The Black and the Green God

Jakub Goldman had proposed to Flora about a week after they met; in this regard he was like others; the young people were getting married right away; marriage was one of the cheapest things in the world; no one was acquiring coats-of-arms or fortunes, but purely and solely suitcases, plus the set number of square metres of living space given by the state. Morals were extremely loose, despite which the young people were setting up home. They had no idea one could set store by marriage, or that one could set store by anything. They were tragic, without knowing it, they were tragic, with their immorality and easy marriages. They were producing children in such high numbers that the social workers were tearing their hair out. Although this generation liked to sound off, every superfluous word annoyed them, in fact they hated words, they’d been raised on formulae, and although they thought they hated formulae, they sought them everywhere, because they were too pervaded by technology, which relies on formulae. The young people couldn’t forget that yesterday’s death of tens of millions in cruel torment had a crude formula as its only justification, and they were sure that a formula of the same kind would be enough for the same purposes tomorrow. This awareness defined their attitude to life. The only gods before whom they bowed down without reservation were sex and sport.

Goldman and Flora both liked the idea that they were getting married. Flora saw it as an excellent lark, and she thought he felt the same. She was pleased he was so handsome, and that they made a perfect picture. They attracted attention wherever they appeared. She liked the foreignness of his looks, the colouring no longer encountered on our streets, she liked to look at him. ‘And it’s all mine,’ she thought, not without trepidation, ‘that black hair, those joined eyebrows, those puppy dog eyes, that nose, those helpless hands’. She found his hands immensely moving, and had to wrestle with herself not to kiss them – a woman never kisses a man’s hands.

After the cataclysm of the Second World War, Goldman was alone, like most of the Jews, who, deprived of their families, lived in a closed, tight circle of their few remaining acquaintances. Flora was soon able to confirm that all Goldman’s friends and associates were either leaving the country, or wondering whether to leave; they were too grief-stricken to make up their minds about anything. Though highly diverse in looks, to her they all seemed to have something in common. The fact that so many of them were leaving made it easier for the young couple to get married. Jakub’s chemist uncle, ‘old Goldman’, was leaving too, and for the rest of his stay was living with acquaintances whose house had plenty of room because another occupant had recently left the country. Old Goldman was not like his nephew: he was tiny, he smiled like a demon, his eyes glittered constantly, and his head was too solemn for such a shrimp, too energetic, as if removed from a great, big body – it was just asking for a little pair of horns. At first he regarded Flora with animosity, but then he quite simply fell in love with her. From him she learned a few details about Jakub’s parents; Jakub himself never talked about them.

Flora loved Goldman and wasn’t upset by what was said about him at the theatre, that he didn’t have what actors call the ‘bloody hell factor’, that he had nothing beyond intelligence and would probably end up as a second-rate director, or, definitely, a second-rate translator from foreign languages. She’d fall asleep and wake up happy, she felt as if she were water-skiing along a not very deep, but safe and jolly, river. In this period she read the texts of the tragedians as if they were the work of pulp writers, and couldn’t see the difference between them; tragedy was hunger, and after satisfying the most persistent of hungers – the hunger for happiness – she had nothing else to wait for.

If she hadn’t met Goldman that evening, it probably would have happened the next day or a few days later at the theatre, because it turned out Wiktor had taken him into his company. In the very first few days she was witness to the following conversation between two of the pre-war actors, both middle-aged; the chasm between the pre-war and post-war generations was immense.

One of them said: ‘They give each other mutual support.’

‘Are you talking about Goldman?’ asked the other. ‘You’re wrong, as usual. As usual you don’t understand a thing, you don’t know what’s going on. The one and only antisemite at our theatre is Wiktor himself. It’s that he’s observing the rule of the first Jew, and as that’s him, he doesn’t want a whole crowd of them. He took on Goldman because he’s harmless, because he’s only just starting, he took him instead of . . . But that Goldman should have spruced himself up with a nice stage name.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Can’t you understand why? A stage name is proof that the guy has buckled under, that he’ll do his best to fit in.’

‘Why make such a farce of it?’

