Listless and irritated, I waited for the prize-giving ceremony. Obviously, I thought, there’s nothing to be hoped for from the school; I should have given up on that a long time ago. That’s not where I’ll get the appreciation I deserve. It was only a few days before events confirmed how right I was.
The prize-giving was scheduled for Sunday at five. It was to include presentations of brief extracts from the selected performances, and would take place not at the theatre where the competition had been held but at the municipal community centre, which, although fine as a public amenity, was not exactly a temple to art. It housed a variety of offices and workshops, a rather grungy café and a huge conference hall, used during the week for committee meetings and on weekends either for the depressing evenings put on to entertain the old-age pensioners who lived near by or for noisy dances, attended by the older representatives of the local youth and usually ending in drunken brawls. In short, it wasn’t the most attractive locale; for me, with my aspirations, it was an affront, an outrage to my artistic soul. But perhaps it was the only possibility: at that hour theatres would be getting ready for evening performances and perhaps weren’t available. Or so, at least, I told myself. A pity, of course: it would have been nice if such a pleasant ceremony could have been held in one of the temples at which I worshipped. Oh, well, I consoled myself, it’s not all that important; no point in worrying about it.
But the sight that met our eyes when we arrived on Sunday turned my muffled resentment into serious anxiety. We seemed to have blundered into some kind of horrific nightmare.
The famous conference hall was done up as if for a carnival. On stage a bunch of teddy boys, members of a rock group idolised by the local youth and rejoicing in the name of The Firecats, were feverishly milling about. They all wore the high-heeled boots favoured by The Beatles, tight, narrow trousers and short jackets beneath which hideous folds of ruffled cloth could be seen, drooping unattractively. Thus attired, they were fussing about hooking up the cables to their electric guitars, tuning the converted radios that served as their amps and endlessly trying out the microphone with hoarse rumbles of ‘testing, one-two-three’, an activity which produced fearful whistles and caused the window panes to vibrate alarmingly.
Then there was the public. It was the most bizarre and fantastic assortment of people ever gathered in one room. The first few rows were filled by pensioners from the nearby Home of Tranquil Old Age. Behind them and on benches to the side sat the competitors, surrounded by numerous relatives, and representatives of various schools, come no doubt to cheer on their friends and make as much commotion as possible. The back of the hall was reserved for the rabble: overgrown students from technical schools, soldiers on leave and gangs of excitable teenagers, alert to every opportunity for dubious pleasantries and spoiling for a fight.
It was clear what all this meant: our ceremony had been incorporated into the community centre’s normal programme, an item like any other on its list of activities. And, indeed, to the management it must have seemed providential: for the pensioners a more perfect form of entertainment could not have been devised, and for the rabble it was ideal as the medicinal dose of culture exacted by the Ministry of Education as payment for each rowdy dance.
I looked around desperately for S. and the other members of the jury, hoping that their presence, even if it didn’t raise the standard of the proceedings, might at least lend them some measure of seriousness. But in vain. Prospero, having removed his mantle, had dissolved into thin air.
I did notice another actor, however, a smooth and foppish type best known not for his achievements on stage or screen but for his appearances on television shows of the vilest sort, such as Quiz or Teatime at the Microphone. Dressed in a black suit and shiny black patent-leather shoes, a white drip-dry shirt and a pretentious bow tie, he was nervously fussing about the stage, talking to the organisers and jotting things down in his notebook. Clearly he was to be master of ceremonies.
The thing began. The brilliantined buffoon gave a prancing leap onto the stage, seized the microphone and launched into his act. He postured, strutted and smirked; he gushed; he paid effusive compliments to the audience. It was all in the worst of taste. But the public loved it, and he was applauded.
