TINNITUS

The bells had already started to ring.

I was in the back seat of a cab in Nowa Huta, headed to the Człowiek Obcy Gallery for the Great Fire of London when the radio announcer delivered the news in a broken voice.

Panie i Panowie, umarł Papie

The driver stopped the car in the middle of the street. It was night.

The radio fought with the bells for our attention.

Panie i Panowie, umarł Papie

Panie i panowie, Papienie yje

Maybe he knew his listeners needed to hear it from different grammatical angles for it to sink in. But we had all known this was coming. The commentator could’ve said it any way he liked, and it wouldn’t have changed a thing.

A flash mob blocked the street, and the driver hit the brakes. It was easy to see the masses of people in the dark because they were phosphorescent. They moved as a single entity, slowly, protecting tiny fires and spreading them from hand to hand. They carried lit candles plucked from dinner tables and birthday cakes and emergency kits, and windproof candles in red plastic cups that they had no doubt hoarded for occasions like this. The driver backed up to the last intersection and rerouted the trip. I was going to be late for my show, not that it mattered.

The bells were gonging wildly, but there was no melody. The dissonance spread over the roofs, one church catching it from the other, until all Kraków was sonic chaos. People poured out of restaurants still chewing their last bites, and stumbled out of hair salons with lopsided bobs. Supermarket staff crawled into the store windows, tearing down advertisements and crying into the wadded up, high-gloss paper.

Kurva.

We came to another impasse, still stuck in Nowa Huta. A crowd gathered around Arka Pana—The Lord’s Ark—the first church in our dear Soviet suburb. The driver could’ve jumped the parking lot median and slipped out the exit on the other side of the crush, but it was clear he wanted to watch for a few minutes.

Watch, I thought, but told him, “Go.”

[It is midnight, 1960, in the City without God. Bishop Karol Wojtyła stands in a barren field, his arms stretched heavenward, giving a midnight Christmas mass to no one, speaking the liturgy in foggy puffs. Behind him, the residents of Nowa Huta are afraid and peer furtively from the windows of their apartment blocks. The bishop knows that the cold may paralyze his throat and that the police may ask him to leave. Still, he continues.]

Tinnitus is often described as a ringing in the ear corresponding to no external sound, but it can be much more. It can be the slooshing of the ocean or an insistent breeze, the chirping of a grasshopper you can’t seem to kill. It can also be much less: an occasional click. Church bells can touch off a variety of sounds, long after they quit swinging.

But the bells were still raising thunder, and we darted down a side street to look for another way downtown. People were now draping their windowsills with yellow and white Vatican flags garnished with a single black ribbon to signify mourning. Behind the flags, pictures of Karol Wojtyła ripped from photo albums and picture frames and magazyny, printed dot matrix from the Internet, and painted lovingly in oils. Few pictures showed him wearing vestments; now that he was dead, he was allowed to be human again. People were allowed to scream and tear the hair off their arms and beat recycling boxes with trash cans.

You could tell that they had been craving this national communion for decades.

The Polish word osoby has a much different feeling than its English equivalent, “people.” It’s more of a collective than a collection. So tough to explain.

[Midnight Mass, 1966. Still outside in the field, but somewhat formalized with a portable podium and altar, and a microphone and speakers hooked up to a diesel generator. Archbishop Wojtyła no longer addresses only God, speaking instead to the thousands assembled before him. “Nie bój si. Nie lkajcie si!” But Nowa Huta is long past the point of fear, now that the community has hired a professional architect to draft blueprints for an illegal church. “It is real now that it is on paper,” says a man in the crowd.

“No,” the Archbishop counters, “it is real when you gather out here in the cold. You are the rock on which Peter built his church.”

“Peter’s rock is a political machine, and it is going to crush their skulls,” the man says, blowing cigarette smoke into the sky. This mass is being hijacked by people who would later become members of the Solidarnomovement. They were hoping to give each other the best Christmas present ever—a revolution.

Now we were parked in the middle of Tyniecka Street, surrounded by osoby gathered to see the house where Karol once hid from the Nazis.

Witaj Królowo nieba i Matko litoci

Witaj nadziejo nasza, w smutku i z´ałoci

You typically heard this chant when your babcia died. Your family would go hoarse repeating it, to keep the sobs at bay. Swallow. You heard this when sadness and emphysema took your dziadek, when they told you, in every possible grammatical way, so there would be no confusion. Exhale.

But I never heard this hymn when my mother died. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear a fucking thing in the days and weeks and years that followed.

It sounded as if Radio Maryja had turned its mics to the window to broadcast the sound of mourners spilling into the streets in greater numbers, shuffling, roaming aimlessly. Refrains dropped off and resumed again out of nowhere. The sound of thirty-eight million people destined to get lost in each other’s grief.

The announcer didn’t dare play any recorded music. Who could presume to choose the right soundtrack for a night like this?

