Grandfather "died of fear of love". Grandmother's body is alive, but for years her thoughts have been circulating around her fiancé from the war, a Home Army soldier, who picked elderberries for her. The heroine suffering from Alzheimer's no longer distinguishes between truth and fantasy - but maybe she never did? The spectre of Grandfather and the memory of the Home Army soldier are no less real than the Granddaughter, a woman of blood and bone who visits her grandmother in a nursing home. In this space, the living and the dead meet as if they were not separated by any boundaries. As the author writes: "the everyday reality of the meeting of both worlds is crucial, despite its fatalism, uncertainty and horror that it entails.
Paradoxically, it is the Grandfather's Spirit that seems to be the most rational, clear-eyed character. "ONE CANNOT DIE, THE OTHER CANNOT START LIVING!" - he accuses the Grandmother, his wife, and his neurotic Granddaughter. The old lady did not even try to find happiness in marriage. She fell into the routine of everyday rituals - cleaning, cooking - without trying to create a successful relationship with Grandpa. Her heart was always occupied by someone else - the idealised image of the man who brought her elderberries and danced kujawiak with her. Grandfather took a ghost for a wife: a woman present only in body, absent in spirit.
"You, so in love with life, you don't like life... Because life just is what it is!" - says the bitter Spirit. "And you've clung to what is not there! A dream of Poland, for which you have to give your life. The man dancind kujawiak, who once held your hand... Life is not something that you will fucking erect a monument to! You do not recognize the smell of bread, sweat and burnt pots...".
The Granddaughter, on the other hand, does not want to allow any admirer to come close. She defends herself against the intimacy, but at the same time she desires it. Both female heroines are in a clinch. Will a voice from the afterlife be able to change their mental perspective? Will the analysis of the choices made by her ancestors help the Granddaughter to work through the problems and eliminate the barriers that prevent her from achieving happiness? "For what would you do? Without this damn adventure of a war?" - the Granddaughter asks the Grandmother, provocatively.
Anna Elżbieta Kamieniecka's play is not only an in-depth psychological portrait of the three main characters who have to redefine their relations and settle accounts with the past. It is also a brilliant, slightly biting, but also a carefully calculated commentary on the romanticization of war. Grandmother devoted her whole life to building a pedestal for her former fiancé. For her, the war was indeed a "damn adventure" - and extremely romantic. Grandfather, who survived the deportation to Siberia, has other experiences.
Grandmother is at death's doorstep: she is getting ready for her last ball... The last witnesses of World War II are dying. Their testimonies are becoming more and more mediated stories, narratives serving certain particular rhetoric. The figures of Grandmother and Grandfather represent two extreme ways of practicing memory: romanticizing, mythologizing - and evoking the past with all its macabre and awareness of how it influenced the present. In this context, Kamieniecka's well-written play, far from sentimentalism, speaks not only about the fate of a certain family, but about settling accounts with history per se.