Poland

by James A. Michener

  ‘It should be very interesting at Brzesc Litewski,’ Bukowski told his wife when he awakened her at half after three in the morning.

  ‘Did you accomplish anything?’ she asked.

  ‘What could one accomplish with a dumb Lithuanian and a stupid Ukrainian?’ he asked.

  At the first of their two concerts Paderewski insisted that Krystyna Szprot open the evening, and this she did with a sparkling selection of mazurkas, after which he said enthusiastically: ‘We could have had no better opening. Real Polish music. Now I shall follow with an equal number of polonaises.’ When the applause died down he stood beside his piano and said in a voice resonant with patriotism and love of land: ‘You are to imagine the king’s court in Krakow. All the nobles have gathered in their traditional dress—furs for the men, jewels for the ladies. A march forms. See, they come in stately fashion, arms akimbo, they bow, they turn, they disappear down that aisle and out that door. The eye fills with tears at the majestic march of the Polish patriots.’

  Like many in the audience, he wiped his eyes, then sat at the piano and launched into the first of the eleven polonaises he would play that night. How melodic they were, how surprising in their changes of rhythm, how infused with the essence of a vanished Poland suddenly revived.

  ‘And now,’ he said at the conclusion of one of the deft promenades, ‘we come to music I love.’ When he began the hushed notes of the longest and perhaps most impressive of the polonaises, Number Five in F sharp minor, Opus 44, a few people clapped, and instead of rebuking them, he turned and smiled, nodding his head in agreement. Those who had applauded knew that midway through this piece the music would drop to a heavenly whisper, one of the subtlest of Chopin’s inventions, and when this happened one could hear a sigh echoing across the theater, as if the people of the new Poland were joining with those forgotten promenaders of the old.

  But Paderewski did not propose to end his concert on any such note of nostalgia, for when this difficult and lovely music ended he stepped to the apron of the stage and said: ‘In those heartbreak years when I wandered the world an exile, visiting capitals and pleading for Poland’s freedom, it was customary for Polish pianists playing abroad always to include in our program the two wonderful polonaises of Opus 40, for we believed they summarized our history, first the glorious past, then the prolonged agony of defeat. That’s the order in which Chopin wrote them, for he had known both the glory and the despair.

  ‘But tonight, when we have won our freedom, and hereafter whenever I play, I shall reverse the order. First the tragic years in C minor.’ Bowing his head over the keyboard, as if this music were too painful to begin, he finally started that exquisite threnody, that long lament for lost dreams, and rarely had a piano seemed so intimate a part of a nation. With deft skill he brought the sorrowful notes to a conclusion, keeping his head bowed long after the final chord.

  Then, with almost savage joy, he struck the triumphant notes of the A major, which many called the ‘Military,’ and with this burst of patriotism, written when Chopin was at his loneliest, the little theater rang with cheers, and Marjorie Bukowska’s pleas for quiet went unheeded, nor did Paderewski object, for this was a night of celebration. When he ended, there were more cheers and applause, not only for his performance but also for his years of noble service, which he acknowledged with two sentences: ‘We have won so much. Let us strive to keep it.’

  On the second night the two pianists offered as a joint encore a more or less impromptu offering of some Brahms waltzes, during which Paderewski stopped the music twice to instruct Krystyna in how a passage should be handled. The first time she nodded demurely, changed her approach, and followed him through that particular waltz, but at his second bit of instruction she demurred: ‘It will sound much better if we play it as written,’ and she ran through a passage of difficult transition. Then she rose, turned to the audience and asked them: ‘Now, doesn’t that seem more like a waltz?’ When the audience applauded, Paderewski also rose, walked over to Krystyna and kissed her. Then, with his powerful right hand, he swatted her on the bottom: ‘Now we shall play it my way,’ and they did.

