Microworlds Read online

  I was a good student. Some years after the war, I learned from an older man who had held some position or other in the prewar Polish educational system that when the IQs of all high-school students were tested — it must have been around 1936 or 1937 -mine was over 180, and I was said to have been, in the words of that man, the most intelligent child in southern Poland. (I myself suspected nothing of this sort at the time of the test, for the results were not made known to us.) But this high IQ certainly was of no help in surviving the occupation of the General-gouvernement (to which administrative unit Poland had been reduced by the Germans). During that period, I learned in a very personal, practical way that I was no “Aryan.” I knew that my ancestors were Jews, but I knew nothing of the Mosaic faith and, regrettably, nothing at all of Jewish culture. So it was, strictly speaking, only the Nazi legislation that brought home to me the realization that I had Jewish blood in my veins. We succeeded in evading imprisonment in the ghetto, however. With false papers, my parents and I survived that ordeal.

  But, to return to my childhood in prewar Poland, my first reading matter was of a rather curious nature. It was my father’s anatomy books and medical texts, in which I browsed when I was still hardly able to read, and I understood them all the less since my father’s professional books were in German or in French. Only the fiction in his library was in Polish. Pictures of skeletons, of neatly dissected human skulls, of human brains precisely sketched in many colors, of intestines in preserved condition and embellished with magic-sounding Latin names provided my earliest contacts with the world of books. Hunting through my father’s library was, of course, strictly forbidden to me, and it attracted me precisely because it was forbidden and mysterious. I must not forget to mention the actual human bone that was kept behind the glass doors of my father’s bookcase. It was a skull bone — os temporale — that had been removed during a trepanation; perhaps it was a relic from the time when my father was studying medicine. I held this bone, without any particular feelings, several times in my hands. (I had to steal my father’s key to be able to do this.) I knew what it was, but I wasn’t frightened by it. I only wondered about it in a certain way. Its surroundings — the rows of big tomes of medical textbooks — appeared quite natural to me, for a child, lacking any real yardstick, is unable to differentiate between the banal or commonplace and the unusual. That bone — or, rather, its fictional counterpart — is to be found in another novel of mine, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. In this book, the bone became a whole skull, cleanly dissected from a corpse, that was kept by a doctor in a ward — one of the many stations in the hero’s odyssey through a labyrinthine building. A complete skull like this was owned by my uncle, my mother’s brother, who was also a physician. He was murdered two days after the Wehrmacht marched into Lvov. At that time, several non-Jewish Poles were also killed — mostly university professors — and Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski, one of the best-known Polish writers. They were taken from their apartments during the night and shot.

  Now, then, what objective, extrinsic connection — i.e., not one imagined by me and consisting solely of associations — could there be between a little boy’s fascination with the parts of a human skeleton and the era of the Holocaust? Was this apparently significant and fitting omen a matter of chains of chance, purely of coincidence? In my opinion, it was. I do not believe in manifest destiny or predetermination. In lieu of a preestablished harmony, I can well imagine (upon the basis of the experiences of my life) a preestablished disharmony, ending in chaos and madness. In any case, my childhood was certainly peaceful and Arcadian — especially when compared with what happened in the following years.

  I grew into a bookworm, and read everything that fell into my hands: the great national poems, novels, popular-science books. (I still remember that a book of the kind that my father gave me as a gift sold for seventy zlotys — the price was written inside -and that was a fortune in those days; for seventy zlotys you could buy a whole suit. My father spoiled me.) I also — I can still remember it — looked with keen interest at the male and female genitalia reproduced in my father’s anatomy books. The female pubis struck me especially — as something spiderlike, not quite nauseating but certainly something that could hardly have a connection with erotic feelings. I believe that I was later, during my adolescence, sexually quite normal. But since my subsequent studies in medicine included gynecology, and since I was, for a month, an obstetrician in a hospital, I associate the pornography of today not with sexual longing and with copulative lust but with the anatomical pictures in the tomes of my father, and with my own gynecological examinations. The thought that a male may be highly excited by the mere sight of female genitalia strikes me as very peculiar. I happen to know perfectly well that this is a case of libido — of the instincts built into our senses and programmed by evolution — but the desire for sex without love strikes me as something comparable to an irresistible urge to eat salt and pepper by the spoonful because dishes without salt and pepper lack full flavor. I feel no repulsion but no attraction, either, as long as there is no specific erotic bond of the kind that is called “love.”

  As an eight-year-old boy, I fell in love with a girl. I never uttered as much as a word to the girl, but I observed her often in a public garden near our house. The girl had no inkling of my feelings, and most probably never even noticed me. It was a burning, long-lasting love affair dissected, as it were, from all actual circumstances — even from the sphere of any kind of wishful thinking. I was not interested in becoming her friend. My emotions were restricted to worshiping her from afar; aside from that, there was absolutely nothing. May the psychoanalysts make what they will of these feelings of a small boy. I do not comment further on them, because I am of the opinion that such an episode can be interpreted in any way one chooses.

