Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

I didn’t get back on my feet till the wheat was ripe. But we only ever grew a half-acre or so of wheat. So as to have cake for Easter and Whitsun and Christmas, as a base for żurek , and from time to time, mostly on Sundays, for dumplings. As well, the crop hadn’t succeeded that year. It had been overgrown a bit by thistle and gotten lodged by the rain. The police had given up on looking for the culprit. Searching at harvesttime wasn’t the best idea anyway. The farmers were all carrying scythes and the blood was hot in everyone’s veins. And whatever happened the dead man wouldn’t be brought back to life. Besides, he’d been killed among his own people, it was none of the police’s business.

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.