  Since Jurgela and Vondrachuk suspected that their host at the castle, Count Lubonski, had brought them to the Bukowski palace to impress them with the accomplishments of Polish culture as opposed to the bleakness of their own, they had resisted appreciating the great artistry of these two pianists, but on their final night their hostess presented a program which anyone anywhere in the world would enjoy, for it was felicity itself in bright costume, youthful vivacity and joyous singing; to men born and bred in Slavic lands, it would be especially endearing.

  A troupe of nine singers in full costume had come by train from Krakow with their own pianist, first violinist and conductor. Assembling two different groups of highly skilled local Jewish players who had mastered everything from polkas to Beethoven, the visitors had formed an orchestra, and now, after two rehearsals, were prepared to offer a simplified version of Stanislaw Moniuszko’s delightful opera The Haunted Manor. As the leading tenor explained: ‘It may seem just a bit confused at first, but bear with us. Because when I and the other soloists are not singing our lead roles, we shall become the chorus, and at that time we will put on these caps, so when you see me in this cap you are to forget that I am the hero and tell yourself: “Look, there’s another villager.” ’

  When Marjorie heard the music with which she was now familiar, she thought again of its high quality; the solos were as good as any being offered by Smetana in Vienna or Glinka in Moscow, and when the basso profundo sang his aria she judged it, accurately, ‘to be as good as Colline’s apostrophe to his overcoat in La Bohème.’ It was glorious music, ideally suited to the ornate little theater, and the nine singers presented it with just the proper make-believe.

  There came a moment in the action when the father of the two girls who were seeking husbands stepped forward to describe what it was he sought in a man who might enter his family, and the aria, written in the 1860s while Poland was still in bondage, had been used as a device to describe the ideal revolutionary Pole—such a man as Count Lubonski, biding his time in Vienna, or a woman like Krystyna Szprot, living in exile but breathing wherever she went the message of ultimate freedom. It was a splendid aria, deeply loved by Poles everywhere, and as the baritone enunciated the meaningful words, all in the audience who had fought for Poland’s resurgence compared themselves with the father’s description of the ideal citizen and calculated how far they had fallen below the target. Andrzej Lubonski wiped his eyes and remembered how his valiant Zamoyski wife had worked so resolutely during the long years in Vienna, dying before freedom was attained but assured even on her deathbed that it must come.

  In the balcony two listeners were not so deeply impressed; Miroslawa Bukowska whispered to the peasant Seweryn Buk: ‘Always they sing of gentry in the manors. The real Poland is the peasant in the village. On that stage it’s all fluff.’

  The next day the negotiators from Lithuania and Ukraine departed to write reports for their governing committees, and the other guests trailed off, leaving Paderewski and Szprot at the palace with the Bukowskis and Count Lubonski, and when it became apparent that the prime minister was determined to resign his high office before he was forced out, all tried to persuade him that it was his duty to fight on, but he would have none of that: ‘They don’t want me, and to tell you the truth, I don’t think they need me.’

  In the discussion which followed, it gradually became clear that he was planning not only to quit his post as head of the government, but also Poland, forever, and this caused real dismay, for as Lubonski said: ‘Maestro, you are Poland.’

  ‘I was,’ he said quietly, and Bukowski reminded him of how in the dark years of 1909 and 1910 he had contributed all the money he made from his concerts in Berlin and Buenos Aires and Paris for the erection of a public monument in Krakow honoring the five-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald when the Teutonic Knights were dr
iven back, and the old man said: ‘Matejko with his paintings, Sienkiewicz with his novels, I with my music, we tried to keep Poland alive,’ and Wiktor cried impulsively: ‘Yes, and Krystyna Szprot with her Chopin.’

  ‘She did indeed!’ Paderewski agreed, blowing his fellow artist a kiss. ‘Great on Chopin, dreadful on Brahms.’ And Marjorie Bukowska, noting well the ardent enthusiasm of her husband, resolved that whereas there would in the future be much playing of Chopin in her theater, it would be played only by aspiring young male pianists and never again by visitors from Paris like Mademoiselle.

