Stefan Czarniecki's Memoir [6]by Witold Gombrowicz (translated, from the Polish, by Christopher Makosa)
1. I was born and raised in a home full of worthiness . With tender emotion I let my thoughts run toward you - 0 my childhood! I can see my father, a fine-looking man, of haughty bearing, with a face on which everything - his gaze, features, and grizzled hair - conspired to create the image of a perfect, noble race. I can also see you, O Mother, in irreproachable black, with only a pair of ancient boutons in your ears. I can also see myself - a small, serious, thoughtful lad - and I feel like crying because of my dashed hopes. - The only, perhaps, blemish on our family life was that father hated mother. Not hated - I misspoke myself: rather, he detested her, and why - I never could answer, and this is exactly where the mystery begins whose vapors brought me, in my mature years, to moral disaster. For what am I today? A pipsqueak or, better still - a moral bankrupt. What do I do, for instance? Kissing a lady's hand, I slobber it heavily, then quickly take out a handkerchief: "Oh, I beg pardon," I say - and wipe with the handkerchief. I noticed, early on, that father avoided mother's touch like the plague. Even more - he avoided her gaze and, as often as not, while talking, he would look away or inspect his fingernails. There was nothing sadder in its kind than these downcast eyes of my father. Once in a while, though, he would glance askance at her with an expression of immeasurable disgust. This was beyond my comprehension, for I did not feel any aversion to mother; indeed, although she grew excessively fat and overflowed on all sides, I liked to snuggle up and rest my little head upon her lap. - Still, how does one, under these circumstances, account for the fact of my existence, how did I come into the world? I suppose that I was begotten - as it were - through coercion, with clenched teeth, in defiance of natural reflexes; in a word, I suppose that my father, for some time, in the name of marital duty, grappled heroically with disgust (for he placed the honor of his manhood above all else), and that I, a little child, was the fruit of that heroism. After this superhuman and - in all probability - solitary exertion, his repugnance exploded with elemental force. Once I overheard him shouting at mother, cracking the joints of his fingers: "You're getting bald! Soon you'll be bald as a cannonball! A bald woman: do you understand what that means to me - a bald woman? Feminine baldness . . . a wig . . . no, I won't stand for it!" And he added more calmly, in a soft voice laden with anguish: "Ah, how horrible you are. You can't know how horrible you are. One’s baldness, for that matter, is a detail - and so is one’s nose; this or that detail can be horrible - that happens in the Aryan race too. But you're horrible in your entirety, saturated with hideousness from head to toe, you're hideousness itself ... Oh, if only one spot on your body were free of that element of hideousness, I would at least have a point of attachment, some basis, and, upon my word, I would focus on it all the sentiments I swore to you at the altar. Oh, God!" This was incomprehensible to me. In what respect was mother's baldness worse than father's? And mother's teeth were even better: there was one white fang with a gold filling there...And why did mother, on her part, not only not loathe father but, on the contrary, liked to stroke him - in the presence of guests, for it was only then that father did not recoil. My mother was full of majesty. To this day, I can see her as the patroness of a charity ball, or of a dinner party, or else making an evening retreat with servants in her private little chapel.
My mother's piety was without equal; it was no longer ardor but greed - greed for fasting, prayer, and good deeds. At the appointed hour, I, the lackey, the chef, the maid, and the janitor would appear in the blackness of the crepe-clad chapel. After the prayers were recited, the sermon would begin: "It's a sin! Hideous!" mother would say forcibly, her chin undulating and quaking like a yolk in an egg. Am I, perhaps, not speaking with the respect I owe the dear shades? Life has taught me this language, the language of mystery . . . but let us not anticipate events. Once in a while mother would summon me, the chef, the lackey, the janitor, and the maid at an unusual hour. "Pray, poor child, for the soul of that monster - your father; and you, too, pray for the soul of your Master, sold to the Devil!" More than once, we would chant litanies under her leadership until four or five in the morning, at which time the door would fly open and father would appear, in tails or tuxedo, his face portraying an expression of the utmost distaste. - "On your knees!" mother, awave and asway, would cry out approaching him, her finger pointing to the likeness of Christ. "Off with you, off to bed, on the double!" father would order