ANDRZEJ STASIUK

TALES OF GALICIA

translated from the Polish

b y M a r g a r i t a N a f p a k t i t i s

T W I S T E D S P O O N P R E S S • P R A G U E • 2 0 0 3

Copyright © 1995, 2003 by Andrzej StasiukTranslation copyright © 2003 by Margarita Nafpaktitis

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. This book, or parts thereof, may not be

used or reproduced in any form, except in the context of reviews,without written permission from the publisher.

isbn 80-86264-05-x

C O N T E N T S

Józek / 9

W∏adek / 18

Blacksmith Kruk / 25

Janek / 32

Place / 42

KoÊciejny / 51

Lewandowski / 57

The Pub / 64

Grandma / 73

The Red-Haired Sergeant / 80

Night / 88

MaryÊka / 97

Confession / 106

The Second Night / 114

The End / 128

Translator’s Note / 133

Notes to the Text / 138

JÓZEK

He was some forty years old, with a fox’s sly face and a body skinnyas a rail. The last tractor driver on the state collective farm, thepgr, because he was driving the last tractor, and there wouldn’tbe any more new ones. Ever. But Józek didn’t know that word,because it belonged to the realm of the imagination. And he wastrying just like he’d always done, in motionless time, to breathe alittle life into the iron corpse. His tractor was still running, but onlybecause Józek knew what to “borrow” from whom.

“So what does he need a generator for anyway, since he doesn’teven know how to drive?” he muttered to himself in the Egyptiandarkness, using his #19 wrench as skillfully as a Chinese man wouldchopsticks. After a second, he put his own piece of scrap iron wherethe other generator had been, smeared the unscrewed bolts withmud, and no one would even notice.

His figure was the only thing moving across the landscape ofthe expiring world, among the remains of machines and theirimmobilized mechanisms, between the rust-eaten sowing-machinesand the cold and silent smithy. A little over forty, he was alreadyold. He remembered the days of paradise.

“You there! Bring that cement, take that wool, then head outagain for manure and for oil.” The customers would even get intofist fights, because back then, a private shop owner could get a kickin the ass and not a sack of cement. And everybody fixed the bills.The boss couldn’t even do anything about it if he didn’t catchthem red-handed. Fire them? Who else would come to work forhim out here in the backwoods? But now . . .

He waved his hand, jumped into the worn-out seat and left. Asinnocent as an angel, like a child, like a creature from the time whenGod had only begun to contemplate the notion of sin.

People who have been disinherited live in the present. If theypossess any kind of past, then it is a memory just as uncertain asthe future.

He came from somewhere in the neighborhood of Limanowa.Not by himself. His parents brought him when he was just a fewyears old. He could look around in this complete desolation andremember the creation of the world. The reality of the pgr wasa universe unto itself. This was where a person comes into thisworld, lives and dies. No eight hours in a factory, riding the tram,and then the privacy of home. The same faces at work, the sameones on the muddy road that was their place for strolling, shop-ping, meeting and brawling. Nobody came, sometimes somebodyleft. Even the military barracks were something transitory, for

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waiting out times of peace.

What kind of consciousness was bestowed upon the first peo-ple? No doubt it was inversely proportional to their freedom. Thissubordination, more than any other, brings us nearer to animals.

Once on the way to the pub, I asked why he had that handycrowbar up his sleeve. “I don’t know everyone there. I don’t knowwho’s one of us and who’s an enemy.”

Once I found him in a ditch. Just sleeping in his tractor over-turned on its side. Generally speaking, he often slept whereversleep found him.

And so, he was completely faithful to his senses and to wariness,to rapid reasoning for the moment’s advantage. “When you’re eat-ing, then eat. When you’re drinking, then drink.” Those are thekind of instructions Zen masters give to adepts. In all likelihood,they would make Józek burst into hearty laughter. Masters wasteso much time on the discovery of basic truths. But even he wouldengage in reflection, if it could bring him solace.

One day I ran into him in the forest. He was sitting in his trac-tor, pressing the gas pedal to the floor and slowly sinking into theswamp. He believed with drunken optimism that he would pull him-self out of the oozing muck, even though the mud had alreadyflowed in as high as the tops of his rubber boots. “Take it easy.That’s the way life is,” he repeated over and over, “Sometimesyou get lucky, and sometimes you don’t.”

There is no doubt that uncomplicated minds are much bettersuited to the task of interpreting reality. The pgr civitas had beenfounded on the principles of collectivity. Availing himself ofOckham’s razor, Józek learned the ultimate lesson from the

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formula, “to each according to his needs, from each according tohis abilities.” For all intents and purposes, this postulate did notset any limits. Because, after all, a person’s abilities were hard toqualify. They presented themselves as the circumstances requiredand reason demanded. Not to mention a person’s needs, with rootsembedded in the dark and irrational will.

And so he gave as much as he wanted and took as much as hecould, accommodating his rational philosophy to man’s impulsivenature.

I have a vague suspicion that Józek’s pgr was a remote branchof a system that fell apart for reasons other than the resistance of afew people who exalted virtue, truth and integrity. Certainly, thosevalues are beautiful, but too abstract and inadequate to withstandthe actual conditions of life. The system’s logical and mechanical,as well as abstract, structure shattered to pieces because Józek andhis brothers and sisters lived in it — a legion of all those who hadbeen disinherited and liberated from the harsh dictates of moral-ity, religion and memory. Surrendering themselves to instinct,listening intently to nature’s murmured temptations, they becamea mass that the most ingenious structure could not contain.

One winter day I dug myself in so deep that I couldn’t movebackward or forward, even with a four-wheel drive. He was driv-ing by right then. We rigged up a cable, and he dragged me outthrough a belt of snowdrifts a kilometer wide. “The bottle’s on you,”he said jokingly, contorting that fox’s muzzle of his into a smile.And I replied in all seriousness, “It’s on me,” and we went to drink.

The pub was cold and empty, only the barmaid was there,standing behind a pyramid of mugs which looked like a prism of

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ice. After the third round, the spirit of Raymond Roussel descendedinto Józek’s body and began to dictate some kind of pieced together,patched up Locus Solus through his lips. It was almost like theauthor wanted to make up for the contempt he had been subjectedto in his previous incarnation. Except that this spirit replaced thesubtle semantic and sound associations with some kind of logo-pedic code of a few hundred words, for ease of composition.Because Józek had about that many words, give or take a few, inhis vocabulary, in that voluble flow he used to describe the wholeof existence. It was all about his tongue’s convenience, literallyabout how easy it was for that little piece of meat to move in hismouth. Józek’s speech didn’t stumble, never paused for reflection,and always seemed to get to the heart of the matter, because hedidn’t revise anything or state anything precisely. Józek wouldsettle down and, after a shot of vodka, his speech would be com-pletely transformed into something that could change the world,all of reality, and even set to work on the universe like aqua regiaon metal. The consequences of events disappeared, causes andeffects disappeared, and sin disappeared right along with history.Everything happened simultaneously, started before time andreached the end before it began. Józek deadened time with eachsuccessive glass and performed some kind of crazy autopsy that com-pletely exposed the weak little skeleton over which we stretch ourefforts, achievements, plans and hopes. Józek himself disappearedinto this flow, like the borderline between that which was and thatwhich only will be. Sure, he settled himself behind the table andslumped against the back of the chair with a nonchalance that grewsteadily stronger, along with the greedy drags on his cigarette thatsucked the insides of his cheeks together. But his existence had

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become problematic. The zero point disappeared from the axis oftime. After an hour, after the bottle had been drained, and overthe course of subsequent misericordal beers, he transformed myname into some other, ancient one which had played a part in hislife. He recovered it again after a moment and invited me into thefuture, to spring fishing for trout, which took shape in his mindlike a distant reminiscence from childhood, pulling a couple ofother stories behind it. It was the brushwood of branching foot-paths. Józek did not choose which way to go. He went where theeasy syllables, or a similarity in names, or the chance focus of hisdrunken gaze would carry him.

At that time, or today or tomorrow, Józek would swim like afish in the ocean. His wake always assumed the shape of doublelooped infinity. He tilted back the bottle and, gulping, swalloweddown his own tail along with the beer. Because Józek was an ancientserpent, maybe a Leviathan, that is, a form of chaos that God justcouldn’t handle, even with the passage of time. Or maybe He justdidn’t want to, because it would make our task too easy.

Finally, as if he realized that only motion could liberate himfrom his logorrhea, he stood up, caught his balance, looked for hisscarf but didn’t find it since it was hanging from his shoulders likesome kind of big green lizard, mumbled something else, and left.

He got into his tractor, which was like a well-traveled horse thatwould take its drowsing driver to the next petty embezzlements,frauds or swindles, these secrets of independent existence. BecauseJózek was independent, and even if his freedom was bounded bysome kind of inevitability, he had no knowledge of it.

He devoted himself to a few favorite mortal sins with the samekind of freedom he had when he showed up in church on Sunday

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morning. He stood before the altar in navy blue pants, a white shirtand a green jacket — everything festive and plastic. When he gen-uflected and when he made the sign of the cross he would shootoff sparks of static electricity with a quiet crackle. His children’sfaces were washed, his wife’s hair was done, and there was not asingle whisper or a shove. The table was simple, covered with alace tablecloth, and Józek knew, although he was not conscious ofit, that he, too, had his stake in absolution, that, in the arithmeticof the world, a fragment of white wafer is allotted for every sin. Thatis why his fox face was peaceful. He was at home. He surrenderedhimself to the cycle of things. Józek was a being both chaotic andcosmic all at the same time. Nothing extreme could touch him.When the ceremony ended, when the divine was rendered untoGod, he would return to his world. Smoke from his Populars min-gled with the aroma of extinguished candles and incense, since themen let the women go ahead of them while they themselves heldcouncil near the church gate. A council concerning the rest oftheir day off.

From the place where the sanctuary stood, you could see thepgr laid out like on the palm of your hand: a white smooth moun-tain gently ascending along the horizon, surrounded by a ridgeof forest. A few buildings like heavy barges, lichen-covered anddilapidated, taken on a journey to nowhere, motionless on a gigan-tic white wave. Sheds for wood, shelters for hay. Clothes on linesbuffeting against each other, smacking like pieces of frozen meat.The wind from over the mountain pass laden with clouds of snow.That is how Józek’s world looked. A shapeless, listless reality,where gravity affected objects and bodies with equal force. Timewas round. Women knew better about this because, for them, it

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was broken up into nine-month cycles. Between one childbirthand another sheep would also bear their young, and in terms ofthe number of deliveries, some women achieved a certain resem-blance to animals. Five children, seven, ten, enough at any rate tobelieve that life was only an unending chain of birth and death.You needed either virtue or crime to break out of the circle. Józekcultivated the former in so far as it was necessary for his existenceamong people. He did it casually and with moderation. But whenhe said in that way he had, “Man, the way we used to guzzle itdown,” or when he described the eras “under Gomu∏ka” and “underGierek” in terms of numbers of thefts and how easy they were, thenthere was unconcealed pride and satisfaction in his voice. It wasalmost like those acts were the measure of his sovereignty, as ifhe had saved his own individual existence and invested it withmeaning with their help.

The last time I saw him was in summer. Denim jeans, an under-shirt and a rusty black beret. Skin tanned to bronze, and with theeternally smoldering end of a cigarette in his mouth. “Man, thePepikis spit on my tractor. I was ready to punch somebody out,but nobody wanted to fight.” At that time he was mowing themeadows right next to the Slovak border. Polish on one side, andthe foreign state farm on the other. The guys on the other side weremowing with red Zetors: soundproof cabs, built-in radios, twenty-first century. When they saw Józek’s wreck, they rolled on theground with laughter.

A week later he was no longer among the living. It was the kindof summer when the sun scorches the sky white. Twenty hoursin the sweltering heat and a machine gets as hot as an oven. His

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buddies said how on that day there was nothing to drink. Noteven a drop of homemade wine or beer. When the afternoon wasat its hottest, Józek chased the frogs out of a stagnant puddle anddrank the water. They say this noxious drink is what killed him.

When the doctors in the hospital looked at his body, theyclaimed he looked at least a hundred years old.

Whenever I think about him, I wonder about whether he wassaved. He and the mass of people like him. Because in some sensethey were a new tribe after all, a people who hadn’t been reachedby any good news or apostle Paul. That church on the hill wherehe went on Sunday was witness to the dualism of his world. Youcould enter it and cleanse yourself of guilt, so you could plungeback into a reality where categories of virtue and sin were indis-tinct and intermingled with one another, just like darkness and lightbefore the first day of creation. Could an intuition have emergedin Józek’s mind that this sanctuary was licensed by the chaos thatsurrounded it? That it was established so that he, Józek, couldsubmit himself to his own kind of psychotherapy once a week andensure the peace of his soul?

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W¸ADEK

It was a village like any other. A snaking three-kilometer chain ofbuildings scattering, splitting off, and then clustering denselytogether again. The concrete, wood, sagging roofs, relics of fences,and iron balustrades produced a fallen cake of poverty and a yearn-ing for the world as seen on tv. The asphalt road barely grazedthe outskirts of the area of densest settlement, barely brushedagainst it. Which was probably all for the best, since kids and dogshad taken possession of the pot-holed gravel road that served asthe main artery. They devoted themselves to shared amusements,and no speeding vehicle could disturb this symbiosis. Sometimesa tractor would pass through, but tractors are slow, tame machines.

W∏adek’s place was somewhere in the middle of that chain ofhouses, a link only slightly touched by corrosion, no better and noworse than the others. And in fact, it was better than those new,

white, occasionally two-storied houses that looked so overbearingand out of place against the horizontal landscape — against themountains, trees, and shacks that, in keeping with nature’s laws oferosion, were sliding their way into ruin.

So there was W∏adek, a roof with a broken spine, and a wifeand twelve kids. W∏adek was about forty, so you could say his fer-tility was of almost biblical proportions, although not too much outof the ordinary around here. That’s the way it’s always been — smallexpenditure and substantial gain. The earth gave birth to stonesmost willingly, and piles of them were strewn along the fallowedges of his fields at regular intervals. And besides that, there werea few sheep, two cows. But raising grain was by this time art forart’s sake, and probably just force of habit, since he had to dosomething else besides haymaking and potato farming. And thus,abundance will always assume the shape of lesser or greater poverty.

When souls were handed out, there was doubtless some mis-take, because W∏adek’s body, born and raised on this earth, receiveda spiritual organ that was a bit too light and insubstantial to copein any way with the heaviness of matter. With his own limbs, withhis dreams, with the passage of time, with the burden of the stonysoil. He hardly felt the pulse of the ancient rhythm that drove hisneighbors into the fields in spring, the meadows in summer, andthe potato fields in autumn. Which is why W∏adek, although a mod-erate drinker and a decent person, was on a fairly low rung in thevillage hierarchy, and if you’re talking about income per capita, thenmaybe the lowest one. Attempting to make up for his lack of innerstrength with resourcefulness, he sent his children around to theneighboring households supplied with little notes: “Mrs. Gienia,we don’t have enough for bread, please loan us fifty thousand.”

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Sometimes people would loan it to them, and sometimes they’dbe thrown out, when a note to Mrs. Gienia would find its way toher sworn enemy, Mrs. Wiesia. Sometimes they were taken inhand by the social welfare agency, and sometimes by the priest, butneither could provide anything more than temporary help. Because,when it came down to it, W∏adek was a good father, and whatgave him the greatest joy was having his little ones hanging all overhim from head to foot. Then he would sit, happy as a Mormon,while his wife went to work in the forest.

In the village there was a kiosk. When communism, that great-est of dispensers of grayness, had a desk job in the neighborhood,the booth looked like a dirty aquarium with a few toothbrushes,three kinds of cigarettes, and the saleswoman’s pale, bored facefloating in it. You could get Team and Polish Farmer, full of solaceand promises. “Two bus tickets and a pack of Populars.” “Two packsof Populars and a bus ticket.” And matches. So many possible com-binations.

And now it looked like the next creation of the world had takenplace not in time and space, but in the realm of color. The displaywindow was the most colorful place within a fifteen-kilometerradius. Old ladies stopped to look, and the yellows, azure, sevenshades of red, gold, silver, blue, green — colors that people wholived here during the 70’s had never seen — lit up their dim, sunkeneyes. The waters of the flood were receding, the last party secre-taries had drowned or escaped, evil had been destroyed, and a newrainbow stretched across the sky, a sign of reconciliation. The oldwomen stood there like animals let off the ark, looking at the signsof the newest covenant. The landscape had never awakened this

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much interest before. It was as if that old work of God’s had faded,as if rains, snows and suffering had washed away all its color andmade it transparent.

The display window’s rainbow radiated a hard, determinedglare, with incantations in an incomprehensible language floatingin it.

The color white — Similac Isomil — is purity, joy, innocenceand eternal glory, it is the hue of Christ’s robes on Mount Tabor,the byssus in Solomon’s temple. Sky-blue — Blue Ocean Deodorant— this is the color of the Mother of God, of the firmament, andlike white it represents purity. Red — Fort Moka Desert — thisis the color of the Holy Ghost which kindles the flames of love andbursts forth as tongues of flame. It is also the color of Christ’sPassion, of the cross and of all those travelers who spilled blood onthe road to faith. Black — John Players Stuyvesant — this is death,mourning, grief and conciliation but also contempt for the world,repudiation and darkness which only divine light can dispel. Green— Fa Fresh Creme and Soap — this is the color of hope, becausethe emerald rainbow of the Apocalypse manifests itself as a sign ofcompassionate Judgment. And there are many more, since therehas been no mention here of any kind of virtue, of any variationin shade. It was a rectangular mandala stuck in the dark gray spacebetween the dingy pub and the square. And like a window ontothe other side of existence, it allowed us to look into the myster-ies of the future, to establish our own place in it, and to choose theroad to freedom.

So those old women and little children stood before a map ofthe new world, whose continents had been laid out according tothe desires of particular parts of the body, its whims and tastes. Here

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unambiguous colors reigned supreme. There was no room forimagination. Neither time, nor changing light, nor caprice ofnature could wear it away. It was not inconceivable that the newJerusalem was already at hand.

This was W∏adek’s doing. In church, when the priest said thatit’s hard, but necessary, because that’s the price of freedom andPoland, and that the farmer always et cetera, W∏adek felt the stir-rings of a breeze from a new direction, one that had never blownthrough these valleys before. He sold whatever he had, bought anold, used Syrenka, rented the kiosk and started to bring all thosesplendors and marvels from somewhere out by Rymanów. His wifestill spent half the day in the forest, relying somehow on the feel-ing of monotony in her movements and on her calloused hands,and his children went to school, hoping to conquer the world withanachronisms. In the evenings the rest of them sat at their tablesand performed complicated calculations, figuring the price of milkinto the price of tractor fuel, the price of fuel into the price of live-stock, livestock into feed, feed into electricity, electricity into wool,wool back into milk — on and on without end. And whereas theyran short of existential absurdities every time — since it was allabout existence — W∏adek simply added up his receipts or loadedthe car for the next day. Because by this time not just one villagebut the whole surrounding area had experienced the taste of Marsbars. And then came a plywood shed and a sign, foreign second-hand clothes, and then a well-built kiosk, fruits and vegetables,and a few more little tables out in the open, and five kinds of beer.And a shelf in the corner of his house for video rentals.

In the morning W∏adek, wearing a leather jacket, got into his

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red Fiat Combi stationwagon. His wife, in a jeans outfit, got intothe six-year-old Fiat compact. They headed out for their motherlodes, their bonanzas, their wheeling and dealing with the Russians,to come back by evening with goods or good prospects. His kidstook care of the local business, because school was looking like ananachronism by now: all that Polish language was a little unnec-essary, and theoretical accounting was boring.

