Stone Upon Stone (62 page)

“Mama, people are tickling each other over there,” I whispered in mother’s ear, not knowing she was barely awake.

“Don’t listen, son, go to sleep,” she sighed, and pulled me closer to her.

But how could I sleep when it sounded like at any moment one of them was about to jump up and run, probably the woman, run off over the hay and the other people, because it sounded as if they were short of breath. A short time later they started groaning and making a rustling sound. Mother was dog-tired and she fell asleep for good, the whole barn was asleep, and those people just kept groaning and groaning. Then every so often the woman said, oh Jasiu, oh Jasiu. And he’d say, shh.

The next day we were walking down a gravel road lined with acacias and suddenly someone said it was this road where bandits robbed farmers when they were on their way back from the market at Kawęczyn. At that, one woman burst out saying that it wasn’t bandits, they just drank all their money away and afterward they blamed it on bandits. The farmers from our village used to travel to the Kawęczyn market, even though it was a long ways from us. They’d leave by night so as to arrive in the morning, then they’d travel back the whole of the next night and again arrive in the morning. And it also happened that someone would come back without two cents to rub together because he’d been robbed by bandits. Franek Szczerba’s father came back one time on foot, without his horse and wagon, a week later, aching and hollow-cheeked. After he got back he didn’t have the will to do anything, all he wanted was to sit around all day at the pub and drink, supposedly out of bitterness at having been robbed like that, and it goes without saying, on credit. But Franek let on to us that it wasn’t bandits, his father had spent everything on an “auntie,” but she’d dumped him anyway. Because Szczerba had had a lady friend in town in Kawęczyn. Franek had been at the lady’s
once when his father took him to market, and the lady had stroked Franek’s hair and made him shiver. Then she gave him an orange and said:

“You have a nice son, Ignacy. All right, go play outside awhile, kid.”

So maybe she was right, the woman that said it wasn’t bandits, because what would bandits be doing on an ordinary road like this one. We took a break and sat on either side of the road in the shade of the acacias, and right away we felt sleepy. It hurt to think we’d have to be setting off again in just a moment. Plus, birds were chirping so nicely among the leaves. Not far away there was a manor house, you could see its roof peeping out from the grounds. Some people started talking about what life must be like in a manor like that, on its grounds. But the organist got up, and the priest, and we had to set off again.

I might not have remembered that road, it was just a road like any other, there are roads like that everywhere, if it hadn’t come back to me several years later. A couple of miles from Kawęczyn, in the Kawęczyn woods, it was September, my unit was stationed in the village of Maruszew. One day, out of the blue we were surrounded by Germans. Someone must have informed on us, otherwise how could they have known? The village was right in the middle of the woods, and the woods were huge. Beyond the village there was a river and more woods. There was one guy, maybe he’d been the one? But if it wasn’t him, may God strike me down. His code name was “Prosecutor.” Truth be told, I didn’t like those kind of names. I liked “Honeybee,” “Birchtree,” “Mint,” “Goldfinch.” But he picked Prosecutor, let it be Prosecutor. When I asked him why that name, he said he wanted to study law after the war.

“Putting all this on trial. Measuring out punishments. There’ll be more work than you can shake a stick at,” he said.

“Who’s going to believe in the law after the war, are you daft?” I tried to convince him. “And what kind of profession is the law. All they’ll do is curse you out. Even being a farmer’s better than that, though that’s no profession
either. But at least you don’t get in anyone’s way. You’d be better off being a dentist. People’s teeth are going to be all messed up from the war, then you’d really have all the work you could handle. And Dentist sounds better than Prosecutor.”

Before the war he’d worked for the town hall. He’d graduated high school, he was a smooth talker and he had nice writing. So I thought to myself, he could write the death sentences, if he’s so keen on being Prosecutor. Because no one was willing to write them. And there were orders from above, you weren’t allowed to kill even the biggest bastard without a sentence. No one knew why, because why did a son of a bitch like that need a written judgment, but that’s how it was. His eyes sparkled and he got to work right away. We were supposed to rub out this restaurant owner in Tylice, because he’d turned out to be a snitch. So write it down, Prosecutor. He brings it to me, I read it and I can’t tell if it’s a sentence or a sermon.

“Make it shorter,” I tell him. “Write it again.”

