The books that have permanently entered the canon of Polish literature is not all that he has left behind. Along with Günter Grass and Stefan Chwin he was an artist who, through the power of his writing, created a new identity of Gdańsk.
It has been over two months since he is no longer with us. It is still difficult to come to terms with the fact that we will never see him again – walking down the street, wearing an elegant black coat, a red scarf wrapped around his neck and a wide-brim fedora (which attracted so much attention among the passers-by), never hear his unique laughter, never read his new poem or novel, never see his new play…
1.
A writer stays with us as long as his books are being red. No one is able to undo his physical death but each of us has the power to postpone the other kind – the erasure of memory by the passage of time. Paweł did so much for us, but we can do something for him in return. A careful reading of what he wrote before his premature death would be enough.
However, the books that have permanently entered the canon of Polish literature is not all that he has left behind. Along with Günter Grass and Stefan Chwin he was an artist who, through the power of his writing, created a new identity of Gdańsk.
Their prose has enriched Gdańsk with characters and events, which – while being a part of literary fiction – have become so real in our imagination that they are now incorporated in the history of the city. They gave rise to the new mythology which shapes the image of Gdańsk to an almost equal extent as everything that actually happened in the past.
Perhaps the most significant impact of Huelle, Grass and Chwin’s fiction is visible in the dramatic shift in both our perception and evaluation of the German heritage of the city. Gdańsk is no longer haunted by its Germanness. It ceased to be the nest of the Teutonic-Nazi pandemonium. We live in a place that bears no resemblance to the city our parents and grandparents used to live in, and more often than not we are oblivious to who contributed to this state of affairs the most.
The true beginning of this change dates back to Who Was David Weiser – a widely acclaimed debut novel by a young author published in 1987. The book became a literary legend almost in an instant. Its power was further enhanced by the excellent collection of short fiction Moving House and Other Stories published in the early 90s, which along with Huelle’s comments in the media initiated the public debate on Gdańsk’s identity.
From this boiling cauldron of countless ideas and vigorous disputes emerged a brand new city, utterly different than before.
2.
In the era before the “Copernican revolution” by Huelle and Chwin, who were both inspired by Günter Grass, Gdańsk was basically a foreign city to its postwar inhabitants. These were mostly newcomers from distant places, settlers beginning a new life in a world shaped by different people, different culture and history that had taken an unfamiliar course.
They claimed other people’s flats together with all the equipment abandoned in a hurry by their former owners; they passed houses, churches and other buildings so dissimilar from the ones they knew from their childhood; they encountered incomprehensible inscriptions which, despite being methodically removed, persistently reappeared here and there, their German lettering an eyesore.
This city, whose backbone was broken by the war, reminded the new arrivals at every turn that they didn’t belong here. Their response was a simple defense mechanism: consistent ignoring of what they felt was a hostile unfamiliarity. Almost everything that had been connected with the German past of Gdańsk was consumed by the collective amnesia.
It was one of the most remarkable phenomena within the common awareness in the postwar era of the city. The general loathing towards Germans and everything German seemed conducive to this shared memory loss. Paradoxically, with time their hatred solidified instead of becoming diluted. It was successfully kindled by the communist propaganda apparatus which obsessively demonized the image of Germans by presenting them almost exclusively in the context of the Nazi war crimes or the actually ahistorical notion of the Teutonic Drang nach Osten. There was an anathema placed on the Germanness, a consistent conspiracy of silence.
What did it look like in practice? Those who lived in the formerly German houses never talked about their displaced owners. When a need arose to explain that they lived in such a flat, they used an euphemism “in an old building”. While taking out letters from a mail box, they never noticed the word Briefe engraved on its flap. While taking part in services in brick, Gothic and neo-Gothic churches, they never wondered, not for a second, who had built them or who had worn out the pews, now darkened with age. Of course, if one were to ask about all of this, one would be given a clear answer. But nobody put forth these questions, and that which remains unspoken, simply does not exist.
When we were children we used to play hide-and-seek in the devastated German graveyards, without ever thinking who was buried there. I will never forget the moment, this sudden epiphany, when the fact dawned on me. It felt as if a heavy curtain was lifted and I saw a continent, right next to me, whose existence, until now, I had been oblivious to.
