Georgia Scott
The Place Where You Live
IT IS SUCH an ordinary thing to write about the place where you live.
Yet, I'd be lying to say I ever looked at Poland as anything but
extraordinary. I came here when Le Carr� novels still featured spies,
when James Bond still fought the Cold War. My first impression was from
a train on the way up to Gdansk from Warsaw in January 1985. Looking
out of the windows, I remember thinking I had been transported to the
set of Doctor Zhivago, the forbidden film of my childhood my mother
claimed was "too sad" for me to see. But it was all here: the expanses
of snow, the fur hats and, yes, an alluring sadness that somehow
underscored everything, like the sepia circles around the eyes of
unnaturally quiet child in my compartment.
Maybe my mother was right. But this sadness at
least had me seduced. It became my muse, though I knew it was not only
mine. Bewitching, ball breaking, always begging for more. Communist
Poland was in some ways a writer's dream. Like a magic line of coke
that kept replenishing itself. But the downside, as with most things
that good, was that it did bad things to your body (anemia for example)
and your head (why, when I actually feel happy, do I sound so depressed
when talking about Poland to anyone living west of Berlin?).
Writing has always been a means of communicating
the uncommunicable for me. The poems that follow are my attempt at
capturing in pictures and voices a place and a time which no one back
in 1988 imagined would so soon be a part of the past. Yet they are
meant to be more than museum pieces. For there is no possible way of
understanding this part of Europe today without knowing what it was
then. The poems also might explain people, like me, who choose to live
in Gdansk or Prague rather than London or New York.
As for the ex-pat "Lost Generation" tradition of
Americans living abroad, I don't paint or play jazz, I am not Black,
and I landed in Poland (and stayed), not in Paris, so there is no use
in making any comparison there anyway. And, being from a Greek family,
the "myth" I'm challenging is in fact completely different. Short of
world war, total bankruptcy, or the severest of economic depression,
what could justify my undoing all that my parents underwent to
assimilate-not to mention the seasickness which nearly killed my
grandmother to get here and made the motion even of a rocking chair
unbearable for years afterwards?
Still, I might try to explain that being an
American abroad is oftentimes easier than being a hyphenated one at
home, that I no longer have to dread the finger pointing to a puffed
out chest, calling itself "a real American," though I had two great
uncles and two uncles who fought in world wars and one brother-in-law
wounded in Korea-that it was in America, not here in Poland, whree I
have heard "kike" called in the direction of my Jewish friends. (Yes,
there are Jews living here in Poland.)
But I do not mean to idealize the place. My poem
"What Survives" should make that clear. Suffering alone does not give
worth, not to a tea cup any more than a nation. My childhood, too, was
spent hearing "the histories they never taught in school:" the women
taken into the mountains by the guerillas during the Greek civil war,
the Kosher butcher made to slaughter the pig by Cossack soldiers, the
bullet marks covered by eyeliner, the twisted thumb nail after a stint
with the Caracas police, the prison term for writing the wrong kind of
poetry. . . . I grew up in a multi-cultural family long before the term
became fashionable. One of my sisters married a Jew from a Russian
family. Another married a Spaniard whose parents fled Franco's regime
for Venezuela. Besides these relatives were friends as close as
family-Armenian, Black-and even those who had the bad luck to get
involved with the mafia. No, suffering didn't make you "good" any more
than my own bout with childhood arthritis and back surgery did. At best
it only taught you the joy of coming back to life once again-like
Poland since the changes.
There is no getting around it. A choice is
involved. But it has nothing, at least for me, to do with
idealism-least of all masochism. I moved here because this place
captured my imagination once and, like all great love affairs, the
romance still lingers. I stay here because I like it, because I
experience withdrawal if I am away too long. My kids are happy. My
husband is happy. I am never bored. Ever.
To explain what living in Poland means to me as a
writer, I have to go back to the 1980's again. What first struck me was
the silence. Under Communism, the roads were almost as empty as the
shops. The few bars were like badly run parties where the drink runs
out faster than the beer nuts. The only time lots of people were out
and about was for a May Day parade, a strike, or the Pope's visit. What
you did instead was meet indoors around low tables aching with cakes
(cheesecake, coffeecake, babkas, black poppyseed strudels, layered
torts, and so on). You drank tea out of glasses that burned the first
layer of skin off your thumb. And you talked. And talked-until suddenly
you remembered you lived somewhere else and the streetcars had all
stopped running for the night. Which brings me back to the silence.
