Landscapes. John Berger
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weariness; for his sad curiosity.
A little too upright, he repeats. Never mind, every copy has to change something, doesn’t it?
My love for his lack of illusions comes back too. Without illusions, he avoided disillusionment.
When I first met him I was eleven and he forty. For the next six or seven years he was the most influential person in my life. It was with him that I learnt to cross frontiers. In French there is the word passeur – often translated as ferryman or smuggler. Yet there is also in the word the connotation of guide, and something of the mountains. He was my passeur.
Ken flips backwards through the sketchbook. He had deft fingers and could palm cards skilfully. He tried to teach me Find the Lady: You can always make money with that! he said. Now he puts a finger between two pages and stops.
Another copy? Antonello da Messina?
Dead Christ supported by Angel, I say.
I never saw it, only in reproduction. If I could have chosen to have my portrait painted by any artist in history, I’d have chosen him, he says. Antonello. He painted like he was printing words. Everything he painted had that kind of coherence and authority, and it was during his lifetime that the first printing presses were invented.
He looks down again at the sketchbook.
Not a trace of pity on the angel’s face or in his hands, he says, only tenderness. You’ve caught that tenderness, but not the gravity, the gravity of the first printed words. That’s gone for good.
I did it last year in the Prado. Until the guards came to chuck me out!
Anyone has the right to draw there, no?
Yes, but not to sit on the floor.
Then why didn’t you draw standing up!
When Ken says this in the Place Nowy, I see him, tall, stooped, standing on the edge of a cliff making a sketch of the sea. Near Brighton, the summer of 1939. He always carried in his pocket a large black graphite pencil called a Black Prince, which, instead of being round, was rectangular like a carpenter’s pencil.
I’m too old now, I tell him, to draw for a long time standing up.
He puts down the sketchbook abruptly without glancing at me. He abhorred self-pity. The weakness, he said, of many intellectuals. Avoid it! This was the only moral imperative he ever imparted to me.
He fingers one of the cheeses I have bought.
Her name is Jagusia, he says, nodding towards the woman who sold me the oscypek, and she comes from the mountains in Podhale. Her two sons work in Germany. Black labour. Hard for them to get work permits, they’re forced to be illegal. Néanmoins, they’re building a house, a house larger than Jagusia has even dreamt of, not one storey but three, not two rooms but seven!
Néanmoins! French words cropped up in his sentences not out of affectation but because the years he had lived in Paris, before coming to London and the Bayswater Road, were the happiest of his life. It was for the same reason that he sometimes wore a black beret.
Yet Jagusia will refuse, he prophesies, to move out of her chata, with the cheesecloths on the line in the garden.
This was the man who made me believe that together we could find music in any city in the world.
What about a beer? he says now in Kraków, pointing towards the far end of the market building, beyond a clothes shop belonging to a fat woman who is sitting smoking in an armchair, surrounded by dresses.
I get up and walk towards her. As she smokes, she tells the story of what happened when she arrived in the Place Nowy; every morning she does this, and every morning the man who sells dried and pickled mushrooms listens to her, his face expressionless. When all the dresses and trousers she has on display are folded up and stacked in the little shop, there is no space for her. On the inside of the door there is a long mirror, since customers sometimes use it as a changing room. Each morning when she opens the shop, she sees herself in this mirror and each morning she is surprised by her size.
I spot the cans of beer on a stall with dried beans, Polish mustard, biscuits, honey-bread and tinned meats. There is also an open chessboard and a game in progress. The grocer behind the stand is playing Black, and a man who looks like a passer-by is playing White. Several pawns, a knight and a bishop have been taken.
The grocer studies the chessboard from a distance, then turns away and gets on with his job until the other one has made his move. The other one hovers above the game and rocks forwards and backwards on his feet, as if he were one of his own bishops, already lifted very slightly off the board between the fingers of a giant player who is cautiously trying out possible moves, being careful not to relinquish the piece until he is certain.
I ask for two beers. White moves his queen diagonally and says Check! Black takes my money and moves a knight. The queen withdraws. A woman customer asks for some of the honey-bread which has sweet candied oranges buried in it. Black cuts the slices and weighs them. White makes a careless move and realises it too late. He swallows hard, for he has an acid taste in his throat. Black takes a castle.
Kraków’s Jewish ghetto, on the other side of the Vistula, outside the old city, is from here less than ten minutes’ walk over the Powstancôw bridge. The ghetto covered an area of 600m × 400m and was sealed off by walled-up buildings, blockades and barbed wire. In the autumn of 1941, six months after it was sealed off, eighteen thousand people were imprisoned there. Thousands died from disease and malnutrition each month. Only those fit enough to work as slave labour in the German armament or clothes workshops were permitted to leave for their stints of work. All other Jews found trespassing outside the ghetto were shot, as were any Poles who helped them to pass into Aryan Kraków or who hid them.
Tyskie! Ken applauds when I return to the table. You chose the best beer!
Early training! I say.
He’s called Zedrek, Ken says, the man you were watching playing chess. He comes to play with Abram the grocer at least once a week. Zedrek could play a good game if he didn’t start drinking vodka so early. I don’t think he can stop though. Abram as a small boy survived the war in hiding.
Ken taught me most of the games I know: chess, snooker, darts, billiards, poker, table tennis, backgammon. Chess we played in his bed-sitting rooms, the others in bars. Bridge, which I had learnt before I met him, we played with my parents or when we got invited to somebody’s house, which was not often.
I met him in 1937. He was a replacement teacher in the lunatic boarding school to which I had been bundled. In front of the school assembly – fifty bare-kneed, cowed boys, each trying to find, unaided, a sense to life – the apoplectic headmaster threw a dining-room chair at the Latin teacher and Ken, who happened to be between them, caught it with one hand in mid-flight. This is how I first noticed him. He set the chair down on the podium, put his feet up on it, and the boss continued to harangue.
On the final day of that same term I invited him to a caravan my parents had on a beach near Selsey Bill in Sussex. Why not? he said. And he came for a week.
My father was pleased, for, now making a foursome, we could play bridge together.
Shall we play for money, Sir? asked Ken. Otherwise the bids don’t count.
Agreed, but the stakes shouldn’t be too high, because of John here.
Tuppence a hundred?
I’ll go and fetch my purse, said my mother.
Ken shuffled the pack and the cards cascaded between his two hands held far apart. Sometimes the cascade looked like a moving staircase, an escalator or a playing-cards ladder. Once, later, he said to me, when I was complaining of not being able to go to sleep: Imagine you’re shuffling a pack of cards! That’s how I go to sleep.
Cut for deal.
My father enjoyed the game, not only because he was a good player, but, more, because the game allowed him to recall certain easy moments with