Hospital of the Transfiguration

A COUNTRY FUNERAL

The train stopped briefly in Nieczawy. Stefan had barely pushed through the crowd to the doors and jumped off when the locomotive wheezed and the wheels began to drum behind him. For an hour he had been worrying that he would miss his stop; that problem had overshadowed all others, even the goal of the journey itself. Now, breathing the sharp outdoor air after the stuffiness of the train, he walked uncertainly, squinting in the sun, at once liberated and helpless, as if he had been jolted out of a deep sleep.

It was one of the last days of February and the sky was streaked with light clouds pale at their edges. The snow had been partly melted by the thaw and sat heavily in the hollows and gorges, exposing clumps of brush and bushes, blackening the road with mud and baring the clay hillsides. Chaos, harbinger of change, had appeared in a landscape once uniformly white.

This thought cost Stefan a careless step and water seeped into his shoe. He shuddered with disgust. The snorting of the locomotive was fading behind the Bierzyniec hills; Stefan could hear what sounded like an elusive chirping of crickets that seemed to come from all over: the unvarying sound of melting. In his woolly raglan, soft felt hat, and low city shoes, he knew that he cut an incongruous figure against the background of rolling hills. Dazzling streams danced and flashed along the road up to the village. Hopping from stone to stone, he finally made it to the crossroads and glanced at his watch. It was almost one. No specific time had been set for the funeral, but he felt he ought to hurry. The body had left Kielce in its coffin yesterday. So it should already be at the church, since the telegram had contained that vague mention of a Mass. Or was it exequies? He couldn’t remember, and it annoyed him to be pondering a liturgical question. It was a ten-minute walk to his uncle’s house, and just as far to the cemetery, but what if the procession went the long way to stop at the church? Stefan moved toward the bend in the road, stopped, took a few steps back, and stopped again. He saw an old peasant coming along a path between the fields, shouldering the kind of cross usually carried at the head of a funeral procession. Stefan wanted to call out to him, but didn’t dare. Clenching his teeth, he strode toward the cemetery. The peasant reached the cemetery wall and disappeared. Stefan could not tell whether he had gone on toward the village; in desperation he gathered up the folds of his coat like an old woman and charged through the puddles. The road to the cemetery skirted a small hill overgrown with hazel. Ignoring the way his feet sank into the snow and the twigs lashed his face, Stefan ran to the top. The thicket ended abruptly. He came back down onto the road just in front of the cemetery. It was quiet and empty, with no trace of the peasant. Stefan’s haste evaporated at once. He looked mournfully at his muddy trouser cuffs and, gasping for breath, peered over the gate. There was no one in the cemetery. When he pushed it open, the gate’s dreadful shriek subsided into a sad groan. Dirty, crusted snow covered the graves in billows that left mounds at the foot of the crosses, whose wooden ranks ended at a wild lilac bush. Beyond stood the stone monument of the Princes of Nieczawy and the larger, separate crypt of the Trzyniecki family, black with names and dates in gold letters, three birches standing at the granite headstone. In an empty strip that separated the mausoleum from the rest of the cemetery like a no-man’s-land gaped a freshly dug grave whose clay blotted the surrounding white. Stefan stopped dead, shocked. Apparently the mausoleum was full, and with no time or way to enlarge it, a Trzyniecki would have to go into the ground like anyone else. Stefan imagined how Uncle Anzelm must have felt about this, but there was no real choice: since Nieczawy had once belonged to the Trzynieckis, all the dead were buried here, and although only Uncle Ksawery’s house now remained, the custom endured. At each death family representatives came to the funeral from all over Poland.

Crystal icicles hung from the arms of the crosses and the wild lilac branches, and the quietly dripping water made holes in the snow. Stefan stood for a moment before the open grave. He should have gone to the house, but he found that idea so unappealing that instead he paced between the crosses of the country cemetery. The names, burned with wire into the boards, had turned into black stains. Many had disappeared entirely, leaving smooth wood. Floundering in the snow that chilled his feet, Stefan walked around the cemetery until he stopped suddenly at a grave marked by a large birch cross with a piece of metal nailed to it. The inscription was done with flourishes:

Traveller, Tell Poland Her Sons Lie Beneath

Faithful To Her Until The Hour Of Their Death.

Below was a list of names and ranks. An unknown soldier came last. There was also a September 1939 date.

