17 - Public and Private Dramas

Summary

The authorities now assumed a stick-and-carrot technique in dealing with me. While declaring my symphony extinct, they awarded me the highest honour in the land, the Standard of Labour First Class!

This carrot was worth more than the gilded and red-ribboned medal that came with it. It entitled me to the special facilities enjoyed by our top politicians and Party members, including improved medical care and the right to obtain foreign medicine, otherwise unavailable.

I decided to try to re-apply for an apartment. My father, always longing to return to Warsaw, urgently needed to be rescued from the unlovable cousins. The Kraków flat was my only proper home, though I stayed most of the time in the Union house in order to carry out my Warsaw duties. With the political pressures, composition was receding out of my life yet again; my creative imagination had gone numb. I wondered whether, with reasonable privacy and quiet working conditions, I might still, without betraying my aesthetic principles, find some musical solution even within the constrictions of Socialist Realism. Part of me had become cynical about having to eat and breathe the system, but another part remained patriotic, needing – indeed, wanting profoundly – to remain a Polish composer able to function creatively in my own environment.

Only a matter of weeks after my application to the Housing Minister, I was informed that a two-room flat was at my disposal, by chance in a district of Mokotów, on land which had formerly belonged to my great-grandfather Szuster. My father was overjoyed. In a hired lorry, I transported him with his violins and the little furniture we possessed to Warsaw. Climbing to the first floor of the small, modern block, I took the key from my pocket and opened the front door, drawing back to watch the happiness in his face at the sight of his new home; but his features crumpled in anger and disgust.

‘Do you call that a flat?’ he asked me reproachfully. ‘It's a doll's house!’ He was quite unable to appreciate the miracle that we had anything at all: two small, bare, square rooms, a kitchen one could hardly turn round in and a bathroom like a cupboard. Soon, however,