Nobody Leaves Read online

  The train carriage sways and they read their books.

  From Tama Brodzka station, on foot through the woods, they reach Stanica Wodna. The nest of houses spread across the flattened slope of the hill is called Bachotek. The lecturers straighten their shoulders, do some deep knee bends, and finally become motionless. ‘Is it ringing?’ one of them asks.

  They listen. ‘It’s ringing!’ the other one whispers.

  ‘What’s ringing?’ I ask (I can tell that I’m making a fool of myself).

  They’re taken aback. ‘The silence, my good man. The silence is ringing!’

  They set about eating. Dinner is available at the inn. They disdain this. They solemnly set up the cooker and prepare instant oxtail soup. The water boils over, putting out the flame and scalding their hands. They eat by turn with a single spoon. They’re hungry but they convince themselves that they’ve never been so sated.

  They’re already moving across the lake in a kayak. I can barely keep up. They spot a swan. An argument breaks out over whether swans fly high or not. Of course they fly! You townie, you’re wrong! They argue and seek proofs from literature. Who could have written about swans?

  Żeromski, Konopnicka? Give me a break with Konopnicka – that’s not great poetry! The startled birds take off from the water and alight in the reeds. They reach a compromise: So, we’ll check in the encyclopedia.

  A heron is wading in the distance. They splash their oars, hurrying in that direction. Soon, they’ll see it close up. But the bird hears the noise, takes to the air and flies away. Disappointed, they exchange accusations: We paddled too slowly. In self-justification, they show each other the palms of their hands. They’re covered in blisters.

  They rest oars. ‘We’ll drift,’ one of them says.

  ‘How? There’s no current,’ the other protests.

  The kayak moves a few metres. They look at their watches, calculating the speed at which the current is carrying them.

  Far off, outlined against the background of the woods, a figure is advancing along the shore.

  ‘It’s him!’ shouts one lecturer.

  They strain to see (‘Educated, but they have good eyes,’ the Survivor will later say).

  ‘No, I don’t think it’s him,’ his colleague says doubtfully.

  ‘What do you mean? Aside from him there’s nobody else here,’ the first one maintains.

  ‘But remember how he put his back into it, and this one’s not straining at all, he’s strolling,’ his opponent argues.

  The discussion drags on and the uncertainty torments them. They’ll paddle closer and then everything will become clear.

  As they approach, the silhouette grows and takes on a distinct shape. The spirit of triumph wells up in my friends. Of course it’s him. Pushing his pole into the bottom, the solitary raftsman guides his craft along the lake.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mister Jagielski!’ they say.

  The raftsman looks at us and his eyes twinkle with amusement.

  ‘Well, good afternoon,’ he says.

  ‘Can we get on? Won’t it be too heavy?’

  ‘What do you mean, heavy? What does it weigh?’

  It (that is, the three of us) can’t weigh more than 200 kilograms. We therefore have no scruples about tiptoeing along the tree trunks in the direction of Jagielski. The lecturers take the raftsman’s hand. (‘Incredible,’ one of them told me later. ‘I thought that it would be a heavy hand, lumpy and hard as the sole of a shoe. But he has soft, delicate skin that I’d say is like moleskin!’)

  Józef Jagielski looks at us and we at him. He’s a smallish guy, with narrow bones and the muscles of a flea. A thin face with a sparse, faint beard, hidden in the shadow of a wide hat brim. He looks like he’s in his early thirties but he’s twenty-five. He’s already been in the army but hasn’t yet taken a wife (Why hurry, gentlemen?). The army is significant in his life, because that was when he rode on a train. He didn’t ride far, but still. Now, he doesn’t have any occasion.

  ‘Have you ever been in a city?’ asks one of the lecturers.

  ‘Sure I have, gentlemen. I’ve been in Brodnica, I’ve been in Jabłonów and I’ve been in Toruń, too.’

  ‘Have you been to the seashore?’

  ‘Well, no. The seashore? That’s too far.’

