- Book Institute
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- Book Institute
POLISH BOOKS TO DISCOVER OLGA TOKARCZUK MARIUSZ CZUBAJ WITOLD SZABŁOWSKI IGNACY KARPOWICZ JACEK DEHNEL MAGDALENA TULLI THE POLISH BOOK INSTITUTE. ORIGINAL SINCE 2003 THE POLISH BOOK INSTITUTE INSTYTUT KSIĄŻKI ul. Zygmunta Wróblewskiego 6 31-148 Kraków t: +48 12 61 71 900 f: +48 12 62 37 682 [email protected] bookinstitute.pl Warsaw Section Pałac Kultury i Nauki Pl. Defilad 1, IX piętro, pok. 911 PL 00-901 Warszawa t: +48 22 656 63 86 f: +48 22 656 63 89 [email protected] Warszawa 134, P.O. Box 39 We are now over 10 years old – almost 12, to be precise. We have 2 branches, in Krakow and Warsaw, and 11 editorial boards. Our grants have supported the publication of over 1,700 translations of Polish literature into 45 languages. We have organized 3 World Congresses of Translators of Polish Literature: the first featured 174 translators from 50 countries, the second had 215 translators from 56 countries, and the third had 237 translators from 47 countries. Our seminars devoted to Polish literature have been attended by 105 foreign publishers. We have organized 5 editions of the Four Seasons of the Book Festival held in Poland 4 times a year. We have published 59 New Books From Poland catalogues in 7 languages, in which we have presented over 740 Polish books. Our website – instytutksiazki.pl – has 182 biographical listings of Polish contemporary writers, 1,186 reviews of Polish books, and many more short publication announcements in 2 language versions. In 2014, our website was visited by almost 300,000 people. We have organized The Year of Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, and Janusz Korczak, and also three International Miłosz Festivals. The Translators’ College we run has hosted 75 scholarship winners from 33 countries. We have granted the Transatlantyk Award 10 times, and the Found in Translation Award 7 times. We currently have 1,295 book clubs under our patronage, which bring together 13,153 readers across Poland. Over the past 8 years they have organized and taken part in more than 6,000 meetings with authors. We also run the Library+ program, which has remodeled or equipped 465 library centers throughout the country. We have re-trained 5,300 librarians. We have developed the MAK+ integrated library system, used by over 1,600 libraries. Thanks to the Library+: Library Infrastructures government program, by the end of 2015 we will have managed to build or modernize 245 public libraries throughout Poland. 3 1. OLGA TOKARCZUK © Krzysztof Dubiel Olga Tokarczuk (born 1962) is regarded by the critics as one of Poland’s greatest contemporary novelists and is extremely popular among Polish readers. She has won numerous Polish and foreign awards. She is one of the most widely translated Polish authors, her books have been translated into thirty-three languages. The Books of Jacob is her fifteenth publication. The protagonist of Olga Tokarczuk’s magnificent new novel, Jacob Frank, was a real historical figure, though all but forgotten. Yet Frank was a fascinating and enigmatic man whose fortunes are connected with many places in Europe and beyond. It’s hard to believe that lots of novels haven’t been written about him, or lots of films made – but the reality is that Jacob Frank is known only to a few scholars. He lived in the eighteenth century, when history began to speed up, as the French Revolution approached, and the currents of the Enlightenment were on the rise. The mystical religiosity of this Jewish heretic, considered the last Messiah, while it may seem particular to its day, also contributed to the demolition of the old structures and divisions between Jews and practitioners of other religions. In the mid-eighteenth century several thousand of his followers, under the auspices of the Polish king and nobility, converted to Catholicism. It was not their first conversion: they had already become Muslim, too. A mystic and a politician, charismatic and debauched, a charlatan and a religious leader, Frank was an ambiguous character, very difficult to pin down. Tokarczuk’s great epic, written in a somewhat Baroque style, abounds with colorful characters, while Jacob is always portrayed through the eyes of others, always just beyond our grasp. Perhaps it was this ambiguity that caused history to be so unkind to him. Or maybe he was inconvenient to everyone? To the Jews he was an apostate, the precursor to an identity-destroying assimilation, which is hard to reconcile with the global history of Judaism, although it is a part of it. For the Catholics, Frank served as a reminder of their anti-Semitism. For the many assimilated descendants of the Frankists (as his followers later came to be known) he represented a display of their origins and of the circuitous routes of their assimilation. Frank was born in a small village in Podolia, in other words today’s Ukraine, to a family of followers of another Jewish heretic, Shabbetai Zevi. He grew up among Ashkenazi Jews in what is now Romania, traveling to Turkey as a merchant, then returning to the eastern territories of Poland to spread word of his faith and recruit new followers. He taught that all the religions up until then had been insufficient, just 5 stages on the road to true awareness. His conversion had nothing to do with accepting traditional Catholicism, but was rather a road he believed would lead him further on. It was a rebellion against ossified religion and social habits. Persecuted by Orthodox rabbis, he fled Poland and began to preach in Smyrna and in Thessaloniki. He tried to set up a commune; as the prevailing customs amongst his followers were pretty promiscuous, he dreamed of a small Jewish state, to be established on Polish or Austro-Hungarian territory. Poland was host to great public debates between the Frankists and the Orthodox Jews. The moderators in these debates were Polish bishops, who became Frank’s protectors. But none of this was well-intentioned – the Frankists were used against Jewish society in an attempt to ascribe ritual murders to Judaism. Not long after Frank’s baptism he was accused of heresy and spent thirteen years imprisoned in the monastery at Jasna Góra, the famous Polish sanctuary housing the holy icon of the Virgin Mary. In examining this painting, Frank discovered in it Shekhinah, the manifestation of God in female form. When freed by the Russian army he set off for Brno in Czech Moravia. He aroused interest at the Austrian imperial court, and also had his own court, with an army and servants, drawing Jews and a variety of curious onlookers from all over Europe. He died in Offenbach, near Frankfurt, in a mansion, to which apparently cartloads of gold were delivered by his followers. Tokarczuk takes us on a journey through different places, times, and religions. It is a journey readers will not want to return from, and one which will remain etched in their memory for a long time after. It restores Frank to Poland, the Jews, Europe, and to all those who might otherwise assume on reading this novel that the whole thing is made up. But this is Polish history told otherwise, with a place in it for Jews, women, and the metaphysical longings and desires that don’t fit in traditional works. Along with a wealth of wonderful stories generated by the author’s unusual imagination. Kinga Dunin OLGA TOKARCZUK KSIĘGI JAKUBOWE WYDAWNICTWO LITERACKIE KRAKÓW 2014 150 × 225, 912 PAGES ISBN: 987-83-08-04939-6 6 THE BOOKS OF JACOB Above the entrance hangs a handmade – and rather poorly done – sign: >SchorrGeneral Store< And then Hebrew letters.There is a metal plaque on the door, with some symbols next to it, and Father Chmielowski recalls that according to Athanasius Kircher, the Jews write the words “Adam, Chava, Chuts, Lilith” on the walls when a wife is due to give birth, to ward off witches: “Adam and Eve may enter here, but you, Lilith, evil sorceress, go away.” This must be that, he thinks. And a child must have been born here recently, too. He takes a big step over the high threshold and is wholly submerged in the warm fragrance of spices. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, for the only light inside is let in by a single little window, cluttered with flower pots. Behind the counter stands an adolescent with a barely sprouted mustache and full lips that tremble slightly at the sight of the priest, and then attempt to arrange themselves into some word or other. The priest can tell the boy is taken aback. “What is your name, son?” the priest asks, to show how sure of himself he feels in this dark, low-ceilinged little shop, and to encourage the boy to talk, but he does not respond. So the priest repeats, officially, “Quod tibi nomen?” But this Latin, intended to be an aid to communication, now sounds too formal, as though the priest had come to conduct an exorcism, like Christ in the Gospel of Saint Luke, who poses that very question to the possessed man. But the boy’s eyes bulge, and still all he manages is a “buh, buh” sound, and then he bolts back behind the shelves, bumping as he goes into a braid of garlic bulbs hanging on a nail. The priest has acted foolishly. He ought not to have expected Latin to be spoken here. He now takes a harsh look at himself. The black horsehair buttons of his cassock protrude from beneath his coat. That must be what has scared the boy off, thinks the priest: the cassock. He smiles to himself as he recollects Jeremiah, who also almost lost his head, stammering, “Lord God, for I cannot speak!”: “Aaa, Domine Deus ecce nescio loqui!” So from now on the priest will call the boy Jeremiah, in his head. He doesn’t know what to do, since Jeremiah has gone off. So he looks around the store, buttoning his coat up. It was Father Pikulski who talked him into coming here. Now it doesn’t really seem like it was such a good idea. No one comes in from outside, for which the priest mentally thanks the Lord. It would hardly be your ordinary scene: a Catholic priest, the dean of Rohatyn, standing in a Jew’s shop, waiting to be helped like some housewife. Father Pikulski had advised him to go and see Rabbi Dubs in Lwów, saying how he used to go there himself, how he had learned a lot from him. 7 And the priest had gone, but old Dubs seemed to have had enough by then of Catholic priests pestering him with questions about books. The rabbi was unpleasantly surprised by the priest’s request, and what Father Chmielowski wanted most he didn’t even have, or at least he pretended not to have it. He made a polite face and shook his head, tut-tutting. When the priest asked who might be able to help him, Dubs just waved his hands and looked back like someone was standing behind him, giving the priest to understand that he didn’t know that, either, and even if he did, he wouldn’t tell. Father Pikulski explained to the dean later that this was a question of heresies, and that while the Jews generally liked to pretend they didn’t suffer from the problem of heresies, it did seem that for this particular one they made an exception, hating it head on. Until finally Father Pikulski suggested he go and visit Schorr. The big house with the shop on the market square. But as he said this, he looked at Chmielowski wryly, almost mockingly, unless Chmielowski was imagining it, of course. Perhaps he should have arranged to get those Jewish books through Pikulski, despite not liking him very much. Had he done so, he wouldn’t be standing here sweating and embarrassed. But Father Chmielowski had a rebellious streak, so he’d come. And there was something else that wasn’t very smart, a little word play that had intruded upon the matter – who would have believed that such things had any impact on the world? – for the priest had been working diligently on one particular passage in Kircher, on the great ox Schorrobor. So perhaps the similarity between the two names was what had brought him here, Schorr and Schorrobor. Bewildering are the determinations of the Lord. Yet where are these famous books, where is this figure inspiring such fear and respect? The shop looks like a regular stall – yet its owner is supposedly descended from the renowned rabbi and sage, the venerable Zalman Naftali Schorr. But here are garlic, herbs, pots full of spices, canisters and jars containing all stripe of seasoning, crushed, ground, or in its original form, like these vanilla pods or nutmeg seeds or cloves. On the shelves there are bolts of cloth arranged atop hay – these look like silk and satin, very bright and attractive, and the priest wonders if he might not need something, but now his attention is drawn to the clumsy label on a sizeable dark green canister: “Herbate.” He knows what he will ask for now when someone finally comes out – some of this herb, which lifts his spirits, which for the dean means that he can continue working without getting tired. And it aids in his digestion. He would also buy a few cloves to use in his evening mulled wine. The last few nights were so cold that his freezing feet had not allowed him to focus on his writing. He casts around for some sort of chair. Then everything happens all at once. From behind the shelves there appears a sturdily built man with a beard wearing a long woolen garment and Turkish