  It was at the Bukowski palace that Paderewski finally determined to go into voluntary exile, and on the final night he said: ‘Poland drives out all its talented people. Frederic Chopin never saw this country again after the age of twenty. He wrote all his great works abroad. Adam Mickiewicz wrote his Pan Tadeusz in exile. Maria Sklodowska, whom I saw so often in Paris, won her two Nobel prizes there and not in Poland. I’m leaving because the nation is determined to fight one war after another. Against Lithuania over the matter of Wilno. Against the Ukrainians over the division of farmland. Against Czechoslovakia over a wedge called Cieszyn. And before long, against Russia over a matter of politics. Lubonski, slow your horses down or they will gallop away with you.’

  Marjorie, unwilling to see her gala week end in such disarray, pleaded with Paderewski to play for them one last time his Variations and Fugue, and when Krystyna Szprot added her entreaties with one calculated to warm the composer’s heart—‘I want to add it to my repertoire for America and Brazil, and I want to hear how you think it should be played’—he walked slowly to the theater, mounted the stage, and ran his fingers over the piano he had chosen as his own. Then, with the bare, heavy mastery which he sometimes displayed, he struck the keys, lining out the theme upon which he would build his twenty variations, but as he played he instructed Krystyna: ‘I like it slow, and heavy at the opening so that it sounds almost banal. Because you and I know what we shall do with it later.’

  On and on he went, speaking now and again when some critical point was reached and bringing all his listeners into the secret places where music was written. Lubonski, who had known most of the great musicians of his day, entertaining them in his home, simply allowed the sound to flow over him. Krystyna was enchanted by the complexities the great master had introduced into his music, providing something for any virtuoso who wanted to tackle his difficult composition, but at the same time she could hear herself playing certain variations rather better than he was doing, for she was in certain restricted ways a superior pianist. Marjorie hoped again that she might some day find a recording of the piece.

  Wiktor sat enraptured, a veritable slave to every nuance. Chopin, he said to himself, was a dreamer, writing music that envisaged a day fifty years removed, either backward or forward. It evoked romance, the ringing of fairy bells. What I’m hearing now is the music of an extraordinary man who struggled to make today’s dreaming come true. There’s not a shred of romanticism. This is the statement of a practical man, a cynic who battled them all. Chopin may be the soul of Poland. This is the sinew and the strong trees in the forest and the workman plowing his field.

  For the duration of the piece he continued thinking along these lines, accurately defining the two approaches to music, the two approaches to Poland, but when Paderewski finished his thundering fugue, Bukowski muttered to himself: ‘I prefer Chopin.’

  * * *

  Paderewski had been right in his predictions about the future. In a series of twists and turns so bizarre that one could scarcely follow them, the new Polish nation launched an invasion of Lithuanian territory, with the announced intention of protecting Poles in that confused nation while at the same time aiding true Lithuanian patriots in establishing a secure state. This was a gambit difficult to explain, so negotiations between Lubonski and Jurgela, seeking a union of the two states, were shattered.

  At almost the same time Polish patriots, for the best reasons in the world, felt they had to fight the Ukrainians in the Polish part of Galicia and some rather brutal events occurred, about evenly divided between the two armies but all calculated to make any future union of the two nations impossible. For a while Lubonski would see no more of Vondrachuk.

  But war was a common commodity in these parts, and the battles far removed, so it was easy for attention to be diverted when a startling event focused attention on the Bukowski palace. Miroslawa Bukowska announced that she was marrying Seweryn Buk, the master’s bastard son.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ Wiktor protested, but his distant cousin, this tall, ungainly woman of twenty-nine whom no one could imagine as engaged in passion of any kind, was obdurate: ‘We’re getting married.’

  ‘No priest will countenance such a thing,’ Wiktor growled, and it was apparent that he would take steps immediately to ensure that Father Barski did not perform any ceremony.

  ‘I have supposed you would behave like this,’ Miroslawa said with lips pursed.

  ‘You can’t continue here,’ Marjorie said in defense of her husband’s position, but as soon as the words were spoken she regretted them and would have softened her statement had not the housekeeper said: ‘I have no intention of staying. This is my formal announcement that I’m leaving.’

