Stone Upon Stone

IV. The Land

Sometimes I think to myself, what does the land actually care about me? What does it know about me? Does it even know I exist? Does it know how long I’ve traipsed around it? If you counted up all the steps together I might even have gone all the way around this world of ours. Or maybe I’d even have made it into the next world, and I’m still walking along. Over ridges and furrows and ruts, over stubble fields, in rain and cold and swelter, in agony, spring and summer and autumn, with scythe or plow. And for what?

On top of that, does it know how much you’ve quarreled over it, how much you’ve hated? To the point that you were amazed where all that hatred inside you came from. Did you enter the world with it already in you? And the hatred only later turned into the land?

In any case, before I was ever born, father had a law case with the Prażuchs over our field boundary. He didn’t believe in earthly justice, but he came back from the field one time shaking with anger, saying:

“Whether there’s any justice or no, that crook Prażuch needs to be taken to court. The land can’t take it anymore.”

What had happened was, Prażuch had yet again plowed over our field boundary. And so it began. One time father sued Prażuch, then Prażuch sued father, and so on in turn, depending on whose land happened not to be able to take it any longer. It went on for years, because the courts weren’t exactly in any kind of hurry to make a final judgment. Judges have to earn a living too.

Maybe you couldn’t even say who was in the wrong, maybe the Lord God himself couldn’t have decided. Because when it comes to the land there aren’t any guilty or innocent folks, only those that are wronged. And everyone knows what courts are like, it’s all about being guilty or innocent. But that wasn’t the right measure. And so the courts took their course, while father and Prażuch doled out their own justice. Where Prażuch would plow over a strip of our land in the spring, father would plow it back in the autumn, and add at least another half-furrow from Prażuch’s field to make up for the wrong he’d suffered. That bandit shouldn’t think he can get off scot-free.

Then one day, after yet another time in court that hadn’t resolved a thing, father met Prażuch out in the fields. Father was harrowing his land, Prażuch was mucking his. Prażuch ups and says, when you need to sell that field to pay for the courts, I’ll buy it off you. Wishful thinking, answers father, because if the courts don’t finish you the Lord God will. One way or another you’ll get what you deserve, and then maybe you’ll finally drop dead, you crook. It turned into a terrible argument between the two of them, you could hear it way off, like two whole villages were at each other’s throats, or two whole manor houses, or the sky and the land. Anyone who was out working the fields straightened up, stopped their plow or their harrow, stood for a moment, and looked around to see where the quarrel was. They argued so loud the larks vanished from the sky. And even the sky, that had been clear, clouded over and there were flashes of lightning in the distance.

In the end father had had enough, he ran up to Prażuch and landed him one with his whip. Without thinking Prażuch pushed his pitchfork at father. Father fell down, there was blood, and the other man stood over him, leaned on his pitchfork, and jeered:

“Who’s dying now, you bastard? Who’s getting what they deserve?”

Father was barely conscious, but he threatened him back:

“You just wait till my Szymek grows up, you crook.”

And so when I did grow up there was nothing for it. One time I was plowing the same field, and Prażuch was in his field sowing wheat. A flock of crows landed on his field and mine, and they walked about pecking at things, the way crows do. All of a sudden the old guy bent down, grabbed a clod of earth, and chucked it, supposedly at the crows that were on his field. But the ones on mine flew up as well. That made me mad, because I like it when the crows follow behind me when I’m plowing. I stopped the horse and shouted:

“Leave the crows alone, you old fart! Scare them off your own land! Keep the hell away from mine!”

Not only did Prażuch keep throwing clods of earth at the crows, he also started cawing, caw! caw! caw!

“Shut it, or I’ll shut it for you!”

But on he goes with his, caw! caw! caw!

I ran up to him and landed my fist right between his eyes. He flipped over and all the grain scattered from his canvas sheet. I kicked him where he lay on the ground.

“Who’s getting what they deserve now?” I said. I went back and plowed half my field and he still couldn’t even get up, he just lay there grunting and cursing. People even said I’d done something to his back, because he was stuck in bed almost till the spring.

Then autumn came again, and Antek was grazing the cows one day among the potato stalks, and Prażuch was plowing his land. And somehow or other one of the cows strayed onto his field. Antek ran over to drive it back. Prażuch left his plow and horse and set about Antek with his whip. He beat the kid so bad he had purple welts all over. Then he whipped the cow that had strayed. And as if that wasn’t enough, he ran over onto our land and whipped the other cow, that hadn’t done a damn thing to him. Antek came back home crying, it wasn’t even close to midday, and the cows were flogged so bad their skin was covered in ridges.

That finally did it for me. I grabbed an ax and ran out into the fields, I was going to kill the old man and be done with it. After that I could rot in prison. But he saw me coming from far off, he quickly unhitched the horse from the plow, jumped on the horse, flicked the reins, and galloped off down the road by the mill toward his house. I ran after him, but his place was all bolted up. I started hammering at the door.

“Open up, you son of a bitch, I’m gonna kill you! Open up, you hear! This world’s too small for the both of us!”

But I couldn’t even hear the slightest peep from behind the door — it was like no one was there. And they all were there. I looked through the window, there was a tin crucifix standing in it. I could have smashed the window, but it somehow didn’t seem right to clamber in over a crucifix. I just hacked the corner post of the house with my ax.

From that time on he avoided me like the plague. I never ran into him down in the village. Or at the store. And whenever I’d go into the fields, his land would already have been worked, like the devil himself had done it in the night. In the end we bumped into each other one time at the pub. He mustn’t have been expecting to see me, because it was still morning, the weather was perfect, and it was harvesttime. He’d come for tobacco, I was at the bar and I’d already had a bit to drink.

“So it’s tobacco you’re after, granddad?” I said. He shrunk his head in and didn’t utter a word. “What’s wrong with smoking clover? Or chop yourself up some cherry leaves!” Then I said to the Jew: “Chaim, give him a glass of anis vodka, let him drink to my health since we’ve finally run into each other.”

The Jew poured the drink, but Prażuch acted like it wasn’t meant for him.

“What, you’re not gonna drink to my health?” I grabbed his head in one hand and the glass in the other, and I was about to pour the stuff down his throat by force, when he ups and spits in my face. “That’s the thanks I get, you son of a bitch? I buy you a drink and you spit on me?”

I lifted him almost as high as the ceiling and threw him down on the floor so hard the place shook. He gave a moan like it was his last breath. I got scared I’d maybe killed him, he was getting on and his old bones could have been smashed to pieces by a fall like that. But he managed to stand. The Jew helped him some. He staggered out of the pub almost on all fours, meek as a lamb. It was only when he was outside, when he’d climbed up on his wagon and taken the whip and reins, he started cussing me out:

“You bastard! You piece of shit! Antichrist!”

I ran out after him, but he whipped up the horse. And once he’d gotten a good ways away, he turned around to threaten me again:

“Just you wait till my boys grow up!”

He had three sons, Wojtek, Jędrek, and Bolek. And so when they grew up, though the oldest one, Wojtek, had barely come of age, they waited for me one time. I was coming back that night from a dance in Boleszyce. It was like everything conspired against me that evening. I’d had the urge to walk a girl back to her place, she lived almost at the edge of the village, and I stood with her outside her house for a while. But she wouldn’t even let me kiss her, she was stubborn as a mule, she squeezed her lips shut and kept turning her head away. And afterwards I had to walk back home alone because the guys had gone off somewhere. The night was black as pitch, there wasn’t a star in the sky or even any moonlight, just dogs barking in the distance. On top of that I’d taken a shortcut through the dense woods in this hollow, and there was one bush after another, hawthorn, juniper, hazel, you could barely see the path that led through them. But it wasn’t the first time I’d gone home on my own, and often it was from a lot farther away, so what did I have to be afraid of. I whistled as I walked, O my Rosemary, and, My darling war, and, Duckies and geese in the water clucking, run away girl or they’ll come pecking. All of a sudden the Prażuch boys jumped out from behind the bushes waving sticks. Before I had time to reach for my knife I was already on the ground half dead. All I could feel was them kicking me from every side, but it only lasted a moment, after that I didn’t feel a thing, I couldn’t tell whether I was alive or dead. It wasn’t till the morning that a farmer came along the same path and went to tell people in the village there was a corpse in the hollow.

For two weeks I couldn’t get out of bed. Though everything hurt even when I was lying down. Mother kept making compresses for me, sobbing over me the whole while:

“Dear Lord Jesus, Szymek, how many times have I begged you! How many times have I prayed to God! Are you trying to send me to my grave? Promise me this’ll be the last time.”

But how could I make any promises, even to my mother, when I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t forgive them. I’d burn their house down, I’d kill them, but I wouldn’t forgive them. Except that soon afterward, the war began and I had to go to war. True, before you could say Jack Robinson, the war was lost and I was back home before the potato lifting was even done. But after the war, all the things that had happened with the Prażuchs seemed like they’d been in a different world. Because losing the war bothered me more than the Prażuchs did. And I probably would have forgiven them. But father went on about Prażuch plowing over the field boundary again while I was away at the war, because the old fart was counting on me not coming back. And he kept telling me, you need to do something about it, you really do, the land can’t take it any longer. At the very least go take him to court. I couldn’t get him to understand that there was no court to take him to anymore. What court? Poland was gone, so the courts were gone as well. He just kept repeating:

“You lost the war, and on top of that I’m supposed to lose to the Prażuchs as well?”

So one day I threw the plow into the wagon, and although our field and Prażuch’s were both sown already, and the crop was starting to come up, I plowed over what was ours so the old fart would know I was back.

The following year there was a church fair in Lisice for Saint Peter and Paul’s Day. Normally I might not have gone, but there wasn’t anywhere to mill rye for bread because the military police were minding the mill like guard dogs, and you needed to have a chit to say you’d provided a levy. Though even when you had the chit, they’d still sometimes requisition part of your crop and smack you in the face into the bargain. Plus, the mill in Lisice belonged to a guy called Pasieńko that had a daughter he was trying to marry off. She was an old maid already, Zośka was her name. I knew her from different dances and she’d often invited me to come by. But first off, Lisice was a fair ways from us, and second, she was a plain, dumpy thing, her back was level with her rump, she had teeth like a horse, on top of which all she did was laugh. All the same, what won’t a person do for bread. I thought to myself, I’ll go over there, take her to the fair, and her old man’ll grind at least a quarter bushel of rye for me on the down low. I can even spend a bit of time with her, let him think I’m interested in marrying her, maybe the war won’t last that long. At most I’ll buy her a puppy or a kitten at the fair, or a string of beads, so she won’t bad-mouth me later.

Luckily people were crowding round the stalls like bees on honey, and there was no way we could elbow through. Though as it happened I didn’t feel a whole lot like pushing anyway, and for Zośka it was enough that she was on my arm. She would have given anything to be seen around the fair with a young fellow like me, never mind puppies or kittens or beads. Also, even though it was wartime the fair was grander than many a one before the war. The rows of stalls stretched all the way to the cemetery. There were as many wagons as on market day. And the crowd was so big the place was stifling, it was like processions moving this way and that, you couldn’t even tell which one was going which direction, because they were all squeezed together. And all the squeals and shouts and laughter, and trumpeting, and whistling, and roosters crowing, like there was no war and the whole world was one giant fair. Plus, I told her I liked it when she laughed, so she kept laughing the whole time.

All at once the three Prażuchs are standing there in front of us like three pine trees. They’re eyeing us like bandits. Uh-oh, I think to myself, this could turn nasty. I tried to go around them, because I had rye flour and bread-making on my mind, not fighting. But on the right there happened to be a stall with a crowd of customers, and on the left a wagon that someone was selling cherries off of, and I wasn’t about to turn around and beat a retreat. I let Zośka go ahead first, thinking it might be easier if we passed them one by one. They let her through, though as she passed Bolek, the youngest one, he said with a sneer:

“He’s found himself a genuine dwarf girl.”

