I meet Lilian from Brazil who lives in Tucson, Arizona, traveling here with her mother and then on to Switzerland for a cruise down a river, somewhere.  The places run together, all of us passing through on our way to somewhere else.

Everywhere I look there is another window or door each with its own beauty that can’t be duplicated, layers of years.

Each morning I catch my reflection, scrutinizing what I see.  I see in others a grace of years.  In the mirror: a stranger looking back at me.

Lilian from Brazil tells of changes she has made, will make, now beyond mid-life, reinventing, finding someone new: There you are–again–a former self, knocking on the door.

At the cafe, life is teeming.  I eat enough to be sated; back home I devour in greedy gobbles, where more is never enough.

A lone man sits down at a long table for six or eight.  He looks American, taking up space.  I assess who he is, his life.  Time passes, still, and still he sits, alone.

Nine people sit at this cafe on a beautiful cool sunny day, seven lost in their phones, quick to hide from each other, disappear.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever read this carefully, see this clearly again.

A holy place –a contrast to the other but both evoke awe.  Not sure how the two views coexist –hope and despair.

The source of the chatter in the night is evident in the breakfast room, young people take over, filling the tables; they are not where I’m from; their words unfamiliar, they don’t speak in my tongue.  But still the same: the excitement of being somewhere unencumbered, no one to guide their lives, their choices.  Their appetites voracious.

I retreat to the patio, waiting.

Lillian on the train from Vienna tells me that children in Israel come here on school trips, visiting a different camp each day.  No chance to be free to do what they want.  On their last night, they explore Krakow, a city filled with history and beauty, light and age.  The mornings are cool and crisp and bright even in June.  It seems to me filled with promise of what the day might bring: anything could happen, anything might be.

After the Salt Mines I will hop on one of the wagons surrounding the square waiting for people like me to tour the Jewish Quarter, hear the guide’s version of history; this is different than my stroll at dusk after my day: my slow meander to the Stare Miasto.  In the morning I rush, my fast fast New Yorker’s walk; I focus on arriving, of not being left behind.  Only in evening do I laze, swelling with the day.  I  search for street food where I can take it to go, gesturing with my hands, looking for something familiar, a picture I can point to I want that; and then make my way to a bench or crumbling wall and eat my dinner with beer or wine or something else to dull or enhance and watch the people, the scene unfolding before dark.

One night I shared it with Lindsay as we made our way to places I wouldn’t go alone, across the bridge with the trapeze sculptures suspended, figures flying in inconceivable poses.  I think of Emma at trapeze school in New York, at nine, so many years ago, flying fearless above while I tried to capture it, watching down below, heart somewhere out of my body.

We take pictures of each other, leaning against the bridge, people and sky in the background avoiding the selfies of the solo traveler, tonight together we are not alone.  The next day we venture to Adam’s temporary apartment where everything is arranged just so by someone else, complete with someone who comes in and cleans while he’s gone, straightens whatever messes he may have left behind.  He makes a pasta dish with jarred sauce that could have been gotten at any grocer back home.  Lindsay admires the modern architecture of the building standing out from everything else, but I long for something older, the creaky stairs of my temporary home, where my things are spread out, the clutter already littering the dresser; where a clock ticks announcing the wrong time; where I hit my head on the wooden beam every time I look out the window to see what might be there.

Always the sloping roofline, the sound of the world waking.

Warsaw follows after Krakow.  I want to see–what did they keep or abandon?  A chance to start again, to redefine.

I go inside and get a plate for breakfast.  The young people are gone, disappeared to the rooms above me named for different spices or colors (The Lavender Lounge and others) something to flavor their day.  They are here still; I did not see them leave from my place on the patio.

I think of privilege for me and for them.  I envision the time it will take to pay for it all, the sacrifices to avoid the mistakes of my past: struggling not to drown, trying to accumulate what everyone else has or had, what I thought I needed, never considering what it’s worth; how quickly it all dissipates.

In a place now teeming with people I sit apart, although my refrain is different:  I’m alone, I’m alone, listening to the bells in the distance marking the sameness of years.

The train’s whistle, the green outside, the sky, the clouds.

 

People pass through so quickly forgotten: here and gone.  James and I, together on the bus to Auschwitz, mostly stayed nearby as we walked through.  They gave us headsets, and our guide’s voice led us; we could hear her cough or clear her throat or whisper a small comment, all magnified in our ears.  Someone’s phone went off and she admonished in a stern voice.  Some people were snapping pictures but I couldn’t.  This wasn’t a building or a vista or a river spreading out.  I won’t forget what I see, need no reminder.  In certain places, she said –no pictures allowed –out of respect.  That room that contained all the hair behind glass.  Later James told me that people still held up their phones, like crowding around the Mona Lisa, let me see! while up ahead our guide had already passed through into another room.  Why they would want to, what drove them to capture that?  People lost.

They did the same in the gas chamber, tilting their cameras upwards to get pictures of the openings where the gas came in, or the ovens in the next room.  I wanted to shout: Put your fucking cameras down! but I didn’t.  I should have –especially here.  In this place.

After we returned to Krakow, there was time for James and me to get coffee before he proceeded to the Salt Mines, but I didn’t suggest it.  I wanted to be alone.

The dried roses on the bunks in the barracks, the haunted faces I’d seen; the room of pots and pans, cooking utensils, the detritus of ordinary lives.

White clouds in blue sky slowly moving past, the sharp angle of the roof slanting down, a slide going somewhere; the green leaves dotting the white stucco, the sun umbrella shading it all, shadows.

