Manuela Gretkowska – novelist, essayist, screenwriter and columnist was born in 1964 in Łódź. After reading philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, she went abroad to Paris for several years. She attempted to study painting and medieval anthropology, and worked for the Polish section of Radio France Internationale. Her early novels are written there about Paris and what it is like to be not quite an émigré, nor an “eternal student”. They have a strongly autobiographical tone which Gretkowska retains in most of her works.

After her return to Poland Gretkowska quickly established herself as the national scandalist. A radio programme she had in Polish Radio Three disappeared after the first edition in which she discussed on the air the pros and cons of oral sex. An interview she gave in the TV programme Pegassus, in which she discussed erotic vocabulary she used in her then latest novel, brought about an official protest from the Episcopate of Poland which ended not only Gretkowska’s presence on public TV but also the career of her interviewer who rather fortunately works now in a more liberal commercial TV station.

In a press interview Gretkowska called her works “harlequin romances for the intellectuals” – a combination of the erotic and the esoteric, two spheres which are seldom treated by Polish literature, a combination of which is more than surprising for the unprepared reading public.

August – thirty one varieties of the same day. Getting up, breakfast, at nine to work, into computer stocks, that is. Till 4 or 5 writing the screenplay for the Small Town, a walk, switching off, telly. After a day's writing I have no strength to read, I hate letters. In September I'll shut down the computer and will be free. I won't have to scratch anything for the papers, hurry up with a book.

We are planning a holiday in September. I'm trying to win Piotr over for the Indian Ocean. But we are not up to flying for half a day. After more than four hours I'm howling and Pietushka is ready to bite through the window's rubber seams.

I'm thinking of changes on route. I would like to see Israel, Piotr has not seen Katmandu, we would aim for northern Australia. But in vain. The level headed Pietushkin counts the piggy-banks – not enough. Besides, he has only two weeks leave. We choose Greece – it's close, warm and no need to sit on the beach, there is enough to see.

I've picked something to nibble, staring at the computer screen. I bite into a green tomato. Even before I swallowed I felt sick. Such a tomato could be a murderer. I switch to bread and tea. After two days, the same: hunger, nausea. Nothing hurts but how am I to know how the gall bladder or pancreas hurt? Pietushka driven to despair:

"Throw away those herbs and diets! Start eating! You've been starving yourself and now you have the effect."

I throw them away. Does not help much.

The first novel by Manuela Gretkowska My zdies emigranty (We Are Russian Emigrés Here) was published in 1990. Gretkowska proved her talent for PR as she sent a copy of her manuscript to the Nobel winning poet Czesław Miłosz who responded in a kind letter. Gretkowska published the letter as an introduction to her book which guaranteed at the time at least a mild interest from press reviewers.

The book itself is a combination of an esoteric study on the Biblical Mary Magdalene who is the subject of the MA thesis written by the heroine and narrator, and adventures of the latter in Paris of the late 1980s which hardly combine to make a meaningful plot. After 15 years its popularity may be surprising but Gretkowska certainly was at that time a new voice in Polish literature.

In the evenings we go mushroom picking. Ceps like those in fairy tales – knee-high. I have learnt how to recognise the boletus – it has a head like a well baked bun. There are different kinds of ceps: the light-headed by the lake and those with bent legs from the hill. They cling to people, they go out onto the paths, they don't like sitting in the wood. I pick mushrooms, trying to forget about the nausea, fever. I will go to see a doctor in Poland. Now I don't have the time, I have to finish the script for Small Town. Production sticks to the schedule, no let up.

At night I ring up friends, wanting to find out what these nauseous symptoms might mean.
"Darling, you are overworked. It's called a burn-out." So claims my dentist workaholic. "One day you wake up and you can't move your hand. Half of Sweden suffers from it."

"But I can work from morning till night."

"That's how it seems to you. The older you get… there comes a day… the switch goes off and that's it."

But Beata claims I am pregnant. "Nah… Firstly, it's impossible. Secondly, I feel sick all day long, not just in the morning, and then the fortune-teller told me it's in two years' time. Remember? Everything she said has come true."

"So what's wrong with you?"

