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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha's mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. She found intrinsic – and often idiosyncratic – value in each item. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things. The objects are the seemingly ordinary possessions of an ordinary life. But through them, Wicha begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland emerged from the Second World War into the material meanness of the Communist regime, shortages of every kind shaped its people in deep and profound ways. What they chose to buy, keep – and, arguably, hoard – tells the story of contemporary Poland. Joanna's Jewishness, her devotion to work, her formidable temperament, her weakness for consumer goods, all accumulate into an unforgettable portrait of a woman and, ultimately, her country. Things I Didn't Throw Out is an intimate, unconventional and very funny memoir about everything we leave behind.
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‘I loved it; so funny, clever and moving. So impressively unsentimental … I adored all the bits about books and the precise, unflinching portrait of Joanna.’ Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of Dear Reader and The Last Act of Love
‘Devastatingly funny about the minutiae of family life and the foibles of the elders but animated by a deep ethical sense of how injustice damages and contaminates … Profoundly engaging [and] richly resonant.’ Irish Times
‘Vivid and sharply written … the book shows how objects are often where memories reside. It also expresses … the impossible human effort to end up with an adequate inventory of what was lost.’ Hisham Matar
Things I Didn’t Throw Out
Contents
Introduction
This is a story about things. And about talking. That is – about words and objects. It’s also a book about my mother, and so it won’t be too cheerful.
I used to think that we remember people for as long as we can describe them. Now I think it’s the other way around: they’re with us for as long as we don’t know how to pin them down with language.
It’s only dead people that we can make our own, reduce to some image or a few sentences, figures in the background. Suddenly it’s clear – they were like this or like that. Now we can sum up the whole struggle. Untangle the inconsistencies. Put in the full stop. Enter the result.
But I don’t remember everything yet. As long as I can’t describe them, they’re still a little bit alive.
4Forty years ago – and I don’t understand why this particular conversation lodged itself in my memory – I was complaining about some dull educational programme on Polskie Radio, and my mother said: ‘Not everything in life can be turned into a funny story.’ I knew it was true. But still I tried.
PART 1
MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN
The estate
She never spoke about death. Just once. A vague hand movement, a wave towards the shelves:
‘What are you going to do with all this?’
‘All this’ meant one of those shelving systems you buy at IKEA. Metal runners, brackets, planks, paper, dust, kids’ drawings hung up with drawing pins. Also postcards, mementoes, wrinkled little chestnut people, bunches of last year’s leaves. I had to react somehow.
‘You remember Mariuszek from school?’
‘A lovely boy,’ she said, because she remembered I didn’t like him.
‘A few years ago, Marta and I visited his mother-in-law to bring or take something, something for kids, a playpen or what have you.’
‘How many children does he have?’
8‘I don’t know, but the mother-in-law spoke very highly of him. She said that when her roof started leaking, Mariuszek paid to have it replaced, in bituminous tile, all very expensive, and he told her: “Don’t you worry about money, Mummy, it will all stay in the estate.”’
‘So how is he doing?’
‘I don’t know, he works at a law firm. Don’t worry about the estate. There’s still time.’
But there wasn’t.
My mother adored shopping. In the happiest years of her life she’d set off to the shops every afternoon. ‘Let’s go into town,’ she’d say.
She and my father liked to buy small, unnecessary things. Teapots. Penknives. Lamps. Mechanical pencils. Torches. Inflatable headrests, roomy toiletry bags, and various clever gadgets that might come in useful when travelling. This was strange, as they never went anywhere.
They would trek halfway across town in search of their favourite kind of tea, or the new Martin Amis novel.
They had their favourite bookshops. Favourite toyshops. Favourite repair shops. They struck up friendships with various – always very, very nice – salespeople. The antique shop lady. The penknife man. The sturgeon man. The lapsang souchong couple.
Every purchase followed the same ritual. They would notice some extraordinary specimen – in the shop that sold 9second-hand lamps, for example, where the lamp man held court, a very pleasant citizen, to use my father’s jaunty phrase.
They would have a look. Ask about the price. Agree they couldn’t afford it. They returned home. Suffered. Sighed. Shook their heads. Promised themselves that once they had some money, which should happen soon, they really must …
In the days that followed they would talk about that unattainable lamp. They wondered where to put it. They reminded each other it was too expensive. The lamp lived with them. It became a part of the household.
My father talked about its remarkable features. He sketched the lamp out on a napkin (he had excellent visual memory), pointing out how original certain solutions were. He stressed that the cable had textile insulation, barely worn. He praised the Bakelite switch (I could already see him taking it apart with one of his screwdrivers).
Sometimes they’d decide to visit it again. Just to have a look. I suspect it never occurred to them to bargain. In the end, they’d make the purchase.
They were perfect customers. Kind-hearted. Genuinely interested in new merchandise. Then my father tried a sample of the green Frugo soft drink in a shopping centre and had a heart attack. We had a little time to joke about it. Even the doctor at A&E thought it was funny.
A thin trickle was all that was left after they were both gone. The TV remote. The medication box. The vomit bowl.
10Things that nobody touches turn matt. They fade. The meanders of a river, swamps, mud.
Drawers full of chargers for old phones, broken pens, shop business cards. Old newspapers. A broken thermometer. A garlic press, a grater, and a – what’s it called? – we laughed at that word, it featured in so many recipes for a time: a quirl whisk. A quirl whisk.
The objects already knew. They felt they would be moved soon, shifted out of place, handled by strangers. They’d gather dust. They’d smash. Crack. Break at the unfamiliar touch.
