The Graveyard (2 page)

The brilliant young writer—onetime petty thief, onetime truck driver across treacherous mountain roads, onetime manual laborer and noncompliant spy on fellow workers,
onetime journalist and editor, always a heavy drinker, always a mustang among saddle horses—becomes officially renegade. Attacked by the Polish press, and with permission to extend his visa refused, Hłasko makes the decision to remain abroad.

And so he wandered, so he spun out and sideways and back again. To Paris. To Switzerland. Giving interviews to the foreign press, cut off permanently from the world of Polish journalism and publishing. To West Germany. Working as a truck driver and manual laborer in Israel, where he wrote, in a two-year period, four extraordinary novels. To Spain and Denmark. Marrying, in 1962, Sonja Ziemann, who had played the leading role in the film version of
The Eighth Day of the Week
. Hanging with Polanski in Hollywood. Writing in 1969 his American novel,
The Rice Burners
.

Dying in Wiesbaden.

One of the novels that had been refused publication is the book you’re holding now. Other early work largely ignored the established, Communist order; characters were outsiders chiefly because of their dogged insistence in pursuing their individual lives behind the wall.
The Graveyard
drove headfirst into that wall. Thereafter, his characters would be not just outsiders but outcasts. With exile, Hłasko found his focus become at once tighter, in that he narrowed his observations to the fatally marginalized, the disavowed and dispossessed, and wider in that again and again he limned the question of how to live without faith, without belief. Agnieszka of
The Eighth Day of the Week
said it for them all: “The ideal is life without illusions.” Hłasko wrote of the people among whom he had earlier lived and worked, and of those whom he, while subsisting on menial labor, stubborn determination, and his wits, had encountered at the places he’d touched down.

So, too, does violence push itself from the wings to center stage, pulling behind it, as on a chain, all manner of inauthenticity, deception, and dissembling. In
Killing the Second Dog
, a character looks “like an insect emerging into light for the first time from under an overturned stone.” One character declares: “My future? That’s a word I won’t be needing anymore.” Another: “There are no values left. That’s why no tragedy is possible today.” And if no tragedy, then what? Characters impersonate the cartoon character Goofy, take on the traits of movie types, spin duplicitous selves from spit, spite, and thin air—filling the void with whatever comes to hand.

Often Hłasko himself seems to be much like his characters, barely clinging to the edge of the world, to the edge of what he knows. Making his way not from streetlight to streetlight in the darkness but from stopgap to stopgap.

The Graveyard
foreshadows much that was to come. The novel skirts the border of and plunges into the sinkholes of nihilism, a great zero burning at its heart: a circle around nothing. Yet it goes about its business subversively. Its surface bears up the simple tale of a man who loses all, a crooked retelling, really—Job and the Great Collective—while, just beneath, alligators glide and turn. Their eyes, their snouts are visible for moments, then are gone.

All begins simply enough. Out for a visit with a friend, Franciszek Kowalski becomes a bit drunk and, singing an old patriotic song on the way home, is stopped and questioned by police, grows indignant, and gets jailed overnight.

His military service, his years of faithful, productive work, his countless hours of party meetings, his constant aid and counsel to fellow workers—none of this matters now, in light of that one evening. The first unmasking leads to another and, once set in motion, cannot be undone. As Archibald MacLeish wrote in
his
retelling of the Job story: “Saw it start to, saw it had to. / Saw it.” Here, almost halfway through the novel, Kowalski goes for a walk along familiar streets.

People won’t go without an idea, one of Franciszek’s several confessors explains. Some new madman will always come along, grab hold of an icon, and run through the streets holding it aloft. The best revenge, he says, would be to create a new ideology. “To lead crowds to the sunny days of the future—that’s the biggest joke of all.”

A joke, or a lie? A question you well may ask yourself after reading
The Graveyard
and seeing what happens to poor, unsuspecting Franciszek Kowalski.

Friend and countryman Leopold Tyrmand said of Hłasko that he was “a man built of lies, some of them scurilous, some of them charming,” setting the small lies of himself and his books against what he saw as a sea of untruth around him. Marek Hłasko lived and wrote in the interstice between what we see in the world and what we make of it, in that narrow crawlspace between outside and inside, self and world, where we all take up temporary habitation, never settlers, forever squatters.

FRANCISZEK KOWALSKI, FORTY-EIGHT YEARS OF
age, slender, slightly balding, with a ruddy complexion, prominent cheekbones, and blue eyes, took a drink you won’t believe how rarely, only on really extraordinary occasions; he never drank more than he could hold, and never had to be told later by others what he had talked about and how he had behaved. He was one of the lucky few who upon waking in the morning never have to be ashamed of the night before. Late one night, however, on his way home from a party meeting, a meeting which had dragged on for many hours, and at which he had often had to take the floor on matters of importance to him and his fellow workers, he ran into a friend whom he had known when they were both partisan fighters. He had not seen him since 1945 when he himself had marched off to the front while his friend, then seriously wounded, had gone to the hospital and stayed there until the end of the war. This meeting so delighted them that they decided to celebrate it with a glass of vodka. They went to the nearest bar. The friend ordered a half pint; and when the bottom of the bottle showed, Franciszek called the waiter, and, so as not to give his friend the impression that he had gone completely rusty since the days of the underground, ordered another half pint. This put them in such high spirits, they talked so heartily, and faded memories took on such brilliant colors, that they asked
for a third half pint almost in one breath, and then the waiter himself, without asking them, served them a fourth. When they walked out, day was breaking, and the first bands of light were beginning to show in the gray sky. They said goodbye, affectionately shaking hands at great length, and then each went his way.

