A Tour of Bones

Czermna

The first leg of my journey will take me all the way to Czermna, a hamlet on the edge of a remote spa town in a distant corner of Europe that was once called Silesia – a region fought over by successive armies and attached to acquisitive empires. Hungry and tired, there I will meet with kindness and brutality; I will meet strangeness and forgiveness and not know how they are related. I will stay in one of the most curious houses I have ever seen. I will arrive there looking for answers, and I will come away haunted by a question.

It was a long way to Czermna. Even when you shrink the overland distance through France, Belgium, Germany and into the Czech Republic by flying the first 793 miles from London to Prague, still you have quite a way to go. It was not just the mileage but the distance, by which I mean the span of cultures, the alienation of strange words, the inscrutability of foreign food, the unfamiliarity of coins. Even the maps upon which we relied to guide us were a minefield of probable errors. I was stymied every time I tried to name a place – ‘Czermna’ was a hesitation on my lips. ‘Kudowa Zdroj’ with its w’s that were v’s and its j’s that were y’s. Well, what did I expect? I had intended strangeness.

In the silent months between conceiving the idea and embarking on the tour, I had stopped writing. I had stopped researching. I had tried (unsuccessfully) to stop thinking about the trip because I wanted everything to be fresh, to arrive to the unexpected and experience everything as new. We had chosen four charnel houses in four different countries, none of them familiar. I wanted to keep it that way, to be completely open as only a stranger can be to what the travelling and the destinations would say to me, to feel what those lines from a poem by the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne are saying about seeing things for the first time:

A Stranger here

Strange Things doth meet, Strange Glories see;

Strange Treasures lodg’d in this fair World appear,

Strange all and New to me.

He is writing not about a traveller but about an infant, describing the newborn as first of all a stranger in the world. Maybe one of the things we humans love about travelling, I thought, is that it brings us these moments of innocence. Stunned by the new, our senses are keen, our minds are awake. In the wash of the unfamiliar we swim like newborn seals, graceless till we hit the water, eyes intent, surviving, imbibing, agog. Our new infancy is even more pronounced if we do not speak the language. Just like infants, we are deaf to all instruction, infringe regulations and live by example. Proud notions of independence dissolve.

Like infants too, travellers are often sleep-deprived, hungry and lost. They are easily deceived. The adult traveller submits to these indignities in the belief that the benefit of the new outweighs the trouble it takes to get to the place of newness, but when we plan our journeys we rarely consider the personal discomfort of adventure. Prague station, when we found it, seemed to speak directly into such discontinuities of place and time. Outside, broken pavements, graffiti, a stubborn front door – dreary remnants of failed socialism. Then, inside, shiny escalators swept us past electronic screens designating times and platforms, past a gleaming Burger King. Everything was in the process of construction; we dodged cones and builders carrying long metal tubes (who, if they had turned right or left, would have annihilated seven pedestrians in one fell swoop) before finding at last the gleaming row of ticket windows.

As if the transformation we had just witnessed from fractured history to chrome modernity were nothing but a film set, we emerged, blinking, to scruffy platforms where passengers in jaded jeans and faded anoraks waited, nonplussed by the shriek of the approaching train. My hands dropped the bags and flew to my ears in pain. I could not believe any rail company could be allowed to let their brakes get into such a parlous state; as the train drew to a stop the wail intensified, came underneath my fingernails and quivered up my nose. Then one woman in a smart business suit carrying what felt like the whole of modern capitalism on her shoulders strode along the platform, grabbed the side handle of a waiting train and hiked herself up, closing the ungainly gap between platform and footplate with the swing of a coltish leg and one black court shoe. Consulting our tickets again, we boarded behind her, hoping we had found the correct train that would take us away from the city east to Nachod near the Polish border; feeling anyway that, even if we were wrong, we would rather be going in her direction.

In the hours that followed, long-armed and easy, sun-drenched and dreamy, I nestled my head on the bristly headrest and thought, clickety-clack. About the human aversion to strangeness, clickety-clack, how we crave the known and familiar as deeply as we claim to love the shiny and new, clickety-click. How our favourite pairs of shoes for walking are the oldest, how we hoard and sentimentalize, scrapbook and memorize. How we are not only creatures of habit but also of history, without which we do not know ourselves. I wondered what it is like to live in a country where so much of that is changing so fast.

Now, as I sit at my desk and write, I begin to appreciate the necessity of strangeness, the importance of being taken beyond the boundaries of the familiar in order for new thoughts to appear. Then, looking out at the fast-passing countryside, all I did was drink it in, my mind searching always in the new for something familiar, something understood on which to hang the new impression, so that when we passed flat fields where workers harvested red rows of radiccio and bright lines of cos, I registered, familiar to me, the East Anglian Fens.

I looked out of the train at the passing failed socialist cityscapes and agrarian landscapes and did not know that out of these glimpses of culture and agriculture my mind was busily plaiting the visually familiar and the unfamiliar into a kind of mental refuge for my psyche. I didn’t ask my brain to do this, didn’t even know that’s what it was doing. But it was putting up defences against the strange as fast as I was providing it with unexpected images. ‘The power of the new, the shocking and the astonishing’, writes Stephen Cherry in his recent book Barefoot Disciple, ‘is that it somehow gets past our defences and starts to trouble us.’ I know now, as I reflect on my journey, what he means.

I had not yet come to anything like the border of the new, though I had passed stations of the inexplicable. Like the stop after Lysá nad Labem where the train screeched to its ear-piercing stop in a ghost town of rusty roofs and spent lampposts. There, with dozens of abandoned freight cars littering the sidings, inertia settled upon the train in an eerie silence, as if we were waiting for the arrival of some determining force.

Suddenly and with wind-whipping speed, a train thundered past on the nearest line to ours, rattling like a tin of giant dominoes. We waited. A random passenger, glued into headphones, opened a door, descended directly to the tracks. ‘Wait!’ I wanted to call, remembering the train that had just passed us, ‘Somebody stop him!’ No one looked up from his luncheon roll as the man crossed five working lines and placidly disappeared over a ridge towards nothing. We opened the window to listen to the silence, and heard in this eerie hiatus birdsong sweet in the late spring air. Then, for no apparent reason, with a shudder and a thud our train wheezed to a start and trundled on. Nothing except the birds had made sense to me.

