The Copernicus Affair — Alexander Theroux

“The center, the center.”

“Zontle?”

  “Listen, the middle of town. Put it that way.”

“Ah, meetzle!” he recognized, somewhat chuffed, and then sighted his nose down the street in the direction of the Rynek, or Square, of Warsaw's famous Old Town, the oldest part of the capital city, which I had noticed, especially for its tall, flat-faced mansions of fading pastels—there was a bohemian look to it all, and I loved the old bricks—while being taxied from the train station to the hotel the night previous in an old black 1939 De Soto. Remember those little rubber propellered fans above the driver's seat? Rumpled steering-wheel covers? And running boards?

We stood in the doorway of the old Orbis Europejski Hotel, me and Wietzel, my waiter—and, let it be said, my first real Polish acquaintance—who, in a comradely way, held my elbow amicably and glanced up at me with the fondness of his little snowman eyes, two wee raisins set in a doughy face round as a ducatoon and the color of that apron of greasy duck girdling his paunch. I can honestly say I did not know what to make of him. His hair was wild-whipped and looked like pot-warp, straggly and limp. A few double chins which he would wobble with a finger while thinking looked like a set of lino stairs with rubber nosing. His complexion was a pale, sickly green. It fit. Death, the so-called “pale horse” of the Apocalypse, is a weak translation from the book of Revelation for chloros, which actually means a frail or feeble green. He farted, loudly. It didn't really matter. I love a contactee situation.

“I see, I get the bus at Old Town then?”

“Yes, your honesty. There is not any ruler without an exception.” Then Wietzel peered closer. “No automobibble you?”

“No,” I sighed. “I'm afraid not.”

“This too is as you vish,” he smiled, dipping a shoulder. “Put your confidence at my.”

“Good.”

“Kood,” came the choric response. Wietzel scurried about me, nodding. “Must,” he managed, cutely walking two fingers across his cuff, “must to go this way on your foot, krab the bus, and, um, best for luck, also too. Don't interompt me. Because is so varm, please to take woda sodowa for sips who make you cold.” He then slid from somewhere a bottle of garishly bright orange soda, and, allowing for no refusal—this was affected by closed eyes and clucks—pressed it onto me, and frankly I wasn't ungrateful. It was August, month of the sickle. The sun bore down, shimmering all. My shoes were melting. I was anxious to be off. “Someshine,” Wietzel grinned, picking up a handful of mud, “is making pisses on airth.”

Yes, well.

I buckled my gear and was about to say goodbye. But his face, suddenly, creased wistfully like a slowly deaerating balloon. He humbly bent deeply over his two cupped hand, the dots of his eyes snapping sheepishly. I leaned closer, only to hear the whisper I believe I had already heard twice before.

“Carmel tigarette?”

Poland, smaller than the New Mexico from which I myself hailed—and where at a recognized university I proudly, and for some time, have held a chair in radio astronomy—found me a passionate pilgrim. I had logged into Warsaw, with a frightful case of railway kidney, only the night before, my very first visit, in a dung-brown train screeching to deaf heaven, my sole reading diversions all the way from dim Berlin nothing more than a microscopically-printed copy of Mickiewicz's epical Pan Tadeusz and the loose, garbled conversation of a ballet dancer from Poznań who, attaching himself to me, kept trying to put his hand on my shin, calling me “Lelitchka,” and attempting to ply me with the national drink, the mere noxious smell from which pinched shut my nose and caused shooting pains in the area of Wirsung's duct.

Contactee, yes, but with limits, OK? I mean, I had a job to do. I was on a mission might be another way to put it. You see, I had secured my papers, letters of introduction, visas—even got several injections of iron from a neighboring neurologist—and set off, with a cud of anticipation in my throat, outward bound for legendary Poland. I was hot for facts, discoveries. I adore science. I am a birder, amateur, of course, a member of the Audubon Society. Premium member. Six issues a year, read religiously cover to cover. Reading is my dram and drug. The cost of membership is high. Point is, I was in the process of writing—and simultaneously, of course, updating the earlier spatchcock works of Starowolski, Broscius, and Gassendi—a biography of Copernicus. The astronomer Nicholas Copernicus? Exactly.

I am a frequent contributor to Sky and Telescope.

