Olanda

Scattered Bones Beneath the Juniper Tree by Charles S. Kraszewski The Metaphysical Realism of Rafał Wojasiński At one point in his story, Rafał Wojasiński’s surprisingly ruminative gravedigger, Stanisław Hiacynt, describes himself thus: ‘Who am I? I am a witness to the progressive extinction of our species. And after me there will be other witnesses.’ Considering the general tenor of the loosely-linked short stories that make up Olanda, it is fair to wonder whether this phrase might not apply to the author himself, or at the very least, be used as a motto for the entire book. Marcin Kube has noted the organic manner in which some of the situations and experiences of Wojasiński’s heroes parallel the author’s own background, growing up in a small village near the north-central Polish city of Włocławek.1 While the narratives that play out in Olanda are far from autobiographical, Wojasiński has stated (echoing one of his narrators, by the way), that ‘Olanda is an expression of my approach to life. Am I supposed to die without writing what I think? At least there’s that.’2 For what is the author’s purpose in bringing us these seemingly banal stories of unimportant people? Is it not the desire to bear witness to even the smallest existence, which, both in the large scale of the cosmos, and the particular, frequently so cruel, history of Poland, is so painfully ephemeral? As the one and only narrator of the title-cycle Olanda puts it: I had no idea what all the thoughts, both written down and unrecorded, of all the people since the beginning of man’s creation might be. Today I know that it is they that created the world, but I also know that they are not worth a jot more than the tiniest, most insignificant life. The world is worth only as much as the smallest pulse of life in the grass or beneath the soil. All of the wisdom, theology, science, poetry and music of the world cannot be more significant than that living and dead being, unnoticed among other beings. This attitude is what leads Wojasiński’s narrators to a careful consideration of the world and people that surround them, such as Baśka, the developmentally challenged girl who comes into the Chinese bar day after day: In the Chinese bar near our shop I saw this girl. She’s been coming there maybe every other day for the last two or three years. She’s getting fatter and fatter, but she’s still young. She’s ill — developmentally retarded. She goes about in tight sweats collecting fag-ends. She even smiles. She doesn’t pronounce her words very clearly. Once she sat down on a wet bench in the garden that’s in front of the bar. Then she got up and walked around the benches, came into the bar and asked for a cola, saying that Marek would pay for it. Her rear-end was all wet. This almost obsessive need to record, to understand, the most seemingly insignificant phenomenon of (human) life is behind the ‘archaeological’ passions of Wojasiński’s protagonists. For Stanisław Hiacynt, his work in the graveyard leads to discoveries that mirror those of Shakespeare’s clowns, spading up the skull of Yorick, for Hamlet to muse upon: Sometimes when I’m getting a grave ready I come across a skull. A skull which once housed the memory of a beloved person’s name, the amount stashed away in a savings account, or hatred. Dreams of trips to be taken, dreams of the curls of a young neighbour girl, or the torso of a film star. Skulls are empty things when I dig them up. There’s nothing in them. There was, but it’s evaporated. Even more pointed in this regard are the comments of the narrator of Olanda: who once, literally, delved beneath the surface himself: I worked at the time in a brigade that cleaned out sumps. The kind that couldn’t be cleaned with vacuum hoses. My friends — boys and girls — went out on dates, rolled around naked on the sand of the beach between the trees, and I was lowered down into sumps by a rope, just like a miner. I shovelled out human excrement, petrified by the passage of time. I’d fill buckets of it with a sand shovel, buckets that my boss would winch up to the surface and toss onto a flatbed pulled by a tractor. I don’t know why I liked this job more than I did girls, but that’s me. After four hours on the bottom of a sump, my body was strong, but it ceased being a body. I was entirely transformed into a spirit by human excrement — some of which was forty years old. After a month on the job I became able to tell its age. And I came to understand its striations, which split apart whole cosmic years — maybe even ages. In the same way that homo sapiens split apart from the vitalised matter of carbon, protein, water, and all those elements. A more poignant argument for the dignity of the most elemental labourer has perhaps never been made. Now, what these musings will lead to is something that we will discuss in just a bit. What is most important here is the unswerving focus of the author, who fixes our attention upon the most common and (on the face of things) unremarkable members of our kind, and holds it there. As Dariusz Jaworski insightfully puts it, ‘Wojasiński […] brings us to the world of the provinces, which, so often, we contact only through the window of a train, or during walks beyond the city centre. These are dynamic pictures of today’s Poland, ambiguous, fascinating.’3 This is the first thing that strikes one upon reading Wojasiński: his fascination with the simple, the overlooked. Echoing Jaworski, Kube says: We find in [these works] a gallery of figures which, on the face of it, are not very attractive — drunks, village idiots, shopkeepers and retirees. The doubting and the humble, who fill their time alternately with garrulity and attention to the words of others. They are immersed in sadness, but not in despair. Are we wrong to pass by, without a thought, the various villages like Słomniki, Krze and Jerzmanowice as we speed on our way from Częstochowa to Kraków? Of course not. The human mind is simply incapable of