The satirist Lec, who was a good friend of mine until his death and in whose house I was a guest on several occasions and who always wrote his philosophical-satirical statements in what he called his wife’s cookbooks, insisted, every time I walked with him across a particular stretch of the so-called Nowy Swiat about hundred meters long and thirty wide—and whenever I was in Warsaw I would walk along the Nowy Swiat with him almost every day—that the most dangerous opponents of the regime then in power were buried beneath this stretch and that he himself had witnessed the way in which those who were in power at the present day had murdered their opponents and buried them at this spot. When I asked people what they had to say about Lec’s claim, I was always confronted with head-shaking and left without an answer. But Lec always spoke the truth.

The Royal Vault

THE ROYAL VAULT

In Cracow, in which, as is well known, communism has held sway since the end of the so-called Second World War, there was a man who, whenever he visited the so-called royal vault on the Wawel, always heard the royal hymn coming from the sarcophagus of the last Polish king. Without considering the consequences he did not, in the nature of things, immediately report this experience, which was repeated every time he entered the royal vault, but told the story in the city only after some time had passed and he had had the experience almost a hundred times. When, as a result, more and more inhabitants of Cracow and, as time passed, hundreds and thousands of them made a pilgrimage to the royal vault and to the Wawel in order to hear the royal hymn from the sarcophagus as the man had done, and hundreds and thousands of them did hear the royal hymn just as the man had, the Cracow police arrested the man and threw him into prison. The inhabitants of Cracow were forbidden, on pain of punishment, to walk along the Wawel, and the royal vault was closed. For years, anyone walking along the Wawel was subjected to a thorough interrogation by the police. Today, the royal vault on the Wawel has long since been reopened and no one remembers the affair.

Contradiction

CONTRADICTION