_A Polish Journal, 1987
(slide show)
excerpts
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_
It was through the Dienanka gallery that we had Jacek’s and Piotr’s names and also that we were told of the opening. It looks much like any opening, doesn’t it, including the fiddler. The show’s called “I’m 32 years old and I live in Warsaw,” with over 50 paintings. The painter is Jaroslaw Modzelewski and we are very taken with his work. Johanna had shown us some photos at the gallery, telling us that the show was being sponsored by the only private art dealer around, who was using a space at the architecture foundation. The paintings hang down in the middle of the room as well as all along the glass walls. In the middle somewhere we spotted Jacek. One or two men went through the room with trays of glasses with good whiskey. The work is very figurative, with a restrained brush, but the figures are all on the edge of mysterious gestures, things we once knew perhaps. It is disturbing. The colors and places in these paintings add almost mythic dimensions to what is pictured and we each find our own favorites. Friends advise us to go see the socialist realism show at the national museum in reference to this. We discuss the idea of coming back here tomorrow and writing a piece together on the work. We end the evening with Piotr over coffee back at our cafe by the gallery. * I’m glad I got a photo of Jacek. He’s the second Jacek though we didn’t really meet him. He’s an artist and from what Piotr says this Jacek is not likely to live a long time at the rate he’s going. Too far out there, too provocative, whether in performance or conceptual work, or in his guerrilla art actions. He was the fiddler at the opening, self-appointed, though he’s not holding it here while he talks to Piotr. Two weeks later Piotr tells us of this Jacek’s most famous exploit: bringing Witkacy’s bones back to Poland. With two friends he entered Russia and, dressed in standard Soviet work clothes, they bought bicycles and rode out to Witkacy’s grave one night. There they dug up his bones and ground them up into dust with a hand grinder. That way they could bring him back into Poland. In the next issue of this Jacek’s art magazine came a plastic bag attached with a powder in it; the pages told the story, complete with photos. Art professors are afraid of this Jacek, institutions cannot stand up to him. So at last, after almost fifty years, Witkacy has returned to Poland. * A road sign to Bialystok obviously. Pawel tells me it means white slope. My mother’s father came from there, her mother also came from the east of Poland. It was occupied by the Russians then, before the First World War. Does that make me part Polish? As a child, the little I thought about it, I imagined them as Russian---whatever that could have meant to a child half a world away. But people got moved around a lot near the eastern border, and there are not likely to be any archives left; besides, I can’t expect to have any relatives in Bialystok, they’re Jews. Most of them left long ago, the rest I don’t know about. Were Jews the original counterfeiters of passports? And if I ask where am I from, would I also have to ask which century? Bialystok, which I’m told is not so interesting, might just be the most recent stop, in Europe at least. What would I be looking for if I went there? To scuff my shoes with local dust? * What could be more socialist realism than a shot of this building, other than if we had a picture of the labor that went into it. Inside these massively sober walls resides not the ministry of defense, nor of the interior, but art. This is the national museum where we saw the socialist realism show on our last day in town, Sunday. We had just scored an obscenely large hunk of cheesecake and were wiping our fingers and mouths before entering the door. We took notes. The paintings were a sort of documentation of physical realities, yet they were not all about work and not all were out and out so-called realism. Funny to think of realism as a pistol-packing word. The dynamics of the effort of labor were shown, and portraiture was re-employed to grant dignity to workers, to the labor class. Names were less often portrayed than were scenes from working life. Ultimately I feel the heaviness of this external physical reality, and I notice there are no portraits of fatigue. Is this a new innocence that was hoped for in Stalinist times? Did it not look as false then? Looked at today, almost forty years later, it seems too many people are smiling. Is it because the war is over? Downstairs in the cafe we each have a bowl of flaczki, a sort of hearty chicken soup. Then we see the sometimes gruesomely vivid Renaissance art from churches before returning to the Modzelewski show down the street where we run into Johanna. * The press bar, we finally found it. Since the first time we arrived at the Sala Kongresowa we’d been told that the bar upstairs reserved for guests of the festival was the place to meet up with people. In the foreground you might notice the plate of bigos, that’s my dinner. We are all drinking Zytnia vodka that Edinburgh Jim across the table there keeps in his bag. Some of the first bottle has already spilled in the bag but he soon materializes a second bottle. Louisiana Jim is the tall guy with the moustache standing to the side. He is talking with two women, the blonde on the left is Czarka who met us at the airport and the other blonde has just taken his number in Paris. We are taking the 6:30 express train to Krakow in the morning, so we’re trying to keep it an early night. If we’re on the second bottle here, and it appears that we are, then we’ve already caught the end of Art Blakey’s early set, come in here where we found friends and the first bottle, went back out to hear Zbigniew Namyslowski, a Polish star who is good certainly but didn’t excite me, come back in to the bar where we joined in the second bottle, and we will still be there to hear Art Blakey do his later set to end the festival. * * * Here we are riding into the hills at sunset in our rented Fiat. Robert is at the wheel, and he will end up doing all the driving, as I don’t have much practice with a stick shift. I can read maps, though. That’s a beautiful landscape, isn’t it. We both felt a great relief getting out of the city and onto the open road. We have one address where we might stay for the night, a street in Rabka where the sister of our Krakow babcza lives. Is this a foreign country or not? We can’t tell. So many resonances are being rung that perhaps we just can’t remember the last time we were in Poland. This is especially the case for Robert, I think. We pick up two girls hitchhiking, but they don’t speak our language either. We try a few simple questions, as I spin through my phrase book, though soon we are left to talking among ourselves. We think of taking them a little further, to the small city of Nowy Targ where they’re going, but they get out at Rabka offering a hundred zloty note. Every hitchhiker did the