Stone Upon Stone

by Wieslaw Mysliwski

  “Of course I remember them. You taught us religious instruction at school, father.”

  “So tell me, what’s the third commandment?”

  “The third commandment?” I hesitated. “I think it’s, thou shalt not steal,” I said. It was mostly a shot in the dark, because at my age how are you supposed to remember which one is third, fourth, tenth, your memory doesn’t remember them all in the right order. People can’t even live in the right order, let alone remember things.

  “The third is to keep the Sabbath day holy.” He pointed his index finger at me as if he’d suddenly spotted me in the congregation from the pulpit. “I see you’re a bigger sinner than I thought,” he said with a bitter sigh, though a bit indulgently as well.

  “I won’t deny it, father, I’m no saint,” I said a little more boldly. “Though in my view sins oughtn’t to be connected to a person so much as to their life. For a person it’s often too much just to have to live.”

  “But they have to die as well, and then what?” This time he was seriously upset. I regretted annoying him unnecessarily, because as well as raising the cost of the plot he might stick me next to some guy that drowned or was hung. Not long before, Bolek Brzostek had hung himself. He worked in the warehouse at the co-op, there’d been an inspection and it turned out he was a million zlotys short. The Brzostek women had so many clothes they couldn’t decide what to wear, they were constantly heading into town to go to the pictures, because his old lady liked the pictures so much she used to say she could spend her whole life there. He had a new house built, bought a car, people couldn’t figure out how they did it on that little salary. You’ve got a head on your shoulders, Bolek. Your Dziunia’s a lucky woman.

  “Well, when you have to die, you have to,” I said, humble again. “But death knows best of all when to come, father, there’s no point hurrying out to meet it.”

  “Maybe you’re in no hurry to meet it. But it might be in a hurry to meet you. How can you know?”

  “I guess I can’t.”

  “Is it not said, ‘ye know neither the day nor the hour’?”

  “It is.”

  “You see then. And you also remember ‘memento mori’? You used to serve during holy mass, you’d have picked up a bit of Latin there, Franciszek the sacristan used to teach it.”

  “Kind of, though he mostly had us scraping the wax off the candlesticks. Saecula saeculorum, forever and ever. Dominus vobiscum, the Lord be with you. And ite missa est, the mass is over. That’s all,” I said, because I was afraid he’d start asking me questions about the mass as well. “Other than that he just made sure we knew when to carry the missal from one side to the other.”

  He gave a good-natured laugh:

  “Oh, that Franciszek. As for you, don’t worry, I’ve no intention of taking you on as an altar boy. Besides, these days it’s all in Polish. I had to learn everything all over again myself. Though I still can’t get used to it. It sounds funny to me. There are times, may God forgive me, when I feel it’s like a whole other faith. But enough of that. So you say you need a place for a tomb?”

  I nodded. He started getting up from behind the desk, his head shook a bit, maybe from all that writing, because sitting like that with your head down, you couldn’t have held it up for long even in two hands, let alone just having it on your neck. It was another thing that he seemed to have put on weight, not that much, it was just that back in the day he was thin as a rake. All these young newlywed women, unmarried women, probably even old grannies would come flocking in for every service just for his sake, they’d compete with each other who would bring the most flowers for the church, till there were times he’d tell them to stop, he’d say it’s too much, too much, ladies. God doesn’t like too many riches, he was poor himself, remember. They may even have believed more strongly in God for his sake than they would have if it’d been someone else.

  I braced myself to see how much he would say, because I was convinced he was standing up so as to tell me the price, and he wasn’t on the cheap side, oh no. He always said, it’s not me you’re paying, it’s God, so don’t sell God short.

  “Will you have a glass of wine?” I was floored at first, I would have expected all kinds of prices rather than wine. He looked at me in a mock-angry way. “Surely you won’t say no to your religion teacher?”

