Nuns and Soldiers Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gomulka had been succeeded by Gierek. (The Count’s father would have hated him too.) The Polish government, which had previously regarded exiled Poles as traitors, now began sagely to woo its diaspora. The Count was amazed to receive communications with Polish stamps, periodicals in English and Polish, literary journals, questionnaires, propaganda, news. He was surprised and oddly gratified to find that they knew he existed. His father would have been alarmed, suspicious. (He felt less flattered later when he realized they could simply have searched the telephone book for Polish names.) He devoured these offerings but did not reply. There was, he felt, nothing for him at the other end, and nothing for them either. There was nothing he could do for Poland. The bureaucratic missives touched his heart, yet they were love letters sent to the wrong address. Like his father he had, in his own way, interiorized Poland, he was his own Poland, suffering alone. In spite of all his childhood resistance, his father had taught him a burning searing patriotism which flamed on, endlessly, vainly.
    He spoke of this to no one, and received indeed little encouragement to do so. No one came close enough to him to suspect the intensity of this secret life. No one was really interested in his nationality or even in his nation. Was Poland invisible? He meditated often upon the fact that England had entered the war for the sake of Poland. (So, in a sense, had everyone. Mourir pour Danzig? ) But in England this meant nothing now, was forgotten. It was, of course, an accident of history at what point, in those terrible years, England and France decided to draw the line. Everyone seemed to think of Poland, if thinking of it at all, in a sort of mechanical diplomatic sense as part of some more general problem: as a constituent of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as one of the ‘eastern democracies’. The eternal ‘Polish question’ was never, it appeared, really about Poland at all, but about some use to which Poland could be put or some hindrance which Poland represented in the larger designs of others. No one seemed to perceive or appreciate that unique burning flame of Polishness which though still dimmed by a ruthless neighbour continued to burn as it had always done.
    Such reflections (and they were frequent) bred in the Count a sort of frustrated fantasy heroism, as of one cheated of his inheritance and awaiting a call to arms. He had a heroic role in the world, though he knew that it was an impossible one which he would never find. In reality, he was not a crusader. (He gave money to causes but never attended their meetings.) He felt now in a new way that he was alone with his father. Admiration and love and yearning reached out mournfully towards that shade. His father had been an exile and a thinker and a gentleman, a brave man and a patriot, a man lost, destroyed, disappointed, and laid to ruins. He had died with finis poloniae written upon his heart. The Count, measuring by that stature his own meagre being, soberly translated his ‘heroism’ into a sort of negative sense of honour. He would never die for Poland, as his father would have done if he could, gladly and without a second’s hesitation. But he could avoid any baseness which might demean that memory, and could cultivate a narrow moral stiffness with which to resist the world. Such was his honour. He knew that his father had, all his life, seen himself as a soldier. The Count too saw himself as a soldier, but a very ordinary soldier with a soldier’s dullness and circumscribed lot and extremely small chance of glory.
     
     
    When the Count was over thirty he received a tardy promotion and moved from his obscure department to the Home Office, and here he met Guy Openshaw who was the head of his section. Guy won his heart by asking him questions. The Count was a phenomenon. Guy liked phenomena. Guy never asked quite the questions which the Count wanted, and the questioning never