Twenty years ago at the Actors’ Club in Warsaw, where the best conversation was to be had and the best food was to be found, I met the wife of a so-called surrealist painter well known in Poland; she has, among other things, translated Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain into Polish and is one of the most cultured women in Poland. It was only at the end of our conversation that she mentioned what a terrible situation she was in—her husband was lying at death’s door in a Warsaw hospital and she had come out that evening for the first time in a year to be among people. I had the pleasure of meeting her on several occasions and of having conversations with her about German and Polish literature and art. And, of course, I also discussed politics with her and repeatedly expressed my admiration for the Poles. When back in Warsaw ten years later, I naturally called on her. But she greeted me at the door with the announcement that her husband was at death’s door, which led me to think she was mad. But in fact she had been remarried for almost ten years after the death of her first husband, and now her second husband was in the same hospital as her first and with the same illness, which she did not tell me at once. Naturally I invited her to the Actors’ Club, and once again she told me that she had not been out for a year and of course not to the Actors’ Club. When I went back to Warsaw after another ten years, I did not visit her, though I missed her all the time I was there and, in the nature of things, had a guilty conscience.

Forgotten

FORGOTTEN