A Long Long Time Ago And Essentially True

“After suffering so many invasions from the Russians, Tatars, Ottomans, Turks, Cossacks, Prussians, and good God, even the Swedes, it is a primal instinct of all Poles everywhere to fence and wall in what belongs to us.”

This sardonically humorous comment relates to Czesław’s first building project. He proposes a wall around the Hetmański property. Boundary issues have always been a concern for Poland, given the numerous invaders who claimed land. Even in a peaceful rural setting, the people heed a territorial imperative.

“I love the afterglow of films, the nimbus of hope and idealism that follows you out from the cinema. The world opens wide, dreams seem close enough to touch, and anything is possible.”

Beata describes her trip to a Kraków movie theater. Even in her home village, she felt the lure of the cinema. Throughout the novel, Beata has difficulty defining a dream for herself, not realizing that her dream job is staring her in the face every time she watches a film.

“My naive little góralka. There is an enormous difference between knowing about something and having the freedom to speak about it.”

Irena is addressing Beata in this quote. The people in the big city perceive the górale highlanders as slow-witted rustics. Irena’s comment implies that Beata doesn’t understand how the world works. For much of the story, Irena believes that a painful past should be suppressed.

“Everyone she mentions is an artist, a writer, a singer, a musician, or a journalist, all of them alternately tolerated, ignored, harassed, blacklisted, and exiled throughout the seventies and eighties.”

Irena has been telling Beata about her friends during the days when she was still an artist. Based on what happened to them, Irena considers being a member of the arts community in communist Poland too risky. Irena learned that speaking freely carried grave risk.

“After the morning out with Irena, I start to hear more stories like Irena’s, stories that Nela left out. On the street. From strangers. And it seems they have been here all along. […] I start to hear the people around me all talking about the old days. The War. The Trains. The Secret Police. The Shortages.”

Beata lived an isolated life with Nela in the remains of Half-Village. Because Nela wanted to turn her back on the outer world, Beata was aware of the repressive atmosphere in the country. Now that Beata is in Kraków, she becomes conscious of the misery and sadness that afflicted the entire country before she was born.

“I know now there will be no Big Life for me. […] At least when I was in the village I could imagine something on the horizon. Here in the city […] the only thing I can see is the crumb trail of obligations leading me from one day to the next.”

Beata is still processing the death of her grandmother. Consequently, she spends so much time looking back that she never contemplates moving forward. Although she envies Magda’s aspirations for a “Big Life,” she has given no thought to her own desires. At this point, she doesn’t think she has any.

“‘Do you ever think you’ll go back to painting?’ She looks over at me, a little surprised. ‘Phooh. There’s no time for painting in the New Poland. No one cares about those things anymore. Not even me.’”

In the preceding quote, Beata belies a lack of direction. In this quote, Irena demonstrates that she’s suppressing her own. She rationalizes her refusal to return to art by saying that no one cares in the New Poland. In fact, the New Poland is the one place where she might be allowed to practice her craft freely.

“Your whole generation. You have freedoms we only dreamed about. The whole world is open to you, and what are you doing with it? You go to the same mediocre jobs every day and sit around my living room.”

Irena accuses Beata of being a slacker without recognizing the irony of her statement. She wants the younger generation to accomplish great things but excuses herself by saying that she’s too old. She vicariously lives through Magda’s potential accomplishments, pushing her daughter to excel in law school. Fortunately, she soon recognizes the need to do something constructive with her own life.

“After their homes had been looted, their food rationed, their children forced into Baudienst, their daughters and sisters raped, their priests taken away, the górale always somehow cultivated enough hope to maintain a relatively normal life. Życie. Or at least życie na niby. Life as if.”

This quote details the oppression and trauma that the highlanders experienced during the Nazi occupation. However, it also highlights their ability to survive appalling circumstances and continue to carry on as if life is good. This attitude, more than anything else, explains their capacity to endure the most adverse conditions.

“Under the table, I can feel my fingers anxiously bending and straightening, contorting and contracting, contracting, hovering around the space inside myself that I can feel opening up, demanding to be filled by something grand.”

Beata is about to ask Bożena if she can film the old woman. The idea of actually using the video camera offers the first glimmer of hope in her dull existence. She describes the restless activity of her fingers as she contemplates this plan. Beata’s own golden hands are coming to life.

“You can go all the way to the wealthy suburbs of Argentina and back, and you will still never be able to find the rat who rounded up your neighbors, who shot your girlfriend, who clipped short your education, and who forced you to spend four years in a dirt cellar with your parents.”

This quote describes the mindset of Marysia’s Jewish brother. He only briefly enters the story, defending his sister from Nazi rapists. Then, he joins the Polish army solely to kill as many Germans as possible. The above statement suggests that he can never even the score for the atrocities committed against his people.

“And just like the people suffering on the retrospectives and the grandmothers and grandfathers at the tram stops who talk about the war as if it ended only a few weeks ago, Irena needed a witness.”

Beata has just accompanied Irena to her ex-husband’s grave and heard the story of his abusive behavior. This is the first time in the novel that Irena opens up about her painful past. Giving voice to her misery is therapeutic because Beata doesn’t judge Irena’s life choices in marrying the man. She simply witnesses the confession, just as her video camera later does for those she interviews.

“‘You know, you don’t have to take the exam just because my mother wants you to.’ ‘No, your mother is right. I’m going to be twenty-three soon. What else am I going to do?’ ‘Anything you want,’ she says. ‘After all, anything is possible in the New Poland.’”

