It took him a long time to calm down. Finally, he dashed to the office for more posters and pasted them up himself. The people who had gathered in the waiting-room began reading aloud the words of the proclamation to the beloved nations. To begin with, one word at a time, if their reading ability allowed, then in chorus with the illiterates. They repeated each word like a litany in church. In these distant lands, their faith in Emperor Franz Joseph united Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Armenians and Jews in one shared universal church. Piotr involuntarily removed his cap as he listened open-mouthed to the Emperor’s solemn imputation. The Emperor had despatched it here, to the very limits of his domains, so that good people might take pity on him and take up the cause of the injustice to his gracious person. The Emperor’s faithful subjects did not disappoint him. In the universal agitation that overcame the Topory-Czernielica station waiting-room, Piotr Niewiadomski forgot his personal shame, because he was thick-skinned but soft-hearted. In a biblical, hieratic, moving style, the Emperor’s proclamation railed against the wicked, subversive Serbs for obliging him to take up the sword instead of permitting him to eventually die in peace.
“What sort of sword?” Piotr wondered. “It must be the large silver pen-knife that His Majesty carries around in his pocket, and only takes out in the event of war.”
Two days later, the stationmaster called Piotr into his office once again. Piotr thought he was going to be punished for the lèse-majesté he had committed by attaching the proclamation upside-down. By way of justification he could only say that he was illiterate, and that there were no illustrations on the Emperor’s posters allowing him to tell top from bottom. However, the stationmaster received him calmly and amicably. Evidently, it was forgotten. Mobilization had smothered all else. For many a criminal, it brought a pleasant, unexpected amnesty.
“Niewiadomski,” said the stationmaster, “you are an ass, but I have nobody else I can turn to. One after another they are being conscripted into the army. You have to go to 86; Banasik has received his call-up papers and he is joining the reservists. Today you have to go down to the track, take his cap and flag and look after the level-crossing barrier. Banasik will show you everything. The war won’t last long, three weeks, four at the most. In a week’s time we’ll enter Belgrade, in two weeks we’ll take Warsaw, and in three weeks we’ll be in Moscow, God willing. Then we’ll all return home; Banasik will return, unless he gets killed. Until then you have to stay at 86 and carry out his duties. Just don’t let me hear any complaints, because war is no joking matter. You’ll be out on your ear and not even the dog will bark for you.”
When he said “we’ll enter Belgrade” and “we’ll take Warsaw”, the stationmaster did not have in mind participating in the expedition personally, as he was, at least for the time being, exempted from that on account of his occupation and his age. He was merely using the pronoun “we” popular in wartime, as a manifestation of solidarity with those who go to war.
Piotr was not familiar with the subtle metaphors employed by civilized people since time immemorial. He took every word literally. So he imagined that the stationmaster would go to war together with the signalman. Piotr thought this was detrimental to his own interests. If Piotr had been able to think as civilized people do, he would have wished that the war might continue as long as possible, or that signalman Banasik would never return. For in either case he would have a chance of staying in signal box 86 for ever. But Piotr was not capable of such far-reaching speculation. He accepted the news of this so long-desired turn of fate with great calm, bordering on resignation. After what the stationmaster had said, he took his unexpected conditional promotion as more of a demotion. After all, he had become a signalman only by default and not in recognition of his personal deserts and abilities.
So Piotr Niewiadomski donned his dreamt-of railwayman’s cap, his Imperial cap. It was in fact made of navy blue cloth, not black, and it did not have a little eagle with the Emperor’s monogram, but it sported a fine metal railway-carriage wheel running towards infinity, with outstretched wings spreading on each side as though from the shoulders of an angel. Unfortunately this cap, received in such circumstances, was no promotion, and Piotr took no pleasure in it. Its charm had passed; its magic had vanished as soon as it became reality. Piotr was the victim of his own imagination.
