Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Yet improvements did slowly filter in, a wooden roof to replace a thatch, a slab of precious glass for a rude window, so that in time an attractive collection of harmonious, low, modestly colored cottages grouped themselves artistically about the three sides of a trim central rectangle. As with the palace, the open end faced the Vistula, with the backs of the cottages abutting against the grove of beech trees. Peasants who were born and raised in Bukowo preferred it to any other villages they knew, but this was a limited endorsement because many would have had an opportunity to see only those few that were within a dozen miles. Beyond that perimeter the villagers rarely moved.

  That was Bukowo: primeval forest to the east, a splendid grove of beech trees, a snug village, a handsome palace, ancient castle ruins and, dominating everything, the majesty of the Vistula. Here was where the most advanced theories of the contemporary world would do battle.

  Sessions would be held in one of the many medium-sized rooms on the upper floor of the palace, and there were six widely recognized clues by which those attending would be able to determine the importance of their meeting. In Communist Poland if guests invited to a formal discussion were of trivial position, only tea was served, in plain cups and from a plain pot. Guests slightly more important saw with gratification that the teacups were placed on a lace doily. Those of medium power sometimes gasped with pleasure when bottles of a delicious black-currant cordial called sok (juice) were to be provided, but one did not wield real power until the fourth level was reached: all the preceding plus a bottle of really good brandy.

  If the visitors held truly high office, a plate of cookies would be added, delicious things wafer-thin and decorated with sugared designs, but if the official being honored held a cabinet position, or comparable rank in the army or church, or if he was a cinema star or a leading editor, a sixth mark of honor could be reached. In addition to the five customary degrees—tea to cookies—a final one appeared: actual sandwiches, made of the best bread, with thick butter and tangy cheese, or ham, or spiced chicken. Persons attending a meeting where all this was offered did not require medieval trumpets or modern cannon salutes; they knew they came with honors.

  For the meeting of the agricultural consultants, sandwiches were prepared and a chocolate cake.

  The Communist representatives reached the palace first, and custodians showed them to their rooms; with so many to choose from, it was easy to get one overlooking the castle to the south and the river to the west. Clerks and research assistants received rooms looking toward the beech trees, and some deemed these preferable, for the Forest of Szczek was in its own way as beautiful as the river.

  The arrival of the cabinet minister occasioned a good deal of merriment, for his name was Szymon Bukowski, and everyone joked: ‘It’s nice to be in your palace,’ and he had fun explaining that the Bukowskis who had owned this showplace were not from his Bukowskis, but nevertheless everyone kept calling it his palace.

  He was an important member of the Warsaw government, fifty-seven years old, gray hair close-cropped and clipped far up the sides and back, steel-rimmed glasses, heavyset, with slightly hunched shoulders, squarish, placid face, dark-complexioned and with deeply recessed eyes. He wore even in summer a dark, conservative suit made of thick wool and a neatly shaped dark tie. He could have been any Communist official, in any Iron Curtain country; actually, he was Poland’s Minister of Agriculture, and it was his job to deal with the rural disturbances which threatened the food supply of his country.

  He was a logical choice for the task, a devout Communist who had real appreciation for the difficulties under which farmers labored. He had lived in this village of Bukowo until the age of fifteen, watching his father, who supervised a group of farms, and his hard-working mother, who tilled her own garden patch. In those years he himself had often worked on the farms his father superintended, thus acquiring a sense of what the problems of agriculture were.

  After the German occupation ended he had studied architecture, gaining his reputation in government circles because of two activities: he helped organize strong Communist movements among his fellow students, and upon graduation he launched into massive projects for the rebuilding of war-ravaged Poland. In the latter field he achieved remarkable results, the one most often commented upon being his reconstruction of whole sections of the city of Lublin and the adding of nearly twenty thousand housing units for war refugees who would otherwise have been homeless.