the domestics in a lordly manner. "These are my servants!" mother would reply, and father would leave hastily, accompanied by our suppliant wailing in front of the altar. What did that mean, and why did mother say: "his dirty deals" - why did she loathe father's deals, when father, in turn, loathed mother? The innocent mind of a child was lost in these arcane matters. "Lecher," mother would say, "remember - don't tolerate! He who at the sight of sin does not cry out in repulsion, let him tie a millstone around his neck! One mustn't loathe, despise or hate. He has sworn, and now he loathes! He has sworn not to loathe! Fire of hell! He loathes me, but I loathe him as well! Judgment Day shall come! In the other world we shall see which of us is better! The nose? - the soul! The soul has neither nose nor baldpate, and ardent faith opens the gates to paradisial delights in the future. The time will come when your father, writhing in torments, will implore me, seated on Jehova's - or rather, I meant to say, the Lord’s - right hand, to give him my moist finger to lick. We will see if he will loathe me!" - Father, for that matter, was also pious and attended church regularly - but never our home chapel. More than once, perfectly urbane, he would say, squinting like the aristocrat he was: "Believe me, my dear, it’s a case of tactlessness on your part, and when I see you in front of the altar with your nose and ears, with your lips - I’m certain that Christ, too, feels ill at ease. Naturally I don't deny your right to piety," he would add, "indeed, from a religious point of view, it’s a beautiful thing - a neophyte, and yet it can't be helped. Nature won’t be propitiated and remember the French adage: "Dieu pardonnera, les hommes oublieront, mais le nez restera." [7] And I was growing up. Sometimes father would take me on his lap and anxiously examine my visage at length. "The nose is, so far, like mine," I heard him whisper."Glory be to God! But here in the eyes...and in the ears...poor child!" - and his noble features would become drawn with pain. - "He’ll suffer horribly when he reaches the level of awareness, I wouldn't be surprised if something of an internal pogrom occurred within him then." - About what awareness was he talking, and about what pogrom? And generally - what color should be a rat born of a black male and a white female? Should it be spotted? Or, perhaps, when the contrasting colors are of a strictly equal force - a colorless rat, a rat without a hue is the result of this conjunction . . . but I can see again that I anticipate events with impatient digressions. 2. At school I was a diligent and exemplary student, and yet I did not enjoy general popularity. I remember the first time: I stood before the headmaster, willing, eager, full of good resolutions, with the alacrity which had always typified my nature - and the headmaster chucked me graciously under the chin. I assumed that the better my conduct, the more deserving of favors I would become by my teachers and classmates. My good intentions, however, woud crash against the impenetrable wall of a mystery. What mystery? Bah! I did not know - and actually I still do not know; I felt only that I was surrounded on all sides by an alien, hostile and yet charming mystery, which I could not penetrate. For is it not a charming and mysterious jingle: "One, two, three/ All the Yids are lice/And the Poles are nice/ And I'm choosing thee" [8] - which we used to call out to one another with classmates during games in the school yard? I felt it to be charming - I declaimed it with emotion and delight, but why it was charming, I was unable to grasp, and it even seemed to me that I was quite unnecessary; that I should rather stand on the sidelines and only look on. I compensated for it with diligence and politeness, but in return for my diligence and politeness I met with the antipathy not only of the students but, which was stranger and all the more unfair, also of the teachers. So, too, I can remember:
And I can remember my late lamented professor of history and of our national literature - a quiet, rather torpid old man, who never raised his voice. "Gentlemen," he would say, coughing into an enormous foulard handkerchief or shaking out [earwax] with his finger, "what other nation was the Messiah of nations? [10] The bulwark of Christianity? What other nation had Prince Jozef Poniatowski? [11] As for the number of geniuses - forerunners, especially - we have them just as many as all Europe." And all at once he would begin: "Dante?" - "I know, sir!" I would instantly spring up - "Krasinski! [12] Moliere? - Fredro! [13] Newton?- Copernicus! Beethoven? - Chopin! Bach? - Moniuszko! [14] "Gentlemen, you see for yourselves," he would sum up," our language is a hundredfold richer than French, which, after all, is reputed to be the most perfect of all languages. What's French, anyway? Petit, petiot, tres petite - at most. And Polish - what wealth: maly, malutki, maluchny, malusi, malenki, malenieczki, malusienki, and so on."