In the gathering dusk we rattled toward Częstochowa. Here it began; here, eleven years before, a lamp first shone; here, into our headlights, stepped a drunk Pole.
“Bloody hell,” snapped Zita. “I should never have let you drive.” But I had already hit him.
I pulled off the highway and ran back. A war veteran sat where he had fallen, slicking back his ruffled nicotine-stained hair. Home Army medals jangled on his chest. I asked if he was all right.
“Mind your own business. I state employee.”
Who wasn’t? I offered my hand.
“Go. No. Wait. You kill me — nearly. You damn well take me home.” I helped him to his feet. He seemed uninjured.
“You stepped right in front of the car.”
“You lie like dog with fleas.” Jerzy, for that was his name, fell into the passenger seat. His nose, bulbous and rosy, dominated his face as if it were its only feature. He stank of wine and mildew, but his clothes looked immaculate.
“You cannot get drink in Poland,” he said, “you can only get drunk.” When he spoke his arms thrashed up and down as if to churn forgotten words from the ether.
“Which way do you live?” I asked.
“So depend where we now.”
“My question exactly,” pronounced Zita, who had retreated into the backseat with Winston. She had been navigating until the map blew out of the window.
“We’re on the road to Częstochowa,” I said.
“Every road in Poland leading to Częstochowa.”
“The E75,” I specified.
“Thanks to God, a navigator. Drive on, corporal, drive on.”
We drove through empty halogen-lit streets past soulless apartment blocks to the far side of town. Jerzy suggested the accident offered suitable cause for my arrest. “You know people all over Poland thrown into lorries and driven to dark, cold cells.”
Zita was rather shocked by the thought.
“No food, no water, unlimited sentence,” he said as he directed us into the shadows. “Only place for nephew.”
A tired palace of origin unknown yawned out of the darkness. Grass grew between its roof tiles. Birds nested under its eaves.
“You live here?”
“Here my son Andrzej work and we sleep. He hero. Prisoners here too.”
The Trabant lurched over potholes the size of foxholes to the back of the palace. We stopped in front of a large, rotting stable. Jerzy rapped a challenge on a door. “This Ubecja” — the Security Police — “open up in law.” Somewhere a dog barked. He hushed us, rather unnecessarily. “Poland is safe country as long you not make too much noise.”
A man with infinitely forgiving eyes opened the door. His face seemed to be made of handfuls of clay, roughly molded into a vaguely familiar form.
“Papa?” he mouthed, but no sound left his mouth, not even a whisper.
“Where I be?” Jerzy asked for him. “Run down by imperialists. Lucky to be alive.”
“Nothing imperial about me,” lied Zita.
“My boy.” Jerzy introduced his middle-aged son and struggled to remember a word. “Defender? Yes, defender of family tradition.” Jerzy jingled his medals. “What do you think? Better later than never, yes?” He unpinned the baubles and fastened them to his son’s chest. “My father fight Czar, I fight Nazis, Andrzej fight Communists. One, two, three generations,” he announced proudly. “But Andrzej is real hero, he just from of prison. I burst with water; excuse.” He gestured at us as he pushed toward the toilet. “Invite for Lenin luncheon meat supper. That teach them lesson.”
The detainees stood in silent rows or lay leaden on the earthen floor. Józef Cyrankiewicz, the Communist Prime Minister, was frozen mid-tirade. Ho Chi Minh wore an inscrutable bronze grin. Stalin and Dzerzhinski, founder of the Cheka, affected the guise of statesmen. Deprived of his plinth Lenin seemed curiously stunted. Like all communist statues they had been removed. They had been blocking the view. The totems of repression were melted down or consigned to dusty sheds and basements. Prospects were improving all over Poland.
Andrzej, keeper of the statues, spoke no English, German, or Czech, in fact he didn’t speak at all. Zita repeated her dozen words of Polish in no particular order and to no effect. He didn’t respond. She leaned back against a bust of Brezhnev and tried to look composed.
“Forty years of socialism and still no toilet paper,” said Jerzy as he reemerged. He sat at the feet of a band of joyful peasants, hung his coat on a brawny arm and unscrewed the Wyborowa. He poured the vodka and raised his glass in a toast. “The Red Fleet.” We looked surprised. “To the bottom.” He drained his glass. “In Gdańsk I meet Russian sailor. He hate Poles and told so. Nothing the matter; we hate Russians also. He say Russians more strong and hard and fast and then, insult, he say Russians better drinkers.”
