Stone Upon Stone (2 page)

People have been trying to convince me to grow flax as well. Flax is gold, they say. An acre of flax is worth five acres of wheat, seven acres of rye, and potatoes, God knows how many. And it’s no more work than with rye or wheat or potatoes. You sow it, pick it, dry it, thresh it, and take it to be sold. As for seed, if you contract for a supply they’ll provide it. They’ll even give you a loan so you can pay them. And if there’s a wet year for flax? Then it’ll be a wet year for rye and wheat too, to say nothing about potatoes. When it’s wet, everything’s wet. The rain doesn’t choose to fall only on wheat or potatoes or flax. On your field or on mine. Is any of us more pleasing to God? The flood covered the whole world. Only Noah was left, and he took two of every animal and two grains of every grain. And if there’s a disease? Don’t rye and wheat and potatoes have their own diseases? With potatoes it’s even worse, because they have the potato beetle. And even pheasants won’t get
rid of the potato beetle. One time they released pheasants into the fields, to eat the potato beetles, they said. It got quite colorful out there. You’d be mowing and a pheasant would fly up from under your feet. But did it last long? There was one group of hunters after another, and now you can’t find a pheasant to save your life. So they’re sending people out again to look for beetles. And turnip, carrots, cabbage – don’t they all have their own diseases? What doesn’t?

If you look closely enough you’ll see that even diseases have their own diseases, and those diseases have diseases of their own. Everything in this world is up against everything else, and it’ll be more and more that way. So grow flax, because flax at least pays. Quickly even. What about sparrows? Don’t be stupid, in the country you can’t get by without sparrows. Put up a scarecrow, put up a couple of them, one in each corner of the field. It’s no big deal to nail a couple of poles together and dress them in some old pants, jacket, shirt, hat. Everyone has old clothes lying around that are good for nothing. You save them up over the years because it’s always a pity to throw them out.

With flax the straw and the grain both pay. With rye and wheat only the grain pays. Look around the village. You can tell right away who grows flax. Or go to high mass on Sunday. Paper money comes fluttering down into the collection tray like feathers from angels’ wings. When there’s a rattle of coins once in a while, people look round as if you’d done something wrong. When I was in the hospital, from spring to fall there were two guys here painting the church. One of them got drunk and fell off the scaffolding. But the other one kept on painting. Now the ceiling is blue as the sky. On the walls there’s a new stations of the cross. Before, Jesus’s head was in a crown of thorns, but now you can just see one of his eyes. When people are better off, the Lord God does better too. And that new bell in the church tower, where did that come from? From flax, my friend. When it rings you can hear it up hill and down dale. Folks come from all around to buy salt and oil
and matches, and they say they can hear it ringing everywhere:
Ding-dong, ding-dong
.

But then if everyone grew flax, who would grow rye and wheat, what would they make bread out of? Though I often think to myself, I’ve got ten acres, maybe I could plant at least one acre of flax? It’d bring in a few pennies if there was a good year for flax. And maybe I’d finish that tomb, because it’s gotten embarrassing. It looks like a bunker, with no statue, no cross. There was a guy made a cross for Malinowski’s tomb. He offered to do one for me. But I didn’t care for it. It looked like a fence post, without a Lord Jesus. What kind of cross is that? Though I can’t say I think much of the more expensive ones either in our cemetery. Sometimes I drop by there to take a look and see if one of them might be good for my tomb, but they’re just getting fancier and fancier.

The Kowaliks’ cross you can see way before you even get to the cemetery. It’s almost on a level with the trees. It looks like a tree that’s been snapped in a gale, like two unstripped tree trunks nailed together. It even has knots from sawn-off branches like on a real tree, and bark that’s cracked with age. And it’s all carved in stone. The Lord Jesus is no great size, but his crown of thorns is like a crow’s nest. When you stand underneath it it’s like standing at a gallows, and you have to tip your head way back like you were looking at a hung man. What does it have to be so high for? You can’t look at death high up like that for long. Your neck goes stiff. Looking up is something you can only do to check the weather or when the storks are flying away. Death draws you downward. With your head craned up it’s hard to cry even. The tears get stuck in your throat when it’s stretching up, and they trickle down into your stomach instead of into your eyes.

