Hold on to the Sun

Part II: Letter from the Regions of Delusion

PArt ii: letter froM tHe reGionS of deluSion Paris, november 2, 1975 My dears, Back home—what a relief! A week in Poland is like a year,like years,like a moment. ever since the visa was approved, a week before the trip, i felt as if i were facing an operation. i was waiting for something to stop me, for an iron curtain to block the way.And even in the dark, when the bus took us from the plane to the airport inWarsaw i still didn’t believe that the distance between me and Poland would be swallowed up just like that, in a few steps. Your letter, which reached me just before the trip, was a lifeline in moments when the dizziness intensified; in moments when there was only a definite absence of my 25 The Journey to Poland imaginary picture of those places, when instead, there were only the long lines in gray raincoats; in moments of awful loneliness, when there was no one to shout at; in moments when i didn’t believe i could finally get on the train and leave that madness behind. How to tell, and wasn’t there any chronology? How to live that over again? Wroclaw. A dreary city and a theater festival. i was ejected into the darkness in the heart of an empty field. that’s how it began.night in the hotel.An enormous radio, and voices from russian, Polish, czech, and Hungarian stations . Stifling heat from the furnace, the chambermaid, a blond Gentile woman, fills the bathtub for me. in the soap box and in the closet are roaches. A strife-torn night in dreams and a grayish morning.the outside was stopped by the curtains. crowds of people with rubbed-out faces. A few old cars.Awful cold. fog. How to leave the room and go into that reality? How to be a “tourist” in it? Wroclaw. in the display windows, rows of laundry soap in coarse packages. cooperative restaurants smelling of cabbage and sweat. in the festival offices, full ashtrays, organizers with sleepless faces.And then a writers’ café, in kosciuszko Square, and it was as if i had come to a kind of Jerusalem before i was born, from the thirties, a Jerusalem i lived from books. With that blend of provincialism and culture.Waitresses dressed in black with starched aprons, 26 The Journey to Poland newspapers in wooden frames, cigarette smoke, grave discussions about art,literature,politics,metaphysics.the soft tones of a language that is so familiar, so close.the intonations , the gestures, the excited seriousness. An international festival—a few days of devotion to joy, before the regime returns to its everyday gray. And i, a stranger at the celebration. only an “alibi” for another mission, which no one in fact has assigned to me.Yes, a few addresses for it’s impossible-not-to-acceptwith -a-letter-to-take before setting out. Backs of houses, yards covered with trash and rubble. Staircase supported by boards. number 72, apartment 9A.two old people in the doorway.A kitchen black with soot. examining me, the letter, with a scared look. Sneaking back to the ongoing celebration, just so they won’t find out. it’s only because of sloppiness that they haven’t yet arrested me. And then, early one misty morning, wrapped in a coat, at the railroad station.Among hundreds of people in a line. Buying a ticket to krakow with black-market zlotys . . . to the regions of my real trip. Getting off the train, and simply walking into the lightflooded square among ancient buildings, whose carved facades are sparkling in the sun.Walking among the other people on the boulevard with the autumn chestnut trees, 27 The Journey to Poland on Planty, Mother’s route to the tennis courts. Autumn leaves struggle on my shoes. entering the rynek Square resounding around itself.the renaissance arches, the Sukiennice market in the middle like an island in the heart of a lagoon of light, the breeze rising from the virgin Mary church . . . all those names, with a soft “r” as i (“wonderful child!”: the only two words i understood in the foreign language ) would accompany Mother to the nightly suppers on an aunt’s balcony with a smell of down comforters and the saltiness of the sea air on hottel Aviv nights, when friends from “there” would gather...