THE SALT
OF THE
EARTH
JÓZEF WITTLIN
Translated from the Polish by Patrick John Corness
PUSHKIN PRESS
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
MATTHEW 5:13
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Foreword by Philippe Sands
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Healthy Death (a Fragment)
About the Author
Copyright
Foreword
Józef Wittlin came into my life by chance. When I was invited to travel to the Ukrainian city of Lviv to deliver a lecture, a colleague in Warsaw sent me a photocopy of Mój Lwów,* a slim volume published in Polish in 1946. The author, an émigré poet, born in 1896 in the small Polish village of Dmytrów, reached the United States in his forty-sixth year. I did not speak Polish, but appreciated the grainy black-and-white photographs of buildings. They seemed significant to Wittlin. I wandered around the city in search of the monuments that touched him, a fine introduction to a city that melded pre-war Austro-Hungarian and interwar Polish style.
By the time of my second visit to Lviv a year later, I obtained a Spanish translation of Wittlin’s book, published with the assistance of his daughter Elizabeth, who lives in Madrid. My understanding of Spanish is bare, but with the help of a friend from Barcelona I was able to appreciate the magical quality of Wittlin’s lyrical prose. His words brought to life a world that was lost yet deeply present. Reassuring, full of life and energy and hope even during the dark periods from which he emerged, Wittlin opened up the imagination, helped me to feel what it might have been like to occupy those spaces at the time he walked them. He brought the past alive, and made it even more relevant.
I wanted more Józef Wittlin. Eventually, I found a copy of his only published novel, to which he gave the title Sól ziemi, or “The Salt of the Earth”. Inspired in part by Homer’s Odyssey, which Wittlin had translated into Polish in 1924 and for which he was honoured by the Polish PEN Club, the novel was first published in Polish in 1935, to considerable acclaim. A German edition appeared a year later, with a preface by Josef Roth. “He finds out through the loss of his soul”, wrote Roth, “that there is something mightier than the emperor and even death.” More translations followed—French in 1939, English in 1941. The book won awards, and led to Wittlin’s being nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1939, the year in which the war that defined the essence of the poet’s being was resumed.
The novel was intended as the first volume of a trilogy entitled “The Saga of the Patient Foot Soldier”, but the drafts of the two other volumes were lost in the small French seaside town of St Jean de Luz on 22nd June 1940, when a soldier threw one of his suitcases into the sea. Only the first section of the second book, Healthy Death, survives, and is included at the end of this edition. The main protagonist is a railwayman, Piotr Niewiadomski, “Peter Incognito”, a lowly worker on the Lwów—Czerniowce—Ickany line. The inhabitant of a small village in the Carpathian mountains in Eastern Galicia, a Catholic, son of a Hutsul mother and a Polish father, like millions of others he is summoned to war by Emperor Franz Joseph, into the Austro-Hungarian Army, to defend the Empire. “He did not always comprehend this tragedy,” Wittlin wrote of him in an essay. “He did not always know what he was fighting for or for what he was dying.” Through the eyes of this exceptional being, a filter perhaps for Wittlin’s own experiences and assessment, we come to a sense of war.
Plucked out of a simple life, Piotr Niewiadomski is thrust into a heaving, anonymous mass, fellow conscripts—Poles, Hungarians, Jews, Rumanians, Bosnians and others—who made up the Empire:
Sweaty, breathless, drunken numbers of heads, arms, legs and torsos flow like lava towards the east and the south, from east to west, from south to north, to satisfy someone’s ambitions, to someone’s greater glory. Healthy, strong lungs, hearts and stomachs set off in their thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to all corners of the earth to a tournament of their own suffering, hunger and fever.
