Stone Upon Stone

I. The Cemetery

Having a tomb built. It’s easy enough to say. But if you’ve never done it, you have no idea how much one of those things costs. It’s almost as much as a house. Though they say a tomb is a house as well, just for the next life. Whether it’s for eternity or not, a person needs a corner to call their own.

I got compensation for my legs — a good few thousand. It all went. I had a silver watch on a chain, a keepsake from the resistance. That went. I sold a piece of land. The money went. I barely got the walls up and I didn’t have enough for the finish work. It’s another thing that if Chmiel hadn’t gone and died, I probably would have gotten it done. Maybe not right away, but bit by bit. I would’ve put something aside, found something I could sell. In any case there would have been someone to keep at me and not let me give up. Chmiel never liked starting a job then leaving it half done, like workmen these days. What he began he always had to finish. Except that after he did the vault he never even came to ask for his money. He took to his bed the same day, and a week later he was gone.

And before then I couldn’t find any extra cash so he could wrap the job up before he died. Because even when something came along, there were more urgent needs and the tomb had to wait. Luckily no one’s dying, I’d say to myself. Plus there were taxes and taxes. I ended up having to borrow some. Then the time came to repay and I had nowhere to get the money from.

Kubik, my neighbor, he’d come by almost every day and straight from the doorway, without so much as a good morning he’d start in with, “When are you paying me back, when are you paying me back? I was supposed to get it last Christmas, and now it’s almost December again. My lad has to get married. There’s a baby on the way. He needs a suit, a shirt, shoes. Music, vodka. The groom has to foot the bill for the whole thing. Don’t think it’s like weddings in the old days. Back then you wore your dad’s suit and your mother made you a linen shirt. And it was only local people from the village, all you really needed was the priest’s blessing. These days you have to invite everyone from the town. And you can’t give them homemade hooch — it has to be the fizzy stuff from the store. And the wedding has to last three days, cause if they’ve taken the trouble to come all this way they have to eat and drink their fill. Otherwise they’ll bad-mouth you and say the hosts were bums. And on top of everything they manage to sober up every few minutes, the bastards. The food isn’t so much of a problem as the booze. Then at the end you have to give every one of them a bottle for the road, so they’ll remember you well.”

So I borrowed from Maciołek and repaid Kubik. I reckoned that since Maciołek lived all the way past the mill, he wouldn’t be there every day like Kubik was. But Maciołek turned out to be a pain in the ass as well. He didn’t come visit. But every time I met him in the village, he’d start hollering from way off:

“Give me my money back, you son of a bitch! You borrowed it fast enough!”

I was afraid to go down the co-op to buy bread, because I might run into him there. I was even afraid to go to church on Sunday — sometimes he wouldn’t even wait till we got out of the churchyard, he’d start right in on me in front of everyone while we were still on hallowed ground.

In the end I said to myself, why should I let some old fart push me around. I put a rope on the heifer and walked her down to the purchasing center to sell her. Ever since she was a calf I’d planned to keep her, but what could I do. I just made sure not to meet anyone in the village on the way. I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me and saying what a pity it was I had to sell it. Luckily the weather was good and people were working in the fields. There was only old Błach sitting on the bench outside his place warming himself in the sun. His eyes were closed, either from the glare or because he was dozing, so I was counting on being able to pass by without him noticing. The heifer wasn’t making much noise, and I was walking softly as well. But all of a sudden something flashed in those eyes of his, like they’d flipped over.

“You taking her to be serviced?”

“No, to sell her.”

“It’d be better to have her serviced.”

“That it would.”

“Then you’d have a fine cow. You could milk her on all six teats. You wouldn’t have to drink water during the harvest. You could drink sour milk. You’d just have to buy some jugs. Back in the day, at the fairs there was every kind of jug you could want — clay ones, earthenware ones, tin ones. You could make cheeses. You could hang ’em up in your attic in straw baskets and let ’em cure there. They can cure for years. War comes, you’ve got cured cheeses. You can eat ’em with noodles or with bread. You can even take a hunk to the fields with you. You can plow and mow and seed all day long and you won’t go hungry. Or you could tear bits off it and toss ’em to the rooks. They’d follow you all day long. This way, they’ll just slaughter her and eat her and shit her back out again.”

“Cows don’t last forever either.”

“But while they’re there they give you milk. Besides, what lasts forever?”

I had to bite my lip to stop myself saying something harsh to the old man, he was driving me crazy. I knew full well I’d have had a cow. I didn’t need to be reminded. Her coat was dense as thatch. She had a nice small-sized head and broad shoulders. Her hind legs were set wide apart, she almost looked like she’d have grown a double udder. Also, when I went to lead her out of the shed she wouldn’t let me put the rope over her horns. She wouldn’t have it, she shook her head left and right to stop me. In the end I had to take her by the muzzle, stroke her, and say:

“Come on, I have to build that tomb.”

And now the tomb’s standing there unfinished and going to waste. It needs timbering on the outside. There needs to be a separate slab for the entrance, so you don’t have to wall it up after every casket. And an inscription saying this is the tomb of the Pietruszka family. Maybe it could even be gilded. These days everyone has a gilded inscription. At the Kłonicas’ they don’t just have an inscription that says Kłonica Family, but each Kłonica is written separately in gold — Baltazar Kłonica, Jędrzej Kłonica, Adelajda Kłonica, Zofia Kłonica, née Cholewka, when they were born, when they died, and in addition, “Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him!” There must be a hundred letters in all. But then the Kłonicas sow eight or ten acres of flax alone every year, so they can afford gilding.

People have been trying to convince me to grow flax as well. Flax is gold, they say. An acre of flax is worth five acres of wheat, seven acres of rye, and potatoes, God knows how many. And it’s no more work than with rye or wheat or potatoes. You sow it, pick it, dry it, thresh it, and take it to be sold. As for seed, if you contract for a supply they’ll provide it. They’ll even give you a loan so you can pay them. And if there’s a wet year for flax? Then it’ll be a wet year for rye and wheat too, to say nothing about potatoes. When it’s wet, everything’s wet. The rain doesn’t choose to fall only on wheat or potatoes or flax. On your field or on mine. Is any of us more pleasing to God? The flood covered the whole world. Only Noah was left, and he took two of every animal and two grains of every grain. And if there’s a disease? Don’t rye and wheat and potatoes have their own diseases? With potatoes it’s even worse, because they have the potato beetle. And even pheasants won’t get rid of the potato beetle. One time they released pheasants into the fields, to eat the potato beetles, they said. It got quite colorful out there. You’d be mowing and a pheasant would fly up from under your feet. But did it last long? There was one group of hunters after another, and now you can’t find a pheasant to save your life. So they’re sending people out again to look for beetles. And turnip, carrots, cabbage — don’t they all have their own diseases? What doesn’t?

If you look closely enough you’ll see that even diseases have their own diseases, and those diseases have diseases of their own. Everything in this world is up against everything else, and it’ll be more and more that way. So grow flax, because flax at least pays. Quickly even. What about sparrows? Don’t be stupid, in the country you can’t get by without sparrows. Put up a scarecrow, put up a couple of them, one in each corner of the field. It’s no big deal to nail a couple of poles together and dress them in some old pants, jacket, shirt, hat. Everyone has old clothes lying around that are good for nothing. You save them up over the years because it’s always a pity to throw them out.

With flax the straw and the grain both pay. With rye and wheat only the grain pays. Look around the village. You can tell right away who grows flax. Or go to high mass on Sunday. Paper money comes fluttering down into the collection tray like feathers from angels’ wings. When there’s a rattle of coins once in a while, people look round as if you’d done something wrong. When I was in the hospital, from spring to fall there were two guys here painting the church. One of them got drunk and fell off the scaffolding. But the other one kept on painting. Now the ceiling is blue as the sky. On the walls there’s a new stations of the cross. Before, Jesus’s head was in a crown of thorns, but now you can just see one of his eyes. When people are better off, the Lord God does better too. And that new bell in the church tower, where did that come from? From flax, my friend. When it rings you can hear it up hill and down dale. Folks come from all around to buy salt and oil and matches, and they say they can hear it ringing everywhere: Ding-dong, ding-dong.

But then if everyone grew flax, who would grow rye and wheat, what would they make bread out of? Though I often think to myself, I’ve got ten acres, maybe I could plant at least one acre of flax? It’d bring in a few pennies if there was a good year for flax. And maybe I’d finish that tomb, because it’s gotten embarrassing. It looks like a bunker, with no statue, no cross. There was a guy made a cross for Malinowski’s tomb. He offered to do one for me. But I didn’t care for it. It looked like a fence post, without a Lord Jesus. What kind of cross is that? Though I can’t say I think much of the more expensive ones either in our cemetery. Sometimes I drop by there to take a look and see if one of them might be good for my tomb, but they’re just getting fancier and fancier.

The Kowaliks’ cross you can see way before you even get to the cemetery. It’s almost on a level with the trees. It looks like a tree that’s been snapped in a gale, like two unstripped tree trunks nailed together. It even has knots from sawn-off branches like on a real tree, and bark that’s cracked with age. And it’s all carved in stone. The Lord Jesus is no great size, but his crown of thorns is like a crow’s nest. When you stand underneath it it’s like standing at a gallows, and you have to tip your head way back like you were looking at a hung man. What does it have to be so high for? You can’t look at death high up like that for long. Your neck goes stiff. Looking up is something you can only do to check the weather or when the storks are flying away. Death draws you downward. With your head craned up it’s hard to cry even. The tears get stuck in your throat when it’s stretching up, and they trickle down into your stomach instead of into your eyes.

One time the Germans hung someone from the village on a high cross like that. When you looked up at him from below he seemed to be laughing at it all. But when they took him down and he was lying at our feet you could see his face was twisted and his tongue was poking out. You could imagine he’d choked on some word that had gotten stuck in his throat when he was trying to shout it out. Though in those times, at moments like that people usually shouted out something short, mostly the same kind of thing. In the time between the trigger being pulled and the bullet entering your body.

If he hadn’t run away into the fields but in the opposite direction, toward the river, he might have gotten away. The river’s no great depth or width, it’s just a river, like you find in any village. When you water your horse its muzzle almost touches the bottom. Old buckets stick out from the surface with mint growing in them. When the women go down to rinse their laundry they wade out into the middle and the water barely comes up to their knees. There are willow trees and bushes along the banks. And he was closer to the river than to that cross. Though maybe they happened to chase him in the direction of the cross, and you run away in whatever direction you’re being chased in. Or perhaps he thought the cross was the edge of the wood.

They shot him, but he somehow managed to crawl to the cross. He put his arms around it with all his strength. Afterward his fingernails were full of splinters and the skin on his arms was scraped all the way up to the elbows because they couldn’t get him to let go however much they tried. They had to break his fingers. And he was already almost dead when they hung him on an arm of the cross. Later there was no way to get him down and they had to cut down the cross.

