Shostakovich on the run, Cohen again to “raise a tent of shelter now,
though every thread is torn.” Why not wish this “too too solid flesh would
melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!” No wolf would devour me—we’re beyond
fairy tales and the trappings of the twentieth century! No SS dog by the name
of Barry, trained to become the ‘Mensch,
fass den Hund!’ and bite me by the balls. No reason to lift myself from
this mark of land, with buffalo grass to wrap me in, to wait for the promise of
a late summer’s dawn and the dew it brings. Likely then the clouds will have
disbanded, their rain withheld for another day; there wasn’t thunder in them,
anyway.
Ten
years earlier, when I skied down a slope that held too many challenges—and I
avoided some, but took some on—I realized then that Kierkegaardian leaps were
exponentially beyond our sense to commandeer. I skied Spirit Mountain, near
Duluth, and took a jump that had no bottom I could see. I tumbled in the air to
position myself to whatever telemark mercy may grant, and when that failed, I
met the mindless slope with a crash that had me seeing stars, briefly, before
the specter of passing out—consigned with the knowledge that no one else had taken
the dusky chairlift to see my final run. I was blacking out alone, on idiotic
Spirit Mountain in the budding eve of my auspicious view of being adult, of
being realized and (whatever theology cast it) realizable. I fought this
blackening out with all my marrow, and miraculously, maybe, it worked. Maybe
the mountain was named on purpose, but I left that thought and adventure skiing
for others to experience.
I
did not want to muse like that at Treblinka. There’s nothing notional in its
name. No one needs Nietzsche or his doting sister to avow that God is dead in
this all-too-stark stage, another Polish hamlet absorbed into the machinery of
Operation Reinhard, an approximation of anything ruthless anyone can do. At a
certain point, one does not read placards for the sense of what happened here
by and to whom (victims rarely have a final word); those signs and names must
reassemble in our journeys home, finding new names and signs along the way,
preempting new such operations from gaining traction. People of Treblinka, if
we meet them in their homes, wake to dawns that do not have to hold that
nightmare hostage. Their burden should be on us, tossing and turning in remote
hotels. ‘Where is God in this’ was Moshe’s waterstone that Eliezer never let
vanish; we are worse to dismiss this question out of hand. We should somehow
muse at Treblinka—museum that it somewhat is. And when museums close (for dusk,
for instance), memorials in mind and spirit should open infinitely, even as
dreams beyond our control.
A
drizzle began as I finally found the parking area. The headlights against the
pines and oaks seemed to lure the car forward, then away, as opposing ends of a
magnet. I knew my windshield wipers were old and loose, so I hesitated putting
them on. I’d be going slowly, anyway: I wasn’t sure which road to take south
toward Lublin or Sobibor, the latter of which would probably not have any
accommodation. For some minutes I drove with the overhead light on, casting
poor illumination on my map. But after sidling to the ditch and stopping to
smear the grime of the wipers, I couldn’t continue with the bounce-back glare
of the inside light. I could sleep here, at the side of this lonely road, or
retrace the route to the parking area. Fatigue, though, wasn’t what I was
feeling, and as long as I could focus, there was no reason to stop. The gentle
rain even attended my fondest memories as a runner, when others might have
cursed the clouds instead of deeming them baptismal.
The
rain subsided but my windshield suffered worse the lack of water to spread. Through
blurred signs and a hint of a village, I finally came upon human beings—a
couple of middle-aged men sitting beside the road, under a bulb-lit umbrella
that would befit a beer garden. Their shirts were unbuttoned for the night’s
warmth and humidity, and as I came to a stop they sat semi-interested in the
fact of my presence. In Russian I asked the way to Lublin, which elicited a
laugh from both. “You’ve left that in your dust,” one roughly said, his breath
wafting of liquor. The other bid me to come over to them, betraying a more
specific answer. I turned off the engine and stepped out, and they found a
chair at their little table. It was only then that I recognized their unkempt
uniforms as patrolmen—their shirts had the markings of probably the lowest rank
possible, and beside their vodka tumblers were hats that seemed to have
resigned their days’ work. They didn’t ask for my documents, which I had stored
deep beneath the passenger seat, so I didn’t fetch them. Instead, I told them
my name and my purpose for being on such a remote road at this time of night.
