Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

I grabbed him under the arms, he was light as a feather, and I threw him onto the soldier that was standing behind me. The soldier fired off a short burst then they both fell to the ground. Him underneath and Kuraś on top of him, already dead. First off they thought Kuraś was the one trying to run away, before they realized it was me I’d reached the nearest oak tree and gotten behind it, and it was only then they started firing and chasing after me. But beyond that oak tree there were more oaks, beeches, spruce, the whole forest. Plus, death was driving me along and I was running like a stag, dodging between the trees till they hid me completely. Though for the longest time it felt like they were right at my back, I could hear them running through the woods and shouting, and their bullets kept zinging around me.

I must have kept running for a heck of a long time, because I could barely breathe, I felt a stabbing pain in my chest, and it was harder and harder to swerve around the trees. I kept crashing into some obstacle, I’d fall over and get up, but it was all I could do to stay on my feet. Then I smashed into something again, fell over again, and this time I didn’t have the strength to stand back up. Fortunately I couldn’t hear anyone chasing me or shooting at me, all I could hear was silence surging through the woods. But I didn’t want to live so much as just sleep and sleep.

All of a sudden I felt a twinge in my left side. I reached my hand down, and it came back covered in blood. The sleepiness passed instantly. I rolled my jacket up and saw that a part of my side had been almost completely shot away. There were lumps of half-dried blood in my torn shirt, blood all around my belt, and the leg of my pants was soaked in blood all the way down to the ankle. Though I hadn’t even felt I’d been hit. I tried to stop the blood with my hand, but it kept running through my fingers. I struggled to my feet and set off again. But which way should I go to find people? Suddenly the woods spun around me like a merry-go-round, my eyes went dark, and I had to lean against a tree. I thought I heard a rooster crowing. I figured maybe I was dying and I was imagining things. But no, I heard it again, and it sounded like it was right close by, just beyond the trees. So I dragged myself that way, either holding on to the trees or on all fours. After a few yards, in a gap in the trees I saw a cottage with a roof of golden-colored shingles, smoke rising from its chimney. I passed out.

When I came round, a mongrel dog was standing over me yelping like I was a dead body. A farmer was walking toward me from beyond the trees, carrying a pitchfork at the ready like he was about to stick it in me, and at each step he was asking the dog:

“What is it, Mikuś? Whatcha got there?”

He wanted to hitch up his wagon and go fetch the healer right away, because neither him nor his wife believed I’d live, I’d lost so much blood. But I refused, let what was going to happen happen, the healer might turn out to be a snitch and I’d have run away in vain.

Luckily the bullet hadn’t lodged in the wound. They washed it with moonshine, then they applied compresses of horsetail and coughwort in turn, and after a few days the bleeding stopped. After that they just put on badger fat, and slowly, slowly it started to heal. But the most useful thing of all was that I munched on carrots like a rabbit, that helped to make new blood. I’d sometimes eat half a basketful in a single day. Plus the farmer’s wife grated carrot into a juice for me, and gave me boiled carrots for dinner. I ended up all yellow from the carrots, not just my face but my arms and legs and even my fingernails turned yellow, like I was covered in wax. My teeth, I had to clean them with ash to get rid of the color. So when I finally went to visit father and mother to show them I was still alive, a good few months had passed by then, father’s first words were:

“Why’re you all yellow? Are you really alive? Is it you or your ghost? We already mourned for you. We went gray because of you. But why are you all yellow?”

Mother sat up from her pillows and burst into tears. She couldn’t get a word out at first, it was only when the crying eased off a bit that she defended me against father.

“What do you mean, yellow? He’s thin and pale. Dear Lord in heaven. He’s not yellow, he looks like he’s just been taken down from the cross. You must be hungry, son? I’ll heat something up for you. There’s dumplings left over from dinner. I said so many prayers for you after they told us you were killed.” She burst out crying again.

But father wouldn’t give it up:

“Sure he’s yellow. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. He’s yellow as can be.”

“It’s from the carrots,” I said.

At that moment he looked at me like I was making fun of him and suddenly broke off. He sat down on the bench, rocking and staring at his own bare feet. I was a bit surprised, because how could he have known I was yellow, it was dark in the house, the lamp was turned way down and there was no more light than you’d have from sunlight shining through a knothole, plus I wasn’t all that yellow by then. Maybe he didn’t believe it was me, but he felt it wouldn’t be right to ask, is that you, my son Szymek, that they killed, so he just asked me why I was so yellow.

Because mother didn’t need to ask anything at all, she cried her eyes out and everything was clear to her. But that’s how things are in the world, for a woman, weeping is there to help when reason stops understanding. And weeping knows everything, words don’t know, thoughts don’t know, dreams don’t know, and sometimes God himself doesn’t know, but human weeping knows. Because weeping is weeping, and it’s also the thing that it’s weeping over.

When mother’s tears eased off she still didn’t ask me anything, she just started telling her own news. That her chickens weren’t laying. Yesterday she only found three eggs. How could she expect them to lay, though? If they’d had wheat they’d be laying. But here all we had was potatoes and chaff, and nothing but what they could find on the ground by themselves. On top of that one of them got eaten by a polecat last month. And it had been the best one, it was going to be a brood hen. The speckled one, remember? I did remember, though there’d been more than one speckled hen. That was one smart hen. The second it caught sight of me it’d come pattering from the other end of the yard to see if I had any grain or bread crumbs to drop down for it. Why did it have to be that one the polecat killed. When it found something to eat on the ground it would rather let the other hens have it than get into a fight with them. It never squeezed through the fence into other people’s farms, or onto the road. And it would always go roost at sundown of its own accord, when the other ones, you’d have to shoo them into the barn. It would have been a good mother to its chicks. I was so glad I had it, Lord I was so glad. But one morning I go into the barn and there’s feathers and blood all over the place. She bled and bled. I’ve never seen so much blood from a single chicken. Another one they had to slaughter cause it looked to have some kind of sickness. It started keeping its distance from the other chickens. Then all it would do was stand by the barn, on one leg. I thought to myself, aha, there’s a storm coming, just don’t let there be lightning, Lord. Or maybe it was hail. That would have ruined everything. All it would do, once in a while it would go over to the water trough and drink and drink, then it would go back near the barn on its one leg. This went on for a day or two. I took a handful of wheat and put it right under its nose, but it never even poked its head out from its feathers. And at night you had to pick it up and carry it into the barn, because on its own it wouldn’t have known it was nighttime. Then, at one moment I lift up its head and I see its eyelids are starting to close up over its eyes, that its eyes are like little tiny millet seeds. You poor thing, I can tell you’re never getting better. Oh dear Lord Jesus!