Kim są Polacy?

Though I have yet to actually see the sun in Poland, the avatar for it showed up on my computer desktop this morning, the local weather, pagoda, so I looked out my window and saw blue openings in the clouds—encouraging blues, though soon closed—and a faint wash of sunlight on a chimney. If my body, and more so my mind, were not still so torpid from the time change, I would have rallied my strength to see the real thing, słonce, and gone out into the street. I only made it to the window. Poles, I learn, have an internal watch, wewnętrz zegarek, instead of a clock, and mine doesn’t yet keep Kraków time.

My friend, the good Dr. hab. Monika Banaś, has emerged at last from the grip of flu and bronchitis to more actively sponsor my sloppy experiment in transculturalism. She has discovered that however rudimentary my reading and writing proficiency, my oral comprehension and speaking skills, if existent at all, remain blocked by English language interference—even my rudimentary German interferes—lack of vocabulary, weak memory, and a marked aversion to error—that is, a marked aversion to appearing stupid. My only attempts at everyday exchange, buying bread, post cards, a plate of pierogi, a volume of poetry at the księgarnia—the bookshop, of which, refreshingly, there seems to be one on almost every block around the university—terminate more or less abruptly with a kind of awkward relief on both of our parts. But then there are those conversations that never go wrong because they can’t, in fact, go right, like trying to buy a wash cloth. Poles don’t seem to wash with a cloth, but a lufa, a sponge, or an abrasive mitten of sorts. A wash cloth doesn’t seem to exist as either a concept or a drugstore product, and therefore doesn’t exist as a word in my vocabulary, even if I could remember it, which I couldn’t, though I could remember the German word for “clothing,” kleidung. How helpful was that? Absurdly long miscommunicative story short, I’m washing with a sock, in Polish, skarpetka.

At the księgarnia, though, I found what I thought was the perfect book and book title for my needs, Kim są Polacy? (“Who are [the] Poles?”). And with the perfect cover art: white background, red letters (the national colors) and with the Vitruvian man adorned with the wings of the Polish white eagle. Very smart design, very promising. But an essay by Adam Zagajewski, one of my favorite Polish writers, begins problematically: “Poles don’t know very well how to be Poles. Also, they don’t know, aren’t quite sure, how to be a patriot.” (my translation, p. 44) The implications, thus, for a non-native pledge to the fraternity would suggest that if I don’t know how to become a Pole, I’m not alone in the quandary, though differently positioned. As I read further—I have a long, slow way to go, in the book, I mean—I begin to suspect that the question may be answerable in grammatically different terms from those in which it is posed. As nations and national cultures blend in this global, cosmopolitan flow, the only relevant noun is “human being,” and national identities express not even as adjectives, but as adverbs, modifiers of the process of being, which is to say, living. So perhaps, in the end, I don’t become a Pole, but a human being living Polishly.