The past shapes the present—they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past—ours, our family’s, our culture’s—wields in the present?

Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology—the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough. Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms: ‘Time Heals All Wounds’; ‘History Repeats Itself…’; ‘Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It’; ‘Give Me a Child Before the Age of Seven and I’ll Give You the Woman’; and ‘You Can’t Enter The Same River Twice.’

These beliefs—or intuitions—about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.

Excerpts

history repeats itself (part 3)

This morning, that morning rather, two men in my carriage lift their heads – two men in their fifties in silky understated ties – then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they’re leaning into each other laughing how long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What’s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one mid-chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don’t tell me it’s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriage picks, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on city loop trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?

My phone vibrates: one time only for texts. ‘Make sure you don’t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.’ It’s Vanda. Thank you Vanda.

Shhh.

In front of me is time. Time is not a river. It is two strangers on a train whose briefcases touch as they hold each other. Two men who’ll never ride the same train again.

I don’t remember getting off or walking. Somehow I reached the courthouse doors on William Street where my bag was screened, nothing sharp in it, and the structure that looked dull and huge on the outside, a building without qualities, was alive and brown inside with wrappers pulled off chocolate bars, doors slamming, others opening, kids in school uniforms who were not, as I’d guessed, witnesses to inexplicable suburban crimes but legal studies students bored on a field trip. Several of the magistrates looked like Karl Heinrich Marx. In a lift I stood next to a lawyer with the face of someone who sometimes forgets he has not, yet, seen it all. I looked at him. He looked at the crease in his hardworking pants.

What is the Court 8 clerk wearing today? Orange jacket, there you go, bold choice for the setting. And what is Court 8’s loudest sound right now? My fineliner pen making notes about courtroom silence. Big silence in a roomful of busy-looking people is jarring. Then the magistrate appears – once he’s seated, that silence is gone – and to a man on the stand whose second drink- driving offence is the day’s first matter he says, ‘I cannot take your past away,’ and it is like some subterranean conversation underneath the one everybody can hear is flowing about how to be alive is to be caught in one web or another. ‘I know your first offence was twenty years ago but your past doesn’t disappear. If police stop you, they’ll test you.’ The magistrate means it’s your last chance, your cufflinks can’t save you, the taxes you pay won’t save you. He also means: nothing is more human than the experience of feeling trapped. And everything’s a trap, your past, family, genes, addictions, loneliness, that feeling that pretty much everyone else is galloping gaily ahead while you are crawling backwards like a lobster or lopsided baby.

give me a child before the age of seven and I will show you the woman (part 4)

V.W.

Patient goes to doctor. ‘Doctor,’ he says, ‘you have to help me, I am in desperate need. I’m pissing everywhere.’ Doctor gives him a tablet and tells him to come back. In a few days as agreed the patient comes back. ‘Hello doctor, how are you, how is your wife?’ the patient says cheerfully. ‘What a positively lovely day it is.’ The doctor is bemused and asks: ‘And how is your condition?’ ‘Oh, it’s great, doctor. I’m pissing everywhere but I don’t give a fuck about it anymore.’

Roman Polanski told this joke to Vera Wasowski sometime in the 1960s when they saw each other in London. Polanski lived in London then, post-Poland, pre-Hollywood. He took Vera to some fancy club frequented, so he mentioned in passing, by Mick Jagger. She remembers the joke but forgets the club’s name. It was the Ad Lib club – see a 1983 Clive James interview with Polanski, post-Hollywood by then. Vera in the 1960s was living in Australia, dreamy dull flatland which was nothing much like London of the 1960s, not at all like Warsaw of the 1950s – what are the stats? Gone, 85 to 90% of it, in the war. The ‘most agonising spot in the whole of terrorised Europe’ said poet Czeslaw Milosz yet a city which allowed the flourishing, only a few years later, of people Vera calls, insistently, ‘intellectual elites’. She says ‘top’. She says ‘world class’.

They’d all come together, film-makers, journalists, actors, intellectuals, Andrzej Wajda in whose Pokolenie Polanski made his acting debut, Vera, her journalist-husband Jan; they would get in one room. And sparks! Wasn’t the doctor-patient joke actually about them? The ability to not give a fuck – was it not one of the few freedoms possible in their country now it had been Stalinised? Whatever was being surrendered and taken over in the outside world, the inside of one’s head was one potentially unreachable place. Most of the people around Vera and Jan in Warsaw in the 1950s had that place inside that belonged to them only. The state’s fingerprints were all over work you did, streets you walked, the whole school-university-job-pension track. You had to register your typewriters. The air itself was like that: breathe in and out, once, and you were implicated. But there were ways of being free or at least acting as if you were free, ways of blending with no wallpaper. Watch Vera and Jan and you’d know. It was possible to cultivate a willed conspicuousness. To banish meekness. And channel abandonment. Let’s say you were not circumspect about the volume at which you spoke in public and not fastidiously self-censoring about the contents of your speech either, and your quantities of alcohol drunk weren’t moderate and you were, maybe, borderline scandalous in how you did love, sex, family while the poems you’d memorised were poems of Adam Mickiewicz, who considered Poland the Christ of nations, not those by some servility-extolling, drum-beating Party stooge.

Poetry, art, drinking, affairs. These were not luxuries or sweeteners, no. Not extra-political digressions. It was all too easy to rage deep inside at a regime that, as poet Adam Zagajewski wrote, had no time for agriculture or architecture or literature or the railway system but time without limit for its army, police, speeches, parades. The trick said Zagajewski was ‘to conquer totalitarianism in passing, on our way to greater things’. Lest you become defined by your opposition to it. Lest you get enslaved by the fight against it. So many surrounding you did. One of the twentieth century’s lessons went precisely: sooner or later you become what you fight. So: poetry, art, drinking, affairs . . . Essential inoculations?

No. Yes. What they did was produce a wildness, a state of constant incalculable movement of the soul. As long as the soul kept moving, expanding, opening its chambers, speeding up and slowing down like a wise fugitive who knows how to run in large open spaces while evading a sniper lying in wait, it could not be co-opted fully. Were these inoculations enough? Yes. No. To most questions about Poland lurk two answers minimum. In Milosz’s book The Captive Mind is a version, more an inversion, of Polanski’s doctor joke. The ‘Pill of Murti-Bing’, a fictional wonderdrug Milosz encountered in a little-known 1930 Polish novel by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, soothes nagging dread, making those who pop it ‘impervious to any metaphysical concerns’ and, soon enough, welcoming of imminent invader dictatorships from the East. Witkiewicz killed himself on 18th September 1939 after learning the Red Army had crossed Poland’s eastern border. Milosz defected to the West in 1951 after spending the entire five years of German occupation in Warsaw. Perhaps the doubleness of the doctor joke was always there. Perhaps the doubleness of the joke was the joke.

When Poland was overrun Polanski was six. Vera – a year younger. Out of a million Polish Jewish children younger than fourteen about five thousand were alive by war’s end. Most survived the way Polanski and Vera survived, hiding in convents, boarding schools, orphanages, on farms, in attics, with Christian families. In holes, caves, forests, between false walls, in cupboards. Jan’s survival was different; he was in Kazakhstan. Jan’s father, editor of a Jewish newspaper when Jewish newspapers still existed in Poland, had the foresight to get his family out. At their second romantic dinner Vera told Jan about what happened to her. She was brief, rolled the whole thing into a few sentences, no drawn-out sagas. He, her formidable future husband, could not drive back tears.