BACZYNSKI

 

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA HAS written a fine poem entitled "In Broad Daylight":

He would travel to a mountain rooming house
And go down to the dining room
He would look at four spruce trees
Branch by branch
From his table by the window
Without shaking off their snow 

His beard trimmed to a goatee
Balding, graying, bespectacled
The features of his face thick and weary
With a wart on his cheek and a furrowed brow
Angelic marble now covered with clay
He himself would not have known when this happened
Because the price for not having died sooner
Goes up gradually, not all at once
And pay the price he would
As for the bit of ear grazed by a bullet
When he ducked at the last minute-
"I was damned lucky," he would say. 

While waiting for the chicken noodle soup to be served
He would read his daily paper
Bold headlines, ads in small print
Or drum his fingers on the snowy cloth
His palms long worn
His chapped hands, bulging veins 

Occasionally someone would call from the threshold:
"Mr. Baczynski-telephone!"
And there would be nothing odd about it
That it was he rising, pulling down his sweater
Moving unhurriedly toward the door 

No one would interrupt a conversation
Upon seeing him
No one would gasp, freeze in mid-gesture
Because seeing him would be common
And it's too bad, too bad, too bad
That it would be treated like a normal thing. 

    "In Broad Daylight" is included in People on the Bridge, a volume of poetry published in 1986. This poem has already been analyzed for its masterly use of the conditional tense, thanks to which we are dealing with a completely hypothetical situation; Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski, an extraordinarily gifted young poet, died (at age twenty-three) in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944.
    Baczynski is a legendary figure in Poland. He belongs to the pantheon of heroes who died young. His poems are published in enormous editions; in Szymborska's poem the dead youth changes into a sixty-year-old writer, a little gray, a little bald, and altogether ordinary. The only thing out of the ordinary is that the writer is alive. And it is precisely the fact that living does not amaze us that strikes us in Szymborska's poem.
    I would, however, like to draw attention to the kind of life this hypothetical Baczynski leads in the poem which has drawn him from the other world. We are in a "mountain rooming house." Baczynski "frequents" this rooming house. He is at home in it. He would be reading the newspaper, waiting calmly for "chicken noodle soup." He would be called to the phone in an unhurried and natural manner, as if he were a regular member of the household rather than a special guest. For Baczynski would have to have been a famous poet, and the other guests would not have concealed their interest in the renowned sixty-year-old.
    Unless ... Unless this is a rooming house where no one bestows the least attention upon famous writers, for the simple reason that all its guests, waiting for their chicken noodle soup, are writers. (Perhaps not all are famous-but writers know each other too well to make much of rank and distinction.) So perhaps the rooming house is the Astoria in Zakopane, belonging to the Polish Writers Union, and also acts as a workplace.
    But does this change anything in our understanding of Szymborska's poem? Does the name of the rooming house the resurrected Baczynski frequents make a difference if he lives the brief life of a one-day May fly and then, when it ends, in our reading of the poem, if he has to return to his nonexistence? Can the fundamental difference between existing and not existing be in any possible way modified by the nature of the rooming house, which the hypothetical Baczynski frequents?
    I say yes. The fundamental difference between existing and not existing is, in this poem, colored by the kind of life the writers led-not all, but the majority-in the epoch of collectivism.
    The writers from this period of collectivism, it is easy to guess, lived in a manner that one might call exceedingly collective. There was no lack of housing for them to proliferate in, with novelists, poets, and playwrights at various levels knocking on one another's doors-to borrow salt or an iron, or to interrupt a neighbor's creative inspiration. This was a Soviet invention: writers housed in one place allowed the authorities to control their minds, pens, and wallets. Each person who has ever read about Bulgakov, Mandelstam, or Pasternak certainly remembers the stories about literary apartment houses and tenements, about houses in which there were more typewriters than gas stoves. This same model for a collectivized literature was transferred after 1945 to all the countries conquered by Stalin. In time, in Poland at least, this model lost its distinctiveness. There were fewer "literary tenements"; writers came to live in regular houses, having regular neighbors-engineers, laborers, officials. But collectivism did not give up all its attributes, such as literary houses and cafeterias, to name two.
    Cafeterias! O Muses, help me describe cafeterias for the literati! He who has never crossed their threshold, he who has never seen those dark halls in which friends and enemies, lyrical poets and painters of battle scenes, young geniuses and resigned erudites rubbed elbows, will never understand what collectivism was for literature. Cafeterias! The smell of all-penetrating cabbage soup; pale, neurotic light bulbs trembling under a majestic ceiling; timid, stolen looks, cast by fine writers at trays upon which were plates piled with the second course (stealthy glances-would there be enough meat dumpling-adorned this cuisine).
    In one section of the cafeteria were the proud and frail writers' widows, who even in summer wore their lean fox furs and pointed prewar hats. Almost no one knew who the husbands of these widows had been; Mephisto had forgotten to take back the yellowed contracts signed so long ago. They had lived for centuries-eternal, weak, failing, and tyrannical widows, who were the bane of publishing houses and even censor, blackmailing editors with the unpublished remainder of their husband's travail. Sometimes it happened that humankind inherited two or even three widows from one poet, and these were condemned to eternal mutual hatred of one another and daily contact in the same dining halls; and only the awful flashing eyes and whispered curses betrayed the wild vehemence of these black-clad figures or the tension between the demigoddesses endowed with immortality (though a bit late unfortunately).
    Young writers, barely tolerated by the older ones, gathered in a separate room. Here there was a predominance of poets in army jackets and dark-haired, ugly, taciturn women poets with complicated personalities. Whoever had the least success immediately ran from this room, which was the cold entryway leading to the real cafeteria.
    There was no dearth of middle, transitional places where one could meet journalists, sportscasters, fledgling film and theater directors. There were also people here about whom one knew nothing, perhaps secret-police apprentices sent for the experience or perhaps simply cousins of real writers, fed by the writers' union out of pure generosity. There were areas occupied by Party writers, second-rate, it is true, in a purely artistic sense, but certain of their political value. Perhaps they did not write good books, but when the next congress of the writers' union approached, their votes were worth their weight in gold for the Party. Thus they ate every day, even though they were useful only once every three years. They dressed like officials, always in suits, light-colored shirts, and carefully knotted ties. They smelled of soap and mediocrity, obedience and envy.