shoes with pointed toes. A thin dark blue coat is draped over his shoulders. He squints as though he’s just emerged from deep inside a well. That Jeremiah peeks out from behind him, along with two other faces that resemble Jeremiah’s, rosy and curious. And meanwhile, at the door opening onto the square, there is now a scrawny, winded boy, or perhaps a young man, for his facial hair is abundant, a light-colored goatee. He leans against the doorframe and pants, you can tell he must have run here as fast as he could. He openly surveys the priest and smiles a big, impish smile, revealing healthy, widely spaced teeth. The priest can’t quite tell if this is a derisive smile or not. He prefers the distinguished figure in the coat, and it is to him he says, with extraordinary politeness: 8 “Kindly forgive this intrusion, noble sir…” The man in the coat looks at him tensely, but after a while the expression on his face slowly changes, revealing something like a smile. The dean realizes all of a sudden that the other man can’t understand him, so he tries again, this time in Latin, pleased and certain he has now found the right tack. The man in the coat slowly shifts his gaze to the breathless boy in the doorway, who steps right into the room then, pulling at his dark-colored jacket. “I’ll translate,” he declares in an unexpectedly deep voice with a little bit of a Ruthenian lilt to it, and pointing a large finger at the dean, he remarks excitedly upon the fact that Father Chmielowski is a real live priest. It had not occurred to the priest that he might need an interpreter – he simply hadn’t thought of it – and now he feels uncomfortable but has no idea how to get out of this situation – the matter, after all, being a delicate one, and yet one which is now becoming public, and before you know it, the whole marketplace would be brought in. He would certainly prefer to get out of here, out into the chilly fog that smells of horse dung. He is beginning to feel trapped in this low-ceilinged room, in this air that is thick with the smell of spices, and on top of it all there is some person off the street now poking his nose in their business. “I’d like to have a word with the venerable Elisha Schorr, if I may be permitted,” he says. “In private.” The Jews are taken aback. They exchange a few words. Jeremiah vanishes and only after the longest and most intolerable silence does he reemerge. But evidently the priest is to be permitted, because now they lead him back behind the shelves. He is followed by whispers, the soft patter of children’s feet, and stifled giggling – as though behind these thin walls there were crowds of other people peeking in through the cracks in the wood, trying to catch a glimpse of Rohatyn’s dean wandering behind the scenes in the house of a Jew. And it turns out, furthermore, that the little store on the square is no more than a single enclave of a much vaster structure, a kind of beehive: rooms, hallways, stairs. The whole home turns out to be larger, built up around an inner courtyard, which the priest just glimpses out of the corner of his eye through a window when they pause a moment. “I am Hryćko,” pipes up the young man with the slender beard. And the priest realizes that even if he wished to retreat now, he could not possibly find his way back out of this beehivehouse. The thought makes him perspire, and just then a door creaks open, and in the doorway there stands a trim man in his prime, his face bright, smooth, impenetrable, with a gray beard, a garment that goes down to his knees, and on his feet woolen socks and black slippers. “That’s the Rabbi Elisha Schorr,” whispers Hryćko excitedly. The room is small and low-ceilinged, sparsely furnished. In its center there is a broad table with a splayed book atop it, and next to it in several piles some others – the priest’s eyes prowl their spines voraciously, trying to make out their titles. The priest doesn’t know much about the Jews in general, and he only knows these Rohatyn Jews by sight. Suddenly the priest is struck by how nice it is that both of them are of only moderate height. With tall men he always feels a little ill at ease. As they stand there facing one another, for a moment it seems to the priest that the rabbi is also pleased that they have this in common. Then he sits down, smiles, and gestures for the priest to do the same. Translated by Jennifer Croft 9 Bibliography and translations: Miasta w lustrach / Cities in Mirrors Kłodzko: Okolice, 1989. Podróż ludzi księgi / The Journey of the People of the Book Warsaw: Przedświt, 1993. – has been translated into: Danish, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian. E.E. / E.E., Warsaw: PIW, 1995. – has been translated into: Danish, Hungarian, Macedonian, Norwegian. Prawiek i inne czasy / Primeval and Other Times Warsaw: W.A.B., 1996. – has been translated into: Belorussian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian. Szafa / The Wardrobe Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 1997. – has been translated into: Croatian, German, Hindi. Dom dzienny, dom nocny / House of Day, House of Night Wałbrzych: Ruta, 1998. – has been translated into: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Swedish. Anna In w grobowcach świata / Anna In in the Catacombs Kraków: Znak, 2006. – has been translated into: Czech, German. Bieguni / Runners Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007. – has been translated into: Bulgarian, Czech, Finnish, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Ukrainian. Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych / Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2009. – has been translated into: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Italian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian. Moment niedźwiedzia / The Moment of the Bear (essays) Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 2012. – has been translated into: Czech, Swedish. Księgi Jakubowe / The Books of Jacob Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014. – Rights sold to: Czech Republic, France, Israel, Serbia, Sweden. Opowieści wigilijne / Christmas Tales with Jerzy Pilch and Andrzej Stasiuk, Wołowiec: Czarne, 2000. Lalka i Perła / The Doll and the Pearl Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000. Gra na wielu bębenkach / Playing Many Drums Wałbrzych: Ruta, 2001. – has been translated into: Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian. Ostatnie historie / Final Stories Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004. – has been translated into: Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Russian, Ukrainian. TRANSLATION RIGHTS: OLGA TOKARCZUK CONTACT: [email protected] 10 11 2. MARIUSZ CZUBAJ © Magda Raczyńska Mariusz Czubaj (born 1969) – By education and profession Czubaj is a cultural anthropologist specializing in pop culture, on which he has published several academic books. He made his debut as a crime writer in 2008 when the first novel in the series featuring the profiler, Heinz, was published. His work has been translated into English, German, Turkish and Ukrainian. He won the Wielki Kaliber (“High Calibre”) award for the best crime novel of the year in 2009. Crime novels can be divided into the kind that feature fastmoving, dynamic action that rivets the reader’s attention, and the kind where the action is unhurried, and various sub-plots are just as crucial as the main crime story. Mariusz Czubaj’s latest novel, The Fifth Beatle, definitely belongs to the second category. It is the fourth in a series starring Katowice-based police profiler, musician and karate expert Rudolf Heinz. And it is the pace of the action that it makes it notably different from the earlier books in the series. It’s 2012, and the EURO soccer championships are being held in Poland, when the corpse of a twenty-year-old man is found in a hangar at an abandoned military airfield in Pila; someone has deprived him of life in a very inventive way. The case takes on high priority when it turns out that the victim was the son of a businessman who is well known from the media. On top of that, at the crime scene the police find a photograph of the cover of one of the biggest hit records in the history of music, Abbey Road by the Beatles. It’s the perfect mystery for Heinz, who happens to be in Pila, where he is running a course at the local police academy. But months will go by, and more victims will die before the case reaches the dramatic finale that is a regular feature of Czubaj’s novels. And Heinz will have to dig deep into the past to uncover a sinister secret that someone has gone to great pains to keep hidden. At the same time Heinz is dealing – successfully – with the case of a psychopathic murderer from Katowice, known as the Handyman, whom Czubaj tersely but artfully describes as “a skilful builder, who turned out to be totally lacking in skills when it came to building normal relationships with women”. In The Fifth Beatle Czubaj varies the narrative by interweaving chapters in the first person, narrated by Heinz, with chapters in the third person. The first-person chapters describe how Heinz is questioned by an internal commission, tasked with determining whether he has ignored police procedures and broken the law during his inquiry into the murder in Pila and the ones that come after 13 it. The third-person chapters retrospectively tell the reader details of the investigations Heinz has conducted over the past few years. Varying the narrative approach is another pointer to what actually matters most in this crime novel – which to my mind is the issue of old scores, settled or not, and exploring the tensions between the past and the present. The unhurried but never tedious pace of the action in The Fifth Beatle allows Czubaj to focus more closely on Heinz’s personal ups and downs. And there is a lot happening in the life of this widower, who is a bit of a loner and a bit of an eccentric. His one child, a son, gets married, and soon makes Heinz a grandfather. After losing consciousness during the wedding, Heinz briefly ends up in hospital, which prompts him to wonder whether he should finally change his rather unhealthy habits. His relationship with a psychologist, whom he calls by the pet name Pocahontas, survives a serious crisis. Heinz realizes that he has increasing problems relating to people, at work and in his private life; he’s feeling more and more disconnected from reality, as if there’s a pane of glass between him and his surroundings. Either the world is slipping away from him, or else he’s voluntarily moving away from it, refusing to accept all sorts of things that others accept in his environment. Is it that Heinz has passed a certain point in life too suddenly and uneasily, and is now on the threshold of inevitable old age? To some extent, in Heinz’s attitude, in his increasing weariness and embitterment, we can also see a fundamental resistance to the way things are changing in the present day, in a world that is set on “mobility, movement, and change”. But Heinz doesn’t want to change; he wants to stay true to his values and the things that matter to him and to people of his generation. Even at the cost of losing contact with the world, and being unable to communicate with the next, relentlessly succeeding generations. Hence all the bitterness in The Fifth Beatle, evident for instance in the ending: “He felt that the ties which had once united the generations had been broken for good and all. A rift had appeared, a black hole, an abyss. All that was left at most was an illusory thread of understanding.” The conclusions this novel draws about existence, society and culture are fairly grim, but are also muted with irony and humour, as ever in Czubaj’s writing. As distinct from most Polish crime writers, who go for a transparent, neutral style, Czubaj has devised an expressive, recognizable style of his own, characterized by well-turned phrases, unobtrusive humour and some memorable epithets, such as the favourite saying of Heinz, who usually ends his spot-on statements with the words: “So much for that.” Robert Ostaszewski MARIUSZ CZUBAJ PIĄTY BEATLES GRUPA WYDAWNICZA FOKSAL / W.A.B. WARSZAWA 2015 135 × 202, 320 PAGES ISBN: 978-83-280-1513-5 14 THE FIFTH BEATLE The first message was from Rusiński – aka “Ruski”. They’d identified the body. “Patryk Kodym. Does that mean anything to you, sir? It should do.” This one had come at about four in the morning. Evidently, Rusiński hadn’t slept a wink. Or a situation had come up that hadn’t let him. Kodym. Patryk Kodym. Where had he heard that name before? Suddenly he sat up in bed, gripping the mattress. Patryk Kodym – of course. The second call was from Katowice. It was his boss Gawlik, head of the crime department, phoning with a simple instruction. Heinz was to make his way to the airfield and supervise the investigation, unofficially for now. “I’m almost certain” he heard Gawlik say, ”this case is going to come our way, to Katowice.” It was hard to detect any brighter tones in the message. The voice was that of a man who had got out of bed very early, and had been put on the alert. And made to feel hacked off for the rest of the day. This message had come at five fifty. Heinz wasn’t surprised his boss was on edge. Ludwik Kodym was a businessman, regarded as the model of a modern Polish capitalist; not only did his name open lots of door, it had the power to put an end to plenty of careers too. Being one of the movers and shakers meant having equally influential friends, and Ludwik Kodym was quite capable of getting them on his side. He also knew how to turn ideas into multi-million contracts, and then huge profits. “You see, I don’t like being called a businessman. I prefer to be defined as a visionary, or a creator,” he had explained, resting a hand on Heinz’s arm, with a frosted glass of vodka in the other. They had met in the winter at a charity ball, where Heinz was playing with the band. For a noble cause the guests could bid to have a song played for them, something within reason, in other words a classic rock hit. No pop or disco. At some point the young Kodym had flashed past him. He was wearing a baseball cap, and had probably talked most with the drummer, something to do with the beat. “My son,” the visionary-and-creator in one had said, straightening his wine-red tie, “hasn’t a business bone in his body. He’s an artistic soul. But tell me, chief, you know about music – what about this rap stuff? Is it really art?” At the time, Heinz had been promoted for a few hours to chief of police. But now Gawlik was calling, at five fifty in the morning, clearly concerned about ending up as a beat cop. Even if his fears were greatly exaggerated, Kodym could certainly give him some trouble. 