- Book Institute

Transcription

- Book Institute

POLISH
BOOKS
TO DISCOVER
OLGA TOKARCZUK
MARIUSZ CZUBAJ
WITOLD SZABŁOWSKI
IGNACY KARPOWICZ
JACEK DEHNEL
MAGDALENA TULLI
THE POLISH
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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.
Danish, Hungarian, Macedonian, Norwegian.
Prawiek i inne czasy / Primeval and Other Times
Warsaw: W.A.B., 1996.
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.
Croatian, German, Hindi.
Dom dzienny, dom nocny /
House of Day, House of Night
Wałbrzych: Ruta, 1998.
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.
Czech, German.
Bieguni / Runners
Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007.
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
Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French,
German, Italian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian.
Moment niedźwiedzia /
The Moment of the Bear (essays)
Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 2012.
Czech, Swedish.
Księgi Jakubowe / The Books of Jacob
– 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
Gra na wielu bębenkach / Playing Many Drums
Wałbrzych: Ruta, 2001.
Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, German, Hungarian,
Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian.
Ostatnie historie / Final Stories
Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, French,
German, Russian, Ukrainian.
TRANSLATION RIGHTS: OLGA TOKARCZUK
CONTACT: OTO.OLGA@GMAIL.COM
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
21:37 / 21.37
– 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
Róże cmentarne / Graveyard Roses
Kołysanka dla mordercy / Lullaby for a Murderer
– German
Wiegenlied für einen Mörder, trans. Lisa Palmes,
Münster / Berlin: Prospero Verlag, 2015.
Zanim znowu zabiję / Before I Kill Again
– German
Rights sold to Prospero Verlag.
Martwe popołudnie / Dead Afternoon
Warsaw: Albatros, 2014.
Piąty beatles / The Fifth Beatle
TRANSLATION RIGHTS: GRUPA WYDAWNICZA FOKSAL
CONTACT: BLANKA WOŚKOWIAK
BLANKA.WOSKOWIAK@GWFOKSAL.PL
MARTWE POPOŁUDNIE / DEAD AFTERNOON
TRANSLATION RIGHTS: ALBATROS
CONTACT: EWA KRZYSZTOSZEK
E.KRZYSZTOSZEK@WYDAWNICTWOALBATROS.COM
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.”
Zabójca z miasta moreli /
The Assassin from Apricot City
– 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
DEBOWSKA@POLISHRIGHTS.COM
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
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.
Niehalo / Uncool
Cud / The Miracle
– 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
– 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
– 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
– Bulgarian
Rights sold to Gea Libris.
– Hungarian
Rights sold to Typotex.
– Slovenian
Rights sold to KUD Police Dubove.
Sońka / Sonia
– 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
J.DABROWSKA@WYDAWNICTWOLITERACKIE.PL
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
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.
41
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
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
– 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
– 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)
Młodszy księgowy. O książkach, czytaniu i pisaniu /
The Junior Bookkeeper: On Books, Reading and Writing
(essays)
Języki obce / Foreign Tongues (poems)
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
Brzytwa okamgnienia / A Razor-sharp Glance (poems)
Balzakiana / Balzaciennes
TRANSLATION RIGHTS: GRUPA WYDAWNICZA FOKSAL
CONTACT: BLANKA WOŚKOWIAK
BLANKA.WOSKOWIAK@GWFOKSAL.PL
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
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
– 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
– Czech
Soukolí,
trans. Iveta Mikešová, Prague: Paseka, 2006.
– English
Moving Parts,
trans. Bill Johnston, New York: Archipelago Books 2005.
