Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  But when he returned to his quarters at Concordiaplatz he found that Krystyna had forced her way in, and had brought her belongings as if intending to stay indefinitely. She was a much different woman from the one he thought he knew: pianist no more, she revealed herself to be a dedicated revolutionary, and the force of her comment stunned Wiktor: ‘Heroic Poles have been combatting our oppressors for a century, and it’s now time for you to join the battle. Do you even know what’s been happening?’ She drew back, studied the handsome young boulevardier, and said scornfully: ‘You, a man of your ability, wasting your time at the Austrian court when you could be in Paris helping to push forward our revolution.’

  ‘I discharge serious responsibilities right here.’

  ‘But the real struggle? Are you aware of it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then it’s time you learned.’ And sitting him down, she recited that chain of events which Poles like her kept in their memories like a rosary, these gallant men and women on the battlements, always praying that some lucky stroke would come along to revitalize their captive nation and enable it to repel the invaders:

  ‘When Napoleon marched through Poland with his soaring promises of freedom, no one else in Europe had assisted him the way my great-grandfather did, and thousands like him. We were willing to fight the entire Russian army, and we did.

  ‘In 1831 my great-grandfather was with the Warsaw corps that revolted, and we kept the tyrants on their toes for two years. My great-grandfather fled to Paris with Chopin and Mickiewicz. That’s why I was born there, because my great-grandfather was a hero.

  ‘In 1844 we supported the weavers in their pitiful bid for freedom and a decent wage. In 1846, more revolution. In 1848, fires all over Poland, and we almost triumphed that time. How many of us died then? And in 1863 we launched our great war against Russia—yes, outright war. As soon as the gunfire started, my father, God bless him, he came right back to do his part. Escaped Siberia by a hair. Secret police trailing him wherever he went. We almost did it that time.’

  ‘You keep saying we,’ Wiktor said, awed by the young woman’s fury, and she replied: ‘I was part of every revolution,’ and he said: ‘You weren’t even born,’ and she said: ‘And I shall be part of every move that occurs after my death, because Poland will never surrender. People like me will never surrender, and you must be one of us.’

  ‘I have my duties here,’ he repeated, as if that justified everything, and she was about to excoriate him; instead she leaped up, gave him a passionate kiss, and said: ‘Wiktor, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love you. So Polish, so handsome, so stupid.’ Before he could express hurt she caught him by the hands and cried: ‘Let’s go to the reception and watch the old order dying on its feet.’ He was so enamored of her, so irritated by the condescension of the Lubonskis, lecturing him as if he were an ignorant peasant, that despite the dangers Krystyna Szprot represented, he dressed in his most flamboyant Polish costume, sent Buk to fetch the Serbian and his fiacre, and proudly led the beautiful young revolutionary into the Annagasse palace … twenty minutes late.

  Bowing grimly to the countess, whose face was livid, he nodded to the American girl and introduced Krystyna to half a dozen dignified persons who had not attended her concert. It was a chilly beginning, but Andrzej Lubonski had not advanced to level of minister without having mastered the art of diplomacy, so he accepted the affront and made both Wiktor Bukowski and his talented mistress welcome. The accounting would come later; he would see to that.

  After dinner some of the guests, learning that Mlle. Szprot was an accomplished pianist, asked if she would honor them with a few selections, and after a polite demurral, she allowed herself to be escorted to the piano, where she played a series of lively numbers by Offenbach and then a potpourri from Die Fledermaus, which, she explained ‘had been first presented over twenty years ago in Vienna.’

  The audience was charmed, but both Wiktor and the count realized that she was laughing at them, and the latter said coldly: ‘Perhaps Mlle. Szprot would favor us with something a little more classical?’ When the audience responded enthusiastically, she said in her halting German: ‘What I like best, the mazurkas of my Chopin.’ And with great skill she played a selection, moving from the easy ballroom measures to those intricate, broken-patterned ones which bespoke the very essence of the dance, as if the composer had been seeking music not for a man and woman but for the dance itself.