Or Barański’s daughter. She hadn’t even turned three, but Barański had a tomb built for her that made it look as if the Barańskis had been burying their people there since time immemorial. On that tomb, as well as the Lord Jesus being gigantic, the stone was kind of gray, or covered in something, so he looked a hundred years old. And how old was he actually? Thirty-three. And he could have walked into any cottage without having to bow his head at the lintel. I’m not exactly on the short side myself — as a young man I was the tallest in the village. When there was a dance at one of the villages farther away there’d sometimes be somebody taller. In the resistance, in our whole unit there were only two or three men taller than me, though every one of us was straight as an oak. If we’d been lined up in double rank, Lord Jesus would have been somewhere in the middle. I even said to Barański, for a little child like that an angel would be better. But he wouldn’t listen. Angels can intercede but they can’t save you.

He’s standing as if he was on a hilltop, his hands folded on his chest, his head lowered, thinking. There’s a lot for him to be thinking about. God or man, it comes to everyone. Even a three-year-old child. You could think and think what might have become of her. Barański used to brag that she would’ve been a doctor. But can you boast about the dead? Better just say a prayer for them. Barański always was a blowhard. One time he bought a horse and he claimed it was only four years old. You could tell from looking at its teeth it was at least twice that. She might have become a seamstress. Or like the other women, she would have gotten married, and she and her man would have worked the land till they died.

Or take Partyka. On his tomb he put up a Jesus carrying his cross to Golgotha. His shoulders are as wide as three Partykas, and each foot is the size of three human feet. On top of that the end of the cross reaches over above the Ciepielas’ tomb next door, and Partyka and Ciepiela always get into a fight on All Souls’. When Lord Jesus is so big, you don’t get the feeling that he’s suffering even when he’s carrying his cross to Golgotha. Even if you wanted to help him, what can you do with your little strength next to his. God ought to be like a person, so you can see that whatever’s painful for people is painful for him as well. So you can be troubled when he’s troubled. And feel sorry for him the way you’d feel sorry for yourself. And understand when there’s nothing he can do, just like a person. And even switch jobs with him awhile. Give me your cross, I’ll carry it for you, and you do some of my thinking for me.

Pity I wasn’t an airman, or I’d have put up a propeller like the Króls’ lad Jasiu has on his tomb. I really like that propeller. But a person’s neither fish nor fowl. As for Jasiu, the last time he visited he’d made captain. His jet crashed when they were practicing for a flyby. They brought him back in a metal casket in a separate van. His pals were in another van. There were twenty of them, every one an officer. Each of them had silver cord on his shoulder, there were medals on their chests, bayonets at their sides. They carried him six at a time all the way from the house to the cemetery. They wouldn’t let anyone else do it even for one shift, though Jasiu had friends here in the village too. They’d minded the cows together and been at school with him.

The whole village came to the funeral. The fire brigade turned out. Schoolchildren. Two older gray-haired colonels walked behind the casket and gave their arms to Jasiu’s folks, Król and Mrs. Król, one on each side. Old Król wasn’t that tall to begin with, and he seemed to have shrunk, either from being on the colonel’s arm or from his son dying, though he didn’t cry at all. Afterward people said no one would have cried at the compensation the Króls got from the government. But it could have been that when he walked next to the colonel old Król felt like a soldier too.

Mrs. Król didn’t look like she’d been crying either. But at the cemetery, when everyone was standing at the graveside and one of the colonels said he’d died like a hero, she collapsed into the arms of the other one and they had to bring her round. She only started crying the day after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. Since then it’s been all these years and she’s still crying away.

Then some guys came and brought sheet metal. They cut it and bent it and welded it, and it turned into a propeller. Some people didn’t think a whole lot of that propeller, they said that the parents were Christians and Jasiu himself was christened, and here there’s a propeller instead of a Lord Jesus on the tomb. If you ask me though, that propeller is sadder than a good many Lord Jesuses. Aside from anything else, it’s designed so that when the wind blows you can hear something in it, as if a plane was flying across the sky. Maybe it’s the one Jasiu crashed in? And when you stare at it for long enough, you even think the propeller’s spinning. Except it’s going so fast you can’t see it. You can just see a blur of light over the tomb. If someone wanted, that propeller could stand for a crucifixion.

I wonder what a propeller like that might cost? Even the labor alone. An ordinary tinsmith couldn’t make one. Covering a roof is one thing, making a propeller is a whole other business. The men that put it up on Jasiu’s tomb kept checking some papers they had and measuring lengthways and width-ways and from a distance, like the guys that merged land together for the big farms. Except that at government prices it probably wasn’t that expensive. But then you have to die for the government first.

When I worked in the district administration, whenever one of the office workers died the administration would at least send a wreath for free, with fir and spruce branches and a few flowers woven into it, and on the ribbon it would say, from your friends at the district administration. And at the graveside someone would always say a few words about how he was liked, how he was good with people, farewell, may the earth weigh lightly on you. But when a person’s on their own they have to pay for the whole thing on their own, with their own money. Even if you borrow from someone, they’ll suck the blood out of you afterwards, anything to make sure you don’t accidentally die before you’ve paid them back.

Actually, the tomb alone might not have cost me all that much. But I’d a yen to have a vestibule as well. And a vestibule is almost a third the size of the tomb, and of course that means the cost is one third more. On the other hand, with a vestibule you can go in and turn around properly. The casket can be put in like it should be, not just shoved in there like a barrel of cabbage. The deceased isn’t being tugged about and twisted and shaken. That way people aren’t distracted from their mourning. And you can tell just from their behavior that this is for all eternity.

Also, I had partitions built to make separate compartments, broad ones because I can’t stand being cramped for space, even in a tomb. Not like other people’s, where they’re all on top of each other like beetroots in a beet pit, on rails. Then they rot and collapse onto each other. In my tomb the deceased is slipped in like bread into an oven, and walled in, and at least in the next world no one’s going to come poking their nose in there. Because let me tell you, there’s no lack of people who’d be snooping around in there if they only could. There are eight compartments, four on top, four below. That’s how many I counted there ought to be in our closest family. Mother, father, Antek, Stasiek, their wives, Michał, and of course me.

I didn’t include our grandparents either on mother’s side or father’s. They say grandparents are close family too, but it’s been so many years since they died. And they were buried just normally, in the earth, so the earth will have worked them over long ago. On top of that, the war mixed all the graves up in our cemetery, so it’d be hard to even find where they are. Today there’s probably someone else in their place.

Besides, on mother’s side I never even knew my grandfather Łukasz or my grandmother Rozalia. Way back in the last century grandfather killed a farm overseer and had to run away to America. And he stayed in his new land. Apparently the overseer was a brute and he would make passes at grandmother, while grandfather wasn’t the type to take any nonsense even from the lord of the manor himself. One time when they were in the fields during harvest, the overseer patted grandmother on the backside. Grandfather grabbed him by the throat and squeezed him against the sheaves till his eyes almost popped out. To get his own back, the overseer counted two days less work when grandfather was mowing the barley. Grandfather couldn’t count, but he remembered every day he’d worked. He got furious. He grabbed the tally stick that the overseer wrote the days of work on, tore it from his hand, snapped it over his knee, and tossed it aside. How do you like that, you son of a bitch! Grandfather thought he’d taken revenge on him big time. But all the overseer did was laugh so loud the field rang. And after he was done laughing he said to grandfather, get the hell out of here! Without a second thought grandfather swung his scythe at the other man’s neck, and the overseer’s head went rolling all the way to the horses’ hooves. The horses took fright and tipped over a cart full of grain, and one of them broke its leg and had to be put down. The Cossack militiamen came; they turned the house upside down and combed the village from one end to the other, but grandfather was already on his way to America.

For a long time he gave no sign, no one even knew he was there. It was only a few years later, when everyone thought he was dead, that he sent Grandmother Rozalia a few dollars and a letter. He wrote to say he wasn’t ever coming back to the village, and that he didn’t regret what he’d done, because at least there was one less villain in the world, so it was a little bit of a better place. Though it wasn’t easy for him over there. For days on end, in the heat and dust, through the wilderness they drove cattle to the town to be slaughtered. They traveled farther than it took when you had to go to the war back home. And once they were done driving one herd, there was another. Sometimes when there was a drought they had to drink their own piss, because the rivers had all run dry, and the cattle would drop like flies. And even when there were clouds the rain would dry up in the sky before it reached the ground. But he would cut the overseer’s head off all over again if he tried it on with grandmother. One time he turned the food table over in a pub in America because he suddenly saw her kissing the overseer. “Get down on your knees before Lord Jesus, Rozalia, swear on His Passion. Maybe you’ve got some other feller now? Then hope the good Lord is watching over you, Rozalia, and may your brother Felek look out for you. And you, Felek, brother-in-law, keep an eye on her, because if anything happens, remember we’ll meet in the next world and we’ll have to settle our accounts there.” And he said the next time he’d write he would tell grandmother when she should come and join him. And it wouldn’t be soon, because this letter cost him five dollars, and five dollars, do you know what a fortune that is, Rozalia? The letter to grandmother was written by Blume the tailor, that he went to to get his pants patched when they were driving cattle, and he turned out to be a good Christian even though he was a Jew.

But grandmother was just as much of a hothead as grandfather. Without waiting for him to write again like he promised he would, she left mother and mother’s brother Sylwester — the one that died later of dysentery — with her sister, even though they were both still small, and off she went to join grandfather over in America. People advised her against it, they said it was halfway around the world, that it was farther away than where the sun goes down, and people over there walk on their heads. Someone from Podleśna had come back from there and he was all upside down, he slept during the day and got up at night, and the dogs wouldn’t stop barking at him. He plowed in the night and mowed in the night, and one time he even went to market in the night. He didn’t sell anything or buy anything there and he never came back to his house. Eventually he washed up on the bank of the river. But grandmother ignored all the advice and the warnings.

People said afterwards that God punished grandmother for abandoning her children and chasing off after her man. Because when she was already on the sea a huge storm blew up. The sky was full of thick clouds, and it went as dark as the darkest night. The gale howled like a pack of starving wolves. Lightning cracked the sky in two over and over. And there were thunderbolts the like of which no one had ever seen, that smashed holes in the sea all the way to the bottom. And the waves crashed over the ship with all their might. People were pulling their hair out, calling on God and Our Lady and all the saints, and strangers were saying goodbye to strangers. There was a priest on the ship, and some folk rushed to him to make their confession, but others just jumped into the sea. Grandmother knelt down and started shouting out, “Łukasz, Łukasz, I swore to Lord Jesus on His Passion just like you wrote me to! I never went with that pig of an overseer, or with anyone! You’re the only one, Łukasz! If I could count the tears I’ve cried! If the priest could only pass on the holy secrets I told him at confession! Don’t believe my brother Felek! He’s a bad man even though he’s my brother! All he did was keep asking if you’d sent him any dollars! And saying that if you didn’t send him money he’d write to you and tell you things so you wouldn’t want anything to do with me. The key to the house is over the lintel on top of the door, if you ever want to go back! I left the children with my sister Agata, she’ll be good to them. I gave her a cow and all the chickens and some bed linen. If you say you’re their father they’ll know you. I wanted to tell you all this when I got there, but I’m not going to make it, Łukasz. God doesn’t want it. So I’m at least sending these words to you through Him, so you’ll know.” At that very moment a wave the size of a building hit the ship and the ship broke in two and sank, and grandmother with it. They say she always was a giddy one and that she liked to enjoy life. She never missed a church fair, or a wedding, or a christening, and she’d dance three nights in a row. And in the end she never even got her own grave, but instead she was eaten by the fishes.

