But Piątek doesn’t concern himself with history. The important thing is the land. Wars have rolled across the surface of the land for centuries. The land throbs with hooves, crunches with tank treads, and bends under blows from bombs. But it brings forth, the ears of grain multiply, it yields crops. Wars pass, but the juices always circulate in the soil. The ground accepts warm rain and stinking fertilizer, powdery phosphates and clotting blood. It accepts everything, and always gives back only one thing: grain. In the face of that process of eternal transmutation and fructification that lets Piątek live, it doesn’t matter where the battles are fought. When and how. The earth will still yield crops. Piątek will still harvest them.
The Fifth Column on the March
They themselves told how it came about. They said it started with time and music. The time and the music were together. The music lasted in time for an hour, and they knew that their time had come.
They heard a familiar melody. First, they heard distant, shrill tones, and then came lower, harsh notes borne on the breeze and space. They heard singing, the patter of the snare drum, and orders sharply given. They could make out the howl of tanks, the bass drums of cannon, and a cacophony of motorcycles. Groans and shouts rang out. The water rang in the bucket. They were thirsty, and so they had to drink. They banged on the door with a rifle butt, panted, and finally broke out laughing. Laughter and panting are their speech. They hear the commotion. The music rises and fills the room, the porch, and the yard, it rolls along the cobblestone street and penetrates the forest. No one can hear it, except for them. Because they have the Blutinstinkt.
‘Blutinstinkt?’ I asked. ‘What’s Blut?’
‘Blood. Blut is blood,’ someone said from off to the side.
So it was like this: two toads were lying motionless. Somebody applied current to their bodies. They jerked, and the blood moved in their calcified veins. That blood went to their brains and filled the grey cells sensitive to music. To that one kind of music that you can hear, experience, and remember if you have the Blutinstinkt. And they have it. That’s why the one tells the other:
‘It’s the real thing, Margot.’
‘Yes,’ Margot replied. ‘It’s our music and our time has come.’
There are few words in this conversation and you can count them all on your fingers. But the blood is flowing to their brains and the grey cells are filling with the patter of snare drums. Some grey cells hear it, and others think about it. The head cannot sleep. Two heads keep a vigil that night and their gums gnaw the manna of the rosary. Our Lord, out of your magnanimity, let the dawn come. And so the dawn comes. It is 11 September 1961. It’s Monday.
The two women escape from the old people’s home in Szczytno.
Nobody sees them.
Augusta is older and Margot is younger. Augusta can’t stand up straight and so she leans on Margot so that they both can walk with their heads up. Augusta often gets short of breath, so she stops. She hears the music again, but she’s out of breath. Then she stops and Augusta waits for that droplet of energy that gives her the impetus for ten more metres. Or for twenty if it’s really good.
Augusta Bruzius, born 1876. ‘Mister,’ she says, ‘look at me. My mind is clear, my insides are fine. My lungs and heart are in great shape. And she’s younger, but she has Rheumatismus.’
That one, Margot, is her daughter. Augusta gave birth to her in 1903. Margot has an excellent education. For ten years, she worked at the courthouse. ‘Did she prosecute Poles?’ I ask. ‘She didn’t prosecute anybody. She was just a stenographer.’
A drop of energy coalesces somewhere in the healthy insides of Augusta, so they keep going. By noon they’re at the train station. They buy tickets.
‘Two tickets for Taubus,’ says Augusta.
‘That cashier, she gave us such a look. She had no idea where Taubus is. Margot had to tell her that we want to go to Olecko. And then she looked at how green the coins were. It was Schimmel, mould. I’d been saving them ten years for that ticket to Taubus.’
So they had their tickets and they rode to Olecko. The beautiful Mazurian countryside moved outside the train carriage windows in the smoke of rain and fog. There were a lot of people on the train, a lot of people at the stations and on the roads. What could they know about the Blutinstinkt? It had nothing to do with them. Only the two women had everything in their blood that they needed to hear the music. That was why the one said to the other: ‘It’s the real thing.’