The official version of the history of Gdańsk, served as the dogma by the Polish People’s Republic authorities, was a story about an ancient, Slavic borough by the Motlawa river, which had forever gravitated towards Poland. A story about a city which was a loyal subject of Polish Kings through and through, and thrived most in times when its links with the Polish Republic became strongest. Insidiously taken over by treacherous Prussia, the city fell into a coma and was only brought back to life by units of Kościuszko’s Infantry Division marching briskly down the Royal Route.
This image was reinforced by the legends of Gdańsk, Polonized by Franicszek Fenikowski and published in a volume Okręt w herbie. The collection became one of the most popular books among residents of Gdańsk and perhaps the most significant and undisputed source of knowledge concerning the history of the city.
If there were any gaps, the people of Gdańsk filled them on their own with the events the party apparatchiks preferred to overlook, such as the December 1970 protests, including setting fire by the strikers to the building of the Provincial Committee of the ruling party and the bloody suppression of the revolt; the great victory of the Solidarity movement in August 1980, or pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Gdańsk in 1987 and the famous mass he celebrated in Zaspa, attended by hundreds of thousands of Poles.
Apart from these, the vision of Gdańsk’s identity present in the mind of an average citizen and the one served by the hated communist authorities were virtually the same. This was the common ground where both sides saw eye to eye: Gdańsk had always been a Polish city with Germans playing the villain’s part in its history.
And so we lived a lie, functioning within a meticulously maintained fiction which suited us as it soothed our anti-Semitic insecurities and fears.
Conrad Letzaku, Johannes Scolvus and Johann Hewelcke became the saint patrons of our claims. Covered with a thick coat of Polonizing varnish, they transmogrified into Konrad Leczkow, Jan z Kolna and Jan Heweliusz. Everything that this varnish couldn’t stick to evoked our aversion and anxiety. And there was plenty of it.
Truth be told, the only patches of Gdańsk and its centuries-old history that belonged to us were the ones we managed to Polonize. The rest remained foreign, inaccessible, defiantly turning its back to us.
As I have already mentioned, in those days the word “Germans” caused a sharp pang of fear. It generated associations which automatically brought images that were broadcast ad-infinitum by television: Hitler screaming in a hateful frenzy from the podium at a rally, white Zyklon B crystals spilled from a can, soap made of human corpses, ghastly wounds on women’s legs, a result of medical experiments carried out by Nazi physicians, piles of skeletons wrapped in skin, staring into the void with big, glassy eyes…
This non-stop conditioning aimed at only one thing: to instill in us, once and for all, hatred towards Germans and to perpetually remind us what monsters the Soviet Army had saved us from.
Although it had been years since the war, Gdańsk was still filled with landmines. Landmines of an ubiquitous Germanness. In other words, it was full of blank spots: people, events and places we were incessantly wiping out from our consciousness. It was necessary in order to be able to live in a hostile environment, but it had its price – as we closed our eyes, we sentenced ourselves to live in an invisible town, a phantom city.
These mines were only disarmed by the prose of Grass, Huelle and Chwin.
These writers, all born in Gdańsk, dramatically changed our attitudes towards Germanness. Through their fictional characters, such as Oskar Matzerath, miss Greta or Hanemann, they showed us the ordinariness of German life that had been going on in the city for generations, no different in its nature from our own existence. Until then we had known only bad Germans. Now, while reading the books by these Gdańsk authors, we were given a chance to see, for the first time, Germans who were not fierce blond-haired beasts from the concentration-camp literature or war films, to acknowledge, somewhat surprised, that they actually are human beings, to get accustomed to their otherness, understand it and get to like it. In our minds, the Germanness, at least to some extent, came unstuck from Nazism and ceased to be felt as lethal danger.
Of course, it is not to say that our perception of Germans was limited to anti-German clichés generated by the authorities. But even though our common sense suggested otherwise, it was helpless against the truth of radically negative emotions, which were ignited in us. It took real art to extinguish this filthy, blazing fire. Art which appeals to all dimensions of our “self”. Without these outstanding Gdańsk novels this could never happen. Objective knowledge, the domain of the intellect, wouldn’t be able to achieve much in this area.
In the aforementioned books, the German myth of an ever-German Gdańsk and the Polish myth of an ever-Polish Gdańsk were replaced with the myth of a centuries-old multiculturalism. According to this new narrative, people had been arriving in the city by the Motława since forever, including Kashubians, Poles, Germans, Jews, Dutchmen, Scots, Frenchmen…There was enough room for everyone. On an equal footing. Without chauvinistic attempts to outdo one another in terms of both merits and faults. “Everyone brought the best they had” (Każdy przyniósł, co miał najlepszego), as Mieczysław Abramowicz entitled his collection of short stories.