Not six months had passed since that September, but the inscription would not have endured the foul weather and frost had it not been retouched by some evocative hand. A similar care showed in the fir branches that covered the grave, which was so small that it was hard to believe that several people were buried in it. Stefan lingered a moment, moved but also uncertain, for he was not sure whether he should take off his hat. Unable to decide, he moved on. The cold of the snow was getting to him; he kicked his shoes together and looked at his watch again. It was twenty past one. He had to hurry if he wanted to get to the house in time, but it occurred to him that he could simplify his ceremonial participation in this funeral by waiting for the procession at the cemetery, so he turned back and stood again at the excavation that would receive Uncle Leszek’s body.

Looking into the hole, Stefan realized how deep it was. He knew enough of the gravedigger’s mysterious technique to understand that the grave had purposely been dug deep enough to contain a future coffin—that of Aunt Aniela, Leszek’s widow. The realization made him feel like an inadvertent witness to some impropriety; he forced himself to pull away and found himself looking down rows of lopsided crosses. His mind had been sensitized by loneliness, and the thought that differences in living standards persisted even among the dead struck him as absurd and pitiful. He breathed deeply for a moment. It was absolutely quiet. Not the slightest sound came from the nearby village, and even the crows, whose cawing had accompanied him as he walked, had fallen silent. The foreshortened shadows of the crosses lay on the snow and the chill rose from his feet up through his body to his heart. He crouched, burying his hands in his pockets, and in the right one found a small bundle—bread his mother had tucked there before he left home. Suddenly hungry, he took out the bread and unwrapped the thin paper. Ham shined pink between the slices. He brought the bread to his mouth but could not bring himself to eat standing at the freshly dug grave. He told himself this was going too far—what was it, really, but a hole dug in clay?—but he could not help it. A piece of bread in his hand, he waded through the snow toward the cemetery gate. As he passed the nameless crosses he searched in vain for some individual trait, some evidence of the dead, in their ungainly forms. He thought that efforts to maintain graves expressed a belief that reached back to times immemorial. Regardless of the precepts of religion, in spite of the obvious fact of decay, and contrary to the evidence of their senses, people still acted as though the dead led some sort of existence deep in the earth—uncomfortable perhaps, maybe even dreadful, but an existence just the same, one that lasted as long as some identifying mark on the surface remained.

He reached the gate, looked once more at the distant rows of crosses sunk in the snow and at the yellowish stain of the open grave, then walked out onto the muddy road. As he mulled over his last thoughts again, the absurdity of funeral rites struck him as obvious and his own participation in the day’s ceremony seemed embarrassing. For a moment he was even angry at his parents for persuading him to come all this way, but that was stranger still, since he was representing not himself, but his father, who was ill.

He ate the bread and ham slowly, moistening each mouthful with his saliva and swallowing with some effort, for his throat was dry. His mind kept working. Yes, he thought, the people who paid the least heed to the arguments of this world believed somewhere within themselves in the “continued existence of the dead.” If concern for the grave were a mere expression of love and sorrow for the departed, then taking care of the visible, above-ground part of the grave would suffice. But if that were the only motive of human funeral ceremonies, it could not account for the pains taken over the appearance of the corpse, the dressing of the deceased, the pillow placed under the head, the box as resistant as possible to the forces of nature. No, such actions betrayed a dark and uncomprehending faith that the dead endured, a faith in that gruesome, horrifying living existence in the narrow confines of the coffin, apparently preferable, in people’s instinctive opinion, to complete annihilation and union with the earth.

Not knowing the answer himself, he began walking toward the village and the church spire that glistened in the sunlight. Suddenly he glimpsed some movement at the bend in the road and quickly shoved the bread back into his pocket before he realized what he was doing.

