‘Astonishing’ Guardian
‘Invigorating’ New Statesman
‘Elegant’ Mail on Sunday
J. M. THE
AND OTHER STORIES
POLE COETZEE
J. M. COETZEE
J. M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, Summertime, The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus. He is the first writer to have won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
ALSO BY J. M. COETZEE
Late Essays 2006–2017
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005
Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999
The Childhood of Jesus
The Schooldays of Jesus
The Death of Jesus
Summertime
Youth
Boyhood
Slow Man
Elizabeth Costello
Age of Iron
Dusklands
Foe
In the Heart of the Country
Disgrace
Life & Times of Michael K
The Master of Petersburg
Waiting for the Barbarians
Three Stories
Diary of a Bad Year
J.
M. COETZEE
The Pole
& Other Stories
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Vintage in 2024
First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker in 2023
First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company in 2023
Copyright © J. M. Coetzee 2023
J. M. Coetzee has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The title story, ‘The Pole’, was first published in Argentina under the title El Polaco, by El Hilo de Adriana, Buenos Aires, 2022
Page design by W. H. Chong
Typeset by J&M Typesetting penguin.co.uk/vintage
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781529920635
Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
The Pole
& Other Stories
THE POLE & OTHER STORIES
THE POLE
ONE
1. The woman is the rst to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.
2. At the beginning he has a perfectly clear idea of who the woman is. She is tall and graceful; by conventional standards she may not qualify as a beauty but her features—dark hair and eyes, high cheekbones, full mouth—are striking and her voice, a low contralto, has a suave attractive power. Sexy? No, she is not sexy, and certainly not seductive. She might have been sexy when she was young—how can she not have been with a gure like that?—but now, in her forties, she goes in for a certain remoteness. She walks—one notices this particularly—without swinging her hips, gliding across the oor erect, even stately.
That is how he would sum up her exterior. As for her self, her soul, there is time for that to reveal itself. Of one thing he is convinced: she is a good person, kind, friendly.
3. The man is more troublesome. In concept, again, he is perfectly clear. He is a Pole, a man of seventy, a vigorous seventy, a concert pianist best known as an interpreter of Chopin, but a controversial interpreter: his Chopin is not at all Romantic but on the contrary somewhat austere, Chopin as inheritor of Bach. To that extent he is an oddity on the concert scene, odd enough to draw a small but discerning audience in Barcelona, the city to which he has been invited, the city where he will meet the graceful, soft-spoken woman.
But barely has the Pole emerged into the light than he begins to change. With his striking mane of silver hair, his idiosyncratic renderings of Chopin, the Pole promises to be a distinct enough personage. But in matters of soul, of feeling, he is troublingly opaque. At the piano he plays with soul, undeniably; but the soul that rules him is Chopin’s, not his own. And if that soul strikes one as unusually dry and severe, it may point to a certain aridity in his own temperament.
4. Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker’s wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let
in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come?
5. The invitation to the Pole comes from a Circle that stages monthly recitals in the Sala Mompou, in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, and has been doing so for decades. The recitals are open to the public, but tickets are expensive and the audience tends to be wealthy, aging, and conservative in its tastes.
The woman in question—her name is Beatriz—is a member of the board that administers the series. She performs this role as a civic duty, but also because she believes that music is good in itself, as love is good, or charity, or beauty, and good furthermore in that it makes people better people. Though well aware that her beliefs are naive, she holds to them anyway. She is an intelligent person but not re ective. A portion of her intelligence consists in an awareness that excess of re ection can paralyse the will.
6. The decision to invite the Pole, whose name has so many w’s and z’s in it that no one on the board even tries to pronounce it—they refer to him simply as ‘the Pole’—is arrived at only after some soul-searching.
His candidacy was proposed not by her, Beatriz, but by her friend Margarita, the animating spirit behind the concert series, who in her youth studied at the conservatory in Madrid and knows much more about music than she does.
The Pole, says Margarita, led the way for a new generation of Chopin interpreters in his native land. She circulates a review of a concert he gave in London. According to the reviewer, the fashion for a hard, percussive Chopin—Chopin as Proko ev—has had its day. It was never anything but a Modernist reaction against the branding of the Franco-Polish master as a delicate, dreamy, ‘feminine’ spirit. The emerging, historically authentic Chopin is soft-toned and Italianate. The Pole’s revisionary reading of Chopin, even if somewhat over-intellectualized, is to be lauded.