  I look around the raft. It’s gigantic. A dozen pine trunks, slightly dried out and bound together, make up one segment. The second segment and the ones after that are attached by wire. All told, there are over twenty of them. It’s a long raft, stretching more than 200 metres. They put it together in the Iława forests and float it from there to Drwęca. The wood goes to a sawmill. It floats some 120 kilometres, and several raftsmen guide the raft in turn. Jagielski is one of them. He has his own stage. He tows the load through the lake and the job is done. Several people therefore make money off a single raft. The overall total of these earnings is the summit of Jagielski’s desires.

  A lecturer sounds him out: ‘What do you dream of?’

  ‘Oh, nothing in particular,’ the raftsman says evasively.

  ‘Come on, don’t be shy,’ the lecturer insists.

  ‘To have all the cash from these rafts for everybody for a whole month.’

  ‘How much is that?’

  ‘I fear to say, gentlemen.’

  ‘Well, don’t be afraid.’

  Jagielski straightens up and takes off his cap. ‘It would be some three thousand. Or maybe even four.’

  He sets furiously to work to avoid getting carried away with this idealism. He makes 800 to 900 zloty a month. This is the pay rate: for moving a cubic metre of wood over a distance of one kilometre, he gets twenty-two grosz. One Giewont cigarette. Supposedly a worker, he labours like a peasant in the field. He lives in the village with his brother, to whom he turns over his wages to cover his food and a corner of the room. He gets up with the chickens, eats some potato soup, fills a bottle with tea, and rides his bicycle to the place where the raft is waiting. He cuts down a young spruce tree, strips it, smooths it, and he has a pole, the tool of his work.

  He stands on the raft.

  ‘The rest, gentlemen, is by the grace of God.’

  If the wind’s against him, he doesn’t move a single metre.

  A wind from the left pushes the raft against the shore, where it snags in the reeds.

  A wind from the right pulls the raft into the middle of the lake, where the water is too deep for him to get a purchase with his pole, and he waits for salvation.

  If there’s no wind, the whole effort of moving this mass of wood rests on his shoulders.

  Backbreaking labour.

  Good winds visit him seldom. Usually, the wind is his enemy. How far will he float by evening? If things go well, six kilometres (once, it was eight, he says proudly). He has to be opportunistic, far enough from the shore not to get hung up, but close enough to touch bottom.

  The lecturers are delighted by the fact that Jagielski is also sometimes adrift. They’ve been adrift for a long time. A crisis of values has occurred in the world, they say. Traditional institutions have been compromised, morality no longer makes sense, and acknowledged truths are questioned. They do not even trust the facts they teach. Weren’t texts being falsified centuries ago? People act under the terror of circumstances, like a raft that behaves according to the wind direction. People have been cast adrift. One of the lecturers, balancing precariously on a tree trunk, summons up the testimony of Pascal. (I hunted down the quotation: ‘Man does not know in which rank to place himself. He has plainly gone astray, and fallen from his true place without being able to find it again. He seeks it anxiously and unsuccessfully everywhere in impenetrable darkness.’) Shadowing Jagielski, they observe the phenomenon of being adrift as it manifests itself not abstractly, but concretely. The raftsman penetrates the water, lowering the pole all the way to the hilt. No bottom. They wait in suspense to see what he will do.

  Jagielski lays down the pole.

  He sits down and stretche
s out his legs.

  ‘We have to wait,’ he announces.

  This statement strikes them as brilliant. ‘A philosopher,’ one of them says.

  ‘A true philosopher,’ the other one affirms. ‘He doesn’t get hysterical, he doesn’t feel despondent, he doesn’t flounder around, he doesn’t turn bitter. Although every adversity of nature cuts into his earnings, the raftsman remains calm. Wait – and the bottom will come to him. The bottom escapes, and then it’s there. There must be ground beneath him!’