The postwar influx of newcomers was only one of many waves of people who had been coming to Gdańsk for ages. This openness of the city, always ready to welcome new citizens, was supposed to constitute the basis of Gdańsk’s identity.
How much historical truth doest it contain? It is irrelevant. At last, Gdańsk became our city. Since that moment everything that was sitting inside this vast, ancient chest of a town , became our heritage as well. For the first time we could say this place was our home.
3.
Who Was David Weiser was both the beginning of Huelle’s instant career and the source of his later worries. The writer, elevated to the literary Parnassus by the success of his debut novel, was fully aware of the fact that from now on every subsequent book needs to be at least as good as the first one. Moving House and Other Stories met these expectations. His status of one of the most important writers of the day was set and consolidated. At the age of thirty five, he practically became a classic.
The following novels and collections of short stories, however, did not meet with such a strong response as his previous works. At first he took it with stoic calm; he kept going, took his time and published a new book every few years, working on them in a very meticulous manner. Mercedes-Benz, Castorp and The Last Supper were recognized and indeed appreciated by the public, but Huelle perfectly understood that the temperature around the perception of these books differed considerably from the hectic fever raised by his debut novel. Huelle feared that he would remain a one hit wonder author, sharing the fate of great actors such as Stanisław Mikulski or Peter Falk, who would forever be associated with one film, even if legendary. He wanted to be neither the Kloss nor Columbo of Polish prose.
This increasingly tiring situation was to be changed by a novel into which Huelle poured all of his creative energy as well as the best resources of his intellect and imagination – Sing, Gardens. In my opinion the book is Huelle’s opus magnum. He finally reached the heights of perfection, artistically exceeding his debut literary feat.
He displayed similar mastery in his brilliant short stories which today belong to the canon of the genre that, regrettably, has fewer and fewer practitioners. And yet, both critics and readers remember him most by the “sensational Who Was David Weiser”.
Yes, this is unfair, but the first love will always seem to our memory as the most beautiful one.
4.
He belonged to the category of writers whose style organically blends with their real-life personality. Paweł himself was like the things he wrote and how he wrote them. While reading his books, people who knew him will always hear his clear, resonant voice of a natural born raconteur, a voice filled with happiness of a child who is spinning a yarn.
Telling stories (naturally besides writing them) was his greatest passion. He was in his element whenever he could share his tales with others. His eyes radiated with sheer delight and the whole body imitated the course of the story in a vivid pantomime. Most of these could be placed in one of his books with almost no editing. Their dramatic tension was perfect and they always ended with a strong culminating point.
His excellent memory, voluble eloquence, precise use of words, sense of humor and lively imagination made him an orator capable of establishing great rapport with the audience. He could effortlessly capture their attention and win their favor. When he spoke, he emanated warmth and cordiality. He simply liked people and people liked him in return. You could feel it instantly.
Toward the end of his life this great gift of the gab was somewhat decalibrated by his illness. Sometimes the threads of narratives got tangled up, diverged a little too far, or remained suspended in a void. But it never occurred to anyone to callously point out such failings or to interrupt this nonetheless hypnotizing one man show. We still listened attentively, even if he kept telling the same stories, unknowingly repeating himself.
5.
The language of his prose…This dimension of writing is frequently overlooked as the conversation around any given novel boils down to discussing its characters, topics and ideas. As if we have forgotten that in the realm of literature we experience all of the above through language. And it is its flavor that ultimately determines how we feel the taste of these components, and how intense or deep of a sensation they evoke.
The manner of writing plays the same role that the colour and the intensity of light plays in perception of objects. Strong, bright light brings out a lot of details which fully absorb our attention. On the other hand, dim and warm light masks particular features, exposing the general shape of the thing we look at. The language of Paweł Huelle’s prose lies somewhere between these two extremes, which means that the reality it captures is close to our ordinary perception thereof. Nevertheless, this realistic picture was always slightly coloured by the author with a warm hue of sepia.
To enter a sentence written by Huelle is to cross a threshold of a house which has been tailor-made for a human. The whole interior is exactly as it should be: the size and layout of rooms, the height of ceilings, the amount of light coming through windows. The space is both vast and cozy. Not overcrowded with excessive objects. The only things we find here are those which are essential for a comfortable life. Here, it is easy to move around and to think.