And so there was W∏adek, the proprietor of this altar beforewhich the May-decorated church became but a distant reflection:its pastel, ethereal and transitory colors were wilting like flowersand fraying like ribbons. W∏adek, like an Ariel among the Calibans,caught those sudden, unfamiliar stirrings in the breeze, and his soulrose into the air over the village, while all the rest of them devotedthemselves to hard and hopeless occupations. Forty years of wait-ing, of hibernation in a state of poverty, only to transform in twoyears into a messenger and herald of a new worldwide religionwhich would eliminate the opposition, do away with controversiesand fulfill desires. What did Soloviev’s magus Apollonius do, afterall, if not charm the purest and brightest colors from thin air?Colors the likes of which the world had never seen?

Children and women, young and old, moved away from thedisplay. It was hard to guess their thoughts, but it was not in theirthinking that the transformations were taking place. They took holdof feelings, touched the places where wonder and enchantment areconceived.

Miniature shop window displays like W∏adek’s started to appearin the new, whitewashed houses. Rows of empty cans of Dab beer,Maxim brandy boxes, lines of empty Gold Wiener and Orange Juice

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cartons were standing on credenzas, on televisions, on glossyshelves, empty cubes with not quite familiar contents. They sat alittle lower than the old chromolithographs covered with dust: St.Joseph in sepia tones, the Mother of God in fading azure, a black-and-white Holy Father.

One Mary, one Joseph, one Pope, compared to such quantity,such variety . . .

Not long ago, W∏adek bought himself a ̊ uk van, because therewas no room for miracles in the Fiat anymore.

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BLACKSMITH KRUK

It wasn’t hard to run into him, because even in retirement he wasas mobile as ever. He shambled here and there for real and imag-ined purposes, and his pace may have been a little slower, but hiswalk was just the same — flap, flap, flap — as if he had suckers onthe bottom of his feet to help him stick to the gray, broken-downroad. It was a shuffling walk, slightly bow-legged — if you standin front of an anvil all your life the shock absorption gets into yourbones.

“Mr. Czesiek, how about a beer, sir?”“Much obliged, but the next one is on me.”The bench was sitting in the sun, and the shifting shadows

made it feel a little like a slow journey somewhere. There wasabout as much gray in Blacksmith Kruk’s black mustache as thereis glaze on a doughnut. Snow was moving down the slopes but

couldn’t manage to slide off the bulging fields.“No offense, but none of those new ones really . . .” and he pulled

out a pack of Populars a couple of shades darker than his light blueeyes. pgr workers’ children were hanging on to a seesaw. Everythingwas falling down around them, and the seesaw was the only thingthat lifted them higher and higher. Blacksmith Kruk squinted intothe sun at the children flying up into the air, and his face was amirror of their puppyish laughter. A fairly wrinkled and unshavenone, but a true reflection for all that.

“And did you know, sir, I went to see my son in Silesia lastweek . . .”

This moment was the last chance for anyone with somethingto take care of, anyone in a hurry, or anyone afraid of the dark.

“I took the six-forty bus. I get on, hand over ten thousand, butthe driver looks at me like he wants something, so finally I ask him.And what do you know, yes sir, tickets had gone up. But you’vegot to do what you’ve got to do, so I pulled out a couple thousandmore, sat myself down in the back and off I go. On the hill, rightafter the roadside shrine, Maƒkowski’s tractor was stalled and hewas messing around with it, and it’s a new tractor, just a monthsince he bought it and already there’s something wrong with it,you know whatever they make these days is completely worthless,and I kept telling him not to buy a Russian one . . .” Drags on hiscigarette and swigs from the bottle took us past two more busstops.

“Romek got on in S´kowa, the one whose wife died this fall. Iknew her pretty well, because she was MaryÊka’s cousin, you know,and MaryÊka lived right near us and she came over every Sundayand they went to church together, and I won’t say a bad word

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against her, she was a good woman, but those daughters of hersare, if you’ll pardon the expression, tramps. Nowadays, though,they’re all tramps, so maybe that’s nothing to shake a finger at. SoRomek sat down near me, and, you know, it’s made him half theman he used to be. I ask him where he’s going, and he says thathe’s going to go take a look at some pigs, because it was Tuesday,which was market day. I tell him you can’t get anything for pigsthese days, and he says to that, that he has to be raising something,because it’s not like he could just do nothing. He’s already on apension now, but he used to work in petroleum in Libusza and heeven made a decent living, drove a Syrenka. My son-in-law had aSyrenka too, good car, can’t say anything against it. There weretimes in winter when the bus couldn’t get through, and he gotthrough. That was back when we had some kind of winter, backin the 70’s, and then he sold it and bought a Fiat, but that’s notthe same thing at all.”

The seesaw was already abandoned, the kids had disappearedsomewhere, and the bottles were empty, too, so Blacksmith Krukgot up and shuffled over to the little store and you had time to catchyour breath. When he got back, the bus was already in Gorlice,and Blacksmith Kruk grabbed his beat-up satchel with sandwichesand a clean shirt in it and got off.

“. . . at Zawodzie, because I had some time before the train, andyou know, I like to take a little stroll through a town, maybe notall that often, but about once a month or so, because you shouldgo on a trip, just to look at people. And so I walked around wherethat butcher’s stall used to be where old SuchuÊ chopped horse meat.We both came from the same village, and his father was shot bythe Germans during the occupation, and that stall isn’t there any

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more, because everything is changing so much now that youwouldn’t recognize it a week later. I walked out that way because,you know, I wanted to take another look at the market. The mar-ket always cheers me up, because everything there is like it alwayswas, and when I was walking along the highway that comes fromDukla, Kazek was driving by in a ˚uk van, you know, he’s the guywho used to work around here and then moved away because hemarried a widow, and she had a house near ̊ migród and that ̊ uk,too, from the deceased. Even saw me and nodded to me, but theysay that now he’s so high and mighty even though he was alwaysa good guy. I still remember how one spring we went out for trout,and the most fish were in that stream that . . .”

We were still more than two hundred kilometers from Silesia,so it was time to go for another beer and then calmly watch thesun sink behind the bare mountain ridge. The earth was letting goof the cold it had accumulated all winter, and the cigarettes tastedlike the frosty mist. Thirty kilometers down, but more than twohundred kilometers still to go. Now for a short morning strollthrough the little town: the market square by the river, horses, calvesin two-wheeled carts, piglets in cages, bundles of birch twig brooms,rakes made of wood as white as bone, sieves, whips that smelledlike tanned leather, snorting nags with their heads buried in feedbags. Józeks, JaÊeks, W∏adeks, J´dreks — nothing escaped the gazeof Blacksmith Kruk, but his mind did not differentiate between onething and another. It was as if he were rooted in some primordialtime when nouns, verbs and adjectives were firmly bound to objects,events and attributes, in a time when language was only a mirrorreflection of the world and lived in perfect harmony with it. So any-way, there were also clay flowerpots, recollections of the Under

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the Tit pub, sacks of wheat, little yellow balls of squirming, squeak-ing chicks, bleating sheep, the smack of hands sealing a deal, andvodka mixed with the smell of horse sweat, and then it was on tothe other side of the river, across the bridge, “because you know,you should see what those Russians have over there, yes sir.”

The rundown cars of the East were groaning with riches.Hoods, roofs, trunks covered with rugs, and rows of stalls on theconcrete desert of the marketplace. Samovars, crystal, the plasticgold of battery-powered rococo clocks, things whose purpose mustbe inquired about in a kind of grotesque Pan-Slavic language, uten-sils for everything, smuggled cigarettes and little sweaters made outof synthetic fibers in colors never before seen by the human eye.Blacksmith Kruk recounted all of this as if he were reading outof some kind of catalog, and when some of those things pulledforgotten faces and events out of his memory, he abandoned hisdescription of the trip to venture onto a side-track, and movementin space was transformed into wandering in time. But then heimmediately returned and moved on, turned left past the court-house, bought cigarettes at a kiosk, and went to the train stationand right up to the counter, asked for a ticket, but couldn’t workthings out with the cashier, because he mentioned some stationwhich, according to her, the cashier, didn’t exist, “that’s what shetold me, but even so that’s where I always went and I finally got aticket to Zabrze, and maybe she knows better but I still got off whereI always got off.”

It was already dark. It was getting harder to sit there, you hadto tap your feet, you could see your breath, and the frost was bit-ing your fingers, but this round was on Blacksmith Kruk, and justso there were no bad feelings, you had to accept the next icy cold

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bottle, and the real journey was only just beginning. The trainstarted off, and then there was one transfer after another, Stró˝e,Bobowa, Ci´˝kowice.

“In Bobowa, the conductor came and checked the tickets. Igave him mine, and he punched it and moved on. I had a smokebecause it was a smoking car, like it should be, and then I wantedto get some sleep, so I asked the guy who was sitting near me towake me up in Tarnów. Because I was going to see my son takethe oath, not this one, but the older one, and I slept right throughRzeszów, because he was in Rzeszów for military service, and Ididn’t wake up until Przeworsk. But right then there was a returntrain and I caught it. When we got to Tarnów the guy woke meup, I got off and I had an hour, so I decided to have somethingto eat. I went to that little snack bar there on the left when youwalk out. I had pork knuckles, because there’s nothing like goodpork knuckles, and generally speaking there’s nothing like pork.Other meat doesn’t do much for me, but it doesn’t get any bet-ter than a pigsticking, and I’m not even talking about the meat,but all the rest of it, yes sir, when the blood pudding is still hot.During the occupation . . .”

And even though it was cold, Blacksmith Kruk didn’t move,didn’t hunch his shoulders, didn’t try to button up his denim shirt.He continued his story mindful not to leave anything out, andeverything had its own weight, everything had its own proper placein the story, as if memory and speech were gifts he was notallowed to waste. Not even the smallest drop could fall unnoticed.In the fading daylight, you could see frosty cracks appearing on themirrors of the puddles. The water was hardening and losing its lus-ter and there was something in Blacksmith Kruk’s voice like the

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monotone clatter of train car wheels. There was no skipping overthings here, no rush. Kraków and its train station and a strollaround the kiosks were still to come, and for a little relaxation hehad to fire off another salvo of time — “because you know, the lasttime I was in Kraków” — and then there was space again, chang-ing trains, slag heaps, flaming chimneys, the wheels of mine-shaftelevator towers, everything that he observed had to be told, and themagnitude and tedium of his story recalled the tedium and magni-tude of all the don quixotes of literature, and all the tolstoys, proustsand joyces into the bargain, and at the moment when his face wasjust barely visible, a window opened somewhere in the darknessand a woman’s voice called out: “Czesiek, Czesiek, time to comehome.”

Czesiek heaved a sigh: “Well, you know how it is.” And hetossed his cigarette butt, collected the empty bottles, and tookthem back to the store. Then he came back and said, “I’ll tell youthe rest next time.”

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JANEK

Janek was a blond, dwarfish species of human in whom the mus-cles and tendons of a large man had shrunk and tightened withoutlosing any of their strength. He looked like a forest kobold, shapedto the proportions of the dense thickets, wind-fallen trees, andtangled, chaotic scrub. His pants dragged along the ground, andhis rapid, chaplinesque walk had worn down the heels of his shoes.Where he got those jackets from, the ones that were always toosmall, remained a mystery. But perhaps it was only studied elegance,since, as a result, his heavy Soviet watch never disappeared underhis cuff.

Even so, Janek lived according to the clock of the sun, whoseadaptability was more compatible with a nature immersed in thecosmos. Because when the afternoon shadows grew disturbinglyshort, Janek inhaled damp breaths of air into his nostrils and

watched the slopes as darker shades crept into the white and finallybroke it down into fraying, decaying material, last year’s rotten grassshowing underneath it.

Then there came a morning, maybe Monday, maybe Thursday.It was hard to tell, because as usual, yesterday’s day had fled frommemory, and today’s trembling hands weren’t any different thanthey had been the week before. But today Janek was busy and didnot head out as usual for a beer to start his day. He just walkedinto the wooden shed, opened the door as wide as it would go andsurveyed that vehicle of his with a critical eye: gray, rusted and asbent as Janek himself. It had none of the conceit and arrogance ofmodern machines. When it moved out into the forest, it immedi-ately vanished into nature’s disorder. The landscape claimed itsirregular contours, its ruggedness and its simplicity as its own cre-ation, its own child, just as it claimed the blocks of sandstone, themoss-covered logs, and the rest of nature’s abundance.

Three cylinders, four-liter capacity, two caterpillar treads, adrip pan like a small bathtub, a gear case as big as a dresser, andthat was about all. It was an artillery tractor from the SecondWorld War. Janek walked all around it, muttered a few curses —most likely the usual ones — looked at the dented radiator, last year’smud, the coil of steel cable on a winch, the three dead gauges, andthen looked into the gas tank, checked the oil, and shook his headwith disbelief. Next he took hold of the crank and tried to startthe engine. It didn’t go so well, so he tossed a clump of rags underthe drip pan, doused it with oil and set it on fire. He came backin half an hour. There was nothing left of the fire, but its reek filledthe shed, and the pile of scrap iron had warmed up by a fewdegrees. Then Janek removed the air filter and wrapped the exposed

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pipe with some old undershorts, doused it, set it on fire and calledhis son just in case the decompressor had to be closed. His sonwalked in, rolled the sleeves of his Turkish denim shirt up to theelbows, and half-heartedly shoved his shoulder into the belly ofthe vehicle.

Janek drew some fuel up with the pump, grasped the crankhandle, and slowly, lethargically, ponderously, like a tortoise, theguts of the engine started to turn over. When all the pistons, thecrankshaft, and the flywheel gathered momentum, he shouted,“Close it!” The engine went “pukch” and stalled.

A half hour later they were both sweating and stripped downto their undershirts. On the thousandth turn of the crank handlethe machine went “pukch pukch,” thought it over for a second, andthen belched a pitch-black cloud of fumes, soot and sparks and set-tled into a monotonous, even “pukch pukch pukch pukch.”

Dark, nomadic essences flowed under Janek’s kobold skin. Butthey had been watered down by alcohol, the blood of sedentarygenerations, and the hopelessness of a limited horizon, where thesun rose behind a picket fence hung with babies’ diapers andwomen’s cottons and linens. The houses were filled with children’sshrieking. Not wails of hunger yet, but then again, nobody knewwhat the future had in store. In the guise of springtime, it wouldreveal the deterioration. Old people would die as usual. And thevanishing snow would expose the slow gangrene in the fields andbuildings and in the piles of laboriously collected things, rottingand leaning to one side only to collapse and return once again tothe somnolent and sluggish earth.

Like he did every other day, Janek could have walked by the

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leafless gooseberry bushes, past the hawthorn scrub where bustlingclusters of waxwings contended with each other for the last black-ened fruit, out onto the highway and then climbed up the hill. Hecould have caught his breath up there, surrounded by repulsive,pathetic, concrete dreams of wealth: collapsing, closely built,unfinished houses. He could have come back down near the woodenpolice station, turned left and pushed open the door to the pub. Athin trickle leaked out of the darkness of the toilet to greet new-comers. Some customers stepped over it without really noticing it,and others marked a path to the bar, trailing the oldest smell ofhumanity behind them all the way to the dust-caked bottles ofNapoleon, Cinzano and imitation Dutch whisky. When their visionbecame so blurred that it rolled all around within its limits, whenthe men could no longer distinguish between the faces of their com-rades, the distant window, the tops of their rubber boots, or thecigarettes burning out in their fingers, their eyes would be drawnto those bottles. At six in the evening, the cosmos was coiled upin the ashtray like a snake swallowing its own tail, and only a shoutfrom the waitress or a buddy’s punch in the arm could rouse someof them out of their mystical contemplation. The Napoleon, thewhisky and the Cinzano slept on the highest shelf, as unreal in theirbeauty and as out of reach as the women in American televisionprograms. In their struggle for a higher existence, these men wereforever stuck on the level of their forefathers, on the lowest shelf,where the bottles of white vodka and fruit wine stood open andready. It was a safe and familiar legacy, the limit of their patrimony,their christening, their Sunday mass and their graveyard.

And so Janek could have, like every other day, walked into thatfoul purgatory, into that antechamber of the next day, and begun

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a conversation about anything. He could have waited until some-one, tired of guzzling the cloudy beer, ordered a bottle of boozeand livened up the stream of conversation, diverting it in thedirection of remotest memory or into the misty tributaries oftomorrow. But Janek climbed onto the oilcloth seat, pressed theclutch, hesitated a moment, and backed out into the yard. Thenhe wound the steel cable around a barrel of fuel and hauled up thewinch so that the barrel dangled just under his backside.

“Hey, Old Lady! So I’m going!” and he wanted to be gonealready. But the Old Lady flew down the stairs like a bat out ofhell, almost like she’d been waiting for a long time, lurking behindthe door. She shouted out a litany of some sort of female profan-ity, straining her voice to the limit, more entreaties than curses,so where do you think you’re going with your damn worthless self,you said not before Sunday and here I am alone again, with thecows, the kids . . .

Instinctively, he stepped on the gas a little and the machine’snoise protected him from the woman’s yelling. The caterpillartreads impatiently dug up the earth like the shoes of a restlesshorse, and finally, mingling tears and abuse, she tossed him a sackof food, made the sign of the cross and watched the vehicle grazethe gooseberry bushes in its crawl toward the asphalt.

Janek was going only twenty kilometers, but if he didn’t leavebefore afternoon, then he wouldn’t reach the place until dusk. Nowhe yanked the earflaps of his cap down, fastened his quilted jacketunder his beard, and left his village behind, left that turbulent king-dom of women and children and chance that, with the passage oftime, had imperceptibly become law. Breaking away and getting

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lost in the woods for a few months demanded a good deal of effortand indifference.

Rolling along the edge of the highway, churning up the thaw-ing snow with his right caterpillar tread, he would finally find aclearing or an old logging-road and escape to the right, to climbup to the level summit, straight up along the bowstring instead ofaround along the bow.

And so he must have made it there before it got dark. Hewouldn’t have run into anyone on the way, he would cross fivestreams, and at dusk he would drive into that settlement of threebarracks at the end of an enigmatic road in the middle of thewoods. If it was Monday, then the men would have just arrived,still parading in their Sunday best, wardrobes full of trimmings,emblems and lettering which they made no attempt to decipher,taking them as marks of elegance. Only towards evening did theTurkish, Chinese, Thai and assorted other kinds of attire wanderback to closets, hangers, and shelves lined with newspapers fullof reports from the London stock market and the salons of thecapital. “I could hang them up so that they could dry out,” saidsomeone to his denim pants, sniffing their sourish odor. “I’ll sitin my drawers and they’ll dry out by tomorrow.” Tomorrow,when they come back from the forest, their dark gray overallswill have recovered their own living scent. The men coming fromthe still will bring in with them the smell of burning, of charcoal,and the thick, sweetish aroma of beech smoke. The ones from theclear-cutting, the distinctive combination of sap and exhaust fumes.The ones from the tractors will come in with a whiff of oils,greases, and run-down, overheated metal. It was the smell of sweatthat united the clashing auras. But not until tomorrow. Now, a trace

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of cologne trembled in the warm air like the memory of exhaust-ing weekend entertainments.

Janek occupied his old iron bed near the stove. He drowsed,smoking his Populars and listening to conversations and the soundof the television behind the wall, and then finally fell asleep untilmorning. When the black windows paled to blue and the light ofdawn drew out their transparency and grime, the men would getup, one waking up the other, muttering the same curses theirfathers had used. There would be cold food and then the usual hikeinto the mountains through the mists from the night before, stilltangled in the hollows and gaps of the forest. To get up to the clear-ing, they had to slide down into a deep ravine and then climb forhalf an hour uphill in the slushy, wet snow along a beaten-downpath, first through pine trees, and then through a fir wood, orrather, through a forest of stumps and hollow giants, since the resthad been cut down long ago.

