Piotr Szewc - Annihilation

Annihilation is a day in the life of a village full of people who are all about to die. They don't know it, but of course we do, because the village is in Poland and the citizens are primarily Jewish. Piotr Szewc's novella captures the essence of place, time and memory; he avoids action completely and dialogue mostly, instead focusing on those meaningless moments of time that, when added up, constitute a life that was always assumed would be lived another way. Life tends to happen to us whether we will it or not, and Szewc understands this, devoting time to people getting ready in the morning, or idling by a puddle made from yesterday's rain, or sharing a quiet beer with a colleague at the end of a work shift.

The tone of Szewc's novella is set from the start, and holds up well over the course of the day. The narrator is a firm character, and while he does not possess any traits or qualities as such, he is very much in control of the text and where our “camera” will roam while observing the village. The narrator talks to us, asks us questions, and ponders mysteries. Szewc notes early on that “Data, documents, and credible explanations are unavailable.” He is referring to Persian butterflies, but the quote easily applies to the text as a whole – it is no accident this line comes halfway into the first paragraph of the novella. Because we cannot refer to data and documentation, then, we must instead rely on Szewc's languid roam from one area of the village to another. He wanders inside a house, out along on the street, up above the houses on to the rooftops, and a little ways outside the village where there are branching trees and cool streams.

The word camera above is apt, because Szewc often refers to the photographs he is 'taking' as the novella progresses. A particularly vivid scene will inspire the narrator to commit it to film, which usually then leads to a description of even greater detail:

We are at the edge of the market square, where Lwowska begins. One of us takes a picture. The photographer can shoot at will. Only the width of the lens curbs his freedom. The world is frozen for a fraction of a second. What do we see after the film is developed? Unnatural, somewhat grotesque figures of passersby and of a bicyclist. Two policemen are entering the tavern. The swinging door hasn't quite closed. Through the crack we see a raised hand holding a beer stein.

From here, the narrator examines each discrete portion of the photograph, exploring the history of the policemen and their beliefs about duty, wondering who is the owner of the raised hand, and so forth. Again and again the narrator will capture a scene as a photograph, and sometimes he will even consider photographing before, ultimately, discarding. There are hints (often quite explicit) that the narrator is in fact leafing through a photo album many years in the future, long after the annihilation of the title will occur.

But what is this annihilation? It is never stated outright, but of course the reader coming into the story knows what surely must happen. Szewc refers only rarely to the doom we both know will eventually occur, and this obliqueness adds to the poignancy of the images collected by the narrator. Early in the piece, the narrator comments that:

Those few minor events most likely will not influence future events universally considered most significant. The minor events will vanish in the turmoil surrounding more important events and will not be salvaged by memory or photographs. They belong to the past that isn't studied – they are question marks left by each successive generation. Like burned paper, they, together with similar facts and circumstances, will turn to dust scattered in time.

Szewc's primary characters throughout the novella are the town itself and the narrator. That said, there are touchstones characters and places we return to again and again. One such location is Rosenzweig's tavern, and it wouldn't be far off to say that all the characters essentially revolve around it, coming and going throughout the day. The Attorney Danilowski is another touchstone, and it is with him we spend a good chunk of the first half as he goes about his day. Another character we return to often is Kazimiera M, a sensual, lazy woman who enjoys admiring her body in mirrors, and who perhaps relies too heavily upon the favours of wealthy men about town.

I wrote, “as he goes about his day” above, when referring to Danilowski and what happens to him. It's true that that isn't much of an explanation, but that is really how Szewc's novella flows. The characters never do much, not really – or they do as much as you or I would do during an ordinary day from our lives. Which is to say, to summarise would be boring, to expand upon would create Annihilation, or something similar. Time, memory and place are very strong for each of the characters, but they are times, memories and places of their own, things that are important to them. Szewc shows us them, but he does not embellish or enhance. Each character's day is described with honesty, but the day itself is not special.

But a day that is not special can certainly be beautiful. Szewc writes well of ordinary moments, both those that deal with person to person interaction, and those that require simply that we possess five senses and are receptive to our surroundings. A good example of this is the following quote:

Blended with the hot steam, the smell of lavender wafts in the bathroom. In June, likewise, hot steam, blended with the smell of simultaneously blooming herbs and grasses, wafts through the meadow air. Because June comes only once a year, the warmed-up meadow vegetates recklessly, impetuously, with every leaf counting the pieces of sun that keep falling from the sky. The attorney likes the atmosphere in the bathroom, the sweat flowering in large drops on his skin. A tiny window at the level of his head is closed. Steam covers the windowpane.

Perhaps the best way to describe Annihilation is to consider the following: If you have ever watched a person – or even an animal die – then you will understand the intensity of Szewc's prose. There is a time, when a living being is dying, where they breathe out, slowly, very slowly, and it seems, for an extended moment that stretches and stretches, that they will never inhale. While you wait for what you so desperately want to see (the jagged sounds of ailed inhalation, the lungs expanding, the continuance, however brief, of life), the world loses its focus and becomes blurred, and all that matters is the breath inward. Szewc's prose is this moment, expanded out to one hundred pages. We all know that the waited-for inhalation never actually occurs – the Jews die – but we don't know which breath, exactly, or when. Szewc's scenes are maddening in their ordinariness, their smallness, as we wait for the axe to fall – but it never does.

Annihilation is that rare gem, a work of literature which takes a well-worn subject and finds a new way to approach it. Its menace lies in what is not said, and that which is not done within the confines of the pages. Everything that is really important – and again, it is critical that these people, and the village itself, remain unaware of their future – is off in the distance. But it is there. It is no accident that Szewc refers to a train heard from a distance in the last few pages of the novel. This image, brief amongst the rest, reinforces the dread of what will be. Szewc laments that, no matter how will a time and place is captured, there is always something missing, and that something is everything. All that can be done is one's best, and the implication at the end of the novel is that this is Szewc's best effort at capturing the truth of his small town before he was born, before the Holocaust.

Author	Piotr Szewc
Title	Annihilation (Original Title: Zagłada)
Translator	Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
Nationality	Polish
Publisher	Dalkey Archive
Published	1993 (English) 1987 (Polish)
Pages	107
Availability: ---Amazon (US)

See Also

List of Polish authors under review
Other titles from The Dalkey Archive Press under review.

Reviews

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Heart Hammer
Context - Reading Piotr Szewc by Martin Riker