Heaven Tree

Essays on classical arts, literature, aesthetics, and the aesthetic experience East and West.

Sleeping with my grandfather

November 11, 2006 in Uncategorized
Tags: Love, Poland

Like many life-threatening adventures, my passage through the Scylla and Charybdis — the Treiskirchen refugee camp – at impressionable 17, brought me many gifts, but by far the dearest was the opportunity to room, for 3 months, with my maternal grandfather, a refugee like the rest of us. Each night we turned out the lights at 9 or 10 PM, tucked in, he on the bunk bed, I on an improvised mat on the floor, and we talked.

Or rather, he talked.

Perhaps he enjoyed the freedom of these conversations — the age gap meant that we revolved in separate worlds, so he could talk to me openly, without the need to dissimulate too much (there was no way I could tell on him to anyone that mattered).

And perhaps our conversations became for him the memoir he never wrote, a way to have his final say, to make a summation, or synthesis of the 71 years which had gone before: a kind of ethereal Ramkamhaeng Stella, not of letters carved in stone, but of ephemeral impressions deposited in the memory of his eldest grandson.

I was glad to listen because I was eager to know the land upon which I was about to embark – the land of adulthood – from the lips of a witness who had been there.

The land of adulthood looms so terrifying at 17, to us who have had as yet no way to learn anything about it. It is a fear our elders stoke and exploit in order to drive us into life choices which address their fears rather than ours: the fear we may not make it financially and thus lean on them forever, and the fear we may choose a life which does not validate the choices they had made. (Don’t you want to live the way we have? Or do you perhaps think we have been foolish to dedicate ourselves to plastics/ fatherland/ whatever? Do you not respect us?)

It is by their fears that we are compelled to make binding decisions about our future – the choice of career in particular – at this tender age, long before we have had a chance to peep out of the sheltering walls of our homes and the anti-life of schools, before we have seen anything of the vast land of adulthood with which we are constantly threatened but about which we are being asked to decide here, now, all the same. The Germans have a word which describes this system well: Idiotisch.

To talk to an adult who does not have an agenda for us – it is such a rare commodity at 17.

And, come to think about it, always.

*

These late-night conversations with my grandfather have changed my life in many ways.

One thing they did was to teach me a slice of history of Eastern Europe of which I had been completely ignorant, which is not to be found in the textbooks or in any of the officially abridged versions, and which yet had played such an important role in determining everything which followed; and which happens to be also that slice of history from which I grew, like a weed sprouting from black soil. What started out for me as a way of looking into the future, into the land of adulthood, became also a way of looking into the past, and seeing how the future emerges sinuously and seemlessly out of it.

You see, had it not been for the late night talks with my grandfather I would have never learned about many things which have shaped me: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Ruthenian nation, the Church Salvinic Rite, the Commonwealth of Both Nations (tendentiously misrepresented in Polish textbooks as Poland), and about the people who as recently as 1930s called themselves “locals”.

And it is a fascinating story.

Listen.

*

There had once existed in the vast plain of the Dnieper a people whom we today call Ruthenians – and whom all Slavs called Rus’ (the apostrophe indicates a softening, a whispy sort of “sh”). Ruthenians were an Eastern Slavic speaking nation, Church-Slavonic in rite, with a capital in Kiev. Following the Mongol invasions, the state imploded and the people fell into dispersal. The dispersal resulted in the nation’s break up and the eventual rise out of its stock of several new nations, including Russians.

Russians, you see, for a long time were only known to the world – and themselves – as “Muscovy”, which meant to those who knew what it meant, “a remote Ruthenian principality centered upon the city of Moscow”. The beautiful Russian tongue for many centuries was thought by many to be nothing but a rude provincial dialect of what everyone (except Russians) called ruskii – Ruthenian.

(The other present-day nation-states descended from Ruthenia are Ukraine and Byelorussia).

In the wake of the Mongol invasion, the Ruthenian state ceased to exist. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, heretofore a not so grand affair on the shores of the Baltic, expanded into this vacuum and thus many Ruthenians became the subjects of the Lithuanian state.

The Lithuanians had been Baltic speakers but, once in Ruthenia, they became like all the barbarians who have ever conquered China: they adopted the local language and dress and form of government. Ruthenian became the administrative language of their state; the Lithuanian military caste became Ruthenians in language, custom, political practice; indeed, in everything but name; and Ruthenians, much of whose gentry was accepted into the ranks of and intermarried with the Lithuanian military caste, remained Ruthenians in everything but name, and now came to call themselves – Lithuanians.

But nothing in the cauldron of Eastern Europe remains constant for long. Change follows change, one twist another. And soon there was one.

Through a dynastic union, the Grand Duchy fused with neighboring Poland, a Western Slavic nation, to create an entity which for the next 300 years was to dominate Easter Europe: The Commonwealth of Both Nations, in all official documents referred to as Res Publica, viz. “the common good”. Polish history textbooks unabashedly call this entity Poland (as did our western neighbors), but the truth is that rarely did anyone in the country refer to it by that name. Lithuanians, for one, would not permit it.