They clambered up the slopes like some kind of Antarctic ants,loaded down with cans of benzine, saws, axes, and with Coca-Colabottles full of tea sticking out of their pockets — with all of thegear necessary for work and survival — as well as some jam andbread. They will forever ascend or descend into the valleys of onevanishing kingdom after another in search of wood, ore, preciousstones, all things as essential, heavy, and rough as they were them-selves. Descendants of the second son of Noah and unaware of thisgenealogy, they were entangled in the memories of their fathersand grandfathers — what the eyes do not see, memory does notpreserve.

When enough wood had been collected in the clearing, Janek

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started his machine, hitched up a two-wheeled trailer, and set outuphill on tracks that nobody else knew about, through ravines andup steep slopes, where it would be difficult even on foot. But aftertwenty years, you learn where the border lies between risk and sui-cide. He loaded up a few tons of uniform, one-meter logs andbegan the descent, seeking out firm ground and favorable slopes,at times cutting down or crushing whatever stood in his path tomake his way through. As steadily as a pendulum, he would repeatthis journey until evening and then the next day and the day afterthat, feeling his muscles, which had gotten soft over the winter,get stronger and recover those few dozen specialized movementsand stretches. That is how it would be for a month or even less,until the next payday, when time came to a standstill and he couldhead back for a few days. The men would wake up and sober upin the same place, the place where they would resume their labors.Because life was round, it moved in a circle, and if someone didmanage to tear himself away from it, then someone else wouldimmediately appear to take his place.

Once a month Janek would show up in his village, breeze rightthrough it, leaving some small change at home and taking the restwith him to the pub, which was no longer an everyday thing, butsomething festive. At last he could sit down and leave his body inpeace, and his muscles would loosen up like his tongue and finallyhis mind, and everything would move toward the ultimate form ofrelaxation. “We were already asleep when the police showed up.There was one on the stairs, and the rest came and stood aroundinside. They slapped a fine on us, as if we did a lot of damage. Justa couple of glasses, some iron chairs, nothing got smashed, the

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windows were still in one piece. Run? Nobody felt like it. Couldn’tmove a muscle. We’d been drinking for three days.”

When his money ran out, it would all start all over again. Itwould be spring already, the days would be getting longer, and workwould turn up. He could have piled a mountain up to the sky outof the wood from all those years — tons of it that he had carriedon his own back, loaded and unloaded — a wooden tower of Babel.But Janek was a stranger to the sin of pride. He wanted only onething, that it was all scrupulously noted down and paid for. Whatwas there to pride himself on, seeing as how labor and dirt wereshared out fairly, and each took as much as he could? But at timesthere was a little pride, like when he drove his old goat — that’swhat he called it — on its caterpillar treads to the pub. Peoplestepped back, the women squealed, and he drove straight up theten steps to the door and probably would have drunk his beer atthe bar, but the door frames were a little too narrow and held himback until whoever was more alert could pull him off the vehicle.That’s Cossack pride for you. When it came down to it, it was aman’s kingdom, those couple of barracks in the woods, and a littlelike the Zaporozhian Cossacks, with no women allowed, althoughthey sometimes showed up on payday to get their hands on the earn-ings. A kingdom of women and a kingdom of men. A delegationof guys in cheap suits with briefcases, members of clubs, sailors,gangsters, hotel workers, Cossacks . . .

But one spring Janek didn’t show up. He got on a ferry boatand sailed to Sweden to conquer it like the rebel Cossack haidamaksin their chaika canoes conquered Tsargorod. In six months he

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came back with plunder. Denim clothing covered with lettering andshiny decorations, a beautiful shirt with green palm trees and goldparrots on it, and white Adidas on his feet. He treated everybodyin the pub and said, “I go to the woods when I feel like doing somesightseeing.” Then he set out again for the open sea.

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It didn’t take them long. Two months. A rectangle of gray, clayeyearth was all that was left. That bareness looked like a strip of tornskin in the wooded and desolate landscape. Grass would growhere next year, for the first time in two hundred years. Or rather,nettles. They show up more quickly than anything else in theplaces people abandon.

“What was here before?” the man asked me. He had a back-pack on, a map in his hand, and a camera around his neck.

“A Greek Catholic church,” I answered.“So what happened to it?”“Nothing. They took it to a museum.”“The whole thing?”“The whole thing, piece by piece.”He walked into the beaten-down little square and looked all

PLACE

around, as if he was searching for walls and a dome. Then he founda sunny patch around the presbytery and snapped his Practica.

“Too bad,” he said.“Yes,” I muttered in reply.

I’ve tried to imagine the beginning many times.Giacomo Casanova was dying in a castle in Dux. Thirty thou-

sand Don Cossacks were marching to India. Louis xvi, not sus-pecting a thing, was constructing his last locks and padlocks. Allthese dates are precisely fixed, descriptions fill the space betweenthem, and if any gaps had been left, then they would have beensealed up with carefully considered hypotheses, or with poetry.

But in this case the date is uncertain. It was not recorded any-where, as if the Gregorian and Julian calendars, which were bothused here, had canceled each other out and consigned the eventto unmarked Time.

Remnants of broken shingles were scattered in the grass. Thenails sticking out of them had a square profile that you never seetoday. They were probably forged, each individually, in someGypsy blacksmith’s shop or right there on the spot as the thatchwas being nailed on.

But that is why this unmarked Time is tempting. The imagi-nation has just as much of a need for order, for a name, a result, acause. This is where all the invented histories come from that westart to believe in with the passage of time. Maybe imagination andfaith cannot exist without each other because they have a commonessence — they do not demand proof.

Most likely it all began in winter. There is more time then, and

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transportation is relatively easy. If the edge of the forest at that timeran close to today’s, then the nearest fir trees would have been founda kilometer further out and higher up. They had to find the bestones: thick, straight, growing in sunny places. And then cut themdown.

When I looked at the sloping pillars which made up the sup-porting structure of the sanctuary, their bulk gave a sense of howmighty the ancient forest had been. Some of the trees used in thebuilding must have been close to a meter in diameter at the base.They had handsaws. Two men sawed one tree all day. They sawed,drove in wooden wedges, and stripped down to their shirts, steam-ing in the cold. The last moments were full of anxiety. They strainedtheir ears for the cracking of wood fibers snapping as the tree beganits slow descent. After lopping off the thicker branches and boughs,they could harness the horses to the silver-gray trunk. Straps musthave broken, chains must have snapped. Until they made their waythrough the snow-covered, wind-felled trees, rotting logs andscattered branches to the edge of the forest, the horses’ backssteamed just like the men’s had an hour before. It was easier oncethey got to the slope. If other teams had come this way earlier, thena deep channel would be gouged into the snow. Fifty, a hundredtrees, even more? At any rate, as many as the village, which num-bered perhaps some twenty houses, could handle. In some places,the horses sank as high as their bellies into the snow.

When I talk with old people, they remember that the winterswere more like winters and the summers were hotter in their youth.The further an image reaches into the past, the more its colors,shapes, and events come to resemble allegories and symbols. Two

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dark silhouettes of horses toil up the slope, the small figure of aman behind them. Their pace is marked by the same weariness.The man undoubtedly has some name like Wasyl, Iwan, maybeSimon. Their march looks like they’re plowing through whiteeternity. The effort is absurd, because windblown snow quicklyburies their deep prints. The return journey must have had some-thing in it of escape or pursuit, in any case, something of a strug-gle. The horses sit back on their haunches while negotiating theturns. Held back by the reins, pressed forward by the slope, theytry to flee ahead of the mass of wood which, with every passingmoment, takes on more of the qualities of a living thing — itbecomes restless, agile, and vicious. There are fountains of pow-dery snow, froth, sounds are deadened, shouts are carried away bythe wind. As if the whole thing were taking place not on earth, buton the ocean, in a chaotic, treacherous element they have to tearthemselves free from in order to reach the valley floor, scatteredwith a few old oaks. The trunks, dragged and piled together andlying side by side, resemble a raft.

I thought to myself that the man had photographed, doubtlessby accident, the space where the iconostasis used to be. Now itwas empty of figures but filled with light. As it usually was beforesunset. On golden autumn afternoons the sun’s path fell oppositethe entrance. All you had to do was push open the doors for theradiant sunshine to flow into the interior. The bright surge rolledthrough the nave full of the odor of decay, hurriedly swept pastthe walls covered with peeling polychromy, and broke right on theiconostasis. For those few minutes, the decaying gold of the woodcarvings and the graying colors of the icons regained the original,

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miraculous glow that was first conceived in the nostalgic imagina-tion of the village’s artists. The moment was short. The sunretreated behind a grassy hillock and semi-darkness returned to thesanctuary. The face of St. Dymitr darkened, becoming humanonce again, and Adam’s naked body resumed the dark gray tingeof clay.

It was like a glimpse of the other side. Reality fractured andsealed up again a moment later, without leaving even a trace of acrack. The woodborers took up their interrupted work, mice andmold continued about their business. The man looked through thecamera’s viewfinder at a pile of rotten boards.

“Are they going to rebuild it?”“I don’t know. That’s what they had in mind,” I answered.

Winter ends late here. There are blizzards even in April, andthe nights are frosty. The arrival of spring is preceded by a muddyseason when colors run together. White struggles with black, withgrayness, with the first green. The slopes and valleys continuallychange their appearance. What the sun melts, the night’s snow-storm reclaims.

So it is likely that they started in the mud. And in that fourthuncertain state of matter they set the cornerstones marking theoutlines of the porch, nave, and presbytery. The frame was madeof squared larch trunks. That wood — heavy, sticky, drippingwith sap — had defied the weather for hundreds of years. Theychopped the trunks into shape with axes to give them a square orrectangular profile. It was arduous, slow work, considering thatthe successive rings of trunks had to fit together perfectly. Againstthe background of the muddy landscape the wood had a light,

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almost white color. On warm and windless days the air was thickwith an aromatic scent, as if the sanctuary were materializing in aspace formed out of all the senses. The sounds of striking tools,multiplied by echoes, rang out through the valley until they eitherfound a way to escape or lost themselves in the emptiness of thesky. The high-pitched sound of saws, the blows of axes shaping thecorner joints, the master builders’ commands and curses as thenext hewn log was raised.

By autumn it was likely already done. The last shingles werenailed down. The structure was closed. Inside, the floor was laidout. A fragment of the world had been taken out of the world,brought to another realm. Like the prophet Elijah from the leftside of the iconostasis.

What is least fascinating in sanctuaries are the images and objects.They bear too much of a resemblance to the rest of reality. Theytry to tear themselves away from it and end up sinking back intoit instead, testifying to the futility of all such efforts. Air, however,closed within a solid form, and space, shaped by vaulting, wallsand architectural detail, becomes the most perfect representationof nostalgia. You can walk into it, feel its touch on your skin, butit all flows between your fingers, you can hold it in your lungs, butjust for a moment.

Not long ago, when the eastern border was opened up, thebuilders’ descendants began to turn up here, fifty years after theyhad left, displaced from their home villages by brute force or bydeceit. Old women stepped over the church’s threshold, enteredthe nave, kneeled on the clayey mud, since the floor was by nowlong gone, crossed themselves and bowed down low to the ground.

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To whom? The altar stood crookedly, propped against the wall,not a trace of its former splendor remaining. The tabernacle, withits little doors torn off, looked like a dilapidated wooden box. Partsof the icons, the ones that were the most important — Christ, theMother of God, St. Nicholas — were missing. Others, those fromthe higher rows of the iconostasis, were lost in the gloom, swollenwith moisture and difficult to make out. The interior reeked likea cellar. But the women kneeled.

Or there was that old-timer who was brought by his family,which lived a few dozen kilometers further on. He sat up straighton a chair set in the middle of an ordinary peasant cart. I thoughtit was out of respect that he was transported so ceremoniously. Buttwo men had to lift him and carry him together with the chair intothe church. He was paralyzed. But his ninety-year-old mind wasas lucid as ever.

“Sir, I was in Siberia, I was in Kazakhstan and saw theMohammedans, I was in Mongolia, saw the Buddhists. I saw theRussians, too, who didn’t believe in anything since the day theywere born. My father helped to put the new roof on here in ’95.They covered the shingles with sheet metal. And then they bap-tized me here.”

Later on, I walked alongside the cart and the old man pointedout the places where houses had stood, mentioned names, recountedfragments of past events. It was a tour through the village thatexisted in his memory. Neither time, nor flames, nor frailty couldtouch it. In the end, when he was leaving, he smiled a little iron-ically. His face looked like a frostbitten apple. And he said with analmost cheerful glint in his eye: “Well I guess I can go ahead anddie now.”

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From time to time I would climb the narrow steps to the attic.You had to make your way carefully, and only along the joists,because the ceiling boards barely held together. The rafter fram-ing, the high entablature of the bell tower — all of it was joinedtogether without a single nail, by hinging, doweling and dove-tailing — it reminded me of the inside of an old sailing ship.When the wind blew from the south, you could hear a monotonecreaking. The skeleton was hard at work. It weathered the gustsof wind, groaned imperceptibly and, still unyielding and resilient,it sheltered the stillness of the closed space within it.

A tawny owl made its nest in the place where the bells once hung.Its nocturnal hooting made the sanctuary seem not quite real. Onfine, moonlit nights the small cupolas stood out in relief againstthe background of the sky. The wrought-iron crosses rose abovethe crowns of the oaks and the ash trees, but the silence, the still-ness and the darkness of the secluded valley made the trees andcrosses look as if they were made from the same substance. As ifnature had completely reclaimed the church, which had beenwrenched from it two hundred years before.

“It would have been good,” said the man with the camera. Hewanted to snap a shot of something else, but just then the sundisappeared.

And I still wasn’t sure. I kept on going back to the beginningand following the builders’ slow, uphill climb. From the conse-cration of that patch of earth, up through the risky operation ofsecuring the round domes to the steep, banked rooftops. And thensurely, whole decades must have passed before the interior tookon its dignified and ceremonial appearance. There was something

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moving in the amateur polychromy imitating stone cornices,columns and pilasters — distant memories of the sanctuaries of Jerusalem and Constantinople, perhaps a vision of the NewJerusalem.

With time, the abandoned church started to lean to one side.Dampness bit into the northern foundations. Cracks appearedbetween the beams. Delicate, gold-tinted wood rot showed throughthe thin layer of limestone plaster. I thought that this was a signof the triumph of impermanence. But it was the living bacteria, themites, and the insects that conquered its illusory marble after all.

The people who came to restore it brought the smell of deathwith them. The chemicals they used to stop the decay had an acridodor. In the sweltering heat of August it all reeked like a hospital.Then they wrapped the beams in special fabric, like mummies,and loaded them into their cars.

I am no lover of ruins. But the vision of a renovated sanctuarystanding in the middle of other houses and implements uprootedfrom their time and place in the same way bears the taint of one-dimensionality. Learned experts will argue over the Ruthenizationor Latinization of friezes and paintings. The elements of Baroqueand Byzantine will compete with one another, dimensions will becalculated, and someone will definitively determine the type andpurity of its form. But places cannot be carried off. A place doesnot have dimensions. It is both a fixed point and intangible space.That is why I still wasn’t sure if it had really been taken away.

The man closed his camera case.“Where is the place where the entrance used to be?” he asked.“Here. You’re standing at the threshold.”

50

KOÂCIEJNY

Simon Wasylczuk showed up at KoÊciejny’s and said “come on.”KoÊciejny took a long, narrow knife out from behind the doorframe.They walked two houses further down. Simon led out a mournful-faced sheep and averted his gaze. Mount Cergowa was holding upthe sky as usual, and snow still lay on its peak between the trees.It was over in a second. They lifted the animal up and hung it ona bare apple tree by a tendon in its hind leg.

KoÊciejny looked like he usually did, a little like a scarecrow thathad just escaped from the garden. That’s exactly how skinny, forty-year-old men in overalls look. Time rubs their features away, andit’s only in old age, when they have become reconciled with it, thatthey get their own one-of-a-kind faces back. Maybe so death cantell them apart.

But he wasn’t thinking about death. Life was keeping him busy.

He cut off the head with short, quick strokes. Two mongrels werehanging around nearby. Then the tip of the knife slipped alongthe belly, along the legs, and the skin came off like a stocking.Steam was rising in the cold morning air. It was already over —skin, carcass, entrails, everything neatly separated. A simple andprecise dissection of existence.

“Should I cut it up?” asked KoÊciejny.“I’ll cut it up myself. I just don’t like doing the killing,” said

Simon Wasylczuk. He went into the house and came back with abottle. They sat down against the wall of the barn, in the sun, anddrank to each other and lit their cigarettes, watching Cergowahold up the sky.

“Well I like it,” said KoÊciejny. “The most important thing isthat the little beast doesn’t get scared. Makes a bad job of it, andthe meat’s no good. Stinks of fear. It’s worst with a pig. You can’tfool a pig, it’s smart. I’m doin’ a pig tomorrow at your sister’s.”

“Yeah,” Simon Wasylczuk replied.Who was KoÊciejny? His restless spirit drove him to do so many

things. In winter he wore a nylon cap with a brim, and in summerhe went bareheaded, shriveled by the sun and just as waterproof.

When there was a shortage of calves and pigs in the village, orwhen people’s hunger was already satisfied, or when a Lenten calmdescended between weddings and christenings, he harnessed twohorses to his ashwood cart and headed south. His woman stayedat home. It was no big deal to beat a path a couple times a daybetween the house, the pigsty and the cow barn, that’s what hethought. That much one woman could handle. He started thejourney in the morning and he could have made it by afternoon,but there was a pub halfway there. No matter where you’re headed,

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some pub or other is always standing by the side of the road, likea reward for the peace and quiet at home.

He tied up the horses, tossed them a couple handfuls of hayand sat down to drink. And since everybody knew him, he alwaysmanaged to find himself an enemy. Come evening, the soberer onesheaved two grappling men out the door. They landed in the mudor the dust, trying to get at vulnerable places, each trying to forcethe other to feel some pain. Then KoÊciejny continued on his jour-ney south. Peaceful, drowsing, just like the horses, one foot afterthe other to the edge of night, where darkness flowed over themountains like rich, black milk. He unharnessed the horses in hissleep, and in his sleep he fell on a bed where he lay on his backuntil morning. The men living in that barrack at the end of theworld said that KoÊciejny slept with his eyes open, that he musthave been afraid of something. But they were the ones who wereafraid, and they closed their eyes so they didn’t have to look outat the dark. They got up in the morning and left for the clearing.KoÊciejny stayed behind and drank whatever he had brought withhim. Rain was falling beyond the window. The room was clutteredwith the debris of objects essential for living. Empty cans, dry breadcrusts, leaky rubber boots, empty bottles . . . dirt and freedomalways intermingle. KoÊciejny talked to himself and sang songsthat nobody ever heard. He slumped on the bed, and the menreturning at dusk ran up against his motionless gaze, which tookin everyone and no one. On the third day he got up. He harnessedhis horses and started up through the wet clearings to the ridge ofUhryƒ, where the piles of cut wood looked like the ruins of afortification, like long walls eaten away by siege. He worked untilevening, until the moment when neither the whip nor the stick

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managed to give the animals any more strength. Half of that workconsisted of cruelty to his animals, and half of cruelty to himself.The rest was pure effort.

“A whip lasts him two days,” said the ones who dealt with thedead mechanisms of their motorized saws. But they said it quietly.They remembered the winter when KoÊciejny walked six kilome-ters barefoot, because he had bought new boots and thrown outthe old ones but then felt sorry for those new ones when he sawthe snowdrifts. Or that night when they found him in the stable.It was October. Silver dust sprinkled down from the moon andcrunched like frost underfoot. It was quiet, so they heard the sob-bing. He was kissing the sides of his horses, smearing their necks,which had been rubbed sore, with snot and tears.