‘It’s necessary! It is! People would scoff behind his back, repeating his real name on the sly; sometimes it would be printed in brackets in the press to keep the fellow in check, to rein him in if he gets too big for his boots. All told, if there’s a stage name we’ve got the upper hand – because it was he who came to us. Goldman – try saying that name to yourself out loud. Can’t you hear it? Straight away you’ve got a spoke in your wheels, you’ve got to jump across something foreign.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Perhaps? Definitely, man! That Goldman has already made several serious mistakes. His father – well, that’s too bad, no one chooses their own father. But why Goldman? So number one, we have the name Goldman. Number two: his voice is too harsh. Three: he’s too good-looking, that hurts Joe Public’s feelings! They don’t like it, they don’t like it when someone’s too good-looking . . .’

As she overheard this conversation, Flora saw Goldman in front of her the whole time, telling her his first confidences. While the ghetto was burning, he told her, the whole city talked about nothing else: some were delighted, others horrified that people were being burned up. The only living beings that never spoke about it were the Jews themselves; not a word on the topic could pass their throats.

Suddenly the weather became inhuman in its beauty. The sunlight, the colours and smells made life impossible, and being in the city was unbearable. People walked about in a daze, constantly returning in their conversations to the weather, to memories of the summer, and to places where the sun could not be killed off by walls and workplaces. Flora and Goldman were both determined to go away, on a short trip to the town of K., for instance.

By now they had entered a time when there was no sweetness in the city to change ugly streets into gardens, though it was still beautiful, sunny and warm. The sun looked yellow and only had strength for about an hour at noon, then it went white, melted and cooled off; the evenings set in early, cool and deep. In the desert of the evening only the moon cried above the town.

To escape the threat of the inexpressible beauty of the evenings, to escape the chill and the desert, they sought refuge at the Tourist Centre, the only bright, warm, safe place where they felt at home; the rest of the town – at night – was like exile abroad, at the end of the world. At the Tourist Centre they had meals both urban and rural: sour milk, bread and butter, white cheese, hot black pudding, and apple compote. To reach the Tourist Centre, on the edge of town, they walked through empty little streets, plunged in impenetrable darkness, a journey that afforded them impressions they had never gained on the well-lit streets of the big city. On the way, huddling together, they felt aware of the union of two people as an elemental, natural refuge from fear and darkness. They felt it again later on, especially after the meals, as they returned home through the utterly deserted town, and their footsteps rang with a loud echo at the other end of the marketplace, as if someone were constantly following and aping them. They hurried down the empty little streets, making haste to be in the two small rooms they had rented; they were the last guests of the summer. Their skin went numb with cold in this summer-time accommodation, in a house within a garden by a river. There was not much furniture, no double windows, and the walls were thin. Goldman’s little room had nothing but a wooden bed with a straw mattress and two chairs, on one of which stood a wash bowl; each morning they fetched water for themselves from a nearby well. But there was a huge number of portraits of kings and heroes hanging on the walls in the cheapest reproductions. In the other little room, which was darker, stood a wardrobe lined with apples, a large table surrounded by six armchairs suitable for anything but sitting; they must have been designed by a madman and made by another. The rooms were connected by a glass door, always set ajar. They slept in Jakub’s bed. The man took full advantage of his rights, going beyond the woman’s desire. He took her with a softness at the bottom of which she could sense cruelty.

On their first evening, chilled to the bone, they had only just sat down, when in the doorway of the Tourist Centre the mighty figure of the Black God appeared, and lunged towards them with a shout. Flora hadn’t seen him since that time. She realized it was he who had united them; if she had met Goldman at the theatre, the result might have been different. Wearing an anorak with the collar of a navy-blue sweater protruding from under it, and short plus-fours on his fat legs, the Black God looked like a prematurely aged boy. A little later it occurred to Flora: ‘He’s just the same as all the Jews – you could put your hand between his teeth and he wouldn’t bite; maybe that’s why some people like them.’

‘Well, what’s up?’ he asked her. ‘Well, how’s life? All right?’

She smiled.

‘No, don’t say it’s still too early for the divorce courts. One can see everything right away; the grudges and defects merely come into focus later on, but they’re the same grudges and defects one could sense on the first day. The world was created on the first day, all at once.’