The three of them snickered, and I was sure they’d let me past too, at Zośka’s expense. Then suddenly the oldest one, Wojtek, blocks my way with his shoulder and he’s all, Where the hell do you think you’re going? Can’t you see we’re standing here?

“Of course I can see,” I answered. And without a second thought I punched him in the mouth as he stood there still grinning. He didn’t even have time to duck. He swayed, I straightened him up with my other fist and he rolled backwards onto the wagon with the cherries. His head hit the wheel and after that he didn’t get up. Bolek jumped forward and grabbed me by the shoulders, and we struggled for a moment. There was a commotion. Some folks got out of the way, but others pushed forward so they could see. There were even some wanted to join in. Someone called out like they were selling candy:

“Fight! There’s a fight!”

Someone else shouted:

“Jesus and Mary! Isn’t it enough there’s a war on, damn them!”

“Get the priest! Have him spray holy water on them, the goddam fools! Get the priest!”

Zośka was tugging at my jacket.

“Szymek! Szymuś! You’re the smart one! Let the stupid idiots have their way!”

At that exact moment a massive weight hit my head from behind. I reeled, and my eyes went blank. But I managed to stay on my feet, and I swung my fist blindly into the darkness in front of me. I missed. It made me stagger, and so as not to fall over I lurched after my arm. My head landed in someone’s belly and there was a grunt. I got my sight back. I saw Bolek, it was his belly, spin back against a stall and knock it over. Plaster figures flew every which way. The stall owner let rip with a stream of curses, he took Bolek by the shoulders and pushed him back toward me. I held up my fist, and Bolek smashed into it with his nose like it was a wagon shaft. His eyes spun. But he was a strong one, even though he was the smallest of the three of them. He just shook his head like someone had thrown a bucket of water over him. I gave him a left hook, he rocked but stayed upright. If I’d punched him one more time that probably would’ve done it. But by now Jędrek, the tallest one, had pushed all the people aside and he was reaching his arms out toward me like he wanted to put them round me and crush me. I leaned back a bit and with all the force I could muster I hit him halfway between those arms. They opened up like wings. It was almost like he was suspended by them. All at once he clapped his left hand to his eye and gave a terrible howl:

“Jesus!” He swayed for a moment with his hand to his eye as if he didn’t know whether to fall or not. I helped him out with a pretty gentle blow under the elbow and he dropped down at my knees, moaning: “My eye! I can’t see! My eye! You fucking bastard!”

I wondered whether I should keep fighting, most of all I’d have liked to stomp him into the ground. I just pulled his hand away from his eye and I said, Look at me with that bloody eye of yours, you son of a bitch, I want you to remember this. He thought I was fixing to keep at him and he burst into tears:

“Don’t hit me anymore! Leave me alone! We’re from the same village!”

Except that while Jędrek was begging for me to spare him, Bolek had recovered and was coming at me from the side with a knife. I might not even have seen it, but there was a sudden flash, as if the sun had glanced off the gold cross on the church steeple. Plus, a well-wisher in the crowd warned me at the last moment:

“He’s got a knife!”

It was too late for me to knock the knife out of his hand because he was already swiping it at me. But I managed to dodge, and I gave him an almighty kick between the legs. He folded in two, and the knife flew out of his hand like a little sparrow. I lifted his limp body from the ground. With my left hand I held him up by his lapels, and with my right I started hitting him as payback for the knife, slowly, with pauses, because I could barely keep on my feet myself. Though maybe I only thought I was hitting him because of the knife, and really it was for that damned field boundary that had been plowed over so many times. I pulled him up every time he started slipping back down, and I kept hitting him. He came round and passed out again in turns, as if he didn’t even feel he was being hit. I was running out of strength, but I still had so much rage in me it probably wouldn’t have been satisfied even if I’d killed him. In the end blood welled up out of his mouth.

“Let him go. He’s had enough,” some angel said to me from the side. And I let him go.

He dropped like a lump of earth, but my legs buckled as well and I almost fell down with him. For a moment I stood there like a drunk, afraid to take even a single step, it was like someone was striking sparks in my eyes. Then I heard the angel’s voice again:

“Come sit here, young falcon.”

I turned my head, and right by me I saw a stall, and the owner sitting behind it. She was a plump old woman, her face was all pitted with the smallpox, but the angelic voice was hers. She gave a kind of strange smile, as if two different smiles were competing on her face, maybe it was because of the smallpox, or maybe I was just seeing double. I suddenly remembered I was supposed to get the rye milled with Zośka. I looked around, but there was no sign of her.

“Don’t waste your time looking for her,” said the stall owner in her angelic voice. “She squealed and squealed, then off she ran. That’s young women today for you. Come over here and rest up.” She put a stool out for me in front of the stall. She even took her headscarf off and laid it down on the stool. “Szymek’s your name? I heard her calling you that. Nice name. Pull your jacket off and I’ll sew the buttons back on, they’ve all gotten ripped off.”

She came out from behind the stall and removed my jacket. She took it to the neighboring stalls, and a moment later she came back with a handful of buttons.

“Here. These’ll look even nicer than the old ones.”

She squeezed back behind the stall and started sewing. As I watched her worn, swollen hands at work, she picked a string of pretzels from a pile in her stall and tossed them into my lap.

“Here, have something to eat, young falcon. You’ve been working hard. That you have. There’s still strength in this country. They can’t put us down so easily. It was only the first one you didn’t do enough to, the wagon wheel was what finished him off. That last one, he’ll have had enough for the rest of his life. It was quite a show. People were running away like they were being blown in the wind. A couple of the stall owners even closed up shop. They must have had something on their conscience, they still had merchandise and they could have done business till evening. Today there’s no more selling to be done. But it was worth coming. There’ll be something to remember. Cause usually fairs come and fairs go, they’re alike as peas in a pod, what’s there to remember? How many pretzels you sold? Selling on its own, that doesn’t make a church fair. A real church fair is either when the bishop comes, or there’s a fight. Back in the day there was more fighting. One year in Radzików, on Saint Vincent’s Day, they started scrapping right after morning mass and they went on all through high mass, they were still at it after it ended. People were beginning to gather for the evening service and the fight was still going on. One of them fell on my stall, he had a knife wound from ear to ear and he spilled blood all over my pretzels. I had to go through each bunch one by one and wipe all the blood off. Half of them I had to throw away. And it had all started from nothing. First one guy with another guy. Then there was no telling who was fighting who, they were all scrapping together. You couldn’t even tell which side was against which, all the sides got mixed up. It was just one big free-for-all. The priest came out with holy water and a sprinkler, the organist came, the verger brought a cross, and they started ringing the church bell. But they only got as far as the edge of the tangle, they couldn’t go a step farther. The organist sang for a bit, the priest sprayed them with holy water, and off they went. And the boys just kept on fighting. Here.” She threw me another string of pretzels. “Eat. I’m not going to sell them today anyway. That way I won’t have to cart them all back home. Look — with this one a piece of the cloth’s been torn out as well. But I’ll patch it up for you. With the dark color and it being next to the button, it won’t show. That suit’s good on you. But you’d look even better in brown. With a light blue shirt, and a spotted necktie. You needn’t have any regrets with that young lady of yours. It’s just as well she ran off, she wasn’t meant for you. All she did was cling to your coattails instead of cheering you on. With a girl you have to feel like she’s part of you, then you can get hitched. That one, she just stood there squealing. If it were me, I’d have at least bitten one of them on the hand or kicked him in the leg. She wouldn’t have been any kind of wife or housekeeper for you, nor a mother to your children. You could tell from how she walked she wasn’t the one for you. And she’d have been a downright quarrelsome one. After the first baby you’d have had a real shrew at home, then in the years to come she’d be an absolute she-devil. All you’d be thinking about was where you could go so as not to have to be at home. God wouldn’t call you to him yet, because God only calls people when they get old, so you’d either have to find another woman or turn to drink. Sometimes the pub can help, but that’s no good in the long term either. It often happens the road from the pub leads straight to the noose. Though truth be told, with a young falcon like you no woman’s going to last long, however rich or good-looking she might be. She can lock the doors and the windows, close the chimney vent, tie him up with a rosary even, he’ll still get away. And all those things he swore before God, it’ll be like he spat them out, all his oaths will come undone. Because he’s not made for the happiness of one woman, but to bring unhappiness to many. Besides, why should you be in any hurry to wed. Marriage isn’t so sweet. Enjoy yourself while you feel like it. Because as long as you’re enjoying yourself, death’s going to stay far off too. I’ve lived through all sorts of things and I know. I’ve had three husbands. Life was good and bad with them, though with each one of them it was different. But I recall more raising them like children three times over, than them marrying me three times. It was lucky I had my pretzel stall, I’d barely buried one and the next was wanting a wedding. They flocked to me, that they did, like it was easier to die at my side. But after three of them I said to myself, enough. What am I, a graveyard? I’ve got my pretzels, I’ll go sell them here and there, I’ll be content if the guys fight over me once in a while. Because fight they did back when, young falcon, they’d fight till the ground ran red with blood, like the earth itself was bleeding. They fought with knives, iron bars. Whatever came to hand. One time, one of them smashed the other over the head with a figure of the Virgin Mary. The one that got the Virgin Mary over the head, he was my first. I would have preferred the other guy, but I felt sorry for the first one. He sold saints, I had my pretzels and our stalls were always next to each other. But he didn’t live long. The second one I got from a fight as well. He made this huge ruckus at a Saint Sabina’s Day fair in Wojciechów, and at some point it just popped out of my mouth, you’ll be mine. And he was. Till a policeman shot him. He went for the policeman when he was being taken to jail. The third one, he stopped for a moment right there in front of the stall, where you are now, and he said, I’ll buy all these pretzels, and twice as many more again, but you have to be mine. I was. Except he could never get over the fact I’d had two men before him, and he’d get drunk every day. And whenever he was drunk he’d grab an ax and start in with, Throw them out, throw them out, you bitch, or I’ll cut you up as well as them. And he drank worse and worse. Till I came back from a fair one day and I see my third one dangling from a rafter. From that time on I never wanted them to marry me.” She tossed me another bunch of pretzels from the pile. “Dig in, they’re made from good flour. And there I was thinking nothing was going to happen. High mass was already over, and there was nothing but people asking, How much a bunch, how much a bunch. And they were all so polite, they were more like nuns in disguise than young men. I’m not complaining, I did decent business, but I was thinking it wouldn’t be a good fair. Did you not have a knife? You should have used a knife if he went for you with one. The Lord would have forgiven you, he could see it was one against three. But you shouldn’t have kicked him between the legs. You can smash people up any which way, but you have to respect between the legs, young falcon. However much of a bandit the other guy is, what’s between the legs is sacred. It’s like you were kicking God himself, who gave birth to all of us and told us to give birth to others. Even him, though he’s God, he didn’t have any other way of coming into the world. He supposedly came from the Holy Ghost, but what could the Holy Ghost have done without the Virgin? What’s between your legs is life, it’s death, all sorrows and joys, from it one man is good and another bad, one is one way and one the other. It gives us treachery and wars, kings and do-nothings and saints. All that was and all that will be comes from there, young falcon. And do you know where dreams lie? Between your legs. It’s from there that they come out to you at night so you can dream them. Whatever’s between your legs is in your heart and your head too. Because what’s there stands above it, the way eternity stands over a split second. Without his head a man is nothing but a fool, and without his heart he’s a stone. But kill what’s between his legs and it’s like you drove him out of paradise all over again. After that he’s got no interest in either sin or salvation. Once in a while a nightingale’ll appear in his throat and sing. But it’s like it was singing about how he was driven out.”

