A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True

by Brigid Pasulka

Overview

PEN/Hemingway Award Winner: A “gorgeous” novel weaving together stories of Poland past and present in one whimsically romantic epic (Chicago Tribune).

On the eve of World War II, in a small Polish village, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon falls in love with a girl fabled for her angelic looks. To build a place in Anielica’s heart, he transforms her family’s modest hut into a beautiful home. But war arrives, cutting short their courtship and sending the young lovers off to the promise of a fresh start in Krakow.
 
Nearly fifty years later, the couple’s granddaughter, Beata, repeats this journey, seeking a new life in the fairy-tale city of her grandmother’s stories. But instead of the rumored prosperity of the New Poland, she discovers a city full of frustrated youths, caught between its future and its past. Taken in by her tough-talking cousin, Irena, and her glamorous daughter, Magda, Beata struggles to find her own place in the world. But unexpected events—tragedies and miracles both—change lives and open eyes.
 
“[A] whimsical debut,” A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True weaves together two remarkable stories, reimagining half a century of Polish history through the legacy of one unforgettable love affair (New York Times Book Review).  This magical, heartbreaking novel “rings hauntingly, enchantingly, real” (National Geographic Traveler).
 
“With a touch of Marina Lewycka and a dash of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, this is storytelling that gets under your skin and forces you to press copies into your best friends’ hands.” —Elle (UK)
 
“Funny and romantic like all the best true stories.” —Charlotte Mendelson, author of When We Were Bad

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547428475
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	08/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	199,649
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Brigid Pasulka, a descendant of Polish immigrants, first arrived in Kraków in the early nineties, with no contacts, no knowledge of the language, and only a vague idea of Polish culture. She quickly fell in love with the city, learned Polish, and decided to live there for one year. Pasulka now teaches English at a Chicago high school.

