Stone Upon Stone (12 page)

I did a bit of mowing, but I started to feel dizzy and mother told me to go home. She even went after father, saying he should be ashamed of himself, sending me out to work like I was his stepson or some foundling instead of his own son. The poor thing ended up in tears. Because father had been trying to get me out to work since the third day. He came up to the loft where I was hiding while I recovered.

“Are you not getting up? We need to make a start on the rye tomorrow. The spikes are beginning to ripen. You’re not hurt that bad. Looks like flesh wounds. If you could use a knife you can use a scythe. You’re going to come to no good. You’ll end up in jail. We never had a bad seed yet in the family,
but it looks like we’re going to now. Grandfather Łukasz killed a man, but that was for the sake of justice. And he ran away to America. You, where are you going to run to? Stach Owsianek only has one leg, the other one’s made of wood, and he mows like no one’s business. Or Mielczarek, his body’s twisted like a tree root, but when he picks up that scythe you’d never know he was deformed. He stands there straight as a fence post and the crop lies itself down in front of him. See, when you’re mowing rye you forget whatever’s wrong with you, whatever hurts. I mean, it’s not like they killed you to death. And if something hurts, it’s best to walk it off. You got cut in the side and the back, but your arms are fine. Your legs are fine. And for mowing all you need is your arms and your legs. If someone’s a good mower they don’t even need to twist. They walk forward like they were going down the road, and their arms swing to and fro in front of them all on their own. The man and his arms are separate. And it’s just legs and arms. You ever see the priest walking along saying his prayers? It’s exactly like that – step by step, slow as can be. Sure, it hurts. But once you’ve mowed a swath it’ll pass. After the second swath you’ll forget you’re injured. The Lord Jesus was stabbed just the same as you, and he’s been hanging on the cross all these thousands of years. His wound isn’t healing. And he has to keep looking at all the badness. Don’t you think he’d rather be mowing than hanging there on the cross? But how can he come down if that’s his lot? The worst part is getting started. Even if you’ve not been stabbed, after the first day it feels like you have. In your arms, your legs, your sides, your back, everywhere. But once you get going your scythe won’t let you rest. Only enough to sharpen it up. Or cross yourself when they ring the Angelus bell. After that it’ll pull you back to work, and on, and on. Till the very end. That’s how it is with a scythe. Wounds’ll often heal quicker when you’re mowing than if you’d gone to church. Wounds of the body, wounds of the soul, wounds in the family, in the village, out in the world. It was thanks to the peasants mowing all those hundreds of years that they could stand having masters. Once you’ve done
some mowing, you can put up with all sorts of things, and forgive even more. And how someone mows will tell you whether they’re good or bad, mean, or false. And even when death comes, it’s like he just took the scythe from your hand at harvesttime when you were getting tired, and he took your place and finished what was left of the rye and the wheat and barley. Depending on what you were mowing. When you mow in wartime, it stops death being so terrible. And you, you didn’t get stabbed in wartime, it happened at a dance. You and your pals were having a party, not crying. Holding young girls, not the dead. Drinking vodka, not bitterness.”

And though I’d been a fool to let myself get stuck that time, the harvest came and went and my wounds healed and it was off to the dances again. And boy, did I like to have fun! I didn’t think the world was all that well set up, but if you got even a little bit scratched up in a fight, after the dance you somehow took a kinder view of things, you were more in the mood to work. One time I got a job for the railways building an embankment they were going to lay the track on, and with the money I earned I bought a brown suit with white stripes. Another time they were digging a pond at the manor and paying half a zloty per cubic yard. I bought a gabardine coat, a shirt, necktie, socks. I even thought about getting a watch and a cigarette case, I probably would have if the war hadn’t broken out. But even without the watch and cigarette case I was better dressed than many a rich man. I had a handkerchief that some people, they didn’t even know what it was for. You’d have had to look far and wide for another young buck like me. And so there wasn’t a single girl at the dance that didn’t want to dance with me. I could take my pick. Sometimes it happened that I wouldn’t come home from a party till the evening of the next day. Father would treat me like I’d just gotten back from hell. Have all the fun you like, damn you. You’ll see, before you know it you’ll have wasted all your life on fun. Then what’ll you say to God when your time comes – that you were busy having fun?