I must have eaten a dozen strings of pretzels, but she wouldn’t take a penny from me. She just wanted me to promise I’d come to the Assumption Fair in Milejów. I promised. As for the Prażuchs, since that day it was like they’d gone underground. Though once in a while someone would tell me they’d been making threats, because everyone in our village heard about the fight. Apparently they even needed to get a doctor out for Bolek. The old man supposedly said I’d have to pay for the doctor. But soon after that I joined the resistance and stopped giving a damn about the Prażuchs. I thought I was done with them, that at most the field boundary would get plowed back over after the war.

But one time I went to pay my folks a visit in the night. The journey went well. It was quiet and deserted, there wasn’t a soul about, the houses were all asleep and not even any dogs barked. It was kind of like in the old days, when I’d often be coming back home from some young lady at that hour. You almost felt like asking the sky, So where’s this war I hear about?

I was almost halfway through the village, I just had to pass Dereń’s place and Maszczyk’s and it was our house. Then all at once, out of the darkness, from only a few yards away I heard in German: “Halt!” And a flashlight gets shined in my eyes. Without a second thought I dodged sideways into Oryszka’s yard, I knew every lane around here. There were shots and a clatter of boots. I vaulted the fence into Niezgódka’s farm. Niezgódka’s dog started woofing furiously. Behind me, again I heard: “Halt, halt!” More shots rang out. From Niezgódka’s I ran behind Kwiecień’s barn. Luckily Kwiecień’s dog didn’t have time to wake up, or maybe it was just too lazy, in any case it never even barked. Then I crossed Gawil’s farm and took the hollow behind the firehouse to Barański’s. I thought about maybe climbing into Barański’s wagon house and waiting things out there. Barański’s place was set back a bit from the road and he was well off, maybe they wouldn’t go looking for me there. Plus there was a German lieutenant that had been seeing Irka Barańska, maybe he still was. Except I forgot that the Barańskis had a devil of a dog. The moment I squeezed between the lilac and jasmine around the edge of their place, the dog starts up like a fury and comes at me from way the other end of the yard. On top of that it was dragging its chain over some wire, and the wire and the chain made a barking noise along with the dog, like they were mad too. Over on the road, right away there was the stomp of boots. Halt! Halt! And a burst of gunfire from the orchards in the other direction.

Things weren’t looking good. I decided to try and make it down to the river, it wasn’t far and maybe I could beat them to it. I crept around the backs of the fenced yards to Siudak’s smithy. I squatted there for a moment, listening whether I couldn’t hear any suspicious noises, then I snuck over to the other side of the road. I slipped into the passage between żmuda’s place and Gabryś’s. Then I followed the edge of the pond through the alder thicket and came out behind Zdun’s barn. I thought I was safe already, because from Zdun’s place the river is just across a meadow, and over the river there’s a slope then woodland, and they could kiss my ass. I even sat down a moment to catch my breath. Then all of a sudden there’s a rustling in the bushes, I reach for my pistol, and this tiny little mongrel pops out like a sprite and starts sniffing at me. I felt all warm inside, I thought to myself there’s dogs and dogs. So I tried to stroke him, and the damn thing bites me on the hand and starts yapping. So that’s the kind of dog you are, you little bastard! I kicked him away, he gave a yelp and barked even louder. I thought, there’s nothing for it, I’ll try and be nice. I wanted to appeal to his doggy logic, make him calm down:

“Good dog, good, good dog. You’re not silly like the other dogs. Come on now, cut it out. You hear those shots? It’s me they’re shooting at. You’ll have plenty of time to bark once the war’s over. After the war we’ll all have it easier, people and dogs both. Are you a dog or a bitch? Something tells me you’re a dog. A bitch wouldn’t yap so much. A bitch would have puppies, she’d be lying with her puppies. Who do you belong to, the Zduns? Do they at least feed you decently? Cause they’re sneaky ones, they’d take food from each other and never give it to the dog. You’d have it better at Jamróz’s or Stajuda’s. Stajuda trades in pigs. And the Jamrózes are always praying for God to give them a baby. What’s your name now? Maybe Rattles? Come here, Rattles, let me pet you, just stop yapping for chrissakes. The Zduns don’t give you any affection because they don’t give their own children any, they just send them out to work. Come on, come here.”

But he was having none of it, he was barking away as if what I was saying made him even madder.

“Are you a Polish dog or a Kraut dog? They’re after me, goddammit, how can I get it through to you? Am I not talking plain Polish? Are you trying to give me away? Do you know what they do to dogs that do that? The same thing they do to people. A bullet in the head. A Polish dog wouldn’t bark at a Pole like that. You must be a mix, or a stray. Go on, get the hell out of here, you dumb piece of shit.”

I got up, and the dog must have decided I was a burglar, it started biting my boots and yapping louder and louder. Suddenly, over the yapping I heard someone running across the field, more than one man. Over the river there was the glint of a flashlight beam, then another.

“See what you’ve done, you little bastard? Now I’m surrounded.”

At this point the only way out was through the upper fields. But to get there I had to circle the entire village so as not to cross the road, because they were probably lying in wait there. I set off through the willows down the path that led to the mill. The dog stuck to me like a burr, it came right after me yapping its head off. Wait, goddammit. There wasn’t a moment to lose, but still I bent down and grabbed the creature by the head. Normally I’d never have hurt a dog, a cat sooner than a dog. When I was a kid I even used to think dogs came from people. It bit me and scratched and yelped. I held it to the ground and smashed my heel down on its head till there was a crunching sound. Right at that moment, from a dozen yards away I heard: “Halt!” A burst of gunfire whistled right overhead.

I dashed into Jamróz’s orchard. The branches whipped at my face, my eyes. Bullets struck against the leaves like hail. They must have hit apples too. One knocked my cap off. I tripped over a stump and fell. I stumbled into Mikus’s field. As if out of spite, Mikus happened to have sowed alfalfa. And it had grown well, it was up over my knees. It took all my strength to lift my feet up at each step. It was like in a dream, I was all in a rush, and here my feet were being held in place, and the guys chasing me seemed on the brink of catching up. I felt my strength beginning to fail. I fell again. For a split second I thought about not getting back up. Let them capture me and shoot me, let the whole dream finally come to an end. But I jumped up, and a dozen or so steps later I came to the end of the alfalfa. In a couple of leaps I was at the ravine, and to make my trail harder to follow I scrambled up the side. Then I made a big loop around Karwacki’s farm so I wouldn’t attract his dog’s attention. At the statue of Saint Florian I turned toward the Prażuchs’ house, since the cutting to the upper fields happened to lead that way.

I even slowed my pace a bit. I looked in at the Prażuchs’ windows, but without any hatred, and I just thought normally, the way you do about people in the night, that they were probably in there snoring away. The night had lightened a little, and a good many stars had disappeared from the sky. Suddenly, from across the way I heard a muffled jabbering. I moved quickly behind the corner of the Prażuchs’ house. I poked my head out, and at the place where the cutting dropped downward, I saw three figures coming out of the darkness. They were moving slowly, but I could tell they were coming in my direction, because they were getting bigger and bigger and their chatter was growing clearer. It was too late to run back into the night, with the growing light I would have been in plain sight. But there wasn’t anywhere to hide there either. The Prażuchs didn’t have a fence, there weren’t any trees or bushes. The house and barn and cattle shed were virtually in the middle of open ground. The worst thing was that at any moment their dog might smell me. I was even surprised it wasn’t already barking. They had a dog, after all. Maybe it had gone looking for bitches? Either way, it’d be back any minute now, and when it came, everything would be over.

I moved nearer to the door and tapped lightly on the window. I stuck my face close to the pane, trying to see in the darkness whether there wasn’t any movement inside. But the window was covered with a cloth. I tapped again, a bit louder. The chatter of the three men was almost by the farmyard. Finally, behind the door there was a creak no louder than the squeaking of a mouse. I tried the handle. There was silence. But I felt someone was standing behind the door, because it was as if the whole house was leaning up against it. I pressed the handle down again. Then I heard the fearful voice of the old man:

“Who’s there?”

“A friend. Open up,” I answered, more breathing than speaking. He would have expected someone from the next life sooner than me, so he didn’t recognize my voice. He unbolted the door, poked his shaggy head out, his eyes suddenly looked like an ox’s eyes, and he started to close the door again. But I’d expected that, and I put my foot in the jamb. He pressed his whole weight against the door, but I pushed back so hard he staggered across the hall.

“What do you want?” he hissed.

“Shut the door,” I said hurriedly. “There’re Germans outside.”

I moved quickly into the main room. I was struck by the stale smell of sour cabbage. There was a barely smoldering lamp on the stove that had obviously just been lit, because the oldest son, Wojtek, was putting the glass over it. He looked at me like he was about to reach for an ax, but he didn’t say anything. Jędrek and Bolek poked their heads out from under their bedding and stared at me, uncertain whether they should jump out of bed or stay there.

“Christ be praised,” I greeted them, catching my breath.

None of them responded, they just scowled at me like wolves, expecting the worst. Finally Wojtek finished with the lamp and sat at the table, but he was still on edge, because he even put his hands on the table, and there was bread and a knife on it. Then their old mother got out of her bed in the farthest dark corner and, like she was the most unforgiving of all of them, she said:

“What’s that fiend doing here?”

“I tried not to let him in, but he pushed the door open,” Prażuch said, trying to explain it wasn’t his fault. And as he stood there, barefoot, in his long johns, he dropped down on the bench and rested his arms helplessly on his knees, as if they were broken.

Then the two that were still in bed, Jędrek and Bolek, got mad and raised their voices at their father:

“Couldn’t you at least have grabbed a poker and let him have it over the head? There’s one standing right there!”

“You should at least have asked the bastard who he was before you opened the door!”

“They’re after me,” I said. “If you want, you can just turn me in.”

They lowered their heads, and none of them said a word. Wojtek suddenly grabbed the knife and cut himself a big slice of bread. He started biting off mouthfuls like he was about to starve to death. The two in bed got sleepy again. They fell back and pulled their quilts up under their chins. The wick of the lamp guttered and started to fizzle, and the faint light got even dimmer. But no one moved to turn it up. It even seemed that everyone was waiting for it to go out and plunge them in darkness again. And just when it seemed about to fail, the old woman spoke again from her corner:

“Turn the lamp up a bit, Wojtek.”

Wojtek stood, turned the lamp up, and sat back down at the table. He cut himself a second slice, but this time a smaller one, that he could have fit in his mouth in a single go. This time he picked at it with his fingers like he was eating sunflower seeds. The old lady spoke again:

“Sit yourself down. There’s some cabbage left over from dinner. I’ll heat it up for you.” She dropped her feet from the bed, slipped her clogs on, and tying on her apron she sighed: “We oughtn’t to be born if we don’t know how to live.”

Not long after that all three of them, Wojtek, Jędrek, and Bolek, joined my unit. All three of them died. Jędrek fell in an attack on a train outside Dębowa Góra. Wojtek was taken wounded as we were trying to escape from an encirclement at Maruszew. They hung him from a tree along the Kawęczyn road. As for Bolek, he was covering our retreat from the Olechów woods. He got hit in the legs by submachine-gun fire and he couldn’t get away. He’d fired every last round he had and he didn’t have anything left to shoot himself with, so he wrapped an old MPK submachine-gun strap around his neck and kept twisting it till he died.

Their old lady passed away not long after the war, when she finally realized none of them was coming back. She knew they were dead. But while the war had still been going on it was like she was holding out hope they’d be home. When Jędrek, the first one, died she started having problems with her heart and she couldn’t do much work around the farm, old Prażuch had to do everything. Then when Wojtek was lost, and after him Bolek, and the war went and ended without them, her heart couldn’t take it.

