Kaszëbe

For some years now, I’ve been contemplating a new bad habit, a minor one, something to complement my excessive consumption of white sugar, something savory with a Polish theme, something tobacco related. My grandfather, during his brief stint as a Polish gentleman farmer, had raised a surreptitious row or two in his own garden, either for his own use or as a cash crop. Obviously not enough, as the farm failed. But I appreciate the effort, consciously resistant of authority, but not recklessly subversive or revolutionarily stupid. After all, the state he was resisting was renewly Polish. Now, there is a lot of cigarette smoking going on here, and not merely among the foolish and faddish young, but among bus drivers and the late heroes of modern Polish poetry. And I do remember rather fondly the second-hand smoke of a Marlboro as it wafted into the back seat of a Ford Maverick. But smoking cigarettes has become an outdoor, and therefore an almost exclusively public vice in the United States, and the sophisticated gestural dance of pack-tapping (why exactly?), opening and extraction, lighting, inhaling, and ash-tapping, and butt-stubbing or precision-flicking, would betray me as a novice. Cigarette smoking is an addiction to be acquired in one’s youth, in stupidity and with a sense of immortality and hubris. I’m too old.

However, on my last full day in Sulęczyno, Krzysztof took me to Szymbark, a regional educational center for the promotion of Kaszubian culture. Kaszubia, a heavily forested region in east-central Pomerania, Pomorze (literally, “up to the sea”), partakes of a rustic culture of wood and salt-water, lumber and fish, and offers a language called a “dialect” of Polish, although most Poles find it incomprehensible and many linguists consider it a distinct language. Road signs here in the north/northwest of Poland, as in Quebec, are written in two scripts. Krzysztof, I learn, is half Kaszub, and though sympathetic and of a lively inquisitive mind, shakes his head and furrows his brow at the thought of mastering Kaszubian. At any rate, at the end of the tour, in the Kaszub souvenir shop, I found my new bad habit—well, maybe not a habit yet, maybe only the promise of a bad habit. Habits take time. We’ll have to see.

The tour included the world’s longest board (Guinnessly confirmed), and by “board” they meant “table for eating,” as in “room and board,” a single half-tree slab extending 36+ meters. On the wall hung an even longer plank, 3” x 24” x 46+ meters, the longest I’ve ever seen, though unverified by Guinness. A lumbering tool exhibit, a Siberian Labor Camp House (for wayward Poles), a Siberian transport train, an insurgent’s home, transplanted houses of Polish emigrants to Canada and Turkey, a replica of a World War II Kaszubian/Polish partisan bunker (Gryf Pomorski),a wooden chapel, and an upside-down house with nary a horizontal plane in the entire structure. One walks up and through it as if afflicted by vertigo or Żubrówka.

 

 

All of interest, yet the most curious item to me was my surname, emblazoned on a Kaszubian street sign at the entry to the Siberian exhibit. “There were Kaszubian Borowiczes?” I asked Krzysztof. “Tak.” “How do we know that we’re not Kaszubian?” (This is where I learned that he was half-Kaszubian, but on his mother’s side.) Our family, he explained, are and were to the south and the east of Kaszubia, from Kujawy—which is really not that far away, but in days past, may well have been.

In the souvenir shop I found my bad: Kaszubian snuff. Looking for mementoes I chanced upon a case of snuff horns, which took me back ten years to my first trip to Poland and to Kaszubia, to a skansen, an “open-air museum,” a replica of a Kaszub village, not entirely unlike Szymbark, in which I first snorted the pungent leaf. (All of Europe is a skansen to an American, but this was self-consciously so.) I can remember thinking, “Interesting, not too bad.” And while I wasn’t too keen on the hats, the blue of the Kaszubian kontusz is the color of my soul and Kaszubian blues decorate my brand new vice-box.