John Paul II

Earlier today, about 10am, I decided the saturation TV and radio coverage was enough. As on all such occasions, after a certain point the biographies and interviews start to repeat themselves; all the TV stations were showing either live broadcasts from the Vatican, interviews with the great and good, or documentaries, the radio was either playing the usual 'solemn music' (it struck me as odd when they played Bach, here in a Catholic country) or the same round of interviews and reportage. So I went out, into the bright morning sun. The sun, anyway, was not in mourning.

There's a church opposite my place here in Warsaw. (Not that one usually has to go far to find a church in this country.) The people were standing by the doors; others were sitting or standing, silent, in front of the grotto with the statue of the Virgin Mary. The church was full, of course. I didn't go in. I am neither Catholic or Polish, and it was not my place to interfere. I didn't have to go in to perceive what was going on, though.

I couldn't hear what the priest who was presiding said, even though there were loudspeakers; by the door, the noise from the traffic was loud enough to make most of what he said inaudible. Also, a baby in its mother's arms was obviously in discomfort; you could see the usual flickers of irritation on the faces of other people, who forget their own children, or that they were once children themselves. Some phrases emerged; 'in the memory of the Holy Father', 'an end to suffering', but the words weren't relevant. People were being together. A woman next to me seemed to be smiling; then she removed her glasses and dabbed at her eyes. She was crying, but quietly, trying to be strong, perhaps. Her husband and their four- or five-year-old moved towards her; their presence seemed to calm her. After a moment of eye contact, they looked together towards the altar inside, as everyone else was doing.

I have the fortune to live on a tram-line which leads straight to the heart of the Old Town; riding the big shiny new tram to the centre, dominated by the old plague column erected by King Sigismund. The trams here, like the buses, are liveried in yellow and red, the city's colours. From windows and buildings hung little groups of flags; the white-and-red horizontal stripes of Poland, the yellow-and-white vertical bands of the Vatican, and the yellow-and-red of the city. Often, the flags were accompanied by thin black strips, signs of mourning; the buses and trams had them, as did the police wagons in the city centre, as they escorted dignitaries and monitored the crowds.

On the tram, a woman next to me sneezed; in this country, the equivalent of 'Bless you' is to say 'Your health', which I did. She turned briefly to me and said, 'Thanks... but I don't know if it's much to do with health.' Her watery half-smile was surmounted by shining eyes; she blew her nose, and I could see it wasn't a catarrh caused by the warm, sunny weather. A man in the seat in front of me was staring straight ahead, his face set, fists clenched, big working man's hands, not wanting to release anything, to let anything go.

It's funny how people choose where to go in these situations. Warsaw's Old Town doesn't lack churches or basilicae to go to; large, pompously imposing in that combination of Habsburg-looking baroque and post-Communist grey dirt which afflicts the buildings which haven't had a lick of paint for some big civil occasion. However, everyone seemed to be heading for the church of St. Anne. It wasn't particularly because the Pope had been there; he had, of course, and there was the commemorative plaque on the wall to recall that. But there are other places in the city with such plaques. The people were heading for St. Anne's, though; the television crews were there too, reporters and cameramen milling around, men in grubby jeans moving cables and spotlights around. Beneath the plaque, a mass of flowers and candles. Someone was moving the barriers around them, to expand the space they could be fitted into. A woman saw that one of the postcards with the Pope's face had caught alight from a candle; with great delicacy, she stepped into the mass of flowers, rescued the card and placed in it the safety of a bouquet of tulips.

Some people had put on something black, as a sign of mourning; I saw one or two middle-aged women, unaccompanied, wearing black dresses of an oddly child-like cut, maybe the kind of dress they wore when they went to church as children years ago. A tall young student had a black tie dangling loosely and incongruously around his sweater. Every so often, you could see an elderly couple with an air of pre-war sophistication; the man in a dark fedora and well-cut overcoat, looking like it was made of mohair or something equally old-world elegant, his arm in the crook of his large-hatted wife's elbow, proceeding slowly down the street. No-one was hurrying; everyone knew where they had to go.

As the morning went on, it became apparent to me that more and more people were going in the direction of St. Anne, as I walked away from the centre, back towards the trams; at one point I was almost literally walking alone against the tide of people as they headed for the centre. There was nothing special about them; the vast majority were normally dressed; all ages and classes were there. This was society; this was the people. No-one had told them to come there; no-one had to.

As I walked around, I heard brief snatches of conversation; 'the next Pope might be black', 'and what if he hadn't been so ill?' Free copies of the daily newspapers were being distributed; one vendor was getting rattled because she couldn't give them out fast enough. The headlines read, 'John Paul II has departed', 'He has returned to God', 'He stands near the Throne', 'Ready for the journey.' A common theme of the tributes inside was that people considered themselves fortunate, blessed, to have lived in his times.

At midday, the traffic stopped and the police cars' sirens were all started simultaneously. An eerie sound, so many of them making a weird, hieratic harmony. A young man had his arm around his girlfriend, who had quietly hidden her head in his chest. She was carrying a bunch of tulips in her hand; they hung limp, like a flag without the wind to blow it.