[15] Even though I would provide the best and quickest answers, he disliked me; why? - I did not know, but on one occasion, clearing his throat, he said in a strange, knowing, and confidential tone: "Poles, gentlemen, have always been lazy, for laziness goes hand in hand with great talents. Poles are talented, if lazy, rogues. Poles are a strangely amiable people." - Since then my zest for learning subsided, but even with that I failed to curry favor with my pedagogue, although generally he had a weakness for lazy rascals. Once in a while, he would half close one eye, and then the whole class would prick up their ears. "Eh?" he would say, "sweet springtime, huh? It spreads through your bones, it draws you toward meadows and woods. A Pole has always been like that - as they say, a scapegrace and tough customer. He won't sit still, ho, ho...that's why women from Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany rave about us, but we prefer our Polish women, for their beauty is renowned the world over." These and other remarks affected me to such an extent that I fell in love - with a young maiden with whom I studied on one and the same bench in the Lazienkowski Park. For a long time I did not know how to begin and when at last I asked: "Would you allow, Miss...?" - she did not even answer. The next day, however, having taken counsel with my schoolmates, I steeled myself and pinched her - and then she screwed up her eyes and began to giggle . . . Success - I returned triumphant, overjoyed and self-confident, but also strangely anxious over the - incomprehensible to me - giggling and screwing up of the eyes. "Know what?" I said in the school yard, " I too am a tough customer, a rascal, a little Pole; shame you couldn’t see me in the Park yesterday - you would've seen some nice things . . . " And I told them all. "Ninny!" they said, but for the first time they listened to me with rapt attention. All at once, one of them called out: "A frog!" - "Where! What? Hit the frog!" - All lunged after it, and I along with them. We began to whip it with thin sticks, until it died. Feverish and proud to be allowed to participate in the most exclusive of their games, seeing in this the beginning of a new era in my life, " You know what?" I cried, "there’s also a swallow! A swallow has flown into the classroom and is flapping against the windows - just wait..." I brought the swallow, broke its wing so it would not fly away, and my hand at once went to the stick. Meanwhile, all surrounded it. "Poor little thing," they kept saying, "poor little birdie, give it some bread and milk." And when they noticed that I was raising my stick, my classmate Pawelski so narrowed his eyes that his cheekbones became more prominent, and smacked me painfully in the mug. "He got smacked in the mug!" they yelled, "you've no honor, Czarniecki, don't give in, hit him back, smack him in the mug!" "How can I smack him," I rejoined, "when I’m the weaker? If I hit him back, he’ll smack me again, and I‘ll be dishonored twice." -Then they all pounced upon me and clobbered me, sparing neither jeers nor malevolent gibes. Love! - oh, what enchanting, incomprehensible nonsense - to pinch, to nip, and even to clasp in one's arms - oh, how much it contains! Bah, bah! Today I know what to hold on to: I can see, here, a clandestine affinity with war, for actually war too is all about pinching, nipping or clasping in one's arms, but at that time I was not yet bankrupt as a human being - on the contrary, I was full of good intentions. To love? I can boldly say that I was eager to love, for in this way I wanted to penetrate the wall of mystery . . . and with ardor and faith I endured all the oddities of that strangest of affections, in the hope that, after all, I would one day understand what the thing was about. "I desire you!" I said to my beloved. She dismissed me with generalities. "You’re such a zero, sir!" she said enigmatically, peering into my visage, "a namby-pamby fop, a mamma's boy!" I shuddered: a mamma's boy? What could she mean by that? Could she have guessed? . . . For I had guessed at a thing or two. I already understood that, if my father was pure-blooded to the marrow - my mother, too, was pure-blooded, but in a different sense, in a Semitic sense. What had induced father, that impoverished aristocrat, to marry mother, the daughter of a wealthy banker? I could already understand his anxious glances probing my features, and the nocturnal excursions of this man who, wasted in the loathsome symbiosis with mother, aspired, at the loftiest behest of the human species, to impart his race to different, more worthy loins. I could understand? Actually - I could not understand, and here the enchanting wall of mystery would rise again - I knew in theory, but personally I felt no repugnance either toward mother or father; I was a devoted son. Even