“I didn’t come to visit,” said KoÊciejny when Simon Wasylczukoffered him a chair. He stood at the threshold. Warmth escapedthrough the open door and a white hen was scrabbling in the hall-way. Wasylczuk sat under a religious painting and smoked, peeringthrough the heavy air. Outside the window, the puddles of mudwere overflowing.

“I came to tell you that my woman doesn’t need your help.”“You were gone a long time. She said she needed it.”“No she didn’t. Get married, Simon. Then you won’t have to

be goin’ around the village with your help.”“Did you come to make me a proposition?”But KoÊciejny wasn’t saying anything more. The door stayed

open, he walked through the flood in the yard and disappearedbehind the dark gray curtain of rain, where earth, mountains,sky, animals and people mingled with each other, dissolved in a

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multitude of waters, in a land of darkness, chaos and innocence.That same day he left for the barrack in the wilderness, where themen had almost finished drinking up their monthly wages.

Who was KoÊciejny? The two fiery substances in his body —blood and alcohol — made him resistant to seasons and to weather.But sometimes the soul needs cold and the heart a bit of rest. Andeven when he slept, he still watched the darkness closing in on him.

“Take it easy, KoÊciejny,” the gamekeeper told him. “You couldwork for fourteen hours and still not get the work done, just likewith a woman you can’t . . . you know.”

“It’s too late, gamekeeper, I’m past forty.”“I don’t feel sorry for you, I just pity the horses.”

And then it happened like this.The ones who saw it said that KoÊciejny was wearing a white

shirt, and maybe that’s why the whole pub went quiet when hewalked between the tables over to the corner where SimonWasylczuk was sitting. Nobody moved, nobody blinked, nobodysaid a word, and everything happened quickly and calmly with thehelp of that long, narrow knife. KoÊciejny wiped it on his pants andstood there another second to make sure. And then with that knifestill in his hand, he went just as calmly to the door to go down theconcrete steps, through the patches of light and shade underneaththe three chestnut trees, and straight to the police station, wherethe fat, red-haired sergeant in his unbuttoned uniform said, “Forthe love of God, KoÊciejny.”

He got twelve years. Did his time in Rzeszów. He could watchthe bare, furrowed fields and the slow change of colors. They all

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emerged from winter white and to it they returned, as if Decemberactually had the power to abolish time. On a snowy night, whenthe fluorescent lights glowed with a quiet hum, it always lookedlike the start of eternity. On fine days, the silhouettes of planes fromthe nearby airport moved through the sky. To KoÊciejny, theylooked like little gold crosses.

After three years he got out on a weekend pass. He was calm,quiet, and orderly, so he got out, because everybody thought hewould be back at the appointed time. Just like, at the appointedtime, he got up, went to bed, and performed all those activities thathelped to give the infinity of imprisonment the appearance of a finiteform. He got a cloak for the road. Once again, there was snow lyingin the fields.

He sat in that same corner in the pub. The waitresses keptdropping things. The red-haired sergeant showed up to clarifywhether he was a fugitive or a ghost.

“Take it easy, officer, it’s only for three days.”He left last, showed up first, ate a little, drank a little, and lit

one cigarette off of another. He sat with his back to the room, andit seemed like his figure was shrouded in perpetual twilight. Onthe last day he left a tip for the barmaid and walked out into thenight. The snow crunched under his feet, and the echoes of his foot-steps mingled with the soft tinkling of the frozen stars.

They found him a week later, at dusk, but it wasn’t him any-more. It looked like him, sleeping, curled up in a ball. You couldgive it a few taps. Then it would make a wooden sound. In thedistance, Cergowa was trying to hold up the sky, but darkness stilltumbled down over the earth.

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LEWANDOWSKI

His house stood at the edge, and beyond it there was only forest.It was a long, charcoal gray hulk, like a sharp-edged fish or some-thing along those lines. There was nothing to conceal its ugliness.It was a huge fish, a whale hundreds of kilometers from the shore.

But it all started two weeks earlier.The last bus was always drunk. Men rolled between the seats

like billiard balls and fell into random pockets, starting up conver-sations with their neighbors, with women, and sometimes talkingto a shadow. In winter, at nine o’clock at night, it made absolutelyno difference.

He flopped down next to me, suddenly deflated, and he seemedto have fallen asleep. But when the darkness and snow mingled andswallowed up the last lights from town, he started to recite the names

of Warsaw streets. As if he were riding on the 21 or the no. 6:“Ratuszowa, 11. Listopada, Wileƒska, Âwierczewskiego, Wójcika,Okrzei, Zàbkowska . . .”

“Bia∏ostocka,” I said, “You missed Bia∏ostocka.”But it was his ride and nobody else’s business, so he didn’t even

blink, he just rode by Kijowska and Skaryszewska, and fat flakesof snow whirled in the beams of the headlights like gold moths.And then when the mountains moved in on both sides, unseen,hulking, and darker and darker, he said, “Szembek,” and stood up.He staggered, and someone cheerfully and automatically deflectedhim like a ball. So there he was right in front of me again, and thenhe mumbled in my ear. “This is where I live. Just ask for me.Lewandowski.” He headed for the door, and I didn’t even seehis face.

So they showed me his house. It was made entirely of unplas-tered cinderblocks and all under one roof, vast and dead and sep-arated from the road by a muddy clearing that didn’t have a singlestray dog loitering in it. A cart was tilting its shafts toward the sky.Two crows flew away from a pile of manure. There wasn’t even acat. I walked into the low, small entryway. I stepped over cast-offrubber boots. He was sitting in the kitchen and looked unusuallysmall. In a house of that size, a person expects bigger things. Hesat by the window, as still and gray as the world was on that day,and I don’t know if he recognized me, but I pulled up a chair. Alight bulb burned near the ceiling, naked and helpless against thediluted darkness. He pulled a bottle and a thick-sided shot glassfrom underneath the table.

“I hide it when I don’t know who it is,” he said.

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In the course of our conversation we came to an understand-ing on that Bia∏ostocka. The small, dirty little street had gottenlost in the confusion of side streets and stores around the railroadstation, just like it had in his memory, since he hadn’t been toWarsaw in twenty some years, maybe thirty, he couldn’t recallthat either. Generally speaking, we came to an understanding. Ilistened to him.

When we lit our cigarettes, the flickers of the matches werereflected in the Christmas-tree ornaments. It was the beginningof February, and there was a cold draft from the stove. When nightfell, the electric light brought out the rest of his features. He hada round, boyish face with a sparse gray moustache and fifty years’wear. The oily sheen of strenuous drunkenness made it resemblea tin mask.

“Nobody else is coming today,” he said. “JaÊek’s in the hospi-tal. They took him away yesterday. The rest are all bastards. Theycome and poke around and then talk about how I’m so poor. Sowhat, do they have honey with sugar and lard with butter? I don’tneed any more than this. I’ve got everything.”

He stood up and pulled me into the hallway, and then througha side door and along a corridor that ran the length of the house,until I caught a whiff of the stable. He switched on the light. A blackrump gleamed with a dull luster. The cow was chewing and scarcelyglanced at us. Darkness hovered in the corners. The little shed wasabysmal and morbid, and the little figures of the animals were lostin its depths.

“She lives one day at a time, and he’s an old thief. They caughthim not too long ago, but it was me who got fined.”

We went back. The scent of weariness accompanied me, the

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aura of sadness that emanates from people who never cry, becausetheir tears leave their bodies together with the drops of sweat.

The windowpanes were already completely black. The lighthad acquired a sulfuric intensity. The speckled wallpaper, the peel-ing paint on the floor, the pile of filthy pots and pans, the knife onthe table, the ebonite ashtray — the outlines of everything aroundus were saturated with a supernatural distinctness. We finished hisbottle so we could start on mine. It was easy for us to come to anunderstanding. I listened to him.

He came to these parts twenty odd years ago. He kept movingfor a long time, because somebody had to be picked up or some-body dropped off at the prisons along the way. “Those four years,that was a sentence somebody would give his brother. Not muchmore than a couple of walks up and down the corridor.” That’s whathe said. He tended cows, fired bricks, dug ditches, cut trees, andall around as far as the eye could see there were fields and forestsand a rectangle of earth fenced in with barbed wire. Then he gotout and did the same thing: trees, animals, ditches. Over the nextfew years he beat a path from one collective farm to another, a fewdozen kilometers. Ratuszowa, Targowa, Szembek — Paris, London,Lisbon — time took on the shape of distance.

He told me about it in a droning voice with a kind of motion-less intonation, filling in the gaps with the next swallows or drags.A flash of Szembek and Targowa showed itself only once, when Irudely and indiscreetly asked him “what for.”

“For my convictions. I had the conviction that they wouldn’tcatch me.” And he watched me with a scowl that came out of thesheds at the corner of Sulejkowska and Kwacza and from in betweenthe pigeons and stalls at the bazaar where gold wedding rings were

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made out of tombac and French blouses by seamstresses onGrochowska Street.

The thick light of night stuck to our bodies. We moved slowlyand with effort. At such times you had to save your strength to holdout for the end of the story, for death, or for whatever else.

Finally, he ended up not too far from here and did what heusually did, performed those genuinely manly tasks whose essenceis the monotony leading out of infinity and back into infinity. Nochanges, a little money, getting up at dawn, and that’s how the worldkept going.

In that last pgr he met a woman just as accidental and essen-tial as he was, and he married her and started to build a house.

“Come on, I’ll show you,” he said.He got up and headed in the direction of a white door, and

it was only then that I noticed that a smudged calendar from acouple of years before, with a large photograph of a red-hairedDavid Bowie, was hanging on it. He wiped his hands on the seatof his pants and unlatched the door. It was dark in there and evencolder than out here. He switched on the light but didn’t step overthe threshold. That smell. That was how all the rooms nobody looksinto smell. Time dies out in them, and the erosion of minutes andyears has the taste of damp and rot — of elemental things — thetaste of the end and the beginning. It was like a stage in half-dark-ness before the performance begins. A single light bulb burned inthe dense filaments of a golden chandelier. A long table, six uphol-stered chairs, a wardrobe, a credenza. Large glossy surfaces gleamedlike dark brown mirrors. The television stood under the window,against the background of a white curtain and crowned by the boxof a vcr, and the corner of a doily hung down over it all like a

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playful forelock over the cold face of the screen. The only thingin the room which did not cast dim reflections was the carpet lyingon the floor.

“That’s her,” he said.I saw only two splotches of shadow in the black frame. A wed-

ding picture. I had to imagine their faces myself. It was the modelof ideal dignity, motionless, flat, smoothed by retouching.

He switched off the light and gently closed the door. We returnedto our table, to the yellow oil-cloth with red flowers, to the hyper-reality of the kitchen, where life had not surrendered but looked atus intently from the corners and waited for what would happen next.What came next was what had been before. I listened to him. Hereturned to what there was, as if that white door over there lockedin what was past, as if the past could be let in and out like a guestor the postman. He told me about everything. About the guy whohad been sleeping with his own daughter for years, and how peo-ple had already gotten used to it and forgotten about it. He toldme who had bought himself a fourteen-year-old girl for money andwas waiting for the girl to grow up so he could marry her and fornow he was just keeping her in the house for work of one kind oranother. He told me that he had everything, that he didn’t needanything, and to hell with everything else, because he paid for whathe drank, his beasts were fed and nobody heard them making anynoise at night. He told me his name and that he was thinking aboutgoing to Warsaw, and he wanted me to ask him about all the streetsin order and about all the green and brown painted booths withlight and dark beer. He wanted to show me something else and gotup, but then he changed his mind. At that moment his eyes lookedat me completely lucidly, the drunken film cleared for a second.

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But when he sat down, his pupils were already just as lifeless asbefore. He asked if that pub at 160 Grochowska was still there, andI didn’t know, but I didn’t want to upset him, so I said that it was,that everything was just like it used to be. And I don’t know whatelse I would have agreed to, maybe to a complete invalidation oftime, to a train line to Wilanów, to men in cycling caps and quiltedjackets, to vodka sold starting at dawn at every train station, to every-thing. But his head dropped, and he fell asleep stretched out inhis chair, lips thrust forward, with his hands on his belly — like atraveler, as if he were going somewhere.

And I saw him one more time later on. It was daybreak, andthe bus was rolling downhill. The sun splintered against the dirtywindows, but individual needles of light shot through the vehicle.He got on at the usual place. He moved between the seats, and fora moment his silhouette was lost in a sunny aureole. He shatteredthe beams of light and then they fused behind his back again.When he sat down next to me, he was already back to normal, whichmeans that he looked like he had gotten up from that kitchen tablejust a moment ago. He composed his face according to some com-plex conception of a smile. There was nothing in it but effort. “It’slike a carnival, it’s a carnival,” he said.

I asked him where he was headed.“Exchange, my man, exchange,” he almost whispered. He

pulled a few trashy, colorful, boxes out of his black briefcase. EroticDreams, Pleasure Principle . . . I hardly had time to glance at them,because he had already stuffed the tapes back into his briefcase.

“You have to keep on living, my man, you have to keep onliving . . .”

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THE PUB

The jagged steps led to a door with a broken window and then intothe damp half-darkness of the entryway, and you had to turn left,because if you didn’t, then you could find yourself first off in theplace you should only be visiting later. The barmaid had dark hairput up in a ponytail. Her eyes didn’t fit her bird-like face. Theyhad the size and dim luster of a roe deer’s. And then there wasthat dark complexion: nobody knew if it was from the sun orfrom tobacco smoke. More likely from the latter, because therewas never any sun in there. It shone outside, on the rotting two-hundred-year-old town-hall tower under a four-sided roof. Nobodyremembered what used to be there any more. Now it was just apile of rubble, its windows boarded over, an absurd souvenir of acity, abandoned in the middle of a village square.

The barmaid pressed a button on the tape player and the hollow,

dead sounds of the music made the set of glasses on the bar starttinkling. She called over her shoulder and the waitress appearedfrom behind a curtain of colorful plastic strips in makeup, jewelryand stretch pants covered with clusters of grape vines, her goldearrings in a duet with the tape player, just like the dreamilyyawning, final lazy aamoorree. She started to straighten up thetables — all of them were askew, but each one at a different angle.And even though the music was hard and metallic, it was drownedout by the clatter of the iron chairs on the concrete floor. Thenshe went into the next room, put her hands on her hips and yelledinto the depths of the echoing space. Her voice came back at herlike it was coming from the inside of a well-shaft, but the two mendidn’t even look up. They were sitting under a signboard with thewords the drinking of vodka brought from elsewhereis prohibited and will be punished burned into it. Therewas a bottle under the table, and they themselves were sunk deepin a conversation that had probably been going on since last Friday.The waitress wanted to yell one more time, but when she wasfilling her lungs, she raised her head a bit and her gaze fell on thelast table way in the corner by the wall. And she saw KoÊciejnywalking out of that corner through the stuffy, greasy air, and withthat same white shirt on like that time when it happened, wheneverybody was quiet and he was walking, walking with the knifein his hand, but holding it so lightly, just with his fingers, reallyonly with his fingertips, and nobody paid any attention to SimonWasylczuk, since he was still sitting like he was before, motion-less. Everybody looked at that knife — will it drop or won’t it —they waited for the quiet clatter of metal or wood on the floor. Thenthere was just a rectangle of white cloth disappearing into the dark

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entryway, and it was only then that someone stirred, that some-one went over to Wasylczuk. But most of them went over to thesmudged windows to see what the other one was doing. But hehad neither vanished nor run away. He just walked calmly downW´gierski Trakt and turned the corner.

So now she was seeing it all over again. It was almost like thesun had broken through the tin roof and the ceiling to mold phan-tasmagoria out of the air. She shrank back and stumbled into achair, but she never looked away, just felt her way back to the bar,bumping up against the wall with her rear end until she finallytouched the cold chrome counter.

“What? Did you see him again?” The barmaid was sitting ona table and looking through cassette tapes in a cardboard box. “Youalways see him in the afternoon. Cross yourself.” She looked in thedirection of the entrance, poured a small shot with a flick of thewrist and shoved it at the waitress.

KoÊciejny’s ghost moved right through the little groups ofpeople getting off the bus from Dukla, walked for a moment alongW´gierski Trakt and turned the corner at the one-storied housewith the arcades where Olgierd Giemza used to live. He was theone who painted icons for the Greek Catholic churches around here,but also farther out, over on the Slovak side. And then he confessedto performing the same service for the schismatics, but the priestdid not want to give him any absolution and only told him at somepoint to paint the side chapel of St. Anne’s. But St. Paraskeva keptappearing to him, and they say that Giemza went crazy, threwaway his paints, broke his brushes and went to the Holy Land insearch of absolution or punishment. All that was a very long timeago.

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By now the bus had started off and was circling the marketsquare. The ducks paddling in what was left of the puddles didn’teven glance at the huge machine, as if it belonged to some other,invisible world. Women in kerchiefs with string bags scattereddown the side streets, where the rough cobblestones broke offabruptly and without warning, and where the white clouds of blos-soming trees crept out from behind the skeletal picket fences toconceal the wretchedness of the rotting buildings. The men werein no hurry. Time circled more slowly around the four-corneredsquare. To free themselves from its slower and slower circles, theguys went up those jagged steps, sat down at the tables, or stoodat the bar and looked at the labels. But there was no miracle to beseen between the Goleszes and the Tytans or the Gastronomicznavodka so they just said “wine” or, “pour me a couple of short ones.”On the top shelf, the Maxim brandy was overgrown with dust.

The waitress was coping. No more ghosts. The way Edekslapped her on the ass and grabbed her around the waist wasabsolutely carnal. He got rapped on the knuckles, but her hipspressed against him with an understanding that no one else couldsee. It lasted hardly a moment, because Edek had already let hergo and was walking away with that deliberately lazy walk of a malewho knows that somebody’s eyes are following him. The girl lookedat his broad shoulders in a parrot-green American Kick Boxerjacket, at his rear end in purple Gladiator sweat pants, at his wholefigure, which iridesced and phosphoresced from his feet on up tohis lemon-colored Yellowstone cap. Edek brightened up the com-pany at the table. He was like a fiery angel, and when he foundhimself a place and sat down, the men pulled back — maybe outof respect, and maybe out of anxiety before such radiance, which

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exposed the ordinariness and inadequacy of their own attire. Thewaitress set a mug in front of Edek, then she picked it up, wipedthe tabletop, put it back, took away the empty ashtray, brought anew one, twirled flourishes with her dishtowel one more timebetween the elbows of the people sitting there, and finally caughta passing glance.

“Tell her to put somethin’ else on, not those frog-eaters.”“Edek, they’re Italians.”“So what. Tell her to turn it down or put somethin’ on in

English.”“What difference does it make to you?” said Lewandowski,

staring down into what was left of his beer.“Maybe there’s no difference to you, but to me there is.”“Aha,” Lewandowski nodded his head without looking up.

A vehicle was coming in from the direction of Tatarska Górka.As it drove, it tried to avoid the deep ruts in the pavement. Whereit was sunken in, there had once been vaults for barrels of winebrought from abroad. Old sun, imprisoned in the cellars for cen-turies, must have eaten into the walls, and now they were allfalling to pieces. The vehicle drove up to the pub. It was a strangeconstruction, the fruit of poverty and ingenuity — an old wsmotorcycle, two wheels and a platform in back. It was JanZalatywój, all in denim and an aureole of relentless poverty, andhe came in to relax, accompanied by the smell of saltpeter andburning rubber.