15 Kodym junior. But perhaps it wasn’t actually him? He remembered the tattoo. The chance of more than one person having the same three letters etched onto their skin wasn’t exactly high. The third message was from little Pocahontas. “Let me know when you’re back. I’ll make us something to eat.” He listened to it again. He shook his head. A rare instance of loving concern. He wouldn’t delete it. What was the time? Seven fifty. At eight thirty Ruski rang and left another message. “We’re at the site. We’re just about to start. There’s a car waiting for you.” It sounded like pressure, something like “hurry up”, but the soft-boiled version. He had breakfast at the canteen. He called Pocahontas. “Yes, things have got a bit complicated. I’ve got a corpse to deal with. You probably know Ludwik Kodym, he may even have been to a therapist of choice like you to have his neuroses treated. He hasn’t? Then you have all that to look forward to. What I’ve got is the body of Kodym junior, it’s definitely Kodym junior, and I’ve no idea what’s going to come of it.” He picked up a set of keys and found a red Renault in the parking lot. Ruski had done well. Attached to the keys there was a small map he had drawn. The Renault turned left, passed the Hotel Gromada, and then Heinz lost his way at a roundabout, as if he were in Paris, not Pila. He made three circuits, chose the first exit and pulled up. “Matwiejew roundabout?” The girl looked at him in surprise. “It’s right here. Everyone calls it that, so the name stuck.” He thanked her and drove off, tyres squealing. He turned left and drove past the Ars Medical private hospital. At the entrance to the airfield he passed a police car. He stopped it, explained who he was, and asked the way. Another two kilometres or so. Position ten o’clock. Hangar number ten. Near the stud farm. Near – at the military airfield distances were a relative concept, he realized, as he drove up to the runway. It was a real giant of a place. And no wonder they held races here. He felt the urge to line up and step on the gas. As he approached a barrier made of wooden beams, fencing off the grounds of the stud farm, he stopped. There was no trace of yesterday’s barbecue. Everything had been tidied up – there wasn’t a single beer can in sight. As sterile as in the warehouse where the body had been found. He reached the site and said hello to the two forensic experts he’d met the day before. He went up to Ruski. The man’s face wore the evidence of a sleepless night. And soon after, Heinz felt a sense of reserve in his behaviour. A guarded tone, which was new and hadn’t been there yesterday. “Let’s get something straight,” said Heinz, grabbing Rusiński by the elbow and drawing him aside. They did just that – first he suggested they be less formal, and move onto first-name terms. And then they went back to the case, which in the past few hours had grown far more problematic, taking on two new complications. Firstly, the victim was the son of a well-known guy from Katowice. Secondly, the investigation was sure to be taken on by a team from Silesia. Unless the circumstantial evidence were going to be run here, in Pila. “We don’t know much, but so far there’s nothing to imply that,” muttered Ruski. There was a third point too. “I’d like us to understand each other properly,” said Heinz. “This inquiry is pretty awkward for me. And knowing life, I’ll be taking part in it. I already am. You know why?” 16 Ruski knew perfectly well why. The victim was the son of an influential businessman. There’d be pressure, urgency, reports to be written, information to be provided, journalists and sensation seekers. In this sort of situation it was hard to set up anything like a cordon sanitaire to isolate yourself from all the fuss, or to prepare a specimen to go under the police microscope without your hands shaking. “Even so, the most important thing is what we’re going to do here.” He pointed to the warehouse. “What we find at the crime scene will be crucial. And that,” he said, nodding at Rusiński, “is already your department.” He walked around the hangar once again. Only now, in the daytime, did he notice that it was covered in camouflage colours. Next to the figure “10” someone had written in white paint: “Until death us do part”. Well, quite. Every death is a separation from the living. But murder also involves a set of connections. The boy had met someone on his path, and then… Who had he met? Where? When, and in what circumstances? “How did you establish his identity?” he asked. “I started by looking in the missing person’s database,” said Ruski, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “I don’t know why… I must have sensed there was something bigger than usual going on. He jumped out right at the top, a new case. Only reported two days ago.” “Has someone confirmed it’s him?” “His mother’s on her way.” “His mother?” “I was surprised too. It turned out the businessman, Ludwik or whatever he’s called, flew to London yesterday. He has been told too. He’s cancelled his talks and he’s coming home. He called my boss. She’s already on her way…” He hesitated. “What’s up?” “I’m afraid we can’t avoid an encounter. I mean…” He tugged at his trouser leg like a schoolboy caught in the act. “Would you rather I took that on?” said Heinz. Ruski confirmed that he would. “It’s your case now anyway,” he said. I hope you’re wrong about that, thought Heinz, but he didn’t say anything. He stood in the entrance, and just as last night, he cast his eyes around the warehouse. In the middle stood a blow-up paddling pool, with a light bulb flickering on a long cable above it. The principle difference was that there was no corpse in here now. The forensic guys had finished work. The room was clean. There were no fingerprints on the table, the chair or the material the pool was made of. But he could see a stain on the concrete slab that definitely hadn’t been there the day before. “Just the handle from under the sink and this,” said one of the forensic guys, taking out an inventoried plastic bag. “What is it?” asked Heinz, squinting. It took him a while to make out a small piece of transparent plastic – a little tile a centimetre and a half long and not quite as wide. “We don’t know,” the same man replied. “We don’t know if it has anything to do with the case. We found it right here.” He pointed to a spot beside a back leg of the table. “Plus the photo you saw yesterday.” He nodded towards the pool. “And that’s it.” “Have you checked the light bulb and the cable?” The guy glared at Heinz. “Just making sure,” muttered the profiler. Things like that had happened before now, he thought, and they still do. Although they’d checked the warehouse, Heinz asked for a pair of gloves. He ran a finger across the wobbly table. 17 He examined it under the light. There should have been a layer of dust, but there wasn’t any. He did the same thing with the seat and the backrest of the wobbly chair. The finger of his latex glove remained white. Apparently there’s a popular TV show where a woman goes round people’s flats, doing the glove test. She’s coming round to your place, Pocahontas had said recently. He couldn’t help smiling at the thought. He knelt down and took a close look at the floor. This time he didn’t feel any pain in his joints. He leaned further forward, his nose almost touching the ground. All he could smell was the musty odour of cold concrete. Still kneeling, he shuffled over to the pool. He looked up and gazed at the hanging light bulb. He stood up, brushed off the knees of his jeans and moved to the right. He examined the sink and took hold of the tap. It didn’t even shudder. He tried again. Nothing. He frowned. The rust had done its job. Nobody could have got up to anything in here. He went outside, where it was much warmer than in the warehouse. About forty metres away from the hangar a group of four cyclists had stopped and was staring at the police cars. “Go inside,” he instructed the forensic experts, “and I’ll shut the door. Go and stand by the pool, and after ten seconds give us a shout, scream, as if you were calling for help. As loud as you can.” He slammed the metal door shut; it wasn’t entirely airtight, and had probably been secured with a chain and the cheapest padlock. No barrier to entry. There was a halfcentimetre chink between the two leaves. He listened. Five seconds, seven seconds. Finally he heard a muffled shout, muted, but audible. Satisfied, he nodded. He opened the door and let the forensics guys out. The four men walked off a few metres and stood by the police car. Two of them lit cigarettes, two didn’t. There was a bored policeman sitting at the wheel, who may have dozed off. “Our mystery man, and I bet it is a man, must have had this place worked out,” said Heinz. “He didn’t come here by accident. That would be absurd.” They listened to him in silence. “He’s got the hangar scoped out, he must have seen one like this before. A child could have broken into the warehouse. There’s nothing inside it anyway.” He turned to Ruski. “I think you said it’s not guarded?” “If you want to hire a hangar, like the people with the horses,” put in the forensics man who was smoking, “you employ a security firm. And they only guard the place you’ve rented. They’re not interested in the rest of it.” “Exactly. So our guy drives up. I take it we can’t expect to find any tyre marks?” “It’s been dry lately. We’ve got nothing.” “So he drives up. He’s got his pool. And the boy. But what about water? The tap doesn’t work. How does he deal with that? He’s not going to bring a thousand bottles of mineral water with him.” He tapped the ash off his cigarette, and at once a gust of wind carried it away. “He’s got a problem. But he’s attached to the pool idea. What would you do in his place?” “I’d borrow some kegs. Or some sort of small barrels,” said Ruski. “What have you done with the water in the pool?” They were silent. