Nobody Leaves Read online

  The Dune was held liable. The horse needed replacing, but they couldn’t afford it. This happened at harvest time, and the farm was facing a loss. Edek came up with the idea of borrowing from Sienkiewicz. They pressured the old codger, but the old codger replied: No.

  So they convened a court.

  They put Sienkiewicz on trial that night.

  He lay on his bed with his face to the wall, with his sheepskin coat covering his head. At the table sat the pale Trofim, Lipko the Droshky Driver, Edek the Party Man and Rysiek the Bifurcated, who was working on a watch.

  ‘You won’t get out of here alive,’ said Lipko.

  Trofim tried to smooth things over.

  ‘Man’s name is weakness,’ he said, ‘as shown taking Judas for an example.’

  ‘He’s not weak,’ Edek objected. ‘He’s a hardened kulak.’

  Rysiek didn’t say anything. He leaned over listening to the watch. The watch had fallen silent and time had stopped in its movement.

  ‘Comrade, is this a man?’ Edek asked me. I made a face that was neither here nor there, because I never know how to respond to questions like that.

  ‘Sienkiewicz,’ I asked, ‘did your mother breastfeed you?’

  ‘They say it was by breast,’ he answered.

  ‘And what did she feed you after that?’ I asked.

  ‘After that, potato peels.’

  ‘Of what your mother said to you, do you remember anything?’

  He stirred, and the sheepskin smell carried around the room.

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘I said, “Why are you giving me potato peels? I’m not a piglet. I’m a human being.” And my mother said, “When you’re as rich as Pan Kozanecki, then you’ll be a human being.” ’

  The lamp trembled with a yellow flame and the shadows moved over the walls. In Rysiek’s watch, the stream of time began to burble.

  I thought that the dirty brat in pants held up by a string took a lot on board back then.

  He took on board at least two things: first, there’s a difference between a human being and an animal.

  Second, wealth is what makes the difference.

  You might ask: What kind of wealth? You can give the example of the impoverished Cézanne, who was a great man. You can give the example of Balzac drowning in debt. You can point to Marx. But Sienkiewicz never got as far as those distinctions, and he may have been incapable of getting there. The peasant hut might not have allowed it, and later the years of servitude, and later still the vagabond panhandling. After the war, they took him into care. They washed him and gave him something to eat. They gave him a bed and a roof. He might have thought: They’ve arranged for my elementary affairs. Maybe now I can give it a try.

  A person wants to be a human being once in his life. And he waits seventy years for it. After that, he reckons it up: I have 9,365 zloty and 15 grosz. Am I a human being now? He asks people that question. And he counts on somebody giving him an answer.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ I said. ‘I’ll finagle the money out of the county administration for you.’

  A week later, Lipko brought the new horse home. Lipko said it wasn’t the same, but he buffed up the stallion and the horse’s short coat glistened. It would also be called Mongol.

  Mongol II was harnessed to the mower. Lipko shouted ‘Odsie!’ and ‘Ksobie!’ like a carter at a coalyard. The field of rye stretched to the Dune.

  On the Dune sat Trofim.

  The wind struck the sand, the sand trembled and sang.

  But now the grain sang, and the mower sang too. The world brightened like on the first day of creation. They had a late harvest; it was August. The summer of ’61. As if nothing was going on. Poland was at peace. Europe was at peace. Five people had saved a scrap of land. I have seen how the farmers in Japan defended their fields against the sea. How in Africa they rescued a plantation from the jungle. The earth is vast and no one has yet walked from the Sahara to Trofim’s Dune. Everybody knows what the world is like: anything can happen. And here is what happened on the Dune: five people, saving the land, saved themselves. What could they have wanted before that? To try one more time. To have a chance. And they were given that chance. ‘It’s good,’ says Rysiek, ‘that they gave it to us. And that it worked out.’