The organizing, unifying force the Emperor—and his world of absurdity and lies—is the anvil on which the fear that grips these young men is hammered out, as they prepare for war and death:
Until then, fear had been something external; now it settled within them. It penetrated into their bodies from the coarse fibres of the uniforms. They all felt that this fragrant apparel smelling of malt consigned them to death. A miracle had occurred; this undrilled crowd had been overtaken by Discipline. It crept into their bones, mingling with the marrow and stiffening their movements. It even altered their voices.
Wittlin knew of what he wrote. Having attended a gymnasium school in Lwów, some seventy kilometres north-east of the small town where he was born, he enrolled at the University of Vienna. The studies were interrupted by two years of service in the Austro-Hungarian Army, in its Eastern Polish Legion. “Mythical and epical,” Thomas Mann wrote from California in the autumn of 1941, in a letter to the author. The words were directed at the novel’s subject matter, but they might equally have been written for the man:
There is humour and the lyrical, extraordinary detail that allows us to begin to understand some greater truths. There is irony and pity. There is a cry against horror and absurdity. There is the focus on the individual in the group. There is a tale, simple and extraordinary, that is perhaps for our times, once again, as greater forces propel us in an increasingly unsettled direction.
“Throughout his life,” Wittlin’s daughter Elizabeth tells me, “my father would always run off to the railroad station to search for a porter to speak with, so as to resuscitate Piotr Niewiadomski.” Sickly and underweight, she adds, as he could not carry his own suitcases “the porters—the red-caps—were crucial to him”.
As they should be to us. As the drums of nationalism and conflict start to beat again, amidst forces unknown that threaten to overwhelm, this “poetic representation of the First World War”—this was how Wittlin characterized his novel about a “little Galician porter”—offers a salutary reminder. Of where we once were, to where we may return, of the power of the novel, of who we are and who is truly around us. Nothing is ever quite what it seems.
Philippe Sands
Bonnieux, July 2018
* Included in City of Lions by Józef Wittlin and Philippe Sands (also published by Pushkin Press).
THE SALT
OF THE
EARTH
Prologue
I
The black two-headed bird, the triple-crowned eagle, convulsively grips in its talons a golden apple and an unsheathed sword. What is the reason for its sudden appearance above our heads, darkening the sky with its massive black plumage? With a rustle of its wings and a clanking of its golden chains festooned with coats of arms, it escaped from the black-and-yellow sign above the tobacconist’s where my brother used to buy cigarettes. Like a startled cockerel, it suddenly tore itself away from the metallic shield above the entrance to the post office, just as I was sending a telegram to our village to tell my mother about the bir
th of my son. It abandoned the cosy, warm nests it built years ago above the doorways to the school, the courthouse and the prison. It took flight, abandoning the round red seals on baptism, marriage and death certificates. It suddenly vanished from my tattered national identity certificate, and it scarpered from the official notice imposing on me a fine of 10 crowns for jay-walking across the railway tracks. It deserted from the postman’s brass buttons, the cap of the guard at the savings bank and the gendarme’s helmet. Like a gigantic black-and-yellow aircraft, it is swaying overhead with the sword in its grasp.
My brother is a reader of the boulevard press. My brother is a messenger in the offices of a certain commercial company. My brother sees—my brothers see—the eagle circling in the air, menacingly wielding the heraldic sword in its claws. The keen sword glints in its sharp talons like a thunderbolt from heaven, then abruptly plunges from on high to pierce the distant heart of my mother, our old mother who works on the land, her back bent as she struggles to wrest potatoes from the earth with her hoe—the last of this year’s crops.
My brother is a simple man. My brothers are simple folk—barbers, cobblers, railway workers, tram conductors, foundrymen in vast iron foundries, clerks, waiters, peasants. Peasants.
My sister is a simple woman. They are all like her—simple and loquacious. Market-stall sellers, washerwomen, milliners, seamstresses, “maids of all work”, nannies of children better situated than mine.
They have seen, they have heard, they have read their local papers, they have seen coloured picture postcards. I may have seen, heard and read myself.
