The Call of the Toad Read online

  I let the widower carry the heirloom and must admit that as he shuffles along slightly stooped beside the widow, not only his beret but the string bag as well is most becoming to him, as though he and not she had inherited it, as though the Japanese camera had been only borrowed and from now on he would carry his specialized literature, his thick tomes on Baroque iconology, in a crocheted or knotted string bag, on his way, for instance, to Ruhr University.

  Though I fail to remember a classmate by his name, he seems an old acquaintance with his ingrained eccentricities and first signs of geriatric ailments. And the widow, too, as beside him she makes her way slowly cemeteryward, takes shape by virtue of sheer willpower. She’ll teach him to stop shuffling.

  A long but enjoyable walk, for the widow subdivided it by explaining everything in short, concise sentences and letting out an occasional burst of her bellbird laughter. By the time they had made their way from St. Catherine’s and the Big Mill, where the Radaune canal carries very little water—“Stinks,” she said, “but what doesn’t around here!”—and came in sight of the highrise Hotel Hevelius, she knew: “I bet gentleman from West has view of city from so high.”

  The widower opened up as they approached the library, and was still talking as they passed the former St. Peter’s High School—both Prussian neo-Gothic structures spared by the war. He admitted that he had been precocious and a bookworm, referred to the barn still being operated as a school as “my old Alma M.,” a term he explained most elaborately. And they had passed the Church of St. James before he finished explaining what books in the reading room of the municipal library had infected and at the same time inoculated him. “You can’t imagine how I devoured books, every single volume of the Knackfuss monographs on artists …”

  And then outside the gate of the Lenin Shipyard—just before it was renamed—the square with the three towering crosses spread out before them, where three anchors hung crucified.

  “That was Solidarność,” the widow said, and added a sentence designed to mitigate the brusqueness of her obituary. “But we Poles can still build monuments. Everywhere martyrs and statues of martyrs.” Then she fell silent, without laughter before or after.

  In this sentence the widower thought he detected “a bitterness bordering on despair.” All she had left were gestures. Then she extracted an aster from the bouquet, added it to the flowers heaped up in front of the memorial wall, and at the widower’s request translated, line for line, the poem by Czesław Miłosz inscribed on the monument: a stern poem in praise of futility. Thereupon she associated herself and her family with the poet and his family—all refugees driven from the East to an uncertain West. “We had to leave Wilno, like you all had to leave here.”

  Still on the square, but already moving, she lit a cigarette.

  To abbreviate their walk to the cemetery: Smoking, the widow led the widower out of the city across a bridge, which since the demolition of the fortifications and the construction of the main railroad station arches over all the railroad tracks leading westward from Danzig or Gdańsk or eastward to Gdańsk or Danzig. Since German and Polish spellings are used interchangeably in the widower’s notes, I shall follow his irresolute nomenclature and say not Brama Oliwska but: The widow led him out of the city to the Olivaer Tor streetcar stop; then, via the left fork of the highway to Kartuzy, up the gently sloping Hagelsberg to the service station for tourists intent on lead-free gasoline, across from which there is an old cemetery shaded by beeches and lindens, which formerly belonged to the parishes of Corpus Christi, further up to those of St. Joseph and St. Bridget, and on the western edge to various “non-sectarian” religious congregations. Overcrowded for years, it now seemed abandoned. No open gate provided access. They walked along a fence overgrown with shrubbery. Across from the adjacent military cemetery was a Red Army war memorial, on whose lawn some teenagers were playing soccer. The widow knew a hole in the fence.

  Once inside—under trees and among overgrown single and double graves—the widower proffered a formal introduction: “Please allow me to introduce myself, as I should have done long ago: My name is Alexander Reschke.”

  The widow’s laughter took time, and must have struck him as out of place, especially here among tombs. Nevertheless, still laughing, she followed suit: “Alexandra Piątkowska.”

  This entry in Reschke’s diary made it clear that fate had a hand in it. What difference does it make that his former classmate, whose only function here is that of a reporter, finds this consonance too much in harmony, suitable at best for an operetta on the well-known model, all right for fairy-tale characters but not for this pair thrown together by chance. But it’s got to be Alexander and Alexandra; after all it’s their story.

