Stone Upon Stone (6 page)

People have one swallow’s nest, maybe two, but under my roof there must be ten of them. We got so used to each other that even in the hospital they’d wake up with me. It would usually start with a noise that sounded like a drop of dew falling on something soft. That was the first hungry nestling waking up. I’d open my eyes and look out the window. Dawn through the window looks like an empty tin pail. After the first drop there’d come a second, though this time it was like it hit the pail, it was hungrier. After that a third, a fourth, a tenth, each one hungrier than the last. Then the dawn would start to grow brighter. At first it was like someone was rinsing out the dark blue of the pail. Then after a bit someone else would bring milk in the pail from the milking and put it in the middle of the room. Right away the beds would start creaking. Someone would say something. Someone would give a sigh to God. Someone missing a leg or an arm would turn over on his other side and the whole ward would turn with them. After that you couldn’t sleep any longer.

It might even have been one of those dawns when I got the idea of maybe having a tomb built, so everyone would have a place they could be buried in. Because your thoughts after you’ve been asleep are like swallows at dawn. And in the hospital wanted and unwanted thoughts come to you alike. Even thoughts that would never have occurred to a healthy person.
Because healthy people only think on this side of the world. When you try and think on the other side, your thoughts slip like they were on glass. Because if you’re going over there you need to go body and soul with your thoughts. For good.

It’s not surprising really. You’re lying there confined to your bed, you’ve got more time than there are flies on shit and you don’t know what to do with it. You don’t feel like sleeping any more, how much can a person sleep anyway. There’s nothing to talk about either, because it’s always about the same thing. An hour seems as long as a day, a day as long as a month, a month as long as a year. I doubt you’d have so much time even in eternity. And that kind of empty time is worse than the sickness itself. On top of that, you’ve got twelve beds on the ward. And in each one of them there’s either an amputated leg or a crushed arm, someone run over by a tractor, someone that broke their back, or someone else with a pipe in their Adam’s apple making this whistling sound, here someone’s had half their stomach cut out, next to them someone’s head is wrapped in bandages, and over there it’s hard to know exactly what’s wrong with him. Every day the whole place is sighing, hacking, groaning, dying. And everybody’s going on and on and on about his illness and all. There’s nowhere to run, so you run away in your thoughts, though it’s not much better in there.

I never did as much thinking in my whole life as I did during those two years in the hospital. When I got out I felt as if my head was twice as heavy. It kept buzzing like a beehive. But you couldn’t not think. Even if you didn’t want to, your thoughts thought themselves on their own. If you shooed them out of your head they just flew around you like a flock of crows driven out of a poplar tree. Cawing and squawking. There was no way you could stop them, even though they were your thoughts.

If someone had said to me before that I’d be the one to have a tomb built I’d have laughed them out. Me build a tomb. I wasn’t either the youngest or the oldest. And I had no intention of running the farm. I wasn’t drawn to
the land. I did what I did because father told me to, but in my thoughts I was always somewhere else.

Of us four brothers Stasiek was the one most likely to take over the farm, he looked like a farmer ever since he was small. Father even used to imagine how Stasiek would probably have a new house built when he grew up. And Stasiek and him would discuss it back and forth, because Stasiek wanted it to have stone walls, with cellars and a verandah and rounded windows, with sheet-metal roofing and laid floors in all the rooms. While father wanted to leave an earthen floor at least in the kitchen, because how could you walk on floorboards in muddy boots when fall comes. And sometimes you needed to spit or stamp out a cigarette butt. Stasiek wanted three rooms. Two downstairs, one for him and his wife when he got married, and a separate one for father and mother. And a third one upstairs so that when one of us brothers came to visit we’d also have a room of our own to stay in. Plus a storeroom and a larder. You were supposed to get to all the rooms separately from the hallway. Father tried to convince Stasiek that at least him and mother should be able to go into their room from the kitchen. Their whole lives they’d lived like that and it would be hard to change. But Stasiek wouldn’t budge, it had to be from the hallway only, because he’d seen it done like that at the presbytery and at the miller’s, where you went into each of the rooms separately. You were supposed to take your boots off in the hallway and put slippers on, because he’d seen that at the presbytery and the miller’s as well. Though before he built the house, father would probably have persuaded him to let him and mother get to their room from the kitchen. They were old and they wouldn’t have used that doorway long. Then afterward he could’ve altered it. Or maybe he would have changed when he got older himself, and he’d want to get to his room straight from the kitchen just like father and mother.

