Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  Further thunderclaps – it’s raining cats and dogs. It’s raining, it’s raining and the sun is shining; in a moment a big gay rainbow will erupt over the beach – a sign that God has forgiven us! Perhaps we should hurl ourselves into the water like so many lemmings, so they can discover us later on the ecologically untainted beaches of Sweden? It’s raining harder and harder, and we still have a ways to go, only at the green steps now, nothing up that way but woods and a lone Społem centre. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you how obsessively afraid I am of lightning. I’m always certain I’ll get struck by a flash of lightning. Basically we’re all highly neurotic. That one’s afraid of this, this one’s afraid of that, and none of us can sleep a wink at night because of all our neuroses! Oh heavens, just listen to that noise, Paula, run, take to your heels! Shut up a second. Just shut your trap already! Look at them, a bunch of bedraggled witches, the way they’re running off they’ll lose their drawers, like the witches of Thessaly, or straight from the Sierra Morena! Look, but don’t you stop running yourself! They forecast thunderstorms this morning, we should have returned to our rooms earlier! Of course they said we’d have fine weather, just not today. Oh my God, I’ve fucked up my foot! I can’t run. Any more. Did I really need that last fag?

  ‘And those lads would come back to us all fresh and clean, but just so they don’t get too familiar, we won’t receive them in that hall where Princess Lubomirska was, but in the inferior one, where the stewards go.’

  ‘In the pipe-smoking room.’

  ‘Yes, in the smoking room.’

  ‘And we won’t serve them with our good Baranówka family china. Maybe in something from Ćmielów’.

  ‘What kind of twat would use the Ćmielów china?’

  ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? What would you serve them with? Those clay pots from Cepelia? So they’ll go down and tell the whole village that they eat like peasants in the palace of the Marquis de Merteuil?’

  ‘Here!’ – they locked horns – ‘Now you have something to serve those lads with.’

  ‘And they’ll just sit there, too embarrassed to ask why they’ve been invited to dine at such an august table; it’ll take vodka to loosen their lips, so that finally they pipe up:

  ‘“An invitation from a gentleman like you! But what reason do you have, sire, for inviting us?”’

  ‘And they’ll still be wondering what it’s all about until eventually they whisper slyly to each other:

  ‘“The gentlemen fear a peasant rebellion, the gentlemen mock us behind our backs!”’

  ‘And I’ll answer mine, so he doesn’t think we’re just placating the peasants or that we’re afraid of plebeian unrest in the villages:

  ‘“So Łukasz can give my back a good scrub, that’s why.” Then I’ll lead him to the bath with my wrist as limp as a wet cravat.’

  ‘They didn’t have baths in the Baroque era, they simply powdered their spots, and when they began to stink they perfumed themselves, and when they got a spot they either painted over it or had it removed…’

  ‘You know, we haven’t been in the Baroque for quite some time. We’ve moved on. We have baths! So anyway, I infuse the bath with all those salts I brought back from Baden-Baden. He won’t even know what they’re for. Then I’ll disrobe, placing my imitation neck next to the bath together with my ersatz bosom, and I’ll enter the water wearing only my lace knickers, and he’ll be standing there with his hands clasped behind his back…’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘What do you mean: you?’

  ‘Well, what will I be doing all this time?’

  ‘You?’ Paula thinks. ‘You’ll be with yours in your room. You’ll just have to make something up… I’ll be busy saying things like this to mine:

  ‘“You know, my dear, dear Łukasz, if you simply close your eyes, a fellow can imagine anything at all, even that he’s with a woman…” And then I’ll start to undress him like a commoner, ripping off all those simple, linen rags of his, and then I’ll pull him into the water with me! He’ll experience fellatio for the first time. Then later he’ll question me, what and how and whether or not he needs to tell the parish priest about it, and I’ll say:

  ‘“Did the priest ever say anything in his sermons about doing it with other lads? If he didn’t, that means it isn’t a sin! But if you dare breathe a word about me to the priest, I’ll smash your head in! Punch you right in your face, I will!” Anyway, even if he were to say something, it’s a priest we’re talking about… (stop winking, Paula). So it’s like in the family… Everyone sitting round, playing cards together… Do you remember how in Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke he only had problems because he wanted to “fraternise”? But if all he had wanted was to have sex with a farmhand, it would have been written off as an aristocratic caprice.’

  ‘He’ll blab all about it.’

  ‘No, he won’t. In the morning he’ll go home back to the family hovel and his mother, slicing bread in the countryside. One of those women who’re wider than they are tall, like in The Peasants. A fire burning in the hearth. She’s furious, glaring out the corner of her eye, cutting an enormous loaf of bread, and says:

  ‘“Where ye been, boy? At court all night?”

  ‘“Aye, Ma, his lordship and another lord made me and Łukasz stay the whole night in the castle with them…”

  ‘“And what did you do there? Spit it out! On the hop from work were ye?!’”