I liked taking pictures better when I didn’t know what might show up: dropping the film off in the little black canisters at Walgreen’s, sometimes finding a roll undeveloped years later and taking it in: who was that?  Always a surprise: that girl in camouflage popping up again, holding onto a tree, posing in front of my parents’ cabin after my father died, log and wood, the old barn, crumbling down.  Before his death, my father would go there to pick the blackberries out by the lake, spend hours taking in the land walking the perimeter, smoking his pipe, watching the sun set or rise; or he watched the changing sky from the dock on a lawn chair maybe, dangled his feet in the water; this I only imagine.  I was never there until years later, arm hugging that tree, posing.  The man I was with snapped his camera while I moved this way and that, imagining what he saw through the artifice of his lens.

Years later I remember my own daughter, watching her, taking her high school senior photos in Forest Park, holding onto the tree, hugging her body around its base, moving this way and that.  Now there is immediate satisfaction, the photographer calling her over and showing her the girl she had become through his lens.  She was enamored; the surprise of recognizing: I am someone else.

 

It’s quiet now and cool.  The breeze coming in.  I remember sleeping in the little room in the back of the house on Utah Place, Mary Beth and I in our twin beds; the rest of the kids spread out somewhere; Sue right above us;  the boys in the large room adjacent; the rooms were connected with a secret passageway and as kids we would crawl in one room and end up in Sue’s closet.  The porch off the back bedroom overlooked the backyard, where Dad grew tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce in summer months.  Dad admonished  That porch is going to fall down! but we never listened, our bare legs swinging over the ledge, listening to the summer dark.  Years later Mary Kreiner said she remembered drinking beer out there when we were in high school, but I don’t remember that at all. That’s how memory works.  You have it and it fades or else it doesn’t.  I do remember getting sick in the bushes bordering Carpenter Branch Library from a long slow night of red sloe gin.  High school.  A long time away from here.

Sometimes I think it would be better to go through life drunk or stoned on something to make you forget, but then I have to ask: What am I trying to forget and why?  I remember floating on a rooftop in New York City, the lights glittering in front of me in the inky black, so high my lips were numb, my teeth tingled.  Looking out into the New York City night sky, lights like fireflies: Anything was possible.

Downstairs I hear voices in the TV room.  This is the noisiest this place has been; I hear laughter.  I don’t feel apart but do and am, up here at the top of the house, alone.  Earlier I heard someone fiddling with my door and I called out.  A young girl –about Emma’s age–was standing there –American, I think.  Is this a room, she asked?  This room is called “The Loft.”  All of the rooms have names: “The Lavender Lounge,” or “Thyme to Rest.”  I will wander the downstairs floors tomorrow to see what the others are called.  The girl thought that this room was another common area –a cool hangout place she was missing.  Outside of this room is a separate lounging area with a couch similar to my own at home, but no one uses it.  It feels like a private suite.  I am reminded of all the women in literature –the mad women in the attic, where you put them away and they aren’t seen.  “The Woman in the Yellow Wallpaper,” for example, or Jane Eyre, Rochester’s mad wife; go away go away go away.

In Cesky Krumlov it didn’t matter.  I felt like one of them.  Here, in this hostel, I would be uncomfortable among giggling and silly chatter.  I don’t feel like I can enter unless drunk or stoned.

In my old apartment on Byron the two girls upstairs once threw a party, opening the doors between their two apartments, noise reverberating, their voices like shattered glass.  My room below shook and when I heard someone yell: Party!! I called the police.  Through my open bedroom window I heard the young people complaining when the police arrived about America and being young and free.  Downstairs, here, they try to be.

I feel like I need to get finished, like I am forgetting something.

Windows without screens and gigantic flies that buzz around the room.  Nothing else.

I take pictures of windows and doors, the intricate patterns, like webs or lace,  grooves imbedded.  The aged buildings with peeling paint don’t need graffiti, masking the beauty of time, the muted colors from sun and years.  The peeling paint, the plaster, the brick, the cobblestone streets that twist.  In Krakow I can walk these streets without getting lost.  Or if I do, I will turn around.  Lindsay says she walks every street like she owns it –with attitude, that she will do what she wants when she wants to: Go to the movies alone without thinking: They are all looking at me or What’s wrong with you?  Or You poor thing.  

The ladies at work looking at you like you are half finished, waiting for life to begin.

Sometimes I feel blank.  A sheet of lined paper with nothing on it.

I’m not sure who I am without artifice, who I want to be.

Fearless maybe.

Each day I leave the hostel with a book, my water, paper to write on, my phone to record it all.  Cesky Krumlov was the most beautiful, peaceful and serene, a fairy tale come to life.  Everywhere I looked there was something else; quiet walking the cobblestone streets.  I didn’t have to be anywhere, or meet anyone, or leave.

The place I stayed there (Hostel Postel) was not the nicest –the shared bath, the tiny sink and toilets outside the door, but I didn’t care.

Berlin was dirty, distant.  I felt alone, but liked the bike tour, pumping fast, pulling out that stupid camera and playing with the settings instead of listening.  The history is everywhere.  I take in fragments.

Someplace there was sensory overload, but I forget where.  I wonder if it’s time to go.

Everywhere there are contrasts: “I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand.”  –Alice Sebold

The air feels sticky with the day, the heat.  I took a hat to Auschwitz but didn’t wear it.  It seemed better suited to somewhere else: a beach walking along the hot white sand picking up smooth stones, a silk skirt billowing in the soft wind; dawn beginning to rise or set, sky colors pink and blue and purple orange; afire with possibility or promise; skin kissed.

I have my river stones from the Danube.

As we leave the camp, I take a stone and place it on the brick wall.  It’s not enough.