Today, I have celebrated Eid al-Adha by trying out a new restaurant, one of those where the menu is only in Hindustani, the only drink available is tap water, and the plastic tablecloths are completely worn out and torn at the corners. But the waiter wore an extravagant kurta in rich aubergine tonality, adorned with a palmette pattern that took centuries to refine. I ordered lamb kurma, an original dish in which pieces of mutton are cooked in a surprisingly sweet gravy made of coconut milk, youghurt, cream, and who knows what else. It was rich in calories but extremely tasty.
As I published the photo on Facebook, an expert discussion ensued, asserting that kurma/korma should not be sweet and does not even look like that at all. For further reference, a link was send to me, narrating the history of what, philologically, should rather be called qorma. The term is related to the Turkish qavirma/qavurma. Is this the Turkic verb "kavurmak," meaning "to fry" or "to roast", that influenced Arabic, Persian, and Urdu? Or the other way around, the name of the dish it derived from the Urdu and Hindi word "qormā," meaning "braise"? I do not pretend to get it clear. Be that as it may, the dish is to be associated with a region encompassing Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Iran, and allegedly from there it migrated to northern India. For the rest, the reference source is worth a literal quotation:

"The recipe hints towards a mix of Turkish & Parsi recipe, in which the meat is fried, braised & cooked with herbs, vegetables or sometimes even apricots or pomegranate. Qovurma on the other hand is an Azerbaijani delicacy where the meat stew is prepared with dry fruits and sour grape juice/ Verjuice and vegetables.
The first mention of korma is found in the scrolls of Dastarkhwan- the royal table of the Mughal emperor of Bahadur Shah Zafar. It is safe to say that by then the Mughlai fusion between the Persian Khormeh, Azebaijani Quovurma & Turkish Qovurma had been born. While there were other versions that were formed such as Awadhi Korma or the variants formed solely on the basis of availability of ingredients. Mughlai korma has dominated Indian curries by large & far. So even so, that it even travelled with the land’s colonisers. 
The korma we cherish in present day India includes marinated meat/poultry braised with spices, roasted in ghee and khada garam masala. The gravy is formed by cooking browned onions with the meat and adding yogurt or cream to increase its richness. The glaze is formed from the ghee and the fat of the meat."
foodism.xyz/food-stories/The-History-of-Korma

Any of my stays in Lisbon brings me to one place: Feira da Ladra, a flea market held every Saturday and Tuesday at Campo de Santa Clara, near the National Pantheon, offering a splendid view over the white marble dome and the Tagus river. 
Although the view alone makes the visit worthwhile, I never leave empty-handed, and I usually bring only a limited amount of cash to avoid overspending. My latest passion is porcelain, and I recently purchased a small milk jug originating from the French region of Limoges. Although it does not bear any of the best-known luxurious marks—such as Bernardaud, Raynaud, or Haviland—it possesses a fine translucency and is marked on the bottom with the distinctive flag. Like many Limoges pieces, it is simply stamped Limoges France, which means it was made in Limoges but not necessarily by a specific renowned  manufacturer. Yet it brings this fine, discreetly playful, feminine Rococo spirit into my life. I love the organic feel and the rythmic twist of its belly. As if it had a dancing octopus inside. 