And the other one answered: ‘Yes.’
Five words you can count on your fingers. But enough to make sure. In their brain cells, the snare drums patter. The howl of tanks and the whine of engines drill into their brains until it hurts. The water rings in the bucket. They’re thirsty, they need something to drink. Two old ladies are on their way to grab some Poles by the throat. Two old ladies on the train to Olecko. They need help, they need protection. Grey-haired, hunched-over ladies on the road. Could one of you gentlemen give us your seat? Close the window? Open’s OK. Do you ladies have far to go? ‘To Taubus,’ says Margot. ‘To Olecko,’ Augusta explains. Is it a family visit?
They don’t say anything. What’s the use of saying they’re going to get their two houses back? Those houses, Augusta tells us later, were left by her husband, Bruzius, the leading pork-butcher in Taubus. They had ninety voloks of land. A hundred Polish farmhands worked there. Her husband was driving a jog cart with two horses once, and he struck a high stone. Her husband fell between those horses and died. Her husband left her the land, the houses, the farmhands, and Margot. The Polish state took away the land and the houses. The farmhands left on their own. Margot remained. She and Augusta wanted to go to Essen at the time of the transport, but Margot came down with that Rheumatismus. They were in the hospital in Szczytno for a long time. Then they were in the old people’s home. It’s noisy all the time in the old people’s home. It was noisy that Sunday, too, but then it all faded away and they could hear those sounds.
‘It’s the real thing,’ Augusta said.
‘Yes,’ Margot retorted. ‘It’s our music and our time has come.’
They set out into Olecko. From the station, they walked to the town square. Those houses stood on the square. Big townhouses. All at once, something was wrong: the music didn’t follow them into town. No patter of snare drums and no bass drums of cannons. Olecko was quiet, drizzly, drowsy. People were living here the way they do all over the world. They were bustling over their minor affairs, trying to make a little money. Farmers were buying nails, children coming home from school, municipal clerks sipping cold, weak tea. It didn’t sound like a song. It wasn’t any kind of music at all.
Augusta and Margot knocked on the door. Later they would say that a boy opened the door. He thought they were begging and he said: I don’t have any small change. He pointed to the next door. So they went from door to door, two grey-haired women who needed help and protection. At every door, they recited their formula. This is Germany now and you have to leave. You get out of here because my sons are coming. They said it in German and the people didn’t understand. Some of the people winked at their neighbours – they’re nuts. That’s how it often is with people. They don’t know how to hear somebody out. They catch ten words but don’t wait for the full stop. A sentence broken off in the middle sounds crazy. And so they say: Nuts.
But they weren’t nuts. I talked with them for a long time. Augusta was right – her mind was clear. All they did was go to the common room in Szczytno in the evening, where there was a powerful new radio. They spun the dial in the ether. The magical eye blinked nervously. The old ladies caught Adenauer. They pressed their ears to the speaker and the snare drums pattered in their brain cells.
They spent three days in Olecko. The music never came, and they never found those voloks or the Polish farmhands. They went to the People’s Council to complain. The people there also thought they were nuts. They told them to go back to Szczytno. They refused, they wanted to be close to O
lecko. They were given money to buy tickets and they travelled to Nowa Wieś near Ełk. There’s an old people’s home there just like the one in Szczytno, but it’s a hundred kilometres closer to the place where Herr Bruzius, the biggest pork-butcher in Taubus, employed a hundred Polish farmhands.
It was evening, and rain and cold harried the land. They came into the dining room, dragging a trail of water, dusk, humility and fatigue. We sat on a bench with the director.
‘Herr Führer …’ Margot began.
‘I don’t understand that!’ shouted the director. ‘Speak Polish!’
Margot withdrew into herself. She didn’t want to talk. As long as we were there she didn’t say a word in Polish. But Augusta spoke: ‘We travelled to Olecko because we thought it was already Germany, and then they told us that it was Poland. I wanted to take back my houses so I could welcome my sons there.’