And if he’d had a house built he probably also would have put up a tomb. Because a real farmer ought to have his own tomb too. The house is the
trunk and the tomb is the roots, and it’s only house and tomb together that make up the whole tree. Besides, if father and mother had died he wouldn’t have just buried them in an ordinary grave. Even just for when you visit the cemetery on All Souls’ Day it’s nicer to stand at a stone-built tomb where everyone’s all together than at separate graves in the earth. It’s nicer to pray and to light candles there, even your grief feels better. And when your tomb is better looking than the other ones, you feel like you’re not just master of your own however many acres but that you’ve worked a decent piece of land in the next world as well.

Michał or Antek, not to mention me – none of us could compete with Stasiek. Though by the time Stasiek was starting school Michał had already left to seek his fortune in the outside world. Antek, on the other hand, he was a madcap, you never knew what he’d come up with next. Whereas me, I never dreamed of ever building a new house, let alone a tomb. I was always more interested in living than in dying. Living and living, as long as I could, as much as I could. Even if there was no reason to. Though does it matter all that much whether there’s a reason or no? Maybe it actually makes no difference, and we’re just wasting our time worrying about it. Who knows, maybe living is the eleventh commandment that God forgot to tell us. Or perhaps everyone has it written in their stars or in some other book that they’re supposed to keep on living, and that has to be enough. People don’t need to know everything. Horses don’t know things and they go on living. And bees, for instance, if they knew it was humans they were collecting honey for, they wouldn’t do it. How are people any better than horses or bees?

In any case I couldn’t have said whether I liked living or I just felt I had to, so much so that I felt closer to being born than to dying. And death counted for little with me. I was only interested in life. It goes without saying that death came after me a good few times, probably more than the next man. There were moments it followed right behind me and even lay down to rest beside me, because it thought it might take me in my sleep. Other times it
already had its bony hands on me. But it never got the better of me. Sometimes, at those moments it would weep with rage. Weep away, you dark bastard. I’m going to keep on living awhile, because that’s what I feel like doing. You’ll never take me when you want to. I’ll come to you myself when I’ve had enough, I’ll say I’m done with living, I can die now.

How so much life got into me I couldn’t say. Sometimes it’s destiny, and sometimes a person’s born that keeps on living however much everything gangs up against them. It’s as if life itself picked them to stand up to death.

I wasn’t quite three when the neighbor’s turkey-cock strayed into our yard. It was big as a young cow and all covered in dangling red wattles, like it had a cherry branch instead of a neck. The wattles made everything around go red, like a red glow from a fire. The barn, the cattle shed, the fence, the ground, it all suddenly turned red. The dog dashed out of its kennel and started yapping at the turkey, it was filled with red anger. The cat came out of the house, here kitty kitty, its fur was gray, and all of a sudden now it was red. The geese, it seemed like someone had taken their white covers off, as if they were pillows and they were waddling around in the red linings. And even the scythe leaning against the barn started to drip with red blood, drip, drip, drip.