  Far Away

  The old man was like a fir tree. City guys would arrive from the city. ‘He-he,’ the one city guy would call to the other city guy. ‘His hair looks like kindling. He walks and glows.’ But in this place, nobody used to laugh at grey hair. This was a land of old people. A pack of children would run through the village. Somebody would grab one of the children and look him over: crumbling teeth, dull eyes, a wrinkled neck. Old. The child would dash off and trip over something, tumbling into the dust. Rickets. There were no young people here. Many of them were eighteen years old, or a little younger or older, but that’s by no means to say that, when they were eighteen, they were young. By no means to say that at all.

  They were all old. From old age, there was no escape. And there was no escape from this land for anyone. Encircled by the border. Fields, meadows, the swamp, the forest: the border. On the other side of the border, life must have been better. That’s what people would always think. Then they’d go there and come back. They’d ask the one who came back: So, what’s it like? That person would say nothing, waving the question aside. The next day, he’d go out into the fields. He’d take up a handful of soil and sniff it. City people don’t know that you can sniff the soil. And it had a smell. ‘Soir de Paris’. The soil here had two smells: sandy and swampy. Wretched fields, scraggly furrows. If you changed the land, you could change your life. But how? No one knew. A person who doesn’t know how to change the land is a poor person. There are perhaps a billion people living in the world today who don’t know how. And no one is able to tell them.

  Beyond the village stood a marshy little pond. When it started getting cold, that old man would walk to the pond. That old man who was like a fir tree. They wore linen shirts down to the knees there, and linen pants down to their ankles. Buttons were unknown, and therefore the shirt had to be long because otherwise you’d see too much of a person at a time. The old man pulled off the shirt and pants. Now he could do it: he washed himself. Maybe he didn’t have a big bath, just a splash. I remember well how that kind of splashing was done. It was an interesting sight, and children like sights to be interesting. Next he’d take some pine tar and rub his skin with that tar. A double dose would go into each fold of his skin. Fleas don’t like pine tar, and lice get stuck in it. That’s the way it was done. He’d pull his shirt back on, and over the shirt a sheepskin coat. The coat needed to be belted somehow, and so he’d stretch wire around it. Wired up like that, he’d return to the village and climb up on the stove. Autumn and winter he’d drowse atop that stove. In the spring, he’d go to the marsh. He’d untwist the wire and splash himself again.

  Here’s that pond. But the old man’s not there. Three kids are paddling around in the murky water, snorting and frolicking. I notice that there’s a fourth one, too. That fourth one is not swimming. He can’t go in the water – he’s got a watch on his wrist. He can’t take it off, because that would be a loss of face. Everyone has the right to look at that pond and that kid on the shore. Everyone should think at this point: Look, a boy from Cisówka with a gleaming watch!

  The village is over there to the right, through that thicket. My mother used to hurry to the thicket to get brushwood. The brushwood went into the stove. The sheet-metal plate heated up until it was just right for stovetop cakes. We didn’t know bread. Mother would mix flour with water, and onto the stovetop. This is called flatbread. Sometimes there was butter, but I don’t recall knives. They had sickles in the village, they even had scythes, but I know that when it came to spreading butter on flatbread, you took a fingerful and smeared it on. I also remember how the butter melted on the hot flatbread. It gave off such an aroma that our bellies howl
ed like a hundred dogs. Father once bought half a loaf of bread. From far off we could see father, and how he was carrying that bread. My sister and I stood in the window and when I saw the bread, I started crying. Back then, that was the one time in my life when I knew what happiness was.

  Now, I ask a girl: ‘What do you dream about?’

  ‘Dream about? About buying myself Italian high heels for 1,400 zloty, and having a big room in which there would be an enormous plush carpet.’

  ‘But don’t you want to eat?’

  ‘Eat? Why do you ask stupid questions?’

  But it’s not a stupid question. A question like that can blow up the world. If many people ask it at the same moment, then there’s a revolution. But how can I explain that to this girl? In general, you shouldn’t explain anything to girls, because their heads ache afterwards.

