Excerpt from Poland in Transition
Upon Awakening from a Dream of Poland
Walk with this woman at your own risk.
The touch alone of her hand on your arm
will drive you deep into yourself.
Lose whole afternoons in baroque cathedrals.
Wander confused down cobblestone alleys,
through forests of birch and pine,
across fields golden with shocked grain.
Grow inexplicably fond of beet-root soup.
Beware the power of strong music;
fear evenings in the darkened opera,
night walks in Market Place Square.
She has style, she has grace.
She wears blue eye shadow.
Bring her silver. Bring her amber,
bugs suspended in frozen honey.
Dance with this woman just one night,
and walk your remaining years with a limp.
A Brief Preface
“I got a Nikon camera,
I love to take photographs . . .
—Paul Simon
The following essays were written at various moments during my two-year stay in Poland as a Fulbright lecturer in American culture at the University of Lodz. They were prompted on the one hand by my need to fix that remarkable adventure on paper, to explore the political and social landscape, my own reaction to that landscape, and my own self in the landscape . . . and on the, other hand by American curiosity about life in Eastern Europe. Over the past three years that curiosity has shifted eastward to Russia, but Poland is still news, and people seem as fascinated as ever by details of my stay there.
1989 to 1991 brought dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, in Poland, and in Lodz, Poland’s second-largest city. Through the eyes of Polish television, I saw the dissolution of the Polish Communist Party, the opening of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification of Germany, and (Christmas of 1989, replayed incessantly in private homes, in public offices, on monitor screens in Warszawa Centralna Train Station) the execution of Rumanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu. With my own eyes I saw the arrival in Polish stores of sugar, toilet paper, bananas, cans of diet Coke, copies of the International Herald Tribune, boxes of Fruit Loops cereal, genuine Levi jeans and Benetton sweaters; the inflation of bus and tram tickets from 30 to 1800 zlotych; the opening of dozens of private shops along Piotrkowska in Lodz and in cities all across the country, and the closing of most Pewex hard currency shops which sold, in fall of 1989, almost all luxury items available in Poland; trains packed with Polish peddlers headed for Berlin, Prague, and Budapest (and, one gray day in August, 1991, lines of grim-faced Soviet peddlers rushing home to a nation whose president was under house arrest, in jail, or possibly dead). I saw the names of communist heroes purged from parks and boulevards, Stalinist memorials hoisted from their pedestals and trucked off to the junkyard of history. By summer, 1991, I saw Fiats, Mercedes, VWs and Ladas jamming the hopelessly inadequate road system of a city where, in the fall of 1989, I could have walked in absolute safety, at any time of day or night, down the center of any city avenue or boulevard. Sometimes I think each of these pieces should bear its own date: year month, even week and day. Each time I thought I’d figured Poland out, Poland was no longer as I had it figured. The country seemed to reconfigure itself every three months, and looking around me now, I scarcely recognize the landscape to which I came. Of course my status as an outsider and my perspective on event (from the street up) only obfuscated matters, but possibly confusion itself is the constant, the essence of country and people. Does anyone really know what’s going on in Poland? Ask three Poles, the saying goes, and get four opinions. A phrase I heard from natives and foreigners alike—“one of those Polish deals”—is no joke. When I read that the Polish Beer Party elected sixteen members to the Sejm, that a “Party of the Bald” “and a “Congress of Polish Eskimos” registered for the 1993 elections, that in May, 1992 Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka failed a vote of confidence by a single vote because one supporter overslept, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “Poland is ever and always Poland.”
Rereading these pieces, I find impatience mingled with affection. They contain much criticism, but I hope readers, especially Polish readers, find tenderness in the honesty. My affection is genuine, something both Michelle and I felt from our first moments in Poland; much of the impatience, I have come to believe, is projected: less a dissatisfaction with Poland than a fear of what I see America becoming, the land of Mediocrity Empowered.
