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Conversations with the Dead

2022; Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23300841.67.1.07

2330-0841

Ross Ufberg,

Central European Literary Studies

Anna Frajlich left Poland in 1969, and New York has been her home for fifty years. Her poetry is rich with the language of exile and wandering, and frequently evokes lost landscapes and the gnawing persistence of memory. But there is yet another theme running throughout her work, one which emphasizes the intense personal connections a poet maintains within the larger tradition of art and even the world at large. Many of Frajlich's poems are conversations with, and about, the dead. These are not simple apostrophes, nor are they elegiac poems, or even eulogies in verse. Rather, they are small nuggets of remembrance, and as such they serve a vital purpose. Much in the same way that in memoirs, the inclusion of names serves not only a narrative purpose, but also a historical one—this person was there, this person existed—so too do Frajlich's poems create a testament of sorts. As the reader can see from the interview, the selection of poetry, and Anna's commentary on each poem (taken from a longer interview and edited by me) that follows, the dead are remembered for their small acts, their rituals, their peculiarities, and their kindnesses, all of which defined them as friends, relatives, mentors, teachers, parents. Figures such as Polish critic Jan Kott and Polish poet Tymoteusz Karpowicz hardly need a few lines of verse to quantify their cultural achievements; but achievements only offer a partial view of a life lived.In Anna Frajlich's poetry, the oblivion of the memory of small things is rescued, transferred to the page, so that we have the ones who passed on to the next world coming back to inhabit this paper realm as characters in all their earthly dimensions. Which, in the end, is the greatest way to commemorate a person in full.RU: You have written enough poetry that one can find lots of themes—the city, exile, various geographies—in your work. One of those, under discussion here, is the idea of “Conversations with the Dead.” When you write a poem, do you have an idea of what “theme” it fits into in your mind?AF: A poem comes to me, I do not think of the topic first and then write a poem, no. With the theme of conversations with the dead, I'm talking to people who were important in my life. Suddenly you realize that you didn't say enough, you didn't talk enough, there are people who were and are important in your life and they're missing, all of a sudden. What do you say? What you want is just to talk to this person. Suddenly you realize you didn't use up this friendship, these ties, suddenly there are so many things that were not touched upon. One of the first deeply felt poems I wrote was in memory of my friend and my former boss, Jerzy Szczygieł, a well-known writer and editor of a publication for the blind.I was speaking once with my friend Renata Gorczyński and she told me a quotation from the Japanese writer Yasanuri Kawabata: “The dead are our property, in a way. We must take care of them . . . But they all died in such a hurry.” This is practically what it is. You still have to take care of them, of their memory. You have to let them know how much you miss them, how much you love them.RU: In some ways, poetry is a private art that comes from a very personal place, but once you publish a poem it becomes a public act. Do you see your poetry about people who are no longer here as a service to their memory, as lasting forever? Or do you write with the idea that since you can't tell them, you tell somebody else.AF: Probably you think you are telling them, but of course you are telling someone else. And you are right because many things are private. I wouldn't say anything that would diminish a person or their memory, but I think there is no harm in expressing how dear or how important a person was, and how much emptiness their disappearance leaves. When a person is still alive, there are many things left unsaid—because they are such private things, you wouldn't dare say them out loud. You know that there's this understanding between you and the other person but it's not something you need to discuss, because if it's obvious for two people, there is nothing to discuss. But later, if you cannot talk, you cannot have this silent understanding, you want to voice what hurts you.All of a sudden you realize that there is a mystery in certain things that were never openly talked about. They are symbols of something, though of what exactly you don't know.• • •If I could callIn memory of Jan KottFor years on the West Coastfor years you were far awayWill I see you again?—you asked on the phonewe were talking as usualnight hereevening theremy failures, for the most partfor the most part, your triumphsand if I could call nowto the coast of your better world?what's the difference in timein hours thoughin light years?