But what did I care about father. All he ever talked about was work and
God. He never gave me any money for my ticket. So I’d sneak a quarter-bushel of rye from the attic and sell it to the Jew at half price. Or take a few eggs and then tell mother afterwards the hens didn’t seem to be laying properly. One time I shook almost every last pear out of the pear tree and took them to the railway workers for two groszes apiece. Another time a dogcatcher came through the village buying dogs. I untied our Reks and quietly, round the back of the barn so no one would see, I led him all the way to the end of the village, and I sold him to the catcher as he was already heading out. He was a fine dog, but there was a dance over in Boleszyce that Sunday. It would have been a pity not to go, though it was a pity about the dog as well. He kept rubbing against my leg and whimpering, like he knew what was going on. I started talking to him to make him feel better. This isn’t much of a life for you, Reks. From now on no one’s gonna make you watch out for housebreakers. You’ll be working in a better world. Dogs go to heaven too. Afterwards father went about in a daze, asking everyone in the village if they hadn’t seen our Reks. Because he liked him like no other dog before him, and Reks was fonder of him than of anyone else.

One time there happened to be no dance. So a bunch of us guys were standing around outside the pub on a Sunday afternoon. The young ladies were still all at home for some reason. They had to wash the dishes and clear up. The old women were on their way to late afternoon mass. We would have gotten something to drink, but none of us had two pennies to rub together. The Jew wouldn’t give credit, because each of us already had a tab with him. The sun was all hazy, like it was going to rain. And it was still a long ways till evening. If someone would at least have shown up and bought us a beer. Or gotten into a fight, except there wasn’t even any ragging going on, the boys were all kind of sleepy.

All of a sudden, far away down the road there’s a cloud of dust and three horses, and on the horses three riders. Who the heck could be riding to the village on a Sunday? They looked like they were in military uniform. They
ride up to the inn, rein in their horses, and we see it’s a captain, a lieutenant, and a young lady. The captain just looks like a captain, the lieutenant the same, but the young lady takes my breath away. She’s wearing riding breeches and tall boots and spurs, a kind of black skull cap with a peak, she’s got a riding crop in her hand. She looks like an angel in riding clothes. The captain speaks up from the saddle:

“So then, boys! I see there’ll be no shortage of fellows ready to fight for their country if need be! Is there anything to drink in this inn of yours?”

“Sure there is!” The guys livened up, they were talking over each other. “Beer! Kvass! Lemonade!”

I had my eyes glued on the angel, I was staring at her like she was a picture. You’d meet good-looking girls in the village too from time to time, but I’d never seen a beauty like her ever before. Or was it just because of what she was wearing and the fact she was on horseback? In any case I must have been looking real hard, because the angel looked back at me and smiled. Then she slipped down off her horse light as can be, like a cat jumping down from the stove corner. The captain and the lieutenant dismounted as well.

“Mind our horses then, boys, while we go get a drink.”

The guys all rushed forward to hold the horses. Holding horses like those ones meant something. But wait up! I pushed them all aside. They gave them to me to hold.

“Out of my way, all of you, or you’ll be seeing stars!”

I gathered all three sets of reins together and wrapped them around my hand. The three riders went into the inn. After a short while they came out again. The captain mounted up first.

“Thank you, young man!”

The lieutenant followed. Then the angel put her foot in the stirrup. Whether she wasn’t lifting her other leg strongly enough or what, she tried once and twice, but it seemed the saddle was too high for her. And she looks
at me. So I grab her under the backside with my right hand, my left still holding the reins, and I hoist her up into the saddle. And then, as if of its own accord my hand ran down her thigh and her boot to the spur, and at the spur I squeezed her foot. She closed her eyes for a second, then she smiled, though kind of sadly. At that moment someone lashed me on the head with a riding crop. The angel exclaimed:

“Oh!”

I turned around. It was the lieutenant.