Prażuch, though, he just kept on living. And he never got funny in the head, and never let the farm go, though he had a right to and people would have understood. His land was always plowed on time, always sowed when it needed to be, and mowed and gathered in. And his house, whenever you went over it was clean and swept, there was fresh water in the pail and milk in clay pots souring for cheese, or already made cheese being dripped dry. The pillows on the bed were so white they shone. Every spring there’d be a brood hen in a basket under the table hatching eggs. Come Easter, he’d whitewash not just the hallway and the main room but the whole outside of the house as well. He even wove a wattle fence around the farmyard, though all those years they’d never had a fence. When he did the laundry he’d wash everything however clean or dirty it was, whatever there was lying around the room, whether it was his or his sons’ or his old woman’s. When he hung it all out to dry in the yard, you’d have thought an orchard had just bloomed at the Prażuchs’. On top of that he learned to read and write, because teachers were going house to house around the villages and teaching old folks to read and write.

From time to time I’d swing by and visit him, and I’d have to sit and listen how his reading was coming along, or check whether he hadn’t made any mistakes in his writing. The only thing he had trouble with was addition. But even with young people, not everyone does well at addition. You have to be born a good adder. And none of the animals at Prażuch’s — horse, cow, dog, cat, anything else — none of them could complain they had it bad there or that they had to lie in crap. Nor him himself, you couldn’t tell from looking at him that anything was bothering him except for just old age. Though sometimes a lust for life like that can also be despair. And it can happen that because of that, a person lives longer than their age ought to allow, longer than they’d have wanted to.

He even looked after my farm when I wound up in the hospital after my accident, and he did just as good a job with it as with his own. I didn’t have to worry about what was happening while I was gone. The animals were always fed. Michał always had enough to eat and he was properly dressed. Prażuch would sweep the house out every so often and clean up and light the stove. And most of important of all, the fields would be seen to. He didn’t do everything himself, he wouldn’t have been able to look after his own land and mine with just one pair of hands. But he’d at least watch over the work and make sure it was done well. Once a month, on a Sunday or a market day, he’d visit me in the hospital. And he’d never come empty-handed. He’d always bring something in a basket, some cheese, a dozen apples, cigarettes, an egg blessed at Easter time, or at Christmas a Christmas Eve wafer and a length of sausage. Then, when he was going to die he also came, and he said he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on my farm anymore, because it was time for him to die. Every night he could hear his sons calling him and his woman weeping for him.

It was a Thursday, and on Saturday he went to the priest to have him give last rites, because he’d decided that he’d die on Sunday afternoon, and he didn’t want the priest to have to trek all the way to the other end of the village just for his death. Actually he could have managed fine without the priest. For a long time already he’d had an oak casket, a black suit, elastic-sided boots, a shirt and tie, all set. In the morning he saw to the livestock, fed the dog and the cat, swept out the house, swatted the flies, poured the sour milk into a muslin sack to make cheese. Then he took a bath, shaved, dressed, and called Strugała to come light a funerary candle for him. His last words were:

“Staś, my will is under the picture of Jesus. Everything’s written there, who’s to get what, and when the cheese stops dripping you can have it.”

And in that way my farm was left to the mercy of fate. Because even with my closest neighbors, if any of them did any work there it was only in their own interest, so they could take as much as possible for themselves. When I came back the place looked like a battleground. I didn’t know where to turn first. The main shaft of the wagon’s chassis was cracked, and the side panels had been stolen. All that was left of the dog was its kennel, even its chain must have come in handy for someone else. When I went into the barn, the mows were almost empty, though there was no shortage of sparrows. It sounded like I was standing under the sluice-gate of a mill and water was pouring down on me from above — the noise was deafening. They’d run so wild they weren’t even that afraid of me. Only the ones on the threshing floor rose up, though to the last moment they weren’t sure whether they needed to be scared of me or not. I threw one of my walking sticks at them, but you’re never going to hit a sparrow, they just flew up under the roof. And my walking stick bounced off the boards and into a mow, and I had to clamber over the partition to fetch it. I was so furious I tipped my head back and started cursing them and calling them names, you damn this and that! But they couldn’t even hear me. You’d have needed the trumpets of Jericho to be heard over that racket. Besides, sparrow talk is different from people talk, and they wouldn’t have understood anyway. You just wait, you little buggers!

I hurried out to look for my whip. But try finding your whip when you’ve been gone two years. I went to the neighbor’s.

“Franek, lend me a whip, will you.”

“You in a hurry to get out into the fields? You only just got back from the hospital.”

“It’s not for going to the fields, it’s for the sparrows.”

“What the heck use is a whip, with sparrows?”

I bolted the door, stood in the middle of the threshing floor, and leaning on a walking stick with one arm, with the other I started waving the whip and cracking it way up to the rafters, shouting, “boo! boo!” at the top of my voice. There was a swirling confusion of birds. It was like a sudden whirlwind was blowing them out of the mows, out from under the thatched roof, who knows where from, so they all gathered in a huge swarm that was frantic with fear, with the beating of thousands of little wings. Sometimes when a storm wind blows through the orchard the leaves on the trees make the same sound. They weren’t sparrows, they were a gale, a blizzard. The entire barn was shaking. And I kept going “boo! boo!” and cracking the whip. The birds were thrashing about, flying this way and that, up above, down below, I even had to duck because they were flying around me as well. They moved toward the door, but the door was bolted, then up toward the sky, but there there was the roof, then against the walls. In fact the walls had fist-sized holes in them, because the barn was a good old age, plus it had been hit by shrapnel in the war, and even a pigeon could have squeezed through those holes, never mind a sparrow. But the sparrows were so confused that one sparrow was a flock of sparrows, and a flock of sparrows can’t get through a hole for one sparrow. You could actually smell overheated feathers in the air, like the stink of chaff when the wind is in the grain. But it wasn’t chaff, how could it have been chaff? It was the fear of the sparrows that stank like chaff, as they rose up in a swarm to try and escape their sparrowy death.

My walking stick fell out of my hand, but it was like a miracle had happened, my legs stood on their own. I didn’t even feel any pain, because I didn’t feel I had legs at all. I just hobbled this way and that around the threshing floor, and, boo! boo! My throat was as dry as a well in a drought and my arm was about to fall off from waving the whip. But the birds up by the roof were evidently also getting tired, because they started looking for somewhere they could perch even for a second. They weren’t that frightened anymore, either by the whip or by my shouting. I am not giving in to you, I said to myself, not if it kills me. I grabbed the flail that was standing in the corner by one of the mows, and I started smashing it against the threshing floor, the doors, the partitions, the pillars. This set the storm in motion again. They weren’t flying in a single dense cloud anymore, but in little groups, in tatters, birds on their own. They flapped about every which way, even bumping into each other. They didn’t look like sparrows so much as sparrow dust, sparrow fear, sparrow death, fluttering around the barn. And in that dust, that fear, that death, they crashed against the walls and rafters and beams and came tumbling down to the ground like rotten apples falling off a tree. At moments it was like someone had shaken the trunk of the barn, and there was an absolute hail. Though the others kept trying to get away, maybe they thought they’d already made it out of the barn to freedom, that they’d managed to pass through the walls and the roof like sparrow ghosts and they were soaring through the air farther and farther away from my flail. Because in a state of panic like that, even sparrows can think goodness knows what. A couple of them even fell on me, but what’s a sparrow, even a dead one. Just a little bundle of feathers. Besides, I was in a rage, and I’d gotten so carried away with the flail that even if rocks had fallen on me they would’ve felt like sparrows.

I began to run out of strength, the flail got out of control and I hit myself on the head with the swingle. At that exact moment it felt like someone had kicked my legs from under me, and I had to grab hold of a pillar so I wouldn’t fall over. I dragged myself to a sack of bran and plumped down on it, exhausted and gasping like a dog that’s been rushing around. The sparrows were still flying all over the place and killing themselves up above, though the cloud wasn’t so dense now, it was like the last drops of rain. And even after they’d stopped flying, every so often one of them would still rise into the air then thump down into a mow or onto the threshing floor.

My rage was through and I was even starting to feel bad about what I’d done. I mean, what had the sparrows done to me. But how could I help it if the sparrows had been on the receiving end? I could just as easily have turned the house upside down or taken an ax and cut down the orchard. Because I’d obviously needed to do something to come to terms with myself. What was I now? It wasn’t enough that I had to learn to walk from scratch, I also had to learn how to live all over again. Yet how could I live when everything here was in ruins. One of the cows was at least calving, but with the other one you felt bad even milking her. When you pulled her teats she twisted her head around to see why you were tormenting her. And she gave no more than a cupful of milk in the morning and the same in the evening. As for the horse, if I hadn’t known he was mine I’d never have recognized him. His ribs were poking through his skin. He only stood when I took him by the halter. And even when he was only harnessed to an empty wagon he staggered like he was about to collapse. He’d need to be fattened up on oats for at least a week to get his strength back a bit. But where was I supposed to get oats from when the bins were gaping empty. He had to eat chaff, and from borrowed straw at that. And on top of everything, the harvest had begun.

I’d had about twenty chickens. Mrs. Makuła was looking after them for me, and that was a lot of eggs for her, minimum one egg every other day from each chicken. In return she was supposed to water the flowers in the window boxes. There was nothing left of the flowers except dry stalks, and she claimed the chickens had gotten fowl cholera and it happened to be my chickens that all died. She gave me two of hers to replace my twenty, and she promised me a brood hen in the spring.

As for the fence along the road, no more than half of it was left, though there hadn’t been a single post missing before.

I had a chaff-cutter, I’d thought about motorizing it one of these days, but someone had borrowed it. I went around almost all the neighbors near and far, and eventually I found it all the way over by the mill with Przytuła, he even tried to convince me I’d lent it to him myself before I was taken to the hospital. I didn’t have the strength to argue. It might have been true, it might not have, so be it.

My scythe had always hung under the overhang of the barn, now there was no sign of it. The rake had lived next to it, that had disappeared just the same.

I went to Stajuda’s because he’d been the last one to look after my land, all I wanted to know was whether he’d mucked my fields, because the muck stall was completely empty. Sure, he’d gone and mucked the fields and plowed them over, he swore he had. Except his eyes were darting about in this odd way and he didn’t look at me once, he just kept squinting at the walls the whole time. I had to believe him. I mean, I couldn’t go ask the land, tell me, did the bastard muck you or not?

The floor in the house was so covered in mouse droppings it was like walking over spilled buckwheat, scrit scrit scrit. I grabbed a broom and started sweeping. All at once I hear a scratching sound in the pail. I look in, and there’s a mouse. Where did you come from? It made me think, because a bucket for a mouse is like a well for a person. There’s no way to either get in or get out without a ladder. So I had to think it had been born from the water. The water had dried up and the mouse was left behind. I set it free, why should I go blaming a stupid little mouse for everything and killing it.

When I looked at the Our Lady over the bed I saw the glass was broken. There were umpteen empty vodka bottles under the bed. The lightbulb had been removed. It was just as well I’d come back during the day, I managed to go buy a new one. Except that when I screwed it in it turned out there was no light, because there hadn’t been anyone to pay the bill and my electricity had been turned off.

I’d had an alarm clock. Admittedly it was broken, it was stopped on nine o’clock. But at least it showed nine o’clock. You looked at it and you knew you had to do this and do that, go here, drive there, bring such and such, take something down, throw it out, feed the animals, milk them. And everyone has the time inside them anyway, they don’t need a clock to tell them. But someone had found a use even for a broken clock.

