Report of the County Chairman by James A. Michener
‘They also are a part of our discussion,’ Bukowski said, and Buk replied: ‘I know.’
When the session resumed, Bukowski acted as if he expected his reminder to Buk to deaden the latter’s outcry against the central government, but it did not. Buk said in his quiet way: ‘We’re not fools, Mr. Minister. We know your government is limited in what it can do … well, I mean, in what it can permit.’
‘You’re very wise to keep that limitation in mind, Pan Buk.’
‘We do. We realize that Poland is one part of a much bigger unit. The great bloc of the socialist republics. And we’re mindful of our obligation within that bloc. But we’re now talking about the management of a food program for a great nation of nearly thirty-six million people. The program is in confusion. Even the food we do grow is not reaching the people who need it.’
‘We are taking steps—’ Bukowski began, but one of the farmers interrupted: ‘If we say that our baby is taking steps, we suppose that pretty soon he’s going to walk, and if he’s strong, maybe even run. We no longer have any confidence that your steps will ever lead to walking, let alone running.’
‘These readjustments take time,’ Bukowski argued, but the farmers were adamant: ‘You’ve had since 1944. And things have grown constantly worse.’
Now Bukowski grew angry. He wanted to shout at these clods: ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you simpletons who have never traveled fifty miles from home. Have you been to Rumania? Poland is ten times better off. East Germany? Poland is superior in all respects. Czechoslovakia—where they’re afraid to breathe? Hungary? Even Yugoslavia? And what about Bulgaria? Who in his right mind would trade with Bulgaria?’ But as a loyal Communist he could not denigrate the other bloc countries, so he listened in bitterness as the farmers argued.
‘I hear Czechoslovakia’s much better off for food than we are,’ one said, but another pointed out: ‘I’m not so sure about Russia. Why did they stop their people from visiting in Poland? Because they didn’t want their citizens to see how much better we ate.’
Now Bukowski had to speak: ‘Poland is a paradise. Everyone else knows it, and you better not forget.’
At this, the farmers fell silent, for each knew that of all the Iron Curtain countries, Poland was the one that was relatively free—no heavy police, no army in the streets, and until recently, no rationing of food or clothing. Travelers familiar with other countries within the bloc had liked to play the game ‘If you didn’t live in Poland, which other socialist country would you prefer?’ Universally, Bulgaria rested at the bottom; life there was deplorable, beyond rescue. Rumania stood next to the bottom, then East Germany. Czechoslovakia stood in the middle, a land of great promise but soft in spirit. Hungary stood very high, partly because it had braved a massive showdown with the Soviets and survived.
About Yugoslavia the players had to be cautious. One couldn’t afford to praise it too highly because it wasn’t really a part of the bloc, and to acknowledge that life there was superior, which it was, would be disturbing. People didn’t say much about Yugoslavia except in whispers: ‘That’s a gorgeous country.’ They also used whispers in evaluating Russia; ‘May God preserve me from being forced to take my vacation there.’
This last judgment was shrewd and accurate; the Poles knew what they were talking about. Prior to 1980, Russian tourists had been a familiar sight throughout Poland; they arrived in big buses, stayed severely together under the rigid discipline of a tour director, marveled at the abundance and variety of consumer goods available, and stood gazing in wonder at the displays of flowers. They looked very much like peasants from the eastern part of Poland, good, lively people strong in body, suspicious in mind, and it was obvious that the free, varied life in Poland surprised and made them envious. They were rarely allowed to talk with Poles but they did seem to extend friendship rather than animosity.
Some years back a knowing Pole had summarized it this way: ‘A Russian coming to Poland is like a Pole traveling to West Germany. He can’t understand the freedom and the surplus of food and consumer goods.’ And that was what the silent farmers were thinking about as they compared their Poland with the other nations.
‘Our problem,’ Bukowski said at last, ‘is to preserve the great good things we have in Poland. And keep our independence.’
