by Marek Hlasko
“Why?” said the policeman, and his face suddenly clouded. “Don’t you like the name?”
“Nonsense; I haven’t said anything of the kind.”
“And you’re very pleased about it, aren’t you?”
“What am I pleased about?”
“The fact that you haven’t said anything of the kind. Admit it.”
They were walking slowly across the deserted square. “Ah, my friend,” Franciszek said, “if you had gone through what I have, you’d realize that that isn’t enough: you like it, you don’t like it. I raised my hand against things which neither conscience nor reason can grasp, which are beyond human understanding. I know, I know it perfectly; I told you then that there were no such things. I told you—it’s a fact, I know I told you—that everything described as beyond human understanding is at bottom an absurdity and a lie, and a crime as well, and that it is not beyond man, but against man. That’s what I said, yes. I said that every human action can be measured only by a man’s endurance and life, and by the amount of happiness it gives him—however little. Yes, that’s what I said. What of it? Like everybody else, I had my moments of doubt. My dear man: the more moments of doubt that can be mastered by reason, the stronger the faith.”
He turned to the policeman, but he was walking alone—there was no one beside him. Somewhere near a fence three old women stood gossiping, and the young policeman was running toward them, holding up his long coat. A moment later Franciszek could hear his resounding voice: “Do you like it or don’t you?” and the frightened chirping of the three old women.
He entered a telephone booth and dialed a number. After a while he heard the click of the receiver at the other end. “Excuse me,” he said; “may I speak to Jerzy?”
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice asked.
“My name is Kowalski.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Jerzy isn’t in,” the woman said. “Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Again the receiver was silent for a moment. Someone knocked sharply at the booth window.
“On vacation,” said the voice in the receiver. “You understand—on va-ca-tion. Surely he is entitled to a vacation, isn’t he?”
Franciszek wanted to say something, but the receiver clicked at the other end. Again he was walking through the dark, empty city, which had been washed by rain for many weeks, and still refused to awaken to spring, the city with one neon sign over it: YOUNG PEOPLE READ THE BANNER OF YO H.” At home, he sat by the window in a cold draft; he looked at the blinking letters, and it seemed to him that over the noise and bustle of the city he could hear a sharp barking voice: “Do you like it or don’t you? Do you like it or don’t you? Do you like it or …”
Suddenly he turned around. “Why don’t you serve supper, Elzbieta?”
He heard her stand up heavily and move off to the kitchen. He followed her. “You’ve broken with Roman, haven’t you?”
She leaned on his arm and suddenly burst into tears.
“It will pass,” he said, stroking her cold, heavy hair. “Everything will pass, my child. Everything evil, stupid, inhuman. We must think that we are continually moving toward light; we must believe in it …” He fell silent, and stared at the darkness outside and the quivering neon letters, and once again—against his will—read them from beginning to end, mentally replacing the missing ones. Then he pushed Elzbieta away, and violently drew the curtain, so violently that some of its rings tore off.
XIII
HE STOPPED IN FRONT OF A TALL WHITE HOUSE, and checked the address on a slip of paper. He walked in, and was starting to climb the broad staircase when someone called from behind, “Hey, Citizen!”
He turned around, his hand on the banister: a soldier with a tommy gun slung over his shoulder stood on the landing below.
“Who do you want to see?” he asked Franciszek.
“A friend.”
“What’s this?” the soldier said, and his young face was suddenly clouded. “Without a pass? Come back down, Citizen.” He held out his hand. “Your papers.”
He slowly made out a pass for him on a red form, wetting his pencil and murmuring solemnly the while; finally he gave Franciszek his identification with the pass, and said, “Third floor.” Then, as Franciszek was beginning to climb, he added in a chiding tone, “Next time, Citizen, don’t try to get in without a pass.”
He stopped at the third floor and rang the bell. The door opened for him, there were whispers, and finally he stood before the man he had come to see. “Do you recognize me, Birch?” Franciszek asked.
The man standing before him, with a sickly face and sunken, lusterless black eyes, scrutinized him carefully. “Skinny,” he said at last, holding out his hand. “It’s Skinny, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Franciszek. “It’s me.”
They sat in armchairs. They looked at each other, trying to discover changes in one another’s faces and gestures; for a few moments an awkward silence prevailed. Then Franciszek, trying to hide his embarrassment, began to speak hurriedly: “You must excuse me for bothering you—I know people like you have no time even for their families, but my case …” He suddenly hesitated.
“Go on,” Birch said. “I’m listening.”
“Do you remember me as I was in the underground?”
“Yes, you, and the others too.”
“Will you help me?”
“Surely that goes without saying,” Birch said. “Talk.”
“I … I …” Franciszek said, trying to look the other straight in the eyes, “I raised my hand against the party. I don’t understand myself how it happened …” He turned scarlet. “You know, I was a bit tight, and I shouted that …”
He paused, suddenly overcome with a feeling that this talk was hopeless. “What did I shout?” he thought desperately, “What did I shout? After all, I said the truth, what I felt …” He went on: “I said that I didn’t believe that—that—”
“That what?”