She, Beatriz, is not sure that she wants to hear an evening’s worth of historically authentic Chopin, nor, more pertinently, whether the rather staid Circle will take kindly to it. But Margarita feels strongly about the matter, and Margarita is her friend, so she gives her her support.
The invitation to the Pole accordingly went out, with a proposed date and a proposed fee, and was
accepted. Now the day has arrived. He has own in from Berlin, has been met at the airport and driven to his hotel. The plan for the evening is that, after the recital, she, together with Margarita and Margarita’s husband, will take him out to dinner.
7. Why will Beatriz’s own husband not be one of the party? The answer: because he never attends Concert Circle events.
8. The plan is simple enough. But then there is a hitch. On the morning in question Margarita telephones to say that she has fallen ill. That is the rather formal term she uses: caído enferma, fallen ill. What has she fallen ill with? She does not say. She is vague, deliberately so, it would seem. But she will not be coming to the recital. Nor will her husband. Therefore will she, Beatriz, please take over the duties of hospitality, that is to say, arrange to have their guest conveyed from hotel to auditorium in good time, and entertain him afterwards, if he wants to be entertained, so that when he returns to his native country he will be able to say to his friends, Yes, I had a good time in Barcelona, on the whole. Yes, they took good care of me.
‘Very well,’ says Beatriz, ‘I will do it. And I hope you get better soon.’
9. She has known Margarita since they were children together at the nuns’ school; she has always admired her friend’s spirit, her enterprise, her social aplomb. Now she must take her place. What will it entail, entertaining a man on a eeting visit to a strange city? Surely, at his age, he will not expect sex. But he will certainly expect to be attered, even irted with. Flirting is not an art she has ever cared to master. Margarita is different. Margarita has a light touch with men. She, Beatriz, has more than once, with amusement, watched her friend go about her conquests. But she has no wish to imitate her. If their guest has high expectations in the department of attery, he is going to be disappointed.
10. The Pole is, according to Margarita, a ‘truly memorable’ pianist. She heard him in the esh, in Paris. Is it possible that something happened between the two of them, Margarita and the Pole, in the esh; and that, having engineered his visit to Barcelona, Margarita is at the last minute having cold feet? Or has her husband nally had enough, and issued a at? Is that how
‘falling ill’ is to be understood? Why must everything be so complicated!
And now she must take care of the stranger! There is no reason to expect he speaks Spanish. What if he does not speak English either? What if he is the kind of Pole who speaks French? The only regulars in the Concert Circle who speak French are the Lesinskis, Ester and Tomás; and Tomás, in his eighties, is becoming in rm. How will the Pole feel when, instead of the vivacious Margarita, he is offered the decrepit Lesinskis? She is not looking forward to the evening. What a life, she thinks, the life of an itinerant entertainer! The airports, the hotels, all different yet all the same; the hosts to put up with, all different yet all the same: gushing middle-aged women with bored attendant husbands. Enough to quench whatever spark there is in the soul.
At least she does not gush. Nor does she chatter. If after his performance the Pole wants to retreat into moody silence, she will be moody right back.
11. Producing a concert, making sure that everything runs smoothly, is no small feat. The burden has now fallen squarely on her. She spends the afternoon at the
concert hall, chivvying the staff (their supervisor is, in her experience, dilatory), ticking off details. Is it necessary to list the details? No. But it is by her attention to detail that Beatriz will prove that she possesses the virtues of diligence and competence. By comparison, the Pole will show himself to be impractical, unenterprising. If one can conceive of virtue as a quantity, then the greater part of the Pole’s virtue is spent on his music, leaving hardly any behind for his dealings with the world; whereas Beatriz’s virtue is expended evenly in all directions.
12. Publicity photographs show a man with a craggy pro le and a shock of white hair staring into the middle distance. The accompanying biography says that Witold Walczykiewicz was born in 1943 and made his concert debut at the age of fourteen. It lists prizes he has won and some of his recordings.
She wonders what it was like to be born in 1943, in Poland, in the middle of a war, with nothing to eat but cabbage-and-potato-peel soup. Is one’s physical development stunted? And what of the spirit? Will Witold W prove to bear, in his bones, in his spirit, the marks of a starved childhood?
