Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  This time Chalubinski’s temper did flare, his face showing a deep red. ‘Pan Buk, I have not come here all the way from Warsaw to be insulted. No Russian anywhere in their great system of republics is starving.’

  ‘For the moment they escape by borrowing huge quantities of grain from America.’

  Chalubinski regained control. With disarming blandness he said: ‘Russia can have one bad season the way we in Poland had one last year. But the system itself is never impaired or modified by one bad year.’

  All morning Chalubinski hammered away at Buk, reiterating that in the grand design outlined by Karl Marx and Lenin, there was no place for a union of farmers, and finally he scored a most telling point: ‘All agencies of production, especially the land, belong to the people, who have wisely placed its management in the hands of the Communist party. It is not your land to abuse, Pan Buk.’

  When Buk stoutly advanced the argument that it was the government, and not he, who was abusing the land, Bukowski had to notice, with apprehension, that Farmer Buk seemed to have an almost physical dislike for Chalubinski and was taking delight in opposing even the good points the theoretician proposed, and he wondered what could have generated this automatic rejection. He could not know that from infancy Janko Buk had been familiar with the name and deeds of Tytus Chalubinski, for when his mother, Biruta, was able to talk with those former members of the Stork Commando who had not been banished to Siberia as enemies of the new Communist Poland, she saw clearly that it could only have been Chalubinski who placed Jan Buk’s name on the list of those to be deported. No one else could have done it. No one else knew about the medal from London. And no one else had so consistently opposed Buk’s leadership. It was obvious, therefore, that Chalubinski had murdered, so to speak, the heroic leader of the Storks, Janko’s father. And now he, Janko, sought to test what this strange man was like.

  The more he heard Chalubinski speak, the more clearly the philosopher’s character stood out, and the more satisfied Janko became that this man was the type who could have sent a close companion to exile and death. Watching ever more closely, he saw the portrait of a fanatic, and as he listened to Chalubinski he could imagine him uttering the words that had doomed Jan Buk, and his bitterness toward the philosopher and all his preachings deepened.

  But now the session took a sharp turn, which none of the participants could have anticipated, for Szymon Bukowski took command. Forcefully, and with a good deal of intelligence, he started to hew out the solution to the problems of the farmers. Ignoring Warsaw, and rebuffing Chalubinski when the latter grew too doctrinaire, he said: ‘Let us find a Polish solution to these matters.’

  Regaining the chairmanship that was rightfully his, he began a practical analysis of what steps must be taken, now, to protect the nation’s food supply: ‘Always Poland will remain Russia’s close ally, Respected Minister, so I need to offer no more reassurances on that point. And always we will find our solutions within the Communist doctrine, so we can put those matters to rest. On the one hand, we cannot allow our factory workers to disadvantage our farmers. On the other, we will not allow our farmers to hold the entire nation for ransom.’

  ‘Fine words,’ Buk cried sarcastically. ‘You’ve made Chalubinski happy, and you’ve obviously made yourself happy, but you haven’t made me happy.’

  ‘No more of that, Pan Buk. We’re about ready to spell out the course of action our government intends to follow with regard to its farmers.’

  ‘Beginning when?’ Buk asked almost insolently.

  Bukowski ignored him. ‘After lunch we have agreed to hear the complaints of certain women, a farmer who grows grain only for sale to the government and one who grows produce for sale in Krakow. When we’ve finished with them, Pan Chalubinski and I will deliver our report.’

  It was fortunate that Janko went home for lunch that day because he found his mother in a state of distress. She had heard that Tytus Chalubinski was in the village, the first time ever, and she was trembling to think that within an hour she would be testifying before the man responsible for her husband’s disappearance. ‘What is he like, Janko?’

  ‘Tall and thin and mean. Very intelligent, I think. Very harsh in doctrine, and obviously afraid of the Russians.’ Then he added: ‘About the age Father would have been.’ Janko had, of course, never seen his father, having been born after the hero’s deportation by the Communists, but in discussions with his mother they had always supposed that as a notorious free-commando leader, Jan would have been quickly liquidated by the Russians, who demanded total submission; they never thought of him as living in extended slavery; he was not the kind to have endured that.