Though if you ask me, eternity’s the same whether you’re eaten by worms in your grave or fishes in the sea. When the Day of Judgment comes, the folk in their graves and the ones from the sea will have to rise up just the same. And it’s a lot less trouble in the sea than when you have to build a tomb.

My grandmother on my father’s side, Paulina, died when I was still a kid, and I don’t remember her that well. Her husband, Grandfather Kacper, outlived her by a good few years, but what kind of life did he have. When he had to go to the outhouse, mother would send me out to keep an eye on him.

“You go, Szymuś honey, I’ve got pots on the boil here. Take grandpa behind the barn. If he wanders out onto the road again it’ll be embarrassing. And pull up a couple of parsnips for me.”

It’s hard to believe grandfather was supposedly the first person in the village to think up a hoop on the handle of a scythe. He either thought it up or saw it somewhere, people said different things. Some folks reckoned he must have seen it on his way back from the war. Someplace the people mowed with hoops on their scythes, and so when he got back he started mowing like that with his own scythe. I mean, what was there to think up. A length of oak rod, two holes in the grip, anyone could have thought of it. Besides, there are some things that nobody has to think up because they’re just there. A horsewhip for instance. It’s there and you crack it when the horse won’t pull. It must have come with the horse. Or the roof on a house, wheels on a cart, soles on boots.

Grandfather was supposed to have also started the fire brigade. Before, when someone’s place was on fire people would just run up each with their own bucket of water and when they’d emptied it onto the fire they thought they’d done all they could to help. The women would start their wailing, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus! And the men would take out their tobacco and light up. Here something’s on fire, and they’re all sitting around wondering if it was God’s will or if someone set it deliberately. Because if it was God’s will there was no point trying to put it out. Though the fact was, there weren’t any pumps in the farmyards and you had to go down to the river to fetch water. And the houses were made of wood, with thatched straw roofs. One time half the village went up in flames, including our place.

Also, grandfather had gotten papers to say he had a right to some land, because he’d given refuge to a group of insurgents in the uprising. He didn’t remember how much land it was, but he said it was a whole lot. He could have been lord of the manor. Except that he buried the papers somewhere and he couldn’t for the life of him remember where. It was hardly surprising, for more than fifty years there’d been no need to show them to anyone or even admit he had them. You could be sent to Siberia at the drop of a hat, so the papers could just have gone and lost themselves somewhere. On top of everything else, that was the time half the village burned down, so it wasn’t just people’s memory that got muddled up, but even their land, and now the papers were gone, because they’d been buried when the land was arranged differently.

Father would beg grandfather by all that was holy to remember, because it was already going around that Poland was going to be reborn. There’d be an end of servitude, obviously people would be grabbing land, and whoever grabbed it first, it would be theirs for good. They even tried to remember together. They’d get up at the crack of dawn, say a prayer, then father would lead grandfather around the farmyard and they’d go step by step, ever so slowly, staring at the ground, and at each step father would say, maybe here? They’d pause, grandfather would think and think and think, father’s eyes would start to light up with hope, but mostly grandfather would say, no, not here. Though sometimes, as if he’d gotten some kind of inspiration, he’d say, you know what, we should dig here. And father would dig. He’d dig a hole, then fill it in afterward. Later he’d get mad at grandfather, and start going on at him about how the devil must have clogged up his memory, that grandfather was a freeloader, because he never forgot how to eat, and if he hadn’t drunk so much back then his memory would be fine now, that he remembered all sorts of things he didn’t need to. What a song and dance there was about grandfather’s memory. Some days my mother even defended grandfather, saying what was father getting so hot under the collar about, we didn’t have that land before and we didn’t need it now to keep us healthy. Perhaps God didn’t want grandfather to remember, and there was no point getting angry at God, because God knew what he was doing. And grandfather was all timid, his bad memory weighed on him like some great wrongdoing, he was afraid to even look father in the eye. It was only when father reached for his tobacco pouch, which was a sign he was through being angry, that grandfather’s words also got their courage back:

“Dammit, I remember everything, but not that. I could even tell you who died when the epidemic came. Go on, ask me. They said it was Bolek Koseł brought it from somewhere else to Górki. Right after he came back from the army people in Górki started falling ill, and soon the whole village was dead. After Górki there were other villages, though people weren’t allowed to travel from one village to another, and everything was bleached, houses, fences, trees, shrines. And all those crosses they put up! There was a cross in every direction. And there weren’t just four directions, like now. Everywhere you turned there was a cross. And at every one of them people would be praying, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy. Luckily it only reached the edge of our village. The Powiślaks died, and Kasperski the miller. The Powiślaks were bandits, they got what they deserved. And Kasperski used to mix low-grade flour in with the regular stuff and he never gave you back all your bran. He was a straight-up crook. But there weren’t as many mills back then as there are now. There was the one here, then the next one was all the way over in Zawodzie. Sometimes it’d take you three days to get the job done. But people rode all the way to Zawodzie, though they cheated you there as well, even if it wasn’t by so much. There never was a world without cheating and there never will be. Once I bought some boots at the market. They looked like leather. When you spat on the sole it didn’t soak in. They were supposed to be for rain or shine, for church and for working in the fields, but they barely made it through the spring. I rode back over there to make the bastards give me my money back, but the people I bought them from weren’t there anymore. There were other people and they were saying the same thing, that their boots were the real deal. And do you know how much those boots cost? Go ahead, ask me. Just about the boots. Why shouldn’t you. Three rubles. I remember. I could even tell you the names of all the horses we ever had, in order. Ask me. At the very beginning we had a roan. Ruffian was his name, because he’d bite you and kick, he was a son of a bitch. He wasn’t a good workhorse so father sold him. But he didn’t tell the merchant the horse’s name was Ruffian. He said he was called Kuba, not Ruffian, and that our family name was Kapusta, not Pietruszka, and that our village was Oleśnica. Oleśnica was three miles in the opposite direction. And he never found us. You see, I remember. So I’ll remember about the papers as well. I’ll not die before it comes to me. Can I have a smoke?”

And though father was still acting like he was mad, he’d pass grandfather the tobacco. Then the next day he’d lead grandfather round the farmyard again. Step by step, and at every step: “Maybe here?” If you’d counted all those steps together they would have gone halfway around the world, though our farmyard isn’t that big at all. They walked the area behind the barn as well, and around the pond, they went into the cattle sheds and the barn itself, and father even carried grandfather down into the cellar, because our cellar’s a deep one with a couple dozen steep steps, and grandfather wouldn’t have been able to make it down there on his own. But it was always, not here. And just once in a while, we should dig here. And father would dig. He’d dig a hole then fill it in afterward. And once again he’d get mad at grandfather.

Father tried every possible way to get at grandfather’s memory. In the morning he would make grandfather tell him what he’d dreamed about the night before. But old people don’t have much to dream about anymore, so grandfather hardly ever had dreams. Father got angry again. He really didn’t have any dreams? So sometimes grandfather had dreams, but it was never what father wanted. Because either he was wading in the river and picking mint from the buckets that were stuck there, and as if out of spite the water was murky. Or he was dancing with Karolka Bugaj at Karolka’s wedding, and Karolka strokes grandfather’s cheek and whispers in his ear, “Oh, Kacper, Kacper, how come you’re so old?” Or father and him were walking around the farmyard and father asks, maybe here, and grandfather says, look at that worm coming up out of the ground. That means the soil is sick, nothing’ll come from it anymore.

So then father changed grandfather’s bedding, and instead of straw he filled the mattress with pea stalks, because if he wasn’t going to dream anything, at least he should sleep less soundly. If he twisted and turned more in the night he’d wake up more often, and his thoughts would come to him more and maybe he’d remember. He explained to grandfather that there’d been too many fleas and he’d had to refill the mattress, and there was only enough straw left for chaff. To begin with grandfather complained that he was stiff all over. But eventually he got used to it and in the end it was the same as straw for him.

Then father heard somewhere that wormwood was supposed to be good for bringing back memory. He gathered it all summer long from the edges of the fields and dried it; people thought he had something wrong with his stomach, because wormwood is good for your stomach as well. Grandfather wouldn’t drink it because it was too bitter, he said. So without telling mother, father bought some sugar and sweetened it. But grandfather still couldn’t remember.

Another time father took grandfather to the pub and got him drunk. He was hoping that when grandfather was drunk his soul would open up and let on where he’d buried those papers. But grandfather got all merry, as if he was fifty years younger. All of a sudden he felt like singing and dancing, he even almost got in a fight. And he bought drinks for anyone that happened to be at the pub, all on father’s penny it goes without saying. And when father tried to get him to go easy, saying he’d had enough, that they’d be left stone broke, he started calling him names, you little idiot, I’d never want a kid like you again! Not on your life!

Afterward father had to sell off a calf to pay back what he owed at the pub. The only good to come of it was that the next day, when grandfather sobered up and he just had an awful headache, he promised father that when Poland got its independence back he’d remember for sure. There was still time. The fighting was still going on. Because without an independent Poland those papers weren’t worth anything anyway, and that was why he couldn’t remember where he’d buried them. But Poland got its independence and he still didn’t remember.

Then he swore it would come to him when he was dying, because in the hour of death a person remembers their whole life. The person’s life stands by their bedside with a great book and says, I am Kacper Pietruszka, see all you’ve forgotten and all the sins you’ve committed, it’s written right here. You got crushed one time by that cart loaded with grain, you’d forgotten about it, but here it is. You never returned the sack of oats you borrowed from your neighbor Dereń, here it is. You wouldn’t give the Lord God your money that one time on Palm Sunday, here it is. And here are those papers you buried, right here on the first page. Written in the biggest letters in the whole book. But there was no way you could have remembered before the book was opened. Shall I read it to you?

Father watched over him like a dog for three days and three nights when grandfather lay dying, he didn’t have a moment’s sleep, because for some reason grandfather wasn’t able to die. It even seemed he might get better, because that had happened once before, he got better after he’d been given last rites. Goddammit, he’d said back then, there I was thinking I was already dead, and I was just dreaming it. On the third day father dozed off for a minute and that was when grandfather died. Ever so quietly, as if a little fly had flown out of the house. So when father woke up he asked grandfather one more time:

“So then, does it say in that book of yours where you buried them?”