  When she reached a conclusion she said in French: ‘I should like to end with a composition which has come to mean much to me,’ and she started the étude ‘Winter Wind,’ with its eight grand notes and tornadolike arpeggios, and this, of course, led to the last étude, the one that captured Bukowski’s imagination, and when the mysterious thirteen chords approached, he leaped beside the piano and cried: ‘I have composed a poem to this music, a poem of my homeland.’ And with sturdy voice he chanted the thirteen syllables:

  ‘Home!

  The fields are green,

  The woods are clean,

  My soul serene …’

  Krystyna, startled, stopped her playing to look at him: ‘Wiktor! You’re a poet!’ and at that same moment the young nobleman dropped to his knees before her. ‘Krystyna!’ he cried in French. ‘Will you marry me?’

  Before she could say anything, three young men in overcoats broke into the room, rushed to the piano, grabbed her, and hurried her out a side door.

  ‘They’re after you!’ some of the guests heard the men say as they spirited her away, but they were unable to share this knowledge with the other guests, because now four policemen came into the salon demanding of the count to know where the revolutionary Krystyna Szprot was hiding.

  Lubonski, who had arranged this charade, pointed to the door through which the conspirators had fled, and out ran the four policemen, banging their way as they went. Wiktor Bukowski, still on his knees at the vacated piano, looked up at the guests as if to ascertain what kind of bomb had exploded in his face, and he saw the American girl in white dress and pale-pink jewels smiling at him. No, not smiling. She was laughing … quietly … with amusement rather than ridicule.

  This triple notoriety—duel, riding championship, public proposal to a beautiful revolutionary—made Wiktor Bukowski a personage in two centers. The secret police began looking into his precedents and found him to be exactly as represented: a rather confused Polish provincial who had oscillated among seven different women of seven sharply contrasting natures, but who had never harmed either them, himself or the empire. When his summary was read, it created the portrait of a rather impulsive fellow who bore watching lest he be duped by those more clever, but German investigators dispatched to check on his Bukowo behavior reported: ‘He is no more stupid than your average romantic Polish landowner who has never been away from his estates.’

  The second group of Viennese now interested in Wiktor were the marriageable young women, and their investigations, often more perceptive than those of the police, showed him to be a real nobleman, though in distinctly limited circumstances, a young man of gallant instincts, a dancer of more than average ability, a fellow with a good singing voice and a man who wore his clothes well. They learned also that he lived alone in a rather large apartment in Concordiaplatz, and that if there was any young man in Vienna who ought to have a wife, it was he.

  He therefore became a three-week social sensation, with liveried messengers stopping by Concordiaplatz and Landtmann’s with invitations, but the most intriguing came from the coachman at the American Embassy. Miss Marjorie Trilling, whose parents occupied one of the minor palaces among the nobility of the Schwarzenberg Quarter, wondered if Mr. Bukowski would care to join her family at a small celebration. He would, and when his fiacre drove up to the gracious palace, small but elegantly designed, he felt that a new life was beginning for him.

  Mr. and Mrs. Trilling were unusually gracious in receiving him, and the ambassador said: ‘We watched you at Die Schmelz. Superb.’
/>   ‘And you, sir,’ Wiktor said in English, ‘is it that you are also a horseman?’

  ‘Heavens, no! But Marjorie is.’

  When he shook hands with the clean-looking, strong-bodied young woman, four years younger than he, he noticed that she was just a mite taller, so he stood slightly on his toes. ‘Your excellency father says that you like to ride, perhaps …’

  ‘I’d love to. No city in the world has finer parks than Vienna.’

  ‘Could it be that you have seen our Prater, yes?’

  ‘No, but I should like to.’

  ‘Then I believe it could be arranged, on a day which I do not work …’

  ‘You have a regular job?’ she asked in French.

  He noticed that Miss Trilling bored right in with her questions.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ he replied in English. ‘All the Poles in Vienna have jobs, even a man as excellency as Count Lubonski.’

