The Story of a Life

51

Spring on the Vepsh

Silence is especially precious in wartime.

Lublin was full of silence. The noisy war hurried by, just like the troop trains which raced through, barely pausing at the station. Lublin station was thick with tobacco smoke, it clanged with mess tins, and echoed with the sound of tramping boots and the rattle of rifles. But if you just walked a little way up the main street into town, you found yourself enveloped in silence and the smell of lilacs. You could take off your cap, rub the red mark it had left on your forehead, take a deep breath and say to yourself: ‘What kind of crazy nonsense is this! There’s no war on, and I doubt there ever was!’

You could look up and see swifts darting over the rooftops. Thin clouds drifted from one distant blue horizon to another without depriving the earth of a single ray of sun. The sunshine filtered through the heart-shaped leaves of the lilac trees and touched the paving stones with a bit of their springtime warmth. In the Saxon Garden a brass band rehearsed a few opera selections. The music carried far in the silence that hung over the city. In a side street down by the river, between the kitchen gardens and some narrow gates, came the sound of a familiar melody: ‘He’s far away, your young groom, far away in some foreign land …’ Wrought-iron lanterns hung over the gates. Lilacs crowded against the railing. The silver church bells rang all day long from morning until night.

We were in Lublin for Easter. Feast days took the place of the commotion and dust of the recent battle. Nevertheless, we were still finding in our now scrubbed and tidy train a wad of blood-stained gauze behind a brake handle or a cigarette butt chewed to pulp by some poor man in pain overlooked in the corner of one of the carriages.

We went to the midnight service in the Bernadine Church. It was all very theatrical: the altar boys in their lace, the mounds of lilacs piled before the wooden statue of the Infant Jesus draped in blue brocade, the grey-haired priests, the nasal drone of the Latin chants, the thunderous peals of the organ.

The eyes of the praying women spoke of only one thing – their fervent expectation of a miracle, their enormous hope that just maybe this infant or that pale woman with the thick eyelashes, the mother of this little child, would banish war, endless toil and poverty from this world, so that they could straighten up at last from their washtubs and smile at the sun playing upon the soapy water.

Religion was their self-deception. It was a world of fruitless make-believe for weary people. They could see no other way out of their troubles and so despite common sense and their own life experiences they believed with a burning fanaticism that justice was incarnate in the person of this poor soul from Galilee, in the person of God. But for some reason this God, invented by people in order to make sense of the bloody and harsh muddle of human existence, never came, or spoke, or helped in their lives. Yet they still believed in him, even though their God’s inaction had lasted for centuries. So great was their longing for happiness that they looked for its poetry in religion, in the sobs of the organ, in the smoke of incense, in solemn incantations.

On the first day of Easter Lëlya, Romanin and I walked far out of town to the banks of the river Vepsh. Its clear water flowed between fields of wheat. In the depths of the water the reeds looked like black walls. Small marsh birds fluttered about above the grasses along the banks. It was pleasant to walk along this firm road through the fields in a foreign land with no idea where it was leading us. Wild flowers waved on either side, and we watched snowy mountain ranges of clouds form in the deep sky overhead. And no one – not then on the Vepsh, not later in life – has ever been able to explain to me why sudden waves of happiness come to us at moments when nothing out of the ordinary has just happened. I was truly happy that day.

We came upon a hut with a thatched roof by the Vepsh. A fishing net hung on the fence. Brown reed warblers were busy picking at the dry weeds caught in the net. We startled the birds, and the flapping of their wings woke a baby asleep in a wicker basket below the window. The baby began to cry. A peasant woman in a striped skirt came out of the hut. Upon seeing us, she stopped, her hands pressed to her chest. An old dog dragged itself out from under a broken tub, walked to the basket and peered inside with a look of surprise. Convinced everything was in order, it yawned, sat down and began scratching at its fleas, the entire time keeping its tired yellow eyes trained on us.

‘Shoo!’ the woman said quietly to the dog. She picked up her baby and turned to us with such a warm smile that we smiled back, even though we could say nothing and so just stood there in silence.

The woman asked us shyly to come in and have some milk. We thanked her and followed her into the hut. Everything inside was made of wood – not only the walls, floors, table, benches and bedstead, but also the plates, the hackle on the sill, the salt cellar and the lamp in front of the icon. A wooden fork lay on another windowsill. These wooden things accentuated the air of poverty and cleanliness.

Lëlya took the baby while the woman went down into the cellar to fetch a sweaty pitcher of milk. She wiped the table with a cloth, and as she leaned over her golden hair caught the sunlight. I looked at her fine, wavy hair. She felt my gaze and looked up. There was embarrassment in her soft green eyes. This, and other things as well, told me that a quiet happiness dwelled in her home. For some reason the thought struck me when I looked up at the ceiling. There was a small chandelier with thin wax candles. It had been woven from dry flowers. The unlit candles had been stuck into large crimson thistle heads that served as holders.

‘What’s this?’ I asked the woman. ‘It’s delightful!’

‘It’s just for fun,’ she said, blushing. ‘You can’t light it. My husband made it to bring a little joy into our home. He’s a basket weaver. He makes reed baskets and stools. He also just made a parasol for Panna Yavorskaya.’