“Zalatywój, how’s business out there?” Edek greeted him, eventhough he was sitting two tables away. He carefully and preciselyplaced his hands in front of him in their too-short sleeves and

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nodded at the waitress. Lewandowski abandoned the company,who were all ears listening to Edek’s niuyorks, grinpoynts, djobs, blaksand kadylaks, and sat down next to him, mumbling under his breath:

“ . . . and pigs with wings. Stand me a beer, Jasiu.”Zalatywój took two Wyspiaƒskis out of a thin wad and held

them in readiness.“It’s just not worth it,” he said. “Doesn’t even cover gas. Oh,

today I gave back three pairs and picked up two.”Jan Zalatywój repaired rubber shoes. He went around to villages,

collected galoshes and patched them up at home. Then he dis-tributed the goods to his clients. He avoided asphalt roads, becausea three-wheeler was illegal, not to mention Zalatywój the driver.Sometimes he raced through a few dozen kilometers during thenight and then came back two, three days through the mountains.There were plenty of by-roads. You just had to know them. Afew shacks in Mokryia, a pgr in Ni˝na, a long snake of houses inHucisko, a little here, a little there. The worst thing was the mud,the worst thing was that short-cut near Ubocze, where he had topush his foundering vehicle through a kilometer-long stretch ofstinking swamp, and sometimes he had to unload all his gear andstruggle with the reddish, sticky mess that reeked like rot and oil.At one time this track led straight into the middle of a peniten-tiary fiefdom where a few hundred prisoners would sweat in theendless fields, pastures and meadows, all of them craving vodka,tea and cigarettes. That time was long gone. The prisoners mar-ried the jailers’ daughters, and even though barbed wire was stillhanging here and there, the windows didn’t have bars on themany more. The doors were knocked out between the cells, and amixed breed of the guarders and the guarded was maturing in the

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two-room apartments. A few buildings, looking like a slipshod rafton a windy ocean of hills, stretched out to the farthest horizon.There was no more contraband and all the poisons were local. Soat the most, Zalatywój repaired something for someone, spent thenight with friends, and at dawn he would set off further to the east,so that he could return after a day or two by the roads that nobodyelse ever used: Czerty˝ne, Suczne, Spalona Polana — around houseswith vaulted cellars, gardens running wild, and the air thick withghosts. By Suczne, the sky was turning red, and the edges of theclouds curled like decorations. He left his rickshaw in the bushes,took an old quilt and climbed a hill. A stone tower looked out overthe surrounding countryside. The light from the west colored itpink. This was all that remained of the Greek Catholic church.Blackthorn bushes were blooming where the nave and presbyteryused to be. Zalatywój wrapped himself up in the quilt, smokedcigarettes and watched as everything around him darkened, charredand turned to black ash with a few silver sparks in the east.

“You! Zalatywój! I asked you how’s business out there!” Edekwas sipping a vodka and Pepsi and didn’t even have to raise his voicetoo much, because everybody got quiet. He and his crimson facewere bright, pulsating, and the whole pub was hanging on his words.

“You! Zalatywój . . . you gypsy motherfucker . . .”This blow was aimed at his heart, but Zalatywój’s heart was fifty-

six years old and could handle the pain.“I still have to drive out to Spe∏z∏a,” he said quietly, and

Lewandowski answered:“Yeah. You better go.”He stood up, paid, and headed for the door through a quiet

so thick, it was like he was walking out through tall, wet grass.

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In the evening, not even a ghost could have squeezed its wayin there. It was full of sweaty bodies. Two guys were leaving fortheir military service, and four others were trying to sing “TheReserve” for them, but none of them knew the words, so only“long live” rose up above the crush, and their heads collapsed ontothe tabletop immediately afterwards. The barmaid filled a proces-sion of mugs and glasses like a tired, dark-skinned automaton. Atthat time of night her eyes looked like misted glass. Music was play-ing, and the sounds thumped off the ceiling. When they fell, theywere absorbed by the spongy buzz, and even Edek’s ear couldn’tmanage to make out the words. Now and then the waitress perchedon his knees like a migratory bird, and the man stroked her andpatted her like a faithful dog. The tincture of the electric lightdissolved people, shapes and objects. Words, gestures, clinkingglasses, shouts of laughter, everything slid toward immobility. Theones who had the strength were already long gone. Lewandowski’slips were moving. No sounds were coming out — they were stucksomewhere inside his head — and the smoke drifting from hiscigarette looked like it was flowing out from underneath his eye-lids. He raised his mug and discovered that it was empty. So he setit down and looked through the window, even though out there itwas nothing but night falling and the gray lights of televisionsflickering somewhere on its outskirts, on the far side of the square.The red-haired sergeant, in just his shirt-sleeves, was standing inthe doorway, and Lewandowski saw his reflection in the win-dowpane. The cop said something to the barmaid and slowlywalked through both rooms. The buzz quieted down, andLewandowski instinctively flinched, but the policeman went backto the bar and asked the girl about something. The girl shook her

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head, the sergeant left, and the racket was turned up again.Lewandowski could stare out peacefully into the darkness. The windstirred the branches of the chestnut tree, exposing the streetlampand then covering it up again. Shadows flitted by the walls of thetown hall. The soldiers-to-be got a little sleepy. They stood up,picked up their helmets, walked away from the pub after one lastglass of Tytan for the road, and disappeared through the door.There was a sound of shattering glass, curses, and the sputter ofgunning engines. They did a lap around the market square, just asthe cavaliers of the Congregatio Adolescentium had done on horse-back, in their red capes with crosses on them, when they set off tothe south to guard the merchants’ caravan routes. The resem-blance lasted only two times around. Maybe it was even the samemoon. It hung over the city at the Wallachian Gate and had theyellowish color of the windows of the pub.

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GRANDMA

It was only fields running wild as far as the eye could see. In springthey were colorful with flowers, then they barely turned russetbefore the complete grayness of November. There were junipers,too, so stiff that the strongest wind couldn’t bend them. The airrushed relentlessly through the low mountain pass.

Its whistlings penetrated right through Grandma’s shack, sweptthe dust from the floor, whipped the gray, braided straw ropes upthe chimney and flung them into the sky, which was the color ofceladon in the west when the twilight was fine.

Grandma hardly ever looked up. Her body was subject to grav-ity, or perhaps it was the weight of the sky, it was bent at such anodd angle. She could squint up into the clouds only when she satdown. And in the evening it was dark up there, and there wasn’tanything to see.

So it was just those wild fields and the white snake of the road,which hardly anybody ever took. The ones that went away left notraces. Six daughters left by that road to go out into the world. Theseventh, the oldest, stayed, and if you asked Grandma how old shewas, Grandma in her black head scarf would say: “Well, she wasborn some time during the front.”

If it was late summer or autumn twilight right then, Grandmawould get up, call her old dog and go out. They walked along thesmooth slope at the foot of the mountain, past a straggling ridgeof scrub, and when they found themselves in open space, on thegentle crest of a hill, their figures looked like silhouettes cut outof black paper. They differed from each other only in size, becauseGrandma’s bent spine made her look like a four-legged animal.

“I’m going to stand guard,” she would say. At night, wild boarsshowed up at the potato patches. When the full moon was high,she could see them coming down the slopes of Baraƒ. Three, fourindistinct shadows — the silvery shimmer gave them away whenthey disrupted the stream’s lazy current. Grandma shouted and beata thick baking-pan with a piece of iron. It sounded like a crackedbell, but the air was too weak to carry the sound. Then the dog,half-blind and almost deaf, started to bark. Afterwards, Grandmawrapped herself up in an old quilt, huddled in a corner of thewooden shed, and fell into a shallow doze. The night’s luminos-ity was airy — nothing like the day’s massive brightness that herbody had to make an effort to get through, bent over, creaking,and animated only by the hope of eternal rest in darkness. If it wasSeptember, hoarfrost would cover the ground before dawn.

“That’s a man for you,” said Grandma when Czesiek the son-

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in-law was already sleeping. Broken furniture, a table covered withax scars, shells crunching underfoot. The worst was in winter,when they had to take refuge at the neighbors. First a kilometerthrough the snowdrifts, and not only that, but out there everybodywent to bed earlier, so they had to knock, pound on the door. Theneighbors were used to it already and opened up practically intheir sleep. Czesiek the son-in-law could see as clear as day in hiswhite hot fury, and sometimes he ran after the women, right ontheir heels. Once or twice the neighbors set the dog on him justto get some peace and quiet.

Her daughter was born around the time of the front, someforty years ago, so it was like winning the lottery that she finallyfound herself a man. He had a face like an old rock. You couldhide anything under a mask like that, with that kind of stillnessyou didn’t know what to expect. He was also on the other side offorty. At that age, habits don’t change: he worked, he drank, hefought, he slept — safety requires predictability.

He was the first one up in the morning, and sleep wiped hismemory clean like a wet sponge. Since he was almost completelydressed already, he could head right out to catch the first bus.There was a market square in Dukla with an angular tower, TheBorder pub, and sometimes there was work even if you weren’tmuch good at anything.

That was the time when Grandma would wander through theravines with her calves. The four skinny beasts were looking forshade more than grass. When the sun rose so high that it threat-ened to fall at any second, they hid in the muddy stream beds orin the sultry semi-darkness of the alders, and once one of them gotstuck so deep that it had to be pulled out. There were wolves, too.

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Grandma would see them from time to time in broad daylight,through the haze of sweltering heat, as they emerged from theforest on Baraƒ and froze in anticipation. Or it could have beenthe junipers, animated by the shimmering air. Grandma’s sharp,screechy scream made them turn back.

Sometimes she sat down under a tree and sleep overtook her.In a way, old age canceled out night and day. Times of effort andrest followed one another in a rapid rhythm. Maybe it was just thatlife was in a hurry. Around evening she came back down to thehut to get something to eat. Her grandsons were white and shape-less, like dolls made out of raw dough. The wind twisted hornsout of the dust in the yard. In the women’s house it was quiet, andyou could hear the satiated buzz of flies. There weren’t enoughwords in the world to keep talking for forty years. Grandmagnawed on bread with her last tooth. She was waiting along withher daughter to see whether the son-in-law would show up or not.

“What about your man, Grandma? You don’t get seven daugh-ters out of thin air, no matter how full of ghosts it is, because I’veseen you spit over your shoulder and cross yourself, even in broaddaylight.”

Grandma nodded her head. Her black wool kerchief framedher face in a hard, sharp outline — a pale face, a flat image of half-conscious torment. There was, there was a man. But that wasfifteen years ago.

It was Easter time, and the last remnants of snow were slidingdown from the mountains. Pietr and a couple of others were get-ting drunk in people’s houses, now here, now there. Spring andthe Lord’s Resurrection were on the way. So it was here a glass,

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there a measure, from house to house — white vodka and water— it looked like the strictest kind of fasting. Around evening theycame to a stop in front of the store. A warm wind swept in fromthe south, from Baraƒ. The stream that cut the village in half wasthe green color of hope, and the Le˝ajsk beer had a bitterishautumnal flavor. It stopped blowing at dusk, and all things, treesand houses, reclaimed their true shapes in the still air. Pietr saidhe’d better go, but nobody knew why he wanted to walk throughthe stream instead of across the little wooden bridge. The menstanding around the shop watched how he staggered into the swiftcurrent, but the water didn’t even reach his knees. You could getthe best of that stream in summer by jumping from rock to rock.When he’d made it halfway across, when he was already closer tothe other bank, he fell down among the green-white whirlpools.Not one of the men standing there and sipping their beers madea move. It was almost like the story was still going on and that ithad to have some kind of continuation. Pietr lay down, and nowhe was lying down and drinking. The ones who pulled him out latersaid that a bucket of water drained out of him, and the whole timethey could hear it sloshing inside his body. The Greek Catholicchurch loomed above them on the slope.

“That’s because he didn’t come from here.” Grandma tied theknot of the kerchief tighter under her chin. She got up, put on herquilted jacket, took her stick and went out. Her bent figure in thedoorway didn’t reach much higher than the door handle. In theyard, she called the dog with an awkward woman’s whistle. Nightwas moving into the soaring sky from the direction of Dukla.Grandma went to dream her shallow dreams, full of bygone eventsemerging out of her unconscious the way animals emerge from the

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edge of the forest after nightfall. When the sun came up it wasdifficult to tell them apart: animals, events, dreams. Those lastones took on the shape of an airy, colorful kerchief shot throughwith gold thread, and a white Sunday handbag. A light frost hard-ened over the grass and the images by daybreak.

In late August, Grandma was always gathering hay. Czesiek theson-in-law showed up and disappeared — he preferred to work upa sweat on the construction sites outside of Dukla. The Border stoodin the sun, but inside, it stayed cool. Her daughter fed the chil-dren dumplings with milk, and maybe that’s why they wouldn’t turnpink. So Grandma raked the hay herself and gathered it into stacksthat were scattered by the wind sweeping in from the mountainpasses. She took as much as she could carry in a tarp and came downwith a bundle two times bigger than she was. Sometimes a neigh-bor would show up for an hour with his cart. And everything wenton the same as usual. The rain soaked what had dried, her eyes wentblind in the afternoon, and the day seemed like it had no end. Butthen, one afternoon, deliverance came. Grandma’s shack was struckby lightning. There was no way it could have been an accident inthat desolate place. Her daughter was standing in line at the storewith the children, and Grandma saw everything from her fieldshigh above. There was a flicker of lightning in the stormy blackair, and the wind spread it out like a twisted scrap of paper. Grandmaran toward it, but the heat kept her from getting even as far asthe yard. At dusk, the sky cleared and it stopped blowing. Theflames subsided. They crept along the ground, the color of thewestern sky.

A day or two later, when it all had cooled down, Grandma

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waded ankle-deep into the slimy grit where the fire had been andraked the coals with her stick. There was nothing left. It wasn’tlike she had any gold or silver. Even the iron pots had acquiredthe brittle structure of minerals. And she herself looked as if shehad been caught in the blaze — black, frail, frayed. She pokedaround with her stick and muttered: “The Lord God is a man, theLord God is a man.”

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THE RED-HAIRED SERGEANT

The red-haired sergeant sat behind his desk and looked out thewindow. It had been raining since morning. The roofs of thehouses were dark and glistening. His uaz military jeep, parkedthat morning in the usual place, looked like a greenish island inthe middle of a gray lake. The sergeant was a little worried aboutthis: the waters for certain wouldn’t subside before evening, andhe felt a little strange about going and asking someone for rainboots. Commandeer them? He shook his head and banished thethought. He drained the rest of his cold coffee and turned on thefan, but then immediately turned it off again. He thought maybehe could switch the light on already and dispel the disturbinggloom, but there were no curtains on the windows, and he didn’twant to look like somebody put on display. A truck was driving infrom Ni˝na. He took a good look at it, but the only cargo it was

carrying was rain. He stood up and walked over to the window, sothat somebody, anybody, would see a white, vigilant face in the darkglass. On the other side of the highway there was a cement obeliskwith p pr in red letters on it. Someone had knocked off the z,setting it back in time, or maybe giving it a good shove. That wasa year ago, three guys on motorcycles, one evening when it wasalready getting dark. He walked outside, they saw the light fromthe open door. They tossed a couple of rude words in his direc-tion and kicked-started their machines — mz’s were easy to fireup — and all he ended up with was a red helmet they left on theground. He locked it in the cabinet and left it at that.

“So then, rain boots,” he considered. He went out into the cor-ridor and took a look around the storeroom, where there weresome brushes, various odds-and-ends, and a bicycle. All he foundwas a pair of heavy, black combat boots. Those would do if noth-ing better turned up. He went back to his desk. The telephone satthere quietly. A black belt was dangling from the open door of thearmor-plated safe, and somewhere further back was a holster witha pistol in it. The faucet dripped over the sink. “The major aspectof being on duty is immobility,” thought the sergeant. He walkedback and forth, from one wall to the other. The floor creakedbehind him step for step. He thumped his open palm with his fist.

Now was the time when he was supposed to go out, wearinghis cap, one hand in the pocket of his pants, armed, along thesteep, shady little street, to emerge onto the sunny clock face ofthe market square, where the church stood at noon, the pub at sixo’clock, the store at three, and the stop for outgoing buses at nine.Loiterers and locals either motionless or roaming around likemobile seconds. Józek, who would leave his drunken tractor at the

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edge of town, always had a spot on one of those benches, wherehe sat and waited for a buddy to come along, or for nothing tohappen at all. When Józek died one day and didn’t show up, Edektook his place. The red-haired sergeant always stood there for amoment or two, and Edek told him what he knew, expecting inreturn for the sergeant to know a little less about him.

But today there was nothing doing. It was deserted, the churchtower didn’t cast a shadow, and the market square looked a littlelike an hourglass filled with water. Little streamlets of water trick-led along the sloping pavement stones from west to east and creptinto the side streets, taking the shortest route to the river.

The sergeant looked at the electric tea kettle standing on thewindowsill. A hardened trickle of sugar flowed from a paper bag.A fly sat on the granular heap and rolled a little frosted cube in itstiny paws. He tried to comprehend how it was that this light,almost bodiless creature could cope with hard, angular matter. Hemoved his hand close to the fly, but he couldn’t tell whether it flewaway with its prize or abandoned it. A few of the little crystals sliddown the heap, and there was a tiny hollow in the place where ittook off.

A ˚uk van drove in from Ni˝na, along the road through thestunted, gloomy willows. A torn tarpaulin flapped like the cape ofa horseman out of nowhere. “Must be Dziunek,” the sergeantthought as he twisted the knob. Radio Rzeszów was playing Nirvana,so he wandered around the dial. rmf was barely coming in. StationThree had Nick Cave, so he went back to Rzeszów, and then foundBratislava and left it there. The sounds of cymbals, violins andbass materialized in the still air in the likeness of a swarm of insects.Humming, droning and fluttering. It made things drier somehow.

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The sergeant unbuttoned two buttons of his uniform and thenbuttoned one back up again. Ducks were paddling in the puddlesbetween the wheels of the jeep. It looked completely undignified.

“I can get someone to call their dog and tie it up, but that won’twork with ducks,” he thought. The birds disappeared under thebelly of the vehicle, reappeared, playing “house,” or “roof” or“bridge.”

He could hear a strained, high-pitched vibrating sound com-ing from somewhere off to the left, from the market square, andJan Zalatywój’s vehicle appeared a moment later. He had put upa canvas top to cover the back, and its ragged brim extended overthe driver, but the south wind whipped the lashes of rain and drovethem under the cloth. The old motorcycle climbed its way up thepot-holed, asphalt ribbon in the direction of Ni˝na. The willowshad already hidden him from view, and the damp air slowly watereddown the wailing of the machine. “God bless him,” thought thesergeant. “He’s probably the most law-abiding one of them, evenwithout a driver’s license or registration.”

Jan Zalatywój was passing the stone figure of an angel by now,which, on clear days, shone white on its mound, poised to take off.But today it stood heavy, dark gray, with lowered, soaking wings.Beyond that there was nothing. Earth and sky were basted togetherby an invisible seam. Zalatywój must have known about some holein this curtain, about a secret entrance leading to the other side,into the valley with its decaying collective farm, where the windblew past barns as long as trains and swept away whatever animalodors were left, and where huge spider webs fluttered in the win-dows instead of glass. “Eh,” said the sergeant, “So what was all thatfor anyway?”