One time the Germans hung someone from the village on a high cross like that. When you looked up at him from below he seemed to be laughing at it all. But when they took him down and he was lying at our feet you could see his face was twisted and his tongue was poking out. You could imagine
he’d choked on some word that had gotten stuck in his throat when he was trying to shout it out. Though in those times, at moments like that people usually shouted out something short, mostly the same kind of thing. In the time between the trigger being pulled and the bullet entering your body.

If he hadn’t run away into the fields but in the opposite direction, toward the river, he might have gotten away. The river’s no great depth or width, it’s just a river, like you find in any village. When you water your horse its muzzle almost touches the bottom. Old buckets stick out from the surface with mint growing in them. When the women go down to rinse their laundry they wade out into the middle and the water barely comes up to their knees. There are willow trees and bushes along the banks. And he was closer to the river than to that cross. Though maybe they happened to chase him in the direction of the cross, and you run away in whatever direction you’re being chased in. Or perhaps he thought the cross was the edge of the wood.

They shot him, but he somehow managed to crawl to the cross. He put his arms around it with all his strength. Afterward his fingernails were full of splinters and the skin on his arms was scraped all the way up to the elbows because they couldn’t get him to let go however much they tried. They had to break his fingers. And he was already almost dead when they hung him on an arm of the cross. Later there was no way to get him down and they had to cut down the cross.

Or Barański’s daughter. She hadn’t even turned three, but Barański had a tomb built for her that made it look as if the Barańskis had been burying their people there since time immemorial. On that tomb, as well as the Lord Jesus being gigantic, the stone was kind of gray, or covered in something, so he looked a hundred years old. And how old was he actually? Thirty-three. And he could have walked into any cottage without having to bow his head at the lintel. I’m not exactly on the short side myself – as a young man I was the tallest in the village. When there was a dance at one of the villages farther away there’d sometimes be somebody taller. In the resistance, in our whole
unit there were only two or three men taller than me, though every one of us was straight as an oak. If we’d been lined up in double rank, Lord Jesus would have been somewhere in the middle. I even said to Barański, for a little child like that an angel would be better. But he wouldn’t listen. Angels can intercede but they can’t save you.

He’s standing as if he was on a hilltop, his hands folded on his chest, his head lowered, thinking. There’s a lot for him to be thinking about. God or man, it comes to everyone. Even a three-year-old child. You could think and think what might have become of her. Barański used to brag that she would’ve been a doctor. But can you boast about the dead? Better just say a prayer for them. Barański always was a blowhard. One time he bought a horse and he claimed it was only four years old. You could tell from looking at its teeth it was at least twice that. She might have become a seamstress. Or like the other women, she would have gotten married, and she and her man would have worked the land till they died.

Or take Partyka. On his tomb he put up a Jesus carrying his cross to Golgotha. His shoulders are as wide as three Partykas, and each foot is the size of three human feet. On top of that the end of the cross reaches over above the Ciepielas’ tomb next door, and Partyka and Ciepiela always get into a fight on All Souls’. When Lord Jesus is so big, you don’t get the feeling that he’s suffering even when he’s carrying his cross to Golgotha. Even if you wanted to help him, what can you do with your little strength next to his. God ought to be like a person, so you can see that whatever’s painful for people is painful for him as well. So you can be troubled when he’s troubled. And feel sorry for him the way you’d feel sorry for yourself. And understand when there’s nothing he can do, just like a person. And even switch jobs with him awhile. Give me your cross, I’ll carry it for you, and you do some of my thinking for me.

Pity I wasn’t an airman, or I’d have put up a propeller like the Króls’ lad Jasiu has on his tomb. I really like that propeller. But a person’s neither fish
nor fowl. As for Jasiu, the last time he visited he’d made captain. His jet crashed when they were practicing for a flyby. They brought him back in a metal casket in a separate van. His pals were in another van. There were twenty of them, every one an officer. Each of them had silver cord on his shoulder, there were medals on their chests, bayonets at their sides. They carried him six at a time all the way from the house to the cemetery. They wouldn’t let anyone else do it even for one shift, though Jasiu had friends here in the village too. They’d minded the cows together and been at school with him.

