by Arnold Zable
Halinka is barely beyond her teens and Andrei is well into his forties. With his athlete’s physique, unblemished blue eyes, tanned skin and blond hair tied back in a ponytail, he exudes the vigour of a twenty-year-old. ‘I don’t give a damn,’ he shouts at the heavens. ‘I don’t give a damn.’ He lifts Halinka into the air in a flight of exuberance, and sets her down with the deftness of a ballet dancer.
We resume our places and drive on. The forest yields to fields of oats and barley. Strands of flax lie drying on the earth, thistles wave on the roadside. We come upon an enclave of datchas, summer vacation houses barely larger than one-room cabins. The fenced gardens are luxuriant with vegetables and flowers, the houses defined by individual touches, unique designs and colours.
‘That’s how it is in Poland,’ laughs Marek. ‘This is what the old farts and collaborators who talk endlessly about building Communism have succeeded in creating. We know that despite their fine words the apparatchiks are lining their own pockets. The Party enables them to advance while they drone on about revolution. So we tend our tiny private plots, fence them in, protect them, and pour our energy into our little datchas. Small as they are, they mean more to us than any collective venture.’
‘It is our one big “Fuck you” to those who want to control us,’ laughs Andrei. Halinka lights a cigarette, leans over and places it between his lips. ‘Jaruzelski, our current president, is the biggest fart of them all,’ he says, ‘a Soviet stooge. We have a joke that defines him.
‘Jaruzelski craves the people’s love, so he approaches God and says, “Please God, give me something that will gain me the people’s respect.” God takes pity on him and grants him the power to walk on water. Jaruzelski calls a public holiday in Warsaw. The people assemble on the banks of the Vistula, having been promised a display of powers that will astonish them. Bands are playing, stalls are selling food, children are running wild. The crowds are in a festive mood at this unexpected respite from their labours. At the appointed hour, to a fanfare of trumpets, Jaruzelski begins to walk on the water. He possesses miraculous powers. “Surely the people will admire me now,” he thinks. But all along the banks the spectators are jabbing each other in the ribs, whispering, “Look at the poor bastard, he can’t even swim.”’
We return to our private thoughts. I am warming to this region of drowsy hamlets, lakes and forests. There are few remaining traces of my ancestors, but after two months of moving about I am coming to understand why poets have sung the praises of these borderlands, their vast tracts of untamed wildness.
Farmlands yield back to forest. Marek directs Andrei to stop and leads us along a path to a forest clearing. There are six mounds in the clearing, each thirty or so metres in length, twenty in width, and each dotted by white and mauve chrysanthemums, marigolds and the occasional posy of plastic flowers. There are up to one hundred bodies buried in each mound, proclaims a sign by the entrance to the clearing.
‘My father was a Polish soldier. He was shot here in the autumn of 1939,’ says Marek. ‘I was ten at the time.’ He speaks plainly, as one who has lived with this all his life. ‘Years can go by between visits, but on each return I have the same thought. I work with trees every day. I know them better than I know people. Many of the trees that overlook the clearing are more than one hundred years old. They are the same trees my father would have seen before he closed his eyes for the last time.’
He bends down, places an oil lamp on one of the mounds and lights the wick. ‘These borderlands are criss-crossed with mass graves. I am a scientist, but science cannot explain this cruelty. I cannot fathom it. How can people kill on such golden days, surrounded by so much radiance?’
We hear a tractor beyond the forest, approaching, receding, and the whir of a chainsaw. ‘Let’s get out of here or we’ll end up singing sad songs,’ laughs Andrei. ‘At this rate we’ll never make it to Puchalski’s cottage. I did not come back to Poland to spend my time brooding over corpses.’
We drive on for an hour and stop for lunch in a hamlet by a river. The streets are ablaze with flowers. They grow by the roadsides, in cottage gardens and in pots and jars on windowsills. On the door of one cottage hangs a print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and in the front garden sunflowers nod under blue skies like live replicas. ‘Welcome to my uncle’s humble abode,’ says Andrei with a mock flourish.