“You
won’t find a hotel near here, and there’s no use waking up anyone in Lublin,” proclaimed
the apparent leader of this pair. “But a half-hour east is my brother’s
house—you can knock on his door day or night, and it wouldn’t even matter if I told
him in advance.”
“But,”
I asked, scratching my head, “wouldn’t a half-hour east put me in Belarus?”
“You’re
already here, comrade—did you think we’re Polish?” They laughed heartily at my
strange look and the circumstances in general. “Look, join us for a drink, you
won’t be late for anything.”
“I’m
driving, of course, and you,” I smelled the trap, “are the very ones who arrest
those who drink.”
“Those
who drink dangerously,” the second man said, “yes, we arrest. To guests of our
nation, we raise a toast.”
I
relented, warily, and pursued the offer of the brother’s house: “How would I
get back through to Poland, without a Belarussian visa?” The question made little
sense if these two were still here, but they weren’t sure when they’d be
relieved, at midnight or daybreak or noon. They’d herald my return to the next
crew, they said, and poured another drink to vouch for their word. “It’s a
generous offer,” I told them, “but I wanted to start the day in Lublin—”
“Why?
What’s there?”
“Majdanek,”
and I explained my journey to this point. I told them I could start
alternatively at Sobibor and work my way west, but they couldn’t agree which
road would get me there. They hadn’t much experience with these places, they
said, even if they held them in memory each eighth of May, when the Red Army
forced the fascists to surrender. Something more to drink about, but their
bottle had run dry.
So
they brewed some tea. “Look here, have you seen one of these?” the leader
pulled out a P-shaped box that clattered with pieces inside. “From Krakow, its
owner said, another traveller from afar. He played us one game to get into our
country and lost—”
“the
game, not his way in,” the other guard gibed. “You lost, too, my friend!”
“Nothing—I
surrendered my squares in beating him; you sat back safely to figure out the
game. And now I’m eager for revenge!” He opened the hinges to show chess pieces
in lacquered white, black, and maroon.
He
assumed I played at all, scooping the white pieces into my hands, while he and
his deputy took the rest. My mind recalled George Orwell’s Down and Out, and Boris who’d play chess to forget being hungry,
and his saying that “the rules of chess are the same as the rules of love and
war, and that if you can win at one you can win at the others.” I didn’t utter
that to my hosts but instead posed this hypothetical: given a prison cell and
one cellmate (or, considering this odd board, maybe two fellow convicts), which
single game would pass the time best? Chess? Cards? Scrabble?
“Scrabble—what’s
that?”
I
described it to their scoffs, but defended its eternal value as a language game
that could lend to the expression of ideas.
“Maybe,”
said the leader, “but in our country, you don’t need a tool like that to talk.”
“What
ideas, anyway?” the deputy wanted to know. “The words as you described it are
random, unconnected—”
“—well,
connected in a literal way—”
“—but
not a way that makes sense of anything. What’s the point of that?”
“You
can ask that of any of them.”
“But
why in prison?”
“I
guess I’m interested in which of them imprisons less.”
“Chess,”
the deputy concluded after not much thought. “Strategies are endless.”
“But
if you wanted to get out of jail,” the other demurred, “and who wouldn’t? you’d
rather have a deck of cards. Tricks. Bluffs. Power of invention.”
“Like
a house of cards—voilà!” the deputy
exulted, having stacked a knight upon a rook upon a king.
“There’s
metaphor in everything,” I offered.
“And
that’s why you’d torture your cellmate with letter tiles?”
“I
think I’d actually vote for chess. What little I know, the thought exceeds
expression.”
“So
enough of this talk, let’s play.”
The
trigram board was set, and I apprehensively moved my king’s knight forward. The
deputy, in black, played a small pawn, and the honcho countered in kind. We
discussed the confusions of the lines—when a quadrant led to one player’s side or
the other. The honcho, true to his forecast, tried to bluff at times; he
favored fast moves and was bothered when we slowed things down. I castled as
soon as possible, which shifted the deputy’s direction: his boss was now in
trouble, and I had a chance to slam him from my side. We all lost bishops and
knights in quick succession, then, blindsided, I lost my queen. I retained a
rook advantage, however, and marched my outer pawn to claim a new piece, which
foolishly I called a queen. A knight would have beaten maroon in a single move;
instead I had to run my queen around and watch black close in on my king. But
then maroon did the inexplicable by putting himself in check against black,
forcing a legal debate:
“You
can’t do that!”
