Dukla Read online

  OTHER WORKS BY ANDRZEJ STASIUK IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

  White Raven

  Tales of Galicia

  Nine

  Fado

  On the Road to Babadag

  DUKLA

  ANDRZEJ STASIUK

  TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  BILL JOHNSTON

  DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

  CHAMPAIGN • DUBLIN • LONDON

  Originally published in Polish as Dukla by Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wolowiec, 1999

  Copyright © 1997 by Andrzej Stasiuk

  Translation and introduction copyright © 2011 by Bill Johnston

  First edition, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stasiuk, Andrzej, 1960-

  [Dukla. English]

  Dukla / Andrzej Stasiuk ; translated and with an introduction by Bill Johnston. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in Polish as Dukla by Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wolowiec, 1999.”

  ISBN 978-1-56478-687-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Johnston, Bill, 1960- II. Title.

  PG7178.T28D8513 2011

  891.8’538--dc23

  2011021844

  Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  This publication has been funded by the Book Institute—the ©POLAND Translation Program

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Cover: design and composition by Danielle Dutton

  Ebook conversion by Erin L. Campbell, TIPS Technical Publishing, Inc.

  Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Introduction

  Midsummer, Pogórze

  Dukla

  Wasyl Padwa

  Sunday

  Rite of Spring

  A Little-Used Room

  Party

  Crayfish

  Birds

  Storks

  Green Lacewings

  The Swallows

  The River

  Rain

  End of September

  Frost

  Rain in December

  Night

  Beyond the Threshold

  Sky

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  “I’d always wanted to write a book about light,” Stasiuk tells us in Dukla. And in fact that is precisely what he has done. In achingly beautiful prose, he takes on the quixotic task of rendering in language the experiences we receive through our eyes. At one level, this is how to read Dukla—as an extended series of attempts to put into words the different effects of light, and a meditation on what this undertaking entails.

  At the same time, of course, a book about light also has to be a book about darkness. Dukla is filled with the constant presence of dark, shadows, blackness, night—Stasiuk strains the resources of language to breaking point in striving to convey the absence of light as well as its presence. His goal of “describing light” recalls Claude Monet’s desire to paint light in his series paintings, though the intense play of light and shade in Dukla is reminiscent of nothing so much as Caravaggio’s thunderous chiaroscuro.

  Yet, extraordinary as this goal is, and however remarkable its results, Dukla is also much more than a book about light. In Poland it is widely regarded as Stasiuk’s most brilliant achievement and as one of the landmark texts of the postcommunist period. What is it that makes the book so unusual and memorable?

  Part of the answer lies in the sheer originality of form. By making light his central organizing principle, Stasiuk is able to play merry havoc with genre. Quite consciously and deliberately, he intertwines memoir, travelogue, and nature writing, together with an admixture of reportage and latter-day ethnography, all subordinated to the wistful discipline of a languid prose poem. Part of the delight of reading Dukla is the reader’s constant struggle to figure out what exactly it is he or she is reading: what kind of text is this, and how is it to be categorized and thus understood? As in the case of much great literature, with Dukla this question has no simple answer, but the multiple resonances of the various genres mentioned above have the effect of weaving the text into the complex fabric of literature itself.

  It is also striking that Stasiuk dwells on things and places no one else thinks worthy of writing about. Polish literature has preponderantly been urban in character; writing set in the countryside has traditionally involved country estates, and has concerned above all the life of the gentry. What goes on in the small towns and villages has, with a few notable exceptions (like Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone upon Stone), been overlooked. Stasiuk goes looking for his poetry, his light and its effects, in precisely those seemingly banal and uninteresting places that others have ignored. One of the gifts this book offers is a new way of looking at the everyday, and learning how to let it captivate us. Even during the papal visit described in Part III of the novella-length “Dukla,” what interests Stasiuk is not the pontiff himself so much as the people who come to see him and hear him—the little old lady to whom “the world has suddenly come,” or the farmers who have to leave early because, presumably, their cows need milking.

  As he enters imaginatively into the lives of these overlooked others and their habitations, Stasiuk displays stunning powers of observation. He is the poet of the concrete; eschewing the general (because “everything that’s general ends up on the trash heap”), he is interested in things, objects, tangible items, confident that if he renders them with sufficient clarity and respect they themselves will reveal their meaning. He is a shining vindication of Flaubert’s dictum that “anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” The brilliant depiction of a rural home in Part II of “Dukla,” for instance, is at once a carefully observed catalog of possessions, and a detailed portrait of a moral habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term. It tells us what people are like, what their values and tastes are, through an exquisite presentation of the apparently banal objects they gather around them.

  It might be more accurate to say that Dukla is about light remembered, and in this sense it is also a book about memory. Stasiuk has said elsewhere, in Fado, that he is not interested in the future (which he dismisses as “the refuge of fools”), only in the past, which “treats us with seriousness.” In Dukla he mines his own past, giving us among other things a plaintive evocation of childhood summers spent with his grandparents, and an equally poignant narrative of his erotic awakening as a teenager. And as with every other facet of the book, these recollections are shot through with qualities of light that help transfix them in memory.

