Stone Upon Stone (20 page)

“All right,” I whispered gently to him, and I gave him a soft nudge with the spurs. The horse suddenly kicked up his hindquarters so high that I was thrown forward from his back onto his neck. The moment his back legs dropped, he flung his front hooves high in the air and jerked his head. I grabbed on to his mane with both hands. My lance fell to the ground, and there was a burst of laughter from the road. The horse threw up its hindquarters again, higher even than the first time. I almost came tumbling down like I was falling out of a willow tree into the river. Luckily I managed to hold on to his neck. He lifted his front legs way off the ground again – he was nearly vertical this time. He opened his mouth, bared his teeth, and neighed like he was full of bottled-up rage that had been gathering for centuries, for all the peasants’ horses that had been as meek as him. The saddle slipped from under my backside, my feet with their spurs flew out to the sides, and for a second I hung there in the air, clinging to his neck alone. He dropped back down, but not for long. He turned around, dropped his rear almost to the ground, then jerked it upward again, higher still. And he neighed, even louder than before. I could feel his guts churning inside him. Blood and rage and pain – it was like a dam had broken. The people on the road were shouting. The horse was leaping upward yet again, his front legs were clawing at the air as if he was trying to climb even higher, it was like he was trying to tear
off a piece of the sky with his teeth. He was running amok, tossing his rear and his head in turn, he hardly seemed to come down to earth at all.

Suddenly, with a sort of furious tug he freed his neck from my grip and I fell to the ground like an apple falling from a tree. He kicked again to check I wasn’t still stuck to him like a burr. Then once and twice he spun in a wide circle, scaring all the people. He gave a great whinny of relief. And off he ran like a storm, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust.

People ran up to me and started to help me up. I didn’t want their help. But I couldn’t straighten my back or turn my head to the side, and I could hardly see out of one eye. Plus, the spurs were covered in my blood and the horse’s. On top of that, Michał had somehow shown up, even though he’d not been there when I led the horse out of the stable because he and mother had gone to the fields to do some weeding. He stood over me and burst into tears, as if I wasn’t embarrassed enough as it was.

“Szymuś, are you all right? Szymuś, are you all right?” he sniveled. He even kneeled by my feet and tried to untie the bloody spurs. I was so angry I almost kicked him.

“Leave me alone. I’m fine. Stop blubbering.”

Father came back from market and gave me a hiding and a good talking to, and it was only then we went off to the fields to look for the bay. He was feeding on someone’s clover near Boleszyce. When he saw us he neighed and ran a couple of fields farther off. Father told me to stay back and hide behind a field boundary, and he went to try and get close on his own. But whenever he came near, the horse rose up on his hind legs and kicked at father with his hooves. In the end we brought the wagon. We took the horse-collar and a full feed bag. It was only then he let himself be harnessed to the wagon.

And so father probably imagined my chestnut mare would have been like the bay. I didn’t ride her for long. We got ambushed and she was hit by machine-gun fire in the legs. I had to finish her off with a shot to the head.
We took the saddle off her. It was all decorated with brass studs. The stirrups looked like they were made of gold. And there was so much leather in it you could have resoled who knows how many pairs of shoes. It would have been a shame to leave it. I even thought about finding another chestnut mare for the saddle. We searched around in the villages. But all the horses there were in terrible shape, overworked and worn out. We might have found one at a manor house somewhere. But there didn’t happen to be any manor houses on our way.

That saddle traveled with us almost the whole summer. Through the villages and woods and fields. No one knew what for. Everyone got sick of lugging it around. They had to be ordered. You carry it a bit. Now you. Now you. Now you take it off him. They cursed and complained. The hell do we need this for, sir? I wish I knew. We should have just dumped the damn thing somewhere so someone would find it. But what if the wrong person found it? And so on. Sometimes I’d rest my head on it. Sometimes I’d sit on it and think for a bit. Because thinking’s different in a saddle like that than on a tree stump or on the grass. In the end a farmer came along the road and we threw the saddle in his wagon. Maybe you’ll find a use for it, if not now then after the war. In return, if we find ourselves in these parts again we’ll come by for some sour milk.