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones 18 Bibliography and translations: 21:37 / 21.37 Warsaw: W.A.B., 2008. – English 21:37, trans. Anna Hyde, London: Stork Press, 2013. – German 21:37, trans. Lisa Palmes, Münster / Berlin: Prospero Verlag, 2013. – Turkish 21:37, trans. Neşe Taluy Yüce, Istanbul: Apollon Yayincilik, 2012. – Ukrainian 21:37, trans. Ołena Szeremet, Kiev: Tempora, 2013. Aleja samobójców / Suicides’ Avenue Warsaw: W.A.B., 2008. Róże cmentarne / Graveyard Roses Warsaw: W.A.B., 2009. Kołysanka dla mordercy / Lullaby for a Murderer Warsaw: W.A.B., 2011. – German Wiegenlied für einen Mörder, trans. Lisa Palmes, Münster / Berlin: Prospero Verlag, 2015. Zanim znowu zabiję / Before I Kill Again Warsaw: W.A.B., 2012. – German Rights sold to Prospero Verlag. Martwe popołudnie / Dead Afternoon Warsaw: Albatros, 2014. Piąty beatles / The Fifth Beatle Warsaw: W.A.B., 2015. TRANSLATION RIGHTS: GRUPA WYDAWNICZA FOKSAL CONTACT: BLANKA WOŚKOWIAK [email protected] MARTWE POPOŁUDNIE / DEAD AFTERNOON TRANSLATION RIGHTS: ALBATROS CONTACT: EWA KRZYSZTOSZEK [email protected] 19 3. WITOLD SZABŁOWSKI © Albert Zawada / AG Witold Szabłowski (born 1980) is a correspondent for Poland’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. He has won numerous awards, including the Beata Pawlak Prize for his first book, The Assassin from Apricot City, which was listed by World Literature Today as one of the top ten translated books of 2013. “Ladies and gentlemen, presenting... the bear!” as Jan Brzechwa wrote. He may be only a few years old, or possibly more than thirty. He has thick fur, weighs two hundred kilos, and has something called a “holka” through his nose – a metal ring that was stuck into the most sensitive part of his body by his master, a gypsy. As a result, the bear does as he’s told – he stands up on his hind legs and dances, does impressions of famous sportsmen, politicians or other stars, and lets you stroke him for good luck before you buy a lottery ticket. He usually lives near human habitations and eats several loaves of bread per day. He chews them very slowly, because in most cases his teeth have been knocked out. In this book of reportage, Witold Szabłowski describes the years leading up to Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union. One of the many changes that were made there at the time involved the country’s dancing bears, which have been taken away from their gypsy owners by an animal rights organisation and relocated to a special park, where they’ve learned to be free. It sounds like a splendid idea. But is it really? The book opens with a conversation with one of the former bear owners. For him, parting with the bear was a dramatic event. He claims to have treated his animal like a member of the family, saying he never beat it. In fact, it was quite the opposite – he cared for it as well as he possibly could. The bears travel to their – symbolic – freedom in cages. Accustomed to living among people, they find it all very confusing. They keep putting their paws to their noses, from which the metal rings have suddenly been removed. They don’t know how to get food for themselves, and must learn how to hibernate; as they’re not very resourceful they have to be castrated – for how could they teach their young? On top of that, the range of their freedom is limited by an electrified fence. “Freedom is an extremely tricky business. You have to apply it gradually,” says one of the animals’ new keepers. Surely by now everyone will have realised that this book isn’t just about bears. It reminds me of a famous report entitled “Paw in paw,” written in 1976 by the journalist Barbara N. Łopieńska, who used tiger training as a metaphor for the relationship between the Polish regime and its citizens in the 21 era of “real socialism.” Nowadays it is cited as the standard example of Aesopian journalism. But Szabłowski doesn’t need the animal metaphor to outwit the censors. He can go further. And he does. The second half of Dancing Bears is a set of reports from various parts of the world, each of which has been in some way affected by a change of system. Szabłowski has already shown himself to be sceptical about the benefits of capitalism (especially in the book he co-wrote with Izabela Meyza, Our Mini People’s Poland, about daily life in the communist era), and a similar, though ambiguous, attitude comes through in these texts. Dynamic language and the careful eye of the observer guarantee that Szabłowski’s accounts, whether from Cuba, Ukraine or the Balkans, are truly fascinating. DANCING BEARS Małgorzata I. Niemczyńska WITOLD SZABŁOWSKI TAŃCZĄCE NIEDŹWIEDZIE AGORA SA, WARSZAWA 2014 135 × 210, 224 PAGES ISBN: 978-83-268-1335-1 22 Gyorgy Mirchev Marinov hides his head in his right hand, and with his left taps the ash from his cigarette onto the ground, which in the village of Dryanovets is a deep brown colour, passing here and there into black. We’re sitting outside his house, which is coated in grey plaster. Marinov is a little over seventy, but he’s not bent double yet, although in Dryanovets, a village in northern Bulgaria inhabited mainly by gypsies, very few of the men live to his age. It’s not much better for the women either. There’s a death notice pinned to the doorframe of Marinov’s house with a picture of a woman only a little younger than him. It’s his wife – she died last year. If you go through that door, passing a cart, a mule and a heap of junk along the way, you come to a dirt floor. In the middle of the room there’s a metal pole stuck into the ground. A female bear called Vela spent almost twenty years tied to it. “I loved her as if she were my own daughter,” says Mirchev, as he casts back his mind to those mornings on the Black Sea, when he and Vela, dependent on each other, pointed their noses in the direction of the sea, had a quick bite of bread and then set off to work along the asphalt as it rapidly heated up. And those memories make him melt, as the sunshine used to melt the asphalt in those days, and he forgets about his cigarette, until the lighted tip starts to burn his fingers – then he tosses the butt onto the brownand-black earth and he’s back in Dryanovets, outside his grey house with the death notice pinned to the door frame. “As God is my witness, I loved her as if she were human,” he says, shaking his head. “I loved her like one of my immediate family. She always had more than enough bread. The best alcohol. Strawberries. Chocolate. Candy bars. I’d have carried her on my back if I only could. So if you say I beat her, or that she had a bad time with me, you’re lying.” Vela first appeared at the Mirchevs’ house at the beginning of the gloomy 1990s, when communism collapsed, and in its wake the collective farms began to go under, known in Bulgaria as TKZS – trudovo kooperativno zemedyelsko stopanstvo, or “labour cooperative farms”. “I was a tractor driver at the TKZS in Dryanovets, I drove a ‘Belarus’ tractor and I loved my job,” says Mirchev. “If I could have, I’d have worked at the collective farm to the end of my days. Nice people. The work was tough sometimes, but it was in the open air. We never lacked a thing.” But in 1991 the TKZS began to slow down. The manager called Mirchev in, and told him that under capitalism a tractor driver must not only drive a tractor, but also help with the cows, and the sowing, and the harvest. Gyorgy had helped 23 people doing other jobs on very many occasions anyway, so he couldn’t see any problem. The manager replied that he understood all that, but that even if his tractor drivers were multifunctional he couldn’t keep twelve of them on under capitalism – because until then there had been twelve at the TKZS in Dryanovets – but at most, three. Mirchev was made redundant. “I was given three months’ pay in advance, then that was it, bye-bye,” he recalls. And adds: “If you go out of my house, walk a short way to the right and stand on the hill, you’ll see what’s left of our collective farm. It was a lovely farm, three hundred cows, several hundred hectares, extremely well run! Most of the people working there were gypsies, because the work was too stinky for Bulgarians. Now it has all fallen through, and instead of working the gypsies sit around unemployed. But the milk they sell in the market at Razgrad is German. Clearly it’s worth it for the Germans to have big farms, but not for the Bulgarians.” In 1991 Mirchev had to ask himself the basic question that every redundant worker has to face: “What else am I capable of doing?” “In my case the answer was simple,” he says. “I knew how to train bears to dance.” His father and grandfather were bear keepers, and his brother Stefan had kept bears ever since leaving school. “I was the only one in the family who’d gone to work at the collective farm,” says Mirchev. “I wanted to try another life, because I already knew about bears. Lots of the bear keepers got jobs at the farm, as I did. But I grew up around bears. I knew all the songs, all the tricks, all the stories. I used to bottle-feed my father’s two bears by hand. When my son was born they were kept together. There were plenty of times when I got it wrong, and the baby drank from the bear’s bottle, and the bear from his. So when they fired me from the collective farm, one thing I knew for sure: if I wanted to go on living, I had to find a bear as fast as possible. Without a bear I wouldn’t survive a year. “How did I find one? Wait, I’ll just light another cigarette and then I’ll tell you the whole story.” “I went to the Kormisosh nature reserve to get a bear. It’s a well-known hunting ground; apparently Brezhnev let our communists off a billion lev of debt in exchange for taking him hunting there. So I was told by a guy who worked at Kormisosh for forty years, but I don’t know if it’s true. “First I had to go to Sofia, to the ministry responsible for the forests, because I had a friend there from school. Thanks to him I got a voucher for a bear, authorizing me to buy one at Kormisosh, so from Sofia I went straight to the reserve. They knew of me there by hearsay, because my brother Stefan had been to them in the past with other bear keepers, and in those days he’d been a real star. He used to perform at a very expensive restaurant on the Black Sea, where the top communist party leaders used to go. He was on television several times. Lots of people all over Bulgaria would recognize him. “Stefan got his bear from a zoo in Sofia. A drunken soldier had broken into the bear enclosure, and the mother happened to have cubs at the time so she attacked him and killed him on the spot. They had to euthanize her, as they always do if a zoo animal kills a person. Stefan heard about it from someone and went to buy one of the cubs. “First in the show at the restaurant came some girls who danced on hot coals, and then he was on. He’d start by wrestling with the bear, and to finish the bear would massage the restaurant manager’s back. 24 “Then a long queue of people would form to have the bear massage them too. My brother earned pretty good money that way. Of course he had to share it with the manager, but there was enough for both of them. “So I went to Kormisosh, the forester asked me to pass on his greetings to my brother, and then they brought out the little bear. She was a few months old. They’re best like that, because they’re not too attached to their mothers yet – they can still change keeper without making a fuss. If you take an older bear away from its mother, it can starve itself to death. “So she’s looking at me. And I’m looking at her. I’m thinking: will she come to me or not? I kneel down, hold out my hand and call: ‘Come here, little one’. She doesn’t move, just gazes at me, and her eyes are like two black coals. You’d fall in love with those eyes, I tell you. “I took a piece of bread out of my pocket, put it in the cage and waited for her to go inside. She looked at me again. She hesitated for a moment, but then she went in. ‘Now you’re mine,’ I thought, ‘for better or worse.’ Because I was fully aware that a bear can live with a man for thirty years. That’s half a lifetime! “I paid three thousand five hundred lev for her, but I didn’t regret a single penny. She went straight to my heart at once. That money was my pay-off from the collective farm, and a little more that I’d borrowed. In those days you could buy a Moskvich car for about four thousand. “But I couldn’t afford a Moskvich as well. So I went part of the way home with the cub by bus, which was a great pleasure right away, because all the children were interested in my bear and wanted to stroke her. I took it as a good sign. And it showed I’d got a really great bear, friendly and lovable. And then I thought, ‘Your name will be Valentina. You’re a beautiful bear, and that’s a beautiful name, just right for you’. And it stuck. Valentina, or Vela for short. “Then we had to change onto a train, and Vela travelled in the luggage compartment. The conductor didn’t want a ticket for her, he just asked me to let him stroke her. Of course I did. But I also insisted on paying for a ticket. That’s what I’m like – if something’s owing, you have to pay, and that’s final. I always used to buy Vela a ticket, like for an adult person, without any reductions for stroking her. There was just one occasion when the conductor insisted. He said someone in his family was in hospital, and he regarded the bear as a good sign, as good luck for that person. I could see it mattered to him, so that one single time I didn’t pay up.” [...] I was very lucky to land myself a bear that didn’t have to be bullied or beaten to learn tricks. I’d never have been able to do that – I’d sooner have sold her to someone else. “Luckily she loved it all anyway. She had the nature of an artiste, she liked it when people clapped, when they laughed and gave us tips. Or when they poured her beer. She liked that best of all. I’m sure at that reserve where they took her she misses those performances of ours. “But like a real artiste, she did have days when she didn’t feel like performing. I’d say: ‘Vela, show us how Gigova jumps the vaulting horse.’ But she’d growl, whine and complain. All quite normal – she was just having a bad day and didn’t want to work. And I respected that. Sometimes on days like that we used to stand outside the lottery ticket sales point, and people who’d come to buy a lottery ticket would stroke Vela for good luck. And sometimes we just took the day off. “The only time I had to hurt her was when I stuck the ring through her nose. “I drove her to the forest. I lit a small bonfire. I heated a metal bar red-hot. I said: ‘This’ll hurt you for a while, little 25 one, but it’s got to be done. Otherwise you and I won’t get on. You’ll do me harm, or you’ll do it to someone else.’ “There was no alternative. The ring is like a steering wheel for controlling the bear – without it you can’t lead her where you want her to go, or she’ll break loose, and a bear weighs more than two hundred kilos. “First I stuck the red-hot bar into her nose. She struggled terribly. She howled. She tried to run away, but I held onto her with all the strength in my knees and elbows. “I’m not surprised. A bear has a very sensitive nose. What’s more, I didn’t do it very well, because Vela was my first bear. My brother Stefan would definitely have done it better, but I couldn’t ask him. It’s very important for the keeper who’s going to be taking care of the animal to stick in the ring. Why’s that? Because the bear’s going to remember that moment all its life. You stuck the ring through its nose – that means you’re its master. The ring is the steering wheel for the bear, and you’ve got the keys to the ignition. “Finally I managed to make a hole through her nose. It bled for a while, and then there was some pus. She howled, struggled, and looked terrified. I quickly put the wire through the hole and bent it round with pliers. Then a blacksmith tightened it for me, so it would never break. For the next few days Vela kept grabbing hold of her snout with her paws. After that she forgot about the whole thing, and treated the ring like part of her nose.” Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Bibliography and translations: Zabójca z miasta moreli / The Assassin from Apricot City Wołowiec: Czarne, 2010. – Czech Rights sold to Dokoran. – Dutch Rights sold to Atlas Contact. – English (UK rights only) The Assassin From Apricot City, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, London: Stork Press, 2013. – Estonian Mõrtsukas aprikooside linnast. Reportaažid Türgist, trans. Hendrik Lindepuu, Lindepuu, 2015. – German Weil ich dich liebe, Schwester. Reportagen aus der Türkei, trans. Joanna Manc, Berlin: Vliegen Verlag, 2015. – Russian Ubijjca iz goroda abrikosov, trans. Madina Alekseeva, Moskow: Corpus Books, 2015. – Slovak Rights sold to Absynt. – Ukrainian Ubivcja z mista abrikosiv, trans. Dzvinka Matiyash, Kiev: Tempora, 2012. Nasz mały PRL. Pół roku w M-3 z trwałą, wąsami i maluchem / Our Mini Polish People’s Republic: six months in a tiny flat with a perm, a moustache and a Fiat 126 with Izabela Meyza, Kraków: Znak, 2012. – Ukrainian Nasza malenka PNR, trans.Andrij Bondar, Kiev: Tempora, 2013. Tańczące niedźwiedzie / Dancing Bears Warsaw: Agora SA, 2014. – Ukrainian Rights sold to Tempora. TRANSLATION RIGHTS: POLISHRIGHTS.COM CONTACT: MAGDALENA DĘBOWSKA [email protected] 26 27 4. IGNACY KARPOWICZ © Krzysztof Dubiel Ignacy Karpowicz (born 1976) is a novelist and columnist, one of the most interesting contemporary writers of the younger generation. He has written seven books, and his work has been shortlisted four times for the NIKE Literary Prize (Poland’s top book award). In 2010 he won the Paszport prize, awarded by the news weekly Polityka. This is a masterfully constructed, contrary story. It starts like a fairy tale, not just because it opens with the phrase “Once upon a time…”, immediately followed by some animals that talk (a cat and a dog). The main reason is that it’s about the incredible encounter of two fairy-tale characters: an old woman whose owns nothing but a cow, and a handsome prince, who owns a luxury Mercedes. As bad luck would have it, this fabulous vehicle has broken down in the middle of nowhere, “at the end of the world”, in other words, on the Polish-Belarusian border, near a village called Słuczanka, where – and this may be highly relevant – Ignacy Karpowicz spent his childhood. The old woman invites the prince into her poor cottage, offers him milk straight from the cow and tells him her life story. Her name is Sonia, and the man listening is called Igor, a trendy theatre director from Warsaw who’s been corrupted by success. Igor rapidly realizes that Sonia’s fortunes are ideal material for a moving play about great love and even greater suffering, set within the real events of the Nazi occupation. At this moment the reader loses his or her bearings; s/he doesn’t know if s/he is dealing with a shocking story taken straight from real life, or a stage script that’s been edited over and over again, cranked up for theatrical effect, essentially a kitsch “product” manufactured by the crafty Igor, who knows how to win the hearts of the Warsaw public. Sonia hasn’t had an easy life – she grew up with no mother, beaten and raped by her father, knocked about by her brothers, and chained to the housework like an animal. Nothing but blood, sweat and tears – until June 1941, when the German army came marching through the village on its journey east. Just one glance, and she instantly fell in love with Joachim, a handsome SS officer. And her feelings were reciprocated. For two weeks the lovers meet each night, and love gives Sonia wings, tearing her away from life in the strict sense of the word (all this time she never eats or sleeps, as if she’s in a supernatural sphere). The price of this transgression will be high, but for the time being the sentence is postponed: now pregnant, Sonia gets married to a young man from the neighbourhood, and gives birth to a son, who is the result 29 of her liaison with Joachim. But about a year later she loses everyone in her immediate circle: the cruel father, the insensitive brothers, her devoted husband, the child, and finally her SS-man lover. From then on she lives alone, branded by the village community as a traitor, a whore and a witch, with domestic animals as her only friends. Karpowicz has had the excellent idea of constantly confronting his main characters with things that are foreign to them and experiences that cannot be expressed. Sonia speaks in Belarusian, and Igor translates her story, not just into Polish, but into the language of the engagé theatre (for Warsaw snobs) as well. In her conversations with Joachim, Sonia is – as we read it – totally sincere, because she doesn’t know German, and he doesn’t know Belarusian, which means that neither of them has to tell lies. Karpowicz “plays out” this situation brilliantly: while she’s listening to the SS-man’s account of exterminating the local Jews, Sonia is fantasizing about their future happiness, imagining an idyll at the side of her beloved, while he, as he cuddles up to her breasts and strokes her hair, can give vent to the nightmares tormenting him. He tells her about the bestial acts in which he has been participating, while she listens and doesn’t listen all at once. It’s an excellent idea. It’s also quite original to include a semi-autobiographical figure in the story. It turns out that Igor is actually called Ignacy, and like Sonia, he comes from the Podlasie area, but has turned his back on his roots and on the Orthodox faith; having killed off his own rural identity, he has been entirely possessed by the idea of an international career. But typically for Karpowicz, all this is placed in inverted commas, tinged with irony and self-irony, streaked with a fear of being too straightforward, artless or sentimental. As a result we trust Sonia, but at the same time we approach it with suspicion – and that’s exactly what Ignacy Karpowicz wants us to do. Dariusz Nowacki IGNACY KARPOWICZ SOŃKA WYDAWNICTWO LITERACKIE KRAKÓW 2014 120 × 207, 208 PAGES ISBN: 987-83-08-05353-9 30 SONIA Strawberries, sweet cream and sugar – the air on my cheek was as fragrant as a dish, fragrant as the promise of dessert. I opened my eyes. He was standing before me in a black uniform; in any case it was night, so the colour wasn’t relevant. I was the one who went up to him and took him by the hand. A shock wave ran through me. Quietly I made my wish aloud, breathing it in: Joachim. I was filling up with happiness; I was bursting with happiness like breath inflating a frog, it flooded out of me and ran across the fields and meadows, ran into the woods and under the feather beds. Trails of ants went marching over me, but from the underside, underneath me, from the skin, concealed in my blood. I brushed silver dust from his arms. I drew my fingers down his bright face. And then he embraced me. A ball of lightning exploded in my brain. We fell to the ground, as if struck by a missile. It never even occurred to me that we should hide. It was the night my wish came true – nothing could possibly hurt us. We lay beside a bench, kissing each other, tugging at bits of the other’s naked flesh between gaps in our clothing. I knew nobody would spot us, even if they stopped at arm’s length. The night my wish came true was shielding us like a loving mother’s skirts. I was trying not to scream, I was weeping, our skins were emitting sparks. Glued to each other like magnets, stuck together like coupling dogs. And so we sealed our own fate. The fresh seal of the Creator set solid as we lay beside each other. There was an odour of wax and incense, an odour of ash and burning flesh. Of secretions whose names I’d never heard. I think that even then, a very long time ago, we knew each other already: that beginning, that night when my wish came true, the force of our conjoined bodies – that was our end, the beginning of our fall. I prayed ardently for our fall to last a long, long time, for years, tens of years, for the Germans to win and to stay forever – surely this time the wise Father wasn’t going to let the stars plummet at the sight of our happiness? Unhappiness was ripening in us, but each of us was prepared to pay any price for the other, and for time spent together; not even a higher price than the highest would have been costly. Not even falsehood, treachery, and degradation. Not even a lying confession and a ripped dress. Not even that. [...] In the village people are easily found, whether they want to be or not, unless perhaps they go missing, then they sink like a stone –nobody saw it, or heard it, or sensed it, just 31 a splash. A village is a small world, where everything is within range of sight and hearing, everyone lives so close to each other that nothing can escape anybody’s notice, and then comes the punishment, which is rarely just. I slipped out of the cottage as usual. My father and brother were sleeping solid, heavy sleep, as if they’d taken opium. Past the gate, Wasyl rubbed against my legs. He let out a high-pitched, pitiful meow. I leaned down to stroke him. Just then I thought I heard a noise, something like twigs snapping, someone holding their breath and a droplet of sweat welling between their breasts. But it was nothing, so I went on my way, to the bridge. I spotted Joachim immediately: as the daylight dazzled and blinded me more and more, a clear outline reflected in my eyes, a dark set of arcs. Two steel flashes gleamed on his uniform. To me it was as if those flashes, so close together, momentarily set alight in a blinding flare, were us. I kissed him and took his hand. For the first time he was tense all over, hard and absent. Angular, all corners, with no circles or curves. We walked down to the riverbank, and he started to tell me a story. At first I thought it was just that, a story. Not long from now the war will end. The front will be gone, and I won’t be needed here. I’m going to take you to my mother’s place – she has a beautiful villa outside the German town of Haradok. My father died two years ago, he was a teacher. My mother will be pleased. She’s sure to fall in love with you. My mother predicts the future and the past; she’s bipolar. Then we’ll get married. Sometimes you’ll cook polnische food. Everyone will love it. We’ll have five children: Waschil, Griken, Jan, Phrosch and Schiessen. We’ll go to holiday resorts and to the seaside (the German word for the sea is Juden). We’ll have a cat called Raus. He’ll bask in the sunshine and catch Schweine (that’s the German for mice). The neighbour, Herr Abramowitsch, a smart old man in a striped suit, will bequeath us his fortune. And another neighbour, Mr Buchwald, who’s also from Polen, will marry off his daughter to our first-born. At first I really did think it was just a story. The panic that fluttered up inside me when I first saw Joachim had clouded my mind so badly that I didn’t know things I actually did know. After all, people were talking. The panic was bouncing around inside me like a dried bean against the sides of a can. But with each sentence I was gradually realising that I understood all too much in my total lack of understanding; the names of our unborn children sounded suspiciously familiar, only distorted in this rasping dialect. Then I started to hear a different story, peeping out from behind the first; I’ve heard that other story hundreds of times since, not from Joachim’s lips, but from those who had survived or witnessed it, or had tried to beat off the nightmare like fire, waving their hands about and just fuelling the flames. Or maybe the story wasn’t about them at all, but about my brothers and my husband? Or maybe it wasn’t in the past at all, but in the future? More than a hundred people had assembled near the wooden synagogue in Gródko, the one that stood close to the Orthodox church. It was a very hot day. The Jews were packed in a throng. They were afraid. There were some petty tradesmen, innkeepers and cobblers. Their families were there. Those who still had some possessions: not much perhaps, but still, they still had something. They had accounts recorded in notebooks, nightmares about Yahweh, because their God is even nastier than ours, they had bar mitzvahs on their minds and daughters to marry off. They were spreading their hands helplessly, shoving their hands in their pockets, and clenching their hands into fists. 