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The Force of History

My father once told me that our history is like a force behind us, pushing us along, unacknowledged or even unknown, but dictating the way we live our lives.

In the Memory of the Forest by Charles T. Powers is set in a small Polish town fifty miles east of Warsaw in the early 1990s. Communism is being dismantled. Free-market capitalism lets rip.

The body of a young man, Tomek Powierza, is found in the forest, victim of foul play. The police chief is incompetent. Other officials hamper Tomek’s father, Staszek’s, attempts to investigate. His neighbour, the young farmer Leszek Maleszewski, helps him. They discover murky business deals with Russian gangs, in which Tomek was involved, deals conducted by ex-Communist officials, hanging on to any kind of power in the new world order.

Meanwhile other forces are at work. Church authorities allocate elderly Father Tadeusz a fierce new curate, who leads a campaign to purge the town leadership of its Communist stain. But such purification is not so simple. Young Father Jerzy uncovers evidence that a previous incumbent had a fine new rectory built with the Party’s help, but finds that the Bishopric is less impressed by his zeal than he had expected.

Leszek’s investigation into Tomek’s death threatens the local Party head, who retaliates with names from the town’s extensive list of informers: they include not only Leszek’s own father, but also the vet with whose wife he is conducting a naïve, first-love affair. She tells Leszek, ‘It’s worse since the changes. Karol said it would be this way. He’s right. It’s just as rotten. Only now we have the privilege of smelling it.’

Then people discover in the mornings that stones have been dug out from the foundations of their barns and outbuildings. They begin to ask, ‘Are they coming back?’

‘Who are they?’ Leszek wonders. ‘The Jews,’ he is told. He learns for the first time that once many J

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My father once told me that our history is like a force behind us, pushing us along, unacknowledged or even unknown, but dictating the way we live our lives.

In the Memory of the Forest by Charles T. Powers is set in a small Polish town fifty miles east of Warsaw in the early 1990s. Communism is being dismantled. Free-market capitalism lets rip. The body of a young man, Tomek Powierza, is found in the forest, victim of foul play. The police chief is incompetent. Other officials hamper Tomek’s father, Staszek’s, attempts to investigate. His neighbour, the young farmer Leszek Maleszewski, helps him. They discover murky business deals with Russian gangs, in which Tomek was involved, deals conducted by ex-Communist officials, hanging on to any kind of power in the new world order. Meanwhile other forces are at work. Church authorities allocate elderly Father Tadeusz a fierce new curate, who leads a campaign to purge the town leadership of its Communist stain. But such purification is not so simple. Young Father Jerzy uncovers evidence that a previous incumbent had a fine new rectory built with the Party’s help, but finds that the Bishopric is less impressed by his zeal than he had expected. Leszek’s investigation into Tomek’s death threatens the local Party head, who retaliates with names from the town’s extensive list of informers: they include not only Leszek’s own father, but also the vet with whose wife he is conducting a naïve, first-love affair. She tells Leszek, ‘It’s worse since the changes. Karol said it would be this way. He’s right. It’s just as rotten. Only now we have the privilege of smelling it.’ Then people discover in the mornings that stones have been dug out from the foundations of their barns and outbuildings. They begin to ask, ‘Are they coming back?’ ‘Who are they?’ Leszek wonders. ‘The Jews,’ he is told. He learns for the first time that once many Jews lived in the town; they were rounded up and taken away by the Nazis. Then other townspeople took over their homes, and used stones from the Jewish cemetery to build new barns. And thus Charles T. Powers weaves a tapestry of interconnecting explorations of corruption and collusion, of the past buried yet with the present rooted in it. Everyone is implicated in one way or another, and now everyone is guilty and suspicious and paranoid. The American author had been a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, and was Eastern European Bureau Chief based in Warsaw from 1986 to 1991. He then returned to the States and wrote the novel over the following five years – during which time he developed cancer. He died at the age of 53 in 1996, shortly after completing the book. It was published posthumously in 1997, to glowing reviews.

*

I read In the Memory of the Forest in 1998, shortly before I married a woman who is half-Polish. Her father Paul was a man I admired enormously. He came to Britain as a refugee in 1948, at the age of 19, his few clothes and possessions contained in a British Army kit bag slung over his shoulder. The war had robbed him of his youth and education; the subsequent Soviet occupation of Poland robbed him of a home. He told his children little about his childhood or his experiences in the war. He never took them to Poland or taught them Polish. In London he worked in a factory while he studied Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry by correspondence, and took evening classes in mechanical draughtsmanship. In 1955 he got a job in Engineering Research and Development at Metal Box – where he would remain for the rest of his working life, becoming a Senior Designing Engineer. Paul met and married an Englishwoman, Ann, in 1961. They had three children: two boys sandwiching a girl, Hania. But Paul’s fierce determination did not make for domestic harmony. The man who’d lost so much held too tight. His marriage to Ann floundered; his children became increasingly alienated.

