The Graveyard

by Marek Hlasko

  “Have you forgotten?”

  “Have I forgotten what?”

  “It’s very funny,” Franciszek said, “and I often laugh at it myself, but the only sense in any action is man, and his short, sad life: unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about it, no matter how hard we might try. Apparently that’s how it has to be; in this accursed world, man, little as he is, has to be a giant; and in the actual relationship of forces, everything else is tiny—the great construction projects, the dams, the canals, the Dneprostroi, and God knows what. Unfortunately you can’t turn all this upside down.”

  “What have you come for, Franciszek?” Birch asked. “For faith?”

  “Yes,” Franciszek replied seriously, “for faith.”

  “So you have no faith?”

  “I have faith,” Franciszek said, “but not in you any more. I believe in Communism, if it can be saved from you, and if you quit in time. Pieces of wreckage can’t guide anyone lost at sea …” He paused, and then whispered, “Jerzy, perhaps.”

  He saw Birch’s face give a sudden twitch. “What about Jerzy?” he asked sharply.

  “He must be different.”

  “Jerzy,” Birch said, smiling. “Yes, you’re right; go to see him. He is different. Even more different than you think.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Very well indeed.”

  “Yes,” Franciszek said, shaking his head stubbornly. “He must be different. Different—from all of us.”

  “Go to see him,” Birch said. “I can do only one thing for you: after you leave I can try to think that we chatted about the good old simple times in the underground.”

  Franciszek rose.

  “I can give you a lift,” Birch said. “I’m about to leave myself.”

  “Where are you going? In what direction?”

  “To the big electrical machine plant.”

  “To a meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll make a speech?”

  “Yes.”

  “About the leadership of the working class?”

  “Yes.”

  He held out his hand; and both pretended not to notice that their hands avoided each other.

  “Goodbye, Birch,” Franciszek said.

  “Goodbye, Skinny,” Birch said.

  Again he walked through the nighttime city, wading in the wet, filthy snow; there was still not even the slightest sign of spring. Wherever he looked, he saw nothing but mud, patches of snow thawing in black puddles, and trash drifting about the pavements; nothing but the clammy darkness over which the single neon sign quivered hysterically. “Jerzy; of course, Jerzy,” Franciszek thought. “He is different, purer and better. Surely he’s putting up a fight, and he knows how to fight; it’s his destiny to fight this vile thing.” There was a telephone booth at the corner, and he hurried toward it. He waited a long time outside the glass door; someone with his back turned to him was talking vehemently, gesticulating madly with his left hand, in a strangely familiar way. Finally he hung up the receiver, and walked out.

  “Roman,” Franciszek said with surprise. “Good evening.”

  He held out his hand. His daughter’s fiancé stopped and looked sharply in his face. His childish mouth curled in contempt. Without a word, he turned and walked off, whistling shrilly. Franciszek stood motionless for a long time, numb with fury and astonishment; finally he walked in and dialed his number. After a while he heard the same woman’s voice.

  “May I speak to Jerzy?” he asked.

  “Who is it?”

  “Please tell him it’s Franciszek. Or better still: Skinny.”

  For a moment the receiver was silent. A stoutish man outside began to bang the glass door with the handle of his umbrella. Then the woman said: “Jerzy is on vacation. Do you get me? On va-ca-tion.”

  XIV

  HE WALKED DOWN A DARK CORRIDOR, STUMBLING over empty milk bottles and pieces of junk that had lain there for years; he trampled on innumerable dogs and cats and groped in the darkness and clouds of dust. Here and there the darkness was broken by the light bulbs protected by wire nets. Their dim glow, the smell of dust, the screaming of the cats, the smell of washing, and the fumes of cabbage cooking on every floor from the basement to the attic made Franciszek’s head ache. This was an old house; it had been hit by a bomb which had opened up a terrible gash in its left wing; the staircase broke off abruptly, and one could see the wet street below, the slippery sidewalks, and the hurrying pedestrians. Franciszek stopped.