Jerzy poured another round. “So my friends and I take him for drinking: pepper vodka, honey vodka, even Žmijówka, vodka marinated by serpent. Of course he not take; he only Russian and he pass under table. So my friends carry him to tattoo maker. And while he dream of virgin in Minsk we tattoo on his chest a damn big Polish eagle. It much money but worth every złoty.” He roared and spilled his vodka. “We send Communists to the mushrooms.” He poured again. “You see statues? Andrzej thinking they go to Stalinland.” A proposal for a theme park to communism had been mooted: the haunted Kremlin, Tunnel of Terror, the Gulag Mystery Ride. It was worrying to consider how successful it would be. His son said nothing. “Oh, no worry about him,” said Jerzy. “He lose voice.”
He sat us on a camp bed between bookcases filled with well-thumbed, well-read tomes, and samizdat pamphlets, under a garish portrait of the Pope, beside a photograph of Hitler taking the salute at the German victory parade in Warsaw.
“You German?” he asked. Zita held her tongue. “You see under podium explosive enough blow devil back to hell.” He jangled one of his medals. Jerzy had helped set the charges. “We watch, we wait; nothing happen.” At the last moment the man responsible for their detonation had been transferred. “The devil step off podium, into car, and on to big trouble. God work in mysterious ways.”
In Poland it all came down to history. The Germans ruled the world, or so it seemed from Warsaw in 1942. Yet despite the overwhelming odds, the Home Army operated the largest underground force in Europe during the last war. Trains were derailed, bridges blown up, and equipment sabotaged.
But every act of resistance provoked massive reprisals. For each German killed, ten, then twenty, then one hundred Poles were executed. Jerzy was arrested. As he had no chance of survival his superiors ordered him to feign madness. In the dank prison cell he began to goose-step and bark orders in German. His captors, not used to Poles imitating Nazis, were at a loss what to do. The harder they beat him the louder he ordered obedience to the Führer. The SS could cope with terror, anger, courage, anything but the irrational. Madness upset their certainties. His transfer to an asylum was arranged. Three Home Army men dressed in SS uniforms and speaking with Berlin accents spirited Jerzy out of their hands.
Andrzej served thick cherry jam to stir into tea, a Russian tradition no longer practiced there.
“No more jam,” said Jerzy.
A cold supper of bread, cheese, and tinned meat was laid before us.
“Ah, Lenin luncheon meat,” he raved and tucked in.
After the war the new communist government guaranteed amnesty to the Home Army. But the soldiers who came forward were accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Tens of thousands of men and women were interrogated, tortured, or murdered. Many were sent to Siberian gulags.
“It the worst of prisons,” remembered Jerzy, speaking with his mouth full. “A ‘Prussian’ prison.”
The underground burrowed back into hiding and had remained buried, living in the shadows, until recent months. Only that morning at a grand ceremony had Jerzy been awarded the medals fifty years after his derring-do.
“When I return home Lenin everywhere: in books, on posters, in papers, Lenin’s words, Lenin’s life. You could not listen to radio without another serving of canned ‘Leninismus.’ In those days no can buy fresh meat. Wise Communists replace cow with tin.” Jerzy held up a can. It read “meat.” “As Lenin everywhere, so we told, must be in meat too. So when Andrzej asked at school, ‘What knowing you about Lenin?,’ he reply, ‘My father’s afraid to eat him for lunch.’ It get me six months in Mielęcin.” He roared. “Lenin have no humor.”
Andrzej was a frail child, raised on stories of his grandfather’s struggle against the Okhrana. There was little else to eat. His mother had been shot out of hand on the day the Germans took Nowe Miasto, their town on the Pilica river, two hundred kilometers from Częstochowa, and Jerzy was away with the resistance upholding the tradition of his father and all his fathers before him. The old man’s exploits against the Czar’s secret police nourished his grandson’s sense of history. The child peered over the window ledge, in 1944, and watched five thousand Home Army soldiers march through the town to join the Warsaw Uprising. After years of gray occupation the spectacle marked him. He too wanted to fight for his country but grew up in a state that did not represent the nation; to defend the People’s Republic of Poland was to attack the Polish people.
