This Noble Land

by James A. Michener

‘For what?’ the woman from Paris asked in Polish.

  ‘Because she was here when the Nazis arrived,’ he replied in English.

  That ended that line of interrogation. Now a man from Berlin well versed in economics asked: ‘What solutions do you see to the food shortage, Herr Buk?’ and Buk said with great caution: ‘One, to grow any food at all, we face a grave shortage of fertilizer and spare parts. Two, if we want to increase production, we must have more of everything. Three, to distribute even what we do have, we must change present patterns.’

  This was a bold, sharp answer, and pencils scribbled rapidly. Both the Japanese and American television men asked if Buk would repeat his three points for their cameras and he said yes, but before doing so he asked that Bukowski appear with him: ‘Because we’re not fighting, you know. We’re talking.’

  So the two Poles with-such similar backgrounds and such contrasting positions stood side by side to face the cameras, and after Buk had repeated what he had just said, Bukowski smiled thinly and added his comment: ‘We’re exploring every avenue to relax the present crisis.’

  ‘Even a farmers’ union?’ the Berlin man shouted, and the two Poles merely smiled.

  But in their afternoon session both sides began cautiously to explore exactly that question, and Bukowski tried to stamp out the first tentative proposals: ‘Unions have always been for workers in cities. You can’t find a major nation in the world which amounts to anything that allows agricultural unions.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time,’ Buk said, and the debate was joined.

  Bukowski had been warned by his superiors in Warsaw, who had been warned by their superiors in Moscow: ‘You can make almost any reasonable concession you wish. Prices, schedules, priorities, spare parts, lower rates for agricultural gasoline … But under no circumstance should you even discuss a farmers’ union. That would imperil the state.’

  ‘A rural union,’ he said with attempted finality, ‘would be untidy. Difficult to administer. Open to all sorts of fraud. It simply isn’t needed.’

  ‘But when all us farmers face the same problems, we’re going to take the same action whether we have a union or not.’

  ‘That’s the socialist way,’ Bukowski said eagerly, ‘without a union.’

  ‘But if we did have a union, our responses would be more sensible, more productive.’

  ‘You would gain nothing by a union,’ Bukowski said with near-contempt.

  A Warsaw official who had not yet spoken now did so: ‘What you would gain, Buk, would be the power to control this nation’s food supply, and that cannot be tolerated.’

  Buk sat with hands folded in front of him on the table. Leaning forward until his chest almost touched his hands, he said: ‘We will control the food supply whether we have a union or not. You can never make us sow and reap at the rate we did when we were free to find our own markets. You know that’s why Russia is starving. With all the power they command, they can’t get their farmers to produce two-thirds of what they produced in the old days. And we Poles in 1981 aren’t producing two-thirds of what our grandfathers produced, either. And if you allow things to get worse, the food supply will get worse.’ Leaving his hands folded resolutely on the table, as if they represented his answer, he leaned back.

  The fierce confrontation continued all that afternoon, farmers with their backs to the wall defending themselves against a bureaucracy with its back to several walls. But gradually certain definitions did emerge: the government would not allow a union; the farmers demanded one with powers equal to those obtained by factory workers. On that there was a stalemate. But certain concessions were agreed to: the government would make a concentrated drive to find spare parts; the farmers promised not to diminish any further their normal schedules of planting and husbandry.

  And then Janko Buk dropped his bombshell. When it had been agreed that he and Bukowski would go before the cameras again and stress the agreements, not the differences, Bukowski said: ‘We’ll resume our discussions tomorrow,’ and Buk said: ‘We would like to involve the Bishop of Gorka.’

  Bukowski stopped dead. His head jerked back and he stared at the farmers. ‘Yes,’ they agreed. ‘We’d like to have the Bishop of Gorka take part.’

  ‘He has no concern in this!’ Bukowski exploded. ‘This is an economic problem. This is food and money and oil and machinery.’

  ‘It’s the welfare of Poland,’ Buk said stubbornly. ‘And the church is a third part of Poland. We want the bishop here.’

  The appearance before the television cameras had to be delayed while Bukowski went to the telephone to consult with Warsaw: ‘We had everything going smoothly when the clever little bastard threw a hand grenade at us. He wants to involve the Catholic church.’