  “Uncle, Uncle, please unchain me,” a thin little voice said.

  He turned. In the corridor, a little boy was sitting on the floor, attached to the banister by an iron chain fastened with a padlock.

  “Who chained you?” Franciszek said.

  “Mama,” said the boy.

  “Mama? Why?”

  “So I don’t fall down,” the boy explained, pointing at the misty void below. “But I wouldn’t fall. Unchain me, Uncle.”

  At this moment another voice cried: “Unchain me, Uncle, not him; he’ll fall.” Franciszek turned. A few steps away a little girl was chained, and then another girl; farther on, two little boys were playing, unconcerned with those around them; they had a pile of colored blocks in front of them.

  “Where is your mother?”

  “She went to work,” said the first little boy. “What else could she do with us?” he added defensively. “Otherwise we’d be left alone in the room. This way we can play, at least.” He picked up pieces of brick and began to throw them at the other children, who dodged the missiles, pressing their heads to the banister, squealing and melodiously clanking their chains. The girl’s chain was decorated with ribbons. She held a doll whose head was attached to the banister with a chromium watch chain.

  Franciszek was silent for a minute, then bent beside the little boy. He rummaged in his pockets, trying to find something to give him, but he found only his comb, mirror, and papers. He said: “You’ll have to wait for Mama.”

  The boy twisted his mouth angrily. “I do, do I?” he said, jumping up like a monkey and rattling his chain. “Unchain me, Uncle. I’ve been here long enough. Or else, tell me a story. Do you know stories?”

  “What story shall I tell you?” Franciszek pondered. The two boys at the end of the corridor started a fight, rolling furiously on the floor and getting entangled in their chains.

  The boy said to Franciszek, “Tell me what you see down there.” He pointed to the hole, and Franciszek leaned over, staring into the darkness till his eyes smarted. There was nothing unusual in the street; in fact there was scarcely anything to be seen. A drunk went by, then two drunks, then three drunks, one of them holding his hat in his hand; then a mother with a child, and an old man pushing a cart loaded with coal; there were drunken footsteps and sounds of laughter answered by cries of rage; and all that attracted the eye was the glow of the neon sign, which seemed to outlast the light of the stars.

  “What do you see, Uncle?” the boy repeated, tugging Franciszek’s trousers.

  “The city,” Franciszek said. “The city. Brightly lighted white houses, people coming home from work, laughing; now I see some boys running after a ball; and there’s a little girl who just stumbled over her jump rope. Neon signs. And lights, lights, lights …” He stopped, and then asked the boy: “Where does the artist live here?”

  “The one that makes statues of the little grandfather?”

  “The little grandfather?”

  “The little grandfather with the mustache. Is that the one you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “The door at the end,” the boy said. And when Franciszek walked off, he cried after him, “Uncle, come and see me again.”

  “I’ll come,” Franciszek said. As he looked at the faintly gleaming bell, he thought: “Another door. What have I come for? What do I expect? You, behind this door, you can’t be different. And that’s what I have come for. I didn’t leave my room: I’ll just be looking into a mirror. I
’ll open the door to myself. Shall I turn back?” But he knocked. A man in a dressing gown examined him carefully before showing him in. They crossed a dark entrance hall, and suddenly Franciszek found himself within a circle of light—a bright, incredibly glaring light, which the other used in his workshop. He closed his eyes and mechanically sat down on the chair that had been pushed over to him. Only after a long while did he reopen his eyes, slowly, with an effort, like a man preparing to feel pain.

  “Coffee?” asked the painter.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Tea?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t put yourself out—” he began, but the painter interrupted him.

  “Stop,” he said, raising his hand imperiously. “Every word delays our joy. These are mere formalities: I have no tea or coffee anyway. We’ll drink vodka.”

  He left him in the painful glare, and after a while came back with a bottle and two glasses, which he put on the rough, paint-spattered table. He filled the glasses, humming a tune.

