A Warsaw Chronicle

By Carol Hebald

A Warsaw Chronicle, depicts the poignant  portrait  of  Karolina  Heybald,  an  American exchange professor at a Polish university during the 1981 advent of martial law. The nation is torn between the Communist regime, the Solidarity opposition movement and the imminent threat of Soviet invasion. In the mid

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regal House Publishing
• Release date: Mar 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780991261253

Carol Hebald

Carol Hebald taught creative writing at the university level for thirteen years before resigning to write full time. She has since published the novella collection, Three Blind Mice (Unicorn Press, 1989), the memoir, The Heart Too Long Suppressed (Northeastern University Press, 2001); and more recently four books of poetry: Delusion of Grandeur (2016), Colloquy (2015), Spinster by the Sea (2005), and Little Monologs (2004). Carol lives in New York and is currently working on a play about the Watergate heroine Martha Mitchell.

Book preview

A Warsaw Chronicle

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Copyright © 2017 by Carol Hebald

First published as a Regal House paperback 2017

Published by arrangement with

Regal House Publishing, LLC, Raleigh 27607

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All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN -13: 978-0-9912612-3-9

Cover photography by Valery Sidelnykov and observe.co/Shutterstock

Regal House Publishing, LLC.

www.regalhousepublishing.com

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the members of Dorothy Helly’s Narrative Writing Group for their editorial suggestions on the expansion of this novel.

Special thanks also to the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where portions of this novel were written or revised.

I am indebted to John Turner for his excellent technical assistance.

Finally, my gratitude to Regal House editors Ruth Feiertag, Jaynie Royal, Pim Wiersinga and Elizabeth Lowenstein for their helpful notes on the final draft of this novel.

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Advance Praise for The Warsaw Chronicle

A Warsaw Chronicle is a powerful and moving story set against the backdrop of martial-law Poland (1981-82), one of the most dramatic periods of twentieth-century European history.

Michael Mandelbaum, author of Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era

Carol Hebald’s A Warsaw Chronicle is a wonderful book that evokes the deceptive and dangerous atmosphere of Warsaw under the communist regime. Among her students, the eponymous professor Karolina Heybald recognizes and is drawn to a budding young male poet whose gifts, she hopes, will flourish with a fellowship to the States. But around the young man, the jealousy and scheming is thick and ominous—and darkly fascinating...

Rosa Shand, author of The Gravity of Sunlight

This fine novel shook me and taught me. The complexity of the shift to martial law and the resistance of the Solidarity movement to that change in Poland is depicted in quick, effective brushstrokes. I felt for Karolina, a visiting professor of literature from the United States who becomes involved in situations way beyond her experience. She’s sophisticated about the literature she teaches, but naive about Realpolitik, tension that makes her the perfect fulcrum between the student Marek and his father Adam, a Communist official, who represent different aspects of the conflict. When Karolina’s innocent search for her father’s Jewish past unearths a secret never meant to be revealed, she comes into danger, bringing to life the idea that the personal is political.

Alice Elliott Dark, author of In the Gloaming and Think of England

Carol Hebald is a masterful writer, her prose consistently intelligent, probing, and, withal, beautiful. Karolina, an American professor visiting at Warsaw University, must deal with spies, lies, missing letters, and her own ambivalence. The main characters, vividly rendered, form a most unusual triangle, their voices and views so clear and distinct they could be in a play—or real life. Hebald has produced a tragedy specific to our times and as timelessly resonant as Sophocles. The final pages are heart-stopping.

Kelly Cherry, author of Twelve Women in a Country Called America and A Kelly Cherry Reader

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Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.

Franz Kafka, 1913

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A Word From the Author

In telling this story, my characters cite references and lines from poems that are meaningful to them.

I refer to a line from Hart Crane’s poem, For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen, from The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 28.

Karolina quotes a line from Theodore Roethke’s I Knew a Woman, from Words for the Wind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), p.151.

Karolina quotes line two from Epistle II of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, from the Third Edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), p. 1177.

The Black Madonna refers to the revered icon of the Virgin Mary in Czestochowa, Poland.

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To the memory of my father

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Part One

On Saturday night, December 12, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, under threat of Soviet invasion, declared martial law in Poland. Polish Solidarity in its hope for democratic reform was wiped out in one blow. A nation of thirty-six million people was cordoned off from the world.

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Karolina in Warsaw

December 13, 1981.

This morning when I rose, all the clocks had stopped. I dressed quickly and came out into the street.

It was a dark morning. Never, never was there such darkness. Rain poured down continuously, the coldest, gloomiest rain, threatening, and full of animosity. I had on a thin white raincoat. I wore no boots.

I must have walked over a mile. The shadows of houses oppressed me: Flat, tin-roofed structures rebuilt from the burnt-out ruins of the Second World War. Not one light was burning. It seemed all Warsaw was asleep. I felt stiff and hungry from the cold, and in such utter loneliness, I began mistaking my footsteps for a booted tread behind me. When I stopped, it stopped. I glanced around but saw no one. I kept walking. Then, checking behind me again, I glimpsed the hastily averted broadcloth of a gray military coat, whose owner had reversed course.

Reaching the corner, I turned to watch for traffic and crossed at a spot intersected by a boulevard I had never seen before. I didn’t know where I was. I looked behind me and to both sides. The rain came down harder, as though the sea were all around me, and no one would know if I drowned.