    Slowly we approach the rooms closest to the center of the cafeteria, the darkest rooms closest to the kitchen. The unwritten rule observed with iron consistency determined that here, in the very nucleus of this enormous place, the best writers, or at least those who were regarded as the best, met. Sometimes one could get there only by being the friend of one of these. In the late seventies all the big writers became dissidents, so that without exaggeration the state, which subsidized these meals, fed its opponents at the best tables. Sometimes, when the heads of dissidents bent toward one another in a conspiratorial reflex and their lips whispered something or other, it seemed the entire cafeteria, all its countless rooms and corners, froze as if in anticipation or desire to hear what its best guests were whispering. Undoubtedly, special confidence men, mixed in with the dissidents, also strained their ears.
    But let us follow the camera, let us leave, not without regret, the most important space, and let us have one last peek at the translators. The translators created a separate milieu, philologists amid passionate artists. In the translators' room, the tensions did not run as high. It is difficult to speak at once of friendship, but at least the hostility manifested itself less than it did elsewhere; someone would write a Greek word on a napkin and suggest an interpretation, while the other translators looked at the Greek signs with seriousness, with seriousness and solemnity, and others proposed a different reading of the Hellenic phrase. They shook their heads, gesticulated, wrinkled their brows. Someone else read a fragment from an Auden poem, while a certain old man, known for his lifelong love of Baudelaire, recited his famous "Balcony" with thick lips.
    Behind the translators were the administrators of the writers' union, located in a small but quite comfortable room. They seemed to look at all the rest of the clients of the cafeteria with a slightly indulgent smile, as if they were meditating upon Goethe's saying-wafting in from the translators' room-that "those who do not write, do not compromise themselves." They, the neat administrative workers, Pythagoreans, advocates of numbers and reports, specialists in negotiations with authorities for writers' passports, were not compromised by their writing. They did not describe their childhoods or unhappy love affairs. In Stalinist times they did not confess in writing their enthusiasm for the Party, and later they did not express the hopes they had tied with liberalization. They did not write a single lame poem, they did not construct a single deformed metaphor. In a certain sense, they belonged to the aristocracy of the cafeteria; they had clean hands and clean hearts. The writers viewed them with condescension, of course; and let us not forget that among them would undoubtedly be a few dry and efficient collaborators with the political police, writing if not sonnets then reports.
    The meals were not gourmet delights. A sample menu: mushroom soup (well watered down), hamburger with potatoes and beets, apple charlotte, and prune compote. Or: chicken soup with very thin noodles, a beef roast with kasha, and those beets again. Apple charlotte again, too. Pudding with raspberry syrup. Currant compote. And more: fried gilthead, potatoes, sauerkraut salad, fruit gelatin, and apple compote. Pierogi with blueberries. Stuffed cabbage leaves. Pierogi with no filling (silent, sad). Sometimes pork chops, small, runty, having nothing whatsoever in common with the enormous, bold, and carefree chops prepared in frying pans at home. And then beets, beets, beets, dug up in spacious beet fields in an autumn drizzle.
    We leave the cafeteria; once again we have to pass through the room of awkward and melancholy young writers, but before we do that we cannot resist the bittersweet pleasure of visiting the literary widows, five minutes older by now. The widows don't leave all that quickly. They order coffee, light a menthol cigarette, and stare with unabashed hostility at their antagonists. They will not hurry: the next century will be over shortly. They will wait for the end of the world.
    We leave the cafeteria, passing by the cloakroom, site of many scenes (old friends, now hateful enemies, meet and withdraw their hands; each day they see themselves here, next to the cloakroom, and they cannot exchange greetings). We step out onto the sidewalk, and the fresh air rescues us from fainting. A camera films Castle Square. The camera zooms in on the flower stall. Chrysanthemums.
    If not the cafeteria, then the "literary house" in the mountains or at seaside, a rooming house which ordinary mortals ever see. And again the same friends and enemies and widows and a few promising young people, two translators, and three poets.
    What does this lead to? It leads to the fact that the habitues of these cafeterias and rooming houses know each other too well. They see each other daily. Each person who appears there will be thoroughly inspected. The cruel looks of others will rob him of secrets great and small; they will take away his mystery, bleach him of intimacy. Every day at this same little table, in winter or summer, lost in thought, sad or cheerful. Others will find out everything about him. They will get to know his family life, they will know the brand of his typewriter, they will know that he has trouble with varicose veins and that this is a family problem. They will know the state of his bank account and his endless disagreements with his publisher. They will observe day by day his growing marital crisis. They will become familiar with the medicines he must take before and after eating. They will pretend that the state of his liver worries them. They will take everything away from him until he sits before them naked and ordinary, an everyman, except that not what is universal will be revealed but what is trivial. This is how collectivism works: it kills with the ordinary.
    It destroys what is individual. What it worships is "milieu." Let each person live in a milieu and let him not dare seek refuge on the sidelines. After a while a secret police will be completely unnecessary. What for, if your milieu knows everything about you already. There is more life in death than in the existence to which collectivism condemns us: chicken noodle soup and the neighbors' astute glance, the inextinguishable reflector of sorneone's curiosity, long hours of common meetings, when nothing occurs except that life is consumed and becomes ordinary, gray-similar to rationed, skimpily rationed substitute goods. Baczynski was a darling of the gods-he died young. He leads a mythic existence in our imagination. Wislawa Szyrnborska allowed the absent poet to don the homespun suit of compromises made by his less happy counterparts. The ashes of the everyday bury the wings of the angel. One should consider another possibility, however: it is possible that Baczynski, had the German bullet chosen a different course, would have been proud, bold, and internally pure. Perhaps he would not have made a single compromise and perhaps this would even have expressed itself in his noble face, not destroyed but merely sculpted by time.