National schizophrenia induced physical infirmity. Andrzej was judged unfit for military service. The reprieve allowed him to follow his passion. He became a history teacher. From the lectern he would read his students the official line, for the past had become the property of the state, then lay the text aside and say, “This is what I believe in my heart really happened.” His grandfather’s memories, stories of their forefathers, were passed on to another generation.
But frustration mounted in him like steam in a boiler. He influenced his students, yet nothing changed. Untruths continued to be printed. He felt as useless as he had when a German officer put the Luger under the soft tendrils of hair on the nape of his mother’s neck. He wasn’t the stone that started the avalanche but the pebble in its path. History swept him up and rolled on unaffected by his existence.
After the first riots in Gdańsk and the shooting of the protesters, he vowed to change its course. The university, his university, had loaned its main hall to the Milicja. Polish boys in Polish uniforms were to dance the night away the day after their comrades had shot unarmed workers. The betrayal was too insidious. He made a crude bomb, a craft he had learned well on his grandfather’s knee, and blew up the hall. No one was harmed. The building was unoccupied. But Andrzej was arrested and sentenced to death. They asked him to sign a Weryfikacje, an assessment of loyalty to the regime, to admit it had all been a terrible mistake. If he didn’t, they said, his wife too might go to prison or his son fail his exams. When he refused to sign they took him out of his cell, told him he would be shot but instead marched him to an interrogation. Poles like a good joke. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was sent to a camp, a copper mine, to dig the metal that cast the statues of Lenin and Marx. Rather than teach the truth the historian hacked out the ore that gave substance to the lie. His lungs filled with dust. In the acrid airless vapors he lost his voice. His term was reduced to twenty-five years, then ten, then it was over. He was released and given a job — though not at the university, the dumb cannot teach — but as a night watchman at the stable.
Zita stared at the Stalinist bust below which Winston dozed. “I know him,” she said.
“You keep damn quiet about that.” Moczar had once been Minister of the Interior, head of the secret police.
“Mietek Moczar; I met him at a party in Moscow. Peter had just been awarded that bloody Order of Lenin.”
“I knew it,” said Jerzy. “Lock up the silver, Andrzej.”
“The Pope was in Poland,” she continued.
“Here in Częstochowa.”
“They were blabbering about it. Mietek said he wasn’t worried about the visit. He said, ‘The old dogma’s dead.’ Peter took it more seriously. Then in the middle of the argument, his legs gave out. Just like that. One minute he was making a point with a caviar canapé, the next he was flat on his face. Peter was as surprised as the rest of us. His legs had tingled before, but we hadn’t given it much thought. It was the blood on his shirt that frightened me — and he had a sudden pain in his heart. Then we realized that the medal’s pin hadn’t been fastened. When he collapsed Lenin had stabbed him in the chest. Even Mietek laughed, and he had no sense of humor, so Peter’s legs were forgotten and the party went on all night. We danced until the sun touched the domes of St. Basil’s. But it was the beginning and everything; the beginning and the bloody end.” She stood beside the fallen idol. “At least, I think that’s Mietek. Memory plays tricks with me.”
“Oh, is him all right,” said Jerzy. “Red sins have long shadows.”
“Moscow” was what she said. “Bloody Moscow.”
Polish society once had been an association of minorities, a haven for the persecuted. Its people spoke a babble of languages and professed a profusion of faiths. Łódź, Mietek Moczar’s home, had been a city of three nations: equally Polish, German, and Jewish. The Jews were eliminated during the last war and the Germans deported at its end. Poland became wholly Polish and wholly Catholic, a nation of one language and one religion. But as head of the Security Services, Moczar fanned the embers of intolerance. Repeated anti-Semitic campaigns were mounted even when no significant numbers of Jews remained in the country. He inflamed the fears of imaginary conspiracies.
“If Hitler hadn’t solved Poland’s Jewish problem,” Zita recalled him saying, “the Poles would have had to themselves.” The tradition of open-minded patriotism had been cowed into xenophobic nationalism.