The order of the proceedings was as follows: the master of ceremonies called the winners up on stage, beginning with the lowest prizes; then, with much consulting of notes, he introduced everyone in the group; finally, modulating his voice like an American television host, he announced each prize and the performance for which it had been awarded. The Firecats’ percussionist crashed out a deafening flourish on his cymbals and drums, the master of ceremonies, having presented the certificate to a member of the group, withdrew, and the prizewinners were left alone to display their artistic skills. When this part of the ritual came to an end, there ensued a musical interlude (a notion familiar to me from another occasion), enthusiastically greeted by the back rows, in the form of some rock’n’roll number by The Firecats.
It was a ghastly spectacle. The most absurd school ceremonies, the most grotesque moments of the Festival of Choirs and Vocal Groups, were nothing compared with this travesty. To call it ludicrous, preposterous, a mockery, a farce, would not do justice to its monumental idiocy. Embarrassment and shame trickled down my back in rivulets of cold sweat.
Where am I? What am I doing here? Why did I let myself in for this? I wailed silently.
And all the while, ineluctably, our turn was drawing closer. I couldn’t decide what to do. Refuse to go on stage? Refuse the award? Refuse to perform? I didn’t dare; it would have made too much of a scene. In the end, I put my faith in the spirit of improvisation.
When the dreaded moment finally came, when the master of ceremonies, having reached the high end of his range of vocal possibilities, called us up on stage, one of my cast, to wit Prometheus, whispered into my ear: ‘You can do what you like, but count us out. We’re not coming.’
‘I’ll take care of everything,’ I said through gritted teeth, like the captain of a sinking ship. ‘You can leave the stage as soon as he’s handed over the certificate.’
We stood there, in the glare of the lights, like a group of condemned men on the way to the scaffold. The master of ceremonies droned on, consulting his notes – some nonsense about the ‘high artistic value’ of our performance. And I was looking at the back rows, where the rabble was, and thinking, They’re sitting there like good little lambs, just waiting for this farce to end so that they can finally have their dance and whoop it up. Just as we waited for the end of the Festival of Choirs. And they’re right: now I’m the thorn in their side, the pathetic creep they have to listen to. As soon as I leave the stage and the public disperses, they’ll clear away the chairs, make a dance-floor and throw themselves into the wild gyrations of some frenetic dance to The Firecats’ music. And that will be their triumph: their ‘No more’.
These lugubrious thoughts suddenly revealed a challenge. No, I decided: I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I wouldn’t let them amuse themselves at my expense. Let them sneer, but not at me. Let them amuse themselves as they please, let them jeer – and quite rightly – at the Festival of Amateur Theatres; but they shall not mock me!
And then it occurred to me that they were the supreme judge here. To bring the thing off in front of people like myself, to win the hearts of the pensioners in the front rows, even, yes, to impress S. himself with my skills – none of that was so very hard. But to subdue the rabble, especially rabble itching for the brutish bacchanalia to come – now that would be an achievement. It was a challenge worth attempting.
‘And now, ladies and gentlemen,’ shrieked the master of ceremonies, ‘the winners of this year’s first prize, the Golden Mask! A big hand for them!’ And he hurried offstage.
‘A big hand for the end!’ someone yelled from the back.
With a discreet but authoritative nod I signalled to the cast to leave the stage. Then I took a few steps forward
and, shading my eyes dramatically against the lights, commanded with an edge of impatience, ‘Lights, please.’
The old electrician in charge of the lights, whom I knew from the theatre, grasped at once what I wanted. He slowly killed every light but one, a spotlight on my face and the upper half of my body.
Then, in the most ordinary voice I could manage, as if talking to myself, I began my piece:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages . . .
I spoke these words with a kind of cold indifference, as if from birth I had been under no illusions as to the nature of this world and life in it, as if the only emotions I knew were disgust and contempt. There was also scorn in my voice, and a certain arrogance. One might have been forgiven for thinking that, instead of reciting verse, I was openly mocking my audience. At each successive age of man I sought out the appropriate age group where it sat in the hall and spoke to them; it was to them that I directed Jaques’s wry little portraits. But behind all this there was a message, and it shone through clearly.