  ‘And where will you live?’ Wiktor asked contemptuously. The answer indicated how deeply the Positivist malignancy had infected his cousin: ‘I shall live as the people of this land have always lived. Seweryn has a cottage—’

  ‘I will not allow him, or you, to occupy—’

  ‘Those days are past, Pan Bukowski. You no longer have the right to say who can and who cannot.’

  ‘I still own the cottages, remember that.’

  ‘But not the land that Janko Buk farms. Not the land on which his cottage stands.’

  ‘Is that one giving you his cottage?’

  ‘No. But he’s already given us land on which we shall do our own building.’

  ‘Seweryn Buk hasn’t a zloty to build anything.’

  ‘I have,’ the determined woman said, and when Wiktor asked sneeringly: ‘You’d use your savings to build a house for a peasant?’ she snapped: ‘Whose savings did you use to build this palace?’

  It was then that Marjorie entered the conversation seriously: ‘I’ve always been distressed about Seweryn. Miroslawa, your mother begged me to ignore his mother, but I knew that a great wrong had been done to Jadwiga. My conscience warned me that I owed her …’

  When Wiktor saw how this conversation was heading he stomped from the room, leaving the two women to discuss a problem which had never really been resolved.

  ‘Are you determined to go ahead with this?’ Marjorie asked as she rang for tea.

  ‘I am. It’s my salvation and the salvation of Poland.’

  ‘Don’t mix the two, Miroslawa. Is it that you’re growing older—’

  ‘Because the two have never been mixed, there have been two Polands, one for the gentry, one for the peasants.’

  ‘Never try to correct a national situation by a foolish personal act.’

  ‘I’m sure people like me must have warned people like you in Vienna that if things continued, the empire would have to crumble. But you never listened.’

  ‘Predictions of disaster are easy to announce, but they rarely come to pass. I think you’re acting this way because you’re frightened you may never find a husband. Wiktor and I will take you to the little palace in Warsaw, where you can meet hundreds of men who would make good husbands.’

  ‘I am of this soil, Pani Bukowska.’

  ‘I wish you would call me Marjorie. If you do move out of the palace and live here in our village—’

  ‘It is no longer your village. There’s a new day, Pani Bukowska, and you don’t seem to realize that.’

  ‘You are so determined?’

  ‘I am. A new day is dawning in Poland and I shall consecrate it by giving Seweryn Buk the name he’s entitled to.’

  ‘You’r
e going to call him Bukowski?’

  ‘No, he’s going to call himself Bukowski.’

  Now Marjorie had to voice strong protest, and she summoned a servant to find Wiktor, and as he returned to the room she said abruptly: ‘Miroslawa tells me that after their wedding Buk is going to take her name—Bukowski.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’ Wiktor cried. During the quarter of a century since the birth of Seweryn Buk in 1896, the infant, and then the boy, and now the young man had been an agitation in this district. He had carried himself well, fitting easily into the Buk family, but everyone knew that he was really Wiktor’s son and that brash Janko Buk had utilized him as a device for acquiring fields and a portion of the forest, so he was both resented and scorned.

  At the palace, he was also a problem, a colorless, shapeless threat who bore the master’s physiognomy but not his name, and Wiktor, coming upon him suddenly in some field, had often wished that the young fellow would go away … just vanish. But in those early-1900 days peasants were not likely to be going away to anywhere; they were tied to the land and that was that.

  Now the skeletons were to be wrenched out of their hiding places, so that what had been talked of openly in the village would also be discussed openly in the palace. No matter what objection the Bukowskis raised, Miroslawa, who shared that name, remained resolute, and banns were published.

  It could not be a wedding in the old style, Monday-through-Saturday, because the participants were not real villagers, and the riotous celebrations of a typical wedding would have appeared strange and improper for someone so austere as Miroslawa, but it was a three-day affair, with musicians paid for by Pani Bukowska and beer provided by her husband.