"I don't know, Beata, I've never felt this way in my life. A combination of jaundice with bonkers. I go to bed at ten… Go? I keel over. I don't have the strength to walk, fever, weird fever, on the thermometer it's not even 37. Take this for example: the day before yesterday we went to IKEA, we bought flower pots and a sofa. Every time I look at that flower pot my stomach turns. I can't look at ugly things any more, it makes me want to puke. Psychosis? Have I gone mad?"

"Well, it happens to the best of us."

"Don't laugh. Our little colourful house has become awful, as if covered with ash. I'm not telling Piotr but I count the days to my Polish trip, or I'll go mad. I feel objects ache. And I'm unhappy, Piotr thinks I feel bad here, that I've had enough…"

"Come to Poland quick, we'll think of something."

Just as My zdyes emigranty The Parisian Tarot published in 1993, The Metaphysical Cabaret published a year later, and especially A Guidebook to People from 1996, are all devoid of any clear story-line. The element Gretkowska prefers is the digressive essay, including lots of interludes in the form of reportage, memoir or parody. The hybrids of style and genre that she enjoys are part of the problem with her books, because a sort of “neurotic personality of our times” looms out of them, a portrait of late 20th century Western Man as horrifying as it is comical. He is a whirl of contradictory ideas, has no coherent system of values, and easily succumbs to quickly changing intellectual and moral fashions.

In the mid-1990s, when Gretkowska’s effective and controversial prose provoked the biggest stir, the Polish public was disoriented. People kept asking the question, is she merely reproducing the spiritual landscape and intellectual climate of the era, or is she creating an image of the world that has nothing to do with reality? Is she seeking out and describing the paradoxes of decadent, late-20th-century civilisation, or is she trying to be intellectually and morally provocative, trying to shock us with everything that’s scandalous and heretical? The controversy was never resolved, but meanwhile Manuela Gretkowska has seriously reformed her way of writing.

"You could not be poisoned by such a tiny tomato. For that long? It's the stress, I know you." That is Petushkin's version.

Stress-schmess. Stressed, I can smash a plate on the wall but will not go to bed, moaning I have no strength to go on living. Stress – he can sell this kind of crap to his patients.
"When you finish the script you will relax and all will be right again. You are before a period, you swell up, it makes go off your trolley." He puts me in the car.

We take a short cut through the Dark Island. The cafe is shut. Their wooden headquarters, a barn painted in pastel colours, gives off a suspicious smell: rotting blue, orange moulded into green. We go home. Passing a petrol station, Pietushka stops to tank up. A boy with a hot dog. I have an urge to snatch it out of his hand.

Enough. I'm looking for a pregnancy test. Before a check up at the gynaecologist. Just in case… In case he asks about pregnancy. Towards the end of the month I can always be… Today should be my first day, I'm already feeling it. It's hard to say – nausea or cramps. Pietushka walks into the bathroom just when I'm pissing over the tester. No flimsy piece of paper in plastic. Formula One and Rolls-Royce of pregnancy testers. Pietushka draws a circle on his forehead:
"Sheer waste and female curiosity…" and goes back to bed.

True, I have wasted so many testers... I know my body inside out, every symptom, but not using any anti- or spiral traps for kiddies, I need to know for sure. Especially that I'm already taking medication potentially harmful in pregnancy.

In the first window slowly appears a blue line. Confirmation the tester works… The second window… I expect a miss, a red minus… waiting… the little drop is absorbed and turns blue. Rubbish. Read the instructions: "Oceanic blue: appearance of the first blue line means pregnancy. The second blue line is a confirmation. 99.9% certainty." I am holding a plastic Rolls-

Royce, a UFO landed on my hand.

"Piotr!!!"

"What?"

"I'm pregnant!"

Pietushka runs out of the bedroom. "You must be wrong. Show me."

Yes, I was wrong. But it was last month. Now I'm done in blue.

"Damn right, Fanny Anna Manuela, we are pregnant." Piotr is knocking on the tester; the blue line is not going away, it turns aqua marine…

"How come? Now? Eeeeuaa…" I slip into gobbledegook. I begin to shake, laugh, cry.

