Hi! Lenuta! the one with the old man calls out to the one who had no luck with the Ukrainian. Do you know what the bastards have done?
What?
They have pinched his car. I take him into the forest. I bring him back and it’s gone. A new BMW 525.
Is he blaming you?
He’s German and I fear he may have a heart attack.
He’s paid you? Lenuta asks.
The other one nods.
Then leave him!
The other one pulls a face and shrugs her shoulders.
So give him to me, says Lenuta, and go and see Janey — maybe Evgen knows something about the car.
The man sits down on the ferns. He stares at his boots and puts a hand on his chest. Lenuta takes off his hat with the feather in it and, holding it by the brim, fans him. It’s 40 °C.
An old woman accompanied by a small boy emerges from the forest. Her fingers and thumbs are stained purple. The boy is carrying a supermarket carrier-bag. They have been picking blueberries. And in a moment the boy will sit on the roadside with four one-litre jars, filled with the black fruit they have gathered.
I have a friend who is an ethologist. Not long ago she worked for years with the wolves in the Białowieƶa forest, about 200 kilometres east from here. Over many months, patiently and fearlessly, she sidled up to the wolves until they accepted her, until their curiosity became keener than their wariness. Her name is Despina. Early one morning the pack-leader, whom she called Siber, approached and showed her he wanted her to follow him. She complied. He led her slowly, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure she was following, through the undergrowth of the forest, to the lair in the earth, where his she-wolf had given birth to their cubs. By now they were two weeks old, and on the morning in question the mother was about to bring them out of the lair to introduce them for the first time to the rest of the pack, three other wolves who were there in front of Despina, waiting for the encounter. Siber and his mate called the cubs out. Yuuuer. . yuuer. . yuue. One by one they emerged, eyes searching. After they are three weeks old cubs become suspicious of any creature who is not recognisable as a member of the pack, so this was the moment for them to meet. And Siber wanted Despina to witness that moment.
Not too close to the girls, the grandmother warns her grandson with his jar of blueberries. Keep away from the Romanian girls, otherwise when there are women in the cars they won’t let their men stop.
Everybody in this land sells or tries to sell something. Men in their sixties stand on the kerb in the large towns towards evening, holding up a piece of cardboard on which they’ve written the word: POKOJE. They are trying to sell the guest room in their small flat or house for one night to a passing traveller.
Each jar of berries costs eight złoty.
The BMW has been recovered. The elderly German forks out several hundred złoty. He’s wearing his hat with the feather in it again and is minutely examining his car’s tyres — probably to make sure that they have not been changed.
The roads are straight, the distance between towns long. The sky is making a new proposition to the earth. I imagine travelling alone between Kalisz and Kielce a hundred and fifty years ago. Between the two names there would always have been a third — the name of your horse. Your horse’s name the constant between the names of the towns you approach and the towns you leave behind.
I see a sign for Tarnów to the south. At the end of the nineteenth century Abraham Bredius, the compiler of the first modern catalogue of Rembrandt paintings, discovered a canvas in a castle there.
’When I saw a magnificent four-in-hand passing my hotel and learnt from the porter that it was Count Tarnowski who had become engaged some days before to the ravishing Countess Potocka, who would bring him a considerable dowry, I had little idea that this man was also the fortunate owner of one of the most sublime works by our great master.’
Bredius left the hotel and made a long and difficult journey by train — he complained that for miles the train travelled at a walking pace — to the Count’s castle. There he spotted a canvas of a horse and rider, which he unhesitatingly attributed to Rembrandt, considering it a masterpiece that had been forgotten for a century. It was given the title of The Polish Rider.
Nobody today knows precisely who or what the painting represented for the painter. The rider’s coat is typically Polish — a kontusz. Likewise the rider’s headgear. This is probably why the painting was bought by a Polish nobleman in Amsterdam, and taken to Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.
When I first saw the painting in the Frick Collection in New York, where it ended up, I felt it might be a portrait of Rembrandt’s beloved son, Titus. It seemed to me — and it still does — a painting about leaving home.
A more scholarly theory suggests that the painting may have been inspired by a Pole, Jonaz Szlichtyng, who, during Rembrandt’s time in Amsterdam, was something of a rebel-hero in dissident circles. Szlichtyng belonged to a sect that followed the sixteenth-century Sienese theologian Lebo Sozznisi, who denied that Christ was the son of God — for, if he were, the religion would cease to be monotheistic. If the painting was inspired by Jonaz Szlichtyng it offers an image of a Christlike figure, who is a man, only a man, setting out, mounted on a horse, to meet his destiny.
Do you think you are going fast enough to get away from me? she asks as she draws up beside me at the first traffic light in Kielce.
I notice that she is driving with her shoes kicked off, her bare feet on the pedals.
No question of leaving you behind, I say, straightening my back and putting both feet on the ground.
Then why so fast?
I don’t reply, for she knows the answer.
In speed there is a forgotten tenderness. She had a way, when driving, of lifting her right hand from the steering wheel so that she could see the dials on the dashboard without having to move her head a centimetre. And this small movement of her hand was as neat and precise as that of a great conductor before an orchestra. I loved her surety.
When she was alive I called her Liz, and she called me Met. She liked the nickname Liz because during her life up to that moment it would have been inconceivable that she should answer to such a vulgar abbreviation. ’Liz’ implied a law had been broken and she adored broken laws.
Met is the name given to a flight navigator in a novel by Saint-Exupéry. Perhaps Vol de Nuit. She was much better read than I, but I was more street-wise, and perhaps this is why she named me after a navigator. The idea of calling me Met came to her while driving through Calabria. Whenever we got out of the car she put on a hat with a wide brim. She detested suntan. Her skin was as pale as the Spanish royal family’s in the time of Velásquez.
What brought us together? Superficially it was curiosity — almost everything about us, including our ages, was undisguisedly different. Between us there were many first times. Yet more profoundly, it was an unspoken acknowledgement of the same sadness which brought us together. There was no self-pity. If she had perceived a trace of this in me she would have cauterised it. And I, as I say, loved her surety, which is incompatible with self-pity. A sadness that was like the crazy howl of a dog at the full moon.
For different reasons, the two of us believed that style was indispensable for living with a little hope, and either you lived with hope or in despair. There was no middle way.
Style? A certain lightness. A sense of shame excluding certain actions or reactions. A certain proposition of elegance. The supposition that, despite everything, a melody can be looked for and sometimes found. Style is tenuous, however. It comes from within. You can’t go out and acquire it. Style and fashion may share a dream, but they are created differently. Style is about an invisible promise. This is why it requires and encourages a talent for endurance and an ease with time. Style is very close to music.