The dark blot of the procession appeared around the little hill, where the road curved and ran below a steep clay wall. The people were too far away for him to make out their faces. He could see only the cross swaying at the head, the white spots of the priests’ surplices just behind it, the roof of a truck, and in the background tiny figures moving so slowly that they seemed to be marching in place, rocking with a certain majesty, the motion made almost grotesque by the diminishing effects of distance. It was hard to take this miniature funeral seriously and wait for it with the proper gravity, but it was no easier to go forward to meet it. It looked like a randomly scattered collection of dolls bouncing at the foot of a great clay landslide, from which the wind carried snatches of incomprehensible lamentations. Stefan wanted to get there as quickly as possible, but he dared not move. Instead, taking off his hat, he stood motionless at the edge of the road, the wind now blowing his hair into disarray. An onlooker would have been hard put to tell whether he was a belated participant in the solemnities or just a chance passerby. The walking figures grew in size as they came nearer, and imperceptibly got close enough to erase the peculiar effect the distance had had on Stefan. Now, finally, he was able to make out the old peasant leading the way with the cross, the two priests, the truck from the nearby sawmill inching along behind them, and finally all the scattered members of his family. The discordant singing of the village women droned on endlessly; when the procession was a few dozen paces away, Stefan heard a ringing, first a few uneven sounds, and then a full, strong tolling that echoed with dignity throughout the countryside. When the bell sounded, Stefan thought that the Szymczaks’ little Wicek must have been pulling the cord, only to be supplanted by the more proficient, redheaded Tomek, but he suddenly remembered that “little” Wicek would be a man of his own age by now, and that nothing had been heard of Tomek since his departure for the city. But the battle over the right to ring the bell apparently persisted among the younger generation of Nieczawy.

Life entails situations unforeseen by handbooks of etiquette, situations so difficult and delicate that they require great tact and self-confidence. Lacking these virtues, Stefan had no idea how to go about joining the procession; he stood indecisively with a distinct feeling that he was being watched, which only compounded his confusion. Fortunately, the cortège halted just before the church. One of the priests walked over to the truck and asked the driver a question; the driver nodded, and some peasants Stefan didn’t know climbed out of the truck and began to remove the coffin. There was some confusion during which Stefan managed to slip into the group standing around the truck. He had just noticed the thickset, short-necked figure and graying head of Uncle Ksawery, who was supporting Aunt Aniela, dressed all in black, when a muffled call went out that more people were needed to carry the coffin into the church. Stefan stepped forward, but as always when everyone was watching and some ever so slightly responsible action was required, he made a mess of it and his eagerness produced no more than a nervous stumble in the truck’s direction. In the end the coffin was lifted over the heads of those assembled without his help, and he was left to carry the fur coat that Uncle Anzelm, his father’s oldest brother, had taken off and handed to him at the last moment.

Stefan carried the coat into the church. He was among the last to enter but was deeply convinced that by carrying the enormous bearskin he too was contributing to the ceremony. The bell stuttered to the end of its monotonous song, both priests disappeared for a moment and emerged again when the family had settled into the pews, and the first words of the Latin exequy were pronounced from the altar.

Stefan could have sat down, since there were plenty of seats and his uncle’s fur coat was not exactly light, but he preferred to stand in the depths of the nave bearing his burden which, perhaps just because it was so heavy, seemed to atone for his earlier awkwardness. The coffin lay at the altar and Uncle Anzelm, after lighting the candles around it, walked straight toward Stefan, who felt slightly unnerved by this attention, for he had hoped the darkness at the foot of the pillar where he was standing would preserve his anonymity.

His uncle squeezed his shoulder and whispered under the priest’s melodic voice, “Is your father ill?”

“Yes, Uncle. He had an attack yesterday.”

“Those stones again?” asked Uncle Anzelm in a piercing whisper, trying to take the fur from Stefan.

But Stefan did not want to let go and mumbled, “No, please don’t, I’ll…”

“Come on, give me the fur, you fool, it’s cold as hell in here,” his uncle said with good humor, but too loudly. Anzelm took the fur, threw it over his shoulders, and walked to the pew where the widow sat, leaving Stefan embarrassed; the young man could feel himself turning red.

This incident, trivial as it was, ruined his whole stay in the church. He recovered only when he spotted Uncle Ksawery sitting at the far comer of the last pew. He took comfort in imagining how out of place Ksawery must have felt, an atheist so militant he tried to convert each new parish priest. Uncle Ksawery was an old bachelor, hot-tempered and outspoken, an enthusiastic subscriber to Boy’s library of French classics, a proponent of birth control, and the only doctor in a twelve-kilometer radius to boot. The Kielce relatives had long tried to evict him from the old house, battling for years in the township and district courts, but Ksawery had won every round, cheating them so cunningly—as they put it—that they finally gave up. Now he sat with his big hands resting heavily on the rail, separated from his conquered relatives by a pew.

The organ’s deep voice sounded, and Stefan shuddered as he recalled the humble saintliness that had fired his soul as a small boy; he had always held organ music in deep respect. The exequies unfolded properly. One of the priests lighted incense in a small censer and circled the coffin, surrounding it with a cloud of fragrant though acrid smoke. Stefan looked for the widow. She was sitting in the second pew, bent, patient, strangely indifferent to the words of the priest who, in florid Latin, kept singing the last name of the deceased, which was also her last name, repeating it with exultation and insistence. But he was not addressing any of the living, only Providence, requesting, begging, almost commanding Its benevolence toward that which was no more.