  In almost every paragraph of this book, Stasiuk displays his extraordinary talent for metaphor and imagery. A man sitting motionless in a bar is like “one of those people who resemble mineral matter”; motorcycles converted into farming vehicles move across a field “like docile beasts of a newly domesticated species”; a dead stork in a meadow looks “like an overturned plaything.” Such examples spill from his pen, and are put at the service of a mind that sees things in strikingly original ways. Stasiuk’s originality extends to the very language he uses: a couple of years ago, in a workshop in Poland, I showed a group of young people an anonymous passage from an as-yet unpublished novel; within a sentence or two the majority of those present had identified it correctly as being by Andrzej Stasiuk. Part of the joy of reading Dukla is knowing that you are listening to a distinct, unmistakable, compelling voice.

>   Everyone I know who has read Dukla has a favorite passage. One friend remembers best the astonishing image of the teenage protagonist entering the skin of the dancing woman he is watching, pushing his hands into her fingertips like putting on a glove. Another recalls the little girl whose swinging feet in a country bus shelter are the only moving thing in sight, till her mother says “Sit still” and the entire scene becomes motionless. Like the exploratory mine shaft that the Polish word “dukla” refers to, Dukla the book bores into the surface of our lives and perceptions; it reveals wondrous prospects and resources whose very existence was unsuspected, and sheds dazzling new light on lives and landscapes that each reader will respond to in different and unique ways. This, too, is the pleasure of reading Dukla.

  BILL JOHNSTON

  MIDSUMMER, POGÓRZE

  At four in the morning the night slowly raises its dark backside as if it were getting up from a heavy dinner and going to bed. The air’s like cold ink, it flows along the road surfaces, spills to each side and congeals into black lakes. It’s Sunday and people are still asleep, that’s why this story ought to lack a plot, because no one thing can cover up other things when we’re headed toward nothingness, toward the realization that the world is merely a momentary obstacle in the free passage of light. Lutcza, Barycz, Harta, Mały Dół, Tatarska Góra: faded green road signs show the way, but in those places nothing is happening, nothing is moving except dreams, which can see in the dark like cats or bats and which keep pacing about, brushing against the walls, the religious pictures, cobwebs, and whatever else people have accumulated over the years. The sun is still hidden deep, it’s fretting at another world right now, but in an hour’s time it’ll rise to the surface, emerge like a beetle crawling out of a piece of wood. The sound of the car engine can probably be heard for miles. The road follows the crest of the hills, dipping then rising again, each time higher and higher, and in that incomplete darkness, between the specters of woods and houses, it feels like a spiral tower.

  At this time of day the sky is barely separate from the earth, the boundary between them hasn’t yet been fixed; the two are simply different kinds of dark in which the imagination can run wild. Though what can people imagine to themselves, in fact, aside from all the things that others have seen in this place, banal things made from the faint, indistinct forms of reality; this is nothing but a kind of night blindness, an absurd game of Chinese whispers. And the truth of it is that sight touches the dark, cold, damp colors the way a hand strokes smooth satin, the warm lining of an overcoat when it’s chilly outside, in the same unthinking way, with the same sense of pleasure.

  There won’t be any plot, there won’t be any story, especially in the night, when the terrain is stripped of its landmarks, when we’re driving from Rogi to Równe and on through Miejsce Piastowe. We’re traveling between place-names in a solution of pure idea. Reality doesn’t put up any resistance, so all stories, all consequences, all the old marriages of cause and effect are uniformly devoid of meaning.

  Kombornia. Where do these names come from? It’s been so long since the last moment they still had any significance. The puttering sound of the car rising high into the air is like the rattle of a sewing machine. Darkness leaches into the seams, and tacking the journey together does no good whatsoever. The eastern skyline lightens like a silvery snake that’s come to rest stretched out between the peaks of the hills. Its cold hue is a forecast of heat and dust and so we need to get a move on, mount those motionless waves then plunge down again to the bottom of a desolate ocean where houses shake off the darkness like dogs coming out of water, or stand whitely there like skulls in flashing sunglasses. And that’s where all the people are. They’re lying on their backs, or on their bellies with their shoulders pointing upward, dreaming their dreams, sweating or calm, covered up or outside a kicked-off mound of sheets, some still in their Saturday clothes. They have no idea someone’s thinking about them. Actually they don’t even really exist. Their minds are at rest, the sickness that is life has let up temporarily and they’re like pieces of heavy fabric—almost lifeless and almost happy. Jan, Stanisław, Florian, Maria, Cecylia—a litany addressed to the old saints. Another minute and time will blow them out like the wind extinguishing a candle. They’ll become part of the past and nothing will be a danger to them anymore, no rising dawn, no sweltering day. Shades in the dark.

