Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  At the lunch break everyone, even old-hand Bukowski, was startled by the large number of reporters delivered to this little village by the press bus. They had come to report on the talks: London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Washington and Moscow being represented. Television crews came from most of the nations and double teams from Japan and America. Bukowski, looking toward the Forest of Szczek, saw that the Russian tanks had drawn back, and he was relieved.

  Buk spoke no foreign language, but Bukowski could handle German and English, so he stepped forward to offer a résumé of what had been happening, but this did not satisfy the reporters: ‘We want to hear from the little guy. It’s his fight.’

  Interpreters from among the government people volunteered, but reporters from Paris and Berlin spoke Polish, and they wanted to interrogate Janko Buk directly, so the interpreters were used only to translate Buk’s answers to the others, and it became obvious that the newspeople were going to report this meeting as a battle between Buk and Bukowski. BUK VERSUS BUKOWSKI, The New York Times would proclaim, and the reporters were right. This was David going up against Goliath.

  Buk, who had never before been publicly interviewed even by Polish reporters, showed remarkable self-confidence and restraint in giving his answers. He did not assume the posture of one who had told the government what it must do.

  ‘Could we say,’ the Paris man asked, ‘that you explored differences?’

  ‘That would be accurate,’ Buk said.

  ‘And what were those differences?’ a young woman from Berlin asked.

  ‘The problems that you can see all about you,’ Buk replied.

  ‘Centering on food?’ one of the Japanese television people asked.

  ‘We’re farmers. Always we center on food.’

  ‘And about other shortages?’ the Berlin woman pressed.

  Buk smiled at her, the gap between his teeth showing attractively. ‘We men worry about food. Our wives, they worry about shortages in the stores.’ When this brought chuckles, he added: ‘But at night we hear about the store shortages too.’

  Now the Americans began to bore in: ‘Is it true, Mr. Buk, that you and Minister Bukowski come from this same little village?’

  Buk deferred to Bukowski, who said: ‘We do.’

  But again the reporters wanted to keep the focus on Buk, so they asked him: ‘Would it be correct to say he’s your cousin?’

  Buk looked up at the much taller Bukowski and smiled again. ‘I never saw this man before today. But I’ve heard about him all my life. He would be more like my uncle.’

  ‘Does he lecture you like Big Uncle?’ This was too difficult for the interpreters to handle, not linguistically, for one of them knew the locution well, but no one wished to introduce any word or idea that might represent Russia. The illusion must be maintained that this was a purely Polish debate with no intrusion being made by the Soviet Union.

  ‘What is the exact relationship between you two?’ the American asked, and again Buk deferred to Bukowski.

  ‘My grandmother,’ Bukowski said very carefully, ‘was Pan Buk’s great-grandmother, so he was correct. I am of the generation that would be his uncle.’ He paused, then left the steps of the palace where the television people had asked them to stand, and walked to a spot from which he could point toward the village. He was not engaged in a game and he wished to bring the interview back to a proper level of sobriety. ‘The woman we’re speaking of was hanged over there in 1939 for grinding her own wheat. My mother, that would be Pan Buk’s great-aunt sort of, she was shot against that wall, a few days earlier.’

  ‘For what?’ the woman from Paris asked in Polish.

  ‘Because she was here when the Nazis arrived,’ he replied in English.

  That ended that line of interrogation. Now a man from Berlin well versed in economics asked: ‘What solutions do you see to the food shortage, Herr Buk?’ and Buk said with great caution: ‘One, to grow any food at all, we face a grave shortage of fertilizer and spare parts. Two, if we want to increase production, we must have more of everything. Three, to distribute even what we do have, we must change present patterns.’

  This was a bold, sharp answer, and pencils scribbled rapidly. Both the Japanese and American television men asked if Buk would repeat his three points for their cameras and he said yes, but before doing so he asked that Bukowski appear with him: ‘Because we’re not fighting, you know. We’re talking.’

