Salt of the Earth

by Józef Wittlin

  When examining highly educated people, he considerately lowered his voice, and when they complained of lassitude, anaemia or nerves he would say:

  “Life in the field will do you good. You will see how you put on weight in a month. Your own mother won’t recognize you. If I had a son,” (how fortunate that he did not!) “I would not hesitate to send him to the front line.” He recommended “life” in the field as though it was life, and not death, that flourished there. But Piotr Niewiadomski was not highly educated. Doctor Jellinek did not need to lower his voice. He didn’t want to talk to him at all.

  He drew himself up, abruptly raising his head from Piotr’s chest, then with a smile gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder. Fully cognizant of the fact that he had released two perfectly fit people that day in return for payment, and that he would release the Jew out of pity, he called out to the Commission:

  “‘A’! Fit for the infantry!”

  Turning to Blumenkrantz, he said: “Next!”

  Piotr did not know whether he should thank him, or kiss the hand with which he had so benevolently tapped him on the shoulder. The corporals told him he was “taken” and told him to go out and get dressed in his civilian clothes. He left.

  Once again, the clerks noted down his name, entering it in the books and registers. In black ink, which dries immediately, they committed it for centuries to come to the white paper, from where no amount of force could ever remove it. Book would pass it to book, and so it would wander from office to office, in time perhaps wandering back to the Emperor. But that word was already converted into a soldier’s body provided with a regimental number, a body to be sustained and equipped at the expense of the State Treasury. A body whose absence would be punished.

  Piotr Niewiadomski found himself back in the waiting-room. The bodies bouncing from chair to chair no longer made such an impression on him. In Piotr’s eyes, those still waiting to be assessed had a lesser value than his own body, which now belonged to the Emperor. There, before the Commission, he had thought they would immediately put him in uniform. Why else would they have taken his measurements? Now they had told him to crawl back into his old skin. Slightly disappointed, he dressed in his civilian trousers and his old tunic. He no longer felt at home in this garb. Only the railwayman’s cap gave him a feeling of superiority over other rustic men. In the changing room he found out that after the swearing-in he could go back home. His cohort would be not be called up for another six weeks. He found this news disappointing too. The Emperor did not need him immediately, then? He was not mobilizing him on the spot? Piotr had not expected to return to his signal box, thinking that they would give him at most a day or two to sort out his personal affairs. What was all the fuss about, if the war was going to be over in six weeks? He felt good at the thought of the war being over. Perhaps he would not be called up at all? Piotr was now like a piece of furniture, commandeered by the bailiff and left for a certain period of time in the home of a citizen who has failed to pay his taxes.

  The corpulent sergeant led the whole contingent of men passed fit for service out of the recruiting offices to the school building opposite. When they passed the piled-up benches and entered the school, Niewiadomski was alarmed. Who knows, perhaps they would now force him to sit down at one of these benches, press a slate pencil into his hand and order him to draw on the black slate tablet—white signs of the devil. But he soon calmed down. In the extensive hall they entered with the sergeant, there was not a single bench. On the other hand, there was a row of yellow ladders attached vertically to the wall. At the end of the room stood four polished climbing poles, reaching from floor to ceiling. Nearby, like horses’ bodies with their heads, necks and tails cut off, stood two straddle-legged vaulting horses. Beyond them could be seen a springboard and some dusty mattresses. Underneath the vaulting horses lay masses of iron weights, prominent among them a heavy black bar with spheres the size of human heads attached to each end.

  There was no lack of human heads here. New bodies continually flocked in. Over in the Recruitment Commission building all the diseases, weaknesses and infirmities remained. Here, where children’s physical prowess was developed on the yellow ladders, poles and trapezes, only those bodies that had been passed fit by the commission were given access. But these people had not been brought to the gymnasium in order to have their strength and agility tested. Here it was all about their souls. For Emperor Franz Joseph acknowledged not only the human body. He was not an adherent of materialist doctrine or an advocate of Haeckel’s theory. He was an adherent of dualism and he would not deny that even the most wretched of his subjects, the most backward Hutsul, possessed a soul. Nonetheless, he must have order. He took bodies and souls separately. They are two different things and they may not be mixed up. In the building of the district recruiting office, bodies were acquired for the Emperor; here, in the gymnasium of the seven-year provincial lower school, it was souls. Bodies one at a time, souls collectively.