It wouldn’t have been right for father to be mad at a dead person, but he put on a funeral for grandfather that wasn’t the kind a father should have. The casket was made of pine boards that weren’t even painted, just varnished over. And the priest didn’t lead the body out of the house, but only from the church. And at the cemetery all he did was sprinkle the casket and the family with holy water, throw in a piece of earth, and leave, because father didn’t even want those few words said over grandfather’s grave, that’s how bitter he was. And for years afterwards he never once looked in on grandfather, though grandfather and grandmother were in the same cemetery and close to each other, and he visited grandmother, but it was only mother and us grandsons that visited grandfather. He never gave money for a mass to be said for grandfather, mother had to do it on the quiet. And he never said grandfather’s name out loud. He would just give a sigh from time to time and say we could use more land than we had, because what was he going to leave to his four sons.

And he kept digging. He dug at random, wherever he felt he should, because there was no one left to say to him, Not here. He dug in the barn, in the grain bins, in the cattle sheds under the mangers, round the wagon house, by the front door. He even wanted to dig inside the house, but mother wouldn’t let him. One time he dreamt that the papers were buried under the dog’s kennel, so he moved the kennel to the other side of the yard, then he moved it somewhere else, then somewhere else again. He must have moved it ten times or more, and he dug in each of those ten places, as if we had ten kennels and ten dogs. But we only had the one. And from having his kennel moved around the whole time the dog stopped knowing what he was supposed to bark at. So he barked at everything, people, horses, cows, chickens, geese, ducks. He even barked at father. In the end, one night he broke loose from his chain and disappeared. People said they saw him running across the fields like a mad dog.

And father kept digging. When the mood struck him he wouldn’t even go out plowing but he’d dig holes instead. War came, the planes flew right over the thatched roofs, people ran away into the fields with their cattle and their bedding, and he just seemed to get more single-minded with his digging, and he’d make bigger and bigger holes.

He kept digging after the war too, though he seemed to have lost faith, because often he’d just walk round and round the farmyard not knowing where to start, and all of a sudden he’d toss his spade down and go off to do the threshing or cut chaff. When he got old and his strength began to fail, once in a while he’d still go and do some digging. Sometimes he’d dig a pit as deep as half a man right in the middle of the yard, and it’d have to be filled in straightaway because the wagon couldn’t even drive in.

When I wouldn’t let him dig in the yard he’d go into the orchard and dig there. From all that digging my russet tree withered up, and my masztan sweet plum. The plum tree used to bear plums like cow’s eyes. Some years there’d be so many that its branches were weighed down to the ground. I had to keep an eye on it the whole time to stop the local boys pulling the leaves off with the fruit. They were the best plums of all for fruit soup.

Then, when he was dying he gave me a sign that he had something to say to me, and in a croaky voice that already seemed to come from the next world he told me I should keep digging, because although he never found the papers, I would for sure. Now, now he would know where to dig. But now it was too late for him.

Father and mother were both buried in regular graves in the ground, and they’re lying there now waiting for me to finish this tomb. There’s probably not much left of them, it doesn’t take long for the earth to make them over. There may be more of father, because he was buried a lot later, but mother, after they brought Michał back she only lived another six months or so, that was all those years ago, and she first fell ill soon after the war. Maybe they even think I’ve forgotten about them. They’ve been lying there all this while, the earth working them over, perhaps they reckon I’ve turned to drink. “Szymek, Szymek, think what you’re doing.” Soon there won’t be the littlest bone left of them. But I made myself a promise that as soon as I finish that tomb I’ll have new caskets made for them and I’ll move whatever’s left of them. They’ll be in there next to each other, on the left lower side, that’s what I decided, because the bottom right is for me and Michał, and on top there’ll be Antek and Stasiek and their wives. In that way we’ll all be together and none of them’ll be able to say that I got the farm and they were left with nothing. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be building a tomb, I wouldn’t have gone to all that expense and all that effort. I mean, when it comes down to it is it all that much better in a walled tomb than in the ground? If it was just me I’d actually rather be in the ground. So long as I had a mound of earth smoothed over with a spade, some kind of cross stuck in there, and the thirty years of eternity a person’s officially entitled to, I’d be fine. Then someone else could come lie in my place. And after them there’d be somebody else, and somebody else, and so on till the very end, as long as there are people in the world. Because there’s no point separating yourself from the earth with a stone wall after you’re dead. A person lives from the earth, and they should give their eternity back to the earth. The earth deserves something from people too.

One time in the resistance I spent three days alive in one of those walled tombs and I won’t say it was all that comfortable. I tried imagining that I was a corpse myself, but it didn’t help. On top of everything else, probably to keep people out they’d made the entranceway small as a rabbit cage, you couldn’t even stand up or turn around. There was two of us, me and this other guy, Honeybee was his resistance name, and we had to squat facing each other the whole time. Our legs were all tangled up, his next to mine, mine next to his; it was like they all belonged to both of us at once, because there wasn’t room for us to each have our own legs. And we kept asking each other, is that your leg or mine? I’ve gotten the worst goddam pins and needles in it. I kept thinking it was yours. When one of us needed to stretch, he’d slide over into an empty space where there was room for a new body. Three of the places were still free and three had coffins. They weren’t even walled in, they’d just slid the caskets in there. But you couldn’t lie for long in those slots, you got stiff from the lack of room and from the concrete.

We’d been on a recce to this one village and we’d gotten caught in a manhunt. Before we knew it the place was crawling with Germans. There was no woods and no river, and the village was right in the middle of a flat plain. Plus it was autumn, the crops had been harvested and the fields were bare. There were just a few orchards behind people’s barns, that was it. Luckily there was an old man sitting outside his house, and when he saw us running away he shouted to us:

“Go to the cemetery! The cemetery! Over there!” And he pointed with his stick at a stand of trees that looked as though they’d popped up in the middle of the flatness just to give us shelter.

We ran there and crawled into the first tomb we found. We pulled the cover over and stayed there. They must have buried someone in it not that long ago, because on the top there was still a wreath made of fir and spruce and flowers, all dried up. Over the whole thing there was the most beautiful Lord Jesus I think I’ve ever seen. He had one hand on his heart and the other stretched out in front of him like he was checking whether it was raining out in the world. Inside, it was dark and smelly, but you just had to say to yourself, tough. Though it was actually hard to say anything at all, words just left a bitter taste in your mouth. Besides, what can you talk about in a tomb. You let out a fuck it or whatever and that’s pretty much all you have to say. Even when we tried to talk to pass the time, the only thing that came to our lips were more cusswords, like we’d forgotten all the decent words. But there are times when all the decent words in the world won’t do the job of a single fuck it. It’s like they’re all hollow and blind and lame. And too stupid for the whole situation, however decent they are. Decent words are good for when life is decent. But in there the lice were biting like there was no tomorrow, it was all we could do to just keep it together. Once they got properly going there wasn’t an inch of our bodies that didn’t itch. We were a paradise for them in that tomb. And in addition, it was like we were sharing the lice and our bodies were shared as well. When his body started to itch, mine upped and started to also. I’d scratch my belly or the back of my neck, and he’d start scratching in exactly the same place. Though it was hardly surprising. We were crammed in there, bent double, and they could hop about on us to their heart’s content. Besides, if we hadn’t had lice we would have itched anyway. When a person isn’t talking or thinking or moving, they have to at least have an itch.

I was tougher, I’d scratch and for a while it would go away. But he was a town kid and he’d probably never had to deal with lice before. He’d start scratching his head and all you could hear was scrit, scrit, scrit, like someone was planing a casket nearby.

“Cut it out,” I’d say, because I was starting to hurt from his skin. But he’d just keep on, scrit, scrit, scrit.

“Cut it out for chrissakes, you hear?”

And he’d just be scrit, scrit, scrit. He was going to scratch himself to death, or give us away. At one moment I got so mad I pulled my gun on him.

“If you don’t cut it out I’ll shoot you, I swear to God I will.”

“Fire away. Makes no difference to me whether I die from a bullet or from lice.”

That same day, in the late afternoon, the old man that had pointed the way to the cemetery came to visit. How he figured out which tomb we were in I couldn’t say. First we heard this light tapping on the cover. Our hearts stopped and I grabbed the other guy’s arms in case he felt the need to scratch himself. Then all of a sudden there’s this banging noise, and when you’re in a tomb it sounds like you’re inside a drum.

“Hey there, say something. I know you’re in there. It’s me.” I moved the cover aside a bit and I saw it was the old man from outside the house. He was kneeling with his hands together as though he was praying.

“Because of you I gotta kneel at the Siewierskis’ tomb, and they’re a right bunch of good-for-nothings. One of those bastards in there with you stole my heifer, the crook. But what can I do. I brought you some moonshine and some bread and lard. You ought to eat something.”

“God bless you,” I said. “How are things in the village?”

“Not good. There’s going to be hangings. They gathered all the men outside the firehouse and picked out ten of them that haven’t provided a levy like they were supposed to. The carpenters are building a gallows. When they’re gone I’ll let you know.”

The moonshine was strong — not at all watered down. We each tried a mouthful to begin with. He was going to refuse, said he didn’t drink, but I made him. Then we took another mouthful. It was supposed to just warm us up and help with the lice, because when you’ve got vodka in your system they don’t bite so bad. But would that work from two mouthfuls only? Your blood has to be properly drunk, so there’s not a single drop left sober. And if you could measure it, two mouthfuls wouldn’t even be enough to get your finger tipsy. So we had another drink. In addition, we didn’t want to waste the food, because who knew if the old man would come back again. So we drank without eating, like we were drinking to the dead, on empty bellies. He started saying no, he couldn’t drink any more, that it stank of beetroot.

“Drink,” I said. “You see, the lice aren’t biting. If you were sober you’d already be scratching away.”

So we drank, him a mouthful, me a mouthful, and so on in turns till the bottle was empty. Nothing was biting, nothing was itching, and the tomb seemed less cramped. You even felt you could have stood up and stretched. In the end we fell asleep.

Except that when we woke up, then the lice really started in. Once he got to scratching himself I thought I’d lose it. I gave him some of the bread and lard. He ate it with one hand and with the other he just went on scratching. Plus he started whining about whether there wasn’t a little drop of hooch left. There wasn’t. I could’ve used a drink myself. I felt sorry for him. I was itching like hell myself, but you could tell it was worse for him. In the end I pulled my belt out.

“Give me your hands, I’ll tie them.”

He started begging me not to do it because he’d itch even more. True, I thought.

“Then get a goddam grip!”

“I can’t though, it itches so bad.”

“Then eat sunflower seeds.”

“Sunflower seeds? Where would I find sunflower seeds?”

“Don’t ask questions, just get on with it.”

“I would, but how can I do it without a sunflower?”

