Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

Franciszek the sacristan, who used to think that because of the birds the cemetery wasn’t sad enough — now, he’d make bird feeders and put them up here and there where a tree was still standing, or even just a branch, or even on the crosses and the Lord Jesuses and angels, he’d hang them wherever he could. You’d see a cross over a grave and on its arms there’d be two bird feeders hanging, as if Jesus was holding them in his crucified arms to attract the birds. Or in the place where there’d been the head of an angel that had gotten blown off by a shell, the angel would have a feeder for a head. He put up so many of those feeders that when you saw them you’d be forgiven for thinking there were all kinds of birds at the cemetery. But there wasn’t a single one, they wouldn’t touch the feeders.

He also set out water in old tin cans from army rations, so the birds would have something to drink if they came. People kept removing the cans to put flowers in for the graves, so he put new ones down, luckily there was no shortage of tin cans. The front had been stationed there for months and the soldiers had emptied piles of cans. They were lying about all over the place along the roadsides, in ditches, in dugouts and trenches. People used them as containers for sugar and salt, if need be you could make a bowl or a mug out of a can like that. Boys even used them for goalposts. Sometimes you’d read the label in Russian, svinskaya tushonka , and that would be the closest you’d get to eating all day.

Some days you could find Franciszek at the cemetery at the crack of dawn wandering like a spirit with his pockets full of millet, flaxseed, wheat, poppy seed, bread crumbs. He’d be scattering it all among the tombs and calling to the empty sky: cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep. Every few steps he’d drop his eyes from the sky to the ground, stop, and look to see if there wasn’t some starling or bullfinch or waxwing he’d managed to attract, pecking the grains and skipping about. Then he’d move on his way like someone sowing in the fields: cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep.

Some folks reckoned Franciszek was scattering sand instead of grain, and that the birds weren’t stupid and they wouldn’t let themselves be fooled by sand. I mean, think how much grain you’d need for a cemetery the size of ours. People didn’t even have enough to bake bread with. The fields were all churned up and trampled, and how could they harvest anything from under all the shells? But the birds must have been hungry too. And a hungry bird’ll be tempted even by sand. Besides, when you’re a bird and you’re flying way up a height, from up there you can’t see who’s scattering what down on the ground, whether it’s sand or grain. And if he’s going cheep-cheep and looking up at the sky, why shouldn’t you trust him?

Franciszek would teach the new altar boys how to serve at mass. The old ones had grown up because of the war and they preferred spending their time defusing mines and unexploded bombs. But anyone who had a yen to be an altar boy had to make a trap to catch starlings. And Franciszek would take his altar boys over to the hill along the edge of the woods. Then for days on end they’d try and trap starlings there. Whenever they caught one they’d bring it to the cemetery and release it there.

It sometimes happened that Franciszek would be lying there in the grass and bushes, with the ends of the strings from the traps in his hand and his altar boys all around him, and he’d forget about the church. Because trapping starlings is easier said than done. You can spend the entire day and not catch a single one. All it takes is for someone to whisper to someone else right at the moment the starling’s getting close, or even to just give a louder than usual sigh, and the bird’ll get spooked and fly away. And altar boys are altar boys, they see a starling coming close and their heart immediately starts pounding, and with starlings, they can even hear your heart if it’s beating too loud. But anyone who scared a bird away wouldn’t be an altar boy any longer.

“Clear off, you little imp. You think you can serve the Lord God when you don’t have the patience for a starling?”

And it wouldn’t do any good to cry or say sorry, or that you’d get a hiding from your parents. Franciszek could be stern as they come. Though really he was a good person. When I was learning to be an altar boy we mostly spent our time just scraping wax off the candlesticks. Whenever anyone asked what saecula saeculorum or Dominus vobiscum meant, he’d claim it was a divine mystery.

“You need to know when to turn the page in the missal, and when you’re supposed to pour the water and the wine into the chalice, and when you have to ring the bells. The rest, you just need to be able to mumble along.”

There were times people would come to mass and it would be so stuffy in the church it was like a holy cattle shed, because there was no one there to air the place out. The priest himself would have to fetch the long pole and open the windows, because Franciszek was out trapping starlings. Or folks would start to arrive for the service and the church door would be locked, because Franciszek had been out after starlings since early morning and wasn’t back yet. Or mass was already supposed to have begun, the church is full, the priest’s in his chasuble and he keeps popping his head out of the vestry to see if the candles are lit, but here the candles aren’t lit and the altar’s not prepared either, the organist is playing on and on, and Franciszek’s nowhere to be seen.

Sometimes one of the parishioners who could remember his altar boy duties would throw on a surplice and carry in the missal behind the priest. Franciszek wouldn’t turn up till the priest was raising the chalice. He’d be all flushed still from the starlings. His gray hair would be full of grass, and his shoes and pants wet and muddy from the dew. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been embarrassed and knelt down quietly. Nothing of the kind — he’d plonk himself down on his knees so loud it would echo all round the church. And the guy that was taking his place, he’d push him aside and be all angry he was in the way. And he’d shout out et cum spiritu Tuo or at the very least amen like he’d been kneeling in front of the altar the whole time.

But it wasn’t anything to be surprised at. Starlings are best caught in the morning, especially on a Sunday, when they’re hungry from the night and everything’s quiet out in the fields. And from the hillside by the woods it was a good mile and a half to the church, Franciszek was getting on and it might only have been those starlings that were keeping him among the living. Or maybe the Lord God had said to him, trap some starlings before you die, Franciszek. And so the priest went easy on Franciszek too, and he never told him off. He’d even ask him when Franciszek was helping him off with his chasuble in the vestry after mass:

“So how was it with the starlings today, Franciszek? Do we have any more at the cemetery?”

Besides, Franciszek was too old to do any heavy jobs around the church. Trapping starlings on the hill up by the woods and bringing them down to the cemetery — that was all he could handle.

One time he brought a nest of blue tits with the young birds still in it and he put it in a tree in the cemetery. Adult birds would probably have flown away, but the young ones grew up and stayed there. Then someone brought him a squirrel from the woods and he let that loose among the graves as well. Someone else brought a woodpecker. Someone brought a blackbird. Someone a dove. And gradually life came back to the cemetery.

There was a road ran through our village. It wasn’t the best of roads, like most roads that go through a village. It had bumps and potholes. In spring and fall there was mud, in the summertime it was dusty. But it did okay for people. Every now and then they’d level it out here and there, fill it in with gravel, and you could drive on it just fine. You took it to get to market in town, or to other villages around here, and whether you were going off to war or headed for the outside world, the road would lead you there just the same.