This, more or less, was its gist: Here you are; take a look. This is you. All of you, without exception. But not me. I may have a certain number of years, a certain age, but I fit none of these roles. I’m not a mewling and puking infant. True, no one here is. But neither am I a whining schoolboy with his satchel, creeping unwillingly to school. And the best proof is that I’m standing here now, doing what I’m doing. I’m not a lover sighing like a furnace or a soldier full of strange oaths; I’m certainly not a justice in round belly lined; still less am I slippered or in my second childhood.
Who, then, am I? And why don’t I have a place in this picture?
I have no place in the picture because I am not here. I am merely a mirror that reflects the world: its pupil, its eye. I am pure Irony and Art. And that is something that lies beyond life.
The silence as I spoke the last lines was almost absolute. Not a cough, not even a rustle. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’ve done it, I thought. Whatever they’re thinking, at least they’ve been silenced. Subdued by Shakespeare. I’ve won.
The applause may not have been thunderous (there had, after all, been something insulting in my performance), but it was sincere and respectful. I took a polite bow and was about to leave the stage when the master of ceremonies suddenly rushed in, seized me by the right wrist as if introducing a boxer before a fight, thus preventing my escape, and shouted at the already dispersing public, ‘One moment, ladies and gentlemen, one moment! We haven’t finished yet! There’s still one more surprise, one more wonderful surprise to come!’
What has the idiot come up with now, I wondered, with horrible foreboding. What else does he expect from me?
‘Our great Shakespearean scholar here,’ the master of ceremonies ploughed on, ‘had been awarded another prize – a special, individual prize – funded, ladies and gentlemen, by none other than the chairman of the jury himself, our beloved, incomparable Prospero!’
At this my heart began to beat at a brisker pace, and I even managed an inner smile. An individual prize from S.! Well, well. That was something, even in these miserable circumstances.
‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ the MC persisted, ‘This is a rare and remarkable event, sure to go down forever in theatrical history. And the prize, ladies and gentlemen . . .’ – he reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket – ‘the prize . . .’ He paused dramatically, raising both hands, one still gripping my wrist and the other clasping the object extracted from his pocket, and screamed, ‘The prize is a RUHLA WATCH!’
‘Rukhla, Rukhla!’ came gleeful shouts from the back of the room. With the heavy guttural consonants, absent from the accepted German pronunciation, the word becomes an obscene verb (in the third person singular, present tense, to be exact); the rabble, of course, exploited this for all it was worth. I felt my knees giving way. But the MC still held my wrist aloft in a tight grip, and this kept me from collapsing in a heap to the ground.
The reasons for my collapse, the full ghastly extent of this horrific, ultimate, murderous blow, will be plain to those who know something about Ruhla watches and their peculiar significance.
The Ruhla watch was manufactured in East Germany (Geedee-arse, as it was popularly known), and was distinguished in those days for being by far the cheapest watch available in Poland. By itself, this would not, of course, have been a point in its disfavour; but its suspicious cheapness went along with unbelievably low quality. Ruhla watches generally stopped working after just a few weeks of use, and during their brief span never once gave the right time: they were always fast or slow, from the moment you bought them. Their unfortunate owners were eternally having to set them forward or back, and to perform a series of complicated calculations whenever they wanted to determine the right time. This, however, was not enough to account for the Ruhla’s reputation: there were a lot of shoddy goods on the market then, but not all of them became objects of ridicule. The Ruhla owed its unique status to the shrill advertising campaigns that insistently extolled its alleged virtues. Radio and television programmes were full of it; on game shows for the masses it was the most frequently awarded prize. A car with a loudspeaker could often be seen making the rounds of the city’s streets, haranguing people with the following jingle, blared out at full volume:
Come and play on Guess-me-Kate;
Win a Ruhla and a date!!