Likewise, I never did much fighting with the sword. I mean, what can you do with a sword in the woods – cut branches? The squire had said his great-grandfather had thrashed the Turks with it. That may have been the truth, because whenever you wanted to take it out of its scabbard, one man would have to hold it between his knees while the other one pulled with all his strength to get it out, it was so rusty. Out of respect for the squire I wanted to at least cut one of the bastards’ heads off or chop off an arm, so the squire would have something to be pleased about, so he could say the sword had fought for its country during his lifetime as well. But they were always too far off and you could only reach them with bullets. I just took
it out a couple of times so it could tell me about the Turks. But it was iron after all, and when you ask iron a question it doesn’t answer. Then once in a while I’d do the present arms with it when we were burying one of our own. But when the chestnut mare fell I wasn’t really able to keep walking with the sword, it kept rubbing against my boot. I thought to myself, maybe you were good against the Turks, but in this war you won’t be doing any cutting or slicing. If all I ever do is present arms when someone’s being buried, I’ll end up burying the lot of them. So I hung it on a tree in the woods. It could be dangling there to this day for all I know.

But father didn’t hold the sword against me, because what use is a sword on a farm.

“They fought the Turks, you say? That would have been for our faith. You should have taken it to a church, it could have hung there instead of on a tree.”

But the chestnut mare and the saddle, he couldn’t stop thinking about them. With the mare at least I had the excuse that they’d killed her. But the saddle hadn’t been killed.

“Do you know how much a saddle like that is worth? All that leather and studs, and you said the stirrups were gold. You could have bought any amount of land. To have a saddle like that. But you’re not interested in land – all you care about is girls and dancing and fighting. You can’t spend your whole life gallivanting around the countryside playing your harmonica. You sure lucked out with that war – anything to get out of working.”

“I wouldn’t exactly say I lucked out, father. We worked ourselves into the ground, we gave our blood as well.”

“Fine, but what am I supposed to do when it comes time to divide up the farm among you all?”

“You don’t need to give me any share. I’m going away,” I’d snap back at him when he really got on my nerves.

The truth was, I’d thought about doing that right after I came back from
the resistance. I wasn’t drawn to the land, and after those couple years of freedom I really couldn’t see myself plowing or mowing. I even regretted coming back. I should have done what quite a few of the guys did and gone straight into the army or to the city, anywhere so long as it was far away. But not going back home after the whole thing to see father, mother, my brothers, the village, it would have been like the war hadn’t finished at all, with its filth and lice and sleepless nights and killing. Besides, I was thinking I’d stay a month or two, catch up on my sleep, forget what needs to be forgotten, rest up, and then head out, instead of leaving right off the bat.

But I’d barely crossed the threshold and kissed everyone hello and sat down, when right away father starts in with his, we’ve been watching and watching for you, we didn’t think you’d come back, and here spring’s right around the corner and there’ll be plowing and sowing to get done. I didn’t say a word, I pulled off my tall boots, mother poured water into a basin and she didn’t say anything either, she didn’t even ask, how was it there? She just stood next to me, letting the tears roll down her cheeks. Then she kneeled down by the water, stirred it and started washing my feet.