  The village is over that way, where the wires run. Electrical sparks sing in the wires. A bird alights on the wire and it doesn’t kill the bird. A person touches it – he falls dead. There’s something to this. Each has current according to his needs. To one for the chaff-cutter, to another for light, to still another to get the sewing machine going. It might even be that all of them are running in a single home. A kind of Canada. They turned on the current three years ago. Electrical communism began in the year ’58. Everybody worked the light switches to excess. The ones from the city laugh at this. But a peasant doesn’t laugh. A peasant takes flipping the switch seriously. Light – darkness, light – darkness. Now he’s got what he wants – heaven and hell in a single switch.

  Soot marks remained on the walls in the old rooms. The stains have to be painted over. I walk into a room and cross myself – abstract art gone mad. One wall in pastel cream, another in orange, another in blue, and the ceiling in blue. A radio on the shelf, a lampshade hanging from the ceiling, and pride of place for the sewing machine. The children in their beds on white pillows. They all go to school. The oldest of them will graduate this year and then continue his education, because he’s clever. He writes clever things in his notebooks. Like what? His mother doesn’t know. His mother does not know how to write or how to read. Who could teach her? Educated people hardly ever used to come here. When someone’s educated, they wear glasses. Such individuals would occasionally be seen in the vicinity. They’d come along taking notes on observances, customs, and the ditties at weddings. This was a paradise for them. This benighted region was a paradise for ethnographers. This mildewed Białystok swampland, hidden in the shadow of the Białowieża Wilderness. Lost somewhere in the fork of the Narwa and the Świsłocz, Cisówka could have been one such paradise. In his lectures at the university, our professor used to say: ‘If before the war you wanted to find an authentic Slavic rural collective, characteristic of the period of primordial communities in our part of Europe, you had to go – oh – here!’ On the map, he drew a circle with his finger in the region of Wołkowysk, Zabłudów, Siemiatycz – and Cisówka, too.

  ‘The populace here does not know the automobile. Arranged for the purpose of observing the reaction of the populace, the passage of an automobile, the roar of the engine and the blowing of the horn evoked panic among the people. The village emptied out as the car passed through.’ The ethnographer stood off to the side, the car emerged from the woods stirring up great clouds of dust, and people hid in their attics. The ethnographer wrote it all down. Where did I read that? I sit down on a bench. Perhaps I can remember. Then I hear that roar and the horn blowing. A farmer is riding a WFM in the field. A rake and a pitchfork are strapped to the motorcycle. A motor drones somewhere on the horizon, at the edge of the woods. Sunshine falls on the forest. People are riding back from the fields. Milk-white horses, wagons on balloon tyres.

  Will they have anything to carry this year? For sure, there are prospects for a crop like nothing anyone in the village remembers. Neither Wąsaty nor Szczerbaty. Even Łuksza Mikołaj says he can’t remember the like. Nine sons Łuksza has, and a daughter too. He’s a real peasant, a peasant by anatomy and by social class. Łuksza walks around with his eyes open and he sees what’s happening in the village. ‘Before, when the shopkeeper brought in a sack of sugar in the spring, he still hadn’t sold it by winter. Fifty or a hundred grams at a time. Now they bring the sugar by the sack and still run short. Before the war they gave me a radio to sell. But a radio before the war cost seven cows. Nobody bought it. Today for one cow I have a beautiful radio, the model called Capital City. There’s a radio in every cottage.’

  Łuksza has a calling as a philosopher and disputant. I listen to him arguing with the village headman. The land is bad here, he says, and socialism won’t take root in a hurry. You can’t drive a tractor here. You can, the headman says, what do you mean you can’t? You can. But Łuksza’s really concerned about DDT, not about that tractor. There are potato beetles. The potato beetle is a political bug. When you give it DDT, it shrivels up and doesn’t move. There isn’t enough DDT and the peasants are fighting over it. There’s a new dispute. Not all DDT is equal. Some has more methoxychlor, some has more lindane, and some has more HCN. These names mean nothing to me. I simply listen to them being enumerated.

