Death by longing

III. Death of Longing

Juliusz Michniewicz 1949 - 1968

An elderly woman comes every day to the seventh grave in the fifth row on the right side of the cemetery. Her hair is gray, her face is dry, her back is hunched. She always dresses in black. She brings fresh flowers, lights a small lamp, and stands thoughtfully by the grave for a long time. She prays. Now she no longer cries as she used to. She has been coming here continuously for over thirty years, since she buried her son at Przerosla. She is here every day. There has never been a day when she left her son alone. Her elderly eyes now smile kindly; her whole wrinkled face smiles.

The tombstone is modest but well-cared for. It's a handful of earth formed into a low mound, planted with tiny yellow-orange marigolds and purple geraniums. A black-painted metal cross, like other similar crosses in this and many other cemeteries, is set in the heads, bearing the figure of a crucified God painted with imitation silver paint. Below is a plaque with white inscription and information about the person buried in this grave. It is a simple piece of sheet metal, bent at the top and bottom like a rolled-up piece of paper.

His funeral was also modest. There were few people, because although it was late June, his last Saturday, the day was cool and rainy. His mother, a few close family members, and a few people from the village were present: neighbors, the village headman, school friends, his girlfriend, the ghost of his father who had died years before. About thirty survivors and one familiar soul.

Juliusz was born in Żytkiejmy in the spring of 1949. The birth was difficult, just as difficult as the first pregnancy had been for the mother who brought him into the world. It lasted several hours by kerosene lamp and ended with dawn outside the window. The pale sun gave him his first breath, the last fading star gave him the final pulse of blood from his umbilical cord.

He was a small child, always thin, with a pale complexion. He was often ill. Scarlet fever almost took him away earlier. He studied eagerly, though his grades weren't good. Instead, he painted beautifully humpbacked Masurian landscapes. He took charred pieces of spruce logs from the hearth of the tiled stove, cardboard cartons from boxes that the GS store had disposed of by throwing them in the lot behind its building, and went outdoors to patiently sketch black-and-white views. He stored these works behind the kitchen sideboard in a flat box made of flimsy plywood found in the attic.

When he was eleven, he almost drowned in Przerosl. He remembered the event as a vast expanse of blue. From that day on, he was afraid of the lake, and whenever he drove past it, he averted his gaze. Before his eyes was an old cemetery nestled among ancient trees. In autumn, hordes of rooks roared shrilly from those trees.

Four years later, his father died. During a felling operation, a spruce tree felled him. He survived that death peacefully. His mother returned to Błąkały, to her family home, and he was forced to leave Żytkiejmy with her. When he passed through it a year later, on his way to the Saint Teresa's church fair in Wiżajny, he realized for the first time that he was longing. That he possessed such a capacity within himself. He experienced, for the first time, a conscious longing for something. It was a longing for everything at once, everything that had ever been his, and everything that had ceased to be his. For his family home in a former German building now inhabited by a complete stranger, for his father, who loved him and was a decent man, as his mother always said, for his carefree and warm childhood.

Błąkały captivated him more than he had expected. Until then, everything that had deserved to be called the best and most beautiful in a child's capacity for understanding and appreciation had been closely linked to Żytkiejmy and the immediate surrounding area. Here he discovered a whole series of other places: Stańczyki, Kiepojcie, Rogajny, and beyond, all the way to Gołdap and the Szeskie Wzgórza. And he painted it all with charcoal, immortalizing it as if something might happen to it, might end, vanish, dissolve in the morning mists of every spring and autumn, as it seemingly did with the Błędzianka Valley on almost every autumn morning.

And then he fell in love with Irena, the neighbor. She was three years older than him. Otherwise, she was ordinary: commonplace looks, fair hair, gray eyes, a sensitive soul. It was his first love, his first evening walks to Przerośl, which he had feared until then, to the Forest or to Stańczyki, his first hidden kisses, mutual touches, intimacy, that first, almost sacramental, first time... Everything unfolded, as in the ordinary acquaintance of two young people eager for reciprocation. He loved her, and she loved him. He was willing to sacrifice everything for her; she became the challenge of his strange life.

And the army came calling for him. It arrived with the postman on a crumpled gray piece of paper. They threw him across Poland, to Prudnik. He took it as a malicious twist of fate. His friends had ended up much closer.

The Prudnik barracks were enormous. They recalled Prussian times. Rather gloomy and cold, they evoked nothing in him but longing for his abandoned home, his girlfriend, and the Mazurian Lake District. The rolling landscape, the mountain peaks on the horizon, the murmur of streams only intensified his sense of nostalgia for his homeland.