Someone else had taken a liking to the calendar, though it was a good few years old. It hung on the wall under the crucifix and I got so used to it being there that I’d been reluctant to throw it out. Plus, once in a while I’d write something on it, maybe someone died, or there was a big hailstorm, or the cow was taken to be covered. Maybe they’d liked the sayings, because there was a different saying for each day. And if someone doesn’t know how to live, a saying like that can often be good advice.

I’d had a bucket I took the food out to the pigs in, that had gone too.

I’d had two stools, only one was left.

What I missed most were my haircutting things. Whoever took them, I cursed him to high heaven. I wished him a lingering death. I’d been counting on maybe beginning to offer haircuts and shaves for the local men, though there was a barber in the village now. Olek żmuda was his name. But they’d come to me as well, if not the young folks then the older ones, and I’d earn a bit of money to help get me started again.

Or my fireman’s helmet, these days you won’t find a helmet like that anymore, all gold, with a crest and a peak and a studded chinstrap. It had hung on a nail in the main room. The bastard who took it couldn’t even wear it, I mean where would he go in it? To a fire? Everyone would stare at him instead of putting out the fire. There aren’t any more parades, and the firemen don’t guard Christ’s tomb at Easter anymore.

Or my prayer book. I got it from mother when she was dying. She had four prayer books, the same as her number of sons. She prayed for each one of us from a different one. From one she prayed for Stasiek, from another for Antek, a third one for Michał, and the one she prayed from for me she’d gotten from her own mother. That was all I had of hers. It was in the drawer in the table. I mean, how can a son of a bitch like that pray from a stolen prayer book? Will God listen to him?

I had a saw used to always be propped up in the hallway. Someone took that as well.

I had a raincoat. It had holes in it, but I’d still always put it on for going out into the fields when it was raining, or taking the animals down to the river to water them. That was gone.

The hoe for weeding, it was almost brand-new, I bought it the spring before my accident, someone even stole the handle.

Then there were all kinds of things I only remembered later.

The basket I always used to take food to be blessed, I didn’t remember till Easter when I’d already boiled the eggs to take them to be blessed.

Or the masher for mashing potatoes up for the pigs. It stood by the door in the passageway, I remember well, twice a day I’d take it and twice a day I’d put it back in its place. And not just for a year or two, but even when mother and father were still alive. Mashers would come and go, but they were always kept in the same place, behind the door in the passageway. But what use was a memory. Sometimes it’s best not to remember at all, because when you remember something it ought to be there.

When I went up into the attic, there’d used to be a sack of feathers hanging from a rod, an old cloak of Michał’s, some other old clothes, half a dozen strings of garlic, a horse-collar, two lengths of rope. Only the rod was left.

I’d had an almost full sack of bolted flour, one and a half hundredweight, yellow as the sun, I didn’t even need to add eggs when I was making noodles. There was no sign of flour or sack.

There’d been two cheeses hanging from a rafter in wicker baskets, I thought they’d be just what was needed when the cow stopped giving milk before it had its calf, but someone had cut the baskets down and left just rag-ends of cord.

Wherever I looked there was something missing. I didn’t want to look anymore. But on the way back from the attic to the main room I noticed the sieve was gone, though there’d always been one hanging on a nail by the ladder. This was gone, that was gone, and two of the rungs of the ladder were broken.

I threw myself on the bed to try and gather my thoughts. Though that’s easier said than done, gathering your thoughts. There are times a man would much rather scatter his thoughts to the four winds. Then turn into a table or a stool. And just be that stool or table till his time came. Because it was like pouring sand from one hand to the other, back and forth, endlessly. You could pour it there and back again all your life, you’d never make it into a whip. And even if you did, who would you use it on? Szymon, Szymon — I thought I heard someone calling me. But I didn’t want to hear who. I stared at the room, or the room stared at me, and there was nothing but a dead reflection in my eyes. And then the cat appeared.

It stood on the threshold, meowed, and jumped up onto my lap. I’d forgotten all about it. I couldn’t remember everything. Besides, truth be told, I never liked it. It was lazy as the day is long, and you had to force it to go out mousing, it would hardly ever go of its own accord. And when it came back it would be all hungry and bedraggled like it had been the one being bitten by the mice, and it would look at me to get me to toss it a crust of bread at least. It would have just laid there by the stove and slept all day. There were times it drove me mad when the mice were running wild in the barn, and the cat’s in here sleeping, maybe even enjoying a nice dream. Though I don’t think cats have dreams, because if cats do then other animals must, horses, cows, dogs, pigs, chickens, geese, rabbits — why would a cat be any better than them? If all of them had dreams every night on the farm, with all those animals and on top of that all those dreams, a man would go mad. It’s enough that people dream, sometimes even that’s too much.

Often it would sleep all day and all night, and still not want to wake up in the morning, not until I’d lit the stove and it felt warm enough. And even then it wouldn’t hop down right away. It would stretch and arch its back, stick its tail up in the air then curl it underneath, till I lost patience, I’d grab it by the scruff of the neck and force it to get up. Or I’d take it straight to the barn and bolt the door, this is where you belong, damn you. Can you smell mice? Then go catch some. But sometimes it’d be less than half an hour before it was back scratching at the door again. And how could I not let it in. Sure, it was an idle one, but without a cat the place felt somehow empty, just like a farmyard feels empty without a dog and cows, fields without a horse, the sky without birds. Come evening, it’s nice just to hear purring from something that’s alive. You listen to the purring and it’s like someone was sleeping in the other bed, or like mother was kneeling way over in the corner saying her prayers.

I thought it would have disappeared in the two years I was gone. I wouldn’t have minded much. And here it’d even grown fat. If it wasn’t for the fact it was a tomcat, you might have thought he was about to have kittens and that was why his belly was so big. Even his meow was deeper. And his tail had gotten all bushy, like a fox’s. His head had almost become one with his body. It was hard to even believe it was my old cat. But how could I have not known my own cat? He was dark gray with green eyes and half his tail was white. No one else had a cat like that in the whole village. I stroked his back, and it was like stroking sun-warmed grass.

He sat in my lap like a loaf fresh from the oven and I could hear the mice playing inside him. He must have had a good bellyful, because I could feel beneath my hand how they were stirring in him, jostling about, running amok. His big stomach was just swelling and settling, swelling and settling. And he was purring somewhere deep down. You could have been forgiven for thinking his stomach was the only living part of him, while the rest of him lay in my lap, lifeless and contented. And the hand I was stroking him with was like the sky over that dead contentment of his.

He even stank of mice. Maybe he’d had so many of them for my benefit, to make up for all his years of idleness. And I felt bad that when I was in the hospital, whenever anyone asked if I had a cat I’d said I used to, but it was so lazy I’d put it down.

Though there wasn’t that much talk about cats. What kind of a creature is a cat that you’d want to talk about it. It’s gray or black, a hunter or a lazybones, that’s it. There’s more to say about dogs, or pigeons. And most of all about horses. When it came to horses, if one person started talking about them, all of a sudden everyone was talking. This kind and that kind, old ones, young ones, workhorses, horses gone bad, black ones, grays, bays, sorrels, chestnuts, tows, dapples, roans. Sometimes we’d talk all day about horses. Because everyone had more to say about horses than about themselves, more than about their own children and their wives and their farms, more than about the rest of the world. Made no difference whether it was all true or not. You didn’t have to believe it, you listened along with everyone else. Because when you’re stuck in bed, and in some cases you’ve got one foot in the next life, it makes no difference whether you believe what you’re hearing or not. There were times they’d turn the lights out for bedtime and people would carry on talking about horses in the dark, as if the horses were lying down for the night between the beds, each one by his owner.

There was one guy that was a lawyer on the ward with us, other than him it was all farmers from the country. But he liked listening too. Not just about horses, about any animals. Even if he was reading his book, when someone started talking he’d set it aside and listen as if what was being said was more interesting than what was in the book. His bed was next to mine, to the left. He had something wrong with his spine, and he was visibly going downhill. But he never complained of being in pain. It was just that he couldn’t sleep much, and he’d wake up way early in the morning. Then he’d wait for me to wake up as well. If I so much as reached my hand out of the sheets in my sleep, I’d hear a whisper, muffled like it was coming from inside the earth:

“Are you awake, Mr. Szymon?”

Ever since I was in the resistance I’ve been a light sleeper, plus I had plenty of sleep in the hospital, so I would have heard a mouse. Besides, I used to wake up early myself, before everyone else. I’d just lie there with my eyes closed, but my head would already be full of thoughts. I sometimes even thought about him, how his breathing was so shallow, how that was death breathing inside him.

“Did I wake you up?”

“Not at all. At home I’d be up and about already.”

“What would you be doing?”

“There’s no shortage of things to do. The animals will need feeding. They’ll all be squealing and lowing and neighing and cackling so loud you never know who to see to first. The worst are the pigs, they won’t eat things raw so you have to cook it for them, and they’re the biggest eaters of all. On a farm, Mr. Kazimierz” — because that was his name, Kazimierz — “the day doesn’t begin with the sunrise but with the animals being hungry. The sun’s only just starting to come up when the animals have already been fed. In here, we don’t do anything but laze around. It’s neither living nor dying. There’s no telling why we need to go to sleep, or why we have to get up.”

I knew that he liked hearing about the animals, and I often brought the subject up deliberately, because I felt it helped him. So he would ask right away:

“Do you have a lot of pigs?”

“There’s a good few of them, Mr. Kazimierz. Sows, I’ve got two of them. With a good litter there can be as many as twenty from one of them and twenty from the other, and I don’t sell any of them, I raise them all myself. When you go in to feed them there’s no room to even put your feet. It’s all white as can be, like the floor was covered with lilac. And once they latch on to the teats, all you can hear is sucking, suck suck suck. Sounds like someone was threshing corn far off, or like rain dripping down the walls. And the sow just lies there in the middle of all that lilac doing nothing, you’d think she was dead. Her belly’s wide open, her eyes are half closed, and she’s barely breathing. And the young ones, they’re squealing and scrambling all over her and jockeying around her teats. They’re stubborner than puppies. But you need to know that not all teats are alike, even though they all belong to the same mother. Some have more milk, some less. Some are firm, others are limp. And the piglets aren’t born equal either, there are sickly ones, fussy ones, greedy ones. The greedy ones can feed from three teats in one sitting. And they fight for the teats like no one’s business. It’s just as well they don’t have claws, cause they’d be covered in blood. And the sow is just a big heap of flesh, meekness itself. The most she’ll do is kick one of them if it tickles her too much, but otherwise she’ll just lie there till they’ve sucked every last drop out of her.”

“Do you have much in the way of poultry?”

“Sure I do. Chickens, geese, ducks, other things. Loads of them. But I like poultry. In the early morning, before you even open the door of the coop they set up a racket, as soon as they know it’s you. Then when I open the door for them it’s like opening a sluice-gate in a water mill. They rush past you, under you, over you. One big cloud of feathers. The whole yard is filled with feathers, earth and sky. If the dog tries to bark it’s choked by feathers and it sounds like it’s barking behind a wall. And even more than the feathers, there’s all the cackling and quacking and honking and gobbling. And once they all start pecking at the ground, the whole place quakes like in a hailstorm. If the calf pokes its head out from the cattle shed, it hurries back in again right away. If you need to harness the horse, you have to drag him by force through all the hullabaloo. I’ve got turkeys, guinea fowl. But guinea fowl are something else. They’re calm as anything, timid, it’s like they’re lost among all the other birds. They’re not pushy, they don’t get in the way. Because chickens, they’re ragtag and bobtail. All they’re good for is laying eggs. Though come wintertime, eggs are expensive and things even out. I even have two peacocks. I hold on to them because people in the village have gotten used to saying, the house with the two peacocks. Sometimes one of them will spread its tail, and I have my own rainbow. It’s lovely to look at. The truth is, though, I don’t know how many birds I have. I don’t count. Besides, how could you count even if you wanted to? They’re always moving around, hopping and pecking and fighting, you’d need a hundred eyes to keep track. Plus, when the sun comes out in the yard everything’s all glittery. Sometimes, if I get to a hundred I can’t be bothered to keep on counting. What’s the point, I ask myself? Will there be more of them if I count them? Let them live uncounted. If I knew how many I had, I’d need to worry whenever one of my geese or ducks or chickens went missing. Though when that happens, try searching other people’s farms and orchards, in their yards and behind their barns, try asking if they haven’t seen anything anywhere. In the village there isn’t even anywhere to look. There’s one house next to another, all in a row. You’d have to look to the neighbors, because when something goes missing, they’re the likeliest suspects. Though maybe that’s why people are neighbors? And if you’re at odds with your neighbors, then all the more they’re the likeliest. Or you could set traps for polecats, and catch a neighbor in one of them from time to time. Though polecats can do their fair share of damage too.”

