Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Within the nation itself there were the Jews, a substantial minority of the total population, about ten percent, highest in Europe. Jewish influx had begun in the eleventh century, when many flooded in to escape persecution elsewhere. Here they were given the right to own land, conduct business, and preserve their unique culture. At one time they operated the Royal Mint, and in all cities they began to form the nucleus of an emerging middle class, something desperately needed in Poland.

  Through succeeding centuries Polish kings extended protection to Jews fleeing other lands, and in what was a pluralistic and tolerant climate Jewish life thrived as nowhere else in Europe. The lives of Jews and Poles meshed together, despite inescapable divisions created by religious differences and language barriers.

  But during the partition Jews fell under the rule of foreign powers that were openly and sometimes savagely anti-Semitic in their official policies. During an entire century excesses against Jews were orchestrated by the occupying powers, and pogroms, often officially sponsored, flourished. Inevitably, some Poles were raised in a climate which encouraged religious prejudice.

  Now, in these exciting years when Poland was reestablishing her independence, large numbers of poor Orthodox Jews—especially those from little towns and villages—found themselves thrust into a new political environment alien to them and with which they felt no affinity. Failing to shout for Polish regeneration, they aroused suspicions among the Polish nationalists who were shouting.

  Count Lubonski never shared in suspicion of the Jews, for he had lived through the disgraceful anti-Semitism of Vienna in the 1890s. He had known the flamboyant anti-Jewish mayor Karl Lueger, and had watched the skill with which he utilized racial prejudice to advance his career. Repelled by such abuse of power, Lubonski sometimes feared that some of his neighbors in Poland were awaiting their own Karl Lueger to lead the Poles in a drive to cleanse the nation of Jews and Jewish influences, and he was determined to forestall such movement if possible.

  ‘They’ve given me a massive job,’ the slim white-haired man told the Bukowskis, ‘but I shall leave the Jews and the Germans to others. My task is to persuade Lithuania and the Ukraine to join us in a union which will stabilize this part of Europe.’ And he unfolded a map, which he kept with him at all times, and showed how sensible his plan was: ‘From the shores of the Baltic to Kiev on the Dnieper River, from a safe border with Germany to a safe border with Russia, such a union could protect itself for the rest of this century.’

  ‘With the hatred that would have to be submerged,’ Bukowski asked, ‘could such a marriage be arranged?’

  ‘It has to be,’ Lubonski said, with fire flashing from his wise old eyes. Then he took his younger friend by the arm and said: ‘That night you spoke of … in Annagasse when you penetrated my secret and saw my four maps. Well, the miracle I longed for then has come to pass, a true act of God. So now I’m calling for a new one’—and he touched the map—‘and I believe it, too, has a chance, if God is listening.’

  Wiktor Bukowski was now fifty years old and his palace did, as his American wife, Marjorie, had once predicted, ‘make Lubonski’s castle look like a barn.’ It consisted of a beautifully designed capital U, with the open end facing the Vistula and giving a fine view both of that river and of the ancient castle ruins to the south. It contained three stories, really, but the first was mostly underground, with only narrow windows showing. The two wings which formed the legs of the U were handsomely proportioned and faced with marble from an Austrian quarry; between them ran a fine dual driveway cutting deep into the building, so that the carriages of visitors, and now their automobiles, could come to the main entrance in one direction, deposit their guests and drive off in the other. For nine months each year the soil in between was filled with flowers, and these were the only external adornments, except that in each of the wing façades was a niche in which stood a marble statue from Italy.

  There were no towers, no baroque curlicues, no unnecessary excrescences, only the lovely mass and balance of the building itself, with the huge eastern wing a major palace in itself. There was, however, to the north and nicely balancing the living quarters, a stately building longer than the widest extension of the palace; this housed the stables in which Wiktor Bukowski kept his forty Arabian horses and his thirty-six black carriages and sleighs. By good luck, plus a little rearrangement of the façade by the Italian architect who had done the palace, the building fitted perfectly the grand design of the area, while the semi-formal gardens which linked it to the palace made the Bukowski estate, with its three notable features—castle ruins, palace, stables—one of the most congenial in all Poland.

