Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

There was nothing for it, I lent Stasiek my officer’s boots, because I mean he couldn’t not go to school. School was like first communion. Everyone went. People who’d only finished second or third grade. People who’d never even started school before. People that couldn’t read or write, bachelors, married guys, folks with kids. He looked like a stork in those boots, they almost came up over his knees. But who was interested in whether your boots were too big or too small, the important thing was they were in one piece. To begin with he walked around like he was on stilts, he even fell over a couple of times, but then he got used to them, he started walking in long strides without really bending his knees, and he looked pretty good, even though it’s not that easy to walk in tall boots when they’re the wrong size. I mean real officer’s boots, of course. Because people say officer’s boots whenever their shoes have any kind of uppers at all. Or any boots that an officer’s wearing. But real officer’s boots you can tell not from the uppers, not even from someone’s rank. Real officer’s boots have to be made of chamois, the toe caps and straps and stiffeners need to be leather that’s hard as metal, and the boot has to be the exact same shape as your leg. And not just around the foot, but at the instep, the ankle, the calf, everywhere, like it was your own skin. You might have been walking around like you had two left feet your whole life, the Lord God himself might have decided that’s how you’re supposed to walk, but the moment you put on officer’s boots it’s like you’d been given new legs. Because it’s not just that you’re wearing footwear that goes all the way from your toes to your knees, also the straps hold your heel like it was in a vise, and the stiffeners do the same for your calves, and you have to walk the way the boots tell you to.

Kurosad, the guy in Oleśnica that made those boots for me, he measured each leg separately, and in different places. On the calf alone he took three measurements, by the ankle, in the middle, and under the knee. And he did it both on bare flesh and in breeches. And by the way, you won’t find another shoemaker like Kurosad for love nor money. He made boots for “Eagle” — that was my resistance name — and he wasn’t the only one that knew who Eagle was. When you went into his shop you’d never know it was a shoemaker’s — there was a carpet and armchairs and mirrors, and Kurosad behind the counter with his, how can I help you, sir. He only made boots for SS officers, resistance fighters, and the gentry. And when it came to officer’s boots, he had no equal. When I tried them on, stood in front of the mirror and clicked the heels, I felt as if even dying in those boots would be a different kind of death than dying in ordinary shoes or barefoot. And Kurosad was licking his lips he was so pleased:

“All you need now is a pair of spurs and it’ll be: Mount up! mount up!”

I stayed in every morning with my feet in the straw slippers, waiting for Stasiek to come home from school and give me my boots back. It was only in the afternoon I could go down to the village. In the mornings I thought I’d go nuts with boredom. I couldn’t even watch the road from the window because the window was forever iced up and you had to breathe a hole in the ice to see out at all. Though father didn’t let me get too bored. He’d come right in with the horse-collar.

“If you’re just going to be sitting around doing nothing you can mend this.”

This, then that, then something else. Every day it was the same thing. I even got kind of depressed, to the point where I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Someone would come by and ask, so how was it in the resistance, but I didn’t even feel like talking about the resistance, and father would speak for me:

“Well, since he came back he’s just been thinking and thinking. But thinking’s no good. I mean, you’re not going to think something up unless you actually do it. People thought and thought, and what did they come up with? The world’s still the way it was, and all thinking does is make you want to think more and do less.”

There were times all I wanted to do was jump up, slam the door, and head out wherever. But how could I go without anything on my feet? So in the end I started cutting the farmers’ hair and shaving them. Luckily, from the resistance I’d brought home my razor, my scissors and brush and shaving cream, and I started cutting hair and giving shaves. Right after I came back I cut father’s hair and Antek’s and Stasiek’s, because their hair was so long they looked like sheep, and I did a pretty decent job of it. Then one day I met Bartosz down in the village. He was over seventy, but he was a soldier to the marrow of his bones, he’d served way back in the tsar’s army, and he always wore a crew cut. But this time I see his hair’s so long he looks like Saint Joseph, and he’s scratching away at it.

“I didn’t know you, Bartosz,” I say.

“I’m not surprised. I used to cut my hair the army way. Now look at me.”

“What are you scratching it for?”

“Lice, son, lice. The blasted things bite so much they won’t let you sleep, they won’t let you live. They bite when you’re praying. But in a mop of hair like this, of course they’re going to bite. Plus our house burned down and we’re sleeping with the cattle in the shed. Maybe you could cut my hair for me, I’d give you a rooster?”

I felt sorry for the man. I used to like listening to his army stories, he served with the heavy cavalry all the way over in the Caucasus.

“Come by tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’m at home then, because Stasiek wears my boots to school. Just bring a cloth I can wrap around you.”

I was never taught how to cut hair, but it’s no big deal. You can do harder things than that without being taught. Besides, the important thing wasn’t how you looked but feeling comfortable. If anyone doubted that, they could have told by looking at Bartosz what a relief it was to him. His eyes were brighter, he breathed more easily, and he held himself straight as a ramrod, like I’d taken twenty years off him. He looked at himself in a piece of mirror and he was so pleased his old soldier’s blood stirred in him.

“You’ve done a fine thing, young man. You weren’t in the resistance for nothing, I see. Anyone that can succeed at being a soldier can succeed at anything.”

Afterward one guy or another who saw Bartosz would come, and anyone that bumped into me in the village, then they started coming by of their own accord. It wasn’t surprising really, every farm had lost something to fire, if it wasn’t the house it was the barn or the cattle sheds. If their horses hadn’t been requisitioned they’d been killed. The cows’ udders would dry up from lack of feed. In the fields there were mines. Anyone would have been glad to at least get rid of the shock of hair they’d grown, to feel freer. But there was no barber in the village. Under the occupation there’d been one, an newcomer. Jan Basiak they called him. He told people he’d been resettled, and he seemed to fit in. He made a decent living, rented a room at Madej’s place on the side next to the road and hung up a sign: Jan Basiak, Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Hairdresser, Permanent Waves, Water Waves. All the women in the village went crazy, the young girls, the married women, the ones with small children — everyone. They cut off their braids and they all started getting those perms.

The first one was the Siudaks’ Gabrysia. She had braids like ropes of wheat straw, but with her new hairdo she looked like a scarecrow and right away she started sleeping with a German corporal from the police station. One time Siudak beat her, in fact he cut her till she bled, because he used a whip handle, so she told her corporal and the corporal beat Siudak up. Siudak couldn’t get out of bed for a month or more. On top of that he had to pay a fine for being disorderly. Ever since then he was scared of Gabrysia like she was the devil himself, though she was his own daughter. She had them all wrapped around her little finger.