  So the two Poles with such similar backgrounds and such contrasting positions stood side by side to face the cameras, and after Buk had repeated what he had just said, Bukowski smiled thinly and added his comment: ‘We’re exploring every avenue to relax the present crisis.’

  ‘Even a farmers’ union?’ the Berlin man shouted, and the two Poles merely smiled.

  But in their afternoon session both sides began cautiously to explore exactly that question, and Bukowski tried to stamp out the first tentative proposals: ‘Unions have always been for workers in cities. You can’t find a major nation in the world which amounts to anything that allows agricultural unions.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time,’ Buk said, and the debate was joined.

  Bukowski had been warned by his superiors in Warsaw, who had been warned by their superiors in Moscow: ‘You can make almost any reasonable concession you wish. Prices, schedules, priorities, spare parts, lower rates for agricultural gasoline … But under no circumstance should you even discuss a farmers’ union. That would imperil the state.’

  ‘A rural union,’ he said with attempted finality, ‘would be untidy. Difficult to administer. Open to all sorts of fraud. It simply isn’t needed.’

  ‘But when all us farmers face the same problems, we’re going to take the same action whether we have a union or not.’

  ‘That’s the socialist way,’ Bukowski said eagerly, ‘without a union.’

  ‘But if we did have a union, our responses would be more sensible, more productive.’

  ‘You would gain nothing by a union,’ Bukowski said with near-contempt.

  A Warsaw official who had not yet spoken now did so: ‘What you would gain, Buk, would be the power to control this nation’s food supply, and that cannot be tolerated.’

  Buk sat with hands folded in front of him on the table. Leaning forward until his chest almost touched his hands, he said: ‘We will control the food supply whether we have a union or not. You can never make us sow and reap at the rate we did when we were free to find our own markets. You know that’s why Russia is starving. With all the power they command, they can’t get their farmers to produce two-thirds of what they produced in the old days. And we Poles in 1981 aren’t producing two-thirds of what our grandfathers produced, either. And if you allow things to get worse, the food supply will get worse.’ Leaving his hands folded resolutely on the table, as if they represented his answer, he leaned back.

  The fierce confrontation continued all that afternoon, farmers with their backs to the wall defending themselves against a bureaucracy with its back to several walls. But gradually certain definitions did emerge: the government would not allow a union; the farmers demanded one with powers equal to those obtained by factory workers. On that there was a stalemate. But certain concessions were agreed to: the government would make a concentrated drive to find spare parts; the farmers promised not to diminish any further their normal schedules of planting and husbandry.

  And then Janko Buk dropped his bombshell. When it had been agreed that he and Bukowski would go before the cameras again and stress the agreements, not the differences, Bukowski said: ‘We’ll resume our discussions tomorrow,’ and Buk said: ‘We would like to involve the Bishop of Gorka.’

  Bukowski stopped dead. His head jerked back and he stared at the farmers. ‘Yes,’ they agreed. ‘We’d like to have the Bishop of Gorka take part.’

  ‘He has no concern in this!’ Bukowski exploded. ‘This is an economic problem. This is food and money and oil and machinery.’

  ‘It’s the welfare of
Poland,’ Buk said stubbornly. ‘And the church is a third part of Poland. We want the bishop here.’

  The appearance before the television cameras had to be delayed while Bukowski went to the telephone to consult with Warsaw: ‘We had everything going smoothly when the clever little bastard threw a hand grenade at us. He wants to involve the Catholic church.’

  There was a loud rumble in the phone, to which he replied: ‘That’s exactly what I told him. But he still wants to bring in the bishop.’

  This simple proposal apparently caused as much turmoil in Warsaw as it had in Bukowo, for during five minutes Bukowski did nothing but listen. Then he said meekly: ‘I think your suggestion is very wise. Yes, yes. Four weeks. Yes.’