The organ fell silent, and again it was necessary to shoulder the coffin that now rested on the catafalque before the altar, but this time Stefan did not even try to help. Everyone stood up and, clearing their throats, prepared for the way ahead. When the gently swaying coffin left the shadowed nave and reached the church steps, there was some jostling—the elongated, heavy box pitched forward threateningly, but a forest of upraised hands rebalanced it and it emerged into the afternoon sun with no more than a brisk bobbing, as if excited by the close call.

Just then a foolish and macabre thought ran through Stefan’s mind: it must indeed be Uncle Leszek in there, because he had always loved practical jokes, especially on solemn occasions. Stefan quickly squelched the idea, or rather recast it in terms of healthy reason: it was absurd, that wasn’t his uncle in the coffin but only the remains of his person, remains so embarrassing and troublesome that their removal from the domain of the living required the devising and staging of this whole interminable, intricate, and rather unconvincing ceremony.

He followed the coffin with the others, heading for the open cemetery gate. There were about twenty people in the procession; without the coffin they would have made a strange impression, because they wore clothes somewhere between dress appropriate for a long journey (almost all of them had traveled to Nieczawy from far away) and evening wear, predominately black. Most of the men wore Ugh riding boots and some of the women were in high laced shoes like boots, trimmed with fur. Someone Stefan could not recognize from behind was wearing an army coat with no insignia, as if the patches had been ripped off; that coat, which held Stefan’s eye for a long moment, was the only reminder of the September Campaign. No, he thought, not really—there was also the absence of people who would have been there under different circumstances, like Uncle Antoni and Cousin Piotr, both of whom were in German prison camps.

The singing—or rather wailing—of the village women was an endless repetition of “Give him eternal rest, O Lord, and everlasting light.” It bothered Stefan only for a moment, then he ceased to be aware of it. The strung-out procession bunched up at the cemetery gate, then followed the upraised coffin in a black line between the graves. Prayers began again over the open grave. Stefan found this a bit excessive, and thought that if he were a believer, he would wonder whether the being to whom they were addressed might not regard such endlessly renewed pleas as importunate.

Someone tugged at his sleeve before he could finish formulating this last thought. He turned and saw the wide, hawk-nosed face of Uncle Anzelm in his fur collar, who asked, again too loudly, “Have you had anything to eat today?” Without waiting for an answer, he quickly added, “Don’t worry, there’ll be bigos!” Anzelm slapped Stefan on the back, hunched his shoulders, and waded in among the relatives, who stood looking at the still-empty grave. He touched each of them with a finger, moving his lips as he did so. Stefan thought this quite curious until he realized that his uncle was simply counting the crowd. Then Anzelm whispered loudly to a village boy, who backed away from the black circle in rustic reverence, walked to the gate, and then broke into a run toward Ksawery’s house.

Having completed these host’s duties, Uncle Anzelm returned, whether by accident or design, to Stefan’s side and even found the time to point out how colorful the group around the grave was. Four stout boys then placed the coffin on cords and lowered it into the yawning hole, where it landed askew. One of the boys, holding onto the edge with dirty hands, climbed down and shoved it hard with his boot. Stefan was hurt by this rough treatment of an object that had so far been accorded uninterrupted respect. In this he found further confirmation of his thesis that the living, no matter how they tried to polish the rough edges of the passage out of life, could find no consistent and harmonious attitude to the dead.

The particular wartime aspect of the funeral was evident after the men with shovels, working with an almost feverish energy, closed the grave and formed the elongated mound of earth above it. Under normal circumstances, it would have been unthinkable for the mourners to leave the cemetery without strewing their relative’s grave with flowers, but flowers were out of the question in this first winter after the invasion. Even the greenhouses on the nearby Przetułowicz estate, where all the glass had been broken during the battle, left the Trzynieckis down, so only spruce boughs were laid on the grave. The prayers finished, their respects paid, the mourners turned from the green mound and made their way, one by one, down the snowy path to the muddy, puddle-strewn road back to the village.

When the priests, who were as cold as everyone else, removed their white surplices, things seemed more normal. Other changes, less explicit, came over the rest of the mourners. Their solemnity, a sort of slowing of movement and glance, fell away. A naive observer might have thought that they had been walking on tiptoe and had now got tired of it.