  He was not appreciated by all members of the Polish community, however, because he was so stout a Communist that he could find no place in his heart for religion, and whereas many members of the government decried the Catholic church publicly in order to retain their jobs, then worshipped privately to preserve their Polishness, Szymon Bukowski would have nothing to do with the church, public or private. He believed, as Lenin had repeated so often, quoting Marx, that religion was the opium of the people, and he found his own work of building the new Poland so exciting that he required no intruding opiate. He did, however, keep such views to himself, for he felt that if he fought the battles of building and food, he was not required to fight the church as well.

  But he was determined to fight this fellow Buk, whose efforts to stir up the rural population were causing so much concern throughout the country. Farmers saw Buk as the man who would lead them out of the despair in which they were trapped; government saw him as an incipient force threatening the fundamentals of the system. When shipyard workers in Gdansk formed a union which they called Solidarity, that could be considered acceptable, if one wished to stretch a point, for it was a movement within the great tradition of European labor movements. Factory workers in all nations had formed unions, even in old Russia, and Communism had devised procedures for absorbing such unions easily into its system, preempting their good ideas, killing off the bad, and always forestalling any runaway tendencies. The needs of factory workers could be accommodated to the needs of mechanical production.

  But when farmers started talking about unions that would control the growing and distributing of foodstuffs, upon which the nation depended day by day, a new and dangerous dimension was being introduced, one without precedent and one which could lead to the most deplorable aberrations. This Lech Walesa, the factory worker in Gdansk, was in no way an enemy of the state; he was a logical outgrowth of the state, and although he might need discipline to keep him in line, his dimensions and his capabilities were known. But Janko Buk, who was creating so much disturbance among the farmers, was unknown; there was nothing in the theory of state socialism which prepared the Communist leaders of Poland to accept a man like Buk, and they were greatly disturbed by his actions.

  As the leaders of the party warned Szymon Bukowski when he left Warsaw for this confrontation: ‘If Lech Walesa causes us to miss the building of one ship, too bad. We can adjust to that and deliver the ship at some later date. But if Janko Buk causes us to lose a substantial portion of even one harvest, this nation will be in profound trouble. You get him straightened out.’

  The young man to whom this stricture applied now arrived, accompanied by three farmers from surrounding districts. He was thirty-six years old, stockily built like all men of his family, extremely square of face, with a shock of sandy hair and eyes that smiled easily. He had a slight gap between his two big front teeth, but this was offset by their unusual whiteness, which gave him an appealing expression when he gave a wide smile. Like many farmers, he held his elbows out from his body as if ready for any assault which might come at him, but he seemed more stubborn than aggressive.

  He was Janko Buk, Janko of the Beech Trees, a name familiar in this village for a thousand years. Some men in his line had been plain Jan, a name of solid virtue; others of a livelier disposition had been called by the affectionate diminutive Janko, or Good Old Jan. He was a responsible farmer, supported by a sturdy country wife and a widowed mother who knew as much about rural life as he.

  How had this wonderfully average man with less than a high s
chool education become the spokesman for the farmers of southeastern Poland and by extension, it seemed, all of Poland?

  First, he had a strong intelligence capable of seeing that if the industrial unions that comprised Solidarity gained the higher wages to which they were entitled, the cost of things the farmers needed, like machinery and fertilizer, would have to rise. And then, if government kept the prices of food down to prevent riots in the cities, the farmer would inevitably find himself in a bind: ‘Increased prices on everything we buy, same prices for everything we sell. That leads to ruin.’ It was really worse than that: ‘To cover unexpected expenses in the cities, the government is actually lowering what they pay us. We can’t live that way.’

  Because of the tradition in his family, generations of speaking out, including a fiery great-grandmother who had been hanged for refusing to obey nonsensical rules promulgated by the German Nazis in 1939, a father who had probably been executed by the Russian Communists in 1944, and above all, a mother who had defended freedom and decency with a courage that few could have equaled, Janko Buk was more willing to speak out on these matters than most of his fellow farmers, and in those gradual steps which lead simple men from the contemplation of a wrong to discovered truth, to a voicing of complaint, to actual resistance, he had found himself almost accidentally at the head of a vast rural protest against the irrational way the Communist system was managing its farmers, and the more he spoke out, the more clearly other farmers recognized the truth of what he was saying.

