To ancestral spirits one brings gifts: cookies baked especially for this purpose, fruit, prayers written on pieces of material.
Those who remain in the cities experience very strange sensations: the giant shopping centres are closed and even the huge screens with advertisements are turned off for this period. The number of metros is reduced, and some stations are completely shut down (for example, University and Stock Exchange). Fast food restaurants and nightclubs are closed. The city is so empty that this year the authorities decided to stop the electronically controlled system of city fountains, which is expected to bring massive savings.
RUTH
After his wife died, he made a list of all the places that had the same name as her: Ruth.
He found quite a few of them, not only towns, but also streams, little settlements, hills – even an island. He said he was doing it for her sake, and besides, it gave him strength to see that in some indefinable way she still existed in the world, even if only in name. And that furthermore, whenever he would stand at the foot of a hill called Ruth, he would get the sense she hadn’t died at all, that she was right there, just differently.
Her life insurance was able to cover the costs of his travels.
RECEPTION AT LARGE FANCY HOTELS
In a rush I enter and am greeted by the polite smile of the porter. I look around as though I’m busy, as though I’ve come to meet someone. I put on an act. I glance impatiently at my watch, and then I collapse into one of the chairs and light a cigarette.
Receptions are better than cafés. You don’t have to order anything, you don’t have to get into any disputes with the waiters, or eat anything. The hotel extends before me its rhythms, it’s a whirlpool, and its centre is the revolving door. The flowing stream of people pauses, turns in place for a night or two, then continues.
Whoever was supposed to come won’t come, but does that undermine the ethos of my waiting? It’s an activity similar to meditation – time flows and brings little in the way of novelty, situations repeat (a taxi drives up, a new guest gets out of it, the porter takes their suitcase out of the boot, they walk up to reception, with the key to the lift). Sometimes situations double up (two taxis arrive symmetrically from two opposing directions, and two guests get out of them, two porters take out two suitcases from the two boots) or multiply, it gets crowded, the situation gets tense, chaos looms, but it’s just a complicated figure, hard to see at first its complex harmony. At other times the hall becomes unexpectedly empty, and then the porter flirts with the receptionist, but only absent-mindedly, half-heartedly, remaining at full hotel readiness.
I sit like this for about an hour, no longer. I see those coming out of the lift and rushing off to a meeting, late by nature, sometimes in their rush they spin around in the revolving door as though in a mill that will grind them into dust in a moment. I see those who shamble along, dragging their feet, as though forcing themselves to put one foot in front of the other, lingering before every movement. Women waiting for men, men waiting for women. The women wear fresh make-up that the coming evening will wipe off completely, and over them a cloud of perfume, a sacred halo. The men act out complete freedom, but in reality they’re tense, living somewhere in the lower floors of their bodies today, in their lower abdomens.
This waiting periodically brings lovely presents – here a man is escorting a woman to a taxi. They get out of the lift. She is small, petite, dark-haired, dressed in a tight short skirt, but she doesn’t look vulgar. An elegant prostitute. He walks behind her, tall, greying, in a grey suit, with his hands in his trousers pockets. They don’t talk, and they keep a distance; it’s hard to believe that just a moment ago their mucus membranes were rubbing against each other, that he was thoroughly investigating the insides of her mouth with his tongue. They walk side by side now, but he lets her go first again into the mill of the revolving door. The taxi is waiting, notified. The woman gets in without a word, at most just a slight smile. There is no ‘see you later’ or ‘this was nice’, nothing of the kind. He leans into the window just a little, but I don’t think he says anything. Maybe a completely superfluous ‘goodbye’, perhaps still bound by habit. And she’s driven off. He comes back, meanwhile, with his hands in his pockets, light and content, there’s even the hint of a smile on his face. He’s already starting to come up with plans for the evening, has already remembered email and phones, but he won’t go to them just yet, he’ll keep enjoying this lightness for a bit, perhaps he’ll just go out for a drink.
POINT
Passing through these cities, I do know that at some point I will have to stay in one of them for longer, maybe even settle down. I weigh them in my mind, compare and evaluate, and it always seems to me that each of them is too far, or too near.
Which means there must be some fixed point around which all of my perambulations revolve. Too far from what, too near to what?
CROSS SECTION AS LEARNING METHOD
Learning by layers; each layer is only vaguely reminiscent of the next or of the previous; usually it’s a variation, a modified version, each contributes to the order of the whole, though you wouldn’t know it looking at each one on its own, cut off from the whole.
Each slice is a part of the whole, but it’s governed by its own rules. The three-dimensional order, reduced and imprisoned in a two-dimensional layer, seems abstract. You might even think that there was no whole, that there never had been.
CHOPIN’S HEART
It is widely known that Chopin died at two o’clock in the morning (‘aux petites heures de la nuit,’ as French Wikipedia tells us) on 17 October 1849. By his death bed were several of his closest friends, among them his sister Ludwika, who attended to him munificently until the very end, as well as Father Aleksander Jełowicki who, shaken by the quiet, animal deceasing of a thoroughly ruined body, by the drawn-out battle that was every gulp of air, first fainted in the stairwell and then, under the rubric of some rebellion he wasn’t altogether conscious of, thought up a better version of the virtuoso’s death in his memoirs. He wrote, among other things, that the last words of Fryderyk Chopin had been, ‘I am already at the source of all happiness,’ which was a very obvious lie, although certainly beautiful and moving. In fact, as Ludwika recalled it, her brother said nothing; in fact, he had been unconscious for a few hours. What actually escaped his lips in the very end was a stream of dark, thick blood.
Now Ludwika, freezing and exhausted, is driving off in a stagecoach. She’s nearing Leipzig. It’s a wet winter, and heavy clouds with black bellies are coming up on them from the west; it will most likely snow. Many months have passed since the funeral, but yet another funeral, in Poland, awaits Ludwika now. Fryderyk Chopin had always said he wanted to be buried in his native land, and because he knew perfectly well that he was dying, he had planned his death quite carefully. And his funerals, too.