“It’s easy. It’s so dark in here you can’t see a thing anyway. Just imagine you’ve got a big sunflower dial on your lap and you’re picking out the seeds. You’re putting the seeds in your mouth and biting out the insides. Don’t you remember? You found the sunflower at the edge of the village outside that one house. The one that was painted blue, with the pots drying on the fence and the cat sunning itself by the wall and chickens pecking in the dust. You slipped into the yard and tried to twist off the head of a sunflower but it wouldn’t come off. Then this girl came out of the house and said, I’ll get a knife. And she did. Take that big one, she said. Or you can take all of them if you want. And she kept smiling at you. What about that one, see, it’s got nice big seeds. You got it there? Just don’t spit the husks out on me.”

“It’s good and ripe, did you try it?”

“Sure it’s ripe. It’s fall, this time of year everything’s ripe.”

“You want to pick some seeds with me?”

“I’m not the one the lice are bothering.”

So he picked away. He’d only scratch himself once in a while, the rest of the time he picked seeds. You could hear them crack in his mouth and then he’d spit out the husks. I was already thinking he’d forget about the lice. Even I was itching less, though I wasn’t picking sunflower seeds. Then all at once he ups and says:

“At the edge of the village, outside that blue house? That was where they were growing?”

“Keep picking,” I said. “Why’ve you stopped?”

“I’m going out to get more. Maybe they’re still there.” And he starts getting up to go.

“Where are you off to? Sit the hell down, you’re fine here.”

“I’ll bring some more and you can have some.”

“What are you, nuts? The Germans are out there.”

“So what? You heard the old man — they already chose the ones they’re gonna hang. Maybe they already hung them.”

“They’ll kill you,” I said, trying to stop him. “There weren’t any sunflowers there. I was making it up. The sunflowers were in a different village.”

“You weren’t making it up. I remember them. And I remember the girl. She brought me a knife. She told me to take the one with the big seeds. And I did. But now I’m out of seeds.”

I buried him in the same cemetery, in the bare earth, without a casket or a funeral. I patted down the mound of earth, made him a cross. I took the wreath from the tomb we’d been hiding in, from the Siewierskis — if they were bastards they could do without a wreath — and I played him a tune on my mouth organ, because I always had my mouth organ with me. Honeybee, you damn fool. You should’ve stuck to picking sunflower seeds.

That was mostly how we buried people in the resistance, wherever they fell. Without a casket, in the bare ground. For the cross you’d cut down a birch branch. You wouldn’t even strip the bark off, just fasten two pieces together with a bit of wire or a strip of leather and you had a cross. And you didn’t leave any information, no first name or last name. The person just lay there and they didn’t know who they were. Anyone who stopped by on their way wouldn’t know either. The Lord God himself might not have known. Though every one of them had some kind of name. Grzęda, Sowa, Smardz, Krakowiak, Malinowski, Buda, Gruszka, Mikus, Niecałek, Barcik, Tamtyrynda, Wrzosek, Maj, Szumigaj, Jamroz, Kudła, Wróbel, Karpiel, Guz, Mucha, Warzocha, Czerwonka, Bąk, Zyga, Kozieja, Donda, Zając, Lis, Gałęza, Kołodziej, Jan, Józef, Jędrzej, Jakub, Mikołaj, Marcin, Mateusz. There wouldn’t have been enough room in the calendar of saints. And all of them had to deny their own names and rot like carrion.

Sometimes you’d just hang a forage cap on the cross, if the man had one. And it was, Sleep beneath the earth and dew, May you dream of Poland true. But not many of them had a forage cap. They mostly had caps with peaks, berets, ski caps. There were a few hats, a handful of four-cornered army caps, and once in a while someone would have a sheepskin hat or a fur hat. Some of them had hats that you didn’t even know what to call them, because they were whatever they’d brought from home or had come by during their soldiering. Mikus and Łukasik even had balaclavas like mothers make their children wear in the winter, with earflaps and a strap buttoned under the chin. But those two weren’t even sixteen, we’d found them sleeping in the woods in a clump of juniper, because the Germans had burned their village and killed their fathers and their mothers, they were the only ones from the whole village that had managed to escape. And if you didn’t have anything else you just wore a plain goddam cap. You just had to give it a good wash first, not to clean it so much as get rid of all the bad thoughts from the cap that might have taken root in the dirt. And you pinned a little eagle on the front, and under the eagle a tiny strip from a white-and-red flag.

To judge by the caps you might have thought we were a bunch of riffraff and pansies, not an army. A rabble that was only good for digging ditches, or building dikes, or beating game when the masters go hunting, not an army. But inside each man there was a devil, and each one of them had a heart of stone. They forgot about God and they forgot how to cry. And even when we were burying one of our own, no one shed a tear. It was just, Ten-shun! Because sometimes tears make bigger holes than bullets. No one dared so much as let their stomach rumble, even if they hadn’t had a bite to eat in three days and were hungrier than during Lent. Or even swallow loud. Or even sniff. And no one was allowed to whisper amen. I’d just look at everyone’s eyes to make sure none of them were wet. Because in my command, attention didn’t just mean feet together and hands at your buttocks. It meant attention in your mind, and standing up straight in your soul. Everything was at attention. I had a voice like a bell, I sang bass in the church choir and sometimes the priest even had to ask me to sing quieter, our church isn’t that big, you don’t want the Lord God to go deaf, do you? Remember you’re singing right in his ear. He doesn’t like it to be too loud, he even prefers it when someone’s feeling the hymn more than singing it, just like he prefers humbler people over greater people. So when I called Ten-shun! even a hunchback would have straightened up. But then, in the resistance my name was “Eagle,” and the difference between attention and at ease was the same as the difference between life and death. People might find it hard to believe that one word could have so much power. But it did. Like the power of fate when it settles on someone. Like the power of hell and heaven together. At attention a person can do anything, however much he doesn’t want to, or it’s beyond his strength. Like they say, he could knock over mountains and turn back rivers. At attention the heart beats slower and the mind thinks straighter. Who knows, maybe at attention you could even die without regrets. I sometimes wonder how so much power can fit in a single word like that. Whoever thought up that word must have known life through and through. Because there are times when you have no other choice than to say to your own self, attention!

If I died they were forbidden the same to shed a tear, they had to just stand at attention. At most someone could play a song for me on the mouth organ. “Stone upon stone, on stone a stone.” Because if I had to choose only one tune to take with me to the next world, that would be the one. Of all the tunes in all my life.

Sometimes I regret it didn’t happen that way. I’d have had it all over and done with, I wouldn’t have had to struggle with everything like I do now. Like with the tomb for instance. On top of that the district administration folks are always telling me how much grain I have to sell them, how many potatoes, how much beet, how much of this, how much of that, and every year it’s more and more. I’ll sell however much grows. A bitch won’t pup ten times a year, she’ll do it twice at the most. Likewise the earth’ll only give birth to what it can. And from you it’ll only buy the same shit. Though when I die you’ll take my land away anyway, it’s not like I have anyone to leave it to. You’ll be able to sell it and buy ten times as much. But while I’m alive it’s my land, and it’s just as well I feel like working it, because otherwise it’d be standing fallow. Yet you won’t get those folks to understand. They’ve never worked the land in all their lives, though they know all about it because they went to school. But you can only learn about the land from the land itself, not from any books.

For years they went on at me to get rid of the thatch on my house and put up tiles or tar paper, because there was an ordinance against thatched roofs. But it’s in perfectly good shape, it’s not leaking or anything. They say it’s an eyesore. If you ask me, though, that thatched roof of mine is handsomer than any amount of tile or tar paper or even sheet-metal roofing. Besides which, I’ve got the attic. Come take a look, goddammit, you’ve probably all forgotten what an attic looks like. Where are you going to find an attic like that under tiles and tar paper and sheeting? Those aren’t attics, they’re boxes. Crates. When it’s hot they’re hot as hellfire itself, and when it’s cold, up there it’s even colder. In my attic it’s warm in winter and cool in summer. Grain, flour, onions, garlic — it can all be kept up there without going moldy or without freezing. You can dry cheeses there, or hang clothes up to air. Or just go take a nap, when you’ve been working like a dog or you’ve had enough of everything it’s cozier than downstairs, there aren’t as many flies and it’s as if the thatch keeps the rest of the world at bay. What the heck have you got against thatched roofs? You know, you’d be better off building a road to the mill, because in springtime a pair of horses isn’t strong enough to pull a wagon out of the mud that’s there. Or find a blacksmith for the village, so people don’t have to go all the way to Boleszyce to get their horse shod. There’s not going to be an ordinance against horses any time soon. Have you heard the sound of rain on thatch? You won’t ever hear that sound under tiles or tar paper or metal sheeting — those make it sound like gravel falling from the sky. Under thatch it sounds like pure white grains of semolina pattering down. You can lie there forever listening to the rain making that sound. And if you need to gather your thoughts, you won’t find a better place to do it than under thatch. Not in the fields, not in the orchard, not by the river or in the church.

Also, I’ve got swallows under the eaves. When the little ones hatch they start chirping for food right from first light, and I wake up with them. There’s fewer and fewer swallows in our village, ever since people started getting rid of their thatched roofs. Because swallows won’t just build their nests again when you change your roof. They won’t take to any old roof. For instance they can’t stand tar paper, metal sheeting the same. With the metal sheeting, when it’s hot the heat makes their nests all sticky, while tar paper stinks. Storks, now, they’re more likely to get used to a different roof, so long as you mount an old wagon wheel up there for them or a handful of sticks woven together. Doves can be lured back too, you just need to put down some grain for them. Not to mention sparrows — to them it’s all the same what kind of roof you have, as long as they’ve got food to eat. But swallows, even if they’ve lived under the same roof as humans for years, they’re constantly afraid. The fear of God, human fear, trembling like aspen leaves. And they’re forever in flight. Forever on the wing. Close by one minute, way far away the next. Up high and down low. One minute skimming the ground, the next up a height. Like they were always on the run from something. From what, though? Sometimes you look at them up there, and it’s as if they’re a blade of grass making the eye of the sky water. Other times, seems they feel hemmed in by the world and they’re bouncing about like they’re trapped in a cage between the sky and the earth. Like they’re losing their senses from all that flying. They keep chasing, chasing. Chasing what? Because even when they fly ever so low over the house they make such sharp turns that they almost cut your eye, it’s like they don’t want you to even remember them at all. If it wasn’t for the fact that they’re half black you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the sun glinting up in the sky. It’s only when they’re high up that they get a bit calmer. Though even then they’re nowhere near as calm as storks, or doves. There are times the whole world is broiling, the heat’s so sleepy even the dogs are too tired to bark, they just doze in their doghouses. Even the chickens move over to the shade and put their heads under their wings. There’s not so much as a leaf moving. The flies can’t be bothered to bite. There’s nothing but the swallows trembling high up in the air or plunging down close to the ground. You wonder how they have the energy, what they’re doing it for. Then the next day there’s either a storm or there isn’t. Because swallows know no peace.