  “I wouldn’t want to take up your time,” I stammered, because I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m sure you’ve got as much work in the church as we do in the fields. I still have my potatoes to bring in. And you have that funeral.”

  “Don’t get all concerned about me.” He walked over to the dresser. “What a hypocrite,” he said, pretending to be in a huff. “You never bothered about my feelings before, you just did whatever you felt like. That vulture, that greedy pig with the big belly. Have you forgotten the things you used to say? And where’s that big belly of mine? I was always skinny, still am. When you passed me on the road, I wouldn’t have expected a ‘Christ be praised’ because it wouldn’t pass your lips, but you might at least have said good morning. Yet all you’d do was look down and scowl like there was no tomorrow. Or start gazing at the sky as if you’d heard an airplane. I was the one that taught you God’s ten commandments. You’re not going to try and tell me they never came in useful? For each of my students, good and bad, every day I say at least one Hail Mary.” He put a bottle of wine and two glasses on the table. “And don’t you worry about my time either. My time is for God and for my parishioners. Your potatoes can wait awhile too. The Lord’s given us a mild fall, thank goodness, you’ll have time to get them in.” He seemed to lose himself in thought for a moment. “Though I’m not sure I have the right to say this is still my time. I sometimes have the feeling I’m living at the expense of eternity. Come on, take a seat.”

  He gestured to an armchair that happened to be right beneath a huge larchwood cross that took up almost the whole wall from ceiling to floor. It was like it was fresh from the ax, none of it had been planed, there were splinters everywhere. If you’d touched it you’d for sure have gotten a hand full of spelks. I was about to say that the carpenter that made the cross, I wouldn’t hire him to build a cattle shed, how could he leave so many splinters, but he spoke before me:

  “You’re looking at the cross? It was made by someone special.”

  “I can see,” I said, and dropped into the armchair. I sank into it like it was a pile of hay.

  He took my walking sticks from me. One fell on the ground and he picked it up himself, though you could tell it was an effort for him to bend over, and he grunted and turned red. He looked around to see where to put the sticks, and in the end he hung them over one of the arms of the cross. He poured out two glasses, a full one for me, just a little for himself, explaining that he still had to lead the rosary because the sacristan was sick. He handed me the glass so I wouldn’t have to get up, because he’d put it down a short ways away. I tried to stand, though I don’t know how I would have managed it without my walking sticks. But he put a hand on my shoulder to tell me to stay seated. He took the armchair opposite.

  The wine was so sweet it was sickly. Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of wine. When it’s sweet I can hardly get it down, I don’t know how people can drink the stuff. But I couldn’t tell him that. I said it was nice.

  “Must be foreign.”

  “No, it’s made with blackcurrants,” he said. “You like it? Helenka, my housekeeper, she makes it. She’ll be pleased when I tell her you said it was good. She adds a little rose hip, juniper seeds, something else besides. Though she won’t say exactly what, she treats it like a big secret. She won’t even tell me exactly what she makes it from. If you like it, father, she says, then drink it and don’t ask questions. There’s no need to know everything right from the get-go.” He raised his glass. “Your health, then.” He barely touched the rim of the glass, smacked his lips, and set the wine aside.

  I raised my glass too.

  “Your health, fath
er.” Again I started worrying about what he’d charge for the plot. Because he suddenly started staring at the wall, like he was bothered by the same thought, how much he should ask. Or maybe he was just looking at the larchwood cross. He suddenly broke off staring and sighed:

  “So are you not afraid of death?”

  I gave a sigh of relief that he hadn’t been thinking about the price.

  “What’s there to be afraid of? A person’s only afraid when they’re not certain about something.”

  “All the same, everyone’s afraid of death.”