The Black God was born here in this town, then he had left, and now he had come back to say goodbye to it; he too was leaving the country. On that first evening he came with a local artist, Orywał, who painted saints. The saint-painter and ‘Flora’s Jews’ were on the best terms immediately. They spent the whole evening drinking in each other’s words, enjoying a good, warm and pleasant mood, and none of them wanted to leave. Late into the night Orywał told stories about the Queen of Sheba, who was in fact the Black God’s aunt, a teacher whose name was Klara Segał. Her true nature only appeared once the Jews had been deported to the other side of the river, where they lived behind a wire fence. The local peasants often sneaked up to the fence bringing a loaf of bread, a pat of butter or a chunk of pork fat, in exchange for which they got clothes or the occasional piece of jewellery. One day, Klara Segał gathered her folks around her and made a long speech that started like this: ‘Children, we are doomed, we don’t know the day or the hour. Let no woman refuse a man, or man a woman. It is God’s wish. I have told my three daughters to do the same.’

Late at night, the saint-painter and the Black God escorted them home. On the way they didn’t meet a living soul, not even a drunk; the fog was thick, biting, and they shivered with cold. Next day, when at breakfast in the cafeteria they met the Black God again, drinking milk, Flora felt as if they had never parted at all, as if she had met someone who’d been a friend for years.

As the Black God had come to bid farewell to the town, they said goodbye to it together. Together they went for walks, together they ate their meals, they hardly parted at all. One time he showed them the house where he was born. It was a small wooden villa on a low foundation, in the style of houses in the foothills rather than the local one, though in fact there wasn’t any local style; the poor wooden cabins were the most typical.

‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll find a crust of bread in the outside world. I have family, they’ll help, they have a duty. Someone must do the dirty work for the poets, their own is too clean, which must be why there’s so much meanness in them, so little character, reduced by a complete lack of definition of what they call their work, but luckily I’m not a poet, I’m an architect. I have decided to leave for two reasons. First, I want to avoid the putrefaction that’s inevitable wherever something has come to an end, and where there are no young people. You can run the length and breadth of this country with a candle in daylight and you’ll hardly find any young people of Flora’s age. Wherever there’s no youth, putrefaction is inevitable, and the old people are suspended in a void – they’re doomed to pity, which is a base emotion. I think all the past wanderings of the Jews have been an escape from putrefaction. Second, I want to preserve my memories. One should not ignore one’s memories, memories are a fine thing, of paramount importance. Here I have fewer and fewer memories, here I keep burying them every day.

‘And I advise you, children,’ he said, glancing at Flora, ‘to do the same. They bake bread throughout the world. Goldman is young, and could change his profession, in fact he should, he absolutely should, and you, Flora, should help him to do it. Because here they’ll eat him up; sooner or later, by means boorish and elaborate, crude and refined, before he knows it, he’ll be devoured . . . Leave the country, it’s better in a marriage for both partners to be foreign than just one,’ he said, smiling as usual.

‘When I was a boy,’ he continued, ‘I thought I had an answer for everything. Now I’m forty-five, and I know that I know nothing, and have an answer for nothing. I’m facing all the same questions that stood before my father. Whenever a figure from the past floats before my memory, a dearly beloved face, I say to myself: “So will none of it ever return?” Now I know: everything that was ever going to be has already been and gone. Every time I look at that stretch of water between the willows, I can’t drive away my amazement that the landscape has remained unchanged, but the people are gone. It’s as if a huge fish has shaken them off its back. But the huge fish has shaken off some, and not others.’

On Friday, their first evening, they were almost alone at the Tourist Centre, and their table was one of only three that were occupied; on Saturday evening a few tourists arrived, who are similar the world over, but on Sunday a considerable gathering was expected; a painting was due to be consecrated at the monastery. They were advised to secure themselves dinner elsewhere, as they might not get it at the centre.

So on Sunday they went for a long walk, had dinner at the manicurist’s, and then headed at a slow pace towards the town, where it was as crowded as it was in the high season.

At one point the Black God stopped them. On their right hand lay an empty slope gilded by the sun, and above it they could see the delicate image of a birch grove against the sky.