* * *No answerCaliforniais already disappearing from the mapever more uncharted territorybut when night falls earlyI callnobody answershummingbirds and cormorants sleepin the insurmountable darknessare silenton the shoulders of the palms.Jan Kott (1914–2001) was a professor at Warsaw University. I was applying there, and he was the examiner for the entrance exam. He was very sharp, in many ways, intellectually and he could also give you a hard time. He had a list of difficult words that he asked me about. There was one word I didn't know, but I passed the exam anyways.I never took his class—I wasn't interested in drama—but I saw him here and there, I knew about him. And when I was leaving Poland, my boss wrote him a letter to help me establish myself. And Kott, who by then was already in America, got me a Polish lectureship at Stony Brook. He was a professor there. Anyway, we became friends. He was famous and I wasn't . . . Years later he got a visiting professorship in Los Angeles and stayed there. So, we only talked on the phone. But you know, after so many years—I came here in 1970, I worked at Stony Brook in 1971–1972, and he passed away in 2001—at a certain point he came not only to like me but to respect me. And we would talk. Especially in the evening, because of the time difference between New York and LA, we could really have a conversation.The poems are about a need to communicate, quite literally, to talk. The only sort of obstacle is that I don't know what the time difference is, between where Jan went after death, and where I remain. That's it. But you know, one day I'll be there too.• • •The Unnecessary LetterIn memory of Staszek OlejniczakTeacher and FriendMy unwritten letterenters the sphere of sleepwe'll meet where it's betterwe won't meet again hereSzczecin, autumn weatherschool and the tramcar and timefate will bear us togetherlike a comfortable rhymethe why? the how? and the where?there are no more answers aroundcoffee in the Market Squareseek your answer in the groundsI pass through another cityI pass through —from West to East—knowingI've an unwritten letterfor which there's no need.Olejniczak was my teacher in the eighth grade. Instead of loving the boys in our class, we loved our teacher. We were all in love with him, more or less. He was a very good teacher. Especially of phonetics. I love phonetics so I loved his classes. I was a good student as far as literature and grammar were concerned. He liked me, he respected me. And he quit working as a teacher and went to film school in Łódź, where he studied and then he became an assistant professor.He didn't stay long with film. When he left our school in Szczecin we corresponded, and we all knew there was a woman he was in love with in Szczecin. It never amounted to anything, I don't know why. One time he was in a streetcar with her and when I saw him, I went into another car. And then at the next stop, he came over, he'd noticed me, just to talk. That was a meaningful gesture.We lost touch for years, then at a certain point there was an interview with me on Voice of America, and he found me via his friend in Canada. He started to write to me. He was living in Katowice, editing a cultural magazine and, around 1978, there was a Mass for the Fatherland, and he arranged for my poem to be read in the cathedral in Katowice at this mass. Then, after ’93, I was going more or less regularly to Poland. He arranged for me to come to Katowice, for a reading at the University. We would always meet, mostly in Kraków. But we were always surrounded by people and we could never explain certain things, what really happened, what happened to him in life. I could never ask him directly. So now that he's dead I can ask him directly.There are mysteries in life, and mysteries are very sexy.• • •All Hallows’ EveIn memory of Andrzej GorczyńskiYour spirit beneath the glasspyramid—the fog in Parisyour ashes in Bródnoin the cemetery your voicein her dreamsbut you wander like a ghostall the roadswhere you once left a markMadison Avenueon the creaky stairsand with your dog in the parkand right behind yourustling her white shroudthe femme fatale.All Hallows’ Eve or Forefathers’ Eve is a sort of pre-Christian holiday paying homage to the dead. Everybody who knows Polish literature knows what the holiday is, but we don't really take it for what it is. We just take it for a holiday to dress up, but it actually deals with the dead—commemorating them. And that's why it has survived for so many centuries. See, it's not only me. We all miss something that cannot be called back.Andrzej Gorczyński (1939–1991) was my friend Renata's husband. He was an architect who actually designed the pyramid in Paris over the Louvre. His ashes were buried in Warsaw. And here in this poem are a few “takes” from his life. I met him here in New York and liked him a lot. He was a very good man, quite modest for all his achievements. He was an accomplished architect who worked for I. M. Pei.And then, there was his relationship with my good friend Renata—at one point she had an affair with Czesław Milosz, but then she and Gorczyński got back together.Gorczyński lived on Madison Avenue on the fifth floor with no elevator, and one day he went to walk the dog and he had a stroke.His sister once told me that he had a preference for femmes fatales, women who were difficult to love. And in this poem—“and right behind . . . a femme fatale”—the ultimate femme fatale is death. We were at that time relatively young. It is very hard to accept when your friend suddenly dies.