John Berger: To the Wedding

The Pope is visiting Poland, and all during lunch Maman talks about what’s happening there. Lech Walesa is in hiding and his trade union has been outlawed. Solidarno ść, as Papa calls it. The old General, according to Maman, the one whose name begins with a J, has fewer and fewer choices, he’ll have to negotiate with Walesa even if he doesn’t want to. The old guard are finished, she whispers. We both have a second ice cream. The Brezhnevs and Husáks can’t last, they’ll go, swept aside. Do you know what the people in the street call our President? — she bends very close to my ear — they call him the President of Oblivion!

Maman has two daughters! That’s what I’ve learnt. I have a sister. Maman loves us both. My sister’s called Social Justice. Justie, for short. She’s writing a book, Maman. It’s called “A Dictionary of Political Terms and Their Usage, 1947 Till Today.” The first entries are Abstention, Activist, Agent Provocateur … When she says these words, they sound like love words. She has a lover, I think. A man called Anton telephones and she talks to him — I can’t understand anything except when she says my name — she talks to him with a voice like a cat’s tongue, tiny and warm and raspy. I asked her and she said Anton wants to take us into the country. We’ll see. Her book is all about my sister. She’s plainer than I am. But worthier. They’ve got as far as the letter I. Idealism, Ideology. Soon she’ll be on to the Ks. In the restaurant we’re drinking coffee when an orchestra files in, tunes up and starts to play. Tchaikovsky! Maman hisses. A disgrace! For Czechs it’s a disgrace! We have our own composers. I ask her if she knows the Doors? She shakes her head. Jim Morrison then? No, tell me about him, you must tell me. I recite in my poor English:

Strange days have found us,

Strange days have tracked us down.

They’re going to destroy

Our casual joys.

We shall go on playing

Or find a new town …

Say it to me again, slowly, Maman asks. So I do. And she sits there gazing at me. After a silence she says something I immediately wanted to write in my diary. You’ll never have, she says, all of you, the future for which we sacrificed everything! I felt so close to her at that moment, closer than my sister ever is. Afterwards, in the tram, we cried a little on each other’s shoulders and she touched my ear, fingering it — like the boys at school try to do.

The roar of a waterfall. Jean, the signalman, has left his bike on the mountain road, its two headlights still burning, and he is picking his way across a kind of shore of stones. The waterfall is behind him. On the shore there are many boulders, some as small as him, others much larger, which have fallen from the peaks. Perhaps yesterday, perhaps a hundred years ago. Everything is stone, and everything speaks of a time which is not ours, a time which touches eternity but can’t get back inside it. Perhaps this is why Jean Ferrero left his headlights on. The crags and mountains around the shore are lit up by a pale light, the stars are fading. In the east, towards which he is walking, the sky is the colour of a dressing over a wound which bleeds. He appears totally alone in the vastness which surrounds him, but this may be more evident to me than it is to him.

A mountain is as indescribable as a man, so men give mountains names: Ovarda. Civriari. Orsiera. Giamarella. Viso. Each day the mountains are in the same place. Often they disappear. Sometimes they seem near, sometimes far. But they are always in the same place. Their wives and husbands are water and wind. On another planet the wives and husbands of mountains may be only helium and heat.

He stops and squats before a boulder, whose southern side is covered with lichen. It is the south winds from the Sahara which bring rain here. They gather clouds of vapour as they cross the Mediterranean, and these condense to make rain when they touch the cold mountains.

He’s looking, as he squats, into a pool of water beneath the boulder. The pool is the size of a washbasin. A current of water flows into it from under the rocks and, on the side where he is squatting, overflows into a gulley, which captures the little stream no larger than the width of two fingers. In the depths of the pool the tiny current is as continuous as the roar of the waterfall and he is staring at it. Its rippling waves are like those of hair and their curling is the only soft, unbroken thing to be imagined here among the jagged mountains at daybreak. He changes position and kneels on his knees, head bowed. Abruptly he puts a hand into the basin and splashes a handful of the icy water over his face. The shock of the cold stops his tears.

When I take the train with Papa, he talks railway talk. When I’m alone, I see soldiers. I know why. Ever since the History Prof, told us about the accident that took place in 1917, I’ve seen them. When the train’s empty, like this morning, they are there. The ticket collector just came in and said: Ah, Miss Ninon, so this term you’re going to take your Bac! Now he’s gone and all I see on this fucking train are the soldiers.

Not officers, common soldiers. Young men like the ones I talk to in the Tout Va Bien Café. The train is packed with them, with their rifles and their haversacks. A long train packed with soldiers can change history, Papa says.

My soldiers, they’re happy, it’s nearly Christmas, the twelfth of December, they’ve left the front line and they are going home. They’ve come through our tunnel. They waited a long time in Modane. Why Are We Waiting? , they began to sing. The engine driver didn’t want to take the train down to Maurienne with only one locomotive and with ice on the tracks. But the commanding officer ordered him to do so.

The coaches are rolling down to the plain full of soldiers going home on leave and I’m with them. I’d give a lot not to be. I know the tragedy by heart, yet I can’t take this line without seeing them. Every time I take the train I ride down with the soldiers.

Out of the window I can see the other track, the river and the road. Our valley is so narrow the three have to run side by side. All they can do is to change positions. The road can take a bridge over the railway. The river can go under the road. The railway can run over them both. Always the railway, the river and the road, and for me in the train, the soldiers.

They pass their bottles of pinard in front of me. The train is without lights but somebody has brought a hurricane lamp. One of them closes his eyes as he sings. By the window there’s an accordion player. The locomotive starts to whistle, as shrill and high as a circular saw cutting into wood. Nobody stops singing. Nobody doubts for an instant that they’re going home to fuck with their wives and see their children. No one is frightened of anything.

Now the train is going too fast, sparks are flying from the wheels into the night and the coach is lurching dangerously from side to side. They stop singing. They eye one another. Then they lower their heads. A man with red hair says between his teeth: We have to jump! His friends hold him back from the door. If you don’t want to die, jump! The man with red hair breaks free, gets the door open and jumps. To his death.

The wheels of trains are very close together under the coaches, closer than you’d ever guess, tucked right under, so the weight of the men being thrown around is making the coach lurch more and more violently. Stand in the centre, shouts a corporal. Keep in the fucking centre! The soldiers try. They try to move away from the windows and doors and they put their arms round each other standing in the centre of the train, as it hurtles towards the corner by the paper factory.