II
Everyone stood up. The old rococo armchairs heaved a sigh of relief, suddenly free of the burden of venerable bodies. Below, outside the gateway, the crash of the palace guard’s hobnailed boots rang out. Traditionally, soldiers of the 99th Moravian Infantry Regiment had the privilege of guarding these sacred places.
“Gewehr heraaaaaus!” yelled the sentry, like a locomotive whistle administering the last rites to victims of a disaster. The guard presented arms.
A tall, bald-headed, distinguished-looking man, smiling frostily beneath a thin black moustache, cleared his throat. Today it was he who was to fulfil the most important role. Already as a child he had been fond of history. Very. Once more he glanced provocatively in the direction of the ministers poised stiffly in anticipation. Their faces, which now took on a ceremonial expression, though they were customarily sour and morose, bore witness to a severe hardening of the arteries. The worn-out vessels were now having difficulty pumping these gentlemen’s true-blue blood to their hearts. It was common knowledge whom these hearts were beating for. History itself would testify to whom they had promised to give the “last drop” of their blood. Especially as nobody had asked it of them. Meanwhile, the blood was battling against its own degeneration.
The agreeable gentleman’s gaze next came to rest on Maria Theresa’s silver wig; from the enormous portrait, she was sizing up the bald heads and beards gathered around the table with her large, unashamedly masculine eyes. Above the wig, over the gilt frame, the large stones set in the crown of St Stephen surmounted by its leaning cross glowed with fiery reds, greens and purples. The crown blazed in the glow of the setting sun; it shed multi-coloured tears, but the Empress’s eyes glowed even more intensely. Her arteries had never hardened.
A carriage rumbled up to the gateway. A crash of rifle butts on the command to order arms. Down below a dry cough.
The magnificent double doors were flung open. Two svelte guards officers had assumed their positions either side of the entrance, as motionless as two statues in the foyer of the court theatre. A secret ritual suddenly enclosed the two living bodies in deep silence, as though in chilly niches of marble. The ringing of the spurs, sounding like broken glass, was muffled in that silence.
Ceremonial expressions rapidly came over the gentlemen’s faces. The short, stocky Chief of the General Staff knitted his bushy eyebrows. He inclined his greying, close-cropped head slightly to one side towards his left breast, where the most illustrious crosses and stars were soon to blossom. The bald, elegant gentleman, the Foreign Minister, shifted impatiently from foot to foot. The patent-leather shoes that he had to wear on official occasions had given him bunions. One had to create a good impression at the embassy! He was the only one in this company to wear a fragrance. Very discreetly, mind you. He was accustomed to importing his fragrances directly from Paris. He didn’t trust the local products.
All of a sudden, two old men in general’s uniform, with sashes the colour of scrambled eggs draped across their chests, escorted in a third old man in a bright blue tunic. He was stooping, leaning on a silver-handled cane. All three of them had grey sideburns and they were as alike as peas in a pod. The life they had shared over many years—the shared boredom and the shared pleasures—had conferred on them the same appearance. If it were not for the Golden Fleece beneath the third button on the breast of the stooping figure, a stranger in this house would be unable to tell which of the three old men was by the grace of God Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, King of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia, King of Galicia and Lodomeria, King of Illyria, Archduke of Upper and Lower Austria, Grand Duke of Transylvania, Duke of Lorraine, Carinthia, Carniola, Bukovina and Upper and Lower Silesia, Prince-Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, Margrave of Moravia, King of Jerusalem, etc., etc., and which were the two aides-de-camp, Count Paar and Baron Bolfras.
The ministers and the generals bowed their heads. Just one of them, a third replica of His Majesty with sideburns, stood erect. He had the right to do so. On his breast—considerably younger than the Emperor’s, it’s true—he also wore a Golden Fleece. He was, after all, the grandson of the victor of Aspern, Archduke Karl.