The further east we went, the odder things became until, arriving at Nachod on the Polish border, the supply of familiar so diminished that the neat plaiting of familiar and unfamiliar started to unravel. We had been travelling since 4.00 a.m. We’d had no time to stop for breakfast in the Prague station rush; at nonsensical Lysá nad Labem, we’d had no rolls to unpack while the savoury scents that pinged from the popped tins of our neighbours’ paté had snaked across the aisles to torture us. It had been nearly twenty hours since our last meal. Heady with hunger, we spied with delight just outside the station a little wooden cabin called Bramborka, ‘The Little Potato’, selling all manner of potatoes – fried, chopped, made into pancakes, even potato sandwiches – and a choice of two hot drinks: punch and … ‘Grog!’ I exclaimed, laughing at the absurdity of this drink I had always imagined was reserved for pirates in storybooks. The person at the window of the cabin was not, however, a fellow pirate but a harried middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt and fat-splattered apron, a fish slice in her hand, waking me out of my dream with a question I could not understand but which seemed to require a swift reply.

Though I could read nothing, photographs of my culinary options were helpfully pasted to the walls of the Bramborka. Encased in damp plastic, they showed pictures of what I took to be mainly meaty things in bread rolls, various deep-fried chicken parts (though they could as easily be rabbit), and flat roundish shiny things that could be pizzas or pancakes, or might in fact be flying saucers. Although there was no queue behind me and little sign of one building in the near future, I was clearly taking too long to decide; the apron lady uttered crosser-sounding words than the first. I pointed at one of the flying saucer pancake pizzas and stuck my head into the window to watch. Would it come from the oven? A fat fryer? From a freezer? But the cabin was ill-lit and I could see little.

As I pulled my head back out I noticed four dark-haired gypsies around us and Zuzana urging my suitcase closer to the protection of my careless calves, but no threat was real to me. Nothing was quite real to me, or rather, one real thing did not relate to another. The sequential links by which we recognize our place in the familiar world were damaged here and I was increasingly left with a series of lucid but somewhat isolated impressions.

The grog arrived tawny and clear, steaming in its cheap plastic cup. Gingerly I drew it towards my face, my fingers pressing dimples into its flimsy sides. I sipped. Liquid heat torched my nose and eyes and throat all at once. I passed the cup towards Zuzana, who had been called back to the window for our order. Shiny and hot, my bramborak slid across the counter with greasy ease on a torn sheet of non-absorbent paper. Eyeing it suspiciously, I lifted it slowly in my fingers and bit. A little rubbery, I reflected, but not so bad really with a day’s hunger behind you.

Even with some food inside us, Nachod continued to feel like an absurd theatre. We knew we had to catch a bus across the border to Poland but the bus timetable appeared to run backwards, so that the bus which left Nachod at 16.45 arrived at Kudowa Zdroj at 16.25. I handed it to Zuzana in despair. The tall gypsy woman, ruby earrings glinting against her deep black hair, glared at us aggressively from the Bramborka bar. Her man downed his large bottle of beer and peered with benighted interest at the contents of his fellow’s small pull-along wagon: one torn traffic cone, two packets of soap powder and a disembowelled white portable television. The value of these things was completely lost on me, as was the continuing attraction of the grog, although two loud lads arrived by farting car and queued for it with a relish amounting almost to glee.

Scanning eagerly for a sign, a word, anything familiar, my eyes lit upon a poster pasted among many on the wall of a nearby shop advertising classes where you could learn ‘Magic English’. Foxed by the impossible bus timetable which suggested to us that we had already missed the last backwards bus of the day, I began to wish for anything magic or anything English that would help us get out of there and to a comfortable shelter for the night. Slippery bramboraks swallowed, we abandoned the remaining grog and approached a kind-looking woman with a toddler standing near the taxi rank. ‘Yes, this is the taxi rank,’ she said, ‘but the taxis don’t go from here.’

* * *

Nestled in the wooded foothills of the Stolowe Mountains, enriched by salt mines and served by thermal springs, Kudowa Zdroj is one of the oldest spa resorts in Europe. In 1580 mineral waters were noted in the region at Czermna in the Chronicles of Louis of Nachod. Decades later a seventeenth-century Lutheran monk wrote about the tasty mineral waters at Kudowa, their health-giving properties and their usefulness in wine-making. Such a treasure couldn’t remain unclaimed, and the first official owner of the springs was Albrecht von Wallenstein, commander from the Thirty Years’ War, the war that denuded the region of its trees, plundered its wealth and decimated its population. The public consumption of spa water gradually began.

As early as 1630 small shelters are known to have been constructed from wood to facilitate healing baths, and the first attempt at a scientific description of the baths was made in 1694. But it was not until nearly two hundred years later, after the first scientists and doctors had made a chemical analysis of the waters which suggested that they had healing properties for the cardiovascular and circulatory systems, that Kudowa became a popular destination for the nineteenth-century élite. Under their entrepreneurial eye, what had been a small healing fountain with little wooden cabins near a remote castle grew to a fully fledged thermal park with avenues of palms, box-edged beds opulently spilling flowers, and an arboretum of species trees.

In 1847 the spa was visited by three hundred patients. By 1900 the number was 4,150 and, with a railway, in 1906 the numbers doubled. Among Kudowa’s most illustrious visitors were the courtier, diplomat, adviser to the Ottoman Empire and Commander of the Prussian Army, Helmut von Moltke and his family, and the wartime English Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Kudowa is a place that has changed its name many times. From Lipolitov under the Hussites to Chudoba in the mid-sixteenth century, then Kudoba in the nineteenth century, it became Bad Kudowa during the period when it was part of Germany in the province of Lower Silesia, then Kudow Zdroj after 1945 when many German inhabitants were forced to leave and Polish settlers filled their places.