I am a descendent of Polish serfs. This is the opening sentence of an essay on Naipaul I've recently submitted to one of those Romanian journals of mine (I hope they publish it soon). What I evoke there is my bookless childhood, and the way how I came (parallel to Naipaul's A Writer's People) to have any idea of literature whatsoever. Yet another consequence of my being a descendent of Polish serfs is the fact that for many years I had great difficulty in throwing anything whatsoever that might still prove useful. A supermarket bag, for example. 
This is also the reason why I could make the unusual discovery that I actually made on my balcony. I possess there a triple bookstand with a triple glass door bought in Ikea some twenty years ago. This is where I keep my papers that might still prove useful. And which I eternally try to get rid of. 
It is with considerable surprise that I found there a vintage collection of issues of "Gazeta Wyborcza", some of them as old as 2001 and 2003. To celebrate the fact that I religiously kept them for the last 20 years, I decided to read them. 
They make indeed quite an enlightening reading, almost like a time machine taking me back to the beginning of everything, to the time before Poland even entered the European Union (2004). It really makes me think, it gives me a perspective. How we could put ourselves in the state we are (jak można było doprowadzić się do takiego stanu).
"Gazeta Wyborcza" was at its best those twenty years ago. I would say it was making quite an unusual newspaper, without an exact equivalent in Europe. It was a cultured journal, full of history, literature, and politics, and ideas. Paying more attention to religion than any newspaper in Europe would. Trying to capture, explain and cultivate values. Publishing memories of people who went to the theatre to see Konrad Swinarski's Dziady 10, and 20, and 30 times over and over again. Reflecting on what our European becoming might be. Organizing those memorable actions that aimed at educating the Poles linguistically ("Polish your English") and improving significant healthcare circumstances ("Rodzić po ludzku"). 
As I look back on it, I see clearly how it cultivated the Pole of today. There is a well-known, yet curious paradox in recent Polish history: the existence of two brothers, one of them the editor of the main opposition newspaper that "Gazeta Wyborcza" is, and the other one the author of the propagandistic tool that public television has become. It is thus easy to defend that together, they actually made the Pole of today. But of course, this is a matter of recent years, my vintage issues of "Gazeta Wyborcza" are much, much older.
Reading my "Wyborcza" time machine, I realise the shortcomings of this enterprise that was glorious in many ways. Its geographic horizons, for example. The widened worldview signified that it was essentially busy with regional reality, with some sort of Mitteleuropa or Middle-Eastern Europe (our own mythical Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia) with blurred frontiers, stretching to the Balkans and to Russia. The news from Western Europe was significantly scarcer, and they give me the feeling of distance. The news from other parts of the world was dictated by major conflicts, major events that simply couldn't be ignored; but they never occupied an entire page, contrary to the domestic and Mitteleuropean in-depth essays, that sometimes stretched over two pages, up to two and a half. But very little or nothing was coming from that distant world in terms of first-hand ideas, except, very occasionally, a translated article by Edward Said. The peculiar geography of "Gazeta Wyborcza" can be detected relatively easily. But it is only a metaphor for the peculiar geography of ideas, that also had its own blurred and relatively narrow frontiers. Yes, with all the richness of content and ideas, it all turned around just a couple of rather conservative points of view not far from home. 
This is how "Gazeta Wyborcza" managed to occupy the place that it occupied in Polish culture: a must of the intelligentsia. But the status came at a price: "Gazeta Wyborcza" never challenged the worldview of Polish intelligentsia; it preserved and protected its self-satisfaction. And it was a class surviving and perpetuating, under the communist regime, on sheer cultivation of the national culture, for only universal content having Greco-Roman antiquity. Perhaps because all the effort of bringing the diversity of the world closer to Polish readers (yes, it had been done) was put under the auspices of communist internationalism. This fact gave the intelligentsia an excuse not to digest it.
When History turned the page, "Gazeta Wyborcza" still made it easy for the Polish intelligentsia to avoid the discomfort of confrontation with the world. Just like the other Kurski's public television offered to the popular audience the world to live in, with their favorite disco-polo stars and without the discomfort of questioning or ambivalence. And this is how, reading the intelligent "Gazeta Wyborcza" or just passively staring at the TV, the Poles remained in that Middle-Eastern Europe of their own, and the true Europe is a transatlantic that slowly departs (has already departed) from their wharf. Being given a free ticket, they didn't even claim their place onboard. 
I'm nostalgic of that "Gazeta Wyborcza" twenty years ago, of our fleeting European spring, of being young at the time of those great expectations. Now I'm mature, and far away from that unlucky Middle-Eastern European wharf. At least mentally. And just once, I must agree with Kaczyński: they have never been truly European. There has always been a cultural difference. A gap that is just a bit too large to jump across. And it never occurred to anyone to build a bridge. Oh no, those people of "Gazeta Wyborcza" truly wanted to build a bridge, plenty of bridges. It's just that their engineering proved to be somehow flawed. Too fragile, falling short of reaching the opposite shore.
The first PiS government took office in 2006, only two years after the access of Poland to the European Union.

