The Graveyard

by Marek Hlasko

  “Screw me!” a drunken woman cried. He was passing a smelly doorway. “You may be a carpenter, but you’re no St. Joseph.” There was a tussle; the man hit her in the face; the blow sounded as loathsome and sticky as the echo of the footsteps in the mud; Franciszek shuddered as though suddenly drenched in cold water.

  … I was dying. A fellow who had been a carpenter in civilian life made a stretcher for me—a filthy wooden litter stinking with my blood and pus. As they carried me I begged them to destroy those boards after everything was over, after I’d given up the ghost, and not to touch them even for a minute. I was dying; I knew it, and so did the others—Jerzy, our commander, and all the boys who dragged me from place to place, stumbling over roots in the forest, over holes in the muddy roads, and sinking to the waist in the slush, pressed down by the weight of my carcass. They were saying that I was dying; they asked each other, “Is he still breathing?” There were marches, longer stops, stops for rest, narrow escapes. One day, at a place where we stayed for some time, a few boys were admitted to the party. It’s difficult to explain why they should have wanted to be; they had excellent chances of reaching eternity next day by any number of roads; but this short ceremony was the only reality in the lives of any of us, a reality toward which we all marched, or which marched toward us; this, nothing else. I asked for Jerzy; he was and will always be the man closest to me. All sorts of people have a place in our hearts—we can take them or leave them; those we love leave a scar. He came, slender, calm, cool.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Fine. And what about her, Jerzy?”

  “Her? Who do you mean?”

  “The woman that owned the place.”

  “What do you think? Just a couple of days later.”

  “There, on her estate?”

  “No, in town.”

  “Had you arranged the requisition with her?”

  “Of course. Why do you bring that up?”

  “I’m going to die.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  “I’m sure. And first I want to know: who got her?”

  “I did.”

  “You?”

  “I can die any time, too. I’ve got to settle everything first, everything there is to be settled.”

  We were silent for a while. I remember where we had our talk—the smoky interior of a hut. In the corner, an old woman was muttering prayers; a forlorn cat was crawling on the window sill.

  “Jerzy, are boys being admitted to the party today?”

  “Two.”

  “Take me in with them.”

  He did not answer; he bent over me and looked at me fixedly. Without averting his eyes, he said in the same neutral tone, “We don’t know whether you’ll get out of this.” He smiled. He took the cat on his knees and stroked its flat head. “What use are dead people to the party?”

  “If that’s the kind of man you are,” I said, “I’m glad I’m saying goodbye to you.”

  He rose.

  “You can tell each other jokes at my funeral,” I said.

  “We don’t hold funerals,” he said. “There’s never enough time.”

  He put the cat down gently, and walked away. I hovered between life and death, at some undefined point of existence, helpless, without a will, like a bird driven by a high wind; I vomited, I raved, I averted my eyes from the dressings stiff with my blood; the hours, the days, the weeks were like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point. I begged for life, for death, for medicines, for a gun; I choked with hatred for others who paid me back in kind, burdened as they were with my emaciated body that aroused their contempt—a bundle of pale purple bones covered with yellow skin. Then came a day when I knew I was ready to die every day at dawn if need be: I knew I was alive. I was already moving about unaided.

  “Well,” Jerzy asked one day, “are you all right now?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat down. He began to roll a cigarette, frowning desperately. He had never learned to roll a cigarette properly, although his fingers were skillful and strong. In all the years of partisan warfare he had still not mastered an art that every boy learns in a week. I saw that his eyes were angry as he bent over his recalcitrant piece of paper. At last he lighted it. “Do you know why I talked like that—then?” he asked.

  “It’s none of my business. You’re the commander. I don’t want to slosh around in your conscience.”