Despite the ravages of war, much of its nineteenth-century grandeur remains. Palm trees line the wide gravel paths that lead past indoor and outdoor concert halls, past the handsome rotunda that now houses the pump house. Beneath American pines, Japanese ginkgo and towering copper beeches, azaleas and rhododendrons flash their bold bright blooms. Benches abound, paths meander up the side of the hill, the park growing wilder and steeper till it merges with woodland paths that lead eventually beyond the park to a high-level ropes course heavy with happy youths, and beyond that to the small village of Czermna. Despite all of this, Kudowa Zdroj is a quiet place. Its healing waters and tranquil hills have not yet hit the modern international tourist trail.

It seems they have not even hit the Czech tourist trail, for the taxi driver we eventually found, decrepit as his car, hunched wheezing over the wheel, seemed entirely lost once over the border. What was worse, between gasps, he recounted his recent release from hospital, the infuriating refusal of anything to work properly – the brake pads, his heart, the gearbox, his lungs. With each gasp and clutching at his chest, we feared both he and the taxi were on the brink of complete demise. ‘Perhaps we should just stop here and get out’, suggested Zuzana at the precarious bend of an unknown road. I glanced at the darkening sky and shook my head.

The taxi rattled ominously at the change of gears and groaned up the hills until either the driver or the car grew tired of trying. Dropping us unceremoniously by the side of an empty road somewhere outside Kudowa Zdroj, he declared us to be ‘in Czermna’. This he said in English, pointing fiercely to the ground at our feet and repeating it twice in case we were in any doubt. Pocketing our koruna with obvious satisfaction, he lurched back into the car, banged the rusty door and clattered off, leaving us with a cloud of black exhaust and a sincere wish to be somewhere else, somewhere kind and warm and waterproof.

There were puddles in the gravelly grit at the roadside and clouds overhead. Evening was upon us. With no idea in which direction to go and a plucky hope that Barbara would still be waiting for us when we got there, Zuzana hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder blades, I yanked my pull-along into line and we trudged on. Keeping to the road climbing gently away from Kudowa Zdroj towards the hills, in the stillness of the evening countryside my noisy tag-along rumbled on the tarmac like a thunderous armadillo. We fed on hope and on humour, laughing at the folly of our city selves trundling along the road to nowhere, in approaching darkness, in a foreign land, with ridiculous baggage.

Eighteen colourful gnomes flashed their stone smiles at us from the garden of a concrete bungalow. After the gnome house a settlement, then street names appeared, and persons we could ask. Suddenly, from a pub across the road, a gang of shirtless young men vomited, brawling, into the street. One knelt on the chest of another at the side of the road, held his close-shaved head in line with any oncoming car and pummelled it. Bright blood spurted from his nose, scarlet ribbon on the gritty tarmac, and we stood transfixed by the force of that violence and the terrible potential of a car arriving suddenly over a hill in the dusk. Two neighbour ladies, clutching their cardigans, leaned over a gate absorbing the scene with curiosity and no alarm, adding it to their week’s quota of quotidian gossip.

Shaken, we fled into a muddy side street. It was Chrobrego Street, where we hoped to find Barbara. Instead, she found us, sliding inexorably, arms flailing, through ever-deepening mud towards a neighbour’s wire mesh fence. ‘Halo girls!’ she called, her smile in the dusky twilight as bright as the midday sun.

* * *

I was not prepared for Barbara, though Barbara had prepared a space for me. Short and round and cheerful, with grey-peppered hair yanked back and gathered into a small practical knot, the sleeves of her patterned jumper were too long, as if it belonged to her husband or her brother. She and Richard had been there for hours stoking the antediluvian coal-fired boiler; she had got out her best china for our tea. Countless times I have extended hospitality to visitors; now there I was, receiving. Receiving puts everything on someone else’s terms. And the terms of Barbara’s house were not terms with which I was familiar. There was not chaos in Barbara’s house but a different kind of order. In a journey of increasing strangeness, stepping into Barbara’s house took me past eccentric to the very edge of the absurd.

There were five let rooms in the house. Ours was number 16. Zuzana turned the key and we ducked to enter, finding ourselves in a low-hung room full as a second-hand furniture warehouse with a king-sized bed between marble-topped nightstands. Beside formica cupboards squeezed an ancient wireless and a beautiful antique child’s sleigh on which perched a charmingly threadbare teddy.

‘Would you like some tea or coffee?’ Barbara called up the steep linoleum-lined stairs. Every surface in the house, I had noticed, horizontal or vertical, was covered with objects, paintings, carvings, hangings. Portraits abounded – particularly a primitive collection, painted on thin cut-outs of wood, with long Modigliani necks and faces.

My eyes ranged over everything in our room, fascinated by the wildly eclectic collection of pictures that bedecked the walls. Gulping images, I tried without success to make any kind of sense of their selection and arrangement – the ghastly and the exquisite given equal pride of place, the only apparent organizing factor for their position being the availability of space. Beautifully painted old ceramic tiles of peasant girls holding an arch of flowers hung next to faded Renoir prints, Japanese ladies painted in reverse on glass and socialist-realist peasant Holy Families. Over the double bed an erotic print showed a woman manacled to a rock, head thrown back in torturous ecstasy, fingers to her nipple, pleasuring herself. Next to her, lithographs of churches averted their eyes, and a nineteenth-century woodcutter ignored her and got on with his work.

My eyes drank on – a bleak hunter in winter, La Bohémienne, then Leda and the Swan coupling; two nineteenth-century Dutch women in black conversed at a table; Holy Mary held her child facing out to the world; another woman paused at an open gate waiting – for escape, for her lover, possibly for a letter. My brain called ‘Enough!’ but my eyes wanted to miss nothing of this jabber of human life, its agonies and ecstasies, its myths and lore, its transgressions and indefatigable hope.

The practical function of the room was no less bizarre. There were three kinds of curtains at the one window. None of them closed, though one at the top gave a credible imitation of Bo Peep’s flounce. As it turned out, our giant bed was in fact two singles pushed together and rigged out in faux-four-poster style by fixing a narrow frame of gas pipes to the ceiling and draping bits of greying net curtain over them, fastened with small neon-bright plastic hairclips. The bed itself was made up in exquisite antique white embroidered bedclothes trimmed in handmade lace. What was inside the lumpy duvet cover we decided not to investigate. It might have been an ancient duvet; it may have been a collection of odd pillows or old teddy bears.

