Poland

  Word flashed through the yard, enclosed by a high chain-link fence, that the farmer who’d been to see the Pope was here, and several refugees produced Austrian newspapers showing Buk on the front page. Now he had an audience of hundreds, most of whom wanted to know how Jan Pawel looked and how he was recovering from his bullet wounds. Several ardent patriots wished to explore the rumors which had been floating through Poland when they left: that the Pope had been shot by Italians who resented his occupancy of the Vatican, or by Russian Communists, or by a Bulgarian infiltrator under the pay of the Orthodox bishops, or by a demented nun, or particularly by agents of the Polish government who had gone to Turkey to hire the gunman for their plot.

  Buk, who had heard none of these theories, gave it as his opinion that the gunman had pretty clearly been acting on his own, and several men jeered: ‘That’s what they said about President Kennedy,’ but when they volunteered who the conspirators in that case had been, their guesses were as wild and as fascinating as before. One man insisted that Kennedy, too, had been shot by a demented nun.

  But when the chatter and the nonsense ended, there remained the dreadful fact that these barracks which had once housed Polish recruits taken under duress were now filled with some of Poland’s finest, who had placed themselves within the confines voluntarily, and Buk felt he had to address this tragedy: ‘Men like me, all over Poland, we’re trying to correct things.’

  ‘We wish you luck.’

  ‘But don’t you have any desire to help?’

  One man answered for all: ‘I’ve been to Rumania. I’ve been to Czechoslovakia. And, God forbid, I’ve been to East Germany. And in that entire system there is no hope.’

  ‘Poland is not like those countries,’ Buk insisted.

  ‘In some respects, it’s worse.’

  But the men were hungry for news about their homeland, and after the negatives had been voiced, rather bitterly Buk thought, they wanted to hear about the strikes and the reaction of the two governments, Poland and Russia. They listened to every word Buk said, and several men complimented him: ‘You have courage. But what do you expect to accomplish?’

  And Buk retreated to a saying popular in his village: ‘ “A Pole is a man born with a sword in his right hand, a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to rebuild.” After every war we rebuild. After every disaster we regroup. I do wish you would return home and help us regroup.’

  ‘There is no hope,’ the refugees said, and Janko Buk left the barracks sick in spirit.

  That night the Austrian television people arranged an informal dinner at a popular Viennese restaurant called the Balkan Grill, where a sturdy country meal was provided, featuring great platters of mixed meats and hefty vegetables. Steins of beer were served, and when Buk leaned back to survey the littered table, he felt the same sickness, for this was another discrepancy he could not explain: Vienna gorged with food, nearby Warsaw facing terrible shortages.

  When talks resumed, television crews from all over the world, including Moscow, descended on Bukowo, so many that some had to be housed in Castle Gorka up the river, some down at Baranow Castle, and all wanted to interview Jan Buk, but they found a much more sober farmer, and one Paris reporter wrote: ‘In the four-week break he gave himself a university education.’ He did not posture, nor did he fulminate; he showed that he was deadly serious in his endeavors to find a solution to the problem of food.

  The second session began with a tour of the Bukowski palace for the reporters, and selected television cameramen were assigned as a pool to take pictures for all the networks. A spokeswoman from the cultural branch of the Warsaw government explained what was being shown, and she started with the great hall, where the visitors were delighted by the two huge facing canvases Jan Sobieski on the Route to Vienna and The Defense of Czestochowa. They formed a stunning pair.

  ‘But I read somewhere they had been destroyed,’ a Japanese newsman said.

  ‘They were,’ the spokeswoman said, ‘and your question gives me an opportunity to pay tribute to the man who resuscitated them.’ To everyone’s surprise she pointed at Szymon Bukowski, who stood with his hands clasped at his waist.

  ‘After the German occupation, in the years from 1950 through 1970, Pan Bukowski, now a minister of government, was responsible for the rebuilding of Poland’s destroyed treasures. It was he who rebuilt Castle Gorka, where some of you are staying. You’ve seen photographs of how the Nazis left it. He then rebuilt beautiful Baranow to the north, which many of you know. He rebuilt parts of Lublin and of Stalowa Wola. But his heart, I do believe, was in the rebuilding of the palace we are now in.’

