Care of Wooden Floors. Will Wiles

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СКАЧАТЬ republic and democratic republic. All these phases were packed into the twentieth century. The preceding epochs were simply a grim routine of invaders, pogroms and home-grown rulers with soubriquets such as ‘the gouger’.

      The particularly potent version of hell that the Nazis and Soviets inflicted on Eastern Europe was handled in a curiously modest fashion, with little bombast or horror. And the final three panels of the exhibition were visibly recent insertions, pale patches on the wall betraying the outlines of their predecessors. Presumably the originals had extolled the glorious strides made by the people’s republic towards the socialist nirvana envisaged by its leader, the father of the nation. Instead, they extolled the collapse of the Soviet east. Walls fell. Assemblies were stormed. Street names changed. The advertisers arrived.

      The history was the newest thing in the building.

      As I was crossing the polished floor of the museum’s atrium to the heavy wooden doors and the street beyond, the old woman who had sold me my ticket jumped up from her chair. I froze, suddenly nervous, as she rushed towards me, apparently eager to prevent my leaving. The brass of the front door’s fingerplate was cold under my fingers – I desperately wanted to brace my shoulder and push out, escape, but held back. Perhaps one paid on the way out, I thought, except that I had bought a ticket on the way in; perhaps you had to pay to enter and leave, or perhaps she expected a tip of some sort. Or perhaps she suspected that I had hidden a stuffed owl under my coat. It seemed certain that she thought I had done something wrong.

      She was ushering me towards the door in gestures that seemed half shooing and half encouraging, as though she wanted me to leave. All the while she was speaking to me, an incomprehensible torrent. Was this a simple send-off? Was she throwing me out?

      We were through the door, and she still spoke, and gestured, now with a sense of eagerness or purpose. She took me by the sleeve of my coat and led me with a strange, quick, waddling gait around to the side of the building, where a narrow alleyway separated the museum from the neighbouring cube of stone. Decades of fumes from brown coal, retarded industrial adventures and pitiful automobiles had unevenly stained the museum’s side wall, and it was etched with graffiti, mostly domestic and cryptic, some international (a swastika, and USA #1). Pockmarks like acne scars were sprinkled over this filthy surface, deep holes like missing divots.

      The sentinel of the museum looked at me expectantly. This, this wall, was what I had been brought to see, but I did not know why. Her face, regarding me with a sort of anticipatory glee, carried no clues. In the 1990s I had been to a birthday party where the host’s presents included a ‘magic eye’ print – a rectangle of coloured static that, if stared at for long enough, apparently resolved into an image of the New York skyline. A succession of other guests gazed deep into this picture and then whooped or gasped or similarly exclaimed satisfaction when the trick played out. It would not work for me, remaining a poly-chrome garble. Look more closely, the other guests, my friends, said, unfocus your eyes, cross your eyes, look past the picture, don’t try too hard. I stared and stared, and they all looked at me with that same expression that the museum guide now wore, a sort of cultish eagerness.

      I pointed at the wall. ‘What am I looking at, then?’ I said.

      Before I could lower my arm or step back, the old woman grabbed my raised arm by the wrist and pulled it insistently towards the wall. I was stunned; a sick horror rose in me and I think I let loose a breath, a gasp of shock, but she still wore that determined grin. Her grip was like iron, and maybe I could have freed my arm, but not without a violent movement that was utterly beyond me. This woman was perhaps more than double my age yet I was completely unable to conceive of wresting free of this grip that terrified me. My muscles were heavy wads of wet toilet tissue. She pulled my hand forward so that the index finger, still extended, went into one of the holes in the stone. How many years of filth are in there? I wondered. And then my wrist was free – she left my hand with a finger pointing in this rough little hole. The hole was deep, maybe three inches or more – it almost swallowed my finger. It was too deep to have been made by some natural process of erosion, and there were many others like it.

      ‘Pan!’ the woman said, quite suddenly, a short, explosive syllable. ‘Pan! Pan!’ She was pantomiming firing a rifle. Maybe in other circumstances the sight would have been comical. But not now.

      ‘Pan!’

      I saw now, and whipped out my finger as if it had been burned. These pockmarks were bullet holes. The side of the museum had been riddled with bullets. From what war or revolution? Who had been fighting whom? Was it even fighting? They could have just lined people up in this alley and shot them. Revolutionary justice. Counter-revolutionary justice.

      The museum guide was still grinning at me. She could see that I now knew what I was looking at, I was sure. Maybe she thought that this was what tourists wanted to see, the real history. She clearly had me pegged as a foreigner – maybe she thought, or knew from experience, that Westerners were likely to be unenchanted by the displays inside the museum and instead had a ghoulish fascination with the story drilled into its stone, its guts, the real thing. I still did not know if these scars were recent or not. But it seemed to me that most of the history here was recent. I doubted that their television schedules were cluttered with I

the 1980s. Strikes and shortages, curfews and disappearances. The holes were a presence, not an absence. They awed and chilled me.

      I ran my fingertips over a hole at chest level. Dug into solid stone at the bottom of that hole was a chunk of lead. What did it pass through before pitting the wall? The air, alive with shouts and commands and terrible noises; and skin, and muscle and sinew, and bone and blood? Had the blood been washed off, or was it now a component of the black filth that coated every inch of the wall? From blood to crud; vital motivating fluid one moment, dirt the next. Whose blood, though, if it was indeed there at all? Why spilled? What for? Fascist? Communist? Nationalist? Dissident? Loyalist? Monarchist? Collaborator? Resistance? Might this have been a freedom fighter’s corpuscles, or were these terrorist cells? Whoever had won would now decide that. Faceless idealists flitted in my imagination. Or no one, nothing – a bullet hurled through air ringing with forgotten slogans only to embed itself in this dead rock, which remembers it still. And the slogans echo to silence, and a man from an indifferent country sees the mark but not the maker, his time, his cause. All gone, and damage and trash is left behind.

      The woman from the museum, that strange creature who brought me here, wrinkled her nose as if to indicate Ooh, isn’t this fun? and turned back towards the street, talking merrily to herself. I waited a couple of minutes until I was certain that there was no possibility of awkwardly re-encountering her around the corner, and then followed.

      My stomach pinched and I realised with unwelcome timing that I was hungry. It was past lunchtime, the bulk of the afternoon was already gone, and my lower back ached from the walking. Doubly unwelcome was the realisation that I had a chore to run. I needed to buy groceries. Either I had to shop, or I had to eat out every night, and as I didn’t know how long I would be here, eating out could become expensive. But the notion of shopping for groceries while technically on holiday was repulsive to me.

      There was a small supermarket on the way back to Oskar’s flat – I had seen it on my way out. But at some point in its history, a thunderingly incompetent acolyte of Baron Haussmann had had his way with this city. Its historic street pattern had been almost obliterated by an attempt to systematise it into a grid. This almost-grid had then been further complicated by a series of non-orthogonal avenues that stretched out from two focal points, the Market Square and the National Assembly. This carved the plan into dozens of flatirons, splinters and sawteeth. On the map, it looked a little like a sheet of reinforced glass that had two bullet holes punched in it, radiating fractures. On the ground, my path back to Oskar’s via the supermarket zig-zagged in an uneven W.

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