Madame. Antoni Libera

bit of a sore point. Chopin, for instance: he was half French. So was Gallus Anonimus, the first Polish historian. Even the author of the first dictionary of the Polish language, Samuel Linde, was German. And the only writer of Polish origin who ever made it, and is read all over the world, unfortunately didn’t write in Polish. I mean Conrad, of course. And thank God for that! Because if he’d written in Polish, he would probably have written like that precious little wonder of yours, Zeromski. Well, isn’t that right?’

      ‘You talk as if you weren’t Polish yourself,’ one of the romantics said.

      ‘He’s not,’ muttered another: ‘Goltz isn’t a Polish n—’

      ‘That’s enough!’ Madame cried. ‘I will not listen to this any longer! You’re to stop it right now!’

      But Roz could never let anyone else have the last word. ‘Whether or not I’m Polish remains to be seen. If I ever amount to anything, and especially if I become famous, then I’ll turn out to be more Polish than any of you. I’ll be treated like a king! And you’ll all go around boasting that you went to school with me. Unfortunately that’s how it works. And that’s how it’ll always work here. The best people either aren’t really Polish or get the hell out.’

      Then something extraordinary happened: Madame strode energetically up to Roz and said, in Polish, ‘One more word out of you and you’ll be sent out of this classroom.’ A deathly hush fell. ‘Stand up when I’m talking to you!’

      Roz got to his feet, visibly subdued.

      ‘You’re to come to my office after school, at two o’clock. And now I’m warning you: if I hear one more interruption, if you disrupt my lesson one more time, you’ll regret it. No one ever wins with me. Remember that.’

      She returned to the blackboard, and Roz meekly subsided onto his bench.