Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

“What do you mean, fighting, father,” I said as humbly as I could, because I thought to myself, if I start arguing with him he’ll just go and jack up the price of the plot. “I was living, is all. Better or worse, it wasn’t up to me. You can’t always live the way you’d like to, you live the way you have to. A person doesn’t choose their life, father, life chooses the person according to its will, depending on who it needs for what. One person’s good for one thing, another person for another, and someone else again isn’t good for anything. There’s no telling how it decides that one man’s a general, another’s a judge, a third one is a church man, that you’re a priest, father, for example, and as for me, I don’t even know what I can say about myself.”

“Come off it, you were a priest as well!” He gave a big grin from ear to ear. I was all riled up inside, but I said to myself, think your own thoughts but sit still and be good, and all I said was:

“When people have to, they can be anything, father. Even a bandit or a robber.”

“All right, all right,” he interrupted. “Tell me though, when was the last time you made confession?”

“Confession?” I felt like he’d called on me in the back row in religious instruction, behind Stach Niezgódka’s back, because I always sat in the back row. “Must have been after the war.”

“What do you mean, after the war?”

“You know, when it ended. I’d killed all those bad guys, I had to confess it so they wouldn’t come haunting me at night. Though if you ask me, father, you shouldn’t have to confess those kind of things. Course, there could have been an innocent guy among them. There were a few other sins that had mounted up a bit, the way they do in wartime, so I had to get clean.”

“So you cleansed yourself and went back to sinning, is that it? Do you at least come to church? Because I somehow don’t recall seeing you.”

“The last two years I was in a hospital bed, father, I couldn’t exactly go to church.”

He narrowed his eyes in a strange kind of way, as if against the light, though he was sitting with his back to the window. In order not to come out looking like a nonbeliever, I added:

“But before the war I never missed mass. Mother wouldn’t have let us. I’d sometimes go to the evening service, May Day services, the rosary. And I used to sing in the church choir. Maybe you remember me? Though it’s been donkey’s years. Kolasiński the organist even used to say that if they sent me to school I could sing in town at the opera. I was a bass. I often sang solo. But the land wouldn’t let me go. You can’t reconcile singing and the land. The land needs work, father. As for singing, it’s mostly good for making the work go easier, or for after work, on Sundays. Though even on Sundays you can’t have a good sing, because God sends rain clouds, and here your crop’s in sheaves still out in the fields.”

“Don’t you start talking to me about God!” he said, interrupting me with a sour face. “Hiding behind God. Do you even remember his ten commandments?”

“Of course I remember them. You taught us religious instruction at school, father.”

“So tell me, what’s the third commandment?”

“The third commandment?” I hesitated. “I think it’s, thou shalt not steal,” I said. It was mostly a shot in the dark, because at my age how are you supposed to remember which one is third, fourth, tenth, your memory doesn’t remember them all in the right order. People can’t even live in the right order, let alone remember things.

“The third is to keep the Sabbath day holy.” He pointed his index finger at me as if he’d suddenly spotted me in the congregation from the pulpit. “I see you’re a bigger sinner than I thought,” he said with a bitter sigh, though a bit indulgently as well.

“I won’t deny it, father, I’m no saint,” I said a little more boldly. “Though in my view sins oughtn’t to be connected to a person so much as to their life. For a person it’s often too much just to have to live.”

“But they have to die as well, and then what?” This time he was seriously upset. I regretted annoying him unnecessarily, because as well as raising the cost of the plot he might stick me next to some guy that drowned or was hung. Not long before, Bolek Brzostek had hung himself. He worked in the warehouse at the co-op, there’d been an inspection and it turned out he was a million zlotys short. The Brzostek women had so many clothes they couldn’t decide what to wear, they were constantly heading into town to go to the pictures, because his old lady liked the pictures so much she used to say she could spend her whole life there. He had a new house built, bought a car, people couldn’t figure out how they did it on that little salary. You’ve got a head on your shoulders, Bolek. Your Dziunia’s a lucky woman.

“Well, when you have to die, you have to,” I said, humble again. “But death knows best of all when to come, father, there’s no point hurrying out to meet it.”

“Maybe you’re in no hurry to meet it. But it might be in a hurry to meet you. How can you know?”

“I guess I can’t.”

“Is it not said, ‘ye know neither the day nor the hour’?”

“It is.”

“You see then. And you also remember ‘memento mori’? You used to serve during holy mass, you’d have picked up a bit of Latin there, Franciszek the sacristan used to teach it.”

“Kind of, though he mostly had us scraping the wax off the candlesticks. Saecula saeculorum , forever and ever. Dominus vobiscum , the Lord be with you. And ite missa est , the mass is over. That’s all,” I said, because I was afraid he’d start asking me questions about the mass as well. “Other than that he just made sure we knew when to carry the missal from one side to the other.”

He gave a good-natured laugh:

“Oh, that Franciszek. As for you, don’t worry, I’ve no intention of taking you on as an altar boy. Besides, these days it’s all in Polish. I had to learn everything all over again myself. Though I still can’t get used to it. It sounds funny to me. There are times, may God forgive me, when I feel it’s like a whole other faith. But enough of that. So you say you need a place for a tomb?”

I nodded. He started getting up from behind the desk, his head shook a bit, maybe from all that writing, because sitting like that with your head down, you couldn’t have held it up for long even in two hands, let alone just having it on your neck. It was another thing that he seemed to have put on weight, not that much, it was just that back in the day he was thin as a rake. All these young newlywed women, unmarried women, probably even old grannies would come flocking in for every service just for his sake, they’d compete with each other who would bring the most flowers for the church, till there were times he’d tell them to stop, he’d say it’s too much, too much, ladies. God doesn’t like too many riches, he was poor himself, remember. They may even have believed more strongly in God for his sake than they would have if it’d been someone else.

I braced myself to see how much he would say, because I was convinced he was standing up so as to tell me the price, and he wasn’t on the cheap side, oh no. He always said, it’s not me you’re paying, it’s God, so don’t sell God short.

“Will you have a glass of wine?” I was floored at first, I would have expected all kinds of prices rather than wine. He looked at me in a mock-angry way. “Surely you won’t say no to your religion teacher?”

“I wouldn’t want to take up your time,” I stammered, because I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m sure you’ve got as much work in the church as we do in the fields. I still have my potatoes to bring in. And you have that funeral.”