“That it was possible to build anything valuable by means of crimes and lies, by destroying human dignity, by transforming Communist loyalty into slavery.”
“And what am I to do about it?”
“I want you—you, one of the men who have power and know the authorities—I want you to tell me: Where is the dividing line between loyalty and slavery, between crime and necessity? It was always reason that drew that line, reason and conscience. And now—that’s what I said then—now man has become only a miserable plaything of politics. We try to forget reason if we know what’s good for us; and as for conscience, that miserable thing, it’s better to think it never existed.”
“Whom did you say all this to?”
“To whom? To whom? Does it matter? What matters is that I’m saying it to myself.”
“What happened afterward?”
“What happened afterward is beside the point. I was expelled from the party. But that’s beside the point too.”
“And so?”
“I want you to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“That I’m wrong.”
They were silent for a while. The other looked at Franciszek with his lusterless eyes, his head slightly bowed. “Listen,” he said at last. “The first year after the war I worked for the security police. I had a son; all through the occupation he was in the underground; then he took part in armed attacks, was riddled with bullets, lost one lung, and finally, as an invalid, he landed in my office. In my office, where he had to do the work of three strong healthy men. So he worked—interrogations, investigations, spies, saboteurs, diversionists. Once he questioned a diversionist; he had been questioning him I don’t know how many nights on end; the prisoner behaved provocatively, and finally my boy—sick, almost dead with exhaustion, his nerves strained to the breaking point—couldn’t stand it any more and struck the diversionist in the face.” He paused.
“Well, what then?” Franciszek asked.
Birch smiled strangely. “Well, nothing,” he said. “I had to lock him up—eight years in jail. I myself saw to it that he was sentenced. And do you know what the diversionist got? Five years. He was a halfwit; he didn’t even know what he was doing, or who he was working against. Whereas my son was a conscious, militant party member, and was supposed to know what he was doing.”
He rose suddenly and began to pace the room. His neck grew purple, and his upper lip quivered. “Goddam it to hell!” he said. “To hell with this goddam chatter! What matters are the consequences, the final consequences. Once you’ve started a revolution, you have to realize that it can’t be stopped, or moderated, or turned off, or delayed. A revolution can be only won or lost, and that’s all. What horrifies you? The dimensions? The methods?”
“The consequences,” Franciszek said. “What you said a moment ago. Is the revolution a blind, brutal force?”
Birch gripped Franciszek by the arm and led him to the window. Before them lay the wet city, bristling with scaffoldings. “Here, to this place,” Birch said, “in I don’t know how many years, a man will come who hasn’t yet been born. He will come and he’ll want to live, to have food, an apartment, children, a family; he will want to live in security and he will expect the time he lives in to provide everything a man is entitled to. I assure you that he won’t be concerned with your sufferings and doubts, or mine. He will evaluate the world he finds by the yardstick of his reason. And that’s all.”
He fell silent. He looked down at the wet scaffoldings, and his sickly yellow face darkened.
“You have a son,” Franciszek said. “I didn’t know.”
Birch raised his head. “ ‘Have’?” he said. “I had. He’s so sick he’ll never survive it all …” He walked up to the radio and turned the knob. “Excuse me, Franciszek,” he said, “but yesterday I made a speech at a meeting and now they’re going to broadcast it. I want to listen.”
Franciszek was silent. What had he come here for? Who had he been talking to? And what had he expected to hear in reply? He had heard only what he himself had repeated a million times to himself and others, in order to find strength to act. And where was that strength? In Mikołaj’s departure, in Bear’s failure, or in the tired voice of this man who had sentenced his own son? Where was the goal, and the hope? Was it really in this man still unborn who would confront life unseeing, ignorant of the sacrifices and renunciations and defeats others had suffered for his sake, those others who had been tortured to death and thrown on the dung pile? If this contented blind man of the future, who would walk with a smile upon this filthy earth, was to be our hope, if our sacrifices were for his sake, what would justify them?
“May Day is near,” Birch’s voice said on the radio. “Comrades. The founders of Marxism-Leninism teach us that the working class cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the oppressed and exploited, without abolishing all oppression and exploitation of man by man. The working class is the class under whose leadership mankind emancipates itself from all forms of social injustice, from everything that obstructs social progress. The working class is the class under whose leadership mankind takes the historic leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, achieves mastery over nature, and begins, through knowledge of the laws of social evolution, consciously to shape its fate.”
He was interrupted by long and frantic applause. Then he went on:
“The doctrine of Marx and Engels was further developed by Lenin and Stalin, our Great Teacher. They developed it in the age of imperialism, when capitalist oppression and exploitation had spread over the entire terrestrial globe and combined with all the pre-capitalist forms of enslavement of labor, when the greed of the imperialist exploiters threw mankind into bloody wars of historically unprecedented dimensions, when the bourgeoisie and its ideologists betrayed and trampled upon all ideals, including the limited freedom and justice they themselves had once proclaimed, and when the working masses of the entire world were filled with a growing and irresistible aspiration for full social justice and full freedom—the aspiration toward socialism …”
Long and frantic applause.