One of the farmers burst out laughing. ‘It’s crazy to talk about our independence when we’re free to make no important decisions.’
This was moving close to forbidden comment, and Bukowski was about to reprimand the farmer when another remarked: ‘You think we have trouble in Poland. You ought to spend a winter in Bulgaria!’ At this, even Bukowski had to stifle a chuckle.
The recital of grievances continued, and Bukowski felt that it was healthy to allow these rural people who had never before met with a high official to present their complaints before getting down to the real negotiating, and this was not a new tactic devised for this occasion. Discussion had generally remained free and open in Poland, which had never imposed a censorship as rigid as Russia’s. Poles tended to say what they thought, and it was only during the first harsh years of Russian domination that they had suffered for doing so. It was not like Czechoslovakia or, God forbid, Bulgaria, where the citizens were terrified and muted.
At the lunch break everyone, even old-hand Bukowski, was startled by the large number of reporters delivered to this little village by the press bus. They had come to report on the talks: London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Washington and Moscow being represented. Television crews came from most of the nations and double teams from Japan and America. Bukowski, looking toward the Forest of Szczek, saw that the Russian tanks had drawn back, and he was relieved.
Buk spoke no foreign language, but Bukowski could handle German and English, so he stepped forward to offer a résumé of what had been happening, but this did not satisfy the reporters: ‘We want to hear from the little guy. It’s his fight.’
Interpreters from among the government people volunteered, but reporters from Paris and Berlin spoke Polish, and they wanted to interrogate Janko Buk directly, so the interpreters were used only to translate Buk’s answers to the others, and it became obvious that the newspeople were going to report this meeting as a battle between Buk and Bukowski. BUK VERSUS BUKOWSKI, The New York Times would proclaim, and the reporters were right. This was David going up against Goliath.
Buk, who had never before been publicly interviewed even by Polish reporters, showed remarkable self-confidence and restraint in giving his answers. He did not assume the posture of one who had told the government what it must do.
‘Could we say,’ the Paris man asked, ‘that you explored differences?’
‘That would be accurate,’ Buk said.
‘And what were those differences?’ a young woman from Berlin asked.
‘The problems that you can see all about you,’ Buk replied.
‘Centering on food?’ one of the Japanese television people asked.
‘We’re farmers. Always we center on food.’
‘And about other shortages?’ the Berlin woman pressed.
Buk smiled at her, the gap between his teeth showing attractively. ‘We men worry about food. Our wives, they worry about shortages in the stores.’ When this brought chuckles, he added: ‘But at night we hear about the store shortages too.’
Now the Americans began to bore in: ‘Is it true, Mr. Buk, that you and Minister Bukowski come from this same little village?’
Buk deferred to Bukowski, who said: ‘We do.’
But again the reporters wanted to keep the focus on Buk, so they asked him: ‘Would it be correct to say he’s your cousin?’
Buk looked up at the much taller Bukowski and smiled again. ‘I never saw this man before today. But I’ve heard about him all my life. He would be more like my uncle.’
‘Does he lecture you like Big Uncle?’ This was too difficult for the interpreters to handle, not linguistically, for one of them knew the locution wel
‘What is the exact relationship between you two?’ the American asked, and again Buk deferred to Bukowski.
‘My grandmother,’ Bukowski said very carefully, ‘was Pan Buk’s great-grandmother, so he was correct. I am of the generation that would be his uncle.’ He paused, then left the steps of the palace where the television people had asked them to stand, and walked to a spot from which he could point toward the village. He was not engaged in a game and he wished to bring the interview back to a proper level of sobriety. ‘The woman we’re speaking of was hanged over there in 1939 for grinding her own wheat. My mother, that would be Pan Buk’s great-aunt sort of, she was shot against that wall, a few days earlier.’
‘For what?’ the woman from Paris asked in Polish.
‘Because she was here when the Nazis arrived,’ he replied in English.