*

In his novel Charles T. Powers weaves a tapestry of threads tying the present to the past, then he carefully unpicks it. ‘Farm work is reality,’ Leszek says,
but as the ax sank into wood and the wrench slipped on the grease-caked nuts in the tractor’s engine, solid objects under my grip gave no hold against the overwhelming sense of being surrounded by memories, misinterpretations, and illusions weeded and tended as carefully as a kitchen garden . . . All around me, memories recurred; like stones in a path, they pushed up. Memory had a future as well as a past.
The novel is written with a scrupulous clarity; with great intelligence but not knowingness. There is an innocence in its lucid style, reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Here were the gargoyle faces of men standing in doorways, drunkenness working at them like magnified gravity, tugging flesh earthward, slowing words and motion. An old woman, gray as bone, veered wide around them, tugging her tiny frightened dog. It’s a wonderfully told story of the past rising from hidden graves to shame the present, and it burns with a mounting moral force. Though young Leszek narrates alternate chapters, old Father Tadeusz emerges as its moral centre. He realizes he ‘had sought to muffle himself against his surroundings’, but gradually he faces up to the past, and obliges his parishioners to do the same.

*

Hania and I both read In the Memory of the Forest as we planned our marriage, and honeymoon. Hania wanted to go to Poland for the first time. Her father suggested meeting us there, to show her where he was born. So Hania and I drove through Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic, heading towards the centre of Europe. We reached Tylicz, a small village in the forested foothills of the Carpathians, in the south of Poland, very close to the Slovakian border, where Paul was born on 8 February 1928. He was the seventh of nine children born to Maria and Michal, a forester. Only four children survived infancy or childhood. Over the following days we visited the houses, churches and schools, the fields and forests, of Paul’s childhood. Over meals of bigos and pierogi, over coffees and beers, he told his daughter (and attendant son-in-law) his story for the first time. Paul was 11 in September 1939 when the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe invaded and then occupied Poland. In late 1943 Germany feared attack from its erstwhile Soviet ally. Paul and his younger brother Teodor were pressed into child labour gangs to dig a line of trenches against Soviet tanks. Teodor was then allowed to go home, but Paul, by now aged 15, was sent to Germany. There, through 1944 and into 1945, he worked as a forced labourer, repairing and clearing the rubble of cities being bombed from the air. There was little food. During Allied air raids, when the German guards ran for the nearest shelter, Paul rushed in the opposite direction, into fields where he scrabbled up potatoes or carrots with his hands and ate them raw. Early in 1945, a wall collapsed on him. His leg was broken, and he was put in a cellar with straw on the floor along with other injured workers, and left to heal or die. Occasionally a brave German civilian would pass a loaf of bread through the grille at pavement level. In April 1945 Paul was in Bavaria when it was conquered by American troops. For the next two and a half years he was employed by the US Government as a driver in Schweinfurt, where he learned car mechanics. He wondered where to go now. Back to Poland? But from his family there came no reply to his letters. Furthermore, he understood it was dangerous to return to what was now the Stalinist Polish People’s Republic. Anyone tainted by contact with the West was liable to deportation to camps in the USSR. And so he took the opportunity to come to Britain. It would be another twenty years before the Red Cross located his mother and his younger brother Teodor, living in Lviv, a city which had been in eastern Poland but was now in Ukraine. He never saw either of his parents alive again, and it wasn’t until the ’70s that he felt able to go to see Teodor and meet his brother’s Ukrainian wife, Katia, and their children. Paul told us much yet still held something back. I couldn’t imagine what it was, but then Hania asked her father a question: he had a younger brother, Teodor. But four children had survived infancy. What had happened to his other two siblings? Paul said nothing for a long time. Neither did his daughter. Then he took a deep breath, as if he needed to really fill his lungs to be able to share his story. He told us how in occupied Poland there was an escape route for Poles through the forests and over the border into Slovakia, through Hungary and onwards. His older brother Basyli was a people smuggler for the Polish underground. In 1942, during such an operation, he and his comrades were intercepted by the Germans and shot. Hania and I took a trek into the forest. Weirdly, we unwittingly crossed the Slovak border and suddenly found ourselves surrounded by armed soldiers, who must have been out on exercise, and redirected us back towards Poland. It was the next day that Paul told us of his beloved elder sister Maria. He learned after the war that she had been killed by Soviet soldiers, on a train, in circumstances that he would or could not elaborate upon. But we knew what Red Army soldiers did to women across Europe. As Paul told Hania the story of his youth, shedding light thereby on his later achievements and his failings, I understood that the woman I’d just married brought her family history with her. Paul died in 2013. In the last weeks of his life, in the John Radcliffe and Churchill hospitals in Oxford, he was treated by three senior doctors: Dr Mason, an Englishman; Dr Fliettner, a German; and Dr Darowski, a Pole. Given his life story, it seemed appropriate. My wife studied history at Oxford – the first from either side of her family to go to university. She spent her twenties doing different things. When we met she was a dance teacher. After our children were born, she retrained, and eventually became a psychoanalyst. Now she helps people explore their own histories – the unique personal and political legacy that each of us owns. For as one of Powers’s characters in his novel says:
My father once told me that our history is like a force behind us, pushing us along, unacknowledged or even unknown, but dictating the way we live our lives.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 67 © Tim Pears 2020


About the contributor

Tim Pears’s most recent novels are the West Country trilogy: The Horseman, The Wanderers and The Redeemed. He also loves writing about sport and politics.

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