32 There were old people, smelling of dust and kerosene from lamps; there were also young ones, smelling of sunshine and fresh sweat. Behind a cordon of soldiers, the townspeople of Gródko were gathering. Some were sympathetic, some didn’t understand, some were counting on settling a debt. Some were amused by the sudden humiliation of their better-off neighbours, some were shocked. First the soldiers pulled a young boy out of the compact group. “Sehr gut,” said Joachim, just as he had once addressed me. The soldier drew his Mauser from its holster, put the barrel to the boy’s temple, and pulled the trigger. And that was all, a fountain of drops of blood and shattered bones. Sonia shook her head, as if not understanding much of what she was summoning up, but hadn’t seen with her own eyes. Perhaps she had actually invented it all? Perhaps in the clash between an oral account and history it’s the truth that always gets battered? Igor was lying down, tensed. He was already taking individual suffering badly, his own for instance, which was close to tonsillitis; mass suffering, planned from above and inflicted from below, paralysed him. He was unable to listen, but just sympathised automatically, in an unconditional reflex of numb solidarity. In the bright spark that jumped across to him from the cat, Jozik the Shepherd of Mice, he realised that he must memorise even more than Sonia was telling him, that he must harness his memory to the theatrical or novel-writing treadmill, in order to save himself, to tell a true story at last, to get up and fight for something. Though in fact he had sensed this from the very start, as soon as he crossed the threshold. The boy fell. The elder kept saying that the God of the fallen will rise, and strike down the unfallen. God did not raise the boy, or press the drops of blood or the slivers of bone back into him. Could it be that the Jewish Yahweh wasn’t quite so benevolent or powerful? After all, here in Haradok He was as if in exile, far from the sands and deserts, a wanderer. Or maybe we didn’t deserve it? For the boy it no longer mattered; it was others who felt the unhappiness, it was others who needed a miracle to reassure them. Clearly we didn’t deserve a Lazarus. Though this Lazarus, in rational terms, was not ours, and the Jew was like all the first Christians. Apparently nobody said a word. The Germans dragged people forward one at a time, put guns to their temples and pulled the triggers. As each one fell, several persons broke free of the circle of neighbours watching the incident. These people went to houses, but not to their own. Seeing the death of a shopkeeper, they headed for his abandoned shop. Seeing the death of a cobbler, they went to his ownerless workshop. Finally there was no one left but old Mr Buchwald, the elder, and a Catholic priest. At this point the German soldiers suddenly walked away, leaving almost a hundred corpses, three men living and swarms of flies. Flies will instantly scent out corpses and shit. The Germans simply walked away, as if this incident was of no great consequence, as if the working day were over and the time had come for a rest. Almost a hundred dead, three living, and the flies. That was, or may have been, Joachim’s story. I no longer thought Juden was the German word for the sea, that Raus was a cat, and Schweine meant mice. I felt extreme sympathy for Joachim. I loved him, and he was still alive; in spite of all I sympathised with him, I couldn’t do otherwise. My poor, fair Joachim, and his beautiful body, suddenly surrounded by the twisted figures of corpses. Joachim stopped talking. To this day I still don’t know what he was trying to tell me that night: about the future 33 and a massacre in the town, or maybe the future after the massacre, or the future without a future, I don’t know. He squeezed my hand tightly. It hurt, but that pain was nothing compared with the pain he was feeling. He had started to cry. He was talking and crying, without any connection. Then he laid his head on my breast and was silent. I breathed with a sack of stones on my chest. We didn’t sit there for long. He didn’t even kiss me goodbye, just touched my arm, and then my breast; my nipple hardened. I watched as he walked away: he had long since dissolved in the darkness, yet I stood without moving, wondering whether my Joachim was a nocturnal illusion, or a real man of flesh and blood. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Bibliography and translations: Niehalo / Uncool Wołowiec: Czarne, 2006. Cud / The Miracle Wołowiec: Czarne, 2007. – Hungarian Csoda, trans. Korner Gabor, Budapest: Typotex, 2014. Nowy Kwiat Cesarza (i pszczoły) / The Emperor’s New Flower (and Bees) Warsaw: PIW, 2007. Gesty / Gestures Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008. – English Rights sold to World English Rights and Dalkey Archive Press. – Latvian Rights sold to Mansards. – Lithuanian Gestai, trans. Kazys Uscila, Vilnius: Vaga, 2011. Balladyny i romanse / Balladynas and Romances Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010. – Hungarian Égiek és földiek, trans. Korner Gabor, Budapest: Typotex, 2012. – Slovenian Baladine in romance, trans. Jana Unuk, Ljubljana: Mladinska Knjiga Zalożba, 2014. – Spanish Rights sold to Rayo Verde Editorial. ości / nesses Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013. – Bulgarian Rights sold to Gea Libris. – Hungarian Rights sold to Typotex. – Slovenian Rights sold to KUD Police Dubove. Sońka / Sonia Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014. – Belorussian Rights sold to Literaturny Dom Lovhinau. – English Rights sold to World English Rights and Dalkey Archive Press. – Ukrainian Rights sold to Komora. TRANSLATION RIGHTS: WYDAWNICTWO LITERACKIE CONTACT: JOANNA DĄBROWSKA [email protected] 34 35 5. JACEK DEHNEL © Krzysztof Dubiel Jacek Dehnel (born 1980) is a poet, novelist, translator and columnist. His published works include poetry collections, novels and short stories. He has won many literary awards, including the Kościelski Foundation prize (2005) and the Polityka Passport (2006). His novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Mother Makryna is his fourteenth book. Jacek Dehnel has dusted off and returned to the cultural fold the real historical figure of Makryna Mieczysławska, who perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes of the nineteenth century, and on a European scale too. The story of the fake nun, who was not exposed until fifty years after her death, provides the material for a thrilling plot. In September 1845 a middle-aged woman turns up in Paris, claiming to have been the Mother Superior at a convent of Sisters of the Order of Saint Basil in Minsk, which was closed down eleven years earlier by the Russian authorities. In Paris Makryna is taken up by some eminent representatives of the so-called Great Migration of Poles who have fled from the empires that have engulfed their country, first and foremost Prince Adam Czartoryski. They are extremely willing to listen to her made-up stories about martyrdom for the Catholic faith and for being Polish. For Makryna maintains that she and the other nuns were kept prisoner for years on end, cruelly tortured, starved and forced to do hard labour, all because she had refused to convert to the Russian Orthodox church. Curiously, not just Polish émigrés are fooled by her shocking stories but so is the European general public – the French and British press report widely on her sufferings and the cruelty of the Russians, the bishops refer to her martyrdom in their pastoral letters, and finally she is received by Pope Gregory XVI; his successor, Pius IX, also has a soft spot for her. Clearly fascinated by this unusual swindler, Dehnel’s main question concerns what determined the success of her incredible hoax; he explains why Makryna’s lies were useful, in the political sense. In any case, her more perceptive listeners quite soon realised that she was a fraud and a liar, but the need to maintain the image of a holy martyr took the upper hand. What triumphed was not so much naivety, as plain cynicism. The story develops through two interwoven monologues narrated by the title character. The first, as it were official line, is a literary rendition of the testimonies to her martyrdom for her faith and motherland that Makryna gave in Poznań, Paris and Rome, in other words contemporary documentary evidence. The second, which is more like 37 a religious confession than anything else, reveals the true story of Makryna, and this is the one that has the greater effect on the reader’s imagination and emotions. What we get is the story of Irena Wińczowa, a poor Jewish girl from Wilno, who was forced to adopt a series of false identities as the only way to survive in a cruel world. As a convert obsessed with the Catholic faith, she dreamed of entering a holy order, but became a servant instead. As the pretty Jula (previously known as Juta), she attracted a Russian officer called Wińcz, and then became Irena, in exchange for two betrayals – her religious conversion (this time to the Orthodox church) and her liaison with the Russian, and thus with a representative of the hateful partitioning power. At first he doted on her, but when it turned out that she couldn’t have children, he became a ruthless wife-beater. The countless wounds on her body, which she showed in Paris and Rome as proof of the cruelty of the Russkies, were inflicted by her sadistic alcoholic husband. After his death she wound up destitute – he had drunk away everything they owned. She managed to latch on to one of the Wilno convents as a charwoman, and that was where she came across the Basilian nuns who had been driven out of Minsk. Embellishing the stories she heard from them, she took on a new identity, becoming Mother Makryna. Dehnel tells the story in a way that leads us to sympathise with the central character, and even to feel fond of her; he persuades us that her fabricated martyrdom was not at all far from the genuine suffering she endured. As she sets off to conquer the world as a fake nun, she describes herself as: “One, a widow. Two, a pauper. Three, no longer young. Four, a woman. Five, a Jewish convert. Six, ugly. With lots of old scars on her face, and a few more entirely new ones, wrinkled and hunchbacked, with swollen legs, panting as she goes up steps.” Despite such negative assets, she did extremely well for herself, living to a great age as a guest at a convent in Rome, surrounded to the end of her days by the cult of a holy martyr. Dariusz Nowacki JACEK DEHNEL MATKA MAKRYNA GRUPA WYDAWNICZA FOKSAL / W.A.B. WARSZAWA 2014 123 × 195, 400 PAGES ISBN: 978-83-280-0928-8 38 MOTHER MAKRYNA In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I shall write the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God in heaven and all the saints, amen. Scarcely had I entered the presence of Archbishop Przyłuski in Poznań, scarcely had I fallen at his feet, when I raised my weeping eyes to him and said: “This is the tale of Makryna Mieczysławska, Mother Superior of the Basilian Sisters of Minsk, and of their seven years of persecution for their faith. As I recall the scene today, I could see Siemaszko as clearly as I can see the fringes on the Episcopal throne, as clearly as the tassels on the curtains; I had him within arm’s reach, as he stood there and said: ‘Just you wait – with the lash I shall strip you of the skin in which you were born! By the time a new one grows, you’ll be singing a different tune’ – those were his exact words, and no other, as he stood in the convent with his hired assassins, like the assassins that took Our Lord Jesus Christ captive in Gethsemane, though those men came on a cold spring night, in March, or April, before Holy Week, and these came to us in mid-summer, at break of day. So Siemaszko addressed us, while there I stood in my robes of Prioress of the Basilian convent, with my ring and my crosier, and my sisters around me: Krystyna Huwaldówna, Nepomucena Grotkowska, and lastly Euzebia Wawrzecka – she with whom I later ran from Muscovite bondage, having broken our chains; that was the last I saw of her, for we scattered in all directions, calling on God to help us evade pursuit, like the Holy Family pursued by Herod’s henchmen. So there stood Siemaszko, setting foot on the door, forced open by those Muscovite ruffians, until the iron staples and hinges snapped like kindling wood; he was savouring his might, his satanic power, as if he were the Lord Jesus Christ Himself at the gates of hell – yet he had done wrong, for he had invaded the Holy Church and was maltreating us, the handmaidens of the Lord, threatening us. By then it was high summer, and the red, well-fed snout of the civilian governor Ushakov, all decked in his braided uniform, was bathed in beads of sweat; but Siemaszko was dry, dry as the very devil, dried by the desert winds of hell. He screamed at us, the handmaidens of God, he screamed at me, ‘You, Polish sow, you Warsaw sow’ – for he knew me to be of high birth, and that in my youth I had frequented our, Mieszko’s, the son of Mieszko’s old Polish capital – ‘sow’, therefore, ‘Warsaw sow’, he shouted, ‘I shall rip your tongue from your throat, I shall tug, yank, and grip so hard that my very grasp shall cause the blood to spurt, and I shall toss it to the ravening hounds’ – until dry, bitter froth appeared in the corners of his mouth, so close was my view as he leaned over me, every word like a bitter 39 wind blowing in my face. ‘Ha’, thought I, ‘Mieczysław became the Bold, so Mieczysławska shall be the stone from David’s sling: let him just try to fight a woman’. The day was dawning; on our way to the chancel for meditation, we had been torn from prayer as from a mother’s womb. As the bell struck five, I implored the governor to let us enter the confines of the church, where for so many years we had served God. Siemaszko was all but casting sparks from his eyes; I merely gazed at the apostate, waiting for his cassock to burst into sulphurous flames upon him. When I instructed our dearest, fresh-faced sisters Irena Pomarnacka and Liberata Korminówna to fetch from the treasury our silver cross, set with precious stones and the relics of Saint Basil himself, at once it was seized by sacrilegious hands, causing the blood to flow from Sister Liberata’s fingers, as if a portent of the day to come when they would tear her limb from limb; she merely gave a gentle moan and yielded to the care of Providence. Fortunately, the Muscovite was greedy for precious metal and stones; thus he was desirous of riches, not the cross – and took much plunder from the treasury, the precious robes, and the altars, including my entire dowry, twice one hundred thousand Polish zlotys with which I had entered the convent, and which I had wholly invested in its embellishment. Never mind the riches snapped up by those ruffians – our souls are what matters. We were allowed to take a simple cross, of wood, for under this symbol we would go to our martyrdom. That it would indeed be martyrdom had been made plain to us by then; therefore I took hold of the hard, sharp-edged cross, and laid it on my left shoulder, with Sister Pomarnacka like Simon of Cyrene to help me, and sometimes other sisters too, though if any tried to give me aid, a soldier would strike her with the flat of his sword or prick her with his bayonet. Thus began our Golgotha – as soon as we left the convent, coming through the gate, which I had seen so often from the window of my cell, I looked about for the wagons that would convey us into exile; but at once I realized that, ringed by a band of armed men, we were going to their brigands’ lair on foot. At this point we heard the cries of children. For our convent was not merely dedicated to praising God, but also to serving the people. And day by day many paupers and beggars came to us, with suppurating wounds, with legs or arms missing… a hand torn off by grape shot in the wars, or severed by a Muscovite broadsword; a man whose legs had been trampled by a horse, another who was lame from birth, or with a face so crooked as to be painful to behold; a woman riddled with monstrous worms, another covered in weeping boils – every second person was itching, scabious, or louse-ridden, with matted locks one cubit long, or two. All these people came to us as to the purest spring, in which we would wash, feed and water them. And as if that were too little for our feeble arms to bear, there were the children, the orphans, of whom we had six times ten to nurture. As in the paintings, where Herod’s henchman raises a heavy iron gauntlet to a child, so too the soldiers dispersed and threatened the innocents. The babes were crying and screaming; I can still see them today, gazing out of a small square window, divided in a cross, one child’s head in each pane, in terror and in tears, the younger ones below, the older above; some opened the windows, stretched out their little arms and cried: ‘Our mothers are captured, our mothers are captured!’ Others ran down the stairs, their small feet pattering as they ran towards us, but when they clung to the hem of our habits, the butts of the Muscovite rifles pushed them aside; as if their lives were at stake they watched, until 40 the soldiers glanced the other way, and then at once they sprang to our sides again. The oldest children, the wisest, just as they had often entered the orchard for sour apples, now scrambled over the wall, for the Muscovites were guarding the gate; they went and ran throughout the town, banging on doors, and loudly shouting: ‘Our mothers are captured, our mothers are captured!’ At this cry the whole town awoke, people leaped from their beds, this man flew from his house in nothing but his shirt, that man’s wife threw a cape on his back, yet another grabbed a club, and they all rushed to join us; but they only caught up with us at the inn called the Convenience, a quarter of a mile from town, so nobody saw how the Muscovite assassins drove us through the convent gates, never to enter them again. I with the cross at the fore, like the Lord Jesus, with Sister Pomarnacka like Simon of Cyrene at my side, thinking only of our Lord’s torment as I glanced at my own shoulder – He must have had the self same wound on the shoulder that bore the cross; three bared bones protruded from it, yet contemplating agony not my own, but that of Christ, succoured me on our march. Others among us, especially the older sisters whose health was failing, tumbled to the ground, whereupon the henchmen jabbed and beat them with their rifles, heedless of the blood that came bursting from their mouths, their noses, and their feet. Then at the Convenience, the tavern – perhaps so named in derision, for there we suffered the greatest inconvenience – Siemaszko halted our conduct. Three days had passed since his previous visit; he no longer rode in an open gig that bounced on every stone and exposed him to a cloud of dust; sometimes he had come in a fine, lacquered Berlin, newly bought for imperial roubles, at others, if with a distinguished guest, he had come lounging on cushions in a comfortable vis-à-vis; lately he had gained flesh, fattened on Muscovite victuals, grown red, florid and satisfied. Indeed he had been most willing to travel to Saint Petersburg, and at the Tsar’s court church to enter the schismatic faith with the title of archiereus, and then propose a plan to convert all Uniates by force and to turn his endeavours against us. On the first day of our martyrdom, when he and the governor assailed us, he had come in the vis-à-vis. He bid the carriage stop, stood up as if in a pulpit, as if to address us, but merely watched; he waved a hand, beckoned to one of the soldiers and whispered in his ear. At once there was a commotion, the assassins dashed into the courtyard of the inn, where coffers had been placed in advance. One by one they hauled them into the road, then raised the lids, and there inside were fetters, with which they bound us, chaining us to one another, in pairs. We were made to set our feet, then our hands on a block, and the hammers thumped, while the blood splashed on shattered faces and beaten backs, and soaked into the ground. ‘They’re putting our mothers in chains, they’re putting our mothers in chains!’ wept the children; the people wept too, as now and then a woman who had known kindness from us, an old beggar or a godly citizen emerged from the crowd to beg us for a blessing, each from the sister he knew and held dearest; but the soldiery kept pitilessly warding them off with their rifle butts and bayonets. At last the final hammer fell silent, the final pair of sisters was manacled in chains, the weeping crowd was scattered to the four winds and we set off, impelled at a great rate, now across frozen ground, now mud, all but barefoot, all the way to Vitebsk. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones 41 Bibliography and translations: Kolekcja / The Collection Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Marpress, 1999. Ekran kontrolny / Control Panel (poems) Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2009. Żywoty równoległe / Parallel Lives (poems) Kraków: Wydawnictwo Zielona Sowa, 2004. Fotoplastikon / Photoplasticon Warsaw: W.A.B., 2009. Wyprawa na południe / Journey Southward (poems) Tychy: Teatr Mały, 2005. Saturn. Czarne obrazy z życia mężczyzn z rodziny Goya / Saturn, Black Paintings from the Lives of the Men in the Goya Family Warsaw: W.A.B., 2011. – Dutch Saturnus, trans. Esselien’t Hart, Baarn: Uitgeverij Marmer, 2012. – English (US rights available from UK publisher) Saturn, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Sawtry: Dedalus Books, 2013. – Hungarian Saturn, trans. Pályi Márk, Pozsony: Kalligram, 2014. – Italian Il quadro nero, trans. Raffaella Belletti, Milan: Salani Editore, 2013. – Slovak Saturn, trans. Karol Chmel, Bratislava: Kalligram, 2013. Lala / Lala Warsaw: W.A.B., 2006. – Croatian Lala, trans. Adrian Cvitanović, Zaprešić: Fraktura, 2010. – German Lala, trans. Renate Schmidgall, Berlin: Rowohlt, 2008. – Hebrew Lala, trans. Boris Gerus, Jerusalem: Keter, 2009. – Hungarian Lala, trans. Gáspár Keresztes, Pozsony: Kalligram, 2010. – Italian Sotto il segno dell’acero, trans. Raffaella Belletti, Milan: Salani, 2009. – Lithuanian Lialé, trans. Birute Jonuškaite, Vilnius: Kronta, 2010. – Slovak Babuľa, trans. Karol Chmel, Bratislava: Kalligram, 2009. – Slovenian Pupa, trans. Jana Unuk, Ljubljana: EHO, 2012. – Spanish El Jardín de Lala, trans. Jerzy Sławomirski and Anna Rubió, Barcelona: Duomo Ediciones S.L., 2012. – Turkish Lala, trans. Seda Köycü, Istambul: Apollon, 2011. Rubryki strat i zysków / Profit and Loss Columns (poems) Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2011. Młodszy księgowy. O książkach, czytaniu i pisaniu / The Junior Bookkeeper: On Books, Reading and Writing (essays) Warsaw: W.A.B., 2013. Języki obce / Foreign Tongues (poems) Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2013. Matka Makryna / Mother Makryna Warsaw: GW Foksal/W.A.B., 2014. Wiersze (1999-2004) / Poems 1999-2004 (poems) Warsaw: Lampa i Iskra Boża, 2006. Rynek w Smyrnie / The Square in Smyrna Warsaw: W.A.B., 2007. Brzytwa okamgnienia / A Razor-sharp Glance (poems) Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2007. Balzakiana / Balzaciennes Warsaw: W.A.B., 2008. TRANSLATION RIGHTS: GRUPA WYDAWNICZA FOKSAL CONTACT: BLANKA WOŚKOWIAK [email protected] 42 43 6. MAGDALENA TULLI © Krzysztof Dubiel Magdalena Tulli (born 1955) is a novelist and translator. Her books have won many awards and have all been shortlisted for Poland’s top book award, the NIKE Literary Prize. Her novel, Italian Pumps, won the prestigious Gdynia Literary Prize and the Gryfia Prize. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. How can we live in a world that turns out to be a trap? How can we talk about something we have barred ourselves access to for many years? Noise by Magdalena Tulli is an intimate story woven into the grand history of a century marked ignominiously by war’s “times of contempt”; it is a tale about how to survive catastrophe – how to clear the minefield of one’s memory, come out of hiding, become master of one’s own fate. The heroine is a little girl, the daughter of a woman whose emotions remained trapped behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz. Her few loved ones are destroyed by the war, while in the world of those who have survived, in brutalized communist Poland, goodness, empathy, and understanding are in short supply. With her inability to connect with people and her lack of self-confidence, the girl becomes easy prey for her peers. Even years afterward, as a teenager, then as the mother of two sons, she remains the hostage of the little girl. Many years later, a cousin in America she is not fond of sends her a letter that triggers a stream of recollections and at the same time also of events. To begin with, it might seem that this new novel is simply a continuation of the brilliant, prize-winning Italian Pumps (2011). Nothing could be further from the truth – in Noise Tulli effects a spectacular escape from the world of her nightmares presented in the earlier book. The little girl in this novel, left to her own devices, befriends an imaginary fox, terror of chicken coops, object of hatred of every society – like her, a perpetual outsider. No surprise here – in many folk mythologies the fox personifies the trickster, someone whose status is ambiguous, who is both despised and admired, scapegoat and also guide to new worlds. Much later, the teachings of the fox allow the heroine to escape from her oppression; to find understanding for her mother, who was an inadvertent victim; to forgive not only her persecutors but also those who once were directly responsible for the afflictions of wartime, and now populate the imaginarium of European memory, or these days rather post-memory. All of them, victims and oppressors, in the twentieth century constitute what she calls a great “family.” 