  She pointed to the Matejko painting of Jan Sobieski and said: ‘This painting has always been a national treasure. We revered it. But in the last hours of the war German soldiers stationed here took their machine guns and riddled every one of those men. We’ve put a photograph over there of how the painting looked when Pan Bukowski got to it. Not very pretty.’

  She allowed time for those who wished to study the ghastly sight of the great painting as it had appeared in 1944. Then she brought the reporters back to the painting itself: ‘Every figure you see there was first patiently rewoven by women from this village. By that I mean, we stretched the canvas out on an immense table and we rewove every missing fiber. I did the head of Brat Piotr, a wild and famous priest who accompanied Sobieski. It took me five weeks, but when I was finished we had a canvas on which some very skilled artists could re-create the face of Brat Piotr as Matejko had painted it a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Who did the head of Sobieski?’

  ‘Some woman like me.’

  ‘I mean, who repainted it?’

  ‘Some artist like the man who did Brat Piotr.’

  She invited those who considered themselves expert in art to study the two paintings, then she led everyone to the rooms where copies of the Correggio, the Rembrandt and especially the Holbein were displayed as they had been in the time of Marjorie Bukowska, and she made this point: ‘The palace is very old, perhaps back to 1450, but it had to be rebuilt so many times that we scarcely know what we have at any given intersection of the walls. We do know that it took its present form in 1896 when young Wiktor Bukowski, serving in Vienna, married the extremely wealthy daughter of the American ambassador. Oscar Mandeville Trilling, his name was for you American reporters. From Chicago. Grain and real estate and railroads, I believe.’

  She answered further questions about the Trillings, then said: ‘We are grateful to Madame Trilling Bukowska for what she did in reconstructing such a fine palace, but many of us treasure most what she did in the long gallery downstairs.’ She led the group down to the portrait gallery, where the thirty-one worthies of Polish history lived again. She told briefly of that last day when the Nazi troops ran wild, and she showed where the bloodstains of the murders had been allowed to remain on the old carpet. Then she led the reporters past the noble heads, the great paunches held in by golden sashes, the fierce mustaches, and gave brief introductions to these glorious wild men of Polish history: ‘Radziwill, one of the founders of the Lithuanian family—one married the sister of your Jackie Kennedy. Mniszech, who helped decide who should be Czar of Russia. This is Leszczynski, twice elected our king, twice rejected. He became father-in-law to one of the kings of France.’

  ‘Louis XV,’ a French reporter volunteered.

  ‘And so it goes,’ she said. ‘Remember that every portrait here was bullet-ridden that day. But Pan Bukowski would not allow that desecration to remain. He ordered them all restored, and I wove the fabric for this fine fellow. I can never remember his name.’

  Some reporters felt afterward that this tour, instructive though it might be, had been a ploy on the part of the government to inflate Bukowski as their negotiator, but even these doubters had to concede that his work of restoration along the Vistula was triumphant. ‘These are three of the most congenial monuments in Europe,’ the French critic wrote. ‘Not grandiose. Not stupefyin
g. But extremely real. That they should have been rescued from the debris of war will be a permanent tribute to Polish doggedness. Architect Bukowski made not a single mistake in his buildings. Now we shall see what he can do with his recalcitrant farmers.’

  This series of meetings, much enlarged in attendance, was held in the great hall, with Jan Sobieski looking down in stern supervision, and they were entirely different from those four weeks earlier. Jan Buk was no longer an embattled farmer; he was now a statesman, so acknowledged by other statesmen around the world. He carried weight where before he had carried only conviction.

  But Szymon Bukowski was not the same man, either. Stiffened by his series of hammer-blow consultations with leaders of the Polish government, who themselves had sought secret instructions from Russian envoys who had slipped into the country, he was in no mood to make irrelevant concessions, and in the opening minutes he announced his first decision: ‘We recessed our discussions four weeks ago because Pan Buk asked that a high official of the Catholic church be brought into our meetings. This request is denied. Our two teams are competent to make all decisions.’