  So when Janko Buk entered the palace, he brought considerable weight behind him, and the representatives of the government had to treat him with respect. When he came into the meeting room he saw in rapid succession the cups for tea, the doilies beneath them, the bottles of currant sok, the brandy, the cookies, and in the middle of the table the plate of delicious-looking sandwiches, and he was assured that the discussions were to be serious.

  He sat opposite Szymon Bukowski and nodded pleasantly. He had never met this high official before but he had heard a great deal about him, and he wondered who should speak first. When Bukowski said nothing, Janko Buk felt no hesitation in plunging right in: ‘I’ve always been told, since you became famous, that is, Mr. Minister, that we’re related.’

  ‘That could well be. I came from these parts.’

  ‘My wife thinks that your grandmother and my great-grandmother were the same woman.’

  ‘My grandmother Jadwiga was hanged in 1939 for resisting the Nazis.’

  ‘Then we are related!’ With visible pleasure, Buk stood, reached across the table and shook Bukowski’s hand, holding it warmly and strongly in his own.

  ‘That’s a good beginning,’ one of the farmers said, and a member of Bukowski’s team agreed: ‘Token of a good ending.’

  Bukowski, seeing an opportunity to establish his credentials with the farmers, said: ‘You know, I was raised in this village. Used to work on your farms. And during the first part of the Nazi occupation I hid in your forest. When peace came I returned to help rebuild this palace … worked on this room we’re sitting in.’

  ‘My family was in Krakow at that time,’ Buk said. ‘I’m sorry we missed you.’

  ‘So I know your region well, gentlemen. I know your problems.’

  ‘I don’t think you do,’ a stern voice from the far left of the table said.

  Everyone turned to stare at the speaker, a farmer in his late fifties whose worried countenance spoke even more loudly than his words: ‘We’re caught in a vise, Mr. Minister, high prices for what we buy, low prices for what we sell.’

  ‘I understand, and that’s why my team has come down to talk with you.’

  ‘It isn’t talk we need, Mr. Minister.’ The older farmer spoke with a harshness which surprised some of the Warsaw men. It was obvious that the old days when rural people nodded and agreed with anything the high commissioners said were gone. There was now a contentiousness in this room that was almost frightening. Ten years ago, even two, Szymon Bukowski would have come thumping into this room and said: ‘That’s how it’s to be,’ and that’s how it would have been. Had there been even a whisper of protest, he would have indicated either by inflection or outright statement: ‘Because that’s how Big Brother wants it to be.’ One always said this with a twist of head or shoulder to the east. In those simple days, what Russia wanted is what Poland got. Now it was all different, and both the farmers and the Warsaw men were sparring more with an unknown future than with each other. They were obligated to determine what the relationship between the Polish city and the Polish farm would be, but far more important, they were endeavoring to discover what the logical relationship between the Polish nation as a whole and the Soviet Union ought ostensibly to be. They were a group of administrators and farmers wrestling with a gnawing problem; in reality they were the forerunners of the 1980s and 1990s grappling with one of the most profound problems in the world: how does a Communist dictatorship relax its controls, especially when the collapse of its economic policies demands that such controls be relaxed?

  Once the problem was voiced, even inferentially, the embittered farmers knew that they must state their case strongly so as to attain a good bargaining position, and they spoke with a fury the men from Warsaw had never before seen in rural areas:

  FIRST FARMER: I cannot pay a hundred zlotys for everything you make me buy from your government retail stores and then accept seventy zlotys from you when I deliver my produce to your wholesale centers. Mr. Minister, that isn’t fair.