On the way back Stefan made sure to stay away from Aunt Aniela, not out of lack of affection or sympathy but because he was well aware of what a loving wife she had been to his uncle, and no matter how hard he tried, he would have been unable to utter a single phrase of condolence. In the meantime, panic spread over the mourners’ faces when they saw Uncle Ksawery take Aunt Melania Skoczyńska by the arm. Stefan was dumbfounded at the strange and rare sight. Ksawery hated Aunt Melania, had called her an old bottle of poison and said that the ground she walked on ought to be disinfected. Aunt Melania, an old spinster, had long devoted herself to stirring up family quarrels in which she could maintain a sweet neutrality while going from house to house spreading venomous remarks and rumors that fostered bitterness and did great damage, since the Trzynieckis were all stubborn once their emotions were aroused.

When he saw Stefan, Ksawery called from a distance, “Welcome, my brother in Aesculapius! Have you got your diploma yet?!”

Naturally Stefan had to stop to greet them, and after he quickly touched his maiden aunt’s frigid hand with his nose, the three walked together toward the house, now just visible through the trees. It was yellow as egg yolk, the very essence of a manor house, with classic columns and a large veranda overlooking the orchard. They stopped at the entrance to wait for the others. Uncle Ksawery revealed an unexpected flair for acting the host, expansively inviting everyone inside as though he feared they would drift off into the snowy, marshy countryside.

At the door, Stefan suffered a brief but intense torment, as an avalanche of greetings suspended during the funeral descended on him. During the kissing of hands and pecking of cheeks he had to be careful not to confuse the men with the women, which he may have done, he was not quite sure, Finally, amid the wiping of boots and waving sleeves of shed coats, he entered the drawing room. The sight of the enormous grandfather clock with its inlaid pendulum made him feel instantly at home, because whenever he visited Nieczawy he slept under the deer-head trophy on the wall opposite. In the comer stood the battered armchair in whose hairy depths he rested during the day and in which he was sometimes awakened at night by the loud striking of the clock, its unearthly face shining round and cold in the moonlight, glowing in stillness like the moon itself. But the traffic in the room prevented him from wallowing in childhood memories. The ladies sat in armchairs, the gentlemen stood enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke. The conversation had barely begun when the double doors of the dining room opened to reveal Anzelm standing on the threshold. Frowning like a benevolent, somewhat absent-minded emperor, he invited everyone to table, A proper funeral dinner was out of the question, of course—the very term would have rung resoundingly false—and the weary, sorrowful relatives were instead invited to a modest snack.

The guests included one of the priests who had led the procession to the cemetery, thin, sallow, and tired, but smiling as though happy that everything had gone so well. The priest, bending stiffly low, was talking to Great-aunt Jadwiga, the matriarch of the Trzynieckis, a small woman in a dress that was too big for her. She seemed to have withered and shrunk so much inside the garment that she had to hold her hands up as if in prayer to keep the sleeves from falling over her dry fingers. The distracted, contrary expression on her small, slightly flat, and childish face made it seem as though she were contemplating some senile, childish prank instead of listening to the priest. She looked up with her round blue eyes and, spotting Stefan, called him over with a finger bent into a hook. Stefan swallowed manfully and approached his great-aunt. She looked up at Stefan carefully and somewhat slyly before saying in a surprisingly deep voice, “Stefan, the son of Stefan and Michalina?”

“Yes, yes,” he acknowledged eagerly.

She smiled at him, pleased either by her memory or by her great-nephew’s appearance; she took his hand in her own painfully sharp grip, brought it close to her eyes, examined it from both sides, and then released it suddenly, as if it contained nothing of interest after all. Then she looked Stefan in the eye and said, “Do you know that your father wanted to be a saint?”

She cackled softly three times before Stefan had a chance to answer, and added for no apparent reason: “We still have his diapers somewhere. We saved them.”

Then she looked straight ahead and said no more. In the meantime, Uncle Anzelm had reappeared and vigorously invited everyone to the dining room, bowing perfectly in Great-aunt Jadwiga’s direction. He led her into the dining room first, and that drew in the others. His great-aunt had not forgotten Stefan, for she asked him to sit beside her, which he did with something like pleased despair. Sitting down at the table was a little chaotic. Then Uncle Ksawery, the host, unseen until now, came in with a huge porcelain tureen smelling of bigos. He served each of the guests in turn, his nicotine-stained doctor’s fingers ladling bigos onto the plates so forcefully that the women drew back to protect their clothes. This warmed up the atmosphere. Everyone talked about the same thing: the weather, and their hope for an allied offensive in the spring.