  Although it was strictly forbidden, they smoked and spat on the floor. Spitting could not be unhygienic, because they were all healthy. Health was somehow being made the most of. The moment the sergeant left, the hall was full of voices. The nervous tension that had built up in the room over there in anticipation of the decision was now relaxed here. The younger men leapt onto the trampoline, climbed the poles and slid down to the floor laughing. Even Piotr was tempted by the weights. Especially the large bar-bells. He raised them effortlessly with one hand.

  All of a sudden, the hall fell silent. The younger men hurriedly jumped down from the gymnastic apparatus. Unfinished cigarettes were thrown on the floor and extinguished underfoot. In the open doorway there appeared a young officer wearing a cap similar to Piotr’s railwayman’s cap. He wore a sabre at his hip and military decorations on his chest. They stood back to let him through. He was followed at an appropriate distance by the portly sergeant carrying a sheaf of papers in each hand. He wore neither sabre nor cap.

  The young officer was delegated to receive the souls, but he remained silent throughout the ceremony. Just once he whispered something to the sergeant, whereupon the sergeant burst out laughing. First of all, the sergeant divided those present into three groups, according to the languages they spoke. He separated a small German group, consisting almost without exception of Jews, from the Polish and Ukrainian ones. Everyone could take the oath in the language of their choice, because the liturgy of the military did not impose its Latin, as it were—that is to say, the German language—on those who did not understand it. In the Imperial and Royal Army only commands were to be issued to everyone in German. Then the sergeant explained to the souls, divided into three groups, the technicalities and the significance of the ritual. Everyone had to remove their caps. Including the Jews.

  Piotr noticed that the Jew who had stood next to him in the queue at the recruiting office was not present in the room.

  Everyone had to raise two fingers of their right hand, the middle and index fingers, keeping them at eye level the whole time, until they reached the word “Amen”.

  “Everyone is to repeat all the words after me, loud and clear. After swearing the oath,” the sergeant explained, “all of you, though still civilians, are effectively soldiers. You are liable to military punishment. You are forbidden to do this and you are forbidden to do that. Many things are forbidden.”

  The young officer, an emissary of the Emperor, stood motionless and silent, like an allegorical statue. But he did not remove his cap. Priests too sometimes lead prayers in a biretta, whereas the faithful are obliged to be bare-headed.

  First the German group took the oath, then the Ukrainian, and finally the Polish. Piotr Niewiadomski joined the Polish group. The sergeant read out the oath, and Piotr repeated it word for word in chorus:

  “Before Almighty God we solemnly swear faith and allegiance to his Apostolic Majesty, our Supreme Ruler Franz Joseph the First, by th
e grace of God Austrian Emperor, King of Bohemia and so forth…”

  “And so forth,” came the thunderous response.

  “…to the Apostolic King of Hungary that we will honour and defend His Majesty, his generals and all our other superiors, following their commands and directions at all times, against all enemies whoever they may be and wherever his Imperial Majesty’s will shall demand of us.”

  “…shall demand of us,” they chanted in unison. In Piotr’s soul, invisible kettle-drums were beating and unseen fanfares were blaring.

  “…On water and in the air, by day and by night, in battles, assaults, skirmishes and operations of every kind—in other words, wherever we may be, we will fight gallantly and courageously…”

  Piotr Niewiadomski already pictured himself fighting on water, on land and in the air. He was dripping water and blood. Blood and water were getting in his mouth, his ears and his nostrils; he was drowning, but summoning what remained of his failing strength he thrust the enemy to the riverbed with his bare hands. The enemy was now a long-bearded Muscovite, rather like that Jew whose Adam’s apple had been jumping, now a superhumanly powerful moustachioed Serb. The latter struck Piotr on the forehead with his rifle butt but Piotr dispatched him with his bayonet. Evidently, some old engraving of the Balkan war had come to mind.