Read an Excerpt

1
A Faraway Land
The pigeon was not one to sit around and pine, and so the day after he saw the beautiful Anielica Hetmanska up on Old Baldy Hill, he went to talk to her father.
     The Pigeon’s village was two hills and three valleys away, and he came upon her only by Providence, or “by chance,” as some would start to say after the communists and their half-attempts at secularization.
     He happened to be visiting his older brother, Jakub, who was living at the old sheep camp and tending the Hetmanski flock through the summer; she happened to be running an errand for the Fates and her father to drop off a bottle of his special herbal ovine fertility concoction. Ordinarily, of course, a maiden meeting with a bachelor alone — and over the matter of ovine procreation no less — would be considered verboten or nilzya or whatever the Polish equivalent was before the Nazis and the Soviets routed the language and appropriated all the words for forbiddenness. But the Pigeon’s brother, Jakub, was a simpleton, a gentle simpleton, and the risk of Anielica twisting an ankle in the hike was greater than any danger posed by Jakub.
     The Pigeon happened to be climbing up the side of the hill just as the sun was sliding down, and when he spotted his brother talking to the girl in front of the old sheep hut, he stopped flat in his shadow and ducked behind a tree to watch. The breeze was blowing from behind, and he couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying, but he could see his brother talking and bulging his eyes. He was used to his brother’s way of speaking by now, and he was only reminded of it when he saw him talking to strangers. Jakub spoke with a clenched jaw, his lips spreading and puckering around an impenetrable grate of teeth, which, along with the lack of pauses in his thoughts, created a low, buzzing monotone. The only inflection to his words came through his eyes, which bugged out when there was a word he wanted to stress, then quickly receded. It was very much like a radio left on and stuck at the edge of a station: annoying at first, but quite easy to ignore after the first twenty years or so.
     If you were not used to talking to him, the common stance was to lean backward, one foot pointed to the side, looking for an end to the loop of monologue that never came, finally reaching in and snapping one of his sentences in half before muttering a quick good-bye and making an escape. But the girl was not like this at all. In fact, she seemed to be leaning in toward Jakub, her nodding chin following his every word, her parted lips anticipating what he would say next with what very closely resembled interest and pleasure.
     She was absolutely stunning. She had strong legs and high cheekbones, a blood-and-milk complexion and Cupid’s-bow lips, and the Pigeon was suddenly full of admiration for his brother for having the courage to stand there and have an ordinary conversation with such a beautiful creature. He crouched behind the pine tree, watching them for perhaps half an hour, and he started toward the hut only once she was on her way down the other side of the hill.
     “Who was that?”
     His brother stared wistfully at the empty crest of the hill long after she had disappeared.
     “. . . That, oh, that, that is the angel, she brought me medicine, for the sheep, not for me, and she also brought me some fresh bread, you know, she comes to visit me very often, she is the daughter of Pan Hetmanski, she brought me herbs for his sheep, so they will have more sheep, and I didn’t see you coming, how long were you watching . . .” Jakub breathed in deeply through his teeth.
     “The angel? What do you mean, ‘the angel’?” The Pigeon and the rest of the family were always vigilant for signs of his brother’s simpleness turning into something more worrying.
     “. . . if I knew you were there I would have introduced you, even though she came to see me, she comes to see me often, and ‘the angel’ is her name — Anielica — and she is Pan Hetmanski’s daughter, she is going to come again sometime soon, she said, maybe she will bring the herbs or bread or . . .”
     “She is very beautiful,” the Pigeon said, and he brought the milk pail of Sunday dinner into the sheep hut and set it down on the bench. His brother followed.
     “. . . maybe a book, sometimes she reads to me, yes, she is very beautiful, isn’t she, more beautiful than mama, don’t tell mama that, but do tell mama that I like the socks she knitted me, it is very cold up here this summer, not during the day but at night, and Pan Hetmanski brought extra blankets up last week, he is very nice, and they have two dozen sheep, but it is strange that they do not live in a nicer house, it is just a hut over in Half-Village, nothing special, our house is much nicer, I think . . .”
     Sometimes the talking could go on forever.
     The thing was to act, and the Pigeon knew just what to do.
     Throughout history, from medieval workshops to loft rehabs in the E.U., we Poles have always been known by our zlote raczki, our golden hands. The ability to fix wagons and computers, to construct Enigma machines and homemade wedding cakes, to erect village churches and American skyscrapers all without ever opening a book or applying for permits or drafting a blueprint. And since courting a beautiful girl by using a full range of body parts has only recently become acceptable, in the spring of 1939 the Pigeon made the solemn decision to court Anielica through his hands. Specifically, he vowed to turn her parents’ modest hut into the envy of the twenty-seven other inhabitants of Half-Village, into a dwelling that would elicit hosannas-in-the-highest every time they passed. Besides Jakub, the Pigeon had eight sisters, who had taught him the importance of a clean shirt and a shave, and so the next morning before dawn, he donned his church clothes, borrowed his father’s wedding shoes, and made the long walk over two hills and three valleys to the Hetmanski family door. He knocked and waited patiently on the modest path, overgrown with weeds and muddy with the runoff from the mountain, until Pan Hetmanski finally appeared at the door.
     “Excuse me for bothering you so early in the morning, Pan, but I was wondering if Pan wouldn’t mind if I made some improvements to Pan’s house. For free, of course.”
     “You want to make improvements to my house?”
     “For free.”
     “And what did you say your name was?”
     “Everyone calls me the Pigeon.”
     Pan Hetmanski stood in his substantial nightshirt and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “And exactly what improvements did you have in mind?”
     “Well, take this path for one, it could be paved . . . and there could be a garden wall to keep out the Gypsies . . . and glass could be put in these windows . . . and a new tin roof, perhaps.”
     Pan Hetmanski suppressed a smirk. “For free, you say.” Another man might have been offended rather than amused, but Pan Hetmanski was a highlander and not a farmer, and thus more concerned with enjoying his plot of land than with working it. Besides, there had been enough young men lurking around lately to make him aware of what the Pigeon was up to, that the request was not to work on the hut, but to work somewhere in the vicinity of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Anielica. At least this one had the decency to come to the door and offer something useful.
     “And how do I know you will not make rubble of my house?”
     “If you would like to see my work, I can take you to my parents’ house. I did a complete remont last summer.”
     “And you will work for free.”
     “Yes, Pan.”
     “And would this have anything to do with my daughter?”
     “I will leave that up to Pan. In time, of course.”
     “I’m not going to help you with any of the work.”
     “Of course not, Pan.”
     “And if you touch her I will throw you off the mountain and let the wild boars gnaw your bones.”
     “Of course, Pan.”
     “And if you make up stories about touching her, I will cut out your tongue and my wife will use it as a pincushion for her embroidery needles.”
     “That won’t be necessary, Pan.”
     The others had been easily scared away by such talk, and as Pan Hetmanski stood in the doorway scowling at the Pigeon, he regretted that he had not answered the door with a knife or an awl in his hand to appear more threatening.
     “And when will you begin?”
     “Now if you like. I brought a change of clothes.”
     “Now? Good God, you are an eager one. Why don’t you preserve your enthusiasm until the weekend?” He smiled. “And whatever else might be propelling you.”
     “Friday evening then?”
     “Saturday morning,” Pan Hetmanski countered, suppressing another smirk.
     “We’ll see if he shows up, the young buck,” he mumbled to his wife after he had shut the door.
     “I hope so. I do need a new pincushion.”
     The attention given to Anielica in the past year was not entirely unexpected. Some said that Pan Hetmanski had even planned for it. He had always been known as a man with big dreams born into a small village, and though he occupied himself with the modest business of sheep, he had conferred his dreams on his children. His son he had named after the great medieval king, Wladyslaw Jagiello, which, despite the obvious bureaucratic snafus it caused, proved to be the perfect name for a partisan when the war came. By the time his daughter was born, he had raised his aspirations to even greater heights.
     The angel herself had heard the entire conversation from the corner of the main room, where she was pretending to do her embroidery. “Who was that?” she asked her father as indifferently as she could manage.
     “He calls himself the Pigeon. He says he is from one of the villages on the other side of the Napping Knight.” The Napping Knight was the optimists’ name for the Sleeping Knight, a rock formation and legend that is believed to wake in times of trouble to help the Polish people. After being thoroughly tuckered out by the Tatars, Ottomans, Turks, Cossacks, Russians, Prussians, and Swedes, however, it hadn’t risen in some time, and would, in the years of Nazi occupation, also come to be known as the Oversleeping Knight, and later, during the Soviets, the Blasted Malingering Knight.
     “The Pigeon?”
     “The Pigeon.”
     “Is that because of his nose or the way he walks?” Indeed the Pigeon was well-endowed of nose, and his feet turned in, causing his toes to kiss with each step.
     “Hopefully, it is not because of the size of his pecker,” Anielica’s mother interjected, laughing roughly. She had, in the tradition of górale women, become weathered by the merciless wind and snow that pounded the Tatras.
     “Fortunately, he didn’t provide me with that information,” Pan Hetmanski said.
     “And why is he going to work on the house again?” Anielica asked.
     “Don’t you see?” Her mother laughed. “Your father has sold you to the highest bidder.”
     “Sold? What are you talking about? Don’t be ridiculous! This one is just like the others. He will give up before he even gets a chance to peep in the window.”
     “You can’t see anything through the blasted greased paper anyway,” Anielica’s mother said, waving her arm in her daughter’s direction. “But that doesn’t mean that he can’t picture it all in his mind from the yard.”
     Anielica went over to the window. She pulled back the edge of the greased paper and watched the figure disappear into the woods, the corners of her mouth creeping upward, cocking the bow that would eventually lodge the arrow securely in the Pigeon’s heart.

