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At their heart, the best works of literature usually have a simple story--a day in Dublin, a boy waiting for his mother’s kiss, a poor girl who hopes for a romantic glance--and “Madame” is no exception: Here we find a clever high school student infatuated with the new French teacher. Of course, it is in the telling that such stories are nudged into the pantheon of great literature.

“Madame,” a 440-page novel translated from the Polish, is seemingly light in touch like the music of Chopin, and Libera’s handling of the narrative might well be taken from one character’s casual remark: “Trust isn’t a thing you thank someone for . . . it’s something you don’t betray.”

Unknown to many readers (“Madame” is his first novel), Libera was a secretary to the Communist-turned-dissident author of “Ashes and Diamonds,” Jerzy Andrzejewski. Libera was also involved with the production of Samuel Beckett’s plays in Poland. He spoke out in defense of Polish writers living in exile and was a supporter of the Committee in Defense of the Workers, one of the early groups opposing the Communist regime in Poland. As a result of these activities, Libera found himself unemployed, harassed by the secret police, unable to publish in Poland and forbidden to travel.

“Madame,” as Libera recounts in a postscript, was written in the darkest days of 1982 following the suppression of Solidarity, as a sort of response to the repressive Communist regime. Creating the story was Libera’s way of countering the deadening effects of martial law: “With time, however, the wind caught my sails; the writing developed a momentum of its own and gradually carried me with it. I stopped regarding it as mere therapy. I was no longer simply writing; I was creating. With full deliberation I began to compose and hone, to structure and shape: seven ‘large’ chapters, for the seven days of creation; and 35 ‘small’ ones, for the moment in our ‘heroic age’ when Madame came into the world, and also for my own age now--for today I find myself ‘at the mid-point of the journey of human life.’ ” Art, Libera realizes, is worth creating because it will endure though history has proved that repressions, even one as forceful as Polish martial law, are only temporary.

The tale unfolds within the confines of Communist Poland, a society in which every aspect of life was contaminated by the Communist lie, where studying French was a risky proposition because France was a Western country, a source of contamination according to Poland’s Communist rulers. Such study was tolerated because of the historic ties between France and Poland, but serious study was a different matter because this could be perceived by the authorities as a form of escape or subversion: Studying another culture becomes a form of mental exile, of emigrating without leaving.

Feeling that he was born into an uninteresting time, the unnamed narrator begins the story with the remark that “[f]or many years I used to think I had been born too late. Fascinating times, extraordinary events, exceptional people--all these, I felt, were things of the past, gone for good. In my early childhood, in the 1950s, the ‘great epochs’ for me were above all the 1930s and the years of the war. I saw the latter as an age of heroic, almost titanic struggle when the fate of the world hung in the balance, the former as a golden age of carefree oblivion when the world, as if set aglow by the gentle light of a setting sun, gave itself up to pleasure and innocent folly.”

Bored with his life, he turns to jazz, literature and chess for escape. And into his world Madame arrives, representing a new world of knowledge and possibility so unlike the world promised by the Communist version of utopia--but without the regime’s officialdom and repression.

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The reader is seduced by Libera’s opening sentence, with its Proustian echo and its obvious ironic tone. The nature of the narrator’s ensuing struggle to become an individual, as well as an intellectual, is quickly evident when the narrator, entering high school, simply cannot go along: “Was I really supposed to believe that even pupils were better in the Past? No--this idea I could not accept. It was just not possible, I thought, that all this grayness and mediocrity around me is irrevocable; it can’t be entirely beyond redemption. After all, the way things are also depends on me: I can influence reality; I too, can create it. In which case, it’s time to act. To launch myself into something. Let something happen: let something start, once again, to happen! Let the old times return, and with them the great heroes in new incarnations.”

Against the drab background of his ordinary secondary school, the narrator drifts, precocious, dreaming of literature, unconnected from the world. All this changes, however, with the first appearance of Madame: “She was a very good-looking woman of thirty-odd and the contrast was striking between her and the other teachers--a gray boring and embittered lot of which the best that could be said was that they were nondescript. She was always well-dressed in clothes whose quality and cut made it immediately apparent that they were of Western manufacture; on her well-cared-for hands she wore a discreet number of elegant rings. Her face was carefully made up and her chestnut hair, cut short and styled by a skillful hand to display her long graceful neck, was smooth and glossy. Her deportment and manners were impeccable; and there wafted about her in delicious waves the intoxicating aura of good French perfume. At the same time she gave off an icy kind of chill.”

She arrives at the school like an emissary from another world, the embodiment of possibilities that the young man vaguely yearns for. For him, Madame’s air of elegance and the care she takes in her appearance cause her to contrast sharply with all those forgettable teachers he’s had, people who loathe their jobs and themselves.

Because teachers, after parents, are the most prominent adults in a young person’s life, it is surprising how few novels are devoted to the relationship between a student and his or her teacher: Such simple subject matter can be easily overlooked. More surprising, “Madame,” though devoid of any dreary, voyeuristic reductive reliance upon salacious activity, possesses suspense that is intensely riveting as Libera re-creates his narrator’s attempts to find out who she is and then to somehow get her to acknowledge him and his awareness of the tragedy of her life. Their relationship (if it can be called one) is indirect, unspoken: no sentimental romantic encounters. Instead, the narrator wins Madame’s attention--however oblique--with his academic achievement; his perfect schoolwork is rewarded by her A grades.

Though they barely exchange words, gradually, inspired by her presence and the strangeness of her in the dull socialist world, the narrator comes to learn about Madame by putting together what he hears from people who knew her, her university peers and old friends. “Madame” describes what the narrator finds out about this woman, who was “the ideal of justice: the same toward everyone, industrious or lazy, gifted or not, well-behaved or recalcitrant. And that’s just what was so unbearable.”

In a story that is as compelling as the sight of the fingers of a surgeon moving about the chambers of a living human heart, we discover why Madame’s father in 1935 brought her mother to the Alps in Switzerland so that Madame could be born on a mountainside; how the birth of Schopenhauer in Danzig comes to be seen as mirroring this incident in Madame’s life; how her father volunteered for the fight against Franco in Spain and how he came to be sentenced to death by the Communists in Spain but, surviving and on the run from Russian agents in France throughout the war, fled back to Stalinist Poland in 1952.

It is the absence of cunning that one finally admires in “Madame.” Libera refuses today’s novelistic cheap tricks of re-creation, the tugging at the heartstrings: He allows his characters, acting as informants, to tell the narrator what they know of Madame and, through the telling, we are drawn into the mystery of her life. “Madame” is that wonderfully rare achievement: a book for adults who understand that questions and answers are interchangeable. *