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The music on the radio was over. Now they were talking inSlovak. He turned off the receiver, sat down behind the desk,pulled out the drawer, took out a sandwich, unwrapped the whitepaper and started to eat. He took The News out of another drawer.He spread it out and was soon absorbed in his reading, from timeto time brushing away imaginary crumbs. Somebody in ˚urawicahad hacked off the sink and faucet in the pub with an ax, a tractorran over its own driver near Medyka, a dead dog had been lying onthe bridge in Nagnajów for more than two weeks. Life assumed var-ious forms, taking on and then abandoning the bodies of animalsand people, today it’s raining, the day after tomorrow it will stop,lord knows you don’t move up in a hurry, you have to sit anotherhour or so, so that the citizenry feels safe and so that somebody orother doesn’t start taking immunity from punishment for granted.He got to the sports column. The third league was fighting it outamong themselves. There wasn’t anything close to a stadium or ateam around here, he thought with satisfaction. Because a crowd,even a third-league crowd, was capable of being unpredictable.And all he had for handling enthusiasm was a service Makarovwith strict instructions on when to use it, one night stick, and thepolice station fire extinguisher. He would have had to appeal to thecrowd to disperse calmly, and this filled him with terror. Becausethe red-haired sergeant was shy and lost his composure in front ofan audience.

He felt cold. A draft scudded along the floor, and a corner ofthe newspaper lifted and fell. Someone was standing in the middleof the room.

“Citizen, what are you doing walking into a government officelike . . .” The door closed.

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The person who had just arrived stepped forward. The wet, graylight drifting from the window settled on his face and froze to adull sheen. The sergeant squinted, blinded by the white of thenewspaper.

“What’s your business?” He put his unfinished sandwich in thedrawer, and ran the fingers of his other hand over the buttons ofhis uniform. He found two undone. He pushed them through thebuttonholes with the lightning speed of many years’ practice andas he straightened up, the chair back creaked. Then his gaze, as ifhe had adjusted a lens at the end of it, regained its focus.

“Looks like that draft must be coming from you,” said the red-haired sergeant.

“That’s ’cause I froze to death,” answered KoÊciejny.“Well maybe, but now it’s warm. You should be thawing out.”They sat across from each other: one ruddy, stocky, the sweat

of uncertainty beading on his forehead, and the other like wood,like a motionless, carved figure on the chair and not sweating atall, even though the moisture settled on his face like on a potbrought in from the cold. A snub-nosed Praga was heading down-hill. The fir logs it was hauling were the color of tobacco smoke.“Gacek,” thought the sergeant. “He must be up to something.” Buthe didn’t do anything, just started folding up the paper. First inhalf, then in quarters, again and again. The truck slowly and coollyrolled past the police station.

“I was at the priest’s,” KoÊciejny said.“Well?”“Nothin’. I went to the presbytery. He was eating soup. Tomato.

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It was hot. He blew on it. I stood by the table for a while. Hedidn’t even look up. The housekeeper came in and brought thesecond course. It was a pork chop. Covered half the plate. The wayit smelled, Sarge, the way it smelled . . .”

“They didn’t see you?”“No.”The dark blue umbrella of the sky hovered in the air over the

horizon. From the southeast, a narrow blade of gold edged inunder the drooping ruffle of clouds. The evening shadows musthave spread over the market square in Bardejov by now.

“So what are you doing walking around like this, KoÊciejny?You’re scaring people. Irka’s seen you in the pub. Is it that bad overthere?” The sergeant made a vague gesture.

“There? There everybody’s doin’ fine, better than here, but still. . .” KoÊciejny straightened up in his chair, stretched out a largehand in front of him, closed it, opened it and closed it again.“There’s nothin’ to hold on to, nothin’ to put your hands on.”

“Did you go see your wife?”“She didn’t see me then, so she’s not lookin’ now. I go to the

pub, because they drink vodka, they eat, they beat each other upthere. Now I go when Irka’s not around. I sit in the corner andwatch ’til my heart almost breaks.”

The luminous gash floated over Czeremcha. A blue skull ofdrizzle broke off and rose upwards, and the wind rolled it north.The wall of the Austrian cemetery blazed red, and its fire wheeledand spread to cover the hilltop. A sliver of orange pierced thewindowpane, darted right through KoÊciejny, scattered against thewall and faded.

“Why me exactly?” asked the red-haired sergeant.

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“Exactly because you can see me, Sarge . . . and it so happensthat the authorities usually don’t get surprised or scared.”

“Well then,” said the sergeant and wiped his forehead.“And I wanted you to tell me somethin’.”“Well?”“Where’s there goin’ to be a pigsticking around here?”“A what?”“A pigsticking, Sarge. You know a lot, you talk to people. The

thing I miss most over there are pigstickings.”

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NIGHT

On the twenty-fourth of July, KoÊciejny, deprived of his own body,was walking along the road. The sky’s enameled lid fit tightly tothe earth. Lizards rustled in the brittle grasses. He didn’t cast ashadow. His soul craving incarnation, he kept his left hand in thepocket of his denim trousers and felt no pain in his feet. The graygash of the road cut the valley in half and vanished into the pass.The world looked just the same on the other side: the mountainpeaks were livid blue from the sweltering heat, the stones white.

He had ˚∏obisk at his back. The church tower stood like a sailin the windless blue. He’d been there this morning. He stoodwhere he used to stand when he was alive — over on the right, nearthe vestibule. Nothing was going on. The sacristan walked out ofthe vestry. He bent his knee in front of the altar and moved towardthe door. The metal plates on the soles of his shoes tapped like a

clock immersed in eternity. He opened one wing of the gate andcame back. The sun shone horizontally through the stained-glasswindows. KoÊciejny’s sense of his own non-existence doubled.When he left, he reflexively dipped his hand into the font of holywater. The water remained undisturbed. The archangel over thealtar blew his trumpet. Dust sprinkled down from his face. A trickleof tiny particles light as air fell through a patch of sunlight andtrembled like a golden thread. It was a death watch beetle boringinto Gabriel.

KoÊciejny walked along the road and felt no weariness, eventhough he had known neither sleep nor rest the night before. Hecould see in the dark just as well as in daylight. Things, trees, ani-mals, people. He watched it all happen, came a step closer, closer,went into houses, imbibed the smells of bodies. Events flowedright through him, and there were no secrets. He sat in front oftelevisions, watched movies, three, four in one evening. The greenciphers in the little windows flickered monotonously, measuringout the infinity of endless plots, and he had a feeling that of all theliving, the ones on film were the most like him. They driftedthrough the air, died, and were born again, immortal, condemnedto homelessness and void of meaning. Lewandowski sat in hishouse, in a dark room, like Jonah in the belly of the whale, and thefurniture recalled its glossy intestines. The burning, drunken nightrocked the enormous homestead and tried to cast it onto the shore,but Lewandowski hung on to his bottle and held off catastrophe.The men and women were doing what they usually did in thescreen’s underwater glow. Their bodies were like sweaty and beau-tiful mechanisms, so Lewandowski hit the remote, paused it, hit itagain, paused it, set it in motion again, fast-forwarded or made it

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start from the beginning. They performed flawlessly. KoÊciejnystood in the half-open doorway. He watched Lewandowski’s slack,slow movements — glass, bottle, cigarette — watched the bareshoulders gleaming in the half-darkness. Then he moved closer,stood right behind him and caught the scent, the scent of slow,drunken death’s pale flame burning out mind and guts. “Ech,Mietek,” he said soundlessly and went out through the house,into the darkness full of shouts and wobbling motorcycle head-lights, because now the store was open as late as people had thestrength to get there. He walked along the edge of the highway.Dogs rattled their chains. Open windows looked like puppet the-aters. Yellow light brightened the chore of Saturday or Sunday nightsupper, and KoÊciejny, hungry for life, stood at the windowsills andlistened to the rattle of plates and stories. But not one of themuttered his name. Even the ones he used to fight and drink with.Sometimes, somebody got up from the table, looked out into theyard and said, “Those dogs gone rabid or what?”

Now, walking along the road, KoÊciejny remembered it all,remembered the last several hours of roaming from village tovillage. The night tried to break up the places of settlement byunwinding its black bandages in the fields. But in July the dark-ness is never complete, because the air is full of voices. Outside ofM∏aczny, a nightjar chattered in the wild fields that belonged tonobody. A monotonous, wooden sound reached him from some-where underground. A faint rustle could be heard up above, eventhough not a tree was growing in this wasteland. The GreekCatholic church, he thought then, the church. There it was, fallingto pieces to the right of the path. Young birch saplings, sown bythe wind, were growing on the thick, roofless walls. He reached

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the highway. A stagnant stretch of sweltering heat hung motion-less over the asphalt. He left the bird with its song of ill-omen andwalked on, toward M∏aczny. He passed several dark houses. Therewas a warm, animal smell floating from the yards, and somewherea horse snorted. He paused, but a snarling chain was dragged outof a shed and a dog started barking. He headed in the direction of˚∏obisk. Three streetlamps sprayed silver dust into the sky. A partywas raging in a brick house under a tin roof. He turned, made hisway through the farmyard cluttered with junk, passed Gacek’struck, and saw Edek’s car gleaming in the shadow of the barn. Abottle was flung out the window and shattered somewhere in thedepths of the yard. KoÊciejny walked into the hallway. The smellof rubber boots and denim reminded him of his past life.

Gacek and Edek were sitting at the table, and a thirty-year-oldwoman was on the sofa bed. Gacek was naked to the waist. Theoutline of his undershirt showed white on his tanned shoulders.The buckles and snaps on Edek’s jacket shone like medals. Thewoman had red hair and a lemon-yellow blouse. Edek set a fullbottle on the table. Gacek speared a slice of canned meat with hisfork, forgot about it and stared at the screen, which was mutelyshowing a film about love.

“Don’t think it over, Gacek, just you do it,” said Edek. Heraised his glass and the stone on his little finger glistened like adroplet of dark blood. Gacek looked at the pork and said:

“Fear at night what you risk during the day.”“Your boyfriend’s a coward, MaryÊka,” Edek poured a glass

and gave it to the man. “Drink! For courage!”“Whatcha mean mine? I just stop by now and then . . .” said

the woman, smoothing her blouse over her bulging breasts.

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“So would you come to see me?” Edek hooked his thumbs ontohis belt and leaned back in his chair.

“I ain’t a scaredy-cat.” She flashed her silver tooth and blew outa scornful puff of smoke.

KoÊciejny stood next to the dresser, where the tape player wasplaying “you were my one and only and now you don’t notice me.”Outside the window, a tractor drove by with its headlights off. Onthe television, a black-haired woman was walking along the beach,and the sea was the color of washing blue. Moths fluttered aroundthe lamp. Their shadows bumped against the wall, as if they werelooking for an exit. Edek flicked ash onto the green linoleum.

“Don’t you need some cash, Gacek? One run, an hour’s drivethere and back.” A fork clattered as it was set down, a fly flew upover the plate, and the beach turned into an elegant apartment.

“No,” said Gacek and he poured himself a drink. When heraised it to his lips, a clear trickle ran down his fingers. His finger-nails were black from grease. Edek stood up and took off hisjacket. His undershirt, white an hour ago, was now the color ofwet snow.

“Hey MaryÊka! The night’s almost over!” and he pulled her upto dance. They collided heavily with each other, soundlessly andfleshily, waltzing out from behind the table near the door to thesound of clanking glass, and then along the wall and back again,like a heavy spinning top. A glass fell and rang out as it hit the floor,but the crunch of glass under their feet was lost in MaryÊka’s laugh.She swept the air with her red hair, and its heat whipped Gacek’snaked shoulders. The sweltering heat poured into the window likeblack honey, and the dancers’ bodies spun slowly around, inter-twined, joined by that certainty which comes at the first touch, when

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virtually everything that is going to happen has happened already.That spinning, heavy with blood, sucked up everything around it.The speckled wallpaper, the half-naked Sandy in the newspaper,the yellow globe of the chandelier, the table and its satellites of ash-trays and dishes, the sofa bed, the Black Madonna of Cz´stochowabehind glass, the floor. Its throbbing spread through the house allthe way up to the attic and as high as the soft skin of the sky, whereconstellations rubbed against each other, sliding into the west, intoa rift that was darker than the night, and only Gacek remainedmotionless.

The music suddenly broke off, but they kept swaying back andforth, as if its sounds were not even necessary. A chair fell over ontothe floor. Edek kicked it into the corner and tried to do somethingwith the cassette, but he didn’t want to let his partner go even fora moment.

“Drink!” MaryÊka called out, but the bottle was already empty.“Well, Gacek? You scared to go get vodka too?” Edek burst out

laughing.

Now the road was sloping down into the hot shade of the sprucetrees. It looked like a dried up river. Dark blackthorns twinedaround the crosses in the Ruthenian cemetery, and the dead laybeneath the earth, deaf and blind to the world. KoÊciejny passedan overturned gravestone made out of sandstone and then another,crowned with a rusted Christ. An arm of the cross had been knockedoff and the figure’s right hand stretched out lonely against thebackground of the sky. After ten more steps, he stopped envyingthe dead. Those moments he had left behind caught up with him.Especially that moment when quiet filled the room and Gacek

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slowly pulled himself together, tense, strained, fingers white fromhis grip on the table’s edge, which looked like it was going to crackand break off like a wafer. But the music exploded out of the speak-ers again, and he just stood up slowly, holding on to the tabletopthe whole time, as if he wasn’t sure of his own legs. The other twohad already forgotten him, because their pounding blood pushedthem into the television, which swayed but kept on showing whatit was showing. Now they were like those shadows of the moths,and if it were not for the walls, if it were not for the six sides ofthe house, their bodies would have long since tumbled out into thesultry, unrolled bedding of the night.

“Yeah. I’ll be afraid alright,” Gacek said quietly. He let go ofthe table and walked to the door.

In the light of the cab, KoÊciejny saw that his face was like awet stone. But he couldn’t tell if it was from sweat or from tears.

The engine roared at the first try, and the truck lurched for-ward, missing the back of Edek’s Ford by a hair. By the time theyreached the gate, the length of wooden fence lay down beforethem as softly as grain under a scythe, and the post that the gatewas hanging on snapped against the fender and disappeared. Theydrove out onto the highway. The headlights couldn’t reach the endof the darkness, the sticky asphalt held the car back, and the drivewas like a bad dream about running, when nothing gets any closeror moves farther away. Gacek floored the accelerator and thespeedometer needle held steady. The darkness spit out houses andswallowed them up again. The diesel engine’s harsh rattle filled thecab, shattered against the horizon, rebounded, and fell back down,multiplied by the echo of the cosmos, and KoÊciejny thought point-lessly: “Damn, they can probably hear us in Krosno.” Gacek was

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whispering to himself:“Oh God, there’ll be fear, oh God . . .”They ran off the road coming around the turn before ˚∏obisk.

They heard the scrabble of the wheels on loose gravel. Handfulsof pebbles crackled against metal. The lumber hook mowed downa post, and its red reflector died as it was tossed into the ditch. Aminute later, they stopped in the little town.

He finally walked out into the pass. The sun had the bigger partof the sky already behind it. A single cloud was floating in fromthe west, from somewhere between Czumak and Sukowaty. Itsedges were gold and it looked like a whiplash had outlined itsshape in the air. “It’s cold there,” thought KoÊciejny. Clumps ofovergrown apple trees were as dark as their own shadows spillingout onto the road like puddles of ink. This cold should have sep-arated him from the heat and turmoil of the past night. Becauseeven now he needed consolation, just like when he was alive. Buthe didn’t have a body to experience it, so he imagined relief, quiet,and stillness to himself, searching for them in his memory. But allhe sensed was the oily smell of the machine left in the middle ofthe sloping market square. It stood under the wan street lamp asmotionless as a jaded horse, and Gacek disappeared into a yard,came out, vanished into the next one, and his appeals reboundedoff the walls together with his curses until he finally stumbled uponthe right door and returned with three bottles. He climbed backin behind the wheel with surprising soberness and agility. But theodor of madness was palpable through the smell of overheatedmetal, rubber and oil. The stormy, electric air has that kind offlavor when the Devil crawls into a human skin, and a man

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becomes calm, because he knows he is already set on the thing thathe has to do.

They drove fast but steady on the return trip. Gacek drank outof a bottle and got more sober with every gulp. KoÊciejny watchedhis Adam’s apple.

Edek’s car was parked in the shadow of the barn. All the lightsin the house were out.

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MARYÂKA

When it gets this hot, it messes with your head. Have you ever seenin August how dry meadows catch fire and how the south windwhips the flames and all that’s left is black earth, black dust, birdbones and the skeletons of poor little grass snakes that had crawledout of their holes? They crumble in your fingers. Maybe you’venever seen it, but that’s how it must’ve looked. It was so hot . . .air like a tin roof . . . one match is all it takes when the wind isblowing. That’s how it must’ve been. So what if it was night? LikeI said: It was so hot the heat poured down your throat right alongwith the vodka. One match is all it takes. One word. Even if youwere there, you couldn’t get to the whole truth of it. Anyway . . .you’re not from around here. I knew all three of them like every-body here knows them. But that was in the daytime. Night comeson and you see that it all doesn’t mean a thing. Gacek, Edek,

MaryÊka . . . MaryÊka, Edek, Gacek. When and where did it all start. . . She, you know . . . I remember when she was sixteen and worea white dress above her knees. Beginning of June and her legs werealready tanned. Maybe that’s why nobody ever saw her in pants,even when the rest of the gals wore nothing but pants. This way,through the market square, you could go through the willow treesto the riverbank. The guys, girls behind them, a little off to theside, because you know how it is: they wanted to, but they werescared. She was the only one who wasn’t scared. I remember howone spring, maybe it was May, nobody’d gone swimming yet. Theguys were just sitting on the bank, getting their feet and theirfishhooks wet, and she just took off her clothes. She unbuttonedsomething and that little white dress dropped, she stepped out ofit and walked as calm as could be over to the dam, the one theGermans built during the war from Jewish gravestones. It got quiet.Everybody turned their heads to look at her. Nope, she wasn’tnaked. She had something on, but the wind was blowing and thatblack hair wrapped all around her, and maybe that’s why she lookedlike she was naked. It was so quiet . . . She walked right to themiddle of the dam. The water was green, must’ve rained the daybefore. It was green and came up to her knees, but higher up shewas brown, like she’d been lying in the sun her whole life. Shelooked at the guys, like she wanted to tease them, and then pushedoff from those stone slabs and jumped. Head first. It wasn’t all thatdeep there. Just past the dam the bottom got shallower and thestones, you know, the stones are bigger than a horse’s head. Butshe came back up again. And when she started coming out of thewater, so wet, everything sticking to her, they all saw it was likesomething guys dream about at night. She was all glistening like

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some kind of snake. She pulled on her dress and left, not evenlooking at them stare. That’s the way it was, I’m telling you, evenif you’re not from around here. How about if you go get some wine.There’s more to this story.

She had six sisters, and they were about as a poor as it gets. Nottoo long ago her mother’s shack was struck by lightning and burnedto the ground. You know, all the sisters were light-haired, I meanblonde, and they had eyes the color of water when it turns to ice.She must’ve felt something while she was growing up. Later on, shemust’ve heard it too, because people are people and just can’t keeptheir mouths shut. Six pale as the moon, and she was the lone blacksheep. She was only waiting to run off into the world, first for thepeople, and second because her restless blood just wouldn’t let hersit still in one place. She went to one of her older sisters who wasalready married with kids, somewhere in Krosno. But she came backquick. Her brother-in-law probably couldn’t take his eyes off her.Came back to that same backwater, that shack propped up withstakes — even crows would turn around and fly back where theycame from — mother scarcely alive and those girls like some kindof Sleeping Beauties, wandering around the yard in the afternoonin their nightshirts, feathers in their hair. Her father? Her fatherdid what he did, and then went and died. He drowned right afterhis youngest was born. They say he was coming home and fell asleepin the stream. Nobody was around to wake him up.

So what was left for her there? She took off again, escaped. Toanother sister somewhere near Rymanów, married already, too. Youknow, someone like her should have a brother, so she’d have some-where to go. Someone like her can’t find what she needs aroundwomen, and that’s why she came here, to ˚∏obisk, even though

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there wasn’t anything here for her either.Got a cigarette? Drinking wine makes you want to light up.There used to be dancing here once a month. In the old depot.