  At the beginning, I mentioned the opposites of chance and order, of coincidence and predestination. Only as I wrote the book The High Castle did the thought cross my mind that my fate — my profession as a writer — was already budding in me when I looked at skeletons, galaxies in astrophysical tomes, pictures of reconstructions of the monstrous extinct saurians of the Mesozoic, and many-colored human brains in anatomical handbooks. Perhaps these external circumstances — these impulses and sensuous impressions — helped to shape my sensibility. But that is only speculation.

  I not only imagined fantastic kingdoms and domains but also made inventions and mentally created prehistoric animals unheard of in paleontology. For instance, I dreamed up an aircraft shaped like a giant concave mirror, with a boiler situated in the focus. The circumference of the mirror was studded with turbines and rotors to provide lift, as in a helicopter, and the energy for all that was to be derived from solar radiation. This unwieldy monstrosity was supposed to fly very high, far above the clouds, and, of course, only during daytime. And I invented what had already existed for a long time without my knowing it: the differential gear. I also drew many funny things in my thick copybooks, including a bicycle on which one rode moving up and down, as on a horse. Recently, I saw something like this imaginary bicycle somewhere — it may have been in the English periodical New Scientist, but I am not quite sure.

  I think it is significant that I never bothered to show my designs to other people; indeed, I kept them all secret, both from my parents and from my fellow pupils, but I have no idea why I acted in this way. Perhaps it was because of a childish affection for the mysterious. The same was the case with my “passports” — certificates and permits that, for instance, allowed one to enter subterranean treasure troves. I suppose also that I was afraid to be laughed at, for, although I knew that these things were only a game, I played it with great seriousness. I divulged something of this childhood world in the book that I have already mentioned, The High Castle, but it contains only a small part of my memories. Why only a small part? I can answer such a question at least partly. First, in The High Castle I wanted to transport myself back into the child that I had been, and to comment on childhood
as little as possible from the position of the adult. Second, during its gestation period the book generated a specific normative aesthetic similar to a selforganizing process, and there were certain memories that would appear as dissonances in this canon. It was not the case that I intended to hide certain things because of, say, a feeling of guilt or of shame but, rather, that there were memories that would not fit into the pattern that I presented as my childhood. I wanted — something impossible to attain — to extract the essence of my childhood, in its pure form, from my whole life: to peel away, as it were, the overlying strata of war, of mass murder and extermination, of the nights in the shelters during air raids, of an existence under a false identity, of hide-andseek, of all the dangers, as if they had never existed. For, indeed, nothing of this had existed when I was a child, or even a sixteen-year-old high-school boy. I gave an indication of these exclusions in the novel itself. I do not remember exactly where, but I signaled that I had to or wanted to keep certain matters out by dropping a parenthetical remark that every human being is able to write several strikingly different autobiographies, according to the viewpoint chosen and the principle of selection.

  The meaning of the categories of order and chance for human life was impressed upon me during the war years in a purely practical, instinctual manner; I resembled more a hunted animal than a thinking human being. I was able to learn from hard experience that the difference between life and death depended upon minuscule, seemingly unimportant things and the smallest of decisions: whether one chose this or that street for going to work; whether one visited a friend at one o’clock or twenty minutes later; whether one found a door open or closed. I cannot claim that in following my instinct for self-preservation I always employed a minimax strategy of extreme cautiousness. To the contrary, I exposed myself to danger several times — occasionally when I thought it necessary but in some cases through mere thoughtlessness, or even stupidity. So that today, when I think of such idiotically reckless patterns of behavior, I still feel wonder, mingled with bewilderment, about why I acted as I did. To steal ammunition from the so-called Beutepark der Luftwaffe (the depot where the German Air Force stored its loot) in Lvov and to turn it over to somebody totally unknown to me — somebody of whom I knew only that he was a member of the Resistance — I considered to be my duty. (I was in a position to do so since, as an employee of a German company, I had access to this depot.) But when I was instructed to transport something — a gun, in this case — from one place to another just before curfew, and was told, strictly, not to use the tram (I was supposed to walk), it happened that I nevertheless disobeyed the order and climbed onto the footboard of a tram, and that a “Black One” — a Ukrainian policeman who was a member of the auxiliary police of the German occupational forces — jumped onto the footboard behind me and put his arm around me to reach for the door handle. It could have meant an ill end for me if the policeman had felt the gun. My act was insubordination, thoughtlessness, and folly all in one, but I did it anyway. Was it a challenge to fate, or only foolhardiness? Up to this day, I am not sure. (I am better able to understand why I visited the ghetto several times — risky though this was — when it was open to visitors. I had friends there. As far as I know, all, or nearly all, of them were transported to the gas chambers of Belzec in the fall of 1942.)

  At this point, the question arises whether what I have reported so far is relevant at all, in the sense of having any direct, causal relationship to my profession as a writer, or to the kind of writing I have done — excluding, of course, autobiographical works like The High Castle. I believe that such a causal relationship exists — that it isn’t mere chance that I attribute in my work such a prominent role to chance as the shaper of human destiny. I have lived in radically different social systems. Not only have I experienced the huge differences in poor but independent, capitalist (if one must call it that) prewar Poland, the Pax Sovietica in the years 1939-41, the German occupation, the return of the Red Army, and the postwar years in a quite different Poland, but at the same time I have also come to understand the fragility that all systems have in common, and I have learned how human beings behave under extreme conditions — how their behavior when they are under enormous pressure is almost impossible to predict.

