Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF MICHAŁ

The Russians collected their dead from Papiernia and transported them on carts to the village. They dug a large hole in Cherubin’s field and buried the soldiers’ bodies there. They laid the officers to one side.

Everyone who came back to Primeval went to watch this hurried burial with no priest, no words, and no flowers. Michał went, too, and incautiously let the gaze of the gloomy lieutenant rest on him. The gloomy lieutenant clapped Michał on the back and had the officers’ bodies taken to the Boskis’ house.

“No, don’t dig here,” asked Michał. “Is there so little ground for your soldiers’ graves? Why in my daughter’s garden? Why are you pulling up the flower bulbs? Go to the graveyard, I’ll show you other places, too…”

The gloomy lieutenant, always polite and courteous until now, pushed Michał aside, and one of the soldiers aimed a rifle at him. Michał moved away.

“Where is Ivan?” Izydor asked the lieutenant.

“Dead,” he said in Russian.

“No,” said Izydor, and for a moment the lieutenant fixed his gaze on him.

“Why not?”

Izydor turned and ran away.

The Russians buried eight officers in the garden under the bedroom window. They covered them all with earth, and once they had driven away, snow fell.

From then on no one wanted to sleep in the bedroom overlooking the garden. Misia rolled up the eiderdowns and took them upstairs.

In spring Michał nailed a cross together out of wood and erected it under the window. Then he carefully made rows in the earth with a stick and sowed snapdragons. The flowers grew lush and colourful, with their little mouths open to heaven.

Towards the end of 1945, when the war was already over, a military jeep drove up to the house, and out got a Polish officer and a man in civilian clothes. They said they were going to exhume the officers. Then a truck full of soldiers appeared and a hayrack wagon, on which the bodies removed from the earth were laid. The earth and the snapdragons had sucked the blood and water out of them. Best preserved were the woollen uniforms, and it was they that held the decaying corpses together. The soldiers who shifted them onto the cart tied handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses.

People from Primeval stood on the Highway and tried to see as much as possible over the fence, but when the cart set off for Jeszkotle, they withdrew in silence. Boldest of all were the hens – they bravely ran after the cart as it bounced on the stones and greedily devoured whatever fell from them to the ground.

Michał vomited into the lilac bushes. He never put a hen’s egg in his mouth again.