Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI is the author of several books of poetry, including Tremor and Mysticism for Beginners. He divides his time between Paris and Houston, where he is on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

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Another Beauty

University of Georgia Press

Chapter One

Dluga Street didn't belong to our world. It had little in commonwith the historical moment, with the moment designated by thatproud, often misused phrase "the present day." It was a flagrantanachronism, even though a few steps away Warsaw Street ranobligingly in the direction of the capital and Dluga Street itselfbisected Three Poets' Boulevard, already a busy thoroughfare bythe 1960s. But of course this kind of distance from the reigning ageis something completely different for a street than it is for living,feeling people. Streets are usually mindless: their low brows don'tconceal hope, despair, or ideas. The rooftops rest placidly on apartmentbuildings. But one may suppose or suspect certain thingsnonetheless. Thus it seems to me that Dluga Street preferredhorses and horse-drawn carriages. Peasant carts probably suited itbest, but it had no objection to smart coaches with cushioned rubberwheels rolling merrily on their springs. There was a place forsuch things, they fit the street's tricky character. In the winter fragranthorse dung garnished the white snow with yellow spots,steaming lavishly; it lured the local sparrows, greedy for any sort ofdiversion. Dluga Street was caught painfully off guard by modernhistory. It didn't like electricity or internal combustion engines; itdidn't like Hitlerism, introduced by the triumphant Wehrmacht,or Stalinism, imported by the Red Army. It would have beenhappy with horses, carts, and the sweet scent of manure. Servants'shouting, the parasols of elegant ladies, the changing seasons, rain,snow, and sun?these would have filled its modest life completely.Some of these enduring things lingered on. In the fall, heaps of coalrose on the sidewalk, transported in scuttles, or shoveled withspades straight into cellars. Before the Christmas holidays, firs andpines sprouted on balconies, and luckless, bug-eyed carps withvoluptuous lips were brought home by patresfamilias in nets fromwhich drops of water fled. There, in the dense hedgerows of apartmenthouses rubbing walls in solidarity as if boosting one another'sspirits in troubled times, there on the fourth floor, lay the tinyestate of Mrs. C., where I rented my first room in Krakow.

    Mrs. C. is doubtless no longer living. Mrs. C. would certainlynot have wanted her noble surname disclosed to the reading public.Thus she will remain simply Mrs. C., former member of the landedgentry?an F.L.G., FLAG, as they were usually known?althoughnow, after the war, she governed not an entire estate but a singlesmall apartment.

    I didn't know much about her. I didn't know what had happenedto her husband, or if she'd actually ever been married. I didn't knowif she had children, and if so, where they lived. Mrs. C. despised hertenants and almost never spoke with them, that is, with us. Her personallife, the prehistory of her present existence, thus could not beuncovered. But no, I misspoke, she didn't despise her tenants, itwasn't anything so simple, so vulgar. Her true residence was elsewhere,in a different realm, in some imperceptible, inscrutable registerof the cosmos. She wasn't there among us, among those whohad agreed that the gray world of Communism actually did exist.She refused to endorse a treaty with Reality; she performed in a differenttheater, dwelled in a different country. She wasn't amongus?we met her only in the apartment's corridor, a dismal hallwaythat called to mind the ruined parts of town. Mrs. C. was determinedto maintain her prewar status in this shabby setting. She haddecided to remain an heiress, the mistress of an estate, and continuedto look down her nose at those from other walks of life. Thisdecision determined everything, since she wasn't actually distinguishedin any way, she didn't know any more than ordinary people,she wasn't a blue blood, a true aristocrat. She was a short, heavywoman with a cross, homely face like a crushed doughnut, hair ofan indeterminate color, and a damp, unpleasant voice.

