Pani K.

My friend, my neighbor, a guest of hers has died in a plane crash far away. I got the news when it happened, thinking I heard something, as if though a wall. I got a call from her tonight. I left a note for her, on my way to work a night or two ago, but what can you say, except a great official mourning for another November 22nd. For the Polish nation, of which many of us are ancestors, no, you don't really want to go into what happened at Catyn Woods. No, you don't want to realize that who knows how many were shot one by one, execution style, in a grim prison, one by one by one. It wasn't all mass mow down, no. But they ended up there, like they say, a lot with a bullet in the base of the neck. You can imagine.

This is the Polish President who came up the street one day, and dropped by to visit. She liked exactly what he stood for. Why be so secular in this day and age--maybe something we need to appreciate about human nature, that gift, troublesome as it seems. Someone who seemed to remember the importance of defying Homo Sovieticos. Defying the cold life-is-meaningless spirit.

I sit and have tea with her. She alludes, but she doesn't go into it. Women stripped naked, whipped about the scalp and further tortured by NKVD, Soviet gestapo.

He was pro-Catholic. He was a veteran of Solidarity movement, as were others on that plane. He thought, along with his brother, that it was worth bringing out the abuses of the old Soviet leaning regime. He seems to have spoken for a truth that goes unsaid, or that people are frightened to speak out about, for reasons of being bullied in bad ways. The old apparatchiks. The old thugs. The old grease the wheels, but in cynical ways and corruption. All the things that this old generous wise neighbor takes a real exception to on every level of her being and moral fiber.

If there is anyone you would trust to calibrate or leave Polish sensibility and art and history to, you would pick her, or her husband, who is gone now, but lives on in dignified spirit. The departed Polish President, wife and family, were friends, and she a friend of theirs. Connected to each, to many, and loving all, even me enough to call in the midst of all this, she is someone, someone alive. God bless her, and the Polish nation.



The notion strikes me today that I must qualify the above and apologize for its sentimentality. One meant to say there are lovely people in the world, like my neighbor, and that things come along in life that effect them deeply. One wants to share, to say to random strangers and friends, the things that make them sad, so that events don't just slip away down the hole of what was yesterday without being acknowledged. I think going by one of my old haunts, Bourbon, in Glover Park, my appearance provoking a shot or two clinked over the bar after my shift last night, had something to do with it. Maybe it is a reference to James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an homage paid, that invites one to qualify and re-qualify, as in the habit of modern master David Foster Wallace too.

There is an epic poem for the Poles, Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz. The Polish lady next door gave me once a rare English translation of this, and I must confess I haven't been able to get very far with it. The poem rises to present a vision of Poland as a Christ amongst nations, and indeed Poland and her people have suffered, and kept true to their faith.

As Buddha tells us, violence only begets violence. Therefore, politics will only beget more politics. One diatribe will only raise another from someone with another point of view. So must I apologize for my outburst of nationalistic sentiment, and only hope that there is some sentiment somewhere... Ahh, yes, Buddha tells us the self is an illusion. What one thinks one day, well, the next day it could be quite different. Still, there are beautiful old neighbors in the world, ones with good karma, who share suffering in the spirit of ... well... love, I suppose.

Did the New Yorker do anything about this?