Editorial Reviews

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Late-20th-century Kraków, where every stone and every brick is dear, and whose walls, when gazed upon by Pope John Paul II, inspired a heartfelt tribute. But many years earlier, a young man courted the beautiful Anielica Hetma´nska with the promise that his "golden hands" could renovate her family's cottage from the ground up. With patience and persistence, he won her heart, and while World War II frustrated their love, delayed their marriage, and wrought havoc and horror in everyone's lives, the mystery and beauty of Kraków finally became their own. Sadly, those remarkable years would become the barest whisper of a memory for Anielica when tragedy sends her home to her small village.

Fifty years later, their granddaughter Beata journeys to the fairy-tale city that lit up her grandmother's eyes and illuminated her stories. However, Kraków in the new Poland is not the same city Anielica left behind. Caught between poverty and prosperity, history and modernity, and teeming with dissolute youth, 1990s Kraków is cold and unwelcoming. In league with her street-savvy cousin Irena and Magda, Irena's beautiful but troubled daughter, Beata struggles to find a foothold in a rapidly growing city.

Artfully weaving together the strands of Anielica's and Beata's stories, Pasulka has penned an ingenious and involving novel so compelling that readers will be reluctant to turn the last page. (Fall 2009 Selection)

Pasulka's delightful debut braids together two tales of old and new Poland. The old is the fairy tale love story of the Pigeon, a young man so entranced by village beauty Anielica that he builds her family a house to prove his devotion. When war comes to Poland, the Pigeon works for the resistance, guarding the town and his Jewish sister-in-law with creativity and bravery. After the war, he and Anielica get engaged and the Pigeon brings his family to Kraków, but the fabled promises of the golden city and the glories of communism prove hollow. The new tale is about Anielica and the Pigeon's granddaughter, Beata, whose plainness has earned her the nickname Baba Yaga. Now living in a much-changed Kraków, Beata is a bar girl with no hopes of love or plans for the future. When tragedy strikes and Beata uncovers family secrets, she brings together the old and new to create her own bright future. Pasulka creates a world that's magical despite the absence of magical happenings, and where Poland's history is bound up in one family's story. (Aug.)

