Poland by James A. Michener
‘Have you ever noticed?’ the Czech asked. ‘You and me, we get fired, it’s for good. Starve, you miserable bastard. But a nobleman gets fired, three weeks he has a better job.’
When the Czech left the train at Brno, Janko settled back against the wall to catch what sleep he could, but the clatter of the wheels kept him awake and he thought patiently and seriously about his problems. He was twenty-six years old, healthy, strong. He did not like serving as a groom in Vienna, for although he loved horses and was adept at handling them, he felt a great affinity for the land and wished to be associated with it: I could be a good forester, maybe a better farmer, or maybe a farmer who also took care of horses at the big house.
But most of all he wanted a piece of land which he could call his own, something that he could till and seed and reap, something from which he could subtract a corner for the building of his own cottage—two rooms, no more—which he could pass on to his son and he to his son, the way the Lubonskis and the Bukowskis passed along their lands. For one shining moment, as the train moved north toward the Polish border, Janko Buk visualized a world in which every man owned his land and cottage, but he could imagine no system which would permit him to acquire his.
Since the year 830 the men and women of the Buk line had belonged to other men and women of the Bukowski line, who in turn had been subservient to the men and women of the Lubonski line, who were subservient, by God, to no one, except that they had mismanaged things so sorely that they were now subservient to the Emperor Franz Josef, and you better keep that firmly in mind. Things changed for the Lubonskis and to a lesser degree for the Bukowskis, but for the Buks they never changed.
However, the concept of passing a farm and a cottage on to one’s sons encouraged Janko to consider seriously his possible relations with this girl Jadwiga, as fine a woman as any of the villages along the Vistula provided. She was the daughter of a widow, which was bad, because that could mean that her husband might have to support not only a wife but also a mother-in-law, and this was a real possibility, because if the old woman could no longer farm the master’s land constructively, she would be thrown out of her cottage, and then what?
On the other hand, not many men caught themselves wives as capable as Jadwiga. Besides, she had a free and easy smile, as if she had made her peace with the world and with the fools that inhabited it. Watching her swing along a lane, bringing the geese home at the end of day, or chasing across the meadows to fetch a wandering cow, was to see grace and beauty, and Janko had reason to believe that she would always retain these qualities. She was, in village parlance, a good woman, and he knew for a fact that she had already refused proposals of marriage from men not worthy of her.
So by the time the train approached Krakow, where wagons would be waiting to carry the travelers on to Bukowo, Janko Buk had pretty much made up his mind to court Jadwiga seriously and in due course to propose marriage, whether he had a cottage of his own or not, whether he owned the land he sought or not: A man can’t wait forever to have children.
And then he fell to wondering about his master, and he had one simple wish: He’s as generous a master as a man could have. I only wish he’d find a good Polish woman, someone at a palace like Lancut or Gorka who has lots of money, and he could stay here with his horses and not go back to Vienna … He laughed as he reflected on this: Maybe he wants to go back to Vienna. Maybe it’s only me that wants to stay home.
On the ride from Krakow to the village, Wiktor sat with his groom and revealed that he did indeed want to get back to Vienna as soon as his informal exile permitted: There is so much to be done. So many people to see.’
‘There’s lots to be done at Bukowo,’ Janko said.
‘I know. The roads. The buildings. And we do need a barn for the horses.’
‘Why not stay home?’
‘Money. Janko, we have no extra money but what my salary gives us. At Bukowo, I know a hundred things that need doing, but I haven’t one spare crown.’
‘There must be a lot of girls in the big houses … looking for husbands.’
‘It’s not like the old days. I’m told that then you could travel to sixteen houses and find fifteen wives.’
‘Isn’t it a pity Lubonski has no daughter.’
