It was the Golden Autumn of travel brochures (Złota Jesień), the Old Hag’s Summer of children’s songs (babie lato), the season Teresa dumped me. That’s why I walked the twenty kilometers from Istebna to Koniakow in the Carpathian Mountains of southern Poland, blue rucksack strapped on my back–blue the color of the Virgin, pilgrimage blue. The blue of all those mountain huts where old ladies sat making lace by rundown dairy collectives and rusting Ursus tractors, and tiny Stalin-era cinemas projecting Stalin-era films.
It was the same blue I caught in Teresa’s eyes in the flash of the elevated train, as she told me of her grandfather’s trek from Koniakow to the mines and mills of Silesia, to the anthracite coal pits in the Poconos, to the punch presses and smelting shops of Fishtown. I wondered what Teresa would think of my radical stalking, tracking down her unknown cousins removed by half a century?
And yet, I was also seeking the Bal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, who roamed these hills too, two centuries before, his Yiddish prayers spread like thick goose down over the meadows, whose wordless songs remain trapped in the haze of stone pines or rotting orchards, in sheep-pens abandoned in alpine meadows. Did I really think I could release them? Or did I see myself from as a character from an Isaac Babel tale—Pan Apolek, itinerant icon painter—For ten kopecks I’ll paint your daughter as the Virgin Mary, for twenty I’ll throw in your brother-in-law as Judas Iscariot.
Here in southern Poland, the raw slump-backed mountains like an old plow horse sunk to its knees—and over its carcass a young girl leads her cow to fresh pasture. Both she and the beast lazily saunter, dragging the chain through dust, past gleaners bent at the waist digging potatoes, earth-clumps, they call them, half-filled wagon by the row, its horse snorting belligerence. The fields gutted and gouged and moldy—where I walk till sundown, the entire village has become a hearth when I show up—blazing windows and thin wavery streams of smoke that evanesce into the congealing dark.
There is no one to ask for lodging, but a young priest, geese in tow, his cassock grazing the cobbles as he seems to float by, his sleeves flapping out, to the graveyard. And ancient Pani Kohut, the landlady he sends me to–there she is, heavy-sweatered and kerchiefed. She might have an extra room. I talk to her after she’s finished grooming her husband’s grave, singing about lindens and gossip and death. She is resting on his tombstone, squat as a haystack.
She is a haystack, this Pani Kohut, no different from the hundreds I passed along the way, row upon row, shaggy, rotting, hay, streaked and ridged, clinging to skeletal ricks, clumped from wind and rain into human faces. I passed whole communities of them, ranging up and down the hills, some stuck raging in place, others fiercely compliant, tagged frozen or creeping down into the village like an occupying army to post new edicts. They inch along too slowly to detect.
Pani Kohut tells me that her husband’s been dead 40 years, murdered by invaders, or revolutionaries, or defenders, all as dead as he is, dead and remembered and honored. Here in Istebna where they are pitched high past grief, these haystacks, held together by it, outlasting the two-timing downpours of autumn.