  ‘“Can’t really talk about it now, Mother…”

  ‘She furrows her brows, her knitted brow, and can hardly control herself:

  ‘“You spit it out now or I’ll clobber you one, boy!”

  ‘“Eh, I don’t know if I…”

  ‘“Tell me now! Or I’ll take this stick and…”

  ‘“His lordship called me to him like he was a woman, he wanted me to wash his back…”

  ‘Then she puts down her knife and runs over to him:

  ‘“I’ll thump ye, spawn! I’ll thump ye, dunderhead, ye dunce, if ye ever dare say things like that about the squire! It’s very well for ye to be thick as a ditch, but all of us is in his pocket, and it’s a long time afore the harvest. If the old man loses his work hauling logs and the potatoes, we’ll be turned out, all because of ye and your addled brains! How dare ye blather such things about our lordship, and before the harvest at that!”

  ‘See? So take that, darling, and put that in one pan of the scales, and in the other put those gay bars of yours …’

  Heavens, look how it’s pouring, Paula. Let’s go, we’ll take cover here, in the Społem Centre, with all those choice, luxury jellies straight out of the refrigerator, with all those locally bottled bevies. It’s pouring, it’s raining cats and dogs, but eventually it will rain itself out and then stop, and tomorrow the weather will be beautiful. Beautiful is what they said on Radio Zed. And that is that.

  UFO

  But Paula, this is no normal storm, I’m serious… Those weird purple streaks of lightning look like… And what’s that saucer thing that landed on the dunes? What a bit of rubbish, Paula! Seriously, that saucer has blinking lights on it! Like something dreamed up by a crazy ufologist! Blinking in the ultraviolet light of lightning bolts like a stroboscopic advisor to the department of planetary fellatio! What rubbish, that is too much! Le Gendarme et le UFO! Help! The hatch on top of the vehicle is opening and a little green man is coming out. With antennae on top of his head. And Prada moonboots on. There, Wisława, there, Zdzisław, is your chance! Why are you hesitating? Then Zdzisia walks up to him and starts fumbling around the flies on his overalls. But that’s no flies, and what’s worse, Zdzisia gets zapped by electricity! Eventually the little flap thing falls off, but there’s nothing inside, just that eerie ultraviolet light. Maybe something will spring out, like the cuckoo in an old-fashioned cuckoo clock: Here I am, blow me! But no, nothing. Like an empty suit of armour. So now Wisława decides she’s going to examine it and compare versions. Find out the truth about their anatomy. Maybe they
have it somewhere else? Some elongated thing erupting from under an armpit or something? Oh heavens! And round the back, what’s that? A tail? But she gets zapped by electricity, too, when she attempts to put her mouth around it. Then laughter. Space laughter. As if it were coming from deep inside a tin.

  It’s another civilisation after all.

  Paula and Her Phone Calls (II)

  Brring – brring – brring! It’s Anna calling:

  ‘Paula, what’s going on? The whole country is in a flap!’

  ‘What happened? But be quick, I’m on my way to see Carmen at the opera…’

  ‘Your correspondence with Michalina was discovered by this bit of grunt who stole the letters and published them!’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Everything, everything, all that fatuous twaddle – published! People know about everything now! About the blowjobs, everything, all of it! And just look what happened to Michalina! First they threw her out of every place they could, out of the university, and then they took all her money, but what’s worse, she’s contracted some kind of leprosy! She’s lost an eye, half her face is covered in boils, she must be having a relapse… Michalina escaped back to Switzerland last night, to Zurich. She took the family silver and diamonds with her. She left behind a sea of debts – never settled her accounts, never paid her taxes… But on the road her diligence was overtaken by a band of Gypsies; they wanted to abduct her and take her to a harem, but the moment they unfurled the black veil the moon’s light fell on what was left of her face, and, horrified by her hideousness they took her for a witch and decided to drown her in one of the Swiss lakes. Michalina told me all about it herself on her mobile! And she had some other misadventures there as well. Oh the things I could tell you. Reportedly she was spotted in the desert with some Arabs, there are these clans there, a load of bollocks, Kurps or something, Uzbeki Kashubs… She was abducted by this Uzbek Arab, the clan chieftain; they wanted to kill her, but she gave him her laptop as a peace offering, started up Windows Vista, and said it was Allah himself talking to them from the box! That desert turned out to be one big sex party, and she had so much sex she got this disease where you get sand up your arse. How true that is I have no idea, don’t even ask, suffice it to say Michalina never made it to Zurich, she ended up going on foot to Roulettenburg, and now she’s there playing pontoon on the slot machines, and roulette… She’s saving her money for plastic surgery! She’s never coming back, they say, and she’s done with writing, too.’

  ‘What?! We were supposed to be going to the opera, I was just wondering what was keeping her!’

