Jerzy Ficowski - Waiting for the Dog to Sleep

Polish author Jerzy Ficowski was approaching his fifties before he published his first and only collection of short stories. Waiting for the Dog to Sleep was well-received in Poland, but has since fallen out of print there, and it only came to the English in 2006. Ficowski is known better both in Poland and elsewhere for his poetry and his work concerning Bruno Schulz. How, then, does an author primarily a poet fare when turning his hand to short stories?

In Ficowski's case, quite well. Waiting for the Dog to Sleep is a collection wide in theme and character, without an over-arching plot or grouping of characters to keep it together; what unites the text is its atmosphere, both in terms of language – the poet's voice – and overall coherency of feeling. Ficowski's stories, some of which are long, though most are either very short (a page or two) or a handful of pages in length, are aware of the obliteration of the past once it it past, and the uncertainty of the future. The various narrators can't remember their past, or simply have none, or what past they have is so supremely focused on one specific aspect (childhood, a crime, an aspect of prison-life, a smell or sound), that they may as well have that and nothing else.

In Outskirts on the Sands, we learn from the narrator that,

My experience has taught me to believe in the unintended continuation of a provisional state, in the indestructibility of things randomly thrown together.

He is given an allotment for an empty apartment in a building filled with them, a street filled with them, a neighbourhood filled with them. The ghosts of previous tenants aren't present because Ficowski knows that there are no ghosts. Once you're gone you're gone, and everyone in Poland has vanished in some way or another.

The narrators have no future, no past, and little by way of the present. Poland is represented alternately as a wasteland, a concrete jungle, a dream, an undeveloped forest. It's sins, but more importantly the sins committed against it, have ensured that those things which could have developed a memory, have become marginalised, or died, or simply disappeared.

Ficowsky draws heavily on his work as “translator, poet, ethnologist, philosophy graduate, impromptu soldier, entomologist, collecter of oddities, lyricis and devote as well as biographer of Bruno Schulz”. His stories often eschew the supposed necessity for plot, instead focusing on that difficult and intangible aspect of storytelling known as atmosphere. These stories feel like something, even when they aren't about anything in particular.

There are, of course, several stories which do explicitly focus on plot. A few deal glancingly with the Holocaust and the concentration camps that blighted Poland's landscape during the Second World War; and a few deal quite explicitly with this horror. Communism is touched on as well, and so too the brutality and artificiality of the concrete and glass post-industrial malaise that affects all developed cities and spreads amongst them like bulky cancerous nodes.

Perhaps the best way to understand Ficowski's particular method is to read an extended quote. This quote, which comes from The Joy of Dead Things, touches on many of the themes that are present with all the stories and, though it is a slight bit more dramatic in narrative tone that most of the other pieces, it is quite representative of what one can expect when reading Waiting for the Dog to Sleep:

The shacks appeared with less and less frequency, and I still can't find the diner where I once left my last twenty złotys. Maybe they're still there on that faience plate beneath the window. I want to find the diner, but I have to go quickly, so onwards.

Because: I am moving to the rhythm of my heart, precisely, as if on command; I cannot fall behind it. I breath more and more quickly from fatigue, keeping track of my pulse, which goes faster and faster, by placing a hand on my heart. And I speed up, I have to keep pace, my tired heart again gets ahead, I give chase, now I'm running, I can't break the tempo mustn't part with myself. I run as breathless as a drum major who has lost control of his beat, a mutinous, dictatorial beat. Its racing patter from within my ribs and the shallow breathes, this is the melody of the march.

I'm running. I can't find the diner. I see other shops with rusted signboards whose letters have become illegible. Closed shops. You could get into them through their low, smashed windows, but then there's nothing inside them anymore. I still have a few handful of coins. They're weighing me down as I run, there's nothing to spend them on here on this overgrown street, I throw them into the grass at the roadside, the ever-higher grass.

I won't find my diner. The houses are petering out, there are now just skeletons of houses, and some surviving old crosses in an old cemetery; they are proliferating, they are exponential crosses, with bifurcating side shoots like the antlers of old stags.

Memory, loss, the destruction of the ordinary and the bleak - this is Ficowski. Yet, for all that, his prose is a joy to read. The sentences are tightly constructed, and possess an extravagance of vocabulary that never becomes an embarrassment of riches. At their strangest – concrete elephants being patched up before a circus performance, where they will come alive and perform; a whore who loves until she doesn't, and then packs up and leaves without taking a thing; an Aunt who plucks and eats her family one by one – the stories remain coherent because Ficowski's use of the rhythm of language keeps everything together. His stories are felt things, which means that if a certain strangeness or intensity or menace or danger or sexuality or destruction is needed to enhance the feeling, Ficowski will utilise its effects.

These are the types of stories where it is possible that danger lurks around not “every corner” but the most immediate and nearest one, where windows may suddenly have bars, and where prisons exist everywhere, even in our homes. Ficowski's language is beautiful, really quite evocative of place and feeling, but he can dream only dark dreams, where even the most uneventful and calm stories carry with them the whiff of menace. Everything seems poised for anything, as in this paragraph from the story, My Forest, which turns suddenly dark:

From that moment on, turning against its own nature, my forest started to lose its inborn shade, it fell silent; though the sap effusions still smelled of pine. It might have started earlier, I must have overlooked the first signs, but now it had intensified and swollen. I was gripped by a woodcutter's phobia: the sudden panic that, at any moment, the trunks of my pines would come toppling down on me. Nothing of the sort. Nothing had changed, the perpendiculars were intact, it was only that the birds weren't singing. The wind shook the treetops. I was no woodcutter, let them stands, there's no sense in felling captive trees.

The tension builds, climaxes, and then eases – and nothing has occurred. But the feeling persists, becoming greater story after story. The overall culmination of the collection is to leave the reader with a sense of unease coupled with an understanding of the frailty of memory and the inability of language, whether written or spoken, to properly capture a time which is past. And if we can't know our past, how then do we have a hoping in determining our future?

Author	Jerzy Ficowski
Title	Waiting for the Dog to Sleep (Original Title: Czekanie na sen psa)
Translators	Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski
Nationality	Polish
Publisher	Twisted Spoon Press
Published	2006 (English) 1970 (Polish)
Pages	184
Availability: ---Amazon (US)