  “To your health,” he said, raising his glass.

  “Your health,” Franciszek said after him.

  They drank. The painter refilled their glasses.

  “To the underground,” Franciszek said, raising his glass. But the painter put his down. “Why the underground?” he asked. “What underground? Why the underground, rather, for instance, than the eternal beauty of pretty girls?”

  “To the underground,” Franciszek repeated. “We were both in the underground.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know when,” he said closing his eyes; the weird glare was splitting his head. “Can glare have a color?” he thought. “It can. White. This is a white glare.” He said, “During the war.”

  “Right,” the painter said, staring at the bottom of his glass. “Absolutely right. We are heroes, aren’t we? I forgot. I beg your pardon. Your health.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “And yours.”

  They lighted cigarettes; they looked at each other, incredulous, finding nothing, striking no spark; outside, the city whirred insistently, cats screamed in the corridor; boys’ voices chanted monotonously, “Unchain me, Uncle; unchain me, Auntie …” Suddenly their eyes met; and both smiled with relief.

  “Now I remember,” the painter said. “You’re Skinny, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Franciszek said, “and you’re Historian.”

  “They’ve certainly made a mess of us,” the painter said, smiling happily. “It’s just plain shit, isn’t it?”

  “Shit,” Franciszek said. “What have I come here for, for God’s sake? I wanted only one thing—I wanted you to be different from me, to think differently, speak differently, I don’t know; maybe I wanted to say something, and I wanted you to answer by spitting in my face …” Turning his empty glass in his hands, he said: “It might be a good thing to agree once and for all that the whole thing is senseless. In fact I can go now.”

  “Have you joined the secret police yet?”

  “No. And you?”

  “I haven’t either.”

  “So I can go now.”

  “As a matter of fact you can,” the painter said. “You can go and you can give up the idea of going anywhere else, no matter where. You won’t hear anything different. But you can try to fool yourself. You may succeed. That’s what everyone else is doing.”

  Franciszek looked about the studio and suddenly realized why there was such a glare. Everywhere busts of the Great Teacher were piled up; the snow-white plaster sharply reflected the light of the bulbs; identical mustachioed faces stared with dead eyes from every wall.

  “Christ,” Franciszek stammered. “Why have you got so many of them?”

  “Commissions,” the painter said. “Easy, clean work: plaster, water, a mold. They sell like hot cakes. I have a customer who runs a clandestine shooting gallery on the outskirts. We Poles always like to protest …” He hummed a tune, then said, sighing: “At first I modeled only the Prime Minister and St. Francis of Assisi. Easy work; they’re both bald. But no one can compete with him.” He picked up a cast. “Socialism’s pin-up Number One. Want one for a souvenir?”

  Franciszek did not answer. He sat motionless, his head between his fists. From every corner of the studio a dead face stared at him. Someone walked by in the corridor, accompanied by an imploring chorus of “Unchain me, Auntie.”

  “Do they always cry like that?”

  “No,” said the painter. “Only up to a certain age. Then they can move about safely.”

  “We called you Historian,” said Franciszek. “I remember that after the war you were going to paint everything we experienced—the woods, the fights, man triumphing over fear, and fear triumphing over man. Life and death. Even then you were making sketches.”

  “I don’t give a damn about what happened then,” the painter said. “I threw out my sketches. I don’t want to talk about it. Everything’s all right the way it is. So far as I’m concerned, it can go on like this forever. I understand too much to be interested in anything.”

  “It’s funny,” Franciszek said. “Man always dreamed of one thing—knowledge. That was the meaning of his eternal struggle. He dreamed of only one thing—to understand his times, his purpose, his place, his meaning, and his moment in eternity. And now that he has come closest to this understanding, knowledge is his main enemy. It’s better not to understand—knowledge is a disease.”

  “No,” the painter said. “It’s death. It’s worse than death. It’s an encore piece, an encore to something that didn’t exist, that couldn’t be taken seriously.” He waved the bottle joyfully. “How about a drink?”

