CONVERSATIONS IN WARSAW
265
in
the East European style, was a combined living room-dining
room, with a large table in the middle and a couch on the side. The
boy had a room to himself, with a radio and record player. The
apartment seemed like a caricature of petit-bourgeois taste fifty
years ago--the heavy, veneered furniture, the antimacassars, the
colored lithographs of forests and mountain springs.
Although the father was a party member, and apparently im–
portant enough to have a large apartment, he was extremely cordial,
and
his
wife, a plump and pleasant woman, was even more so. She
plied us with cakes and a homemade honey liqueur. Although she
spoke only Polish, there was no mistaking the meaning of the
sounds--"Eat, eat." They seemed proud of the fact that their son
had American friends, and were eager to display their affluence–
especially the television set, and the large radio-phonograph. They
turned on the television set, and we watched it for about twenty
minutes (with the mother smilingly insistent that I have more cake
and mead). There seemed to be no regular programs, but a series
of disconnected items of irregular length, like a badly edited maga–
zine. We saw a demonstration of new domestic items for housewives;
after a ten-minute mechanical parade of goods, there was a news–
reel of some young, attractive boys and girls lying indolently on a
beach. I assumed the program was proclaiming the beauty of Polish
women or the joys of Polish vacations, but then a harsh voice inter–
rupted the music, and the scene shifted to a studio where a girl in
a bathing suit was doing body-building exercises with a hoop. As I
surmised, and this was later confirmed by the student, the beach–
combers were being reproached for just lying on the sand, and were
being exhorted to eschew the older, "decadent" pleasures for exer–
cise and activity instead. The next item was an interview between a
Polish journalist and the North Korean ambassador, on the anni–
versary of the Korean War. The interview was incredibly stilted–
the two men sat in chairs facing each other, and the camera re–
mained in fixed position, neither shifting from one to the other nor
moving in for c1oseups.
In the morning
J.,
a sociologist, came to see me at the hotel.
He is a tall, open-faced man with a pleasant manner. During the
war he had fought in the Resistance, and after the war, because
