Foreign Faces

by V. S. Pritchett

  But the writers do not find life very easy. The Party has been through a phase of indulgence, hoping that greater liberty would entice the writers out of silence or mediocrity. The editor told me that this had not succeeded. The writers are in a state of mistrust. They argue that in Poland things can change overnight. They improve and then worsen with the whims of policy—since I was in Warsaw they have tightened up again. Above all, the writers have come to mistrust themselves. It is not only a question of “Shall I be allowed to say this or that?” but “Ought I to or am I sure?” They are tied up in knots. It must be remembered that on the continent of Europe and especially in Poland writers have traditionally had great public prestige and are thought of in Shelleyan terms, as the legislators. There are far too many painters and the State has a great stock of pictures on its hands that it does not know what to do with. There are no private buyers. Something is done to divert the painters to applied art; and, in fact, some of the best Polish artists have turned out some fine posters.

  I was never bored by Polish conversation: it has some affinities with Irish talk. I was never bored by the streets. The Poles go to work early and finish at 3.30 in the afternoon. Then comes the rush-hour of golden-headed girls and men with brief-cases. They rush for the trams and hang on anywhere. Those dense clusters of human beings hanging on the trams are called “the grapes”. Later on, in the evening, one sees many of this crowd returning to some extra job which city people have to do to support themselves. It is usual for both husband and wife to work in order to get enough to live on. Over the river in Praga is the poor quarter, overcrowded and lively, where a family of seven will often be found living in one room. This quarter has a flea market which my friends were ashamed of: although not Party members they thought there was something disgraceful and dishonest about private trade like this. They regarded a dealers’ market as a swindle and said a lot of the stuff was stolen or smuggled.

  The market in Praga is a collection of tiny booths, selling old clothes, displays of gaudy oleographs, stockings, boots. There was a very fine and pretty show of bridal dresses. There was an old lady, a herbalist and witch, I suppose, who wore two pairs of glasses, one of them dark blue—the wearing of blue glasses was an affectation of the Russian nihilists in the nineteenth century; perhaps hers had somehow come down to her from them! She was selling what looked like big knobs of rock or fossil, but which turned out to be the parasitic whorls of wood that grow on the trunks of trees. She told us it was a well-known cure for cancer and showed us a newspaper cutting in which an American doctor had said there was something in the notion. She could recite the medical jargon. There was an old man who was carrying strings of dried mushrooms over his shoulder like beads. “Gomulka doesn’t approve of this place,” my friends persisted. But the crowd liked it. The sellers rushed out with skirts, dresses and coats on their arm into the crowd, shouting. The State had its own small hut there too, selling slippers at clearly marked prices. No one was at the State stall. People preferred to haggle.

  “Selling things on the arm” is one of the lowest occupations. It causes shame to families. I had one Polish acquaintance who had an aunt who did this. “I regard my family,” he said, “as a cross-section of the new Poland. My father was a factory worker, killed by the Germans; my mother a simple peasant, devoutly Catholic. My first aunt was a beautiful peasant girl. She became a cocotte, lived with various rich men, married a fashionable hairdresser in Warsaw and was murdered by the Nazis. My second aunt, a shopkeeper, is the most detestable conventional type of petit-bourgeoise, who now pretends she has read all the latest books. My third aunt, the simple one, sells clothes on the arm in the markets and lives in misery. Myself—an atheist and a lecturer. My brother an engineer. We are the history of modern Poland.”

  Each one has his revolutionary story. There was and is no such thing as evasion and non-committal. There is the once enormously rich and powerful landowner, Prince Radziwill living in his little Warsaw flat among a few of his treasures. The Prince was a leader of the Right Wing Party before the war, bitterly anti-Communist and strictly Catholic. He is a figure very much admired for his aristocratic and disdainful handling of German generals during the war. He asked a group of them to dinner and made them eat the starvation rations they allowed the Poles, served with full ceremony. His country house outside Warsaw is now a national museum and writers go there to work. The family servants still work there and the old gentleman anxiously enquires from time to time if “the service is as good as it used to be”.

  I think of a middle-aged lawyer who had been sent by his family to toughen up by working in the dock quarter of London when he was young. He grew up to manage the legal affairs of a great Polish estate and became a small landowner himself. When the State took over his land his peasants came to him and gave him all the rents they had saved up during the Nazi occupation. He was a man of great charm who liked good food and was funny about good tailoring. “There is no excuse for a man being poorly dressed in Warsaw,” he said. “It is a city of tailors and if anyone tells you a cadging story about needing new clothes you can be sure he is a fool living beyond his means.”

  Or I think of that tragic road on the far side of the Vistula where hundreds of thousands of civilians marched out in 1940 to join regiments which had already been overrun and scattered and were to fall in the great common graves that were discovered towards the end of the war. It was down this road, in a chic garden café for polite Sunday excursions, that a worried middle-aged official told me of the trouble he had with his young daughter. “She hates politics, she sneers at the Party”— his party—“she won’t work. When I ask ‘What is the matter with you and your generation?’ she says ‘We are bored, bored. We want a good time.’ ‘Do something,’ I say. ‘There is nothing to do,’ she says, and sulks. Is it the same in the West? I can’t get anything out of her.” I think of the Professor laughing: “How can they know how many pickled cucumbers everyone is going to eat during the next three years; and if they don’t, how can they correctly plan the number of glass jars they will require for them?”