Fortune, then, immediately smiled. Some background: this waiter Wietzel, he that morning seeing me off on my lateral trip to the birthplace of Copernicus, had dropped a bombshell. A. Bomb. Shell, let me tell you. In the course of serving me my dinner of hot krupnik and fat, devoted Wietzel casually mentioned, out of the blue, that he himself actually owned Copernicus's very own alpenstock. The original ciupaga! It seemed a highly unlikely prospect, but he was convincing. He told me, but garbled, its history. Never you mind, I thought, I would have that alpenstock, no matter what the cost, or the sun would never be as bright for me again. Well, the poor gormless fellow just blurted it out—and should I sit by? I'm not an Albuquerquian for nothing. But then—get ready!—he apprised me, also offhand and in his laughably malapropistic English, that he alone knew some secrets which he had never told anybody about the relationship between the great genius and his mysterious mistress. 

How shall I put it? Pourparlers were arranged. For a biographer to know such a thing? To be thrown such a bone? I was aquiver.

       I can’t honestly say what I was expecting to see, although I envisioned an old-world and probably well-made shepherd's axe—valaška, in Czech or Slovak, бартка in Ukrainian, fokos in Hungarian—you know, a mountain stick with the handle in the form of a small axe. A true ciupaga—pronounced “chew-PAWH-gah”—was once considered a dang weapon, although the colorful Gorals of southern Poland actually wore them as an element of folk costume, and versions of them you can find in many souvenir shops today. I was breathless, I must say, wondering what I was going to see. The classic ciupaga had a steel handle, but faux versions, souvenir jobs, have handles made of brass or wood, with colored inlays. The bars are decorated with carvings. I owned one which I made myself, after finding a couple of tomahawk heads years back. So have a homemade ciupaga, right? Wrong! I gave it away as a birthday present to a bubble-headed nephew of mine, and he broke it the same day! When a person sees you wielding one, he can become terrified. Someone trying to push you around can meet a very unhealthy end that way, for after all they're designed to kill wolves and bears and things. One good belt with one is all one needs to flatten an adversary. You can split his skull like a melon, he'll be dead before he hits the ground.

Thanking jolly old Wietzel, and resolved utterly to return that same night to jimmy him of some of his secrets (to say nothing of niggling that 500-year-old antique), I trotted away with glee toward the Old Town in order to catch my bus. I had not gone a hundred steps when, lo, I heard—“Hey, meester man!” I turned around. There stood Wietzel in the middle of the sidewalk—his arms raised and circling wildly, his head melodramatically thrown back, his bullet-shaped nose fast in the air like a cartoon elf. It was a picture of an opera singer, poised for high C. Then the little devil let go his clamorous and effulgent note: “Mikolaj Kopernik!”

The old hissing red and white bus wound up, backfired, and we swung around a corner past the stained statue of King Sigismund and jerked out of town with one last flatulent poop of exhaust.

I was heading to Toruń—about 115 miles from Warsaw—an old Hanseatic city of about 70,000 inhabitants, the place famous, of course, as the birthplace of Copernicus who had lived, died, and was buried in Poland. Having arrived, I rented an old pretzel, which they called a bicycle to look around, but one of its vulcanized inner tubes blew and on an unremarkable country road left me for the hour it took to wheel it to a garage and remap out my bearings and resume my small tour not overly absorbed, if the truth be told, in the drab peasant cottages and four-sided windmills made of wood with flukes that just about cleared the ground. 

        Roads I followed were meandering and circuitous. I spoke almost no Polish; my friends claimed I knew about seven words, kołaczki, my favorite dessert being one of them. I kept stopping to try to sound out the directional signs but was confounded by the language—words based on the Latin alphabet, yes, but including too many of them nipped with diacritics, like the kreska or acute accent (ć, ń, ó, ś, ź) and the overdot or kropka (ż); and the tails or ogonek (ą, ę); and the strokes (ł).             

