Michael Harding: Icons appear and my peak cap vanishes

I was perfectly happy in that moment in the airport in Warsaw, until I realised that my hat was missing

I had a meal with the icon maker one evening in a beer hall beside the university. He spoke in broken English over a plate of pierogies as we sipped beer, and gradually I put together the story of how he became a student of icons.

“I was four years old when the icons appeared,” he says. “My father and mother went for a walk one day, and I was in the house on my own. So I decided to draw. I saw very clearly there were white walls all around me, so I thought: nobody can see me; I will use the wall to draw.”

And so he did. When his father and mother returned they went up to the wall and examined his drawings, but they said nothing to chastise him because the drawings were imitations of images he would have seen in church.

“The next morning I get out of bed,” he said. “And I see that my father and mother have worked all night to make the wall white. And I see that my drawings had disappeared and the white wall had reappeared.”

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Blank canvas

When his parents went to work, the child began all over again. But this time he used a chair so he could make more drawings on the wall.

“And the next day the white wall came back again, and so I thought my mother and father were preparing the wall for me every night.”

One day a friend of his father went up close to the wall and for two minutes he said nothing. But then he said to the father “I think you must show these images to somebody important.”

So a famous artist was invited to the house and he asked the child to draw something, and after two hours another naive icon appeared on the wall, and the artist said, “You must leave this child with me. And he must begin work.”

It seems that’s the way some people understand icons. They appear. And once you realise that they appear, your life changes. Everything that you thought was real becomes imbued with possibilities of transcendence.

Cold coffee, hot stares

One day I bought a hat from a vendor at the Christmas market. It was a peak cap, the kind you would see in a movie about the 19th century. I was delighted and wore it everywhere with a kind of attitude. But on my way home to Ireland it disappeared.

The boarding area of Warsaw Modlin Airport has a drinks outlet, a perfume outlet and a bar for coffee and buns.

I ordered a latte, paid for it and took it to a seat where I could look out at the sky. But the coffee was hardly warm, and so I went back with it.

I tried to assert myself but the woman behind the counter looked at me as if I had two heads. Then a tall woman beside me got irritated because she was in a rush to order her coffee, and I was holding things up.

They were glaring at me, so eventually I gave up and wished I had said nothing, instead of making an eejit of myself and annoying two women just because my coffee wasn’t perfect.

I mean, after all, what’s wrong with cold coffee? It’s not as if I was standing in the middle of Damascus.

I withdrew to my seat and drank the coffee and tried to forget the embarrassing moment. But I was already unbalanced. And when a young man leaned in on me and showed me his boarding pass and asked me where he might find the queue for the Lisbon flight, I was delighted. It gave me a way to shake off my bad mood.

He had sallow skin, soft Nepalese eyes, and an enormous rucksack. A rucksack I could hardly imagine being allowed on any flight. But that was none of my business. He wanted to find the queue for the Lisbon flight, so I said, “Let me show you. Please come with me.”

And I showed him, leaving my bags on the seat for a moment as we walked around the corner and I pointed to the screen on the ceiling.

“There you are,” I said. “The queue for the Lisbon flight.”

I was perfectly happy in that moment, until I realised that my hat was missing. And I never saw it again. My bags and coat were still lying on the same seat. But my beautiful hat was gone. It had disappeared.