The Book of Ten

Decalogue: Husbands and Wives

 Decalogue: husbands and Wives n because Kieslowski’s subject is the enduring power of love, of course when roman discovers his impotency is permanent and suggests to hanka that she divorce him, she says no, insists love is in the heart and not between the legs. She does, in fact, take a lover, a young man with hair the color of the pale Polish sun, but of course he doesn’t fulfill her. She feels guilty and sends him away, the way one might banish a naughty child picking flowers in one’s garden: “do up your jacket and be off.” of course roman discovers her betrayal and wants to die, riding his little bicycle off a cliff, its wheels spinning back and forth, like the legs of a cartoon character, say Wile e. Coyote, trying to stop himself in midair. of course he doesn’t die. of course when he calls hanka from the hospital, the telephone in their apartment just rings and rings because hanka’s afraid to answer. of course she picks it up weeping, whispers, “god, are you there?” meaning, maybe, not just roman, but god himself. and all this from a director so famously morose he never smiles in his photographs, just stands there looking down with his hangdog beard, his doggy eyes, a man of whom his friend adam, who is also my friend, said, “he vas very gloomy”—i can’t get the accent right, but it was said with all the eastern european dolor he could muster— a man who was the subject of a film called I’m So-So, his natural state, a man so notoriously stubborn he refused to go to Paris where all the good heart surgeons were, despite the fact  that he could afford it and everyone urged him to go, but instead he insisted on staying in Warsaw to have the operation at some crumbling, post-Soviet hospital. of course he died. i suppose if even he could believe in the redemptive power of love, i can too—oh, i’ve seen it in my own life, in the love of family and friends, in the few couples i know whose intimacy seems to go on and on like birdsong in the trees this afternoon, despite all the many annoyances, the way even birdsong itself can be annoying. Sometimes it shrills like the rasping of the workmen’s saws at the house across the field. i’m feeling so-so myself today—not just the saws or the pain in my tailbone where i slipped on the wet steps this morning, but of course more lies from the president, of course more genocide in darfur, of course thirty-four children waiting for american soldiers to hand out candy were killed by a car bomb in baghdad and a mother holds up a bleeding child whose open mouth seems to be forming some version of “Mama! Mama!” which of course sounds to me like “nada! nada!” i’m so-so in spite of that one white flower blooming in the garden, some kind of lily, its petals resembling the feathers of a bird, a dove, maybe, so-so despite the afternoon sun tatting its lace in intricate patterns all over the lawn. Maybe i am thinking of my own marriage, which is petty of me in the face of all the bad news in the world, but there it is, my marriage, with its failures of love and nerve, its bad omens from the start—the wedding day on which i hid in my mother’s closet among the winter suits and wept and tried to tell myself it was just wedding-day jitters though i knew it wasn’t, not to mention the wedding ring i put on his right hand instead of his left, the album of wedding pictures lost in our first move. but that doesn’t explain  anything, really. every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way, i suppose, but sometimes it’s the impossible ideal that strands you there with the knife in your hand or the words “i never loved you” curling on your lips, the way my ex was stranded in sadness every Sunday. fridays, the blue Pacific’s still to be crossed, green island of Saturday looming ahead, a hawaii of leis and piña coladas at the swim-up bar in a pool beside the...