Magda is advising Beata to dream big. Beata is ready to take advantage of the new freedom offered to the people but is so used to being told what to do that she has never even ventured to ask what she wants for herself. Blind obedience has been the norm for so long that Magda’s question seems strange to her.

“They knew, of course, that the freedom was temporary, and that somewhere in the distance, Responsibility, Hardship, and Authority waited to catch them under the arms and set them back into their grooves. But for now, there was only unfettered joy, an absence of walls and bombs.”

The war has just ended, and the communists have “liberated” the Polish people. The end of deprivation is a reason to celebrate, but the people are aware that they’ve merely exchanged one autocracy for another. They perceive freedom and liberation as only temporary states because the country still doesn’t belong to them.

“Grandmother had never talked about politics to me before because there were so many sad endings in politics, but she must have believed that there was a happy ending somewhere out there because this time, she glowed with excitement as she told me about the protests and the strikes in the shipyards and steel mills in Gdansk and Katowice. There was freedom just around the corner, Nela promised me, and she wanted to live to see it.”

This quote describes the Solidarity movement of the 1980s that led to the downfall of communism in Poland. Despite Anielica’s stoic acceptance of foreign domination throughout much of her life, she seems to believe that freedom might actually be possible for her people. However, being granted freedom and knowing how to use it are two different things, as Beata later learns.

“I feel the flush of shame slowly condensing into rivulets of resentment. Kinga’s, Tadeusz’s, Magda’s, mine. It’s the resentment of an entire country, the muddied expectations of a whole generation collecting in the great cavern in my belly, seething, simmering, bubbling.”

Beata is about to confront the Englishman who recently propositioned Kinga. His friends have just implied that Polish girls are only interested in sex. Beata’s anger at the insult is more than personal. For a generation, foreigners exploited the people of Poland, so this is merely a new version of an old, old story.

“It starts to feel like my entire life is a television retrospective, nothing to look forward to, all the people I was once close to parading by, stuck on one of those moving walkways like they have in Warsaw now. My parents. Nela. My classmates from liceum. My neighbors. Tadeusz. Even Irena.”

Beata once again perceives her life as on hold. To some degree, circumstances may limit her options, but her central problem is her inability to choose a path. While she’s stuck in the past, she can’t set a course for a better future. This passivity, simply the result of her belief that she has no options, amounts to self-sabotage.

“In the New Poland, the truths were separated from the untruths by decibels. The untruths were now proclaimed loudly with a brass band. […] Meanwhile, everything real was whispered, passed softly and meticulously from one person to the next.”

Anielica perceives this truth shortly after the end of the war. The New Poland is simply the Old Poland with a new set of overlords. Propaganda passes for truth because the communist rulers hope that their forceful assertions of fact will be accepted. However, their noise can’t drown out the truths that are spoken privately in whispers.

“That was the whole problem, really. By the spring of 1947, everything was moving Toward the Bright Future. The construction and reconstruction was happening so rapidly that the streets from one day to the next became unrecognizable.”

After the war, Kraków is rushing to repair and rebuild. However, the shiny new facades can’t eradicate the people’s deeply felt injuries. This is simply a mad rush to conceal the structural damage as a salve to soothe the psyche of an entire country. Just as the builders seek to hide the evidence of the war, individuals seek to bury their tragedies by never speaking about them. Both approaches are wrong in that they do not truly allow people to confront their pain.

“She knew by now that he was dead. Her father would still talk about when the Pigeon would return, and her mother would reassure her that she would be back in Kraków before Sylwester, but Anielica knew in her gut already that he was gone, that her own life would end in Half-Village, and the next forty or fifty years—God willing—would be merely living out the means.”

Anielica has accepted her fate. She chooses to remain frozen in the past and doesn’t envision a better future for herself or her offspring. This quote predicts a monotonous series of days strung together for five decades. The words are prophetic since this is precisely the sort of non-life that Anielica will live because she has chosen to do so.

“It seems impossible to me that the world has gone on eating and watching television and cheating on their wives, that the people on the street don’t stop even for a split second to acknowledge the gaping hole where Magda used to be.”

Beata has fallen into a deep depression over Magda’s death. She’s punishing herself for being alive even though her cousin is gone. Consequently, she tries to shut life out by entombing herself inside Bożena’s apartment building. At many points in the novel, Beata demonstrates a tendency to take on guilt that she doesn’t deserve.

“To say the truth, there is a part of me that never wants to see Irena again, that wants to let the memory of her and Magda fade and dissipate. Because sometimes it’s easier to move on than to keep walking around the same hole in the floor. Sometimes it’s easier to make new friends than to keep returning to family.”

Initially, Beata contemplates a strategy of avoidance. She doesn’t consciously realize that this tactic is what keeps everyone stuck in the past. It might seem easier to avoid her relatives and to avoid talking about painful memories, but these never go away until they’re confronted and spoken aloud.

“As it turns out, my góralka hands, the ones that Irena used to joke were good for plucking chickens and shearing sheep, are also good for digging inside people, pulling out family roots and scrabbling under the dust for memories. And my góralka eyes turn out to be good at picking out the glimmers of dreams and the pockmarks of regret.”

This quote contrasts with the preceding one to demonstrate Beata’s change of attitude. After the catharsis she experiences by expressing her grief to Czesław, she no longer wants to hide from past regrets. She’s now using her video camera and her golden hands to fix what is broken in other people by making them express what they’ve kept hidden for decades.