  ‘When I testify I shall throw the murder in his face,’ Biruta said, and her son replied: ‘Now that’s foolishness, and you know it.’

  At lunch he told his wife and mother how penetrating Chalubinski’s questions had been, at which his mother said: ‘You seem proud that the murderer was clever,’ and her son answered: ‘I’m always pleased to see a fellow Pole handle himself well.’

  As his mother combed her hair preparatory to the afternoon meeting at which she was to explain the plight of farm women during this difficult period, Janko happened to look at the small trunk in which he kept his clothes, and he saw that a shirt sleeve was hanging from under the lid, something which his wife would never permit, and as he went to the trunk to remedy this, it became clear that his mother had invaded what amounted to his private closet in search of a terrible item.

  ‘Mother!’ he shouted as she stood before the little wall mirror.

  ‘What?’ Her manner betrayed that she knew the answer.

  ‘Oh my God! Give it to me.’

  ‘What?’ she repeated, and remained facing the mirror as her son rushed over, frisked her as if he were a policeman, and found hidden in her pleated skirt the revolver he used when on patrol to protect the tractor.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Janko whispered, falling onto a chair and holding the weapon on his knees. He stayed that way for some minutes while the two women stood silent. Finally he looked at his wife and asked: ‘Did you know?’ And Kazimiera nodded: ‘We were going to do it, the animal.’

  Janko remained sitting, trying to visualize what might have happened had his mother killed a high official of the party. The whole structure could have fallen apart. Everything that Szymon Bukowski had been trying to formulate during the last two hours of the morning session would have been lost, and countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia would have been called upon to join the Soviet Union in stamping out the Polish rebellion.

  ‘Oh God! You could have destroyed us all.’ Very carefully he returned the revolver to its hiding place, for under the disarmament laws insisted upon by the authorities, he was not entitled to own such a weapon, and then he went to stand before his two women: ‘You must do it with words, Mother. Crucify the bastard with words.’

  So when the afternoon session convened, with a pale and shaken Janko Buk sitting very quietly at the table while Szymon Bukowski continued to command with a mixture of force and brilliance that made him most effective, Biruta Buk was invited to make her statement as a working housewife, and she was forceful:

  ‘I address my words principally to Pan Chalubinski, whom I have never met before. But he knew my husband well, Jan Buk of the Stork Commando, since it was he who reported to the authorities that my husband had received a medal from the Polish government-in-exile in London.

  ‘The theories that Pan Chalubinski has been forcing on the farmers of this nation have failed in every respect. They have not produced more food. They have not created justice. They have provided no encouragement or hope. And they have not stocked our stores with things we need and which we could afford to buy if our food was properly priced and if our zlotys were worth anything.

  ‘I am going to tell you, Pan Chalubinski, what my family must do without because of your planning. We have no dresses, no stockings, no cosmetics, no vodka, no oranges, no canned meat from New Ze
aland, no sewing needles, no penicillin, no paper tablets for our children’s home study.’

  As Biruta continued to pour out the grievances of a Polish patriot who had watched her country slide toward chaos, the Communist leaders who faced her had varying reactions, which their stolid faces kept masked from witnesses.

  A round-faced, stocky Russian cameraman, ostensibly a member of the television crew but actually a high official assigned to the Polish talks by the Kremlin, studied the fifty-nine-year-old housewife with disbelief: How dare this peasant woman come before an arm of government and publicly bring such charges? If she did this in Moscow or Kiev … Whsssst! No one would ever see that one again. In Bulgaria they’d shoot her. In Rumania, silenced for good. We showed such people in Czechoslovakia where power rested and what happened when people criticized it. What’s the matter with these Poles?