‘What sons?’ I asked.
Well, she had four sons. One son on the Ukrainian front. A second son on the Syrian front. Those two sons stayed on those fronts. But the other sons are in West Germany. They’re there, those sons. They’re going to come here to make peace. They’re going to come from America. Those sons, here.
The scraggly spiders of her words crept around my brain. I looked at her. She was eighty-five, but if she got it into her mind to dance the Wienerblut, she’d kick up the dust on Olecko town square. Margot was less lively. Hunched over, toothless, her lips sagged into her gullet. She had bulging eyes and she had rimless lenses tied in her hair with strings.
‘Where are your things?’ asked the director.
They had left everything in Szczytno. They didn’t have time to take anything, because they were in a hurry to get to Olecko before those two sons, who were supposed to be coming from America, got there. They didn’t need anything. They only wanted something to eat and a place to sleep, and they would leave for Olecko the next morning because their time might come tomorrow. And maybe there would be that music to fill the time.
We weren’t alone, because in the meantime people had started coming in and were straining to hear. They were elderly people, the residents of this home. They had withered faces, shrunken bodies, and minds afflicted with sclerosis. They spent their days sitting and watching the road where no one ever came. Or they looked at each other, and then they started crying. They were going deaf and blind, losing their senses of taste and smell. But they still remembered one thing or another. The women could still enunciate the names of their sons who had been killed, and the men recalled the addresses of houses that had been blasted away by shells. They were lonely and helpless here, because that was what the war had done to them. War stalked often over this land where it had been given them to live, have children, labour and die. They all had accounts that they would like to present to those musicians. Each of them had a score to settle with those players who made such splendid music. These old people knew that the two women were not nuts. They knew: two toads had been lying motionless, and someone applied current to their bodies. They jerked, and the blood flowed in their calcified veins. That blood went to their brains, and the patter of snare drums filled their grey cells.
That’s what it was, just like that. And that’s why the old man standing at the head of the crowd said: ‘Chase them out!’
And others repeated after him: ‘That’s right, chase them out!’
Something had returned, some evil, accursed fragment of the past had returned and brought the blood back to the pale faces of the old people, which had long ago dried up, which had long ago ceased to express anything. But they didn’t have the strength to move. They stood crowded together like that, casting their judgement from their toothless jaws, their curses, their numb despair. But perhaps it wasn’t a lack of strength, only some kind of solidarity of old age, the instinctive community of a world receding into the dust, blind, dull and deaf, but still aware or at least intuiting that they couldn’t expel these old women into the rain and cold, at night.
So they stayed there.
The director said that he would order a car the next day, and they would be taken to Szczytno. They didn’t say anything. They ate their fill and went to sleep, and in the wet dawn they ran away, the one leaning on the other, vigorous and well rested, with that patter of the snare drums in their grey cells.
An Advertisement for Toothpaste
The sax wailed piercingly and Marian Jesion shouted: ‘Let’s go, boys.’ On the forest road through the limitless darkness Jesion’s grandmother sighed a tremulous whisper: ‘Oh God.’ Those three voices, raised simultaneously but so clearly out of step, weigh like a stone on the village of Pratki in Ełk county.
The girls from Pratki tell me that it was a lovely dance. The band came all the way from Olsztyn. Two people appeared with the band: a fantastic entertainer and a singer with fashionably teased hair, except that she was a bit too much on the scrawny side. The village hall had been swept and all the windows washed. The special effects came out great: red and blue light, filtered through rustling fronds of crepe paper, filled the hall. On the right wall, as seen from the door, it was more blue, whereas intense red flamed on the left. The girls stood on the blue side and the boys on the red side. They were divided by the multicoloured expanse of the village hall with the bandstand pinned in the middle like a brooch, but of course they could see each other clearly. There are fifteen girls in the village, and there are four boys. The girls saw how those boys stood stiffly in the romantic black of their suits, with plastic ties on elastic bands under their chins, the brilliantined masters of the world in wafts of Derby Eau de Cologne (produced by Lechia in Poznań). The boys looked pensively in the direction of the girls, evaluating the quality of their high heels, nylon dresses and Czech jewellery, as they mulled over all-too-predictable plans to be implemented later.
