Jacek Dehnel

Lala

About the book

Whereas in the evenings, over buttermilk – beaten to make it lumpy, of course – oh, how I adored those sour chunks of softened porcelain – over baked apples sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, or a sandwich spread with purple plum jam, Granny used to show me Europe.
“Aaah, at Lisów there were different plums,” Granny’s narrative suddenly cuts in on me imperceptibly, having merely ducked to one side for a moment, “better for jam, bigger and juicier, except they didn’t come away from the stone as easily; in summer there was a field kitchen roaring away in the garden, with a hearth made of bricks where Grandma Wanda, surrounded by the servants, would perform her incredible alchemy, commanding whole regiments of copper cauldrons and frying pans – as you know, it doesn’t stick to copper so badly – and then the latest generation of jams, jellies and preserves would be carried down to the cellar, carefully indexed and labelled like the one hundred and forty four thousand redeemed…”
Europe – so what exactly was Europe? As I saw it in the evenings – drunk on garden air, weary from feeding the ducks and swans in the park, delighted with the damned falling into the fiery abyss in Memling’s altarpiece, bitter towards the whole world because soon I’d have to go to bed, though the world stood wide open before me, laying ream upon ream of sparkling mysteries on the counter?
It was a portmanteau Europe, a jewellery casket Europe made by skilled craftsmen for a capricious child, a Europe inlaid with mahogany and rosewood, a Europe full of complicated machines and automata that I didn’t have to bother with, though it was nice to watch their fancy tricks; a Europe peopled by gentlemen in frock coats and ladies in corsets and dresses with bustles, a Europe of violins and grand pianos, a Europe where every object was decorated, and unnecessary things were not denied the right to exist – so it was revealed to me in its as yet unscathed form, just as it might have been seen by my great-great-grandfather the motorist, who solemnly believed in acid radicals, luminescence and steam power: glazed and gilded, full of crystal and palaces, festively illuminated by gas lamps, rising skywards from raw bricks and steel, which would only be revealed under the layers of stucco putti and gilt roses by both great wars.
Naturally, there was book-keeping too, for how else could an inventory be kept of all the screens and pictures, porcelain and paintings, houses and flats that once existed but no longer do? With people it is so much easier – they died, and went to heaven or hell. Aunties, great-grandmamas, great-great-grandmamas, Mr Korytko and Mrs Korytkowa, all the Jews who were shot and Gołda, on whom a box of eggs once fell. But what about things?
Where have all the black-feather fans that the Lisów children trailed about the fields flown to now? And Misha Sicarda’s Amati violin – can the Amati really have burned up, never to return? Did the apple tree that was split by a Russian shell ever blossom again somewhere else, and did its apples fall into some unknown grass? Surely there must have been a paradise, well, at least a purgatory for objects, where almost all of Lisów ended up, along with all the putti and crystal of my Europe, to wait patiently for a second coming in the near future.
This was not a coherent concept, or one of those brilliant ideas that children think out in detail like a mediaeval compendium – I myself have created whole countries, with their own wide-ranging, sophisticated cartography, kingdoms rules by mythical dynasties, distinct races of dragons and angels – but a sort of subliminal belief that I hid from myself in the recesses of my mind.
I’m sorry, but I can’t remember what caused me to understand the full desperation of transience, and to realise that the Europe I believed in, even if it did once exist, would never come back again. I know it might be nice for the reader to hear how I broke a Venetian vase made of blue glass, and that was the moment when… or I found a dead dove in the park, and I swear, those little feet – what a desperate feeling – and that was the moment when… but no. No.
It was a moment of painful, garish enlightenment – the only way one can really discover important things. Perhaps my brother and I were fighting with maple sticks, perhaps I was drawing the raspberry-and-turquoise wings of a heralding archangel, or perhaps I was investigating the life of a centipede under an overturned stone. It doesn’t matter – the gods simply opened the heavens, sent down a ray of light and showed me – as they do everyone – that things pass. I realised that there is no purgatory for objects, no one waits for lost letters, no one reads burned books, rubble doesn’t turn back into houses, or shards into cups from my great-great-grandmother’s Sunday best tea service. Lost things don’t go on living – they just lie in the ground or fly into the air, with no burial vaults. I didn’t try to parry the blow, the angel set firm on the paper, and the centipedes scattered. And I, as I well remember, walked across the garden, taking long strides and shouting out loud, very loud indeed: “Give me back my Europe!”
Afterwards I had a fever, I went all stiff and clenched my teeth, and a faith healer laid his hands on me and shook me, removing each degree of temperature from me in turn, like small insects from quicksilver. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones