Polish Contempt

Page 8 American Book Review Polish Contempt Jaimy Gordon The small world of this novel—a public square of a nameless city in a nameless European country , circumnavigated by a streetcar line that goes nowhere—is summoned into being, in a voice curdling with exasperation, by a narrator who is worried about her bill. She is being woefully overcharged by a host of shady “master craftsmen and apprentices” for the work of building this rickety scene, which barely manages to pass for a basic city square, with views into the distance along its edges that turn out to be plyboard panels, painted and patched, some of the patches missing or upside down. Its human population is likewise the work of a dispirited and negligent craftsman: the tailor. “First will come the costumes”—so reads the opening sentence of Flaw. The tailor will supply them all wholesale. He’ll select the designs off-handedly and, with a few snips of the shears, will summon to life a predictable repertoire of gestures. See—scraps of fabric and thread in a circle of light, while all around is darkness. Out of the turmoil will emerge a fold of cloth, the germ of a tuck fastened with a pin. The tuck will create everything else. So we have seen them all before, these characters, in a certain kind of European novel, or a certain way of thinking about the world. We know their outer costumes and their inner lives, their sense of being overburdened and underpaid, worth more than the little credit they get. The querulous note is ubiquitous in Flaw, in the voice of its narrator, among its mysterious workmen, and now inside the characters. Because the materials are inferior, because the workers bear a grudge, what can we expect but this hierarchy of stereotypes, the harrumphing notary and his nervous wife, their maid whose bottom is regularly pinched, the bumbling policeman, the lowly washerwoman , the waiter in the one café, the law student.A couple of airmen are misdirected to the square and, when an unspecified political “catastrophe” occurs offstage, the one in a general’s uniform takes charge. Character is costume, the narrator explains, but costumes , too, are overpriced and never really fit, and the tailor, like the master craftsmen and apprentices, has learned to finish his flawed work in a hurry, with an attitude somewhere between malice and disgust. This is the flaw for which Flaw is named, “the flaw of contempt.” How can anything ever be made better under these conditions? “And what if I’m the one who placed the order?” the narrator asks. “What if I can barely afford the whole thing?” It goes without saying that all this carries a price—the pavement, the tracks, the streetcar. Every brick and every roof tile has to be paid for…. I provide work for painters, upholsterers, and decorators; for mechanics and lighting specialists; for swaggering types with cigarettes permanently stuck in the corners of their mouths; for master craftsmen and apprentices in crumpled overalls who value their pay and despise their work; for devout servants of all their own weaknesses . Were it not for the odious job it is their lot to perform, were it not for the rule in their pocket and the scuffed bandages on their fingers, they would have nothing but the despair that wrenches them from sleep at dawn. They are as bound to me as I am bound to them. I pay the advances and swallow without a murmur both smaller and larger chicaneries. I do not question the bills when they include props already long since paid for and used, or repainted backdrops in which a hole from a previous hook gives the game away at once. How painful it is to see plainly all the shortcomings of this world, its shabbiness and its inability to actually exist. Into this makeshift world comes “catastrophe”— the word is sown freely through Flaw—nameless, featureless catastrophe, which happens elsewhere, but overtakes the square in the form of tramcar upon tramcar full of refugees. How do we know they are refugees? “[B]ecause of the cap with the earflaps and the thick winter coat, which...