Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

It had never happened that anyone had died on a Monday. They died on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, sometimes even on a Sunday, but on Monday they were always alive. The afternoon passed. The market was at its busiest.

“Are you not reading your book today, Mr. Kazimierz?” I asked. There was a book lying open on the bedside table and I was a bit surprised he wasn’t reading, because a day didn’t go by without him reading. His cupboard was full of books, there were even some on the windowsill. Often he’d read a whole book in a single day. When he lost himself in his reading he didn’t hear what people said to him. We couldn’t get over the fact that he kept wanting to read. Because on the whole ward he was the only one that read. Didn’t it hurt his eyes? Didn’t it give him a headache? And after all, what was the point? You read and read, and in the end it all went into the ground with you anyway. With the land it was another matter. You worked and worked the land, but the land remained afterwards. With reading, not even a line, not a single word, was left behind.

Evening had begun to set in. The nurse came in, she gave him a sort of funny look and hurried out. A moment later the doctor arrived, held his arm for a moment then left again. The nurse came back and gave him an injection. She asked if he wasn’t thirsty, and she brought him some compote. Someone wanted to put the lights on but I said no, it wasn’t time yet. No one was reading, and it was far from dark.

You couldn’t tell anything from looking at him. Though people say that when someone’s going to die, you can tell two days before. But truth be told, what were you supposed to be able to see? He was always pale as can be, he couldn’t have gotten any paler. He was skinny as a rake and he couldn’t have gotten thinner. As the dusk fell his eyes grew sort of dim, and you’d have needed to lean over him for him to see anything. Only that open book on the bedside table that he didn’t feel like reaching for even just to close it — that might have been the only sign he was dying.

I sat on the edge of his bed and it seemed strange to me that you couldn’t tell anything from looking at him, but that he was dying. Things went quiet on the ward, though there were twelve of us in there. No one said a word, no one coughed, no one sighed, and if anyone was in pain, they kept it to themselves. Though more than one of them could have died right after him. But it was always the way that when someone on the ward was dying, everyone else died a bit with him, and they set their own deaths aside. Someone started whispering the rosary in the corner, though it was so quiet every word could be heard all around the ward like pebbles falling on the floor.

“Don’t pay any mind to him,” I said. “In the country they always pray in the early evening.”

And I took him by the hand, the way you take a child’s hand to lead him across a footbridge over the river. His hand was actually like a child’s, it was so small and scrawny both of them would have fit in my one hand. At one moment he squeezed my hand so hard and so desperately it was like he was falling off a cliff, and I felt my hand and my arm were dying with him.

“Mr. Szymon” — his whisper reached me like something moving down a bumpy road — “you’ve been in the next world. What’s it like there?”

“That was a long time ago, Mr. Kazimierz. And it was in the war. In wartime things might be different in the next world as well as in this one. Besides, war doesn’t distinguish between one world and the other. Maybe I just thought I was there. Shall I tell you about rabbits? What kind do you like better, angoras or lop-eareds? Me, I prefer angoras. Lop-eareds are big, but if you keep them it’s for the meat. Angoras are white as can be, they like to keep clean, and their eyes kind of shine red. When you touch an angora’s fur it’s like touching the daybreak, or touching a cloud, or the sky. And I’ve been thinking, I’m going to start keeping rabbits when I come home from the hospital. To begin with I’ll only need a single pair. After that they’ll breed. One pair can have three litters a year, six or seven little ones each time. Then the next year the same. Because rabbits, once they start breeding there’s no stopping them. And as for food, they’ll eat anything, grass, peelings. Come visit sometime and you’ll see. When they eat, their jaws make a noise like they were talking to themselves. Though grass makes one noise, peelings a different one. With grass it’s a tiny sound like autumn drizzle, but with peelings it’s deep like warm rain in May. You could listen to it till the cows come home. And if you listen harder, you can even hear the rush of springwater, bees collecting honey, clouds rubbing against the sky. You can hear the earth turning, and people turning with it. Even though it’s nothing but rabbits making a noise while they eat. But you often have a yen to just lie down on the ground among them like you were lying on hay, in the meadow, by the river, in the shade of a tree, and just melt away in that noise, among the springs and the bees and the clouds, and let yourself be carried away by the tired, tired earth around you. Because there’s something about rabbits that makes everything get softer all around, and inside you as well. Maybe it’s their whiteness. Have you ever seen anything whiter than a rabbit’s fur? Nothing’s whiter than that — not an orchard in bloom, not an eiderdown airing in the sun, not geese swimming on the water. It looks like something that isn’t even born yet and that’s why it’s so white, because it hasn’t yet come into contact with the world. When you pick up one of those rabbits, pull it out of the mass of them and put it on your lap, it’s like you’d taken it out of a warm womb. It trembles, it fights, sometimes scratches, as if it’s afraid to come out into the world. Then when you stroke it, you can feel the fear through your hand, that its whiteness is going to forever be dirtied from your touch. Though on the face of it it’s no big deal, you’re sitting stroking a rabbit and the rabbit’s trembling. You just have to hold it by the ears with your other hand, or else it’ll hop off your lap and there’ll be an emptiness in your hands, it’ll be emptier on your lap than before. And you won’t be able to catch it again. It’ll mix in with the other rabbits and you’ll lose it in all the whiteness. White mixes with white like water mixes with water, sand with sand. When there’re all those white creatures, how can you pick out one of them? Has anyone ever picked a drop of water out of a pool of water, or one grain in a handful?”

I felt a strange chill in the hand that was holding his hand. It was a bit like the chill of freshly plowed earth, or an apple picked when the dew’s still on it.

“I think he’s dead,” I said unsurely, as if it were him I was asking whether he’d died. Everyone on the ward held their breath a short while, like they’d died with him for a moment. Or maybe they were waiting to see if he’d answer me. In the end someone couldn’t take it anymore and they said as if they were surprised:

“He’s dead?” He probably said it not because he didn’t believe it but because you ought to be a bit surprised by death, that’s death’s right.

“Then he’s dead,” someone said almost with relief.

“So, he’s dead,” someone else sighed at the other end of the ward, as if he was saying, “so, it’s evening.”

“Then it’s evening,” someone agreed, because what else can you do with death except agree, “then he’s dead.”

I freed my hand carefully from his and sat back on my own bed.

“Turn the light on maybe,” someone said as though he was suddenly afraid. “Turn on the light.”