Plebanczyk

Plebanczyk was a good fifteen years older than me. During the war he served in the Anders Army, and towards the end in some special group, something akin to the present day’s Delta Force, where he had been exceptionally trained. After the war he returned to the country. 

He always repeated, that God took away his reasoning... To his Borysław he had no reason to return, so he settled in this town instead. He worked in some bureau and was happy, I think, to have in me an appropriate and discrete enthusiast to keep in shape. He took me through a training regiment in a fully and almost overzealously conspiratorial manner. 

With a young and pretty wife he lived in the middle of a very large garden in a medium sized funny looking house, which he built himself from post war wreckage. They were childless, and to every comment on this subject Plebanczyk always had the response, that when soon the Americans would enter, which he had the entire time strongly believed, then for sure he would decide on progeny. After this admission almost always fell a certain double edged question: and for what exactly are they necessary to this endeavor? Our conspired sessions happened in a part of the garden fully isolated from the rest of the world. The whole training, irrespective of the time of year or the weather, lasted always exactly an hour. 

Plebanczyk dressed in a weird, brought in from England, sports outfit, in which he looked like an English second league ball player from the era when over here the January uprising was just dying out. At his house I kept my outfit, towels and sneakers. I had these in large supply because I was constantly getting something from my club. 

The training began with an intensive fifteen minutes of gymnastics, always with exercising somersaults forwards and backwards, which at my height, a meter eighty seven, was not at all that simple, and then to boredom we repeated every version of defense from attacks with fisticuffs, with a firearm, a knife, a carbine with bayonet, from attacks by two, for example one with a club the other with a spear, three, four, and even more assailants. 

This was not wondrous battle and had absolutely nothing in common with the spectacular gentlemanly boxing, for example, of Lord Byron or the superb boxing we watched in contemporary American film. 

With Plebanczyk it was not only fisticuffs, we fought with the side of our hands, elbows, head, knee and anything that could come in handy. Most of all counted heroism, speed, reflexes, determination and steel will. Battle always had to end with the fastest total elimination of the opponent, meaning simply his death. 

It was the way they taught Plebanczyk, and now he taught me. I even learned the art of throwing knives, which when many years later I would demonstrate in some more cultured settings always elicited mixed feelings. Our trainings we set up so that irrespective of anything else they took place at a minimum twice a week, but were not regular: sometimes we met during the day, sometimes very early in the morning or very late at night. In only one matter was Plebanczyk at all unpleased. 

He told me that during his schooling in England one of the most important exercises was jumping in full gear backwards out of a third floor window. During this short fall you had to execute in mid air a quick somersault and, comfortably and ready for further battle, land on your feet. Quite luckily we never disposed ourselves of a third floor window. Almost always after the end of the training, a few times even during frosty weather, we took under the naked sky cold showers, with the help of a device which we constructed from a large bucket placed on a gazebo roof. Thanks to my sports connections I acquired a rubber hose, hard to get in those times, of a length of more than thirty meters, which brought water from the house straight into this bucket. I don’t have to add, that then and for many years later, different kinds of colds, flus, and similar ailments were for me a rather abstract concept, divorced from reality. 

Whenever I could, I tried to pay Plebanczyk back, giving him and his wife some small presents or helping them with something. To only one thing was I not talented—to work in the garden. Digging in the ground evoked in me always an allergic aversion. They knew about this and so never asked me. I figured that Plebanczyk longed for his Borysław, so once I painted a landscape for him. It presented the oil fields in Texas or Oklahoma. On a surrealistic horizonless, and actually composed mostly of horizontal steppe, stretch, drowned in a very romantic setting of the sun and beautifully titled SUNSET, I placed a considerable number of oil rigs. This motif I took from a photo in the American weekly magazine “Life,” of which I owned three issues, treating them like a thing of light, sacred relics. 

Plebanczyk lightly criticized the work, saying that the oil rigs in Borysław were actually wooden and that the landscape there was decidedly hillier, nevertheless, mounted into some post-German frames, the painting hung in an honored place in the modest dining room of their house.

What a dangerous art this was, a conclusion I came to not a whole year from the time when I first began my contact with Plebanczyk.