  “…that under no circumstances will we desert our fellow soldiers, our flag, our standards or our weapons, nor will we enter into any form of understanding with the enemy whatsoever.”

  No, no, no! Piotr Niewiadomski will not desert the standards and will not enter into any form of understanding with the enemy whatsoever. He would not even be able to converse with them. But why is that officer maintaining such an ominous silence? If only he would make some slight movement. Everyone would undoubtedly feel more relaxed if he did. The young officer, the Emperor’s emissary, moved. The long mirror of his sabre swayed. The gilt tassels on his sword-tail swayed. He raised a hand and covered his mouth in order to conceal a yawn. He had already had enough of all this. From morning till night—nothing but the endless “Before God Almighty”. Enough to drive you mad. Better to set off for the front line. But no, actually, it’s not better to set off for the front line. It’s better to listen from morning till night to:

  “…As obliged by military regulations and as befits honest soldiers, we wish always to behave in such a way as to live and die honourably.”

  The sergeant followed this with a solemn, pregnant pause, then he intoned the final:

  “So help us God. Amen.”

  The god of the military, before whom this oath was taken, actually had no particular identity. He was inter-confessional—unlike in civilian life, where he listened to some people only when they bared their heads and knelt down, recognizing others only when standing and wearing their hats. The Imperial and Royal military god was not Jehovah, nor the Holy Trinity, nor Allah; rather, he could have been the deity of agnostics, deists and Robespierre. He abandoned any attributes of particular faiths, renounced forms given him by dogma and legend, and was insensitive to incense and wax candles. He represented that highest being to which even freethinkers and freemasons bow down. The army recognized no doubts unforeseen in the military regulations, therefore it obliged also the souls of atheists, socialists and anarchists to serve the Emperor in the name of God, regardless of what those people actually thought of him. Every non-believer, once he was judged fit for military service, thereby became a believer in God. As for God, whose existence it was forbidden to doubt, he indeed had to be an abstraction, as bland as an algebraic symbol. In the Imperial and Royal military’s algebra, God was that infinite number of zeros added to the highest possible figure, which was the Emperor. That God was summoned to bear witness when the souls promised that their bodies would be faithful to the Emperor. At this spoken, obligatory agreement between the peoples of Austria and the Supreme Monarch, God acted as regent.

  As the final words of the oath were being spoken, fear struck Piotr’s soul. However, with his own lips he assured God that he was willing to die for the Emperor. Had the Emperor heard him make this promise? Where is the Emperor? There was not even a portrait of the Emperor in that room, and there was no cross either. The Emperor is somewhere in space, like God, whom nobody sees with their own eyes either. So they took the oath in the air. The oath rose to heaven through the ceiling of the gymnasium, puncturing the ceiling, flying up to the first floor, to class IIb, where at that moment a contingent of recruits was waiting to be transported to the front line. It soared up over the heads of the recruits from the first floor into the attic, through the layer of hot dust, between the roof tiles out into the open air. It rushed up the chimneys and vents. It also rushed out into the street through three wide-open windows. There was a clear blue sky, so the oath met no obstructions on its way to God.

  But for some people God was present in that room, hovering above the souls, above the bodies, above the gymnastic apparatus.

  Piotr Niewiadomski turned his gaze to the floor, as in church during mass. For he had no doubt that somewhere high up under the ceiling, on the highest rung of the yellow ladder, the Holy Spirit was sitting with folded wings. Not in the form of a white dove, but as a black two-headed eagle. In its talons, it was convulsively gripping an iron rod with black spheres at each end.