        I saw a horse staggering to and fro in a furrow and lapsing under a wooden droshky yoke as I meandered past wheat-colored landscapes and sunken barns and queer houses and, becoming more optimistic, I not only picked some small sprays of cosmos and rudbeckia and threw them sillily at indecipherable signs but took out my camera and shot some rosy babushkas mangling flax who, for me, for my Leica, looked up with embarrassed frowns. I cajoled several of them to pose for me and today still run through the photos in my snap album (at least I have these for remembrance): bulb-headed, arms akimbo, and even some women I later snapped on a street corner dressed in their beaded doublets or “frogs” with braided seams, their legs wrapped in the usual Polesian way, and their white bandannas shining like samite in the hot glare of my hero's central sun. One loon, an older moonfaced lady with eyes too close together, stuck her tongue out at me for no reason whatsoever. Some people nowadays are like this. You wonder where the nice ones are, you know? Lord. In any case, my babushka photos I later printed for friends. 

Allow me an anecdote? I was backing up at one point for depth-of-field and unwittingly, not seeing the cow-fold I should have, won the captious hearts of those kind ladies by sliding—then slop!—right into guess what? Right. I can't quite forgive their whoops of laughter nor their toothless exclamations, so often were they repeated, as they pointed at me and bawled, “Krowa gowno! Krowa gowno!” Krowa, I figured it out, cow. And gowno? Right. Exactly.

Then I bicycled back, disgusted, to Toruń.

The house in which Copernicus had lived and the dark-red brick observatory where he worked—and over which flew the flag of the white eagle on a red shield—looked like a massive Edwardian toilet. I managed to see his astrolabe, his daybook, some wooden yardsticks which composed part of his crude telescope, a chart of the planets he had fashioned in metal. (His father, named Nicolaus Koppernigk, so spelled, was a copper merchant from Krakow.) The observatory! The thought of what the great man might have seen! Our galaxy contains 100 billion stars, and there are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in our galaxies alone! Three or four old chairs stood around. There were rows of ancient Galilean “telescopes” with out-of-date concave eyeglasses. On the wall hung a series of prints of the great fellow: a keen, bright-eyed gentleman, usually portrayed with a pageboy haircut sitting before an astrolabe in his scholar's fur-lined robes. Why, I even saw a vial that contained the dye he fastidiously used on his hair. (May I mention here that, hard as I looked, I noticed no ciupaga?) I was given permission—putting on white gloves—to poke around the library to look through various papers.

I took copious notes on everything, thinking all the while, as I threaded from glass case to glass case, that I had at last got to the center of things. There I was, in the house of the great astronomer of heavenly bodies. It was astrospectroscopal! The Bachelor Canon himself, Pan Nicholas Copernicus, the very man who refuted Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy. I was hoping to scour through and possibly fumble up some old texts to show that the great astronomer had actually discovered accounts of Aristarchus of Samos, born about 300 B.C., a Pythagorean who had actually been among the first, maybe the very first, to suggest the unique notion that our Earth orbits the Sun, a rebirth of ancient Greek ideas in 16th-century Europe! Am I suggesting plagiarism? Well, it surely would have won me some approval among my peers—or scorn. Academiciana is competitive and among the most envious people alive. Still, I shall never quite forget the reverence I felt as I skipped hither and yon through his observatory, softly whistling snatches of Fidelio and corroborating a thousand odd details for my book.

I had a vision: I looked into the land of the Jagiello kings at the University of Krakow, about May 1494, and saw a handsome youth—one fascinated with revolution (get it?)—standing before the stone-faced rectors there and not only daring to gainsay the earth's importance but also courageously articulating his views on the fixed sun, which later became the life-imperiling Book I, Chapter 10 of De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). You know, it all reminded me somehow of that most memorable of Christmases when—a mere tyke—my father gave me my very first telescope, the formal cause of my assuming the profession, as I believe I mentioned for a little autobiographical fun in my monograph, “Do Planets Sneeze?” in the periodical Wortcunning and Starcraft, XXI, pp. 801–9, and how I had it screwed together and pitched on its three pods that very night on my roof. To see the Hair of Berenice? 

         At seven years old? Money can't buy things like that.

Well, no, actually it cost my father quite a bit.

My return stub for Warsaw showed I had almost an hour to kill. I wandered around some, found myself in a little forest at the end of a long street, and watched birds in the sky. What if I saw a white eagle? I wondered. A white eagle, the noble emblem on the Polish flag! How thrilling that would be! Not merely white-bellied sea-eagles, I mean the real thing. Partially albino, or leukistic, birds are rare, of course, occurring in about one in every 1,800 individuals, according to the Audubon Society. I scoured the sky, in vain. 