For the last 20-odd hours I had been rattled by planes and cars and trains, dumbed by foreign languages, famished, fed slippery potatoes and grog, glared at by a ruby-eared Romany, dumped at a violent roadside, taken further and further from anything familiar and ended up here in the queerest house an absurd fairytale could invent. Anything could happen next. From any one of the squeezed-in wardrobes, trolls or bandits or giant German-speaking gummy bears could emerge. I would not have been surprised to discover that the second staircase led into a cavern or the nest of a phoenix.

The loo, it seemed, was down a long corridor constructed in the eaves of the house. You ducked, felt your way past head-bashing beams. An acid yellow cistern in dispute with its bowl, topped with a hot-pink plastic seat. The sliding door and cramped quarters made me feel I was still on the train and I half-expected to hear my station called halfway through proceedings. But it was Barbara, mother of comfort, calling that tea was ready. I washed my hands.

A strong smell of coal and a slice of homemade apple cake greeted us downstairs. Richard, who had stirred up the heater and boiled the kettle for tea, emerged from behind a curtained compartment in the kitchen, slightly blackened and smiling proudly. I glimpsed, before the curtain closed, an array of unfamiliar tools and a puzzling heavy, black, coal-consuming contraption about the size of an American washing machine. Barbara laid out her teacups and her visitor’s book and her creased maps of Kudowa. Tea. At last something familiar. Breathing deeply, I could feel my whole self relaxing in the scent of it. Richard, who spoke Polish and not much at all, smiled; he had baked the cake and watched with pleasure our complete satisfaction at its consumption. Moist and crumbly, dusted with icing sugar, it was the best cake I had eaten in years.

Over that cake and tea, Barbara told us about the Beinhaus, about the local man who had gathered the bones and built it as a place of reconciliation, and about the Germans who had come back recently to repair it. Like ants that carry a weight of bread in heroic increments, they were there, working away by neighbourliness and generosity to purge a guilt that remained.

Too late by then to find the charnel house open, we settled for an evening stroll. Seizing a black showerproof shell of Barbara’s from its peg in the hall, Richard thrust it in my direction. ‘Take it,’ he said in Polish, ‘she will not mind. She is like Mother Mary, always thinking of someone else’s comfort.’ His face broke into a beaming smile, so proud of his simple, round, hospitable wife. The coat engulfed me, sleeves hiding my hands entirely, the pocket so low I had to bend over to find it. Like a child in her elder sister’s cast-offs, I felt small and grateful in Barbara’s coat.

We re-entered the damp twilight of beautiful, brutal Czermna, unsure of what we might find but calm in the knowledge that at least we had a bed for the night. Our first discovery was a small corner of the ossuary’s courtyard dedicated to foreign graves – Hubert, Agnes, Ledwig, Karel, familien Kreigel, familien Aulich – Germans mostly and some Czechs, and a German/Polish plaque telling us that these women, men and children, whose homes were near Czermna and who now rested together in the designated plot, were reminding us of reconciliation.

Only steps away, across a cobbled courtyard, over the door of the chapel we had come to see, under the guardianship of two angels in the frieze overhead were carved in stone the words ‘Kostnice, Kaplica Czaszek, Beinhaus’ – ‘Ossuary’, ‘Skull Chapel’ and ‘Bone House’, in Czech, Polish and German respectively. This area of land, so fought over, so tossed about, handed from victor to victor like a parcel, still seemed to defy the conventions of ownership. Shared by all these peoples, it was also home to all their dead.

As we cut back through the cemetery, evening mist rose over the hills, and we were taken out of our tiredness by the magic of dozens and dozens of flickering lights which glowed from as many graves. The dead were so much with us here, it was as if they had not ceased to be. ‘Dozens of people’, I said quietly, as Zuzana and I sat on the bench and listened, ‘must have come here this evening from houses all over the village, and lit these.’ I imagined their brief private pilgrimages from supper table to grave, from bus stop to cemetery gate. Had they spoken to each other, to their dead, to God?

How un-English, I thought – the monumental graves, the gravel underfoot, the cold metal benches and faded silk bouquets. The graves were mainly marble, shining as if varnished. They were feted with flowers and silk bouquets fresh and drooping, and some were planted up as gardens with roses and everlastings or with colourful busy lizzies, begonias, petunias. There were benches dotted randomly where one could sit and be friendly with one’s earth-under family and with one’s memories, with the sounds of evening as we were: mournful bullfinches calling to soundless batwings, cicadas clicking in a sleep-inducing drone.

Across the fields, squares of light appeared in farmhouses and cottages and then, as full night descended, a comfortable woman in a cardigan smiled at us as she closed up for the night. It was 9.30 p.m. Reluctantly we rose and left the night-lights in their lanterns burning yellow, green, orange, reddish, white, a village of prayers, or souls, or something I cannot name – presences – behind. In the morning they would have expired, I expected, or been extinguished.

There was no loneliness on that hillside but a steady falling stillness. Not approaching silence, pierced as it was by near birds and distant haloos of youths down in the town below, but quiet, as if the quieter you got inside the bigger your ears became. Here was the company of the dead and the company of the living (birds, boys, bugs) tumbling together like stones and water in a brook and creating out of the counterplay of their contrary motion and immobility a kind of music that was sometimes harmony and sometimes dissonance.

The tourist brochure calls this place a ‘Sanktuarium Milczemia’ – ‘Sanctuary of Silence’ – a noun made of a verb, like our English gerund; it implies active silence, a cessation of speech rather than the absence of sound. One didn’t have to find words at all, just listen and watch. Watch the evening fall, houses disappearing into darkness, the lighted window squares appearing, candle lanterns flickering on graves; listen to a howl of a guard dog, the rising and falling churr of the nightjars, a chug of buses far away, the call of open spaces and finally, behind one’s back, a clank of keys.