  He smiled. “Listen,” he said. “I didn’t want you to think of the party as a sacrament. We’re at war; we must think about how to win it and survive. You’ve got to live, Franciszek; for people like you the war won’t be over soon, perhaps never. You can depend on a man’s will to live only if he has something to look forward to, something he wants to possess or to be a part of. Revenge, a man, a woman—something must get into your blood and say to you: Stand up and fight. When your life was running so low, you hadn’t made up your mind about that. Now you can go ahead; the sooner, the better.”

  “You’re a hard man, Jerzy,” I said. “And what if I had reported to the clouds?”

  He shrugged. “We would have given you a funeral, anyway,” he said. “Though you know yourself that there’s no time for such things.”

  “You’re a hard man,” I repeated. “It takes a special kind of courage to talk like that.”

  He struggled with his cigarette, rerolling the treacherous paper over and over. “I don’t know what courage really is,” he said. Despite his efforts, his cigarette kept falling apart. “I’ve thought about it all my life. As a boy, I had a different idea of it—rescuing somebody from fire or water, performing a heroic action in war, raping my grandmother, that kind of thing. Now these things have to be reconsidered. All the usual opinions about courage are based on the idea of exceptional circumstances. But at bottom a man’s behavior in battle or during a fire tells us nothing about him, but only shows how he reacts in such situations. In abnormal circumstances you get abnormal reactions; nothing that can be foreseen, and nothing to be surprised at.”

  “Is there such a thing as normal courage?”

  He was silent for a moment; his cigarette had disintegrated for good. He rolled the remnants of tobacco between his fingers. “I think there is,” he said. “Courage is probably just a matter of faith. People are nothing but a herd of swine wallowing in a sea of shit. It’s easy to define man in his lower aspects—he is infinitely beastly; he is capable of everything; he’ll believe everything and befoul everything. Courage in the truest sense is ability to find man’s upper, ultimate limits—the extent to which he can be trusted and is capable of achievement. That is how I understand Communism. As for you, I was sure you’d pull through.”

  “In order to kill?”

  “In the name of life.”

  “And our enemies?”

  “What about our enemies?”

  “Don’t they think the same way?”

  He shrugged again. “I don’t know what they think,” he said. “I only know in the name of what they kill, and that is what matters to me in this war. I know what they did to man, and I know what I want man to be: this entitles me to take part in the game. I want an epoch and an earth that will make it possible for man to be truly courageous. That’s the only thing I’m interested in.” He rose; his boots creaked unpleasantly. “While the war is on, don’t try to find justifications that don’t exist,” he said. “The only thing you can do is to think about the world you want to go back to, the place you want to live in. Distance between dream and reality defines a man’s morality, nothing more. Haven’t you got a decent cigarette?”

  He lighted one. We set out. Where? To what place of life, dream, war? I don’t remember. We were approaching a little town; there were only a few of us. We were supposed to find somebody in the market, a fellow who thought he was terribly smart, a secret agent of the Gestapo, and to blast him out of existence. It was noon. The August air was thick as cheese. When we emerged from the woods and saw the town spread out below us—a dirty litt
le place—bells began to ring, gloomy and helpless in the torrid air. Then a factory siren began to wail; as far as I know there was only one factory in this hole.

  “The siren operator must have been asleep,” Jerzy said.

  “Why? Maybe he let the church have priority.”

  “You go to the left, and we’ll go to the right …”

  The taxicab stopped with a screech a few steps behind Franciszek. He jumped aside like a rabbit. The driver, furious, leaned out the window. “Didn’t you hear my horn?”

  “I’m sorry; I was thinking,” Franciszek said, staring at his mud-spattered overcoat.

  “Where are you going?” the driver asked. His motor gave off black fumes. “Want a lift?”

  “Thanks,” Franciszek said. “I’ll walk.”

  The car rolled on, and vanished beyond the street corner. After a few dozen yards the street was suddenly all lit up. A night shift was working on a building; elevators whirred inside the stone walls; platforms swinging like big formless birds moved slowly upward; the green light of drilling crews gleamed from dark scaffoldings that merged with the empty sky—lumpy human spiders amid showers of burning metal. Compressors hissed monotonously in the ditches; a sign said:

  “THIS MONTH WE HAVE FULFILLED …” The figures were hidden in the shadows.