The news that Piotr Niewiadomski was wearing a railwayman’s cap was received by the world with indifference. Piotr was not so naive as to look on the changes taking place on the 28th of July as being the result of his own promotion. Nevertheless, he was surprised that the people closest to him, who were not familiar with the details of his appointment, paid it no attention. Even Magda remained quite aloof. A young author, seeing his name in print for the first time, experiences similar feelings, surprised to find that people in the street don’t point him out. Actually, Piotr had no worldly ambitions. The only thing that upset him was the fact that the high point of his life passed unnoticed, being associated rather with an unpleasant, downright humiliating memory, dissolving without trace in the general chaos and pathos of those momentous days. His head soon became so full of thoughts about the changes in the world that little room was left in it for thoughts about his actual role in that world. He did not even enjoy the saluting that was now his right, observing so many people in uniform who were obliged to salute.
He locked up his cottage and set off down the track, taking Bass with him. The signalman’s wife continued to live in the signal box for a few days, but she soon left with her children and went to town to join her family. Niewiadomski was then alone; just once a day, at noon, Magda brought him food. The signal box stood on open land, high up on the embankment. Entry was gained via ladder-like steps. Before Piotr’s eyes trains, trains and more trains began to flash by incessantly, loaded with military freight. He had ten sleepless nights; there was so much work with the level-crossing barrier. On one occasion, there was even an unpleasant event: a Jew and his horse were nearly run over, and it was Piotr’s fault. Piotr lost his head completely after he started wearing the Imperial cap. It was rather too big for him, and it fell over his ears. The war intimidated him with the roar of the wagons, the rattle of the guns on their carriages, and the multilingual babble of the soldiers.
After ten days and ten nights, fewer and fewer military trains were sent along that line, and the soldiers’ singing became less and less frequent. Finally, the transports ceased altogether in those parts. Everything went quiet. Passenger trains were gradually reinstated; however, the window in the so-called waiting-room at Topory-Czernielica station opened only once a day, and the timetable gave no guarantee of punctuality. Piotr was awakened in the night most often by goods trains. From time to time, such a silence descended on the track and the air was so fresh that he could hear the humming of the telegraph poles and the sound of the machinery at the distant sawmill.
* “Incognito”.
Chapter Two
There was silence in the sky, there was silence on the ground, the dogs were not barking and the cocks were not crowing, when Emperor Franz Joseph announced general mobilization. The Emperor’s voice did not reach as far as Hutsul territory, but the Emperor’s post did. The parish clerks and the gendarmerie reached those places the post could not.
Sergeants and long-serving corporals sat in offices retrieving dusty, yellowing lists of conscripts, dating back to the earliest years. They extracted all the men’s names, knowing nothing about these people beyond the mere fact that they had names. For each name, they prepared an individual call-up card and sent it to the municipality. Many of those being called up had long since been buried in the parish cemetery or lay rotting in foreign soil. Names do not die as quickly as people, however, and death keeps its records more diligently than the sergeants. So the Emperor was calling up the living and the dead.
Piotr Niewiadomski was on the call-up roster for the year 1873. He was unaware of this himself,
not knowing much about figures, but the municipality knew. The municipality knows everything. The municipality also keeps records and fills in the forms on which is recorded in ink for all posterity who has come into this world and when, and who has departed for the next. In peacetime, the municipality identifies every man who has reached the age of twenty-one, and they all have to report for military service. Blind, lame, deaf, hunchbacked—it makes no difference. Once in their lifetime they have to report for military service, though, as in the Holy Scriptures, many are called, but few are chosen.
In peacetime, Piotr had been exempted. He was the sole breadwinner in his family, which consisted at the time of his elderly mother and Paraszka’s illegitimate child. Soon afterwards they both died, first of all the bastard, then the old woman, but Piotr benefited anyway—he was not enlisted in the army. He thought they had forgotten about him by now, but he was mistaken, because the Emperor has a good memory. If necessary, he’ll remember you even twenty years later. The Emperor had not forgotten Piotr, he was just putting him by for a darker hour.