• • •All Hallows’ Eve Part IIWhat am I? —only the proofthat my parents existedI speak in their voiceI bleed their bloodtheir long-orphaned eveningsfall on my windowsilence ringingsilence ringingis it my phone ringingor theirs?This is a little ironic. We exist because of our parents. Anything that is in us is because of their blood, their voices. Whatever they were, we are. We don't know really when we reminisce about someone—are they calling to us, or are we calling to them? But it's some sort of meeting. “I am only the proof.” This is written for therapeutic reasons, not as a monument. Art is therapy. To let out, to let down the feeling, the heaviness, the hopelessness, that it will never be again.• • •About Tymoteusz AgainThey sayhe left behind no willyet he lefthis “Parallax 129”in spite of Einsteinthe radius does not bendthat's what he wrotethat's what he wantedhe stopped answering the phonebecause she died and took with herthe scraps of timefor readingwritingthe reversal of lighthe never finished fixing up that houseyet he undertookto writewhich still existswhen he came down from Śnieżka mountainthe last timethere, at the footwas it by chancehe met the poetby chanceand thus he never couldreturn therebecause at the bottom of the mountainthere was notwould not beroom for more than one.This poem is about Tymoteusz Karpowicz (1921–2005). He was a poet, playwright, and literary scholar who emigrated to the U.S. in 1973 and taught at the University of Illinois. The other poet I mention in the penultimate verse was Tadeusz Różewicz, who passed away in 2014. Tymoteusz had kept his house in Poland for all those years after he left, and nobody ever really understood why he emigrated. It was not as if he were persecuted, even though he probably thought he was. He had a very, very hard time here. He was a prominent poet back home, a co-creator of the new school of Polish poetry. I felt very badly about those young famous poets of the new wave who came here in a cloud of recognition and they never looked back. But he was the one—he created this new poetic language. And I felt very badly for him. He had a need to create everything from the beginning. He could not do anything that would be “following.”For example, he bought his home in Chicago and it had a big driveway. So, with one hand—he only had one hand—he broke all the concrete and created a beautiful garden. He started to renovate his house but couldn't finish because he had all these ideas that he could never see through. His wife became sick and before she died he took care of her, at home, and by her bed, in the hospital. Anything he touched, he created. Our contact was mainly on the phone or in letters.• • •Meeting Bella AkhmadulinaThe poets abandoned herone chose deathanother—a new Karelian brideshe was left one on onewith poetrythat's why her hands tremblewhen she reaches for the glassthe first since yesterdaythe bar's just opened upthe poets abandoned hersome lost their livesothers—the ground beneath their feetwhich is whyshe cannot find the wordsbefore the first drop of winedrips outonto the tonguethen she speaks quicklyDa, I was at Columbia UniversityDon't you want some wine?I knowthat Polyaki like to drinkand then a few gesturesthe gulf in the background, in the windowfocused on the murky drinkhaving trouble getting down the shrimpThat's her, people whisperas she walks byone on one with poetry.I wrote this while Bella Akhmadulina (1937–2010) was still alive. I met her in Finland, at the International PEN Congress, and this is a true snapshot from the meeting. I had heard about her, there was this aura, when she was passing by everybody said, “Look, over there.” Even though this was PEN International, everybody got quiet. On the other hand, everybody knew that she was an alcoholic. She couldn't talk until they opened the bar and could have a glass of wine. Her first husband was the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and she was married a few times after that as well before marrying Boris Messerer, the stage designer, with whom she remained until her death. The shadow of Mandelstam always loomed over her . . . Akhmadulina was a sad monument. And that's it.• • •The Fortieth DayHe who dies in winterShall dream his last dream of springBeneath this frozen earthUntil the word resoundsAmidst the cathedral's echoesUntil that fortieth day sings outAnd hangs among icicles like a crystalIt will stray as a blizzard into nightMortal in his yearninghis name and bodyHe turns to voice eternal.Translated from Polish by Colleen Kerry McQuillenIn 1996, the Manhattan Theatre Club was putting together an evening about Wisława Szymborska. And they asked me to lead the evening. We invited a Polish actress to read in Polish, and they asked, but who could open the evening? I told them, the best person is Brodsky.I knew that Brodsky liked Szymborska because of an incident that happened when he first came to this country and he was teaching at Queens College. A friend of mine wanted me to talk to Brodsky and gave him my poem “Telephone,” and Brodsky read it and