By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

We represent the interests of a Polish client … against the U.S. government. We have attempted to contact the U.S. government re this matter but unfortunately have had no response. Therefore we are going public.

  It details his imprisonment and release, then adds:

  The embarrassing part of this arrangement for the U.S. was that our client’s camouflage was revealed through betrayal in the headquarters of the CIA. David B., a CIA official, was paid $90,000 by the Soviet Union in exchange for the names of spies who worked against the Soviets—among them was our client.

  Our client was recruited by the USA because he was a famous athlete and he could travel without suspicion between the East and West. Point of contact at that time was Colonel Lunkuist, head of the military service in Frankfurt. The first meeting of our client and Colonel Lunkuist took place during a fencing competition in Padua. Colonel Lunkuist was also a famous Formula One driver.

  At the time our client was assured that, due to his work for the American secret services, he would never face financial problems of any kind and that after ten years of espionage he could emigrate to America. Money would not be a problem.20

  So Pawłowski wanted a CIA pension, had got nowhere, and was trying to publicize his case. Lange’s enquiry never came to anything, and although the German fencers put together a new life for him, with an undemanding role in their saber program, they never heard from him again. Understandably, those who offered help feel let down—but not surprised.

  I had heard that when Pawłowski was first taken off to prison, to a decaying structure built in 1902, he was given a room on his own—cell 7—as no one would share with him. According to Pawłowski, there were seven men in his cell, pedophiles, psychopaths, and mentally deranged prisoners: “the worst types—people on the edge of society.” Early on, he had to make it clear he was no “swel”—the lowest of the low among the prisoner population, who would rent his body out to others. He was allowed 112 zlotys—little more than a dollar—a week, one letter a month, two parcels a year. When life got easier, his son was even able to smuggle in chocolates and cigarettes during visits.

  After his release Pawłowski cooperated on a film of his life for Austrian television. It has some interesting information not found elsewhere, such as the assertion that Pawłowski’s formal accusation named two non-Poles as co-spies: a West German, Dieter Fenger, a national épée team member in the early 1960s, and an Israeli, “Checki” Zinnober. But mainly it gives its subject a very sympathetic ride, beginning with shots of him in straw hat and tartan shirt painting swans on a nearby lake. “I had a moral problem,” he says. “To spy against my own country was the most effective way I had of fighting the enemy.” The narrator asks at the film’s end, “Was he a hero or only one who played too high?” Pawłowski gets the final say: “The real hero was my wife … in every day of my hard life.”

  All over their house, which he and Iwonka share with Iwonka’s mother, are Pawłowski’s paintings. Unlike Zabłocki, with whom he has exhibited, he paints only in oils. It is a hobby he took up in prison, using a toothbrush. He gave his first painting to another inmate, who asked him for it. He also became a jailhouse lawyer, helping inmates with their complaints. One prisoner, Fidel the Filipino, serving a life sentence for murder, became his chess partner. Fidel suffered from terrible head pains, and one day, in consternation, Pawłowski laid his hands on his friend’s head. The man felt a strong heat and after a while said with intense relief, “Thank God—the bitch has left.” His migraines never returned. Since then Pawłowski has taken this apparent gift seriously and turns up three times a week at one of the hospitals in Warsaw to help patients. Once, he says, he even helped cure his wife.

  Later that day Iwonka, plump and pretty in a pink suit, joined us and confirmed his story: on holiday in the Canadian mountains, she fell and was convinced she had broken her leg. Pawłowski put his hands on her, and by the time she was brought down to the hotel and X-rayed there was no sign of any damage. “I myself didn’t feel anything,” Pawłowski says. “I was too angry—she was wearing such stupid shoes for climbing.”

  After her husband was taken into custody, Iwonka was told that her work as an obstetrician at the military hospital near their home would be imperiled if she did not file for divorce. She says, “I smiled and told them if that was their condition then I would give up being a doctor.” Soon after, she lost her job. Only after her husband’s release did she start working again. She and Pawłowski seemed very happy together. Was she in fact his third wife, or fourth? “Third!” he replied. “No—first—you know Arab saying? Third wife is first!”