That hour had now come, not the darkest hour, but an early evening time when it is still light, when a stillness comes over the earth as though it is being caressed by the hand of the angel for whom bells are ringing in all the churches. A clear sky like the Virgin Mary’s azure robe softly cloaks the earth, dampening all conflict and din. Swarms of midges, exhausted by their endless circling in the hot atmosphere, muffle the buzzing of their wings. The oppressive heat begins to recede and abate, opening unseen valves. At this time even people’s quarrelsome hearts beat more calmly and the most impetuous creatures of this world recognize the blessing of peace and quiet.
Piotr became very calm and settled. He had forgotten about the war raging somewhere beyond the disappearing horizon and beyond the boundaries of his weary senses. In the cooling atmosphere, the whine of the distant sawmill had finally ceased, and above the greenery of the bushes that hid the village from view bluish smoke began to rise from all the cottages. Everywhere supper was now being prepared. The cottages that had chimneys sent their smoke upwards in a vertical column that dispersed in the blue sky, whereas from the poor huts it spread out in a lazy, low-lying cloud. Piotr set about peeling potatoes. The last train of the day had passed signal box no. 86. It would be another two hours before a goods train was due. Piotr sat down on the doorstep of his little cabin and took off his cap. Bass was lying beside him with his nose to the ground, watching the ants milling around. In the quiet of the evening he did them no harm. His breathing sounded calm and regular.
All of a sudden, the dog raised his head and pricked up his ears. He had heard some suspicious rustling below the bank. A moment later he leapt up and adopted a watchful stance. Somebody must have bumped into the wires joining Piotr’s lever to the level-crossing barrier, making them twang gently. They were slung low, just above ground level, and they continued to vibrate for some time in the prevailing silence. Something was moving in that silence, something was approaching the signal box. Piotr took no notice of the dog’s concern. He continued to peel the potatoes, throwing them into an earthenware bowl filled with water. But Bass had sensed danger and he began to growl. As the rustling sound continued to draw closer, he could stand it no longer and started barking. He was barking so hard in his fear, anger and protest that he started to choke. The danger slithered silently, snake-like, through the undergrowth, gleaming golden flashes among the green vegetation; it was lost, and then flashed again.
“Quiet, Bass!” shouted Niewiadomski, pushing aside his potatoes. Bass lowered his head and stopped his angry barking, just growling softly. Among the bushes there was the flash of a bayonet, reflecting the rays of the setting sun like a mirror. Then the golden spike of a yellow helmet showed itself and suddenly war appeared over the embankment. It marched in black hobnail boots up the steps, bearing a rifle and sabre, to face Piotr Niewiadomski in the shape of the gendarme Corporal Jan Durek.
Piotr was always disturbed at the sight of a gendarme. Not that he had anything on his conscience, but a gendarme gives off the smell of jail and of the handcuffs he carries hidden in his leather bag, just in case. Corporal Durek was well known to Piotr. Piotr often talked to him at the railway station and he was proud to be acquainted with such a man. In Piotr’s eyes, this gendarme represented the pinnacle of intelligence and good taste. The smell of a certain type of shaving cream used by the corporal never failed to make an impression on Niewiadomski. Above all, however, he was impressed by the gold tooth that shone in the gendarme’s mouth whenever he opened it, whether this was on official business or privately. That tooth set Jan Durek apart from Piotr as a personality more decidedly than all the gold on his helmet and uniform, his ominous black chin-strap, or his rifle and sabre. It inspired respect for the man himself, so that even if Corporal Durek stripped naked that gold tooth would protect him from any familiarity.
On this occasion Durek opened his mouth on official business, but he embellished it condescendingly with a private smile.
“I have an invitation for you, Niewiadomski.”
“Call-up papers?”
“No, tickets for a dance!”