His phrase owes its unique character to a harmonious blend of three ingredients: lucid matter-of-factness, unforced simplicity and sensual perception of reality. Free, undisturbed flow of words almost instantly syncs up with the rhythm of our breathing, which is why Huelle’s prose works exceptionally well when read out loud. Let’s take the the first, randomly chosen excerpt from the novel Sing, Gardens:
The hooves of Persherones clacked on the stones laid back in Keiser Wilhelm’s times, and I was actually glad that we were moving into a new flat, where I would finally have a place of my own.
This seemingly simple sentence, so different both in terms of syntax and vocabulary from multilayered structures by Schulz, Proust or Nabokov, contains a trace of what constituted Paweł’s personal charm: directness, straightforwardness and tender affection towards mundane trifles that build our everyday life.
6.
He had no illusions about the incurable human stupidity and the power of the all too often triumphant evil. And yet his writing, just as he himself, ultimately and stubbornly sad “yes” to the world. Under the influence of this loving acceptance of life, the coarse, hum-drum daily existence began to glow in a way we hadn’t previously noticed. The crude pseudo-orange soda, so popular in communist Poland, turned into a magic elixir, while the proletarian hands of Mr Bieszk, holding the leather reins of a horse team, became the embodiment of life wisdom and rough beauty.
Huelle composed his literary universe with elements which were accessible through the five senses. Owing to subtle tenderness he applied while describing the ordinariness of the characters and banal objects filling these worlds, he was able to give his readers a sense of solid footing in their own everyday reality. This way, he strengthened our trust in life, crucial for survival in the world that could crush us at any given moment.
For me, the wooden round table from a short story of the same title is a perfect example of this feature of Huelle’s prose. Every single day the family of the child narrator gathers around this table to eat dinner, so that, over a bowl of potatoes with pork rinds, his mother and father can have a go at the eternal, insolvable dispute of who is worse: Russians or Germans.
7.
He was a modern prosaist who, while writing about our world, continuously glanced over his shoulder – looking at the reality which already belonged to the plusquamperfectum. Thus, his writing is permeated with omnipresent history. Almost all contemporary events he described were deeply rooted in the past, with their tangled course patiently revealed by the story. This way the author reminds us that the past is something real, that in never really disappears, that it influences the present and that it still drives our thoughts and actions.
This remains in accordance with the fact that Huelle as an artist was a conservative. His role model authors were great traditional storytellers such as Hrabal, Kundera, Bulgakov or Babel. Narcissist trips through convoluted labyrinths of one’s own ego or formal experiments in the vein of Joyce or Faulkner were alien to him – yes, he admired these authors, but never tried to imitate them. He often talked with disapproval about the arrogant self-focus of contemporary art, which loses itself in its own hermetic ideas.
He was the writer of the 20th century to the core. Sing, Gardens brings back to life the modernist novel, both in terms of form and subject matter. It could as well be written by Thomas Mann, an author he idolized. I am not saying this to accuse him of being anachronistic, but to point out the spiritual background he originated from and which forever remained a point of reference for him.
The world of his novels has also never crossed the threshold of the 21st century. All the things we cannot imagine contemporary life without are nowhere to be seen in his writing. There are no smartphones, no social media, no tweets, no chats, no compulsive Internet surfing, no
e-banking, no online shopping… For him a computer was just en enhanced version of a typewriter and he treated it as such. Connected as he was, with every fiber of his being, to the palpable world, he wouldn’t be able to make today’s virtual reality his permanent place of residence.
8.
One of frequently recurring figures of Huelle’s imagination is the motif of crossing to the other side or slightly pulling the curtain which hides a reality different from ours. In Who Was David Weiser this is symbolized by a tunnel where the eponymous character disappears with Elka; in the novella The Bridge – by the spans of a broken viaduct where every night the protagonist’s father walks an ever thinner tightrope. In a short story Golden Rain the bizarre dreams haunting Anusewicz and Winterhouse are harbingers of extraordinary events.
For a split second a crack appears in the wall of heavy matter to prove the existence of a transcendent, metaphysical dimension. In everyday life Paweł rejected what he believed was the illusory solace of faith in God or any sort of afterlife, whereas in his writing he remained a mystic.