  As a young man, he had been active in dragging seven hundred thousand Lithuanians from their homes and dispersing them one by one throughout the vast emptiness of the Soviet Union’s eastern territories, and with their leaders gone, the back of Lithuanian resistance had been broken. Later he had done even more important work in Ukraine, where millions were deported to Siberia and other distant settlements, while millions more were allowed to starve. He believed in short, sharp measures, and when he returned to Moscow he would advise his superiors that a sudden rush of such measures was required in Poland now.

  So he listened intently as Biruta dug her own grave. He would remember this woman who had insulted Chalubinski and by extension the Kremlin itself. He would note her well; she had a scar running from her left eye to her chin.

  Tytus Chalubinski, unaware of how close to death he had been an hour before, listened to Biruta with a special interest. Was it true, as she claimed, that she was the widow of the man he had served with in the Stork Commando when it was operating out of the Forest of Szczek? He would try to verify this, for if it was true, she could prove to be dangerous; certainly her husband had been a right-wing reactionary with no vision whatever of a new Poland. He, Chalubinski, had indeed reported Jan Buk to the Soviets as too dangerous a fellow to be left running free, and the man’s removal had been a prudent move: I’d make it again tomorrow. And if things deteriorate, I’ll do the same with his widow.

  But as he listened to Biruta’s stern condemnations he had to concede that the Polish government had failed to keep factory workers and farmers in balance and that the latter did have substantial grievances. It was interesting, however, that he blamed this imbalance not on laggard legislation to help the farmer catch up, but on Lech Walesa and his gang of public enemies who had used their position to forge ahead. Tytus Chalubinski did not like anyone to forge ahead, ever, anywhere, for any reason. He saw society as an organized effort in which those who understood the great revolutionary forces of history made carefully studied decisions for the welfare of all the others. He could not accept that it had been the faulty judgments of his social technocrats that had brought Poland to its present crisis. He blamed it on last year’s floods, on the cupidity of foreign bankers, on the intrusion into the governmental process by men like Walesa, and, if one wanted to be blunt about it, on the sentimental interruptions of that damned Polish Pope.

  Biruta Buk symbolized everything that was wrong with Poland, and since he could not lay his hands on the other enemies of the state, he pondered how he might deal with her.

  Szymon Bukowski, during the first stages of Biruta’s tirade, was deeply irritated by her sweeping accusations and wondered how a man like this Janko Buk allowed any woman in his household, even his mother, to speak so bluntly. But as he listened to her forceful presentation of deadening data he began to realize that she was speaking for all the women of Poland, and when he closed his eyes so that he could not see her tense and angry face, he could imagine his mother, Miroslawa Bukowska of this village, orating in the precise words Pani Buk was using: My mother was a radical, a real Communist before her time, and I know she would have applauded the arrival of Communism. But she was also a realist, and if her men had been forced to work with no goods to reward them, she would have been the first to complain. Damn, but this woman sounds like my mother. Even more, like my grandmother. It’s women like this who get lined up against a wall or hanged from the village tree.

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw a much different Biruta Buk, a kind of permanent revolutionary whose ideals transcended Communism or Syndicalism or Anarchism or State Socialism. She, like his grandmother and his mother, was the embattled Polish woman, fighting terrible injustices which seemed always in the end to overwhelm them. He studied her face and noted again the scar that marred it, and he speculated as to which of her heroic ventures had left her with this mark of honor, and now as she continued to speak with unrelenting force, he listened more carefully. He did not like what she was saying, but he respected her for saying it:

  ‘Recently my son was in Vienna, not three hundred miles from here, and he saw a hundred stores containing a thousand things any husband or father would want for his family. How, how, Pan Chalubinski, can Austrians in their little country provide so much while we Poles in our big country are able to provide so little?

  ‘How does your planning justify itself if it makes the nation poorer and poorer?

  ‘Let’s leave the farmers out of this. If you boast about anything, it’s that you know how to run factories. We’ve seen a score of motion pictures proving how successful you are at that. How is it that none of your factories is open more than four days a week? How is it that they produce so little for us to use?

  ‘You have built a Poland whose cities starve and whose farmers find nothing they can buy. Are you proud of the system you have given us, Pan Chalubinski?’

