Читать книгу Maybe Esther - Katja Petrowskaja, Katja Petrowskaja - Страница 17

My first trip abroad, in the summer of 1989, took me to Poland. The country was aquiver with shock therapy, the term attached to the economic experiment that lifted price controls. We had only six days, one of them for Oświęcim. I remember looking out the window at the flat countryside, which seemed familiar, as though I hadn’t gone away at all, with its gentle hills and long plain, unobtrusive vegetation, and slightly faded colors. I remember my fellow passengers in the bus, conversations about a music festival in Kraków, and a little shop at the entrance to Oświęcim, full of objects that had nothing to do with the memorial site, cheaply priced silver, necklaces, rings, crosses, maybe other items I am no longer seeing clearly now. Everyone who had already been in Poland had brought back silver. “Buy silver!” was the motto of the day. It’s easy to acquire a taste for these shops, and some of the ladies in the bus had brought irons and hair curlers to sell at a profit here in Poland. I remember my growing desire to buy something, anything, a simple chain necklace, for instance, although I really didn’t need one, while struggling with feelings of shame to be thinking about money and profit here at this gate; after all, I was from a good family, which in our case meant that we reined in our yen for profit, which wasn’t hard for us to do, since we had no money, and this conferred dignity on us and confirmed our sense of decency. But a new era had dawned, and our moral norms, which were carved out for eternity, no longer applied. If I didn’t buy the necklace, I would surely come to regret passing up the opportunity to join in and be part of the group, to be one of the people who could buy because there was finally something to buy, and if everyone did it, it was surely a good investment. Investment was one of those brand-new words, so it couldn’t be so bad to buy a silver chain here, at the entrance to Oświęcim, Auschwitz. That was not an immoral deed; it was in keeping with the times to be able to afford something mundane, as a sign of the victory over fascism, for instance. Still, the more I tried to convince myself of that, the more I felt torn apart and overcome with the feeling that pragmatism was inappropriate here. I think I recall holding my breath and opting for a compromise by buying three such chains as presents, as though their being presents jettisoned the question of good and evil. One for Mama, one for my best friend, and one just in case. I wound up keeping the last one for myself until a kind of unease impelled me to lose it; part of me must have wanted to let it go, yet I had a tinge of regret. Even Karl Marx wrote about the chains you lose on the path to freedom.

Once I’d purchased my three chains and was standing at the gate to Oświęcim, my memory ground to a halt. From this moment on, I do not recall anything. I have tried again and again to make my memory slip through the gate, just to have a look around, but it does not work. I was there, but didn’t retain any sense of what I experienced, and I didn’t reemerge until the next day, when we came to a lovely small town in the south of Poland, with a picturesque marketplace and kościół, a newly built, starkly modern church. I regained my composure at the sight of the young priest, whom I regarded as a creature unknown to me and all of science, as though he was the first person I had ever seen, as though I had just emerged from his rib, and as though he could not know that I belonged to his postdiluvian species. I beheld his sharp nostrils, his eyes, with their fan-like lashes, gazing upward to the Virgin Mary, his hands with their long, exaggeratedly decorous fingers, as though seeing everything human, the sum total of anatomy, for the very first time, though for some reason known only to God he was covered up by the cassock, and when he told us in a soft, impassioned voice about his new congregation, I couldn’t concentrate on his concerns, so beautiful he was, beyond all measure. Had I been capable of concentration, I would have had to let in my memory of yesterday, the word itself and what it stands for, how to concentrate people and oneself; instead something within me asked what celibacy and the will of God are about, if I am so attracted to him. I clearly remember having a firm belief in God at the very moment when I was confusing beauty with desire, a belief made possible by my having forgotten something, but I did not know what exactly.

My fellow passengers from Kiev (then considered Russians in Poland) were now adorned and equipped with all manner of silver, and uncharacteristically quiet. There was no chatter or chitchat, but I heard sensible questions about God, Communists, and economic reform. Their solemnity showed that they had not entirely awakened from their nightmare; its spectral images were still galloping on long thin legs in front of their eyes.

Of course I know that we must have gone through this gate, I know what is written on this gate, the way I know what two plus two is, how “Frère Jacques” goes, or the Lord’s Prayer, although I don’t know that one well. I know well enough what the gate says and that I hate work so much because of it, even the word, Arbeit, which will never, with any coin or poem, buy its freedom from this verse, this curse, and that is why I just can’t find any outlook on work, because I always wonder where this Arbeit will take me, for it’s true what it says about freedom here, and there is no solution to that. I know how the paths run, I know what there is to see, what I could have seen there, because I saw the barracks, the containers like those for wholesale goods, and the entire site several times later, often enough to emblazon the place in my memory, but I recall nothing from that particular day.

I have tried to paste later impressions over this amnesia, which seemed to me like a thick pane of frosted glass, but nothing stayed in place, everything vanished like last year’s foliage, and I saw only a golden autumn day with a mixed woodland at the edge of a painting.