we sat and discussed it. At a certain point he said, “Oh, and you know, if Szymborska had written this poem, she would have said “with five fingers I would press seven digits.” The line in my poem is “I can have you / for seven digits / and for a button.”The Manhattan Theater Club invited Brodsky. But a few days before the event, the Blizzard of 1996 set in. I remember the blizzard—you could walk down the middle of the street on Madison Avenue, it was so deserted. Brodsky had heart problems. All events throughout the city were cancelled and the Theatre Club postponed the event as well. Brodsky died soon after the storm.The poem was written on March 8, 1996, in St. John the Divine Cathedral, during Brodsky's sorokoust. In Russian Orthodoxy, sorokoust is the day when the soul ascends to heaven, forty days after one's death. The photographer Czesław Czapliński was sitting behind me. I overheard him say to a friend, “Oh, Anna Frajlich will write a poem about this.” I got so mad, I turned around and said to him, “I never write occasional poems.” Well, five minutes later this poem came to me.I remember the storm, the hail, all of it. It was really Daimonian, as Milosz used to say.• • •Scoop of CoffeeMomI just usedthe last scoop of coffeefrom the jar you left behindit's a bit likewe were drinking it together againthat same mug from your kitchenthat same taste—Chock full o'Nuts?I'm sure I'll forget the brandand maybe I already have?Your houseis yours no longer, againyour possessions here and theremostly nowherebut I ordered a portraitof my great grandfather from Stanislawówfrom that pictureyou recoveredand savedand gave to melike life.Coffee was very important to my mother (Amalia Frajlich, 1912–2004). She always drank coffee. It wasn't just a drink. It wasn't a very big ritual, but without it, she couldn't exist. That's one thing. Another thing—you have to remember that my generation of Jewish children of that time did not know their grandparents. We didn't know anything that happened before our own consciousness. So, we didn't know, to a certain extent, who we were, because if you never see your grandparents, you don't know. And my mother understood this.My mother was a half-orphan at a very young age and after World War II, she did everything to gather photographs, from her family that had survived abroad, and they did have some family documents. I only have one photo of my great-grandfather and one of my grandfathers, nothing of my grandmothers. And we didn't know the traditions, nothing. The fact that she somehow found this photo, and she left it for us. Now we could say, we know who we are.I commissioned two portraits of my great-grandfather from the photograph, for my son and my nephew. The Holocaust cut off the past, totally cut it off.I did not know a single person among Jewish children of my generation who had grandparents. My sister and I missed it, we missed that we couldn't say the word “grandma.” We had a German woman who came to clean our apartment and we started to call her “grandma.” We were so happy we finally had a grandma, there was a person we could use this word with.Photos were important because they provided us with something that we didn't have, meaning a past.• • •And the skin turns ever thinnerAnd skin turns ever thinnerlike paper, like brittleparchmentit won't heal any longerand can't be stitched upsuch happened withmy mother's skinwhen, having had it up to here,she injured her leg on the runfrom herselfyet her whole life through she sewedher needle stitching silk linenwool and evendyed bits of leatherher pen stitchingLwów Kirghizia Szczecinher memory nearly stitchingtwo shores of lifebut thoselike two shores of an oceancan't be stitched togethershores divergeseams rupturethe needle breaksas does the penbut memory turnsever thinnerlike paperlike brittle parchment.The last few weeks of my mother's life touched me very deeply. At a certain point, you start to think about the tragic fate of their generation, the generation that came of age between two wars. They were children when World War I happened, and she lost her mother then. She was essentially orphaned at a young age, she was even homeless at a certain point. But the Jewish charities under the Austrian Partition were quite well developed, so she was put into a good professional school where she learned to be a seamstress, and she lived in a boarding house, all paid for by the charity. She was a Polish Jew in Austria and she went to a Polish school, and learned Hebrew there, too. She spoke Polish, German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and she even had English classes.My mother was in Hashomer HaTzair, the Zionist organization, and there was a strong lot of communist propaganda. She joined the Communist Party of West Ukraine, went to Soviet Union for some activities. On her way back, she was arrested in Poland for illegally crossing the border. One of the policemen who arrested her told her, “You're lucky we caught you and not the Communists.” And she served five years of her ten-year sentence in prison in Poland, from 1934 to 1939. After the Germans attacked Poland, the prison guards released the prisoners and she went back to Lwów, then