  ‘Do you know him? In Poland, I mean?’

  ‘Of course. His palace is next to mine.’ But as soon as he said this he observed how the words had affected Miss Trilling, so he took her arm and said quickly in French: ‘But you understand, his is a real palace. Well, not like this, all marble and gold. A real palace Polish style. Mine is …’ He paused in embarrassment. ‘No one in his sensible mind would call where I live a palace.’

  ‘Is it very old?’

  ‘My castle? Maybe the year 1000 after Christ.’ And again he tried to be honest: ‘But it was ruined in 1200 after Christ. Each year one more rock tumbles down from the walls. My family lives in a house near the castle.’

  ‘Is it old?’

  Wiktor had never pondered that question. His home certainly looked old and he supposed that it had been erected first in those painful years following the Tatar invasion, but he was sure it must have been destroyed when the Ukrainian Cossacks swept across the land and certainly when the Swedish Protestants came surging in from the north. He summarized the history of his home in words calculated to inflame the imagination of any young American: ‘It was built, I think, in 1214 or 1215 and burned by a dozen invaders. But always it was rebuilt on the same spot, looking over … Or is it overlooking?’

  ‘Overlooking. You mean overlooking the castle ruins?’

  ‘No. Overlooking the Vistula.’

  ‘And what is the Vistula?’ she asked, but before he could master his astonishment at her ignorance she cried: ‘Stupid me! Of course, I studied that with the man who tutored Father when he got his appointment to Vienna. The Vistula is Poland’s Danube.’ In some embarrassment she stopped. ‘We were instructed never to use the word Poland, but it is Poland, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ he said gravely, ‘and one day you must to see it.’

  ‘I would like to. And I would like to ride with you in the Prater, too.’

  This was not to be, because when Wiktor rode back to Concordiaplatz that night he found awaiting him the tall, thin young man who had shared his fiacre at the riding exhibition, and he brought a neatly written letter from Paris:

  Dearest Wiktor,

  Come at once to Paris where all who truly love Poland and yearn for its freedom congregate against the day when that freedom comes. We need you and I long for you.

  Together we could do so much.

  Your dearest,

  Krystyna

  ‘I’ve read the letter,’ the young man said. ‘You must go, really you must.’ And for two days Bukowski’s head was in a whirl, for he visualized himself in Paris with this exciting artist. He saw himself in bed with her in some small set of rooms, or carrying her music as she played in London and Munich and Rome. But mostly he saw himself in love with her, involved in the problems of real living and not drifting through the routine of a minor job in a minor ministry in an empire he really did not like.

  Then the chords of the last étude came crashing at him, bringing his own words back to haunt him:

  ‘Home!

  The fields are green,

  The woods are clean,

  My soul serene …’

  He wanted to be in Poland, to be a part of Poland, to see his land once more united as in the old days. He was, in brief, one of the thousands of Poles homesick for a way of life that had vanished, and responding to that seductive sequence of nostalgic chords, he seriously considered chucking everything and heading for Paris.

  He was halted in this folly by Count Lubonski, to whom the secret police had brought a copy of Krystyna Szprot’s letter, and he more than most could appreciate the turmoil this epistle must have ignited in the heart of his young countryman, for he had seen many exiles from the Russian part of Poland commit themselves to stupid actions when caught up in emotional crises. He therefore dispatched one of his carriages to Concordiaplatz, and when Bukowski stood before him in the large reception room he said simply: ‘Wiktor, the police have shown me a copy of Mlle. Szprot’s letter from Paris. Come, sit over here.’

  He talked for a long time with the hot-headed young man, sharing with him incidents in his own life, and then he asked one of the servants to fetch the countess, and when she saw the letter she folded it, tapped it against her teeth, and said: ‘It’s exactly the kind of letter Andrzej once received from a great actress in Berlin. All young men should receive such letters, Wiktor, but they should never act upon them.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  The count answered: ‘I’ve sent my man to pack your things. You’re not to return to your rooms. You’re catching the night train to Krakow, and I want you to spend the winter months at Bukowo, reminding yourself of what life is to be like. In March, come back to Vienna and find yourself a wife.’