Like almost everyone (I’m speaking here on the behalf of generations shaped by the country upon the Vistula River in the pre-Internet era) he was brought up in a Catholic faith which at that time was virtually the only model of identity accessible to us at that early stage of life. Fervent childish belief in evangelical miracles, kindled by participation in Catholic rituals, whose baroque theatricality can have a very strong impact on a child’s imagination, was an experience that left a deep mark in his psyche. A mark that has never fully disappeared, even though Paweł distanced himself from the Church early on.
This is why, at least to some extent, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were among the most important sources of inspiration in his writing. He regularly re-read these texts as an observant reader and an exegete. He particularly often revisited the Book of Ezekiel. Images, concepts and figures of speech derived from the Holy Bible are present in his prose, either applied in a direct manner or in a form of more or less camouflaged allusions. Being an agnostic, he believed that the only form of immortality available to us, humans, is memory.
9.
In my opinion the fact that he did not want to come to terms with the greatest harm inflicted to people by the passage of time – the ultimate erasure from memory – explains an incident which happened many years ago. Let me share this story with you.
It was a piercing cold and damp November evening when Wojtek Wencel and I paid him a visit in his flat in Wrzeszcz at the Sobótki Street. Our lively conversation was accompanied by Irish whiskey we sipped from massive glasses. At some point Paweł asked us to help him with a matter, which – when I think about it from today’s perspective – was definitely against the law. If we had been a little less lucky, we could have ended up at a police station.
As it turned out, during his walks around the suburban neighborhoods of Gdańsk, Paweł had stumbled across an old, post-German cemetery under demolition, adjacent to a newly erected church. Amidst the last tombstones waiting to be removed – they were probably to serve as building material – there was one Paweł wanted to save. The idea was to take it away under the cover of darkness and hide it in a safe place, preferably his own flat. Alcohol had been circulating in our young blood for some time now, so we both eagerly agreed to take part in such an intriguing adventure.
We got to a car and after a twenty-minute journey we arrived at our destination. We parked by the brick wall of the old graveyard. The light of sodium lamps burnt orange holes in the all-encompassing darkness. We walked through a slightly open gate, our shoes sinking in ruts of wet ground furrowed by the wheels of trucks taking this route to the construction site.
A former cemetery looked like a big, unkempt park, with the few remaining graves scattered here and there. In the very middle, there was a modern, unfinished church and a cubist edifice of a parish house.
Paweł led us to one of the big trees, took out a torch from his pocket, and illuminated a tombstone which was propped against its trunk. It was made of red granite. In the light of the torch we saw an engraving in Schwabacher type: names and surnames of two brothers who died in 1943, within months of each other. They were, of course, Germans. The one who passed away first was twenty years old at the time of death, while the other was a year younger. I didn’t memorize their names, so I will never be able to find what the cause of their death was – a bullet on the Eastern Front, an accident, illness, homicide or some unfortunate coincidence?
Paweł stood there in silence, holding his torch high. It was as if he wanted us to remember well the image before our eyes. Strangely enough, this moment dragged on and on. And then it suddenly dawned on me that I was taking part in the plot of a short story yet to be written – we were characters in his narrative, so we needed to take on the roles we were assigned to. Or was it an already existing story? I instantly thought about Who Was David Weiser and a scene when Weiser shows the narrator the tombstone of Horst Meller in the Brętowski Cemetery.
Finally, Paweł turned off the torch. “Let’s get down to business,” he said.
We pulled the tombstone away from the tree and slowly put it on the squishy ground. Only then did I feel its weigh. It was far heavier than I expected. We tried to lift it. I held the top, while Paweł and Wojtek grabbed the basis of the tombstone, raising it to the height of their knees, wobbly with the effort. On the spot, it became clear that we would not be able to take a single step with it.
We decided, however, to give it one last try. The tombstone was lifted again, but it slipped out of our hands almost instantly. Its blunt edge caught my calf before it hit the ground. I hissed with pain. The leg of my pants was torn.
“Nooo…It’s impossible. I can’t do it. It was a stupid idea from the get to,” I blurted out in helpless irritation. And then light went on in one of the parish house windows. A middle aged man opened it rapidly. He was wearing a dressing gown, his bald head was glowing like a full moon. For a while he was gazing into the darkness that engulfed us. “Who’s there?” he called out rather uselessly. We held our breaths. He disappeared for a moment, then came back with a searchlight and directed it straight at us. We froze. A bright beam of light trapped us in its circle. “I’m calling the police!” he barked a warning, and vanished inside again.
