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Originally published in Massachusetts Review
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Postcards from Babel |
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Is it coincidence that Warsaw saw the worst of the war? Or that all the shrapnel of the heart lies scattered in the earth? Mostly the world is not happening in our language. Beside a fountain in a hillside park in Catania, Sicily, a boy and girl face each other in a dialect of the sea. As he steps toward her smiling, she steps back, uphill, pushing his hands away without quite letting go, a smile breaking like a wave across her censure. Mirrored in words, a pantomime, they will walk her step by step uphill backwards so slowly the curving six meter path around the fountain that it will take five minutes before they disappear into the horizon of what was I saying? The old ladies on a bench outside Soviet-era towers on the outskirts of Moscow traffic hide memories in sounds strange as acorns, but they might just be praising Putin or calling all the young girls whores. We forget, or never knew, there were 300,000 axis soldiers on the small island of Sicily in the Summer of 1943. Only in Italian and Spanish does the word for Winter so closely resemble the word for Hell. And only`in English does the sound used to raise a neighbor’s barn also raze a city to the ground. In Poland, the worst of the war was najgorsze z wojna, and could have been anywhere. I walked through Warzawa, its old town rebuilt from 18th century paintings of Belloto (after the Germans turned every block of uprising to rubble) to where the trains parked at the edge of the walled ghetto. In the tenth century, when the exiled Jews first entered the fertile valleys of the Vistula, they kept hearing the word “Polin” on everyone’s lips, which in their own language meant “rest here.” And there they would. |