  Except for the skyscraping Palace of Culture which dominates the city like some absurd wedding cake—it was a Russian present to the Poles, who mock and shudder at its vulgarity—Warsaw is a low-built place and the sky is wide and seems to come down to the streets. The clouds of pigeons whose wings darken and then are as dazzling as bits of tinfoil as they turn in the sky, seem to go higher than any other birds I have seen wheeling over cities. Outside Warsaw when one is on the Polish plain, the sky seems to come down to one’s feet and one feels that only a few chance trees prevent one from seeing for hundreds of miles all the way to Berlin in the West and to Moscow in the East. It is not a monotonous plain, for it is made gentle, graceful and a little melancholy by poplars and willows, by little woods and dark bands of forest. The famous empty pavé road to Poznan and Berlin lies under oaks and ashes that are all movement, and in the autumn when I was driving down it the poplars were already turning yellow and the maples were reddening.

  One drives through the outlying suburbs of Warsaw, half-shattered, half-rebuilt, and across fields and fields of huge cabbages, and the road cuts into the plain as straight as a knife. It is close-cobbled and sometimes macadamised and very good, but the side roads are dusty and rough, for the soil of the Vistula basin is sandy. (The wide river has never been made navigable: the Poles give a temperamental sigh of self-criticism when they recall that the Germans made all the German rivers navigable a hundred years ago. This is once more the kind of conversation one has in Ireland and the smell of turf smoke circling out of cottage chimneys increases one’s Irish sensations. But the Irish have no coal and the Poles have too much: in the present coal slump they are dumping it unwanted in the countryside.)

  People often say that the Polish plain is even more monotonous than the prairie of Canada. This complaint arises from the excessive admiration given to mountain scenery since the Romantic movement and also from the spe
cial boredom that long train journeys introduced to the human mind. Like all great plains, the Polish has the freedom and illumination of a vaster sky than we usually see; the variety and play of light are delicate. The long sky stands over the long distances and brings something changeable, tender, lonely and lyrical to the scene. The poplars and willows, the small woods and the bands of forest give it the grace of continual and quiet disclosure. Chopin’s house—where they now give informal concerts —is in this country and one cannot resist the feeling that the lyricism and the sharply changing moods of his music owe something to the landscape. Nostalgia is natural to places where light and distance are so long. Cornflowers and scabious were growing in the ditches and the road runs under the shade of the oak, the ash and the poplar. It was a Sunday when I drove along it and we occasionally saw youths out partridge shooting. They wore the curiously military dress of the people: stiff, black peaked-caps and high black boots.

  The villages have an Irish negligence. The cottages were single-storey buildings, thatched with rushes. The small windows were filled with geraniums and other window plants and were hung with lace curtains. The cottages usually have two rooms—a summer room and a winter room, the latter with a bulky tiled stove in one corner reaching to within a couple of feet of the ceiling. In another corner is a single bed piled with quilts. At night those members of the family who cannot squeeze into the bed sleep on the floor and the young children are put on top of the stove.

  It was the churchgoing hour and soon we picked up those files of peasants who were walking miles to church at the fast Sunday stride. In this part of the country they are droll, startling figures—the huge men in the orange and black striped pantaloons worn under a long black overcoat flowing out over their high black boots; and the women, immensely petticoated under their bunched-out skirts which are hidden by a black apron in front and have broad stripes of gaudy green, yellow, violet and red at the back. The bodices are black. The women’s skirts are worn in pairs and are weighted with sequins so that they are heavy to wear; but peasant women are strong. They march like men. It is a marvel that the girls can dance in this costume, but, once they are worked up to the full spin of the mazurka, they can make these weighty skirts whirl like a spinning top.

  We went into two churches that Sunday, the huge ugly glazed pink brick church of a tiny hamlet, and afterwards into the splendid church, in the Baroque style, of the town of Lowicz. The sense of theatre is strong in the Polish people. They love gaudy colours. Inside the village church, the sight was startling. A dozen heavy ropes of festoons made of green moss were looped from the high roof to within a yard of our heads, and among them hung gaudily painted emblems, shields and medallions belonging to the brotherhoods of the church. Between them hung elaborate mobiles of tinsel and cut-out paper which are traditional in the folk art of the Poles; I’ve seen dozens of these exquisite and brilliant fantasies in many Polish cottages and museums. The walls were garishly painted. It was like being inside some childish fair booth or box of toys. The place was icy cold and at first we thought it empty. Then we noticed that two or three old women, wrapped in grey and black blankets, were sitting in the pews. Suddenly one of them struck up a raucous chanting; the chant was taken up by one or two of the others, and these harsh and eerie high-pitched sounds came echoing off the walls more like the beating of buckets and pails than the sound of the human voice.