  The intimacy of the names, however, must also have alarmed both the widower and the widow, as I have been calling them up to now, though they couldn’t have known that they were meeting in a widowed state. Determined to be independent, Alexandra Piątkowska walked into the cemetery, disappeared among tombstones, reappeared, disappeared, reappeared. Alexander Reschke also kept his distance. Avoiding the rustling autumn leaves, he shuffled along moss-covered paths, his beret now gone, now seen again. As though loitering, he hesitated before one tombstone, then another: plenty of diabase and highly polished granite, little sandstone, marble, or shell limestone.

  All the stones bore Polish names and indicated dates of death beginning in the late fifties, all, that is, except the numerous children’s graves lined up in a field to one side and dated 1946, the plague year. Wooden crosses and headstones. The silence under the cemetery trees was not lessened by the soccer-playing children, or even by the sounds of the service station. I read: “Here I have again grasped the meaning of the words ‘quiet as a tomb.’”

  Nevertheless, Alexander Reschke was looking for something. On the edge of the cemetery he found two crooked tombstones and then two more, overgrown with weeds, and he had a hard time deciphering what was on them. Death dates from the early twenties to the mid-forties, and inscriptions above the names—“Here Rests in God,” “Death Is the Gateway to Life,” or “Here Lie Our Dear Mommy and Granny”—evoked the distant past of this burial ground. Reschke notes: “These stones, too, are made of the usual material, diabase and black Swedish granite.”

  For a while, I leave him with the remaining tombstones. Long enough for Pani Piątkowska to deposit the bunch of asters in a vase on her parents’ grave. This double grave, I copy, is bordered by box trees, and less neglected than the neighboring graves. Her father died in ’58, her mother in ’54. They were both under seventy. I take note of All Souls’ activity in all areas of the cemetery. Here and there hurricane lamps on tombstones indicate that visitors have come and gone.

  But widow and widower paid no attention to them.

  “I was with Mama and Papa. My husband is in Sopot Forest Cemetery.” Alexandra Piątkowska said this as she joined Alexander Reschke, whom the other tombstones had distracted from the present time; the voice behind and to one side of him may have startled him; in any case it brought him back.

  The pair again. Because she had made it known that she was a widow, he should have talked about the death of his wife and also about the early, too early, deaths of his parents. Instead, he provided her with his professional status, identified himself as a professor of art history lecturing in the Ruhr, and for completeness’ sake brought in the title of his doctoral dissertation submitted and accepted many years before—Memorial Slabs and Epitaphs in the Churches of Danzig—and only then, abruptly, dated the death of his wife: “Edith died five years ago.”

  The widow said nothing. Then she came closer, and another step closer, to the crooked tombstones that the widower had found worthy of notice. Suddenly, and too loudly for a cemetery, she exploded: “Disgraceful Poland! Everything with German on it they cleaned out. Here and other places, in Sopot Forest Cemetery too. For dead no peace. Wiped out everything. After the war and later. Worse even than Russians. They call it politics
. Plain criminals, I say.”

  As far as I can make out from Reschke’s notes, he tried to soothe the widow by putting the blame on the invasion of Poland, the consequences of the war, and the exaggerated nationalism on all sides, roughly in that order. Yes, he said, the desecration of a cemetery borders on barbarism. He, too, he had to admit, was saddened by these forgotten tombstones. One should expect human beings to deal more humanly with the dead. After all, the grave, and its artistic execution, is the last authentic expression of a person. One has to consider, however, that most of the memorial tombs of German patrician families in the main city churches had been protected from vandalism. Yes, yes, he understood the persistence of her anger. It was only natural that people should want to know that the graves of their closest relatives were in good condition. On his first postwar visit to Gdańsk—“That was in the spring of ’58, when I was working on my dissertation”—he had wanted to visit the graves of his paternal grandparents in the United Cemeteries. Yes indeed, it was awful; the place seemed to have been laid waste out of sheer malice. “A terrible sight! Believe me, Frau Piątkowska, I understand your indignation. Nothing was left for me but grief, which, it is true, can also be viewed in the context of facts that are a matter of historical record. After all, such barbarity was first perpetrated by us. Not to mention all our other unspeakable crimes …”

  The two of them were made for such conversation. He was a master of the lofty tone; she had the gift of righteous indignation. Under towering beeches and lindens, which had survived all manner of political vicissitude, widow and widower agreed that politics was a curse and had to stop somewhere, and that it was most certainly out of place in cemeteries. “Yes,” she cried, “dead enemy no longer enemy.”