Back at the cottage, with too much inside my head, I drew a chair up to the crackling log fire and wrote until I felt the pen about to drop from my hands. Still I could not sleep until, well past midnight, Zuzana and I laughed ourselves to tears as we ran through all the absurdities of the day. Tears perhaps and laughter are what we needed, I think now, as I write these memories into a book. How else can any of us face mortality? The unexpected joys of life, the grim brutalities of death? Tears and laughter and friends.

Blind and slow as slugs, we rose next morning to find an enthusiastic note from Barbara. ‘Halo girls,’ it read, ‘here is tee, coffe, pestry. Do not drink the weter.’ Rummaging in the bursting cupboards for a saucepan, I found threescore of them stacked inside each other like Russian dolls and learned that Richard and Barbara do not live in a disposable world. Water boiled, I sank a nameless tea bag, stirred the coffee which floated in Zuzana’s cup like sawdust. There was a small but ample jam-jar of milk, half of a half-squeezed lemon wrapped carefully in twice-used foil, two remaining pieces of Richard’s apple cake and a generous jar of home-pickled cucumber slices.

I expected pickles with apple cake to make me feel almost as giddy as the cocktail of pictures upstairs had done; what I felt instead was a sense of gratitude. I had been given the best there was – fruit of the ground and work of human hands. The frugality and generosity of this breakfast touched me deeply. Locking the door behind us and leaving the keys, we carried our bags from Barbara’s a little sadly, orphans again in a sea of strangeness in search of the meaning of bones.

* * *

I had set out on this journey wanting to let myself be awakened by strangeness. I had thought this would mean having a mind like an empty book, with pristine pages, ready to record impressions. Certainly many impressions came – fast and furious and sometimes too many to process all at once. But there is another kind of innocence I did not know I had to find. It does not have primarily to do with spotlessness but with receptivity. It is not blank merely, but bright-faced and open. It deals not in the absence of impressions but in the willingness to receive them.

The stranger, like Traherne’s infant, receives. Not only information, not only impressions or experiences or knowledge. He or she also receives degrees of brutality and kindness. The infant who does not receive kindness dies. Simple as that. The parameters of life and death that are stark for an infant may be less stark for adult strangers who have at least the wit, the mobility, the strength to feed themselves, seek shelter and defend themselves from attack. This journey never brought me to the brink of danger as other adventures have done, but it has taken me deeper into the knowledge of my need of other people, deeper into gratitude for kindnesses and deeper into an understanding of those simple things which are common to all humanity. It reminded me that need is sometimes the mother of receptivity.

I had chosen Barbara’s house because it offered an authentic slice of local life, because it looked zany and fun and quirky. I had not thought about it belonging to someone who loved it and who might offer it without guile to strangers. We came in inquisitiveness, willing to be charmed by the naive. Equipped with a small knowledge of art and the benefit of some of the world’s best galleries behind me, I came smiling and friendly, and with a secret sliver of superciliousness sharp as a scimitar, curved as a smile, stashed in the lining of my coat. It sneaked past all airport security; it sneaked past my best intentions. It was not until I saw it out of the corner of my eye flashing its keen edge in the direction of the plastic Smurf collection that stood on the top of Barbara’s antiquated television that I was even aware it was there.

How do you rid yourself of such odiousness? How do you get the broom to reach the utmost corners of your heart? I was glad of Barbara’s coat. Glad of its warmth. Grateful too to feel myself shrunken in its capaciousness, to be humbled by my need of it. Wearing it I began to understand the difference between curiosity and receptivity.

It was good to have had to travel a long way to our first charnel house; I had to be taken far away from the familiar. Hungry, worried, displaced, tired, faced with brutality and beauty, only then was I ready to see. How much it takes to have open eyes.

* * *

The Skull Chapel in Czermna was built in 1776, the year that Edward Gibbon’s first volume of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published and Adam Smith was bringing to the world his Wealth of Nations; the same year that my home country the United States was being born. It was a leap year, with an erratic summer which saw unprecedented storms in New York. In July the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia rang for the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, and Mozart’s celebrated Haffner Serenade was first performed in Salzburg, Austria – war being declared in one place while great music was being made in another.

That same summer, in a remote corner of what was then called Lower Silesia, the remnants of past wars were reasserting themselves for legend has it that, while the local parish priest Vaclav Tomaszek was out walking, the noses of his dogs discovered something new in the low-lying fields nearby. Bones. Human bones. Following the trail of his super-sentient dogs, he was horrified to discover feet and shoulders, elbows and ankles protruding in places between the bunches of long waving grass. Some of the bones had been clean clear of skin for a more than a hundred years; some of them had been dead hardly more than ten. These were the mass graves of victims of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and the more recent three Silesian Wars (1740–63). There were shallow graves too of people who had died of cholera epidemics and starvation that followed the wars. Too many bodies, too many wars. Too little respect afforded to these fallen.

One by one, so the tale goes, he started carrying the dead up from the shallow graves. Two of his fellow villagers, Schmidt and Langer, came with carts to help him. They worked through the whole hot summer, rags tied over their noses in the dust, skull after skull, bone after fractured bone, collecting up the toothless fragments of human life.

Another account suggests that a gathering of bones already existed in Czermna, in a wooden charnel house so dilapidated that dogs were able to enter, dig out the bones and carry them off; and that Vaclav Tomaszek’s rebuilding and additions to it were aided by the parish gravedigger Josef Pfleger. Perhaps there is truth in both stories. He may have been aided by all three men and more as he took an inheritance of bones that had become prey to dogs – victims of wars and epidemics – and gathered, cleaned, restored and secured them in this huge project begun in that summer of 1776.

In October, from the opposite end of kingdoms to Czermna, from Stettin in the northwest corner of Poland by the Baltic Sea, the tall, buxom, seventeen-year old Sophie Marie Dorothea of Württemberg went to marry the crown Prince Paul of Russia. An intelligent, multilingual, rosy-cheeked young woman adored by all the court, she would become the Empress of Russia and mother of Tsars. While one European empire blossomed, in Britain the future looked bleak, for that same October, on All Hallows Eve in London, King George III admitted to Parliament that all was not going well for Britain in the war against the Americans. Quietly, as if immured from these international disputes and alliances, in Czermna, Vaclav Tomaszek sorted still more bones for the chapel that was being built. Three thousand skulls in the chapel above, a purported 21,000 more in its crypt.