  There was a loud rumble in the phone, to which he replied: ‘That’s exactly what I told him. But he still wants to bring in the bishop.’

  This simple proposal apparently caused as much turmoil in Warsaw as it had in Bukowo, for during five minutes Bukowski did nothing but listen. Then he said meekly: ‘I think your suggestion is very wise. Yes, yes. Four weeks. Yes.’

  When he left the phone he reassembled both parties and announced grimly: ‘The talks will be recessed for four weeks.’ Everyone wanted to know why, but he stonewalled: ‘I’ll announce it to the press. We’ll resume here in four weeks.’ And when he went before the cameras this time he did not ask Buk to stand beside him. In cold, crisp, bureaucratic tones he delivered an ultimatum: ‘Our talks have progressed amiably, but both sides feel the need for further study. We’ll resume in four weeks.’ He would say no more and permitted Buk to add nothing, so the world press was free to interpret the impasse as it wished. No reporter came even close to guessing the reason for the break.

  Long after the lumbering press bus had started back to Warsaw and the private cars of the lesser Communists had followed, Szymon Bukowski quietly accompanied Janko Buk to the latter’s cottage, where he knew he would meet Buk’s young wife and an older woman he had known with passionate intensity forty years earlier, not in the way of love-making but in the brutal warfare of life and death. In the early winter of 1941 he had come to this cottage, to this woman and her husband, pleading for help.

  When Buk pushed open the door, indicating that Bukowski should enter, he noticed that the commissar was trembling, but then his wife saw them and hurried forward to greet their visitor and he took her hand. Buk’s mother stayed behind, hands folded across her apron, standing very still and erect, for she, too, was remembering those distant fateful nights.

  Then Bukowski saw her, and he left the younger Buks to stride across the kitchen he had once known so well, and he saw that clean hard face with the dreadful welt from left eye to chin, and he held out his hands, grasped hers and drew her toward him in a long embrace.

  ‘It is many years since you stood in this kitchen at midnight,’ she said. Then, pulling away, she looked at him admiringly. ‘You’ve done wonderful things with your life, Mr. Minister.’

  ‘The name is Szymon,’ he said. ‘The name was always Szymon.’

  ‘You were just a boy when I first knew you,’ she said.

  ‘Think of it,’ he said to the younger Buks as he took a chair at the kitchen table. ‘At seventeen I was in that forest … head of a commando … had already killed my first Nazi … the one who had hanged my grandmother.’

  He liked what he saw of young Pani Buk: Kazimiera was of that stalwart breed which had always kept the farms of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia functioning. She was prepared to serve as wife, mother, cook, seamstress, ox when the plow had to be pulled, and always as the sharp verbal critic. It was to her that he now spoke, as if acknowledging that inside the cottage she was mistress.

  ‘Pani, when I left Warsaw at dawn this morning the women in my building asked me—’

  ‘I know,’ she said abruptly. ‘They hoped you could bring home some meat.’

  ‘And vegetables.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have the zlotys, you know.’ />
  Buk’s mother broke in: ‘Zlotys are of no use any more. We can’t buy anything with them.’

  ‘But I’d leave them anyway. To demonstrate my good will.’

  ‘Good will we know you have. I knew your mother, I knew your grandmother. And women like that do not produce poor sons.’

  They talked for a while of the old days, and tough Biruta began to weep when she recalled that special night when Bukowski had come to this cottage to talk her and her husband into joining his underground unit, then operating out of the Forest of Szczek. ‘They were heroic days,’ she said.

  ‘These are heroic days, Biruta.’

  ‘How have you managed to mess up this country so abominably?’

  ‘We’re not free in Warsaw, you know.’ And that was all he would concede. ‘You will let me have some food?’

  ‘Of course. You came here before, begging for food, and we gave it then, didn’t we?’

  ‘What can I give you in return?’

  ‘Not zlotys. Szymon, zlotys are no longer worth a damn. But we would like some books about farming … for Janko and our young ones.’

  ‘Books you shall have,’ he said. Then he left the cottage and whistled for the driver to bring the government car closer so that its trunk could be packed with items of food no longer obtainable in Warsaw.