Throughout my stay in Czecho-Slovakia Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik was often in my mind. Schweik is the delinquent Czech soldier in the Austrian army. In a shrewd peasant way he affects to be a clown and so makes fools of his raging officers. His character raises a fundamental question. I discussed Schweik with all kinds of people and made a point of dining at U Kalicha, the modest eating-house in Prague where workingmen go, and where Hašek used to dine every day. On the walls are cartoons illustrating scenes from the famous comedy; also, the celebrated, original, faded, fly-blown picture of the Emperor Franz Joseph still hangs there.
It was in this restaurant that a Schweik-ish scene took place. Unable to understand the Czech menu, I made animal noises—a cock crowing, a pig grunting, a cow mooing—to determine the meat dishes. Soon everyone joined in with talented imitations. When we became serious, a man said to me sadly, nodding to Schweik’s picture, “We Czechs have lost the art of laughing at ourselves.” Schweik is respected as a historical object by middle-aged members of the Party, but they say he has nothing in common with the Czech today because “the situation has changed”. The one or two young writers I spoke to did not think so. Schweik is old-fashioned, they agreed, but he still represents the traditional Czech device of malingering under a tyranny.
The traveller will remember the anxious, difficult smile of his Czech friends and reflect that they are the people of a country only forty-two years old, living at the heart of the tangle of Central European history, and that under their domestic calm they accept the strain of it. But whether it is true that, given a chance, ninety per cent of the population would throw the Party out, no one can tell. One can only say that “rising” and “throwing out” are foreign to their cautious tempers.
3
Poland
At the end of the late September afternoon, the bed of cloud sud over which we had been flying from Frankfurt onwards, broke at last. Startling chasms, thousands of feet deep, opened; bands of green and blue sky appeared at strange angles and on the floor of each canyon we caught sight of little strips of the Polish steppe. Villages looked grey, the land more unkempt than anything we had looked down on since Brussels or London, as we came down below the cloud. The airport building in Warsaw was stark and small. We got into an old bus and drove down dusty roads under yellowing trees and past miles of beetroot and cabbage gardens. There was ice in the grey evening air.
The first, false impression was of a new stone city, empty and hard to the eye, a place of wide recent streets and of trees that were hardly more than scrub. I went out into the main modern square, a cold Stalinist construction of windy arcades to a rendezvous with a young journalist. Just as he arrived on his scooter I heard laughter. Two middle-aged men were playing hide-and-seek with each other in the arcades, popping their heads out and calling “Bo” to each other. At last, exhausted, they stopped, said a few parting words, kissed each other on the lips and went off. My young friend glanced at them as I got on the back of his scooter.
“Everyone in Poland is mad,” he shouted over his shoulder as we shot off across the city. “Anything can happen here. Anything can be said. You can do anything that comes into your head.”
At my ears, as we whizzed along in the dark, there was not only the cold night wind, but the gusts of careless talk, high spirits and folly. The young man was a Party member, in trouble with everyone. Of all the satellite countries, Poland is the largest, the poorest, the most terribly devastated by war, the most difficult in prospect and by far the most vital and exciting. Whatever may depress or alarm the Western visitor—and the poverty is depressing—he will be astounded by the vivacity and independence of the people. They quarrel in the streets, they say what they like, they work and they laugh.
“The whole city was rebuilt from nothing in a few years! By the people themselves,” my young friend shouted, as we swayed and whizzed across the city. Volunteer workers were still loading rubble on to trucks in the bomb sites: there was not a street without scaffolding. The raw, rough, red brick had yet to get its coat of plaster on scores of buildings but the beautiful old part of the city which the Nazis had taken a special pleasure in burning has been rebuilt in precise facsimile. They put it all back brick by brick and when they ran short of the genuine brick they had the old brick copied. When there were no plans to go by, they drew on the paintings of Canaletto, whose pictures had luckily been bought by Polish landowners in the eighteenth century.