In the living room hangs a painting of a horse-drawn sleigh pulling up in the snow outside a thatched cottage, and, on the opposite wall, a woven tapestry of a bowl of flowers. Like the Van Gogh on the door, the tapestry complements the vases of fresh flowers that sit on the mantelpiece and on top of the bookshelf. A cocker spaniel bounds up to our feet, panting with excitement.
Andrei’s ageing uncle serves a vegetable broth with sour cream, followed by a main course of chicken schnitzel. The talk is of Solidarnosc, the clandestine movement opposing decades of dictatorial rule and Soviet occupation. On the bookshelf stands a framed photo of the movement’s leader, Lech Walesa. In the autumn of 1986, the movement’s appeal is palpable. The people are stirring. Growing in daring. Openly mocking their puppet leaders, buoyed by a sense of comradeship that arises in times of underground activity. Marek is hopeful of change.
But Andrei is sceptical. ‘The counter insurgency police are everywhere,’ he says. ‘And they are determined to put down the revolt for one simple reason: their livelihoods depend on it. As do the livelihoods of the party apparatchiks and their hangers-on. They are not going to let go of their privileges without a dog-fight.’
Solidarnosc is of the present, but Andrei’s uncle slips back into the past. In contrast to the wary optimism of the movement, he has an older way of thinking. His story is a variation on many I have heard in recent months. It is a story that Andrei does not wish to hear again. He lights a cigarette and steps outside as his uncle launches into the telling.
Andrei was born, he says, on the eve of war, in a town now located on the Soviet side of the border. The family retreated to Warsaw, as the Germans crossed the Narew and Bug rivers and attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. He and his brother, Andrei’s father, joined the AK, the underground Home Army, the armed wing of the Polish resistance. They worked as couriers, engaged in sabotage and fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
The Red Army stood by on the banks of the Vistula as the retreating Germans reduced Warsaw to rubble, building by building, block by block. They set the city alight and levelled entire neighbourhoods, and left a network of live mines as their calling cards. As for the Allies, says Andrei’s uncle, why would they intervene when it also suited them to allow Poland to be fatally wounded?
When the German occupiers left, the Soviets entered what remained of Warsaw as triumphant liberators. The city smelt of rotting corpses. Here and there stood a lone chimney, a shattered fireplace. The streets were littered with disembowelled mattresses and hunchbacked street lamps. People clawed the debris in search of a family memento. Others gazed vacantly or sat in the ruins. One crazed man stumbled about calling out the names of the disappeared. His madness was reaffirmed at each discovery of human remains. Each one released a howl of anguish and the realisation that a loved one was not returning.
Andrei’s father survived the uprising but was badly wounded. He lived for five years after the war, long enough to witness one occupation supplanted by another, the Nazis by the Soviet overlords and their puppets.
Andrei steps back into the room, and cuts his uncle short. ‘Spare us the morbid details,’ he says. ‘Every Pole has their hard luck story. I survived and I have not done too badly. Thanks to the party purges in 1968 and the failure of the student protests, I finally saw the light and escaped. At least I have that to thank the apparatchiks for. They destroyed any illusions I still had for a better future.
‘They enabled me to leave Poland with a clear conscience. Tabula rasa. I left singing and was reborn in Paris. I was free to roam the continent, a member of a reputable orchestra, free to cross borders without interrogations in the
company of my fellow musicians. Free even to return here, to Poland, safe in the knowledge that I can leave whenever I wish. What more needs to be said? I found a way out, an escape from the curse called history.’
Andrei serves cheesecake and strawberries, and refills our glasses. ‘Without vodka one can understand nothing,’ he says, lifting his glass. ‘And what one understands when sober is not worth knowing.’
We drive on in silence. The fields are streaked with afternoon sunlight. The Skoda overtakes a horse-drawn cart piled high with turnips on a bridge spanning the Narew River. A fisherman poles a boat between reeds and waterlilies. Downstream, a horse walks aimlessly in a cemetery above the riverbank. The sun is well on the descent when we finally reach our destination.
Puchalski’s log cottage is located in a hamlet. In the yard of a neighbouring cottage, a babushka hauls a pail of feed to a pigsty. Two storks perch on a thatched roof on a gigantic nest constructed around a cartwheel. ‘There are few storks here now,’ says Marek. ‘Most are on their annual migrations.’
