Free Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

stones, three wooden tables with benches. At one of the tables sits a man with slightly dejected shoulders, long hands and a high forehead made higher by the fact that he is going bald. His spectacles have thick lenses. He looks at home here this morning, although he is not Polish.
    Ken was born in New Zealand and died there. I sit on the bench opposite him. This man, sixty years ago, shared with me what he knew, although he never told me how he learnt what he knew. He never spoke about his childhood or his parents. I had the impression he left New Zealand for Europe when he was young, before he was twenty. Were his parents rich or poor? Maybe it makes as little sense to ask that question of him as it would of the people in this market at this moment.
    Distances never daunted him. Wellington, New Zealand, Paris, New York, the Bayswater Road, London, Norway, Spain, and at some moment, I think, Burma or India. He earned his living, variously, as a journalist, a schoolteacher, a dance instructor, an extra in films, a gigolo, a bookseller without a shop, a cricket umpire. Maybe some of what I’m saying is false, yet it is my way of making a portrait of him for myself as he sits in front of me in the Place Nowy. In Paris he drew cartoons for a newspaper, of this I am certain. I remember distinctly the kind of toothbrushes he liked – ones with extra long handles, and I remember the size of shoe he took – an eleven.
    He pushes his bowl of borsch towards me. Then he takes a handkerchief from his right trouser pocket, wipes the spoon and hands it to me. I recognise the handkerchief of black tartan. The soup is a clear, deep, red, vegetable borsch, with a little apple vinegar added to it, Polish-style, to counteract the natural sweetness of the beetroot. I drink some and push the bowl back to him and hand him back the spoon. Not a word has passed between us.
    From the bag slung over my shoulder I take out a sketchbook, for I want to show him a drawing I made yesterday from Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine in the Czartoryski Museum. He studies it, his heavy glasses slipping a little down his nose.
    Pas mal! Yet isn’t she too upright? Isn’t she in fact leaning more as she takes the corner?
    On hearing him speak in this way, which is so indisputably his, my love for him comes back: my love for his journeys; for his appetites, which he set out to satisfy and never suppressed; for his weariness; for his sad curiosity.
    A little too upright, he repeats. Never mind, every copy has to change something, doesn’t it?
    My love for his lack of illusions comes back too. Without illusions, he avoided disillusionment.
    When I first met him I was eleven and he forty. For the next six or seven years he was the most influential person in my life. It was with him that I learnt to cross frontiers. In French there is the word passeur – often translated as ferryman or smuggler. Yet there is also in the word the connotation of guide, and something of the mountains. He was my passeur.
    Ken flips backwards through the sketchbook. He had deft fingers and could palm cards skilfully. He tried to teach me Find the Lady: You can always make money with that! he said. Now he puts a finger between two pages and stops.
    Another copy? Antonello da Messina?
    Dead Christ supported by Angel, I say.
    I never saw it, only in reproduction. If I could have chosen to have my portrait painted by any artist in history, I’d have chosen him, he says. Antonello. He painted like he was printing words. Everything he painted had that kind of coherence and authority, and it was during his lifetime that the first printing presses were invented.
    He looks down again at the sketchbook.
    Not a trace of pity on the angel’s face or in his hands, he says, only tenderness. You’ve caught that tenderness, but not the gravity, the gravity of the first printed words. That’s gone for good.
    I did it last year in the Prado. Until the guards came to chuck me out!
    Anyone has the