'Landscapes Enter Our Innermost Being'

I dreamed I was in Kraków again. I was walking in Planty Park, the fist-shaped green space that surrounds the city’s Old Town. The paths are covered in crushed stone and many of the trees are chestnuts, as in Paris. In a rapid cut, I was walking through stone corridors at Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364. In 2012 I was the North American representative at the wedding of my wife’s German cousin, who was marrying a Polish girl. Three hundred people at the two-day reception and I was the only American. Lots of vodka, wine and beer, and no brawls. The friendliest drunken crowd I’ve ever encountered.

The city and the dream felt welcoming and vaguely déjà vu-ish. I enjoy dreaming but don’t take it seriously. My paternal  grandparents came from some nameless village near Kraków early in the twentieth century, but it’s all a fog to their surviving descendants. Only as a teenager did I learn the original family surname was Kurpiewski. Did my grandparents change it or some hack on Ellis Island?

The late Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwów, Poland in 1945 before the Soviet Union annexed it. He studied at Jagiellonian and started writing poetry while in Kraków. In his prose collection Another Beauty (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2000) Zagajewski writes:

 “I can’t write Kraków’s history, even though its people and ideas, trees and walls, cowardice and courage, freedom and rain all involve me. Ideas as well, since they cling to our skin and change us imperceptibly. The Zeitgeist chisels our thoughts and mocks our dreams. I’m intrigued by all kinds of walls; the space we inhabit isn’t neutral, it shapes our existence. Landscapes enter our innermost being, they leave traces not just on our retinas but on the deepest strata of our personalities. Those moments when the sky’s blue-gray suddenly stands revealed after a downpour stay with us, as do moments of quiet snowfall. And ideas may even join forces with the snow, through our senses and our body. They cling to the walls of houses. And later the houses and bodies, the senses and ideas all vanish. But I can’t write Kraków’s history, I can only try to reclaim a few moments, a few places and events; a few people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised.”

I was in Kraków for a week, long enough for it to join that small museum of places that soothe me and feel like a refuge, even in memory.