  “Gladly,” Franciszek said. Again he turned the glass in his fingers and blinked; the faces on the walls were hurting his eyes. He looked at the bit of vodka running back and forth on the flat bottom of the glass. “That’s how the whole thing began,” he said. “Just like that.”

  “How what began?”

  “My case. My downfall.”

  “Just recently?”

  “Yes. But that’s beside the point. You aren’t an imbecile either, and yet you’re alive.”

  “I just don’t pay any attention to it,” the painter said, raising his glass. “Your health.”

  “And yours.” He drank and put down his glass. “Do you know what?” he said. “A few days ago I went to see Birch.”

  “Birch?” the painter asked, surprised. He smiled. “So far as I know he is now called Rocking Horse.”

  “Rocking Horse?”

  “Yes. He specializes in psychological questioning. It begins like this: he climbs on his desk and jumps on the prisoner’s ribs. That’s how he got the nickname. He hits the genitals with the butt of his gun. He organizes orgies and police courts. A real jokester. People shit with fear at the mere mention of his name.”

  “Nice,” Franciszek said. He smiled. “He told me such moving stories.”

  “That’s right,” the painter said. “There were stories all right. About that son of his, am I right?”

  “About his son, yes.”

  “Well, that’s fine. Another drink?”

  “Sure.”

  They drank. Again the children in the corridor responded to footsteps with an “Unchain me, Auntie.” Then a cat screamed. Then a dog growled. Then came the sound of heavy footsteps, and the children intoned: “Uncle, unchain us, just for a minute …”

  “How about coffee?” the painter asked after a while.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Tea?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself …”

  “No trouble at all,” the painter said. “All I have is vodka. For the last five years I haven’t taken a drop of water. My questions are just a way of talking; you have got to get used to them. Excuse me.” He rose, shuffled over to a corner of his enormous studio, and came back with a new bottle. The little boys outside, the cats, and the dog screamed in unison. The painter set the glasses down side by side and filled them as though
they were measuring cups—not a millimeter’s difference between them.

  “To the trees,” the painter said.

  Franciszek opened his eyes; for a moment he did not understand the glare or the other’s words. “To what trees?” he said.

  “The woods, the underground. We fought together in the woods,” the painter explained impatiently. “We’re heroes, aren’t we? We made a revolution; we were partisan fighters. Have you forgotten?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  “Does all that count?”

  “Alas. Idiots and criminals are given no credit. Nor heroes. Do you know who we are?”

  “No. And you?”

  “I don’t either. But I’m not interested any more. I’m a corpse. Like you. Like Communism. And that’s all. I often think of Hitler. What did he accomplish, when all is said and done? Yes, he went to a great deal of trouble; but in the end, what did he achieve? He murdered more people than any decent man murders in his mind. He tried to be consistent, and he succeeded as far as his stupidity would let him. But in the end he failed like every other Savior. That’s all. The Great Teacher accomplished far greater things. He built a graveyard. From now on, future generations will be born and live in graveyards, Apparently people march toward life, toward the sun, through graves. I stick it all up my ass …” He suddenly leaned toward Franciszek and seized his wrist with terrible strength. “Tell me,” he hissed, “are you with the secret police, or not?”

  “Not yet. And you?”

  “Not yet, either. I’ll tell you myself when I am.”

  “So there’s nothing to be done?”

  “Nothing. Communism ought to be saved from Communism. But people won’t go without an idea, never. It would be easy to die if this were mankind’s last great myth. To die, to commit the greatest crimes, so that people should never again believe in any sun. But it’s no use. After a while some new madman will come along; he’ll get hold of an icon and run through the city carrying it …” He gave a short laugh. “If I were born again,” he said, “and if I wanted to take revenge on people, I’d create a new ideology for them. To lead crowds to the sunny days of the future—that’s the biggest joke of all.”