Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

To begin with it didn’t occur to anyone that they were going to kill us. How could they go straight from a meeting to killing us? We weren’t thieves or any kind of criminals, why would we have to die? Also, we were misled by the spades that were in the truck. If there were spades, that meant they needed laborers. Maybe they’d have us do some digging or fill something in. In wartime there’s always digging and filling in to be done. It would have helped to know which direction they were taking us, but we couldn’t tell because first, the truck was covered with a tarpaulin, and second, the sky was overcast that day and it seemed like the sun was on one side one minute, the next minute on the other, first in front of us then behind, like it wasn’t really there at all. Stelmaszczyk from Obrębów even got into an argument about the sun with Wrona from Lisice. One of them said he knew the sun like the back of his hand, the other one said he did too. The first one said he got up with the sun every morning, the other one said he got up with the sun every morning as well. The first one said he had the sun in his blood, he didn’t even need to look up in the sky to know where it was, the second one said he could have gone completely blind and he still would have known where the sun is in the sky. It’s over there. In the end someone said that maybe the sun in Obrębów was different than the one in Lisice, because perhaps each village had a different sun, and so the sun over the truck was a different one again. It was only then they stopped arguing.

You could feel the potholes and the bends in the road. But potholes and bends won’t tell you you’re being taken to your death. Sure, there were four soldiers sitting at the back of the truck with their guns pointed at us, but that didn’t surprise anyone, if they were taking us somewhere they had to guard us on the way. And even if we’d asked them where they were taking us they likely didn’t know, because it was probably their higher-ups made the decisions. Besides, what language could we ask them in when they didn’t know Polish. But Smoła couldn’t take it, in the end he asked them:

“Excuse me, can you tell me where you’re taking us? You probably need workmen, right? Am I right? We’ll do it, why wouldn’t we. Some of us were soldiers too, though in the old wars, so we even know how to dig trenches if need be. It’s just a pity we didn’t let the folks at home know we’d be gone a while. Because we haven’t done anything wrong, have we?”

The soldiers didn’t say a word. They just sat there all stiff with their eyes shining like cats’ eyes under their helmets.

“What could we have done wrong? You don’t need to go asking them, we know perfectly well ourselves,” said Antos from Górki, bridling up. He was known for talking straight to anyone, even if it was the priest or the squire. Before the war he was always going around to political rallies everywhere.

“Or maybe there’s no point in asking these gentlemen,” said Sitek, like he was trying to excuse the soldiers so they didn’t feel bad about not knowing. “They’re probably country folks like us, they only know as much as we do. But I’m sure they won’t hurt us, no way.”

“You’ll see, we’ll be back home this evening,” said Jagła, backing Sitek up. “There’s twenty-five of us, we’ll have the job done in two shakes. They’d have said if it was anything else.”

“What do you mean, anything else?” said another guy, suddenly worried, and he leaned forward on the bench towards Jagła.

“They might say, they might not.”

“Say what? What might they say?”

“Come on, what’s the point of worrying ahead of time, when we get there they’ll tell us.”

“I don’t like the look of this, I really don’t. We’re going somewhere and we don’t know where. What can it mean?”

“Maybe they’re going to kill us?” Strąk burst out, and everyone was suddenly terrified.

Strąk was the oldest guy in the truck, way older than Antos or Wrona. He could barely shuffle about, they’d had to help him into the truck because he couldn’t have climbed up by himself. His son-in-law had sent him to the meeting just like my father had sent me. Why would they have chosen Strąk as a laborer when so many other younger, stronger men had been left behind on the square? If someone had thought about Strąk earlier, maybe we’d have figured out right away where they were taking us.

“Darn it!” said Kujda angrily, like it was Strąk’s fault that they might be going to kill us. “You should have sat on your backside and not gone to any meeting.”

“How was I supposed to know?” said Strąk, trying to defend himself. “The policeman said to go to the meeting.”

But everyone started in on Strąk.

“Your son-in-law should have come. He’s the head of the household, not you. You signed the farm over to him. You should stick to praying instead of going to meetings.”

“Or if they start telling us to dig, and they will, because why else would there be spades here, we’ll have to do your digging for you. No one’s got four arms.”

“He’s got one foot in the grave already, goddammit, he smells death everywhere.”

“You say they’re going to kill us? Why would they do that? Why?”

“If they were going to kill us they wouldn’t have bothered taking you. You dying doesn’t mean shit to them. It’d be a waste of a bullet. Death’ll take you without any help from them.”

Strąk hunched over like he’d been swallowed up by the earth. He might even have regretted saying what he said about being killed, it came out like it was about everyone dying, when he was likely just talking about himself.

“But what if they are taking us to our deaths? What if they are? Maybe they’re going to have us dig our own graves, that’s what the spades are for? Lord!”

“In that case they’d have taken someone to fill the graves in afterwards. I mean, we couldn’t do it ourselves. But they didn’t.”

“That can’t be it. There’s probably a dike burst somewhere, we had bad rains recently, it could have burst.”

“Hey, hear that? Quiet there. Sounds like there’s another truck behind us. I’m not just hearing things. My hearing’s still good, even if I am getting on.”

“What if there is, they’re not gonna wait back in the village are they?”

“It’s either the wind flapping the tarpaulin, or there’s a mill somewhere close by.”

“Do something, Lord. Make the axle break or whatever.”

“A broken axle won’t help you. One time my axle broke, I was taking rye to the mill, and instead of the miller I needed a blacksmith. A miracle’d be better.”

“Sure, you just order us a miracle.”

“There was a miracle over in Leoncin in the last war, but they didn’t take us in trucks back then.”

“I was supposed to go plow tomorrow, Stanuch and me were gonna team up our horses. You know, up by the hill.”

“One time, this Gypsy fortune-teller told me I’d live a long life. Wish I knew where the bitch is now.”

“Mind your language there, what if we are going to die?”

“What are you going to do about it? Run away? You can’t run away. Besides, we have to die sometime.”

“Dear God, the wife’ll be left on her own with four kids! Though what does God care?”

“I didn’t even say anything about what they should do at home if I don’t come back.”

“You’ll go back, why wouldn’t you. Błażek Oko came back from the war after twenty years, though no one ever thought he would. He was old and bald and his woman had gone to her grave, but he came back. And don’t people come back from over the sea?”

“The storks came back this year, though I was all set to knock the nest off, what good is an empty nest to anyone.”