  “Because that’s how life is, father, the fear comes from life. A person’s afraid of storms. He falls asleep and he’s afraid. He’s afraid of the next person. He’s constantly afraid. Even yesterday, it’s already past and it’s no threat to him, but he’s afraid of it. And it’s not just people. Animals, the land, water, everything’s afraid. Or take trees for instance, do you think they’re not afraid? They won’t say it because they can’t talk, they can’t cry, they just stand there. But why is it an aspen’s leaves shake the whole time? Even when there’s no wind. With oaks, of course, it doesn’t show. They’re hard as rock. And they live for centuries. But when an oak tree finally falls, the whole forest is terrified. And what’s a human next to an oak tree, father?” I grabbed my glass from the table and knocked it back in one. I felt like I’d just swallowed a frog, but I made sure it didn’t show.

  “Will you have some more?” he asked, and without waiting for me to at least nod he filled my glass again. “That’s for sure,” he sighed, as if lost in the deepest thought. He might not even have been listening to what I was saying, because after a moment he said: “The thing is, I thought you needed me to comfort you. Forgive me, though – put it down to priestly weakness.”

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I took another sweet mouthful of frog juice.

  “I’m not sure if a person can comfort another person, father.” It came out too arrogant, but the sweetness was making me sick to my stomach. “It’s a bit like a blind man leading another blind man through the woods. One’s as unfortunate as the other, and the woods are dark and unknown. You have to live alone, for yourself, and you have to die the same way, no one can die for someone else. Besides, people have tried to kill me so many times that when I come to die it won’t be the first time. As for living, I’ve done a good bit of that too, enough for three men. In the resistance I was wounded seven times. Once I even thought I was in the next world. No one believed I’d pull through. But here I am.”

  “Has it not occurred to you that maybe God wanted you to live?”

  “It’s hard to say whether it’s God, father. I was always strong. Before the war, at dances we’d sometimes stick each other with knives, I’d bleed so much another guy would’ve been dead, but me, I’m still alive. It’s only now that our wounds become so unforgiving, the slightest thing and you’re a goner. You might not believe me, but I’ve never had so much as a cold in all my life. Though in the resistance we often slept on the bare ground, in rain and mud, on moss, on snow. You’d wake up frozen to the earth, like you’d become part of it. You couldn’t open your eyes, the frost was so heavy you’d have ice in your mouth and your arms and legs would be stiff as boards. But we always had vodka with us, a mouthful or two and it would all thaw out. Or this accident of mine. The doctors were shaking their heads saying there was nothing they could do to save my legs. They explained they’d have to be amputated. First they said both of them. Then, that I’d lose at least one. I refused, because how can a person live without legs. And here I am walking.”

  “You certainly are a tough nut, my son,” he said like it was part of a mass or service or confession that he’d memorized – he knew all those things by heart. “But that’s pride, believe me, it’s pride. Beware of pride. It can destroy the human soul worse than anything else. Don’t try to be strong at any cost. Strength separates us from other people. Remember that Jesus was God but he allowed himself to be crucified so he could experience human weakness. You have to admit to weakness as well, because it’s in you, it really is. It may even want you to weep over yourself. Weep, even if you have to force yourself to. Otherwise you’ll never understand yourself, or other people.”

  “Is it my fault I had to be strong, father? That’s just how my life was, and maybe those were the times also. You said Jesus was God. But with people, a single moment of weakness can sometimes cost you your whole life, and without salvation. You say I should cry. But life made me forget how to cry, father. Life can make you forget how to do various things, and not teach you anything in return. Course, they say life teaches. But it’s not true. Besides, however much someone wants, he still has to do what he has to do. He’s got it written somewhere in that book of his that he has to be strong, so he has to be. Just like another guy has it written that he has to be bald, or another one that he has to marry a particular person, and he has to, even though she’s a real vixen. That he’s going to be born in this village here, in this house, and not a hundred years earlier or a hundred years later, because from long ago all the way to the end of the world everyone has their assigned time, their place, their life. What’s there to cry over? Crying over yourself is like crying against yourself. People always cry to someone, father. Even when you’re crying over yourself, you’re crying to someone. However deep it is inside you, however secret, it’s always to someone. And me, I don’t even know if there’s anyone inside of me.”

