Dukla

Dukla is the name of a town in the far southeast of Poland, close to the Slovakian border, south of Krosno as the crow flies—no roads in Poland run as the crow flies. (Perhaps no crow actually flies as the crow flies.) But you eventually get to Dukla. I found it on my wall map without the aid of a magnifying glass and marked it with a yellow pushpin, which now completely obscures the name. Dukla is also the title of a book by Andrzej Stasiuk, a book of “mixed genre”, though it suggests just how categorically silly we’ve become as readers and critics with all our marketing and academic vocabulary. Not so long ago it would have been enough to call it simply “a book.” As if any extended piece of serious writing weren’t a mixture, simply literature.

In the process of not worrying overly about genre, I’ve been lightly enchanted nonetheless by Stasiuk’s prose and sensibility, and his sense, too, which sticks his sensibility in the eye when it approaches sentimentality. The author is about my age, and he visited Dukla in his youth and describes it in much the same way as I might my hometown, small, non-descript on the surface—however intricately detailed the description—and non-descript underneath, except for the merest suggestion of excitement and mystery out in “the bushes.” A modern Polish Breughel of homely life: “rubber boots on bare feet, the symbiotic smells of human and animal existence, curdled milk, potatoes, eggs, lard, no long journeys in search of trophies, no miracles or legends other than satiety and a peaceful death.” (73) Which is to say that having more than enough and peace are miracles for those of us lucky enough to have them. And death, too, in its time.