Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

“There there, there there, don’t cry,” I whispered almost in her ear. Though I don’t know if she was crying. I was the one close to tears, maybe I was just comforting myself, because how else can you offer comfort, whether it’s to a person or a cow. You can say to someone, let it stop hurting, and it won’t do any good, unless it’s God himself that says it.

She dragged her head back over the grass, heavy as a rock, and looked my way again. One eye, the one closer to the ground, was all covered with earth, and she probably couldn’t see with the other one either, because it was all cloudy like someone had scrambled it up. Also there was a circle of flies that had settled all around the second eye that were stopping it from seeing. I waved my hand at them, but only a couple flew up, the others just stuck there. Flies are like that, they don’t give a hoot about someone else’s pain, they’ll just stick where they are. It made me mad so I grabbed the cap off my head and knocked at the eye with it, and it got clearer straightaway. Except that at exactly that moment she tossed her head like she was trying to shake me off as well. Luckily I managed to jump back, because she would have knocked me over. She pushed against the ground so hard with her hooves there was a spray of earth. It looked like she was finally going to squeeze that mound of pain out of herself. But again it turned out to be beyond her strength, and again she collapsed onto the grass. She lowed, and the sound was so mournful all the other cows nearby raised their heads and looked nervously in her direction. The mound started swelling her out again, it got bigger and bigger, and all of a sudden I remembered that when a cow swells up like that and there’s nothing else can be done, its side splits open.

I even had a penknife. On the meadow, not having a penknife was like not having a hand. And it wasn’t just an ordinary knife, when you stuck it in wood it rang, and when you threw it at the ground it went in right up to the handle. Because of that penknife I was on good terms with boys much bigger than me. Some of them were four or five years older, almost young men. They knew everything that grown-ups know. It took your breath away sometimes to hear them, and they made you graze their cows for them if you wanted to listen. With the younger ones they’d tell them to go away or send them to bring some of their father’s tobacco, it was only me they wouldn’t do that to.

I took the knife out of my pocket, opened the blade, and stood over the cow with my arm raised. I knew where you made a hole, in the hollow by the hind shoulder. But I couldn’t bring myself to say, all right, do it now. My hand was shaking, the whole of me was shaking inside. I just gripped the knife harder and harder. Suddenly the cow lowed again, just as mournfully as the first time, and I was choked with fear. And right where I stood with the knife, I dropped to my knees by her swollen belly and started praying out loud. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. After that, I couldn’t go on because I was crying. I pressed my head to her belly and tears flowed, not just from my eyes but from my whole face. They might even have dripped into the depths of her stomach. Because when a child cries, the whole world cries. And who knows if it wasn’t from those tears that I became an adult. Though it might be that God gives a person one lot of tears like he has one heart, one liver, one spleen, one bladder. And you need to get those tears out so you can tell when you’re still a child and when you’ve grown up. Otherwise they’ll follow behind you all your life, and all your life you’ll think you’re still a child. Some people actually think that.

Though I wasn’t any kind of crybaby. Even when I cried, it was usually only inwardly, so from the outside no one could tell by looking at me that I was crying. But that time, with the Kubiks’ cow, something kind of opened up wide inside me, even the cow must have been surprised someone was crying over her, because who cries over a cow. Especially the Kubiks’ cow, she was always covered in dried crap, no one ever bothered to even clean her. Because old man Kubik, when he wasn’t at the pub he was at a rally, and Wacek only knew how to use a whip. Or maybe she was listening hard to see if the crying wasn’t inside her, because she calmed down like she’d stopped calving.

Then something moved inside her and the mound I’d bent my head over when I was crying suddenly started to collapse. I jumped to my feet, and the cow jerked its head up almost vertically and started kind of dragging itself backward over the meadow. By now it wasn’t grunting but rasping. I ran to its back, and there, the tip of a muzzle could be seen, and in a short moment a whole head appeared out of its backside like it was poking out of a hollow in a tree. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but I grabbed the head with both hands and pulled with all my might. And the calf was born. It was a roan like its mother, and it was all slimy.

After that, on the meadow they called me Godfather. It was Godfather this, Godfather that. The name stuck. I didn’t mind, why should I. And as things turned out, up till now it was only that one time I was a godfather. Not that I wasn’t asked. I’ve often been asked. I could have had any number of godchildren. Except what good would it have done them to have me as a godparent? What good did it do the Kubiks’ calf? I couldn’t even say what happened to it next, whether the Kubiks decided to keep it and raise it, or whether they sold it, or slaughtered it, or it died. And though it’s not right to refuse when they ask you to be a godfather, I decided I’d never be one. If it were up to me I’d get rid of godfathers and godmothers altogether. You have one real father and one real mother, why do you need a pretend one too. They carry you to the altar for your christening, then after that you don’t get so much as a stick of candy from them, they won’t even pat you on the head, the one or the other of them. Or they could choose a godfather for you after you grow up. You call them godmother and godfather, but you’re strangers to each other.

My godmother, she died young, when I was still in the cradle, I’m not talking about her. But my godfather, in all my life I saw him two times, not counting at my christening. The first time I was almost grown up. A man I didn’t know came to our house one Sunday afternoon, I was getting ready to go to a dance and I hear father and mother saying, oh, it’s Franek! This Franek says hello to them, then he gives me his hand, so I shake it like you do, but mother and father say, this is your godfather, kiss his hand. I didn’t like that, I wasn’t going to kiss some guy’s hand. My godfather says:

“So this is my godson? He’s grown some. He’s a young man already.”

He was from Zbąszyn or Suchowola, I couldn’t even say. Father met him when he was looking for a stove-maker. Our stove was smoking, and for some reason none of the local stove-makers could fix it. They’d come, take the thing apart, put it back together again and it would still smoke. Someone told father there was a guy in Zbąszyn or Suchowola that there wasn’t a stove he couldn’t mend. Father went there and arranged for him to come. Then one day he showed up. He didn’t take it apart or put it back together. He just poked around in it a bit and afterward it drew like no one’s business. When the job was done the two of them were so pleased that they got drunk to celebrate and father asked him to be my godfather, because it was just at the time I was due to be christened.

The second time I met him was during the war, at the market at Płocice. We’d gone there to rub out this one bastard. Before, he’d been a bailiff at the court, then during the war he became a German. Every market day he’d swagger around the market in a German uniform with a gun in his belt, and he’d go up to the women that were selling things and take their eggs, butter, cheeses, chickens, poppy seed. When he was in a good mood he’d pay, at the official rate of course. And everyone knew what the official rate was. A whole chicken was the price of a few eggs. Though most of the time he wasn’t in a good mood and he hardly ever paid for anything, the son of a bitch would even take the basket as well. And if one of the women tried to refuse, he’d just walk all over whatever she was selling and squash it with his boots, all the eggs and cheeses and butter and cream, he’d kick it all around and mess it up, he’d smack the woman around and call her a whore in Polish. When the women came back from market, instead of having a few pennies to pay for salt, thread, kerosene, matches, they’d be crying. We gave him a couple of warnings, he even got a beer mug over the head in a pub, he was hit so hard he was covered in blood. But it didn’t help. He had to be killed.