The tall, broad-shouldered man whose military coat Stefan had noticed earlier sat at his left. He was one of Stefan’s mother’s relatives, a tenant farmer from Poznań named Grzegorz Niedzic. He sat in silence, and froze as if he had been touched by a wand whenever he changed position. His smile was simple, shy, and somehow innocent, as if he were apologizing for the inconvenience caused by his presence. The smile made a peculiar contrast with his sunburned, mustached face and ill-fitting clothes, unmistakably sewn from an army blanket.

It was obvious at the table that post-funeral formalities were nothing new to this assembly, and it occurred to Stefan that the last family gathering he had attended was in Kielce at Christmas. The memory was triggered because unanimity in the family was rare, usually forthcoming only after funerals, and although nobody had died last Christmas, the intensity of shared sorrow had been similar—the occasion was the burial of the fatherland.

Stefan felt uneasy in this company. He disliked large groups, especially formal ones. What’s more, when he looked at the priest seated opposite him, he was sure that such a reverend presence would provoke Ksawery to blasphemy, and he had an innate aversion to scenes. He also felt bad because his father, whom he represented, did not enjoy the best of reputations here, being the only inventor in memory among a family of landowners and doctors and at that an inventor who had reached his sixties without inventing anything.

Nor was the mood lightened by the presence of Grzegorz Niedzic, apparently a born non-talker, who answered attempts at conversation by smiling warmly and peering sympathetically into his plate. And Stefan became especially eager to get a conversation going when he noticed that Ksawery’s eyes were sparkling darkly, a sure sign that trouble was brewing. And so it was. In a moment of relative silence broken only by the ringing of cutlery, Ksawery said to Stefan, “You must have felt as out of place as a eunuch in a harem in that church, eh?”

The crack was indirectly aimed at the priest, and Ksawery doubtless had a sharp rejoinder ready, but he had no chance to use it, because the relatives, as if on command, began speaking loudly and fast. Everyone knew that Ksawery was wont to do such things, and the sole remedy was to drown him out. Then one of the village women called Ksawery into the kitchen to look for the cold pork, and the meal was interrupted.

Stefan amused himself by looking at the collection of family faces. First prize unquestionably went to Uncle Anzelm. Well-built, stocky, massive rather than fat, Anzelm had a face that no one would call handsome, but it was perfectly lordly and he wore it beautifully. That face, along with the bearskin coat, seemed to be the sole remnant of the great manorial possessions he had lost twenty years earlier, supposedly consequent to the indulgence of a variety of passions, although Stefan did not know for sure. What he did know was that Anzelm was dynamic, benevolent, and short-tempered, able to stay angry longer than anyone else in the family—for five, even ten years, so that not even Aunt Melania could remember the cause. No one dared try to settle these marathon quarrels, because an admission of ignorance of the original offense automatically triggered a special wrath reserved for clumsy mediators. Stefan’s father had once been burned this way. But the death of a relative silenced all of Anzelm’s hostility, and everyone else’s too. The treuga Dei would reign for a few days or a couple of weeks, depending on circumstances. At such times, Ksawery’s innate good nature would shine in every glance and word; he would be so inexhaustibly generous and forgiving that Stefan would believe that the rage had been not just suspended but abolished. Then the natural state of Uncle Anzelm’s feelings, violated by death, would be reasserted: implacable hatred would triumph and remain unchanged for years—until the next funeral.

As a boy, Stefan had been immensely impressed by how resistant to time Uncle Anzelm and his emotions were; later, as a student, he partly understood the mechanism. His uncle’s great anger had once been bolstered by the power of his possessions, in other words, by his ability to threaten family members with disinheritance, but Anzelm’s unbending character had allowed his anger to outlive his financial collapse, so that he was still feared even without the threat. But this understanding had not freed Stefan from the mixture of respect and dread he felt for his father’s oldest brother.

