Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

Yes they know, of course they know, Marcin said. It is impossible not to know. Słavek tapped Marcin’s knee; Marcin asked me if it was okay to translate. I nodded. As Słavek listened he put on his most serious face. Then he said: The dead are the most important.

Well, I said.

I said, Of course the dead are important. I know that, I know that you think the dead are very important. So maybe my question is something like: Which comes first? This place where we are right now, Osówka—​is it a site of death or is it a site of mystery?

I had meant this question for Słavek but I had to ask through Marcin and so in effect I was also asking Marcin, who answered me on his own account: Why not this one and also this one? Why not both?

Desecraters! I thought. You are desecraters! But it turned out I did not think this to myself but in fact said it aloud. What, I am sorry, I do not understand, Marcin said. Are you talking about ghosts? Many explorers are big believers in ghosts. I was not talking about ghosts but maybe I was talking about ghosts, I said. Then I epiphanized: The ghosts are dead Jews are the UFOs. They appeal to a similar spirit of exploration, hold a similar grip on the imagination. Gold, rifles, Die Glocke, golden teeth, treasure, skeletons. Mass graves and underground tunnels. It all adds up to: mystery. I understand now, I said, the Jews are your ghosts! What, Marcin said. Nothing, I said, what did you ask me before?

Marcin said, It can be a site of death and also be a site of mystery. It can be both! Marcin was drunk, too, I realized. Somehow this hadn’t registered before.

It can be both, it is both, I said, I know. But still—no one would show up to a place of death in an army costume.

Marcin: For me it is both.

A treasure hunter whose name I did not know sidled up and complained to me about the Polish law which mandates that anything found in the ground belongs to the government. That sucks, I said. Is it like that in America? he asked. I don’t think so, I said. That’s good, he said, then he told me that he once followed my grandfather’s journey. He’d read his book many times, he said, and had done a pilgrimage of sorts, had followed his route exactly, had walked to each of the camps and worksites listed in the book. And what did you learn, I said. I don’t remember, he said. I only remember that it rained and I was very angry at the rain. But you should do it too, he said. It is important. I said I would.

How many times have you been here? I asked Marcin. Not so many, Marcin said. How many times have you been here? I asked Sławek. Many many times, he said. How many times have you been here? Marcin asked me. Three, I said, and this struck me as an astonishingly high number. From the other side of the fire: Manhattan, nominatzia! I did not pour out this shot; I drank it. It hit hard and from this point onward I cannot vouch for what was said and who it was said by: I was taking notes but not responsibly, I wrote down the conversations I was having and I wrote down the thoughts I was thinking but I wasn’t making distinctions between the conversation and the thoughts because in the moment everything made super-perfect sense but in the morning it was a jumbled heap of text. Marcin caught Słavek up. I nominated someone and then listened/reflected as Marcin channeled Sławek and here is what happened in my notebook:

How confront/receive history? With intention; listen, receive. Explore = allow history to ask its questions. There is the dead / they are inside the questions // you think about the dead all the time? // that would be impossible / rather we listen. Słavek says I am distant from my own history and I agree // sure you’re Abraham Kajzer’s grandson (sic!!!) but what does that really mean (and also you’re not even his grandson). You don’t live it. We live it. Look around, whose forest is this / the Jews’? the ghosts’? the treasure hunters’? You are searching but we are literally searching. Your metaphors are so weak.

Andrzej got up to reposition the floodlight but he stumbled and fell and hit his arm on a rock; when he got to his feet and stood beneath the floodlight—​which spotlit him dramatically, as if he were starring in a play in the forest—​there was a thick streak of blood running from elbow to wrist. Kurwa, he said; the other explorers, though not unconcerned, laughed; Andrzej cursed again, then joined in the laughter. He wiped the blood off with a paper towel, disinfected the wound with vodka, and, from the same bottle, poured a shot and nominated himself.

12

It was, in fact, the wrong building. Hanna was right; of course she was right—​it was her personal history against my secondhand Scotch-taped myth. This building, her building, had never been owned by, was wholly unconnected to, my family. Our stories did not intersect. Małachowskiego 12—​that is, the building that is today number 12, the building I’d visited, the building I’d persuaded myself I had an obligation to visit, whose inhabitants I’d persuaded myself I had an obligation to get to know, the building where Hanna and Bartek had lived their entire lives, the building with the Teatr Zagłębia backstory—​was, just as Hanna had said, built in 1955, more than a decade after the history of my family in Sosnowiec had closed. I had no business here, I had no business being here.

Whence the confusion? The addresses had shifted. When this block of apartment buildings, Małachowskiego 10–18, was constructed, the