The Last Midnight

The book is heavy in my hand, a tangible reminder of why I am parting with it.

I had waited until my final day in Atlanta to receive it in the mail: Michael Cunningham's newest book, based, I am told, on Joyce rather than Woolf. The title, however, alludes to Andersen's Snow Queen, displayed prominently on a blue jacket with white flakes of snow (but perhaps ash). It was, I realized, the first book I read in Poland. The first week was spent on trams, learning to navigate the city (a laughable task in retrospect), and reading the chapters of this precious book which anchored me in a bizarre way to the familiarity and routines of a home where I no longer lived but yearned for, none the less. It allowed for the comforts of home, the memories of the ordinary to exist simultaneously in the chaos of novelty, the thrill of living in an entirely new place.

However, for the trek back to America, a hardcover book is a criminal luxury. Simply holding it I could feel the tinges of pain in my lower-back. Should I take this with me, I would have no resolve. I would rescue the Margaret Atwood novel, the Cormack McCarthy novel, the Brecht play. They would all make the journey tucked into my backpack. They had become, I realized, heavy burdens that were once enjoyed, cherished for the moments of enjoyment and entertainment they offered. They were like seashells issued from a beach, soaked in a bucket of bleach water to remove the smell of the ocean and toted the stretch of highway between Tampa and Gainesville as part of the annual Shook family pilgrimage to the Florida coast. Upon arrival, they would sit on a shelf in the garage, blanched, dead, and only nominally reminiscent of the ocean at all as they collected dust until being thrown out a few years later. These books, I decided, would be left for someone else to enjoy (or perhaps dislike and disregard in their own time).

I look out the window at the skyline. It is uninspired and dull against the iron-grey clouds that antedated a summer shower. The concept of summer is used lightly here. It is 61 degrees and I am in the same flannel and sweater that I wore in those early days of October. Small drops of rain shatter against the glass and I realize this will most likely be the last time I look at Poznan, wedged on a tram between the endless gray spiral of a reconstructed medieval city fortified by concrete apartments and other monuments to thrift and the perfectly angular Lake Malta, organized into rows for the easy of kayakers and rowers, the ghost of a winter ski slope jutting out in the distance.

*****
I am writing now from the twin bed of a modest, though tasteful, hotel room within view of the airport. The sky outside has turned ice-blue with the linger of a perpetual summer twilight which illuminates the late evening with a stubborn diligence. It seems as though I am waking from some sort of spell. The past months have flown while still creeping slowly. I had not anticipated their termination, realizing my time's swift conclusion casually, gazing at the year like sand in an hourglass, impossible to track but only visible in accumulation. I am prepared now to close the curtains, to release this year into space and have it dissolve into the cool summer air like the bronze chimes of vespers bells that I could hear from my bedroom, followed by the metal call of a trumpet, like the woodsmoke that lingered on cold evenings as I walked the dark sidewalk from the tram stop to my apartment, a distance I dismissed as irritatingly far, but also perfect for thinking and unwinding from the day's events.

In twelve hours, I will be on a plane, arching over the ocean back to the familiarity of home, of long-absent friends, of the eager family that must grow tired of my inability to remain.

In twelve hours, I will look down on the place from where I currently look upwards and say my final goodbyes to an unlikely home, a quiet place that managed to surprise me at every turn with its ghosts walking side-by-side with the living, the ones who look at their days as something infinite, uncountable, and filled with the promise of twilight morphing into tomorrow's sunrise.

It feels right and wrong at the same time.

With Love from Warsaw
06/21/2015

And Lots of Security

The door, I am told, was padded less for the occupants safety and more to muffle the sound of cries for help and the shrieking of those deranged from torture.

They were, however, in a basement, windows bricked, cool, almost chilly despite the radiating heat of a June afternoon pulsating outside. Inside the cell, a straightjacket hangs from the black-iron tooth of a coatrack (aggressive, jagged, and designed to disturb). The jacket, too, is black with sleeves extending across the room, levitating like some fearful ghost of victorian literature.

 I am taken aback, feeling suddenly sick. The English translations call the room "the grimiest" place in the building (this includes the room where executions were carried out and the showers which, despite running both hot and cold water, were always set to an extreme temperature for amusement). The layers above are less jarring. The building, an enormous municipal, neo-classical number still houses a functioning courthouse and other public offices. In fact, we made the mistake of walking into the courts before finding the appropriate entrance on the other side. Bricks in the wall contain the names of "martyrs" (those, for our purposes, killed by the KGB which used to operate within the building).  The offices are maintained to some degree to give visitors a vibe of what enormous destruction a single bureaucratic system was capable of.

This is another jarring moment of contrast. The neatness, the organization of the institution is apparent (though not necessarily highlighted). Offices were no doubt bright, efficient, and tidy. Rubber stamps gave endorsement or rejection. There were rooms for coats, heavy wooden desks, wardrobes, no doubt. Yet underneath, prisoners were housed, interrogated, and, sometimes, shot in the years of Stalinism just below the floorboards of these offices in a maze of concrete and metal.

The museum is not without politics. Some criticize the space as anti-communist propaganda, an almost violent-erotic display of NATO's vendetta against the USSR to the point of atoning the crimes of the NS (who killed many more people in this area). It is true that the focus is on the communists and with virtually no mentioning of the crimes of the NS (which is marked in a separate museum). Pictures are flashed in every room. Deportations. Mugshots. Smiling partisans. The whiteness of a forehead disrupted by a bullet hole and left as a warning to the politically sympathetic.

In Tallinn, a similar building was left unopened to the public, converted into apartments and recognizable only by the bricks that cover the basement windows, again designed to prevent the shrieking of the interrogated from disturbing those walking snow-blanketed streets.

I think, too, that the government of my own nation had the sense to torture far enough away where people walking to the grocery store wouldn't stumble upon it, keeping it far enough away for common citizens to think it necessary, blood spilt on the altar of safety and peace.

The only way to get reliable information, they tell themselves, gliding behind buggies through electric cool, looking at a thin layer of dust on a can of peaches.

I wonder as I leave what sorts of buildings out grandchildren in the United States will walk through one day, the abandoned temples of torture and interrogation, the palaces of private execution, cheered by the religious with their banners and picket-signs.

What instruments of torture, tools of dispelling subversion in the name of security, will greet them as they wander through cement halls, huddled against the draft of impossibly cold air and their own terrible heritage?