The missing cold pork turned up unexpectedly inside the black sideboard. When the enormous block of meat was removed from the depths of the ancient piece of furniture, its dark color reminded Stefan of the coffin and made him uneasy for a moment. Then, with a stamping of feet and a clatter, a spit of roast duck was carried in, along with a jar of tart cranberries and a bowl of steaming potatoes. The modest snack thus became a feast, especially since Uncle Ksawery pulled bottle after bottle of wine from the sideboard. All along, Stefan had felt distant from the others; but now his sense of estrangement grew. He had been bothered by the tone of the conversation and the skill with which the subject of death was avoided, though that, after all, was the reason they were all together. Now his indignation peaked, and everything seemed to ring false, including grief over the lost fatherland, accompanied as it was by the brisk motion of silverware and the chomping of jaws. No one seemed to remember Uncle Leszek lying underground in the empty cemetery. Stefan looked with distaste at the flushed faces of his neighbors, and his disgust spread beyond the family and became contempt for the world. For the time being he could express it only by refraining from eating, which he did so well that he left the table hungry.

But before he left, a change came over Grzegorz Niedzic, Stefan’s silent neighbor to the left. For some time Grzegorz had been wiping his mustache with irritation and glancing obliquely at the door, as if measuring the distance. He was plainly preparing for something. Then suddenly he leaned toward Stefan and announced that he had to leave to catch the train to Poznań.

“What do you want to do, travel all night?” Stefan asked without thinking.

“Yes, I have to be at work tomorrow morning.”

He explained that the Germans barely tolerated Poles in Poznań, and he had had a lot of trouble getting a day off. It took all night to get to Nieczawy, and he had to start back right away. Without finishing his clumsy explanation, he drew a deep breath, stood up so violently that he almost took the tablecloth with him, bowed blindly in all directions, and started for the door. There was an outcry of questions and protest, but the man, stubbornly silent, bowed again at the threshold and disappeared into the hall. Uncle Ksawery went after him, and a moment later the outside door slammed. Stefan looked out the window. It was dark. The tall figure in the skimpy overcoat loomed in his imagination, tramping the muddy road. Looking at the abandoned chair to his left, Stefan noticed that the starched fringes of the tablecloth had been carefully combed and separated, and he felt a warm rush of compassion for this unknown distant cousin who would spend two nights being jostled in dark trains to accompany a dead relative for a few hundred steps.

The table looked mournful, as after any big meal, the plates piled with picked bones coated with congealed fat. There was a moment of silence as men reached in their pockets for cigarettes, the priest wiped his glasses with a chamois cloth, and the great-aunt fell into a rapt trance that would have been a nap except that her eyes were wide open. Against this background of quiet, the widow Aniela spoke for the first time. Immobile, head down, she said into the tablecloth, “You know, it’s all somehow ridiculous.”

Her voice faltered. No one broke the even deeper silence that followed. This was unprecedented; nobody was prepared for it. The priest went at once to Aunt Aniela, moving with the strained competence of a doctor who feels he ought to administer first aid but is at a loss what to do. He simply stood murmuring over her, both of them black, she in her dress, he in his cassock, his face lemony, his eyelids puffy, until they were all saved by the servants—or rather by the two village women acting as servants for the occasion, who entered and began noisily clearing the table.

Uncle Ksawery conferred in hurried whispers with the relatives in the gloomy drawing room, near the shiny glass of the oak bookcase, under the inlaid, lightly smoking oil lamp with the orange shade. He insisted that some stay the night, informed others about train schedules, and gave directions about who was to be wakened and when. Stefan had planned to start for home, but when he found that there was no train until three in the morning, he let himself be persuaded to stay the night. He would sleep in the drawing room opposite the clock, so he had to wait for the others to leave. It was nearly midnight when they did. Stefan washed quickly, undressed by the light of the flickering lamp, blew out the flame, and climbed between the cold sheets with an unpleasant shudder. He had felt sleepy before, but the feeling now left him as if plucked away by an invisible hand. For a long time he lay on his back trying to fall asleep, but the clock, invisible in the darkness, seemed to strike the quarters and hours with exaggerated emphasis.

