The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Bialoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic

Chapter 1. “The Glaring Identity of ‘Now’”: A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising as a Reenactment of the Traumatic

51 Chapter 1 “The Glaring Identity of ‘Now’”: A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising as a Reenactment of the Traumatic Znów zacza ˛ł sie ˛ dygot. Osuwanie sie ˛ z szumem. Coraz wie ˛kszym. Swen ściskał mnie re ˛ka ˛ za kolano. Ja wciskałem w siebie oczy i wtuliłem w kołnierz głowe ˛: “Wie ˛c to już? To już? tak, trudno, tylko czy ściśnie od głowy? spłaszczy? i żeby tylko pre ˛dko.” Dwa sklepienia razem rune ˛ły z pierwszego pie ˛tra na parter, wie ˛c teraz my. Swen wciskał glowe ˛ gdzieś pod moje kolano. Matka Swena stała bez zmiany. Było cichutko. Była kompletna cisza. Tylko coś szumiało, osypywało sie ˛, jeszcze osypało sie ˛, osypało . . . Again the vibrations began. A noisy moving about. More and more. Swen squeezed my knee. I winced and hid my head in my collar. “Is this it already? Already? Yes, it’s hard, only will it strike from the head? To the feet? Will it knock you flat? If only it could be quick.” Two ceilings collapsed from the first floor to the ground floor, so now it was our turn. Swen pressed his head against my knee. Swen’s mother stood there without changing her position. It was very quiet. There was absolute silence. Only something rumbled, was crumbling, still crumbling, crumbling . . . —Miron Białoszewski, Pamie ˛tnik z powstania warszawskiego (1970) Chapter 1 52 —Zdrowaś, Mario, łaskiś pełna, Pan z Toba ˛ . . . —Świe ˛ta Mario, Matko Boża, módl sie ˛ za nami grzesznymi teraz i w godzine ˛ śmierci naszej, amen. Pamie ˛tam jaskrawa ˛ tożsamość “teraz” i “w godzine ˛ śmierci” – ile razy ja ˛ odczuwałem przy odmawianiach, a wcia ˛ż sie ˛ odmawiało, słyszało, tu, obok, tu drugi raz, na spacerze, u tych obok, i obok dalej, i jak przejść dalej, i jak iść, jak coś tylko głośniej waliło, to to jak fala: —Zdrowaś, Mario, łaskiś pełna . . . —Teraz i w godzine ˛ śmierci naszej, amen. —Hail, Mary, full of grace. The Lord be with Thee . . . —Hail, Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death, amen. I remember the glaring identity of “now” and “in the hour of our death.” How many times did I feel it during the prayers, but people prayed constantly. You could hear them. Here beside you or, during a walk, among those near by, or somewhat distant, as you walked ahead, and as you just wandered about, whenever something exploded a little more loudly than usual. Then it was like a wave: —Hail, Mary, full of grace . . . —Now and in the hour of our death, amen. —Miron Białoszewski, Pamie ˛tnik z powstania warszawskiego (1970) BETWEEN MOURNING AND FETISHIZATION: THE WARSAW UPRISING IN POLISH CULTURAL MEMORY The posters announced, “They were dying in the sun” (“Umierali w słońcu”), but the images were of contemporary young Varsovians. They were dressed like twenty-first-century urban youths, and they faced the camera in the frontal , still posture typical of the tradition of photographic portraiture. These black-and-white images were punctuated by the white-and-red armbands of the Polish Home Army. The posters—accompanied as they were by a state- “The Glaring Identity of ‘Now’” 53 ment whose grammatical subject (“they”) was left vague, yet in its vagueness invited a sense of communal understanding of what it pertains to—were displayed throughout Warsaw to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The afternoon of August 1, 2004, was bright and hot, just like the afternoon sixty years earlier when the Home Army rose up against the Nazis who had occupied Warsaw for almost five years. The months of August and September 1944, through the uprising’s capitulation on October 2, 1944, are still remembered as particularly sunny. The ceremonies of 2004 might be the last major anniversary of the uprising in which surviving insurrectionists participated. The occasion, one of the most elaborate and carefully choreographed state events in recent Polish history, was designed to display the inchoate contours of the country’s postCommunist cultural memory. Led by the mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński (who later became the country’s president and died tragically in a plane crash in 2010),1 and attended by the country’s leading political...