by GAITHER STEWART
The Polish word, jestem—‘I am’, ‘here I am’, ‘present’—seems to define the life of the writer and cult figure for a generation, Andrzej Kusniewicz. On an overcast, pollution-infested Warsaw afternoon over thirty years ago in his crowded study in a surprisingly bourgeois apartment in a quiet residential area of the capital city, the poet-novelist insisted on the Polish word and the multiple occasions of his life when he answered jestem. I, the interviewer, came to feel he had earned a right to the word. For all his life he had been ‘present’—so in contrast to the past about which he wrote.
‘Jestem, I always answered when my parents called me—a Jewish child in Polish Galicia—for unusual tasks in unusual places in those unusual times.’ Kusniewicz answered ‘present’ when called to fight against the Nazi invaders of Operation Barbarossa. He was ‘present’ in the French Resistance. ‘Present’ in Mauthausen concentration camp. ‘Present’ in the Polish United Workers Party. ‘Present’ as a Polish Communist diplomat of the new post-World War II Poland. ‘Present’ as a writer in Poland. When called to act, he answered: jestem. And his life ‘presences’ were indeed many. Errant Quixote. Internal immigrant. Soldier. Resistance warrior. Death camp inmate. Communist. Diplomat. Poet. Novelist.
But today, end of the 1980s, stillness reigned in his life and he didn’t seem like a cult figure at all.
In those 1980s, people of Warsaw felt the approaching uncertainties of the end of a period. Familiar spaces were becoming less familiar. In those great spaces reaching from Russia to West Europe the sense of abandonment was perceptible. East European air was contaminated like that of Warsaw. Conspiracy-infected air. Power was changing hands. People like Kusniewicz were lonely, and their number was accumulating. Lonely people abandoned in familiar spaces that were lonely too. The uncertainty of social-political loneliness spread epidemically. Eastwards and westwards it spread. Time seemed to be running out. Feelings of displacement mounted, invasive shape-shifting aliens infiltrated society. DNAs were mutating. Unaffiliated and traitorous leaders-presidents had declared war on the peoples abandoned in those unusual spaces. People no longer knew who they were. Or where they were. People no longer counted as once. Engulfed by bushfire revolts running wild. Old vigils in the East tottered; artificial infections were hatched in the Western faraway. Pandemic change-renewal infected ancient spaces, contaminating its ancient abandoned peoples. Nature too was in rebellion. Gray skies hung low in the great lonely cities. Cities themselves lonely. Pure air was found only high in the Carpathians, in the Alps, in the Urals; people were confined to tight polluted spaces down below. Nature gives and nature takes away. Animal life was oblivious. Nature neutral. Only faintly echoed lonely voices like that of Andrzej Kusniewicz.
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