It was a Monday, and he asked me right away if I could give him a shave along with the other guys. Because Monday was market day, and from early morning everyone on the ward would start getting ready for visiting hours. Dawn would barely be lighting the windows, and already they’d be whispering and sighing and saying their prayers. Some of them woke up much earlier even, as if it was time to feed the animals. So if anybody felt like sleeping in, Monday wasn’t the day to do it. One bed would creak, and right away every bed in the place would start creaking. Though whoever woke up first generally woke everyone else up right off:

“Hey everybody, wake up! Today’s Monday!”

Right away there’d be a commotion and comings and goings. Even when someone was stuck in bed because of illness or injury, and they couldn’t get up, on a Monday it was like they were expecting a miracle to happen and they’d get ready as well. Everyone washed, shaved, combed their hair, and those that couldn’t do it by themselves, someone else would shave them and comb their hair and wash them. Eventually, when I could get up myself, I was the one that shaved everyone. I had my work cut out for me on Mondays. Because every man jack of them needed something special doing. One of them had to at least have his sideburns evened up, someone else wanted his mustache trimmed so everybody would know he was expecting someone. And though some of them never had visitors, Monday was the kind of day when you might finally get one. They might come to town to buy a horse or sell some suckling pigs, and while they were at it they’d come visit.

That was all people talked about from the early morning, will they come or won’t they. Will they come or won’t they. They might come, they’ve got a bullock they need to sell, why keep it any longer than necessary. It’ll eat more than their cow, and it’s not going to give them any milk. They’ve already plowed and sowed, what else do they have to do. They don’t have that many apples in the orchard, no, not like last year, the branches were almost breaking under the weight. I told them they ought to spray one more time. Damn aphids ate all the blossom. So I think they’ll come. They didn’t sow any beet or carrots this year, they only had to lift the potatoes, so they probably already did it. Why should they need to do the threshing now? It can wait till winter. I’ll do it when I get back. Working the fields with only one leg would be harder, but you can do the threshing as long as your arms are healthy. Really you can, though it’d be easier with a threshing machine. I told her, just get a hired hand if you can’t manage on your own. I bet she did. With me, whatever I say, goes. Though where am I going to get a hired hand these days? You think it’s like it was before the war? She might not have found anyone. They were supposed to come right after the harvest festival. They didn’t come last time, or the time before that, or the time before that either, ever since you’ve all been in here. Because the land won’t let them go. In the winter they’d come for sure. What work is there in the winter? You feed the animals and then you sit and warm yourself in the kitchen. What, you don’t know what the land is like? It’ll grab you by the legs or the arms or round the waist and hold on. If it ever popped into that head of hers to collect a few eggs, some cream, even just a little cheese, she’d have something to bring to market. A bit more money never goes amiss. To buy salt, or sugar, or vinegar. The bus comes to the village now, they’ve surfaced the road, all you have to do is sit and stare out the window and you’re there. Maybe they’ll at least come let me know whether it’s a bull calf or a heifer. Ask me if I think they should keep it or not. I mean, the priest isn’t going to give them any advice, what does he know about calves. I’m telling you, it’s a poor story when the head of the house is gone, that’s for sure. I even said to them, the moment I’m gone, then you’ll cry. Who’s going to drive the geese down to the pond, who’ll look after the grandson, who’ll put the water on to boil when you come back from the fields. Who? I won’t be able to hear you anymore. Cry all you like. They’ll come, they’ll come. Why wouldn’t they? She was going to buy herself a new pair of shoes, and an overcoat for Jaś. She sure dresses up a lot. When he married her she was dirt poor, now she’s the lady of the village. They’re wanting to build a new house but they can’t get sheet metal for the roof anywhere, maybe they’ll come buy it in town. They’ve promised to give me my own room, with curtains in the window and a carpet on the floor. They’re going to paint flowers on the walls. What do you think, will flowers look nice? My whole life I lived with whitewashed walls, I’m worried flowers’ll give me asthma. Maybe they’ll come to buy wedding rings. Christmas is on its way, and at Christmas they’re planning to get married. They could get my blessing at the same time. Cause there’s no telling if I’ll ever make it back home. And without a blessing life can go wrong. Last Monday I sent word by the neighbor, come as soon as you can, me, I could wait, but death might not be willing to. Death’s like an emperor. However much you beg him, he won’t wait even just one more week, till the next market day at least, because something must have held them up. He’s actually not that bad of a farmer, but man does he drink. If he wasn’t drinking yesterday, he’ll for sure come today. He needs to pick up supplies for the cooperative. They canned him three times already, but they don’t have anyone else to give the job to. I told him, I said, it’s my land, my inheritance, my everything, the mutt and the rake and the stork on the roof. And you, you Johnny-come-lately, what’s your contribution? Ten lazy fingers and a lazy arm. And those glazed eyes of yours that are only interested in sleeping the whole time. And on top of that you disrespect me? I’m not giving you a thing. I’ll give to the church, I’ll give to the poor, but you, you’re not getting one red cent from me. So he beat me up so bad the dog was yowling over me. You old fart, you belong in the cemetery. That’s where your land is, your inheritance, your everything. And all she says is, Miecio, don’t hit daddy. Daddy! Daddy! But I guess I’ll forgive them if they come. Why not. I can’t take it with me after I’m gone. So maybe they’ll come. God’ll tip them the wink and they’ll come. I never was much of a one for revenge. It’s all because of the land. The land’s run wild. The land isn’t what it used to be. Evidently the land’s going to die with us, Wojciech. You’ll have enough of it in your hands, in your feet, under your back, in your eyes, in your gray hair. Last year I had a dream that I was standing on a field boundary and the land was coming toward me. There were oats and barley and wheat and rye coming, and fallow fields. There were farmers’ fields coming alongside the squire’s. They were coming from somewhere on the other side of the sky and marching like regiments, armies, battalions, companies, one field after another was marching past me and going on, moving away then disappearing. There were the neighbors’ fields, my brother-in-law’s, mine. I recognized them all from far away, of course I knew my own fields, they were all blue with cornflowers. I spread my arms. Where do you think you’re going? Stop! Stay there! I shouted. I grabbed fistfuls of crop, but it slipped out of my grip like eels. I fell to my knees. Come back! But they passed by and they vanished, and then I woke up. Why shouldn’t they come today. I bought them a car, all they need to do is hop in, vroom vroom, and they’re here. If the Lord would just send some rain, then they’d come. When it rains people remember the most forgotten things. And when the rain really sets in, it rains and rains and you keep remembering things. Long rains, people call it. You can’t send the cows out in weather like that. You can’t go plow. You sit at home, the windows are running with rain, it’s pouring down like it was coming from the sky to the earth and then back from the earth to the sky. All the houses are in a row but every one of them’s apart, every person’s apart. Course, you could mend the chair, the one that the leg fell off of. Or visit your neighbor. But it’s raining over there just the same, it’s raining everywhere in the village. And it’s raining in Sąśnice, in Walencice, the whole world. Cut it out, what’s gotten into you with that rain. If it’s potato lifting time let folks dig their potatoes in peace. The thing is, when it rains it gets at you inside so bad you’d even make up with your worst enemy. One time I actually did make up with my enemy when it was raining. For twenty years we’d been at each other’s throats. But I’m sitting at home, I couldn’t even go look outside cause it was cats and dogs the whole time, and my conscience started nagging me. I’ll go see him, I thought, why should we be angry with each other. I go by there, and he says, I’m surprised you could be bothered in this weather. I would’ve made up with you anyway before I died. Sit yourself down, since you’re here. Look how misty it is over the way. Take a look, your eyes are better than mine. Mine don’t see too good anymore. In the village I’d be able to tell. There’d be smoke lingering on the rooftops, and my bones’d be aching. This could be my last Monday? Lord, let it rain.

It had never happened that anyone had died on a Monday. They died on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, sometimes even on a Sunday, but on Monday they were always alive. The afternoon passed. The market was at its busiest.

“Are you not reading your book today, Mr. Kazimierz?” I asked. There was a book lying open on the bedside table and I was a bit surprised he wasn’t reading, because a day didn’t go by without him reading. His cupboard was full of books, there were even some on the windowsill. Often he’d read a whole book in a single day. When he lost himself in his reading he didn’t hear what people said to him. We couldn’t get over the fact that he kept wanting to read. Because on the whole ward he was the only one that read. Didn’t it hurt his eyes? Didn’t it give him a headache? And after all, what was the point? You read and read, and in the end it all went into the ground with you anyway. With the land it was another matter. You worked and worked the land, but the land remained afterwards. With reading, not even a line, not a single word, was left behind.

Evening had begun to set in. The nurse came in, she gave him a sort of funny look and hurried out. A moment later the doctor arrived, held his arm for a moment then left again. The nurse came back and gave him an injection. She asked if he wasn’t thirsty, and she brought him some compote. Someone wanted to put the lights on but I said no, it wasn’t time yet. No one was reading, and it was far from dark.

You couldn’t tell anything from looking at him. Though people say that when someone’s going to die, you can tell two days before. But truth be told, what were you supposed to be able to see? He was always pale as can be, he couldn’t have gotten any paler. He was skinny as a rake and he couldn’t have gotten thinner. As the dusk fell his eyes grew sort of dim, and you’d have needed to lean over him for him to see anything. Only that open book on the bedside table that he didn’t feel like reaching for even just to close it — that might have been the only sign he was dying.

I sat on the edge of his bed and it seemed strange to me that you couldn’t tell anything from looking at him, but that he was dying. Things went quiet on the ward, though there were twelve of us in there. No one said a word, no one coughed, no one sighed, and if anyone was in pain, they kept it to themselves. Though more than one of them could have died right after him. But it was always the way that when someone on the ward was dying, everyone else died a bit with him, and they set their own deaths aside. Someone started whispering the rosary in the corner, though it was so quiet every word could be heard all around the ward like pebbles falling on the floor.

“Don’t pay any mind to him,” I said. “In the country they always pray in the early evening.”

And I took him by the hand, the way you take a child’s hand to lead him across a footbridge over the river. His hand was actually like a child’s, it was so small and scrawny both of them would have fit in my one hand. At one moment he squeezed my hand so hard and so desperately it was like he was falling off a cliff, and I felt my hand and my arm were dying with him.

“Mr. Szymon” — his whisper reached me like something moving down a bumpy road — “you’ve been in the next world. What’s it like there?”

