Silence

Not the absence of sound.

Warsaw is almost never silent. There is somebody cutting something in a garden, an aeroplane descending towards Chopin Airport, a tram somewhere beyond the houses, dogs, birds, a lawnmower, someone reversing a car very badly. Even on Sunday morning the city hums quietly around you.

Silence is something else.

Silence is when two people have nothing left to say to one another.

A friendship that somehow exhausted its vocabulary.

Two ordinary people sitting opposite each other with coffee between them, waiting for one of them to produce the sentence that will restore whatever used to be there.

Sometimes nobody does.

That is silence.

I have spent a lot of my life trying to fill it.

Words are useful for that. Journalism is useful. Books are particularly useful. Arguments are excellent. Love affairs are almost unbeatable. If there is a space, put something in it. Explain it. Analyse it. Demand an answer from it.

Perhaps silence becomes easier when you stop expecting it to answer.

I slept for about ten hours last night. Maybe twelve. This morning the house is quiet. My children come back to Warsaw today after their holidays. School begins in two days. The cat comes back too. Vicky, a start of previous shows. Soon the house will contain bags, shoes, complaints, chargers, food disappearing from the fridge, somebody shouting from another room, the mysterious administrative crisis generated by a missing PE shirt.

For the moment, none of them is here.

Absence.

Poles know something about absence.

That is a dangerous sentence for an Englishman to write after living here for years. There is always the temptation to turn somebody else’s history into metaphor, particularly when you have spent enough time in a country to imagine that its history somehow belongs to you.

It doesn’t.

But perhaps you can live somewhere long enough to begin noticing what is missing.

Forget the Polish PR campaigns for a moment. Forget pierogi, Chopin Airport, GDP growth, young people drinking expensive coffee beside the Vistula, the Warsaw skyline and the endless national argument about whether Poland has finally returned to Europe.

Look instead at the empty spaces.

Volhynia.

Jedwabne.

Siberia.

The Warsaw Ghetto.

Villages whose populations changed completely.

Cities which acquired new countries without moving anywhere.

Lwów became Lviv. Wilno became Vilnius. Breslau became Wrocław. Germans disappeared westwards. Poles arrived from the east. Jews disappeared almost everywhere.

Ryszard Kapuściński remembered being a schoolboy in Pińsk after the Soviets arrived and noticing pupils and teachers gradually disappearing from school. Deportations had begun. Children vanished because adults had decided that their families belonged somewhere else.

There is something particularly frightening about that kind of disappearance because nothing necessarily announces it.

An empty desk. Then another. The lesson continues.

Perhaps countries acquire habits from histories like these. Perhaps people do too.

Someone is here.

Then they are not.

And everybody else carries on.

Polish history is full of people who became something else without entirely ceasing to be Polish. Or were claimed by somebody else. Copernicus can be placed inside German as well as Polish histories. Chopin had a French father and became one of the great symbols of Polishness while living most of his adult life in Paris. Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski into a Polish family in the Russian Empire, became one of the great writers of the English language. Czesław Miłosz could write in Polish while carrying an idea of Lithuania that does not fit comfortably inside the modern national categories of either Poland or Lithuania.

And then there is Feliks Dzierżyński, born into a Polish noble family, who became the founder of the Bolshevik Cheka.

National cultures prefer their emigrants selectively.

Chopin: ours.

Conrad: ours, although perhaps the English can borrow him.

Dzierżyński: somebody else’s problem.

But perhaps that is precisely the difficulty with the word ours.

Who is us?

It is the question that keeps appearing.

Poles scattered in extraordinary directions. During the Second World War, Polish civilians deported into the Soviet Union eventually emerged through Iran. Polish children ended up in India. Soldiers crossed continents. Governments existed in exile. Borders moved while people were still alive. Someone could be born in Poland, go to sleep in the same house for forty years and discover that the house was no longer in Poland.

Home becomes complicated under those circumstances.

Not sentimental.

Complicated.

And then I remember an old woman in Kałdowo.

Kałdowo is part of Malbork now, on the other side of the Nogat. The house belonged to my first wife’s family. Or perhaps that sentence already contains the problem.

It was their house.

And an old German woman lived in it.

Not metaphorically. Not as a ghost. Literally.

Her small apartment was opposite theirs, inside the same building. She had lived through the transformation of that place from one national world into another. Her husband had been Polish. Her own Polish remained very poor.