‘Unlike our pathetic species, they do not require visas,’ butts in Andrei.
Marek unlocks the door to the cottage. Rattan baskets and bunches of herbs hang from the ceiling beams. Neatly placed about the room are wooden mortars and pestles, fish traps, a weaving loom and reed sandals designed for wading through marshland. There are woodcarvings of bison and deer, elk and eagles. Crucifixes dangle beside strings of corn and garlic. Cooking utensils hang from wall hooks. Two wooden ducks, once used as floating lures for male geese in the swamplands, sit on the mantelpiece.
‘Welcome to the home of Wlodzimierz Puchalski,’ says Marek, ‘photographer, filmmaker, Antarctic explorer, forest ranger, lover of wildlife and wilderness. My friend and confidant, who, to my lasting regret, passed away seven years ago.’
His life was cut short by a heart attack, Marek tells us. He died while filming sea birds in the Antarctic. The cottage is preserved and cared for by friends and former colleagues. The contents are, more or less, as they were when he was last here. ‘Puchalski coined the phrase “the bloodless hunt”,’ says Marek. ‘Instead of tracking and killing wildlife, he stalked it with lenses and cameras.’
On the wall are photos of animals he had caught in situ, mid-movement. Two chicks crouch in a nest, beaks raised and wide open, about to be fed by the unseen mother. A bear lopes across a swampy paddock. Flocks of birds are snapped at the moment of rising. A squirrel perches precariously on a fungus extending horizontally from a tree trunk. On the table is a book of Puchalski’s photos.
I flip through the pages. Frogs face the camera poised for take-off. Rodents peer from hollows and burrows. Herds of elk and bison stampede down hillsides. Animal footprints disappear over a desolate snowfield. Wild flowers bloom on mountain slopes. Trofea Obiektywu, Trophies of the Lens, the book is titled. Puchalski is pictured, surrounded by wetlands, binoculars hanging from his neck, tripod resting on his shoulders.
Above one doorway there are three owls made from pine branches, with acorns for eyes and pinecones for noses. ‘The owls were carved by Puchalski’s wife,’ says Marek, ‘to represent the three members of the immediate family: mother, father and daughter. Their happiest times were spent here in the cabin.’
Marek directs us to an oak trunk opposite the fireplace. It is full of books and papers. A letter is glued inside the lid. Dated August 22 1971, it is addressed to the house and signed by Puchalski: ‘Farewell my house, my treasured haven of silence and rest, source of happiness and beautiful moments spent under the shade of the roof. I would like to sit here for a while. Be for the guests what you always used to be for me. Farewell.’
‘When he wrote these words, perhaps he felt he didn’t have long to live,’ says Marek. We sit by the oak table and toast Puchalski with vodka. The farewell note has made us welcome. Thrown together by chance days earlier, in this moment we share a sense of camaraderie. With each passing minute our faces recede further into darkness. Outside the birch and oak trees rustle. The stone woodstove waits for the return of the fire; the cottage is a still life, poised for the imminent return of its owner.
We would gladly sit here for hours but Andrei, who has not spoken since we entered, is restless. His bravado has evaporated, as has his youthful exuberance. Within this cottage there is no veil of pretence, no cover for his bitterness. The tranquillity has unnerved and unmasked him.
Halinka places a hand on his hands, which are resting on the table. Against Andrei’s hers are like the tiny chicks in one of Puchalski’s photos, dwarfed by the nest that protects them. ‘Compared to humans, the wildlife that Puchalski stalked with his cameras are saints,’ says Andrei, breaking the silence. His voice floats towards us as if from a distance.
‘There are things that can never be understood,’ he says, ‘that words cannot do justice. Everyone around here knows what happened, even those who deny it. It is all about us, like a cancer. The symptom that gives us away is our constant weariness. We are tired, my friend,’ he says, addressing me, the passing traveller.