“Save your hands for your pitchfork, you peasant!” he hissed furiously. “Here, so you don’t feel wronged.” He threw a coin down at my feet. I gave his horse a mighty whack on the rump that made him jump in the saddle. Then they rode away.

The guys ran forward to pick up the coin. I was going to head home – I couldn’t drink with that kind of money. It would have been like selling your soul to the devil. But they grabbed me and forced me into the pub. And before I knew it there was a glass in front of me and it was, down the hatch, because it’s thanks to you. Pity he didn’t hit you twice and give us more. Then, when we’d had a few drinks we started a fight and smashed the place up. Benches, tables, beer mugs, glasses, whatever came to hand got used. One of them picked up a barrel of beer, and when he slammed it down on the floor we all got covered in foam. The Jew hid under the bar shouting:

“Police! Police!”

Every window in there got shattered. The door came off its hinges. And I broke a bottle over my best friend Ignaś Magdziarz’s head so hard he fell to his knees and wept:

“Why, Szymuś? Why?”

I didn’t know why either, and I wept with him, because he looked like someone had dipped his head in a bucket of pig’s blood.

“I don’t know, Ignaś. I don’t know. Maybe if you’d gone for me I wouldn’t
have gone for you. Someone had to go for someone. Don’t cry. Next time we go to a dance you can smash me over the head with a bottle. I won’t say a word. I’ll even buy you a drink afterwards.”

But we were young. When we were enjoying ourselves we did it with all our might, with all our soul, as if we were going to be gone from the world the next day. And I had youth enough for two inside, it was bubbling out of me. There was no right or wrong moment, if there was a chance to have fun you did. There were times when inside you didn’t feel like doing anything at all, but outside you were having a ball, drinking and dancing like nobody’s business. Inside you’d be sad, but you could cheer up the saddest person. And the young ladies thought I was the best fun of all the guys in the village.

“I’m telling you, Szymek, you know how to make people laugh. Even more than Błażej or Łukasz. It’s like you had the devil in you. Hee, hee, hee!”

Because girls like it when you make them laugh to begin with. Making someone laugh is like forgiving their sins. Then it’s easier to persuade them to do the rest. You’d meet one or another of them as she was taking dinner to her folks in the fields, you’d keep her company a ways, joke a bit, put your arm around her, and by evening you’d be lying next to her by the river or in the orchard. And she wouldn’t be afraid it was a sin, because when young people sin it’s honest sinning. If you wanted a peek at this or that she’d show you, even let you hold it in your hand like a dove. Or in church at high mass, you’d sidle up to a girl and whisper in her ear:

“Sleep in the barn tonight, Wikcia.”

And no dog would bark at you, the barn door wouldn’t creak, and the ladder to the hayloft would already be in place. And the hay had just been brought from the fields, so it was like the girl had made you a bed in the meadow, and she was bursting with sunlight like a meadow warmed in the sun. And her blood was buzzing inside her so loud it was like you could hear grasshoppers when you laid your head on that meadow.

Or you only had to go down to the river at noon when the girls were taking their bath. They mostly went in naked, only the odd few would keep their blouses on. The river water was so clean it sweetened their bodies, so what did they have to be embarrassed about. The horses were always watered down there and they never once got the mange. The geese and ducks would go down to the water all on their own, they didn’t need to be driven. Fish swam about almost on the surface. And the bottom glistened from all the different pebbles. You could sit on the bank and gaze at the river to your heart’s content, think about how it flowed just like your own life. It was clean as clean can be.

And all the screaming and squealing! You could hear from way off where the girls were bathing. The river only came up to their belly buttons. Not many of them could swim. So they were more splashing about than bathing. They’d splash and stumble and push each other over, and run upstream and downstream, taking the river in their arms, or lie on their backs and daydream and let it carry them. They wouldn’t even notice me standing on the bank, behind a willow tree or a bush, staring at their breasts and bellies and thighs and backsides swirling around in the water. Till one of them would snap out of it and shout:

“Hide, girls! Szymek’s behind that tree!”

“The dirty so-and-so! Has he no shame!”

“The priest’ll never forgive you for this!”

“Like he doesn’t know what girls look like! They look like this – stare all you want!”