Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

It was late when I found myself in our yard. The dog recognized me at once and started whimpering and rubbing against my leg. I took hold of its snout and said, quiet, Burek, I’m not here, you’re a dog but you have to understand, I’m nowhere to be seen. Like a person he understood and wagged his tail, and slunk back to his kennel.

There was a bit of a frost and maybe because of that I started getting the shivers, because as long as I’d been walking I was too hot, I’d been drenched in sweat. I crouched behind the corner of the barn and decided to wait there for mother to come out for the evening milking. I looked up at the sky, nothing had changed, the stars were still in their same places for that time of year. The Big Dipper was over the poplar tree at Błach’s place, the Little Dipper a bit farther. Maybe it was from staring at the sky that my head suddenly started to spin. For a moment I thought I was going to pass out, but it gradually passed.

I didn’t want to go into the house so as not to get into an argument with father like last time. It wasn’t for that I’d come all this way on foot, and wounded. I just wanted to see mother and tell her I was alive, because she could already be praying for my soul after what happened at Maruszew. Besides, that earlier time I’d come at the wrong moment, during the harvest. Everyone knows that during the harvest a person can only understand himself. They’d been getting ready for bed, mother was in her nightshirt kneeling by the turned-down bed, saying her prayers. Father was soaking his feet in a basin. He could at least have said:

“Thank God you’re alive.”

Or:

“You’re not looking so good.”

Or:

“So how are things?”

Mother started giving vent to all her grievances as she heated up some pierogies for me in the frying pan:

“It’s enough to make you dizzy, he disappears all this time, dear Lord. Then yesterday a magpie perched on the ash tree and it kept cawing and cawing, it set my heart pounding, something must have happened to Szymek. I said to father, Józuś, shoo that evil bird away, something bad must have happened to Szymek. In the end I threw a rock at it myself and chased it away. I pray so much for you, I ask Jesus and Mary to keep you in their care. Every night you’re in my dreams. One night I dreamed you brought a cross into the yard. I asked you where you got it and you said it was lying by the roadside when you were coming back from the fields. And you asked me, mama, where should I put it? I said, put it in Sekuła’s yard by his wagon barn. It’d be a waste, mama, you said, the wood in a cross like this must have a lot of resin in it. Szymek, I don’t think I could live if they killed you.”

All father did was take his feet out of the basin and rest them on the rim to let the water run off. Then all at once he yells at mother:

“Come on, give me something!”

“What do you want?”

“I need to wipe my feet!”

She threw him a cloth, and as he bent down he said:

“Why would they kill him. You think he has it so bad. I’m telling you, they made up that resistance stuff to get out of doing any work. They left their fathers and mothers, what do they care about anything. And you, you don’t even have time to scratch yourself on the backside, but you’re always praying for them, crying for them. There aren’t any dances for them to go play at, so now they’re playing at soldiers.”

“It’s not exactly a game, father,” I said, but without taking offense. “The work’s just as hard.”

“And what work do you do exactly?” He was so furious he was hissing.

So I got riled up as well and I said:

“We kill people.”

“You kill people? Not every day you don’t. If you were a good son you’d show up once in a while and do some mowing. Or I don’t have anyone to help me bring the crop in. Antek’s still little, all he does is run around among the sheaves!”

“Everyday, father. Sometimes the day’s not long enough.” I could barely hold my rage in check.

“Then once in a while, hold off with the killing and come help out.” He stopped wiping his feet, looked at me, and asked as if he was surprised: “And your hand never shakes when you’re doing it?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not our blood anymore.”

I leaped up and slammed the door so hard it groaned. Mother ran out after me, but I rushed off into the orchard and headed down toward the river.

This time, the front door creaked and the pale light of a lantern appeared on the threshold. Mother’s shadow moved off toward the cattle shed. It seemed smaller than usual, or maybe the night was bigger. In one hand she was carrying a pail for the milk, the other hand held the swinging lamp. The frozen ground crunched under her feet. I was about to go out to meet her, but it occurred to me that if I rose up in front of her out of the blue like that she might think it wasn’t me but my ghost. Because it was a starry, moonlit night, a night that seemed made for souls to do penance. And the dog was sitting quietly in its kennel, because dogs can’t smell ghosts. She went into the shed. I could still see a faint light from her lamp through the half-open doorway.

“Come here! Move back a bit!” I heard her say to the cow.

I looked over at the kennel to check whether the dog wasn’t going to jump out and give me away. But no, it evidently still got what I’d told it. I started creeping along the wall toward the light, and when I reached it I quietly stuck my face in the doorway. I felt a waft of warmth, animal sweat, manure. And I suddenly reckoned I understood why God wanted to be born in a cattle shed. Slow as anything I opened up the lighted crack. The door creaked, but mother seemed not to hear. She was sitting hunched over beneath the big belly of the cow, as if she was lost in prayer, with only her hands working somewhere in the belly’s depths. Milk was squirting from those hands of hers into the pail she held between her knees. The milk splashing into the pail was the only sound in the whole shed, maybe even the whole world.

“Mama,” I whispered.

At that exact moment the milk came to a stop in her hands. She raised her head slowly, looked around the roof and the walls, and asked softly:

“Szymek?”

“Not there, mama. Here,” I said more boldly, and walked into the shed, closing the door behind me. She looked at me unbelievingly. It was like she didn’t have the strength to get up from her stool. The cow even waved its tail a couple of times, asking why she’d stopped milking it.

“So, mama. How are things with you all?”

“You’re alive?” she said. And it was like her entire body burst out crying, not just her eyes.

“Careful, or it’ll get in the milk,” I said, and took the pail from her. “It’d be a pity to have to throw it out.”

All at once she stopped her crying, like biting off a thread in her teeth. She wiped her eyes on her apron.

“Wait now, I’ll finish the milking,” she said.

“I have to be going right away,” I said, because what else was I supposed to say.

“Won’t you even come in the house?”

“I can’t. They’re waiting for me.”

“Then at least drink some milk.”

I lifted the pail to my mouth and tipped it.

“You’ve gotten thin, you’re not looking well, son,” she said, starting her lament. But my head was almost completely stuck in the pail, and her voice sounded like it was coming from far away. “Michał was here. He had something he needed to see you about. He looked bad too.” I guzzled the milk like it was the juice of the earth. “Forgive your father, those things he said only came out because he was angry.” I felt the milk giving me back my strength with every mouthful.