Now it’s not there any more. It was right next to the police station.Once a month a bar and a band, accordion, percussion, guitar, andso much dust kicked up off the floor that it just made you want todrink and drink. It was dark, a couple light bulbs in crepe paper,and empty in the middle at first, since everybody was still stand-ing back against the walls, the guys off by themselves, and the galson the other side. After only a couple songs, a couple trips to thebar, those couples who knew each other better started to shuffletheir feet. Off to the side at first, in the shadows, and then closerto the middle, near the stage, near the drums. She went there, too.Alone, not with anybody. In that white dress, drifting, flutteringfrom one girlfriend to another. But she was really waiting for somenumber where she could spin around in the middle of the floorand show what she could do, and she waited ’til the musicians feltthe heat, ’til they warmed up, ’til they loosened up, because at thebeginning no matter what they played it always sounded like amarch. And it was only then she jumped in with the couples, theones who knew her, and they made room for her and she startedthat dance of hers. All by herself. Sometimes some guy from outof town or somebody feeling bold would ask her to dance, buttwo, three times around the room was all it took and he’d hadenough. Their faces got all red, they got sweaty and stupid, step-ping on their own pants, and with their shirttails all pulled out.But herself, she fell into that spinning, that whirling, so her blackhair wrapped around her neck, and that white dress around her legsand hips, and sometimes everybody just stood there and those

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hometown musicians played only for her, louder and louder, fasterand faster, they stood there watching how she finally kicked off hershoes and spun around and around in place, barefoot, with her handsover her head, with her eyes closed, like they’d lowered her downon some kind of string from the ceiling, because those bare heelsseemed like maybe they weren’t even touching the floor anymore.That’s how it was. As for me, back then I’d lean against the wallor the bar and watch. That was still the time when people didn’tdance much by themselves, and that’s why they looked at her likeshe was some crazy woman, but they couldn’t stop looking. Thegals out of jealousy, and the guys maybe because it was somethingto think about at night. Who could she have danced with anyway?

And she never stayed ’til the end. Soon as the real fun gotstarted, with couples sneaking out and giggling in the dark behindthe depot and in the willows by the dam, after midnight, soon asthe night finally got off to a good start, then she disappeared.Nobody ever saw her with anybody, even though more than oneof them would’ve wanted to. What am I saying more than one?They all did. And maybe because nobody did anything with her,people would talk about her being with everybody. She must’veknown about that. Everybody knows about everything here. Butshe didn’t care. Like some kind of queen. She came, she danced,nobody was bold enough to come near her. Maybe it was from fear?Because she was one of us and she wasn’t.

See there, that’s the road to Dukla. That’s the way people goout into the world. In the end she waited long enough. She wasmaybe about twenty. Rzeszów license plate, dark suit, dark glasses,a Fiat, bahama yellow — that’s what they were calling it backthen. She sat next to him, not in that white dress anymore, but in

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a different, new one and looked at ˚∏obisk like she was seeing itfor the last time. They drove around the square maybe three orfour times. Slow, real slow, so everybody could watch, so every-body had time to see for themselves that she got what she wanted,so she could show them what she thought of them.

It’s getting hot. Let’s go find some shade.Later on nobody recognized her. How many years was it? Five?

Six? She looked like it was fifteen. Filled out, made up, even hervoice had changed. Looked like a tramp. That hair of hers, thathair as black as funeral banners in church, she went and had it dyedred. Later it turned out she did it from shame, because it was turn-ing gray. And she wasn’t the way she used to be anymore, toogood for the rest of us. She was tamed, and you could see her firstwith one guy, then with another. Maybe not that kind of thing atfirst, but in the evenings here on the square, on a bench, out bythe river. But as she was tamed, then the others got more bold.MaryÊka this, MaryÊka that, come with us MaryÊka, and in the endit was don’t be afraid, MaryÊka, it’s not like it’s soap, you won’t useit up. She was already different, not like she used to be. She hadthis wild laugh. She snorted, threw her head back, her red hair felldown over her shoulders and her gold tooth shone. Before, all ofthem used to be straight and white like pearls on a string. Sheeven gurgled when she laughed, but when they wanted her, shewent, when they asked her, she sat down, when they were treat-ing, she didn’t say no. She started to hang around in the pub eventhough, you know, around here that’s not a place where womenjust stop by, unless maybe it’s some young one with her boyfriend.And she even came by herself. To have a drink. That’s how it was.Quiet at first, cautious, like she was with somebody, and later

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without any of that. A year went by and she was a pitiful sight. Insummer she slept in haystacks. If you were walking by in the morn-ing, you’d see legs sticking out. Sometimes two, sometimes four.You’re thinking for sure she’s a shameless hussy, right? Maybe so,but she did it on purpose. That’s what it felt like. Like it was allfor show. Once in the pub there was this gal who said somethingabout her. Loud. So everybody heard it. And she made a big mis-take. MaryÊka grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into themiddle of the room. With one hand she hung on to her head, andwith the other she pulled up her skirt and shouted at the top ofher lungs: “Take a good look! Everybody look! Because she seemsto think she’s got something else down there, that she’s some kindof angel and not a woman! Take a look!” They could hardly breakthem up. Gacek was there, too. That’s when it all started. Because,see, he was the only one who remembered her from those long-gone times. And for him she hadn’t changed at all. That’s how ithad to be. Maybe he was only waiting ’til everything worked itselfout, and she’d come for him herself, ’til there came a time whenshe didn’t have anywhere else to go. Because then, when they gotthem apart, that other gal took off, but MaryÊka still went on rant-ing and raving for a while, wild as a she-devil, cursing, and thenshe flopped into a chair and burst into tears. Hell if I know, maybeshe was crying for the first time in her life, because even the glassesrattled and it sure enough took people’s breath away. She sat withher hands hanging down, she was shaking all over, snot runningout of her nose, tears and black mascara running from her eyes.Who’d’ve thought it could get any worse? Then Gacek stood up,went over to her, took her by the hand and led her to the door.Like he was showing a blind person the way, and she didn’t fight

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him at all.He had to come get her like that a lot more times. From the

pub, and from other places . . .In the end there was that night. In the morning the ambulance

came with the siren wailing and headed right back at full speed.Edek’s car wasn’t there anymore. Maybe he was the one who calledthe doctor, or maybe he took off before that from fear. When theybrought out the stretcher, it was Gacek flying after them, scream-ing, he wanted to go along, but the paramedics that came with thedoctor wouldn’t let him. He hung onto the doors, and in the endpeople had to hold him back to let them get by. They said he lookedterrible, that he was pale as a corpse. The ambulance got going andthen they let him go. But he had no intention of standing around.He jumped into his flatbed truck and went weaving all over the yard.People scattered, but he was all confused. He tried to go forward,backward, jerked, started, he was so shook up he forgot everythinghe learned in twenty years of being a truck driver. In the end,somehow he swerved around and headed for the gate. A couple guyswere standing there, but it wouldn’t have been too wise to try andstop him. Everybody was watching to see what would happen next.But there wasn’t much more. After he got past the gate he drovethrough a culvert into the ditch and that rolled him over onto hisside. There he was, tilted over, but he revved the engine and hiswheels were spinning in the mud, and in the end he was hangingthere by the chassis. Somebody came up to him, somebody openedup the door, somebody shut off the engine. He sat with his handson the wheel and stared off into space. People stood around for awhile longer and then they left. But he sat and waited, and heknew they’d be coming to get him soon.

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Yeah. When it gets this hot, your mind gets confused. Whenit gets this hot you want to drink double, and something catchesfire in people. Even if you were there, you couldn’t get to the wholetruth of it. A wildfire, like in August, at night, when the grass isburning . . . When all that red smoke drifts up to the sky.

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CONFESSION

The red-haired sergeant made a slow round of the market square,but nothing was going on. A couple of guys were sitting near thestore waiting for a third one who was supposed to have a little pocketchange. The day overflowed from the south into the west, and itthickened there like jelly heated on the stove. A dog ran diagonallyacross the square and dragged its long dark shadow behind it. Hefollowed the mutt with his eyes, but it immediately disappearedwithout a trace. He walked a few more steps, stopped, folded hisarms behind his back and started to inspect the sunny side of themarket square from under the brim of his cap. Nothing couldhide in the glare of the slanting rays, so he moved on, very slowly,as slowly as he could. And for a second, he was absorbed by hisown boots: he walked so that he would not step on the cracksbetween the cement slabs. But soon the sidewalk ended and the

street pavement began, and there was just a strip of trampled earthon the other side. He squinted off to the left, but there was onlydust whipping along the road — no way to stop it, no way todemand identification. Five in the afternoon, a Monday. The realstretch of time was too long, the day was too hot and, in all hon-esty, he could have gone home a long time ago and nobody wouldhave noticed. He blinked and waited until the gray cloud of dustpassed by and hurtled onward. He could feel particles of dust inhis mouth and the thought came into his head: “Where is this dustflying to?” Could those little bits of earth which were now quietlycrunching in his teeth fly past ˚∏obisk, over the village houses,over the road and the river and as far as the market square in Duklawith its sad, bluish town hall, fly in between the intricate contoursof the Bernardine tower? If the wind would not subside, if it wouldkeep blowing, if it blew as hard as it could, then maybe they couldget even as far as Rzeszów, where he visited a friend from thepolice academy seven years ago . . .

He took a step forward, unable to take his eyes off the reced-ing cloud. The honk of a horn roused him from his meditations.He hopped back onto the curb. An orange Syrenka swerved toavoid him, made a sharp turn and rolled on. He reflexively smoothedthe lapels of his jacket, stuck his chest out and discreetly lookedaround to either side, but all he spotted was a red-haired cat onthe windowsill of a house on the other side of the street. He crossedthe street and walked along the length of a fence overgrown withlilac. Further back, between the ordinary shrubbery, there weregleams of carmine phlox and golden asters, and the tall mallowscast a shadow onto the dark scarlet dahlias. Summer was on its lastlegs. An old woman sat against the gable wall of her house. He

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bowed and slightly moved his lips. She looked at him impassively.The same way the cat had a moment before. He passed the nextthree houses: whitewashed pale blue, brown timbered and oiled,and dark gray with rotting corners caving in. He turned right,glanced at the padlocks on the door of the kiosk out of habit, andthen slowly began to climb the stairs to the pub.

Sunny patches lay on the tables like gold tablecloths. Everythingelse was lost in the dim light, which was the shade of cloudy water.He waited for a moment in the doorway for his eyes to adjust. Itwas quiet. The stale smell of cigarettes hung in the air, but theslanting afternoon light was still invisible, and it didn’t refract intoa single, even the tiniest, arabesque. He passed the dark and emptyrecess of the bar. The bottles glimmered with faint greenish andsilver lights, but only slightly, only slightly, as if from the depthsof an abyss. He walked through the first room. No one was there.He heard the crunch of grains of sand on the tile floor. In the otherroom, two men were sitting in a rectangle of radiance. Lewandowskiwas sleeping, stretched out on a chair. His shoulders were saggingtoward the floor, his beard was resting on his chest, and he lookeda little like a puppet after somebody had cut the strings. JanZalatywój sat across from him, staring into space and rolling anunsmoked cigarette between his fingers. The tabletop was alreadycleared and clean. The red-haired sergeant stood over them andfolded his hands behind his back.

“What’s up, Zalatywój?” Zalatywój looked up.“Not much, Sergeant. Mietek’s sleeping, and I’m sitting.”The sergeant shifted his weight from his toes to his heels and

back again. To do something, anything at all, he reached for thenewspaper that was lying on the table next to him. The Warsaw Life

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was a couple of weeks old. He shrugged his shoulders and put thetattered roll back down.

“When he wakes up, get him out of here.”When he came back out, the barmaid was yawning in the dark

niche of the bar.“Irka’s not here today?” he asked.“Nope. She’s got the day off. She’ll be here tomorrow.”“Not much going on.”“They collected unemployment last week and the forest isn’t

paying for a couple of days yet. Can I get you something?”He shook his head and walked out.Nothing had changed. Only the shadows of the trees crawled

slowly toward the east like black velvet gloves, and the dust fromthe market square left no trace on them. He stood at the top of thestairs with one hand in his pocket and thought that he should haveordered something in the pub after all. He pulled out his cigarettesand put one in his mouth. The third guy had showed up to meetthe two waiting by the store. They were drinking Le˝ajsks. He couldalmost taste the bitter flavor, and he looked away. The peak ofCergowa looked like something torn out of green paper. The windwas still blowing. It covered the sky with a smoky, rainy crimson.One cloud had the pearly tint and shape of a fish skeleton. He flickedhis lighter, but the little flame went out right away. He tried againand again. Resigned to his fate, he put away the cigarettes. Nothingfelt like happening, nothing, nothing. The stream of time slippedbetween the houses, rolled through the market square, and passedthe two benches set crosswise. It flowed over the ruins of the town-hall tower, which over the past two hundred years it had managedto erode, infect with rot, and wash clean of plaster, and which it

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would certainly overcome in the end, like a flood carries awaythings that are light, unnecessary, and forgotten. Time also flowedfrom the sky, poured out like slow molasses and sloshed againstthe pavement’s metallic shell. But neither its stream nor a singlesplash could manage to pull any greater event behind it.

A few women walked out of the church. They slowly dispersed,each in her own direction, and their figures were just as dark astheir shadows. The red-haired sergeant waited another half minuteand slowly, counting the steps in his head, walked down to the side-walk and started in the direction of the church doors.

They looked at each other in silence. The priest was taken bysurprise. The sergeant was daunted by the sound of his own foot-steps, dying out somewhere under the vaulted ceiling. The curateclasped his hands over his belly. His thumbs assumed the shape ofa Greek “delta” or a little steeple. It looked a bit like the sergeantwas standing at attention, and he brushed invisible crumbs awaywith his fingers. He looked at the priest’s soutane, shiny from longwear, and thought that his own uniform was just as old and worn.

“Mr. . . . ?”A cold draft carried the scent of extinguished candles. This

smell reached the sergeant from somewhere that was a very longtime ago, from the distant past. He glanced at the back of the nave.It was bright there. The sun was hanging low in the sky. And itwas probably that strong wind that forced its radiance through thesimple stained-glass windows. That’s what it must have been,because light is matter. The pale lilies in tall glass vases looked asif they had been cut out of supernatural gold leaf or foil.

“Mr. . . . ?” The priest clasped his hands more firmly and the

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little steeple vanished. And only when the sergeant could sense thatthe faded, blue gaze was aimed somewhere just a little above hishead did he understand.

“Excuse me,” he said hurriedly and quietly. “Excuse me.”He took off his cap and held it in both hands for a moment, as

if he wanted to crush the stiff brim and stuff it into his pocket, butin the end he just hid it behind his back.

“I’ve never seen you here before.”“I know. I don’t go . . . But today I have a reason. I have some-

thing I’d like to discuss with you, Father.”“I am at your service.”The sergeant’s gaze slid over his surroundings. The dark pews,

the banners, the figure of Saint Joseph, the picture of Saint Anne,the swallow’s nest of the pulpit, the luminous patches of light, itall whirled around his head.

“All right. Let’s go to the presbytery,” said the priest.“That would be better,” he replied. He headed for the exit and

felt like he really wanted a cigarette.

The dusk slowly rubbed their silhouettes between its fingers.The clock on the wall struck eight. The light falling from thewindow had no color at all. The dark blue sky stuck to the glasslike paper.

“I’ve been a priest for twenty-six years.”“And I’ve been a policeman for twenty.”The glowing red ends of their cigarettes hovered above the

ashtray, over the tabletop, floated near their faces, and then youcould tell that they were turned toward each other, maybe eventrying to look each other in the eye.

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“What exactly is it that you want?”“I’d like you to help me, Father. A priest should know about

these things.”“Good Lord . . . I’m supposed to know about this?”“Am I?”Somewhere in the distance an empty truck rolled by. The rum-

ble and rattle rebounded off the four sides of the market squareand both men listened intently, as if this were something extremelyimportant, as if this were precisely what they had been waiting forthe whole time. The racket faded and the priest stood up. He tooka few steps into the darkness, the floorboards squeaked as delicatelyas a mouse, and the tapping of his metal-reinforced heels was offby a quarter of a beat from the ticking of the clock.

“Did you know her, Father?”“Like all the others I don’t see on Sunday. Sometimes I get the

feeling I know them better than the ones who do come. It’s justthat I think about them more when I can’t sleep.”

He moved in the direction of the door and stretched his handout toward the light switch, but withdrew it at the last moment,imagining that it would be better if night filled the room. Becauseafter all — it occurred to him while he was standing there, stoppedhalfway through his gesture — this is something in the nature ofa confession.

“And the other two?”“Yes. Them, yes. Just that . . . how did you call him?”“KoÊciejny.”“Him, no. He wasn’t from this parish.”“He said that he’d been here. He said you were eating soup and

then a pork chop.”

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“That must have been Sunday.”“He came to see me again just now, and he said he knows, that

he was there, and that it wasn’t Gacek, that they have to let himout, and also that he’s had enough, that he’s tired.”

These words poured out of the sergeant in a rush. He did it inone breath, as if he were being pursued by the shame or fear thatwould come with the light. But the priest finally walked away fromthe switch, and then he started to speak more calmly.

“Because you see, Father, that first time he came to see me, hesaid that he was bored over there and he wanted to be here, andnow he says that it would be better there after all. Even when hewas alive he couldn’t find a place for himself. That’s the way healways was.”

They listened to the darkness begin to stir behind the windowsand above the roof. As if a huge, shaggy beast were rubbing itselfagainst the house. And then the rain beat against the windows andthe sergeant raised his voice.

“And just now when he was here he said Gacek is in jail eventhough he’s innocent, that he’s not the one guilty of her death. Hesaid he’ll tell me how it was, it’s just that for him I have to . . .”

There was a lightning flash like white quicksilver, and right afterthat thunder rolled over the presbytery, over ˚∏obisk, over thewhole Krosno region. The sergeant imagined that this suddenflash in the gloom lit up the faces of all the people he knew anddidn’t know right at the same moment, lit up all the deeds that theywould have wanted to hide in the darkness. When the figure of thepriest was once again barely visible, he finished:

“. . . for him I have to — even though I’m not a believer — hewanted me to have a mass said for him.”

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THE SECOND NIGHT

Where does that supernatural radiance go when darkness descendson all souls together with the night? Phlitt — stars flickered outover the ridge of the mountain. One, then another, and another.From the hardest ones, sharp and white like the prick of a knifemade of celestial steel, to those last, most inferior ones, smearedwith darkness like pebbles in a river overgrown with slime.

Where was that light which should fall like a watchman’s lanternon those who were sleeping, exhausted and unconscious, and closetheir hearts in its golden circlet, that they might have the strengthto get up in the morning and start everything all over again?Night’s black map unrolled between the horizons. Neither peaksnor towers were hard enough to break through it. Villages werelike patches of sticking plaster on the earth’s cheek, roads likescratches, a rash of small towns an hour after midnight. Three

hours before dawn, nothing foretold awakening, nothing foretoldthe absolution of guilt, although heaven was greater than earth.Night, night, night, and Blacksmith Kruk was telling a story in hissleep, a story without end, as long as the life of all humankind, asif he wanted to confess to everything that he had seen, that he hadheard, confess to all things good, bad, and indifferent. Becauselikely as not, life is its own kind of sin that you can forget aboutduring the day, but the night knows no mercy. Lewandowski knewthis, Gacek knew this, and Edek — they all did. Because whenyour mind sleeps, past and future deeds sit on your chest, and theirweight is inexpressible. That is when your heart hardly beats, whenit dies within you, when it hardly pumps your terrified blood. Noteven the smallest splash of radiance can thin out matter thickenedby fear, and you can only wait until the dark bluing of dawn suf-fuses the windowpanes. That is all you can do.