        I meandered down unpaved country roads. I saw many shacks, falling-down barns, water troughs, poverty. Was it any worse than in my own country? I knew better, believe me, who had traveled around quite a bit. Telfair County in Georgia. Conditions in rural Mississippi. What about Centreville, Illinois—the poorest town in the United States. Talk about low median household incomes! Why, New Square, New York has the highest poverty and SNAP recipiency rates of any town in the entire republic—70 percent of the population there lives in poverty.  My feet were getting sore, swollen. So, I took the time to sit down on a narrow bench by a park and collate some of my jot-takings, especially matter touching on the part where I was refuting step-by-step, Gnapheus's Morosophus, which hundreds of years ago nastily ridiculed Copernicus. When I got hungry I wandered off down a dirt side-street and found myself in front of what I assumed was a store, for the pictures, in deference to the illiterate, drawn in the margins of these kinds of signs (the which, ever the scholar, I took down): 

  APTEKA

  Lemoniada Musujaca                 Kosmetyczny

Fabryki                                         Chirurgiczne

Blochowka

Fabryki, that would have been fabrics. Cosmetics you can get out of Kosmetyczny, right? And then Lemoniada. Easy. You just drop the letter i and substitute the letter e for the second a. I was always good at languages. But it was science stole my heart. Anyway, as I said, I was hungry. Ravenous. Two eyes, as I entered the store, peeped over the counter. It was a tiny lady with a few rags on her head and gumless. I ate a few kielbasa and at her request—a twitching head, a cheeping sound, a grin—tried the local pierniki. Washing it all down with a beer, I set out in what remaining time I had for souvenirs; I bought a red rooster carved in the Zakopane, a pair of birch-bark sandals I could use on my patio, barbecuing, and, well, an amber tie-clasp I wasn't going to mention because I got gypped. It was Lithuanian.

You should understand me, no one could ever mean all contactee situations, if you get my drift. I think you're liable to misunderstand the whole point, now that it's come up again.

On my way to the bus, I paused and watched the pinched face of an archbishop in sunglasses, a tiny magenta cap, and all his ridiculous red robes nobbling several old men at a street corner for a donation—złotys showered into his briefcase—to Our Lady of Częstochowa. It made me want to—

Good god, I suddenly noticed I had forgotten my manuscript! I raced back to the food shop, having made several crucial wrong turns, only to find the gumless little twit grinning at me and serving up her steaming kielbasi on sheets ripped off my pile of notes to the thirty or so Poles, it being noon, sloughing around there and eyeing me resentfully. I sagged back with an empty heart to the bus and boarded dejectedly, and we eventually pulled away. I thumbed over my purchases until it grew dark. Then my hands held each other.

A big moon, its wake a silver shimmer across the Vistula, saw our bus rattle into downtown Warsaw. There was a peaceable glow suffusing the front of the Europejski Hotel that promised, inside, a respite from the merciless jouncing. I flopped into a chair in the bygone old lobby and circulated, with relief, my stockinged feet. I heard soft piped-in background music on what I am sure was an old Hammond B-3 with a Leslie model 122 speaker, circa 1959. Out-of-date melodies, from the 1930s, with the mind-bending reverb of a skating rink. It made me want to pee.

       The bulky over-stuffed chairs with long backs were monstrously huge, like leather tombstones. Travelers from all nations stood around, gasbagging in groups about the dreadful money exchange; the charming embroidery they saw; the proliferation of nuns in the dark aged streets (“You'd think they’d die out, wouldn't you?” asked someone); the memorabilia in the Frederick Chopin Museum and Marie Curie's house; and so on. I saw some folks, so contagious it must be, playing pinochle. These were my fellow Europejskis. Speaking of which, by the way, old peasant names in that country never ended in -ski or in -icki. Only the very rich bore them. Initially, they formed the endings of the names of the nobility, etymologically adjectives formed from the names of estates. We have to put up with such pretensions from Indians back in New Mexico. OK, natives. Native Americans. Look, I hate pretentious people, always having to be at the center of things. Republics like America have no room for such things.