And the name, Res Publica, reflected its infinite richness and variety. Poles were the largest ethnic group in the state, but Poles themselves were not a solid entity: they were divided by provincial loyalties and religion (many, for some time, having become Protestants); and there were also all those others: Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Jews, Germans, Armenians, Greeks, Tartars, Italians. Had there been bus stops back then, they would have looked like the bus stops in India today at which one is liable to see seven people, each different color: one black, one wheatey, one white, one in western clothes, one in a traditional kurta-pajama, one in lungi, all right next to a woman in a midriff baring sari and another one in a burka (with an occasional, stark-naked, “sky-clad” Jain mendicant lurking somewhere behind the bus stop).

Growing up in modern Poland, as I did, a dreadfully uniformly ethnically Polish, and Catholic, nation, it is not easy to imagine that only 100 years ago the land looked infinitely more interesting, teaming with a variety of peoples, resounding with a variety of prayers in a multitude of tongues, scented with a variety of foods. I owe my acquisition of this vision to my grandfather.

*

But back to our Ruthenians.

Within the borders of Res Publica, another process of transnatiation took place with the Lithuanian ruling class rapidly polonizing, adopting both the language and the style of “Poles” (perhaps because the universities were in the Polish part, and printing houses, and books, and because the kings gradually came to reside there more and more). Yet, Lithuanians (former Ruthenians among them) guarded most vigilantly their status as administratively separate body within the Polish Commonwealth. (Only “Lithuanians” were allowed to hold high offices in the Lithuanian part of the Commonwealth). So the Ruthenian gentry who had become Lithuanian gentry have now become Polish. A little self-consciously they said about themselves: gente Ruthenii, natione Polonii, while all that time clinging onto their fictitious legal status as Lithuanii.

And then (1795) came the Russian conquest whose unwritten agenda was to undercut (if not quite eradicate) the recalcitrant Polish-Lithuanian gentry in the name of liberating the “oppressed” Ruthenian people. (Our people — Russians — only they had not yet quite seen the light).

So now, can you see how calling oneself “local”, under these circumstances, had the distinct advantage of not entering into disputes such as “Who is a Pole? Who is a Lithuanian? And, what on earth is Ruthenia and where is it?”

Locals it was, then.

My grandfather’s family were locals. They were once Ruthenian gentry turned Lithuanian minor nobility turned Polish szlachta. But if anyone put them on the spot, they would say: we are from here, we are locals.

(Today, most former “locals” from once eastern Poland call themselves Byelorussians, the rest – Poles. The legacy of the 20th century is that there is no room for locals anymore: only approved nations may exist).

*

Now put yourself in my shoes.

Every day of my life I am asked by some new acquaintance or another: where are you from?

I usually answer: “from Poland”.

Why? Well, that I left aged 16, and that I had not been there since 1994, and spent there the sum total of 18 months of my adult life does not seem worth explaining to casual acquaintances. “From Poland” is an answer which seems to satisfy my interlocutors. To their minds, it means something. There is a peg on which they can hang me. Apparently.

Though what peg, exactly, I am not sure. For almost invariably most follow this with: “Funny, you don’t sound Polish”.

(This always puzzles me. I didn’t know the world had such a plurality of authorities capable of spotting the fine nuance of the Polish accent).

But, well, no, I don’t sound Polish. So I could console my interlocutors, I suppose, in their cognitive dissonance: for while I do not sound Polish, perhaps I do sound “local”? Perhaps that is what I should say, henceforth: I am local.

Like Czeslaw Milosz who used to say about himself, with a smirk: “I am from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania”.

So am I, on the distaff side.

I wonder how that would work in self introductions.

*

So now you know what I mean when I say that my grandfather’s family were “locals”. They were small gentry, and unlike the upper crusts of the Lithuanian gentry of whom most became either Catholic or Protestant, they -remained Greek Catholics in rite. They spoke Polish, prayed in Church Slavonic, in the orthodox rite, crossed themselves with three fingers, and in the 1863 uprising against Russia bore arms under the old flag of Lithuania: it is called Pogon, the Chase. It shows an armed man, sinister, galloping on horseback, with a sword raised over his head.

None of this is allowed today. The upheavals of nationalism have created a new reality in which Poles speak Polish, but genuflect in the Roman manner, Greek Catholics are Byelorussian, or Ukrainian, and have nothing to do with Poles. And nobody even remembers The Grand Duchy.

*

Another background note is perhaps in order – and another historical curio for the curious: The Greek Catholic Church.

It is a branch of the Church-Slavonic church.

