Krakow: If I Can't Have You, I Don't Want Nobody, Baby

Scientific Researchers report that humans develop feelings of love for that for which they sacrifice.

This data has been replicated by a Fox, who once told a Little Prince, "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

Do I love Poland because I have – without planning to do so – sacrificed for it?

In any case, I am in danger of falling in love with Krakow and never wanting to leave. In fact right now I do not want to leave. I want to stay, six months, minimum, and write the next book, an oral history of Krakovians who have lived the change.

I have to leave, though, and I'm already feeling the wrench of pain that I will feel a month from now when, bereft of Krakow, I'm walking down the street in Paterson, NJ. Paterson: a city that could never figure out what Krakow knows in its bones: how to, through force of will, turn catastrophe into poetry and dignity and joie de vivre and wisdom and love.

I walk, and travel, much. You can feel the vibrations of a place through your feet. I never *felt* San Francisco. I’m sure Armistead Maupin did. Intellectually, I recognized its beauty: the Golden Gate Bridge, which I saw from my Berkeley bedroom window, the Bay. I recognized their beauty; I never felt it; it never penetrated me.

I can’t get over how at home I feel, and how alive. Over the years, I have loved here. I have stayed up all night here. I have written here – the genesis of two books were first sketched in Krakow. I have been sick and been ministered to by caring friends here. Peggy Kurpinski got me drunk here. Arno Lowi, son of a Plaszow survivor, talked to me all night about Polish-Jewish relations here. Rabbi Laurie made me laugh here.

I’m floored by how content I feel doing my old walk around the blonia. I’m floored by how content I feel right now, sitting at a borrowed and timed computer in Krakow, typing about Krakow … just being in Krakow. This contentment, this feeling of reuniting with an old, geographic and architectural friend, have brought me to tears I struggle not to let fall several times. It was the worst Sunday at mass. If I tried to put down on this screen how happy and connected and at home I felt, I’d have to dig up words we just don’t use any more in modern American English, words and sentiments and stances.

I feel this city’s vibrations through my feet and they excite me. I crave to consume this city, to swallow it whole and digest it delicately, bit by bit. I want to sit each citizen down across a table from me, switch on the tape recorder, and interrogate them, question by question.

Did you chant “Sowiecki do domu!” beside me in 1988-89, or were you the one who glared at us from your tram windows, displaying your annoyance at the inconvenience history, in the form of thousands of suddenly marching bodies, can cause to commuters’ timetables? During that riot, were you the kind, efficient angel, disguised as a teenaged Polish girl, who met us in the courtyard of a Jagiellonian University building, and held rags soaked in vinegar under our noses, and advised us not to touch our eyes, after we'd been tear gassed by Zomo?

Were you like a horse out of the gate when communism, like a million tiny leashes tethering your ambition, your intellect, your libido, your dreams, dropped? Or were you someone who retreated from the pressures of competition into a bottle? Do you miss having Krakow all to yourself? Does capitalism's advance feel like cultural rape? Do the tourists who actually applaud the hejnal annoy you? Applaud the hejnal! As if that tune were not played from the spires of Kosciol Mariacki every hour on the hour, four times, to four directions, ever since Tatar arrow pierced Polish throat?

Krakow is a mess. Graffiti is everywhere. One Krakovian blamed the British. Always sound policy. The signage – billboards, placards, and neon – McDonald's, Benetton, Harry Potter – buy one get one free! 15 % off! – words I never thought I'd see in Polish, comrade – is random, ubiquitous, hideous. Ulica Szewska, once one of my favorite streets in the world, now sprawls like a corpse – suffocated by ugliness. Eventually Krakovians will get it that this signage offends the eye – that what Krakow really has to offer is its stones, not the cheap, tacky, nouveau riche ad atop the stones.

Zoning Board? We don't need no stinking zoning board. Krakow is a splatter chart of a collision between capitalist gaucherie and communist decay, Catholic smells, bells, and smells and young bodies in love, the Middle Ages and the Holocaust and suburban sprawl and make it up as we go along. A rooster crows next to a BMW.

I think I saw this attempt to explain reincarnation in the film “Little Buddha:” a broken tea cup. That the teacup is broken does not mean that its contents have ceased to exist. Most writers, I think, struggling to explain today's Krakow v. Communist Krakow, would invoke the word “palimpsest.” I think that’s mostly because literary types like the word “palimpsest.” If the word for a palimpsest were a more blunt, humble, monosyllable like “Fred,” for example, palimpsests would be invoked less often.

Krakow is not a palimpsest. It is reincarnated.

When I came to spend the year of 1988-89 in Poland, I wanted to leave the first day. I couldn't have hated Poles and Poland more. Everyone was beyond rude – they were demented, Kafkaesque. I walked to the rynek, the main square, to talk over my decision with Adam Mickiewicz, national poet, at the foot of his statue.