  But it was the palace itself which guests remembered most, for the contents of its seventy rooms were nicely varied. Most impressive was the great hall, with Matejko’s massive Jan Sobieski on the Route to Vienna on one wall and Jozef Brandt’s The Defense of Czestochowa facing it; many visitors from Paris, London and New York would gaze at the paintings with awe: ‘We did not know that Poland produced such excellent art.’ And Marjorie Bukowska would say with pride: ‘I didn’t know it, either, till I married Wiktor. But these, I think, are as good in their way as Paolo Veronese.’

  Some of the better-educated guests preferred the more standard works of Rembrandt, Holbein and Correggio and said so; the men almost always elected the Jan Steen or Philips Wouwerman because of the homely treatment of familiar subjects; in these days almost no one commented on the Claude Monet Water Lilies, but Marjorie confided to certain of her European friends that she was beginning to prefer it above all her other paintings.

  To her surprise, she found that many of her guests spent most of their casual time in a long gallery on the first floor, where the half-windows threw little light on the extraordinary assembly of Polish paintings she had gathered from all corners of the nation. There were thirty-one of them and they could all have been painted by the same inadequate artist, except that a knowing viewer would quickly detect that the costumes worn by the ferocious men came from widely separated periods of Polish history.

  The paintings were all about eight feet tall, three and a half feet wide and heavily framed. Invariably they showed some Polish nobleman in full regalia, staring fiercely out of the past as he dictated to the Seym, or tyrannized his Ukrainian peasants, or led a rebellion against some hapless king. About half the portraits showed men with their heads shaved either totally or with a two-inch strip of hair left down the middle, but all of them displayed as a major feature the magnate wearing a very wide band or sash about his ample waist, the ends trailing down his left leg.

  What especially appealed to the visitors were the plaques, all done in Polish and French by the same elegant sign painter in Sandomierz, giving interesting details about the subjects:

  This Radziwill engineered the marriage of his beautiful sister Barbara to Zygmunt II August, King 1548–1572, the son of Queen Bona Sforza, the beautiful Italian whose efforts to enhance the power of the throne evoked so much antagonism among the magnates that they led an uprising against her, The Hen’s War of 1537.

  By no trick or inference did the American chatelaine imply that any of the thirty-one worthies was related to the Bukowskis, but the long spread of time covered by the portraits—1487–1799—and the wild adventures attributed to the men depicted encouraged the viewer to believe that some, at least, had touched the Bukowski family in times past.

  The portrait that attracted most attention was Number 27, which showed a glaring tyrant with a head completely shaved, a monstrous mustache, massive eyebrows and a huge beard which reached down to the eight-inch-wide gold-studded sash that held his enormous belly. Viewers at once accepted him as the epitome of the Polish magnate, but what they remembered long after the image had paled was the brief history on the plaque:

  Zdzislaw Mniszech, 1545–1619, Magnate of Dukla and seventy other towns, a wise and powerful ruler famous as the uncle of extremely beautiful Maryna Mniszech, 1590?–1614, whom he maneuvered i
nto the arms of the False Dmitri who took her as his bride while striving to attain the Czardom. In June 1605 Dmitri became Czar of All the Russias and Maryna his Czarina, an arrangement which lasted until May 1606, when Vasili Shuisky had Dmitri assassinated so that he could himself ascend the throne. Shuisky ruled only briefly, 1606–1610, and died in 1612, probably of poison. Maryna is said to have died of a broken heart at the age of twenty-four.

  The part of the Bukowski palace that Marjorie preferred was the theater on the third floor, for it was a gem of 1896 architecture, a spacious stage with full equipment for giving a three-act opera, but with red-and-gold armchair seats for only fifty-seven spectators. The proscenium provided space for nine marble busts honoring the immortal musicians and playwrights whose work might conceivably be displayed here. In keeping with Marjorie’s special feeling for music, there were five musicians: Beethoven, Bach, Verdi, Wagner, Meyerbeer. The four dramatists were: Molière, Calderón, Shakespeare and Goethe.

