Maybe Esther. Katja Petrowskaja
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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.
Many years have gone by since my babushka Rosa died, but I still keep finding her hairpins, the black Soviet hairpins made of some flexible metal I can’t put a name to, which have disappeared from the market with the collapse of the Soviet empire; maybe the raw material was produced in one of our republics, but the pins themselves in another one and then packaged somewhere in Asia, only to be transported back to the center, because everything was manufactured according to planned economic capriciousness. I find Rosa’s hairpins in all cities of the world, in hotels, at modern train stations, in train corridors, and in the apartments of strangers, as though Rosa had been there shortly before me, as though she knew that I had lost my way and was showing me how to get home with her hairpins—even though she had never traveled abroad.
During the last years of her life, Rosa wrote her memoirs incessantly and in great haste, in pencil on white paper. The paper quickly turned yellow, as though anticipating its natural aging process, but Rosa’s loss of sight was quicker. She didn’t number the pages; she simply piled them up. Did she sense that there was no point in putting them in order if the individual lines couldn’t be made out anyway? She often forgot to move on to a new sheet and wrote several pages’ worth on the same piece of paper. One line ran into the next, and another one lay atop earlier writing like waves of sand on the beach, obeying a force of nature, tangled up in the interlaced and interwoven pencil scribblings.
Rosa fought off her blindness with her scrawl, lacing together the lines of her world as it slipped away. The darker it grew, the more densely she squeezed her writing onto the pages. Some passages were as inextricably intertwined as matted wool; the prices of potatoes in the late 1980s were knotted together with tales from the war and fleeting encounters. Here and there a recognizable word would seep through the woolen thicket: ailing, Moscow, lifeblood. For years, I thought that the texts could be deciphered—in America there are devices that can unscramble lines like these—until I understood that Rosa’s writings were not intended for reading, but rather for holding on to, a thickly woven, unbreakable Ariadne’s thread.
She sat in our apartment building on Ulitsa Florentsii, using the windowsill as a table. She saw as little outside as inside, and she wrote.
The only things I still write by hand are telephone numbers, which I enter into a small telephone book decorated with Leonardo da Vinci’s handwriting. I bought it years ago in Florence, and whenever I look at Leonardo’s refined flourishes, the mark of an era in which people still believed that man was the measure of all things, I always think of Babushka’s illegible pencil scribblings.
Rosa’s hands, which were always animated by her use of sign language, didn’t rest even in retirement. She wanted to cook but wasn’t able to, because she couldn’t see, and her hands now adhered to different principles. She had spent her entire life with the deaf, she spoke sign language every day, her students called Rosa Mi-ni-a-tur-na-ya-mi-mi-ka, miniature mimic, as though that was