  They called each other Herr Reschke and Frau Piątkowska. Relaxed after their exchange of views, they suddenly noticed that all around them other celebrants of All Souls’ Day were paying their respects to their dead with flowers and hurricane lamps. And only then did the widow make the remark that the widower noted verbatim in his diary: “Naturally Mama and Papa prefer to lie in Wilno cemetery than here, where everything strange was and is.”

  Was it these words that sparked it off? Or did ravished tombstones continue to weigh on their cemetery conversation? My former classmate and now doctor of philosophy Alexander Reschke, that past master of elevated discourse, has indeed conveyed to me a whole anthology of somber images—“The autumnal trees provided a wordless commentary in the abode of transience …” or: “Thus the spreading ivy has survived the violent depredation of the cemetery and in its own way remained victorious if not immortal …”—but only after a critical observation (Did she absolutely have to smoke in a cemetery?) does he confess: “Why do I hesitate to tell Alexandra of my parents’ boundless if seldom expressed hope of being allowed to rest in their native soil, though neither of them had any hope of returning in their lifetime? Like Alexandra’s parents, they had to accept their foreign surroundings.”

  The two of them lingered. Their cemetery talk went on and on. Finally they found a cast-iron bench which had managed to survive along with the ivy. They sat in the shelter of yew trees. According to Reschke’s entries, the teenagers had tired of their soccer game on the lawn in front of the Soviet military cemetery; only the large service station continued to intrude into their world. And smoking, still smoking, as though memory were stimulated by puffing at cigarettes, Alexandra, as she is called in his papers from this point on, talked about her childhood and youth in Wilno, as Vilnius or Wilna is called in Polish. “Pilsudski took it from Lithuania and gave to Poland. Was white and gold from Baroque. And all over beautiful city was woods, everywhere woods.” Then after amusing tales of school, with girlfriends in them, two of them Jewish, and country vacations devoted to rounding up potato bugs, she broke off, and said, “But the war was terrible in Wilno. I still see in street dead people lying.”

  Again, service station sounds. No birds in the cemetery trees. The smoker, the nonsmoker. The two of them on the cast-iron bench. And then suddenly, because suddenness was her way, and because she wanted to add one more similarity to those of their first names and their widowhood, she surprised him with a declaration about her profession: “I went to same faculty as gentleman. But only six semesters of art history and professorship no chance. But plenty practical experience to make up for it.”

  Reschke learned that Piątkowska had worked as a restorer for a good thirty years and that her specialty was gilding. “All kinds. Matte gilding and bright gilding with gold leaf and ducat gold. Not just Baroque angels, also burnish gilding on marble stucco. Also good at carved rococo altars. All kinds of altars. Three dozen altars I gilded. In Dominican church and all over. We get material from Dresden, gold leaf from People-Owned Gold-Beating Works …”

  So the iconographer and the gildress of ornate emblems talked shop under cemetery trees that were steadily losing their leaves. He spoke of St. Mary’s thirty-eight epitaphs listed by Curicke; she described her gilding work on an epitaph dating from 1588, which had been given up for lost some years ago. He held forth on Dutch mannerism; she decided that the half horse on a red field and the three lilies on blue in the arms of Jakobus Schadius were well worth gilding. He praised the anatomy of the skeletons rising from tombs in the relief; she reminded him of the golden initials on black in the lower broad oval. He lured her downstairs into crypts; she led him from altar to altar in the Church of St. Nikolai.