“Why
not? It’s white’s move next, not yours.” They both looked at me, as if their
version of logic would be obvious in what I’d do.
I
had to give the boss some credit: it allowed a free move for my rook to slide
over and put both kings in check at the same time. Both could easily escape in
succession, but in the meantime maroon would have gained momentum. Not to win,
probably, but to derail the deputy for a while. I talked through that prospect,
but black still contended that it didn’t matter—the illegal move by maroon
couldn’t presume what white would do.
“What’s
illegal?” the boss blustered, “I didn’t put myself in check against him! You’re
forgetting the difference in this game!”
“But
this will all be stupid—what white should do is move against your expectation
just to cut you out of the fray—”
“—oh,
and white would love to see you absorb my pieces into your army? Remember, that’s in the rules of this game.”
The
deputy, more than the boss, dared me play it out, and despite the aesthetics of
the rook option, I decided to put my
king in check against the now doomed maroon, for at least I’d be able to take
his queen (which would have become black’s queen and my most immanent threat)
as a result.
“For
heaven’s sake!” the deputy threw up his arms. “Here, am I also supposed to
attempt suicide?”
“But
it’s interesting, no?”
“No,
a thousand times no! I wouldn’t last a day in prison—especially when the vodka
runs out!”
We
decided to call the game a draw. A new rain started and the invite to deeper
Belarus was underscored, and maybe I should have taken that opportunity as
another chess gambit. Instead, after conferring around my tattered map, I
thanked them and turned the car west, eventually south, outside of sleepy Wlodawa
to finally get some rest.
A
bright dawn warmed me awake, and unfolding from the car I decided to walk the
town toward the swollen Bug River, the same that ambled past Treblinka some 200
kilometers northwest. What ambivalence, it seemed, this flow upon the flat,
what might have been a nonstop stream of tears or the flush of ashes and offal.
At any rate, the brainless earth cannot care, and
Neither our present blood-feud with the
brave dwarfs
Nor
any future world-quarrel of westering
And
eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of
faiths—
Is a
speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
Robinson Jeffers refers to the
Pacific Ocean in these lines, designating it the “Eye of the earth; and what it
watches is not our wars.” Maybe not so brainless are our waterways.
Some
men fished from the Polish shore despite the high water. No one could be seen
on the other. The river had established a frontline between German and Soviet
soldiers, a moat long outlasting the war. I started to run its winding bank as
I had done a hundred times in college, along the Red River of the North; I knew
Sobibor was a ten-minute drive south, several hours by foot. Roads here didn’t
comply with the wiles of the river, and tall weeds challenged my vision and
stride. Footpaths were sometimes submerged in the flood. I circled back to the
car.
Though
I walked the grounds of Sobibor at length, I didn’t again see the banks of the
Bug. The sun continued to heat up the earth, but by mid-morning dark clouds
were gathering and deciding upon drizzle or downpour. I went in to the
interpretive center and spoke with the guide, and a quick hour later when he
wanted to point out more features outside, the rain hit and we ran back inside.
He brewed some coffee and insisted on sharing his lunch; I had forgotten how
hungry I was.
“This
rain keeps the ash heap green,” he said, “—that is one thing I wanted to show
you.”
“I
had rounded it a couple times and noticed. What do the groundskeepers think?”
“In
terms of what?”
I
had weeds in mind, but didn’t want to say. I’m not sure my Russian was good
enough, anyway. The ash heap here, and as I’d see in Majdanek, was beyond
contemplation, as much as I thought I’d be used to that concept.
But
getting used to anything on this journey was inconsonant to my conscious or
unconscious purpose. To be sure, I kept up my resolve to reflect and pray and ask
questions and walk silently through dozens of places; to be equally sure, I
longed to lose myself in the tangles of unregimented space, whether by the Bug
River, now bygone, or on the forlorn road to Lublin, where holocaust fires more
brazenly blew into a city of tens of thousands—witnesses, by smell, of what had
gone on a dozen fold in various villages and voivodeships in eastern Poland.
Majdanek, like Dachau and Mauthausen, were suburban camps as such: hell could
be anywhere, of course, yet to play devil in the backyards of the masses… There
may have been a showcase argument to the establishment of some labor camps: Arbat Macht Frei wanted its
pronouncement to rationalize the options of the imprisoned. ‘Look, you have purpose to this place, and
our truth will set you free.’ When Reinhard took over, the pretext was
impossible to sustain, and the machinery of death was a different kind of
showcase. ‘Here is your tube, your
heaven’s road, and yes, that captured Soviet truck is running its thick exhaust
into a hole in that building, that place you’re trudging to too warily. What
dignity you have is on display—no saving for another day.’
Ovens at Majdanek retain chunks of bones among their ashes.
A mound the size of Sobibor’s is roofed against eroding rains, the powder and
grains of hundreds of thousands, countless as sand, confusing the tone of Psalm
139. I had cried on this journey—often in preponderance of reflections as I
drove from one place to another. At Majdanek, I sobbed. “I am fearfully and
wonderfully made,” says the psalmist, “I was made in secret, and curiously
wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” Did these ashes say that? “Surely
thou wilt slay the wicked, O God”—wouldn’t that be the thrust of their prayers?
Surely some curiously wrought were meant to survive?
The rain now was a steady blur as I walked to my car.
Running wouldn’t have undrenched me, and I was of a different mind here than at
Treblinka, where to some degree the running made sense. The curator had advised
an early departure if I wanted to cross the Wisla—closed already at the Annopol
bridge. Still, I wanted not to run and rather to repose: “a turn or two I’ll
walk / To still my beating mind.”
The patrolman on the southeast side of Sandomierz was in
no mood to hear my appeal—the bridge had been declared unsafe for traffic. My
car was light, I argued, and I’d drive like a snail. That wouldn’t help, he
reasoned, as the rising water was fast as an eel, a snail-eating eel. Ok, so
maybe I’d try the pace of an eel—no cannibalism would likely occur? He didn’t
laugh at that, but told me to wait (as if I could do otherwise) while he
contacted the other side. They argued, it seemed, and sensing the crux I dug
out twenty zlaty for the man on this side and nodded another twenty to the side
that would receive me, and as tolls go, the bargain was more than fair. I drove
the bridge carefully as a human would, smiling at animal instincts.
A hotel at the top
of the bluff took me in and provided a sonmolent meal of bigos, surówka,
pierogi and pope-endorsed Zywiec. After reading Eva Hoffman’s probe on what
makes a Polish Jew or a Jew in Poland, I wrote a few letters and burrowed into
bed. I knew there’d be some things I’d want to see in the morning, but also the
prospect of disappointment. This beautiful and rather preserved town harbored a
‘blood libel’ history, a defunct synagogue-turned-state archive, a shtetl unease
between peasant Christians and marketplace Jews (and vice versa). Beyond
religious views, the name of the place derived from the Slavic semantics ‘to judge
peace’. Gadzooks!—from Ottoman to
Swedish Deluge, to the Vilno-decreed Pale to the Warsaw-based Congress, to
Kaisers to Nazis—has there been any peace here plausibly to judge? I must have
dreamt entire histories, waking only to the startled yelp from the cleaning
maid, who bashfully apologized for entering unannounced. It was my error,
though, to sleep in past 11, when checkout was past-due. I weighed the sudden
option of taking this room a second night, borrowing one of the three I had
planned for Cracow, but the man at the desk denied me that anyway—the flood was
displacing some low-lying residents who needed this refuge on the rock. A bit
of an illusion, that, recalling what the waiter had told me last night in
structural fragility of this part of town due to myriad hidden tunnels over the
centuries.
The day entailed some research, mostly of dead ends. The
town hall and central rynek conducted a preoccupied sense of business, the
flood most of all on everyone’s mind. The synagogue couldn’t be more closed,
and an old lady outside its doors hadn’t any story to tell about its (or her)
existence. Instead, she wanted to sell her small selection of postcards, and I
gleaned through them for fodder. “Here’s one,” I noticed, “that quotes Isaiah
42:3.” She nodded naively. “Who was behind the photograph and link to that
verse?”