  Soon it was time for me to leave, and Pawłowski offered to drive me to the airport. In the car I was reminded of the only other visit Western fencers had made to the Pawłowski house. Roland Boitelle, former president of the FIE, and an American official, Ralph Zimmerman, had gone there for dinner during a top saber competition in Warsaw in the spring of 1986, within months of Pawłowski’s release. Pawłowski doesn’t ordinarily drink alcohol (bar that special medal-winning shot of vodka), but he raised his glass toward the central light, which he obviously thought was bugged, toasting “Poland and Freedom.” At the end of the evening he gave Zimmerman an engraving he had done—of a suffering Christ. Then he drove his guests back to their hotel, setting off into the night like a demon. At one stage he drove through a red light, just as a police car came by, as if daring the car to give chase. He was still gambling.

  On my own ride to the airport Pawłowski became mournful. He had been out of prison by the time Kevey died, he said, but no one told him, so he had never even tried to go to Budapest for his old teacher’s cremation. “We may have argued at the end, but we were very close. We spent so much time together—we even shared girlfriends. When I left prison, he came to Poland just to see me. I hold it against them all that they never told me. I should have been there.”

  Kevey, who after his time in Poland had taught for several years in Turin, finally returned to coach in Hungary but never had the success in either country that he had enjoyed in Poland. The truth is that there he had had his pick of the country’s most promising young fencers; although his teaching style had the veneer of a new system, he was basically propounding the classic Hungarian method. His horizontal flèche was eventually banned, and later flèching itself was outlawed. Nevertheless, he was a great teacher, the only saber coach worldwide to have worked at international level with three leading fencing nations, just not the original he declared himself to be. When Zabłocki, one of the two Poles at the memorial service, saw the urn carrying Kevey’s ashes, he thought to himself: what a small urn for such a big man.

  In My Longest Duel Pawłowski returns again and again to a famous figure from Polish mythology, Konrad Wallonrod. In the greatest of the romantic poems in which he appears, the young Wallonrod swears revenge against the German Knights of the Sword who have ravaged his country. He later joins them and leads them into a ruinous ambush. So he is both seeming traitor and hero-patriot—displaying what is called “double patriotism.” It is a compelling image but for Pawłowski a self-justifying and unconvincing one. There is a Polish word for it—“bajka,” a fairy tale.

  Pawłowski was the great champion of my competitive days. “It is strange,” wrote the journalist Simon Barnes, “how some athletes have this additional quality of watchability; something that makes them not only a great athlete but also a star. They draw every eye to themselves in triumph and disaster or when they are just having an ordinary day. Talent is something you take for granted at the high level of sport; watchability is something different.”21 Despite all the issues his life raises, I prefer to think of Pawłowski as I saw him first: balletic, effortless, his compact body advancing and retreating under such control that his torso seemed not to move even as his legs carried him onward. He would launch into outlandish actions that had no right to succeed, even against his main rivals, just so he could set up a final hit with a flick to the wrist or the latest of parries
, to leave audiences gasping at his audacity. Then the courteous smile, the slight nod, and that knowing look, as if he and the onlookers were sharing some secret.

  Perhaps we were.

  * Early in the Second World War, Czajkowski was fighting the Red Army and Belorussian partisans in eastern Poland when he and four other teenagers were captured by partisans. “They wanted to hang me; they’d even prepared a rope,” he recalls.3 Instead, two Soviet officers ordered him to Kobrýn, to be interrogated by a military commissar. After a short interview, he was sent home. In April 1940 he was captured once more, this time by Soviet troops, and spent more than a year in prison. Still only eighteen, he was sent to the infamous labor camp at Vorkuta in the Arctic north, where more than 2 million Poles would perish. In September 1941 he escaped, making his way by foot, donkey, camel, and barge to Uzbekistan in Central Asia. By February 1942 he had reached the newly formed Polish forces within the USSR and begged to be allowed to join the Polish navy. Rejected, he made a second extraordinary journey by way of India, Persia, and South Africa to Britain and enlisted at the Polish naval base in Plymouth, where he was assigned to the Oelazak, Destroyer L26. By the end of 1942 his ship held the record for the number of German planes shot down. Czajkowski served in the Dieppe raid and the landings on Sicily and at Salerno.