Soon nobody will remember what was bought at the Hungarian centre. Or at the Desa gallery, the folk art stall, the antique shop – in times of prosperity. For a good few years, trilingual Christmas cards would arrive from businesses, always featuring a photo of some plated trinket. Eventually they stopped. Maybe the owners lost hope of further purchases. Maybe they closed down.
Nobody will remember. Nobody will say that this teacup needs to be glued back together. That the cable needs to be replaced (and where would you find one?). Graters, blenders and sieves will turn into rubbish. They’ll stay in the estate.
But the objects were getting ready for a fight. They intended to resist. My mother was getting ready for a fight.
‘What are you going to do with all this?’
Many people ask this question. We won’t disappear without a trace. And even when we do disappear, our things remain, dusty barricades.
Until
‘This is supposed to be me? Well, if that’s how you see me …’ She didn’t receive handmade greeting cards easily. She wasn’t an easy model. In fact, with her nothing was easy.
Polish homework in Year 4: ‘Describe your mother’, or rather ‘mum’, because the school relished diminutives. God, forgive me, because I wrote: ‘My mother has dark hair and is rather stout.’ Children have a different concept of weights and measures.
The Polish teacher weighed a hundred kilograms and underlined the phrase ‘rather stout’. She pressed the ballpoint pen down so strongly that she ripped through the paper. On the margin she carved the words: ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ My mother rarely agreed with the education system, but that pleased her. 12
—
She also had what respectable compatriots called ‘ahem’. Let me repeat: ‘respectable’. Less respectable ones had no difficulty with pronunciation.
There was something disconcerting about the ostentation of her features. She had the, ahem, look. The look of someone of, ahem, ahem, descent. What descent? Ahem. Upf.
There should be a special punctuation mark. A graphic equivalent of a contraction of the larynx. The comma won’t do. The comma is a wedge for catching your breath, and what’s needed here is a typographic knot, bump or stumble.
It’s a tough thing, having that look. An acquaintance of mine used the phrase: ‘N. is not dissimilar in appearance to Jerzy Kosiński.’ But N. did not have to resemble the famous writer at all. He could be, say, a short, tubby, good soul without the riding breeches or whip which Kosiński sported on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and still be equipped with obvious ahem.
In keeping with this terminology, my mother was also not dissimilar to Jerzy Kosiński. ‘I’m an old Jewess now,’ she said one day in 1984. In fact, she was younger then than I am today. But yes. She had ahem. Ahem for days.
When she died, people wrote to say various nice things. An eminent friend recalled that in her youth she’d been an excellent student. People foresaw a future in academia for her. Everyone expected her to stay at university.
13But she spent her whole life in career counselling in Muranów. Her counselling service moved from place to place around the district, and finally settled in a building right on the Umschlagplatz (where there were many problems with the historic buildings conservation officer).
And so she worked on top of the invisible rubble of the Warsaw ghetto. Wearing the standard-issue white coat – her surname had been written on the front but the marker ink dissolved in the wash – she would give children boxes filled with clever puzzles. Tests bearing the names of German professors. Mazes. Locks with catches. Holes in geometrical shapes. Decks of picture cards. Trick questions for assessing general knowledge. Think carefully: which picture doesn’t match the others? You’ve got plenty of time. Tick tock – the stopwatch chivvied them along.
In the spring, she informed pained young ladies who had failed their high school entry exams that there were still places in the tractor-building technical college in Ursus.
For most of the year she was something of a court-appointed attorney. A one-person committee for saving the unfortunates mauled by the education system. Defence counsel for children at the edge of the norm who got beaten up every year of their school-time ordeal. Guardian of persistent truants. Of the poor wretches with such bad handwriting and spelling problems that nobody – apart from my mother – noticed that they were impressively knowledgeable about explosives, samurai swords and Field Marshal Paulus. 14
—
In 1987 she was at war with a monstrous teacher of chemistry, or biology or something. The teacher was part of the Warsaw pedagogical elite and had many an adolescent’s depressions, neuroses and suicide attempts under her belt.
While talking to the teacher about one of her patients, my mother said: ‘You are ruthless, madam.’
‘You have such a rich vocabulary,’ a friend praised her when she recounted the story later.
‘I have to talk like that,’ mother explained. ‘After all I can’t tell the stupid bitch that she’s a stupid bitch.’
She terrorised people, telling them the truth to their faces. She would not be silent when it suited others for her to be silent. She didn’t react to our shhs, our give it a rests or not so loudlys.
Lots of people said she was strong. I don’t think she was, but she did despise helplessness. She kept Medication in Modern Therapy on her shelf (so as not to depend on a doctor). She had a hundred cookbooks. A notebook with a million phone numbers for every possible requirement. At the turn of each year there was a nervous search for refill pages, difficult due to the absolutely non-standard arrangement of the holes and rings in her binder. Finally the search would succeed and the notebook would swell with new pages, until eventually the press stud on the strap refused to snap shut.
15As Don said in the third Godfather: ‘The richest man is the one with the most powerful friends.’ I think he meant the washing machine repairman and the doctor who gives out their private number.
She taught me that friends are more important than family. That one can really only count on one’s high school classmates.
She would also make a fuss at the newsagents. She made the shopkeepers remove the promotional flyers from Gazeta Wyborcza. Faced with resistance, she would shake the newspaper herself and a rain of leaflets, price lists of electrical goods, discount coupons and samples fell out from between the pages.
She was especially irritated by brochures like Saints and Miracles. Part Four: Levitation, Bilocation, Healing. She was also pitiless towards the cyclical anthology of pilgrimage sites.
‘But you won’t die?’ I asked her once.
‘I will. Everyone dies.’
‘But you won’t?’
‘I will, but only when you don’t need me any more.’
