A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (9 page)

Sir,

I am addressing your office and you personally in connection with case No. PT/2875/2008-09, regarding the defendant whom I, for reasons of my own, will address only as the General here. As you are well aware, in the autumn of 2008 the Institute of National Remembrance, investigating Nazi- and Communist-era crimes, brought in an indictment against a total of nine persons. Now the eighty-six-year-old General, who headed the Military National Salvation Council, created on December 13, 1981, stands accused, among other things, of leading this “criminal organization”—for which he could get up to ten years in prison.

I will abstain from any comment about this institute and its methods in conducting the
lustration
process—perhaps it is enough to mention that I have heard some humans call it the “Ministry of Truth.” But, on the other hand, I do not go out in the streets of Warsaw very often, and it could be that I am missing some valuable information.

I am appealing to you because I believe it is extremely important to bring the case of the General urgently to an end. I will try to explain why.

Sir, you rightly might ask who am I to take it upon myself to address you at all? Therefore, please allow me first to introduce myself. My name is Gorby. I am a female of feline origin—what you humans call cats. Being born in the house of the General's daughter, I have been living in the General's household for almost ten years now. His whole family loves animals; the General himself, unfortunately, favors horses the most. No wonder. He is an officer, after all. Let me explain our relationship: I am considered to be the General's pussycat, although I take a somewhat different view of this myself. From my standpoint I was nice enough to choose to live in his home, and to allow him and everybody else to believe just the opposite. It is perhaps too banal to say that I picked him up, since it is well known that we cats are free spirits, unlike dogs, of course. But I have to share the house with his dog, Napoleon. This is because Napoleon Bonaparte is the person the General admires the most. Not a good choice of a name, because Napoleon is a big, dumb mongrel. The only certain thing about his lineage is that he evidently belongs to the shallow end of a gene pool. Of course, his favorite activity is playing with a ball! The poor thing shows no sign of intellectual activity whatsoever, and I can tell that he bores the General. Who wouldn't be bored by throwing about that round object again and again? But I have some use for him; he brings me news and information from the outside world—as my courier, you might say.

I, on the other hand, am never either bored or boring. You are arrogant, I've heard Napoleon say about me more than once behind my back, but it is not my intention here to gossip about him. I just want to stress the fact that it was my
choice
to live with the General.
To choose
is a very important verb for me. I have no problem with freedom, since I did not live in that allegedly
inhuman
period of human history called Communism. I have often heard this adjective—by “inhuman” humans mean “animal-like.” Let me take a chance here to express my total disagreement with this use of the word; it should be corrected! Needless to say, we animals rarely exercise your bloody habit of killing each other within the same species. With the exception of fighting dogs, but those gladiators are beyond contempt, I am afraid.

Going back to my relationship with the General, I cannot say that he is my butler, although it is very close to the truth; it would offend him if I were to claim that. The General is very much a person of the old times. By that I mean that he is truly sensitive to class differences, maybe even more so because he was born into a noble family.
Noblesse oblige!
So, let's just simplify things and state here that the General is my keeper.

With this introduction, I would like to move to the purpose of my letter and offer you some of my feline reflections.

Let me tell you, Sir, that I have two reasons for submitting this appeal to you. The first one is strictly personal. Right now, the General is in the hospital with a severe case of pneumonia and various other ailments that I don't want to bother you with. This is not the first time; his age and the stress of this trial are wearing him out. Pneumonia can cause the death of an old and frail person. Considering his poor health throughout his whole life, I am seriously worried that he might not ever make it to hear the sentence when it is given out. Especially because I know that in this country such trials can drag on for years. Indeed quite some time elapsed from the first indictment to the beginning of his trial . . . I would hereby like, as his friend—indeed his
confidant
—to submit this appeal for you to take matters into your own hands and bring a quick decision in whatever direction you see fit.

My second reason is of a more general nature, though. I see the young generation of Poles: for them Communism is something that died twenty years ago, before they were even born. It is passé! But although this young generation might not be very knowledgeable or even interested in the events of the past, they should be responsible for how they deal with their past
now
. Therefore, the trial of the General is a very important example for them.

Speaking of the General, I ask myself if he (and others from his time) should have been put on trial at all—and what is such a trial expected to achieve? To make my point clear, I do think that a fair trial makes it possible for an unjustly accused person to exonerate himself. Yet, I wonder if the General should have been put on trial in a criminal court. Let's make no mistake here—the General welcomes his trial. “It is important that history doesn't continue to divide Poles forever,” he has told me often enough. I believe that to try him or not was a major dilemma, because it had to do with the attitude of your society toward the Communist past in general. Seeing that there was no consensus on how to proceed, your office dragged its feet until very recently. After all, life is what happens precisely in between these (or any other) two extremes. Again, as the General himself said: “History and the question of who is right are complicated and cannot be seen in terms of black and white.”

I am sure that you, Sir, with your experience in such matters, would agree with me that truth and justice are brother and sister—but sometimes it is hard to maintain an equilibrium between them without causing even more harm to society. After all, a courtroom should deal not with moral issues, but with individual guilt proved by evidence. The important question in the General's case is: What values do you want to promote: retaliation or social consensus; further conflict or reconciliation? That is my understanding, although Napoleon claims that this trial has nothing to do with either truth or justice, but only politics. Well, perhaps he overheard somebody saying this; I cannot imagine that he deduced it on his own . . .

The General is, as they say in the media, a “divisive figure” in Polish society. There is no doubt about the controversy he has been provoking for almost two decades now, long before I was even born. (Please note, Mr. Prosecutor, that I am being very honest with you, to the point of even admitting my age, which a lady cat should never do!) So, the controversy, which everybody knows about by now, is that the General claims he declared martial law in order to save Poland from Soviet invasion. In short, he saved lives in an act of patriotism. For twenty years, the General has been consistently defending his decision: “We were threatened with fratricidal conflict, and we could have inflicted on ourselves incalculable tragedy.”