Irony was something unusual in this part of the world, so at first Piotr did not take in the sarcasm of the gendarme’s words. For a moment, Piotr imagined snatches of a kołomyjka, a Ukrainian folk-dance tune played on a piano accordion and a fiddle, with heavy, gaudily coloured skirts swaying before his eyes. He could almost feel the gorgeous warmth of those skirts on his cheeks. The gendarme quickly brought him down to earth, drawing from the bag in which he kept those handcuffs a small folded sheet of paper sealed with the Imperial eagle.
Gutenberg, Johannes Gutenberg, was the name of that man the devil had intoxicated with Rhine wine in Mainz in 1450, ordering him to invent a new torture for the illiterate and the slow-witted. Possessed by the devil, Gutenberg founded the first printing press, together with a certain Faust. Since that time the devilish seed had spread like a plague of cholera across the entire globe, disturbing, bewitching and poisoning by night and day greedy souls in thrall to their pride in knowledge. But although so many reams of white paper had been smudged by the devil’s black characters that the entire globe could be wrapped up in it, in the year 1914 there were nevertheless many honest people in this world, especially in the Śniatyn province, who had not succumbed to the temptation. They were not even intimidated by the law introducing compulsory school attendance or by fines and imprisonment, preferring to pay the fines and suffer imprisonment rather than defile their descendants’ souls with the Latin alphabet or the Cyrillic script. It is true, of course, that in this victorious struggle they had a silent but powerful ally, the budget of the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Religious Affairs and Education. In this way the government itself indirectly fought the devil, who inhabits all written words, even the Holy Scriptures. For this reason no God-fearing person would sign documents, recording only three crosses. These three holy signs drive out the devil from all contracts, receipts and promissory notes.
But the devil is vengeful. On all pathways of human life, including main roads as well as crossroads, he has placed signs and warnings, like scarecrows:
“No spitting here, no smoking there. Ignorance of the law is no grounds for exemption from punishment.”
“It is forbidden to drink this water!” declares the devil on the large water-butt at Topory-Czernielica station. “Beware of the trains!”
Strzeż się pociągu!
Sterehty sia pojizdu!
Achtung auf den Zug!
Sama la trenu!
shrieks the devil in Polish, Ukrainian, German and Romanian on a pillar close to signal box no. 86, making out that he is a concerned friend looking after people’s safety, as though human life, rather than death, were dear to him. But death is present everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and it must to be guarded against. Not only i
n wartime. Railway tracks spell death wherever they are found, and death can catch you unawares at any time. It lurks in the fresh air and the sunshine and suddenly falls on the heads of haymakers like a bolt from the blue. Death is in the water. Numerous bodies of the drowned are retrieved from the Prut and the Czeremosz in summer. Death lurks even in mushrooms and it finds its way into stomachs together with plums, bearing bloody dysentery along with their sweetness. The devil, that false friend, mocks human death. He speaks to the deaf and gestures to the blind.
Of course, sometimes there are ways to outwit the devil. For example, there is the level-crossing barrier. Horses, cows and Hutsuls are illiterate, but the good Lord has sent them a guardian angel, also illiterate, to save them from death on the railway track. Many a cow and many a Hutsul would have been taken by the devil, especially in these times of war, were it not for Piotr Niewiadomski.
Corporal Durek knew that Niewiadomski was illiterate. Despite that, he delivered the call-up paper to him with an expression on his face that made out that he was unaware of it. The fact that Niewiadomski would have to ask him to read it aloud flattered the corporal. To people who could read Durek merely communicated the orders of a higher authority, but in respect of the illiterate he felt not only that he was this authority’s partner, a confidant of its intentions, but also that he personified education itself. For them, it was he who determined guilt and punishment. He was the holder of the keys to the prison cells, as well as of the keys to all secrets of the written word. This was why Durek could not resist the pleasure of confirming his superiority over Niewiadomski, although he had no desire to gloat over the latter’s insignificance. Quite the opposite. Only an hour previously, he had been sympathizing in the hall of one of the nearby mansions, where he had gone to announce the requisition of hay and where he had been offered a drink of vodka, a piece of cake and cigarettes.
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