We spent evenings listening wordlessly to Bartók, Walton, Britten, Shostakovich, Chopin, Beethoven. Hundreds of evenings. It was the period of 33’’ records which one had to turn over by hand. And those moments of turning the record over, and slowly lowering the arm with its diamond needle, were moments of a hallucinating plenitude, grateful and expectant, only comparable with the other moments, also wordless, when one of us was on top of the other making love.
So, why the howl? Style comes from within, yet style has to borrow its assurance from another time and then lend it to the present, and the borrower has to leave a pledge with that other time. The passionate present is invariably too short for style. Liz, aristocrat that she was, borrowed from the past, and I borrowed from a revolutionary future.
Our two styles were surprisingly close. I’m not thinking about the accoutrements of life or brand names. I’m remembering how we were when walking through a forest drenched by rain, or when arriving at Milan’s central railway station in the small hours of the morning. Very close.
Yet when we looked deeply into one another’s eyes, defying the risks involved in this, of which we were fully aware, both of us came to realise that the times being borrowed from were chimera. This was the sadness. This is what made the dog howl.
The traffic light turns green. I overtake her and she follows. After we’ve left Kielce behind, I give a sign to announce I’m going to stop. We both pull up along the edge of another forest, darker than the last one. Her car window is already down. The very fine hair by her temple, sweeping back behind her ear, is delicately tangled. Delicately because to untangle it with my fingers would require delicacy. Around the glove compartment of the dashboard she has stuck different coloured feathers.
Met, she says, there were days on end, you remember, when we got rid of the vulgarity of History. Then after a while, you’d go back, deserting me, again and again. You were addicted.
To what?
You were addicted — she touches several of the feathers with her fingers — you were addicted to the making of history, and you chose to ignore that those who believe they’re making history already have their hands on power, or imagine having their hands on power, and that this power, as sure as the night is long, Met, will confuse them! After a year or so they won’t know what they’re doing. She lets her hand fall on to her thigh.
History has to be endured, she goes on, has to be endured with pride, an absurd pride that is also — God knows why — invincible. In Europe the Poles are the centuries-old specialists in such an endurance. That is why I love them. I’ve loved them since I met pilots from Squadron 303 during the war. I never questioned them, I listened to them. And when they asked me, I danced with them.
A wooden dray loaded down with new timber emerges from the forest. The pair of horses are covered with lather and sweat because the wheels sink deep into the soft earth of the forest track.
The soul of this place has a lot to do with horses, she says, laughing. And you with your famous historical laws, you didn’t know any better than Trotsky how to rub down a horse! Maybe one day — who can tell? — maybe one day you’ll come back into my arms without your famous historical laws.
She makes a gesture such as I cannot describe. She simply adjusts her head, so that I can see her hair and the nape of her neck.
Supposing you had to choose an epitaph? she asks.
If I had to chose an epitaph, I’d choose The Polish Rider, I tell her.
You can’t choose a painting as an epitaph!
I can’t?
It’s wonderful when there’s somebody to pull off your boots for you. ’She knows how to get his boots off’ is a proverbial Russian compliment. I pull off my own tonight. And, once off, being motorbike boots, they stand apart. They are different, not because they have metal in certain places as a protection, nor because they have an added piece of leather near the toecap so that they resist the wear and tear of flicking the gear pedal up, nor because they have a phosphorescent sign around the calf so that the rider is more visible at night in the headlights of the vehicle behind, but because, pulling them off, I have the feeling of stepping to the side of the many thousands of kilometres we have ridden together, they and I. They could be the seven-league boots that so fascinated me as a child. The boots I wanted to take everywhere with me, for even then I was dreaming of roads, although the road made me shit-scared.
I love the painting of the Polish Rider as a child might, for it is the beginning of a story being told by an old man who has seen many things and never wants to go to bed.
I love the rider as a woman might: his nerve, his insolence, his vulnerability, the strength of his thighs. Liz is right. Many horses course through dreams here.
In 1939 units of Polish cavalry armed with swords charged against the tanks of the invading Panzer divisions. In the seventeenth century, the ’Winged Horse-men’ were feared as the avenging angels of the eastern plains. Yet the horse means more than military prowess. Over the centuries Poles have been continually obliged to travel or emigrate. Across their land without natural frontiers the roads never end.
The equestrian habit is still sometimes visible in bodies and the way they move. The gesture of putting the right foot in a stirrup and hoicking the other leg over comes to my mind whilst sitting in a pizza bar in Warsaw watching men and women who have never in their lives mounted or even touched a horse, and who are drinking Pepsi-cola.
I love the Polish Rider’s horse as a horseman who has lost his mount and has been given another might. The gift horse is a bit long in the tooth — the Poles call such a nag a szkapa — but he’s an animal whose loyalty has been proven.
Finally I love the landscape’s invitation, wherever it may lead.
It has led to the village of Górecko in the south-east of what is named Little Poland, twenty kilometres from the Ukrainian border.
The village street is dust and stones. There are two shops, and along an overgrown path through the forest, a church. In the centre of the village, near a shrine to the Madonna, where wild asparagus grows in the spring, there is a small reservoir full of green water. The villagers dug and built the reservoir in the 1960s as part of a miniature hydro-electric plan drawn up by the local priest to bring electricity to the village. It didn’t work, but the fact that the Church was meddling with the formula Soviets + Electricity = Communism forced the authorities to supply the area, perhaps more quickly than they would otherwise have done, from the national grid system. Today, when a workhorse goes mad, the villagers stand the animal in the reservoir for several hours, until the animal cools down.
The houses are mostly wooden chatas of two rooms with a stove between them (in winter the temperature can be –20 °C) and a chimney in the middle of the roof. The four small windows are doubled — there’s often a pot-plant placed lovingly in the space between the two frames. The gardens are surrounded by wooden fences and in them grow beetroots, cabbages, potatoes, leeks. Some chatas have been enlarged, rebuilt, fitted with radiators, and given a portico with wooden columns. The plot of land, though, is still the same plot, and the money for improving the grandparents’ house has been earnt in Germany or Chicago.
My friend Mirek’s house stands apart from the village on the other side of the main road. For the last seven years Mirek has worked, as an illegal migrant, on building sites in Paris. By training he is a forestry engineer. I have learnt much from him in the forest.