We common soldiers, armed with shovels and rifles, wanted to find our place in this new world, the world of total danger, in the world of a thousand nuclear bombs, electronic anti-aircraft artillery and remotely guided missiles.
In the meantime we dug our trenches. And though it might not have been the right thing to do, we soon went back to our regular, everyday thoughts – about peace, not war.
Sometimes the lieutenant led us through the forest for hours. He deliberately strayed along the fire breaks and we, using a map, had to locate the place where he ordered a halt. They called it ‘finding the place where you’re standing’. Your place on earth. It was an easy enough exercise, we had precise maps, and we had learned how to do it.
During this activity my neighbour in the ranks, Grzywacz, spoke up: ‘See how easy it is. I draw three lines and their intersection is the desired point. Here I am. In this corner of the globe stands Private Kazimierz Grzywacz. He has found his place in the world. Lord, if only it was like that in life. That easy to find a place for yourself in life.’
With that sigh, he bared his secret. He had volunteered for the army. ‘They’ll get me into shape here,’ he promised himself.
That’s what he needed. He lived in Szymborz, a small Silesian town. He finished school and had a short stint at some technical school, but had to drop out to take a job and help his mother. He started in a stone quarry, but it soon closed down. He moved on to a match factory, but irritated the foreman and was fired. He tried to set himself up in Wrocław, but it didn’t work out. His life, the life of Grzywacz, was a failure. No stabilization and no normalization. People climb to the top or settle for something small but stable; he, on the other hand, was nowhere. He was neither a hooligan nor an enthusiastic gadabout. Just unlucky, just a washout. At some point he had gone off course and couldn’t get back on track.
Grzywacz liked it in the army. Somebody thought about him, gave him things to do, and looked after his stomach. But above all, Grzywacz’s previously undefined existence took on form. He stopped worrying. He got rid of the sense of uncertainty that had filled him and ruined all his joys.
By nature he is a doer in desperate search of a boss. He doesn’t know how to make decisions, choose, take risks – at such moments he looks around for someone to do it for him. Having found that person, he is as obedient as a dog and boundlessly devoted. He reacts to orders instinctively and goes into action unthinkingly. Nevertheless, he is continually in need of an external stimulus to motivate him. Otherwise, he loses his equilibrium and goes around despondent. Because of these character traits, Grzywacz is a constant source of the conflicts that the platoon occasionally experiences. People here retained a dose of scepticism carried over from civilian life, a certain restraint and even something like reserve – do what you must, but why exceed the quota? The execution of orders was not accompanied by that internal tension that prompts people to act with the utmost zeal. Standing out in a positive way was seen in some quarters as an irrefutable sign of sycophancy, and standing out in a negative way as haplessness and incompetence. According to these philosophers, the correct thing was to maintain a sense of proportion, not put oneself forward, and take advantage of that anonymity conferred by a uniform and a cap pulled down over one’s eyes.
Grzywacz went too far. When we were practising in skirmishing formation, he would take the lead and the panting, worn-out men would curse him because they had to speed up. He performed the chores involved in barracks duty so quickly and with such exactitude that our own efforts looked poor, if not disgraceful. The philosophers rebuked the fanatic. ‘What’s the hurry,’ they asked, tapping themselves on the forehead. They didn’t want to see that Grzywacz had at last found his calling, his element. That he had come alive, gained self-confidence, and felt solid ground under his feet. The philosophers were bilious, and they found the joys of life – so beautiful and alluring – distasteful. In contrast to Grzywacz, they held up Hryńcia as an example.
We had to calculate the angle at which the ridge we were standing on sloped down in relation to ground level. There is a formula for that angle, and the whole problem can be solved in half a minute. The lieutenant gave us three minutes and, of course, we finished before that. But all that Hryńcia managed to do was to sign the paper. In the blank place where the calculation should have been, the lieutenant gave us 2 marks out of 5.
‘Where were you raised, Hryńcia?’ he asks.
‘In the wilderness, sir.’
