condemned men on the way to the scaffold. The master of ceremonies droned on, consulting his notes – some nonsense about the ‘high artistic value’ of our performance. And I was looking at the back rows, where the rabble was, and thinking, They’re sitting there like good little lambs, just waiting for this farce to end so that they can finally have their dance and whoop it up. Just as we waited for the end of the Festival of Choirs. And they’re right: now I’m the thorn in their side, the pathetic creep they have to listen to. As soon as I leave the stage and the public disperses, they’ll clear away the chairs, make a dance-floor and throw themselves into the wild gyrations of some frenetic dance to The Firecats’ music. And that will be their triumph: their ‘No more’.
These lugubrious thoughts suddenly revealed a challenge. No, I decided: I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I wouldn’t let them amuse themselves at my expense. Let them sneer, but not at me. Let them amuse themselves as they please, let them jeer – and quite rightly – at the Festival of Amateur Theatres; but they shall not mock me!
And then it occurred to me that they were the supreme judge here. To bring the thing off in front of people like myself, to win the hearts of the pensioners in the front rows, even, yes, to impress S. himself with my skills – none of that was so very hard. But to subdue the rabble, especially rabble itching for the brutish bacchanalia to come – now that would be an achievement. It was a challenge worth attempting.
‘And now, ladies and gentlemen,’ shrieked the master of ceremonies, ‘the winners of this year’s first prize, the Golden Mask! A big hand for them!’ And he hurried offstage.
‘A big hand for the end!’ someone yelled from the back.
With a discreet but authoritative nod I signalled to the cast to leave the stage. Then I took a few steps forward and, shading my eyes dramatically against the lights, commanded with an edge of impatience, ‘Lights, please.’
The old electrician in charge of the lights, whom I knew from the theatre, grasped at once what I wanted. He slowly killed every light but one, a spotlight on my face and the upper half of my body.
Then, in the most ordinary voice I could manage, as if talking to myself, I began my piece:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages . . .
I spoke these words with a kind of cold indifference, as if from birth I had been under no illusions as to the nature of this world and life in it, as if the only emotions I knew were disgust and contempt. There was also scorn in my voice, and a certain arrogance. One might have been forgiven for thinking that, instead of reciting verse, I was openly mocking my audience. At each successive age of man I sought out the appropriate age group where it sat in the hall and spoke to them; it was to them that I directed Jaques’s wry little portraits. But behind all this there was a message, and it shone through clearly.
This, more or less, was its gist: Here you are; take a look. This is you. All of you, without exception. But not me. I may have a certain number of years, a certain age, but I fit none of these roles. I’m not a mewling and puking infant. True, no one here is. But neither am I a whining schoolboy with his satchel, creeping unwillingly to school. And the best proof is that I’m standing here now, doing what I’m doing. I’m not a lover sighing like a furnace or a soldier full of strange oaths; I’m certainly not a justice in round belly lined; still less am I slippered or in my second childhood.
Who, then, am I? And why don’t I have a place in this picture?
I have no place in the picture because I am not here. I am merely a mirror that reflects the world: its pupil, its eye. I am pure Irony and Art. And that is something that lies beyond life.
The silence as I spoke the last lines was almost absolute. Not a cough, not even a rustle. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’ve done it, I thought. Whatever they’re thinking, at least they’ve been silenced. Subdued by Shakespeare. I’ve won.
The applause may not have been thunderous (there had, after all, been something insulting in my performance), but it was sincere and respectful. I took a polite bow and was about to leave the stage when the master of ceremonies suddenly rushed in, seized me by the right wrist as if introducing a boxer before a fight, thus preventing my escape, and shouted at the already dispersing public, ‘One moment, ladies and gentlemen, one moment! We haven’t finished yet! There’s still one more surprise, one more wonderful surprise to come!’
What has the idiot come up with now, I wondered, with horrible foreboding. What else does he expect from me?
‘Our great Shakespearean scholar here,’ the master of ceremonies ploughed on, ‘had been awarded another prize – a special, individual prize – funded, ladies and gentlemen, by none other than the chairman of the jury himself, our beloved, incomparable Prospero!’
At this my heart began to beat at a brisker pace, and I even managed an inner smile. An individual prize from S.! Well, well. That was something, even in these miserable circumstances.
‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ the MC persisted, ‘This is a rare and remarkable event, sure to go down forever in theatrical history. And the prize, ladies and gentlemen . . .’ – he reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket – ‘the prize . . .’ He paused dramatically, raising both hands, one still gripping my wrist and the other clasping the object extracted from his pocket, and screamed, ‘The prize is a RUHLA WATCH!’
‘Rukhla, Rukhla!’ came gleeful shouts from the back of the room. With the heavy guttural consonants, absent from the accepted German pronunciation, the word becomes an obscene verb (in the third person singular, present tense, to be exact); the rabble, of course, exploited this for all it was worth. I felt my knees giving way. But the MC still held my wrist aloft in a tight grip, and this kept me from collapsing in a heap to the ground.
The reasons for my collapse, the full ghastly extent of this horrific, ultimate, murderous blow, will be plain to those who know something about Ruhla watches and their peculiar significance.
The Ruhla watch was manufactured in East Germany (Geedee-arse, as it was popularly known), and was distinguished in those days for being by far the cheapest watch available in Poland. By itself, this would not, of course, have been a point in its disfavour; but its suspicious cheapness went along with unbelievably low quality. Ruhla watches generally stopped working after just a few weeks of use, and during their brief span never once gave the right time: they were always fast or slow, from the moment you bought them. Their unfortunate owners were eternally having to set them forward or back, and to perform a series of complicated calculations whenever they wanted to determine the right time. This, however, was not enough to account for the Ruhla’s reputation: there were a lot of shoddy goods on the market then, but not all of them became objects of ridicule. The Ruhla owed its unique status to the shrill advertising campaigns that insistently extolled its alleged virtues. Radio and television programmes were full of it; on game shows for the masses it was the most frequently awarded prize. A car with a loudspeaker could often be seen making the rounds of the city’s streets, haranguing people with the following jingle, blared out at full volume:
Come and play on Guess-me-Kate;
Win a Ruhla and a date!!
People reacted to this insistent hard sell with verses such as:
A Ruhla watch is rotten luck;
It wouldn’t buy a decent fuck.
To complete the picture, there was the name itself – or rather, its spelling. In Polish it could become a somewhat risqué double entendre, providing material for countless ribald jokes, to the further delight of the populace.
In short, the Ruhla watch was an inexhaustible