If love had changed to something else, something I did not recognise, the terrace at the front of the pensión with its tables and chairs placed under the olive trees looked exactly the same as it did when I last stayed here. Everything was the same. The ornate tiled floor. The heavy wooden doors that opened out onto the ancient palm tree in the courtyard. The polished grand piano that stood majestically in the hallway. The thick cold stone of the whitewashed walls. My room was exactly the same too, except this time when I opened the doors of the worm eaten wardrobe and saw the same four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders.
I started to perform the familiar rituals of travelling alone, as I had done so often in my life; untangling wires and precariously plugging in the European adapter with two pins, switching on my computer, charging up my mobile, arranging on the small writing desk the two books and one notebook I had brought with me. First of all the well thumbed Of Love and Other Demons, and secondly, George Sand’s A Winter in Majorca, an account of the year she spent in Majorca with her lover, Frederick Chopin, and her two children from her first marriage. The notebook I had brought with me was labelled ‘POLAND, 1988’. It would probably be more romantic to describe it as ‘my journal’, or ‘my diary’, but I thought of it as a note book, perhaps even a sheriff’s notebook because I was always gathering evidence for something I could not fathom.
In 1988 I was taking notes in Poland, but what for? I found myself flicking through its pages to remind myself.
In October 1988 I had been invited to write about a performance directed by the renowned Polish actress, Zofia Kalinska, who had collaborated on many productions with the theatre director, painter and auteur, Tandeusz Kantor. My notebook starts at Heathrow, London. I am on a plane (LOT airlines) heading for Warsaw. Nearly all the passengers are chain smoking and the entire female cabin crew have dyed their hair platinum blonde. When they wheel the trolley down the aisle to deliver an unidentifiable ‘soft drink’ (cherry juice?) in a grey plastic cup to the enthusiastic smokers, they resemble belligerent nurses delivering medication to their troublesome patients. This scene turned up in a novel I wrote two decades later — the cabin crew on LOT airlines become nurses who have been imported from Lithuania, Odessa and Kiev to deliver electroshock therapy to patients in a hospital in Kent, England.
This novel, it seems, is what I had been gathering evidence for, twenty years before actually writing it.
And then my notebook tells me I am on a train in Warsaw, wagon 5, seat 71, heading for Krakow where Zofia Kalinska is based. Here I witness a scene that would not be out of place in one of Kantor’s performances. A soldier is saying goodbye to three women — his sister, his mother and his girlfriend. First he kisses his mother’s hand. Then he kisses his sister’s cheek. Finally he kisses his girlfriend’s lips. I also note that Poland’s economy is collapsing, that the government has increased food prices by 40 per cent, that there have been strikes and demonstrations at the iron and steel works in Nowa Huta and the Gdansk ship yard.
It seems that what interests me (in my sheriff’s notebook) is the act of kissing in the middle of a political catastrophe.
I am in Krakow. Zofia Kalinska wears two (shamanistic) necklaces to the rehearsal of her play: one made from cloudy turquoise and one from wormwood. I note that absinthe is made from wormwood. Didn’t the ancient Egyptians soak wormwood in wine and use it as a remedy for various afflictions? I had read somewhere that absinthe, with its heady mix of fennel and green anise was given to the French troops in the early nineteenth century to prevent malaria. The soldiers returned to France with a taste for the ‘green fairy’. If they were not bitten by mosquitoes, they had nevertheless been nipped by a winged creature, a metaphor, as they lay wounded and hallucinating on their camp beds. I remind myself to ask Zofia about her necklaces. She is in her early sixties and has performed in some of the most famous avant-garde theatre productions in Europe — including Kantor’s Dead Class, in which a number of apparently dead characters are confronted by mannequins who remind them of their youthful dreams. Today, Zofia has a few notes to give to her Western European actors.
‘The form must never be bigger than the content, especially in Poland. This is to do with our history: suppression, the Germans, the Russians, we feel ashamed because we have so much emotion. We must use emotion carefully in the theatre, we must not imitate emotion. In my productions, which have been described as “surreal”, there is no such thing as a surreal emotion. At the same time, we are not making psychological theatre, we are not imitating reality.’
She tells a young actress to speak up.
‘To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish. We always hesitate when we wish for something. In my theatre, I like to show the hesitation and not to conceal it. A hesitation is not the same as a pause. It is an attempt to defeat the wish. But when you are ready to catch this wish and put it in to language, then you can whisper but the audience will always hear you.’
And then she has an idea. She says the costume for the actress playing Medea is all wrong. Medea murdered her children so she should wear a dress with a hole cut out of its stomach. Zofia explains that this is a poetic image, but the actress must not speak her lines like poetry.
It occurred to me that I had jogged along with Zofia’s notes to her actors in my own writing for much of my life. Content should be bigger than form — yes, that was a subversive note to a writer like myself who had always experimented with form, but it is the wrong note for a writer who has never experimented with form. And it is the wrong note for a writer who has never wondered what would happen if the Warsaw soldier kissed his mother on her lips and his girlfriend on her hand. And yes, there was no such thing as a surreal emotion. Her other message was that emotion, which always terrifies the avant-garde’s stiff upper lip, is better conveyed in a voice that is like ice. As for the strategies a writer of fiction might employ to unfold the ways in which her characters attempt to defeat a long held wish — for myself it is the story of this hesitation that is the point of writing.
I did not know why I had bought the Polish notebook with me to Majorca. Actually I did know. Scribbled on the back of the cover were two Polish menus that I had asked Zofia to translate into English for me:
White borscht with boiled egg and sausage.
Traditional hunter’s stew with mash potatoes.
Soft drink.
OR
Traditional Polish cucumber soup.
Cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and mash potatoes. Soft drink.