We made a run for it and got to the car in no time. Paweł couldn’t find the keys. With shaking hands he kept rummaging through his pockets. Time passed excruciatingly slowly and every second seemed like eternity. Finally, he found the keys in a pocket he had already searched. We slammed the doors and the car sped off right away. A police car passed us on the way. Perhaps, it was the one called by the priest.
It was the middle of the night. Once again, we were sitting over whiskey in the flat at Sobótki Street. The general mood was grave. It turned out that in this frenzy Paweł tore the coat he brought from a trip abroad. He clipped it with the car door and now it was damaged beyond repair. Meanwhile, I was disinfecting an ugly abrasion on my calf. And Wojtek lost a leather glove during our frantic escape.
The spectacular fiasco of our expedition left us stunned. We did not feel like having a late night conversation so we went outside to look for taxis to take us home.
The wound on my leg still hurt and wouldn’t heal. I feared that I might have caught tetanus. The vision of dying in pure agony haunted me for some time. But instead of going to the emergency room immediately, I preferred to swallow a daily ration of anxiety. Finally, the day came I could safely assume that I was in no danger any more.
Interestingly, after that night we never spoke about this incident again. As if it never happened. The only proof of our adventure was a diagonal scar on my calf. And so, I was still a character from Paweł’s writing: after all, Paweł Heller, the narrator in Who Was David Weiser, was shot in the leg by Weiser himself. Literature devoured reality, while fictitious characters devoured my own identity. Almost everything that was happening in my life at that time seemed to mimic the situations and events already described by Paweł in his books. Maybe my obsession with his prose in those days was to blame.
I felt, however, that there was something unhealthy about this entanglement. And that it was time to end it. So I put his books aside for a few years. The blessed passage of time blew away from my head the plots of his novels and short stories which I knew almost by heart. The scar on my calf grew paler and paler until it got absorbed entirely. There was no mark left, not even the tiniest one.
Once again, I could live exclusively according to scenarios of my own creation.
10.
There was exactly a ten year gap between us. I got to know him at the end of my Polish language studies – the very same course he had finished in his time. Much later, over a period of fourteen years, together with Adam Kmiński, Wojtek Boros, and Paweł in the capacity of editor-in-chief we published the Bliza magazine in Gdynia. Despite our long-time acquaintance, marked with many sigs of fondness and proofs of selfless appreciation, I was never a part of his inner circle of close friends. Apparently, I lacked something that would enable this gregarious man, who made friends with such ease, bestow a real closeness on me. And so I occupied a place in the second or third row of his numerous acquaintances, only occasionally being asked to sit in the first one.
I am writing all this so that you can formulate an accurate view on the nature of our relationship. And I am not going to hide the fact that my memory of Paweł is narrowed to a thin slit in a half closed door, through which he allowed me to observe him.
So I was no one special to him. He, on the other hand, was always special to me. He had become an important figure in my life long before we got to know each other – from the day his debut novel fell into my hands. It felt like a proper epiphany. Who Was David Weiser was my first literary love.
In a way, this happened by accident – the book just came to me in a right moment. In this short period of young adulthood when both sensitivity and intellect are only entering their full form – when we feel far more intensely and understand everything far more deeply than ever before. Our knowledge of life and literature is still so scant that jadedness which comes along with monotonous repetition of experience and the weight of hollow erudition is yet to stifle bursts of pure delight. These are the encounters with books that we never forget. Like a first love. They stay with us forever.
It was the topography of the novel’s setting that attracted me to it in the first place. The part of Wrzeszcz right between Abrahama and Gomółki Streets, the area around the tram depot, and the valley in the woods beneath the viaduct with a disassembled railroad to Kartuzy – this was the land where I spent my early childhood, just like the protagonist of the novel.
Since I was four, every morning at dawn I took a tram with my mother to go to the kindergarten commonly known as “Tramwajarz” (Trammy). The building was adjacent to the depot – and possibly used to be part of it in the past. If the weather was fine, right after breakfast we were taken out for a walk. There were only two possible destinations of these outings: the valley right behind the Church of the Resurrection or an old railway embankment by the tram terminus at Abrahama Street.