  She sat down, and the Communist leaders were relieved that she had not uttered any threats about a rural strike. Her speech was harsh, but it could have been worse. Chalubinski, secretly acknowledging the justice of some of her complaints, was stern in his rejection of her favorable reference to Austria, and he reverted to a line of argumentation popular in the 1950s to rebut it:

  ‘It is unfair to compare corrupt, servile Austria with a great socialist republic like Poland. The shops your son saw in Vienna, crowded with fancy goods no one really needs, are subsidized by the larger corrupt democracies who obtain their surpluses by grinding their workers into the dust, the way the magnates of this nation used to keep us in slavery.

  ‘Mark my words, Pani Buk, America and Brazil and France and Italy are doomed, because their slave workers will see the light one of these days and end the exploitation which alone keeps those nations semi-viable for the time being.’

  Biruta started to shout ‘Those countries—’ but Chalubinski silenced her: ‘You had your chance to speak, now we wish to hear the others.’ She rose to her feet, and retaliated: ‘I have not said one-tenth of what you ought to hear, betrayer of Polish heroes.’ And with that, she nodded deferentially to Bukowski and stamped out of the palace. That one is doomed, the Russian cameraman said to himself.

  When the second farmer finished his testimony, Chairman Bukowski surprised the delegates by announcing a short recess prior to his closing statement for that day, and during the interval the Communist leaders took Janko Buk upstairs to the room which had once held the Holbein, and gathered about a desk like the one Konrad Krumpf had used when doing his modest best to exterminate the Polish race, they laid down the law. It was one of those bare-knuckle sessions which often occurred behind the Iron Curtain when fundamentals had to be restated, and before it had been under way only a few minutes Janko felt faint.

  BUKOWSKI (who wanted to demonstrate that he could handle such a meeting): Pan Buk, the games are over. If you persist, you will be destroyed.

  CHALUBINSKI: You must understand without any confusion that Warsaw supports what Pan Bukowski has so accurately stated. You have put yourself in grave danger, Buk.

  BUKOWSKI: We’ll not tolerate any further nonsense. There will be no
farmers’ union.

  CHALUBINSKI: Discussion of such a thing should never have been allowed in the first place.

  BUKOWSKI: The leaders of our nation have been remarkably patient with agitators like you. (His voice trembled and he was forced to lick his lips, for he knew that the next step would be a specific threat.) Our patience has a limit, you know.

  CHALUBINSKI: You farmers have put serious strains on the international fellowship of Communist nations, and if you continue, we can only expect them to unite in opposition to your heresies. (Now, and for the first time in these talks, the true danger was exposed.) Unless you draw back, Buk—you and Walesa, too … Well, you don’t need me to remind you that one of these days you’ll see troops marching in the streets.

  BUKOWSKI: Have your eyes been dazzled by the fact that a cinema actor posing as the president of a large country invited you to lunch? Do you think for one minute that America will lift even one little finger to help you in a crisis?

  CHALUBINSKI: Are you so stupid that you can’t see the Americans are using you only to embarrass us? They don’t give a damn about your welfare.

  BUKOWSKI: You must cease your agitation. You must listen to what your true friends say. And you must obey.

  CHALUBINSKI: The Soviet Union has been extremely patient with your disturbances. The Polish army has shown restraint. (His voice grew noticeably sterner.) But such concessions will soon stop. You are playing a most dangerous game, Buk, and before you know it, the whole thing could blow up in your face.

  Janko Buk drew back from the desk and gave his adversaries his country-boy smile. Almost better than they, he appreciated the constraints under which they suffered. Russia was afraid to activate her tanks waiting in the woods because she could not anticipate what Red China might do in Asia if she was tied down in Europe. Chalubinski could do none of the things he so desperately wanted to do, because the citizens of Poland had turned against his ruling clique, and without Russian power to back him, he commanded little of his own; he and his gang had lost their legitimacy, and even Szymon Bukowski, a true patriot, would be loath to call for the military to restore order, since he could not anticipate what this might lead to or estimate how long a military dictatorship, once called into power, might wish to retain it.