Being slow at picking up languages and my head still swimming with
squint-making ideograms from two years of living in Tokyo, I took a
while to learn Polish.
So, I watched. At first I appreciated anything I
could understand, an embrace between lovers, a dog's warning bark.
There was safety in the familiar. But it was all an illusion. Only
later did I realize that such epiphanies created no safety net.
My poem "History" illustrates how a landscape,
which elsewhere might constitute a pastoral ideal, in Poland is pure
Kafka. Everything has to do with how the images are assembled. In fact,
apart from the signs displaying crosses on fire which designate the
sites of WWII massacres, none of the other images in "History" are
particularly Polish. Nonetheless, "something bleeding in the road"
gives a political and historical context to the poem that conjures up
the long, painful human history here. We are not talking about roadkill
in rural Michigan.
Then the Polish language started to resemble more
than the sound of my high school boyfriend blowing in my ear at dances
to try and turn me on. I moved from poems principally of image to those
of voice, incorporating, especially, the voices of women I
knew-friends, neighbors, acquaintances. I still took notes of the
things I saw and made countless photographs, often walking for whole
days or riding rickety old buses to villages, where the stork nests
really are big enough to hold babies. But now my muse could talk. And,
as in "The Witness," the last poem in this group, she could even laugh.
The poem "Muddied Feet" first came to me when I
saw a young woman washing bedsheets in a tub outdoors. I then
incorporated a story I had heard of a country woman being spurned by
the staff at a city hospital. The more intimate images came from my own
experiences of giving birth to my first child (pain makes its own
images-and they knock hell out of those sunny islands women are
supposed to envisage between screams). My intent in threading together
image, anecdote and personal experience into this voice poem was to
evoke the oral tradition of women passing on their personal histories
to each other. In this way, I was challenging the icon that the media
in the States had created for Poland: a silent old woman with a
kerchief, standing endlessly in line. My poems "about" women were
indeed meant to disrupt that stereotype as well as all the
simplifications and misconceptions arising from it. All of my poems,
but particularly those that feature the voices of women, can be
regarded as a series of dispatches, my ongoing attempt to get the real
story out.
"The Good Wife" is the most obviously intimate
poem here-but also, to my mind, the most political. The problem with
Communism is it did not work. Not economically, not spiritually. It
corrupted people with every compromise they had to make. And they had
to compromise often.
Most Poles made the most of what was a difficult
situation. Like the "good wife," Poland during these years was not "all
bad." No more than she is any saint now. But Poland does have another
chance to get it right. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Poland
in 1989 was holding its first free elections, experiencing its first
baby steps into the new ironies and complexities of democracy and the
free market, the old Communist strongman Wojciech Jaruzelski and the
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa walking arm in arm, at least in political
cartoons.
So here I am. It's a new beginning for me, too. --Gdansk,
Poland, October 12, 1999
Georgia Scott
History
Rye colored sky. A confetti of slim white birds.
The family of potato pickers, eyes on the ground, move
through swells of dust and sun
leaving the cow chained to the grass
beside the road, a cart horse like a shop girl
droops its head, chewing slow,
the Virgin in an arch of multicolored bulbs
awaits in the shadows for the evening to come on
a police car watches from the trees
something bleeding on the road
the mother pulls the child closer
in the bus shelter, the couple press
together like an envelope without glue
a pond glistens
dogs bark from the village
signs like mushrooms appear
offering forks, beds, crosses on fire
the last to mark the massacre
in the woods outside
that village that on on maps
is nothing but empty space.
Georgia Scott
Small Islands
What can you say? Beyond the words
for children and for tired,
the scars on our bellies tell as much.
The circles around our eyes tell even more.
So many small islands of women.
Standing in the playground between our homes
we heard the news of the shipyard strikes
from a woman in an apron who came running
from sandbox to sandbox. We cleared the shovels.
We took the children inside.
Georgia Scott
Muddied Feet
The pain was great, so great
I didn't care that it rained
and the mud splashed into the wagon
onto my legs.
Whose
legs?
I was all belly now
and one dull claw trying to cut me in half.
By the time I reached the hospital
I could barely stand
but they made me wait. So many doors
and they made me wait.
Oh I could tell
they didn't want me in.
The doctor saw my muddied feet and yelled.
The nurse asked if I brought my soap
and when I said "no" left me
with only my hands to cover myself,
hands smelling of horse.
Afterwards, I had no bribes for the nurses,
nothing to make them come.
I wore the red gown they gave to all the mothers.
I stood at the window and looked out
for a husband with apples in his arms.