Now, the Slavonic Church came into existence in the 9th century when two Byzantine missionaries, Cyril and Methodius (who were either Macedonians or Bulgarians), translated the Gospels and the Greek liturgy into a Slavic language (of a then powerful nation named Moravia, today a province of the Czech Republic). This now dead language, used only in liturgy – it is the language in which assorted Slavs — Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians – and even some non-Slavs, like Rumanians, non-Slavic – but Church-Slavonic – pray. It is a wonderful tongue, with 12 cases and 39 conjugations. To Slavic ears it imparts the sensation of primordial complexity bordering on chaos, from which in time a much simpler, much more pedestrian modernity will emerge.

(Here is an obscure fact for the lovers of curious antiquities. Throughout the middle ages fierce debates often erupted within the Catholic Church regarding the question in what languages it was permissible to offer mass. For centuries, Catholic theologians thought there were only three: Greek, Latin, and Church Slavonic. So much for the primacy of the Germanic tongues).

So that’s the Church Slavonic rite for you. But who are Greek Catholics?

Well, in 1595, in order to forestall Moscow’s claims to religious authority over all Church-Slavonic faithful, a union was negotiated between the Catholic and Church-Slavonic churches within the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Church Slavonic rite in Poland became known as “Greek Catholic”, or Uniate; the church kept is rites, its language, its separate organization, and its theology; and pretty much complete administrative autonomy; in exchange it recognized the nebulous concept of “the dogmatic authority of the Pope” (and the Pope’s right to approve new bishops). The rite still exists. It remains the majority religion in the Ukraine (once a possession of the Grand Duchy of Liuthuania). My friend and guest, Rudy Carrera, is Ukrainian Orthodox, that is, Uniate, that is Greek Catholic. (He tells a very beautiful story of his conversion. Ask him). And so were my maternal grandfather’s family.

*

And these facts put on the ground hundreds of years ago, obscure little footnotes in the history of the world, now came to play themselves out upon my family, like an epidemic disease upon the tender body of a child.

Following the disastrous 1863 uprising of the Polish-Lithuanian-local gentry against Russian rule – in which my family fought under the banner of Pogon – an uprising which burnt longer and more vicious in eastern Poland than elsewhere – the Russian government cracked down on “locals”. Henceforth there would be no Greek Catholic Church, all Greek Catholic faithful were deemed Church-Slavonic, and therefore Russian-Orthodox, and therefore Russians, and therefore no longer under the special legal status reserved within the Russian state for Polish gentry. Their noble titles were cancelled and their lands seized.

Thus, at a stroke, my grandfather’s family were reduced to the legal status of Russian peasants. Out of atavism, perhaps, or perhaps out of their stubborn commitment to remain what they have been for so long, they refused the new label and persisted in calling themselves “locals”.

They also refused to attend the Russian Orthodox church. Many converted to Catholicism, among them the family of my grandfather’s father (because Catholicism was both legal and not Russian). Others remained stubbornly without sacraments rather then step into a Russian tzerkev. And so my grandfather’s maternal grandparents, staunchly local, lived and bred in a union unblessed by the church and unrecognized by the state, and only married in 1919, in their sixties, when the revival of the Polish state allowed the return of the Greek Catholic rite.

(You see, “local” may not be much of a name, but it can inspire its own fierce loyalty).

Their wedding, described to me by my grandfather, seven days long, attended by four hundred people, including a hundred of the extended family, with their children, grandchildren and grand-grandchildren, a wedding for which they slaughtered seventeen cows and thirty four pigs, 700 hens, 500 ducks, and 200 rabbits, at which 7 orchestras played simultaneously, and after which the whole county remained drunk for another week, plays in my imagination the role of the archetypal family wedding, like the wedding in Deer Hunter (are the heroes in the film Ukrainians, or are they locals? The film does not seem to specify). It is the only such wedding I have ever experienced in my family, and it came to me by proxy, through my grandfather’s words. (Only in my forties, in India, would I see weddings like that; I recognized them instantly).

*

The administrative redefinition following the uprising of 1863 was a disaster to my grandfather’s family. Some men were drafted in the Russian army for the compulsory 25 year service. (One of my great uncles served 25 years in Afghanistan in 1870s and 1880s. Today, distant relatives are there again, this time part of the NATO force. How strange, and how far afield, wind the paths of locals, and how global are our political interests!).

Some emigrated, mostly to America. (Perhaps some lurk as extras in the Deer Hunter wedding. One, a furrier, returned, overland, by way of Alaska and Siberia in 1918, right through the heart of the Russian revolution, unscathed, with wife, 7 children, and with a cartful of Siberian furs).

The rest, reduced to penury, cast about for professions with which to make a living. Several of my great-great-uncles became furriers. Others – like my great-grandfather, turners. He was a skilled woodworker and built church altars for Catholic Churches and iconostases for the Orthodox ones. And when Russia collapsed in the 1917 revolution and Poland regained its independence a year later, also Greek Catholic ones, now legal again. Several of them remain in the villages surrounding Biala Podlaska, in Eastern Poland, and I have seen them. He was no Michelangelo, but it was respectable, decent, capable work. Chris Miller would have liked his Virgins and his St Judes.

(to be continued)