Wiktor looked at his groom, aware that this conversation had become too personal, but he liked the frank peasant, and concluded: ‘I’ve often wished that the countess had given birth to a daughter.’ As he said this they were riding past the great and gloomy castle of Gorka, a place that would never again know the levity of the old days when the Counts Lubonski held court here; now they languished in Vienna. They had that splendid little half-palace at 22 Annagasse, but they languished nevertheless, and Bukowski knew it, for that was the destiny which awaited him.
At the Bukowski home he found things much as he had left them after his parents’ death. Auntie Bukowska, no immediate relative but a reliable woman imported from a distant branch of the family, remained in charge, as she had for a dozen years. Her daughter Miroslawa was six now, a quiet, large-eyed child who gave no trouble. The horses were poorly stabled and the fields were not as carefully tended as they had been when Auntie’s husband had served as steward of the two villages. Rents were sometimes not collected, but the cumbersome system did go creakingly forward, providing Wiktor with just enough surplus to pay for his apartment in Vienna and the care of his three horses.
It never would have occurred to Bukowski or to Lubonski, not even to Janko Buk himself, that if he had been placed in charge of the estate, it would have flourished, yielding surpluses for all. To make such a radical change would have been totally impossible; stewards were freedmen of the towns, or sometimes the third or fourth sons of the gentry, who in their amiable ways ran the great estates into the ground. Peasants were not stewards. For one thing, few of them could write or keep figures.
And so things settled into the old ruts: the estate languished, the peasants walked somberly to their distant fields, and church bells rang, and once or twice a year the villages erupted into robust celebrations when some young couple were married or some old man was buried. At the Bukowski house young Wiktor drew plans for a stable that would be built some day, looked idly at the estate books he could not understand, and pined for the excitements of Vienna. Using lesser horses from his stud, he rode across his fields and talked with his peasants, encouraging them to make whatever improvements they deemed best. He also visited with the priest who served these territories, and sometimes fished in the Vistula. He was invited to several big houses in the Russian part of Poland and even to a mournful celebration organized by a branch of the once-great Mniszech family at the Palais Princesse in Warsaw, but he did not care to display himself in his banishment.
There was one significant change in his routine. Auntie Bukowska had discussed it with him in tedious detail: ‘I can’t go on climbing the stairs, and little Miroslawa is too young to be of real help, so we must hire another girl while you’re here. It’s only sensible, and to that I’m sure you’ll agree.’
She had noticed that the girl Jadwiga might be a likely servant: ‘She’s big and strong and rather intelligent, I think. We can get by with paying her almost nothing, and she can care for all the upper rooms.’ She asked Wiktor if he wanted to check as to the girl’s appropriateness, but he said simply: ‘If she satisfies you, she satisfies me.’
She did indeed. With nothing better to occupy his mind, he began talking with this strong-willed peasant girl and found her frank and firm: ‘Master, my mother is an old woman now and we must find some way for her to live.’
‘You have your cottage.’
‘But it will be taken away.’
‘I’ll speak to the steward.’
Jadwiga noticed that he was always going to do things, but never did them, and in this he contrasted very unfavorably with the young man who had begun courting her. Janko Buk said on Monday that he had been thinking about doing something to improve the fields that were not
One morning, as he came out of his way to watch her at work, she asked bluntly: ‘Why haven’t you found yourself a wife?’ and he asked: ‘How old are you, Jadzia?’ and she told him: ‘A year older than you and ten years wiser,’ and he laughed: ‘I think you’re right.’
‘You haven’t heard my question. Why no wife?’
He threw his hands wide, indicating his estate: ‘A man like me, with no prospects and only two villages. I need a rich wife, I really do.’
‘Cast a net and catch one,’ she advised him. ‘North of the line, in Russia
‘And you? Why no husband?’
‘I’ve had men courting me. Plenty. But I have no mind to work my life out for a man who accomplishes nothing. Born in a filthy hut. Die in a filthy hut.’
‘You should go to Vienna, Jadzia.’
‘Born in a filthy corner. Die in a filthy corner. Here at least we breathe clean air.’
