Finished the second volume of Potop (“The Deluge”) Wednesday night—when I should have been reviewing my grammar—1500 pages of war, royal politics, and diplomatic intrigue, concluding with marriage to a wise and virtuous woman: “He was not ashamed of that, however, but acknowledged himself that in every important affair he sought her advice.” The closing words are good counsel for impetuous men. As With Fire and Sword, The Deluge ends happily with the marriage of the long-suffering soldier-hero, Pan Andrei Kmita. Domestic bliss is a good way for even less impetuous men to close 3500 pages of bloody epic fiction. Of course, I have read the trilogy as I have managed to find the books in used-book stores, which is to say, out of order. Sienkiewicz intended Polish history, and perhaps life itself, to be read otherwise, on a heroic down note, with the funeral of Michał Wolodyjowski, the great but diminutive colonel, the master saber-swordsman of all Poland.
The runt myself of a semi-Polish litter and briefly a student of the saber (though in my case, not the bent battle version, quite nasty, but the whippy, stylized fencing edition), I identify most with this tireless, plucky cavalier, small, dapper, dutiful, romantically clumsy, a beautiful loser and eventual cadaver. Over thirty years ago I was routinely cut to ribbons on the strip by Don and Bart and Woz and Simoon Oo (what a fabulous name!) but lived to quit, after only four months of incessant beweltering, and tell about it. I am no cavalier. And while Michał faced Cossacks, Tartars, witches, Russians, Swedes, and Turks, I face, this week, only the Dative Case. Ink runs in my veins not blood, atrament nie krew. And as Pan Zagloba has so rightly observed, “those paper scratchers are the lowest kind of man on earth.” (252) So, though a lesser being, a much lesser being (I don't even scratch, I key), I will have a story. Not sure that’s a good thing.