“At dawn, I take you to Jasna Góra, if I still awake,” Jerzy had promised. We drove through sleeping streets, the darkness daubed violet with the distant dawn. Already, in the shadows, the devout climbed toward the monastery.
The first rays of sun touched “the hill of light,” Jasna Góra, the nation’s holiest shrine. We joined the pilgrims’ ascent on foot. Their fortress, a walled bastion of devotion, was trimmed in great streamers of Polish red and papal yellow. In its teeming passages the faithful wound up toward the high altar and the Black Madonna, a Byzantine icon darkened with age and scarred by the slash of a Hussite sword. “Mother of God, Queen of Poland, pray for us.” Her image rose, so legend told, above the decisive battle to enslave royal Poland in the seventeenth century. Cannonballs bounced harmlessly off the monastery walls, and the Swedish invaders fled in terror.
Jerzy led us through its crowded churches and chapels, their walls adorned with rosaries, necklaces, and sacred hearts. The devout offered them up, with their lives, for their nation and their faith. “Mary, Queen of Poland, I am with you, I remember, I am on the alert.” Everywhere they prayed, out loud or in inward whispers, and without psalters or prayer books for the words were all known by heart. An old man held a sacred triptych carried from home, an old woman bent down in the cool morning sun and cried. Eyes, all eyes, were cast up.
The fields around, where up to a million pilgrims could assemble, stepped down in tiers, the gods, the circle, the stalls, like a theater turned inside out, and fell away to the town of plane tree avenues that, as rivers to the sea, channeled floods of people to the citadel. At the end of one avenue, beyond the Soviet War Memorial, arose a single provocative chimney in irreligious alignment.
A starfish building with three wings, the so-called Bermuda Triangle because those who entered it were never seen again, crouched at the foot of the great hill. From here the security police bugged every chapel and alcove of Jasna Góra to keep a tab on the Church. But the building in the shadow of the Lord was now closed.
“Your friendly Moczar lost,” said Jerzy. He fought to find a word. “Triumph? Yes, that is good word; triumph of Solidarity is triumph for Church.”
On the hill above, at the podium, gathered Home Army veterans and Milicja officers, adversaries reconciled, at the first free mass since before the war. Ribbons of color, of nation and church, rose in the breeze. The archbishop in resplendent robes led the prayers. The Poles bowed their heads, not in fear but out of love, and sank to their knees on the warm spring grass.
Here it began. Here was the turning point. Here on his first visit in 1979 the Pope broke through the barrier of fear. “Mary, Queen of Poland, I am close to you, I remember you, I watch.” For nine extraordinary days millions turned out to follow him, listen to him, and pray with him. The People’s Republic, the political cadaver, ceased to exist except as the censor of television coverage. “What does it mean, ‘I watch’? It means that I make an effort to be a person of conscience. I do not stifle this conscience and I do not deform it. I call good and evil by name.” The Pope declared that their future would depend on those mature enough to be nonconformists, then asked them to conform with the Church. The gentle crowd stood together against the Party-state; in a year Solidarity was born, in ten years the Berlin Wall would fall.
John Paul II picked up a small girl and asked her, “Where is Poland?” She stared at him, bewildered. He placed his hand gently over her heart and said, “Poland is here.”
God placed Poland at the heart of Europe. But, as with man, He missed. Our heart lies off-center, on the wrong side of Germany. The Polish nation, the easternmost bulwark of Latin Christendom, should nestle next to France or be moored to Britain, not lie trapped, as it is, on the open plains between two hungry autocracies, where its democracy clashed with its neighbors’ despotism, its individualism with their collectivism, its Catholicism with Russian Orthodoxy and German Protestantism.
“At end of war,” said Jerzy, “Stalin taking over from God. He moving Poland west one hundred fifty mile and stealing many land. For once old butcher not going enough far. Why he not pushing us right across Rhine into better neighborhood?”
There being no spare beds in the stable, Jerzy passed us on to friends. We lay down in a tidy farmhouse of three low rooms under a photograph of the Pope. That night Zita slept so deeply that when she awoke her face was washed smooth as if the dirt of years had been swept away by a flood. Her cherished certainties, built on sand, were crumbling into the tide. I too thought I heard the sea, but it was only the sound of a distant highway.