Laughter and an exchange of meaningful glances. But it’s the truth. Hryńcia is from Białowieża. In a hamlet lost in the trackless country, he farms a plot of land and distils homebrew. He’s always inviting us for that homebrew. We have to go there on the spot, because Hryńcia’s product tastes best when fresh. He once had a barrel of mash break open. Two wolves lapped up the deadly slurry and fell dead. He got 2,000 from the government for them. So he also has income on the side. Hryńcia is a scammer among scammers, but in the peasant style, not the Warsaw one. This is why his cunning is quiet, intuitive, unostentatious, and not a pose. All Hryńcia’s efforts revolve around getting out of the army and back to the hamlet.
‘The hay’s growing there with no one to gather it, sir. Right now the ground’s frozen and you can cart it out, because it grows in a marshy meadow. When it’s warm, you can’t drive a cart in there.’
All his badgering is in vain – the lieutenant can’t discharge anyone.
‘What am I doing here, sir?’ Hryńcia pleads. ‘I’m too stupid for this learning. I’m illiterate. I had three years of schooling before the war, but what do I know how to do?’
He doesn’t know how to do anything. He can barely sign his name, and he can’t read a newspaper. With the doctor, he tries to feign ear trouble. ‘When they say: “Here you are”, you can hear it, but when they say: “Give it to me”, you can’t,’ the doctor laughs. Hryńcia is dull, but, most of all, he’s not interested in learning anything. When it’s time to study and everybody pores over their notes, he opens his exercise book to a blank page and sits there. He snoozes or his mind wanders. ‘Why aren’t you studying?’ we ask. ‘It’s all beyond me,’ he answers. At the blackboard, he pretends to be a total blockhead.
‘Draw angle A,’ says the lieutenant. Hryńcia stands there. ‘Why aren’t you drawing it?’
‘Do you think I know what that angle is?’
After a certain amount of time, he achieves his aim. They stop asking him questions, they stop bothering him. Everybody knows – a peasant from the wilderness, illiterate, what do they want from him?
From then on, he has a great existence. In the middle of the twentieth century, which is imbuing life with increasingly head-spinning technology and advancing the scope of knowledge, the century of sputnik, television and cybernetics, Hryńcia is winning by going against the universal trend. He doesn’t want to take part in it. He doesn’t even want to know what it’s about. He almost closes his eyes, he almost stops his ears. He’s a little bit afraid of one thing – these novelties are beguiling. Once people see them, life in his village – with no lights, with no tractor, with five children in a single room – will start to seem confining and become unbearable. Better not to get infected with these city things. Hryńcia wants to go back to his land, to the plough and the homebrew, to that hay growing in the marshy meadow that could be gathered now when the ground’s frozen, because when the warm weather comes you can’t drive a cart in there, and it rots.
Grzywacz and Hryńcia were the extremes of the platoon, the two poles who between them embraced all the rest, the average ones. Not that there were no shades of grey. In the army, individual character defines itself quickly. There are so many situations that verify a man’s worth.
When we left the barracks for good, it seemed to us that we would never go back there, not even in our minds, and that the end of our friendship was irrevocable. But no! We hang on to each other’s addresses, we remember names, and it happens that we spot each other’s faces i
n the crowd. We start talking. Then the streets, the buildings, and the passers-by fade away and the rustling of the trees drowns out the noise of the city. Once again there’s the forest, the immeasurable forest without end, with no way out, a green world, the bracing pine fragrance, the sap circulating in the tree trunks, the treacherous forking roots – and us, lost and silent, with rifles in the crooks of our arms.
The Stiff
The truck is racing through the dusk, its headlamps, like a pair of eyes, searching for the finish line. It’s close: Jeziorany, twenty kilometres. Another half-hour and we’ll be there. The truck is pushing hard, but it’s touch and go. The old machine wasn’t meant for such a long haul.
On the flatbed lies a coffin.
Atop the box is a garland of haggard angels. It’s worst on bends: the box slides and threatens to crush the legs of those sitting on the side rails.
The road bends into blind curves, climbing. The engine howls, rises a few notes, hiccups, chokes, and stops. Another breakdown. A smeared figure alights from the cab. That’s Zieja, the driver. He crawls under the truck, looking for the damage. Hidden underneath, he swears at the perverse world. He spits when hot grease drips onto his face. Finally he drags himself out into the middle of the road and brushes off his clothes. ‘Kaput,’ he says. ‘It won’t start. You can smoke.’
