Talk forty three.
La Honda, California, 15th March
- We’ve got quite a punishment for having run away from the Polish winter!
- The weather these last days in California is really hopeless! Cold and rainy.
- Everyone here is happy with the rain which that never get enough of, but we’re complaining about the bad luck that had hit us here.
- Despite bad weather, Nadia took us to the coast.
- The Half Moon Bay[2] is famous for a place good for smuggling alcohol during Prohibition times. A hidden bay and almost everlasting fog facilitated this wicked dealings.
- On a gloomy day like today the Pacific looked particularly menacing and unfriendly. Only the great seals were lounging lazily on the beach. Nobody was disturbing them. Sweet fat creatures.
- Once, in place of the national park, right on the cliff, there was a hotel, the owner of which had planted hundreds of cypress trees that now made a dark forest.
- Like in a horror film.
- Were you scared?
- No, I wasn’t. I even climbed up one of the trees, so you could tyake nice pictures.
- What a sacrifice!
- Nadia was a great guide, wasn’t she?
- Whatever she does, she does well. As a Sankt Petersburg University physicist and an educated painter, now she chose a career as an artist.
- She’s quite successful and now she’s a teacher of drawing and painting in Palo Alto.
- A few years ago she painted a portrait of both of us together. It hangs in our flat in Szczecin next to several works of hers. Nadia, like many artists, doesn’t like to make her work univocally classified. On my persistent question she replied that her portraits can be classified as expressionism.
- After breakfast, in a beautiful setting in the garden of La Honda residency, Nadia was painting another portrait of ours while we were working on our netbooks. Somehow, I’m not an admirer of her technique.
- You’re not an expert! They aren’t realistic portraits! Are you worried that you're not as beautiful in them as in the reality?
- It’s good I look like myself at all.
- Nadia says you are an easy model to paint a portrait of.
- Sure!
- Because you have strong features. Not like me. Kind of… sloppy ones.
- They are good enough for me.
- Oh, how nice you are. Thank you.
- You’re welcome.
- Look at you! You’re getting americanized! Now it’s time we concentrated on organizing our two-week tour of the southern United States starting in Washington DC.
- That's what we're here for! But Zakopane in 2000 and the "beautiful circumstances of nature" were very nice too!
- After coming back from Zakopane I met your mum for the first time.
- The father was still negative. He refused to hear anything about us.
- But he brought Irena and your brother Sebastian from the Gorzów to my place and ... left.
- We were all extremely tense.
- Irena was doing fine keeping her face straight because she couldn’t do much more. Certainly, she didn’t want to lose her son, so she decided to take the bull by the horns.
- The trip to the seaside and your plot in Wisełka was very successful.
- And Irena thanked me for the photos I’d sent her, with the words: (...) Again, thank you for your warm hospitality. I’ll keep fond memories of those moments. Getting to know you helped me understand that you are both happy with Adrian. This is so, isn’t it? (...)
- And then the frenzy time of building our house in Wisełka began.
- Wait a minute! First was Warszawa and a weekend at Janusz and Andrzej’s in June.
- It was their birthday. They’re both zodiac gemini. Maybe it was the reason we never got along.
- At that time it was till all right between you. The problem was that you did not have the right to be right. They knew everything better. Why would you know anything? And even better?
- With humility I accepted their playing wise men.
- They did their best to be nice. Their hospitality had always been genuine. There were moments I felt great with them. Sometimes, however, I felt a certain artificiality and a concealed resentment to you.
- They were all envious of you. Because I took away from them what the used to have exclusively.
- If I had cared more about it (I mean about them), I'd go with the issue to a therapist in order to save the friendship of the four of us.
- Why didn’t you do that? You’d been friends for so many years!
- First Andrzej, then Janusz had left permanently for Warszawa, so our contacts were too scarce that we could take care of it, so that it was OK. We needed each other.
- But not me.
- I needed you. Without you our friendships with them had no meaning. The friendship with Andrzej and Janusz, obviously, did not survive the fire test.
- Now we are talking about the year 2000, and you split up in 2010!
- Of those dramatic moments we’ll still talk.
- I goofed up in Warszawa crushing your Volvo.
- You just lightly hit it on a motorway exit at a high curb.
- We came back to Szczecin by train and we left the car behind for repair. We weren’t in great mood, though.
- Quite bad, actually. And then you did not even call me or mailed to me for a couple of days! On top of that I had some unpleasant situation at PROGRESS. I felt terrible. I did not write to you, either.
- It was nerve wrecking. Testing our endurance?
- Eventually I got a text message. It said: „ (…) if this silence is supposed to be a lesson for me, if ..., so I want you to know that it’s very painful, but I can take it, because I know that it is worth doing so. I love you. And that’s all. "
- Finally, in early July, the construction of our house in Wisełka began. The wooden house stood up in six days!
- And then finishing it took us two more years.
- And it keeps going on.
- We were working hard together with the carpenters.
- It was mainly you. You showed a lot of your skills. I was a little nervous, because the whole logistics of the construction performed by that firm was far from perfect. I tried my best so that there was no tension, but it was difficult.
- Maybe two or three times we went too hard at each other
- My rule got confirmed. We could only get to know each other better spending with each other, in not very comfortable conditions, twenty-four hours a day. Thus we were able to assess how we functioned together. After that month, I was sure that we had defeated our weaknesses and we could start thinking about a shared future.
- Now I’ve just learned that you’d tested me. What if I did not pass the exam?
- I don’t know. Today it is no longer valid. There won’t be a second one. Did I pass my exam?
- You are passing one each day .With the best marks!
- Write down those assessments in my life record book.
- So, the construction finished and …
- … We invited more than thirty people, let’s admit it, to a little bit crazy party:
(…) on 10th February, 2000 we decided to start our common road. We would like our friends to be with us on August 19th, 2000 when we shall open our New House. We kindly invite you (...)
- We put a lot of work ...
- ... and heart ...
- ... in the preparation of the event.
- Robert Janowski (the singer) once published a book of poems where I found something I put in the invitation card, which seemed to me to be an excellent motto:
Why?
For I love – that’s why.
I love – for it is the simplest.
The simplest way I love – for this is the hardest,
For I love the hardest way – it is so simple.
And that’s way there isn’t – why?
For I love after all – I can’t otherwise.
- I’m going to cry!
- Are you ashamed to be sentimental, eh? Mocking is better? You don’t like when I’m moved.
- No, I don’t. I feel uncomfortable.
- I will not let you limit me!
- Someone has to be a man here!
- You are my man!
- Go on! What was going on at that wedding of ours? Somehow I don’t remember many details.
- Forget the details. There was an oath:
-„I take you on a common way of life, so that you satisfy me
and frustrate me, and bother me.
So that you understand me and don’t understand me.
So that you let me be who I am and impose your way of life.
So that you respect me and laugh at me.
So that you are demanding and ridiculously indulgent.
So that you are selfish and overly attentive.
So that you are tough and fair.
So that you are proud and humble.
I take you to respect you and support you until death.”
- That was very serious and for real!
[1] Half Moon Bay California
[2] Half Moon Bay California
