ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
The Chairman's Secret Speech
Flowershops, open even on Sundays, and the sour smell of the earth.
From inside the store appears the tall saleswoman. Adjusting the hairpins
in her chestnut hair, she asks a timid b0y what kind of bouguet he
would like. Roses . Asters. Carnations. Baroque peonies . Garrulous
chrysanthemums. Poppies. Sunflowers . It is quite late. Please don't take
notes. It is night, dark, full of a troublesome rain, and I am old and sick.
It may just happen that I will die soon . We have learned a lot since
Aleksey Tolstoy said death was a bourgeois superstition, and death has
been a patient lecturer.
It isn't easy for me to begin. I have already given hundreds of
speeches. I would get a text at the last minute, and I read it trustingly,
for I have always had devoted aides. But the aides look at us with
curiosity; with fear and hope they await the moment when some great
funeral will once again interrupt the usual routine of meetings, greetings,
and farewells. The cannon carriage is the last vehicle in a long line of
those at the disposition of a great man. Enormous hills of flowers grow,
but they have no fragrance. It isn't easy for me to begin.
We have more and more cities and villages, railroad lines, train cars,
countries, languages; military parades occur so often that the roads must
be changed over and over again, ruined by tank tracks. Victory parades.
How many presidents would have liked to have been in my place, even
in my ailing body: the body of a leader is more than he alone, it is his
endless properties, the featherbeds of his subordinates, the ships of his
flotilla submerged in green water, the school textbooks in the countries
he has conquered, his young, freckled soldiers and the fiancees of his sol–
diers and the fiancees' sisters, and the soldiers' brothers and the custom
officials, and censors with an alert look, and doltish clerks; and even
traitors belong to him, although it seems
to
them that they don't at all,
and emigrants are also his property though they try and deny it. The
more they deny it, the more they belong to him. The body of the
leader, like every other organism, is made up of an infinite number of
Editor's Note: "The Chairman's Secret Speech" is excerpted from
Tlllo Cities:
011
Exile, History, alld the illla,rzillatioll
by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Lillian
Vallee, to be published by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux in March. Translation
copyright
©
1995 by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. All lights reserved.