“Ninety per cent of the industrial buildings; eighty-five per cent of the houses were destroyed,” shouted my young friend. Six hundred thousand civilians died in Warsaw during the war. Six million people were murdered in Poland—and I mean murdered, for military losses were relatively small—four million, a very large number of them Jews, died in Auschwitz. The horror of it never leaves one’s mind. Every open space, every public garden is haunted. Wherever one stands in Warsaw the dust blows out of the side streets and it is as if human dust were blowing into one’s eyes.
Young men and girls were hanging about that night in the old city, playing accordions and guitars. There is always something going on in a Warsaw street at night. Polish tempers are high and the vodka flows. I rarely went out without seeing the beginnings of a street scuffle, with friends dropping their brief-cases and pulling the opponents away from each other. There was also a certain dangerous quizzical pride about the young. When my young friend got off his scooter in the old square two young dandies came up and challenged him with a nod of amused contempt: “Well! What’s this?”
“What is what?”
“This,” nodding to the scooter.
“French motor scooter,” said my friend and gave a nod telling them to buzz off.
“Oh,” they said, examining the situation to see if it offered an opportunity for trouble. After long, leisurely, impertinent stares they dawdled off. They guessed he was a Party member and were taking it out of him. It was all a little like that man-to-man challenging that goes on in Spain, not quite dangerous but not quite safe either.
We went down into the cellar of a youth club, popularly known as “the mad house”. It had long, heavy oak tables in it and the walls painted in tachiste style.
“Not exactly Socialist Realism,” I said.
“That’s finished here. We do what we like. It shocks the Russians,” said my young communist. One might have been in any Western city among the bearded boys in wind-jackets or check shirts, the girls in tight black jeans. We drank red wine and talked. We talked for hours.
Conversation with Communists has, as a rule, painful limitations. It is like conversation with Seventh Day Adventists. One is either dealing with people who smile obsequiously on one side of their faces and are like stone on the other, or one is trying to stop them from delivering the monologue one already knows by heart. Eastern European Communists are naturally more various than the Communists of Great Britain and the United States. They have to live Communism and adapt themselves to its changes. Communism looks fixed to us; for them it is always in flux. There is, for example, a great difference of mind between old, middle-aged and young; the young Communists are bothered, curious and flexible. On this first evening in Warsaw—and all my stay in Poland confirmed it—I saw that Polish patriotism is far more important than Communist doctrine to the Poles; and that to speak fearlessly, freely, exactly what comes into their heads, is the Polish nature.
For two hundred years the Poles have had the habit of rebellion against authority. They find the Russians admirable in many ways, but dull. No Pole can resist the love story of Lara in Dr. Zhivago. They say they did not publish Dr. Zhivago in order not to offend the Russians. (However, they are not as delicate as all that. They are not allowed to publish Evelyn Waugh’s Scott King’s Modern Europe.) They are maliciously delighted because the brilliant Polish magazine Polska—by far the cleverest and most originally produced propaganda magazine in Eastern Europe—has had to be especially censored in its Russian edition. The Russians—as a Saling
er hero would say—“kill” them. Polish culture, they insist, is Western to the core. Hungarians say the same—but with discreet periphrasis. Freedom is the fundamental Polish passion: the freedom they lack is the freedom to print entirely what they talk.
This worried my young friend, the journalist; he accepted the Party line—“but I will never write anything against my conscience. If I lived in the West I’d probably be simply a Left Wing Socialist.” My middle-aged Polish friends worried about him, but they were very tolerant. He belonged, they said, to what is called “the mad faction”. And the thirty-year-olds of the “mad faction” are in turn very critical of the generation who grew up after the war, who did not know the fight against the Nazis or the terror. My young friend said they were irresponsible, jazz mad, Elvis Presley fans, and “car hungry”. Politics and social questions bore them. Worse —they don’t want to be engineers, unless they are of working-class origins, and Poland needs engineers.
My young man was the last of the Puritans. He was twenty-nine. There must be many of his kind who had been platoon leaders in the street fighting at the age of sixteen in the Siege, with boys of eleven under him. (One group of these children held a street for seventeen days against the Nazis.) He himself was the son of a self-educated factory worker, an old Communist, who was killed in a street battle against the Germans. The son admired his father enormously and quoted his sayings. He was proud that his mother, although a peasant woman, was a “noble”, for many peasant families had a “noble” as distinct from a serf past. He had gone to the university —a rare experience for a worker’s son in his father’s generation.