People have one swallow’s nest, maybe two, but under my roof there must be ten of them. We got so used to each other that even in the hospital they’d wake up with me. It would usually start with a noise that sounded like a drop of dew falling on something soft. That was the first hungry nestling waking up. I’d open my eyes and look out the window. Dawn through the window looks like an empty tin pail. After the first drop there’d come a second, though this time it was like it hit the pail, it was hungrier. After that a third, a fourth, a tenth, each one hungrier than the last. Then the dawn would start to grow brighter. At first it was like someone was rinsing out the dark blue of the pail. Then after a bit someone else would bring milk in the pail from the milking and put it in the middle of the room. Right away the beds would start creaking. Someone would say something. Someone would give a sigh to God. Someone missing a leg or an arm would turn over on his other side and the whole ward would turn with them. After that you couldn’t sleep any longer.

It might even have been one of those dawns when I got the idea of maybe having a tomb built, so everyone would have a place they could be buried in. Because your thoughts after you’ve been asleep are like swallows at dawn. And in the hospital wanted and unwanted thoughts come to you alike. Even thoughts that would never have occurred to a healthy person. Because healthy people only think on this side of the world. When you try and think on the other side, your thoughts slip like they were on glass. Because if you’re going over there you need to go body and soul with your thoughts. For good.

It’s not surprising really. You’re lying there confined to your bed, you’ve got more time than there are flies on shit and you don’t know what to do with it. You don’t feel like sleeping any more, how much can a person sleep anyway. There’s nothing to talk about either, because it’s always about the same thing. An hour seems as long as a day, a day as long as a month, a month as long as a year. I doubt you’d have so much time even in eternity. And that kind of empty time is worse than the sickness itself. On top of that, you’ve got twelve beds on the ward. And in each one of them there’s either an amputated leg or a crushed arm, someone run over by a tractor, someone that broke their back, or someone else with a pipe in their Adam’s apple making this whistling sound, here someone’s had half their stomach cut out, next to them someone’s head is wrapped in bandages, and over there it’s hard to know exactly what’s wrong with him. Every day the whole place is sighing, hacking, groaning, dying. And everybody’s going on and on and on about his illness and all. There’s nowhere to run, so you run away in your thoughts, though it’s not much better in there.

I never did as much thinking in my whole life as I did during those two years in the hospital. When I got out I felt as if my head was twice as heavy. It kept buzzing like a beehive. But you couldn’t not think. Even if you didn’t want to, your thoughts thought themselves on their own. If you shooed them out of your head they just flew around you like a flock of crows driven out of a poplar tree. Cawing and squawking. There was no way you could stop them, even though they were your thoughts.

If someone had said to me before that I’d be the one to have a tomb built I’d have laughed them out. Me build a tomb. I wasn’t either the youngest or the oldest. And I had no intention of running the farm. I wasn’t drawn to the land. I did what I did because father told me to, but in my thoughts I was always somewhere else.

Of us four brothers Stasiek was the one most likely to take over the farm, he looked like a farmer ever since he was small. Father even used to imagine how Stasiek would probably have a new house built when he grew up. And Stasiek and him would discuss it back and forth, because Stasiek wanted it to have stone walls, with cellars and a verandah and rounded windows, with sheet-metal roofing and laid floors in all the rooms. While father wanted to leave an earthen floor at least in the kitchen, because how could you walk on floorboards in muddy boots when fall comes. And sometimes you needed to spit or stamp out a cigarette butt. Stasiek wanted three rooms. Two downstairs, one for him and his wife when he got married, and a separate one for father and mother. And a third one upstairs so that when one of us brothers came to visit we’d also have a room of our own to stay in. Plus a storeroom and a larder. You were supposed to get to all the rooms separately from the hallway. Father tried to convince Stasiek that at least him and mother should be able to go into their room from the kitchen. Their whole lives they’d lived like that and it would be hard to change. But Stasiek wouldn’t budge, it had to be from the hallway only, because he’d seen it done like that at the presbytery and at the miller’s, where you went into each of the rooms separately. You were supposed to take your boots off in the hallway and put slippers on, because he’d seen that at the presbytery and the miller’s as well. Though before he built the house, father would probably have persuaded him to let him and mother get to their room from the kitchen. They were old and they wouldn’t have used that doorway long. Then afterward he could’ve altered it. Or maybe he would have changed when he got older himself, and he’d want to get to his room straight from the kitchen just like father and mother.

And if he’d had a house built he probably also would have put up a tomb. Because a real farmer ought to have his own tomb too. The house is the trunk and the tomb is the roots, and it’s only house and tomb together that make up the whole tree. Besides, if father and mother had died he wouldn’t have just buried them in an ordinary grave. Even just for when you visit the cemetery on All Souls’ Day it’s nicer to stand at a stone-built tomb where everyone’s all together than at separate graves in the earth. It’s nicer to pray and to light candles there, even your grief feels better. And when your tomb is better looking than the other ones, you feel like you’re not just master of your own however many acres but that you’ve worked a decent piece of land in the next world as well.

Michał or Antek, not to mention me — none of us could compete with Stasiek. Though by the time Stasiek was starting school Michał had already left to seek his fortune in the outside world. Antek, on the other hand, he was a madcap, you never knew what he’d come up with next. Whereas me, I never dreamed of ever building a new house, let alone a tomb. I was always more interested in living than in dying. Living and living, as long as I could, as much as I could. Even if there was no reason to. Though does it matter all that much whether there’s a reason or no? Maybe it actually makes no difference, and we’re just wasting our time worrying about it. Who knows, maybe living is the eleventh commandment that God forgot to tell us. Or perhaps everyone has it written in their stars or in some other book that they’re supposed to keep on living, and that has to be enough. People don’t need to know everything. Horses don’t know things and they go on living. And bees, for instance, if they knew it was humans they were collecting honey for, they wouldn’t do it. How are people any better than horses or bees?

In any case I couldn’t have said whether I liked living or I just felt I had to, so much so that I felt closer to being born than to dying. And death counted for little with me. I was only interested in life. It goes without saying that death came after me a good few times, probably more than the next man. There were moments it followed right behind me and even lay down to rest beside me, because it thought it might take me in my sleep. Other times it already had its bony hands on me. But it never got the better of me. Sometimes, at those moments it would weep with rage. Weep away, you dark bastard. I’m going to keep on living awhile, because that’s what I feel like doing. You’ll never take me when you want to. I’ll come to you myself when I’ve had enough, I’ll say I’m done with living, I can die now.

How so much life got into me I couldn’t say. Sometimes it’s destiny, and sometimes a person’s born that keeps on living however much everything gangs up against them. It’s as if life itself picked them to stand up to death.

I wasn’t quite three when the neighbor’s turkey-cock strayed into our yard. It was big as a young cow and all covered in dangling red wattles, like it had a cherry branch instead of a neck. The wattles made everything around go red, like a red glow from a fire. The barn, the cattle shed, the fence, the ground, it all suddenly turned red. The dog dashed out of its kennel and started yapping at the turkey, it was filled with red anger. The cat came out of the house, here kitty kitty, its fur was gray, and all of a sudden now it was red. The geese, it seemed like someone had taken their white covers off, as if they were pillows and they were waddling around in the red linings. And even the scythe leaning against the barn started to drip with red blood, drip, drip, drip.

I set off toward the turkey to pull off those wattles of his that had turned the whole world red, and hang them around my own neck. He probably thought I wanted to play with him, and to begin with he started running away. Then all of a sudden he came to a stop, bristled up, gobbled, and spread out like a whole cherry tree, and the blood almost burst from his wattles. I reached for his neck, and he ups and jabs me in the hand, jabs me in the head. Then he gobbles again and jabs me again. But by this time I’d already gotten ahold of his neck with both hands, and I held on like it was a fence post. He tugged and jumped, but I wouldn’t let go. He started hitting me with his wings, and with his head caught in my hands he jerked me one way and the other like he was trying to leave me his head and get free even if it meant going headless. He didn’t manage to, though, because in my little hands I could feel the strength of four grown-up hands. He dragged me all the way across the yard and back. In the end he must have decided there was nothing else for it. He stood still, spread his wings like two clouds, and tried to fly. He flapped and flapped, he thrashed and he twisted and turned, but for some reason the air wouldn’t lift him up. We both fell to the ground. We were covered in dust. You couldn’t have said what was turkey and what was me, we were just one big tangle.

I thought my eyes were covered in red from the wattles, and I didn’t mind one bit. But it was blood that was blinding me. I started to feel weak. The turkey was on his last legs too, he was just barely moving his wings. He tried to peck me again, but what could he do with nothing but his head sticking out of my grip like it was poking out of a hole. He didn’t peck any harder than if he’d been picking up grain from the ground. Besides, he might not even have been able to see what he was pecking, because his eyes were popping out like pebbles. He opened his beak wide and began hissing like a punctured tire, but he was weaker and weaker. I passed out and he collapsed on top of me. Father and mother came running out of the house. They thought we were dead. And that more likely the turkey had pecked me to death than that I’d strangled the turkey. I was a child, after all. And the turkey weighed twenty-two pounds even after it was plucked and dressed. Father carried me into the house. He was crying up a storm and all covered in my blood.

A whole horde of neighbors gathered. They sent to the village for holy water to splash on me before my soul left my body and it went cold. Some of them already began to say the prayers for the dead, others were comforting mother, telling her God wouldn’t let any harm come to me in the next world, and he might even make me one of his angels, because I’d not done any wrong in this world. And they waited for the holy water. But before it arrived I came to of my own accord. Except that when I saw the crowd of people over me I burst out crying and mother had to hold me in her arms for the longest time before I calmed down.

It was the same when I was older and I’d go caroling with the other boys, no one would agree to be King Herod, because death cut Herod’s head off and no one liked to be killed. So I was always Herod, because I preferred being king to being afraid of death. We had a real scythe, one that was used for mowing, not a fake one with a wooden blade. When death cut your head off with a real scythe you felt death was real too, and not Antek Mączka dressed up as death in a white sheet. Especially because each time I was killed the blade of the scythe had to touch my neck, not just knock my crown off. But I never once flinched. Though death cut my head off and I was a goner as many times as we visited houses in a night. The farmers we caroled for sometimes couldn’t even watch, and their wives would scream and cover their children’s eyes. But in the houses where they were most frightened, afterward they’d give us each an even bigger serving of pie, and a piece of sausage, and a glass of vodka. They always turned to me and said, you want a top-off? They’d check whether the scythe was honed and whether I didn’t have a cut on my neck. And they couldn’t get over it. He’s a brave one, dammit. That’s for sure. He’s a proper Herod. The real thing. There was just that one time Antek Mączka brought the scythe down and nicked me till I bled, so I took his scythe away from him and kicked his ass and he didn’t play death anymore.