45 Tulli’s novel says more about postwar Poland and Europe than many volumes written by historians and sociologists. In Noise the living converse with the dead; in the underworld, at a tribunal presided over by the Fox, there is a great judgment upon what has happened. Tulli’s prose is about the need for forgiveness, about how to live in such a way that the sense of shame by which victims are stigmatized does not turn, paradoxically, into a sense of guilt. About how to find a way out of the chalk circle in which those wounded by ricochets struggle with their undeserved suffering. The terse, ironic tone of the writing has an admixture of the phantasmagoric. But this phantasmagoria works in the interests of a great metaphor that has the dimensions of a realistic argument. Noise is a psychotherapy session, an overcoming of trauma with the aid of literature. Literature can become a lifeline across many an abyss in life. Magdalena Tulli’s new novel is the clearest proof of this. Marek Zaleski MAGDALENA TULLI SZUM ZNAK, KRAKÓW 2014 124 × 195, 192 PAGES ISBN: 978-83-240-2625-8 46 NOISE “Children are a lottery,” she said to me one time, a few decades later, during a walk in the park, by the swings. In her time she’d played that lottery; she hadn’t won anything, and had been disappointed.“There’s no way to tell in advance who’ll be born. You’re at the mercy of chance.” She may even have liked walking in the park, though no doubt she would have preferred to take a bus ride somewhere far away, on her own. By that time, however, if she’d done that she would almost certainly have found herself in trouble and been brought home in a police car many hours later. So the park was the only option. “A child is like a box,” I remarked. “It’s hard to take something out that you didn’t put in.” She wouldn’t agree with me. It could happen, some people had managed it, once a long time ago she’d had hopes of succeeding as well. She had counted on it. She expected there to be something in the box. After all, the whole point of a lottery is that it gives you a chance. But for a lottery you need good luck. There was a cold wind, and I fastened her coat under her chin. “I never had the opportunity to put anything into the box, if you want to know, ma’am,” she said. “There was no connection with her, nothing I tried worked. It was nothing but problems from the very start.” I looked into the well of decades past. The problems lay at the bottom, tiny as pebbles. “And now? Is it any better now?” I asked, taken aback by the thought that my mother was right after all: it was a lottery and you could win something. Were my sons not better children than I had been in my time? And my mother – had she not in fact taken out of the box more than she had put in? She eyed me doubtfully; perhaps for a moment she had the impression that I looked a little like the daughter she barely remembered anymore. “No, it’s not better. She hasn’t visited me in years,” she replied. “She never even calls. “Whenever I ask her for anything she always refuses.” The pills did no good. They couldn’t. True, the illness would have progressed more slowly if my mother had begun taking them right away, instead of reassuring us that the worst had been ruled out. Because it was precisely then that she got some crazy notion about the medication that I found later in the dresser, the seal still intact on the container. We’d been told that the pills would delay the worsening of her condition. But the illness was incurable. Incurable? His mother couldn’t understand what that meant. That nothing could be 47 done? That we had to be content with flashes of lucidity while they still occurred? “How can you all accept something like that, how can you sit with arms folded, waiting for it to get worse!” she would say angrily. As for her, she wouldn’t agree to it, she refused to just sit and wait. “Nothing is inevitable!” she would shout, forgetting that raising her voice was not her style. At the district clinic – she would remind us, before she began to suspect we were driven by ill will – my mother had had a good doctor who didn’t prescribe medications of that kind. In his mother’s view we should have gone back to that doctor from the clinic. The entire time, she asked only one thing of me – that I stop constantly interfering. That I let my mother go wherever she wanted on the bus on her own, that I give her a break with the park. She ought to have complete freedom, it was her right, didn’t she live in a free country? Independence would supposedly be the thing to keep her in good shape. Independence alone. It was the only remedy. “She hasn’t been in good shape for a long time now,” I would point out, trying to bring his mother back to reality. “Exactly,” she would retort. “Because you took away her independence.” And turning to my mother, she’d say: “Promise me you’ll stop going to that new doctor.” My mother would have done anything in her power to reassure his mother and make her feel better. It was just that the promises she made vanished from her mind. But she didn’t forget that it had been about the pills. At supper she hid her pill in her pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief. At moments like those, when his mother voiced her opinions about diagnoses and treatments, the same anger would grow in both of us, spilling out between us like a stormy sea. I couldn’t forgive her for incessantly demanding the impossible of me. In her view it was my bounden duty to hold back the unavoidable, while inside me, along with the little girl and her fox there was also someone I didn’t know all that well, who was capable of anything, who would have had the strength to fight back, to actively oppose her will. I studied her out of the corner of my eye: we were somewhat alike, if not in appearance, then in character at least. It was hardly surprising, we had common ancestors after all. Yet the person within me who could have opposed her was bound and gagged. Their fury raged in me, but it was helpless and mute. Anger did not translate into action, it was incapable of pushing his mother aside. Whoever the person was, they couldn’t be relied on. I had to seek help elsewhere. I had to meet with him, with her son. He agreed, he found time for me, but right away he gave me to understand that he found my request indelicate. It was his mother, he reminded me. He would support her whether or not he thought she was right. His gaze shone with the reflected light of his firmness. He could be firm when he was defending the rules she had introduced, when he refused to cast doubt on the opinions she would express in her imperious tone. That was the only time he was capable of being firm. “What did you expect of me?” he asked. Her madness inspired my respect as well as my resistance. When I found myself in the car with her, the houses and trees fled past as if we were about to cross the finish line in a world rally championship. She radiated confidence that she was indestructible and that others too could not be harmed while they were with her. After the loss of the court case she came to her sense a little, and she agreed to slow down. The day after the evening when my mother had died, I completed the formalities, then I went to see his mother. 48 We sat in the kitchen drinking tea. We were both dazed by the sudden absence, which seemed overwhelming. That morning I’d been looking for the receipt for my father’s cemetery plot. I’d found it in an envelope that also contained a letter addressed to the two of us. I laid it on the table. His mother started reading it and frowned. The letter stated that my mother wanted no gravesite or funeral, that she wished to be cremated. “In nineteen seventy-eight she couldn’t have written that,” his mother said as she studied the shaky characters. It was true, it couldn’t possibly have been in seventyeight. In those days she was healthy, her elegant handwriting hadn’t even begun to falter. The remote date in the top right corner spoke tellingly about my mother’s personal calendar, in which time did not flow forward in a straight line but strayed, looped back, and retreated thirty years. I was tormented by the idea that my mother may have died feeling thirsty. It monopolized my thoughts. I told his mother about it. She placed a hand on my arm. “I’m sure you did the best you could,” she said. Shortly before her illness and death, his mother went to a historical exhibit about a concentration camp, the last and worst of those she had been in. I was surprised – previously she’d given such things a wide berth. As for him, he refused to go with her. That was why she called me. She thought that if she went alone, she wouldn’t come back. She was afraid, I was certain of it. Her last and worst camp was located near the city of Linz; she arrived there from another, better camp outside Dresden, in a column of prisoners who had made a formidable journey of several weeks in freight cars, interspersed with long marches. By some miracle, no one died. The commandant of the evacuated camp had a bag of sugar and a spoon. He gave the bag to an NCO, and the NCO, amid the infernal chaos of roads and train stations, every day put a spoonful of sugar in each prisoner’s mouth. At their destination, the camp authorities took charge of the convoy. At that point the responsibility of the conscientious previous commandant came to an end. In that last, worst camp, my mother’s sister survived twelve days; for the last few she was unconscious. On the thirteenth day, the Americans arrived. If they’d come later, she probably wouldn’t have lasted till the fourteenth day. In the subdued lighting she stared at the emblem over the gateway, the interior of the barracks. And the rows of photographs. Afterwards she sat on a chair by the cloakroom as if she were waiting for something else. It was the thirteenth day, but I could see with my own eyes that the Americans had not arrived. I had to take her away. That was exactly why I was there. Translated by Bill Johnston 49 Bibliography and translations: Sny i kamienie / Dreams and Stones Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Open, 1995. – Czech Sny a kameny, trans. Petra Zavřelová, Prague: One Woman Press, 2003. – English Dreams and Stones, trans. Bill Johnston, New York: Archipelago Books, 2004. – German Traüme und Steine, trans. Bettina Eberspächer, Berlin: Oberbaum, 1998. – Italian Sogni e pietre, trans. Raffaella Belletti, Rome: Voland, 2010. – Russian Sny i kamni, trans. Irina Adelgejm, Moskow: NLO, 2007. – Swedish Drömmar och stenar, trans. Julian Birbrajer, Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 2008. – Ukrainian Sni j kamenì, trans. Wiktor Dmitryk, Lviv: Calvaria, 2010. W czerwieni / In Red Warsaw: W.A.B., 1998. – Czech Stehy, trans. Jolanta Kamiňska, Prague: One Woman Press, 2002. – Croatian U crvenilu, trans. Adrian Cvitanović, Zagreb: Hrvatsko Filolosko Drustvo, 2008. – French Dans le rouge, trans. Laurence Dyèvre, Paris: Pauvert, 2001. – German In Rot, trans. Esther Kinsky, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000. – Hungarian Vörösben, trans. Körner Gábor, Budapest: Magveto, 2004. – Latvian Poloneze sarkana, trans. Silvija Brice, Riga: Atena, 2004. – Slovenian V rdečem, trans. Jana Unuk, Ljubljana: Modrjan, 2008. Tryby / Moving Parts Warsaw: W.A.B., 2003. – Czech Soukolí, trans. Iveta Mikešová, Prague: Paseka, 2006. – English Moving Parts, trans. Bill Johnston, New York: Archipelago Books 2005. – German Getriebe, trans. Esther Kinsky, Frankfurt am Main: Schöffling & Co., 2008. Skaza / Flaw Warsaw: W.A.B., 2006. – English Flaw, trans. Bill Johnston, New York: Archipelago Books, 2007. – French Le Defaut, trans. Charles Zaremba, Paris: Editions Stock, 2007. – German Dieses Mal, trans. Esther Kinsky, Frankfurt am Main: Schöffling, 2010. – Slovenian Motnja, trans. Jana Unuk, Ljubljana: Cankarjeva Zalozba, 2015. – Spanish Rights sold to Rayo Verde. Włoskie szpilki / Italian Pumps Warsaw: Nisza, 2011. – Lithuanian Itališkos „špilkos“, trans. Birutė Jonuškaitė, Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2014. – Spanish Rights sold to Rayo Verde. Szum / Noise Kraków: Znak, 2014. – English Rights sold to Archipelago Books. TRANSLATION RIGHTS: POLISHRIGHTS.COM CONTACT: MAGDALENA DĘBOWSKA [email protected] 50 51 SAMPLE TRANSLATIONS ©POLAND ©POLAND TRANSLATION PROGRAM The aim of the program Sample Translations ©POLAND, addressed to translators of Polish literature, is to promote Polish literature abroad through encouraging translators to present Polish books to foreign publishers. THE PROGRAM’S REGULATIONS ARE: • financing is given for 20 pages of a translation (1,800 characters per page) • the translator must have published a minimum of 1 translation from Polish in book form before making an application • the translator submits an application form, supported by the following attachments: • the motivation for choosing the book in question • an action plan • his/her bibliography • the rates applied by the Polish Book Institute are the average current rates in the country where the translator lives • the Institute will consider applications as soon as they are submitted (but will not evaluate the quality of the translation) • receiving a grant in no way influences the decision to finance translations in the framework of the ©POLAND Translation Program • if the translator submits more than one application in a single year (maximum 3 per year), he/she is obliged to inform the Institute of the order of precedence The ©POLAND Translation Program is designed for the use of foreign publishers. 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