His thoughts, indefinite and vague, meandered through bits and pieces of the day’s experiences, but they tended inevitably in one direction. The whole family was made of fire and stone, passion and inflexibility. The Kielce Trzynieckis were famous for their greed, Uncle Anzelm for his rage, his great-aunt for some romantic madness lost in the mists of time. This force of destiny showed differently in different people. Stefan’s father was an inventor who did all other things strictly out of compulsion; he waved the world away as though it were a fly; sometimes he lost days, living Thursday twice and then realizing that Wednesday had been lost. This was not true absentmindedness, just excessive concentration on whatever idea was driving him at the moment. If he was not sleeping or ill, you could bet that he would be sitting in his tiny attic-workshop, among Bunsen burners, alcohol lamps, and glowing instruments, wreathed in the smell of acid and metal, measuring, polishing, welding. These actions that went into the process of inventing never ceased, though the planned inventions changed. His father went from one failure to the next with undiminished faith and a passion so powerful that strangers thought he was obtuse or oblivious. He had never treated Stefan like a child. He spoke to the small boy who appeared in his dimly lighted workshop the way he would have talked to an adult who was hard of hearing, the conversation full of interruptions and misunderstandings. Paying them no mind, moving from lathe to jig and back again, his mouth full of screws and his smock singed, he spoke to Stefan as if he were delivering a lecture, with pauses for particularly absorbed tinkering. What did he talk about? Stefan no longer really remembered, for he had been too young to grasp the meaning of those speeches, but he thought they went something like this: “What has happened and passed no longer exists, just as if it had never been. It’s like a cake you ate yesterday. Now there’s nothing left. That’s why you can make yourself a past you never had. If you just believe in it, it will be as if you really lived it.”

Another time he said: “Did you want to be born? You didn’t, did you? Well, you couldn’t have wanted to, because you didn’t exist. I didn’t want you to be born, either. I mean, I wanted a son, but not you, because I didn’t know you, so I couldn’t want you. I wanted a son in general, but you’re the reality.”

Stefan seldom spoke and never asked his father questions, except once, when he was fifteen. He asked his father what he would do once he had finally perfected his invention. His father’s face darkened, and after a long silence he replied that he would start inventing something else. “Why?” Stefan asked rashly. This question, like its predecessor, arose from a deeply repressed distaste, which had been crystalizing over the years, because his father’s peculiar career, as the boy knew only too well, was an object of widespread scorn—and the odium fell upon the son as well.

Trzyniecki’s reply to his teenage son was this: “Stefan, you can’t ask things like that. Look, if you ask a dying man whether he wants to start life all over again, you can be sure he’ll say yes. And he won’t ask for reasons to live. It’s the same with my work.”

This solemn and exhausting work earned no money, so the household was supported by Stefan’s mother, or more accurately, by her father. When Stefan learned that Trzyniecki was kept by his wife, he was so outraged that for some time he held his father in contempt. His father’s brothers had similar, though less adamant, feelings. But in time the contempt subsided. Anything that lasts too long becomes a matter of indifference. Mrs. Trzyniecki loved her husband, but sadly, everything he did was beyond her understanding. They skirmished, not really knowing why, across the border of two conflicting spheres, workshop and household. Not that his father deliberately turned more and more rooms into workshops. It just happened. Towers of wires and machinery spread over tables, wardrobes, and desks; Stefan’s mother trembled for her tablecloths, lace napkins, rhododendrons and cacti; his father did not like plants, secretly tore out their roots, and took a furtive joy when they withered. When cleaning house his mother might throw out a priceless wire or irreplaceable screw. Trzyniecki was off on a distant journey when he worked, and he really returned only during his frequent illnesses. And though Mrs. Trzyniecki felt his sufferings keenly, the fact was that she was most at peace when her husband lay moaning and helpless in bed, enveloped in hot water bottles. At least then she understood what he was talking about and what he was doing.

As Stefan lay there listening to the tolling clock in the darkness above him, his thoughts returned to the day just past. Considered rationally, family ties—those interwoven interests and feelings, that community of births and deaths—seemed somehow sterile and tiresome. He felt a burning impulse to denounce it all, a delirious urge to shout the brutal truth in the faces of his family, to sweep away all the humdrum bustling. But when he searched for the words to address to the living, he remembered Uncle Leszek and froze, as if in terror. Stefan let his thoughts roam independently, as if he were a mere observer. A pleasant weariness came over him, a feeling that sleep was near, and just then he remembered the collective grave in the village cemetery. The vanquished fatherland had perished—a figure of speech. But that soldiers’ grave was no figure of speech, and what could he do but stand there in silence, a painful, bittersweet feeling of community greater than individual life and death beating in his heart? And Uncle Leszek nearby. Stefan saw his bare grave, uncovered with snow, as distinctly as if he were already dreaming. But he was not asleep. In his mind the fatherland merged with the family and, though they had been condemned by pure reason, both lived on in him, or perhaps he lived on in them. Well, he didn’t know anymore, and as he drifted off to sleep he pressed his hand to his heart, feeling that to free himself from them would be to die.