Franciszek walked briskly, keeping his eye on a line in the sidewalk, but he felt that some hitherto unknown forces were rocking him from side to side, and the line in the sidewalk kept vanishing from his field of vision. “I guess I’m a bit …” he murmured, “a bit … what the hell …” And suddenly, to his own surprise, he began to sing in a tenor:

Some men in overalls on their way to work laughed loudly and stared at him. This angered him so much that he too stopped.

“What the hell’s the matter?” he cried. “You think I’m drunk or something?”

The others went by, but Franciszek kept shouting: “You think I’m drunk? Like hell I’m drunk! It’s a lie. You’re drunk yourselves …”

Suddenly he saw two policemen before him. They were looking at him coolly and attentively. Franciszek wanted to say something, but he was still thinking of the workers who had offended him, and, instead of apologizing, cried once again, “You’re the ones that are drunk!”

The policemen took a step toward him, and Franciszek, suddenly sobered, saw their faces close up. They were young,
one a corporal, the other, with three stripes, a sergeant. The sergeant was very freckled and had a turned-up nose, and it seemed to Franciszek that his blue eyes held a cold threat as they looked at him from under the metal-edged visor of his cap.

“May we see your papers, Citizen?” asked the sergeant.

He extended his hand stiffly, and Franciszek stepped back.

“My papers?” he stammered out, taken by surprise. “What for?”

“Your papers, please,” the sergeant repeated, and his voice sounded a little louder than before.

Franciszek put his hand in the pocket where he kept his wallet, but on touching the cold leather he stopped. “But—” he began.

Then the other policeman, who until then had been standing motionless and silent, alertly watching Franciszek’s every move, thrust his face at him and cried: “Your papers. Do you understand? Or don’t you?”

Franciszek drew out his wallet. He opened it with trembling hands, and gave his papers to the sergeant. The latter examined them, then pressed his leather bag against his knee and began to write something in a greasy little notebook with a black oilcloth cover.

“May I ask what you are writing?” Franciszek said, trying to look over the sergeant’s arm.

The sergeant did not answer; he found it difficult to write in such an uncomfortable position, and Franciszek saw him knitting his brows and sticking out the tip of his tongue. After a moment he asked again: “Why are you taking down my name?”

“What’s the matter, don’t you like it?” the corporal asked sharply. “Maybe you don’t like the police, Citizen?”

“I haven’t said anything of the kind,” Franciszek replied,
just as sharply. He looked at the corporal’s chubby face, and felt himself begin to shake with anger. By now the effects of the liquor had entirely left him.

“You’re not saying it now,” the corporal said, and his childlike mouth twisted into a malicious smile. “Of course you’re not, now. But a moment ago you said the police were drunks.”

“Who? Me?”

“No. Mrs. Malinowska.”

“Come on, now. Don’t take that attitude,” Franciszek said indignantly.

“Now it’s our attitude you don’t like. But a minute ago you had the nerve to call us drunks.” He looked at Franciszek with superiority and said distinctly, “You’re insulting the uniform, Citizen.”

“It’s a lie!” Franciszek cried heatedly.

The corporal turned to the sergeant, who all this time had calmly been writing in his black notebook. “Did you hear that? This citizen says we’re liars. Take that down.”

Franciszek looked again at their young faces, and was overcome with rage. Raising both arms, and shaking them fiercely, he roared: “Take it down, you stinker, take it down! And take down that you can stick it all up your ass, and that I s— on everything …”

He was beside himself with fury. His own words came to him as through a fog; he could neither understand nor distinguish them. He shouted incoherently, desperately waving his arms. When his rage had passed, and he came to, he saw that the sergeant was putting his identification papers into his own leather bag.

“Let’s go,” the sergeant said dryly.

And, quite helpless, Kowalski went with them to the nearby police station.

THEY WALKED LESS THAN TEN MINUTES, AND
during that time Franciszek, whose strength had completely evaporated after his fit of rage, gradually recovered his composure. After a while he decided to put a good face on it, and even began to whistle a tune. He assumed an attitude of injured innocence. He held his head high, strode along with assurance, and once, when he stumbled and noticed the quick glance of one of the policemen, he smiled with ironic superiority. When they entered the long dark passageway leading to the police station, he thought: “There was no need to fly off the handle. It was all because I was too tired and drank too much. Vodka is really a gift of the devil. I’ll never get anywhere with these stupid kids. Maybe I really did make an ass of myself. I must talk to someone sensible.”

They crossed a small courtyard and entered a room where there was a man on duty. Their entrance took no more than a moment, but it made Franciszek feel ill at ease for the first time since the incident in the street. First the younger policeman opened the door, then stepped back, and only after Franciszek had entered did the two policemen follow, closing the door behind them. The door made a particularly unpleasant squeak. “A fine state of affairs,” Franciszek thought. “The one place where things should run smoothly; they might have oiled it. If only I could talk to someone sensible now.”