  When he left the phone he reassembled both parties and announced grimly: ‘The talks will be recessed for four weeks.’ Everyone wanted to know why, but he stonewalled: ‘I’ll announce it to the press. We’ll resume here in four weeks.’ And when he went before the cameras this time he did not ask Buk to stand beside him. In cold, crisp, bureaucratic tones he delivered an ultimatum: ‘Our talks have progressed amiably, but both sides feel the need for further study. We’ll resume in four weeks.’ He would say no more and permitted Buk to add nothing, so the world press was free to interpret the impasse as it wished. No reporter came even close to guessing the reason for the break.

  Long after the lumbering press bus had started back to Warsaw and the private cars of the lesser Communists had followed, Szymon Bukowski quietly accompanied Janko Buk to the latter’s cottage, where he knew he would meet Buk’s young wife and an older woman he had known with passionate intensity forty years earlier, not in the way of love-making but in the brutal warfare of life and death. In the early winter of 1941 he had come to this cottage, to this woman and her husband, pleading for help.

  When Buk pushed open the door, indicating that Bukowski should enter, he noticed that the commissar was trembling, but then his wife saw them and hurried forward to greet their visitor and he took her hand. Buk’s mother stayed behind, hands folded across her apron, standing very still and erect, for she, too, was remembering those distant fateful nights.

  Then Bukowski saw her, and he left the younger Buks to stride across the kitchen he had once known so well, and he saw that clean hard face with the dreadful welt from left eye to chin, and he held out his hands, grasped hers and drew her toward him in a long embrace.

  ‘It is many years since you stood in this kitchen at midnight,’ she said. Then, pulling away, she looked at him admiringly. ‘You’ve done wonderful things with your life, Mr. Minister.’

  ‘The name is Szymon,’ he said. ‘The name was always Szymon.’

  ‘You were just a boy when I first knew you,’ she said.

  ‘Think of it,’ he said to the younger Buks as he took a chair at the kitchen table. ‘At seventeen I was in that forest … head of a commando … had already killed my first Nazi … the one who had hanged my grandmother.’

  He liked what he saw of young Pani Buk: Kazimiera was of that stalwart breed which had always kept the farms of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia functioning. She was prepared to serve as wife, mother, cook, seamstress, ox when the plow had to be pulled, and always as the sharp verbal critic. It was to her that he now spoke, as if acknowledging that inside the cottage she was mistress.

  ‘Pani, when I left Warsaw at dawn this morning the women in my building asked me—’

  ‘I know,’ she said abruptly. ‘They hoped you could bring home some meat.’

  ‘And vegetables.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have the zlotys, you know.’

  Buk’s mother broke in: ‘Zlotys are of no use any more. We can’t buy anything with them.’

  ‘But I’d leave them anyway. To demonstrate my good will.’

  ‘Good will we know you have. I knew your mother, I knew your grandmother. And women like that do not produce poor sons.’

  They talked for a while of the old days, and tough Biruta began to weep when she recalled that special night when Bukowski had come to this cottage to talk her and her husband into joining his underground unit, then operating out of the Forest of Szczek. ‘They were heroic days,’ she said.

  ‘These are heroic days, Biruta.’

  ‘How have you managed to mess up this country so abominably?’

  ‘We’re not free in Warsaw, you know.’ And that was all he would concede. ‘You will let me have some food?’

  ‘Of course. You came here before, begging for food, and we gave it then, didn’t we?’

  ‘What can I give you in return?’

  ‘Not zlotys. Szymon, zlotys are no longer worth a damn. But we would like some books about farming … for Janko and our young ones.’

  ‘Books you shall have,’ he said. Then he left the cottage and whistled for the driver to bring the government car closer so that its trunk could be packed with items of food no longer obtainable in Warsaw.

  II

  From the East

  In A.D. 1204, Genghis Khan, scourge of Asia, reached a straightforward decision. For a score of years he had been trying to discipline the Tatars, that small difficult group of horsemen who lived at the edge of the desert, and sallied forth at unpredictable intervals to upset the Great Khan’s plans. Most often they raided grazing lands occupied by the enemies of Genghis, but when such meadows provided unattractive targets, they were just as willing to raid his Mongolia.