Today, in spite of this controversy, the General's public standing is better than the president's brothers'! For years, opinion polls about whether the Poles believe his justification for martial law have been roughly split down the middle, suggesting that at least one half of Poland's citizens accept it. They don't think that it is necessary to put the General on trial. After all, although most Poles did not choose to live under Communism, they just went along and lived under Communism, accepting the military regime as reality. It is not in their interest to go back and wash their own dirty linen. The other half of Poles, however, would like to “purify” society of its Communist remnants. They prefer a fresh start, a sharp division between past and present, between totalitarianism and democracy. For such
purists
, Poland was divided into Communist supporters and the opposition, with nothing in between. To them, the trial of the General represents an act of revenge. “A traitor is not a victim of circumstances,” they say. But this is a moral statement, and it is not helpful with the trial. I personally would hesitate to belittle the possibility that the General was acting out of patriotism—but I might be prejudiced about him. Because I ask myself, Does the fact that he was a Communist exclude his patriotism? I think not.

“Down with the enemy!” barks Napoleon incongruently when I—out of sheer pity—tell him about the pros and cons of the trial. Sometimes, as an intellectual, I do feel the responsibility of keeping him informed. But what can such a poor creature think when I ask him, Who are
them
? except that I am showing off.

The truth about the General is that he did indeed proclaim martial law on December 13, 1981. The truth is that, as a consequence, the Solidarity movement was banned, its members were persecuted and jailed, censorship was introduced, freedom suspended, and fifty-six people were killed in the year that followed—that is all true. The General does not dispute any of this. The truth is also that in his political career, he made other wrong decisions that inflicted pain upon the Poles. Even when he was not acting on his own but as a member of the ruling political elite—for example, when dispatching Polish troops to Prague in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact invasion. Or when there was the shooting in Gdansk in 1970 in which forty-four protesters were killed. The truth is that he was a political leader who had accumulated too many functions (prime minister, minister of defense, president, head of the Military Council of National Salvation), logically leading him to assume dictatorial power.

I understand all this. Maybe this is the moment to stress again that I am sentimental, that I would like to defend the General. However, while I am on his side in my heart, I try to keep a clear head: I don't want to defend him from the truth—blind faith is his dog's defining trait, not mine.

Sir, before I take you any further, you should bear in mind my special position. I have a chance to observe the General from a very privileged perspective, being the one who sits in his lap most often. Napoleon is too big. And, thank God, we don't keep horses in the house yet, except in pictures. So, he caresses me. He speaks to me. He trusts me, I would say. You see, I am small and elegant, and I try not to be obtrusive. Sometimes I purr, just to make him feel good. Usually I simply sit there quietly in order to watch and listen. Like any “real” psychiatrist would.

He is bony, and to sit in his lap is not very comfortable, to say the least. But boy, is he warm, and that counts for a lot when you are not so young yourself. And he strokes me, which I found out is good for my back. He does it somewhat absentmindedly, because he does it while he reads, and he reads a lot, or listens to the news on the radio—he almost never watches TV—in his small studio on the first floor of the house. I let him do it—I mean, rub me and read at the same time. You can't take away all the fun from an old man, now can you? It wouldn't be nice of me. Meanwhile, I ponder subjects of my interest . . .

My real interest is not politics, it's psychology. Being, well, a semiprofessional, in human terms, I don't judge people. You may think that I need to study the psyche of the General because I depend upon his will. Or because I need to know my enemy. I would not go that far; the General is a good cat-keeper. He does not taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects, as other humans do. I get far better treatment than Napoleon, who is extremely jealous of my privileged position, grumbling stupidly that it is not fair. As if life were fair! In return, I listen and try to understand the General. I also try to understand humans as such, with their strengths and weaknesses. I am essentially fond of your kind of primate! I find you as a species interesting, often puzzling, mostly not very intelligent—but worth observing. You perhaps do not fully trust the observations of a feline psychiatrist without adequate formal education? But please consider that I am in a position to closely scrutinize how human beings behave for the simple reason that
I do nothing but observe them full-time
.

Now, I am well aware that you might harbor a certain suspicion that I am subjective, i.e., prejudiced in favor of my keeper. But let me assure you that my subjective feelings do not stand in the way of my professional findings about the said human being. On the contrary, I treat him like any other patient of mine, like, for example, his wife (a very nice lady, loved by her students!) and his darling only daughter. The pet daughter! Yet, there is no competition between the two of us—she has far too little time and patience for the old man . . . No, I am certainly able to keep the necessary distance between the object of my study and myself. In fact, the General doesn't even know that I am writing this letter. I had to do it behind his back, because he would strongly disapprove of it, maybe even scold me. I only worry that Napoleon, in his simplicity, might bark something to him. But he barks pretty incomprehensibly, and the General is a bit deaf, so I am not really nervous about it.

Please allow me to make a digression here. I am afraid that I have to use this opportunity to make you aware of an injustice in your domain. I am convinced that I qualify as a character witness at the General's trial. I personally volunteered to tell the court that he is a good man. I have sent enough obvious signs of my intention. I also sent a letter to the judge. Believe it or not, the response I received was rejection on the grounds of my species! A judge of the criminal court rejected me as a character witness with these words: “We hereby inform you that, as a rule, our court does not accept witnesses of alien origin.” First and foremost, I am not an “alien.”
E.T. is an alien.
I am a cat! Disregarding this display of ignorance on the part of the said judge, where does your law make this stipulation? He did not even bother to cite the clause that would forbid me to testify, a grave mistake for someone who is responsible for the law.