The armchair the Emperor sat down on was covered in red plush and it stood close to Maria Theresa’s portrait. For a moment, the Empress’s eyes seemed to be searching, over the top of Franz Joseph’s head, for the bushy eyebrows of little Baron Conrad, Chief of the General Staff, in order to remind him that the highest decoration an officer of the Imperial and Royal Army could be awarded is, was, and always would be her own Order, the Order of Maria Theresa. Conrad knew how one gained it. He knew Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince of Homburg virtually off by heart.
Just then, dusk began to sprinkle fluff on the old portraits, exaggerating their outlines. The portraits grew and grew and grew, eventually merging into a continuous grey mass along with the wallpaper and the wood panelling of the elegant room. Prince Eugene of Savoy, with a final glint of his sleek, mirror-like black armour, disappeared into the gloom, where only a moment earlier his golden sceptre and the signet ring on his finger had clearly stood out. Maria Theresa’s crinoline billowed like a gigantic, bulbous cushion filling with water. One might have expected that at any moment the old matriarch of the Habsburgs would emerge from her gilt frame, powerfully elbowing aside these old sclerotics, and casually sit down next to the wilting offspring of her exuberant lifeblood. She would embrace the old man in her plump arms, injecting vigour into his pale, withered being, and burst into lusty peals of laughter.
But the lights in the crown of St Stephen are going out one by one; the fiery glints in her eyes grow dim.
A valet enters. He turns on the electric lights in the crystal chandeliers. Not all of them, however, because His Imperial Majesty cannot bear bright lights. With a trembling hand, he dons his spectacles. After a short while, he removes them again and spends a long time cleaning them with a handkerchief. At this point the bald Count Berchtold, the Foreign Minister, loses his patience. He takes some documents from his briefcase, casting his gaze sternly, yet respectfully, in the Emperor’s direction. His Parisian fragrances not unpleasantly tickle the nostrils of his immediate neighbour, His Excellency von Krobatin, the Minister for War. This aroma at dusk arouses in him memories of his youth. Those wonderful Hungarian girls really know how to
kiss!
The Emperor has finished polishing his spectacles. The starchy faces of the highest state dignitaries come back to life. Not a trace of sclerosis now.
The Emperor is speaking. In a dull tone of voice, he is thanking them for something or other. What his dear Count Berchtold spoke about yesterday had greatly saddened him. If he was not mistaken, that meant—if his memory served him correctly—Belgrade? He was happy to acknowledge that feelings were growing strong among his beloved peoples, who were demanding, demanding…
The Emperor could not recall what it was that the beloved peoples were demanding.
So they began explaining to him. There was something the Emperor, despite everything, was still unwilling to understand at any price, apparently. At first, they explained matters to him patiently, like a mother to her child, but eventually they lost their composure and started gesticulating. When the light finally dawned, they began bargaining with him. The Emperor went on the defensive for some time, resisting, hesitating, coughing, and recalling the murdered Empress Elisabeth. At one point he even stood up unassisted, striking the table so forcibly with his silver-handled cane that the two statuesque guardsmen flinched and Maria Theresa’s eyes sparkled.
Archduke Friedrich, the grandson of the one of Aspern fame, leapt to his feet. He approached His Majesty and bent over the pink ear from which wads of grey cotton wool protruded. At some length, he poured certain weighty words into that ear. As he bent over, the two Golden Fleeces on the Habsburgs’ chests found one another and for a few moments they swung in unison. Then the Emperor conceded. He yielded to the will of his beloved peoples.
He had just one wish; let them display the traditional oak leaves on their helmets. And they must sing. Here the monarch was interrupted again by Archduke Friedrich, who spoke up to remind him that in the twentieth century his soldiers no longer wore helmets, only soft caps. The Emperor apologized; he hadn’t been on manoeuvres for such a long time. He was visualizing the old heads of veterans of Novara, Mortara and Solferino, the Pandours, Radetzky… Shamefacedly, he turned to the Minister for War as a pupil to his teacher.
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