  Visitors were sometimes surprised to find Giacomo Meyerbeer in this distinguished grouping, and several Polish guests pointed out that he was really Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer, whose relatives had once inhabited the Polish ghettos, but Marjorie rebuffed them: ‘I don’t care if he is Jewish. The closest I have ever been to heaven was when Enrico Caruso stood on my stage and sang “Ô Paradis” from Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. And I know others who share that opinion.’

  Many of the world’s great singers had been lured to Bukowo to give recitals for an audience of thirty or forty; Pani Bukowska paid them generously from the immense Trilling fortune monitored by three Chicago banks, and when superlative artists like Caruso or Luisa Tetrazzini appeared, all seats were filled and standees were invited to line the walls.

  Actors also came to Bukowo en route from St. Petersburg, in the old days, to Berlin; Sarah Bernhardt had come twice to give monologues from her greatest successes, including three deathbed scenes, the best of which was from La Dame aux Camélias. Poland’s own Helena Modrzejewska, who when she became the favorite of Europe and America shortened her name to Modjeska, had made her last appearance anywhere in the world on this stage in early 1909. She was sixty-nine then, a frail elderly woman, but when she essayed the role of Schiller’s Princess Eboli, the doomed Spanish woman whom Verdi was to immortalize in Don Carlos, her wavering voice filled the little theater with the mood of tragedy.

  Occasionally some troop would pass through from Moscow to Paris, and Pani Bukowska would hire the entire ensemble, if not too numerous, to detour to her palace for three or four nights of entertainment, and guests would come from Krakow and Lwow and Lublin and Przemysl to enjoy a major treat. William Gillette played Secret Service here, and when Sir Henry Irving gave Othello with only five players, the Moor, Desdemona, Emilia, Iago and Cassio, the mob scenes were scarcely missed.

  One major change had occurred in the palace since those days in 1896 when Marjorie Trilling first envisaged what could be done with this fine setting on the Vistula: Auntie Bukowska was dead, and the firm grace with which she had ruled the decrepit mansion was deeply missed by all who had borne her sharp criticisms. Her place was taken by her daughter Miroslawa, now a tall, shy spinster of twenty-eight who governed the forty servants and ten gardeners but who otherwise kept pretty much to herself. She was essentially an attractive woman, somewhat too thin, a little more austere than required, but she had good features, strong teeth and eyes that saw far and deep.

  She read a great deal, and from contacts with certain professors at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow who visited the palace to enjoy the entertainments, she had been directed to books which had moved her deeply, works on politics and the nature of a good society. Step by step, and without being aware of what was happening to her, she had in 1910 become a Positivist, a person who believed that Poland could be saved by the application of hard work, by allegiance to traditional values, and by the exercise of constant pressure on the three occupying governments—Russia, Austria and Germany—until all civil rights were obtained and assured.

  It would have been difficult to ascertain which of these three ideals she subscribed to most ardently, for sometimes the Positivists were a confused lot. They had surrendered all romantic dreams of revolution as their pathway to freedom, for they had seen only disaster come from this; on the other hand, they did not preach a supine gradualism, which most often became defeatism. What they trusted was the persistent development of basic rights that could not be repressed, and they were willing to devote their lives to the genesis and protection of such rights.

  Miroslawa, however, was developing her own interpretations, and during the year 1913, when Austria faced a crisis because of her arrogant annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, two territories she did not need and could not govern, she awakened to the fact that only the universal disruption of a world war could create the climate from which a free Poland could evolve, and during these hectic fifteen months from May 1913 to August 1914 this tall, quiet woman moved about the Bukowski palace awaiting Armageddon, and when it came, with Austrian troops rushing through the village on their way to the eastern front, and then Russian troops surging through in their great victory over the always hapless Austrians, and then the brutal Hungarians marching north to drive the Russians back, she watched dispassionately the tides of war, aware that it mattered little who won so long as all were losers, for in the disruption of total defeat, new things long dreamed of by her Positivists would come to pass. In brief, she had become a philosophical anarchist, even though for her the throwing of a bomb would have been impossible.

