The Last Season (13 page)

Has Poppa flipped? Enjoy myself? I've already heard and
forgotten
most of this shit at the knee of the old man himself. I wasn't interested then, either. Hell, I could save Marie enough carbon paper to finish off her old man's shack with, if she was interested in the present rather than this crap.

You want to know about the Batterinskis, Marie? Try page 366 of the
National
Hockey League Guide
, right in-between a nobody named Rudy Bastion — a total of
one
NHL career goal in 5 seasons — and a mean bugger called Baxter who took an ill-timed run at me once when he was with the Nordiques.

Just look, Marie, and tell me who's got three-quarters of a whole page all to himself, eh? Seven teams in four leagues, fifteen full- or part-seasons in the pros, 926 games played, 64 goals, 286 assists, a nice round 350 points and a stunning, remarkable, atrocious, magnificent 2,038 minutes in penalties.

That's just a single slash short of thirty-four hours. Hell, in the shaky lumber market, Danny Shannon's lucky if he gets that much work in a week. And for what? Two hundred ugly bucks? Maybe. You know what those same hours paid Batterinski? I'd guess a million. Hadn't been for that weasel Wheeler I'd know for certain, but I'll still say a million. At least on paper. That's
one million dollars
.

This Batterinski is a goddamn millionaire, Poppa. Or at least should be. Not a worm picker. Not a painter of roadhouse shithouses. Not a fucking poet. And certainly not
dead
!

And not a “D.P.” either. But precisely where he belongs — smack dab in the record books. You could look it up, Marie.

God, just look at the trouble they've gone to, the poor, pathetic fools. Them sitting over there thinking this is what I've spent my whole life waiting to read. Poor, poor Poppa! Lord knows I love him, but Jesus H…. I will glance at it, okay … and thank him for it in a letter ... if I can stay awake….

The Batterinski History

by Karol Batterinski

I, Karol Tadeusz Batterinski, am the first and only son of Tadeusz Kósciusko Batterinski who was born in the year 1816 or thereabouts, the records are not accurate. He was born on a farm in Pomerania, some fifty
wiorsta
from Gdansk. (
Felix, this is a measurement I cannot track down. I'm sorry
—
Marie
) The family was Kashube. His father was Dominic and his mother, I believe, Jozefa. Again, the records are sketchy but I know, when his life is told, the reader will understand why so little is known of the father by the son.

It would have been a small farm, for I know my father was very poor and had three older brothers who would stand to inherit before him. My father told my mother, Danuta, that he believed his father to be a romantic, for he named him, obviously, after Tadeusz Kósciusko, leader of the tragic 1794 Insurgents. The Poles were even then fighting Russian oppression. They fought under Kósciusko with scythes. Farmers, all of them, and all they wanted was to own their own small plots of land and not have to kill themselves working as poor serfs with no hope at all. For awhile under Kosciusko they had help. But they were only farmers, remember. They had no training, no weapons, no strategy except their own anger. What organization they had came from Kósciusko alone, and he must have been a remarkable man. He'd fought with Washington in the American War of Independence and had been one of the main officers involved in the successful fortification of West Point. The United States Congress later rewarded him for his act of bravery by granting him huge tracts of land in, I think, Maryland. He could have been a wealthy man, waited on by servants, his work done by slaves if he'd so wished. But what did Kósciusko do? He was completely unselfish and a true Pole. He came home and he fought. And when he was wounded and had lost, he went into exile in Switzerland. He sent instructions to the United States of America that his many lands be sold. The money, he stipulated was to be used for one purpose alone: the buying up and setting free of American negro slaves.

Some would call that naive, foolish. Undoubtedly, the money from the land sales ended up in somebody else's pocket, and what negroes were set free probably were again slaves within the day. But that is not the point. The point is that it is a Pole's nature to think of others first. And in that way the Pole is too easily taken advantage of, on earth. In heaven, however, it is another matter. The Pole is a pauper on earth, a king in heaven.

Our destiny, it seems, is to fight. The Kashubes have fought throughout their history and there has been little time for anything else. A few poets, a composer, I'm sure (but can find none, certainly not on the level of our revered Chopin or Paderewski, my personal favourite, as you well know), some painters, but above all fighters, warriors. The Israelites say they are the lost tribe, the chosen people. The Kashubes are also chosen, chosen to suffer. Poles know what it is to be outcasts. No one needs to describe abuse or oppression to the Poles.

History teaches a Pole that in the end he stands alone. I quote Napoleon Bonaparte in Verona, Italy, speaking in September of 1796, when revolution and new promise was riding the winds of Europe and America. “I like the Poles,” Napoleon said. “When I have finished the war in Italy I will lead the French myself and force the Russians to re-establish Poland.”

We know now what Napoleon was doing. He was firing up the Polish volunteers, many of them the very best fighting men he had. Toss an empty promise into the air and a Pole is sure to charge head down and full-throttle out of the trenches. It works every time. It will work again.