A baby wailing in the night, wailing with hunger. She was born in 1967. In 1967 no one in Europe had to eat cabbage soup: no one in Poland, no one in Spain. She has never known hunger. Never. A blessed generation.
Her sons too have been blessed. They have turned out to be energetic young men deeply involved in independent projects of making successes of their lives. If they ever wailed in the night, it was because of nappy rash, or out of simple petulance, not because they were starving. In their drive for success, her sons take after their father, not their mother. Their father has made an indubitable success of his life. As for their mother, one cannot yet be sure. Is it enough to have propelled two such well-fed, energetic young male beings into the world?
13. She is an intelligent person, well educated, well read, a good wife and mother. But she is not taken seriously. Nor is Margarita. Nor is the rest of their Circle. Society ladies: it is not dif cult to make fun of them. Mocked for their good works. Mocked by themselves too. What a risible fate! Would she ever have guessed that it awaited her?
Perhaps that is why Margarita has chosen to fall ill today of all days. ¡Basta! Enough of good works!
14. Her own husband keeps his distance from the Concert Circle. He believes in separate spheres of activity. A wife’s sphere of activities should be her own. They have grown apart, she and her husband. They were students together; he was her rst love. In those early days they had a great passion for each other, insatiable. That passion persisted even after the birth of the children. Then one day it was no longer there. He had had enough. She too. Nonetheless she has remained a faithful wife. Men make passes at her, which she evades, not because they are unwelcome but because she has not taken the step yet, the step that is hers alone to take, the step from No to Yes.
15. She has her rst sight of the Pole, in the esh, when he strides onto the platform, takes a bow, and seats himself at the Steinway.
Born in 1943, therefore seventy-two years old. He moves easily; he does not look his age.
She is struck by how tall he is. Not just tall but big too, with a chest that seems about to burst out of his
jacket. Crouched over the keyboard, he looks like a huge spider.
Hard to imagine great hands like that coaxing anything sweet and gentle out of a keyboard. Yet they do.
Do male pianists have an inborn advantage over women: hands that on a woman would look grotesque?
She has not given much thought to hands before, hands that do everything for their owners like obedient, unpaid servants. Her own hands are nothing special. The hands of a woman who will soon be fty. Sometimes she discreetly hides them. Hands betray one’s age, as does one’s throat, as do the folds of one’s armpit.
In her mother’s day, a woman could still appear in public wearing gloves. Gloves, hats, veils: last traces of a vanished epoch.
16. The second thing that strikes her about the Pole is his hair, which is extravagantly white, extravagantly waved in a crest. Is that how he prepares for a recital, she wonders: seated with a hairdresser in his hotel room having his coiffure attended to? But perhaps she is ungenerous. Among maestros of his generation, the
heirs of the Abbé Liszt, a mane of hair, grey or white, must be standard equipment.
Years later, when the episode of the Pole has receded into history, she will wonder about those early impressions. She believes, on the whole, in rst impressions, when the heart delivers its verdict, either reaching out to the stranger or recoiling from him. Her heart did not reach out to the Pole when she saw him stride onto the platform, toss back his mane, and address the keyboard. Her heart’s verdict: What a poseur! What an old clown! It would take her a while to overcome that rst, instinctive response, to see the Pole in his full selfhood. But what does full selfhood mean, really? Did the Pole’s full selfhood not perhaps include being a poseur, an old clown?
17. The evening’s recital falls into two halves. The rst half consists of a Haydn sonata and a suite of dances by Lutosławski. The second half is given over to Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes.
He plays the Haydn sonata with clean, crisp lines, as if to demonstrate that big hands need not be clumsy hands, but on the contrary can dance together as delicately as a lady’s.
The little pieces by Lutosławski are new to her. They remind her of Bartók, of his peasant dances. She likes them.
She likes them more than the Chopin that follows. The Pole may have made a name as an interpreter of Chopin, but the Chopin she knows is more intimate and more subtle than what he offers. Her Chopin has the power to transport her out of the Barri Gòtic, out of Barcelona, into the drawing room of a great old country house in the remote Polish plains, with a long summer’s day wheeling to an end, a breeze stirring the curtains, and the scent of roses wafting indoors.
To be transported, to be lost in transports: an outdated idea, in all likelihood, of what music does for its listeners—outdated and probably sentimental too. But that is what she desires on this particular evening, and that is what the Pole does not provide.