Day after day they talked like this, a nobleman preoccupied with his horses, a peasant woman seeing with terrible clarity the years ahead, and one morning when he had dispatched Auntie to the village, he pulled Jadwiga into an unused room and began to fondle her, aware that she was resisting him with a cynical knowledge of exactly what compelled him: his ennui, his pride in his position of ownership, his longing for the city. And in the end she allowed him to force her onto a bed when with a flick of her powerful right arm she could have knocked him across the room.
It was harsh love-making overlaid with a hundred complex motivations, and in the numerous repetitions which followed, so that even Auntie must have known what was happening with her new servant, the compulsions never changed: Wiktor needed a diversion to make his banishment palatable; Jadwiga welcomed this brief vision of a new world during this cold, dreary winter when snow was deep upon the fields.
During one protracted love-making she replied imprudently, in answer to his endless questions about her life: ‘Before all this happened I thought I might take your Janko Buk as my husband,’ and he answered with equal imprudence: ‘Wonderful man. If you were to marry him—when I’m gone, that is—maybe I’d find him a farm …’
‘You mean, his own land?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that at all. But maybe …’
Without his being aware of it, Jadwiga now crossed his path with peculiar frequency, and one morning in March, as spring thaws began, she told him: ‘I think I’m pregnant.’
‘Ridiculous. You can’t be.’
‘And why not? You’re a powerful man …’
Any attention he might have paid to this critical matter was diverted by a telegram dispatched from Vienna: YOU ARE NEEDED AT YOUR MINISTRY THE EMPEROR AGREES TO YOUR RETURN LUBONSKI.
Rushing about to pack his belongings for what he suspected might be a long and important stay, he had little time to discuss Jadwiga’s problems. ‘You’ll manage something. Girls always do.’
She asked only one question: ‘Are you taking Janko with you?’
‘Of course. Someone has to tend the horses.’
‘And who will tend me?’
‘You’ll manage something.’
There were only three cities in Europe in which a man twenty-eight years old who felt his chances slipping away should be in love: Rome, where the proper patronage could always accomplish miracles; London, where there was always a chance to marry money; and Vienna, where the games of love and power were constantly under way. Wiktor Bukowski was allowed one last chance to operate in the imperial city, and he did so masterfully.
Instructing Janko Buk to keep his three horses always at the ready and his Serbian fiacre driver to be at hand almost constantly, he purchased two new suits from a London tailor on the Kärntnerstrasse and had his tailor refurbish his two Polish national costumes. Thus armed, he laid serious siege to the affections of the American heiress, Miss Marjorie Trilling of Chicago.
He went first to a German-Austrian bank to ascertain what Oscar Trilling’s position was in the Chicago commercial world, and found it to be even more dazzling than he had been told: ‘The ambassador’s family has been engaged in railroads, land, cattle, forests and all other aspects of settling the vast American West. He has only one daughter, a secure position with both the Republican and Democratic leaderships, and a personal worth estimated at well over nine million dollars American.’ It was reasonable to suppose that such a man might bestow at least a third of that fortune on his daughter while he was still alive, and much more at his death. Miss Trilling was an enticing opportunity.
He took her riding in the Prater; he took her to the Burgtheater, where Hedda Gabler was disturbing the citizens, and to A Woman of No Importance, which was delighting them. They visited the great museums, especially ones showing the Breughels and the relics of the Napoleonic wars. And always they attended concerts, listening with respect to the works of Beethoven and Schubert, with curiosity to those of the local wonders Mahler and Bruckner, with condescension to the peasant harmonies of the Czechs Dvorak and Smetana.
When Wiktor asked how Miss Trilling had acquired so much knowledge of music, she resumed an earlier explanation which had been interrupted: ‘I attended a distinguished college in America, Oberlin, where music was important.’
‘You went to college?’ He had never before met a woman who had done so.
‘Of course. So did my mother.’
He was not sure that he liked the idea of women attending college, or becoming doctors, while the prospect of their actually playing in orchestras, as Marjorie said she had, was almost repulsive: ‘Don’t all the men stare without listening to the music?’