today I do not understand well: ignorant of the theory as I am, I do not know what color is a rat born of a black male and a white female; I suppose only that mine was an exceptional casus, an unheard-of case; namely, that the inimical races of my parents, being of a strictly equal force, have neutralized themselves within me so perfectly that I am a colorless rat, without a hue! A neutral rat! That is my fate, that is my mystery, that is why I have always been unsuccessful, and, participating in everything, I could not participate in anything. And that is why anxiety swept over me at the sound of the term: "mamma's boy" - the more so because it was accompanied by a slight lowering of the eyelids, on which I had already burned my fingers several times in my life. "A man," she said, puckering up her beautiful eyes, "a man should be daring!" "Certainly," I replied, "I can be daring." She had fantasies. She made me jump over ditches and lift weights. "Trample that bed of flowers, but not now - when the janitor is watching. Crush the bushes, toss that gentleman's hat into the water! I was wary of preaching, remembering the incident in the school yard, and, anyhow, when I asked her about reason and cause, she would reply that she herself did not know; that she was an enigma, an element. "I’m a sphinx," she would say, "a mystery..." - When I was not successful she became sad, and when I was successful she was as happy as a child, and, as a reward, she would let me kiss her dainty little ear. But she would never respond to my " I desire you." "There’s something about you, sir" she said, abashed, "I don't know what, some kind of abschmack." - I knew full well what that meant. All this was, I admit, strangely charming, strangely wondrous - yes, wondrous, that is what it was - but also strangely unconvincing. Still, I did not lose heart. I read a great deal, especially poetry, and assimilated the language of mystery as best I could. I can remember the composition: "Poles versus other nations." "To be sure, it is not even worth talking about the superiority of Poles over Negroes and Orientals, who have repugnant skin," I wrote. "But even among the European nations, the superiority of a Pole is unquestionable. The Germans - ponderous, brutal, flat-footed; the French - small, diminutive, and depraved; the Russians - shaggy; the Italians - bel canto. Oh, what a relief - to be a Pole, and no wonder everyone is envious of us and would like to wipe us off the face of the earth. Only a Pole does not arouse repulsion in us." So I wrote - without conviction; but I felt that this was - the language of mystery, and the very naivete of my assertions was blissful to me. 3. The political horizon was darkening, and my beloved was betraying a strange excitement. Oh, these great, these fantastic September days! They were redolent, as I read in a book, of heather and mint; they were ethereal, bitter, burning, and unreal. In the streets - crowds, songs and parades, terror, madness and exaltation, accentuated by the rhythmic step of the passing detachments. Here - a veteran insurgent, tears and blessings. There - mobilization, young spouses parting with one another. There again - banners, speeches, outbursts of enthusiasm, the national anthem. Vows, consecrations, tears, posters, indignation, loftiness and hatred. Never before, if one is to believe artists, had women been so wonderful. My beloved ceased to pay attention to me, her look became deeper and darker, became expressive, but she looked only at military men. - I was wondering what to do. The world of the riddle suddenly intensified incredibly, and I had to be doubly vigilant. I cheered with the others, giving voice to my patriotism, and, on several occasions, I even took part in summary lynchings of spies. I felt, however, that it was all a mere palliative. In my Jadwisia's look [16] there was something which made me report for active duty as fast as I could, and I was assigned to the uhlans. And right at the outset I discovered that I was treading the proper path; for at the appearance before the medico-military board, standing naked with a piece of paper in hand, in the presence of six clerks and two doctors who had ordered me to lift my foot and inspected my heel, I met with the same scrutinizing, serious - as if pensive and coldly assessing look of Jadwisia's; and I only wondered that, in the park that day, while accusing me of some shortcomings, she took no notice of my heel. And so - I was a soldier, an uhlan, and I sang along with the others:
uhlans, uhlans, O kids divine, you make many a young lady pine. [17]
Indeed; although taken individually, none of us was a kid - when,
in a body, we were passing through town singing this ditty, bent over
our horses' necks, with lances and the visors of our schapskas
[18], an amazingly wonderful smile was playing upon the lips of women,
and I felt that this time hearts were beating also for me . . . Why?