The whole village came to the funeral. The fire brigade turned out. Schoolchildren. Two older gray-haired colonels walked behind the casket and gave their arms to Jasiu’s folks, Król and Mrs. Król, one on each side. Old Król wasn’t that tall to begin with, and he seemed to have shrunk, either from being on the colonel’s arm or from his son dying, though he didn’t cry at all. Afterward people said no one would have cried at the compensation the Króls got from the government. But it could have been that when he walked next to the colonel old Król felt like a soldier too.

Mrs. Król didn’t look like she’d been crying either. But at the cemetery, when everyone was standing at the graveside and one of the colonels said he’d died like a hero, she collapsed into the arms of the other one and they had to bring her round. She only started crying the day after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. Since then it’s been all these years and she’s still crying away.

Then some guys came and brought sheet metal. They cut it and bent it and welded it, and it turned into a propeller. Some people didn’t think a whole lot of that propeller, they said that the parents were Christians and Jasiu himself was christened, and here there’s a propeller instead of a Lord Jesus on the tomb. If you ask me though, that propeller is sadder than a good many Lord Jesuses. Aside from anything else, it’s designed so that when the wind blows you can hear something in it, as if a plane was flying across the
sky. Maybe it’s the one Jasiu crashed in? And when you stare at it for long enough, you even think the propeller’s spinning. Except it’s going so fast you can’t see it. You can just see a blur of light over the tomb. If someone wanted, that propeller could stand for a crucifixion.

I wonder what a propeller like that might cost? Even the labor alone. An ordinary tinsmith couldn’t make one. Covering a roof is one thing, making a propeller is a whole other business. The men that put it up on Jasiu’s tomb kept checking some papers they had and measuring lengthways and width-ways and from a distance, like the guys that merged land together for the big farms. Except that at government prices it probably wasn’t that expensive. But then you have to die for the government first.

When I worked in the district administration, whenever one of the office workers died the administration would at least send a wreath for free, with fir and spruce branches and a few flowers woven into it, and on the ribbon it would say, from your friends at the district administration. And at the graveside someone would always say a few words about how he was liked, how he was good with people, farewell, may the earth weigh lightly on you. But when a person’s on their own they have to pay for the whole thing on their own, with their own money. Even if you borrow from someone, they’ll suck the blood out of you afterwards, anything to make sure you don’t accidentally die before you’ve paid them back.

Actually, the tomb alone might not have cost me all that much. But I’d a yen to have a vestibule as well. And a vestibule is almost a third the size of the tomb, and of course that means the cost is one third more. On the other hand, with a vestibule you can go in and turn around properly. The casket can be put in like it should be, not just shoved in there like a barrel of cabbage. The deceased isn’t being tugged about and twisted and shaken. That way people aren’t distracted from their mourning. And you can tell just from their behavior that this is for all eternity.

Also, I had partitions built to make separate compartments, broad ones
because I can’t stand being cramped for space, even in a tomb. Not like other people’s, where they’re all on top of each other like beetroots in a beet pit, on rails. Then they rot and collapse onto each other. In my tomb the deceased is slipped in like bread into an oven, and walled in, and at least in the next world no one’s going to come poking their nose in there. Because let me tell you, there’s no lack of people who’d be snooping around in there if they only could. There are eight compartments, four on top, four below. That’s how many I counted there ought to be in our closest family. Mother, father, Antek, Stasiek, their wives, Michał, and of course me.

I didn’t include our grandparents either on mother’s side or father’s. They say grandparents are close family too, but it’s been so many years since they died. And they were buried just normally, in the earth, so the earth will have worked them over long ago. On top of that, the war mixed all the graves up in our cemetery, so it’d be hard to even find where they are. Today there’s probably someone else in their place.