“That was a long time ago, Mr. Kazimierz. And it was in the war. In wartime things might be different in the next world as well as in this one. Besides, war doesn’t distinguish between one world and the other. Maybe I just thought I was there. Shall I tell you about rabbits? What kind do you like better, angoras or lop-eareds? Me, I prefer angoras. Lop-eareds are big, but if you keep them it’s for the meat. Angoras are white as can be, they like to keep clean, and their eyes kind of shine red. When you touch an angora’s fur it’s like touching the daybreak, or touching a cloud, or the sky. And I’ve been thinking, I’m going to start keeping rabbits when I come home from the hospital. To begin with I’ll only need a single pair. After that they’ll breed. One pair can have three litters a year, six or seven little ones each time. Then the next year the same. Because rabbits, once they start breeding there’s no stopping them. And as for food, they’ll eat anything, grass, peelings. Come visit sometime and you’ll see. When they eat, their jaws make a noise like they were talking to themselves. Though grass makes one noise, peelings a different one. With grass it’s a tiny sound like autumn drizzle, but with peelings it’s deep like warm rain in May. You could listen to it till the cows come home. And if you listen harder, you can even hear the rush of springwater, bees collecting honey, clouds rubbing against the sky. You can hear the earth turning, and people turning with it. Even though it’s nothing but rabbits making a noise while they eat. But you often have a yen to just lie down on the ground among them like you were lying on hay, in the meadow, by the river, in the shade of a tree, and just melt away in that noise, among the springs and the bees and the clouds, and let yourself be carried away by the tired, tired earth around you. Because there’s something about rabbits that makes everything get softer all around, and inside you as well. Maybe it’s their whiteness. Have you ever seen anything whiter than a rabbit’s fur? Nothing’s whiter than that — not an orchard in bloom, not an eiderdown airing in the sun, not geese swimming on the water. It looks like something that isn’t even born yet and that’s why it’s so white, because it hasn’t yet come into contact with the world. When you pick up one of those rabbits, pull it out of the mass of them and put it on your lap, it’s like you’d taken it out of a warm womb. It trembles, it fights, sometimes scratches, as if it’s afraid to come out into the world. Then when you stroke it, you can feel the fear through your hand, that its whiteness is going to forever be dirtied from your touch. Though on the face of it it’s no big deal, you’re sitting stroking a rabbit and the rabbit’s trembling. You just have to hold it by the ears with your other hand, or else it’ll hop off your lap and there’ll be an emptiness in your hands, it’ll be emptier on your lap than before. And you won’t be able to catch it again. It’ll mix in with the other rabbits and you’ll lose it in all the whiteness. White mixes with white like water mixes with water, sand with sand. When there’re all those white creatures, how can you pick out one of them? Has anyone ever picked a drop of water out of a pool of water, or one grain in a handful?”

I felt a strange chill in the hand that was holding his hand. It was a bit like the chill of freshly plowed earth, or an apple picked when the dew’s still on it.

“I think he’s dead,” I said unsurely, as if it were him I was asking whether he’d died. Everyone on the ward held their breath a short while, like they’d died with him for a moment. Or maybe they were waiting to see if he’d answer me. In the end someone couldn’t take it anymore and they said as if they were surprised:

“He’s dead?” He probably said it not because he didn’t believe it but because you ought to be a bit surprised by death, that’s death’s right.

“Then he’s dead,” someone said almost with relief.

“So, he’s dead,” someone else sighed at the other end of the ward, as if he was saying, “so, it’s evening.”

“Then it’s evening,” someone agreed, because what else can you do with death except agree, “then he’s dead.”

I freed my hand carefully from his and sat back on my own bed.

“Turn the light on maybe,” someone said as though he was suddenly afraid. “Turn on the light.”

“What for, he’s not going to be doing any reading.”

“Well, so we can at least close his eyes.”

“Maybe he’s not dead? Maybe he’s not dead.” Old Ambroży jumped up from the bed right in the corner. No one had come to visit him that day. He’d had his leg amputated at the knee. He grabbed his stick and hobbled over, close to tears, as if he were still trying to keep death back. “Maybe he’s not dead. Look closely. Having cold hands doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead. Nor having cold feet. Death’s a whole lot more than that. It’s not enough to just say he’s dead. You can say all manner of things, it doesn’t make them so. You can say it’s day, but it’ll still be night. Just like Jesus, he was supposedly dead, but he hadn’t died at all. Give him a shake! Now how am I supposed to get Stolarek back for the wrong he did me? Stolarek, Stolarek. Half my land is gone almost. Skin and bones, that’s all my land is. A dried-up branch. Give him a shake. Lawyers don’t just up and die like that. Maybe he’s sleeping only? When death comes, your tongue has to die as well, and the things on your conscience have to die, everything has to die. When you’re dead you can’t even blow your nose. He promised. Sure as he’s lying there now, he promised. Some people just can’t catch a break. Why? Because they’re fools. Stolarek’s land is rich as you like, and he’s still filching other people’s, the crook. All he does is flick his whip at his horses, and they’re just horses, they’re not worried about whose land they’re plowing. His father used to steal land from my father. But what could my father do when his father was backed up by lawyers. All my father had was a head full of anger and a mouth full of prayers. So all he did was pray and curse, pray and curse in turn, while that guy took his land. Plus the other guy had a pair of horses, father only had the one horse, and with one horse there was no way he could have plowed back land that two horses had worked. He kept plowing his land back and his land kept getting smaller. Then one time he got riled up and took a whip to Stolarek. So Stolarek’s lawyers set on him like ravens, and it wasn’t long before he died. Besides, what kind of a life would it be anyway to live and watch your own land shrinking. I’ll leave it all to you, son, my father said, though you’ll need to take an ax with you one of these days. Me, I somehow didn’t have the strength to defend what was mine. You know, I let him have it with my whip, though I didn’t even hurt him that much cause he was wearing a thick cape, and now I have to die already. But you, don’t use a whip, take an ax. All a whip is, is anger and a strip of leather, and there’s nothing you can do against lawyers, it’s like beating a bull with a little twig. As for them, it’s not enough that they’re the law, they’re in with the devil to boot. And there’s no greater power on earth than the law and the devil in cahoots. All you can do then is grab an ax and kill the other guy. Even if you have to die in the slammer afterwards. It’s better to die than to live when you’re up against the law and the devil. God’ll forgive you, because when it’s about the land, he always forgives. He was born on the land, he lived on it and died on it, so he knows what it is. And God wasn’t one of the masters either, he was just a regular carpenter. Same as Kosiorek or Bzdęga in our village. Kosiorek built our cattle sheds, and Bzdęga made wagon wheels for us. And if God doesn’t forgive you, the land will. Because sometimes God doesn’t always see everything from up in his heights, but the land feels every hurt. Though even better than using an ax would be if you had enough to buy your own lawyers. Sell a few acres, sell the horse or a cow, go take a loan, but buy some lawyers. Then you can face Stolarek and his lawyers like an equal. Cause a guy like that, even if you cut him to death, his sons’ll rise up, their sons’ll rise up, their grandsons and great-grandsons, and they’ll be plowing your land over till kingdom come. But you need to find lawyers that are in with an even bigger devil than Stolarek’s. With devils it’s like with people, there’s bigger ones and smaller ones. Don’t keep with the small ones. A small devil is the same as a small calf, small boots. Not much of anything. Always keep with the big ones. However much they ask for. Even if you have to sell your soul. What do you need a soul for if you don’t have any land. A soul on its own, without land, it’s like its body didn’t want it and God’s driven it away. Take the religious pictures off the wall, smash the cross with a mallet and leave it there broken, pour the holy water into the night pail, then go get drunk and curse for all you’re worth, and the devil’ll come find you of his own accord. Prick your finger for him, he’ll do the same, and Stolarek’ll be quaking in his boots. Pity I won’t live to see it, we could have gone together. You’d knock at his window, hey there, Stolarek, I got my own lawyer now! Now we’ll see what’s what! Now we’ll see who’s stronger! We were like two brothers, our beds were next to each other in the hospital! He’s in with better devils than you are! He knows Lucifer! He knows Beelzebub! He knows the Antichrist! He knows all the important devils! He knows all of hell! Your devils are pisspots! He knows all the laws! A hundred times more than yours know! He knows every law there is! And he knows the right law for you, you thief! They cut my leg off, but I don’t care. I’d let them cut the other one off if it meant getting even with you. Come here, Stolarek, come outside, I’ve got more to tell you! He’s visiting Sunday! Come take a look through my window! You’ll see us drinking vodka, eating sausage together! My old lady’ll cook him some chicken! And we’ll laugh together. Ha, ha, ha! Hee, hee, hee! And it’s you we’ll be laughing at! It’s curtains for you, Stolarek! God is slow but just! And you know what he said to me? He said, there’s no reason we should lose against a guy like Stolarek. We don’t even need the devil on our side, Ambroży. All we need is regular justice. That’s what he said. He even laughed, he said those lawyers of Stolarek’s, they’re no more devils than fleas are wasps. When we’re done with them, all that’ll be left of them will be their farts. Ha, ha, ha! He laughed and laughed. Hee, hee, hee! He just kept laughing and laughing. You could see the devil flashing in his eyes. I asked if I should pay him, I said I could pay him, but please stop laughing like that. I can’t afford it, but I’d sell a few acres, the horse, a cow, take a loan, and I’d pay. If Stolarek could pay for a lawyer I could too. But he should stop laughing, cause it was frightening. The only thing left for Stolarek to do will be go hang himself. Pick your tree, Stolarek. And he asked me, Stolarek’s his name? Stolarek. Same as his father! And his father before him. As soon as we get out of here. He promised. But it looks like there’s no law for Stolarek, no God, no devil. That’s for sure.”

“Easy there now, don’t cry.”

Right off, two big brawny auxiliaries came in and took the lawyer away. Then Jadzia the orderly came in and changed his bed. She said, “So, the poor guy’s gone.” She checked around to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. There were a few small things, like there always are after someone dies, so she gathered them in her apron. There was the glass of compote he’d not finished, she asked if anyone wanted it. But no one did so she poured it down the sink. She wiped the top of the bedside table with a cloth. She took down the old temperature chart and put up a new one. She was going to take the books as well but I told her to leave them, that maybe I’d read them.

At one point I even took the book he’d left open by his bed and started to read it. It was about this guy that went around asking about a carpenter. It wasn’t really a carpenter he was interested in, but he didn’t know what he ought to ask about so he asked about a carpenter. Was he nuts or what? You ask about a carpenter when you need someone to make a door or a table or a chest. If he’d come to our village any little child would have told him where the carpenter is. Józef Kalembasa, on the way to the mill, third house after the roadside shrine, the one with the acacia in the yard.

I only read a few pages. I couldn’t get any further because his bed was taken by a damn kid that wanted to be my best buddy right from the get-go and talked my ear off from morning till night. His head was all wrapped in bandages, both his legs were broken, he’d crashed his motorbike when he was drunk, and he was all pleased because he was getting out of doing jobs for his father. He never shut his trap once, whether anyone was listening or no. Most of all he liked to go on about his girlfriends, though it was mostly just dirty stories. Which one he’d been with, and where, and when, and how. Lying down, standing up, from the front, from the back, kneeling, squatting, straight up, and upside down. You really felt sorry for the girlfriends.

One time one of them visited him, she was a nice, good-looking young lady. She brought a basket of apples and gave one to each of us, she even had me take two, and she picked another one out herself and put it on my table. She gave you the impression she was visiting her father and grandfather and uncles, not the kid. She even took her basket around the beds like she was embarrassed at being the only girl among all those men. Though they weren’t much in the way of men, they were all wrinkled and feeble and gray and bald, their teeth falling out, their eyes failing, some of them with one foot in the grave. But they were kind of embarrassed as well, they were supposedly just taking apples from her, but everyone lowered their eyes so as not to look at her without her clothes on, because it was like she was giving out her breasts instead of apples after that animal had undressed her in front of us all.

