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CITIES THAT ARE too beautiful lose their individuality. Some of the southern towns cleaned up for tourists remind one more of glossy photo ads than of organic human settlements. Ugliness creates individuality. Cracow cannot complain of a dearth of infelicitous, heavy, melancholy places. Những thành
phố đẹp quá mất mẹ nó căn cước cá nhân của chúng. Một vài thành phố
phía Nam rửa
ráy làm sạch chúng, để chào đón khách du lịch làm nhớ tới những tấm bưu
thiếp,
những tấm biển quảng cáo hơn là những nơi cư ngụ của bầy đàn con người.
Cái xấu
xí tạo căn cước cá nhân. Cracow chẳng có gì để mà phàn nàn, về những
nơi chốn, địa
điểm không may, bất hạnh, nghèo nàn, dơ dáy, nặng nề, buồn ơi là buồn
của nó. CRACOW CITIES THAT
ARE too beautiful lose their individuality. Some of the southern towns
cleaned
up for tourists remind one more of glossy photo ads than of organic
human
settlements. Ugliness creates individuality. Cracow cannot complain of
a dearth
of infelicitous, heavy, melancholy places. Right next to light
Renaissance streets are dark, almost
black canyons riling through nineteenth-century townhouses. Blue trams,
trucks,
somnolent passersby in winter coats, and villagers in thick caftans
make their
way through these ravines. Yet two feet away one finds bright, graceful
streets
leading to the market square. Similarly, neurological
cells serve our brain's nerve
centers, which are the prima donnas of our organism. And, similarly, in
the
medieval monastery the monks who knew Aristotle's treatises by heart
were
helped in their everyday, difficult, practical life by monks with hale
complexions and large, strong hands. Here are the names of a
few heavy and ugly streets: Dluga, Krakowska,
Starowislna, Zwierzyniecki (not to mention the right bank Podgorze).
And it was
on Dluga that I found my first student lodgings. I arrived in Cracow as a
matriculated eighteen-year-old from Gliwice,
a provincial Silesian city, in which I spent my childhood and
adolescence. My
family was expelled from Lvov, the mythical eastern city. My entire
childhood
was spent under the sign of longing for the lost Lvov, which I had left
as a
four-month-old infant. In coming to Cracow, I felt like a pilgrim
making a
pilgrimage to a holy place. Cracow was a real city. I found myself in Cracow
in October. It was cool under a cold,
slanting rain. Classes had not yet begun at the university, so I had a
lot of
time on my hands. I spent hours walking all over the city. I was a shy
student
and didn't dare enter stores, bookshops, or museums. For now, I looked
at
everything from the outside. The gates were closed, the yellow light of
warm bulbs
glowed in windows. There was neither jealousy nor distaste nor
proletarian
anger in me. I was brimming with astonishment. It was enough for me to
catch
sight of the edge of a bookcase to say to myself: a philosopher, wise
man, or
renowned writer probably lives here. I took Dluga Street to
Planty and I would walk around Planty,
even though the paths were often covered with a layer of autumn
dampness and
corpses of leaves knocked to the ground by the wind. Planty separated two kinds
of streets, dark and bright, and it
is a kind of dike between the murky waters of the suburbs and the pure
stream
of the city center. In the summer the lush trees - ash, chestnut, elm,
linden,
even the plane, which is a rarity in Poland - create a dense canopy in
which
intelligent birds make their homes. But then, in October, the crowns of
the
trees were thinning. I looked respectfully upon
the walls of monastery gardens that
took up quite of bit of space in the city's center. Gradually I
discovered that
one could look at the churches from two mounds, those of Kosciuszko and
Krakus
in the Podgorze area. Cracow's churches remind one of ships sailing
next to one
another. Seen from Kosciuszko's mound, their prows face the observer
(because,
of course, they were built on an east-west axis). From Krakus's mound,
however,
one sees their long brick naves, the enormous bodies of the
sanctuaries. And it
is not the Marian church that seems the largest but St. Catherine's and
the
Church of Corpus Christi. They sail next to one
another, crowded but gigantic. Their seas
are the roofs of townhouses, secessionist towers, and cupolas, gleaming
sometimes when the sun emerges from violet clouds after a downpour. Seen from Krakus's mound,
the city seems to blur distinc- tions
between that which is ugly and that which is lovely. Suddenly
everything seems
necessary. The dark and heavy streets change into furrows of waves. And
the
churches themselves become something ponderous. We are not in Italy.
