Burke.Word

[click to read the first chapter]

2

You are ready to begin again? I know we were at the beginning of the war, but now I think it is more important to understand my father’s part in this story by first seeing him as he took the medal in London, in 1948, on the makeshift bridge over the Empire Pool at Wembley Stadium. As I said, he learned to fight in the war, but closer to the truth is that he only refined his fighting skills there. I think he was born somehow knowing how to fight. Not liking it, or seeking it, but knowing it, accepting its uncertainties and  purposes, understanding  its peculiar rhythms and alarms.

From the time he was very young, he understood that there would always be opponents who were bigger, faster, and stronger. He was not intimidated by such differences. He was, as you no doubt know, fighting that summer in London as a featherweight, at 125 pounds. He also understood, without having to be told, that the odds against a David facing Goliath turn swiftly towards the smaller man once the stronger’s weakness has been identified and exploited. He could remember clearly the first time he really applied this principle, and he never forgot its stunning lesson.

He had grown up in Bielsko, a 14^th century town in southern Poland on the river Biala. The past was everywhere; a six hundred year old castle in the nearby hills of the Beskidy mountains overlooked the town and its centuries old homes and shops. In those days Jerzy and other boys spent many idle hours in a small courtyard just off the ancient market square in the center of Bielsko. Their fathers for the most part worked in the town’s wool industry; the boys had become adept at doing nothing when there was nothing to do.

The summer he was seventeen Jerzy watched as a new boy began to push his way around, simply a bully doing what bullies do. He had heard his name already: Horst Kolobius, from Rudzica, a village to the west. It had come to him in just this way, whispered over-dramatically—Horst Kolobius, from Rudzica—as stories of Horst’s mindless cruelties were passed along. Horst became enamored of the small, medieval courtyard, and began to clear the other boys off of it just for sport, making room for himself and the small gang he had already attracted. Jerzy watched over a period of a few days as the newcomer asserted his will, no one caring to cross him. The worst story was that he had broken both another boy’s arms with a metal pipe in a dispute over a stolen Vis .45 pistol. No one was certain if it was true.

He saw, over and over, how Horst attacked, striking the other boys in the middle of the chest with the heels of both palms, once, twice, backing them down and turning them away from the yard. Horst was large, well over six feet, and those few who tried to stand their ground, not persuaded by the first blows, Horst treated to one or two big-fisted punches to the side of the head or face. Jerzy was going nowhere, so he knew his own time would come, and without having thought much about it, he was ready. He knew the villager’s weakness, to begin each attack with exactly the same motion, and he knew what he would do with it.

—Weaver’s boy, is this your yard? This is not your yard, I think.

The words, sharp and derisive, a common insult that suggested the limits of Horst’s imagination, signaled the start of a countdown toward a conclusion that Jerzy had already clearly pictured. He stood near one of the entrances to the courtyard, leaning against a low stone wall, a few friends standing nearby. Jerzy turned slightly as Horst approached with three others.

As his eyes met Jerzy’s just briefly, Horst sensed that there was no more talking to be done. Taunting would have no effect—it is the bully’s genius to know intuitively when this is true. Kolobius’s arms came out and down, the heels of his palms extended, aimed for the center of Jerzy’s chest. Already moving forward, Jerzy brought his own hands, facing one another about six inches apart, straight up between Horst’s arms and, in one motion, separated both pairs of arms, grabbed the villager’s wrists in his hands and, pulling the bigger boy down into the blow, drove his forehead into the center of Horst’s face. It was a staggering attack, and it was not over.

The blood exploded from Horst’s shattered nose and sprayed across the boy to his right as Horst’s head jerked back and whipped to the side from the force of the blow. Jerzy shuffled quickly forward even as Horst was falling back, his hands reaching for his face, and delivered two short, economical punches, left then right, to the middle of his chest. Kolobius collapsed into a fetal position, barely conscious, vomiting onto the cobblestone as he fell. The whole exchange had taken seconds. Except for Kolobius’s ragged moaning, the courtyard was silent.

Jerzy looked down at Horst.

—We are done weaving for the day.

[Click to read the third chapter]

Losing the Bronze is Copyright ©2009 Nigel Hinshelwood