I went later on to his flat up a leafy avenue out of the centre of the city. The flat was in one of the standard six-storey apartment blocks, plain, but agreeable in style, with poplars and maples planted around it and the grass getting worn by children. There was a stone staircase; also a lift. Like all young men of his age, my friend rushed in and put the gramophone on and then went for his wife, who was a shy, neat, pretty girl, wearing a vermilion dress. She had the lovely fair hair and blue eyes of so many of the girls in Warsaw—if the sun strikes a street full of them when they come out of their offices at half past three, one has the impression of seeing a cloud of dancing haloes. She was his second wife. He had divorced his first wife eighteen months ago, he said, “for political reasons” and there had been earlier troubles: she was Jewish and his parents had opposed the marriage.
The young couple’s flat had three smallish rooms, one of which, under the room-rationing system, they were obliged to sublet. The Poznan rising in 1956—like the rising in Hungary—was a good deal due to anger at the housing situation and not entirely to low wages or resentment at the presence of Russian troops. My friends were lucky to have their place. The sitting-room had hundreds of books in it; a lot of them were political— there were a good number of English and American books. Pointing to the collected works of Stalin he told me he had down-graded them to a lower shelf. “You see,” he said, “I move with the times.” Puritans are adept at the comedies of conscience. On the wall was one of the tachiste paintings that he liked and, sure enough, there were Kafka’s novels on the shelf—for Kafka is admired in Poland. The Trial and The Castle are on sale in all the street bookstalls of Warsaw. This taste shocks Western Communists and Left Wingers generally who with the ingrained insensibility of the political mind had regarded Kafka as a decadent, bourgeois abomination To my friend, and all his circle, Kafka is the one writer who describes the conflicts in the Eastern European’s mind and especially the Party Member’s! We sat up late eating bortsch, veal and rice and onions and drinking that peculiar vodka which is given a flavour a little like vanilla by a blade of grass that stands in the bottle.
At eleven o’clock the streets were empty, except for one or two drunks in the main square. There are one or two dull night clubs and there was an excellent satirical cabaret run by the students in a small builder’s hut in the ruins. There is dancing to very old-fashioned tunes in the two main hotels. Except for these pockets of gaiety the Warsaw nights are silent. The characteristic sound is the plop, plop, plop of a horse cab, or more often, of a cart carrying a load of bricks. One looks out of the window and sees that some enterprising man has been collecting bricks for himself from a bomb site; he is probably going to build a one-room house, a kind of box, on a patch of land among the trees on the outskirts of the city on the far side of the Vistula. This is against the law but the authorities cannot do much about it. Sometimes they fine the builder, who gladly pays. He may even be fined once a year. He shrugs his shoulders; the fine is the rent as far as he is concerned. His house will be a simple box of one room with a door and a large window to it. In a year or two he will add another box. Later, if he can get hold of some plaster or cement he will cover the brick if his enthusiasm has not died. Polish enthusiasms do die. Outside Warsaw hundreds, indeed thousands, of these box houses dot the plain. They are the sign of a man who has begun life from the bare surface of the earth with what tools he could lay hands on. One of the young waiters at my hotel told me a bit of the story of his life which must be typical of the lives of many an ordinary man.
“I came back to Poland from France at the end of the war,” he said. “In France the Germans had put me to work in the mines at Valenciennes. I was sixteen and was glad to be back because Poles are despised in France and in many foreign countries. ‘Drunk as a Pole,’ people say. We have a bad reputation. I never regretted returning. My wages are lower than a factory worker’s but I make something on tips. I’ve got a motor-bike and now I’m married. My father-in-law built himself a room out in the fields and how he lived in that first year is a miracle. Luckily he was a carpenter and a mason. He had nothing but the clothes he stood up in. It took him six months to find his wife and children. Now he has added another little room. My wife and I and our daughter live in that one.” “And” (he added with dignity) “it has its own door.”
