Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘Are you teasing me?’

  ‘No!’ he said emphatically, pointing to the letters Lancut. ‘That’s Winesooth. That’s how we pronounce it.’

  ‘Oh, Wiktor!’

  ‘Look for yourself. The L is pronounced W, the A isn’t like your A, sort of an I, which makes a Wine. Our C is really a TZ. And we give the final T a kind of Th sound. So it comes out Wine-tzooth.’

  She stared at her two maps, each of which clearly showed Lancut as the site of the palace; the word even carried a minute drawing of battlements to prove the point, but now she knew the name was really Winetzooth. Looking up, she had said: ‘I’m so glad you’ve proved you love me, Wiktor.’ She had slammed the books shut. ‘Because otherwise I’d think you were trying to drive me crazy.’

  When it seemed that she would never master this difficult language, she had faced two alternatives: she could surrender in despair or she could laugh at herself and try anew. Having been an honors graduate at Oberlin, she chose the latter, and drew up a small poster which she attached to the mirror in her dressing room:

  And with this guide constantly before her, she continued her struggle with the language, reminding herself when progress was slow: I shall make myself Polish. For I am marrying the land as well as the man. And in this resolve she never wavered.

  Wiktor had proved an understanding husband, and one morning he appeared at breakfast like a little boy with a big secret: ‘No, I shall tell you nothing. Except that you’re to climb into that carriage out there and ride with me to Krakow.’ And in that romantic old city he mysteriously placed her aboard the train to Warsaw, and when they reached that Russian capital he hired a fiacre, which took them to the offices of a German estate agent, who was most pleased to see them: ‘Madame Bukowska, what a surprise we have for you. And since it is a very fine day, we’re not going to hire a carriage, but we three are going to walk down Miodowa and feast your eyes.’

  He led Marjorie and Wiktor out into the street leading to the lovely residential Miodowa, and conducted them to a spot from which they could see the exquisite Palais Princesse built by the Mniszechs a century before as a wedding present to their daughter Elzbieta at the time of her marriage to Roman Lubonski. On the very spot at which they stopped, dreamy young Feliks Bukowski had wept his heart out prior to enlisting in the crusade of Tadeusz Kosciuszko. All Bukowskis since 1794 had entangled in their memories visualizations of this delicate palace with the beautiful marble façade.

  That little building set back from the street,’ Marjorie said, indicating the palais. That’s quite lovely.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ the agent said in German. ‘Your husband bought it for you two weeks ago.’

  ‘You didn’t come to Warsaw,’ Marjorie said, turning to Wiktor. ‘You never saw this building.’

  ‘I’ve seen it all my life,’ he said, and then he said no more. He did not want her to know that he had bought it not for her, but for himself, to assuage an old grief which had been handed down in his family from generation to generation. And when they entered the little palace, the brightest gem in all Miodowa, he felt as if old scores had been settled, for several pieces of furniture were ones that Elzbieta Mniszech herself had purchased before her death.

  Their stay in Warsaw had another fortunate outcome. The German estate agent introduced Marjorie to a German art dealer whose family had maintained a salon in the city for three generations, and this erudite man told her that he knew of various canvases which she ought to buy for the little Mniszech palace on Miodowa, but she surprised him by saying: ‘The Palais Princesse is decorated precisely as we would like it, but we’re building a more important place in Austrian Galicia and we’d be interested in certain things for it.’

  He told her that Krakow had produced a very fine painter, a man named Jan Matejko, who painted enormous canvases much in the style of a Venetian painter named Paolo Veronese. ‘I know Veronese’s work,’ she said crisply.

  ‘You do? How fortunate! How very fortunate. I have an uncle in Berlin, a great scholar, really, and he controls a number of Italian works you really must see.’

  ‘I’d prefer to see the Matejko, if he’s Polish.’

  ‘Indeed. There is in Warsaw at this minute a grand canvas he did. Jan Sobieski on the Route to Vienna. It’s not the famous battle scene, but much better, in my opinion.’

  ‘How large is it?’