‘What are you folks looking for?’ asked a peasant who was sitting on the slope, wearing a flat cap and a brilliant white shirt that contrasted with his tanned, crumpled face; he was peeling an apple.

‘Listen, fellow, wasn’t there once a cemetery around here?’ said the Black God, whose face was worried.

‘A Jewish graveyard?’ asked the peasant.

‘That’s right. I think it’s somewhere here,’ said the Black God.

Hesitating to answer, the peasant stared hard at Flora.

‘Isn’t this the place?’ asked the Black God.

‘It’s here,’ replied the peasant slowly.

‘Where?’ asked the Black God.

‘Right here,’ said the peasant, pointing at the slope where he was sitting.

‘Here? There’s no sign of it . . .’

‘We ploughed up the earth,’ said the peasant, finally ceasing to stare at Flora with the hard eyes of a man used to taming animals, and skilled in how to force the earth, trees, livestock and woman to produce for him; this was not some urban commoner, but a peasant, in whom the Green God lived life to the full.

‘It’s here . . .’ repeated the Black God firmly.

‘We ploughed the earth, we need bread, people must eat,’ said the peasant, smiling at Flora.

‘People must eat,’ repeated the Black God, also only addressing Flora. At once she remembered the pain in old Goldman’s voice when, just before they left the city, he had told them that the ground where one hundred and fifty thousand victims lay buried had been appropriated for a sports field.

‘What was done with the gravestones?’ asked the Black God.

‘They went to pave the street during the war. The Germans gave orders.’

‘The Germans gave orders,’ repeated the Black God.

‘People often used to come here,’ said the peasant. ‘They’d take soil in little bags, as if from a sacred site. But very few come here now.’

‘There’s no one left,’ said the Black God.

Then they walked towards the marketplace, not quite visible from here, yet they could already sense the hubbub and stench of a human throng, like at the approach to a stadium. On the exposed street the sun, though white and fading, still produced a warm, muggy atmosphere, which always gave Flora a headache; in this regard she envied her friend Klara her fantastic hats, which she hadn’t the courage to wear herself. (‘But you have the courage for things I’d never dare to do,’ Klara would reply.) People began to pass them, with overcoats in hand or tucked under their arms, wearing sweaters and trousers held up by cords with their underpants poking out, while the women had bulging bags with small umbrellas protruding from them. Among both the men and the women the semi-rural type prevailed, fair and stocky, excessively bold or excessively timid.

As soon as they entered the crowd – on a small street before the marketplace, then in the marketplace itself – something happened to the Black God that Flora couldn’t understand. His face was clouded with a sort of angry solemnity, as if someone had mortally offended him. Ostentatiously, with no regard for anyone, time and again he stopped, laid a hand on Flora’s arm, and in a loud voice poured out everything he knew about the cathedral, the monastery, the local religious paintings and relics. He spoke in smooth, rounded sentences, stressing every vowel. Flora grasped that the crowd was looking at them – they were a rather garish, foreign stain. Sensing sweat on her brow, she listened to the Black God with a wry grin, her eyes fixed on the ground, as he, slapped in the face by his own colouring and otherness, by she knew not what, replied to every one of her unspoken words with a dozen of his own, as he parried every intended blow with a counter-blow, and replied to every potential insult with an insult, all under the guise of a lecture about the cathedral, the monastery, and the religious paintings. ‘But this is a clash,’ it suddenly occurred to Flora, ‘between the Green God and the Black . . .’ She wanted to get out of the marketplace as fast as possible, where the crowd was at its thickest, but on the small streets beyond it the crowd was already thick enough for the Black God’s rage and garrulousness to continue. He merely passed on to lecturing about the birds and the trees.

Later, once they were all back in the room, the Black God said to her: ‘In a crowd like that I always feel as if they’re going to come up and ask me: “Why did you crucify Him?’’’

‘Centuries of hatred,’ she thought. ‘Now it’ll take new centuries to remove it.’

She made her way into the other room and turned the knob on the radio. But it wasn’t the radio that deafened her, just the words that yelled wildly inside her: ‘Kill the hatred! Kill the hatred and break free of its gods.’ Deafened by this inner screaming, she stood over a crooked, wobbly little table.