    Her policy was simply not to appear, to leave the parlor that wasalso her bedroom as seldom as possible. To be invisible, not to beswallowed up in others' eyes, to shield her essence?but what washer essence??from contact with other essences. She almost neverleft the house, and exhaustive preparations preceded her infrequentoutings, as if major international publications had sent swarms ofphotojournalists to lie in wait for her on the street. Once I heardher say, "Each exit is my Rapallo." Why Rapallo? She probablydidn't know herself, but Rapallo had a nice, round ring to it. Fromtime to time she entertained company?aging ladies drawn onlyfrom her own class, the F.L.G.'s?and then only in the afternoon, atEnglish teatime, never for dinner in the evening.

    Mrs. C. was preoccupied with her historical mission, with thedefense of her own social position, the defense of feudalism in ahostile Communist environment. It was taboo to touch a broom,peel potatoes, wash the floor, make dinner. Such seemingly inconsequentialactions could lead to only one thing: the annihilation ofher higher substance, the substance that was her greatest and?whybeat around the bush??only treasure. If she were to make herself asoft-boiled egg or fry a schnitzel, then the dignity of an entire erawould collapse with a crash, the Middle Ages would finally grind toa halt.

    Fortunately, there was someone to wash the windows andfloors, do the shopping, make lunch and dinner: Helena, the maid,the servant, the serf. Helena got up every day at 4 a.m. and took theearly streetcar?full of desperadoes with eyes red from exhaustion?into work. She worked as a janitor in the city's center for ratcontrol and perhaps as a result she herself looked a little like a rat:she had a narrow snout, a straight nose, and small, bright eyes. Shewas short and deft, restless and meddlesome. No one ever did battlefor this Helen beneath the walls of Troy. When she left for work atdawn, the rest of the apartment house had not yet woken up; mostof the town's inhabitants were still sound asleep. Mrs. C. wasundoubtedly asleep, I was sleeping, and so was my roommate, anenigmatic engineering student two years older than myself. Theentire house woke up only around seven-thirty when Helenareturned with the brisk air of one who had done her small part inexterminating the city's vermin. Helena came home from work justas bleary civil servants were approaching the city's many officebuildings, and as the rats lay down to sleep in their lairs.

    Helena was called upon to deal with the outside world, with historyand nature, with pigeons and crows, with cats, with the milkman,mailman, and chimney sweep, with soot and milk. She was theone who handled concrete objects; she inhaled dust, polished thedoorknobs, and scoured the kettle. She was always in a rush, notime to rest, she hurried and scurried. She slept in the kitchen, on acouch covered with a brown bedspread by day. At night she poredover the local paper by lamplight; this was her only chance to contemplatethe varieties of human folly. She would put on her wire-rimmedglasses and scrutinize the events listed in the crimecolumn: someone had murdered someone else, out of love or envy,for money. I think she sighed then with relief, since this meant theworld had not entirely lost its earlier, prewar imagination andwasn't yet reduced to meetings of the one party's central committee.Mrs. C. handed down instructions, managed the expenses, and,like any minister of finance, complained about costs and Helena'sunconscionable overspending.

    From time to time horrific quarrels erupted between the mistressand her galley slave for no apparent reason; as in an arsenal,the slightest spark could set off an explosion. Helena would give heroppressor notice, slam the door, run out of the house, come back,slam the door again, and scream, "I've had it! Why is it always me,me, me, always just me." Because of her daily streetcar rides and hercontact with people, Helena had a better grasp of what was actuallyhappening in Krakow and the country. She was the one who sensedthe city's shifting moods; she was the one who read the paper, eventhough she only read the crime column. In theory, she should havegradually gained the upper hand in the household; Mrs. C. wouldthen have been reduced to the role of a British sovereign, forced toapprove automatically all decisions taken by the government. ButMrs. C. demanded absolute power; she refused to accept reforms.Her reign was not founded on education or a grasp of modern life.Her right to rule was underwritten by a certain style, a certain mannerof speaking and dressing (she liked white blouses, washed andpressed by Helena), a certain fussy way of puckering her lips, herfour words in French. Knowledge was beside the point. Mrs. C. hadno interest in current events. What had to happen had already happened.The notion of following changes in Communist policy andideology never entered her mind. If someone had told her thatthere was a real difference between Communism's most brutal year,say, 1952, and the Gomulka period in the sixties, she wouldn't havebelieved it for a minute. No, she would have refused even to listen.