I yawned and continued sitting. I rotated my sore stockinged feet, which gave me blessed relief. I considered the idea of a few possible side-trips. Copernicus was thought to be buried in the cathedral at Frombork—it was called Frauenberg at the time—a small town on the Vistula Lagoon in Warmian-Masurian Volvodeship, where the great man worked as a canon ca. 1512–1518, although I was told no marker existed. It was in Frombork that the astronomer wrote the epochal De revolutionibus. I was told that you could smell the Baltic Sea from the bell tower.

I began to feel peckish, I must say. Down with a ringing clatter came the elevator, which I summarily rode up that I might change clothes, bathe, and send a few postcards. Stepping off at my landing, I was almost on top of the several bags of laundry for some reason stacked in large white bundles on my threshhold, when suddenly—my heart club-fisted!—it all began to stir, it moved!

“Halyo, meester man.”

“Wietzel,” I gasped.

He looked like a battered old squirrel.

In one way, it was touching. The retainer asleep at the door of his master. Loyal as a tapeworm. He slept until his face got fat and, waking, yawned like a camel. A loud fart seemed to propel him to his feet.

“Carmel tigarette? Gif it for me.”

I waggled a finger. “That's for later.”

“Lugcky Streeks, to go puff.” He bounced expectantly. “Make these”—he held up four fingers—”tigarette of America in my hand, pleased?”

It was when he entered my room that, intending to show him my small purchases from Toruń, I realized with a thousand stinks and curses that I had gone and left everything on the bus, except my camera, which would now be, I remembered, on its way to Łódź—pronounced wodge, if you can believe it! I felt murderous. I pressed my temples and began walking swiftly in circles. I sulked. Wietzel, the poor simp, did not know what to make of it, I imagine. I managed to repress it all over the three or four schnapps-and-Piwos that we drank, celebrating after a fashion in the darkish old room where we alternately watched the natation of several blueflies in our bottle caps and shared national toasts: "Polska!" "Amedicare!"—and afterwards I dined. By the way, forget negotiating the menu. I tell you, it was alphabetical kookooland! Szczęście is their word for happiness. A beetle is a chrząszcz. Bezwzględny means ruthless, which is what I felt! For pencil, try ołówek! Polish sounds so nutty to Russians they even have a verb for Poles trying to speak their language: pshekat.  So, I call them “puchcarts.” To top it off, Czechs think that Poles talking sound like Czech children with speech defects!  Oh no, there was no ordering anything from a menu, not on my part! 

       About the ciupaga? No, I had not forgotten it. I am no dummy, although I suspected Wietzel was. I hate stereotypes, like ethnic prejudice against Poles, but, oh well, God forgive me, did you hear about the Polish rapist? He was standing in the lineup, they brought in the girl, and he says, ‘That’s her!’”

The dining room of the venerable Orbis Europejski was huge and shadowy, the ceilings barn high. At one end an orchestra of sorts was playing something heavy, the entire atmosphere 1950s American Drab—one saw double-breasted suits; thick, solid hideous telephones; padded shoulders; dated hairstyles and low hemlines; stirrings of fox furs biting fox furs; and, outside, the limousines were only those lumpish pachyderms-with-fins. And the music? In the lobby my first night, the orchestra leader—a plug-ugly in a mothy tux and dumb as a felt boot—walked over to me and earnestly asked, “You am liking the Shubby Schecker? Alwus Pooshly? Vukk and Voll! Fyets Toorminoo!” You cannot make up stuff like this. I did a double take. I took a look at this poor fool. Forgive me, but I couldn't help thinking of one of Copernicus's expressions: "the obliquity of the ecliptic" (De rev orb coel. III, 6). 

       I asked Wietzel for a wine menu. Scratching his buttocks, he just stood there and seemed not to understand. Could he possibly be the moron I suspected him to be? Or was that unkind of me? I felt guilty for thinking so. Were Poles any different from Americans? Frankly, just as no amount of epicyclic complication could adequately describe the observed orbits, so also the ratio of the square of the period of revolution to the cube of the mean distance from the sun turned out to be the same for all planets. Humans were surely no different, I had to be patient with Wietzel. So I called for the sommelier, a tall Bela Lugosi look-alike, très lugubre, and asked for the wine menu. I felt suddenly European. This is my day, I thought. So, I ordered an expensive Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, the favorite wine of Napoleon. Grand Cru!

