melody. The dissonance spread over the roofs, one church catching it from the other, until all Kraków was sonic chaos. People poured out of restaurants still chewing their last bites, and stumbled out of hair salons with lopsided bobs. Supermarket staff crawled into the store windows, tearing down advertisements and crying into the wadded up, high-gloss paper.
Kurva .
We came to another impasse, still stuck in Nowa Huta. A crowd gathered around Arka Pana—The Lord’s Ark—the first church in our dear Soviet suburb. The driver could’ve jumped the parking lot median and slipped out the exit on the other side of the crush, but it was clear he wanted to watch for a few minutes.
Watch, I thought, but told him, “Go.”
[It is midnight, 1960, in the City without God. Bishop Karol Wojtyła stands in a barren field, his arms stretched heavenward, giving a midnight Christmas mass to no one, speaking the liturgy in foggy puffs. Behind him, the residents of Nowa Huta are afraid and peer furtively from the windows of their apartment blocks. The bishop knows that the cold may paralyze his throat and that the police may ask him to leave. Still, he continues.]
Tinnitus is often described as a ringing in the ear corresponding to no external sound, but it can be much more. It can be the slooshing of the ocean or an insistent breeze, the chirping of a grasshopper you can’t seem to kill. It can also be much less: an occasional click. Church bells can touch off a variety of sounds, long after they quit swinging.
But the bells were still raising thunder, and we darted down a side street to look for another way downtown. People were now draping their windowsills with yellow and white Vatican flags garnished with a single black ribbon to signify mourning. Behind the flags, pictures of Karol Wojtyła ripped from photo albums and picture frames and magazyny , printed dot matrix from the Internet, and painted lovingly in oils. Few pictures showed him wearing vestments; now that he was dead, he was allowed to be human again. People were allowed to scream and tear the hair off their arms and beat recycling boxes with trash cans.
You could tell that they had been craving this national communion for decades.
The Polish word osoby has a much different feeling than its English equivalent, “people.” It’s more of a collective than a collection. So tough to explain.
[Midnight Mass, 1966. Still outside in the field, but somewhat formalized with a portable podium and altar, and a microphone and speakers hooked up to a diesel generator. Archbishop Wojtyła no longer addresses only God, speaking instead to the thousands assembled before him. “ Nie bój si . Nie l kajcie si ! ” But Nowa Huta is long past the point of fear, now that the community has hired a professional architect to draft blueprints for an illegal church. “It is real now that it is on paper,” says a man in the crowd.
“No,” the Archbishop counters, “it is real when you gather out here in the cold. You are the rock on which Peter built his church.”
“Peter’s rock is a political machine, and it is going to crush their skulls,” the man says, blowing cigarette smoke into the sky. This mass is being hijacked by people who would later become members of the Solidarno movement. They were hoping to give each other the best Christmas present ever—a revolution.
Now we were parked in the middle of Tyniecka Street, surrounded by osoby gathered to see the house where Karol once hid from the Nazis.
Witaj Królowo nieba i Matko lito ci
Witaj nadziejo nasza, w smutku i z´ało ci
You typically heard this chant when your babcia died. Your family would go hoarse repeating it, to keep the sobs at bay. Swallow. You heard this when sadness and emphysema took your dziadek , when they told you, in every possible grammatical way, so there would be no confusion. Exhale.
But I never heard this hymn when my mother died. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear a fucking thing in
Kurva .
We came to another impasse, still stuck in Nowa Huta. A crowd gathered around Arka Pana—The Lord’s Ark—the first church in our dear Soviet suburb. The driver could’ve jumped the parking lot median and slipped out the exit on the other side of the crush, but it was clear he wanted to watch for a few minutes.
Watch, I thought, but told him, “Go.”
[It is midnight, 1960, in the City without God. Bishop Karol Wojtyła stands in a barren field, his arms stretched heavenward, giving a midnight Christmas mass to no one, speaking the liturgy in foggy puffs. Behind him, the residents of Nowa Huta are afraid and peer furtively from the windows of their apartment blocks. The bishop knows that the cold may paralyze his throat and that the police may ask him to leave. Still, he continues.]
Tinnitus is often described as a ringing in the ear corresponding to no external sound, but it can be much more. It can be the slooshing of the ocean or an insistent breeze, the chirping of a grasshopper you can’t seem to kill. It can also be much less: an occasional click. Church bells can touch off a variety of sounds, long after they quit swinging.
But the bells were still raising thunder, and we darted down a side street to look for another way downtown. People were now draping their windowsills with yellow and white Vatican flags garnished with a single black ribbon to signify mourning. Behind the flags, pictures of Karol Wojtyła ripped from photo albums and picture frames and magazyny , printed dot matrix from the Internet, and painted lovingly in oils. Few pictures showed him wearing vestments; now that he was dead, he was allowed to be human again. People were allowed to scream and tear the hair off their arms and beat recycling boxes with trash cans.
You could tell that they had been craving this national communion for decades.
The Polish word osoby has a much different feeling than its English equivalent, “people.” It’s more of a collective than a collection. So tough to explain.
[Midnight Mass, 1966. Still outside in the field, but somewhat formalized with a portable podium and altar, and a microphone and speakers hooked up to a diesel generator. Archbishop Wojtyła no longer addresses only God, speaking instead to the thousands assembled before him. “ Nie bój si . Nie l kajcie si ! ” But Nowa Huta is long past the point of fear, now that the community has hired a professional architect to draft blueprints for an illegal church. “It is real now that it is on paper,” says a man in the crowd.
“No,” the Archbishop counters, “it is real when you gather out here in the cold. You are the rock on which Peter built his church.”
“Peter’s rock is a political machine, and it is going to crush their skulls,” the man says, blowing cigarette smoke into the sky. This mass is being hijacked by people who would later become members of the Solidarno movement. They were hoping to give each other the best Christmas present ever—a revolution.
Now we were parked in the middle of Tyniecka Street, surrounded by osoby gathered to see the house where Karol once hid from the Nazis.
Witaj Królowo nieba i Matko lito ci
Witaj nadziejo nasza, w smutku i z´ało ci
You typically heard this chant when your babcia died. Your family would go hoarse repeating it, to keep the sobs at bay. Swallow. You heard this when sadness and emphysema took your dziadek , when they told you, in every possible grammatical way, so there would be no confusion. Exhale.
But I never heard this hymn when my mother died. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear a fucking thing in
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