‘Men always stare,’ she said, ‘and women appreciate it.’
In return for his courtesies, she introduced him to the social world of the embassies, inviting him to formal teas at Sacher’s Hotel and to informal ones with young men and women from other embassies who convened at Demel’s pastry shop for monstrous deserts, always ‘mit Schlag,’ the heavy whipped cream from the Vienna countryside. There were dances, receptions, riding exhibitions and occasionally a glimpse of the old emperor, who supervised everything as if he were the burgomaster of a small village.
Wiktor, enchanted by this participation in a life he had not previously known, became a fashionable host, inviting the embassy people to Landtmann’s or to private rooms at Sacher’s, and one morning he told Janko Buk: ‘Hire me a carriage to which you can harness our two lesser horses, and find out which is the best road to the hills behind Grinzing.’ There, where the Vienna Woods began, he took Marjorie riding, and while Buk fished they engaged in amorous dalliance so prolonged that each participant realized the attachment had become more than a passing adventure.
‘I wish I could see the Vistula,’ Marjorie said as they drove dreamily homeward.
‘You can!’ Wiktor cried with real excitement. ‘You get aboard a train, go easily to Krakow, and drivers meet you for the ride to Bukowo.’
‘I would require a chaperone,’ she said.
‘Let’s find one.’
They drove to 22 Annagasse, where they talked frankly with the countess, who was delighted with the progress of their courtship. ‘I will go with you myself and you can stay with me at Gorka. Or it might be even better if your mother accompanied you.’ While they waited she dashed off notes to the Lubonski estates at Lwow and Gorka, then wrote a cordial invitation to Marjorie’s mother.
Once the Lubonskis decided to do something, they moved with force; next day the count called upon Ambassador Trilling and said: ‘I’ll vouch for this fellow Bukowski. Known his family for six centuries. Always poor as church mice. Always men of great dignity. And they have the best Arab stud in the empire.’
‘What about the revolutionary little pianist? Quite a scandal, you know.’
‘I better than most. It was I who called in the secret police … but only after she was safely away.’
‘Exactly the kind of hearty escapade a young man with spirit … Wiktor’s first class.’
So an excursion to the Austrian portion of Poland was arranged, with Countess Lubonska making the decisions: ‘You’ll stop first at our estates near Lwow. Then the Potockis who now occupy Lancut will entertain you, after which their people will carry you on to Gorka, where I shall be waiting to receive you. From there it’s a little jump to Bukowo and you will have seen the best, except that I shall myself take you on to the town built by my family, Zamosc, the heart of all that’s good in Russian Poland.’
Mrs. Trilling, who like her husband had studied Austrian history and geography, said: ‘You keep speaking of Lwow. I’ve never seen it on any map.’
‘That’s our old Polish name. They call it Lemberg now.’
Departure was set for mid-May, when Galicia would be at its loveliest, but during the last week in April, Wiktor Bukowski, who had every reason to hope that the journey would end with his public engagement to the ambassador’s daughter, received a nasty shock. Auntie Bukowska sent him a peremptory letter:
The girl Jadwiga is pregnant and threatens to cause immense trouble unless you find some solution. Your proposed plans for a visit at this time would prove disastrous and must be canceled. More important, advise me immediately what I am to do about Jadwiga.
How miserable it was to have built, with great care and planning, a structure of importance, only to watch it come apart because of some trivial accident. Why had he dallied with this servant? Why had he not detected in her forthright and even brazen conversation the seeds of trouble? And what in hell to do now?
His rescue came from an unbelievable quarter. The girl Jadwiga, having heard about the master’s passionate wooing of the American, for all Bukowo was aware of what was happening, had sent a peasant to Vienna with a message for the master’s groom. Fortified with this knowledge, Buk walked across the bridge over the Danube Canal and presented himself unannounced in Concordiaplatz.