To hell with smoking. We feel like crying.
Just two days ago I was in Silesia at the Aleksandra-Maria coal mine. The story called for an interview with the director of the workers’ dormitory. I found him in his office explaining something to six stocky youngsters. And I listened in.
This was the problem. During blasting, a block of coal had fallen and crushed a miner. They managed to dig out the body, but it was badly smashed. No one had known the dead man well. He had been working in the mine for barely two weeks. His identity was established. Name: Stefan Kanik. Age: eighteen. His father lived in Jeziorany, in Mazuria. The management contacted the local authorities there by telephone. It turned out that the father was paralysed and could not travel to the funeral. The Jeziorany authorities asked if the remains couldn’t be transported to the home town. The management agreed, provided a truck, and assigned the director of the workers’ dormitory to find six people to escort the coffin.
These are the ones who have been summoned.
Five agree, one refuses. He doesn’t want to lose any overtime. So there’s a gap.
Can I go as the sixth?
The director shakes his head: a reporter as a pallbearer? A hell of a mess.
This empty road, this wreck of a truck, this air without a wisp of breeze.
This coffin.
Zieja wipes his oily hands with a rag. ‘So what next?’ he asks. ‘We were supposed to be there this evening.’
We are stretched out on the edge of a ditch, on grass coated with a patina of dust. Our backs ache, our legs hurt, our eyes sting. Sleep, uninvited, introduces itself: warm, companionable, ingratiating.
‘We’ll sleep, boys,’ Wiśnia says weakly, and curls up into a ball.
‘And so?’ Zieja says, surprised. ‘Are we just going to go to sleep? But what about that other one?’
He shouldn’t have mentioned it. Embarrassed by the question, sleep becomes awkward, backs away. We lie there in the torment of our fatigue, and now we are also anxious and uncertain, staring dully into a sky where a silver school of stars is swimming. We have to make up our minds.
Woś says: ‘Let’s stay here till morning. In the morning one of us can go into town and borrow a tractor. There’s no need to hurry. This isn’t a bakery.’
Jacek says: ‘We can’t wait till morning. It would be better to get this over with quickly, as quickly as possible.’
Kotarski says: ‘You know, what if we just picked him up and carried him? He was a little guy, and a good bit of him is still underneath that block of coal. It’s not much of a load. The job will be done by noon.’
It’s a crazy idea, but it’s one everyone likes. Put your shoulder to the wheel. It’s early evening, and there aren’t more than fifteen kilometres to go. We’ll make it for sure. Besides, there’s something else. Crouching on the edge of the ditch, having overcome the first temptation of sleep, more and more we feel that with this coffin literally hanging above our heads we are keeping a vigil, here in the deep darkness, amid shadows and bushes and the silent, deaf horizon: the tension of waiting for the dawn would be unbearable. It would be better to go, better to lug him! Take some sort of action, move, talk, vanquish the silence emanating from the black box, prove to the world and ourselves, and above all to ourselves, that we belong to the realm of the living – in which he, nailed in, the stiff, is an intruder, an alien, a creature resembling nothing at all.
At the same time we find ourselves looking upon the task ahead – this arduous carrying – as a sort of offering to be presented to the deceased, so that he will leave us in peace, freeing us of his insistent, cruel, and stubborn presence.
This march with the coffin on our backs has got off to a rough start. Seen from this viewpoint, the world has shrivelled to a small segment: the pendulum legs of the man ahead, a black slice of ground, the pendulum of your own legs. With his vision confined to this meagre prospect, a man instinctively summons imagination to his aid. Yes, the body may be bound, but the mind remains free.
‘Anybody that came along now and ran into us would sure make tracks.’
‘Know what? The moment he starts moving, we drop him and take off.’
‘I just hope it doesn’t rain. If he gets waterlogged, he’ll be heavy.’
But there is no sign of rain. The evening is warm and the enormous, clear sky soars above an earth that is asleep now except for the sound of the crickets and the rhythmic tramping of our steps.