‘We know how much blood has flowed in these borderlands, and the endless battles that have been waged here. We know that one generation ago, people hid out there,’ he says, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, ‘within walking distance, in the swamps and marshes, among the reeds and thickets that grow on the banks of the Narew, those beautiful places Puchalski loved to photograph. They were hunted down—men, women and children—and slaughtered.
‘We were all caught in the madness. Words cannot convey what I witnessed as a child during the Warsaw Uprising: the shit that comes from fear, from being cornered in crumbling tenements and dead-end alleys; the stench of the sewers and cellars in which the fighters hid between street battles. They cannot do justice to the nobility of my father and uncle, the shadow world of the underground, and the Soviets’ betrayal of our people, their act of abandonment.
‘Words cannot convey my impotence in 1968, when my stepbrother fell to his death. He was pushed from a building in the Warsaw University during the student protests. He naively believed that the regime would not turn on its own children. I cannot fathom the brutality of the thugs and stooges that are always ready to do the dirty work, the devil’s bidding.’
Andrei’s words have become a torrent, made all the more disturbing by the robotic tone of his telling and the grim smile we can see now that our eyes have adjusted to the darkness.
‘During the Warsaw Uprising, my good friend, at the age of twelve, played dead. He extricated himself from a pile of corpses only to come back to life in a Poland that had fallen under the dead weight of yet another dictatorship. He now lives in Brussels and works as a journalist; he stuffs himself with drink and trivial information, and is lost in a lust for women that can never be sated.’
Andrei’s tirade unnerves us. The cottage has grown smaller. Its thick oak door and log walls no longer feel solid; they seem like the timber shell of a penetrable fortress. ‘Words conceal more than they reveal,’ he adds after a silence. ‘They cannot convey how I longed to get away, yet how, within days of leaving, I long to return—the curse of nostalgia. They cannot convey the lure of the fields and forests of my childhood, the paradox that is the history of my country.’
Andrei pauses. ‘I cannot bear the sound of my own voice,’ he resumes. ‘I wish to take back all I have said. Someone else is in control, a pious ventriloquist. What do I know or care about politics? The one language I trust is of musical notes and the silences between them.’
When we leave, Marek locks the door behind us. The evening has descended and the wind is rising. ‘This is a perfect time for a performance,’ says Andrei. ‘Before we drive home, a salute to Puchalski.’ He takes out his violin from the Skoda. He puts the case down on the ground, lifts out the bow, and runs it across the rosin. Showers of powder spit from the bow like fireflies. Once done, he raises the violin to his shoulder.
‘Paganini was the violinist of violinists,’ he says. ‘He wante
d to attain the impossible. His hands were so big they enabled him to do what many other violinists could not. But still it was not enough, it is never enough. No matter how hard the artist tries, no matter what skill he brings to the task, he can never replicate the terror and beauty we call living.
‘But the artist tries. Paganini tried. He was obsessed with composing music that stretched his skills beyond the limits. He was an egotistical bastard, like me, but he lived without pretence and allowed his appetites to take him. He was mad, and his madness can be heard in his music. He poured his lust and longing into his work, and that is why I love him, and why I love to play him. Besides, my large hands are well suited to his compositions.’
Andrei tunes the violin, and readies himself for playing. ‘I salute you my dear pine,’ he says with mock irony, turning his face towards the copses of birch and conifers on the outskirts of the hamlet. ‘For you I play Paganini. It is my gift to the forest in exchange for the amber and the rosin.’
He plays a Paganini capriccio. The notes rise sharply and tear apart the silence. Birds, startled from their evening roosts, break clear of the woodlands. Hares scatter as if pursued by a predator. A horse whinnies and takes off to the far end of a paddock. The two storks rise from their giant nest and vanish into the heavens.
Capriccio, in its original seventeenth-century French and Italian, means ‘a shivering’. The word is said to have derived from capro ‘goat’, a frisking goat, or from capo meaning ‘head’, plus riccio ‘curled and frizzled’. Hence, as one dictionary puts it, ‘a person, shivering in fear’, and ‘a head with the hair standing on end’. From there, it is just a small step to ‘a sense of horror’. Over time capriccio has come to mean a sudden start, and when applied to human behaviour, a whim, an unaccountable turn of mind. An act of impulse.