Stanislaw Baranczak
POLAND, MAY 1990, AND BEYOND
Converting a bowl of fish soup back into an aquarium: this
metaphor, whatever its origin, has become public domain nowadays for all
those who try to tell us exactly how difficult it is going to be for the former
East Bloc nations
to
switch to market economies and democratic political
systems. If things were only as difficult as the metaphor portrays them! A
former inhabitant of Eastern Europe such as myself feels a need for the
gastronomic part of this simile to be rectified. Among dishes with fishy smells,
it is not soup he would refer to as the object of comparison. If anything, life
under Communist regimes resembled fish
aspic.
You may argue that it makes no real difference to a piece of boiled fish
fillet whether it floats in a soup or is stuck in its own congealed juices. Yet
floating is, after all, some kind of motion, whereas the chief quality of life un–
der Communism was precisely that it stood still. In terms of the language of
the individual soul, standstill translates into hopelessness; in terms ofcollective
consciousness, into social apathy. Prior to 1989 in countries such as Poland,
if
you had moved at all, you didn't do much more than tremble with fear or
helpless rage, the way a slice of fish aspic wobbles on a plate.
The simile made more accurate, you may wonder what the correction
means
in
practical terms. On the one hand, turning aspic into aquarium water
sounds an even more futile endeavor. On the other, a nation held tight for
forty-five years in the congealed embrace of an immobilizing political system
feels understandably relieved even as the aspic begins to melt. The resulting
fluid is obviously a far cry from the fresh and bubbly water of prosperous
democracy. But the hopelessness is gone. You may be pessimistic about your
nation's future, but for the first time in your life you admit that there
is
a fu–
ture.
What I found in Poland in the first days of May 1990 was a curious
mixture of these two emotions: the sense of what one might call guarded
pessimism and the sense of relief.
It
was my first trip to my home country
since I had come to the United States in March 1981, any previous visit
having been ruled out by the fact that during martial law the authorities uni–
laterally invalidated my Polish passport. Since then, my stay abroad was,
from the point of view of the Polish secret police, illegal. Had I tried to re–
enter the Polish portion of the East European aspic before 1989, I might
have been let in but most probably not let out again. This time, a brand new
passport securely in my breast pocket and a brand new name for myoid
country gracing the consulate that had issued the document (the Republic of
Poland rather than People's Poland), I breezed past young border guards at