  Thus Piotr Niewiadomski took the oath to the Emperor. Afterwards, he received his documents and went with his fellow countrymen to S.C. Schames’s pub, where he got drunk on ninety per cent pure spirit.

  * “My child, my dearly beloved child”.

  Chapter Four

  Blind organ-grinders at fairgrounds and carnivals had been predicting the end of the world since time immemorial. But that the predicted day of God’s wrath should fall precisely on 21st August 1914—no, not even the wisest people in Topory or in Czernielica had anticipated that. Not even Hryć Łotocki had anticipated it, though no one doubted that he was the wisest man in Topory, illiterate as he was. The parish priest himself, Father Makarucha, frequently sought his advice on many important matters, for example regarding his beehives, which he looked after as enthusiastically as the Lord’s vineyard. Father Makarucha had not had any inkling of such an imminent end of the world, and a man of the cloth, of all people, probably ought to have an idea about at least some of God’s intentions. After all, the church does not just care for people’s souls, it does not just smooth the way to eternity. The Creator also put the church in charge of all time, everything temporal, in particular the measuring and reckoning of passing time, that is to say the calendar. It was by the will of the church that a Thursday was a Thursday, that a Sunday was a Sunday, and it was by the will of the church that the current year was 1914.

  All Father Makarucha knew was that the end of the world favoured round numbers. He remembered from his time at the seminary that God had already once before felt inclined to destroy the world. That was in the year 1000. However, at the last minute the Creator changed his mind, or was moved to pity; at any rate, he extended the world’s sinful life indefinitely. However, the stay of execution did not amount to an amnesty. So if God felt like carrying out his sentence, he would certainly delay it at least until the year 2000. That was a round figure that had a dramatic effect. But so suddenly, out of the blue, in the year 1914? And not even on the 1st of January or the 31st of December, but the 21st of August? Father Makarucha did not attribute such idiosyncrasies or lack of awareness of their impact to celestial accounting, which, as always, was concerned with numbers on a grand scale, hundreds and thousands.

  Piotr Niewiadomski had also heard something to the effect that the world was supposed to come to an end in the year 2000, so he was calm on his own behalf, and on behalf of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. He had no children. And as he had no children, by what miracle could he have grandchildren and great-grandchildren? May God’s will be done—the Niewiadomski line would die out wi
th him, and before the year 2000.

  The Hutsul countryside was calm in those days, in spite of the approaching war. The wheat had already been gathered in, though the fields of stubble had not yet been ploughed. The old Hutsuls were in no hurry to get on with that, having a more pressing task in mind—the haymaking. They would set off in leisurely fashion to the fields at dawn, and at midday the women would bring them milk and potatoes, or even dumplings, in double earthenware pots. They ate their meal in silence, then mowed until nightfall. From time to time they would take a break, stop puffing at their pipes and contemplate the Grim Reaper, sharpening his scythe for their sons in far-away Serbia.

  Fear never deserted the old mothers. It burgeoned in their wilting laps like a monstrous, fiendish bastard. They dragged themselves out of their warm straw beds covered in cold sweat brought on by the horrible haunting dreams they had been suffering. They shook off these nightmares like filthy worms, making triple signs of the cross, for themselves, for their sons who had gone to war and for their children who remained at home. Then, feeling calmer, they went to see to the cows and were soothed by the steady chiming of the brass bells hanging from the necks of their cattle. Occasionally, though, the mere sight of milk was a heartbreaking reminder for these mothers of the times long gone, when it had surged from their own breasts. After all those years, they felt a painful throbbing in their nipples, as though they were being bitten by toothless lips which might even now be biting the dust. The Hutsul mothers envied their bovine counterparts their blissful ignorance of the fate of their offspring, butchered in abattoirs. And they took it out on the cows. Wildly and furiously they wrenched at their udders, as though they wanted to draw their blood rather than their milk. And the innocent, white, warm milk flowed, sounding like a stream of peas drumming into the metal pails.