already under Soviet occupation. She met my father, they got married. Upon the German attack of the Soviet Union my father was conscripted into a Soviet working battalion and was sent to the Urals. She wasn't allowed to go with him so she simply ran east. At a certain point she joined up with a train packed with people heading to Kyrgyzstan. That's where I was born.When my parents parted they didn't know she was pregnant. They found each other when I was already a few months old. They returned to Poland in 1946, and my mother initially worked as a seamstress. But she was a good writer, and a Party member, so she got work in a newspaper, then moved to radio, working as something like a producer. My father, a highly educated technician, initially worked in the factory and then in the harbor. In 1956, when the anti-Semitic campaign began, both my parents were fired from their jobs. And they had to look for some way to survive.The anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 forced us to emigrate in 1969 to the United States, and my parents followed a year later.In their sixties by the time they came to this country, they had to leave everything and start a new life. You couldn't even call it a new life. But at least they were with their families. My mother made the best of her life. But there are certain things that you cannot sew together.• • •FatherHe returnsin dreamsas if by roadmy fatherwho got lost aroundsome turnthe dreams are ever sharperthese dreams won't helpnot menot himand nothing else will ever beother than what waswhat couldwhat had to beon two sidesof existenceon the border of two dreamswe both stand thereeach with a mustard seedto cast.My father (Psachie Frajlich, 1911–1998) came to New York when he was already sick. Nevertheless, he had to work a few years to get social security—he worked for a Swiss clock company, as a technician. He also took up drawing and he was quite talented. But his life was very, very difficult. He'd worked all of his life and he never had anything to show for it.He was born in 1911 in a little village near Lwów called Sokołówka Hetmańska, named after Stefan Czarniecki, a hetman and Polish nobleman of the seventeenth century. Czarniecki was famous for saying, “Jam nie z soli, ani z roli, ale z tego, co mnie boli.” This translates to: “I am neither of salt, nor of the fields, but of that which hurts me.” In other words, I am not defined by what I possess but by what hurts me. And my father, a Jew, was so proud of this famous hetman's saying.When World War I came, my father's family was relocated by the Austrian administration to Prague, to avoid anti-Semitic violence in the Lwów area. His family was religious but they sent my father to a Polish school, and he got a good technical education. He loved literature and knew a lot about it, I first heard Polish poetry from him. He was fluent in Polish, German, Russian, Ukrainian. He spoke Yiddish and knew Hebrew. As a Jew from a modest family, he had a pretty good education. He told me once that Jews—religious Jews—weren't supposed to have secular books on their shelves, but his grandfather had Heine in his library! They were so proud of Heinrich Heine, even though he converted to Christianity. His father died early, and his mother and sisters perished in the Holocaust.English was a language my father learned in his sixties, in New York, so he had problems expressing himself to people. He was a person with no language here, and he suffered very much. It was not easy to care for him, because you can't be a parent to your parents.Toward the end of his life, I asked my father why he didn't participate more in the Jewish activities at his old age home. He told me, “I have not seen Him.” He meant, he had no experience with God, because of all that had happened to him—and to everyone.So, that's the background to this poem. In Forefathers’ Eve, two souls that once belonged to children are asking for a mustard seed. Here, we both give a mustard seed to each other. We don't have anything better to give each other. This is irony. We talk through these mustard seeds. This is quite a bitter poem.45• • •SleepTo die in dreamsso lightlyfrom one dreamto anotherto steal away imperceptiblyand then only to sleepin dreamy labyrinthsto wanderin infinityto live in dreams eternal.21 March 2015Cathy Nepomnyashchy (1951–2015) and I knew each other for a long time. She was a graduate student when I started teaching at Columbia. (She eventually became a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia, and department chair at Barnard.) We were friendly, but not close friends. We'd always promise to drink champagne together, or to have each other over for dinner, and it just never happened. But we had a certain closeness that comes with familiarity.In 2011 her husband died, and I watched her change so much after that. Then in 2015 she got sick herself. I visited her when she was sick, and then Liza Knapp told me that Cathy had returned from the hospital and was at home. I went and visited her, and she said “How are you?” It was a very social greeting—it may have just been that she knew those words so deeply, they were a ritual. She couldn't—we couldn't—really talk, she was already too far gone. And two days later she passed away.It touched me very deeply because, when you see someone for so many years, at least once a week, you develop a closeness.