Testaments. Danuta Mostwin
history parallels that of Mostwin’s extended family: the German occupation of Warsaw and Lublin, the underground activities of practically every relative and friend, the Jewish ghetto in Lublin, heroes, martyrs, traitors. What distinguishes the novel from most other fictionalized accounts of the period in Polish literature is its bracing disregard for political and artistic trends—the latter often serving as strategies to circumvent the former. One may say that here Mostwin rolled up her sleeves and stepped into a locked-up house to recover its unclaimed contents. And this time she went after truth that had been kept secret not because of personal denials and self-deceptions but because of a grand denial by a punitive political system. The denial—which at first had been total, but then gradually weakened and allowed trickles of veracity—concerned all Polish World War II military efforts other than those approved by the Kremlin; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to collaborate in the destruction of Poland; the Soviet policy of standing idly by during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; the persecution of military personnel and of vast categories of the civilian population of the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and under the communist regime in “liberated” Poland. There were also some secrets and distortions of truth on the Western side of the postwar political landscape which, in most general terms, related to the betrayal of Poland by the Allies. Where choice was possible, however, between the bitter and the poisoned cup, Polish freedom fighters opted for emigration to Western Europe, Israel, and the Americas. The escape of the three main protagonists in Tajemnica is the subject of the short final volume of Mostwin’s family saga, Nie ma domu (There Is No Home), published in Poland in 1996.
Home and house, dwellings that need to be fixed or that are beyond repair, austere rented rooms, flower-filled villas, and dreary hospital rooms—these are Mostwin’s signature topoi, and they owe their function and appearance both to the individual traits of their inhabitants and to verdicts of history. The home-centeredness of Mostwin’s imagination may be attributed to her being a woman writer, perhaps in the same way that her interest in fractured identities is a mark of an émigré writer. When one reviewer praised the “masculine maturity” of her later novels, Mostwin promptly identified his remark as symptomatic of male chauvinism, Polish style. It is true that her female characters are seldom weak or meek and that they may be more adaptable to traumatic reversals of fortune than their male companions. Yet men and women in Mostwin’s fiction are equally capable of great courage and integrity in the face of mortal threat and they are equally, if differently, susceptible to the pain of permanent displacement.
One area in which Mostwin’s gender has mattered is that of the reception of her work in Poland. When her novels The Shadow of Father Piotr and The Emerald Specter were published in Poland in 1985 and 1988—both in very small editions—her name was familiar to only a handful of well-informed readers, and, partly because the entire country was deeply preoccupied with the current political situation (the crushing of the Solidarity movement), the books received scant notice. But male émigré writers, whose works were then beginning to be published or circulated in smuggled copies—some of long-established fame, like Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz, others younger and less known—fared much better, preceded by an esteem that traditionally glorified the male exile artist, the émigré poet who, in an old Polish expression, had fought with the pen for the fatherland’s freedom. For forty (yes!) years, Danuta Mostwin had done just that at her home-away-from-home in Baltimore. But in addition to patriotic lore, her typewriter also produced works of broader significance—studies in the contemporary condition of uprootment that are universal and do not require explanatory notes about Polish history. As she examined the fates of the protagonists of her stories, as she transformed living men, women, and children into fictional characters, she continued to discover that external forces in human experience—exile, war, poverty, participation in collective catastrophes or victories—account for only some answers about the trajectory of a life and may reveal as often as conceal the essence of individual existence. In getting close to the point of fusion of the historical and the personal elements of identity, Mostwin attained her very own artistic “third value.”
Danuta Mostwin’s collected works are at last coming out in Poland, issued by Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski in Toruń. That this event coincides with the publication of the present book, the first rendering of her fiction into English, signifies a belated turning point in this outstanding writer’s voyage between the old and the new worlds and in time zones that she continues to expand.
Joanna Rostropowicz Clark
Notes
1. Ian Buruma, “The Romance of Exile: Real Wounds, Unreal Wounds,” New Republic, February 12, 2001, 33.
2. Under German occupation, Poles were not allowed to attend secondary or college-level schools.
3. An underground organization that assisted Polish Jews.
4. Danuta Mostwin, “Uprootment and Anxiety,” International Journal of Mental Health 5, no. 2 (1976): 113.
5. Danuta Mostwin, “Podróż w dwóch czasach: O emigracji i literaturze emigracyjnej” [A Voyage in Two Time Zones: On Emigration and Émigré Literature] in Słyszę jak śpiewa Ameryka [I Hear America Singing] (London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1998), 271.
The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski
NOW THAT Błażej is no longer here, his last will can be opened. But which one? For there are two of them. Which one is more important? Which one will be upheld in court—for that’s the way things are heading, no doubt about that. Two wills. Two pages in an atlas. Two halves of the globe. And between them, Błażej Twardowski. That’s what it has come to, finally, that’s how important he got to be. Although out of this life himself, he still straddles the line dividing two worlds.
A sunken face in the sheltering shadow of an oxygen tent, cheeks made gaunt by the removal of his dentures: that’s Błażej. And that’s his hand stretched out from under the plastic curtain, groping haltingly on top of the hospital blanket.
Błażej cackles.
“Vooltures, vooltures . . . scum . . . they’re no good . . . all of them just waiting, just waiting, just waiting . . . vooltures . . . .”
Błażej implores.
“Promise me . . . swear you’ll do it . . . my last will . . . .”
Błażej beseeches with his outstretched hand, with the waning whisper of his once mighty voice.
“My last will . . . .”
. . .
Perhaps one should take a good look at Błażej himself, for, although he became a personage in his own right, a man to reckon with, because of these two wills, he was there all along for nearly eighty years. Błażej belonged to Broad Street. Is there anyone who does not know Broad Street? It runs from the bay all the way to the hospital and ends beyond. Although it is the part closer to the bay, uncared for and pockmarked in spots, that was truly Błażej’s street, one cannot avoid looking at the hospital, a huge labyrinthine snail with a green dome and additions stuck on here and there.
When Błażej walked along Broad Street, it seemed as though he had come into the world right there and would also meet his end there. Many people thought so. The organist, for one. He says: “That one from Broad Street. You know who I mean . . . Twardowski.” He doesn’t even remember Błażej’s name nor does he think that anything in Błażej’s life could ever have happened away from Broad Street. And yet he had collected a commission and made some money because of the old man. The same with the lawyer. To him, Błażej was just another case. Only Wieniawski knew perhaps a little more about Błażej and, having won the old man’s trust, he had acquired a burden he had to carry until the very end.
There were two other things in Błażej’s life besides Broad Street: his native village and the steel mill. His village was in the old country—an ordinary, poverty-stricken village amid sprawling flat fields, with a church and a graveyard. The village didn’t even have any orchards, just an apple tree or a pear tree in back of some of the houses. Tillable land was what counted. Everyone there was greedy for land.