She stayed.

My mother-in-law’s family looked after her.

They loved her.

When she died, they buried her.

They mourned her.

I remember this now because it complicates almost every sentence we use about what happened after borders moved.

The Germans left.

The Poles arrived.

Except this German woman did not leave.

The house became Polish.

Except she was still living inside it.

The new inhabitants displaced the old inhabitants.

Except sometimes they shared a staircase.

History likes populations because populations move neatly on maps.

People are messier.

Someone brings soup upstairs.

Someone needs help with the shopping.

Someone’s Polish is terrible.

Someone gets old.

Someone dies.

The people who supposedly replaced her become the people who bury her.

What country does that belong to?

Perhaps this is what I mean by ghosts, except that she was not a ghost at all. She was more inconvenient than a ghost.

She was present.

Polish literature contains a great deal of this kind of presence-through-absence. The Jewish neighbour. The German owner of the house. The Ukrainian family. The person deported east. The person expelled west. The language no longer spoken in the street. The synagogue that has become something else. The cemetery behind a supermarket.

The empty place at the table.

And then there is Olga Tokarczuk.

Perhaps no contemporary Polish writer has irritated nationalist custodians of the national story quite so successfully.

This is partly political, but it is also something her prose does.

Tokarczuk seems constitutionally suspicious of borders that behave too confidently. Between countries. Between religions. Between humans and animals. Between men and women. Between the living and the dead. Between what belongs to one national literature and what supposedly belongs to another.

The Books of Jacob may be the grandest example. It returns to an eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that is difficult to squeeze into the later fantasy of an ethnically coherent Poland: Jews and Catholics, Poles, Ruthenians, Turks, Germans, converts, mystics, merchants, aristocrats and peasants move through one another’s worlds. Jacob Frank himself refuses to stay inside the category allocated to him. The book restores to the Polish landscape voices and presences that the subsequent national story has often found easier to separate.

That caused trouble.

When Tokarczuk won the Nike prize for the novel in 2015, she challenged the consoling story of Poland as an almost uniquely tolerant country that had done little wrong to minorities. She spoke instead of domination, colonisation and Polish participation in violence against Jews.

Parts of the nationalist right responded with fury. There were accusations of betrayal, campaigns against her and threats. Later her Nobel Prize did not resolve the argument. If anything it amplified it: here was a Polish writer celebrated abroad partly for telling a Poland that refused to remain inside the approved frame.

That reaction interests me almost as much as the books.

Because the accusation is effectively:

You are showing them the wrong us.

You are allowing outsiders to see things we do not want included in the picture.

But perhaps that is what serious literature does.

It puts the missing people back in.

Not necessarily as saints.

Not necessarily as victims.

As people.

Difficult, selfish, erotic, ridiculous, religious, greedy, generous, frightened people.

The ghost becomes troublesome precisely when it refuses to perform the role assigned to it.

Maybe that is why Tokarczuk can seem profoundly Polish to me even when people accuse her of being insufficiently Polish.

She understands that the place is crowded.

The dead do not stay obediently in their cemeteries.

Borders leak.

Languages survive in odd corners.

People cross into one another.

Home refuses to remain pure.

For years I thought the great question of my life in Poland was whether I belonged here.

It now strikes me as rather a stupid question.

Belong according to whom?

There is no committee.

Twenty years is a long time. My children are here. My marriage happened here and ended here. Most of the work by which I know myself happened here. There are streets whose changing shopfronts I remember. There are Polish expressions which arrive in my head before English ones and English sentences assembled in Polish rhythms. There are people I love here. There are people I have loved badly here. There are people who loved me whom I did not know how to love properly in return.

There are places I fucking hate.

There are things about Poland that can still drive me almost instantly insane.

The aggression. The defensiveness. The suspicion. The historical self-righteousness. The little performances of hierarchy. The strange inability sometimes to say: yes, perhaps we got that wrong.

And I love the place.

Perhaps I love it partly because I am finally allowing myself to hate parts of it.

That feels healthier than patriotism.

Love without criticism always looks slightly suspicious to me anyway. People who insist their country is wonderful resemble men who repeatedly announce that their marriage is wonderful.

You begin wondering what happened last night.

Poland is not wonderful.

England isn’t either.

Neither am I.

Perhaps belonging begins when that stops being the point.

There has been another kind of silence in me recently.