         I shouldn’t have? Be a devil, I thought. Why not push the boat out. When would I ever be here again? I would write it off. 

        Then came dinner. I had thought of formally dressing for the occasion. It amused me to think that dressing so in such a quaint antediluvian setting might have fit perfectly. The dinner jacket seems to have remained obstinately uninvented until 1898, but sitting there I felt that could have been yesterday. I drank deeply of the wine and smiled, it was heaven, and refilled my glass. “Pouring forth its seas everywhere,” I quote Copernicus, “then the ocean envelops the earth and fills its deeper chasms.” Wietzel waddled out with the entire affair balanced on his arms, his fat thumb, I noticed, comfortably macerating in my soup-bowl of chlodnik all the way across the room.

         “Peerfect sloops,” he breathed.

         I sipped my Burgundy. Pure velvet.

         He set down the soup bowl, with a tilted spill.

“Yes,” I said and salted it. Wietzel sucked his thumb and uttered a long satisfying mmmm. I took up a tablespoon large as a ladle and tasted the soup. A tad conglutinate, I thought. A bit mushy.

“Bigos with mushiereems,” exclaimed Wietzel, bowing over the main platter before me, a central slab of meat mantled in sauces, be-crumbed, and surrounded by a coven of what looked like blackish okra.

“Oh look,” I managed halfheartedly.

        “Meats is language!” What was he saying? He stuck out his tongue and began pointing to the small gray slab on the plate. “Język! Speaks! I give you language. Made important for better than nothing is was! You eat with lovely fingers.” My God, he was serving me cow’s tongue!

         Wietzel squatted by my ear. “There is not better sauce who the appetite. I won't,” he added, “to blease meester man, upon my live.” I thanked him. “This is yurple to yump, make for taste tongues.”

He asked, “Wodka?”

  “Vodka,” I repeated.

  “Wodka he is.” And Wietzel poured.

A chubby violinist with a great imperial mustache and wearing a long black velvet vest, embroidered with flat beads, then stepped forward and, swaying romantically, began to play “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” and a few other old 1950s hits. Wietzel, three quarters of the way across the room, paused, stopped, farted, disappeared, unmortified, through the doors, and returned with my dessert, a potato babka. The Poles love it. It means grandmother. I love words—well, let’s face it, I love knowledge. I had hoped to have strawberries and cream cheese, John James Audubon’s favorite dessert, in his honor. No such luck. So, I took the babka. I spooned it in while Wietzel told me that food in Poland was inexpensive (he had told me the very opposite the night before with equal conviction).  I nipped the vodka and sipped more wine. I tasted notes of raspberry, blackberry, cherry, and even some unidentifiable spices, and even gamey flavors. There really is such a thing as perfection.

        The menial paused and, almost drooling, began regarding me, expectantly. I simply thought: ungulate. 

        To tip or not to tip? How many times had I been paralyzed by the problem. But what after all is an emolument in aid of?  A consideration! Protection? Hush money? Appeasement? And exactly what had he done for me so far but put a clamorous and noisy dent into my visit here and squeak with half-witted pleas for my attention? Who was it said, “Cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity”? I patted Wietzel’s hand, that was good enough. He beamed at me.

        I finished my bottle. I pocketed the cork. I adjusted my jacket.

I decided to trump the small chat.

“Is that, ah, alpenstock of yours expensive?”

Wietzel leaned over to ear level. “Tso?”

“Your alpenstock. Much,” I spelled out, “złoty?”

Beyond humiliation, I acted out a little charade. You know, the happy wanderer kind of thing, with groping motions uphill.

“Ah, ciupaga!”

This was it. Yes, I agreed, the ciupaga, and what about it?

“Must for we to upstairs be going,” said Wietzel. “Ciupaga for”—he closed his eyes and licked his nose—“twee hundres of Amedicare dollars in the shiny kold.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger. “Mummy. Gif it for me.”

“Twee hundreds? You mean two. Two hundred.”