Georgia Scott
Ripening in the Dark
A formation of neon birds comes down
stopping just short of the curb
caught it seems by a searchlight or the girl
who holds up the chicken for you to nod
then delivers the guts before your eyes,
bouquets and knotted scarves from a sleeve
into her hand.
A switch flips on.
The Baltic sky darkens and eyes pale.
A fish leaps from a building into a tub of air
it can't escape.
Like snow, the streets clear of people
under the plow of buses in red convoys, scatter
with the shots of bolting doors and step of boots.
The police close in, winding a gray bandage
over the city.
The millions who fell into line all day,
waiting for a door to open and someone to appear
from behind a desk or a counter and say yes,
I am listening, are silent. Their eyes
slip through the iron bars
to the boxes lying open on the floor.
Just this one time
to see the oranges ripen in the dark
and the face in the passport
that calls itself theirs
to smile.
Georgia Scott
What Survives
We drink tea
from her grandmother's cups. Buried in the garden
they outlasted the war.
Tea made cool
by too shallow cups.
I remember my Smyrna aunt
three days with a bone sack over her head
barely breathing for the smell,
fearing she'd be found
by the Turks
and made no nicer for it.
A petty woman with a nervous dog.
What survives
isn't always good.
Georgia Scott
World War II; or, The English
Lesson
It's just too much to say.
The "w's" make a comedy of her mouth.
The lips, so lush in Polish,
wobble back and forth,
do a Marilyn Monroe walk
in skirts so tight
every step is a pain.
Georgia Scott
The Good Wife
I smoke, though I do not smoke.
I stroke his head, though the hair is thin.
I show him the full length of my legs,
raise them up like a bridge.
And I let him make love,
spurting, into my hand.
In this I am faithful to my husband.
Georgia Scott
Anna D. Moves Into a New
Apartment
You can't begin to understand
how wonderful it is.
For years I have waited.
I shared lavatories.
I had no washing machine of my own.
My mother-in-law's cats ate from the counters.
Everywhere their bowls of rotting food.
It's a wonder we weren't all ill.
When friends came to visit I hid them
in my room. I served tea on trays
and shut the door quickly behind me
so they wouldn't see the filth.
It was impossible to have a party.
Only once, when his parents were away,
we called the few friends we had left
and acted like teenagers. We drank and danced
and took color pictures of ourselves
sprawled on their best chairs.
The next day we returned to our whispers,
for his parents took to napping
long into the afternoon. We hushed
the cries of "stop" which mean "go on,"
the time I'd later say I'd fallen,
our children's first sounds.
All of us so nervous.
It was terrible.
I became repulsed by my husband's body.
The whiteness of it. The smell.
I took myself a lover.
Three whole days. Then he left for London.
A friend of mine also had a lover
but only once. She said
it was like brushing her teeth.
As things go, I was lucky.
Wasn't that what I always heard?
Marrying into such a family?
Georgia Scott
Polish Television 1989
The candidates sit in shirt sleeves
patting dogs.
In the lesser towns outside Warsaw,
where the lilacs grow wild in old gardens
and the mothers are tyrannical to their sons' wives
(girls in pointed boots who speak other languages,
work in embassy offices,
and would leave for Glasgow given half the chance),
the sun circles overhead
making good pictures.
They hunch over fishing rods.
They talk with their hands.
In the street outside, two policemen watch
the legs of a woman scissor past, their hats
in their laps.
The candidates smile.
They pat horses.
They nod.
Fetal on the couch, we later watch
the sun from the balconies above
slip down and go lost,
while in a cartoon Jaruzelski walks
on Lech Walesa's bridegroom arm.
Georgia Scott
The Witness
It's been awful. Haven't you heard?
For the past two weeks they've been calling.
My God I haven't slept.
They keep calling
late at night. The first time
they said there'd been an accident.
I should go to the station and give a report.
I said I'd seen no accident.
And they said come down
or we'll come for you ourselves.
So I went.
They said I was a witness.
I said to what? And they laughed.
They said did I ever want a passport,
did I ever want to go abroad again.
Then I laughed.
You know
(she said, taking a sip from her glass)
the little things can matter-
when a colleague goes to lunch
or takes a break.
The littlest things.
More coffee? Or was yours tea?
Zbigniew Machej
The Road North
We were driving north, to the sea,
through a land of dry lips and useless sweat.
All around were empty fields. Forests burned.
The sun stripped the ashen riverbeds,
the stones on the bottom white like bones.
