Tufta

This book pays tribute to the two solaces that kept me and those like me sane when the mad Stalinist disease befell us—the radio stations of the West that played that jazz, and the girls in town that were divine. They were both non-stop. - Author's Note

The thing of it: I ended up in front of the medical commission of the assentierung with prospectives from the country. Because three years of service in the People’s Army of Poland I was uninterested, completely uninterested, in, the first summons with youthful abandon I had simply ignored. Additionally, things had worked out in such a way that I did not have the right recommendation from the union of Polish youth, the ZMP, and so had not registered for university. Nevertheless, I had many plans for taking fruitful advantage of this free year, and the army did not come into play here at all; this was outside of any realm of discussion. 

Some two or three weeks after brushing off the first deadline to report for recruiting, in the late evening, just after I got home, right as Tommy Dorsey had started on American forces radio with his I’M GETTING SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU, Tufta, Tufta the neighborhood militiaman, the local patrolman, arrived at my door. 

He was from the police, but see they did it different then and there; ‘police’ was an imperialist term. Police sprayed fire hoses at blacks in America. This was a citizen’s patrol. Precinct by precinct, block by block, and our citizen was Tufta. Full of poorly played confidence, Tufta showed me an order saying he was obligated to take me tomorrow at seven in the morning, on the late schedule, to assentierung. 

Assentierung was one of those words used by my mom, who as a young girl in Galicia had been a subject of Emperor Franz Josef, and despite pedigree she could not shake certain Austrio-Galician words; heavy hiking boots were BERGSTAIGERS, a cheap bar that had a license for liquors was a PROPINCIA, and the army’s fitness for service review was always and forever ASSENTIERUNG. 

Tufta laid out the plain details to me in the following way: right now he would lock me up, I’d spend the night at the station, and in the morning he’d escort me to the place. Luckily, it was fairly easy to convince him not to make a fool of himself, that, oh well, that there’d be no more trouble from me, that I’d make it to the recruiting station at seven in the morning myself, that I know that he’s had enough problems on my account, even if only because, after all, today he had to wait several hours to finally nab me, so that this time he can be a hundred percent sure that, assuredly, I assert, assuming his assistance, the ass, he’s got my RSVP, that, after all, he knew me. 

And Tufta knew me quite well. He once confided in me that as a militiaman, from a criminal side he had no issue with me, but from the political-moral side, as it were—better left unsaid… Most amusing was this, that poor Tufta, probably because of my look, because of the look of my friends, because of the music to which I listened, and on the whole because he took my entire ensemble as unapologetic pro-Western sentiment, poor Tufta quite seriously believed me an American spy. Of course he knew that for years I had lived in this town, but on the other hand, he naively suspected that by some shadowy power I could have been recruited, I could’ve even, such things happened after all, I could’ve even been discretely extracted for some time to the West, which in Tufta’s head was crawling with American training camps for sabotage-espionage, and there, after thorough programming, I could’ve been appropriately equipped and sent back. In the Cold War era Soviet spy mania very often crossed the line into absurdity, taking the masses’ minds along with it. 

On his mission, Tufta was insistent, nosy. He often tried watching me, my friends, the girls who came by the apartment. He asked the neighbors about me. He eavesdropped. It intrigued him, for example, why I dressed just like that, and not some other way, and from where I was getting the money for it. He didn’t have a clue that as a young, talented illustrator, with numerous comics and even more numerous stupid joke drawings, cooperating with all kinds of periodicals, from which the honoraria were not the worst, and as a competing athlete too, champion of a second-rate but very wealthy sports association, with month-to-month bookings that were not bad cash, I could cobble together a comfortable living. 

One thing was comforting. Tufta was trying to figure me out as an American spy all by himself, and did not share his suspicions about me with the thuggish cadre with which he operated. He counted very much on the fact that after all, he’ll be able to finally unmask me, and that this will cause some untold Pandora’s Box to pour forth incessantly—as if the UNRRA were dropping provisions—honors, awards, promotions and distinctions, not to mention already money and girls. On the other hand, Tufta was also trying to hedge. If suddenly there were some sort of action, or some war and thousands like him were getting hanged on the lamp posts, then the authentic American spy, who he, as a citizen’s militiaman, Tufta, didn’t out, and even in a sense covered and shielded, would certainly protect him from otherwise lowly death.