Suddenly I stopped. There was Marek in military uniform beside me. My student Marek a soldier? I remembered that his father, whom I’d met briefly, wore a uniform, but he? Nor could I dismiss the thought that this gifted, overgrown child, a full head taller than I, had been following me. He opened his mouth to speak. My lightning glare stopped him.

What is it you want? I said finally.

I? Nothing.

He was all wet. I noticed especially his mud-streaked boots.

You haven’t misplaced the assignment? I asked.

Assignment? There isn’t any school! Professor, wait! Where are you going? You can’t cross into the terminal. Nothing is moving. Don’t you understand?

I understood nothing.

Stay! he cried. If you can’t find words for others, why don’t you speak to me? It’s not my fault I love you.

But I was running away.

An armed officer blocked my path: Who are you? he asked in Polish.

"It’s pani Professor Heybald," answered Marek, all out of breath.

"Pani Amerykanka?"

Yes, I said.

Passport, please. I fumbled in my purse, in my satchel. "Pani is diplomat?" the officer inquired.

No! protested Marek excitedly: She’s half-Polish. Her father was Polish.

Your name is Heybald?

Yes.

Come with me.

I looked to Marek, who stepped aside, unable to meet my eyes.

A room beetle-green in the morning light so dank with stagnant air that water stood in drops on the walls. I lay on a crude wooden bench. Day was admitted by a window with massive iron bars. The policewoman, Hanka, was searching my satchel. Armed milicjamen surrounded me. A buzzing electric light glared:

"Where was pani going?"

Why did you come here to teach?

What are the names of your Polish ancestors?

Are you of Jewish origin?

A cane struck along the corridor, rapped sharply at the door. Hanka rose and unlocked it with a key.

The Lieutenant limped briskly in. I recognized Marek’s father. His outsized head cocked over me. I breathed the faintly pungent odor of a fox.

Whom have I the pleasure of remembering? he asked.

Silence. I received a slap in the face.

Tell us your ancestors’ names.

I don’t know! I answered. My father—Heybald—was from Krakow.

Given name? he inquired, reaching for pen and pad.

Henryk. He died in New York when I was three.

Profession?

Merchant—a jeweler.

"And where was pani going this morning?" The Lieutenant was tapping his cane.

I don’t know.

Two pencils started scratching.

What day of the week is it? he asked.

Sunday.

And the month?

Look it up.

"Pani! he cautioned. Remember where you are."

Remember whom you’re addressing, sir!

At the sound of the strap, I bolted upright. The Lieutenant smiled, a supple, winning smile: Professor has bad manners, he chided. She loses too much her temper.

He motioned to his colleagues. With stiff little bows, they turned their backs on me.

Hanka spoke: "What is pani thinking?"

But pani wasn’t thinking. A pigeon ruddered to the window sill, eyes frightened and starved. A hound dog bayed in the courtyard. I heard a carefully closed door.

The Lieutenant and his colleagues had left.

Swallow this, said Hanka, handing me a small pink pill.

No.

Swallow it!

No!

She rose to slip a needle in my arm.

"How old is pani?" she asked me several moments later. Her voice was soft, gentle.

Forty, I answered.

Forty and still alone?

Excuse me? I felt my tongue grow thick.

"Why pani came to Poland?" she asked, picking up a sweater she was knitting.

To what shall I confess? A need to know my heritage, my birthright as a Jew? To say goodbye to the father I never could forget; to find the house where he was born, some remnant of his early youth, a tree, a yard, a stone?

Tell Hanka, she coaxed. Go on.

No, I couldn’t tell her; how could I tell her that for him, only for him, I’d dress in Polish garments, scrub the makeup from my face? In a sturdy pair of shoes, head erect, glance proud, I’d glide over cobblestones, stop strangers in the street to speak—above all, listen—with this cross around my neck to hear unedited Polish responses to Jews.

Instead, I came to get away, I said.

From what to what? she asked, her knitting needles clicking.

My life, my work, were at a crossroads, a standstill. Understand standstill?

No.

I have to shed this nightmare, begin again at the beginning.

December 13, 1981.

On the day of my welcome last week, a beautiful September afternoon, I was ushered to Warsaw University to pick up my ration coupons for the month. With these, I can buy six pounds of meat, one of butter, two of kasha, sugar, and flour. For my pleasure, a fifth of vodka; for my hygiene, one small cake of soap that must last for two whole months. I also received in zlotys my first month’s salary, far in excess of my needs.

I live on the fourth floor—yes, here, this whale-gray structure. Just around the corner stands the Church of the Holy Cross, the only church in Warsaw, I’m told, untouched by the Nazi invasion. Diagonally across, abutting the English Institute where I’ll be teaching, is the main gate of Warsaw University. To its right, half a block up, is the back entrance of Victory Square. There, in 1979, Pope John Paul II addressed his compatriots in an open-air Mass that overflowed Ogród Saski, the park hereafter known as Saxon Gardens with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Back at my apartment, I view my spacious rooms. Through the alcove to the left is my bedroom. I sleep on that narrow daybed, and read at the mahogany table spanning the French windows over the kino sign. To the right is my combined study and living room. Here with the curtains half-drawn I’ll spend my hours writing with time and space to breathe new landscapes for new poems.