Our hands stuck to the steering wheel, tar
to the car's tires. The wrinkled air
throbbed with heat. Ahead and behind
the horizon blurred. On the radio
just news, ads, and songs
by Michael Jackson. By now almost everywhere
democracy had triumphed, but no one was
happy. The great furnaces had gone out.
Tankers brought water to the cities. Gas
had gone up again. Courage, of course, cost the same.
The authorities were patiently questioning
citizens. Doctors had discovered new, mysterious
infections. The bazaars were hopping, corruption
blossomed, there was an increase in assaults with a deadly
weapon, people told tales of the games
the mafia played. Olympic champions
were eliminated in the first round. In the stadiums
new messiahs worked cures, crowds sang.
Peasant prophecies of the world's end
spread, not just among tourists.
The idolatry of computers compacted
with the superstition of satellite disks. Black icons
wept red tears and mice
fed on the epidermis of the faithful
who miaowed in the churches a miaow
of their own which wearied their God...
We were driving north.
And in the south the wars went on,
states fell apart...
When we got to the sea,
a hundred sailboats under a cloudless sky
sailed into the bay and from the forest onto the shore
the wild boar came
to lap, lap, lap
the salt water.
(Translated from the Polish by Georgia
Scott and David Malcolm)
Krzysztof Piechowicz
Leaves
How they are tricked out
In that cool palace
Of opened
Wide-opened arms
Of fragile larynxes
Of aortas
With what seriousness they practice their bows
In front of the mirror consumed
By the blaze
How proudly they rustle
Their lace of colors
Little daughters of the king
Verily
The Wise Virgins
Readied in their death throes by the fire
Of their own fingers
By the veil of their first blood
To send forth the message
For the Bridegroom's arrival
In the whiteness of ice.
(Translated from the Polish by Georgia
Scott and David Malcolm)
Grzegorz Musial
With Sadness and Precision
at last I've stopped believing
I fell into sleep as into a dry seed
the morning's shovel will dig me up
the bang of the sun on the window, the highway's throb
so I lie in silence, I look at the rectangle of
sky
like the shroud in Lazarus's bed I do not rise up
and deeper and deeper I crumble
into myself
without You
down into myself
(Translated from the Polish by Georgia
Scott and David Malcolm)
Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska
Song from behind the wall
Pigs should be
slaughtered mornings,
don't they take the condemned
to the scaffold at dawn.
The cigarette butt stamped out,
the glass knocked back.
They got up early. He gave away,
he took away a life.
It hurts more in the evening.
It's mistier at dawn
when the day shoves through
the windows of the eye-lids.
We wind the prisoners' path
like in the famous picture,
for us dawn is resurrection
and dusk the ages' sleep
O Lord, give me peace.
The golden mean, I suppose,
but don't leave me
in sterile calm.
Let me no longer fear
the turnings of your planets,
give me space and breadth,
deep after toil
Give me a blue notebook
and an oak desk.
The changeless glow beyond the sea,
beyond the high mountains.
I'm floating away--bring me back
with one kind word.
Give me a blue notebook
and a gilded pen.
(Translated from the Polish by Georgia
Scott and David Malcolm)
Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska
Domestic Song
You'll have as much happiness
as you have string in
your hand,
you'll have as much warmth
as coal in your
cellar,
you'll have as much light
as windows in your
wall,
you'll have as many enemies
as you're able to
obtain.
You'll have as much heart
as the kind you were
born with,
you'll have as much taste
as gall on your lips,
the same amount of freedom
you can walk from
wall to wall,
the same hope
as you can hold there
in your hands.
Your house is as high
as you can reach your
fingers,
the fields as wide
as your eyes can
glean.
And you yourself are your own judge and jury,
you yourself your own prize and pain.
(Translated from the Polish by Georgia
Scott and David Malcolm)
Georgia Scott's The
Good Wife (2002) and The
Penny Bride (2004) are available from Poetry
Salzburg. Dreams
of Fires: 100 Polish Poems 1970-1989, translated
& edited by Zbigniew Joachimiak, David Malcolm &
Georgia Scott (Salzburg: Poetry Salzburg, 2004) is also available.
To purchase a copy or for more information, please
e-mail the editor at editor@poetrysalzburg.com
or visit http://www.poetrysalzburg.com.
Or send $9.50 plus $1.50 for shipping and handling to: Wolfgang
Goertschacher, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, University of
Salzburg, Akademiestr 24, A-5020 Salzburg, Austria. Please send cash,
not checks.
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