  ‘Michalina’s in Roulettenburg, girl! Don’t even bother going to the opera, because all of Wrocław is talking about one thing only, and they’ll only heckle you! Go straightaway to Michalina, take only what you need, every moment counts! Quick, go to Chrobot Reisen, your car leaves at eight from the Hotel Wrocław, and off you go to Switzerland! Everything, all of it, all that arsing about, the people know about everything. Everything, Paula, everything!’

  ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  The first edition of Lovetown appeared in Polish bookstores, as Lubiewo, in early 2005, and its author was immediately acclaimed for his droll, sharp-witted, and inventive language and for bringing to light an unknown subculture of communist-era Poland. A second, revised edition of the book followed on the heels of the first, then an even more substantially revised third edition, and then a fourth… Within three years, six published editions had appeared. Most of this revising took place in Part II, where many of the stories are based on telephone interviews with relics of the pre-1989 Wrocław gay scene, who contacted Witkowski after the book was first published. In fact, much of the work is based on real people and their stories; but Lovetown nevertheless remains a work of the imagination, not of reportage – one index of this being the author’s fictionalisation of himself in the narrative (the real Michał Witkowski, who was born in 1975, was hardly old enough to have trolled gay bars and cruising grounds in the 1980s).

  It would be difficult to recreate among English-language readers the reception that Lovetown has had in Poland, where it was hailed, despite Witkowski’s own reservations, as the first Polish queer novel. This is not because it is the first Polish book to represent homosexuality (it is not), but because, as critic Błażej Warkocki points out, after reading Lovetown it is no longer possible to overlook the queer sensibilities or situations present in earlier Polish literature. Witkowski refers to his predecessors throughout the book, above all Witold Gombrowicz and Miron Białoszewski. The opening words proposed by Lucretia at the beginning – ‘The Countess left the house at half past nine in the evening’ – are in fact a rewriting of the famous first line of Białoszewski’s Reports on Reality (1973). More importantly, there are numerous passages in Witkowski’s prose that invoke those two writers on the level of language, the implicit argument being that their queerness is as much a stylistic as a biographical category.

  Readers in countries that have had gay-and-lesbian sections in bookstores and on publishers’ lists, gays and lesbians openly and positively represented in the media, and officially licensed gay pride marches over the past three decades, may not grasp Lovetown’s watershed quality in its original context, nor the complexity of the position it represents. In the years since Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004, Polish gays and lesbians have been increasingly visible, but also increasingly subject to rancour and violence from conservative quarters; and their civil rights have been a primary testing ground for Poland’s adoption of the secular civic values of the EU. One might then expect this so-called ‘first Polish queer novel’ to more closely resemble the book proposed by the volleyball-playing lad on the beach, the one about the gay couple who are thwarted in their ambitions to adopt a son (and must settle for a cat instead). But the author of Lovetown is less interested in calling for the emancipation of gays in Poland than in giving voice to a ‘doubly marginalised’ community, one whose subversiveness is, like that of the ‘luminaries of affliction’ in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers or the ‘doomed queens’ of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance, a matter of aestheticised behaviour and elocution rather than political action or discourse. In the long run, it is not necessary to be familiar with specifics of the book’s Polish context; the worlds described in Lovetown are not limited geographically or historically, but exist wherever class and disenfranchisment are at issue and where language, gesture, and the imagination are deployed as means of survival.

  Despite such universal qualities, Witkowski’s own language presents certain challenges for translation. Lovetown is rife with words and phrases that are so culturally coded that they elicit immediate laughs of recognition from Polish readers, but for the same reason often fall flat when rendered literally into English. One such word is emerytka, which means ‘lady pensioner’ and evokes an image of the dour and ubiquitous women employees of communist-era shops, restaurants, post offices and workers’ cultural centres, etc., who now constitute another ‘doubly marginalised’ group in capitalist Poland. But there is also something both quaint and campy about the word, especially when applied to men of a certain age (one imagines a communist-era shop staffed with drag queens); and that quality comes through quite well, I think, in the term ‘old dear’, which was recommended by Andrew Wille.

  Another word, almost as difficult to translate, is luj, which is unfamiliar even to most gay Polish readers, and for that reason has been rendered not as ‘trade’, the usual English term for straight men who dally with homosexuals, but with ‘grunt’, an American idiom for a very low-level soldier, which, suggested by Philip Gwyn Jones, has been ‘retooled’ for this British context given its resonances with the Russian soldiers and with the noise itself. The Polish word ciota, a variant of the word for ‘aunt’, is used throughout the book to refer to a doubly marginalised homosexual, in contrast with the mainstream, westernised gej (gay man). I have generally translated it
as ‘queen’; but as it is somewhat more pejorative than that English word, it occasionally appears as ‘poofter’, ‘poof’, or ‘queer’ as well.