  Small in number, they were also small in size; even their ponies were smaller than those of the Mongols, but they were an unruly lot, and what they won in rigorous battle they often lost in riotous celebration. They liked to come cascading into an area like the floods of a spring freshet bursting down from snow-capped mountains, sweep everything before them, kill every shepherd or horseman encountered, and drag back to slavery the women and children. They were a devastating force, and when Genghis first encountered them he had said: ‘These can be the greatest of the lot.’

  And they would have been had they submitted themselves to his leadership. He was, in these early years of the thirteenth century, incomparably the greatest general in Asia and probably in the world. He was a cruel genius whose simple rule was: ‘Leave no conquered leader behind who might rally his horsemen.’ When he subdued an area he killed off all leaders, distributed survivors over vast and differing districts, then galloped off with his booty to the next challenge. Like the Tatars, he destroyed existing orders; unlike them, he established new systems which would endure for centuries.

  He had begun by subduing and disseminating all the enemy tribes in Mongolia. He faced little capable opposition when he rampaged through northern China, and by the year 1199 he was supreme in an area reaching from the Pacific Ocean to the Ural Mountains, and then he ran into the Tatars.

  The first time he encountered their fierce little horsemen he defeated them, but in the last moments of battle, when they were thoroughly beaten, they somehow slipped away. In the second big battle he thrashed them outrageously, but in the end they managed to regroup. Realizing that he was up against something special, a desert breed that could not be controlled, he sought to make allies of them, and in a series of wild, triumphant battles the Mongol-Tatar forces raged westward to Turkey, slaying, burning, laying waste even the deserts.

  But Genghis could never rely upon his Tatars, for at the moment of victory they were likely to go thundering off to sack a city that did not pertain to the major goal, causing the Great Khan to lose an objective which he understood but which they did not. He talked with them, cajoled them, promised them rewards greater than those offered any of his other allies, and in the end they turned against him, not once but three times. The Tatars of central Asia were a force that not even Genghis Khan could hammer into civilized form.

  In 1204 he made up his mind. Summoning all the known Tatars in the world to a convocation west of the Gobi and north of the Himalayas, he ordered a line of desert carts to be brought forward and his warriors to apply a simple test: ‘Any Tatar who st
ands higher than the axle of that cart is to be slain.’

  Rigorously the rule was applied. Men, women, girls, lads were stood against the carts, and if the crowns of their heads inched above the hub, they were slaughtered. A few recalcitrants might have remained hidden in gullies and so escaped, but most of the adult Tatars were eliminated, never again to challenge Genghis in battle or disappoint him in peace.

  Among the little ones who witnessed the slaughter and survived was a dwarfish fellow named Vuldai, whose age, had it been revealed, would have automatically caused him to be slain but whose shortened stature kept him below the hub, and the reeducation which the Mongols forced upon the Tatar children caused great bitterness in his savage heart. ‘There never was a Tatar kingdom,’ the teachers said. ‘The Tatars never existed. You are Mongols subservient to the Great Khan. You will fight the way he teaches you and only when he commands, and after the battles are over, you will behave the way he decides.’

  Vuldai and the other little ones were taught new words, new gods, new systems, and in fifteen years the boys became the foremost horsemen in Asia, the girls the ablest women of the steppes. They did learn the new rules; they did obey the precepts of Genghis; and when he turned these young battalions loose they accomplished immense conquests. They were the light cavalry of the Mongol horde, men and women unafraid to dash forward on their small horses, carrying only some strips of dried meat and a handful of dried beans to sustain their charge for fifteen or twenty days without returning to camp.

  Vuldai and his men did not encumber themselves with the heavy machines of war which Genghis had learned to use so effectively in the siege and subjugation of cities: the mangonels, the movable towers, the flamethrowers and the heavy gear for digging tunnels under fortifications. The Tatars rejected even the arbalests which sped arrows so piercingly; their galloping horsemen were content with spear and saber and short dagger, and with them they were well-nigh irresistible.