Romanin had never heard of a parasol and was amazed when we told him what it was.

Just then the door opened, and a tall young peasant stood on the doorstep. He wore a sleeveless white leather coat with green embroidering over his shoulders. He was very thin and had a shy smile like his wife.

‘Here’s Stas, my husband,’ she said. ‘He’s not like all the others.’

He bowed silently, placed his basket of bast in the corner, sat down at the table and then gave each of us a long look, smiling the entire time. Through the open window we could hear the larks and see them, flapping their wings, as they flew up from the green wheat into the blue sky. Stas looked out of the window and grinned. ‘Our helpers,’ he said. ‘The larks.’

‘Why helpers?’ asked Lëlya.

‘They cheer folks up when they’re at work,’ he said, still grinning warmly. ‘I’ve never seen it, but they say there’s a lark with a golden beak. He’s their leader.’

‘Oh, Stas!’ his wife said. ‘Whoever made that up?’

‘That’s what people say,’ Stas said. ‘Just maybe the larks will save us from the war, just like they did in the days of King Yanko the Ferocious.’

‘People don’t want to listen to old fairytales,’ she told him.

Stas said nothing. He just sat there smiling and drumming his fingers on the table.

‘Well,’ he went on after a while, ‘they don’t have to believe it if they don’t want to. But those who do believe it may just find their life on this earth a bit easier to bear.

‘King Yanko the Ferocious went to war against a neighbouring kingdom, and this kingdom was made up of nothing but peasants who kept themselves busy by ploughing the fields and harvesting their crops. They went to fight Yanko’s knights dressed in their white smocks and armed with nothing but their pitchforks. But the knights had brass breastplates and brass trumpets and their swords had been sharpened on both sides and could split an ox in two in a single blow. It was an unjust war, so unjust that the ground refused to accept the men’s blood. It just ran over the ground to the rivers as if it had been spilled onto glass. The peasants died in their hundreds, their huts were burned to the ground, their widows went mad from grief.

‘Now there lived among the peasants an old hunchbacked fiddler. He played his homemade fiddle at weddings. And this hunchback said: “There are many different birds in this world, even birds of paradise, but the best of them all is the lark. Because he’s a friend of the peasant. He sings for the sowing, and so that our harvests are rich and bountiful. He sings to the ploughman to lighten his work, and he sings louder than the reapers’ scythes to make them forget about their labours and so gladden their hearts. The larks have a leader among them – he’s the smallest and youngest among them and he has a beak of gold. You must send to him for help. He won’t let the peasants be mown down. He’ll save all of us, brothers, and our wives and children and our green fields.” So the peasants sent messengers to the lark.’

‘What sort of messengers?’ asked his wife.

‘All kinds. Sparrows and swallows and even a bald woodpecker – the very one that pecked a hole right through the wooden cross in the church at Lyubartov. And so,’ here Stas gave us a wily look, ‘the larks came flying to the peasant kingdom in their thousands. They landed on the rooftops and said to the women: “You, mothers and wives, you, sisters and sweethearts, what would you give to end this war?”

‘“Everything,” they shouted. “Take everything, down to the last crumb.”

‘“Well then,” said the larks, “if you really mean it, go now and gather all your knitting wool and your embroidery thread hidden away in every last room and carry it out to the common beyond the village.”

‘The women did as they were told. In the middle of the night, thousands of larks landed on the common, picked up the skeins of thread and wool and flew to the camp of King Yanko the Ferocious and began to circle in thick clouds around his knights, unwinding the skeins and tying up the soldiers in these threads just like a spider does a fly in its web. At first the knights managed to rip the threads, but the larks flew faster and faster and wrapped them tighter and tighter until the knights fell to the ground and could move neither their hands nor their feet and began choking on the wool in their mouths. Then the peasants came, removed the knights’ breastplates, took their swords, loaded the soldiers into carts, took them back over the border, and then tossed them into a ravine like so much rubbish. As for King Yanko the Ferocious, he swallowed so much wool that he turned blue in the face and choked to death, to the joy of all good people.’

Stas paused.

‘And so, gentlemen,’ he said, laughing, ‘we ought to go and find that lark with the golden beak.’

We left the hut early that evening. Stas’s wife accompanied us to the main road back to Lublin. Stas stayed at home. He stood by the door smoking his pipe and watching us go. The woman was carrying her child and told us that Stas was not at all like others and we mustn’t take offence at what he said. We said goodbye at the crossroads.

The sun was setting beyond the Vepsh. Rising to replace it above the silent woods and fields, a sliver of a moon shone silver in the darkening sky.

The woman gave me her hand. I don’t know why but I bowed and then kissed this rough hand that smelled of bread. She didn’t snatch it away. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply, raising her eyes to me. ‘Please come back and see us again. I’ll bake you some flatbreads and Stas will get some fish from the Vepsh.’

We promised to come back, but the next day our train was sent to Sedltse and from there on to Warsaw, and I never saw Stas, the young woman or their baby again. For a long time I felt a gnawing regret, even though I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because I, along with so many of my generation, felt the want in those days of the simple happiness that this affectionate Polish peasant woman so obviously possessed.