In the late 1990s Manuela Gretkowska was clearly exhausted with writing and her continuous popularity or more precisely notoriety. In 1998, she published World Watcher, a collection of essays drawing on her voyages to among others Northern Africa, Australia, Nepal, China, and Spain. The book was quickly followed by The Passionary, a collection of five short stories of a traditional structure which present needing and looking for love. The openness with which Gretkowska describes sex bordering on bad taste strengthened her position as scandalist although not exactly as a great writer. The series of non-novelistic books was closed in 2000 by the publication of Silicone – a collection of newspaper articles and interviews.

It changes everything, in a miraculous sort of way, but… A child? Later, yes, in some remote future, practically in a different dimension. We kiss, cuddle, scared. A child. We are ourselves a pair of scared kids. We go to bed and make love, touching each other gently, as if it were our first time. Mummy and daddy. We are woken by the alarm set for 1 o'clock. At 2 we are due in Stockholm for a check up. We run to the car, getting dressed on the way.

"Doctor, doctor, I think I'm pregnant, I think I'm in the fourth month," my teeth chatter, I can't fit my leg into the gynaecological contraption.

"Certainly," doctor has no doubts, "Changes in the neck of the vagina, let's have a look at the image. Would you like to have a look too, sir?"

Piotr comes to USG. I lean out of the chair, instead of snow I can see a shape. An outline of a little head. A little spindle, shaken by its own heart beat, weaving threads of life. The image washes away in tears. Pietushka takes me by the slipping sock and squeezes my foot.
"One centimetre long, seventh week," the doctor pulls from the USG a black and white photo with a digitally measured little jot. I can't believe it: a few hours ago It didn't exist. Now It has its first photo taken.

"Seventh week? Impossible," I get out from the chair, leaf through my calendar, figures multiply and divide. "I had my period exactly four weeks ago, a bit early…"
"It was not a period. The bleeding was caused by the embryo grafting onto the vagina wall. Two weeks after fertilisation. You were upset by the operation, hence an early ovulation."

All of a sudden I feel totally helpless. I have inside me something, someone, who has just arrived from outer space, perhaps a God-sent gift, or simply a product of my own genetic engineering. A little human being, suspended on the quivering string of life. I cannot feel Him but He does not care and simply is, hatching out of my flesh. Explosion of a new universe, growing into billions of cells.

The doctor is writing on pieces of paper, makes appointments, calculates the birth day. Mid April. Birth day? The birth is now! The child has appeared a moment ago!

Gretkowska’s next book, a fictionalised personal diary entitled Polka, which appeared in 2001 was much better received. “Polka” is the name of the narrator’s baby daughter, whose birth she is expecting as she writes. The word means also “Polish woman”. The theme of change in her work did not go unnoticed: the one-time “scandalmonger” was now firmly on the side of a normal life. Her book was essentially a hymn of praise to the glory of bountiful motherhood, the home hearth, and the simple joys of everyday life.

This mood was not meant to last for long as two years later in 2003 Gretkowska published with her husband Piotr Pietucha Scenes from Extra-marital Life, a collection of two short stories. The critics were quite united in their criticism – Gretkowska short story was found as boring and badly written while Pietucha’s story was simply even worse. To put somewhat less directly, Gretkowska attempted to do something very difficult in Polish literature – describe an erotic connection. Unfortunately, the result was at best an honourable failure.

At home – interrogation:

"You have children and you haven't realised I might be pregnant?"

"Each pregnancy is different… And you, so in tune with your body, you haven't noticed anything?"

"I thought I got food poisoning… And what are we to do now?"

"Nothing. We'll get married." I can hear the grind of a lovely instrument of torture.

"But why? Pietushka…"

"You will feel more secure. People get married when they have a child together."

I go to the wood for my walk. I'm talking to myself, to It, telling it about this fantastic world (but why am I crying?), that we haven't expected It but we are waiting. I stroke my still flat belly. Through my head flow "tragicomic" thoughts – that I am not a blind alley of evolution. I will give birth to a child, just like so many women and females before me. Millions of years of evolution blaze away in my vagina. I'm trying to imagine giving birth. I'm not afraid. At birth one does not lose consciousness because of the pain. That's how nature set it up, and yet, a period (also cramps, though less) did make me faint a few times. So, the pain will be less. But what shall I push with? I strain but feel no muscle there. There is still time, almost half a year, I'll work out, it will grow. I sit under a tree, I'm too weak to go any further. Only a few months ago I used to run around here several kilometres at a time, without feeling tired. The wood stinks of mushrooms. I feel sick. Why does growth have to be so painful? Millions of new cells everyday, a little hormone-pumping pollution factory. Baby, I hope you don't feel like that, you are brand new, quite "unused". I use my Buddhist imagination to imagine your first moments, when Piotr's white drop blended with my red one, creating a red and white bindu, that which will remain at the bottom of your heart, and which will dissolve at the end, when… it ceases to beat.

