Riding the Iron Rooster

We were delayed in Konin. That was convenient. I could write without my arm being jogged. I wrote: In brown April, in Poland, it looks as though spring will never come—bare trees, dead grass like rags, cold winds, rubbly earth, apartments plastered with wet washing, furrowed fields with nothing sprouting, a man plowing with one skinny horse, men shoveling dust, muddy creeks and ditches, a plastic bag jammed on a stick to scare birds; such monotony ... But this is the view in April, when things in Poland look so bleak that even the ducks seem to be drowning, and the chickens are frantic. In a month or so, things will be different: spring will come, the whole country will be in bloom. Yet it still seems an awful fate to be a Pole.

It seemed to me, as we set off again, that the only really interesting buildings were the churches—the only ones with curves, at any rate. The rest were all right angles and had flat roofs.

The landscape brightened in the environs of Sochaczew—patches of woods, better houses, birch groves—but the struggle continued. People labored everywhere, doing clumsy jobs, shoveling, breaking rocks, chopping wood. All the work looked very hard, and Poland seemed like a glimpse of the past.

Catholicism is obvious, not only in the churches, and the rosaries people wear around their necks, and the way they bless themselves before the train starts; but also in the statuary. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary forty feet high, on an eight-foot pedestal, on the forecourt of the railway station at Szymann. That was something I had never seen in Italy or Spain, or even in Ireland, which claimed the Blessed Virgin as the Queen of Ireland. There were more Virgin Marys on pedestals in bean fields, and in the distance, beyond the man plowing, was always a Virgin Mary.

They served a devotional purpose, and it was possible they were useful in scaring birds, but I felt there was yet another motive in their ubiquity. They were the classic Our Lady of Fatima statues, and what the commissars didn't know—but something every Catholic learns early—is that the message Mary gave to the three little children at Fatima in Portugal, in 1917, was that if they prayed very hard, Russia was going to be converted from atheistic communism to Catholicism. "And now we will pray for the conversion of Russia," priests announced throughout the fifties, all over America.

That's what this statue represents to most Catholics and probably to all Poles: the Mother of God at her most political.

I had finished Elmer Gantry and given it five stars, and now I was reading Balzac's Old Goriot. A Polish proverb was quoted in that book: "Hitch five oxen to your cart"—meaning take precautions so that nothing can go wrong. But reading this in Poland seemed very odd. There were no oxen at all, and the carts were rickety things. I spent an entire day traveling slowly through western Poland, almost 300 miles, from the East German border to Warsaw. I did not see any mechanized farming at all and not a single tractor. Instead, I saw the picturesque hopelessness of the farmer gently whipping his horse as the poor beast struggled with an old plowshare.

"It doesn't look too bad," Ellen Wittrick said, raising her eyes to Warsaw for the first time. The late-afternoon sun had gilded the facades of the narrow buildings on Jerozolomskie and given that whole block the look of Harrods.

"Get me out of here," Millie Westbetter whispered to Rick, who replied, "Take it easy, honey. We'll be back on the train tomorrow."

And then I gave them all the slip and plunged into Warsaw. Two men, one after the other, asked me to change money, at five times the official rate; that was outside the hotel. I crossed the street, and while I was looking at a big, clumsy chess set carved from purple wood, a man approached me with the same question. I was pursued by another man, and all the way down Marszalkowska asked the same money-changing question and quoted rates of exchange.

"Aren't you afraid of the police?" I said.

"The police change money, too," he said.