And it seems likely that the place will keep its fantastical aspect. The town is on the march, and not just in a metaphorical sense. As the old wells begin to stagnate, new ones are opened, and the dusty road sets off after the petroleum. It pushes its houses outward, turns a corner, and bounds onward to catch up with the capricious mineral. If most of the wells in Boryslav and in Tustanowice are now idle, then the drillers are hammering day and night in Mraznica. I can’t help thinking this road will go on for ever, a long, white, dusty ribbon going over humps and hollows, twisty and straight, provisional and durable, as unpredictable as human fortune, and as abiding as human desire.
I will admit that the sight of this great town, consisting as it does of one street, made me forget the actual laws of its social order. For the space of a few hours I thought speculation and greed were elemental and almost mysterious. The gargoyle faces of the lust for profit, the everywhere tense atmosphere, in which overnight catastrophes are a continual possibility, roused my interest in the literary possibilities of the milieu more than the actual beings that lived there. The fact that there were workers here and officials, cabbies and unemployed, tended to disappear behind the novelistic aspect of individuals. Imagination was livelier than conscience.
At least the oil workers are considerably better off than coal miners. They are specialists, even here. The average wage of an assistant is nine zloty, or four marks fifty, for an eight-hour day. A foreman gets twelve zloty. Conditions are relatively tolerable. Work is in — if not an airy space, at least one that is aired — and the smell of oil is not unpleasant, and even said to be good for the lungs. To the layman the tools used in drilling are disappointingly primitive. Motors drive the drills. A man walks round and round a sort of basin with a horizontal iron pole in his hand. The movement and the action look straightforward, but it may be a lot harder in practice. Experts say that the art of the worker lies in judging the degree of difficulty, or if you prefer, sensing the resistance to the drill of various types of geological terrain. The worker’s hand must have a pronounced sensitivity, given that it stands in for the eye, which is not involved in drilling. If the borehole is choked by some object, as for instance a broken screw, then clever and cunning means are used to remove the obstacle — there are instruments of canny reach and clutch that feel in the dark. Their endeavours remind me of efforts to extract a cork from some narrow-necked container. It can cost you hours and months and money.
Money, money, lots of money! Consider that to drill to a depth of a mile costs maybe 90,000 dollars. Neither you nor I will ever own an oil well. It’s become a lottery for people who basically don’t need it, for banks and consortia and American billionaires. The people who once experienced the sensation of fortune bubbling up out of the ground, have already lost the capacity to feel happiness from material gain. There is a certain opposition between the fairy-tale way the earth gives up treasure, and the share-holdings of the naphtha diggers, and the stoic calm with which they await the miracle. These poor treasure diggers sit a very long way away from the miracle of nature, in the great metropolises of the West, and the fact that they are so far away, mighty, invisible and almost impersonal, gives them the lustre of godhead, directing the efforts of engineers and worker teams with mysterious glory. By far the greater part of the Polish sources is in the hands of foreign financiers. The workforces are paid out of a mystically replenished exchequer. Far away, on the great trading floors of the world, the shares are bought and sold, and transactions concluded according to opaque laws. The being and becoming of heavenly bodies are better understood by astronomers than changes in ownership by the local managers and people in charge of the wells. The petty officials can only sit there trembling when the noise of the great tempests on the world markets reaches their ear. Only recently, three large enterprises, “Fanto”, “Nafta” and “Dombrowa”, were sold to a French conglomerate. There was a meeting in Paris, and three or four gentlemen took out their pens and scrawled a signature, nothing more. In Boryslav and environs though, it means 500 employees thrown out of work, and hunger peers in at their windows, and rattles the doorknobs, because some god in Paris said the word: Efficiencies! And because it was a French god — and not as it might have been, a British one — diplomatic motives are woven into the lamentations of the alarmed Polish newspapers. Sceptics claim to understand that the new owners are only interested in the coup on the market, and in selling on the shares at a higher price, and not the exploitation of the resources at all. Even for optimists, though, gods are less than reliable, and at least as remote from any social feeling as from their workers and officials.
I left the area on a peaceful golden evening that gave no indication of the type of terrain that lay beneath. The workers trudged home with the serenity of peasants coming home from the fields, and it was as though they carried scythes over their shoulders, as their grandfathers before them had done. A few paupers stood by murky puddles and scooped up oil in tin canisters. They were the minor colleagues of the great French Dreyfus. Their tools are buckets, not shares. Such oil as they find they sell in minute quantities or they use it to light their temporary hovels with. That’s all that a lavish nature has accorded them. Their huts stood crooked, brown and humble in the flat gleam of the sun. They seemed to huddle together a little more, to grow small, and to almost disappear completely. By tomorrow they wouldn’t be there anymore.
I hope, my dear friend, that I have managed to give you some sense of the atmosphere in this Polish California. I chose to write about it to prove to you that I am not exclusively wedded to idylls in this country.
I remain your humble servant,
J.R.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1928
23. Hotel Kopriva
In P. is the “Hotel Kopriva”. It has eighty rooms on two floors. It has a front-of-house manager who doubles as room-service waiter and porter. He is short and frail-looking and not really imposing enough to serve in a hotel of two storeys and eighty rooms. He meets guests at the station. If the town of P. had a larger station concourse, as would befit a town that harbours within itself a hotel like the Kopriva, then one wouldn’t even be able see him. He owes his visibility entirely to the dimensions of the station hall in P. and the anxious visitors, looking where they may sleep.
The “Hotel Kopriva” is almost always full. And yet, one almost always finds room in it. There are hotels in which the law of solid geometry is suspended and replaced by another law, which goes as follows: “A room that already has one traveller in it may under certain circumstances accommodate a second.” It is to this law that the “Hotel Kopriva” owes its wealth; and to the circumstance that it doesn’t show itself to its visitors first, its unchallenged standing. Many hotel managers could learn from it. Complaints do not exist where they cannot be made. There is no such thing as inaudible dissatisfaction. It is true to say therefore that all its guests are fully satisfied with the “Hotel Kopriva”.
Other hotels have glossy, exchangeable names. They are called things like the Imperial, the Savoy, the Grand, the Central, the Paris, or the Metropole. But this hotel is called plainly and confidence-inspiringly: the Kopriva. Other hotels have had eighty or eighty-odd rooms. But the “Hotel Kopriva” has one hundred and twenty beds in its eighty rooms; because of the eighty, forty are “dual occupancy”.