  The dealer was reluctant to tell how huge the thing was, but when he consulted his notes and stepped off the enormous distances, Marjorie cried: ‘Exactly what I’ve been looking for.’ Then, having betrayed her interest, she added: ‘If the price is reasonable. So let’s talk price first.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the painting.’

  ‘In Vienna, I saw several fine photographs of Matejko’s Battle of Grunwald. I thought him a gentleman’s Peter Breughel.’

  ‘Oh, madame. You know art.’

  ‘I should like to see Jan Sobieski on the Route to Vienna. You know, my husband’s ancestor rode with the king.’

  The canvas was as big as the man had said, as fine as Marjorie had anticipated, for in it she could imagine Bukowski’s great-great-something setting forth on the adventure which had brought him his horses and the Turkish jewels with which he had built the house they were now rebuilding.

  And then the dealer had another good idea: ‘Have you ever heard of the Russian-Polish painter Jozef Brandt? He’s very good, and he has a canvas almost the same size as the Matejko, The Defense of Czestochowa, and if—’

  ‘The same ancestor fought there.’

  ‘Madame, you must have the Jozef Brandt,’ and when she saw it, and visualized it hanging opposite the Matejko, she knew that the Bukowski mansion would be well regarded by all who loved Poland, as she now did.

  It was, however, a purchase she made from the uncle in Berlin which played a crucial role in the history of Bukowo; it was the portrait of an Englishwoman by Hans Holbein, and it was hung in her bedroom along with a small Correggio study of Leda and the Swan. For her husband’s room she bought a Rembrandt Polish Rabbi and a Jan Steen Topers at an Inn. For the small reception room she acquired a Philip Wouwerman Horsemen on a Hill, but for the garden room facing the forest, she bought an extraordinary canvas, a green-and-blue-and-white study of water lilies by a Frenchman whose work she had seen in Paris, Claude Monet. When Wiktor saw a photograph of the painting he told his wife he disliked it intensely, and he barely relented when she assured him that it would stay in the garden room, where only their intimate friends would see it: ‘It’s my intimate friends whose good opinion I want to keep.’

  By the time they left Bukowo for Vienna, the mansion was well under way, with the canvases waiting in a Krakow warehouse and furniture being shipped from various centers. On the train to the capital Marjorie calculated that she had spent of her father’s dowry more than a million dollars, including the stables, which were now costing some $197,000—far more than all the canvases.

  The two Bukowskis were equally happy: Wiktor with the decent home for his horses, Marjorie with the paintings which she believed were rather good.

  It was a much different Marjorie who returned to Vienna that autumn, for her stay in the country and her visit to Warsaw had converted her into a passionate defender of things Polish, and she now looked at the Austrian Empire from within, as it were. She startled Count Lubonski with some of her observations and embarrassed her father with her intensifying republican ideas, for he was by nature a defender of royal prerogatives and a champion of empire. In fact, he intuitively felt that England, Austria, Germany and, perhaps, even Russia had systems of government superior to that of the United States, and any talk of Polish or Hungarian separatism irritated him.

  But he sympathized with Marjorie when she came home one day when Count Lubonski was visiting and demanded: ‘Why in this great city of Vienna, crawling with statues, is there no monument to Jan Sobieski, the Polish king who saved the place from becoming Muslim?’ When Lubonski said that he thought the
re was a small statue somewhere, she stormed: ‘I’ve just come from the new military museum. It’s a grand place, really, with displays of Napoleon and white statues of all the military leaders. It’s disgraceful, too. They have monuments to frightened lieutenants who led an army of seventeen horsemen, but not a word about Sobieski, who led a combined army of seventy-eight thousand. It’s shameful.’

  Lubonski explained: ‘Germans—and you must always remember that Austrians are essentially German—have always had a low opinion of Poles. They see us as the savage hinterland between significant Germany and great Russia. Germans don’t dare to condescend to Russia, which is an empire of magnificent strength. So they vent their contempt on us.’