“Who took the picture?” she reframed my question. “That I
don’t know. But it’s our river, the Wisla—isn’t it beautiful!”
“It is in this postcard. I wish I could have seen the
reedy banks unflooded.”
“Not now, it’s not so nice. But come back to
Sandomierz—will be nice.”
I bought two of those and three of the sealed synagogue,
my only glimpse of its interior. St James church provided more an open gate,
especially to its unassuming grove, but prayers of the active monks precluded
any serendipity from the likes of me. The day was at its sunny zenith, but
still I sought some shadows along the chapelled aisles. Four dozen of these
descendent monks were slaughtered by Mongols in the thirteenth century, a fact the
placards and brochures made painfully known. There was a vulnerability and
resilience evident everywhere in this town, ad hoc adjustments to the nightmare
of history from which every Stephen Daedalus is trying to awake. Searching a
little bit, I couldn’t apprehend the ‘blood libel’ connection to this church,
though it was in the air.
The town’s cathedral, where I walked to next, had this
stain more tangibly in the seventeenth century paintings of Karol de Prevot. A
baby in a nail-studded barrel, rolled and pierced for blood, a dog tearing
another child apart, the leering supervision of dark-vested Jews in distinctive
hats, the chronology of speculation, that Christ-killers still required blood
for their matzah, their Eucharist of sorts—these could be discerned at first
glance. The idea of Jewish tormentors in this region was beyond baffling:
constant victims of pogroms, a semblance of revenge or organized revolt might
make sense; yet against the backdrop of so many other traipsers of power,
‘blood libel’ activity seemed as tenuous as Salem witchcraft, even as the
historical hunts were all too real. The Kielce Pogrom, more than a year after
Hitler’s defeat, drew surreal momentum on this fear-monger myth: imagine the
notion that a hundred Jews would have even survived from this south-central
town in 1945, only to have half of them killed, another half injured by
municipal mobs in ’46. Whatever populations of Jews in towns thereafter,
including those in Sandomierz, summoned the energy to get the hell out, float
to America or Palestine on a prayer.
The cathedral itself whispered other moods, from the
indigo ceiling, majestically vaulted to the boysenberry colors of the nave. The
visage of Pope John Paul II was familiar and strange—of course he wasn’t Lenin
or Stalin or Gomulka or Gierek, and no one conceivably would throw his portrait
onto a bonfire. By camera angle, he wasn’t looking at any painting by Prevot.
Instead, from what I could decipher, there was in happy papal language a call
to some jubilee, and Sandomierz youth would be part and parcel of the viability
of the catholic (small ‘c’ for universality, big for denominational) church. The
flyer had it in all caps.
Then on my way out, I was struck by a colorful drawing
apparently made from one of the parishioners who’d be too young for the pope’s
jubilee. There were dozens of such drawings in the narthex, a conglomeration of
themes that might have represented the downtime between Easter and Christmas,
as late summer was that. Stick figures of Jesus featured mainly, and the art
was first-grade. I thought I saw the parable of the talents in one of them—some
hapless debtors before a Jesus-looking master—but I decided not to read too
much into that. But the one that stopped me cold was a simple, have-a-nice-day
smile of Jesus on a thickly drawn cross, all details of nails and appendages in
proper place, all consciousness of tears that would run down the crucified
face. But the semi-circle smile jostled well after I left the place. The seven
words of Christ upon the cross never in my imagination held a shitty grin. And
‘shitty’ here looked halcyon. And ‘halcyon’ was none too easy to leave at that.