  Does he like his work? For sure. He was in the sawmill once, but he left. Too many bosses. Here, Jagielski is his own boss. He can work by day or at night, as he chooses. It’s good by day and pleasant at night. (‘When it’s dark, it’s so quiet that you feel it somewhere deep inside.’) Just so there’s no bad weather. Then he struggles and pulls until he blacks out. More than once he collapsed onto the tree trunks with the water lapping over him, and it didn’t matter. ‘It doesn’t make any difference at that point,’ he recalls. Last New Year’s Eve he leaned so hard on the pole that he lost his balance and fell into the water. He dragged himself out of the freezing abyss and, dripping wet, walked home in the frosty night – ten kilometres. (‘That’s how I greeted the new year, in my waterlogged underwear.’)

  ‘So you missed the party!’ the lecturers conclude. Fun, entertainment. They ask whether the raftsman has any contact with culture. No. He’s never been to the theatre. He was at the movies a year ago. He’s never seen television, he doesn’t listen to the radio, he’s never happened to read a book, and he doesn’t look at newspapers.

  He doesn’t talk to people much, either.

  And so the great wide world has no way of reaching Jagielski. No news. Neither hope nor anxiety. Neither sensations nor boredom. Nothing, never. The raftsman does not know about earthquakes, about palace revolts, about the fate of the U-2, about the fiasco of the Paris Conference, about the Rome Olympics. Hearing the information from the lecturers does not even pique his curiosity.

  ‘It might all be so, gentlemen.’

  He doesn’t inquire about details, he doesn’t ask for more. He starts working the pole, trying to catch the bottom.

  The lecturers are enchanted: ‘You see, he didn’t let himself be drawn in! For him, our world is a shoal that he steers clear of. He steers clear of it subconsciously, but effectively. Perhaps instinct whispers to him that if he runs aground on that sandbar, he might never get clear of it. It’s terrible how people keep running aground on one shoal or another. Home, job, habits. A point of sterility and numbness. And there are no winds that could push them back out into the current. Or such a wind comes up, and they lie down prone – they’re afraid of getting blown away. But see: Jagielski waits for the wind and the current. He lives with them, and lives by them.’

  ‘He didn’t let himself be drawn in!’ they repeat enviously. ‘He’s self-sufficient.’ As these enthusiasts see it, being Olympian need not necessarily be showy. These times cannot bear empty pretences. They are exaggerating. They see the root of divinity (that is, something inaccessible to humans) in independence. This raftsman is independent. So they call him Zeus. The fact that he wears a hessian shirt and has holes in his rubber boots – so what? They bow low to him, stroke his hand, and repeat his remarks like aphorisms.

  ‘Mister Jagielski, will there be good weather?’ they ask.

  The raftsman looks around at the sky (he reads the sky, they say) and, pushing hard on his pole until it bends like a drawn bow, pronounces: ‘There are clouds, but they might go away.’

  ‘An optimist!’ the lecturers marvel.

  A Farmer at Grunwald Field

  On the field between the Germans and the Royal Army, in the direction of Tannenberg, there rose several age-old oaks up which local peasants climbed to watch the contention of those armies so enormous that the world had not seen the like from time immemorial.

  Henryk Sienkiewicz, The Teutonic Knights

  Piątek deployed to Grunwald neither mounted nor afoot, but on a cart. That expedition had a singular look, for Piątek did not ride alone or with any entourage, but rather carried athwart the packed-down straw his wife and four kids, besides which a sack of down and the implements most needful to him. The horse dawdled, and so he lashed it with his whip until the panicked flies dropped off its frothing haunches. As he did so, he swore that God would forgive him.

  He did not find any battle there.

  There were still, of course, fires here and there throughout the vicinity, there were blackened ruins and the stench from the burning, and the roads were still full of all sorts of military junk, but the clash of arms had sounded and fallen silent already, and in its place the larks trilled gracefully, and the water in the ponds rippled quite placidly.

  It struck him as beautiful. He stopped the horse, climbed down from his perch, took up a handful of earth, weighed it for a long moment, and sniffed at it.

  ‘I liked the soil right off,’ says Piątek when we reminisce about the final year of that dire war and the peace that followed suddenly.

  ‘The soil didn’t let me down. Look here how good this rye is. How heavy the heads are.’

