Older and wiser?
“Do you remember G, the writer, the one who used to live in Paris?” asked my friend, a literary critic, sitting on the floor of an almost empty flat located in one of a very few surviving pre-war Warsaw buildings, to where she has recently moved. “The one that I interviewed once on TV and got fired the next day because during the interview we both used uncensored words? A few weeks ago she wrote in her column something not very affirmative about the present government. It went to print but at the last moment the editor chickened out and ordered his staff to sit down with scissors and cut G’s text out from all the copies of the paper. And they did! It took them the whole weekend. 20,000 copies. Can you imagine? Ridiculous. Like in the 1950s.”
I nod my head, take a sip of wine and look around. I am sitting on the only sofa in the whole apartment. It is red and white and goes very well with the furiously green walls of my friend’s study. Through the open space in the wall I can also see her cheerfully pink bedroom and, further on, greyish kitchen. My friend doesn’t have an oven yet. Nor a fridge. Her flat is absolutely gorgeous, especially because it is so empty. I love empty spaces. I like living in them. Uncluttered. Undisturbed. Free.
Ten years ago, when I got married, I and my then husband stayed for a year in a totally empty loft in Notting Hill. It was great until my mother decided to visit. So we went and bought a bed, a table and two armchairs. And then, with the entry of the material world our problems started. No, of course, not, I am joking. We didn’t get divorced because we bought two armchairs. We got divorced because we didn’t want to be married any more, especially to each other. But then after my divorce when I was thinking about leaving Cyprus (by this time I was already in Nicosia) I didn’t know what to do with all these tables, washing machines, fridges, chairs and bookshelves. So I stayed. No, actually that is not true either. In reality I stayed because I didn’t know where to take a dog and five cats that had rapidly reproduced into fifteen kittens. Notting Hill didn’t seem to be a very good option. And Warsaw…. Well, I don’t know about you but I don’t like going backwards. So instead of moving overseas I organised a big party and gave the kittens away and stayed, and am still in possession of all these absolutely unnecessary family life objects. Rice cookers, juicers, spaghetti machines, napkins.
What a nightmare! I think with nostalgia about the times when I could put my belongings in to just two suitcases. And all these places I could go. All the new empty flats I could enter. And the first thing, the absolute domestic necessity, that I would buy the very next day after moving in? A coffee pot so I could wake up, have a cup of strong coffee and start working. And then I think that this means that I have actually changed since the time I entered the first ever empty flat of my life – an open studio on the tenth floor of an ugly Warsaw skyscraper – twenty years ago. Because then my absolute domestic necessity was a little blue pan to boil milk in. Because that is what I mainly drank back then – milk. At least a litre a day. Like Howard Hughes. Only he made it and became a millionaire and learnt how to fly and I didn’t.
“Do you remember T, the guy we were all in love with when we were at high school?” continued my friend. “The one you were going out with, who became an opera director? He produced a new opera last month. Have you seen it?”
“Yes, I remember T,” I answer. “He really broke my heart when I was 17.”
And then I think that I am actually pleased that my current life essential is a coffee pot. Maybe in twenty years it will be a mug for my false teeth. It means things are changing and moving and I keep falling in love with new men and doing new things. And by the way, yes, I have seen the latest premiere by my ex-boyfriend and in it all the ideas that he was talking about when he was 17. At first I was impressed and thought, “what consistency”. But then I remembered the book I wanted to write at that age and thought that if I wrote it now in the same way it would be very boring.