Or in the resistance, seven times I was wounded. Once I thought I was already in the next world. I got hit in the stomach. When I opened my eyes I was actually surprised it was exactly the same woods, the same sky, that a skylark was singing somewhere up above. A skylark, okay, why shouldn’t there be skylarks in the next world. Except that not far away there was a village in flames. Cows were lowing there, a baby was crying, someone was wailing, Jesuuus! And way far away in the distance a farmer was plowing. He didn’t look like a farmer from this world but like the soul of a farmer, because he wasn’t looking in the direction of the fire, he didn’t hear the shouts or the howling and moaning, he was just bending over his plow and plowing. I didn’t know which world to believe in, this one or the next. Truth be told, I didn’t really feel much like coming back to this world. But the next one just seemed like a continuation of this one. Till I felt that I was lying soaked in blood, and that the lark above me was a lark from earth. Though I wasn’t glad about it at all. It felt like I’d died in the next world and I’d come to this one to live.

I figured it’d be almost fall before I got out of the hospital, maybe I’d be home after the potato lifting. Because I wasn’t in any kind of a hurry. For what? I was just a bit worried about Michał. But they told me he was getting by more or less. One day this person would bring him something to eat, another day someone else. The people from the farmers’ circle were supposed to take in the harvest for me, or if not them, the neighbors. As for the potatoes and the beets, someone would agree to do them in return for a third of the harvest, that was what I was offering.

Except that one day the doctor came. He told me to get out of bed and walk up and down across the ward, with sticks and without. He said he ought to keep me in till the fall, but he knew, he knew I’d want to be getting home for the harvest. So they discharged me, I just had to come back for checkups. I was going to tell him there wasn’t anything I particularly had to rush back for, that the farmers’ circle would take in my harvest for me and if not the neighbors would do it, like they’d done the previous two years. It wasn’t as if I was about to pick up a scythe myself from the get-go. When you’re working with a scythe your legs need to be as healthy as your arms. Mowers even say that with proper mowing, you use your legs and your back, that all your arms do is swing back and forth. But I didn’t say anything. I thought, you’ve been through umpteen harvests and now all of a sudden you’re going to try and get out of one, and here in front of a doctor. There were plenty of men on the ward who dreamed of getting out for the harvest, at least one last one before they died. Just to touch the spikes of wheat with their living hand, maybe see the mowing one last time, take a look at the fields, breathe in the earth. For a good many of them it’d be easier to leave for the next world if they knew there were harvests waiting for them there too. It’s common knowledge, a person lives by the earth, so they ought to be drawn to the harvest like a dog to a bitch.

And so I came home. And right away on the third day I headed out for the cemetery to take a look around. I took a tape measure, a pencil, and a piece of paper, because I wanted to measure some of the graves to see what would be best for me.

Our cemetery is just outside the village. You pass the last houses, hang a left, and walk uphill a bit. When they’re taking a dead person in his casket from one of the houses you can make it all the way with three changes of bearers, four at the most. Even from the farthest places, from the mill or by the school. I’ve been a bearer many a time, always at the head. The head is a lot heavier than the legs, because from the stomach up you’ve got the back and the shoulders and the head, while what is there to carry at the legs, just thighs and shins and ten toes. But I could’ve gone the whole way without being spelled, except it wouldn’t be right not to have a change of bearers. And that’s probably what made me think the cemetery was close. Besides, I’d forgotten that my legs weren’t the same legs they used to be, and every step was like a hundred steps before.

I looked to see if there wasn’t someone driving that could give me a ride part of the way. But I’d picked the wrong time — it was noon, everyone was in the fields. My hands went numb from the walking sticks, the uphill part at the end was the worst. So the moment I made it past the cemetery gate I plopped down on the nearest tomb. I was staggered, my eyes were blinded with sweat.

Kozioł Family, I read on the stone I was sitting on. It didn’t look that big. No one would have believed you could’ve gotten more than three or four people in there. But when they buried old Kozioł here a few years ago there were already five of them in the tomb and he was number six. Though the fact is they barely managed to squeeze him in there. The coffins were squashed next to each other like barrels in a cellar. There wasn’t enough room to go inside and set the casket on its rails. They looked for the smallest farmer to climb in, but no one wanted to be the smallest one. Each one they asked said no, it wasn’t him, so-and-so was smaller. Anyway, how can you tell who’s the smallest in a crowd of people like that. You’d have had to take out a tape measure and measure them. In the end they found someone, maybe he wasn’t the smallest one, but he went in there. Except afterwards he couldn’t get out, because the casket was blocking his way and they had to pull it out again. So then they lifted it up because they thought it might be easier to get it in from the top, but this time the coffin lid got in the way. When they took the lid off, it came out that they were burying their father in resoled shoes. Another time I went to the firehouse to watch the farmers playing cards. The Koziołs’ kid Franek was playing with Jasiu Bąk and Marciniak and Kwiatkowski. Jasiu Bąk had gotten a full house, Marciniak had a straight flush, Kwiatkowski was carrying a pair, and Franek didn’t have a thing, but he was the most fanatical of all of them. In the end he bet the whole pot, and in the pot there must have been ten pairs of shoes, a suit, a shirt, a tie, maybe even a coffin. And he lost the lot, because Jasiu called him. Franek didn’t bat an eyelid. He even took another two hundred from his pocket and sent Gwóźdź out for a bottle of vodka.

I measured a dozen or so of the tombs. I didn’t just measure them, I looked them over carefully and sounded them. From what I could see, the tombs that Chmiel built were way sturdier than the ones the Woźniaks had made. Also, in comparison with Chmiel’s, the Woźniaks’ ones were tiny, even when they were for the same number of coffins. And even the oldest tombs Chmiel had built, from before the war, were still good, it was like they were part of the earth. Because Chmiel had been building tombs for donkey’s years. The Woźniaks only started during the war, when Chmiel couldn’t keep up with the work.

Some people told me to go with the Woźniaks, they were a lot younger and they worked the two of them together, while Chmiel was old and took his time. And that with the Woźniaks I wouldn’t have any trouble getting lime or cement, because they bought it directly off the people that filched it from the trains. It was just that I didn’t like the Woźniaks’ work, and on top of that they like to eat well and at each meal you have to buy them a bottle, because otherwise they’ll go work for someone else and leave your job unfinished. Chmiel didn’t drink. Also, whenever he ate too much or he had food that was too greasy he’d get the bellyache and he’d have to squat down a bit to put pressure on his stomach. He said that in the last war he’d eaten some bad herring and ever since then he needed to squat like that whenever he ate too much, or he ate greasy food. But it wasn’t anything he couldn’t live with.

And you didn’t need to keep an eye on Chmiel, he’d check everything himself and remember about everything. When I bought cement it wasn’t enough that I had it, he had to come and see what kind it was. Actually he pissed me off, because it was like he was looking for problems. First he wet his finger, stuck it in the cement, and put it on his tongue. Then he took a handful from the sack, poured a thin stream of it onto his hand, and blew to see how light it was. Then he took another handful on the palm of his hand, spat on it, and rubbed and rubbed. And if he’d at least smiled. But no, his face was crooked as a dog’s tail the whole time.

“What are you even checking it for, Chmiel? It’s all written on the sack.”

“Sure, be a fool and believe what’s written. Then later on the roof of your tomb’ll collapse. You won’t feel a thing, but me, they’ll say I’m a lousy craftsman.”

Besides, if you go to the cemetery you can tell just by looking which tombs are Chmiel’s. Each one of them is solid as a boulder. While the Woźniaks’, scratch them with your fingernail and they start to crumble, because they never put in as much cement as they should. On some of them there are whole cornerstones broken. On some the sides have started to cave in. Or the top plate’s cracked, and rainwater gets in and drips on the deceased.

On All Souls’ Day you don’t see it, because the tombs all look the same. The whole cemetery’s decorated, flowers and wreaths and candles, and crowds of people, so all you can see is mourning. But on a regular day, when the next All Souls’ is far off and the last one’s even further, and the cemetery’s like a tract of fallow land that hasn’t been plowed in a long, long time — at a time like that every crack comes to the surface, every chip is like an unbandaged wound, and each tomb is different from the next like each person is different from the next one, and all together they’re like people that are dog-tired and they’re taking their rest, and none of them has the strength to be embarrassed. The menfolk scratch themselves, the women spread their legs and you could even sneak a look, it’s just you don’t feel like it.

Before the war Chmiel built a tomb for the schoolteacher’s daughter, Basia was her name, she used to sit in the front row at school. She was pretty as a picture and because of her, one or other of the boys was always getting distracted during class and being sent to sit in the corner. In sixth grade she suddenly went away and she was gone the whole year. Then when she came back she didn’t come to school anymore, but instead she sat around in the shade the whole time. It would be summer, bright sun, and she’d be in the shade by the wall or under a tree, with a little umbrella. She got paler and paler, and her eyes were bigger and bigger, those eyes of hers that were blue as cornflowers.

I wasn’t that good in Polish, and our bitch had just had puppies. So I took one round for her.

“Basia, if you have to sit in the shade you should at least have a little dog.”

“A puppy, a puppy!” She started hugging and kissing it like it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

I didn’t know what was so good about a dog, especially a black-and-white one that was still blind. Father had told us to drown them before they got their sight, or maybe leave just one, because what use were all those dogs. They’d just have to be fed the whole time they were growing up. Then later they’d start chasing after bitches, and get beaten by folks around the village and we’d end up having to look after a cripple dog. You could chain them up of course, but think how much chain you’d need to buy. It was bad enough the cow’s chain broke and no one had the time to take it to the blacksmith’s to get the link mended. And can you even imagine if all of them started howling? The racket would be unbearable. You wouldn’t sleep a wink all night, then how could you get up in the morning and go to work? Let alone wondering who’s died to make them howl like that. Lord, let’s just hope it isn’t any of our relatives. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were just howling to the moon, but the moon’s not always in the sky, while death is always there.

“Hey, little puppy. What’s its name?” she asked.

“It doesn’t have a name yet. I brought you one without a name so you can name it yourself.”

“You name it,” she said. “I want you to name it. I’ll call it whatever you decide.”

“Name it yourself. I gave it to you, it’s yours.”

“Please, give it a name.”

“What’s the big deal about naming a dog. You just call him the first thing that comes into your head.”

“All right, then he’ll be called Szymuś. Would you like that?”

“Don’t ask me, ask the dog. Makes no difference to me.”

“Szymuś, Szymuś.” She started cuddling it again, and blue tears flashed in her blue eyes. “It’s a pity I’m going to die soon.”

I moved up to the next grade, while she spent another six months dying in the shade. The white angel on her tomb has gone gray now and the tomb itself is all rough like old thatch, but there’s no sign of any cracks. The gold’s worn off the inscription, but you can still read the letters as clear as in a schoolbook. “My home stands gaping empty now and drear, My sweetest Basia, since you went from here. Your mother.” What was she, no more than twelve, but when you read it you’d think the whole world had died. I asked Chmiel if he’d made it up or if someone else wrote it for him.