  The field of rye stretches for a kilometre, spilling out broadly almost to the grave mound of Ulrich von Jungingen. A horse-blanket is spread out at the edge of the rye, and Piątek and the reporter are sitting on the horse-blanket. In the winter Piątek was carrying wood for the barn when a tree trunk crushed the bones in his hip and thigh. The bones grew back together but Piątek can’t walk. He doesn’t have the strength to control his leg. So he whittled crutches out of oak and he leans on them. If the weather is good, he immediately exposes his flank to the sun in the hope that the warm rays will draw the debility out of his behind. The sky has cleared up just at this moment and Piątek is warming his body, angry to be holidaying when there’s so much work in the fields.

  Since he became physically infirm like this, the farm has been in decline, and he was once first among the farmers here, the authentic master of the fields of Grunwald. He came here right after the war and got a house and land. He came here from the poverty of Mława county, reckoning that he’d be better off. There, in Niedziałki outside of Mława, he hadn’t made anything of himself. Before the war, he managed to set aside wood and bricks for a cottage, but he never erected it, because the Germans took away his building material. Piątek fought his war against the occupier not with weapons, but economically, with stone. They ordered him to deliver stone, thirty kilometres, a whole wagon full. Piątek loaded on sacks of straw, and a little stone on top, and that’s how he drove. It was no strain on the horse, and in his own way he had his revenge on the Germans.

  In Grunwald, he quickly rose to the top. He knew how to run a farm, he liked working, and he said the right things at meetings. He became the village headman. He fulfilled his duties. Over time the children came along, and so he resigned from office and concentrated only on his home. He bought some more cows and expanded the outbuildings.

  I listen to his account. I look around: a flat plain, clumps of trees, potato fields.

  ‘There was a great battle here,’ I begin.

  ‘Not really,’ he replies. ‘The front passed right through.’

  I catch on that we’re talking about different wars. I draw him into the whirl of that feudal one, but he clings to the image of the last one, the World War. I’ve read Sienkiewicz, seen Matejko, studied Kuczyński. The Teutonic Knights’ army came up here (I point out the spot), Jagiełło here (I point), and the Lithuanian wing stood there (I point). Piątek follows my hand with his eyes, looks around and groans because it hurts where his bones are growing together. An awesome multitude of knighthood, I say. A world-shaking event! I look to see whether Piątek is catching my enthusiasm. But no. The peasant’s eyes are not afire. He looks rather worried. Timidly and stuttering, he asks: ‘They won’t trample my grain, will they?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. Whole throngs of them ar
e supposed to gather here from all over Poland.’

  We are sitting on the slope of the embankment. A road runs along the top of the embankment. Columns of trucks are rolling past. Laughter, singing, a multitude of voices. The hubbub fills the air with a carefree din. There is a crossfire of calls and an intermingling of shouts. Vehicles are turning onto a side road in the woods. Tents are set up in the meadow and smoke rises from field kitchens. A crowd spills out of the trucks and divides into groups – for the concert, for the lecture, for the meeting. Piątek can’t see this, because he can’t drag himself over there on his crutches, but he knows that there’s a youth rally in Grunwald, that enormous contingents have come here from all over the country. He even likes the fact that his area has taken on such importance. That it means so much now. But he’s worried that the thousands of feet will crush his field, which has been growing so promisingly.

  ‘I thought about fencing off the field, but it’s too much for me.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not necessary.’

  ‘They say there are going to be parachutists. With parachutists, fences won’t help.’

  We both ponder what to do. Piątek reassures me: ‘This field is mine, sir, I have the papers for it. I have the land grant and the tax receipts. The taxes are paid. Deliveries on time. Everything’s in order.’

  I believe him, I say. ‘It’s your land.’

  He’s happy to have me as an ally. Maybe we can think up something together.

  ‘They’ll be here a while and they’ll go away. But I, sir, am staying.’

  Piątek doesn’t want to leave Grunwald. Things have improved for him here, he has his hectares and his house. He sends his children to school and he’s bought his wife a washing machine. If he were more fanciful he could say:

  ‘The king himself won this scrap of ground for me!’