unattractively sprouting the first wisps of beard – her presence threw them into agonies of shame and embarrassment. She was a rose in full bloom, a butterfly, while we – we were not even buds, with their promise of opening one day to reveal the beauty of fully formed flowers; we were weeds that grew wild by the roadside, or ugly, misshapen larvae, bunched up in ungainly positions in their cocoons.
The entire class lived only for the French lessons; between them we merely existed, in a kind of hypnotised daze. The boys wandered about gloomy and sullen, with flushed cheeks and dark circles under their eyes, leaving no doubt as to the activities to which they devoted their spare time; the girls crept around listlessly, scribbling in their diaries, where they scrupulously wrote down every detail of Madame’s appearance each day: her skirt, her dress, the colour of her scarf; her make-up, and whether it seemed heavier or lighter than on the previous day; her hair, and whether it looked as if she had recently been to the hairdresser’s. These notes were then compared, cross-referenced and compiled, so that the girls, like secret agents or archivists for the Security Services, were in possession of almost all the facts concerning Madame’s use of cosmetics and the contents of her wardrobe. They knew such arcane details as the brand of mascara she used and the number that corresponded to the exact shade of her lipstick; they had evidence that she wore tights (an almost unobtainable rarity in those days) rather than stockings, and that one of her bras was black. (Once, when she raised her arm to write something on the board, I did indeed get a fleeting glimpse of a black strap.)
The pent-up tension was relieved by chatter. Each discussion gave rise to some new idea or hypothesis. According to one of the most popular of these, Madame was . . . frigid. Of course, no one was quite sure what this term meant, but that was precisely its main attraction. Opinions on the matter differed; they could, however, be reduced to three basic lines of thought.
According to the first – let us call it the radical line – a frigid woman was one almost entirely lacking in reproductive organs; her genito-urinary system was limited to a urethra. This view was adopted by the most primitive boys, the so-called extremists.
Exponents of the second line of thought, more moderate but vastly richer in possibilities, claimed that a frigid woman was merely one whose sexual and emotional needs were undeveloped or repressed. Such a case, they insisted, was not incurable; indeed, according to them, it was quite simple to remedy. Perhaps the essential and certainly the most interesting aspect of this theory was an unshakeable conviction on the part of those who held it (known for this reason as the romantics) that, of all possible therapists, they were the ones most competent to treat such a complaint. If only Madame were to place herself in their hands, she would be cured in no time.
The third view, perhaps strangest of all and held by some of the girls, could be summed up in the claim that to be frigid was simply to be in love with oneself. According to its exponents, Madame was so perfect that she had no need of men, indeed found them repulsive. She loved only herself, and in consequence was physically intimate only with her own body. This intimacy was supposed to consist mainly in the incessant cultivation of that body and to involve ministrations so intense that they bordered on the sexual: prolonged bubble baths, face masks, the anointing of her skin with creams and unguents, long, caressing massages of her stomach and breasts, and, finally, parading naked around her flat and examining herself lovingly in the mirror. In short, she was supposed to represent a rare case of female narcissism.
And then, in addition to all this, there was that book – Zeromski’s Ashes. It was firmly established as part of the canon and a prominent item on the school syllabus. Now Andrzej Wajda’s film version had been released – with some entirely unexpected effects.
We were already supposed to have ‘done’ this particular item on our reading list. The novel, a hefty three volumes, had aroused little interest, and hardly anyone had bothered to read it through; Roz Goltz hadn’t even glanced at it. So the film did not generate much excitement. Since we had already spent tedious days ploughing through Ashes in its written form, it was too late to exchange them for a few hours at the cinema, and in this case no one was much interested in comparisons between literature and screen. Nor did anyone pay attention to the heated press and television debates in which Wajda was, as usual, accused of desecration and cheap effects. And yet people went to see it, and more than once.
They went for three short scenes. In the first, Helena, the young and pretty heroine, is shown in her room at the manor preparing to retire for the night; as part of these preparations she apparently finds it necessary to warm her bare legs at the fire, and this she does in the most attractive way, her nightdress riding high up on her thighs as she shamelessly thrusts her body towards the flames. The second scene takes place in the Tatra mountains, against a picturesque background of splendid rugged peaks; in it the heroine, by then a few years older, is raped by a gang of highland robbers, and this provides another opportunity for a close-up of her legs, bare and flexed at the knee. Finally, in the third, some savage and degenerate Polish soldiers, fighting at Napoleon’s side in the unfortunate Spanish campaign, indulge their lust with a group of swarthy nuns against the background of the conquered city of Saragossa.
There was nothing all that extreme about any of these scenes – they contained little nudity and not even much cruelty – but by Polish standards their audacity was breathtaking. It helped that the violated Helena was played by Pola Raksa, at that time a young star and, with her piercingly clear eyes and thrillingly, dramatically breaking voice, the object of thousands of teenagers’ lustful sighs. She was known for her appearances in a number of films aimed at young people, in which she played coltish, innocent girls who tempted men and boys with her charms but never allowed them so much as a kiss. So to see her now being savagely raped by highland robbers (perhaps in revenge for her shameless flirting) was a pleasure of a rare kind. And there was a similar, though slightly different, pleasure to be derived from identifying with Polish soldiers who fought on Spanish soil in such an ignoble cause.
Butch claimed that in one cinema the projectionist would, for a small fee, put on a special treat for aficionados after the last showing and screen just the three all-important scenes, over and over again, freezing the film on the right frames – for example, just at the moment where Pola Raksa stands by the fireplace with one lifted leg exposed almost to the hip. (This, incidentally, gave rise to a long and completely pointless discussion about whether it was possible to freeze-frame with a film projector; Roz Goltz, who knew all about everything, insisted it wasn’t, because it would burn the frame, and a fight nearly broke out.)
In any case, it seemed that the rather singular interest generated by the film had one beneficial result: a national classic once dismissed with a shrug and a yawn now had young people reaching for it unprompted. What they did with it, however, could not exactly be called rereading, nor could the longing it satisfied be described as a thirst for literature. It was dipped into mainly for the mountain rape scene, in the hope that the written description might supply more detail than the brief shot in the film. And this, for the reader, was the beginning of the most remarkable experience of all, for it turned out that in the book, the scene to which the film devoted less than a minute was preceded by an introduction of epic proportions – three whole chapters – and could be read as an independent whole: the story of the brief passion that flamed between the two protagonists and of its tragic end.
It begins with the ‘lovers’, sick of the world, escaping into the mountains (the chapter entitled ‘There . . .’). Here they proceed to spend a sort of honeymoon, living in a hut on the edge of the woods in a state of almost permanent ecstasy (a chapter eloquently entitled ‘Hills and Valleys’). Finally, as a result of their reckless decision to spend the night in a cave high up the mountain (‘Window in the Rocks’), they are set upon by highland robbers. It is at this point that the rape scene occurs, followed by the despairing heroine’s suicidal leap from a precipice.
Among the pupils this episode became immensely popular. It was obsessively read and reread, whole chunks of it were quoted by heart and every detail was minutely discussed. No other
