OCR Output

386

Wladyslaw Chtopicki

Rurka ( Little Pipe; steel plant director) but he fails to win her affection due to his
slimy manners:

Mariolka has a mini skirt

Szmaciak excitedly secretes saliva,

so greatly it arouses him

the curvy bust, the shorty outfit

now with a fast, guite rural movement,
he catches her best female part

“Fuck off with your hands, old pig”

Szmaciak’s own wife, Helka, is highly pretentious, and also a resentful anti¬
Semite. At a drunken party with the Rurkas, she gets into a fight with Rurka’s wife
over the honesty and beauty of their daughters (Fig. 2):

Terrible screams, fingers in hair
In relentless struggle they are panting
Got separated with greatest effort
Szmaciak pulls Helka to the exit
She drags her resistant legs

And shouts: Bitch! Bitch!

He serves her a hefty beating

To force her home.

He tries to sleep and in the bed
her poisoned whisper he can hear:
Rurkowa is a dirty Jewess

her daughter is an all out whore.

During martial law (1981-1983), the actual event was introduced into
Szpotariski’s later poems (1983). Szmaciak becomes an officer and tries to defeat
the striking workers in the Pcim factory, who have turned it into a “fortress”. While
trying to seize the factory, he slips in the mud and falls through a large opening in
the factory wall and, as a result, ends up ina pile of rubbish and slime—a symbolic
event (Figs 5 and 6).

One of the most characteristic scenes in the poems is a terrible dream of Com¬
rade Szmaciak in which he looks into a mirror and sees a pig snout in it (Fig. 7).

This cannot be, he rubs his eyes,

Thinking that it must still be the hangover
Then drives his nails into his body.

But nothing changes! The snout’s still there!
Looks at it critically in the mirror—