People reacted to this insistent hard sell with verses such as:
A Ruhla watch is rotten luck;
It wouldn’t buy a decent fuck.
To complete the picture, there was the name itself – or rather, its spelling. In Polish it could become a somewhat risqué double entendre, providing material for countless ribald jokes, to the further delight of the populace.
In short, the Ruhla watch was an inexhaustible source of hilarity, and the fact that this miracle of East German technology was now being presented to me in public (not even in a box, mind you; in a little plastic bag stapled at the top) was an unbearable humiliation. Burning with shame and embarrassment and wanting only to disappear from sight, I shoved the wretched thing into my pocket, left the stage and rushed for the exit. At the door, however, an unknown individual with a pockmarked face barred my way. Dragging me aside, he handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘You have to sign for it.’
I scrawled a hasty signature and resumed my flight. As I escaped, I heard an impatient shout, ‘Hey, you, come back here! You’ve forgotten the guarantee!’
I dragged myself home in a state of utter wretchedness, obsessively reliving those final moments. Just when I though the worst was behind me, when I was congratulating myself that by some miracle I had not come off too badly, the real blow had been delivered. It was like something out of a film: just when you think the hero is safe at last, something awful and unexpected happens and he dies after all, from a bullet shot by a bad guy lurking in a dark corner.
I also wondered about S.’s role. What had he intended? Did he consider that, having allowed me to dally with him for a moment on his Olympian heights, he was now duty bound to cast me into the abyss, so that I wouldn’t get ideas above my station? Or was it revenge for that first improvisation of mine, when I had caught him off guard and briefly held the advantage? And did that roguish wink in the theatre foyer already presage the revenge he had in store? I lurched blindly from one wild surmise to another. In the end, I decided his motives had been much simpler. I think he genuinely liked me and, searching for the right gesture, considered that a watch would be a charming allusion to and fitting memento of my late entry for the competition. Moreover, being notoriously stingy, he naturally alighted on the cheapest solution: the Ruhla. It probably never even crossed his mind that his choice would wreak such havoc in my soul.
Whatever the truth of the matter, I still had to de
cide what to do with the thing. If I was to shake it off, cleanse myself of its polluting stain, as it were, something had to be done with it, and it seemed quite clear to me that a compromise would not do. Passing it on to someone else, giving it to the poor, even leaving it on the street for someone to find – none of these was a satisfactory solution. It had to be destroyed – returned to a state of nonbeing.
The place of execution was carefully chosen: it was to be Paris Commune Square (Wilson Square before the war), this being an intersection of three streets named after our three great national poets: Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasinski – the very same whose works, as the deputy head had pointed out, had been missing from my script. To them I now offered up the miserable Western (at least in the geographical sense) trinket bestowed on me as a result of my treacherous cosmopolitanism.
I took the watch out of its plastic bag, laid the straps flat and placed it, face up, on one of the tram tracks. It ticked loudly, showing (correctly) nine o’clock.
I took a few steps back and sat down on a bench. After a few minutes the number fifteen arrived, going in the direction of the city centre. There was a sharp crack, repeated like an echo as the wheels of each car went past. I rose and approached the gallows. On the track lay a crushed circle of metal, encrusted like a mosaic with tiny shards of glass; the cheap plastic straps, surprisingly stiffened, were still in place on each side. I picked up this dead, mummified thing and examined it curiously. The entire mechanism was one solid mass: no trace remained of the hands, the numbers on the dial, or the little screw on the side where you wound it up. One thing only survived: at the top, horribly disfigured and barely recognisable, but still discernible even in the dim light of the streetlamp, five silver letters glowed, triumphant and invincible. ‘Ruhla,’ they spelled.
I pondered them for a moment with a twinge of pity and turned my steps slowly towards the corner of Mickiewicz Street. There I wrapped the remains of the watch in the guarantee, enclosed them, thus enshrouded, in the casket of their plastic bag and deposited the whole in the gutter.
Madame Page 4
