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Volume Two
- Northwestern University Press
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Volume Two When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope . . . —william shakespeare, sonnet [3.89.163.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:38 GMT) February 17 After nearly a week’s break, I am filling in the missing days from memory, one by one. The diary seemed like dynamite that could blow up the entire building of the former YMCA. So after yesterday’s summons,346 I moved the notebooks out of the house. By the time I could bring them back, several days had passed. And so I went to the former Mostowski Palace today. The building is popular in Warsaw for both its name and its connotations.347 It has a classical facade, behind which lurk the deepest dungeons in the capital. Its official name is the Municipal Command of Citizens’ Police.348 Just inside the gate one is confronted by heavy, gloomy vaulting and empty courtyards. Why do the police need such walls and such dungeons below, which you can literally feel under your feet, swollen with human misery, wrongdoing, injustice, and violence? For administrative sanctions? To house the municipal archive of jaywalking incidents? Or is it all my imagination and auto-suggestion, and there’s actually nothing under the floor? But then why am I suffocating in here after just a few minutes, even though there is plenty of space and air? After I’d waited an hour in the corridor, there came for me a person of apparently female gender who looked like apathetic domestic help. She took my identification card and escorted me through three different checkpoints, along endless corridors, like a sort of Virgil reeking of cheap cologne. Here and there we passed people who, frightened and looking like Joseph K.,349 were involuntarily exchanging sympathetic glances, suppressing all gestures, uncertain whether even an uncontrolled glance might not lead to a longer stay. This kind 346. For “summons,” Tyrmand uses here the Russian word povestka, used in Poland only with reference to Russia’s institutions under its rule. In the preceding sentence, too, he uses the Russian word for “former,” thus giving a foreign tinge to the oppressive atmosphere he next describes. 347. Tyrmand is being typically sarcastic: for much of its history, the building served as headquarters for security and police organizations under the Russian rule. In 1949 it was rebuilt from war damage for police use; a prison in its basement was added. 348. In Polish: Komenda Miejska Milicji Obywaltelskiej. 349. Joseph K. is the unfortunate protagonist of Franz Kafka’s surrealist novel The Trial, who is arrested and tried by a bureaucratic regime for a crime that is never revealed to him or the reader. Volume Two ˆ 211 212 ˆ Diary 1954 of building is an architectural wonder: there’s an evil alchemy in its walls that makes even the most innocent person feel guilty of something, though he does not and cannot know what it is. The moment you cross the threshold, you are seized by the urge to flee. The tomb-like corridors play havoc with your mind, until you feel like a hummingbird hypnotized by a snake. Your face burns for no reason. An irrational feeling of having not a single defense, although unsupported by any fact or reason, congeals in your brain. Yet, this is just a crummy administrative office, like hundreds of others in Warsaw that issue tax forms, driver’s licenses, and the like, so what’s the menace—the seething, palpable, condensed, almost visible threat? “Nonsense!” I tried to combat the threat. “Get a hold of yourself . . .” But without much success. I know these feelings from the past. It might seem that experience should give some psychological immunity, but each time is just like the first time. After a two-hour wait, which is the ritual—nothing softens a person up like being left alone to wait—the door opens, and I am to enter. The topography of that moment: in the antechamber, two stoutish guys sprawled behind their desks in the standard pose of the almighty police. Tawdry velvet jackets, the good looks of a barber with a generous admixture of small-town stupidity, low foreheads, small eyes, long, narrow, clipped sideburns. One of them condescends to jerk his head toward the next room, in the doorway of which...