‘Seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-five’ – Kostarski is counting. At 200 steps, we change. Three move to the left, three to the right. Then the other way around. The edge of the coffin, hard and sharp, digs into our shoulders. We turn off the paved road onto a forest track, taking a short cut that passes near the shore of the lake. After an hour we haven’t done more than three kilometres.
‘Why is it,’ Wiśnia wonders, ‘that someone dies and instead of being buried in the ground he hangs around and wears everybody else out? Not only that. They all wear themselves out just so that he can hang around. Why?’
‘I read somewhere,’ Jacek says, ‘that in the war, when the snow melted on the Russian battlefields, the hands of the dead would start to show, sticking straight up. You’d be going along the road and all you’d see would be the snow and these hands. Can you imagine, nothing else? A man, when he’s finished, doesn’t want to drop out of sight. It’s people who hide him from their sight. To be left in peace, they hide him. He won’t go on his own.’
‘Just like this one of ours,’ says Woś. ‘He’d follow us round the world. All we have to do is take him along. I think we could even get used to it.’
‘Why not?’ Gruber quips from the back of the coffin. ‘Everyone’s always bearing some burden. A career for one, rabbits for another, a wife for a third. So why shouldn’t we have him?’
‘Don’t speak ill of him, or he’ll kick you in the ear,’ Woś warns.
‘He’s not dangerous,’ Gruber says softly. ‘He’s behaved himself so far. He must have been OK.’
But in fact we don’t know what he was like. None of us ever laid eyes on him. Stefan Kanik, eighteen, died in an accident. That’s all. Now we can add that he weighed around sixty kilos. A young, slender boy. The rest is a mystery, a guess. And now this is the riddle that has taken on such an unseen and unknown shape, this alien, this stiff, ruling six living men, monopolizing their thoughts, wearing out their bodies, and, in cold, impenetrable silence, accepting their tribute of renunciation, submission, and voluntary consent to such an oddly formed destiny.
‘If he was a good guy, then you don’t mind lugging him,’ says Woś, ‘but if he was a son of a bitch, into the water w
ith him.’
What was he like? Can you establish such facts? Yes, certainly! We’ve been lugging him for about five kilometres and we’ve poured out a barrel of sweat. Haven’t we invested a great deal of labour, of nerves, of our own peace of mind, into this remnant? This effort, a part of ourselves, passes on to the stiff, raises his worth in our eyes, unites us with him, our brother across the barrier between life and death. The feeling of mutual strangeness dwindles. He has become ours. We won’t plop him into the water. Sentenced to a burden we feel increasingly keenly, we will fulfil, to the very end, our mission.
The forest ends at the edge of the lake. There is a little clearing. Woś calls for a rest and starts to make a bonfire.
The flame shoots up immediately, impudent and playful. We settle down in a circle and pull off our shirts, now wet and sour-smelling. In the wavering, pulsating glow we can see each other’s sweating faces, glistening torsos and red, swollen shoulders. The heat spreads from the bonfire in concentric waves. We have to back away. Now the coffin is closest to the fire.
‘We’d better move that piece of furniture before it starts to roast and begins stinking,’ Woś says.
We pull the coffin back, push it into the bushes, where Pluta breaks off some branches and covers it up.
We sit down around the fire. We are still breathing heavily, fighting sleep and a feeling of unease, baking ourselves in the warmth and revelling in light miraculously conjured from the darkness. We begin to fall into a state of inertia, abandonment, numbness. The night has imprisoned us in a cell shut off from the world, from other beings, from hope.
Just at that moment we hear Wiśnia’s high, terrifying whisper: ‘Quiet. Something’s coming!’
A sudden, unbearable spasm of terror. Icy pins stab into our backs. Against our will, we glance towards the bushes, in the direction of the coffin. Jacek can’t take it: he presses his head into the grass and, exhausted, sleep-starved, suddenly afraid, he begins to weep. This brings us all to our senses. Woś comes to himself first and falls upon Jacek, pulling at him and then pummelling him. He beats him fiercely, until the boy’s weeping turns to groans, to a low, drawn-out sigh. Woś backs off at last, leans on a stump, and ties his shoe.
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