The only complaint he had—and he whispered it—was that you did not know what was going to happen from day to day. “Now we are freer than we used to be; tomorrow it may come to an end.” The State changes its plans. Things go wrong, are altered, new drives and policies start up and peter out.
“The great mistake you Westerners make about us,” another Polish acquaintance said, “is that you think we are enslaved by a rigidly organised system from which one cannot escape. But the truth is that there is no real system. There is a state of continual disorder. Planners make small miscalculations which lead to enormous mistakes. And the ordinary man spends a lot of his time picking his way through chaos. For example, the population grows fast, people stream into the cities; then the planners discover that food is short and that we have to have queues at the butchers and have one meatless day a week.”
One does not hear people speaking as plainly as this in Czecho-Slovakia or Romania.
Warsaw is poor in restaurants. The two or three large hotels are fairly modern and good, but they are packed out with travellers attending conferences. Large parties of foreigners fifty or a hundred at a time, come in from other Communist countries. I saw them sitting patient and drab in the restaurant, among the foreign traders and speculators, waiting to be served by half-trained waiters who were quarrelling with the manager. It often took me as much as two hours to get a simple meal. If customers complain the manager runs off in a panic. At one hotel I saw four of the waiters who had decided not to attend to the customers sitting on either side of the wide passage that led to the kitchen. Their stretched-out legs nearly met in the middle. They were waiting to trip up the manager when he came by; he had to hop over them as best he could. There is a peculiar, sharp, backwards gesture of the open hand which Poles use to express angry contempt. The waiters used it often and, then, to recover their calm, went off to have a pull at some customer’s carafe of vodka on the serving-table. The lack of discipline becomes eventually as enjoyable as an Irish farce.
But any Pole who comes back from
Russia is delighted to remark that the chaos is far worse there. “Go out of Moscow to some provincial town,” they say. “You’ll soon see.” But, so long as the Pole has his café and his cup of strong black coffee, a place where he can sit because he may be living in an overcrowded flat, he does not complain. There are one or two amusing café bars where writers and artists meet and concoct the jokes about Communism which circulate throughout Eastern Europe.
To travel is to live in an extreme state of mind, the eyes and ears alerted; but one pays for it in spells of loneliness, boredom and personal melancholia. The mind has worked too hard and one is left in a condition of resentful loneliness. There was an elderly Belgian businessman in a bar who had been coming to Poland all his life and who did tricks with matchboxes.
“Ah well,” he sighed when he packed up. “It passes the time. It provides a little comedy.”
And the twinkling old self-therapist waddled off to bed. I must say I had less of this boredom in Warsaw than I have had in other countries.
The bookshops in Warsaw are good. One can buy Western papers; one can read in the many public reading-rooms a great many Western reviews. The cultural attachment to the West is too strong to be broken. The theatre produces the best new European playwrights and does not stick only to Shaw, Shakespeare and Look Back in Anger. I saw a delightful play, Parady by Jan Potocki— a witty, late eighteenth-century charade with a lineage running from The Beggar ’s Opera to vaudeville and pantomime—and the audience laughed loudly when one of the actors mimicked Gomulka’s tub-thumping style of oratory. (Gomulka, a real solid peasant, shrewd, obstinate, unpretentious, is regarded with affection and admiration; they pray that he will not be paralysed by party intrigue.) I was astounded to find a delightful production of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. There is a shortage of cinemas, and one has to book days ahead to get a seat in them, but I managed to get into The Train. Jaded by the cliches of Hollywood, one is excited and refreshed by the Polish cinema. It has never occurred to the Poles to fake; they have emancipated themselves from propaganda and in their naturalism they approach the Italians. The Polish film-makers are fortunate. They can get all the money they need and do not have as much trouble with the censorship as writers do. “We are beginning to wonder,” an editor said to me, “if general poverty such as we have here is not a great advantage to the arts. The public taste is not corrupted by materialism.”
Foreign Faces Page 4