Only Camellia, their daughter, spoke English easily. She took me on expeditions into Epping Forest. She showed me how animals die: It’s fallen, it’ll never leave the ground again. We both had knives for cutting. Tendrils, bines and worts. What she showed me was a secret. We might have explained, when asked, where we had been; we would never tell what we had seen.
I did a drawing of an owl and together we hid it in the hollow of an oak tree that had been split by lightning. When we returned the next week the drawing had gone and the hollow was full of feathers. We collected the feathers and Camellia said we could write with them. I thought she meant they were an alphabet. It could be that it is with them that I’m writing at this moment.
Camellia’s family came from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, until the end of the First World War, included this bridge over the river Szum. I never found out exactly what disaster had forced them to emigrate. All I took in was their homesickness and the various ways they possessed of combating it — tisanes, sachets of dried lavender, records of Liszt, cheesecake, dried mushrooms, a certain way of pulling on their socks. Whatever their story — it was not a Jewish one — the father had been dishonoured in some way, this I could feel, and this was why he gazed into the middle distance and spoke rarely. He was waiting for a message to come which would rectify the error. It never, of course, came.
I walk towards the field where the wild sorrel grows. I have left Bogena’s potatoes in a small pile on the planks of the bridge where they are glowing like eggs. I cut the sorrel plants with my pocket knife. They are about the size of young dandelions, but the green of their leaves, like their taste, is both sweeter and more acid. They grow in clumps together, so I sit down and spread out my handkerchief on the grass and place the cut leaves on it.
The pictorial convention of using fig leaves to hide the human genitalia is comic — the leaves are too shiny and too heraldic. Wild sorrel plants would be far more appropriate, for their leaves feel like green skin when you touch them. Exactly like green skin. Exactly. I’ve picked enough and I remain sitting.
There are no birds to be seen. The sporadic, loud trilling comes from between the leaves of the surrounding trees and bushes. I have the impression it is the foliage itself that is singing! I remember having the same sensation in Gordon Avenue. The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season. I wipe and close the knife.
A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum.
You asked me, Juan, to write something for you about pocket knives, pocket knives and boyhood. I told you I thought pocket knives went with torches. A knife in one pocket and a torch in the other! I never got round to writing anything. Then unaccountably you died.
You are looking at me sardonically, as I hoped you would. Listen, here’s a knife story!
I’ve held this knife in my hand and it was made in the village of Josefow. I’ve seen the grave of the man who made it. A very proud man by all accounts. He was a craftsman, perhaps a harness-maker or a saddler.
He had three children, two boys and a girl, who was the youngest. Either because he knew she was probably his last child, or because of her fierce blue eyes and dark hair, or for his own reasons, he loved her particularly.
This was in 1906, when everyone in Poland was waiting to see what would happen next, after the revolts and strikes of the previous year. The historians would later call it a revolution.
The protests across the country had been about poverty, hunger, working conditions, and most of all about the Polish language, which was forbidden to be taught in any school, or used for any official purpose. The Russians, Prussians and Austrians who occupied the country wanted the language suppressed. Many men and women died in pools of blood fighting for the right to their own words. To die for a certain declension. A certain declension and certain names! The daughter’s name was Eva and her birthday was in May.
After giving the matter considerable thought, the father decided that his birthday present should be a pocket knife, which he would make, especially for her, in his workshop. He had noticed how she was always pestering one of her brothers to lend her his pocket knife.
Her knife should be small, not more than nine centimetres long when shut, and seventeen centimetres when open. The handle should be made from a ram horn, honey-grey, slightly translucent. He would find one at Romek’s store in Aleksandrow, split it, and with four brass rivets attach the two halves to the steel spine, slightly curved, mounting towards the tail. The steel blade would also curve and narrow to a point.
The father made it. The knife is small and feminine — like a barrette for a massive head of black hair. When shut, if you hold it in your right hand, the blade of the knife glints like a moon in its final phase after the last quarter. It’s small, but one could gut a trout with it, peel a pear, cut wild sorrel, open a letter, remove a stone from a goat’s cleft hoof — if the goat was calm. The knife, however, has one peculiarity.
Who knows at what moment during its making the father made his decision. Was it when he first imagined the knife? Or was it only towards the end, after he had made the handle, and before he fitted the blade that is held by a single clamping pin?
The peculiarity of the knife is that the cutting edge of the blade is as thick and as rounded as its back edge. It is a knife perfectly made not to cut. It has a cancelled blade. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the year 1906, when revolutions and troops firing into crowds were the order of the day throughout central and eastern Europe, a man made a knife like this so that his beloved Eva would be less likely to cut her finger.
When you open it, Juan, it occurs to you it’s a Hamlet-object you’re holding. It contains a recognised desire and, running parallel, the fear which that desire provokes. A knife of indecision. Open or shut, the blade is always one of regret.
Yet is that all? This Hamlet-object, which has survived its century against all the odds, speaks of something else: of the wish that a loved one has everything, but everything!
I decide to pull two leeks from the vegetable garden. I need a fork because the earth has baked hard. There should be a fork in the portico, along with an axe and a pick. I find it, pull the leeks, and shake the parched earth out of their white roots. The leeks smell of violets and nickel.
Back in the house, I go into the room next to the one where the hunter and antlers are to wind up the clock that is there and set it at the right hour. There’s a piece of furniture in this room the like of which I’d never seen until I came here.
Probably it hasn’t been used as it was intended to be for close on a century. On the odd drunken night women may have teased men with it. Perhaps, once, a woman climbed on to it naked and the men gasped as she went higher and higher. Otherwise it stood there unused and untouched. And, although it takes up a good deal of space — on the floor it covers an area of one metre by three metres and it’s over two metres tall — nobody has thought of dismantling it. To do so would be easy, a question of undoing a dozen nuts.
It commands a kind of awe; it has a precision and lightness which imply that it was imagined with great care and then patiently constructed according to detailed drawings. It’s made of slender lengths of polished beech wood, and its form is that of the letter A, except that it’s in three dimensions — or four if one includes the rhythm of its soaring.