He would
vacation in a mountain boardinghouse, he would
come down for lunch, from his
table by the window he would
scan the four spruces, branch to branch,
without shaking off the freshly fallen snow. 

Goateed, balding,
gray-haired, in glasses,
with coarsened, weary features,
with a wart on his cheek and a furrowed forehead,
as if clay had covered up the angelic marble - he wouldn't
know himself when it all happened.
The price, after all, for not having died already
goes up not in leaps but step by step, and he would
pay that price, too.
About his ear, just grazed by the bullet
when he ducked at the last minute, he would
say: "I was damned lucky:' 

While waiting to be served his noodle soup, he would
read a paper with the current date,
giant headlines, the tiny print of ads,
or drum his fingers on the white tablecloth, and his hands would
have been used a long time now,
with their chapped skin and swollen veins. 

Sometimes someone would
yell from the doorway: "Mr. Baczynski," phone call for you" -
and there'd be nothing strange about that
being him, about him standing up, straightening his sweater,
and slowly moving toward the door. 

At this sight no one would
stop talking, no one would
freeze in midgesture, midbreath,
because this commonplace event would
be treated - such a pity-
as a commonplace event. 

• Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski, an enormously gifted poet of the "war generation” was killed as a Home Army fighter in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 at the age of twenty three (Translators' note) 

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