  In Lowicz the performance was less primitive, indeed we were present at the Mass. The church is a fine piece of Baroque, with rearing statues and soaring angels, and in this theatrical setting the country people stood or knelt. One woman, a penitent, in the full finery of the country, knelt barefooted at the head of the crowd before the altar which had grouped itself instinctively as if it were a crowd in a play. Once again when the choir sang we heard that harsh, shrill and hoarse note of Polish religious song, though here it had the purity of training. The country people looked as if they had been carved out of wood; and out of the wood stared the large, carven, steady blue eyes that seem to be the mark of the Slav. Afterwards we went to a smoky restaurant in the town, to eat a watery stew of tripe with fennel floating in it, and then potato salad and ham; every time we finished our large glasses of vodka the solid wench in her white apron rushed to bring us another. The glass must never be empty. The place filled up with young men and women from cyclist clubs and the week-end motor-cyclists, for all the countryside had come in to Lowicz to eat, drink and hang about the square, thousands of them in their best clothes. There were buses and even half a dozen motorcars. The vodka got us talking and naturally we were talking about politics, about the peasants, the land and the Catholic church. My friends were not Communists, but they were strong supporters of Gomulka.

  For Gomulka, a peasant himself, had allowed the dissolution of the State farms and co-operatives, which had been the heart and soul of Communist agriculture up to 1956. Out of 10,000 large State farms, there are only 2,000 left. The Polish peasant has always fanatically wanted his few poor acres for himself and nobody else. He has lived badly on uneconomic patches for centuries; the population is growing at a terrible speed and he lives worse. “Yet,” my friends kept saying, “they have shoes. They are well-clothed. We have at any rate seen to that.” Once he had got his way, the peasant grew more, worked harder, may even have looked after the machinery properly, instead of leaving it to fall to pieces. The bigger farmers, the so-called Kulaks who had been expropriated, were not permitted to come back—many of them had in fact taken the chance to become small farmers—but slowly (I was told) some of the peasants have seen advantages in co-operation and are joining once more. They malingered when forced; self-interest has led some back to voluntary associations and this is what the Party hope for.

  The Roman Catholic Church is as powerful in Poland as it is in Ireland. No government can dispense with it, ignore it or completely override it in this peasant country. Under Gomulka, it has become the great negative force. It is not persecuted—there are no political prisoners in Poland—and the Archbishop’s sermons on political co-operation in Warsaw every Sunday morning are famous and crowded. All the same, there are often serious clashes between priests and commissars. The State may set up its birth control clinics; the Church does not protest, but it sees to it that propaganda is not distributed and that the clinics do not thrive. And (again, like the Irish peasant), the Polish peasant is puritanical and severe in the matter of sexual knowledge and morality. It seems that Polish women marry earlier and have more children than they did before the war. The land is crowded; the big cities are crowded, because there has been a rapid advance in industrialism; only the small market towns are getting smaller. This is partly due to the extermination of tens of thousands of Jewish shopkeepers under the Nazis and the nationalisation of the retail trade.

  Because we can talk freely to the Poles we must be careful not to misunderstand them. They enjoy calling themselves the “mad Poles” just as the Irish enjoy calling themselves the “mad Irish”. They have had two hundred years as an enslaved nation and they have the tradition of being “agin the government”. But just as the Irish no longer hate the British, so the Poles no longer hate the Russians; indeed they are bound to Russia by the common historic dread of German invasion. Even in the matter of the Russian halt at the siege of Warsaw—a theme over-exploited by American propaganda—they are far from being totally critical of the Russians. The Poles see themselves as the only real intermediaries between the East and West, for their religion and culture are Western. “We are the French of Eastern Europe.” And like all the central European satellites they regard the withdrawal of British political influence in the ’thirties with bitterness; just as they regard American anti-Communism as hysterical and ill-informed and the American support of West Germany as dangerous. On the long straight road from Berlin to Warsaw, across that defenceless plain, the Polish attitude is vividly understandable.

  4

  Hungary

  “You’re lucky,” said the
French-speaking lady in Bratislava, where the Danube bends on the border of Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary. I had told her I was off to Budapest, less than an hour away by plane. She was a Slovak who hated speaking German, so we used to have rather formal and histrionic conversations in our best French. “Ah, Budapest!” she said. “The Hungarian women are so pretty and they have wonderful taste in clothes. You’ll eat well there. They’re gay and light-hearted. Not like us.”

  “Even after the Rising?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “They forget quickly. Things are better there. You will have friends everywhere.”

  She was right.

  The flight from Bratislava to Budapest is short. One is immediately struck by the change of scene from the thickly-wooded, mountainy land of Czecho-Slovakia. One is flying over the wide Danube valley and over low hills towards the Hungarian plain. It is as flat as a table and occupies a very large part of the country. One is flying also into a softer, if erratic, climate, where the sun is kind, the cattle graze and the vine grows well—a wine-drinking land. Yellow and green, bristling in the sun, dotted with small agricultural towns and red-roofed villages that do not huddle but spread out into little draught-boards of red boxes, the plain is rich.