  In the midst of all this philosophy, night fell. Janiel returned from work at night. Michał Janiel, railway worker and farmer. Two acres of sour land. Four little kids. Janiel works along the tracks. With a pickaxe, he crushes down the rocks so that the ties are tightly seated, because the railway must run on even rails. With this specialization, Janiel is sent to work in Warsaw. Here’s why: because labourers in Warsaw don’t want to work for that money. So the directorate transports Janiel and his ilk 200 kilometres or more. Janiel doesn’t resist. How much does he earn? Eight hundred and sixty-seven zloty, he replies. He says it distinctly, so that it’s clear that there’s eight hundred, and then on top of that sixty, and then seven to top it off. Even if he broke it down to every grosz to make his pay look better, those are still meagre wages. So Janiel calculates and calculates. When there’s not much money, there’s always a lot of calculating. Thoughts of zloty fill Janiel’s head. Money for this, money for that. There’s no talking to Janiel about any bigger matters. Janiel doesn’t know that the world’s absurd. Hegel would have referred to him as detritus. Hegel himself was a thinking idealist. His philosophy stood on its head. But Marx would understand Janiel. Marx calculated a lot and he commanded workers to learn mathematics. Janiel, Łuksza, village headman Lasota, Wąsaty, and Szczerbaty all calculate. There’s a lot of calculating, figuring and planning going on in the village. We have this grassland here, and if we could release this water to the Narva, there would be pasture for a thousand cows. We could feed the whole country.

  The peasant says: the village. But he also says: the country. Cisówka dug itself out of a swamp, out of a feral sinkhole. To a paved road, it was twenty-five kilometres. To the railway, twenty kilometres. It was, but not now. There was an old track here, with a dead end in one direction but connecting with Hajnówka in the other. That track was never in use. Peasants walked along the track – and the police fined them. That was a stab in the back for the peasants. On foot, and they still had to pay. They started complaining to the authorities and a delegation went to the Ministry of Transport. This is what the ministry ruled: We’ll give you the railway if you build the station. The peasants harnessed their horses, delivered the earth, and there was the platform. It opened in December 1959. There are few train stops like this. Lovely, thick woods begin right next to the track. At the top of the embankment, in the middle of the platform, a hole was dug for a pole and an oil lamp mounted on the pole.

  People come along, sit down in the woods, and wait for the train. The women converse and the men light up cigarettes. Someone looks around and the silver arrow is approaching. People leaving Cisówka ride the best of trains, an up-to-date diesel Lux-Torpedo. The Torpedo stops, the people gather in the woods and get on. The train moves away. I also rode the Torpedo. Spacious. Comfortable. Two women sit opposite me, chattering a
way. One of them is carrying eight empty baskets. She had brought fruit in those baskets, to sell. ‘You’re wearing yourself out. Isn’t it ruining your health?’ says the other one.

  ‘You do what you have to do. My husband earns twelve hundred and I have three sons studying in Warsaw. One at the Polytechnic, one in law school, and one in economics. You know how it is. As long as my health holds out I’ll do anything for those children. Yes, yes, of course. Oh, look.’

  I look, too. The Torpedo flies along, the women talk, a hen pokes its head out of a basket and looks flirtatiously around. What a forest, splendid! A green shadow, a damp aroma. Where is he, the tall, proud tree? He has branched out. The train rolls thump-thump, the train is going a long way, the sun is shining in a cha-cha rhythm.

  It’s beautiful.

  A Survivor on a Raft

  ‘What a getaway!’ the lecturer cries. ‘A fairy tale, not a getaway.’

  ‘And you’ll see Zeus, that strange deity,’ adds the second lecturer.

  A reportage about a deity! That’s what got me.

  When they have a grosz, they rush off to that getaway every Saturday. They started their pilgrimages as early as May. A little too chilly, but so what? Chilly and therefore empty! They finish their classes at the university at noon, grab their briefcases, onto the tram, to the station, and they’re on the train. The main line to Działdowo and change at Brodnica. In places, the road runs alongside the train tracks. Cars, motorcycles and scooters race along the road. The two of them look on awkwardly. They teach the history of literature, an honest trade but not one that will make you rich.