same, we found, and in the end we accepted once or twice. * I wanted to just snap a quick shot but the force of the old man’s voice stopped me. He simply said “No” very loudly, or rather Nie, as if it were liable to get louder still. He was a drunk yet he never shouted while we were there. He said no and pulled his comb out, motioning his wife to move closer to him. They primped and posed. I pulled the empty vodka bottle out of the picture; he pulled it back where it was and smiled. I’d never met a man with so many creases in his face, nor with eyes so far set in. She was as she looks, a patient and friendly poodle whose children are responsible, independent, and also patient toward their father. We had brought a note from her sister in Krakow, which we didn’t understand because it was in Polish, but we surprised them all by arriving unannounced one quiet night after six. Their son Marek soon took over, apologizing for his father, engaging us in the most excruciating yet fascinating form of conversation: word by word, pulled out of phrase books and dictionary, hand gestures, incomprehension, toasts. He bid us not refuse to share a small bottle with his father, who rattled on despite our lack of understanding. We threw around names of soccer stars, communicating with hardly any statements, nodding in agreement. Down the hatch, as we tossed back the shotfuls. On the wall above the doorway was a marriage photo, surely 25 years gone. They were the same people, only younger. * This is Marek and Pink Floyd at our table in a small disco upstairs from a local restaurant. We finally told Marek we were hungry, so he led us to the restaurant. I had pierogi and something else, with kapusta of course. Robert remembered that word all his life, cabbage. Then he asked Marek if he’d like to go to the disco upstairs. Marek said it was expensive. Robert paid for all three of us. We were brought a plate of some vegetable paté in aspic, plus fries, though we’d just eaten. Pink Floyd came by, we never learned his real name, greeted Marek, and sat down at the fourth chair. I’d put him around 24 or 25, and Marek a bit younger, not because he has no moustache. On the narrow dance floor there were maybe six and a half couples doing the usual motions to bad American disco garbage. Pink Floyd borrowed my pen to write on his napkin, and was soon drawing all over the cotton table cloth. Intermittently he took a bite from his brittle soda glass, spitting out only the big splinters, and watched us gawk as he swallowed it down. Marek urged me to ask a girl to dance as he got up himself. Relenting I asked a girl at the next table, with a minimum of gestures and less of words. We hardly glanced at each other, I followed while holding her lightly. Could she tell I don’t dance? We sat down at our tables again. Pink Floyd pocketed my pen as I asked Marek what time he worked in the morning. We knew who was keeping the family together. When we got back the couches were made up as beds. * Who were the angels, we wondered, them or us? Does it ever happen that angels don’t speak the language of those they have appeared for? Only the mother was home when we woke up the next morning in the Worwa house. She brought in those glasses of tea on the table. We had arrived as from another planet and they took us in. They tried to talk with us. We paid her more than she would have asked for. Then we started the cold car and were gone. In town we passed her husband waiting in line outside at a kiosk. He almost seemed to recognize us, but the morning was harsh on his eyes. Down the road we took the wrong turn and ended up circling through town again. The old man was still in line. * The general store in the village of Raba Wyzna, we’re standing in a short line to buy bread, cheese and strawberry jam. We don’t in fact know what we’ll be allowed to buy without ration cards but we’re safe. The fat shopkeeper is terribly impatient with the shrunken old woman on the right there who can barely empty her coin purse, we don’t understand. Already that morning we have driven up a long winding narrow lane just outside of Chabowka, past new houses, sending a cart driver and his horse onto the slightest of dirt shoulders but the man is not bothered and waves back to us. We cannot seem to find where Rabka becomes Chabowka becomes another town, searching out the house numbers for there are no street names. We end up on a country road going south of our mark, deciding to follow it, maybe find a cafe. Parked near our car, in a turnout by the store, is another horse and cart, the driver waiting. We ate the bread in the car, Robert cutting slices with his Japanese knife. The blade rusted easily so he would not use it for the jam. I dunked the bread in the jar, and he used his fingers, later the rest of it was served on bread in his cousins’ house. I tried to imagine living at the speed of a cart and horse but it was beyond me. * The best title for this shot would be “Robert Discovers He’s a Highlander.” We are on a road so small it’s barely a squiggle on the map, cutting east to where it joins the main road at Klikuszowa, a bit south of Chabowka. It has been dawning on Robert that unlike the flat lands of south Minnesota these are hills we are driving through and here at the last stretch of this rocky back road, he has stopped the car and climbed out onto the hood to photograph the wide panorama before us: the rolling hills, the quiet valleys, farms and villages, that both his grandmothers came from. It is through those two lines of his family that he has traced a route to this locale, and he is taking these pictures for his parents who have never seen this land, who apparently never knew they were from the hills. The growing discovery of his roots causes a new flowering in his eyes and I wonder that he doesn’t reach out and grab the mountains themselves in his arms. * We came back to Chabowka from our short detour to the south looking again for the number of a house where a man named Jozefa Pedzimas lived. He was the brother of Robert’s paternal grandmother and supposedly he was still alive at 91 though blind. I stayed in the car while Robert asked the woman standing here near a schoolyard. I believe there’s a Pedzimas at the school, she replied, and within moments a shy seven-year old named Tomasz was getting in the car with him. I think we’re cousins, Robert tried to explain to him following the boy’s directions, which for us consisted in knowing the words for there, here, and maybe left and right by then. We pulled up to a modern house, not realizing we were already in Rabka, and a pretty teenage girl, with long dark hair and bright intelligent eyes, met us at the door. In the hallway behind her a round old woman watched over us. Robert gave the man’s name and the girl said, That’s my dad. But we were looking for an old man. Then she caught on and explained that it was also the name of her grandfather. She reached for her coat and got in the car to lead us to them. We dropped little Tomasz back at school on the way. |