“Don't you are ashamed to gif me as like?” Wietzel poked his nose at me. He held up seven fingers, then pried down one. “Make me dat.”

         “Too much,” I rejoined.

          “Cholerni Żydzi,” he muttered.

          “What?”

          He shrugged, cagily, and said “Nie dla wszystkich skrezypce graja.”

         I took out my Polish phrases book and, flipping for proverbs, tried looking what he said. Wszys! Wszys! Wszys! Did every word in Poland begin with those same five letters! Wietzel snatched the book from my hand and finding the phrase pointed to “The violin doesn’t play for everybody.”

I stood up. "I'll give you five dollars.” Tapping each finger—separately, to help—I spread my hand and waved it in front of his beady eyes.

“Nie rosumiem,” he said, leaning forward shaking his head. “Was not twee hundres?”
“Knee what?” I grabbed my wordbook again. He didn't understand me. He was whining and kept shifting his feet like he had to pee. Were police involved? He kept looking behind him. “Don’t for narobic bigosu”—he was pleading for no problems, not making a mess, something like that—“gif Wietzel more much and you smile big like most Amicamerica man fun thing!”

            That was Wietzel all over. Always wrong. Never in doubt.

            He shook his head up and down. “Twee hundres? Six fifty forty eight shiny kold? To make dat you do?” 

            There was a cold scrape in the air.

           I pulled a strategy: employ passive lethargy. I sighed and stepped aside and leaned against a wall. Trick him. Trade space for time, time for position, while he prepared a counter offer. Anxiety in all of its jittery, jiggery ramifications had scooped all the matter out of his headbone.

           “Look,” I snapped. “I.” Pause. “You.” Pause. “Give. This—fiiiiive dollars.”

“Taaallers!” His face wrinkled into a ball. “Dis much, dotknąć.” He spread his fingers in front of him. He blinked. His nose, which was bulbous and comic to a degree, I could see, intruded on his vision. He was perspiring as if he were a tree with mucilaginous inner bark. His stomach bulge seemed to bring him forward. He was now bent over, forward, like a weasel looking at a crippled hen.  “I luff you mak, makes, too much twee hundres?”

“Good?”

        “Wpfive? Fpwive?” He held up his hand. “These?”
       “Fiiiiive, yes.” 

He shrugged, grinned, shrugged again.

          “Good?”

           The Slippery Elm cogitated.

           “Carmel tigarette? Gif it for me.”

           I handed him a pack of cigarettes.

           “Kood!”

I immediately snatched his oily hand and shook it. The umlaut of his eyes moistened and gleamed, happily. He was a pushover. A little figure of joy began dancing in my heart, as I counted my blessings.

   Wietzel lived, it turned out, on the seventh floor of the hotel in a cubicle that smelled of foal wormer. It was a room with one large cloth chair and a shelf with square dishes and innocent tools of the carpentry sort, drills, I suspect, with round I think teak handles. There was a smothering quality to the fat blue dull curtains. On an old black stove sat a battered aluminum pot of stewed and spicy tripe—flaczki, I looked up the word—from which, when passing, he plucked a morsel to eat, crunching the cartilage and sucking his fingers with a slurpable noise. His wee raisiny eyes gleamed as he patted his paunch. I could see that, though repulsive to record, he was a dedicated innards and offals eater, a sucker of marrow, a gnawer of tendons, a muncher of entrails, intestines, viscera, numbles, and great skin-on bone-in gouts of meat.

          He proudly showed me a statue of St. Stanislaus, under which burned a vigil light; recounted for me an endless tale of Szczerbiec, the legendary sword of Poland; and then—finally—rolling back his sleeves, looking back at me with the pride of a collector, stooped to retrieve from under his gritty cot an oblong box about five feet in length. He unlocked it and stepped back proudly.

“Lordy,” said I.

The antique alpenstock lay before me; its handle cut by hand and buffed, its high walnut was designed with delicate carvings, chased, and inset with ivory pieces in beautiful buhl-and-counter. Its grapple, of old iron and peaked, was perfectly balanced. It was unbelievable.

“He has a kood beak?”

“A wonderful beak,” I replied. “Just a wonderful beak, Wietzel.”

“Djarmans in seconds vult var, um —” Fidgeting for a word, he pulled his mouth. He never looked more charming, so I spoke.