That ended that line of interrogation. Now a man from Berlin well versed in economics asked: ‘What solutions do you see to the food shortage, Herr Buk?’ and Buk said with great caution: ‘One, to grow any food at all, we face a grave shortage of fertilizer and spare parts. Two, if we want to increase production, we must have more of everything. Three, to distribute even what we do have, we must change present patterns.’
This was a bold, sharp answer, and pencils scribbled rapidly. Both the Japanese and American television men asked if Buk would repeat his three points for their cameras and he said yes, but before doing so he asked that Bukowski appear with him: ‘Because we’re not fighting, you know. We’re talking.’
So the two Poles with-such similar backgrounds and such contrasting positions stood side by side to face the cameras, and after Buk had repeated what he had just said, Bukowski smiled thinly and added his comment: ‘We’re exploring every avenue to relax the present crisis.’
‘Even a farmers’ union?’ the Berlin man shouted, and the two Poles merely smiled.
But in their afternoon session both sides began cautiously to explore exactly that question, and Bukowski tried to stamp out the first tentative proposals: ‘Unions have always been for workers in cities. You can’t find a major nation in the world which amounts to anything that allows agricultural unions.’
‘Maybe it’s time,’ Buk said, and the debate was joined.
Bukowski had been warned by his superiors in Warsaw, who had been warned by their superiors in Moscow: ‘You can make almost any reasonable concession you wish. Prices, schedules, priorities, spare parts, lower rates for agricultural gasoline … But under no circumstance should you even discuss a farmers’ union. That would imperil the state.’
‘A rural union,’ he said with attempted finality, ‘would be untidy. Difficult to administer. Open to all sorts of fraud. It simply isn’t needed.’
‘But when all us farmers face the same problems, we’re going to take the same action whether we have a union or not.’
‘That’s the socialist way,’ Bukowski said eagerly, ‘without a union.’
‘But if we did have a union, our responses would be more sensible, more productive.’
‘You would gain nothing by a union,’ Bukowski said with near-contempt.
A Warsaw official who had not yet spoken now did so: ‘What you would gain, Buk, would be the power to control this nation’s food supply, and that cannot be tolerated.’
Buk sat with hands folded in front of him on the table. Leaning forward until his chest almost touched his hands, he said: ‘We will control the food supply whether we have a union or not. You can never make us sow and reap at the rate we did when we were free to find our own markets. You know that’s why Russia is starving. With all the power they command, they can’t get their farmers to produce two-thirds of what they produced in the old days. And we Poles in 1981 aren’t producing two-thirds of what our grandfathers produced, either. And if you allow things to get worse, the food supply will get worse.’ Leaving his hands folded resolutely on the table, as if they represented his answer, he leaned back.
The fierce confrontation continued all that afternoon, farmers with their backs to the wall defending themselves against a bureaucracy with its back to several walls. But gradually certain definitions did emerge: the government would not allow a union; the farmers demanded one with powers equal to those obtained by factory workers. On that there was a stalemate. But certain concessions were agreed to: the government would make a concentrated drive to find spare parts; the farmers promised not to diminish any further their normal schedules of planting and husbandry.
And then Janko Buk dropped his bombshell. When it had been agreed that he and Bukowski would go before the cameras again and stress the agreements, not the differences, Bukowski said: ‘We’ll resume our discussions tomorrow,’ and Buk said: ‘We would like to involve the Bishop of Gorka.’
Bukowski stopped dead. His head jerked back and he stared at the farmers. ‘Yes,’ they agreed. ‘We’d like to have the Bishop of Gorka take part.’
‘He has no concern in this!’ Bukowski exploded. ‘This is an economic problem. This is food and money and oil and machinery.’
‘It’s the welfare of Poland,’ Buk said stubbornly. ‘And the church is a third part of Poland. We want the bishop here.’
The appearance before the television cameras had to be delayed while Bukowski went to the telephone to consult with Warsaw: ‘We had everything going smoothly when the clever little bastard threw a hand grenade at us. He wants to involve the Catholic church.’