  ‘But why should Austria do the same?’ Trilling asked, and the count replied: ‘Because she has territories much more interesting, she thinks, than ours. Hungary is a very exciting land. Transylvania is challenging. Moravia and Bohemia are first-rate centers. Very few Austrians ever get to their part of Poland, so they ignore it.’

  It seemed to Marjorie that Count Lubonski made every excuse possible for his government. ‘He’s more Austrian than Pole,’ she told her husband, and Wiktor said: ‘I’ve noticed that. And I was on the path to becoming just like him—servant of the emperor, defending everything he did.’ He walked up and down the big room at Concordiaplatz, stroking his mustache and pondering whether to discuss his plans openly with his wife. Finally he confided: ‘Marjo, would you think ill of me if I resigned my position in the ministry?’

  ‘I think it would be wonderful, Wiktor. Let’s go home to Poland and really work.’

  ‘I don’t mean to leave Vienna. This is where things happen.’

  ‘But they will be happening in Poland, believe me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to miss the music … and the theater.’

  ‘And the coffeehouse.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes. I like to keep up with the world.’

  ‘But we’re to have our own theater at Bukowo …’

  ‘For family theatricals … recitations … and one piano.’

  ‘One piano can do wonders, sometimes. Remember?’ And she began to hum the grand theme from the last étude, and soon they were singing together the words that Wiktor had composed:

  ‘Home!

  The fields are green,

  The woods are clean,

  My soul serene …’

  He took her by the hands and said: ‘We’ll live in Bukowo part of the year, and in Warsaw, too. But the capital of Galicia will always be Vienna, so we’ll keep this apartment until your father goes home. Then we’ll move into Annagasse.’ And this delightful scheme of existence was agreed upon.

  The week after Wiktor’s resignation from the ministry, the Bukowskis had an opportunity to savor Vienna at its best, for Count Lubonski gave a rather large party at 22 Annagasse. For entertainment he had acquired the services of a string quartet that had given concerts in Paris and London, and tonight they were augmented by a powerful double bass and three wind instruments: horn, clarinet and bassoon.

  They were to offer a miniature concert, a delightful piece of music composed in Vienna: Franz Schubert’s Octet in F for Strings and Winds, Opus 166, and this interesting combination of instruments enabled the listeners to follow the various themes as they appeared, sometimes in the violins, at other times in the distinctive horn or bassoon. It was the acme of Viennese music—deft, inventive, light but with serious intentions—and as it unfolded in six unusually long movements, Wiktor whispered to his wife: ‘This is what I could never bear to lose,’ and she nodded, for it was the most congenial music she had heard since coming to Europe—not heavily significant like Beethoven or Bruckner, and not of the very highest quality like the best of Brahms, but gentle and singing and delectable, the song of Vienna.

  The long fourth movement was a theme and variations, and here Schubert had outdone himself, for with the different colorations available, he took a theme that was good to begin with, then embroidered it with variations so inventive that Marjorie almost clapped her hands with joy. ‘It’s so exciting to hear how he brings the strands together—each instrument off on its own, then all of a sudden

  But the significant moment of the evening was one in which she did not participate, for when the long octet came to a triumphant conclusion Count Lubonski remembered some paper work he must attend to, and he retired temporarily to a small room in the rear of the establishment where he maintained a study, and he was working there when the countess told Wiktor: ‘Go fetch my husband. The German and Russian ambassadors want to leave.’

  So Wiktor wandered through the spacious rooms until a maid directed him to the study, and when he entered he surprised the count. ‘Excuse me,’ he apologized, ‘but the countess

  ‘That’s all right,’ Lubonski said, and then he saw his young friend staring at a series of four carefully drawn maps which he kept on his wall.

  They depicted the dismemberment of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. The fourth, labeled 1815–?, showed what once had been Poland, now dissipated among the partitioning powers—Russia, Germany, Austria—a nation vanished from the earth.

  Lubonski said: ‘I’m sorry you saw that, Wiktor. It was not intended …’

  ‘Do you dream of a reunited Poland?’