The thought of my own death makes me sad – I will not take my leave completely; I shall leave here something of myself – you. I don't want to hurt you. I haven't taken my heart drugs today. Had I known I would not have been eating them for a month.

The European Woman, the latest book written by Manuela Gretkowska was published in 2004. It is a personal diary in which the paradoxes of Polish daily life, and also events that occupy the minds of world public opinion, are filtered through the experiences of the author - a controversial writer, publicist, and columnist who has lived abroad for a long time and who is attempting to find her own place in the world of medias and culture. She is also a happy woman and mother of the little Pola. The European Woman is a chronicle, written from a personal perspective, of the small and larger changes that have brought Poland closer to the rest of Europe, the story of a return home and, at the same time, a return to the normalcy of family life. Unfortunately, Gretkowska’s charm seems to have been rooted deeply in her desire for scandal, as a mother and wife she fails to attract reader’s attention for long.

At night in the bedroom, I hear a voice: "Mummy!" Piotr is watching television in the next room. I am alone. I can tell the difference between hallucination and reality, I'm sure I heard a voice. Piotr doesn't believe me, turns the light off, wraps me in the duvet and recommends a good rest. Someone said to me "Mummy!" That centimetre with a tiny beating heart.

I spoil It, nibbling on cheeses, fruit, even sausage. For over two months I fought four centimetres of something swelling, spreading inside me. I imagined it getting smaller and smaller, disappearing. Now I am making room for that Centimetre, growing inside my tummy, my head, my future.

The end of August

At three I finish writing the last page of Small Town; a sheer miracle of timing. At four to the airport. We say goodbyes. Pietushka says good bye to the two of us: "Take care of Pola". I insist it will be Nana or Lulu.

"You've chosen the last name, leave me the first."

"No Lulus."

"Pola has a cow-lick blond hair, parting through the middle and a calico dress," I object.

"Exactly. You can see her straight away."

"We'll talk." I know, nobody likes Lulu. Maybe I'll manage to push through with Nana, we have six months. If it's a boy, it has to be simple too – a Theo.
Pietushka senses a girl.

11 December

Your royal sweetness, your gentle graciousness – that's how I address my Pietushka in the morning. I like kissing his hand. My father's too. Only they can really "plant a kiss" on the palm of my hand. I feel embarrassed when someone else tries to. Too intimate.
I dip in and out of the books and articles on psychotherapy. On the telly, the same soul experts take big bucks. Gestalt into gesheft.

Invasion of Polish Highlanders' folk groups. The export hop of Polish show-bizz. A foreigner is bound to fall in love with them: cute little shoulder capes like toreador's, leather ballet shoes on massive feet, squashed bowler hats with strings of seashells in the style of Papua New Guinea. Gaultier could not come up with a funkier style.

Pola must feel very lonely. The sound of her roistering reminds me of a prisoner's knocking on the (vagina's) wall. Help!

Gretkowska is also the author of screenplay to Andrzej Żuławski’s Shaman, and Mariusz Treliński’s The Egoists, as well as co-author of screenplays to TV comedy series Small Town. Although The Parisian Tarot was published in French translation already in 1996 while her various novels were translated into Hungarian, Russian, German, Spanish and Finnish, a real international career is still before her.

After fifteen years on the Polish literary market Manuela Gretkowska certainly has become a famous author. It is not fully clear however how much of the fame is a result of her talent, and how much is only well handled scandal. It seems that if Gretkowska wants her books to remain in literary history as anything more than time pieces, she will have to surprise us at least once more as she did with her first novel.

This is all for today from Danuta Szafraniec, Peter Gentle and Krzysztof Fordoński
The excerpts from Polka were translated by Wiesiek Powaga.