He brings it again and it’s the same thing. I start explaining to him, but I’m already getting annoyed.

“When you’re killing someone, there’s no time to be reading stuff. Why would you even want to? He’s not gonna remember it. Write it again.”

He brings it once again, and this time I’m really pissed off.

“Are you nuts? We’re just going there to kill him, what the heck have you written here? Who’s even going to listen to any of this? God? Not the guy, for sure! Even a son of a bitch like him, when he’s about to die death’ll stop up his ears and his eyes. What the hell are you talking to him about Satan for?! Have you ever seen Satan? No! Then don’t talk bullshit! When someone doesn’t see the person inside them, they’re not going to see Satan. They’ll either go to hell or they won’t. You don’t know, and neither do I, even though I’m your commanding officer. No one knows. There are times you could be sent there for less, then for worse things you repent and you’re not sent. Piece of work like him, he could have all kinds of ways to get out
of being sent. If he wants he’ll pull the wool over God’s eyes, and Satan’s as well, and he’ll do a bunk while you lot are still reading to him. Plus, how do you know a guy like that isn’t going to be better off in hell than in heaven. I mean look, we’ve got hell on earth down here but him, the scumbag, he’s opened a restaurant and on top of that he’s selling people out. Besides, what’s it to you whether he goes to hell or not? Hell or heaven, he just needs to be gone from here. Got it? Hell doesn’t have to be what you think. You can spend your whole life working in the fields or going to your office with your briefcase, and that can be hell. Did you used to have a briefcase? There you go then. Write it again.”

But nothing came of it even though he kept trying and trying, and in the end we had to kill the restaurant owner without a sentence. Afterwards Prosecutor moped around all dejected, and in the end I felt sorry for him and I called him in again.

“Try writing a couple more,” I told him. “Make up some bad guys. You’ll get the hang of it, you will.”

Maybe I’d been wrong to throw him in at the deep end like that, I thought. Doing anything well takes hard work. Sometimes you need to go one small step at a time, for years sometimes. Take mowing, no one’s born knowing how to pick up a scythe and just start mowing. Their father has to teach them, they have to watch other people doing it, they have to make a mess of a good few swaths, even bang up their scythe. I think I gave him good advice when I said to make up bad guys as an exercise. What else was I supposed to tell him? He was an office worker that had graduated high school, I’d barely finished seventh grade. Also, in the spring of seventh grade father took me out of school for good because he’d started the plowing, he happened to be doing the hill up by the woods, and he didn’t have anyone else to lead the horse by the head to make sure the furrow was straight. Of course there was Michał. Except Michał was afraid of the horse’s head, and besides, he always got headaches from the sun. But it didn’t matter, no one ever went
anywhere after seventh grade, they just kept working the land, so leaving school a couple months early made no difference. So he says to me, I have a request. Go on? He says, if he had a typewriter he’d learn to write sentences in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. He just couldn’t get the hang of it when he wrote in longhand. Besides, what kind of sentence is it when it’s written by hand.

“A typewriter?” I was taken aback. But he used to work in an office, I guessed he must know what you could write on a typewriter and what you could write by hand. “Well, if we can get one somewhere it’ll be yours.”

A short time later we organized a raid on the Arbeitsamt in Kołomierz. We were after the lists of people being sent to do forced labor. He was supposed to just take a typewriter, but he also got writing paper, carbon paper, paper clips, pencils, erasers, other things as well, even a hole punch. He carted a whole sack full of stuff into the woods. He was as pleased as a little kid with a bag full of toys.

After that he’d take the typewriter off into the woods, hide himself away in the bushes, and write. He’d put it on a tree stump and kneel in front of it. Often you could hear him, it was like a woodpecker pecking away far off in the woods. The lads made fun of him, they said he must be writing love letters to his girlfriends or maybe poetry, and some of them wanted him to write a poem for them so they could send it to their own girlfriends. Because other than me, no one knew what he was actually writing.

In the end, curiosity got the better of one of the men, he took the sentences out of the other guy’s knapsack while he was asleep and he brought them straight to me to read. I started reading and my hair stood on end. Every one of them was for someone in the unit. Carp, Rowan, Honeybee, Pinecone, Birchtree, Stag, Cricket, Burdock, Knothole. There was one for me too. On every one there were crimes like the worst son of a bitch. And every one of them was sentenced to death. The higher ranking ones were sent to hell as well. Naturally that included me. I thought to myself, that
damn typewriter’s driven him insane. Maybe there’s something inside a machine like that, if it makes a man stop trusting his own hand.