- I do not know, for I was still Count Stefan Czarniecki born of a mother
nee Goldwasser, only in jackboots and with raspberry-colored
collar badges. My mother, exhorting me not to tolerate, was giving me
her blessing before battle with a sacred relic in the presence of the
whole staff, among whom the maid was the most deeply moved. O war, sweet war - what kind of lady are you?[19] Forgive me for returning, once more, to the mystery which so nags at me. A soldier at the front wallows in mud and flesh; diseases, ringworm and filth oppress him; and, to cap it all, when his belly is ripped apart by a missile, his entrails often creep outside... So what, then? Why should a soldier be a swallow and not a frog? Why should a soldier's occupation be beautiful and longed-for everywhere? No, I misspoke myself, not beautiful but - wondrous, wondrous to the utmost degree. This - the fact that it was wondrous - added to my stamina in battle with the loathsome traitor of the soldier's spirit - with dread - and I was almost happy, as if I already were on the other side of the impenetrable wall. Every time I managed to hit the target with my carbine, I felt that I was being suspended on the inscrutable smile of women and on the measures of the soldier's ditties; and, after many exertions, I even contrived to win the favor of my horse - that pride of the uhlan - which, until then, had only nipped and kicked me. 4. Yet an accident occurred that cast me into the abyss of moral depravity from which I still have not been able to extricate myself. Everything was going very well. The war was raging in the whole world and along with it - the Mystery; men would drive bayonets into one another's bellies, hate, loathe and despise, love and worship one another; on the spot where a peasant used peacefully to thresh grain, now lay a heap of rubble. And I with them! I had no doubt about how to act and what to choose; the tough discipline of the military was my guidepost to the Mystery. I would charge to the attack, or lie in a trench amid asphyxiating gases. - Already hope, mother of fools, would unfold before me joyful perspectives of the future: how I would return home from the war, freed once and for all from the fatal neutrality of a rat... But alas, things took a different turn... In the distance cannons roared... Night fell upon the plowed field before us, ragged clouds scudded across the sky, a cold gale whipped us, and we, more wondrous than ever, for the past three days now had been ferociously defending a hillock on which stood a broken-down tree. Our lieutenant had just ordered us to hold out until death. Suddenly a cannonball comes flying up, bursts, explodes, severs uhlan Kacperski's both legs, rips apart his belly, and he at first becomes disoriented, cannot grasp what has happened, and a moment later he too explodes - but with laughter; he too bursts - but into laughter! - holding his belly, blood gushing forth like a fountain, he screeches and screeches in a humorous, shrill, hysterical, droll treble - long minutes! What contagious laughter! You have no idea what an unexpected voice like this can mean on the field of battle. I barely managed to hold out until the end of the war. - And when I returned home I concluded, my ears still filled with that laughter, that everything I had lived up to then had crumbled to dust, that the dreams of a new, happy existence at Jadwisia's side had turned to nothing, and that on the desert which had suddenly burst open, all I could do was to become a communist. [20] Why - a communist? But first of all - what do I mean by "communist"? With this term I do not embrace any specified ideological content, any program, any ballast; on the contrary, I use it rather for what is alien, hostile, and incomprehensible in it, and what impels the most serious individuals to shrug or to emit wild screams of repulsion and fright. Yet should a program be sorely needed, so be it: I demand and insist that everything - fathers and mothers, race and faith, virtue and fiancees - everything be nationalized and distributed with ration cards in even and adequate portions. I demand, and I maintain this demand in the face of the whole world, that my mother be cut up into tiny bits and given piecemeal to all those who are not zealous enough in prayer, and that the same thing be done with father in regard to beings devoid of race. I also demand that all little smiles, all charms and graces be provided only on express demand, and that unwarranted repulsion be punished by incarceration in a house of correction. So much for the program. As for the method, it consists mainly in squeaky giggling and in narrowing one's eyes. - With a certain contrariness, I base myself on the principle that war has destroyed all human emotions within me. And further I affirm that, personally, I did not sign any peace treaty with anyone, and that the state of war - for me - is not suspended at all. Ha - you will exclaim - the program is unreal and the method silly and incomprehensible! Very well, but is your program more real, and your methods more comprehensible? Anyway, I do not cling obstinately either to the program or to the method - and if I chose the term "communism," it was only because "communism" is a mystery as inscrutable to the minds which oppose it as your pouting and smirking are to me. And so, my ladies and gentlemen, you smile, you narrow your eyes; you caress swallows but torture frogs, you find fault with a nose; you incessantly hate, loathe somebody or other, or else plunge into an inconceivable state of love and rapture - and all for the sake of some Mystery. But what will happen if I, too, bring myself to create my own mystery and impose it upon your world with all the patriotism, heroism, devotion, which love and the Army have taught me? What will happen if I, in turn, smile (a somewhat different smile) and narrow my eye with the unceremoniousness of an old warrior? It may be that I behaved in the wittiest way with my beloved Jadwisia. "Is woman an enigma?" I asked. (After my return, she greeted me with immeasurable effusiveness, examined my medal, and we at once went off to the park). "Oh yes," she replied, "am I not enigmatic?" she said, lowering her eyelids. "An element of a woman and a sphinx". "I too am an enigma!" I declared, "I too have my own language of mystery, and I demand that you speak it. Can you see that frog? I swear upon my honor as a soldier that I'll put it under your blouse if you don't say immediately, in all seriousness and looking me straight in the eye, the following words: ciam-bam- bi, minu-mniu, ba-bi, ba-be-no-zar. She would not do it for anything. She was hedging as best she could, explaining that it was silly and unjustified, that she cannot, she blushed scarlet, tried to turn the whole thing into a joke, and finally began to cry: "I can't, I can't," she repeated, sobbing, "I'm ashamed, how so...such senseless words!" So I took a huge fat toad and carried out my threat. It seemed that she would go mad. She was tossing on the ground like one possessed, and the squealing she emitted I could only compare to the humorous screeching of the man who had had both his legs and a part of his belly ripped off by a cannonball. It may be that this comparison - as well as the frog bit - are distasteful, but please remember that I, a colorless rat, a neutral rat, neither white nor black, am also distasteful to most people. And indeed, should one and the same thing be tasteful and wondrous to one and all? What appeared to me personally to be the most wondrous, the most mysterious, and the most redolent of heather and mint in this whole adventure, was that, in the end - unable to free herself from the toad raging under her blouse - she went mad. Perhaps I am not a communist, perhaps I am only - a militant pacifist. I roam around the world, sail on this abyss of unfathomable idiosyncracies, and wherever I see some mysterious feeling - whether it be virtue or family, faith or fatherland - I always have to commit some scoundrelly act. That is my mystery which, on my part, I impose upon the great riddle of being. I simply cannot pass calmly by a happily engaged couple, mother and child or a worthy old man - but at times I am seized with grief for you, Mother and Father dear, and for you, 0 my sainted childhood!