It took him eighteen years to build the chapel, ten more to finish gathering, cleaning and arranging the bones. By the time he and his colleagues had finished in 1804, America, which had just declared war when he started, had gained its independence and was engaged in the business of becoming a nation, ratifying amendments to its constitution and, in the Louisiana Purchase, acquiring from France that vast tract of land that stretched from the mouth of the Mississippi through the Mid-West and all the way up to Canada. The northern states had abolished slavery and battle lines were being drawn up for the next (the Civil) war that would decimate its population.

During all of this time Vaclav Tomaszek is thought to have been bone-hunting, gathering up the scattered German bones and the Czech bones, the Polish bones and the Silesian bones. Bones of soldiers whose armies and sometimes whole nations had long ago disappeared, and bones of the women they raped and sometimes the women they loved. In 1804 in England, William Pitt the Younger began his second term as Prime Minister, while in Paris Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself the first Emperor of France. As far off as Haiti, in the only successful slave revolt ever, Haitians gained their independence from France, while Serbia began its revolt from the Ottoman Empire.

As the world turned radically around him, Vaclav Tomaszek completed his single-minded task. Clawing order from an inherited chaos, he gathered up the broken bits of anonymous humans, cleaned and stored the unclaimed remains. A frieze was carved on the outside of the chapel above the doorway: two handsome angels reclining on either side of a skull and crossbones. One held a chalice, the other an hourglass. Above them all, he had carved a triangle with an all-seeing eye ever-open in its centre – symbol of the Holy Trinity and the ever-watchful eye of God. When all the 24,000 were in their final resting place and his job was finished, he fastened the shutters. There were stone walls in carved Baroque and a pantile roof. Never again would dogs be able to find them.

* * *

This is how it is inside. Solid walls of skulls and femurs rise to a ceiling heavily hung with skulls and crossbones suspended on wires. You cannot avert your eyes; there is nowhere the bones are not, and many of them at hand height are polished to an impossibly shiny black with touching. It is a small room. One coachload of people standing shoulder to shoulder fills it entirely, and Zuzana and I are pushed by shuffling schoolchildren to the very edges, right to the walls, so that my legs are touching those polished femurs, my shoulder a skull’s cheek. If I were to turn my head even slightly to the left my eye would look straight into an empty socket, my nose would probably fit neatly into the triangular gap where its nose had been. It would, lipless, kiss me.

Plank-stiff I freeze, keep my eyes on Sister Maria of the microphone whose mouth intones in weary Polish the story of the Kapila Czaszek. The unfamiliar vowels tell me nothing except that she is bored; the skull perched just whispering distance from my ear tells me not to move an inch. I don’t. Sister Maria points to the bones above, around her and below. Moving my eyeballs only, I glance up at the ceiling; see there, in the crossbones and skulls, the warning for piracy and poison, repeated over and over again like an incantation: ‘herein death, death herein’.

On one side of the chapel, in a niche half-obscured by protruding femurs, stands a sculpture of the messenger angel Gabriel who was sent to announce the conception of Christ to the Virgin Mary. A gilded band wraps round his muscular bicep and in his left hand he holds a trumpet, as you might expect a heavenly herald to do. ‘Raise the dead’, the inscription on his niche proclaims. Opposite him in a similar niche another angel, the archangel Michael, famous in battle, holds a balancing scale. ‘Come to court’, he calls. Life and judgment are coupled here – there is no hope of one without the other; the day of resurrection is also the day of reckoning. To be awake is to bear the consequences of one’s actions.

I know this charnel house is meant to be a place of reconciliation, that the bones of victim and perpetrator alike have been gathered, the vanquished and the victors laid side by side regardless of race or station. In this place beyond speech, where linguistic differences can have no bearing on their fellowship, it cannot matter that German and Pole and Czech and old Silesian mingle indeterminately. Common humanity, the dignity of all is what I am meant to sense, but all I feel is difference, hostility.

At the east end, behind a marbled green, lace-dressed altar, skulls alone are stacked floor to ceiling, each jawless chin seeming to devour the ash-white cranium on which it rests. Of course this is nonsense; skulls do nothing, least of all eat. The hostility I feel can only be coming from within me. And yet the walls of skulls are far too close for my liking. Stack them here and say their differences are somehow reconciled if you will, but their difference to me is certainly not.

Without moving my head, my eyes glance sideways at shoulder-skull. There are two remaining teeth in its unfortunate maxilla. They seem extraordinarily long. I am glad there is a vast chasm between the living and the dead. As if to ward off a gruesome nibble from those teeth, I remind myself of that chasm again and again while shoulder-skull bides his time four inches from my cheek.

There is fumbling at the front as weary Sister Maria swaps the microphone for specimen femurs: a broken and mended one, and the prize one of all, the long femur of a 2-metre man – ‘a seventeenth-century giant’, Zuzana whispers in translation. I am glad for this quirky diversion; so are the schoolchildren. Compelled by curiosity, they cease their fidgeting and their attempts at illicit skull-touching for a moment and listen. Laying on the altar beneath the painted and gilded crucifix is a display of skulls of particular interest: a mayor of Czermna and his wife, a skull eaten into lacy tracery by syphilis, the femur of a Tartar warrior and, of course, the skull of Vaclav Tomaszek himself who, after his labours were ended, came to join his friends.

The Polish word czaszek, says Sister Maria, is related to the Russian chashka or cup because the upside-down skull looks like a kind of cup. I am fascinated by this. It takes me away from my nervy gut and into my head, where I recall an article I read about the world’s earliest human skull cups, recently discovered in Gough’s Cave near Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. No one knows exactly what the Cro-Magnon cups were used for but they show signs of crafting (a euphemism for the tooth marks made by human gnawing) that correspond to primitive cups made in other parts of the world.

