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During last month's critical decisions he averaged four hours of sleep each night, now he has perhaps six. The other 18 hours vanish in a succession of conferences, interviews, speechwriting, speechmaking (three a week on Radio Warsaw), and listening to dozens of workers' delegations from all over the country. A group of workers from Wroclaw asks about higher wages. A delegation from an association of collective farms seeks his ideas about farm policy. They all get a little of Gomulka's time. At 8 o'clock one night last week a batch of students, workers and farmers walked in, spent three hours getting answers to questions. Typical questions: When do the Russian troops leave? What guarantees do we have against Stalinist activities in Poland? His answer to the last: "You are the guarantee. Without you young people I would not stay one minute."
He does a lot of listening at these sessions, his sharp blue eyes set deep in a sallow face, with its high cheekbones and bulky forehead, expanded by baldness. It is the face of one who has held stubbornly to his beliefs and acted resolutely upon them. But visitors are often astonished to find him so aged and apparently frail. He seems shorter than his 5 ft. 7 in., older than his 51 years. These are the marks of his lifelong apprenticeship to Communism. Years of imprisonment in his youth left him with a lung ailment, a police bullet has permanently stiffened his right knee, and there are hints of unspecified internal organic disorders. The later years of disgrace and isolation have softened his voice, and he no longer speaks loudly as he once did. Reading in isolation has improved his grasp of ideas. It was always said of him that he was a man without humor. "There are no funny stories about Gomulka," says Peasant Leader Stanislaw Banczyk. He is essentially a lonely man. He and his wife Zofia, a member of an old Russian Bolshevik family (purged by Stalin), live quietly in a tiny apartment in the Warsaw suburb of Praga, have no social life. A 26-year-old son, an engineer, lives in the same house. Gomulka's sole recreation: walking his dog around the block.
As he listens, he periodically leans back in his chair, takes off his steel-rimmed glasses, polishing them with a handkerchief in deft circular strokes. It is an uncommonly sad face that is revealed, but the visitor notices the eyes, cool and piercing, the strong, shovel-like chin, and there is an impression of sincerity and power. At midnight Gomulka drops his pencil, closes the manila folder on an unfinished speech, a lone late-staying assistant throws a dark overcoat over Gomulka's thin shoulders, and he clumps out to his ZIS limousine, pausing a moment to look across the streets and roofs of Warsaw shining with frost. Not in his office, or in intellectual circles, but out there in the dark bitter cold is the problem he must lick before Poland or the world knows whether he is a real leader.