The ships
sail from afar. I spent a lot of time
gazing into bookstore windows. I remember
that once 1 stood before the window of a former Gebethner bookstore (I
didn't
know what the name of it was at the time), where books and records were
on
display. A couple from the provinces, an old man with the face of a
squire and his
wife, stopped next to me. The squire pointed to a record with Brahms's
Fourth
Symphony. That is very difficult music, he said to his wife. I was transported into
raptures: I was not alone in my wanderings.
Brahms's Fourth Symphony united us for an instant. I tore myself away
from the window
display right away, however, and continued my journey, in the direction
of the
dark mass of Wawel. I was busy admiring the city. My walks grew longer
and
longer, but I always returned to the main square. One of my paths led
along the
banks of the Vistula, up the river. To my left were garden plots
covered with
autumn rust, on the right the Vistula flowed calmly. On the other bank
I could
see boat docks and even now, on sunny afternoons, students in sport
shirts
sitting in their boats as if they were enormous brown insects prepared
for
regattas. I finally got to the city, where I looked closely at the
Italianate
buildings of the convent of the Norbertine Sisters. I also walked the enormous
expanse of the Blonie. Sometimes
the fog concealed the center of Cracow, and it seemed that I was in the
country, in a spacious meadow, alone. From the Blonie through Jordan
Park I
reached the neighborhood surrounding January 18 Street. This was, and
is, an intellectual,
serious, quiet residential area. And, once again, just about every
passerby
seemed to be a painter or an actor. I frequented churches on weekdays,
when
there were no people in them, except for two old women kneeling before
the altar
and communicating with Jesus in whispers. Someone told me about a
cheap cafeteria in which intellectuals
ate. Someone else told me where the Bishops' Palace was. I found the
buildings
of the main theaters and the editorial offices of literary journals on
my own.
I figured out where the Philharmonic was. This building, still used by
the
symphony orchestra, is ugly and nonfunctional - not a few adagios have
been
marred by the grating of tram wheels - but even the Philharmonic sent
me into
raptures. Then I lived in Cracow and
spent almost seventeen years here.
My rapture dissolved in the everyday. Gradually I got to know the local
luminaries, artists, scholars, editors. I call say that I became
disenchanted
with all of them. But few met the expectations of that first vision.
The
artists were often drunk; I couldn't understand this, I thought that
the
spirits of the imagination should have been enough. The scholars were
very
cautious. The editors perspicacious. All of them lowered their voices
when they
began to speak of things political. Some sort of pall hung over the
city. I
felt like a traveler who had stumbled upon a place threatened by a
monster, the
Minotaur. And yet one couldn't talk
about the Minotaur! I, of course, was
no innocent wanderer, coming from nowhere. I, too, was tainted by the
totalitarian disease, except that I was corning from the provinces and
the
nothingness of childhood, and that is why I was in a position to notice
the
strange atmosphere of danger, uncertainty, capitulation. As we all know, this
changed. But this is not what I want to
talk about; I want to discuss my return to Cracow in June 1989, after a
seven-year absence. During those seven years I had been in the great
and
well-endowed cities of the West- Paris, New York, Stockholm. I had seen
Boston,
San Francisco, Amsterdam, London, Lisbon, Munich. I am not bragging
about this,
because there is nothing to brag about (if one is not an urban
architect). I
mention it only to explain that I returned to Cracow as a blasé
tourist. Yes, many things in Cracow
now seemed small and provincial,
poor and neglected. The auditorium of the Old Theater, in which I had
experienced the greatest theatrical thrills, had gotten smaller. In my
memory
it was enormous; in reality, not very large. I now walked the streets
of Cracow ascertaining how much smaller
it had become. But after a while, quite unexpectedly, I rediscovered my
former
admiration for the royal city. And m it happened that I roamed Cracow
feeling
simultaneously its smallness and greatness, its provinciality and
splendor, its
poverty and riches, its ordinariness and extraordinariness. I was
certain of
just one thing: the trees in Planty had grown. My admiration was
undercut by
doubt, but the trees had become even more majestic, even more real. Adam Zagajewski: Two Cities |