This isn't a particular good way to start of the blog, but I can think of no better. This shall be a blog that primarily focuses on my writing, my experiences in the world, the music i love, and my thoughts on various matters both philosophical and social (including but not limited to feminism, masculinity, agrarianism, environmentalism, anarchism, DIY culture, and so forth). As incentive to start you folks reading, I'll post a story I did that got turned down from my college literary review magazine. I hope that it failed to pass muster because it was too brutal, but something tells me that's not true. Anyhow, here we are: if you seek a monument, look around you.
Jeśli Szukasz Pomnika, Obserwować Wokół Ciebie
The spademan carries with him the bile of ages, a generation
lost within himself to the purging flames of Birkenau, Belsen,
Flossenberg. On his knees shoveling
gravedirt in the hard Earth of a brutal land that hated him with a blind moron
passion. A lifetime of ice in the Gulag,
years spent angrily gesticulating in waist-thick snow before the fetid spruce
of Yakutsk. Trials, tumbrels, guns,
grenades. He has seen things too
terrible to tell, but he can still tell them; that which he cannot tell is that
which every man can understand but refuses to say. It’s…uncomfortable. He was half-dead before the flames reached
his pyre, and his death trails him like a deep grey man. The iron-and-concrete horizon of a November
in Danzig weighs upon his shoulders like the tallit, accelerating the acerbic
digestion of the bile in his gut. A long
time ago he could have learned something about letting go. But that was a long time ago; now is not a
long time ago, now is just discomfort. Maybe
he’ll get rid of it, maybe he won’t. All
the disgust and exhaustion with the world churns at the lining of his shrunken
innards. It’s bad for an already injured
man to carry so many afflictions. So
much hate, too. The tattoo on his arm
shrieks at him like a little snake of numbers, eating into his flesh with
acidic ink and a legacy of unbridled disregard.
The tattoos on his chest mumble foul oaths towards life in general. But this was not solely the invention of Heydrich
and Yezhov, oh no, it was as much him too.
He was a hateful man. He was a
disagreeable man. In fact, one could go
so far as to call him a stupid man.
Above all, he was a dispassionate man.
He’d never had a wife because he’d never gotten the chance nor cared to
take the chance when it was hanging right above him (young Magda Katczinski came
the closest to achieving a breakthrough, and considering how far she got it was
as if she’d never gotten anywhere at all.
And even then, she hadn’t known what he was truly, which would have
prevented it from happening at all). Perhaps
somewhere, after dark deeds in prison camps and halting, stilted encounters in
the brothels of Lodz he’d conceived a little shitkicker, but he wouldn’t have
known about. Rape-born in the camps it
would have gone to the showers anyway, and to carry the son or daughter or
failed abortion of an ex-Polish Jew for the six years that Poland and Germany
were one was a mistake no one with any sense of self-preservation was likely to
make. If he’d discovered one, he
wouldn’t have acknowledged it anyway. It
wasn’t worth his effort.
When he was---how young was he? Fuck, it was so long ago, so many worlds
away---probably a lad of thirteen, anyway, it was after his grandfather, the
proud Jacek Lewartow of Siedlce, sat him down (more like threw him down) and
tried to tell him about how to succeed in life: “Place your trust lightly in goyim,
heavily in women, and never, in any case in any part of this world, in fucking
Russians.” He was right, at least
partially; perhaps he had something against Germans, but the Orthodox child-killers
were always the main enemy, and who could blame him? He never saw 1939 coming from the stalks of
winter wheat where he’d spent his life curling a scythe in an arc through the parched
dry midsummer air, his blade scattering the cut like the armies of the Austrian
and the Georgian had scattered the last vestiges of the ragtag glory of
Sobieski, Pulaski, and Pilsudski. He’d
gone long before that, died of consumption in the last year before Germany
awoke from the dead. The father hadn’t
said anything when they sent Jacek Lewartow into the fertile Masovian loam with
the Kaddish to keep him company. He’d
just stared at his son like the son didn’t get it, like he’d been expected to
learn something from this and had just come up a shallow face, a cretin on Purim
staring blindly at a Christian Easter procession, knowing that something is
happening but unable to know what it is and feeling cheated as a result. They didn’t really talk after that. Mother would talk to him, but mainly when she
wanted something done. She lacked vision
or concern beyond the every day.
Naturally, when Army Group North rumbled through, she was the first one
to be shot, as a practical joke by a screaming gaggle of teenage Prussian
sadists unaccustomed to power. That she
had not cared of the affairs of the Earth had sealed her fate. She was too innocent to live. Father lingered, as he had done all his
unfulfilled life, until he was taken away, and could not have escaped. This was simply a fact. He couldn’t have, he wouldn’t have. Not with the door of Auschwitz itself open
and Heydrich himself beckoning to leave would this have happened. Jacek’s death killed Father, years before his
life ended in the camps.
But, that’s behind him.
All of history is behind him. When
they came it all just blurred together: Russian, German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian,
Jew, Gentile, Papist, Old Believer. When
he looks back to his experiences, they too bleed together: Siberia was just
Birkenau in a harsh winter. You can’t look
for difference where it doesn’t exist. A
spade is a spade, which as a spademan he’s come to use as a rejoinder more than
is appropriate. Fascism is still
fascism, as far as the eye can see into the grey sea horizon of the
future. And looking forward is to look
into the nuclear eye of the new age. It
hurts to stare at, like when his friends at the factory he worked in during the
summer of ’38 said they’d pay him 10 zlotys to stare right at an acetylene
torch for ten seconds. More than that,
it hurts to think at. History has done
its best to kill him over the course of his forty-four years, and has not
relented. Hunger continues in the South,
from places where food used to grow but is now unable to find purchase on
poisoned soil and metal-clotted Earth. Men
who once fought for Poland now threaten it every waking hour. The Earth is tired. The sky is tired. Man is tired.