  “But God is standing over you, have you ever thought about that?”

  “If he is, he sometimes lets himself be forgotten. It may even be wisdom on God’s part that when there’s nothing he can do, he lets himself be forgotten.”

  “Now you’re blaspheming, my friend, you’re blaspheming terribly.” He raised his hands as if he wanted to push away from me. He made the sign of the cross. “But may he forgive you in his great mercy.” He hung his head as if he was praying silently. Also, our conversation might have tired him a bit, he was old after all, sometimes he’d fall asleep during confession. All of a sudden he started and gave me a sort of kindly look. “You’re going to stand before him as well one day, what will you say to him then?”

  “I won’t say anything. When your lips are dead your words are dead as well, father. Whatever you may or may not have said here on earth, you won’t say it up there. God too, what he had to say to people, he said it all here, on earth. Up there he became a mystery and he keeps his peace.”

  “I truly feel sorry for you, my son. But perhaps one day you’ll understand, if only in your final hour, that you too, you were only human. A lost, stray human being like every one of us in this vale of tears. And that strength of yours you keep going on about is nothing but ordinary human weakness that you won’t accept, that you hate so much in yourself.”

  “What do you mean?” I was upset, who was he to talk to me that way, even if he was a priest. “Do I not know who I am? I paid a heavy price for that knowledge. It didn’t come for free.”

  “Right, my son. Perhaps you hated it within yourself more than others do. Perhaps you were harder on it than others. Perhaps it hurt you more than it hurt other people. But believe me, it’s only thanks to our weakness that we’re connected to other people, that we recognize ourselves in other people, and they recognize themselves in us. And that’s how our human fate is shared. It has room for everyone. In it our humanity is fulfilled. Because we don’t exist outside of our fate. We belong to human fate through weakness, not strength. And it’s in this weakness of ours that God manifests himself in every person, not in their strength. So you too, be forbearing toward it, don’t shield yourself from it, submit to it, because otherwise you’ll have a hard death. And that’s not the same thing as having a hard life. And who knows, you might take months and years to die, the way God sometimes tests people, they’re confined to their bed by some terrible illness, their death has no end. The sight fades in their eyes, their ears stop hearing, their mind stops understanding, and they
lose all feeling except pain. How are you going to die then, if you can’t come to terms with yourself, or at the very least understand yourself?”

  “Death’ll come somehow or other. Death isn’t anything special, father. People aren’t just living from cradle to grave, they’re also dying from cradle to grave. Dying isn’t something you do just the one time. Who knows, maybe dying takes longer than living. I mean, dying goes on even after you’re dead. You continue to die among the people that are still alive. That one time, maybe it’s only the end of dying. But before a person reaches that end, how many times do they have to die first. The truth is, father, with each person that dies in our life, those of us left behind die a little bit ourselves. The person goes away and they leave us their death, and we have to shoulder it. They just lie there rotting in their grave and they don’t know, they don’t feel that they’re rotting because they don’t know anything or feel anything at all, not even that they left someone behind. And even if there’s no one close to follow them in death, still those further from them die, their neighbors, people they know, even strangers, though the strangers might not even be aware of it. You see, father, it’s enough for us to be surrounded by constant dying for it to shape us. Or say a cow dies, or a horse drops dead, or a hawk gets in among the chicks. Those are our deaths as well. Maybe it’s from those deaths, when too many of them collect inside you, that your own death comes. I sometimes even have the feeling that I come from the dead. I seem to be alive, but it’s like death is just letting me be so I can bury the last ones. And as if that’s to be the end of something ending forever.”

  “But what about the next world? Has it ever occurred to you that you’ll have to go on living there? Eternity’s promised to everyone, after all. Whether it’ll be good or bad, that God has to decide.”

  “Has anyone ever come back from there, father, so we can believe something’s there? We only die in the one direction, not the opposite one.”