  Never amid tombstones was there so much talk about gold grounds, polished gold, hand gilding, and the tools and accessories of the trade. According to Reschke, who went back as far as the tombs of the pharaohs, gold should have been named the color of the dead: gold on black. This transfiguration, the shimmering between red gold and green gold. “The golden luster of death!” cried Reschke, showing off for all he was worth.

  It was not until Piątkowska started talking about the work which some years ago had familiarized her with every detail of the organ screen in the Church of St. John (evacuated and therefore saved during the war), that her laughter won the upper hand. “More of that we need. You buy with deutschmarks a brand-new organ for Marii Panny Church. We restore old screen with gold leaf that doesn’t cost much.”

  They fell silent. Or rather, I assume silence between them. But this demonstration of how Germans and Poles could collaborate on organs and organ screens rekindled enthusiasm. “That is how it must be!” said the professor. And in his diary noted: “Why can’t it be the same in other fields?”

  Two or three more cigarettes may have been sacrificed to the cemetery mood. Perhaps her idea first took form and then went up in cigarette smoke. However, it was in the air, demanding to be seized.

  Reschke writes that Alexandra then led him, no, invited him to the grave of her parents: “I am pleased if you come to grave of Mama and Papa.”

  As they stood facing the two hurricane lamps on either side of the vase with the rust-red asters on the broad granite tomb, which bore, incidentally, a freshly gilded inscription—it was the widow who gave the plot direction. As though maternal advice had reached her from the tomb, she pointed at the crocheted heirloom that the professor was still holding, released a short burst of laughter, and said, “Now I make us mushrooms, with parsley chopped fine.”

  Through the hole in the cemetery fence they crossed into the early afternoon of the present day. Now the widow was carrying the string bag. The widower, obliged to give in, once again ventured no allusion to Chernobyl and its consequences.

  They took the streetcar, rode past Central Station to High Gate, now called Brama Wyżynna. Alexandra Piątkowska lived on ul. Ogarna, which runs to the right and parallels Langgasse, and which once was Hundegasse, or Dog Street. This street, destroyed by fire like the rest of the city toward the end of the war, with only the tatters of house fronts left, was rebuilt with admirable fidelity during the fifties and, like all the main and side streets of the resurrected city, is in need of thorough restoration: molding c
rumbling on all sides, blistering plaster peeling. Sulfurous fumes blown from the harbor had disfigured all the pedimental figures hewn in stone, aged them before their time. Scaffolding had been placed against a few façades that seemed especially decrepit. I read: “There will never be an end to this much-admired, expensively maintained illusion.”

  Since housing in the historic areas of the Old City and Right City was at all times in demand and not allotted without political considerations, Piątkowska’s membership in the Polish United Workers’ Party through the early eighties, and to an even greater degree the fact that she had been decorated for her work as restorer, must have helped. She had been living there since the mid-seventies. Before that she, her son, and her husband, until her husband’s early retirement—he had been with the merchant marine—occupied two rooms in a housing development between Sopot and Adlershorst (eyrie), now Orlowo, a long trip to her place of work in the inner city. Understandably, she put in a complaint with the Party. As a member of long standing—since 1953—she believed, especially in view of her participation in the forthcoming International Youth Games in Bucharest, that she was entitled to lodgings closer to her work. At that time the workshops of the Restorers and Gilders were in Green Gate, a Renaissance structure at the east end of Long Street and Long Market and fronting the River Mottlau.

  A few years after the move to Hundegasse her husband died of leukemia. And when, in the late eighties, the president proclaimed martial law and Witold, her late-born only son, went to the West to study in Bremen, the widow was alone but not unhappy in the once cramped, now spacious apartment.

  Unlike any other building on Hundegasse, the semi-detached house at ul. Ogarna 78/79 had a front terrace, with steps leading down to the street. During the period of martial law, the government press agency Polska Agencja Interpress had moved into the ground floor, with an entrance of its own, and was now trying to obtain recognition as a private organization. On the street side the spacious terrace had reliefs in sandstone—rococo ornaments and cupids at play. Reschke deplored their condition: “One would like to see these cheerful records of bourgeois culture protected against erosion and moss.”