Temporarily
housed in the Hostel St. Benedict, I’m settled now into my longer-term digs on
Karmelicka Street, named for the Carmelite order and church a few doors down.
The Benedictines, the Carmelites, the Trappists (I just finished Striving Towards Being: The Letters of
Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, the poet Merton being a fully strived
Trappist monk)—a pattern emerges. Catholicism is unavoidable in Poland, and
becoming Polish may involve a kind of rebecoming Catholic. Heavens. Miłosz has
drily observed that “One never stops being a member of the Catholic Church.” (Native Realm, 89) At any rate, I have
been a non-practicing, happily lapsed member for many years, though this past
summer I have taken to wearing a
couple of saints’ medals around my neck, St. Rita, in honor of my mother, and St. Jude; they
are the patron saints of Lost Causes and Hopeless Cases, respectively, that
cause and case being my soul. I wear them now less in faith than in a kind of
ironic but not unhopeful superstition. On my first Sunday in Poland, with my dear
mother in heart and mind, I attended 8:00 a.m. Mass in the basilica on the main
square, Kosciól Mariacki. Still
jet-lagged, I was up at 4:00 a.m. and had nothing better to do.
Gray,
foggy, cold, winter in Kraków has little to recommend to the conventional
tourist, but for the unconventional one, the lack of conventional
tourists—there are more pigeons on the square at the moment—is a big plus. The pigeons, no great attraction,
huddle in dark, sullen masses for warmth, like teenagers, the winds ruffling and parting their
feathers. The swifts and sparrows that pinwheel about the Mariacki towers in summer are gone. I, dressed
in black, an old crow, strolled around the Planty, the green space surrounding the Market Square, on my way to
church. I have wandered these streets before in the morning twilights, once
inebriate, though in summer. In winter they are rather indifferent, neither
inviting nor repelling. But, from time to time one comes upon a dramatic scene,
this, the monument to the glorious battle of Grunwald, when Jagiełło, King of
the Poles, defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1410 and rid the kingdom of their hegemony. Strangely, the Knights were a
monkish order as well, not given, apparently, to hospitality, good words, and
poetry.