Not only did he undress those girlfriends of his, he laughed at them as well. He laughed so much sometimes he slapped himself on the thigh, on his cast. He laughed the way a fool laughs at the slightest thing. He laughed to himself. And though it was none of our business, everyone looked at him as he laughed like he was on his way to his own funeral. How could you laugh like that on a bed that was still warm after someone else had died. Maybe he was so stupid he didn’t even know that through all that laughter and all those undressed girlfriends he was just continuing the other man’s dying. Old men can see straight through the world, and they could see that too.

Besides, is it true that there’re so many different ways? Stallions don’t do anything like that with mares, nor dogs with bitches. Why would people? And what for? After all, whichever way you do it the result’s the same. I was a young man too in my day and I may even have had more girls than him, but I always did it the way you’re supposed to.

The only one to laugh was old Albin in the corner by the door, he’d squeal with delight whenever the kid would put his hand between his girlfriend’s legs, or she’d do the same to him. But Albin’s back was broken and he just lay there like a tree stump, and his arms and legs lay next to him like chopped-off boughs. He could only dream of sleeping with a woman one more time before he died. He was forever cursing his life, cursing his injury, his children, everything. He promised an acre of land to the ward orderly, Jadzia, if she’d only put her hand under his covers, it could even be right before he died. Jadzia laughed and said death was probably a lot nicer than her hand, her hand was all work-worn and chapped and not exactly young. Because Jadzia was able to laugh at even the saddest things. Another woman would have given him an earful, but she laughed. Another woman would have burst into tears, but Jadzia laughed. Often it’d be quiet as the grave on the ward, then Jadzia would come in and say something and everyone would be laughing.

It wasn’t surprising really. To be surrounded like her for so many years by misery and pain and death and moaning, and it was constantly, clean up shit and piss, tidy the place, change the beds, take this out, bring this in — after all that you’d learn to laugh at anything. Plus, everyone was always trying to marry her, old, young, widows, married men, though all of them had half a foot in the next world. A good few couldn’t even stand up on their own, or turn over in bed by themselves, they were armless, legless, they shat their pants, their faces were all crooked, they ached everywhere. But the moment Jadzia came on the ward, every one of them was all set to marry her. Some of them would have married her one day and died the next. And she never turned anyone down, she never said no, she just laughed.

Often one of them would set about marrying her in a way he’d never have done with his own wife, because she’d have knocked his block off. But Jadzia the orderly let anyone try to marry her as much as they wanted, and she laughed with each one the way she would have done with her own man. She was never sad, never angry. It was just that when one of them would try to arrange a wedding with her, she’d ask:

“How am I going to get to the church? Are you planning to take me in a regular wagon with the boards all dirty with manure? Cause I’m not going unless it’s in a carriage drawn by four white horses.”

One guy would promise she’d be a fine lady when she lived with him.

“Then you’ll have to become a fine gentleman first.”

One of them would swear she’d never lack for caviar in his house.

“Caviar maybe not, but I’d lack for everything else.”

One tried to tempt her by saying he had gold rubles buried under a mow in his barn, and when he got back home he’d dig them up and they’d all be hers.

“Best go home first and dig them up, your kids might have gotten there first.”

Another one kept pestering her about getting together in the morning when everyone was still asleep.

“In the morning there’s no moonlight and your breath smells.”

One guy sighed and said that if the Lord let him get well even just for a moment from being with her, he’d buy a new bell for the church.

“Then buy the bell first so I can hear it ringing.”

Someone else boasted that though he was old, if he went with her he’d get his youth back.

“You should get your youth back first, because afterwards it might be too late and we’d both be embarrassed.”

One of them asked if he could at least feel her breast.

“What good would that do you? You’re not a baby anymore, you won’t get any milk from it.”

Another one complained he wanted her so bad it hurt, but he couldn’t move arm or leg.

“So you see yourself. No moving, no loving.”

Another guy would grin at her when she was putting a urinal in place for him, though he couldn’t ever go.

“You need to take a piss first, cause otherwise later it could be a problem.”

When one of them was dying she’d sit by him and say to him:

“You were supposed to marry me, and here you are dying. I laughed just because, but I would have gone with you even in a regular wagon with dirty boards.”

Maybe that’s why she never took a husband, because they were forever marrying her and then dying, and it was like she was constantly being made a widow. I laughed myself a good many times that if it wasn’t for my legs, or if I’d met Miss Jadzia earlier, she would have had to be my wife. I’m no spendthrift, Miss Jadzia was a sensible woman too, we’d have made a good couple. But nothing was lost, when I got home I’d come visit her one day, bring her a chicken, some eggs, cheese, and we’d talk it through. The house would have a housekeeper, I’d have a wife, because my brothers had been on at me about getting married. There was no point even talking about it right now with these legs, who knew if I’d ever walk again, and Miss Jadzia wouldn’t have been able to carry me, even though she had strong arms.

One time at the very beginning, when she was changing my sheets she saw the scars on my body and she was horrified:

“Heavens almighty! Who gave you all those wounds, Mr. Szymek?”

“Different people, Miss Jadzia, some of it was at dances, some was in the resistance.”

“And you survived all of them? Lord have mercy!” And she asked me to tell about one of the scars at least.

“Then you decide which one, Miss Jadzia,” I said playfully. She chose the scar on my shoulder, a small one though it had gotten bigger over the years. And so I had to tell her how it got there.

I was spending the winter in hiding at the house of a guy I knew in Jemielnica. The village was a long way from any main road. To the south there were woods. And it was no ordinary winter either, there was snow everywhere and you could only travel by sleigh. The animals came out of the woods right up to the house. You’d step outside and there’d be a deer poking about in the yard, a hare hopping around, and partridges flying in like snow suddenly falling from the roof. What was there to be afraid of? I even moved my bed from the attic to the main room. Then one night, bang! bang! they start hammering on the door and shouting, open up! And before anyone could even open the door they smashed it in with their rifle butts. They virtually took me from my bed — I just had enough time to put my pants on when they started knocking me in the back and on the head with those rifle butts, and it was, forward march! Like they were in some kind of big hurry.

They’d come in two sleighs. But three of them stayed back to escort me on foot, while the rest went ahead in the sleighs. They didn’t even let me put my boots on — for them I was probably already a corpse. So they pushed me along barefoot in pants and shirt, following the tracks made by the sleighs.

The snow stuck to my feet, and from time to time I tried to rub one foot against the other. But right away one of them would thump me in the back. Though they kept hitting me the whole time anyway, probably to warm themselves up in the cold. Or they may have felt even colder than me, because every couple of yards one of them would bat his arms against his sides. They were wearing greatcoats and boots and balaclavas under their helmets, and gloves, but if you’re not used to it, you’ll be cold even if it’s not that cold. Plus they had their hands on metal the whole time, and metal is even colder than the ground.

To begin with I walked as if I was on burning coals, and I felt I wouldn’t make it very far. I wanted to get beyond the village, at that point I was planning to jump them, let them kill me where I chose for it to happen, not them, especially since there was no telling where that might be. Besides, why go farther when it was all leading to the same thing. But once we got outside the village I started feeling sorry that it was about to happen right now, and I thought, I’ll keep going a little ways farther at least. Why should I worry about my feet, they’re going to be dead either way, and it would be good to go on even a little bit. The sleighs with the other men were farther and farther away, it looked like they were sinking into the snow, and in a minute they’d be out of sight. The guys behind kept prodding me for walking too slowly.

Eventually, to make me forget I was walking on snow I started imagining to myself that I was walking over stubble. Stubble pricks and hurts just as bad, but at least your feet are warm. Though if you know what you’re doing, walking on stubble is no big deal. All you have to do is shuffle your feet along instead of picking them up. If you do that you can move as fast as you like, and you can run away when you’re being chased. And so I felt less and less that I was walking on snow, and more and more I could feel the stubble under my feet, I could feel the earth warm from the sun and dusty dry. I could even hear the chink of a whetstone against a scythe blade. The heat from the crop stuck in my chest. For a moment, way up overhead I heard a lark. But one of the bastards behind me must have heard it as well because he fired a shot over my head and the lark stopped singing.

My throat started to feel dry, as if from the baking heat from the grain and the earth, and I stooped down to take a handful of snow. At that moment one of them whacked me as hard as he could on the side of the head. I went sprawling and I thought about not getting up. I even wanted them to finish me off. But with them it’s never that easy. They don’t like it when someone chooses his own death. They have to take him to where they’ve decided he’s going to die. Even if it’s the same death. They started yapping like wolves, beating me and kicking me, and I got up. But it was harder and harder for me to walk. My ankles were aching. Every step felt like I was treading on a nail. So I started to imagine the grain must be full of thistles, and it was because of the thistles that it hurt so much walking through the stubble. Or maybe it’d been cut with sickles. Stubble that’s been cut with sickles feels like it’s packed with nails. Then I imagined my father was calling me from the far end of the field to bring him his whetstone, and I was on my way to him. Or that my cows had wandered onto the squire’s land and they were eating his beets, and I was hurrying towards them across the stubble, heart in mouth, as fast as I could, to shoo them out of there. At a time like that, who’d be thinking about whether their feet hurt when you can barely breathe, you’re so afraid that any minute now the squire’s steward is going to confiscate the cows before you get there. Or that I was racing the other boys across the stubble field, seeing who’d make it to the field boundary first. I won.

Those sons of bitches probably thought I was exhausted, because how could they have known that the whole way I’d been walking on stubble, at the height of summer, the height of the harvest, since they were leading me over snow. In the end they evidently got real cold themselves, because they started clapping their hands and blowing on them, and stamping their feet. On the left-hand side, right by the track there was a slope overgrown with juniper bushes, and at the bottom there was a deep twisting ravine. But they were so convinced I wouldn’t go an inch farther without being beaten that one of them even dug out a bottle and they all took a swig. They must have been telling dirty stories as well, because all of a sudden they all hooted with laughter as if on command. One of them opened his fly and took a leak. Right at that moment I ran for the slope. Before the first shots sounded I was rolling down through the junipers. Then I dropped like a sack into the ravine. For them it was too steep to chase me. They just stood there shooting. But only one bullet got me, right here in the shoulder. The rest hit the snow, the junipers, the trees. I didn’t even feel anything at the time, only later, when I was already safe.

From that moment on, Jadzia started giving me special treatment with the meals. She’d bring me a bigger piece of meat for dinner, or more potatoes, or a second bowl of soup. Whenever she came onto the ward she’d always ask if I was hungry or thirsty, or if I’d run out of cigarettes, she could go buy me some. A few times she even got me a pack with her own money. Every so often she’d come onto the ward seemingly for no special reason, and while she was there she’d straighten my blanket, because it’s gone and fallen on the floor, Mr. Szymek. She’d plump my pillow, because you’ll get a headache, Mr. Szymek, from lying on a pillow that’s all squashed up like that. And she’d always slip something to eat under the pillow.

“Just make sure you eat it during the night, when everyone else is asleep, Mr. Szymek,” she’d whisper, as if to the pillow. “And watch out for that guy by the window, because he sleeps with one eye open.”

Or when she was bending down for the urinal under the bed, she’d murmur in my ear:

“Tomorrow it’s chops for dinner. You’ll have one on the outside like everyone else, but there’ll be another one hidden under the potatoes. Just don’t pull it out or people will see. The old guy in the corner has eyes like a hawk. He lost his leg but there’s nothing wrong with his eyesight. He watches everyone else’s plates while he’s eating his own dinner. But it won’t do him any good. And you, Mr. Szymek, you need to live so you need to eat. I’ll bake a plum cake for Sunday because my sister’s coming, and I’ll bring you some too.”

One time she brought me an orange. It was the first time in my life I’d eaten an orange. Those wounds of mine came in useful after all.