“Lenin and the Great Teacher,” the speaker went on, “developed the doctrine of Marx and Engels according to which the working class is the class destined to free mankind from all exploitation and oppression, and gave us the doctrine of the leadership of the proletariat in the struggles for national liberation, in the struggles of the peasant masses against the feudal regime and its survivals, in the struggles of all toiling people against the capitalist regime …”
Again there was a mighty clamor. “Long, resounding applause,” Franciszek said. “That’s what all the newspapers will say.”
The speaker went on: “Standing at the head of all the oppressed and exploited in the struggle to overthrow imperialist tyranny, forging the alliance between the workers and the toiling peasants and the popular masses engaged in a struggle for national liberation, the party of the proletariat raises the banner of emancipation in the name of the overwhelming majority of society against an insignificant minority of exploiters. The leadership of the working class aims at carrying out, by the proletariat, a great revolutionary task, consisting in the creation of new social conditions in the interests of the overwhelming majority of people in the whole world, and in the construction of a socialist society …”
“Everything true to form,” Franciszek said, “wasn’t it? The hired orphan with the flowers, and some old fogy, a veteran of the 1905 revolution, whom you embraced before the cameras; and secret policemen in dark blue uniforms behind you. Wasn’t it so?”
“Correct,” said Birch. “And there were people who, after the whole thing was over, asked whether I couldn’t get the woman at the refreshment stand to open an hour early; and there was a fellow who whispered into my ear, ‘Malinowski is a thief.’ ”
“But these details won’t be broadcast, will they?” Franciszek said.
“No, they won’t,” said Birch.
He fell silent and listened to his own voice: “The victorious Great Socialist October Revolution created the first proletarian state, the Soviet state. Henceforward, loyalty to proletarian internationalism is above all loyalty to October. It is no accident that the treachery of the Tito clique manifested itself from the outset in its anti-Soviet attitude, in its negation of the leading role of the Soviet Union. It is no accident that anti-Soviet tendencies were at the basis of Gomułkism, the Polish variety of Titoism. The great achievement of the Soviet Union is the model, the example, the hope of the world. It is a model which proves that there is a way out of depressions and misery, economic and cultural backwardness, oppressions of national minorities, and wars between nations. It is an example which teaches us how to overthrow the rule of capitalists and landlords, how to build a new, just society. It is the hope of all those who are oppressed by exploiters, enslaved by imperialists, tortured by reactionaries who hate the toiling masses. The great constructive work of the Soviet Union is a source of strength for the proletarian movement, for progressive and libertarian movements the world over. It is the strength of the Soviet Union that smashed the Hitlerite dream of making a fascist master race the rulers of the world. It is the strength of the Soviet Union that stands in the way of the Wall Street magnates who are trying to repeat Hitler’s attempt to enslave mankind. The international proletariat led by the Soviet Union has become the vanguard of mankind, of all toiling men, of all the oppressed and exploited the world over, in the struggle for a better tomorrow without wars, a tomorrow without oppression and exploitation, a tomorrow of material prosperity and cultural flowering …” His voice was drowned out for a while; once again there was a clamor in the great auditorium, and happy cries rang out; at one point someone could even be heard saying, “There was misery, there was capitalism; then came a man named Lenin …”
“And now long, frantic applause,” Franciszek said. “How absurd!”
“What?”
“How you mu
st despise these people, hate these poor ants, this working class, these people who have the leadership. On the one hand you have to keep flattering them to get a spark of effort out of them; on the other hand, you have to force them to do things which surely seem inhuman even to yourself.” He rose and walked to the window. “And yet there will surely come a time when you will have to stop talking about leadership and look them in the face,” he said. “And what will you see then? What people? The results will be beyond your expectation …” He returned to his armchair. “The only comforting thought is that you have no longer anything in common with any class, or with any people,” he said. “If there is such a thing as comfort.”
The applause died gradually, and again Birch’s voice resounded from the loudspeaker: “May Day is near, the holiday of the workers’ struggle, the holiday of proletarian internationalism, the holiday of the international solidarity of the proletariat. We shall celebrate this May Day at a moment when each passing hour witnesses new reports of the peaceful victories of the construction of Communism in the great Soviet Union, the state of victorious socialism, the hope of toiling mankind …” A last great storm of applause; then the noise gradually subsided, and the announcer promised a symphony concert. Franciszek and Birch exchanged glances.
“And then,” Birch said, “after long, endless applause, I went out into the yard, in front of the factory. The man you asked me about, the old fogy, veteran of the 1905 revolution, stepped up to me. He works in the factory as a night watchman; he asked if I couldn’t get him transferred to the position of a dog. ‘What do you mean—a dog?’ I asked. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the appropriation for a night watchman is a little over four hundred złotys, and almost six hundred is paid for the upkeep of the dog. So you see, comrade, maybe I could change places with the dog. I won’t starve the animal, my word of honor as a worker, but my own position will improve and no one will be the loser.’ Well, Franciszek? Shall we laugh, or start firing guns?” He rose and paced the floor; then he stopped in front of Franciszek. “Memory,” he said. “That’s our only shield against doubts. We must constantly remember where we come from.”