The American phone system(s) work not much better these days than the Polish phone system; compared to bureaucrats at U. S. Immigrations—hostile, incompetent, arrogant, lazy—Polish civil servants are models of civil service. Free speech, privacy, and pursuit of happiness are a hundred times more threatened by American Neo-Puritans masquerading as political correctivists than by anything I encountered in Poland. At least once a week some news item sets me to thinking, “This country has become a speech, glance, and thought police state. Laws are in the book. We are East Bloc, 1989.”
Part of Poland’s attraction for me was in fact the opportunity to live among real people confronting real problems: scrounging food, housing, clothing, gasoline, good medical care, even warmth and clean air and potable water in a land where all were scarce; keeping a job in a nation without unemployment insurance; sustaining one’s modest hopes and visions through complex and dangerous economic and political reconstructions. In contrast, American problems—at least those most attended by media and courts—seemed the trivial complaints of middle class victim princesses bruised by a pea, a case of Solutions in Search of Problems. Who really cares whether Clarence Thomas discussed porno flicks with Anita Hill, what Marge Schott said on the telephone, or what Woody Allen’s heart desires? Even those Americans who battle daily hardships akin to what I saw in Poland are fewer in number, and their position certainly less desperate: it is to the U. S. that Poles come, hungry for illegal, exploitive, low-paying employment. And it is from the U. S. they depart two or three years later with $75,000 in their pockets.
If my view of Poland was distorted by projected anxieties and romantic adventuring, it was not clarified by increasing familiarity. The closer I looked, the more I saw . . . and the less—not the more—I thought I understood. Another two years in Poland and I would have been as unable to interpret Poland as I am able to explain America. (“You’ve been talking about the American Dream for the past three days,” one student told a 1990 panel of Fulbright lecturers in American Culture, “and not one of you has defined the term.” “Well, well, well,” we all said; “America is complicated and ‘American Dream’ is difficult to define.” “Not at all,” she replied: “The American Dream is driving your truck 200 kilometers per hour down an empty road, the tape deck playing at top volume, throwing empty beer cans out the window behind you.”)
If I couldn’t always interpret events, I could speculate. And I can report what I saw. The words and images of this adventure ride on their own detail.
I can’t say I have the story right. There seem to be so many stories. Some may be fables, although they had the ring of truth and are stories worth retelling. Perhaps, Poland being still in medias res, there is no complete story yet, just a series of images, many a little blurred. It was a quick trip, really, and people were on their best behavior around Americans. I traveled at dusk. Much of the country was closed for renovation. Our plans changed quickly and without notice. Trees sometimes blocked my view.
But I tell you now what I saw then: she was very beautiful, graceful as a willow and fine-featured, stylishly dressed in black and white. She smiled when I waved, but turned her back quickly as I raised my camera. Then she disappeared into a bloc of flats.
Urban Landscape with Student Party
It is early evening, and Michelle and I are crossing the traffic circle where Nowotki Street intersects Zrodrowa and Strykowska, on our way to a party hosted by Violetta Chland, one of the fourth-year students. Classes are done for the year, the weather is warm and clear, and the American literature exam is still two weeks away, so I’m in a mellow mood. Besides, Jacek Szymanski says Violetta throws a good party. We have brought the last of the Russian champagne purchased in November for $1.80 a bottle, and six red roses purchased from a sidewalk vendor for twenty cents each.
In the field adjacent to the circle, in the lengthening shadow of a smoke-smudged factory wall, stands a horse-drawn hay rick. A farmer and his family are loading grass they cut, to judge from the unevenness of the stubble, with hand scythes, commonly used implements even in 1990. Using wood-toothed haying rakes and a wooden haying fork, they gather the ragged rows of sweet grass into small piles, which are pitched one after the other onto the rick. The adolescent son rakes, his father pitches, and his mother, in a printed cotton skirt and a dark, dirty sweater, stands atop the rick, treading each forkful onto the cart, building gradually up and out, so the top of the load overhangs the cart. Periodically the farmer borrows his son’s rake to trim overhanging shag, gather it in another small pile, and toss it up to his wife. When not drawing the wagon from one stack to another, the horse grazes absentmindedly on stubble. A Dalmatian chases insects kicked up by the raking. Though the grass has been curing for a couple of days, all this raking and tossing fills the air with the country smell of fresh-cut hay. The long, low light of late afternoon washes the scene in the warmth peculiar to that time of day, and for a second I think I’ve wandered into some nineteenth century landscape . . . or one of those village scenes, painted just last year in the style of the Old Masters, sold in Lodz art galleries for $20.