  “Where are you going?” cried someone he could not see. “No loitering here; this is a construction project.”

  … “We build everything from the foundations up—if I may use big words—from the very fundamentals.” Someone—who was it?—had said that at the meeting. “We are building something in the name of which people have died not by dozens and not by hundreds, but by whole generations. The struggle for social justice began the moment two people first met in the world. Socialism is the final form of this struggle (applause); the sacrifices made by the party (applause), the martyrs of socialism (applause) …” A short interruption—and what next?…

  He was tired; he was dragging himself through the night and its murky echoes; a dark wave was pulsing within him, growing stronger and stronger. Now he was walking across a vacant lot, through aseptically clean places, with a lump of lead in his head; he could not strike a single spark in himself. He wanted only one thing—to relive the moment he had experienced a few hours earlier, although between that moment and now there was a whole life—years, oceans, worlds of defeat, loneliness, exhaustion, futility. Thus reviewing the different areas of his life, he was unable to fix them in time: the past, the present, memories and facts, everything was fluid, incomprehensible; he thought only of that moment which was the kernel of the universe—the moment when someone had told him to turn in his party card. That was real—as real as the street he was walking in, as real as the shabby dawn beginning to creep over the stones of the city, as real as the visible and persuasive neon sign, YOUNG PEOPLE READ—wherever he might hide, sit down, or stop. He raised his head—YOUNG PEOPLE READ THE BANNER OF YO H—and gasped for air. He wanted to think, he wanted to remember, but he could do nothing now; his thoughts were turning in a void—it was like trying to strike a spark with two damp stones. All he could recall was the moment when he rose and looked at the audience, but he could remember nothing he had said or done. He wanted to think, to set the machine of his awareness in motion; he wanted something to put him on the right track. He picked up a crumpled newspaper from the sidewalk, and stopped under a street lamp. “Tarnow Already Ahead.” “The world camp …” “Polish Youth Flings a Powerful No in Kałużyński’s Face.” He walked, the newspaper dangling from his hand. This helped—the familiar words, always arranged the same way, sounding always the same, had put his thoughts on the right track; he had been there before, he remembered. The rest, like the date of the newspaper, had no importance.

  … “We imagine that the most painful thing that can happen to us is when someone dear to us dies. He leaves an empty place behind; we love, we respect, we cherish; and sometimes years go by before the place is somehow filled and the pain is gone. But worse than death, comrades, is to be betrayed by a man who is close to us; it is more painful, for we ourselves are responsible for that empty and painful place in our lives” (long, heavy applause)—who had said that? Pawlak? The Second Secretary? The district delegate? Someone in the audience? Whose voice was that? Now I am walking through the city; I pass by unknown people, drunks, thieves, lovers—and someone spoke to me, someone who had power, whom others trust, someone who could strike me from party membership. Before that it was day; after that it was night; now there will be dawn—who said that? Somewhere among the walls of this city is my house to which I shall return—changed; somewhere—to the right, to the east or the west—is my place of work, where I shall go presently—changed; all around me are alien people—but who said that? (Long, heavy applause.) “An accident has unmasked you. You said what you really think. I checked it with the police station, and I won’t dare repeat what you had said (cries of indignation), what you screamed (here someone applauded, by mistake; cries of fury and indignation); I have too much respect for what we all believe in. You’re an alien.” An alien. Do we come from monkeys? There was starvation, there was capitalism, there was misery. I ask you, comrades, why Sambo? Such people use napalm bombs in Korea. Had it not been for an accident, you’d still be among us; you’d go on doing your dirty work—a former partisan, officer, party comrade. And then came a man named Lenin. Those who are for the expulsion of Comrade Kowalski, let them show their party cards. Step out, Comrade Kowalski. Come in, Kowalski. Why Sambo? Now it’s a dog, and what will it be later on? People, not peoples, from monkeys. Hand in your card, Kowalski; don’t make a monkey of yourself; we know you’re clever at wearing masks. May this accident be a lesson to you, comrades, that at every moment of our lives, in every situation, we must be vigilant. This is what the party demands of us. This is what the great Stalin teaches us. Well, and how about our glee club? We begin tomorrow …

  “He’s drunk,” a boy cried. “A big man like that! Blubbering like a baby!”