    Helena's rebellions never got off the ground. Mrs. C. didn'tsuppress them, she simply waited them out. She locked herself upin her little parlor as if it were a fortress, fasted, and patiently waitedfor the storm to pass. And the storm always did pass. Helena alwaysrelented and returned to her endless duties. For a time she wouldbe cross and fight-lipped, but resigned. She would snort angrily andmock everyone who spoke to her, but finally this routine boredeven her and, shrugging, she'd regain her usual good nature. Sometimesshe took it out on us, the tenants.

    She was a magpie, a snoop. I suspected her of regularly rummagingthrough our things and once left a card that said "Pleasedon't look here" in my desk drawer. Helena took offense and didn'tspeak to me for several days, and then, when her anger had subsided,she reproached me bitterly: "How could you even think sucha thing? So you don't trust me at all."

    These two aging women, ugly, taken from a second-rate Dutchpainting, hating and tolerating each other by turns, forgiving orforgetting the differences between them, truly existed; brisk, nimbleHelena and phlegmatic Mrs. C., pursing her lips. They bothwent to church on Sunday, but never together. Helena preferredthe early mass, while Mrs. C. attended only high mass, carrying ablack prayerbook in her right hand and a genuine calfskin handbagin her left.

    They lived trapped in a cage, in a second-rate Dutch painting,in a cramped apartment, in spite. I was a student then, attendinglectures, everything seemed open, possible. I rushed out of thatfourth-floor apartment and instantly forgot the two women'stragedies and hatreds. I paced the path to the net-Gothic universitywith rapid steps. I strolled beneath the lush trees of the Planty gardens.At times I pitied the two women, caught once and for allwithin their little fates. It wasn't fair: infinity was humming rightbeside them, the stars came out at night. Everything was possible. Iheard lectures on Husserl, on Descartes, who'd had his epiphanyone night, on Pascal's fire. Some books took flame while others heldonly straw, clay, feathers. I knew I wouldn't stay long at Mrs. C.'splace, although there were in fact moments when I too took part inthe women's dull pain, when their ill humor captured me. Thesewere only moments, though, and I shook them off quickly. But thewomen were chained to their misery, their inferno; they couldn'tbreak free of it.

    Was it naïve to think of them this way? Yes, it was. The jaundicedMrs. C. couldn't suddenly run from the house and become ayoung girl yearning for knowledge and revelation. Helena probablycouldn't escape the center for rat control.

    No, it wasn't naive. They didn't want a great life. Yes, it wasnaïve. A great life had been snatched from them forever, for alleternity. Figuring out crossword puzzles?I glimpsed this oncecompletely by chance?was Mrs. C.'s secret. Not a cross, just acrossword. The words marched up and down, but they didn't makesense, they were powerless, crucified. A great nation's capital on asmall river. Champagne for children. An African city.

    And it had come to this. Mrs. C. had three tenants?two studentsand a tall old man, already half-dead. Hard of hearing, he listenedto the radio for days on end with the volume turned up sohigh that the walls shook. Of course, he listened only to Radio FreeEurope. He moved cautiously, as slowly as possible, shuffling hisslippers across the floor. It had come to this: a few pennies in rent, apension, a cleaning woman's pay.

    No, it wasn't naïve, since life is for each of us, for everyone.

I lost two homelands as a child. I lost the city where I was born, thecity where countless generations of my family had lived before mybirth. But the onset of Soviet-style rule meant I also forfeited myeasy, natural access to a general, self-evident truth. It took me manyyears to return to life's main current, to accept once more the simplestcertainties, certainties that only charlatans and madmen callinto question.

Continues...

Excerpted from Another Beautyby Adam Zagajewski Copyright © 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. Excerpted by permission.
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