There was a loud rumble in the phone, to which he replied: ‘That’s exactly what I told him. But he still wants to bring in the bishop.’
This simple proposal apparently caused as much turmoil in Warsaw as it had in Bukowo, for during five minutes Bukowski did nothing but listen. Then he said meekly: ‘I think your suggestion is very wise. Yes, yes. Four weeks. Yes.’
When he left the phone he reassembled both parties and announced grimly: ‘The talks will be recessed for four weeks.’ Everyone wanted to know why, but he stonewalled: ‘I’ll announce it to the press. We’ll resume here in four weeks.’ And when he went before the cameras this time he did not ask Buk to stand beside him. In cold, crisp, bureaucratic tones he delivered an ultimatum: ‘Our talks have progressed amiably, but both sides feel the need for further study. We’ll resume in four weeks.’ He would say no more and permitted Buk to add nothing, so the world press was free to interpret the impasse as it wished. No reporter came even close to guessing the reason for the break.
Long after the lumbering press bus had started back to Warsaw and the private cars of the lesser Communists had followed, Szymon Bukowski quietly accompanied Janko Buk to the latter’s cottage, where he knew he would meet Buk’s young wife and an older woman he had known with passionate intensity forty years earlier, not in the way of love-making but in the brutal warfare of life and death. In the early winter of 1941 he had come to this cottage, to this woman and her husband, pleading for help.
When Buk pushed open the door, indicating that Bukowski should enter, he noticed that the commissar was trembling, but then his wife saw them and hurried forward to greet their visitor and he took her hand. Buk’s mother stayed behind, hands folded across her apron, standing very still and erect, for she, too, was remembering those distant fateful nights.
Then Bukowski saw her, and he left the younger Buks to stride across the kitchen he had once known so well, and he saw that clean hard face with the dreadful welt from left eye to chin, and he held out his hands, grasped hers and drew her toward him in a long embrace.
‘It is many years since you stood in this kitchen at midnight,’ she said. Then, pulling away, she looked at him admiringly. ‘You’ve done wonderful things with your life, Mr. Minister.’
‘The name is Szymon,’ he said. ‘The name was always Szymon.’
‘You were just a boy when I
‘Think of it,’ he said to the younger Buks as he took a chair at the kitchen table. ‘At seventeen I was in that forest … head of a commando … had already killed my first Nazi … the one who had hanged my grandmother.’
He liked what he saw of young Pani Buk: Kazimiera was of that stalwart breed which had always kept the farms of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia functioning. She was prepared to serve as wife, mother, cook, seamstress, ox when the plow had to be pulled, and always as the sharp verbal critic. It was to her that he now spoke, as if acknowledging that inside the cottage she was mistress.
‘Pani, when I left Warsaw at dawn this morning the women in my building asked me—’
‘I know,’ she said abruptly. ‘They hoped you could bring home some meat.’
‘And vegetables.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have the zlotys, you know.’
Buk’s mother broke in: ‘Zlotys are of no use any more. We can’t buy anything with them.’
‘But I’d leave them anyway. To demonstrate my good will.’
‘Good will we know you have. I knew your mother, I knew your grandmother. And women like that do not produce poor sons.’
They talked for a while of the old days, and tough Biruta began to weep when she recalled that special night when Bukowski had come to this cottage to talk her and her husband into joining his underground unit, then operating out of the Forest of Szczek. ‘They were heroic days,’ she said.
‘These are heroic days, Biruta.’
‘How have you managed to mess up this country so abominably?’
‘We’re not free in Warsaw, you know.’ And that was all he would concede. ‘You will let me have some food?’
‘Of course. You came here before, begging for food, and we gave it then, didn’t we?’
‘What can I give you in return?’
‘Not zlotys. Szymon, zlotys are no longer worth a damn. But we would like some books about farming … for Janko and our young ones.’
‘Books you shall have,’ he said. Then he left the cottage and whistled for the driver to bring the government car closer so that its trunk could be packed with items of food no longer obtainable in Warsaw.