In the City of the Dead

White Week and Other Stories by Wojciech Chmielewski

“The city of the dead is right in the middle of this other city,
the heart of the whole country, and no one cares.”
—from “A Prayer” by Wojciech Chmielewski

Dear Reader,

According to Polish literary critic Jan Franczak, this line, encountered within the first few pages of White Week and Other Stories, is the hallmark of acclaimed Polish writer Wojciech Chmielewski: “There is something in the middle, no one cares, but it is there.” The boarded-up townhouses surrounding Warsaw’s Grzybowski Square, the blackened towers that have always been there, all vestiges of the past, are visible in the present to anyone willing to look. And yet the lady in pressed trousers and stiletto shoes walks from the car park to her office, blind to it all.

Discussing White Week on the podcast In a Nutshell, Joseph Pearce identifies a paradox: “The dead are present in the sense of tradition, the sense of culture, the sense of roots, in the sense of what it is to be Polish. But they’re also present in the indifference of the living. So those who are actually living are actually dead . . . vacuous zombies of modernity.” Even though the past is still viscerally present—in landscape and architecture, in art, and in our very bodies—we moderns often move through the world without really seeing it. For what are we, if not (in part) bits of the past, a grandparent’s nose, our father’s eyes, our mother’s laugh? How often do we walk by cemeteries without praying for the dead? Or speed by the sites of bloody battles and lynchings? How often do we walk by a church without blessing ourselves or bowing our heads?

The characters in Chmielewski’s White Week are just the same. They walk over the cobblestoned streets of Warsaw, past the crumbled, war-torn remnants of buildings, their eyes focused only on the sleek, glass-encased future.

Some people talk about the importance of literature in terms of what it teaches us, how it helps us become more empathetic, and by extension, more “moral”; in many cases morality is reduced to empathy. But our founder and editor-in-chief Joshua Hren has written: “I want to stake a different claim: that literature, like other arts, helps us only to the extent that it first helps us to see. Any moral or emotional effect of literature (and a fully moral response is both rational and emotional) is secondary to, and consequent upon, literature’s great gift: before they bring us into ethical deliberations, novels and short stories coax us into the realm of natural contemplation.” Θαυμάζειν or “thaumazein”—what we know as wonder—follows.

White Week and Other Stories is a master class in seeing.

Prayer, if done well, is an act of complete attention. Chmielweski understands this and thus begins his collection with “A Prayer.” He tutors us in the vital art of paying attention through his description of a June morning in Warsaw: the scent of peonies mingling with perfume, the shining rump of horses, a boy selling strawberries in the navy blue shadow of a building . . . “Polish strawberries, all freeesh.” Everything is rendered with such precise tenderness that you experience what Conrad meant when defining the fiction writer’s task: “to snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life.”

But as you follow Chmielewski’s gaze, this ordinary morning also discloses more than the surface suggests. Four drunk men, flushed and exhausted, scream at each other outside the all-night liquor store. An old woman with a kerchief, nodding over chanterelles, ticks her fingers along her rosary beads. Construction in the vast Grzybowski Square forces residents to walk along newly mapped routes through an openwork labyrinth. And then we see the townhouses, boarded up with blackened plywood. “No one has lived here for a long time—the city of the dead is right in the middle of this other city, the heart of the whole country. No one cares.”

The piece ends in All Saints’ Church, where a man in a railway uniform kneels before Our Lady of Częstochowa, pressing his face against the intricate cast-iron flowers on the chapel gates. There, barely visible in the morning darkness, glows a red eternal light. “You must come closer,” Chmielewski writes. “Everything can be seen from up close, though the gates of the chapel are closed.” This is what it means to see—not glancing from a safe distance, but pressing close enough that the flowers from the cast-iron grille leave a pink imprint on your cheek.

White Week and Other Stories is now available from Amazon HERE and is on sale for only $8.00 from Wiseblood Books HERE.

The stories that follow “A Prayer” continue this discipline of attention and build upon it, bringing readers into Θαυμάζειν or “thaumazein,” and this is one reason why Wojciech Chmielewski is regarded as one of Poland’s finest living writers. We published White Week and Other Stories in collaboration with the Polish Book Institute because we believe literature’s first gift is sight—and Chmielewski’s work can help you recognize and practice what it is to see. Maciej Urbanowski of Jagiellonian University calls him “a bard of the city, where traces of the tragic past lay hidden underneath a layer of self-satisfied modernity. His descriptions of ordinary, forgotten, and marginalized people are brilliant—and he tends to look at them with curiosity and compassion. Finally, he is a true master of short prose. No one in Poland can write such excellent short stories, novellas, or sketches as Chmielewski.” Jan Franczak agrees: “I am very happy that his work is now available in English . . . This selection demonstrates why he is a master.”

This collection does not “increase your empathy” through sentimental manipulation. Instead, it calls upon you to attend, and through attention to wonder, and, in right response to that wonder, to really love. Chmielewski teaches us to look, really look, to practice the art of seeing, to avoid the presentism that so permeates our culture and causes us to become “vacuous zombies of modernity.” By the final story in White Week, you will have expanded your own capacity to see: the bird’s nest curved into the bent branches of a Japanese maple, the worn tombstone listing toward the ground, the old woman’s gnarled fingers caressing the soft head of her granddaughter, the wheaten circle in the center of golden monstrance. You will remember, once again, that the past is part of the whole of the present, and that the essence of all things lives beneath and beyond the surface.

As always, thank you for reading,

The Editors at Wiseblood Books

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