• • •This has a nameOlawe're at your placewithout youhow can this be?your home is packed with peopleso many people.And you?is this realis this realis this how it had to be?empty roomempty deskempty armchairso many placesyou left empty all of a suddensomething happenedthis has a namethat for the life of me I do not know.This poem is about Aleksandra Askanas—she was my sister's friend first, and later we became friendly. She and her husband, a prominent cardiologist, lived a few blocks from us. Doctor Askanas helped me a lot. I wasn't feeling well once and told him my symptoms over the phone. He recognized it as a heart attack, and he called the hospital. We socialized—dinners, parties. I'd meet Aleksandra once a month or so, or I'd see her when I'd go to the doctor—she worked in her husband's office.While she was in the hospital, her husband would spend many nights there. Her death was unexpected. After she died, we went to a memorial service for her at her home. There was this moment of comprehension that suddenly, somebody was here and now is not here anymore. It was a shock. She was somebody I expected to see for another ten or twenty years. And then all of a sudden: nothing.• • •For Stefania KossowskaLife left us at its cornersset us down somewhere on the sideand ran sprightly on aheadkeeps rolling without usbut us?life's buds and leavesbut us?life's rustling canopyheavygolden applesstonesscatteredalong the road.This poem is about Stefania Kossowska (1909–2003), an editor at a prominent emigre literary magazine.I had started to publish poetry in Poland in 1958, when I was 16. I won a prize in Szczecin, but when I came to Warsaw to the University I realized that everybody was writing poetry, and I didn't want to mention that I also wrote poetry. I thought, it's a sickness. In the end, I did tell people, of course, and somebody invited me to give a reading at a poetry club. I had a reading the same day Władysław Gomułka gave his major speech about throwing the Zionists out of the country, calling the Jews a fifth column.So, I had published in student newspapers and magazines but when I came here, the emigration was a shock, a type of trauma, and I realized that my poems were much different than before. And there were two great magazines – one in London, Wiadomości, and one in Paris, Kultura. In the 1930s, before the war in Poland, Wiadomości Literackie was a major literary magazine, and in London it was a major magazine of the postwar political emigration. After the founder and long-time editor Mieczysław Grydzewski became sick, an incredible woman named Stefania Kossowska took over.When I sent her my poems, she printed them immediately. A book of her letters to me, covering 30 years, while she was in London and I in New York, was subsequently published. She actually made me a published author here in the emigration. When I published my poems a second, and then a third time, the entire political emigre elite in New York soon knew my name because all the intellectuals read the magazine.Well, one day, somebody introduced me to Zoya Yurieff, a professor of Slavic literature at NYU. “She writes poems,” they told her. And I told her my name, and Professor Yurieff said, “Oh, and they're good poems!” She knew my name because she read Wiadomości! She asked me what I was doing and when I told her I was working in a lab, she said “No, your place is at the university. I'm going to write you a letter of recommendation.” And that's how I ended up getting my Ph.D. at NYU.Can you imagine? Without these two women, I would have never have got to where I am today. As an immigrant, I never expected this success.• • •My teachersSome rememberedlife under the tsarothers—everything before the warand the rest—only the warI remember them alltheir gestures and faceshow they talkedbut fog has envelopedwhat they talked aboutso many times the bedrockcrumbled to soft sandsometimes I thinkit's me who remembersthe tsar mounting his horsestanding again at the blackboardthe sum of the angles in a triangle?the sum of the angles in a triangle?no one whispers a hint.2008As in every school, I had teachers of different generations. My math teacher, who'd studied in St. Petersburg before the Revolution, couldn't believe I'd ever pass ninth grade. Then there was a generation of teachers who were well educated and who knew well what life was like in Poland between the wars. They had to be converted to Stalinism. And then there was a third generation, who really grew up during the Second World War. Even those who weren't totally brainwashed, however, had to pretend they were.And as this poem shows, as I recall them, I see their faces but I don't exactly remember what they taught me. I had difficulties in mathematics, I didn't know the answer to simple problems. And in the poem, nobody will help me, nobody will whisper the answer. Not because they don't want to, but because they can't. So many are dead. Not only my teachers, but many of my schoolmates, too. They're gone, and that world is gone.