The spademan is tired. And he
doesn’t fucking care. Every day is a
struggle to get through, a long slog through a job he only got by the inability
of the state to recognize him as a former inmate and by their inability to see
through his shirt to the rubber indelibly etched into his ruddy leather skin. They didn’t know what he’d done. They didn’t know what he was. They wouldn’t know what he’d done or was. So they gave him a job. Years of having his life extracted from his
ass and mouth and they got a damn job as
a janitor for the Bureau of Agricultural Sciences, sweeping the concrete dust
out of the door and mopping up mud tracked in from the squalls that pushed
their way angrily through town twice a week.
It doesn’t pay, and he won’t be satisfied. And the wonderful thing about the religion of
Stalin and Gomulka is that jobs cannot be quit without one being
disappeared. Of course, he’s been
disappeared twice before: if wouldn’t be the first time. Perhaps, just to give himself something to do
and try a new path to the glory everlasting that doesn’t require an impotent
Austrian or choleric Georgian intermediary, he’ll see about killing himself
tomorrow. If there is a tomorrow,
because that’s the problem isn’t it?
When you can’t see tomorrow outside of ten suns simultaneously bursting
above a field of melting glass, how can you hope to hope? Of course, he’s lived without tomorrow since
1939, so he figures he’s gotten used to it (he’s wrong). To him it’s like he’s a clock: once wound,
goes till time runs out or the ticker finally snaps. One or the other will happen.
The first body he interred into the scarlet earth of Lesser Poland
was a man. He remembers this, of all the
bodies that were churned into the grave-troughs. Children, women, other men all meld together
in a single ashen mass, but this first one he remembers. The man was tall and gaunt, and skin hung off
of his brittle bones like a curtain of tan flesh. He had died in the night of some disease, and
for some reason he got placed in the pile to be buried, not the pile for
cremation. The kapos never did say; they
just barked angrily as usual, gave the customary boot to the (already
fractured) ribs, and stood around nervously, like cornered rats squeaking
violently in a vague hope that the cat assumes them to be larger than they are
and thus avoids them. It was not a hard
burial; there had been rain the week before, and the autumn ground was still
soft enough to gain purchase. In
Siberia, he’d had a harder time interring bodies; permafrost is hell to get a
shovel through, and on particularly bad days tools could shatter and hands
stick to handles. However, the hardest
burial of all was this one. The man’s
brown eyes stared back at him, a mouth half-gum cracked open past cancerous lips
in an inverted rictus of bewilderment. “No,
no. I wasn’t meant to die here. I should have been a poet, or a
businessman. I should have even been a
martyr for my people. I have dignity, where’s
the dignity in a sick man? It can’t end
like this. I don’t believe it will end
like this.” His bedsores and corpselike
complexion made it clear that this was, indeed, the end, and that he would not
nor ever be a martyr nor a poet, instead just a millionth of a nameless
statistic set to eat the entirety of Europe in its sorrow. The spademan identified and identifies with
him: both of them are a cell, a molecule, a small piece in a machine so large
that no one person can control its machinations. They were hopeless and adrift in years that
wanted them dead, and neither one had the strength to fight or run. Jacek Lewartow of Siedlce could have fought
and run: he would have fought, swinging his beloved oak-handled scythe had all
the Panzers in Germany or all the Cossacks in Russia been bearing down upon him
like a new plague of Egypt. He’d be the
martyr. His grandson could not. With Jacek died the family, pride first, name
second, and blood third.
Eventually he’ll get home.
The street he walks down has to end at some point, even if it takes him
back to Russia. Home isn’t real for him,
and never was. He’s just another
displaced, misplaced husk, another shard of the detritus of war that bore him
far away from home and almost back again.
He doesn’t deserve it but he doesn’t not deserve it either, a pathetic
figure existing in acrimonious equilibrium between the hammer of time and the
anvil of hubris. It’s a lonely road
from Hell to Purgatory. One day, soon,
he will (written with the certainty of a man who has come through it all) affix
the hefty false-leather belt given him by the Employment Bureau to the lone
pipe in his apartment and slip his neck through. The fall won’t kill him instantly because the
pipe will break under his weight, which has never quite gotten back to the 160
pounds of August 1939, remaining closer to the eighty-odd pounds of 1941 to
1953; it’s a weak pipe, built in haste with shoddy tools for a broken city in a
backwards land. Instead of instant
death, he’ll just suffer one last indignity, lying on a too-hot floor with a
broken spine, sentenced to look at the ceiling until the hunger that ran with
him for ten years finally brings him to meet with Grandfather Jacek. Death will be the agent of that, biding his
time, smirking condescendingly at the terminal cripple on that too-hot
floor. In front of his face yet
again. The working man will not care and
will just think about rolling eyes that he can’t roll anymore until he finally
slips beyond the pale. It’s a shitty way
to go, probably shittier than that of the brown-eyed corpse man who wasn’t
martyred in the grave. As it stands,
this is still a ways off. For now,
there is just the cold street, the grey horizon, the lead-iron tallit, and the
man himself. Ecce homo: si monumentum requires, circumspice. Or, as the spademan, the man who was once
sort of but never really Krzistof Lewartow has (soon to be past tense) a habit
of saying: Nazwać rzeczy po imieniu: zycie
jest gówno, a następnie śmierć pieprzy cię. Call a spade a spade: life sucks
and then you fucking die.
