If I were on your skin I would be a tattoo
Cracow, Poland, 2005 |
Krakow
is like an aged attic with trunks full of dust.
It’s
a city made of ashes, tombs, children playing with glass marbles, old crooked
ladies selling fruit and stores selling products that should be displayed in
museums. It’s a city straight out of a black & white film from the 40's. If
you stop and listen carefully, you can hear slow carriages creaking by,
soldiers marching along the streets or even the lethargic steps of old men,
warm blankets covering their frail shoulders. In this city, you can listen
quite well to the silence. It is trapped by a fence of fears and memories of
those who left, but somehow still remain.
The
first time I saw him was in Prague at a train station. The second time, in the
cab we shared together to the hostel. I felt cold and numb from the trip and I
remember two colours: yellow and blue. Through the dark window of the cab, a
ruined old factory could be seen with wrecked windows like broken teeth. Within
a few minutes we were dropped in a dark street. It was 5:30 a.m.
Cracow, Poland, 2005 |
We
walked the entire morning without having slept. We crossed the bridge that goes over the Vístula River
until we reached a deserted park. There was silence, squirrels, an apple and
us. His humour, that’s what I remember best about him. We talked a great deal
and I found out that he had come on
purpose from America to Poland due to intense psychoanalytic work, work that
had helped him to discover something important about himself. He said: I found out that, in some other life, I was
a child that was killed in a concentration camp during the war. I was just a
child. It’s his weeping that doesn’t let me move forward.
I
think I must have entered almost all of the synagogues in the city. Once we
found one whose walls were wrapped in sepia and black and white old photos of
families and children being taken to the camps. In one of them, there was a
crying child wearing a thin black coat, and from her lips you could see a
scream escape. Although unclear, it was just possible to decipher the barrel of
a gun being pointed to his head. Suddenly he called to me to take a look at the picture, and in his eyes I could see
tears.
Whether
he thought that he could have been that child in the photo, I never found out.
The
next morning we took the bus that would drop us in Auschwitz
and later in Birkenau. We exchanged few words that day, but I remember him
saying whilst we were watching the introductory Nazi extermination video: Can you believe what they did to my people?
He stood up and left me alone.
Only
a few hours later, I spotted him on the other side of the barbed wire, from
where he shouted my name. He came closer to me and whispered: Imagine how many families, how many lovers
would have wanted to hold one another, to touch each others’ hands and
throughout the years they were forbidden to do so. That could have been us…
That
same night, he left. I walked with him for a while in that city frozen in time.
The only visible colour was a dark yellow flickering in a fireplace. I thought
to myself, it’s easy for someone to feel
lonely here. Before he said goodbye, as if somehow he foresaw something, he
made me promise him one thing. He said: Whenever
you need me, just say my name. And then pray.
My
mistake was leaving Krakow during the night.
I
bought the ticket, and right after the border control near Prague, the train
stopped. It was 2 a.m., and I couldn’t hear a thing. I couldn’t see anyone. I
was alone in the carriage. I thought, If
something happens to me, no one will report it… Suddenly, someone came down
the hall and caught a glimpse of me. He walked over and mumbled something in
Polish. He called his friend in the next carriage and he also walked up and
down the hall for a while. He briefly whispered something in his friend’s ear
then both started grinning. With their cunning grins, I knew something bad was
about to happen. And that was when one of them entered my carriage and sat next
to me, whilst the other maintained his composure and reserved attitude.
Forcefully,
I told him to leave. He didn’t move and took a look at his partner. My blood
froze. I knew they were planning something, but there was no one to ask for
help. I looked through the window, to the enormous clock hands outside, to a
coloured caramel wrapping paper left on the ground, to the railway tracks going
in the other direction. The only thing I could hear was the thud of my heart
and intuitively I said his name. I repeated it, closed my eyes and began to
pray.
All
of a sudden, he stood up and left with his friend.
A
few minutes later a woman entered my carriage, asking me for a light. Without
asking her anything, amidst the
cigarette smoke, she told me in a hoarse
Spanish accent: My boyfriend and I are
two carriages ahead. You are not alone. If you need us, just scream. She
winked at me and then left.
After
that, the train started moving. I was confused and couldn’t understand what
happened, but I knew that something had happened that protected me that night.
I never saw the other Polish men again.
The
following day I wrote down on a piece of paper what I experienced that night,
and I have kept it with me until this very moment. Every time I read it, I feel
as if I am sitting at the edge of a lake, enjoying the dusk at the end of an
autumn day. And I feel that, even though I never saw him again, this person
left a mark on me far deeper than a tattoo.