I set off toward the turkey to pull off those wattles of his that had turned the whole world red, and hang them around my own neck. He probably thought I wanted to play with him, and to begin with he started running away. Then all of a sudden he came to a stop, bristled up, gobbled, and spread out like a whole cherry tree, and the blood almost burst from his wattles. I reached for his neck, and he ups and jabs me in the hand, jabs me in the head. Then he gobbles again and jabs me again. But by this time I’d already gotten ahold of his neck with both hands, and I held on like it was a fence post. He tugged and jumped, but I wouldn’t let go. He started hitting me with his wings, and with his head caught in my hands he jerked me one way and the other like he was trying to leave me his head and get free even if
it meant going headless. He didn’t manage to, though, because in my little hands I could feel the strength of four grown-up hands. He dragged me all the way across the yard and back. In the end he must have decided there was nothing else for it. He stood still, spread his wings like two clouds, and tried to fly. He flapped and flapped, he thrashed and he twisted and turned, but for some reason the air wouldn’t lift him up. We both fell to the ground. We were covered in dust. You couldn’t have said what was turkey and what was me, we were just one big tangle.

I thought my eyes were covered in red from the wattles, and I didn’t mind one bit. But it was blood that was blinding me. I started to feel weak. The turkey was on his last legs too, he was just barely moving his wings. He tried to peck me again, but what could he do with nothing but his head sticking out of my grip like it was poking out of a hole. He didn’t peck any harder than if he’d been picking up grain from the ground. Besides, he might not even have been able to see what he was pecking, because his eyes were popping out like pebbles. He opened his beak wide and began hissing like a punctured tire, but he was weaker and weaker. I passed out and he collapsed on top of me. Father and mother came running out of the house. They thought we were dead. And that more likely the turkey had pecked me to death than that I’d strangled the turkey. I was a child, after all. And the turkey weighed twenty-two pounds even after it was plucked and dressed. Father carried me into the house. He was crying up a storm and all covered in my blood.

A whole horde of neighbors gathered. They sent to the village for holy water to splash on me before my soul left my body and it went cold. Some of them already began to say the prayers for the dead, others were comforting mother, telling her God wouldn’t let any harm come to me in the next world, and he might even make me one of his angels, because I’d not done any wrong in this world. And they waited for the holy water. But before it arrived I came to of my own accord. Except that when I saw the crowd of
people over me I burst out crying and mother had to hold me in her arms for the longest time before I calmed down.

It was the same when I was older and I’d go caroling with the other boys, no one would agree to be King Herod, because death cut Herod’s head off and no one liked to be killed. So I was always Herod, because I preferred being king to being afraid of death. We had a real scythe, one that was used for mowing, not a fake one with a wooden blade. When death cut your head off with a real scythe you felt death was real too, and not Antek Mączka dressed up as death in a white sheet. Especially because each time I was killed the blade of the scythe had to touch my neck, not just knock my crown off. But I never once flinched. Though death cut my head off and I was a goner as many times as we visited houses in a night. The farmers we caroled for sometimes couldn’t even watch, and their wives would scream and cover their children’s eyes. But in the houses where they were most frightened, afterward they’d give us each an even bigger serving of pie, and a piece of sausage, and a glass of vodka. They always turned to me and said, you want a top-off? They’d check whether the scythe was honed and whether I didn’t have a cut on my neck. And they couldn’t get over it. He’s a brave one, dammit. That’s for sure. He’s a proper Herod. The real thing. There was just that one time Antek Mączka brought the scythe down and nicked me till I bled, so I took his scythe away from him and kicked his ass and he didn’t play death anymore.

Or in the resistance, seven times I was wounded. Once I thought I was already in the next world. I got hit in the stomach. When I opened my eyes I was actually surprised it was exactly the same woods, the same sky, that a skylark was singing somewhere up above. A skylark, okay, why shouldn’t there be skylarks in the next world. Except that not far away there was a village in flames. Cows were lowing there, a baby was crying, someone was wailing, Jesuuus! And way far away in the distance a farmer was plowing. He didn’t look like a farmer from this world but like the soul of a farmer, because
he wasn’t looking in the direction of the fire, he didn’t hear the shouts or the howling and moaning, he was just bending over his plow and plowing. I didn’t know which world to believe in, this one or the next. Truth be told, I didn’t really feel much like coming back to this world. But the next one just seemed like a continuation of this one. Till I felt that I was lying soaked in blood, and that the lark above me was a lark from earth. Though I wasn’t glad about it at all. It felt like I’d died in the next world and I’d come to this one to live.