I made my way down to Krakowska road below the castle,
hoping to walk a Pepper Mountain trail designated as Queen Jadwiga’s Gorge. At
the river end, however, a dozen men were sandbagging the entrance, anticipating
that the river would crest over Krakowska and erode this national parkway. I
lent my own rather famished effort for an hour or so, mostly tying the
fiberglass sacks and carrying them to one of the wall-builders, who had ‘to use
a spell to make them balance’. My hands were accruing scrapes and little cuts,
but the swing of the work was welcome; talk was scant until a man in charge
zipped in on a motorcycle, with a satchel full of paczki. There was no water,
let alone coffee, though some made the trek to the brown Wisla to at least wash
their hands. The boss commended the work and deemed it enough for the time
being. Upriver, he said, the situation was dire, and so the men loaded shovels
and bags into the truck that had just before the boss came dumped a new load of
sand. Then everyone but I clambered aboard as I bid the boss on his motorcycle
good luck. He offered me another paczek which I gratefully refused, the rest of
his crew would need all available energy to work through the evening.
The gorge on the other side of our makeshift wall was quiet
and unpeopled. I felt like Wordsworth’s Michael, aged and ‘watchful more than
ordinary men.’ But who was I to lend such perspective to Queen Jadwiga’s Gorge,
or libelous history, or floods I was in no place to shore? I’m not even, in
this respect, one of the ordinary men that tread paths a thousand times far
needfully than my desire to travel destination point to destination point, a
few unsuspected sallies along the way. Still, returning to the pastoral,
“although
it be a history
Homely and rude, I will relate the same
For the delight of a few natural hearts;
And, with yet fonder feeling, for the sake
Of youthful Poets, who among these hills
Will be my second self when I am gone.”
There was nothing else in Sandomierz I longed to see,
though a second night and day would please inevitably. More cause for coming
back, as I settled into a restaurant with a book I had bought at a bookstore
here—hoping to find something like it at the literary museum, which was fulsome
with curios, not books to read. I had been to Krakow three times before, and
now I was eager to build on this fourth, reading this volume of a native son,
Adam Zagajewski, and his ‘Ode to Softness’ that made me close my eyes:
Mornings
are blind as newborn cats.
Fingernails
grow so trustfully, for a while
they
don’t know what they’re going to touch. Dreams
are
soft, and tenderness looms over us
like
fog, like the cathedral bell of Cracow
before
it cooled.
I’d be there in the turn of a
clock face, a matins that would greet the trumpeter’s call. The waiter wanted
to press on me Zubrovka, but driving, I said, wouldn’t allow. He happily sold
me a bottle, which I tucked into the craw of my backpack, along with my
unwritten postcards on Isaiah 42:3.
I drove away from Sandomierz in the fading pink sky the
Czechs call ‘cervanki’: red skies at night, sailors delight. Floods and famine
duly behind, I prayed for those that lie ahead, especially humbled in the sense
that rarely would these pestilences plague me. Tenderness does loom over us—we
have a plethora of angels watching over each day. Some days? When they do not?
That’s a question for their Higher Up, the ghost in the world’s machine.
I drove into the dark as if my travelled tires were
tenth-grade legs. We race against
the shadows of ourselves by day, the shadow of the world by night, and now that
night descended upon the head-lit car, I turned the radio on to serenade my
hour or two to Krakow. ‘Baba O’reily’ would have been my pick, but instead it
was Bach’s ‘Air aus Stuite No. 3 in D-Dur’—why particularly here? Having
claimed it for my funereal desire, I wasn’t prone to die just yet. Why would
Polish radio float such Thuringian beauty? Why should I celebrate its strains
in the cognizance of all that went before? And who else, in this forlorn
voivodeship was listening in? Who else was crying inconceivably at the last
light of a sun that still shone brightly in the west, not quite in Germany, as
they were in their dusk, but further still. What sun, a billion miles removed,
would wonder upon anything it lit, the road of present day, let alone the roads
of days and years gone by?
Bach faded away, and so
did the announcer’s droll segue to whatever else the broadcast had in mind. I
looked at my flittering dashboard and finally noticed, notwithstanding idiot
lights and such, that I was running out of gas. Of course I was—I had taken
mental note before I’d entered Sandomierz and intended all the time to rectify
that need. Now, beyond its modest infrastructure, I drove on fumes of faith,
knowing all too well they would not get me to Krakow, deceptively close by
modern-fueled measures; I drove until the engine could not drive. And knowing
as I had footed the terrain of Treblinka that I could run for nominal help, I
decided to nest up in the car and sleep as sleep would have, into the thick of
this warm night, beyond the twilight or the dusk it presupposed.