As the bleakness of summer goes on, I return to a book I have read early in my life, in the last years before the Polish transformation. It could be some time around 1988, just to give the idea. I suppose the Berlin Wall was still standing, but the wind of change was already blowing, bringing an unprecedented appetite for eroticism in Polish society. At the time, a little greyish book was printed on the cheapest paper: Wyznania chińskiej kurtyzany. Obviously, it was a best-seller, moving Polish imagination into hitherto unexplored horizons. A few years ago, I got a new edition of it, by nostalgia (W świecie wiatru i wierzb: Wyznania chińskiej kurtyzany, Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2012). Now, as I decided to pack it in my new transport of unwanted books destined to enrich the book room of Narol, or any other countryside library in Eastern Poland, I start to muse on this mysterious text, published without any indication of authorship - although there is a name of a supposed translator and editor: Jerzy Chociłowski. Checking his Wikipedia entrance, I see that Wyznania are mentioned as a translation from English, in 1987. Not unimportantly, a few years later, in 1994, Jerzy Chociłowski appears also as one of the translators of Kwiaty śliwy w złotym wazonie, which is obviously the famous Chinese classic (Jin Ping Mei, usually referred as The Plum in the Golden Vase). Nonetheless, Chociłowski is mentioned as one of the translators from Chinese(!). Could this journalist, who graduated in law at the University of Warsaw, know Chinese?
On the other hand, the presumable author of Wyznania, by the name Miao Sing, is absent from any source. Could the book be a forgery, just as the Wyznania chińskiej kurtyzany: Tortury miłości, in 1990, supposedly published/edited/translated/authored(?) by Witold Jabłoński, together with Maciej Świerkocki? The only books by Miao Sing (1926-...) on Amazon are these two texts in Polish. On the other hand, I find the indication that the original of Wyznania chińskiej kurtyzany is a text under the title Marvellous Pleasure, published in 1969. Nonetheless, I find no further notice of such a novel on Google.  
One thing is certain, the book has nothing in common with the 1972 Hong Kong movie under the title Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan. The film focuses on martial arts as much as sex (lesbian and otherwise). In any case, the brothel of the Four Seasons was a scene of murder and the subsequent police action. In contrast, the Polish Wyznania chińskiej kurtyzany is as peaceful and harmonious a text as an imagination at peace with the patriarchal order could ever invent. There is the Japanese occupation in the background, and at a given moment the Japanese shoot two Chinese clients right there in the elegant brothel, only to die under the revengeful hairpin of one of the courtesans. But overall, the book is dedicated to sex, and sex alone, that becomes the target of systematic study, inspired by the Taoist search for immortality. A lot of attention is dedicated to the sources of yin and yang, in any case. 
As my search for Miao Sing is vain, I try to make a close reading of the text looking for any hints. The confessions are supposedly produced by the old courtesan in various locations in and around London over endless cups of Chinese tea. Various kinds and types are mentioned, undoubtedly to enhance the attractiveness of the text; the female protagonists are connoisseurs in this as they are in sex. At a given moment, the interlocutors admire the Cutty Sark, presumably the fastest of ships bringing tea from China to England, which is now a tourist attraction in Greenwich. At least my new copy, published in 2012, mentions that the tea is a fair trade one. I wonder if such a mention also existed in the version published in 1987, when the idea was completely unknown in Poland (although the fair trade movement took shape in the 1960s). In 1987, in Poland, the tea that people used to appreciate was coming from Georgia, as far as I remember, and the trade, under the auspices of the Soviet regime, could only be fair. Most of those tea types mentioned in the text, even the Pu-erh tea, would be a mark of hardly understandable exoticism for most Polish readers. Is thus the book really a translation, and Miao Sing doesn't appear on Google simply because the literary value of the text is so low that it didn't open the gates of posterity to her/him? Somehow, I don't feel convinced. Perhaps because this text is so organically connected with my memory of the late communism in Poland, its specific longings and fascinations. The China Town of London could be just a valid object of it. And that the book, overall, is not as naïve as those of Zbigniew Nienacki, around the same time? Maybe the author(s) were simply more intelligent. This is why the old courtesan's interlocutor makes her shopping in Harrods and acquires Jeanne Lanvin's La Rose perfume, as well as Burberry trench for her husband. On sale, for a third of the price. And then... Gosh!

-- To pani nie wie, że Harrodsa kupił ten Arab z Egiptu?
-- Tak jest. Zgroza. Ale kiedy synek tego Araba...
-- Dodi.
-- Tak właśnie. Dodi. Kiedy się zabił w aucie razem z Dianą...