“Get Prosecutor in here this second! What the hell have you written here, you bastard? Who told you to do this?”

“You did, sir.”

“Me?! I told you to make up some bad guys! Dear God, if I wasn’t your commanding officer I’d smack you in the face!” I ripped up all the sentences. “From now on, no more writing!” I changed his code name from “Prosecutor” to “Skylark,” and I ordered the typewriter to be smashed against a tree, who needed a typewriter in the woods.

After that he went around with a wild expression in his eyes, like he was looking but not seeing. He didn’t talk to anyone. They even said he wasn’t eating much, he’d just poke his spoon in his mess can a bit then throw the food out for the birds. A few days later he disappeared from the unit and we never heard from him again.

Dawn was just breaking when first from the river, then from the woods, we heard shots, and the dogs in the village started barking. To this day I can’t figure out how it could have happened. We had lookouts posted, and for several days before there hadn’t been any outsiders in the village, no one from the village had left. It was another thing that they took us from the woods, and from the south side at that, where no one would have expected them. There wasn’t even a cutting through the trees that way. And the Germans were scared to death of the woods. Especially woods like around Kawęczyn, where there was no telling where they began or where they ended. Maruszew was surrounded by woods on three sides, and half on the fourth. There was just the one road led there, and that was only a track. It was a good three and a half miles to the dirt road and twice as far to the highway, and you had to ride a whole day by wagon to get to the railroad stop. No German had ever appeared there, they might not even have known there was such a village. God himself seemed to have forgotten about Maruszew. As well as being far
away from the rest of the world, people had a poor life of it there. The earth was sandy, and what can you grow in sandy soil. Rye, oats, potatoes, and that was how they lived out their days. Though in front of every house there was a little garden, and in each garden there were sunflowers, so you could have thought people led happy lives there. Because the sunflowers shone like little suns, even when the big sun went behind the clouds.

Whenever we wanted to clean up and wash our clothes, lick our wounds and get our strength back, and live like humans at least for a bit, we’d go to Maruszew even just for a couple of days. They’d take us in and share whatever they had with us, and though they didn’t have much, when you were there you felt the war wasn’t happening. You ate potato pancakes, drank homebrew vodka, and slept in beds. I even had a girl there. Tereska was her name. She was pretty as a picture and the kindest soul you could hope to meet. Her parents never said anything, even though when I was there we’d live like husband and wife. I never said anything about marrying her. Sometimes I’d promise to visit after the war if I lived, but maybe they didn’t believe I’d survive, and they preferred me to leave their daughter sinful and single than a widow. I still have the little religious medal she gave me one time so I’d always come back safe and sound. I’d often not see her for half a year or more, but every time she’d greet me like the dry earth greets the rain. Right away she’d bring the bathtub, set the water to heat in the kettles, and make the bed. Her parents would go off without a word and busy themselves with something, or go in the other room, and she’d tell me to take my clothes off and get in the tub. She’d soap up my back, pour water over me out of a mug, then help me dry myself. Who knows, maybe I might have married her after the war, but they burned her along with the whole village. She had broad hips, breasts like cabbage heads, she would have made children, two, maybe three.

I pulled on my pants and boots in a flash, grabbed my Sten from the chair, and put my jacket on as I ran. As I was crossing the hallway, behind
me I heard her sob, Szymek! But there wasn’t even time to turn around and say, Tereska. I rushed outside. A few of the lads were crouching and moving along outside the house, firing straight ahead. But there were furious bursts of machine-gun fire coming at the village from every direction, from the fields, the woods, the river. I tried to give orders, but there was no one to carry them out and no one to pass them on. The village wasn’t at all big, but in the confusion everyone was trying to escape however they could. They fired every which way, without rhyme or reason, from attics, round the corners of houses, the men were pressed against the ground, against walls, a tree, a fence. Some of them I had to shake, I gave an order, didn’t you hear? No firing at random! Retreat to the end of the village! We’ll take up positions there! On top of it all, the villagers starting running out of their homes. What’s happening?! It’s the end of the world! Jesus and Mary! There was shouting, wailing. Women, men, mothers with babies, children woken from their sleep.