Marek Hlasko: The Graveyard

“You’re the biggest fool I’ve ever met,” the policeman said, his face expressing enormous relief. “You didn’t say a thing, and that’s why we let you go. You were calm and polite; in fact all of us took a liking to you. We saw you were a party man, soft-spoken, quiet — so we just put a bit of a scare into you and let you go in the morning. Our chief treats everybody like that, even if it’s some lousy virgin straight from her first communion. The moment somebody turns up at the police station, we’ve got to scare him, no matter who he is. We scared you for your own good, so that next time you’d stay sober, and wouldn’t lose your job, and your papers wouldn’t be taken away from you. Understand?”

Franciszek was silent. In the end he said, “So I didn’t say anything.”

“Not a word. I mean, pee-pee, and so on. But nothing bad.”

“And I’m innocent.”

“Sure. We let you go, and the statement went in the waste-basket, and that was that. We do our best to help people. Everybody knows the whole thing doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, and you didn’t have to explain anything to anyone; if you’d tried to explain, you’d have been punched in the jaw, and sent to solitary. Go home and pull yourself together.”

“There are no homes any more,” Franciszek said after a while. “There are only graveyards … So everybody lied. What a joke! You, the secretary, and Jerzy. But now it’s not important any more: the truth has turned out to be even stupider than I thought …”

“Come, come,” the policeman said. “Maybe you don’t like it?”

They measured each other.

“No,” Franciszek said.

“No?”

“No.”

“You really don’t?”

“I really don’t.”

Both stood up straight; and at once both felt enormous relief; they stood motionless, looking at each other — pure and calm; calm as always when something important is about to begin.

“Let’s go,” the policeman said.

“Let’s go,” Franciszek said.

They pushed into the crowd; the joyous throng separated them for a moment. Franciszek looked about him; he saw the gleam of the policeman’s cap a little way off. He forced a passage toward him. “Give me your hand!” he cried. “Give me your hand, or I’ll lose my way again!”