![]() The poet was, in modern parlance, a well-meaning, politically correct elitist and virtue signaler who “went native” and tried to paper over tectonic divides with high ideals of universal brotherhood. Peasants brought in so many heads that the price was lowered from coins to salt. Austrian colonizers did purchase the heads of Polish nobility. Only fifty-four years before Rydel’s wedding, Jakub Szela led an uprising against serfdom, an uprising that took the lives of a thousand nobles. I didn’t know that Polish nobles sometimes called serfs, my ancestors, “cattle.” I didn’t know that in 1900, poet Lucjan Rydel married a peasant girl as part of an effort to bridge the divide between the upper classes and the peasants, a rift that Poland’s enemies reliably exploited in divide-and-conquer strategies. No, I didn’t “understand” The Wedding in that I had a command of all the facts. I wish that I could find that earnest Polish man and tell him. His face expresses all the hatred the elite feel for the great unwashed they try so hard to love. These memories are dredged up at the wedding. A peasant whose face was caked with dirt dipped his hands into a bucket of blood. The Austrians placed the heads in a wicker basket that bled onto the floor. Years before, Polish peasants – just like those at this wedding – had sold Polish aristocrats’ heads to Austrian overlords. She gulps the vodka and rotates her hand to bite off the tips of the sausages. She holds a snifter of vodka in her fist, and sausages project out from between her fingers. ![]() A pretty young partier, her white face slick with sweat, elaborate red ribbons springing from her coiffure, stares blankly ahead. Images from The Wedding have stayed with me for forty years. That juxtaposition – of celebration over the open mouth of hell – made it impossible for me to look away. It was a bacchanalia, with orgiastic flirting, frenzied dancing, and percussive folk tunes, but there was simmering tension underneath. The wedding in question was between an urban poet and a peasant. Through every breathtaking twist, The Wedding owned my rapidly beating heart, my flip-flopping guts, and my spine pressed against the seat. The 1973 film The Wedding ( Wesele) manipulated images so skillfully that it might have been an amusement park ride. My Polish friend, Beata, gave Kirstin her entire month’s salary, so Kirstin could bring back to Beata one spool of turquoise thread. My Australian roommate, Kirstin, was about to visit West Germany. We could exchange one dollar for fistfuls of Polish money. “Our history is peculiar,” the young man informed us. The waiters in the restaurants with no food the train station clerks who couldn’t sell you a ticket and couldn’t explain why the librarians whose shelves were off limits: resignation flowed more reliably than water through the noisy pipes in the student dorm. “Since you are Americans, you will not understand this movie,” the young man promised, with a familiar resignation. Those very few people who could speak any English at all sounded as if they had memorized a purloined dictionary, reverse-engineered the grammar, and practiced only on Mars. The Iron Curtain guaranteed that its detainees didn’t have much of a chance to converse with outsiders. The young man continued in that weird English that could be heard only in the old Soviet Empire. ![]() ![]() Kids love it when class is canceled and the teacher shows a film. ![]()
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