  To the surprise of the delegates, Janko Buk made no objection, and for a good reason: Bukowski had not accompanied the reporters down to the gallery; he spent that time seeking out Buk and assuring him that together they two would meet with the Bishop of Gorka that night, after the plenary session ended. When Buk asked where, Bukowski confided: ‘Secretly. At the castle.’

  With that prickly question settled, the morning session continued, with Bukowski standing forth as the man in command. He made two striking statements: ‘The people of Poland and the world must know that this country stands solidly and irrevocably with our great Soviet partner in our determination to bring social justice into the family of nations. We are united now and forever in that resolve, and anyone or anything that imperils that union is an enemy of the Polish people. I’m not saying that our farmers who are making certain demands are false to the cause. Not at all. They’re discussing honest problems in an honest way. But those enemies of the state who try to inflate these discussions into a form of revolution, or who endeavor to use them as a wedge between Poland and Russia, are enemies of the state and will be so treated.’

  His second major statement caught the attention of all the delegates, and of the world press, when they heard a summary of what he had said: ‘We’ve just heard Pan Buk speak of his visit to Detroit, where he met many Poles who emigrated there in the bad days before we had social justice in Poland. And he spoke of his fellow countrymen who had automobiles, sometimes even two automobiles to a family. Well, let me tell you two things about such evidence. First, any family that has two automobiles anywhere in the world does so at the expense of the workingman. They are prospering on the blood of the workingman.’

  ‘But these were workingmen,’ Buk interrupted.

  Bukowski took no notice. ‘Second, every impartial observer knows that America is heading for a major depression. The devices they’re trying won’t work. If Pan Buk returns to Detroit this time next year, he’ll find his Poles selling both their cars in order to eat. America has solutions to nothing. Only the socialist republics of the world who believe in equality and freedom and peace have the solutions, and we must not be blinded in these days of relative discomfort to that basic fact.’

  A tough lion of a man with gray mane, this graduate of the cruelest academies the world had produced in recent years—exile in the Forest of Szczek, torture in Under the Clock, starvation and genocide in Majdanek, plus the agony of surveying a destroyed land before starting to rebuild it—was not disposed to surrender the social gains he believed his country had made since it passed under Russian control. He was especially forceful when he called upon his countrymen to remember how their ancestors had lived under the dictatorship of the magnates and the despotism of Prussia, Austria and czarist Russia: ‘Look back to how we lived in villages like this a hundred years ago. The dirt floors. Meat twice a year at Christmas and Easter. Bowing when the gentry forced us into the gutters as they passed. Polish forbidden to be spoken. No newspapers. Our colleges closed down. And everywhere the secret police sending our fathers and grandfathers off to permanent exile. That’s the Poland my mother fought against. And I shall fight till I die to prevent its return.’

  At the noon break the television people wanted to cluster around Buk, hoping to stage a photograph of him standing beside a clever poster which some local cartoonist had created; it showed a clearly recognizable Janko Buk shaking hands with President Reagan, and the words in English: JANKO THE YANKO. It was a tricky little play on words, because Buk’s first name was pronounced Yanko, of course, and since Polish has no word beginning with a y, the Yanko had to be pronounced in the American fashion, which made it the same as the other. Children in the waiting group outside the palace were crying ‘Yanko the Yanko’ and sometimes ‘Djanko the Djanko.’ In either case, they were having fun and the television crews wanted to catch the frolicking.

  But Bukowski had decided that from here on he would dominate the picture sessions, and he brought two sober companions before the cameras to help him summarize the morning’s talk: ‘We confirmed our loyalty to the concept of social democracy and our alliance with the Soviet Union. About that there must be no confusion.’