My journey from the Baltic to the Black Sea had been jumbled. The trip had a beginning, middle, and end but, thanks to Zita’s whims, not in that order. I still had to see the Black Sea. “Well, if we’re going to Romania,” she said, “we go to Moscow too.”
“We? And who said anything about Moscow?”
“I did. Yesterday or this morning, whenever the bloody hell it was. I’ve lost all sense of time. I want to go to Moscow.”
“We came to get your teeth, now you’ve got them. You’re less than six hundred kilometers from Berlin. Go home.” I felt my aunt had traveled far enough. She was tired and, in any case, I selfishly longed for a full night’s sleep, undisturbed by Zita’s snores or Winston’s farts.
“I don’t want to go back to that old dump. There’s nothing left for me in Berlin. Let’s go to Bucharest.”
“Why on earth do you want to go to Romania?”
“Well, I know someone, don’t I.” Zita like an old sailor had a friend in every port.
“Of course.”
“A storyteller. You’ll be bloody thankful when you’ve met him.”
“The car might not make it.”
“I might not make it, but, what the hell, a girl’s got to try.”
We rose to the smell of chicory and the creak of the farmer’s leather boots. The house sat in a wooden village. A patchwork of fragmented plots checkered the surrounding slopes. A couple, husband and wife, stood arm in arm beside a small lot, ploughed and newly planted with potatoes.
The Trabant was not well. I cleaned the plugs and adjusted the timing. I poured its petrol-oil mix, which had dripped overnight into carefully placed saucepans, back into the tank. The engine’s gaskets were in a frightful state, but Zita was determined to go on and, in truth, I didn’t want to leave her alone.
Winston was to accompany us, of course. The pig had become vast. Zita could no longer pick him up. His weight had crushed her hatbox during the commotion of our arrival in Warsaw. But nothing would persuade her to leave him behind, which made packing the car difficult. In fact, like married couples who grow to look like each other, Winston had come to resemble the car, low-slung and of heavy girth. Zita proposed that we find him a harem of sows — six or eight — to keep him happy in his old age. But until then there was less and less room on the backseat for ourselves. Thankfully, my aunt had seen fit to leave Stalin’s nose with Jerzy and Andrzej. They planned to melt it down into souvenir busts of the Pope.
We drove east and south along the edge of the Bieszczady mountains, through bucolic pastures and apricot orchards, past towns of long arcades and pastel shades, once at the edge of Austria-Hungary, now at the end of Poland. The steppe-lands of flaking churches and endless beet fields looked only to the east. It hadn’t always been so. Once the cities were filled by Orthodox Jews with ringlets wearing long gabardines, vigorous German merchants, and Polish cavalry officers, descendants of Jan Sobieski’s Husaria, in smart breeches and riding boots. They lived their lives between East and West, between Christian crusaders and Sarmatian magnates, spoke French and Turkish, built Italianate palaces for their Russian wives. But no more; East and West had been divided.
Poland once shared a border with Romania, but since the last war eighty miles of land had separated the two countries. Stalin stole vast tracts of Poland for its oil. Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were annexed from Romania. He peeled away a slice of Hungary. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania lost their independence so he could access the Baltic. He severed uranium-rich Ruthenia, the eastern tail of Slovakia. The curtain dropped and millions of people, who became Soviet citizens against their will, lost half the world.
Stalin wasn’t the first to move borders, simply the most ruthless. Just before dusk we passed near the village of Novoye Selo, called Tiszaújhely in Hungarian. A man called András Orosz lived there. Over the course of his ninety-one years he had held five different nationalities: Austro-Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, and, finally, Soviet. Yet Orosz had never once left his village. The borders had been moved around him.
The wheels hummed on the rough asphalt. Our family history unraveled with the miles. The untangled threads led to truths long forgotten and tied Zita to realities she had never before faced. She sat quietly in the back with Winston, petting his plump flank, staring out on the dying day. My aunt didn’t have to travel. She could have stayed at home behind the garden gate. But forgetting no longer helped her cope. She needed to know her place, to rediscover where she stood. Her fantasies had reality and realities segments of fantasy. The truth would issue from both.
Zita shut her eyes and fell asleep, comforted by Winston’s presence. He lay his great head on her lap and dreamed. The sun set at our backs and stained the horizon the color of ashes of roses.