When I arrived, though, there was a demonstration by the KPN – Konfederacja Polski Niepodleglej – or confederation of independent Poland. A man was delivering a stirring speech. The crowd chanted “Soviets go home” and “Wilno is ours!” a crazily irredentist slogan. I joined in. (I had no desire to retake Wilno from the Lithuanians. Some of my best friends are Lithuanians! Daiva Markelis, take note!) I stayed the year. It was that demonstration, that I joined the first day, that kept me around.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the critical mass of disgust I felt that first day – the disgust that made me want permanently to quit Poland after one day there – even though I'd turned my life inside out in order to arrange the year-long visit – and my staying because of the fifteen or so people at the KPN demonstration – was a microcosm of the macrocosm that would rewrite history. Poland was as sick of Poland as I was. Poland wanted to quit Poland. Poland stuck it out because of those people in the streets determined to kick the Soviets the hell out.

Getting food took up a good part of any day. My apartment refrigerator was tiny and inefficient and stocking up was not an option. Some days all you could find was yogurt, others, bread, others, smalec – lard. Pedestrians body slammed each other. A friend was visibly pregnant. When she began to show, people stopped crashing into her. We thus decided the sidewalk bumper car routine was at least partly conscious, an expression of aggression or a desperate effort to make contact. I made small errors in the Polish I spoke to clerks. They snapped my head off. How dare I worsen Poland's crucifixion by violating her hallowed tongue? Everyone knows you are supposed to use the genitive case, not the nominative, if the noun is the direct object in a negative sentence, especially on Tuesday!

Before that year in Poland, I had lived in remote villages in Africa and Asia, the kind of pre-modern settlements where sixty percent of children die before age five. After much serious thought, I decided that everyday life in Poland in 88-89 was actually harder, worse, hopeless.

Today I make small errors in the Polish I speak to clerks and the sun shines on their faces. “Pani mowi bardzo dobrze po polsku!”

Krakow smells different. Who can put an aroma on the page? Krakow 1988-89 smells different from Krakow today.

In 1978 – yes 1978 not 1988 – this is my fifth trip to Poland – I woke up from sleep in Dom Studenta Piast, more than once, to the clip clop of horse's hooves and the squeak of wagon wheels on the street. Whoosh – whoosh – whoosh – the sound of a scythe slicing down the grass around the building. Now there are four lanes of heavy traffic and weed-whackers and leaf blowers manage the landscaping.

I have been in Poland ten days and no one has pressured me to drink alcohol or overeat. No one has blown cigarette smoke in my face. In 1988-89, we could not walk anywhere in Krakow without seeing flashers. In the Blonia, university buildings, on trams: men exposing themselves. It was all so pathetic. I’d never seen a flasher any place else. It’s been ten days, and I haven’t seen one.

Back in 1988-89, we had a Polish language teacher who would arrive in class, sit at the front of the room, and recite lists of nouns. That was language class. The joke was, of course, about workers in the Soviet system: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” All well and good – malingering as romantic stance. But we, the students, got screwed, Polish didn’t get taught, and, as somebody once said (Vonnegut?) you learn to be what you do. The teachers learned to be malingerers.

My teacher now, Pani Kasia, is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. She knows what she’s doing, and she does it well. She is the first Polish language teacher I’ve ever had who has made me feel that I could actually learn Polish in her class. She is competent. The Poles I’m meeting now: professional, stable, capable – make the words “competent” and “competence” shimmer with magic. The Poles I’m meeting now are *competent.*

I can’t afford anything. I’ve never been so happy not to afford anything. I was offered a furnished, one bedroom apartment, in a nice neighborhood, in 1988-89 for twenty dollars a month. Food and even luxury items like leather coats and amber jewelry cost so little it was laughable even to take the time to tot up the numbers. We ate like pigs. It was an Olympic sport: Belgium waffles slathered with full cream for one cent. Ice cream, zapiekanki, strawberries and cream, champagne. When you could find them, you had them for pennies.

Changing dollars for zloty was an experience out of a film noir. I remember a street corner, a tall, blond man in a trench coat, and an aristocratic air; he could hardly bring himself to touch the bills that brought him sustenance. “This is such dirty business.” Now you change money next to a supermarket – that sells Polish granola, Polish chocolate, Polish weight loss supplements – and no one is the lesser for touching banknotes.

I keep remembering a night in 1978. I urged my boyfriend, who was born in the US but who spoke perfect Polish, to take me to the restaurant in the basement of the medieval tower in the main square. He was hesitant. He caved in. He spoke Polish to me there, as we ate strawberries and cream and drank warm mead and cold champagne. Men at nearby tables began to toss grosze coins – the smallest denomination – onto our table. My boyfriend explained that they were Poles, angry at him for selling out Poland for American money. We left. Today the square is full of tourists. No one is throwing grosze coins at them.

Toto, we are not in Kansas any more.