  † Shortly before the Games, the Polish fencers had challenged their Olympic soccer team to a match, with the goals slightly reduced in size. Zabłocki was keeper, Pawlowski the leading forward. The fencers won 5–3, creating a storm in the home press.

  Escrimeur: (sport) fencer

  [Immediate next entry] Escroc: crook, swindler, shark, con-man

  —Collins French Dictionary, 1995

  Honour! Tut, a breath,

  There’s no such thing in nature; a mere term

  Invented to awe fools.

  —BEN JONSON, Volpone, 1606

  CHEATING HAS INFECTED FENCING, A SPORT ROOTED IN NOTIONS of honor and chivalry, since competitions began just as dueling, a procedure of honor, was always haunted by foul play. In the early years of international meets, France, Italy, and Hungary were so dominant that it was axiomatic that fencers from those nations would be given preferential treatment by juries, who were either too scared or too prejudiced to award hits fairly. (Most smaller European countries understandably concentrated on épée, the first weapon to be run electrically.) Dishonesty is rife and has been since the first modern Olympics, if not before.

  That a sporting contest had to be continually scrutinized for false play was a late-nineteenth-century admission; and even then the idea that participants might systematically find a way round the rules was slow to take root. Cheating, particularly in Olympic sports, became a cause for concern about the time of the 1956 Games, by which time governments as well as individuals could see the advantages to be gained from sporting success, and fencers, particularly from Communist countries, could make a significantly better life for themselves with victories on the piste. Dr. Manfred Hoppner, East Germany’s last chief of sports medicine, found guilty of feeding body-changing drugs to his charges, declared in his defense, “Competitive sport and sport for health are different things. Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.”1 Such a view is not limited to competitors from the old East Bloc: as standards of training, nutrition, and recruitment have risen, championship fencing has demanded more time and dedication, and most contestants have become professional in all but name. Any fencer who hopes to compete successfully on the international scene is expected to be able to “look after himself.”

  Until the advent of electrical épée in the late 1920s, hits were judged by eye. Up till 1932, one had to acknowledge touches—hence Laertes’ “A hit, a palpable hit.” And the target itself was strictly limited, a matter as much of good form as good fencing. “Imagine what it was [like] when every man wore, upon the breast leathers of his fencing jacket, a fine, big heart of red cloth, which told the world where the thrusts were to be and not to be,” mused Richard Burton. “A point denting any other part of the garment was considered not only a failure but a blunder; it was not merely condemned by the rule of arms, it was overwhelmed with contempt. Circles, equally limited, were traced out for everything in the shape of attacks, parries, and ripostes.”2

  Burton was writing about foil in the late eighteenth century; by his day new measures had been introduced, particularly for épée, where the critical issue was who arrived first. The practice épée was given a blunt point, similar to the flat head of a nail, “made still more incapable of penetration by winding round it a small ball of waxed thread, such as cobblers use.”3 For competitions there were various forms of “boutons marqués,” all unsatisfactory. For a while points were tipped with a red dye, so that a good hit would leave a woundlike daub on an opponent, and the intervals between fights would be spent rubbing the incriminating areas with removing fluids. One veteran Olympian recalls the distinctive smell of fencers’ changing rooms—“a mix of perspiration and vinegar.” In the 1950s the Russians invented an improved dye (made from a red chemical and ammonia), which was soaked into cotton-wool pads on the tips of foils, to stain clothing for about thirty seconds before disappearing; but it proved totally impractical, since it could not record good hits and off-target hits in sequence.

  At the same time that dyes were being used, the so-called point d’arrêt—literally, the stopping point—became popular. Introduced in 1883, it was a single sharp tip protruding 2 millimeters from the cord binding wrapped around the top of the épée. It was pronounced “most useful,” for by catching in the clothes it showed where a hit had been made. Eventually it was condemned as dangerous, as well as too costly on clothing, and in 1906 a triple point was introduced, named after its inventor, Léon Sazie. It is difficult to imagine that his épée was once considered state-of-the-art, a real advance over previous weapons, considering that at day’s end fencers would find their jackets honeycombed with tiny nicks, especially along the sleeve. Gauntlets that covered the sleeve were soon introduced, and the stiff corded cotton from which jackets were made replaced by sailcloth. The triple point continued for over fifty years.