  ‘But my man, Janko Buk … My horses?’

  ‘Buk will be on the train. We’re moving your horses to my stables. Wiktor, this is a major crisis in your life. Face it, conquer it, come back and do your job, and I believe that one day you could succeed me as a chief of ministry.’

  Countess Lubonska agreed with this: ‘Vienna will always want to keep one Pole in high position, and it might as well be you, Wiktor.’ She kissed him as he left the great room, a young man in total confusion.

  At the train station he suffered one bad moment, for as he sought Buk and the count’s man who held his tickets he found himself in a queue of animated travelers heading for a train labeled MUNICH-STRASBOURG-PARIS, and for one heady moment he felt like staying with these lively people all the way to Paris and to freedom. But Janko Buk caught sight of him and pulled him away to the proper queue VIENNA-BRNO-KRAKOW-WARSAW, where he obediently went aboard.

  The train consisted of four types of carriages: a luxurious first class, a clean and spacious second class, a wooden-bench third class, and three large, bare wagons for conveying the passengers’ goods. Wiktor proceeded directly to his first-class accommodations, where he consumed an immense meal, and then, despondent, went to sleep.

  Janko Buk found himself a preferred corner seat on one of the wooden benches, where he could rest either sideways against the window or back against the seat. From a cloth bundle he produced rolls, cheese and a half-bottle of wine, which he offered to the man sitting across from him. The man was a Czech going only as far as Brno, a congenial workman who produced a bottle of his own, and after the drinks were shared, with each man deeming his the better, they fell to talking.

  The Czech had been discharged from his position as doorman at one of the ministries because he championed the cause of a fiery young Czech revolutionary, Tómaš Masaryk, who was arguing for a free nation consisting of Bohemia, Moravia and, perhaps, even Slovakia. But he himself wanted no part of Slovakia because he had found Slovaks to be crooks, thieves and murderers.

  ‘What will you do in Brno?’ Buk asked in German.

  ‘What a man always does, survive somehow. Maybe go to Prague and work for Masaryk.’

  ‘Who would pay you?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  In response to the Czech’s careful questioning, Buk explained that his master, an admirable you
ng man, was being sent home for general misbehavior: ‘He challenged a stupid German to a duel.’

  ‘We’ll drink to that!’ the Czech said. ‘I like your young fellow immediately.’

  ‘Then at the big riding exhibition he defeated all the Austrian officers.’

  ‘We’ll drink to that too. I’d like to work for your master.’

  ‘Then he fell on his knees at a public gathering and proposed to a young artist from Paris and she turned out to be a Polish revolutionary, fighting for freedom from Russia.’

  ‘By God, let’s go see your master, for he’s my kind of man.’

  The men were stopped as they tried to pass through the second-class carriages, but the conductor, seeing their jovial inebriation and dismissing it as a normal frolic, spoke no harsh words: ‘Your place is back there, and if you don’t return quickly, your good seats will be taken.’ So they went back and resumed their conversation.

  ‘Are you married?’ Buk asked.

  ‘No, but I’m thinking seriously. A man ought to have children.’

  ‘My own thoughts,’ Buk said, and he confided that in his village of Bukowo there was this hard-working girl Jadwiga: ‘She’s two years or maybe three older than me, but she’s very pretty and she can work like a horse. If we could get ourselves a piece of land …’

  ‘Not possible in Bohemia. How about Galicia?’

  ‘Almost impossible, but I notice that every year some peasant grabs on to a piece, here or there, this way or that.’

  ‘What will happen to your fine young master?’

  ‘The count’s man told me—’

  ‘What count?’ The Czech allowed nothing to pass.

  ‘Count Lubonski.’

  ‘You mean the minister? He’s a very powerful man. He used to come to our offices and we all stepped when he appeared.’