concentrating, fully and with respect, on every human story. There are at least 38,000,000 such stories in Poland alone. The great service of Wojasiński’s Olanda is to grab us by the lapels and fix our eyes upon some of those that we would ordinarily pass by, forcing us to at least pose the question: How is the story of Romek, for example, from Old Man Kalina, any less worthy of our notice than that of a DeGaulle? Is it, in the eyes of God? There is a humility to the poetics and method of Olanda that is very engaging. If it seems like there is a subtly religious basis to these stories — what Olga Kowalska4 calls Wojasiński’s ‘metaphysical realism’ — this is to be found in the respectful, patient and sympathetic manner in which the writer allows his protagonists to express themselves. As Wojasiński revealed to Kube: From early childhood on, I liked to listen to people. It was easy to get the older neighbours in the village talking. They’d come to me and tell me things, and I liked their stories […] What’s interesting is that when they began to exaggerate, their stories seemed all the more attractive and believable. Maybe that’s how myths are born, and the many faiths which are rooted in the written word. Without the word, I reckon, people would never be able to deal with common daily life. We obsess over the lives and foibles of the well-known because they are well known. Even the infamous villains of humankind are constant ‘heroes’ of newsprint and the two (three?) screens that confront us daily. (A simple search of Netflix for movies dealing with Adolf Hitler will provide ample proof of that). But in his voracious attention to the voiceless masses, Wojasiński is much more than a Balzacian mirror set on a muddy village crossroads. He is a champion of tolerance, for ‘it is this very attitude, this determination not to judge another man, or at least not to judge him for the purpose of feeling better about himself, that unites Wojasiński to the patron of the prize, with which he was awarded.’5 THE QUOTIDIAN METAPHYSICAL Now, when Hiacynt asks ‘What was God thinking, when they were gassing children in the death camps? What?’ this is less of an accusation of the Almighty, than an honest question. It’s not necessarily ‘why did God allow this to happen?’ as it is, ‘what must He have thought about the way man perverts, and continues to pervert, His creation, which was good and intended to remain so?’ In his work, Rafał Wojasiński rarely, if ever, offers an answer to such questions. But, like Tadeusz Różewicz in the insightful poem “Unde malum?” he knows right where to place the blame for evil: at man’s feet, and only at man’s feet. This is the basis of his humanism, his interest in, and his affection for, all those marginalised ones who are far from being true believers: As long as they doubt, despite all odds they have an opportunity to develop, and, sometimes, accurately evaluate reality. And through this, maybe they can succeed, sometimes, in not judging another person, because when one begins radically judging another, the next step might well be the application of violence against him. And there’s a huge mistake for you indeed! Sometimes, in history, it’s led to mistakes on a nearly continental scale. But man must get lost endlessly, for only the lost can find themselves. In the citation from the Kube interview just quoted, the allusion to the horrors perpetrated by the Germans and Russians in Poland during the Second World War is unmistakeable. We will have time to speak of this later. Right now, it’s important to stress the difference between ‘getting lost’ and ‘making a [bad] mistake.’ In Wojasiński’s idiom, the first is a fundamental characteristic of humanity — to err is indeed human — and a salubrious one at that. For as long as one recognises the fact of one’s errant nature, of one’s imperfect and subjective powers of comprehension, one stands a good chance of avoiding the other: bad mistakes, which are the result of freely willed actions and often lead to the oppression of others. The two types of people who inhabit the literary works of Rafał Wojasiński are set before us in the radio play Old Man Kalina. The Politician is a true believer. As well meaning as he may be, he is still one of the tribe that ‘makes wars’ through their too trusting confidence in their assessment of things. Such a man of action can’t help but wonder at the unambitious lives led by the residents of the small town, amongst whom he has been thrust by an automobile breakdown. The Shopkeeper replies: shopkeeper To Politician. It’s nice here. Pleasant among us, cosy. And we all like one another. romek We can take care of you, sir. We’ll take you in. I know what it’s like, a fellow knocking about the world like a stray dog. Believing maybe in this thing, or that person… And that’s torture. But we, we all fit together here… shopkeeper Romek, you might say, is the head; I’m the other half, and Alinka is our little spark. Like an overgrown child. And we’re happy here. Perhaps it’s not all about creating something, striving — as in the case of Goethe’s basically tragic hero Faust — but about loving, being content, and doing no harm, as Dante suggests at the end of his journey. Faustus ‘means well’; his story is that of a man with a clear goal in mind — such as wresting more living space (Lebensraum!) from the sea in order to construct an ideal habitation for mankind. But in doing so, he willfully, even angrily, sacrifices the old loving couple Baucis and Philemon, who had been standing in the way of his ‘progress.’ As Wojasiński once put it, ‘the more perfect the goal and the more precise the truth, the greater the Fascism.’6 The feeble-minded Alinka wouldn’t have lasted long in Hitler’s Europe. But in Romek’s she is as welcome as anyone: ‘It’s just splendid when people come together nicely. You could even be stupid. Untalented. You can even be a zero. But when people fit together nicely, even a zero can feel like he’s in Heaven.’