It was in these two spots where we chased each other wildly, pretending to be Indians, and played war games, rife with treacherous ambushes and Shakespearian schemes. Where great friendships were formed and broken off, where operetta like dramas of unrequited love occurred. This was my “brilliant epoch” and sometimes I feel like all the important things in life happened then and there – in a shallow, sandy vale, its slopes covered with monstrously gnarled roots of pines, or in a densely overgrown section of an old railway embankment, bounded at each side with concrete abutments of viaducts that had been damaged toward the end of the war.
Who Was David Weiser brought the mythlike quality of these places to another level. Almost everything in the novel seemed like a repetition of my own experiences. But the book became of paramount significance to me not only because I myself used to walk the same routes as Huelle’s characters. Far more important was the fact that on the pages of the novel I found something, or rather someone who had never appeared in my “brilliant epoch,” someone for whom I had been waiting in vain. What mean is, of course, a child Messiah, a charismatic friend like Weiser, whom I could admire for his wisdom, integrity and strength, who would make me acquainted with major affairs of both this and the other world, while I, in turn, would offer him my unconditional devotion.
11.
In the last weeks of his life Paweł often said that it was time to go. He complained that he no longer wanted to live since the contemporary world was no longer his world – that it didn’t value the things that were important to him. I listened to him with disbelief. He had always been a king of life which he loved passionately. And I think that, contrary to what he claimed, he wanted to live, and that the unfamiliarity of today’s reality wouldn’t be able to break his powerful will to exist. For me, this deeply moving confession was rather a form of desperate resignation resulting from a painful realization the he was losing his battle with the illness which ultimately defeated him. By making him an almost disabled man, it deprived him of everything that was his source of joy in life.
He was killed by the same disease that prematurely took a whole crowd of writers, both the greats and the lesser known ones. The litany of their names seems endless: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Yerofeyev, Bukowski, Capote, Kerouac, Gałczyński, Broniewski, Hłasko, Wojaczek, Grochowiak, Iredyński, Brecht, Osiecka, Żakiewicz, Pilch…
For a long time I have harbored doubts whether to broach this subject or not. I am entering the territory which is tactfully avoided when remembering a recently deceased person. And certainly, there are people far more entitled to comment on this matter than I am.
Maybe I’m committing a faux pas here, but I feel that this remembrance would be false and hypocritical if it failed to mention Paweł’s alcoholism which overshadowed a substantial part of his existence. To keep silent about this aspect of his life would be to make a shameful taboo out of it, to turn it into an unwholesome sensation. In my view it needs to be discussed openly and from the only appropriate point of view: as an incurable disease which became his affliction.
Drinking was a burden Paweł struggled with for many years. It crushed his health, damaged his personal life, was an obstacle preventing him from fulfilling his literary aspirations. In such cases people often say: this guy had everything – a great gift, money, respect, acclaim, health and a bunch of loving people around – but he wasted it all in a most foolish of ways.
Before we tie him to w whipping post, however, let’s take a moment to wonder.
Huelle belonged to one of many generations who considered cigarettes and alcohol an indispensable part of social life, something as natural during family gatherings, ordinary visits and meetings as a bowl of potato chips we put on the table today. Everyone drank, and they did it everywhere. People from all walks of life and all social circles. It was almost impossible to imagine that things could be different. In communist Poland the half-liter bottle became an unofficial currency used when people wanted to pay for minor services and favors. Long queues that formed in front of an off-licence before one p.m. revealed the scale of this bleak phenomenon perhaps in the most explicit way. In the atmosphere of widespread social acceptance, alcoholism developed quickly in those who were naturally predisposed to addiction. The rest needed more time and effort to end up in the same black hole. Paweł, just as many others, became a victim of our thanatic culture of drinking.
I have already mentioned his stumbles – with time they were getting more and more visible and difficult to hide, becoming a topic of comments made behind his back in hushed tones. But it is also important to remember his attempts to pick himself up form the bottom he hit from to time. These were many as well. He desperately wanted to break the vicious circle he found himself in. Paweł was fully aware of the damaging effects of his addiction and of everything drinking took away from him. The case of Jerzy Pilch – his close friend – was a sufficiently acute memento.
In order to free himself he sought medical help, undergoing weeks-long treatments. He was lucky enough to never have been left alone with his problem. He could always count on unconditional support of his dedicated friends and a whole crowd of people who admired him.
And yet, despite all of this, the disease turned out to be stronger. If he failed to liberate himself from the clutches of this deadly addiction, it only means that he was unable to do so. In the end, Paweł disappeared down the tunnel from which there is no coming back.