And with each new day, instead of getting better, things got worse. Unlike his other companions, who easily and relatively quickly adapted to the new conditions, he immersed himself in his memories, his thoughts were present in his Błakały, and in everything he encountered here, he saw some analogy to something he had left behind on the other side of Poland. Whether it was a forested hill, a narrow stream in a deep ravine, a railway viaduct over a forest road, the strange blue of the sky – the spirit of that land was everywhere. And it was only the same people he missed here.

He most enjoyed the solitary night shifts. The solitude where he felt the least loneliness. As he stood watch, the darkness engulfing everything around him, stripping all shapes and colors from things and figures, he felt better, that he no longer missed them so intensely. Nothing reminded him of home. Not the outlines of hills on the horizon, nor the silhouettes of trees, buildings, stones, and people, nor the color of the sky and the sharpness of the clouds drifting across it. Night stripped everything of its appearance, transformed everything into a formless darkness. The entire world became a deep blue, impenetrable, almost black. Only the occasional star or faint city lamppost smoldered in the distance, immersed in the dark immensity of existence.

He never felt tired. He didn't want to sleep. He listened intently to the night. He sensed the strange closeness of his homeland. Perhaps in the darkness of night, the annihilation of shapes entailed the disappearance of all physical dimensions. Distances shrink, flattened by the power of darkness, spaces draw closer together, all distances wither away. Reality is reduced to relatively small, relatively insignificant dimensions. It perishes. It tends toward zero, toward nothingness, but never reaches it, because dawn precedes it. An infinite, progressive geometric sequence converging toward the void.

But these were Juliusz's most pleasant moments in Prudnik. Sleepless nights, lonely and close. Soothing to daily torment. Easing longings intensified by the sober awareness of the immense distance between physical and spiritual presence. A body deprived of its soul dies. Like a plant cut off from light. Slowly turning yellow, losing strength, dwarfing, withering, until all that remains is a dry, protruding stump. Vanity upon vanities. The most fragile material of God—a dead, living body. By day, Juliusz died, by night he returned to life, but each such cycle closed ever closer to finality. "I am close. Absolutely close," he wrote in a letter.

The worst was winter. One night, a bitter frost came from the east. He didn't remember such a piercing cold even from Błąkały. A strong wind blew, intensifying the feeling of cold. He then froze his ears from the metal helmet. Then the doctor forbade him from going on night patrols until the wound healed. Long weeks passed while he recovered. His ears, out of spite, refused to heal quickly. The skin still hadn't healed, the wound burned and festered. The physical pain equaled the pain of longing. Deprived of the closeness of his soul, his body refused to recover. In the evenings, curled up like a dog on his bunk, he counted the time with the beats of dead silence.

Because when he stood outside at night, he heard mostly silence. But sometimes in that silence, with increasing frequency and clarity, he heard echoes of things far away. The murmur of water in the streambeds, the rustle of mist descending on the hillsides, the swaying of trees in the forest, the clatter of horses' hooves on the road to town. The sound of bells from the church tower. His mother's warm voice. Irena's gentle footsteps on the gravel of the field path.

He wrote a long letter to Irena. In it, he poured out all his longing on paper. For her, for home, for the Strays, for walks in the Forest, for drawing, for freedom. "I didn't think that in such a short time a person could lose respect for other people. And vice versa: that another person could be capable of humiliating another so much. That wasn't at home. That wasn't here. It saps all my strength, saps my will to endure. One night, as I lay in my constant insomnia, a single desire tormented me. A gloomy one. My thoughts stopped. They didn't shift, they didn't wander back and forth. Their monotony and stillness led me into the darkness of the night. I remember collecting dew from the blades of grass with my bare feet. Above me, misty clouds crept lazily, brushing their bellies against the peaks of the gray mountains. Dawn woke me by the pond. I stood knee-deep in water."

The next letter was shorter, but it held more nostalgic expression. And then came the third. And this was a cry for help, as he wrote: "I'm drowning in my longing, drowning in it slowly and irrevocably; I'm sinking into it, unable to turn back. Can I escape? I can't. Unless it's madness... But is it worth trying?"

She didn't make it in time. When she arrived that evening, she learned they'd found him dead in a pond. They dismissed it as an accident. But she knew that longing had killed him. She understood that he must have loved. It was a pity he hadn't thought of her when he died. Irena had gone out into the world. She wanted to forget, but the knowledge he left her condemned her to eternal longing for something she would never experience again: no one would love her more than Juliusz.

Every day, an elderly woman comes to the seventh row in the fifth row on the right side of the cemetery. Only she remembers and misses him.

Death by longing is salvation from madness.