  I remember well my feelings when I read Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow. Now, I thought that book very good — so good that I have read it several times. Indeed. But most of the things that Mr. Bellow attributed to his hero, Mr. Sammler, in recounting his experiences in a Poland occupied by the Germans, didn’t sound quite right to me. The skilled novelist must have done careful research before starting on the novel, and he made only one small mistake — giving a Polish maid a name that isn’t Polish. This error could have been corrected by a stroke of the pen. What didn’t seem right was the “aura” -the indescribable “something” that can be expressed in language perhaps only if one has experienced in person the specific situation that is to be described. The problem in the novel is not the unlikeliness of specific events. The most unlikely and incredible things did happen then. It is, rather, the total impression that evokes in me the feeling that Bellow learned of such events from hearsay, and was in the situation of a researcher who receives the individual parts of a specimen packaged in separate crates and then tries to put them together. It is as if oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor and the fragrance of flowers were to be mixed in such a way as to evoke and bring to life the specific mood of a certain part of a forest at a certain morning hour. I do not know whether something like this would be totally impossible, but it would surely be difficult as hell. There is something wrong in Mr. Sammler’s Planet; some tiny inaccuracy got mixed into the compound. Those days have pulverized and exploded all narrative conventions that had previously been used in literature. The unfathomable futility of human life under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed by literary techniques in which individuals or small groups of persons form the core of the narrative. It is, perhaps, as if somebody tried by providing the most exact description of the molecules of which the body of Marilyn Monroe was composed to convey a full impression of her. That would be impossible. I do not know, of course, whether this sort of narrative inadequacy was the reason that I started writing science fiction, but I suppose — and this is a somewhat daring statement -that I began writing science fiction because it deals with human beings as a species (or, rather, with all possible species of intelligent beings, one of which happens to be the human species). At least, it should deal with the whole species, and not just with specific individuals, be they saints or monsters.

  It is likely that, after my beginner’s attempts — that is to say, after my first science-fiction novels — I revolted for the same reason of narrative limitations against the paradigms of the genre as they developed and became fossilized in the United States. As long as I didn’t know current science fiction — and I didn’t know it for a long time, because up to 1956 or 1957 it was almost impossible to get foreign books in Poland — I believed that it had to be a further development of the starting position taken by H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds. It was he who climbed into a general’s position, from which it was possible to survey the whole human species in an extreme situation. He anticipated a future filled with disasters, and I must admit that he was correct. During the war, when I read his novel several times, I was able to confirm his understanding of human psychology.

  Today, I am of the opinion that my earliest science-fiction novels are devoid of any value (regardless of the fact that they had large editions everywhere and made me world-famous). I wrote these novels — for instance, The Astronauts, which was published in 1951, and was about an expedition to the planet Venus from a simplistically Utopian Earth — for reasons that I can still understand today, although in their plots and in the kind of world they depicted they were contrary to all my experience of life at the time. In these books, the evil world of reality was supposed to have suffered a sea change into a good one. In the postwar y
ears, there seemed to be only this choice — between hope and despair, between a historically untenable optimism and a well-justified skepticism that was easily apt to turn into nihilism. Of course, I wanted to embrace optimism and hope!

  However, my very first novel was a realistic one, which I wrote perhaps in order to rid myself of the weight of my war memories — to expel them like pus. But perhaps I wrote this book also in order not to forget; the one motive could well go together with the other. The novel is called The Hospital of Transfiguration, and it is about the fight of the staff of a hospital for the insane to save the inmates from being killed by the German occupiers. One German reviewer ventured the opinion that it was a kind of sequel to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. What was in Mann only a portent — only the distant hint of a then nearly invisible lightning, since the horrors to come were still hidden behind the horizon of the times — proves to be in my novel the final circle of Hell, the logical outcome of the predicted “decline of the West” in the mass exterminations. The village, the hospital for the mentally ill, the professional staff: none of the places and characters ever existed; they are all my invention. But mentally ill persons — and many others — were indeed murdered by the thousands in occupied Poland. I wrote The Hospital of Transfiguration in 1948, my last year as a student. It could not appear until 1955, however, since it didn’t conform to the then already reigning standards of Socialist Realism. In the meantime, I was, as I can say without exaggeration, very busy.

  In 1946, we — my father, my mother, and I — moved from Lvov to Kraków, having lost all our possessions in the course of the war. My father, who was seventy-one years old, was forced, because of these reverses, to work in a hospital; there was no possibility that he could set up his own practice. We all lived in a single room in Kraków, and my father didn’t have the means to buy his own equipment. Purely by chance, I learned how I could financially help our family: I wrote several long stories for a weekly dime-novel series that featured a complete story in each issue. Considered as thrillers, they weren’t so bad. Aside from that, I wrote poems; they appeared in Tygodnik Powszechny, the Krakovian Catholic weekly. And two novellas — not science fiction proper but on the margin of fantasy — plus some odds and ends in various publications. But I did not take my writing very seriously.