  But she retained many old loyalties, and she did want the Bukowski palace to survive, because it was a center of humanity, a good, decent place. And although she refused to admit her next concern even to herself at night, she did hope that Seweryn Buk, the bastard son of Wiktor Bukowski and the maid Jadwiga Buk, would survive the various battles which raged about her so furiously.

  Seweryn was several years younger than Miroslawa and he had spoken to her only a few times, but as a boy of seven he had been encouraged by her to learn his letters, and throughout his uneasy youth he had been vaguely aware of her helping her mother in the palace, reading her books under trees in the garden, or riding out on the better horses from the stables. One day, when he was fifteen, she had stopped to hold a long conversation with him, telling him for certain what he had previously heard only as a rumor: ‘You’re a Bukowski, just like me. You have a right to the name, to a good education. You could even attend the university at Krakow and become a leader like Wincenty Witos.’

  The ideas had come too swiftly for Seweryn to digest: that he was a Bukowski, that he might become a flaming revolutionary spokesman like Witos, that this woman of the gentry cared what he became.

  He asked his hard-working mother: ‘Am I really a Bukowski?’ and for a while she sat silent, saying at last: ‘Call your father.’ When Janko came in from the fields, which he tended so assiduously, she said bluntly: ‘The boy desires to know if he’s a Bukowski,’ and Janko slapped his much-loved son on the back and said: ‘You sure are.’

  With little embarrassment the two peasant parents informed their son of the conditions of his birth, and of how it had enabled them to acquire the good fields they now owned, the cottage they enjoyed and, above all, the corner of the forest which was theirs and no one else’s. Janko spoke with a certain defiance, Jadwiga with intense passion: ‘You brought this family all its goodness, Seweryn, and you will inherit it as if you were our only son. I hope your brothers Jan and Benedykt will get an education and work elsewhere.’ When the boy tried to speak, his father interrupted him: ‘Seweryn, before you came we lived like animals. No floor. No chimney. Smoke destroyed the eyes. No fields of our own. No fallen limbs to feed the fire. We were slaves, six days a week working for the mansion, tilling our own plot of vegetables after dark.’ He gripped his son’s knee as if he would break it. ‘We’ve never told you these things because we didn’t want to burden you, but you wer
e born into a terrible world, Seweryn, and your mother made it a little better for you, and for your brothers, and for all of us.’ The matter took an important turn two days later when Miroslawa came to the Buk cottage with an astonishing proposal: ‘Seweryn is a Bukowski, of that there can be no doubt. And as a member of that family, I want him to take his rightful name.’

  ‘This is craziness,’ Jadwiga said promptly, determined to forestall public scandal, which would accomplish nothing. She was a powerful woman who tended the beehives from which her family earned most of its surplus cash, and she knew at once that what Miroslawa was proposing bordered on the ridiculous; it was an idea of equality she had picked up from those professors at the university.

  When Miroslawa took her concern to the young priest at Gorka, Father Barski, the prelate was aghast at her presumption. ‘Fifteen years ago an event happened in your village which has been absorbed, digested, accepted. Whether the right things were done, I can’t say, Panna Bukowska, but I think you must agree that a workable solution was found. Don’t disturb it at this late point.’

  ‘But he is a legitimate member of my family,’ Miroslawa insisted. ‘He has rights. An education

  ‘You utter three grave errors. He is not legitimate. Legally he is not a member of your family. And as a peasant, which he is, he has no right whatever to an education. Believe me, let him stay where he is, as he is.’

  She next visited a lawyer in Sandomierz to ascertain whether she could adopt Seweryn and thus give him her name, but at this immodest proposal, from a woman in her twenties, the lawyer laughed. ‘Panna Bukowska, what you propose might work in a radical country like France or someplace like America, where they have no traditions at all, but this is Poland. And through the years, with the help of our church, we’ve established certain customs and rules for dealing with bastards. Trust me, they’re the right rules, and if you try to upset them with your modern ideas, you will create only tragedy. Now go home and forget this nonsense.’ She went home but she did not forget.