Skull cups were not always trophies; sometimes they were tributes. The Primary Chronicle tells how the skull of Svyatoslav I of Kiev was made into a goblet from which the ruler’s wife drank, praying for a son as brave as the deceased warlord. In England, 14,700 years after the tooth-gnawed Cheddar Gorge skull cups, nineteenth-century Lord Byron retrieved a skull found by his gardener, had it polished till it shone like tortoiseshell, and used it as a drinking cup. Claret was passed around, recalls Byron, ‘whilst many a grim joke was cut at its expense’. He even made a poem about it.

I am just about to file the whole scary skull thing neatly in this gruesome but distantly academic archaeological skull/cup folder when the nun lays a cut-in-half one on the altar. It looks for all the world like a very primitive chalice. A chalice of what, I wonder. Suffering? Remembrance? Affinity? Reconciliation? Suddenly it is not just Vaclav Tomaszek’s effort that is represented there, but mine too: all of those things remembered, lingering and unresolved. Dark as treacle, the unreconciled parts of my life have been poured into that primitive skull cup.

‘Take this and drink’ – the words of the liturgy echo in my warm and brain-sheltering skull. But I do not want to. I do not even want to stand here in this small death-crowded room one more minute. I have not travelled a thousand miles into foreign lands in order to tease the tangles of a lifetime. I have simply come to investigate interesting facts. ‘Look at Sister Maria’, suggests shoulder-skull. She is pointing to the skull of a woman with a hole in her head who has stopped remembering but is still reminding us of battles military and domestic.

Stranger than strange are these walls of the dead. They have no place speaking to me. I have come here to beat fear. I have set out to overcome, to be fearless and victorious, not alien and intimidated. But I see already that it will not be as simple as that. I cannot escape the alien, not only because in Czermna I am a foreigner, staying in a deeply idiosyncratic and random house. Those oddities are just the precursors to the Strangeness with a capital ‘S’ that we find in death. I knew before I set out that it was weird to share your house with hundreds of skeletons, and that a tour of ossuaries was not your typical holiday but, standing here with a skull whispering in my ear, I see that this tour of bones is alien in its very essence. Its destinations mark the proximity and inevitability of death, unavoidably and characteristically a place of alienation, whose farewell is not merely a buoyant bon voyage. You go into the absolute unknown, leaving behind everyone you love, everything you know, even your flesh and bones.

What I just begin to see, like a flicker at the edge of my field of vision, as I stand in that charnel house, is that it is quite possible I shall not slay this fear at all and that what is being offered to me is a chance for a different kind of victory. Not to silence these odd and disturbing bones, but to embrace them. How are you dealing with the broken bits, the small and large estrangements in your life? they ask. In this place of reconciliation I am not reconciled to my mortality and I know that there are lost and broken parts of my life that still lie as scattered as Vaclav Tomaszek’s bones.

When the double doors open I am as eager as the children are to burst out into open space and fresh air. I wonder if they have encountered mortality as I have, the sense that life is brief and that there is a house to put in order. Boisterous and bouncing, they collide with the next large school group waiting to enter. There is a long queue and they will be packed in to capacity. Another coachload will follow. I ask the children what they thought of the chapel. They shrug; it was part of an exciting day out, out of the ordinary but not momentous. ‘Do you want the same thing to happen to your skull?’ I ask. ‘No, no!’ they cry in unison. ‘Are you scared of being like that one day – just bones?’ ‘No,’ they say smiling, ‘we are not scared to die.’ This afternoon they will go from the bone house to the high-level ropes course in the woods beyond Kudowa to test the limits of their courage. Then they will go for an ice cream at the spa. Death, daring and delight will pound the walls of their dreams tonight like unleashed squash balls.

After the children had gone and the square was empty and quiet, I turned back. Easier here, on the outside, in the open air, I took one last look at the exterior of the small neat chapel, its smooth creamy stucco walls, its solid doors, its sky-high angels offering sacrament and memento. Handsome and young, they sit forever with perfect posture, wings proud, faces calm, Silesian breezes gently blowing their hair. Strong and flawless, they would outlive us all.

That is what the bones said, too, that lay carved between them, skull over bare crossbones. The trilingual inscription ‘Kostnice, Kaplica Czaszek, Beinhaus’ was meant to name what lies behind its doors. Looking again at a photo of the chapel pinned to the noticeboard by my desk, I see that in fact no words are needed. Whatever your mother tongue, you can tell just from looking at the frieze what you will find inside: a chalice of wine and the passage of time and bones guarded by angels under the all-seeing eye of God. I do not doubt that Vaclav Tomaszek felt himself to be under that eye when he carried out his long and demanding labours. I imagine it was not merely an overbearing love of tidiness that compelled him to embark on his task, but a greater longing to return something lost, redeem something damned; to restore human dignity.

Even with that task complete, the Skull Chapel at Czermna continues to function as a place where the stain of war may be expunged. I recalled Barbara’s story from the previous evening about expelled twentieth-century Germans and of the twenty-first-century ones who came back a few years ago to repair the floor of the Beinhaus that was falling in.

* * *

When I think about the Czermna charnel house now it does not fill me with fear. From the distance of my keyboard and my screen there almost seems to be something tamed about it, as if the efforts of Vaclav Tomaszek to claw order out of chaos were like the long labours of a lion trainer. He, quietly persistent and determined, pitting his patience against death’s as if it were a weapon. He could not win, of course, but he did manage to state clearly something about human dignity, a message that derives not from some great act of valour on his part but from the extraordinary respect he paid to the ordinary. Nothing, after all, is more ordinary than our bones. Without our skin and hair, our eyes and teeth, we look pretty much the same whoever we are, wherever we come from. It almost doesn’t matter to whom the bones belong – they could be anyone’s.

Czermna itself seems to me a place that does not know to whom it belongs. Passing from the hands of one ruler to another, through religious and irreligious regimes, having no mother tongue but change, it carries the imprint of Germanic, Slavonic, Lechitic languages in the engravings on its tombstones like hieroglyphs. If there is one language spoken in the Czermna charnel house it is the language of beloved dust – all of us coming up from dust, returning slowly to it in a regular rhythm of human mortality. Even the shape of the bones is mainly regular – so regular, in fact, that skulls and femurs can be stacked with something near the precision of bricks. ‘Each of these more or less samenesses matters’, is what Vaclav’s endeavours say.