The applause, after the last of the Preludes, is polite but not enthusiastic. She is not the only one who came to hear Chopin played by a real Pole, and has been disappointed.
As an encore, as a gesture to his hosts, he offers a short piece by Mompou, played in a rather abstracted way, then with nary a smile is gone from the stage.
Does he happen to be in a bad mood today or is he always like this? Is he going to call home and complain about his reception at the hands of the philistine Catalans? Is there a Madame Pole back at home to hear his complaints? He does not look like a married man. He looks like a man with messy divorces behind him, and ex-wives grinding their teeth, wishing him ill.
18. The Pole, it turns out, does not speak French. He does, however, speak English, after a fashion; as for her, Beatriz, after her two years at Mount Holyoke she is uent in the language. The polyglot Lesinskis are therefore supernumerary. But welcome nonetheless, taking some of the hostly burden off her shoulders. Ester in particular. Ester may be old and bent, but she is as sharp as a pin.
19. They take him to the restaurant to which they routinely take performers, an Italian establishment called Bof ni’s with too much bottle-green velvet in its decor but with a dependable Milanese chef. Once they are seated, Ester is the rst to speak. ‘It must be dif cult, maestro, to come to earth after you have been in the clouds with your sublime music.’
The Pole inclines his head, neither agreeing nor disagreeing about the clouds where he has been. At close quarters it is less easy to conceal marks of age. There are pouches under his eyes; the skin of his throat sags; the backs of his hands are mottled.
Maestro. Best to get it over with quickly, the question of names. ‘If I may,’ she says: ‘how shall we address you? We in Spain nd Polish names dif cult, as you must have realized by now. And we can’t go on calling you maestro all evening.’
‘My name is Witold,’ he says. ‘You can call me Witold. Please.’
‘And I am Beatriz. Our friends are Ester and Tomás.’
The Pole raises an empty glass to his three new friends: Ester, Tomás, Beatriz.
‘I am sure, Witold,’ says Ester, ‘I am not the rst to confuse you with that famous Swedish actor, you must know whom I mean.’
The ghost of a smile crosses the Pole’s face. ‘Max von Sydow,’ he says. ‘My bad brother. He follows me wherever I go.’
Ester is right: the same long, lugubrious face, the same faded blue eyes, the same erect posture. But
the voice is disappointing. It lacks the bad brother’s deep-throated resonance.
20. ‘Tell us about Poland, Witold,’ says Ester. ‘Tell us why your countryman Frédéric Chopin chose to live in France rather than in his homeland.’
‘If Chopin had lived longer he would have returned to Poland,’ replies the Pole, managing the tenses warily but correctly. ‘He was a young man when he departed, he was a young man when he died. Young men are not happy at home. They search adventure.’
‘And you?’ says Ester. ‘Were you, like him, unhappy in your home country when you were a young man?’
It is an opportunity for the Pole, Witold, to tell them about what it was like to be young and restless in his unhappy homeland, about his yearning to escape to the decadent but exciting West, but he does not take it. ‘Happiness is not the most important...the most important sentiment,’ he says. ‘Anyone can be happy.’
Anyone can be happy but it takes someone extraordinary to be unhappy, someone extraordinary like me—is that what he wants them to infer? She hears herself speak. ‘What then is the most important sentiment, Witold? If happiness is not important, what is important?’
There is silence around the table. She catches Ester and her husband in a quick exchange of glances. Is she going to make things dif cult? These dif cult hours that stretch before us—is she going to make them even more dif cult?
‘I am a musician,’ says the Pole. ‘For me music is most important.’
He is not answering her question, he is de ecting it, but no matter. What she would like to ask, but does not, is: What of Madame Witold? How does she feel when her husband says that happiness is not important? Or is there no Madame—did Madame run away long ago to nd happiness in another’s arms?
21. He does not speak of Madame Witold but does speak of a daughter who had a training in music, then moved to Germany to sing in a band and did not come back. ‘I went to hear her once. In Düsseldorf. It was good. She has a good voice. Good voice, good control, not so good music.’
‘Yes, the young...’ says Ester. ‘They bring us such heartache. Still, it must be nice for you—nice to know that the musical line is being continued. And your country—how are affairs in your country nowadays?