Wieslaw Mysliwski - Stone Upon Stone

The last yellow rays of the sun lay on the wall opposite the window, but the lower parts of the room were already getting dark. Where the water buckets stood in the corner, it seemed evening was beginning. All of a sudden there was a crash, she’d dropped a plate, the shards flew every which way across the floor.

“Oh, you clumsy thing,” I said but in a well-meaning way, why would I care about a plate.

She gave me a bitter, reproachful look, hid her face in her hands, burst into tears, and ran off into the other room.

“Małgosia, what’s wrong?” I called after her. “There’s no point crying over a plate. We’ll pick up the pieces and that’ll be that!” I bent down and got to work. I gathered every last little fragment, put it all into the biggest piece, laid it on the stove, and went to ask her where I should throw it out.

“All done.”

She was lying on the bed with her head thrust in the pillow, crying like a wronged child.

“There’s no need to cry,” I said. “A plate got broken is all. No big deal. Could have happened to anyone. One day I was taking myself some potato soup, the bowl knocked against the kettle and it shattered. Another time, I put a plate upside down on some cabbage to cover it and the plate slipped off and broke. If we cried over every broken plate we’d run out of tears to cry over people.” I sat down on the edge of the bed, by her head, and started stroking her hair. “Don’t cry now. Time was, when plates and bowls were made out of tin, a plate would last you your whole life. A young woman would get a set of six plates in her dowry, and on her deathbed she’d be able to leave them to her daughter. Some had flowers on them, some not. When one of those plates fell on the floor the worst that could happen was it would get dented. You’d eat and eat from it. And you could put it down on a hot stove top. When one of them got a hole you’d fill it with a rivet and hammer it out, or plug it with a piece of rag, and you’d keep eating from it. Then when it was really old the cat would eat from it, the chickens, you’d carry the dog’s food out in it. Or you could give it to a kid as a toy to play with, it wouldn’t do itself any harm with a plate like that. Come on now, don’t cry.”

For the longest time she wouldn’t calm down, but gradually, gradually the crying eased off. Though she still lay there with her head in the pillow. I guessed she must be embarrassed because of her tear-stained face, worried that I’d think the crying made her look ugly. I got up intending to get rid of the broken plate.

“Where can I throw away the pieces?”

She didn’t answer right away. After a moment, in a voice still wet with tears, she said:

“Just leave them there.”

“It won’t take a second,” I said. “I’ll get rid of them and that’ll be the end of it.”

I stood over her, waiting for her to say:

“Go throw them out then.”

There’d be a bucket for rubbish outside the shed. Or under the verandah. Or by the fence. Or at the edge of the orchard, by the apple tree. Different people kept it in different places. They buried it, or tossed it in the river. I’d even have gone down to the river, but there was no river in their village. Otherwise I thought her crying would never end, it’d subside, but it wouldn’t end.

It looked like she’d stopped crying, that she was just lying there hugging the pillow. But she was still full of tears. You could smell them in the air, like the smell of roasting salt.

“Don’t go,” she whispered. “I don’t want to be left on my own.”

“Fine,” I said. “I just thought that you did all that cleaning, but there’s still the broken plate.”

“Sit by me. Where you were sitting before.”

I sat down. Dusk had slipped into the room for good, like smoke from a bonfire. Underfoot you could barely tell whether the floor was boards or earth. The ceiling overhead, even though it was high and painted white, it looked like it was covered with mold. On the wall they had a stuffed hawk on a branch, in the daytime it looked like it was swooping down on a chicken in the yard, that it already had it in its talons, Małgosia’s folks were running out and shouting, let it go, you bandit! Now, it was like someone had hung out a hawk carcass to scare off the other hawks. It was the same with the Apostles at the Last Supper. They were already old but the dusk made them even older, like they were tired of sitting at the same table for two thousand years, when would they finally be able to get up? And Małgosia’s parents in their wedding portrait over the bed, they’d also gotten darker, as if they hadn’t just gotten married but had just died, though her mother was still in her white veil like a bride.

“I want to be yours today,” she said, suddenly raising her head from the pillow. She said it in an ordinary way like she was saying, the sun’s rising. The forest is rustling. The river’s flowing. “Do you want that?”

I leaned over and kissed her hair, because what could I say? It would be like someone asking, “Do you want to live?” And you answered: “I do.” A better answer would be: “No, I want to die.” So as to feel how painfully you want to live.

“I’ll get the bed ready.”

She got up, took off the bedspread, folded it in four and hung it over the armrest of a chair. She arranged the pillows, shook out the quilt. It was hard to believe she’d been crying just a moment ago. It was like she’d been making the bed for us every day before nightfall, and today another of those nights had come. And not even a Sunday night but a regular weekday one, like Tuesday to Wednesday, Wednesday to Thursday, and it was time to go to bed after a full day of life. It seemed like any minute now she’d go down on her knees at the bedside and start saying her prayers and telling me off, saying I should at least cross myself, because all the two of us had inside was exhaustion after that whole long day of life. Though it was the same as other days, no harder and no easier. Maybe I’d been mowing, and she was gathering. Maybe I’d been plowing and she’d been doing the laundry.

She took off her blouse and her skirt. She didn’t tell me to turn around or not to look, she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. But why should I have been surprised, when you’ve gotten through a whole day you don’t have the strength or the desire to be embarrassed. Your body’s just an aching weight, and the eyes looking at it are blind. It probably would never have occurred to her that after all those years I could look at her any differently than the way I looked at the earth, at the landscape. After so many years I knew her body like I knew the earth and the landscape, and landscape and earth don’t know what embarrassment is. I knew it in health and in sickness, in joy and in sorrow, in laughter and in tears, at every hour of the day and the night. What was there to be embarrassed about? How many times had I poured water over her to rinse off the soap as she crouched in the bathtub, and looked down at her naked body like the Lord God who made her looking down from above. How many times had I pulled off her sweat-soaked blouse when she was in a fever and too weak to even raise her arms. Why should she be embarrassed now. Or how often in the night had I listened so closely to her breathing that I even had the same dream as her, because when body lives alongside body for so many years, they dream the same dreams together too, why would they need two different ones. I knew the whole of her and every part. I knew her belly, her thighs, her knees, her elbows. I knew each of her arms and each of her legs, and all the fingers on her hands and the toes on her feet separately and together. I knew every vein under her skin, every scar and every spot. I knew her belly button had been poorly tied after she was born, and I knew she had a way of sighing that sounded like a sob. I sometimes thought she was all of life, I sometimes thought she was no more than a speck of grass in my eye. Sometimes I could see death within her, sometimes only a broken fingernail. So it was no surprise that she couldn’t understand it when I still desired her. Something almost like fear came into her eyes. How could it be, her youth had passed and she’d even forgotten how to be embarrassed, why then? It’s only in youth that bodies desire each other for no reason. And here we were after a whole day of life and I desired her, and it felt as if it was after an entire life. Sleep was weighing on her eyes, her arms and feet ached, her body felt like it had just been taken down from the cross, and here you were desiring her. And in an ordinary way, as if you’d come home from mowing and wanted a drink of water.