The girls told me that the saxophonist from Olsztyn, known throughout the province, started off by playing the hit of the season, titled ‘Twenty-Four Thousand Kisses’. That hit is dazzling, and at the same time shocking. On hearing it, Marian Jesion shouted: ‘Let’s go, boys.’
But no one even moved a muscle.
A tension-filled hush descended.
The four boys glowed amaranthine on the left-hand side of the village hall, and the fifteen girls stood in shades of blue to the right. The cause of that tension-filled hush, into which the saxophonist known throughout the province wailed penetratingly, was obvious. It resulted from arithmetic. 15 to 4 is a good score in team handball, but it represents an atrocious disproportion at such an exceptionally glittering dance party (band from Olsztyn, great special effects).
The hush came from the red side, concentrating on making their choices, and emanated from the blue side, whose hope was as soundless as the silence of the stars. They all knew how many things in the village would depend on what happened in a moment, and so no one had any desire to make an ill-considered move. At last, the four on the left crossed over and enunciated the traditional formula to four of the ones on the blue side:
‘Let’s waltz, all right?’
The phrase ‘all right’ is absolutely rhetorical in nature here, added exclusively in order to lend the sentence a fluid cadence like something out of Sienkiewicz. If any of the girls replied: ‘No’, she would spend the rest of her days in a dubious state of spinsterhood. Therefore, the four from the blue side responded: ‘Sure’, and the couples moved into the centre. The saxophonist known throughout the province worked the gilded valves of his instrument and Marian Jesion shouted something in a loud voice. The saxophonist and his instrument had to play loudly enough to drown out the trembling whisper of Jesion’s grandmother, who stood on the road amid the limitless darkness asking ‘Oh Lord, why did he do this to me?’
The four couples performed their first turns. They were precisely calculated according to Euclidian and formalistic principles, like the timeless motions of the planets or the course of Sputniks around the earth. Those who remained on the blue side looked on with a mix
of envy and criticism. Some of them deluded themselves that the soldiers would still show up. The soldiers came from Ełk – always the same ones. They were brought here by skinny, dark-haired Kazik, the corporal in charge of cultural affairs. Kazik had read many books and watched 700 movies. He entered every film in a notebook and totalled them up every quarter. By the end of his service, he might hit 800. Kazik, however, is treacherous, because he tells every girl the same thing. ‘What does he say?’ I ask.
They laugh, until one of them finally repeats it: ‘Girl, I will drink delight from every cell of your body.’
He’s from Warsaw, that Kazik, which is why he’s such an intellectual. Soldiers are dangerous because they get carried away. They are on a pass that’s good until ten o’clock and they want to close the deal in time. They have no regard for contemplation, and they dictate the tempo from the start. In such haste, a girl can forget herself, and after that nothing remains but death.
‘What do you mean, death?’ I ask.
‘Really. What else is left for her? Only killing herself. The ones from Pratki are better, but even they fidget around too much.’
The saxophone croaked out the last bar of the hit and the couples broke off their geometrical evolutions. The four boys standing against the wall went out behind the village hall, where they retrieved a flask hidden under a juniper bush. They drained it. The girls tell me that such is the custom and it’s better that way, because it livens them up. Too much isn’t good, but a little bit is good. The boys returned to the concrete-floored village hall and by their faces it looked like they had been under some enormous strain. In the hearts of the girls there again arose a hope as soundless as the silence of the stars.
Keeping pace with the latest achievements, the band known throughout the province launched into ‘Diana’, and the scarlet veins stood out on the skinny neck of the scrawny singer. The next four girls were led from the wall into the centre, where the red blended with the blue and settled into a respectable purple. Again the couples began absorbedly describing circles on the village-hall concrete to the beat of the song that the scrawny singer was enthusiastically belting out.
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