“Turn here,” I told the driver. We were in Kraków, but still nowhere near the gallery. The meter was running up a fortune, and with this one deft move, I knew we could bypass St Stanislaus, St Michael, St Florian, St Francis of Assisi, the Papal Stone of the Blonia Commons, and anywhere else troublemakers were likely to gather that night.

“That will be worse,” he said, glancing at me in a rearview mirror choked with plastic rosaries. “You’re telling me we’ll be able to get within a kilometre of St Mary’s Basilica?”

He had a point. It’s national lore that when young Karol finished a work day at the quarry mines, he would stop by St Mary’s to soak up the stained glass. It’s no secret he was a Queen of Poland junkie.

“Just do something,” I said. “We can’t go straight.”

“Why not, Mr GPS?” The driver was miffed, and popped the clutch on purpose, jerking us both forward.

“Because that’s where the Solvay chemical factory was,” I said. Where Karol had bottled poison as a young man. Kraków is crows, but it’s also nostalgia. We were navigating through a landmine of sacred sites.

“Give me a better reason.”

“Because you’re not getting a fucking grosz from me if you go straight.”

“Then I’ll take you right to the police station.”

It was 8:45. If my gallery audience hadn’t dispersed into the slipstream of mourners, they would still be waiting for me to set London ablaze. Frustration was making me peel my lips with my teeth.

It wasn’t the taxi driver that was getting to me. It was the noise. You could hear that this death was going to change things permanently.

Medically speaking, subjective tinnitus makes no sense.

Researchers give these sufferers of phantom crickets and whistles a sample sound to listen to, a gauge to measure the buzz that’s slowly driving them zwariowane. Here lies the contradiction: patients focusing on the sample can often hear it below five decibels, rendering their internal hummingbirds and cicadas undetectable, but when focussing on the tinnitus and ignoring the sample, the same osoby claim insect symphonies of seventy decibels—as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

Do you see what I mean? Tinnitus is impossible to measure.

It may sound strange, but even with this din, there was still too much silence in my life. Missing speech. To this day, it kills me not to know all that my mother screamed from the fire. “Tell him.” Maybe she’s behind every inferno I plan, a wraith wrapped in a bed sheet, a spook in a shawl of embers. Invisible and mute, with a swatch of duct tape over her mouth. It’s almost as if I’m waiting for her to make an appearance and to shout a little louder this time. What did she want to tell me? I’m a child in Lourdes, with my sister, waiting for Mother Mary to materialize in a rainbow blur and take us by surprise. But most of all, I need to know if we’re alone in this world. I need to know if the apparition can ever happen or if it’s just a stupid dream.

And I need to know if the sister—Dorota, I mean—is for real.

Do we really need relationships if they end up causing us agony? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’re merely conversations with fellow travellers carried on for far too long.

[Nowa Huta, 1983. Karol Wojtyła is speaking in the middle of a field, where he did so for over a decade. But the middle of the field is now Kociół Arka Pana, a big ship of a church with a cross for a mast, built exactly according to blueprint. The Lord’s Ark, like the Elephant House, is shaped like a flying saucer but is an ocean-going vessel, with a four-metre metal Jesus figurehead arching his giant chest forward into the waves. The church is packed, and 250,000 more believers wait outside for a glimpse of Karol. Little has changed, except that he’s now Pope and has just unknowingly kissed a man dying of AIDS, giving him a personal sacrament. HIV now courses through Poland, but the general public won’t know this for years. And even when they find out, nobody will get tested or administer the tests. Nobody sees the pinpricks that old shopkeepers poke into condoms to give sperm a chance in a cruel world out to get them. The cameras, however, catch the Pope’s every hand gesture as he consecrates the first church in the City without God. Peter is pulverizing the Communists, one construction site at a time. Karol is definitely more useful to the Solidarity movement as Pope than as Karol.]

It was 9:15, and I was furious that London—that heathen, roiling, plague-filled heap of lumber—was spared the dignities of fire. One of the greatest in history, according to the effusive museum paintings usually done in flourishes of yellow, crimson, and hell.

The driver, I realized, had no intention of getting me to the gallery. He had been making a sacred-site pilgrimage this entire time, praying for gridlock and bilking me through the nose.

I paid the ridiculous fare, got out of the cab, and froze in the glow of the intersection. The traffic was wedged in the vertices of a cross made of thousands of candles stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk ... to sidewalk to sidewalk. I knew it was only one of hundreds that were guttering throughout Kraków at that precise moment, drawing devotees of the Virgin Mary closer, like flies.

Everybody wants to see a vision of their Mother.

It was too much.

Tinnitus, it turns out, isn’t always imaginary. Pulsatile tinnitus occurs when increased blood flow to the ear causes audible—and verifiable— spasms and clicks.

Sometimes we just want to hear these sounds, whether they’re real or not.

Clang, clang.