  The sidewalks were filled with people; the factory sirens were howling, and the sounds vanished somewhere under the cardboard sky. A crowded noisy tramcar clattered by. The neon sign over the city went out.

  IX

  HE WAS WIFELESS; HIS WIFE HAD DIED A FEW weeks after the end of hostilities; though of poor health, she had managed to stay alive until his return from the woods. He lived with his son and daughter. His son’s name was Mikołaj, his daughter’s Elzbieta. Mikołaj, a magnificently handsome boy, was twenty-four; Elzbieta was younger. They occupied two small rooms in a new housing project. The day after the meeting, when Franciszek came home, he found his daughter with her fiancé, Roman. They attended the same courses, and planned to marry immediately after getting their degrees. Both looked happy.

  “Got something for supper?” Franciszek asked. He stood in the middle of the room without removing his overcoat and hat.

  “I’ll warm up something for you,” Elzbieta said. She rose. She was tall, towheaded, attractive. Franciszek’s heart sometimes tightened when he looked at her: he had the feeling that he was seeing the woman with whom he had lived his happiest moments twenty years earlier. No one could have discovered any difference between Elzbieta and her mother; both were the image of health, though both spent their time complaining. “I’ll warm the macaroni for you,” Elzbieta said. “I can make you an omelet too.” She went to the kitchen. Franciszek sat down stiffly on a chair.

  “Well, Pop,” said Roman, a black-haired, swarthy boy with fiery eyes, “what’s the matter? Troubles?” Roman called Franciszek “little father-in-law,” “old man,” or “Pop.” The dry and forbidding Franciszek forgave him much for the sake of his daughter’s love-drenched eyes.

  “Everybody has troubles,” he said, and broke off, crushed by the stupidity of his own words.

  “Clever observation,” Roman said. “Elzbieta and I got drunk today.”

  Franciszek started. “Really?”

  “R
eally. We drank a bottle of wine after passing our exams. Ha-ha-ha.”

  Franciszek sighed with relief. “Thank God.”

  “What?”

  “Thank God.”

  “A metaphysical notion. You surely know, Pop, that religion is opium for the masses. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who said it?”

  “I’m tired,” Franciszek said gently. “Let me alone, Romek.”

  “You just don’t remember. That’s bad, bad. Once your memory begins to fail, you can make all sorts of blunders. Lenin wrote brilliantly about memory. It’s in a letter to a friend, saying he needed money for an abortion.”

  Franciszek opened his eyes wide. “Roman, what are you talking about? Where did he write that?”

  Roman expressed surprise. “Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Come, come.”

  “Really, I don’t.”

  Roman wrung his hands. “Why, that’s impossible.”

  “My word of honor.”

  Roman laughed triumphantly. “Of course it’s not true,” he said. “I just wanted to see whether you’d be taken in by such rot.”

  He went on talking, very fast and loud, emphatically and stiffly—he was active in student party affairs, and when he spoke to one man it was as if addressing millions. The shadows cast by his vigorous gestures ran back and forth across the ceiling. Franciszek did not hear him; he looked at him with half-closed eyes, and although Elzbieta was not in the room, he saw her pure and austere face beside Roman’s. “So that’s how it is,” he thought. “This little black beetle, and you—so clear and pure. Your calm and his arrogance; he solves all your problems for you in a minute, problems you’d struggle with for weeks on end. He’ll explain everything to you, and everything will come out even as in a multiplication table. He is your fool and your sorcerer; and you, my little one, you think you’re in love with him. What do you look like together—this barking dwarf and you?”