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Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Jerzy SosnowskiAh!
I am no longer able to reconstruct the circumstances in which I saw this picture. It must have come from before the war: it showed the parish church of my childhood, Saint Wojciech’s, photographed from above and behind, as if from a balloon or an aeroplane hovering behind the presbytery, along with the southern frontage of Wolska Street as it was then, which I had never examined before. The harder I stared at it, the more clearly I saw the facades of the wooden houses opposite the church, the windows of the shabby little shops, the signboards for the laundry and the cake shop, in which I recognised not without some surprise the place where in the old days my grandmother and I used to go for doughnuts (later on, I don’t know when, the cake shop disappeared, my grandmother died and one day I realised to my amazement that I had no idea where the doughnuts came from; all I could remember was the shop girl whose eyes were always red and a statuette of the Virgin Mary in an alcove, above the counter, I think, which in communist Poland seemed to me, for reasons unfathomable for the child I then was, rather exotic). The house on the corner of Wolska and Bem Streets had a sort of veranda: there was a shop there with antiques, ash trays and medals from conquered empires, stamps and loose pieces of cutlery, and photographs like this one. I looked through them with growing emotion, I already knew I would buy this one and present it to my father; but there were others too, even more striking perhaps, immortalising the planting of trees in what was later Sowiński park, the so-called barber’s cottage on the other side of the district railway line before it was blown to bits by Von dem Bach’s detachments, and finally, something quite incredible – the corner of Grabowska and Wolska Streets, before they built the experimental, prefabricated buildings of the “Industrialised Construction Enterprise” estate there at the close of the 1950s (I was born in one of them). The shop assistants, two burly men of about sixty, were giving me a rather ironic look, as if getting excited over old photos of the district revealed not just the customer’s eccentricity but some sort of sexual perversion. To cool down, I started looking at other things, frantically wondering how much money I had on me; it so happened that that morning my mother had asked me to collect some coats and jackets from the laundry, and to this end had given me a fat banknote which I decided to use now, then find a cashpoint machine on the way to the laundry. On a heap under the window lay some fish-shaped napkins woven from eelgrass, only a little worn, and I thought it would be amusing to supplement my Christmas present for my father but also for my mother, grandmother and sister with these napkins, so I chose them, prompting eager politeness in one of the sales assistants (I must have looked like someone who was just about to buy the entire contents of the shop), and amusement in the other. “Will you take everything?” he asked, while the other one, as I guessed it, the boss, ran backstage for some extraordinary treasures shown only to the best customers. And that was when I realised that it was only September and I had plenty of time: I’d still manage to choose presents for all my relatives, living and dead, before Christmas. And then with a sense of having done my duty, I woke up – and lay for a while in the sleep-warmed bedclothes, partly letting my eyes get used to the brightness, and partly breathing in the air, as if in this way I were getting to know the new day, adjusting to it and greeting it.
I am one of those lucky people whom a slight, not very troublesome yet chronic illness has taught to appreciate the value of breathing deeply. When you do it, your lungs receive the air like a friendly host throwing the door wide open to his guests without a second thought. When I eat, I ingest elements of the world that are external to my body after some preliminary processing, once they have been thoroughly ground and chewed. When I drink, the liquid pushes past my larynx in small amounts, and is only let through cautiously. Breathing on the other hand is an instinctive expression of complete harmony with the world: the air gets right inside me, inhaled voraciously without any choice or thought. Starting from the diaphragm, my body stretches to let itself be filled with what’s all around it. And then it breathes out with no shame, uninhibited by my physical being, with my full approval. And then comes another inhalation, avid and ecstatic.
Until some allergen appears in the vicinity that could cause an asthmatic attack (which does not actually happen very often), the whole of what I command as “me” is spontaneously in favour of life. In trouble, in misery, in happy anticipation, in euphoria, in depression, in fear and shame, this organic prayer continues – the prayer of the organism. Ah, Master, it’s good that we are here, whisper my trachea, my bronchi and my alveoli. Ah, it’s good to be under the shelter of the sky, in spite of all. Ah, let me stay here, let me change. Ah, just these next few seconds more. Ah, suffering, despair, danger, disappointment and poverty exist. Ah, so do passing away and dying. Ah, every second thousands die all over the world and thousands are born screaming. “Such is the world, the unkind world; why isn’t there another world?” Ah, but as I complain to the heavens and blame You, and bewail my illusions, I am breathing. Ah, the gratitude. Ah, the thanksgiving mantra of my lungs, again and again insatiable for the world and for life, hungry for existence.
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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