“Who could have made it up,” he said. “It just goes from one tomb to another.”

While on the tombs the Woźniaks built it’s always the same thing, born on such and such a date, died on such and such, rest in peace.

Or the tomb of the young squire. That’s from before the war also. Maybe even from before the schoolteacher’s Basia. He died in his automobile. He’d drive it around the villages and the fields, frightening people and animals, and the dust he kicked up! There were times when after he’d driven by there was a cloud hanging over the village half the day, and people would be gasping like they had the consumption. You had to close the windows in your house and shoo the chickens and geese off the road, and if anyone was heading out into the fields they’d turn back as fast as they could. Because the horses were afraid of it the worst. The moment they heard it droning in the distance they’d rear up. The farmers would have to climb down off the wagon and hold them by the bridle. With horses that were already skittish even that wouldn’t work, they’d break the shaft, snap the reins, then turn the wagon over and run away. Some people said it was a sign of a coming plague. On top of everything he’d be wearing a leather pilot’s cap, and with those big goggles on his eyes he looked like Lucifer himself. That was what they called him. Lucifer’s coming! Lucifer’s coming! Every soul on the road would run for their life. And the old people would cross themselves three times and spit behind them, get thee behind me, Satan.

So one evening the cows were coming back from the pasture. And as usual with cows in those days, the road was all theirs. Also, they’d eaten their fill so they were moving slow and sleepy, you couldn’t have gotten them to go faster even with a stick. They wouldn’t let so much as a wagon get past them, let alone an automobile. They weren’t like the cows these days, that walk along with their ears pricked up and their skin twitching the whole time. The minute they hear the slightest noise behind them or in front, they move to the side of the road of their own accord. They’ve even learned to walk on the left. But back in the day cows were the masters of the road. Except that the young squire thought he was master of everything. And instead of stopping and waiting till they went their way, he started honking his horn and flashing his lights, he didn’t even slow down. And the cows just moved even closer together. He smashed one of them to pieces and broke another one’s legs, and he ended up a corpse himself.

I moved my finger across the inscription. It was even as a ditch, first name and last name, and, died tragically, you could read it all, and in front of the last name Count. The manors didn’t survive, though you’d have thought manors were a whole lot stronger than tombs.

When the front passed through, of all the tombs Chmiel’s survived the best then as well. And there’s no harder test for tombs than a war. For six weeks there were two German artillery batteries stationed at the cemetery, firing to the east day and night. And they were huge guns, every one of them. On top of that they were half dug into the ground so only their muzzles were poking out from among the graves, and with every round the whole hill with the cemetery on it would jump, and each time the crews working the guns had to open their mouths so as not to go deaf. And all those trees they cut down to make room for the guns.

And from the east the Russki guns fired day and night the same, for six weeks. It looked as though the cemetery hill would turn into a valley. It was so hellish even the worms couldn’t take it anymore, let alone the dead. It was like the earth itself was turned inside out, and all of eternity was flung to the surface.

There were skeletons, bodies, coffins, all over the place, like death had suddenly gone on the rampage all on its own because it had run short of living people and it had dragged the dead out of their graves so it could kill them all over again. Like even though they were supposed to already be dead, they were part of the earth now, some of them had rotted and some were nothing but dust — still they had to die a second time. And without even knowing they were dying. So when the front moved on they had to be buried again, like real dead people. And for years later the cemetery looked like a battlefield.

Any time you went there you’d see ruins and stumps of trees, the place was empty and silent, there was only the odd tomb or tree that had survived intact. As for the birds, it was like they’d vanished, you wouldn’t see even the lousiest little sparrow. And for the longest time afterward, even though there wasn’t any danger or anything for them there, they avoided the place like it was infected. They didn’t even perch there on their way to someplace else and sit and chirp. They didn’t even turn up there by accident. Or visit their old nest the way birds will do.

Before, the cemetery had been a paradise for birds. There were cuckoos, blackbirds, goldfinches, titmice, orioles, bullfinches, woodpeckers, crows, doves. Who could have even counted them all. The trees just about shook with them. They’d sing and chirp all day long, and cuckoo and caw. The moment you went into the cemetery you’d find yourself right in the middle of a hullabaloo of birds, before you even got to the graves. When you prayed, the words of the prayer would sometimes get lost in the din. Every so often Franciszek the sacristan would climb up into the trees and knock down the nests of the noisier ones, because he thought it was too cheerful for a cemetery. Though they didn’t just nest in the trees, but on the crosses and the Lord Jesuses and in the grass on the ground. But after the front had passed through, whenever a bird happened to fly over the place it would rise up higher in the sky, sometimes as high as its wings would carry it. As if it was suddenly hemmed in by something and its only escape was to climb higher and higher.

Franciszek the sacristan, who used to think that because of the birds the cemetery wasn’t sad enough — now, he’d make bird feeders and put them up here and there where a tree was still standing, or even just a branch, or even on the crosses and the Lord Jesuses and angels, he’d hang them wherever he could. You’d see a cross over a grave and on its arms there’d be two bird feeders hanging, as if Jesus was holding them in his crucified arms to attract the birds. Or in the place where there’d been the head of an angel that had gotten blown off by a shell, the angel would have a feeder for a head. He put up so many of those feeders that when you saw them you’d be forgiven for thinking there were all kinds of birds at the cemetery. But there wasn’t a single one, they wouldn’t touch the feeders.

He also set out water in old tin cans from army rations, so the birds would have something to drink if they came. People kept removing the cans to put flowers in for the graves, so he put new ones down, luckily there was no shortage of tin cans. The front had been stationed there for months and the soldiers had emptied piles of cans. They were lying about all over the place along the roadsides, in ditches, in dugouts and trenches. People used them as containers for sugar and salt, if need be you could make a bowl or a mug out of a can like that. Boys even used them for goalposts. Sometimes you’d read the label in Russian, svinskaya tushonka, and that would be the closest you’d get to eating all day.

Some days you could find Franciszek at the cemetery at the crack of dawn wandering like a spirit with his pockets full of millet, flaxseed, wheat, poppy seed, bread crumbs. He’d be scattering it all among the tombs and calling to the empty sky: cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep. Every few steps he’d drop his eyes from the sky to the ground, stop, and look to see if there wasn’t some starling or bullfinch or waxwing he’d managed to attract, pecking the grains and skipping about. Then he’d move on his way like someone sowing in the fields: cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep.

Some folks reckoned Franciszek was scattering sand instead of grain, and that the birds weren’t stupid and they wouldn’t let themselves be fooled by sand. I mean, think how much grain you’d need for a cemetery the size of ours. People didn’t even have enough to bake bread with. The fields were all churned up and trampled, and how could they harvest anything from under all the shells? But the birds must have been hungry too. And a hungry bird’ll be tempted even by sand. Besides, when you’re a bird and you’re flying way up a height, from up there you can’t see who’s scattering what down on the ground, whether it’s sand or grain. And if he’s going cheep-cheep and looking up at the sky, why shouldn’t you trust him?

Franciszek would teach the new altar boys how to serve at mass. The old ones had grown up because of the war and they preferred spending their time defusing mines and unexploded bombs. But anyone who had a yen to be an altar boy had to make a trap to catch starlings. And Franciszek would take his altar boys over to the hill along the edge of the woods. Then for days on end they’d try and trap starlings there. Whenever they caught one they’d bring it to the cemetery and release it there.

It sometimes happened that Franciszek would be lying there in the grass and bushes, with the ends of the strings from the traps in his hand and his altar boys all around him, and he’d forget about the church. Because trapping starlings is easier said than done. You can spend the entire day and not catch a single one. All it takes is for someone to whisper to someone else right at the moment the starling’s getting close, or even to just give a louder than usual sigh, and the bird’ll get spooked and fly away. And altar boys are altar boys, they see a starling coming close and their heart immediately starts pounding, and with starlings, they can even hear your heart if it’s beating too loud. But anyone who scared a bird away wouldn’t be an altar boy any longer.

“Clear off, you little imp. You think you can serve the Lord God when you don’t have the patience for a starling?”

And it wouldn’t do any good to cry or say sorry, or that you’d get a hiding from your parents. Franciszek could be stern as they come. Though really he was a good person. When I was learning to be an altar boy we mostly spent our time just scraping wax off the candlesticks. Whenever anyone asked what saecula saeculorum or Dominus vobiscum meant, he’d claim it was a divine mystery.

“You need to know when to turn the page in the missal, and when you’re supposed to pour the water and the wine into the chalice, and when you have to ring the bells. The rest, you just need to be able to mumble along.”

There were times people would come to mass and it would be so stuffy in the church it was like a holy cattle shed, because there was no one there to air the place out. The priest himself would have to fetch the long pole and open the windows, because Franciszek was out trapping starlings. Or folks would start to arrive for the service and the church door would be locked, because Franciszek had been out after starlings since early morning and wasn’t back yet. Or mass was already supposed to have begun, the church is full, the priest’s in his chasuble and he keeps popping his head out of the vestry to see if the candles are lit, but here the candles aren’t lit and the altar’s not prepared either, the organist is playing on and on, and Franciszek’s nowhere to be seen.

Sometimes one of the parishioners who could remember his altar boy duties would throw on a surplice and carry in the missal behind the priest. Franciszek wouldn’t turn up till the priest was raising the chalice. He’d be all flushed still from the starlings. His gray hair would be full of grass, and his shoes and pants wet and muddy from the dew. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been embarrassed and knelt down quietly. Nothing of the kind — he’d plonk himself down on his knees so loud it would echo all round the church. And the guy that was taking his place, he’d push him aside and be all angry he was in the way. And he’d shout out et cum spiritu Tuo or at the very least amen like he’d been kneeling in front of the altar the whole time.

But it wasn’t anything to be surprised at. Starlings are best caught in the morning, especially on a Sunday, when they’re hungry from the night and everything’s quiet out in the fields. And from the hillside by the woods it was a good mile and a half to the church, Franciszek was getting on and it might only have been those starlings that were keeping him among the living. Or maybe the Lord God had said to him, trap some starlings before you die, Franciszek. And so the priest went easy on Franciszek too, and he never told him off. He’d even ask him when Franciszek was helping him off with his chasuble in the vestry after mass:

“So how was it with the starlings today, Franciszek? Do we have any more at the cemetery?”

Besides, Franciszek was too old to do any heavy jobs around the church. Trapping starlings on the hill up by the woods and bringing them down to the cemetery — that was all he could handle.

One time he brought a nest of blue tits with the young birds still in it and he put it in a tree in the cemetery. Adult birds would probably have flown away, but the young ones grew up and stayed there. Then someone brought him a squirrel from the woods and he let that loose among the graves as well. Someone else brought a woodpecker. Someone brought a blackbird. Someone a dove. And gradually life came back to the cemetery.