‘Real Men Need a Woman-Saint’ : RONDO, <i> by Kazimierz Brandys, translated from Polish by Jaroslaw Anders (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 251 pp.; 0-374-25200-9) </i>

Fifty years after the Nazis stormed into Poland starting World War II, Polish writers continue trying to make sense of that brutal war in which 6 million Poles were gassed, bled or starved to death.

A quirky conceit is the linchpin of Kazimierz Brandys’ 1982 novel, “Rondo,” available now for the first time in English translation. In Nazi-occupied Warsaw, protagonist Tom fabricates an underground organization--which he calls Rondo after a Chopin piece--for the sole purpose of providing an off-stage, cloak-and-dagger role for his lady love, Tola, whose spectacular acting career has been forced by the war into hibernation. Tom’s every action is scrutinized by others, as the tall, redheaded former law student is rumored to be the illegitimate son of Poland’s former leader, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. In the eyes of others, the imaginary group becomes real. And so, before war’s end, this organizational mirage has been “overtaken” by ambitious partisans, trying to make names for themselves in the Polish underground.

The novel is framed around a corrective letter Tom writes to a journal years later, responding to a “scholarly” account of Rondo’s war activities. Brandys--who was born in 1916 in Lodz and lived through the war in Warsaw--uses this letter as a take-off and landing point for a discursive, first-person reminiscence of Tom’s life, which is woven into a complex, heavily allegorical plot. The novel spans a 40-year period from the young man’s coming of age in the 1930s--when “Warsaw started to resemble an affluent city”--to his advancing age in the 1970s.

Early on, before the war, a peculiar pattern emerges from Tom and Tola’s love affair. After their first night together, Tola confesses her obsession with another man and urges him to look elsewhere. “ ‘Try to understand!’ she exclaimed. ‘His least gesture would be enough to make me cut off your head and sell it to the butcher.’ ”

Obstinately, Tom--brought up worshiping women, “deriving probably from the cult of the Virgin Mary”--digs his heels of devotion into the relationship. “I understood two things: Always, everywhere, and despite all circumstances, I shall fulfill her every wish, and never, under any conditions, shall I really matter to her, although she may need me.”

His passion for Tola--emotionally unrequited though it is--helps Tom survive the war, providing what contemporary commentators might call the necessary “coping mechanism.” “If one gave up the personal sphere of existence, the last barrier against insanity would fall . . . . This was the source of my endurance: my laboriously built honeycomb.”

Others fit into Tom’s honeycomb, including Wladek, his sparring partner; Lala, Tola’s sage-like sister; Nina, a bright Jew with whom Tom is half in love; and assorted characters from the theater who gain employment at a Warsaw cafe where Tom initially works as a cloakroom attendant.

Tom’s scheme to provide Tola her greatest role works, at first. He fills borrowed suitcases with used books which he assures her are written in code and dispatches her on trains to cities around Poland, where she deposits them in lockers. “She returned from her first trip radiant, almost euphoric.” For a time, Tola worships Tom. Then the worm turns. When she accuses him of poisoning the man she loves, Tom reveals that Rondo is a hoax. The truth unhinges Tola. After a mental breakdown, she checks into a sanitarium.

“Rondo” is strikingly similar in tone and approach to the recent work of Tadeusz Konwicki. As in Konwicki’s “Moonrise, Moonset,” Brandys intercuts between past and present, refusing to hold to strict linear time in his narrative. And Brandys’ narrator intervenes in the text, commenting on the storytelling, apologizing for digressions and slow spots.

Light weekend reading “Rondo” is not. Because the plot is so far-fetched and the characters surreal, it is hard to read the novel as anything other than an allegory--rife with ruminations and philosophical musings, many of which are original and provocative. For example, “Who conceived of the idea that good struggles with evil?” Tom’s father asks. “ ‘Only evil can fight with evil. Good cannot fight . . . . God is neither good nor evil,’ he said quietly. ‘He is our possibility of a good or evil choice. And they (the Nazis) have abolished that possibility.’ ”

And this: “The idealization of women is in my opinion a less dangerous thing than the cult of masculinity,” Brandys writes. “The search for the Relentless and Visionary Leader who would substitute for conscience and reason begins when values and ideas are in ruins and when spiritual emptiness has set in. If I had to express it in the shortest possible way, I would say that real men need a woman-saint.”

“Rondo” offers an important lesson--that the truth cannot be trusted to historians, to partisans, to victims or even to writers. This is worth bearing in mind as the generation of Polish writers including Brandys, Konwicki and Czeslaw Milosz, who survived the war and have reached or are approaching old age, attempt to leave their marks on the canon of memory, folk tale and written document about World War II.

It would seem that Brandys’ own attitude toward the truth is paradoxical. Tom’s history is itself a testimony to truth, and yet its telling proved the undoing of his beloved woman-saint, Tola. In “Rondo,” Tom quotes a friend: “A wise man knows what he says. A foolish man says what he knows.” One cannot help but wonder what Brandys is holding back.