– German
Getriebe,
Frankfurt am Main: Schöffling & Co., 2008.
Skaza / Flaw
– English
Flaw,
trans. Bill Johnston, New York: Archipelago Books, 2007.
– French
Le Defaut,
trans. Charles Zaremba, Paris: Editions Stock, 2007.
– German
Dieses Mal,
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
DEBOWSKA@POLISHRIGHTS.COM
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.
The purpose of the program is to support the translation
and publication of Polish literature in other languages.
GENRES SUPPORTED
•
•
•
•
fiction and poetry
broadly conceived humanities (with particular
emphasis on Polish history and culture)
literature for children and young adults
non-fiction (literary reportage, biography,
memoirs, essays)
THE PROGRAM MAY COVER
1.up to 100 % of the translation cost
2. up to 100 % of the cost of the acquisition of rights
3. up to 50% of the printing costs – only in the case of
children’s picture books, comic books and graphic novels
APPLICATION PERIODS AND GRANT DECISIONS
CONDITIONS FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE PROGRAM
• it must be the first translation of the book into the
given language, and the sample must not have been
previously published
• the book must be a work of literature or essays,
or a Polish humanist work from the past or present (with particular consideration given to books
devoted to the history, culture and literature of
Poland), or literature for children or young people
PREFERENCES
• an initial declaration of interest from a potential
publisher
• the Institute may establish in a given year additional
preferences concerning a given language area
For further information please contact:
Ewa Wojciechowska
e.wojciechowska@bookinstitute.pl
52
•
•
1st application period: 1 January - 31 March
results to be announced on 1 June
2nd application period: 1 September – 31 November
results to be announced on 28 February
HOW TO APPLY
The publisher is required to submit an online application
form supported by the following attachments:
• a copy of the rights agreement
• a copy of the contract with the translator
• a bibliography of the translator’s work
• general information about the publisher
(publishing profile, list of titles, current catalogue)
For further information please contact:
Ewa Wojciechowska
e.wojciechowska@bookinstitute.pl
53
PUBLISHERS’
ADDRESSES
POLISH BOOKS TO DISCOVER
© The Polish Book Institute, Krakow 2015
AGORA SA
ul. Czerska 8/10, 00-732 Warszawa
phone: +48 22 555 60 00, +48 22 555 60 01
fax: +48 22 555 48 50, +48 22 555 47 80
www.wydawnictwoagora.pl
ALBATROS
ul. Hlonda 2a/25, 02-972 Warszawa
phone: + 48 22 253 89 65, fax: +48 22 251 22 72
www.wydawnictwoalbatros.com
CZARNE
Wołowiec 11, 38–307 Sękowa
tel:+48 18 353 58 93, fax: +48 18 352 04 75
www.czarne.com.pl
ul. Foksal 17, 00-372 Warszawa
phone: +48 22 826 08 82, +48 22 828 98 08
fax: +48 22 380 18 01
www.gwfoksal.pl
POLISHRIGHTS.COM
ul. Kochanowskiego 19/1, 31-127 Kraków
www.polishrights.com
ul. Długa 1, 31-147 Kraków
phone: +48 12 619 27 40, fax: +48 12 422 54 23
www.wydawnictwoliterackie.pl
WYDAWNICTWO NISZA
ul. Łukowska 9/229, 04-133 Warszawa
phone: +48 22 617 89 61
www.nisza-wydawnictwo.pl
ZNAK
ul. Kościuszki 37, 30-105 Kraków
phone: +48 12 619 95 01, fax: +48 12 619 95 02
www.znak.com.pl
54
This catalogue has been produced to coincide
with the study visit for foreign publishers
organized by the Polish Book Institute,
Kraków, 11-13 June 2015.
Edited by Izabella Kaluta, Agata Picheta,
Gabriela Dul
Texts written by Kinga Dunin,
Małgorzata I. Niemczyńska, Dariusz Nowacki,
Robert Ostaszewski, Marek Zaleski
Translated by Jennifer Croft, Bill Johnston,
Antonia Lloyd-Jones
English texts edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
More information on Polish literature
is available on bookinstitute.pl
Graphic design & prepress
Studio Otwarte, www.otwarte.com.pl
bookinstitute.pl

- Book Institute

Transcription

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