On memory and questions which will remain unanswered (Weiser Dawidek by P. Huelle)

There are questions which can never be answered but which will always haunt us. P. Huelle's 1984 debut Weiser Dawidek (translated into English as Who was David Weiser?) revolves around such questions. 

The novel is set in postwar Gdansk which is the centre of the characters' universe. Three boyhood friends end the schoolyear and start their summer holidays. They hope to spend them on a nearby Jelitkowo beach but it turns out that that the bay has been poisoned by some mysterious substance which turns the water into a stinking mass of fish corpses. Some believe that the poison must have to do with the Soviets. Others say  that it has leaked out of a German U-Boat sunk in the bay. More religious ones attribute the poison to God's wrath. 

Like the first two theories on the origin of the poison, history is more of a speculation than a fact in the novel. It surfaces in the boys' games as they run after each other with makeshift weapons pretending to be fighting a war against Germans. It becomes more tangible only through Dawid Weiser, the school's other, a Jewish boy with whom the characters strike up a strange bond. 

The bond cannot be called "friendship," because the relationship between them and Weiser is neither equal or reciprocal. Rather than a friend,  Weiser remains a taciturn guide into the Gdansk that the boys had not been aware of. Behind the coarse facade of postwar, communised reality, there is a different Gdansk crisscrossed by secret pathways which lead to wartime brickyards hiding rusty weapons and unexploded shells. 

Weiser moves through this Gdansk expertly and easily, and always accompanied by his girl-friend Ewka,  rationing it to the boys in small, exciting doses. As it turns out, Weiser is a skillful pyrotechnic who concocts makeshift bombs to produce fantastically colourful explosions which he performs in front of the boys. 

Yet Weiser is much more than an amateur bomb-maker. He also seems to be something of a hypnotiser capable of taming wild animals by just looking at them, and at one point the boys see him dancing a mad dervish-like dance and then levitating above the floor. 

The most plausible explanation of Weiser's behaviour is that he wants to be a circus artist and therefore everything that he does is meant to prepare him for his future career as a magician and a wild-animal tamer. However, the theory falls through when Weiser fails to tame an aggressive black panther in a circus performance the boys attend together. 

And one day, following an especially spectacular explosion, Weiser simply disappears. He and Ewka enter a dark, narrow tunnel beneath an old railroad and never come out. 

Some time later, Ewka is found unconscious on the shore of a nearby pond. When she regains consciousness,  she suffers from amnesia and cannot remember what happened either to her or Dawidek. 

It is only at the end of the novel that we learn about the tunnel. The novel's axis is the boys' interrogation during which a sadistic teacher,  a police officer and the schoolmaster question  them about Weiser and Ewka's mysterious disappearance. To satisfy the interrogators, the boys agree on a fabricated version of the story: Weiser and the girl must have died in the last explosion and the boys found a piece of Ewka's red dress which they burnt in the fire. Although this version of events collapses once the girl's unconscious body is discovered, nobody ever finds out what happened on the day when the two disappeared. 

The case is put to rest, but the question remains and continues to haunt the narrator of the story, one of the three boys. Already as a grown man, he tries to find the answer: he digs into Weiser's past, visits Ewka, who is now living in Germany, and writes a story in which he reconstructs the events of his childhood to understand who Weiser really was and why he disappeared the way he did at the end of the summer holidays, just two days before the beginning of school. 

Yet the question is not only about Weiser. It is about the narrator himself. His at once frantic and systematic attempts to solve the irresolvable mystery of Weiser are a way to find a sense and structure to his own life; to grasp facts–and thus to rationalize–all that is structureless, that slips through the fingers.  His is a quest to recover memory, which is never objective but always fragmentary and untrustworthy, and therefore cannot provide the key to the past.

The only thing that the memory can open is speculation about the world which, as the last page of the novel puts it, has long been turned into ashes.  

Accordingly, there can be no answer to the question who Dawidek Weiser was and what happened to him. There is no answer. 

The mysterious Jewish boy who communicated with animals and levitated above the ground is part of the world which no longer is but which the narrator tries to desperately recuperate. By transforming his memory into words, he hopes to elucidate hidden answers. The story becomes for him like the tunnel where he last saw Dawidek and Ewka. He must cross it to see what is on the other side. 

The passage is both metaphorical and literal. At the end of the novel, the narrator follows in the footsteps of Dawidek and Ewka. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing on the other side of the narrow tunnel. 

But he has already known that. And we have probably sensed it all along. Yet he continues to tell the story, and we continue to read it for the sake of this long-lost world of postwar Gdansk, childhood mystery, and dark, pulsating history, which Huelle recuperates and shapes for us out of the magical  matter of (unreliable) memory and imagination.