Well, definitely, this is not a translation of a novel published in 1969. Neither is this a faithful reprint of the late communist classic. Rather, Miao Sing was a sort of postmodern project, a work-in-progress (including also a next-generation novel, Uczennica chińskiej kurtyzany, by the presumable Liu Sing, written by the same tandem of authors, Witold Jabłoński and Maciej Świerkocki, in 1991). It was completely omitted, as far as I know, in Polish literary studies. The original courtesan of 1987 had the greatest repercussion, at least at the level of popular awareness concerning sexuality and eroticism; it contributed to change Poland and Polish provincial, obscurantist mentality; it opened new horizons upon things hitherto unspeakable and unimaginable (even if hardly anyone doubted that the book speaks of China, and its metaphorical way of approaching sex and speaking of it is profoundly and authentically Chinese). Nonetheless, the 2012 version with the death of Diana had no reception whatsoever; the book was nothing but the cheapest pornographic page-turner. The metadimension of postmodern mystification has been completely overlooked.

Time to return to Lisbon. I have a ticket for a KLM flight to Lisbon on 1st March; I exchanged it against a voucher they gave me as compensation for a flight that had been cancelled at the beginning of the Plague. And I have projects. A research project concerning Adamic restitution, and more than this. I'm thinking about writing a book in English, a thick book, a synthesis of all what I learned about Portugal during those years, and of what I wrote about Portugal in Polish. I even have a title: "Empire and Nostalgia. A History of Portuguese Culture". It sounds like the title of my old book in 2015 ("Imperium i nostalgia"...), so I would probably have to change it later on, but it serves me for now. But I will keep the structure (something and something). I am currently reading a similar book, The Icon and the Axe, by James H. Billington, a 1966 history of Russian culture. It inspires me; it reads so well, it is still so insightful. I like books that age well. 
This is why I would like to write something similar about Portugal, over some 500 dense pages. I think it's feasible, after Mgławica Pessoa, and after all those former books, like Terytorium a świat. Alternatively, I also think about a book that would deal exclusively with Portuguese Renaissance, a long Renaissance that would stretch till the end of António Vieira's life, and the evacuation of Mazagao. With all those adventures around the globe, including missions in China and in Japan, it might also fill 500 dense pages. 
Which of the two? I don't need to decide right now, I could just open a new file, and start extracting and translating into English whatever was worth having in my old Terytorium. I still have two boxes of notes I made at the time I was working on that book.
Something and Something. A History of Early-Modern Portuguese Culture. 

Christmas in Poland is no longer what it used to be. The Christmas tree I have this year is good, it is thick, with plenty of tiny branches, and smells nice. But there was practically no fish, just a slice, packed in plastic. Carp, nonetheless, should be eaten fresh, killed ritualistically, with a sharp knife, like on Hieronymus Bosch's painting. 
Overall, the food is bad, and I refuse to buy at those exorbitant prices. I refuse to pay in Biedronka MORE than I used to pay in the Auchan at Cergy Prefecture. Because it is simply not just. 
So my Christmas in Poland lacked many things. I was expecting local delicacies, but of those there was none. I ate a dead forelle; I guess that at some moment, retired from the pools when they are grown, they ARE fresh, even in Poland(?). Perhaps their Catholic beliefs prevent the Poles from eating the fish fresh, I don't know. Apparently, there was a saint who, being given a fresh herring, used to put it aside, and eat only when it became foul-smelling enough to fit his level of ascetic practice...
And I think of my last Christmas, in Paris, with its fallow deer, and crocodile, and wines, and exotic fruits coming from New Caledonia. As if it were on another planet.
Everyone is tired, deadly tired. Tired of scandals, of reading eternally the same kind of news, even tired of power. I am tired of that eternal fight against my own being-here, being-in-this. Tired of fighting against this invisible net that overwhelms me. Tired of lacking a different life.
We had been in Holland, two weeks, my husband and I, right before the beginning of that new lockdown. There, the fish was fresh, and the lemon was sour, just as it used to be on their paintings. The Hague was like on a Christmas movie, only lacking a tiny veil of snow. There is snow here. Rare, interesting. Who knows, it could be one of my last snowy Christmas. My last Christmas in Poland. It's possible. In one year, a lot of things may happen. Next year I could be somewhere. In Queensland, or New Zealand. Till next Christmas so many things may be different. 
I'm tired of falling eternally into the same shitty hole. The hole that becomes shittier and shittier as the years go by. 
I feel like nothing happens in my life, there is no change, the stagnation is overwhelming. In my life! I know, I have no right to complain. Whose life is dynamic, if mine is not? But I need bigger change, a game-changing change, a breakthrough.