  The afternoon session took up in sober detail the implied problems and difficulties of trying to organize and run an agricultural union, and again Bukowski steamrollered the opposition, which insisted that it could be done. When reporters heard of his hard line they began to write that whereas the earlier session had been Buk versus Bukowski, this one was surely Bukowski versus Buk, with the behind-the-scenes power of the Russian bear dominating the discussion. Bukowski, when asked about this, said merely that tomorrow the reporters would witness the real cohesion of the Polish people. When they asked what he meant by this, he said merely: ‘You’ll see.’

  Since Buk still refused to lodge in the palace with the other delegates, preferring the familiarity of his own cottage, it was not difficult for him to slip away after dusk, but he had to wait in the car that would carry him and Bukowski to their meeting with the bishop. After a while the latter made his escape and they sped with dimmed lights to the town of Gorka, where the bishop was waiting.

  They met not in the castle, as Bukowski had first indicated, for that was filled with reporters, and not in the bishop’s palace, for that would have compromised the Communist Bukowski, but in a bare committee room provided in secrecy by the mayor.

  The Bishop of Gorka was, as Jan Pawel Drugi had said in the Vatican, a saintly man. Sixty-three years old and with a face that looked as if it had been carved of wood and allowed to weather as the central figure in some treasured roadside shrine, he wore his white hair combed forward in the Julius Caesar style, which was appropriate, for his tall, lean figure resembled that of the aging Caesar when the daggers came at him.

  He was a wise man, one who had fought enemies all his life, inventing ways to circumvent their ugly intentions and still preserve his own more humane and generous ones. As he had told a group of touring Scandinavian reporters the previous year: ‘When you had to survive under the Nazis as a young man, and under the Communists as an old one, and when you’ve spent your ecclesiastical life being tutored by the revered Cardinal Wyszynski, who was in jail a good deal of the time, and Cardinal Wojtyla, who knew how to resist and smile, you learn something … or you perish.’

  His reputation for saintliness stemmed from his unwavering support of his people, no matter what difficulties they fell into. He was indeed the ideal village priest, and his elevation to bishop had been a mistake which many in and out of the church now acknowledged; that he should be selected for promotion to cardinal, as Jan Buk had suggested to the Pope, was not even under consideration, for the lower his status in the hierarchy, the greater his contribution to the spiritual life of his country.

  He was regarded by the multitude of Poles with reverence because of his s
implicity, by the Polish Communists with apprehension because of his opposition to many of their policies, and by the Russians, who had to deal with these terribly difficult men Wyszynski and Wojtyla, as a source of comparable danger. To abuse this tall, almost ghostly figure would have created exactly the kind of opposition they sought to avoid.

  The bishop, eager to meet the two men from his district who were playing such important roles in the present crisis, hurried forward to greet them as if he were being honored and not they: ‘Two men from the Vistula, causing all this commotion!’ Buk genuflected and brought the bishop’s left hand to his lips; Bukowski, to whom the gesture was distasteful, bowed and then extended his own hand to shake the bishop’s.

  ‘You were kind to arrange this meeting,’ Buk said. ‘As he will tell you,’ he said, smiling at Bukowski, ‘it almost broke up the sessions when I suggested it.’

  ‘I would not have wanted that,’ the bishop said as he led the men to their chairs. ‘In these dolorous times it’s important that we all keep talking.’ He smiled, then paused as the mayor’s assistant brought in tea, but no doilies, currant juice or small cakes. ‘How are the meetings going?’ he asked when they were alone.

  Bukowski replied: ‘Not at all well. Our differences are quite fundamental.’

  ‘They always are, if the meeting is worth anything. What are they this time?’

  ‘They cut to the heart of Poland’s future.’

  ‘Thank God that somebody’s worrying about the future of this land.’

  ‘But in the wrong way,’ Bukowski said.

  ‘Explain, please.’

  ‘My friend Buk here, and his Solidarity men at Gdansk, want to take steps that would alter the basic structure of our country.’

  ‘Well, if one looks at the bread lines—the lines for everything—isn’t some alteration advisable? Isn’t it even …’ The bishop paused a perceptible moment as if loath to use the harsh word he could not evade. ‘Hasn’t it become inevitable?’