  Although primitive electrical scoring systems had been developed early in the history of épée (a French catalog of 1914 shows one such apparatus), the first practical one, invented by a Swiss engineer, Laurent Pagan, was introduced in November 1931 at a tournament in Geneva. The first European championships with electric épée were held in 1935; the first world championships with electric foil in 1955, saber in 1988. Each innovation was acclaimed, yet the criticism persisted that hits were still not being awarded with sufficient accuracy. Of course, even within the parameters of modern sport, fencers have been expected to acknowledge touches; but, as the intensity of competition has grown, this has become a tradition honored more in fine words than in substance.*

  It is no secret that all games are played in continuous tension between their formal rules (or laws) and a shifting convention of what players find acceptable. The great British all-rounder C. B. Fry took this a stage further: if both sides decide to cheat, cheating is fair.5 (He conveniently overlooked that spectators are part of the relationship too.) Fencers have quietly adopted the same axiom, partly because at international level most are manipulative masters of the rules, partly because they are genuinely creative. It was accepted that cheating was wrong; there were myriad rules to penalize it; but there were inevitable gray areas, and soon a double standard evolved, which distinguished “tolerated” cheating, which most fencers might try as long as they could get away with it, from cheating that was beyond the pale in any situation.

  A fencer can cheat in scores of ways, ranging from the simple act of knocking off the clip that makes one’s electric jacket function to subtler manipulations: in the days before electric saber a German international sabreur (now a senior judge) would loosen the pommel of his weapon so it gave a click similar to a blade’s striking its target. Here are some of the more dramatic cheating meth
ods and how they have been applied.

  1. Parrying with the back arm. Fighter pilots say that a particular kind of offensive fire “lies in the grass”—that is, so low to the ground that radar cannot detect it. Fencing is now so fast it can be difficult even for seasoned referees to follow. It is illegal to parry with one’s unarmed hand, yet some fencers are adept at doing so. Opponents are allowed to ask for special judges to watch out for the offense; but by and large if a fencer can get away with the odd illicit parry he wins a certain amount of grudging admiration.

  2. Favoritism. In 1979 the Hungarian world saber champion of 1977, Pál Gerevich, son of the famous father, told an interviewer, “Saber fencers have a saying, ‘For the first half of your life you work to gain authority; for the second half your authority works for you.’ ” Even though electric equipment has helped unknown fencers gain hits on those with a reputation, referees still favor the known fencer. Back in the days of “steam” foil, the hot favorite in the women’s event in the 1952 Olympics was the great Ilona Elek. At the three-quarters stage, leading a final pool of eight with five wins and no losses, she fenced a little-known American, Maxine Mitchell. The audience looked on as Mitchell landed ten hits in a row, but got credit for only four. Elek herself wasn’t cheating—the jury, consciously or unconsciously, was doing it for her. By a rough justice, by the time the Hungarian notched up enough hits to win, both women were exhausted, and Elek lost her next two bouts and with them her chance at gold.

  3. Drugs. There are a few well-known cases, but fencing is relatively clear of this particular problem.† One of the world’s top ten sabreurs during the mid-1980s was convicted of drug taking by the FIE and never again fenced in international competition: he now coaches in South America. The 1984 Olympic saber champion Jean-François Lamour tested positive for excess caffeine after winning the world championships in 1987. A second urine sample was clear, so Lamour was not suspended. He told me that if he had had the alleged amount of caffeine in his system—36 milliliters—he wouldn’t have been able to get on guard, let alone win a title. Yet he still worried that somehow he might have been guilty as charged. “It was as if the sky had fallen in. I kept asking myself if perhaps I had made a mistake. I tried to remember how much coffee I had drunk, how many times I’d been to the toilet, how much water I had taken. Even now I have not received any official letter saying I am cleared—yet the laboratory responsible for the tests made a lot of mistakes, not just with me, and six months after my positive test the lab was closed down.”‡