Poland Under Black Light <i> by Janusz Anderman (Readers International: $12.50. 131 pp.) </i>

A student is pulled into a paddy wagon in one of Janusz Anderman’s sketches of life in post-Solidarity Poland. The police beat him. “Diamonds of dust sparkle,� Anderman writes.

So do his words, and almost as incongruously. The Polish voices of the ‘70s and early ‘80s have been sandbagged, yet they go on, more bleakly but obstinately.

Anderman, a 36-year-old writer, was jailed after the imposition of martial law four years ago. He emigrated briefly to the West but returned to Poland. “Poland Under Black Light� was published clandestinely in 1983, and issued at the same time in London. Readers International, which specializes in muzzled writers, has now brought it out here.

Anderman presents a frozen world, in shock and barely stirring. As the people in these brief fictions toil about Warsaw, they move as if in the teeth of a high wind, with every human grace blown away in the sheer effort of budging. Anderman writes, apparently with the harshest realism, of the gritty details of everyday life. And yet there is something magical, if not exactly cheering, in the result.

In a preface to these sketches, Stanislaw Baranszak, an exiled Polish writer now teaching at Harvard, indicates part of the reason.

“Even the most alien, repellent and despairing reality becomes a human reality if the intellect can find a name for it,� he writes. “Face to face with hopelessness, Anderman finds the only solution within a writer’s reach, the only solution worthy of a writer: Hopelessness must first be called by name.�

Anderman calls hopelessness by name, but not just any name. It is a name that glints like the motes off the student’s shoulders. This is not lyricism, purely, which would be grotesque; but an entirely personal compound of the poetic, the fierce and the absurd. It comes from a refusal to see things in any way other than as they are; and an equal and opposite refusal to accept that they are only what they are seen to be.

The writer evokes the sense of national short-circuitry after Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski banged the lid down. “The addresses in the notebook go blank or crumple,� he writes. “Barbed air wounds the lungs, people forget the future.� It is a time of tidelessness, after the first wave of repression, when things have settled. The country’s movement has been halted but no other motion has replaced it, and Sundays are “like a stain of mildew.�

The sketches are telling. A woman makes a call from a phone booth, only to be told by whoever is listening in to speak clearly and use simple sentences. She goes into a church where an Easter vigil is going on. Under the Christ statue, schoolchildren have pinned up the results of their Lenten vows: “I gave up my seat on the bus. . . . I helped an old lady fetch coal from the cellar. . . . I shared my orange with a schoolmate.� In a country ruled by force and slogans, these childish boasts have a dreadful sound: They are leached of their innocence.

We meet a pair of writers walking the streets at night. Behind them walks their perpetual police spy. “They are walking for his benefit,� Anderman writes. They argue about what themes are appropriate, now that the hopes of the Solidarity times are gone. “Everything that has been is over and done with,� one says. A passing car runs over a pigeon; a second pigeon flies down and prods at the corpse as if making love to it. Perhaps that is a suitable topic; they argue over who will get to write it.

People get by on schemes and small swindles. Bureaucracy reigns; every state job, however humble, is a quota of power. A Turkish bath attendant extorts liquor or money from his clients because of his supposed ability to put in a good word in the right places. All Poland seems to be sitting there on the benches with the customers, dimly visible through the steam and wrapped in white sheets.

That has a fine sardonic touch to it; so does Anderman’s portrait of one of the few free men left. He is a free-lance well-digger. When he falls in love with a widow, he throws a dead cat into her well, and then, drilling her a new one, achieves both propinquity and cash. In Poland, freedom comes 30 feet down.

Up on ground level, meanwhile, the state’s power is everywhere. Anderman’s achievement is to make it both so pervasive and so trivial. After beating the student, the paddy wagon cops drag him over to play cards. No hard feelings; the police have a job like everyone else.

In one of the best of the sketches, a writer receives a summons and presents himself at the police station. It is all low-keyed and routine. Going up the stairs, he passes a group of plainclothesmen going down.

“Young men clad in jeans and fashionable shirts, young men no different from their contemporaries out there; the only difference is the problems they have been given to solve, have accepted to solve.�

It is a chilling phrase. One of the policemen hails the writer, mistaking him for one of them. This is Anderman’s vision of his country’s illness. It is a plague, not of evil people but of those who become instruments of the power that has been imposed on them.

The interrogation is bland and inconclusive. Implied threats are made, but when the writer refuses to answer, his interrogator doesn’t seem to care. He stares blankly into space and, without a word being spoken, the session is over.

--Am I free now?

--Free?--The man will raise his head.--What? Free?

--May I go home now?

--You may go home.

In the police station or out, it makes little difference. Home is simply another place. Freedom is a different planet.