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Publishers Weekly

A debut about Poland from a high-school teacher living in Chicago. The villagers mistake The Pigeon for a simpleton, but he's wise in the ways of the heart. Smitten with gorgeous Anielica, he beseeches her father to let him renovate their home-for free. After setting her protagonist to work building a wall "to keep out the wild boars and the Gypsies," Pasulka constructs a family epic sweeping from 1939 to the 1990s, the aftermath of Solidarity and its triumvirate of "pope, Walesa, and Milosz." Having won her heart, The Pigeon supports Anielica through the hell of World War II, shooting a Soviet trying to burn the cherished home he rebuilt; his wife also proves indomitable, fighting off a Nazi attempting to rape her daughter. Fleeing to Krak-w, they begin life anew. There, a half-century later, in the New Poland of "Adidas shoes, VCRs, Fuji film, lipstick" and other free-market wonders, their granddaughter Baba Yaga aims at fortune. But, as her clear-eyed cousin Irena quips, "capitalists are just communists without the polyester," and times are still tough. Befriending Irena's daughter, a new-style free spirit whose partying compromises her ambition to become a prosecutor, Baba Yaga works as a bar girl and falls for Tadeusz, one of Krak-w's up-and-coming clarinetists. Tadeusz, however, is torn between family pressure to join the army to land a secure career and the urges of his soul (music, Baba Yaga). Their love story, a distorted mirroring of Baba Yaga's grandparents' idealistic romance, encapsulates the complications and frustrations of modern Poland, whose earlier generations found themselves pitted against more straightforward, if fiercer, foes. Pasulka suggests that economic chaosand grappling toward new political identity may require a subtler heroism than war does. Author tour to New York, Boston, Raleigh, Chicago. Agent: Wendy Sherman/Wendy Sherman Associates

Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Fiction

"In this life-affirming novel of past and present, Brigid Pasulka twines the bright colors of fable with the subtler tones of disillusionment, survival, and rebirth—incarnating not only her characters and their lives, but Poland itself. Rarely does a novel succeed so well in evoking place and history, especially with a story as winning as this one. A marvelous debut."

—Nicole Mones, author of The Last Chinese Chef and Lost in Translation

"Two lives, a grandmother's and her granddaughter's, are knit together in a finely wrought tapestry that illuminates an inheritance of a less familiar kind. At once haunting and exquisitely vibrant, Pasulka's original tale is a treasure, transcending history, time, and place." —Martha McPhee, author of Gorgeous Lies

"Pasulka’s delightful debut braids together two tales of old and new Poland. . . . Pasulka creates a world that’s magical despite the absence of magical happenings, and where Poland’s history is bound up in one family’s story." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Grand in scope, yet meticulous in detail, Brigid Pasulka's generous and affectionate novel finds universal truths in both its most-dramatic moments and its most-intimate observations. A compassionate, elegant, and moving debut."—Adam Langer, author of Crossing California

"Funny and romantic like all the best true stories."—Charlotte Mendelson, author of When We Were Bad

From the Publisher

"Pasulka brings to both narratives a warm understanding of her characters’ foibles as they struggle to find happiness in a land racked by tumultuous change."

"Pasulka…does a marvelous job of capturing her ancestral homeland’s culture, including its supple, evocative language."

"Her sweet, generous novel offers hope that her appealing heroine and a nation to often brutalized frequently by the forces of history will both have better tomorrows."

Chicago Tribune

"...Pasulka, an American descendant of Polish immigrants, has charms of her own—appealing characters and keen observations... The most resonant moments come in Baba Yaga’s everyday perceptions."

New York Times Book Review

"The story of Pigeon and Anielica is consistently magical, and this first-time novelist has an indisputable talent for a tale well-told. Like any good host, she makes us feel as if we've found a small piece of home."

Bookpage

"Essentially True is warm and charming, and it brings together a matched pair of stories about old and new Poland together with careful craft."

"Pasulka shows the way that history's disappintments provide the strength for new growth."

Philadelphia City Paper

"One of the many gifts of Brigid Pasulka's debut novel, A Long Long Time Ago & Essentially True, is that it transports us through the outer layers straight into the heart of Poland, brilliantly evoking the country's emotional landscape. Pasulka poignantly portrays Poland's checkerboard history iin the latter half of the 20th century and the evolution of its national character under Nazi occupation, Soviet Communism, and post-Soviet capitalism. With a passion for Poland that suffuses each page, A Long Long Time Ago & Essentially True rings hauntingly, echoingly real."

National Geographic Traveler

"Grand in scope, yet meticulous in detail, Brigid Pasulka’s generous and affectionate novel finds universal truths in both its most-dramatic moments and its most-intimate observations. A compassionate, elegant, and moving debut."

Adam Langer