Perhaps it's a coincidence, perhaps not, but it seems that modern Polish literature is experiencing a countryside revival. Last year, there was Andrzej Muszyński and his Miedza representing the Lesser Poland region, and now Grzegorzewska (who publishes under the pen name Wioletta Greg) with Swallowing Mercury, rooted in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland.
But the prose of Wioletta Greg, an award-winning, though not widely known poet, is not a book ‘about the countryside’. Guguły – the Polish title of the book – means unripe fruit. It is a novel about puberty and childhood. Subtle, dark. A little comical, a little bit sad. Without a doubt very successfully executed.
Swallowing Mercury is a collection of light, delicate short stories/small prose episodes about childhood, then youth, set in the small village of Hektary. The narrator is Wiolka – short for Wioletta. At first, Wiolka is a child; then she has her first period and enters the transitional territory between childhood and womanhood. She has a father with ‘gypsy blood’, who was in prison for escaping from the army and came back thin as a twig, a grandmother who mumbles under her breath the litany ‘O Holy Mother One or Another’, and a grandfather, ‘a stalag prisoner, a stovepipe worker, a carpenter, a singer and a bashaw, all in one’.
It is the 1970s and 1980s, so Wiolka paints assignments about ‘Moscow Through Your Eyes’ at school and goes to church in the afternoon. She collects matchbox labels and scrap metal because there is a competition at school to see who can collect the most. She waits for the Pope to visit, sniffs glue with Lajbos the Elder, tries to run away from home, but comes back.
Greg's book is prose woven from small events and scraps of history, constructed from matchboxes, christening capes adorned with myrtle, blackberries. Taking place on a micro-level. Unconstrained by time, oneiric. Sometimes crazy, as crazy as a maturing imagination can be. Greg fantastically succeeds in rendering the state of mind and sensitivity of someone looking at the world for the first time. Sometimes in awe of reality – like little Grisza, straight out of Chekhov’s work, who went for a walk with his nanny for the first time – sometimes choking on it.
Swallowing Mercury is tart. Greg avoids the sentimental shallows of childhood stories and the nostalgia after one’s ‘little homeland’. Her narration may be melancholic at times, but it is also perverse, impish and tinged with black humour. Or even just plain black, because the end of childhood is marked, as it must be, by death.
Swallowing Mercury takes place mainly in the first half of the 1980s, so there are echoes of great history like the Nobel Prize for Lech Wałęsa or the Pope’s visit to Poland. But they're just background noise, events that pass sideways, like John Paul II’s visit, who instead of driving through the decorated Hektary, chooses to travel by helicopter. The same applies to the countryside. The reader will not find in the book an image of the ‘Polish countryside’.
Swallowing Mercury – if we omit the finer details of everyday life – could take place anywhere and nowhere, in any corner of the world. Although it is a very personal and autobiographically resonant story and it contains specific details about Poland of the 1980s and a specific fragment of space, Wioletta Greg places it on the level of a myth. More than social reality, she is interested in the basic matter of existence: the home, the figures of parents and grandparents, adolescence, the body, death. A seamstress copulating with a mannequin is an image straight out of Schulz, not Konopielka. Greg's village is not particularly surprising, rather following the usual pattern: ritual religiousness, persistence, black humour, exaggeration.
Rather than the rural literary context, the poetic context is more interesting. Wioletta Greg's prose brings to mind the novels of another female poet, Justyna Bargielska: Obsoletki and Małe Lisy (Little Foxes). Both authors have a lot in common: they both made their prose debuts with considerable poetic achievements behind them, they both move through areas of everyday life from which another, intriguing reality shines through, they both move in the micro-scale: Justyna Bargielska does not leave her suburban settlement in Warsaw, Wioletta Greg remains in the village of Hektary. They present small worlds, easy to grasp, but nevertheless abyssal, full of mysterious rifts and revelations.
In Małe Lisy there was an affair with a forest bandit, in Swallowing Mercury we have a friendly elderly murderer, a doctor-paedophile and a prostitute-seducer of little girls. Both writers create prose very strongly saturated with poetry, full of absurd humour, unpredictable in nature (although Justyna Bargielska's wild imagination and language take the lead here; Swallowing Mercury stays more faithful to the traditional logic of the story). The humour is also similar, most often black, wry, surreal.
Swallowing Mercury, as befits prose created by a poetess, enchants with its simple, non-coquettish, but extremely pictorial language. Wioletta Greg has the power to evoke images that are very hard to forget. In Spóźnione Dokarmianie Pszczół (Late Feeding of the Bees), a short story from the collection, she writes:
That evening we sat in the light of the furnace, like prehistoric insects sunk in amber. […] Sparks spilt from the ashtray and disappeared on the marbled rubber flooring like meteorites in a dark, dense ocean.
It's hard to choose from this collection of gems, as there's no shortage of dazzling moments, but it's probably one of the more moving short stories in Swallowing Mercury, a gentle tale infused with sadness, a story about bees and the passing of her father.
There is a certain lightness and unforced charm in Greg’s writing, even, or rather most of all, when she writes about ‘nothing’, when there are not many events, when there are no punch lines or conclusions. At times, when she relies on narrative, she sounds artificial, and plot ideas appear over-complicated, as in the story of a dispute caused by an ‘iconoclastic’ drawing of Moscow sent to the school competition or a visit to the home of the prostitute Natka. Greg is most interesting when focusing on fictional minutiae.
‘It was five o'clock on the clock by the cash registers. A splinter with a maroon halo pulsed under the skin, oozing venom into a five-centimetre weal’, she concludes in a story of a trip to town with her grandmother and selling cherries at the market.
Why is there a wound and where does the pain come from? You should find that out for yourself.
Originally written in Polish by Aleksandra Lipczak, March 2014, translated into English by P. Grabowski, January 2021