Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

We’d been searching all sorts of barns and cattle sheds and wagon houses and cellars and attics, not to mention the houses themselves. And as it happened the harvest had just been taken in and the barns were filled to the roof, in the cellars there were potatoes and carrots and beets, the attics were packed with hay, and on top of everything else it rained day and night without a break as if the flood was coming. And wherever you went it’d be:

“You got any guns?”

To which everyone would answer meek as lambs:

“Guns? What would we need guns for, officer? What are we, soldiers? We don’t even know how to use a gun. We work with plows, scythes, rakes — those are the tools the Lord meant for us. Not guns. Who would we even shoot at? The enemy’s all gone. There’s nothing but our own people everywhere. When you’re among your own, even if someone gets mad at someone else they just call them names, get even with them, threaten them. Maybe go after them with a fence post. But a fence post isn’t a gun. Besides, the war’s barely over. We’ve had enough gunfire to last us a lifetime. These days, you hear a bee buzz close to your ear and you think you’ve been hit. All we did was cry and pray for it to stop. So when it did, were we going to keep on shooting? The land was waiting for us. The land suffered too. It was tired out as well like everyone else. That Lord Jesus or Our Lady up there in that picture, they can be our witness — we don’t have any guns.”

But you only needed to reach behind the Our Lady or the Lord Jesus and pull out a pistol. You’d look in the stove, and inside there’d be a rifle. Have them open the chest, and there under a pile of headscarves, rounds and grenades. Or go up to the attic. Their Sunday suit was hanging from a rafter like it was just waiting for mass, but you’d nudge it and there’d be a clank of metal. Not to even mention what was in the hay, among their clothes, in with the onions, in the thatch, in barrels full of grain, in old shoes — everywhere you’d find stuff. Where did they not hide things. In dogs’ kennels, in chaff-cutters, in cows’ and horses’ mangers, in holes up in old trees.

At one guy’s place, under the grain in the barn we found an entire arsenal. He had everything you could imagine. Rifles, pistols, regular ones and automatics, all of it oiled and wrapped in rags. There were helmets, belts, mess kits, backpacks, Russian and German maps, over a dozen ammunition belts, a couple dozen pairs of boots.

“Where did you get all this?” It was a stupid question, because you knew where he got it, but we were staggered, we didn’t know what else to say.

“Off dead bodies, sir. You know — they were all over the place out in the fields. Was it all supposed to go to waste? And it didn’t feel right to bury it.”

“There was an order to turn in weapons, right?”

“That there was.”

“So why didn’t you hand them over?”

“Well, what if we have to fight again?”

“Fight who, for God’s sake?”

“Whoever. They might invade us again.”

At another guy’s, in the barn as well, we found four heavy machine guns and several cases of ammunition. Another one had a motorcycle and sidecar, and a whole pile of guns in the sidecar. They most of them hid the stuff in their barns, like they reckoned the crop was the most innocent place for it. You sometimes had to dig down through three or four layers of sheaves. And on your own, because the farmer would claim his back had suddenly gone out. At another farm we had to muck the place out ourselves, because the farmer ran away the moment he saw us.

There was one house we went to, all we find is this little old lady in bed. She’s got her cat with her, there’s no one else around.

“What a good thing you’ve come to save me! That Judas son-in-law of mine, he’s put so many rifles under my bedding my sides are all sore. I’m afraid to even move in case they go off.”

We took five wagonloads away from that place. You even felt envious there were so many guns, when in the resistance any old pistol could cost you your life.

Not many people got fined, because what were you going to fine them for. It was the war that brought folks all those guns, the war was the one that should have been punished. But how can you punish a war? Besides, there was enough to do fining the ones that got caught with guns actually in their hands. Even if you just went into the fields you’d always catch two or three of them that were out hunting hares. No one bothered setting snares anymore, there was no point when they had rifles, handguns, automatic pistols. And how many hares could there be left after that long of a war? When you saw one hopping by somewhere it was like seeing a miracle. Look, a hare, a hare! And it didn’t even look much like a hare, it’d have its ears shot away or a missing leg and it’d be peg-legging it along more like an old man than a hare.

Those days almost everyone went hunting with a gun. Not to mention when they were driving their wagon to market or to a wedding, or to gather wood in the forest, they’d always stick a pistol under the seat or in the horse’s feed bag.

One time we had to search a school because the teacher told us the boys were chasing the girls with pistols during the break. Another time Tomala comes rushing into the station all white and shaking and shouting, help! What is it, Wojtek? Turned out his wife is waking their Tomek saying it’s time to go to school, and Tomek pulls a gun from under the pillow and says he’ll shoot her if she doesn’t leave him alone. He needs his sleep, and he’s not going to go to school anymore. Or the boys grazing the cattle, every one of them would have a gun stuck in his belt. And day after day there’d be shooting out in the meadows like the war was still going on out there. And some parent would come running to the police to say their cow had a gunshot wound or it had come home with its horns shot away, because the little bastards had been using the cows’ horns for target practice like they couldn’t think of anything else to shoot at.

And if it had only been in the meadows. But sometimes it was in the middle of the village. Anyone that bore a grudge against someone else, before, they’d have just shouted at them and called them names, or at the most set fire to their place, but now they’d take out their gun and start firing. It could be over women, debts, field boundaries, anything. Wrongs from the time of their fathers or grandfathers. And even if they didn’t shoot directly at each other they’d fire over the guy’s head, at his windows or his roof if he had a tile roof or metal roofing, or they’d put a hole in his wagon or shoot his dog.

Or like it happened once at Rędzinówka. One farmer runs into his neighbor’s yard with an automatic handgun and shoots all his geese and chickens and ducks, then to finish he shoots up the stable door. So then the other guy takes revenge on the first guy’s orchard. He ties a couple of blocks of TNT with a fuse and a detonator to each of the trees, then he lights the fuse from his cigarette. He goes up on the hill and watches the trees blow up one after another. We went to take a look and it was like the worst war you could imagine had passed through that orchard. We had to put both of them away. Though some people said they were just crazy. But you can’t claim they were crazy when everyone was shooting guns left, right, and center. And it wasn’t just one person against another, there were whole villages fighting each other. One time we even had to call in the military because we thought we were being attacked by an army.

After a few months I’d had enough of the police. All I’d done was ruin my tall boots. They were the kind they call officer’s boots. I’d brought them back almost new from the resistance, but after the police you wouldn’t have known they were the same boots. You had to wade through manure and mud and water in them. And those were boots that should only have been worn to church. Plus, you’d think you wouldn’t work as much as when you’re working the land, but there I was, day and night, chasing, looking, searching like the worst bandit, and on top of that everyone was out to get their revenge on me. And instead of the number of guns getting smaller, it was like people were growing them in the fields.