  SECOND FARMER: I don’t grow wheat and barley. I grow vegetables which people in the city need right now. Our papers show us your city people standing in line hour after hour for my cucumbers, my turnips, my beans and radishes. And I had to leave my vegetables rot in the ground because your system of purchasing and delivering them has broken down. People are starving and my vegetables are rotting. That’s criminal.

  THIRD FARMER: Six of us bought a tractor three years ago. Excellent idea. We shared it, with never a problem. Janko Buk was one of us, he’ll testify. Now gasoline is high, we understand that, what with the Arabs and America messing around and all. We could adjust to that if we got decent prices for what we grow.

  FIRST FARMER: Now wait! Even if you did increase what we got, we still couldn’t use that tractor. And do you know why, Mr. Minister? Because we can’t get any spare parts.

  SECOND FARMER: So do you know what we’re doing? We’re cannibalizing. We steal parts from everybody else’s tractor, then watch our own with guns all night so they can’t steal from us. Janko will tell you.

  THIRD FARMER: Do you know what I stole last time? One bolt this long. Impossible to buy such a bolt in all of Poland.

  FIRST FARMER: I think you know what’s happening, Mr. Minister. Our farmers aren’t taking our produce to your buying centers. I won’t use names, but some farmers’ pigs are not going on the national market. They butcher at night, then sneak the meat into Krakow. Sell it door-to-door. Some send their wives to Rzeszow, to sell eggs door-to-door.

  THIRD FARMER: My grandfather says it’s back the way it was a hundred years ago. No one accepts zlotys any more. They aren’t worth a damn, and you know it, Mr. Minister. We barter and trade and sell at night.

  SECOND FARMER: We’re growing the stuff. We’re raising the animals. And our families aren’t hungry for something to eat. But the city people will soon begin to starve. And when we can’t get any fertilizer or spare parts, we’ll starve too.

  FIRST FARMER: We’re in great trouble, Mr. Minister. The women in my family need new clothes, new shoes. Unless they can find someone who needs our meat and vegetables, there’s no way my women can get anything.

  THIRD FARMER: Everything seems to be breaking down. Mr. Minister, I think it’s the system that’s breaking down.

  ALL THE FARMERS: Yes! Yes! The whole damned system.

  FIRST FARMER: We believe, all of us believe because we’ve talked about it, if you let us farm in the old way, each man responsible fo
r what he grows and what he sells … If he makes a mistake, he suffers. If he works hard and is bright, he prospers. You let us do that, you let us price our goods in relation to what we have to pay for what we buy, we could feed Poland and half of Russia.

  SECOND FARMER: In the old days we did. Fifty years ago we did. Ten years ago we did. And we can do it again.

  The fusillade continued for more than half an hour, a patient, non-hysterical outlining of proof that Polish agriculture had collapsed. During this time Janko Buk saw no reason to insert his own doleful experiences, for in recent months he had begun to think on a somewhat higher level than mere personal grievance, but if he wanted his statements to be effective, it was necessary that a full account of all grievances be on the table, with a recognition by both sides that they were serious, permanent and apparently incurable. He could afford to wait.

  Nor did Szymon Bukowski interrupt. He had learned in recent months that it was prudent to allow dissidents to enjoy the new experience of full complaint before the government official tried to contest each small point. He knew that if he tried to give an answer to the spare-parts problem by itself, he would become totally enmeshed in its details, any one of which could be debated on its peculiar merits, and the discussion would achieve nothing but petty animosity. But if the entire animosity was spewed forth in one great mess, then a sensible man could confute it in an orderly way. So he encouraged them to talk.

  FIRST FARMER: Does the government realize that up to forty percent of things grown in this area now filter into the black market?

  THIRD FARMER: Not filter. Rush in like the breaking of a dam. Soon it will be seventy percent. And then what happens to orderly life in the cities? Tell me that.

  SECOND FARMER: What happens to orderly life on the farm? My wife can’t get soap. I can’t get tobacco or matches.