COLUMN ONE : The Lonely Tour of a Lame Duck : For years he was the man with the answers in his Polish village. But like other local leaders picked by the Communists, he’s about to be phased out.

It was raining on market day in Jadow when Zdzislaw Okninski, the local Communist naczelnik , or village leader, walked through the mud in his good brown suit, the one with the broken zipper, looking for someone to talk to.

He had gotten a late start for his market tour, his weekly morning of “meeting the people.” The usual crowd had thinned out, and he had to troll the length of the market and start over before he hooked someone.

“So how are the prices?” he ventured.

A thickset woman with a single protruding tooth hoisted a pig’s head from her spattered table and offered it with a shrug. “Not so bad,” she said. “It’s raining, so it’s a bargain.”

She returned Okninski’s smile with a look of quizzical pessimism and thumped the pig’s head back on the table.

Like many Polish villages, Jadow, population 1,800, is poor. It is the sort of village, its young men say, that young women will do anything to get out of, perhaps inspired by the sight of their mothers and grandmothers riding to market atop a load of potatoes or butchered hog carcasses in a horse-drawn wooden wagon.

By 4 p.m., the village square is abandoned except for a handful of beer-drinking men sullenly watching the scant traffic, as though counting the last eligible females heading off to the glamour of Warsaw.

On a grassy area beside the market, 22 heavy draft horses, hitched to wooden wagons, stood with heads down in the rain, their breath steaming. Nearby, their owners sold meat, vegetables, grain, flowers and a load of herring hauled down from Gdansk.

It was not a great day for pressing the flesh.

Okninski moved on and spied the deceptively merry, rosy-cheeked face of Eugeniusz Powierza, one of the most prosperous farmers in the township, standing behind what was left of the hog he had brought to market.

“Say, Mr. Naczelnik,” Powierza said, “my boy has been looking for two weeks for the woman in the marriage license office, and then he finally finds her, and she says she doesn’t do marriages on Saturday. What’s the story?”

“There’s only one person in the office,” Okninski said. “He must have come when she was out.”

“What about Saturday marriages?”

“I don’t see why not,” Okninski said. “I’ll look into it.”

Okninski has had 11 years on the job, and has outlasted four local Communist Party bosses. His signature has made possible the granting of petitions, army deferments, the selling of land, the improvement of roads and scores of other matters great and small.

In Jadow, he has been the man with the golden arm, but he is about to be phased out. There will be other naczelniks in Poland after local elections this spring, but it is highly unlikely that they will ever again be appointed by the village party boss, as Okninski was.

The party boss, in fact, no longer exists, having gone to the ash heap of Polish history along with the Polish Communist Party, which has voted itself out of existence. Solidarity activists now dominate the government.

“That’s the way it is,” Okninski said. “Solidarity wants its own people. I understand this. From my point of view, I’ve done quite a lot for this area: roads and schools, water management. But the system changed, and my way of thinking was formed in the last 11 years, so I would have to take a couple of years to get used to this. I’ll probably be taking a job in the State Water Enterprise.”

Okninski’s office is on the second floor of gmina (district) headquarters, a building that has running water but no indoor toilet. His office is paneled and furnished in native pine, with a broad desk and a long table. This was a day set aside for “complaints and motions” from the public, and on his return from the market tour he was met by a member of the public, vigorously complaining and motioning.

“I hauled nine wagon loads of trash and I have not been paid,” a short, stocky woman said, waving menacingly.

Two Okninski secretaries explained that the woman’s bill for trash removal had been submitted in terms of wagon loads and that district procedure called for payment on the basis of cubic meters.

“How do I know cubic meters?” the woman shouted. “I hauled nine wagon loads, and I want my money or I will write a letter to the radio station. What is this?”

Okninski settled the problem.

One by one, secretaries scurried into the office, as if on cue, with sheaves of documents for Okninski to sign. He sat, elbows out, pen at the ready, a picture of executive efficiency. As one secretary left, he sighed and shook his head, and when another entered, he looked up eagerly, pen poised.

After a while, the secretaries ran out of documents for him to sign, so he proposed a quick tour of the gmina , a visit to the school he had helped to get built and a stop to see Eugeniusz Powierza, the farmer.

Powierza showed off his 10 milk cows and a barn full of pigs, and laid out a lunch of farm-produced sausage, rye bread and a bottle of vodka. After a while, three neighbors, representatives of Solidarity, the free labor union movement that has become a political party, dropped by and urged Powierza to run for the town council.

“I don’t really want to do it,” Powierza said, but he agreed to do it if they insisted. They did.

Okninski silently ate sausage and bread while the other men talked. The chief officeholder of the district, with no place in this discussion of politics, reached for another slice of sausage. When a visitor asked the men if Okninski had been a good naczelnik , silence fell around the table. A couple of the men coughed, and Okninski’s cheeks, busy with sausage, stopped moving and turned red.

“Well, you see. . . .”

“Well, he has not been so bad.”

“Ummm, he’s been OK for us. . . .”

“Yes, but after the elections there will be a new naczelnik .”

This seemed safe, and there was rapid assent.

“Certainly, a new naczelnik after the elections.”

Okninski had started chewing again and nodded his vigorous agreement.

Unmentioned here, around the table, were certain questions about the sale of public lands to certain persons by other certain persons whose official signatures. . . . They came up only in a quiet aside out by the potato bin, in a quick ruffling of documents, copies of which were now on file with certain authorities. . . .

Okninski hurried back to town and bounded up the stairs to his office. He pushed open the door to the secretaries’ office.

“Anything for me to sign?” he asked.

Three secretaries sprang to their feet, gathered up papers and hurried down the hall. Okninski smoothed his tie. He was ready, sitting at his desk, his elbows spread, his pen in hand.