Notes 6 The point to be marked here is that the protagonist of the story shares his name with a historical figure, Stefan Czarniecki (1599-1665). The latter was the hero of a war between Poland and Sweden (1655-1660), where he routed the Swedish army. Stefan Czarniecki is a symbol of Polish patriotism. 7 Dieu pardonnera, les hommes . . . le nez restera: “God will forgive, people will forget, but the nose shall remain!” 8 The literal, unrhymed version is: “One, two, three/All the Yids are dogs/And the Poles are golden-plumed birds/And the lot falls to you!” 9 Who are you? . . . The White Eagle sole!: A truncated stanza of a patriotic jingle, well known in Poland. The White Eagle is a symbol of Poland. 10 The self-explanatory slogan, Poland as the Messiah of nations, was propounded in the 19th century by one Andrzej Towianski (1799-1878). Although the idea might seem absurd today, in the Romantic period it fired the imagination of eminent Polish artists such as, for example, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Poland’s foremost poet. 11 Prince Jozef Poniatowski (1796-1813): A Polish-born Marshal in the Napoleonic Army. In 1812 he joined Napoleon in his invasion of Russia and distinguished himself at Smolensk, Borodino and Leipzig, where, in covering his retreat, he was drowned in the Elster. 12 Count Zygmunt Krasinski (1812-1859): A romanticist playwright and poet. Zygmunt Krasinski is the author of a play, Nieboska Komedia (Eng. “The Un-Divine Comedy”); hence the comparison to Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). 13 Count Aleksander Fredro (1793-1876): A playwright, often compared to Moliere (1622-1673) and Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), known for light-hearted comedy and gentle satire. Fredro wrote popular comedies-in-verse, lampooning the szlachta, i.e., the Polish nobility. 14 Stanislaw Moniuszko (1813-1872): An operatic composer regarded as “the Father of Polish national opera.” 15 Maly, malutki, maluchny . . . malusienki: This dwindling sequence of Polish diminutives roughly corresponds to the English: “Small, little, tiny, slight, petite, weeny, teeny-weeny.” All the words cited by the teacher share the root -mal. 16 Jadwisia: The diminutive for “Jadwiga.” 17 Uhlan: A Polish lancer, one of the sacred relics of Poland’s romantic tradition. Uhlans were armed with lances, sabers, pistols and carbines. The military events described in the story concern World War I. Uhlans, uhlans . . . many a young lady pine: A truncated line of a once-popular ditty glorifying Polish lancers. 18 shapska: this was a resplendent cavalry helmet, high-crowned, flat-topped and plumed. The schapska was immortalized by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) in the famous opening scene of “Madame Bovary”: “C’etait une de ces coiffures d’ordre composite, ou l’on retrouve les elements du bonnet a poil, du chapska [ . . . ], etc. (G. Flaubert, Oevres completes, aux Editions du Seuil, p. 575). 19 O War, sweet war, what kind of lady are you?: The opening line of a sentimental little song romanticizing war and the army. 20 Gombrowicz was not a communist; the term was chosen for its shock value. It should be noted that the story was first published in 1933, in capitalist, not communist, Poland.
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Christopher Makosa (translation and notes)