  Domaradz. The mist is joining the sky. It reveals haystacks, black fences, pointed roofs. The air is dark green. A viscid sky detaches itself from the horizon. In the crack, the glow of another world can be seen. Those who were dying imagined that this was where they were going.

  *

  Midsummer, Pogórze, the dawn is taking air into its lungs and each successive outbreath is brighter. For another hour it’ll still be possible to imagine the lives of other people. It’s that dead time when the world is gradually becoming visible but is as yet unpopulated. The light has the hue of melted silver. It’s weighty. It spreads along the skyline but does not illuminate the earth. Down here semidarkness and inference still reign, objects are no more than their own shadows. The sky is bursting with the glow, but it remains trapped inside like air in a child’s balloon. The people lie in their houses and the story of each one of them could move in any direction if it weren’t for fate, which lives with them under the same roof and has a certain number of possibilities up its sleeve, but never oversteps itself. The saints watch over them from their pictures, eternally vigilant, motionless, already having done all they had to do. Their idealized visages are mirrors that time in its purest form now rubs up against. It’s undisturbed by any gesture, any deed. This is what heaven is like: life does exist there, but just in case, it never takes on any form.

  I ought to be a ghost, I ought to enter their homes and seek out everything they have to hide. The imagination is powerless. All it does is repeat things it’s seen and heard, repeat them in an altered voice, attempt to commit sins that were already committed long ago.

  Another moment and daybreak will rise higher, dogs will be seen standing by their kennels or at the roadside, but not barking. At this time of day smell and hearing slowly lose significance, while sight hasn’t yet acquired it, so it’s best to treat everything as if it were a dream, a figment of the doggy imagination. A cat is crouching on the windowsill of a brick-built house. It’s chosen the place where the first rays of the sun will fall.

  There’ll be no plot, with its promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of the day. Darkness or blindness give things meaning, when the mind has to seek out a way in the shadows, providing its own light.

  Already it’s bright enough to see fences, trees, trash, junk-filled yards, broken-down cars sinking into the dirt and disintegrating patiently like minerals; pickets, stakes, slim cold chimneys, shafts of carts, motorbikes with lowered heads, outhouses lurking around corners, telegraph poles festooned with cables that droop in mourning, a spade stuck into the ground and forgotten—all this is there, in its place, but none of these things yet casts a shadow, though the sky to the east resembles a silver looking glass; the brightness is reflected in it but remains invisible. This must have been what the world looked like just before it was set in motion: everything was ready, objects poised on the threshold of their destinies like people paralyzed by fear.

  *

  A couple of months ago R. and I drove through here together. It was the middle of the day, April, we were headed in the opposite direction. Snow lay among the trees. The clouds were standing in place, the light was rarefied and immobile, it yielded before the eye, and the farthest ridges, houses, spiked rows of trees were as distinct as objects close by, just slightly reduced in size. We didn’t meet any other cars, no people could be seen. One time a face appeared briefly at a dark window. Yellowish, waterlogged meadows dropped downward from the hill; at the bottom of the val
ley they were taken in by the swollen river. Stillness hovered everywhere. Lace curtains in windows, closed doors, wickets, farmyard gates, deserted bus stops, there wasn’t even a single stupid chicken. The only things moving were us, the water down below, and the tatters of smoke hanging over the cottages. The landscape, unpeopled to its furthest limits, looked like a stage set on which something was going to take place only later, or else already had. The entire area was dominated by space, it filled every nook and corner of the world like liquid glass. We were talking. But there were people in every one of the houses and I kept losing track of what we were saying, because all of them, children, women, men, they all had names and blood flowed in them from head to toe, and even though they couldn’t be seen they were all living their own lives. Dozens of them, hundreds, along the whole route thousands of bodies and souls, each one trying in its own way to cope with the day. They were sitting around tables, stoves, televisions. Their heads were populated with all the people they’d ever known or remembered. The people they knew and remembered had their own people, and those people had theirs . . . R. and I were talking but I kept losing the thread of the conversation, because infinity always inspires awe.

  From time to time a wind blew up and pushed the clouds along; snow would begin to fall, then melt at once. It was Maundy Thursday, and we were taking the long way back from Jarosław. We’d wanted to see Przemyśl, but there’d been a blizzard there, the green road signs had been covered in snow and the only thing we’d visited was the cold inside of a corner shop in some village on the outskirts. R. bought a mineral water and I got something else because we were both really thirsty. We got clear of the whiteness, it tossed a few handfuls after us but we were quicker than it. The way in front of us was light, far, empty. Life had no intention of showing itself. The hills, houses, water, clouds all had the distinctness of a supernatural photograph. In a landscape like that, thoughts sound like mechanical music. You can watch them, listen to them, but their meaning is always ominous, like echoes in a well. The glass dome of the sky was tightly closed over the earth; the air was receding, making way for pure space, and our journey, the movement of the car, was becoming less and less self-evident.