Churchill did it in World War II — just look at the glorious accomplishments of the Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain, and for what? To fall under Russia's boot heel again! Woodrow Wilson did it in the Great War. We were even included in his famous Fourteen Points, you know. We were point thirteen. Any Kashube could have told Wilson what that meant.

In all my reading (and here I must thank the good Fathers for opening up their libraries to me) I have come across but one non-Pole's opinion that was totally accurate, and that, incredibly, comes from the founder of Communism, Karl Marx. Nevertheless, he was right. Writing in the September 6, 1848, issue of
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
, Marx said to the Prussians: “You have devoured the Poles, but you will not succeed in digesting them.”

You have devoured the Poles, but you will not succeed in digesting them.
Think about that! It was true more than a century ago; it is true today; I fear it will also be true tomorrow. The Poles continue to be devoured. All that ever changes is those who bite into us.

The Prussians came and tried to abolish our language. At a time when the Romantic poets were celebrating the dignity of man, the Prussians established throughout Polish territory Gestapo-style organizations called Gustav-Adolf Societies, which were charged with making us over in their own image. They had the right to walk into a death home and tear the Polish books off the shelves and shove them in with the dead. Then they would cart the coffin off to make sure the old Poles and their old ways were buried forever. Some Poles, determined to hang on to what they were,
were forced to rob their own parents' graves in the dead of night.
Just think about it....

My father was fifteen or sixteen years old in 1831 when the Poles decided to fight back. I know nothing of the circumstances but he ended up in the so-called army of General Sowinska. This army numbered perhaps sixty thousand, mostly farmers, and had only anger to fight with. Yet somehow they swept across Poland, thanks, I believe, to Nicholas II's obsession with sending his Russian troops into France to rectify the July Revolution and return Louis to power. The Russians and Prussians simply ignored Sowinska's rebels until they were ensconced in Warsaw. And when they did finally get around to routing them, the rebels won even though they seemed to lose. Many fled with Sowinska to Paris where, because their ragtag revolt forced Nicholas to abandon his assault on the French, they were the toast of France.
Amis des Pol
societies sprang up all over the country. They took the threadbare refugees in, clothed them, fed them and gave them shelter for free and sustenance money each month with no strings attached.

They were known as The Emigration. I know from my mother that my father was in Paris with General Sowinska and that he, the poor farmer's boy, was trained as a typesetter by Paris sympathizers. He was involved in the publishing of tracts and poetry that were smuggled back into Poland to keep the resistance going. Here he apparently met Frederic Chopin, who was then all of twenty-one years of age and a composer of international reputation. My father also knew Adam Mickiewicz, the immortal poet, whose
Books of Polish Pilgrimage
were, with Chopin's music and the writings of Zygmunt Krasinski, the most powerful weapons Poles back home had to fight with. Words are in the mind and music in the heart, and neither can be imprisoned in coffins, buried and forgotten.

(
Felix, your grandfather goes into long, long quotations from Mickiewicz at this point and your father has marked them for you. I feel uncomfortable translating them. I consulted Father Schula and he had some parts already translated in a book. I send you, then, a portion of
Pilgrimage
that he suggested:

“I shall beat one wing against the past,

The other against the future,

And steering by the dictates of the heart,

Strive toward the feet of God.”

I can send more if you want, Felix. Just say the word.
—
Marie
)

So Father Schula suggests this passage, does he? And he wants me to beat my wings, is that it? Has the old coach gone soft, too? Him and Poppa? If Father Schula thinks Batterinski is “The Bird,” then he's got me mixed up with my old Flyer pal Saleski, only for Don the poem would have been written a little different, I'd say.

“I shall beat one wing against the Bruins,

The other against the Canadiens,

And charging by the dictates of Shero,

Strive toward the cup of Stanley.”

What in Christ's name does Poppa expect me to do with this stuff? Clutch it to the bosom and weep? Sing the Polish National Anthem? Hijack the
Newbuildings
and invade Gdansk harbour with a brigade of Volvos?

I find it hard to even picture Father Schula today. Where is the priest who was more coach than knee-banger? Where have the days gone when I would sit opposite him in the St. Martin's confessional running my left hand up and down the velvet curtains because it made me feel horny?
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned and I confess to almighty God and to you, Father
. Schula's voice lowered, sadder, the yelp from the rink missing, but the questions,
How long since your last confession?,
more filled with concern for my shoulder than soul, the Hail Marys aimed more at Renfrew and the upcoming game than at heaven and the upcoming judgment.

Confiteor Deo, omni potenti
… Christ, I'm surprised I can still remember it. I suppose it's like a reverse breakout pattern. See it once in chalk and you never have to see it again….

My father had the sense to give up on phony French promises and return to where the real fighting needed to be done. In 1843 he arrived in Gdansk. That same year Krasinski's
Przedswit
was smuggled into Poland and I choose to believe [Aha, so now he's not so sure! I can almost feel Jaja rocking me.] that it was my father who was the carrier of this powerful message, which I am proud to say I have passed on to my sons — alas, not to Ignace, for whom I have memorized it twice as perfectly — and to my, so far, only grandson, Felix:

“… and I heard

A voice that called in the eternal sky:

As to the world I gave a Son,

So to it, Poland, thee I give.