And father went on and on. The plow would need to be hammered out because the share had gotten damaged on a rock. You’ll need to find another blacksmith to take the horse to, because the Siudaks’ smithy was blown up by a shell and now there’s no one in the village that can shoe horses, but maybe there’ll be someone in another village. One shoe’s completely fallen off and the other ones are worn down to the hoof. When he walks he slips around like he was on a sledge. There was so much fighting around here we didn’t even have time to muck out the pig sheds. But we should at least take some manure out to put down on the potatoes, and it needs to be done while the frosts last, because once the earth gets wet you won’t be able to drive the wagon onto the field. It doesn’t matter if the manure gets frozen, it can just lie there. There’s no need to plow the fields right after you’ve mucked them. And look up there – the ceiling’s leaking. It can’t just be whitewashed, the
plaster’ll need to be scraped off. There’s a hole in the thatch from a piece of shrapnel. Whenever it rains your mother has to put a bucket under it. If we can rustle up a ladder from somewhere you could shin up and fix it. And we lost our table. We’d stay down in the cellar, so anyone could do whatever they wanted up here. They took stuff for firewood, not just tables but doors, wagons, barns. They cut down all the orchards. They needed the wood to build potato clamps. Now people are going around looking for what’s theirs. Maybe you could go look as well. You’ve got a decent pair of boots. Course, we can eat in our laps just as well, but not having a table in the house, it’s kind of like the middle is missing. Or maybe you’ll find something else. These days anything’ll come in handy. That was quite a war. And it hung around in these parts for the longest time. It owes us something back, instead of just bringing us bad luck. Our pig sheds burned down. Did you see? A shell hit them, they caught fire and that was the end of them. At least we got the animals out in time. Stasiek and Antek took turns minding them. The wind was blowing in the other direction, thank God, otherwise the barn and the house would have gone up and we’d be sleeping under the stars. The damn dog got loose from his chain and ran off. On a farm not having a dog is like not having an arm. You have to keep your ears pricked the whole time so thieves won’t sneak up on you. When he was still here he’d bark and run them off. Or at least wake you up if he couldn’t see to them himself. You could ask around if someone’s bitch has had puppies. Dogs, they don’t care if it’s wartime or no, the damn things still go around mating. The Lord alone knows what we’ve been through here. We stuck windows together from little pieces, then we had to board them up. What are you sitting there thinking for? You’re only just back and already you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know, maybe I’ll go away?”

“Where to?” Father was stopped in his tracks.

“To the army maybe?”

“Have you not had enough of soldiering?”

“The war’s not over yet, father. And I was made lieutenant.”

“By who?”

“It was in the woods.”

“That doesn’t count, being made an officer in the woods. That’s not a proper promotion. I mean, making a farmer an officer. Farmers are made to work the land and nothing else. This is your place.”

“What am I supposed to do here?” I said, losing my temper, because it all seemed somehow foreign to me. The house. Father. And what he was saying.

“What do you mean?!” Father’s voice trembled like he was about to get mad, or burst out crying. “Are we short of work here? We barely know which way to turn first. We need to start from the beginning. But go! Go! All of you, go! Let the land die!”

And father wouldn’t have kept me back no matter what. Except they’d just opened the school, and Stasiek’s shoes had fallen apart and he didn’t have anything to wear on his feet. Outside, the boys would whistle and call, are you coming, Stasiek? It’s late! And Stasiek would be sitting there in straw slippers, crying. And it was seventh grade, it would have been a pity if he hadn’t gone back and finished. True, he was kind of in seventh grade during the war. But what could he learn at a school in an occupied country? He’d forgotten everything. I asked him who the first king of Poland was, and he didn’t know. He didn’t know who the king of the peasants was, and he thought Kościuszko was a king.

So I headed for the fields one day thinking I might find him some boots. People said there were bodies everywhere. So there had to be boots also. There was no point being squeamish. Is a dead person any worse than a living one? At one time he was alive as well, and now he’s dead, just like the people that are alive now are also going to be dead in their turn. Though it’s a bit rude taking things off a dead body, you can’t ask them is it all right if I take
your boots, since you don’t need them yourself. But if they were only going to rot away, it’d be better if Stasiek wore them to school, and if the dead guy knew he might even be glad someone else was still using his boots.

There was a good number of them, Russkies as well as Germans. But none of them had boots on. I plodded around the entire day, and I only found one with his boots still on. I was all set to congratulate myself, I even said “
zdravstvuytye
” to him, because he was Russian. But when I got closer I saw there were holes in the soles and the heel on the left boot was completely missing. On top of that, he was barely older than our Stasiek. He lay face upward, his mouth open, as if some word had frozen in it, maybe “mama.” I pulled his blanket out from behind his back and covered him up so at least the wind wouldn’t blow in his face.