Poet Czeslaw Milosz's last days

Should his final resting place be with his mother, in a city near Gda{nacutel}sk? Illg dismissed the notion outright. "Who will light a candle for you there?" he asked.

Should he be buried instead in his beloved homeland, Lithuania -- perhaps in Vilnius, the city of his youth?

Illg proposed the famous cemetery in the Salwator district of Kraków. Many poets and critics were buried on the hilltop graveyard. It would provide "good company and a good view."

When, sometime later, Illg told Bronislaw Maj about this conversation, the younger poet chided him. Milosz had been fishing for the obvious answer, the mollifying answer: Wawel, the ancient castle/cathedral complex at the very heart of Kraków. Poland's leading poets are honored there -- Norwid, Slowacki and, of course, the nation's ur-poet, Adam Mickiewicz, another Polish-speaking Lithuanian. "Of course it was a joke," Illg recalls, "but it has a deep truth."

This "deep truth" embraces the ambiguities left after the 2004 death of Milosz, who had one of the most contentious burials in recent memory. Demonstrations were preempted only by a personal message from Pope John Paul II. What a contrast with the poet's quiet decades in Berkeley as a professor. He had said, after receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, "I want to return to my quiet ways." Then why, 20 years later, did he move to Kraków, where he was treated like a rock star? The answer is many-stranded: Kraków was the culmination of a journey that was spiritual as well as geographical.

Kraków, as Illg's anecdote reminds us, was not Milosz's city. But according to Agnieszka Kosi{nacutel}ska, the poet's assistant for eight years, "The most important thing is that Kraków resembles Vilnius very much." Milosz was drawn to architecture, atmosphere and old friends. "These are the people with whom he had a thousand discussions, a thousand literary evenings," says Kosi{nacutel}ska.

Moreover, in 1993, he was given honorary citizenship in Kraków, with an apartment on Boguslawskiego, one block from Planty, the park that circles the city where the medieval walls used to stand.