For a long time certain thoughts could produce an almost physical collapse. The thought arrived and the body followed it: grief, panic, tears, shaking, some terrible gravitational pull towards the bottom.

Lately the thoughts still arrive.

The sadness is still there.

Sometimes it is enormous.

But something strange has changed. I can feel the thing beginning in the body and the body seems able to hold it.

Not defeat it.

Not control it.

Hold it.

Perhaps that is what silence can be too.

The space in which something is allowed to exist without being immediately answered.

I thought this morning how lovely it would be to see someone.

I didn’t write.

The thought remained lovely.

And sad.

And nothing had to happen next.

That may sound ridiculously small. It does not feel small.

For years I have mistaken desire for instruction.

Wanting something meant doing something. Calling. Writing. Seducing. Persuading. Explaining. Producing another sentence.

Perhaps there are moments when love means allowing the other person to remain absent.

Not disappearing them.

Not replacing them.

Not turning absence into accusation.

Simply allowing the empty chair to be an empty chair.

Poland may have something to teach me there, although perhaps Poland has spent much of its history struggling with exactly the opposite temptation: filling absence with stories.

Every nation does it.

The people who disappeared become heroes, traitors, martyrs, invaders, victims, perpetrators. Memory rushes into the space and starts arranging the furniture.

Sometimes correctly.

Sometimes dishonestly.

Usually both.

The great Polish arguments about history are not really arguments about things that happened eighty or three hundred years ago. They are arguments about who gets to occupy the empty space now.

Who were we?

Who are we?

Who did this to us?

What did we do to them?

Who belongs in the photograph?

Who has been cropped out?

Tokarczuk gets attacked partly because she keeps putting people back into the photograph.

The old woman in Kałdowo was never cropped out.

She simply remained in the house.

Maybe that is the difference between history and life.

History likes deciding who was supposed to be there.

Life finds somebody standing in the kitchen and asks whether she wants tea.

Perhaps this is also why Poland has become such an interesting place from which to think about Europe.

Poles become extremely sensitive to how they are being seen because being seen has so often carried consequences.

But the gaze works both ways.

How others see us becomes part of how we see ourselves.

And perhaps that is true for people as well as countries.

Maybe this is why I am suddenly interested in edges.

Not only borders with fences and guards. Places where the category becomes uncertain.

Where does Poland end and Ukraine begin?

Easy enough on the map.

Where does Russia end in Narva?

Where does France end in Brittany?

Where does England begin in Cornwall?

Where does Europe end in Edirne?

Where did Germany end in the house in Kałdowo?

Where does a marriage end?

Where does love end?

Where does home begin?

Maps are considerably better at answering some of these questions than others.

I have been thinking about travelling next year. Not escaping. That distinction matters to me.

Once a month, perhaps, I want to leave Warsaw for three or four days and go somewhere at an edge. Walk. Read the local newspaper. Look at the statistics. Talk to the mayor. Talk to someone in a café. Ask people where their children went. Ask who they think looks down on their town. Ask what the people on the other side are like.

And ask one question everywhere:

When you say we, who do you mean?

Then come home.

Home.

There is the word again.

For years I thought home had to be somewhere that would finally remove the contradiction.

England perhaps.

Poland perhaps.

A woman perhaps.

A family.

Some perfect arrangement in which the arguments would stop and I would know where I belonged.

I no longer think such a place exists.

Maybe home is where the contradiction becomes bearable.

The place you can leave without repudiating it.

The place you can return to without surrendering to it.

The place you can criticise without needing to destroy.

The person you can miss without needing to possess.

The past you can remember without insisting that it come back.

Perhaps the old woman in Kałdowo knew something about that.

Perhaps my first wife’s family did too.

She remained in the house.

They remained in the house.

Nobody needed history to become simple before somebody could knock on the other door.

Outside, Warsaw continues making its Sunday noises.

Soon the children will come home.

The cat will return.

School starts on Tuesday.

Summer, such as it was, is almost over.

Nothing dramatic has happened this morning.

Perhaps that is what I like about it.

For once there is an absence and I do not need to fill it.

There is sadness and I do not need to cure it.

There is Poland, infuriating and beautiful and impossible to reduce to the stories told about it.

There is this house, for however much longer it remains ours.

There are people who are not here.

There are people coming back.

And beneath all the noise there is silence.

Not emptiness.