The bones are not here distinguished by race, language, nationality, sex – the features that, while living, shaped their lives and often their deaths. A few particularly curious skulls are singled out, but the thousands that line the walls and ceiling, and that lie in piles below, say simply this: the ordinary matters. A life, however unspectacular, however unremarkable, however simple, is after all a human life and worthy of respect just because it is.

It was not only to these dead that Vaclav rendered respect in making that claim; he rendered it to his life too. Generations and an ocean away, he rendered it to my life and to yours. No life should be discarded, he said, spade after earth-filled spade. The diseased and the lame, the old, the broken, the full and the pregnant, the lusty and the lean, the soldiers with arms of chiselled strength mown down at the height of their power. They are all here, in his charnel house. Every human qualifies. Even enemies. No, I mean, especially enemies; the very fact that there were so many generations of enmity is part of what generated the need for this charnel house in the first place. I feel encouraged by the work of reconciliation that was done here and by the fact that even today it remains a place where those who seek to repair the damage of the past may find a way to do so.

And now, months after my journey I begin to understand that the link between strangeness and forgiveness that was first suggested to me in that charnel house in Czermna is a deeper one than I had thought. When you embrace the stranger you make your enemy your friend. It is not just that travelling to unfamiliar places, becoming for some brief time a sojourner and an innocent, may open one’s mind to learning, though that is true. There is a stranger also at your gate. Although at the time I was not able to respond to that challenge, Czermna’s question – Are the broken parts of your deep self being healed? – has haunted me. And I sense that deep healing and embracing the stranger are linked.

The bones in my cellar are my neighbours by proximity but not yet neighbours of my heart. I think of the admonition to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ that was once spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, perhaps the most familiar of all stories about how we might react to a stranger – the story of the Good Samaritan. A man was walking along a road and he was set upon by thieves who beat him and robbed him and left him to die. It is a story that offers no excuses to the self-righteous and stands expectation on its head, because it is the ‘friend’ who passes the injured man by and the despised rival who befriends. Healing and forgiveness go hand in hand with this embracing of the stranger.

Who is my neighbour? My newest neighbours are going to be bones; and I have been invited to embrace the bones within, to ‘count my days’, as the Psalmist says, because looking at mortality can make you wise. I see that now. But then, as I prepared to leave the site of our first charnel house, what I carried was a sack of jumbled impressions, a sense of alienation and sweet memories of kindness received.

* * *

On the bus leaving Kudowa I gathered my bags and sought to arrange my disjointed thoughts. I tried to make some kind of sense of the things I had seen and witnessed: the faded charm of Kudowa, its natural beauty and the full-hearted generosity of Barbara and Richard, their zany art collection with its yearning to give the irrepressible human spirit an airing. The struggle they and their neighbours have had for generations to stay alive through hard times. A warm coat offered to a stranger, and a man bloodied red in the street – that startling cocktail of kindness and brutality that is still, perhaps always, just beneath the surface of our everyday lives. I mulled over the linguistic and littoral legacy of battle: place names that change with victors, and bleached bones like beached driftwood protruding from the shore of a past war. I remembered walls of skulls and the joint of a giant. Bare bones and mineral springs. The things that remain.

The water does not change. Though the name of the place changes, victors change and with them languages, customs, laws, the water at Kudowa has remained its mineral self – ecologically purified and full of iron, useful for stimulating the metabolism and thereby treating circulatory ailments, heart valve defects, murmurs, endocrine system illnesses such as hyperactive thyroid, obesity, migraines and rheumatism.

With mineral integrity, while the world changed radically around him, Vaclav Tomaszek stayed true and fulfilled his single-minded task. Though no one understands them, Barbara and Richard maintain their quietly eccentric and artistic endeavours. I do not know whether it is owing to accident or precedent that these curious acts of collection and reconciliation have occurred in an ancient place of healing. Barbara’s collected objects appear to bear no relation to each other. They coexist, portrait alongside beer bottle alongside saucepans and lace and blackening coal-fired boiler. Vaclav’s intention is deliberate; reconciliation his clearly stated aim.

Both of them collectors of fragments, valuers of the lost and discarded, their collections rise indiscriminately from cultures not by being selected but by being gathered. We are so used to choice, our days a succession of selections, as if it is only by exercising our power to choose that we know we exist. Both Barbara and Vaclav Tomaszek gathered everything up, discarded nothing, believing that even the merest object could be redeemed – indeed, perhaps, that without the merest object nothing was redeemed. For Barbara it is usefulness that ascribes value, whereas for Vaclav simple humanity is value enough, and yet redemption is their common theme. Inclusion is their method.

This is almost the opposite to what I have come to understand about worthwhile activity. Trained in the deductive method of reasoning, educated to within a whisker of my ability to enjoy that education, my mind has been shaped to discriminate, to weigh, value, toss aside the inessential, jettison the irrelevant. Indeed, it has been shaped in such a way that only when discarding can it be certain it is on the path to clarity. It is only by reducing ideas or beliefs to their bare essentials that one can get at a kernel of truth. There is a certain valuable fruit at the end of this process. But there is a different fruit at the end of theirs, one I have not often tasted. I am not sure how I can carry any of it home with me without it spoiling on the way.

I wanted to stay a little longer in Czermna, to linger with these little-known and unmarked histories. I wanted to understand a fraction of the turmoil of this place and its deep need for peace; to drink its waters and let my sweet-coursing blood be pleased. Sad at our swift departing, I watched the town’s houses and parochial shops pass by and then, suddenly, alongside the road there was a dog remarkably like Barbara’s, and a man standing next to the dog seeming to point to it meaningfully. It was Richard, smiling serenely, and he was not pointing at the dog at all but beyond it to Barbara, whose big heart had pushed her body across a lane of traffic to stand in the median, in her borrowed jumper and her shining smile, waving with unabashed affection at two halo girls in a passing yellow bus.