The Book of Air and Shadows

secret policeman trained by the KGB. By that stage, the large jug of Californian red that had begun the evening nearly full was nearly empty. The talk now turned rather drunkenly to films. Klim told some Kiéslowski anecdotes, giving Crosetti fodder for any number of saloon conversations, after which Crosetti asked what Klim thought of Polanski. Klim sniffed, pulled thoughtfully at the tip of his nose, and said, “I cannot like him. I am not a friend of nihilism however beautifully done.”
    “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think? You said before that you thought Zanussi was
too
religious. Religion or lack of it isn’t the point. He’s a great director. He can tell a story on the screen with vivid characters and terrific pacing and mood. It’s like saying that if you like
Rosemary’s Baby
, you’re on the side of the devil.”
    “Are you not?”
    Crosetti was about to launch into an exposition of the pure aesthetics of film, but this answer to what he had imagined was a purely rhetorical statement checked him. He looked at Klim to insure that the man was serious, at his pale blue eyes, which certainly were, serious as fate. Klim continued, “If film or any art for that matter has not some moral basis then you might as well look at flickering patterns, or random scenes. Now I do not say what is this moral basis, only that there should be one. Pagan hedonism is a perfectly acceptable moral basis for a work of art, for example, as in Hollywood. Domestic bliss. Romance. It does not have to be…what is the word? Where the villain always dies and the hero gets the girl…”
    “Melodrama.”
    “Just so. But not
nothing
. Not the devil laughing at us, or not only that.”
    “Why not? If that’s the way you see the world.”
    “Because then art suffocates. The devil gives us nothing, only he takes, takes. Listen, in Europe, in last century, we decide we will not worship God anymore, instead we will worship nation, race, history, the working classes, what you like, and as a result of this everything is totally ruined. And so they said, I mean the artists said, let us not believe anything but art. Let us not believe, it is too painful, it betrays us, but art we trust and understand, so let us believe at least in that. But this betrays too. And also, it is ungrateful for life.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Klim turned to Mary Peg with a smile that quite transformed his face, showing her a faded image of the man he was when he knew Kiéslowski. “I did not expect to talk of such things. We should be in smoky café in Warsaw.”
    “I’ll go burn some toast,” said Mary Peg. “But what
did
you mean?”
    “So…this Polanski. He has had a horrid life. He is born at just wrong time. He is a Jew, his parents taken to death camps, he grows up wild. He makes success through hard work and talents and marries beautiful wife, and she is killed by some madman. Why should he believe anything but that devil rules this world? But I was born somewhat earlier in same time, not a Jew but still, life was not so happy for Poles either, the Nazis thought we were almost so bad as the Jews, and so I say I was, if not same as Polanski, at least, you agree, in the same class. Father murdered by Nazis, mother killed in uprising, 1944, I am on streets, a baby cared for by my sister, she is twelve years old, my first memory is burning corpses, a pile of bodies in flames and the smell. How we survived I don’t know, a whole generation of us. Later, I should add, like Polanski I lost my wife, not to a madman but also tortured to death, months of it. I was by that time not very well in with the authorities and it was difficult to obtain morphia for her. Well, not to talk about these personal troubles. I meant to say, after the war, somehow, despite the Germans and the Russians, we look around and discover there is still life in us. We learn, we make love, we have children. Poland survives, our language lives, people write poetry. Warsaw is rebuilt, every brick, same like before the war. Miloscz wins Nobel, Szymborska wins Nobel, and one of us is pope. Who could imagine this? And so when we make art, this art most often says something more than, oh, poor little me, how I have suffered, the devil is in charge, life is trash, we can do nothing. This is what I mean.”
    Crosetti considered this statement as much as he could, which was not very much, because he was an American and he wanted to make movies and sell them and he thought he