In the most mundane places—Slavic language textbooks, circa 1981—and amidst the tedious practices of Slavic language acquisition, auditing and memorizing dialogs, one can sometimes detect or envision the great dramas of life, or the small and poignant ones of love, unfolding subtly as they sometimes do into a full flowering of frustration, inconsequence, and dismissal.
Now of course, our dialogs have no real narrative structure to them. They were crafted to introduce and explore various vocabulary and grammatical concepts and have little real continuity apart from that provided by solid, second-language pedagogy and the spoken word one might encounter on a Polish street. No plot, no story, no intrinsic literary merit. And yet ….
And yet there is character. Enter Marek, our male voice through 14 chapters to date and 33 dialogs. Marek expresses a not overly bright persona—more gumby than twit—unkempt, rough around the edges, a little touchy, testy, but not irredeemable—in other words, a guy. Rumor has it that he sometimes recorded under the influence. His delivery flows naturally, off-handedly, if sometimes slurredly, so that he would appear to hold us, his second-language audience, slightly in contempt, as if to say, “this is the real thing, get used to it.” According to the text, he has a sad, funny-looking setter named Gypsy or Pirate, but is otherwise no ladies man, a Polish expat from the late Communist era.
Dear Marek initiates occasionally absurd exchanges (for example, the contextless chat introducing reflexive verbs: “You’re bored here probably”/”No, I’m not bored at all”/”I’m surprised that you’re not bored”/”Why, I’m really having a good time”) that are received and graced by two female voices. The junior feminine, Agata (I love the name Agata, have a Polish cousin by that name) rolls through the exercises proficiently, matter-of-factly, crisply, naively. The other female, the first, has no name, let’s call her Ona, though we might refer to her as Agata’s older, wiser, perhaps all-too-wise sister. She allures. She engages both Agata and Marek with the patter of an experienced elementary school teacher: musical, reassuringly intoned with playful highlights, a sardonic and, yes, supercilious intelligence, with a timbre of milk and miod, “honey”. She infatuates with a word, a phrase at most, and though Agata receives one tweak of abuse, Marek absorbs multiple rebuffs more or less upside the head. Poor Marek, who has a thing for Ona and absolutely no clue and no chance.
In dialog 1B, he greets her informally, succeeds in striking up a conversation, only to realize that he’s late and has to hurry off. In 3B, trying to ingratiate himself by complimenting her on a colleague of hers, Marek learns that she’s known this fellow from childhood (od dziecinstwa) and that “he isn’t as nice as it seems.” Okay. By 5A he has bought tickets to a very interesting film; she’s already engaged. In 5B, Ona’s too tired to go to the concert, to which he responds, “Lately you’re constantly tired.” In 5C (Chapter 5 is the nadir in this non-relationship), she has to study. Marek bewails his plight in the most pathetic line to date of his two-year role, “No, to kiedy bedziesz WOLna?” (“Well, then when WILL you be free?” though in the Polish, the stress falls on the word “free.”) The outburst is both completely embarrassing and a little heart-breaking. “Nie wiem,” she says (“I don’t know”), “moze jutro, moze pojutrze,” (“Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after”). Her nonchalance devastates all but the dimmest. She patronizes him a bit in 9C, complimenting his Polish, though it is, in fact, his native tongue. She stands him up in 12D, thinking the film was “dzisiaj” (“today”)—innocently, beautifully, sexily chirped—when it was, alas for poor Marek, “wczoraj,” (“yesterday”). He had waited two hours for her. What man has not endured that pain: the spurned Everyman? (n.b. Professor Swan misses an opportunity here to introduce expletives.) And last week, in 14B, confessing no especial interest in newspapers or what’s going on in the world, Marek takes a swift one in the intellectual shorts: “Well then you’re even more boring than I thought.”
I wonder if that’s how Polska thinks about me, or will, eventually.