My only Son He was — and shall be,

But in thee my purpose for Him lives.

Be thou then the Truth, as He is, everywhere.

Thee I make my daughter!

When though didst descend into the grave

Thou wert, like Him, a part of humankind.”

(Felix, Father Schula again — by the way, he sends his best — Marie.)

Krasinski died a bitter drunk at the age of forty-seven. [Christ, if he'd told me this back then, maybe I'd have listened better.] Still, it is the poem not the man that matters. He may have been, as some have claimed, simply a carrier of a larger meaning, as the Holy Mother herself was.
Przedswit
became the basis for what the skeptics have referred to as Poland's messianism. Not even Chopin, with his Revolutionary Etude no. 12, op. 10, was to have such an effect. The idea spread that Poland had been called on by the Holy Father to suffer crucifixion, just as Jesus had. Why? Well, the true Poles argued that this was because Poland, again like Christ, stood for a universal truth, the cause of human freedom. Poland thereafter was seen as a Christ metaphor, rising from the dead.

We are still waiting. I apologize for my cynicism but I am an old man and I have been waiting all my life. Perhaps you, my children, will see Poland return to her proper glory. I am convinced I will not.

My father vanished between 1843 and 1856. Where, I do not know. My mother believes he was in Gdansk, working in the shipyards. I do not know. Whatever, in the autumn of 1859 “A Circle of Brotherly Help” surfaced in Warsaw. Obviously father was there, for he courted and married my mother — a sister of Krasinski who, sadly, never knew her older brother as he had gone to Paris when she was a child and was dead when she was a woman — there that year. [Jaja's giving away his old age here. I just did a quick check and his father had to be forty-three or forty-four when he married. It's a wonder he did marry. Thank the Christ he did, though. Or there'd be no proof of the Batterinskis in the
NHL Guide
, let alone this.] Several others from The Emigration were also there; the group was now some twenty-eight years in existence. The Circle of Brotherly Help was filled with young men caught up in Rousseau's
Liberté
. They wanted agricultural reform and better working conditions, but more than anything else, control of their own affairs and ownership of Polish land by Poles. In other words, they wanted Russia out.

Tsar Nicholas had died and Alexander had succeeded him, and Alexander had even gone so far as to legalize the Agriculture Society three years earlier, making them, the Circle charged, “the authorized revolutionaries.” The Agriculture Society was led by Andrew Zamoyski, a dull, highly conservative man who naively believed Poland's difficulties as a country lay in the ground. Zamoyski's call was for “organic work,” thinking that by working hard and together the unsullied peasants could somehow triumph over the greed and cruelty of the regime. No wonder Alexander eagerly endorsed the Agriculture Society. In reality, it was working for him, getting the peasants to produce more.

Just imagine the confusion. Krasinski, Poland's most famous poet, was speaking to the country's highly religious, downtrodden people to look above for a solution — God, surely, would never abandon His daughter — and Zamoyski was telling them to look at the ground itself for the answers. The men of the Circle knew that the only answer lay somewhere between heaven and earth. It lay in the space of men and action. They were entranced by the Franco-Austrian war and, later, by the unification of Italy; they felt all they needed was their own Cavour or Garibaldi — men who could change history — and Poland would be saved.

The Russians were holding up the carrot of Tsarist
ukase
, the abolishment of serfdom, and were convinced Zamoyski's Agriculture Society would unwittingly play into their hands. The Poles would be appeased but hardly independent. The Russians failed to realize that the Circle saw through this lie. The Agriculture Society set its convention up for the end of February. On February 27, 1861, my father and other members of the Circle marked their arms and hats with the sign of the Circle and set off carrying banners to demonstrate in full view in the
Krakowskie Przedme
s
cle
. They marched in an orderly fashion, no rock throwing, and they gathered, four hundred strong, and began a chorus of shouts they knew would be carried into the meeting hall of the Society. More Russian Hussars arrived on horseback, carrying lances straight up, but the protesters held their positions and the Russians contented themselves with a show of force, riding up and down along the face of the crowd in formation, turning and quietly retracing their steps.

What happened next no one knows. I suppose someone threw a rock. Perhaps it even missed. Whatever, shortly after noon the Russians spurred their horses into the crowd and levelled their lances. The crown panicked and broke. The Russians moved in methodically, riding two abreast, lances out, levelling the Circle brethren in great wide swaths, turning and running again. For the most part it was simple cruelty, harassment; but toward the end of the panic a Russian rifle brigade kneeled and fired a single volley. Five clearly identified brethren of the Circle died immediately, their bodies left to bleed into the gutters.

My father was one of them. The revolution had just begun and he was already dead, never to realize it was all for nothing. I do not even know what he looked like….