  ‘Every day of my life I look at those maps and ask “When?” ’

  VIII

  Shattered Dreams

  In 1918, at the close of what was then called the Great War, Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after an enforced absence of one hundred and twenty-three years. Various parts that had been stolen by Russia, Austria and Germany were reassembled by the victorious Allies, and with throbbing excitement an old-new nation resumed its stumbling, heroic course through history.

  Count Andrzej Lubonski, now sixty-eight years old and a widower, no longer an official in the dismembered Austrian Empire, gladly moved his headquarters from the little semi-palace at 22 Annagasse in Vienna to his family’s castle at Gorka. He was in Warsaw a good deal of the time, advising the Polish government in the area on which he had concentrated while a senior member of the imperial Austrian government: how to deal with minorities. He had, in fact, merely transferred his seat of operations from Vienna to Warsaw, and he judged that his tasks had not become simplified in the change, for whereas Austria had grappled with its forty minorities, some, like the Hungarians and Czechs, of nation size, Poland wrestled with its half-dozen dissident groups, each with its own inflammable nationalist aspirations.

  To the east the Ukrainians of Galicia yearned for a nation of their own and for freedom from both Russia and Poland; they were agitators of masterful power but they lacked any central government or the ability to form one; they were a people adrift, dreaming of freedom but ignoring the basic steps by which it might be obtained. Lubonski, much of whose life had been spent on his Ukrainian estates, prayed that some kind of Polish-Ukrainian union might be effected for the time being, acknowledging that within half a century the Ukraine would acquire enough skill in self-government to strike out on its own. But he also knew that if these wild, undisciplined Cossacks sought to establish a nation now, when they were in reality a hundred and fifty warring principalities, each with its own self-important ataman, they were doomed to disintegration and swift absorption by some better-disciplined neighbor.

  ‘The only hope for the Ukraine,’ he told his neighbors the Bukowskis, ‘is a temporary alliance with Poland and Lithuania. Anything else is suicide.’

  But the Lithuanians to the north presented a special problem. For centuries Lithuania and Poland had formed a union that dominated eastern Europe, a nation of vast size and great accomplishment. In 1410, Lithuanian armies had joined with Polish to repel the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald; Lithuanian nobles had been chosen to occupy the throne of Poland; Poland’s greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz, was a Lithuanian, as was the present national leader, Jozef Pilsudski; and most intellectual Lithuanians had been educated in Polish, the
language in which they best expressed themselves.

  Thus there was every reason in the world for the Lithuanians and Poles to resume their ancient alliance, and one very good reason why this might prove impossible; the Lithuanians longed for their own nation, minute though it must be, and almost no important leaders called for union with Poland, for they realized that in such an association, Lithuanian culture would be submerged by Polish.

  ‘Sickness has possessed them,’ Lubonski said, ‘that terrible sickness we saw attacking the Austrian Empire. Each little group dreams of its own sovereignty. Each will attain it, some way or other, and in the end, each will perish.’ He confided to Wiktor Bukowski that he was just as afraid of Poland’s future as he was of Lithuania’s and the Ukraine’s: ‘Unless we unite with those two countries to save them, we may not save ourselves. Russia and Germany will always want to absorb us, and we will exist in a state of peril.’

  When Bukowski reminded him of that night in Vienna when he had inadvertently disclosed his continuing dream for Polish freedom, he laughed and confided: ‘Tonight I’m exactly like the Croats and Slovaks who used to pester me. I have my freedom, but I’m terrified by its potentials.’

  In the north Poland had a most uneasy border. The angry state of Prussia was now divided into two parts by the Polish Corridor, and Gdansk had become the so-called Free City of Danzig, yearning to unite openly with Prussia. Only the superpatriot believed that this arrangement could continue indefinitely.

  In the west Poland had acquired much of Silesia, but the citizens living in those former German areas were not happy; and to the south the Poles endeavored to wrest the little province of Cieszyn away from the new nation of Czechoslovakia, which called it Teschen; what the real composition of Cieszyn was, insofar as the national allegiance of its citizens, no one could say, and privately Lubonski thought that the disputed area should be yielded to Czechoslovakia.