In fact, many components in this scene could easily have come from a Constable painting. The rake handle is not the smooth lathed dowel found on American garden tools, not any machine-made form at all, but the stripped trunk of some young pine, full of knots and bumps, hand-polished with grease and dirt and sweat to a soft yellow. The fork is hand-crafted. The wagon, all wooden and ramshackle, must be a century old, except for the automobile tires which have replaced the Old Masters’ heavy wooden wheels. This too is common in Poland: in the Stary Rynek of more elegant cities like Warsaw and Krakow, you often see horse-drawn carriages for hire to western tourists, their drivers spiffed, their carriages spit shined, their horses dressed and groomed, the way it’s done in Vienna or New York. Then you notice those four balding automobile tires and think to yourself, as you often do in Poland, “Well, that’s the general idea. . . .”
Every component of this scene is in fact quite familiar to me, fragments of various half-remembered landscapes brought into jarring juxtaposition in the middle of Poland’s second largest city. The horse I have seen before, and perhaps the wagon as well, filled with turnips and cabbage in early fall, loaded with coal in late October, hauling paving stones up Zrodlowa earlier this spring. The owner lives in Baluty, north and east of my flat, a very old section of Lodz. He lives in a one-story wooden building on Ulica Sporna, a house with green shutters, no paint, a tar roof, and red geraniums in the windows. He gets his water from a backyard well, which is something else you often see in Poland: weathered wooden single-family dwellings still without municipal water service hunkering atavistically among the blocks of encroaching six- and seven-story high-rises. “The buildings will be demolished next year anyway,” conventional wisdom goes, “so why bother with city water?” And next year comes and next year goes in this country always in some stage of incompletion, and the wooden buildings remain, with their well and sewage trench running to a gutter in the street. Where this man farms, I can’t imagine, unless it’s well out of the city; excepting a few parks and a section of those small family garden plots found in all European cities, Baluty is all flats and shops built on ghetto rubble. Maybe this is why he cuts hay in the field beside the traffic circle in the middle of Lodz.
I have seen haying before, of course, along the ditches of rural Minnesota roads and on ranches in the Dakotas, and haying is familiar to me from Hamlin Garland’s descriptions of nineteenth-century haying in A Son of the Middle Border, and Donald Hall’s description of early twentieth-century haying in String too Short to Be Saved, and Verlin Klinkenborg’s fascinating account of later twentieth-century haying in Making Hay. Lately I’ve seen Polish haying in front of my flat, where every afternoon a man has come to scythe a swath of lawn and carry a wicker basket full of clippings to his garden patch across the street.
This spring I observed through the windows of passing trains the gathering of first-cutting hay in the Polish countryside, as last fall I watched the final cutting: the interplay of man and animal (seldom man and machine), the simple wooden contrivances (often broken and often mended) commended by neo-agrarians like Wendell Berry. The potato-shaped, earth-encrusted men and women. The long, ragged lines of raked grass. The careful mounds of gathered hay running the length of a narrow field, shoulder high to a short man. The hand-bound sheaves of grain, shocked as in a Currier and Ives print. The patient horses and the wooden carts come to gather grain and grass. The hay stacks themselves, pitched around a central pole pointing twelve, fifteen feet into the air, rounded loaves of matted vegetation like loaves of brown chleb, or the huts of some South Sea Islanders, or the stacks Monet painted again and again for sale to the wives of new-made Chicago millionaires.