Krakow

The dust is still settling as I sit in the living room of my apartment and listen to the beginnings of a night on the town for most of Letterkenny’s inhabitants. I am tired. Louise sleeps soundly in the bedroom and I’m wracking my brain over a small time assignment I have to write and can’t get round to. Krakow still lingers as the smell of Sobieski cigarettes surrounds me and I puff as masculinely as one can through a polish made cigarette holder. I wish I brought back more beer.

My first trip abroad since I was seventeen was as monumental as one would expect, for someone who missed out on the whole wide-eyed inter-rail trips and the extended southeast Asian vacation all the cool kids got to go on, in and out of college. I felt orphaned during those times, as I watched them all come and go. Photographs and travel-logs and memories piled upon memories, none of which included me. Like the narcissus I am, I flicked through those photos, hoping through some impossibility to be in one, laughing or drinking with them, my friends, well traveled and drifting away. That talk of shared experiences heightened my man-made isolation so I emotionally left them to it, as I withdrew into somewhere else, some darkened vision of myself as an old man, standing on Machu Pichu alone, and laughing at the world. I itched and itched in those days, for the walking shoes to somehow wrap my feet while I slept. My dreams were of flight unaided, and of discovering the will to leave. Afraid, more than anything, of never coming back.

We stepped off the plane into an older world than I knew. One that had loosed the shackles of centuries of oppressors, numerous and varied in their reasoning. Poland, reborn again like some Promethean torment, an immortal locked in a laboratory killed upon each rebirth as if someone, sometime, would discover why. It exists as it always has, with spirit, with pride, and idols, both Religious and otherwise are clung to for their talismanic power. Castle Wawels dominance looms, as the former seat of Polish kings and usurping Nazis both.

The multiple histories overlap and strangle the mind with impossible thought, until you have a beer or vodka and stop the madness inside. It is beautiful, wealthy and impoverished, cultured and philistine, like all of us, living and breathing. They learn some English so they know who to hate now, the boisterous and abrasive tourists, those taking pictures where pictures are forbidden, bus tours and walking tours and click click click. To say thank you in their tongue is the password. To try and see the country through the eyes of the Polish is the key to enjoying it with them. It is the peoples Poland, and I love it.

To step into the labyrinthine city, and explore it nooks first you see a different side to that which is presented so daringly in its more touristy arenas, the buildings are old and beaten, and look it, but with the scars borne it is more magnificent. The pipes lead nowhere and the ancient scaffolds are tucked away, high rise and puck marking the buildings inside the many courtyards there. Beer gardens and cafe-bars line every pavilion and fill the spaces left by other countries civil servants. It was Russia’s once, twice in fact, and the babushkas lining every stall speak volumes of their regard for that history, trinketed as they drink their coca colas in the sun and speak not of the impossible horrors that befell their nation since the capital moved to Warsaw.To speak of such is all too unnecessary, as it sits behind the eyes of Krakow, a weighted soul, unable to cry, so laughing.

The sun shone most days. The magnificent Cathedrals and galleries illuminated by something you could almost think was a god. The central square pulled you to it. Its sheer size is reminiscent of something so military, fit for the grandest of parades, or the most loathsome. We did our tourist thing, shopping enthusiastically with our internal exchange bringing smiles in most places visited, eating and drinking like royalty. A bus trip to the most painful place on earth was offset by a trip to the zoo earlier in the week. I feel guilty for my blown in zeal. For my anxiety mixed with sheer excitement. But it is a place and I a person. The humanity of any reaction is as valid as the next. I could not cry at Auschwitz as I dragged my fingers along the walls, attempting in vain to tap into the place. The noisiness of silence was too much, its vast destructive nature too great. Was this place ordained for such by more than one observant man, trying to avoid being observed?

Anything I write cannot but detract from the sincere loneliness of the camps there. The tour guides thinly veiled depression and my own wishing for those few hours to be Jewish, to touch the heart of that place as one who had lost everything, and returned to spit on gods face. I will smoke my Sobieski and go to bed, no furthen on in my quest to complete something worthwhile. Poland, Krakow, I am in awe of you. Had I but a fraction of your spirit I am sure I could find the words to say how I feel. You have taught me the futility of screaming at the sky and I will shed a tear for you. In happiness and in sadness, Na zdrowie, Vivat!