“Germans? Tried to steal it? Damned right, Wietzel, damned right.”

“Kraść.” One hand angrily snatched the air.

         The word obviously meant steal, grab, seize.

Whatever. “Yes,” I nodded, encouragingly.

He continued. “This nineteen-zirteen me find”—he knocked on the treasure with his knuckles—“in bull-steeples of chairch."

“A church?”

“Chairch,” he repeated. “Gethlicks? Breests?” He bit the air in frustration and tapped his forehead. “Bluss me fudduh?”

He seemed truthful, although, I must say, I wondered. The liar can often be detected by his smarmy insistence on a strange detail.

“And you're sure, this belonged to Copernicus himself?”

“Kopernik,” he nodded vehemently, lifting the piece up and pointing with that cracked, serviceable thumb to a dramatic Polish eagle stamped at the flat of the handle, under which was hammered the mark of a single fading letter: K. I put my arm around his shoulder and together we left the cubicle and walked down the corridor. The gesture was the best icon of friendship I could muster, short of kissing his feet. At the elevator, I paused. I looked at him, so he could see me see him. I eyed him and snapped five crisp ones into his hands, beseech-side-up. His nose was aflame with the great bargain. He suggested a drink; I complied. He suggested a party; I complied. And then he looked up at me, saying: “Carmel tigarette?”

And I complied again. “Of course.”

“Which pleasure! Which fom!” giggled Wietzel, puffing.

The fat was in the fire. I leaned closer. “You also, Wietzel, you also suggested that you were aware of some secrets between —”

“Din't interompt me,” squawked Wietzel, guffawing, the butt pasted in his mouth wagging up and down, and he lurched forward. But then Fright Itself plucked at my sleeve. Screams will always characterize for me what followed, screams and utter chaos. The elevator had been rattling toward our floor from above, and, having several times shoved the bell, Wietzel, in a moment of curious infantilism—whether motivated by the antic or the urgent I still can't say—moronically interposed the alpenstock into a slim crevice there, which, while only momentarily jamming the falling car, splintered the historic stick like slate in a loud dithering crack, a hopeless splintering fracture, and then ripped the astounded waiter clear off his feet and sent him instantaneously crashing through the fences of the door, nose first, when simultaneously came a sickening whirr and snap, and out were torn like thread, a mad ripping of the unraveling ropes and pulleys from inside the orlo, sending the coffin of the old passenger car free-plummeting down the pit of the shaft—along with my chakera, my secrets, and, alas, my waiter—like a dead weight into the explosive crunch of dust and dunnage 120 feet below, punctuated all by a screech so loud it hurt me in the eyes: the horrifyingly eerie decrescendo and dopplerian echo of Wietzel's desperate “Gooooooowwwwnnnoooo!”

Trembling, I looked down the long shaft. Smoke rose. And with it, having passed through the dining hall and then through the thinnish shaft, I heard the paradoxical strains of that weird little orchestra's finale, bowing the evening out. The piece was the Polish national anthem, “Jeszcze Polska nie Zginęła,” which means “Poland Has Not Yet Perished.”

It had for me. But why aggress so fulsomely against the country? Or the earnest constabulary who in a day-long inquiry asked me no end of questions? Simply and briefly, I found myself next morning racing—and with a throbbing kidney—toward Poznań and the Polish/German border. The sky of this earth, I saw through the speckled train window, was now giving over with dark watery stains. 

       I sat terrible-eyed, regretful, staring at my valise: dispossessed of my souvenirs; beggared of my priceless papers; rifled of my lost “secrets”; and unhoused utterly of the sorely coveted alpenstock. The actual alpenstock of Pan Nicholas Copernicus himself! Left only were a jumbled mess of my photographs, foremost among them that disgraceful Ruthenian she, obviously humble of brain, with her fat tongue sticking out at me. 

        It seemed to symbolize the haplessness of my trip. I had to bite my knuckles to keep from weeping. 

        My one reflection. The earth couldn't have been the center of the solar system. 

       Am I unkind in saying that it should have occurred to a Pole first?

***

Alexander Theroux, who lives in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville’s Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. His Early Stories will be published on August 10th. A limited number of signed copies will be available.