The heavy black map of night, the low ceiling of the sky.Lewandowski was sleeping on his back, and the television leeredat him with its web-eyed screen from the depths of the room. Itkept watch over its master. The wind was blowing from the south.A loose patch of asbestos tile rattled against the roof like the stiffwing of a huge bird. An unfinished glass of Kazaczok wine, illu-minated by the television’s gaze, was the color of watery blood.Lewandowski was snoring. Dreams floated out from his nostrils.They filled the room, settled down on the chairs around the tableand argued over his soul. “I’ll come and get it when the timecomes.” “No, it’s mine.” “No, I’m the one who’s tormented himthe longest.” “And what if he doesn’t have a soul?” “Every one hasone. That’s how it is written.” Then they melted away into the air

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to make room for the next, because Lewandowski dreamed dozens,hundreds of them a night, for every year of his life, for every dayof every year. Józek came at daybreak. The flies always woke upfirst. It took just a shred of gray light and they were already bump-ing against the windowpanes. Józek sat down on the bed. “Still notready to go yet Mietek? Things are still good for you here?”Lewandowski’s body tensed, his back arched, and his mouth gulpedat the air. “So what’s making you suffer so much, Mietek?”

A nightjar chattered, an owl hooted, and the night was silent.Souls floated like fish in black water, hung motionless in the mean-ders of dark hours like pike waiting for prey. And nothing floatedup except bygone days, those mirrors of the days that are yet tocome.

Zalatywój was tossing from side to side in his house on theedge of the village. A hot wind was blowing through the open win-dow and wouldn’t let him sleep. He got out of bed and went tothe enameled bucket and drank. But the water tasted just as windy,warm and restless, so he groped in the dark for his pack of Popularsand matches and walked out in his gray T-shirt to the front of thehouse. The smoke tasted like the water and the wind. From thatheight, almost from the mountain pass, he could see the whole vil-lage, how it lay overturned on its stomach. Not a single light to beseen. The deaf, blind houses nestled close to the ground to forgetabout the world around them. Sharp roof edges were embeddedbetween the rustling crowns of the trees. Like stones in a river.“What a wind,” thought Zalatywój. A shiver ran down his back,and that November day rose up in his memory.

He was driving out to Spe∏z∏a. It was getting dark. He could

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have stopped and slept for a while in Smereczny, but he thoughtthat he could do another four kilometers or so, drive through thevillage, and spend the night in an empty house that had been builta long time ago and never finished. He had no desire for humancompany, vodka, or talk that day. The smell of snow was in theair. The frozen ground would thaw for two or three hours in theafternoon and then harden back up again, and he knew that thiswould already be his last trip before winter, so he wanted to lookat the sky and the mountains, and he wanted to be alone. Thebeech trees were bare and the color of purple mist, and the sky inthe west along the horizon glowed like a crest of red feathers. Heparked his wagon, got his bag with a quilt in it, and walked inthrough the splintered door. Someone had boarded the windowsover so he had to light a match. It smelled like dampness and lime.He walked through the entryway, and his giant shadow slunkbehind him. The matchstick burned his finger and went out. Thenhe heard a quiet creaking. He lit another match. The light wasyellow-gray, like sand, but he saw the trousers with legs in them.They were swinging back and forth. One rubber boot was on, theother had fallen off. The foot had shrunken, curled up toes.

Zalatywój never went back for his bag. People from the villagebrought it to him. They also said that what he saw had happeneda year before. Now he was standing on the wooden porch andwondering why it was that Fedor Feçko was haunting him rightthen. The moon was huge and looked like it was made of frostedfire. It was rising slowly. If it could have touched the forest, theforest would have caught fire and the wind would have spread theblaze over the whole area, transforming the valley in a few momentsinto a conflagration, into a bowl of flame that would splash over

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the edges of the mountain ridges like stormy water and spread outfarther and farther, as far as the outermost reaches of the dark-ness. So Zalatywój crushed his cigarette butt very carefully witha calloused heel, grinding it on the stone step, and went back intohis room. The bed creaked just like the rest of the house.

Time flowed in the priest’s clock the same as it did in the otherclocks in the parish. In the complete silence in the middle of thenight, its striking streamed out through the half-open windowand floated in the alley like wafts of sultry scent. Tall, narrow, andFrench-polished like a coffin, it stood in the corner of the roomand did its chiming every hour. The priest had it brought in fromthe church when he noticed how often people’s gazes would wan-der off to the side during mass, in the direction of the dark recessnear the confessional where it stood — not quite furniture, not quitemachine. It was, at any rate, the one thing in the sanctuary thatappeared to have its own, independent life.

This story kept coming to the priest’s mind: There was a timewhen old women used to come and sit for hours in churches, becausethey believed that it was a way to steal those hours from death, thattheir bodies would not grow older while they sat there, that the scentof wax, incense and cold stone was the scent of eternity.

Once he was dozing in the confessional, and the chiming ofthe clock woke him up. Night had already fallen. There wasn’t aliving soul in the church. For a moment he didn’t know where hewas. The baritone peals made the air tremble. He spent a few sec-onds in unfamiliar space and couldn’t recall who he was, what hisname was, he didn’t know anything. He was sure it was the clockthat had pushed him back into reality. Without it, that state could

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have gone on and on. So that was when he finally decided to bringthe clock into the presbytery.

And then he tried to repeat the experience. Those few secondswhen he found himself between dreaming and waking, when hefell into a dark abyss, paralyzed with fear, but with the dim con-sciousness that he was experiencing something similar to the beliefand the desire of those old women. He stayed in the church afternightfall. Old Gawlicki snuffed the candles, carried out the missaland left, leaving the weak echo of his seventy-year-old footstepsbehind him. Left alone, he sat down in the confessional. He closedhis eyes but sleep would not come. In the quiet and the dimness,the slightest sounds were preternaturally magnified. The marketsquare beyond the wall, ˚∏obisk, cows lowing in a distant pasture— all of it grew to universal proportions and the priest experienceda sense of being lost, but it was a completely physical one. Heknew that he was sitting in the confessional. He knew that, inessence, he was whirling and spinning in the cosmos like, let’s say,Gagarin, and this was nothing new. He even caught a glimpse ofhis church from somewhere very high above, like a white patch, aspeck on the dark, boundless blue, and he could glimpse himself,an even smaller speck, enclosed in a whitewashed, wood-paneledshell. But that was only ordinary reality and ordinary imagination.Sleep did not come, waking did not come. It was as if space, eventhough it was universal, was keeping the priest imprisoned in a glassglobe. He stood up, walked out, locked the door and went to thepresbytery. He fell asleep in his bed and woke up, but nothing likethat ever happened to him again: those few moments when insteadof feeling fear, he felt that time had split open like rotten fabric,and he was flying and flying, downwards or upwards, stripped of

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his name, stripped of his memory and of its reverse, that is, of anykind of image of the future, stripped of knowledge. And instead offeeling terror, he wanted it to go on, because he felt that in onemore second he would also learn something, something wouldopen up. And then, with the striking of the clock, he felt the coldand the numbness in his feet.

One evening he set his alarm for two in the morning. He feltthe absurdity of the situation, but he had decided to go to thechurch. “I should fall asleep, fall asleep because I won’t have got-ten enough,” he thought. In the hallway, he groped in the darknessto find his coat, and he threw it on over his pajamas. The Octobernight smelled of deserted gardens. He stole cautiously throughthe yard, under the branches of the apple tree, to the gate. Itcreaked, but the dog in the neighbor’s yard did not start barking.He practically ran across the few meters of open space. Brushingagainst the wall, he reached the doors. The large lock was icy tothe touch, and the key was burning hot. But a lot of time hadpassed since then.

Now it was a different night and the priest was listening to hisclock. Tomorrow he had to say a mass for KoÊciejny’s soul andjust like then, he was feeling the absurdity of the situation. “Theworld doesn’t have any grooves of its own. It bounces like a ball.”he thought. “Mass for the soul.” He repeated the words silently,and then a little louder, to hear their harmonious sound. Then onceagain, and again, until they turned into a meaningless whisper.“. . . for the soul, which the policeman and the girl from the pub,an unmarried woman with a child, saw.”

“Do you believe it?” he had asked the sergeant then, and heanswered: “No, I don’t believe it, but I saw him and he talked to

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me and I’m repeating it to you, Father, because a priest is supposedto be able to deal with these things.”

“But do you believe what he promised to tell you?”“I don’t know. Maybe it will be something that can be verified

in some way.”The clock measured out the third stroke and fell silent.

“Verified,” thought the priest. “Then I’d like to verify something,too.” A small, red light was burning in the depths of the gloom.Like a droplet of blood or like a plucked-out eye that could notsee anything anymore. The four windows were darker than it wasinside. Almost as if little particles of daylight had been lost in theinterior of the church and were still alive. A moment after heclosed the door to the confessional behind him, he had the absurdsensation that he was trying to sit inside his clock. But the clockhad been taken away after all. This thought reassured him. Hewrapped himself up in his coat, folded his hands on his chest andsat motionless, in the pose of all travelers waiting at night for a train.

A woman in a black dress woke him up at dawn. She had pinnedher gray hair up with the help of a few combs made of brown plas-tic, combs the likes of which you can’t buy today. “It was open.Even though I was surprised it was so early in the morning, I camein. I was sitting down there and I wouldn’t have seen you at all,Father, until I heard you snore. Lord! I got so scared I nearlyscreamed.”

So then, nothing happened. Everything stayed just the way itwas, answers still lay in questions like chicks in their shells. Theclouds above ˚∏obisk went on tracing their flourishes. At certainmoments their edges recalled the fiery crack of a whip. But some-times, especially to the west, when the sun was already falling

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beyond the horizon and its light swept all the houses, trees, deadpgrs, former prisons, passers-by and drunks, cows, motorcyclistsand the yellow pks bus from Dukla off the earth. When the slant-ing rays pulled up all visible things like a magnet, then the cloudswere a mirror of the world and everything could be seen on themlike on a huge screen — as on earth, so it was in heaven. But itlasted only for an instant, because time was the gray color andshape of a bird with a transparent body: one brush of its wings anddusk began to fall.

At four in the morning, four strokes of the clock drew out andspread through the presbytery like circles in still water, and thedepths of sleep finally carried the priest away.

That same night, in someone else’s house, Grandma wantedsomething to drink. She hadn’t put a mug of water by her bed inthe evening. She always did, but this time she forgot. It was toohot in this attic room. The sweltering heat had been collecting inthe pine boards and beams the whole day. Resin was dripping fromthe knots. Now it was coming out of the wood and thinning outthe air. The small window had been closed for good, nailed shutwith three nails. Somebody had pasted newspapers over two ofthe walls. Girlfriend, Country Road, The News, The Sub-Carpathian,Edward Gierek in a light-colored suit, a smiling Szewiƒska, thelarge black bulk of Mt. Giewont against a background of greenishclouds — she had looked at all of this in daylight many times.Some of the photographs reminded her of something. Othersmeant as little to her as the pattern of the wallpaper. But shecouldn’t see anything now, and all Grandma had was memory toshorten the time for herself until morning. In the darkness, every

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thought was sharply outlined, swift, coming from who knowswhere. It wasn’t from her head, after all, during the day that samehead scarcely managed to connect one thought to another in anykind of relationship, in any order that would allow her to performsimple motions: washing the dishes, doing laundry, cooking, allthose things that cling to reality like a wet shirt to your back. Sowhere did they come from? Perhaps time is something like air,and reflections of things linger in it the same way that a FataMorgana bears the distant images of cities and landscapes. SoGrandma was lying on her back on the white, bony bed, which hadlikely wandered its way there from some hospital. Through herhalf-open lips she breathed in the past, which blossomed out inher head like tissue-paper flowers in a magician’s hand, explodedlike fireworks at a village fair and lasted for just as short a time.She saw the sky, tinted deep blue with the sweltering heat and thereddened crest of the grassy hill, where two horses suddenlyappeared, and a third a moment later, lurching down at a limp-ing trot. The sun was on its way down in the west. The riders’shadows were long and black, they reeked of dirt, exhaustion andfear. They pulled up next to her and one, the tallest, asked:“Giermaƒcy?!” He had stopped with the sun at his back, and shecould see only his dark silhouette and the whites of his infinitelyweary eyes. Grandma pointed to the village down below: “Downthere.” They looked around and along the wide valley, and finallythe tallest one said something quickly. They set off down the slopeand reached the stream. Grandma saw them jump off their horsesand drop down on all fours by the water to drink, pushing them-selves in between the heads of the animals. Then two men mountedtheir horses and started back uphill. The third, that last one, tried

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to climb into the saddle, slipped off, tried again, until finally therestless horse walked away, and the soldier crawled along theground, clinging to the stirrups with his hands. He called out tohis companions. The two of them returned and said something tohim. One of them took the loose horse by the bridle, and the tallone took out his pistol and fired. A moment later they disappearedbetween the juniper trees. Grandma walked a few dozen steps upthe hill. The soldier had Tatar features and a red hole in his fore-head, and a dark stain was spreading on his stomach, soaking theold, clotted blood. And then she felt the child move violently insideher, so she headed back toward the house to make it there in time.

All of this passed, and a winter scene floated out of the dark-ness. The crowd was pressing against the gates of the church. Thewood shattered into white splinters under the blows of an ax, andthe lock gave way. The priest, standing off to the side, raised hishand and said something to the people. Clattering and crashingcould be heard from inside. Women whose faces were reddenedfrom exertion and agitation dragged the broken pieces of theiconostasis out into the snow. Gold, azure and crimson gleamedin the January sun.

Then Jan Zalatywój walked up, who knows where from, but hisfigure had preserved that same magnetic odor through the thirty-some years since he stood in the middle of the village and askedabout work in the hay fields, at building sites, tending sheep, it wasall the same to him. And only once did she look at him and tellhim to come, even though she still didn’t know exactly what workshe had for him to do.

The colors and light were changing. The oldest events couldbe seen the most clearly, and then everything faded. That evening,

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maybe because it was evening, it was as if she saw it through a mist.They brought her husband on a wagon. The cold rising over hisdark, heavy, water-logged body felt like it was coming from a well-shaft. Her younger daughters stood in the doorway of the alcoveand whispered to each other, “Shhhhh, Daddy’s sleeping.” Theygot scared only when, at the end of an endlessly long moment, ascream forced its way out of her.

But now, when she was so thirsty, the phantom was indistinctand deprived of strength and reminded her of Fedor Feçko, whenhe stood in her doorway one November, and the hoarfrost thick-ened the gray air of dusk behind his back. She didn’t even let himin the house. But he probably didn’t intend to come in anyway,because he was burning with fever, and his eyes were coated withthe glaze of madness. It was the kind of craziness that settles onthe inside, flows through the veins, rubs against the guts, burrowsinto the body like a mole into the ground, and never works its wayout during a person’s time on this earth — it only burns in theeyes. And when it escapes, it’s always the end. It leaves an emptyshell, and the madness moves on, since, things being what theyare, there are still plenty of people on earth. So she didn’t let himin, just said over and over: “She’s not here, she’s not in the house,she left, she’s not here, but you know that anyway, and I can’t tellyou anything more, I don’t know exactly where she is myself.” Andhe just looked at her and moved his mouth, but no sound cameout. Yet that movement of his lips was so precise that MaryÊka’sname was clearly shaped in the air like a ring of cigarette smoke.There was a dried residue of spittle in the corners of his mouth.

This image increased her thirst even more, but Grandma wouldhave to wait until morning, until everyone got up down below.

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Only then would the son-in-law lift the latch on the door leadingto her attic.

And then there was Gacek. Far away, listening intently to thedistant rumble of trains mingling with the echoes of the prison.Sound reverberated off the sky the same way it did off the walls.Freight, passenger, express trains rolled through the tunnel ofnight. Dim trestles, viaducts in the darkness, and wailing sirensbarely brightened the road. Sounds wandered along the corridors,wrapped themselves around the stairwells and crept from the topfloor to the basement. A single rattle of a key against the barswould resound through the whole building, slip through the con-necting corridor, wind itself in a spiral around the neighboring annexand make its way out onto the roof, where it would grow andbranch out like a bare winter tree and intertwine with all the soundsof the world, with a horn in the suburbs, with the rumble of tankcars on the sidings, with the whine of a jet plane drifting east.Gacek, in the cell where KoÊciejny had been, walked barefoot fromthe window to the door. Seven men were sleeping on their backsunder white sheets. Their breaths left their mouths in verticalstreams, like the rising and falling of columns of mercury. Theirbodies absorbed the sweltering heat like sponges. Gacek wasn’tsleeping, because his time was made up of sounds. A policemanin an unbuttoned uniform at the headquarters in Krosno hadyelled at him, “Out with it in the order that it happened,” but hecouldn’t remember any order to it, any sequence or sense. A crash,Edek’s raised voice, the music suddenly went crazy and started tomimic itself like a scratched record, even though it was coming froma tape player. “The way it was . . . the way it was . . . the way it

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was . . .” Those words overlapped onto the rhythm of his footstepsand filled Gacek’s empty skull the same way that the striking of akey against the bars filled the emptiness of the prison in Za∏´˝e.

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THE END

The sergeant crossed the market square shoulder to shoulder withKoÊciejny, the former feeling like he was under guard, and the lat-ter like he was the doing the guarding. The policeman let theghost go in ahead of him when they got to the door of the church.He had a white shirt on under his uniform, and he looked a littlemore imposing than usual. Whereas KoÊciejny was a little less vis-ible — it was almost like his weariness had weakened him or hehad somehow gotten older. They stood in the small vestibule andlooked into the depths of the sanctuary. Grandma was kneeling ona pew near the altar. Three other women were sitting far from oneanother, as motionless and isolated as abandoned statues. The doorto the sacristy was ajar, and the priest was most likely putting onhis robes. Four candles were already burning, although their littleflames were eclipsed by a wave of brilliant sunshine pouring in

from the western windows.“What about music?” asked KoÊciejny.“Where am I supposed to find you music?” whispered the ser-

geant. “There aren’t any organs around here. Maybe the womenwill sing.”

“And people. I want people here.”“KoÊciejny, it’s not Sunday you know, it’s a regular weekday,

and you feel like having a wake . . . ” muttered the policeman, stiffas a poker, perspiring, and staring straight ahead so as not to drawattention to himself.

“I want a decent mass, and if it’s not . . .”Gawlicki’s tiny figure emerged from the sacristy. The white

surplice gave him the look of a small child in a nightshirt. He gen-uflected with difficulty, stood up with even greater difficulty, andplaced the great book on the altar.

“For Christ’s sake, KoÊciejny, could you just be a reasonable . . .”The sergeant looked around uncertainly to either side, glanced

up helplessly and wanted to say something else, but KoÊciejnywalked further into the church. “No help from anywhere,” hethought, “not from anywhere.” And then he got an idea. He turnedon his heel, ran outside and headed straight for the pub.

Over there it was Saturday afternoon, and there was so muchsmoke the door wouldn’t close. He pushed the hot curtains asideand drunken tables reeled under his feet. His eyes started water-ing, but before he was blinded he managed to spot Lewandowski.He walked up to him. The laugh faded from Lewandowski’s faceas quickly and smoothly as a glove slips off a hand.

“You play, Lewandowski, don’t you?”

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“Not me, officer, I can’t remember the last time I held cardsin my hand.”

“I meant the harmonium. I seem to recall that you used to playit . . .”

“It’s been a while . . .”“Get up then, and go wait by the door, and don’t try to cut out.”The whole room watched, not understanding a thing. The

sergeant was holding his cap in his hand. He pushed through themotionless throng and chose the more alert ones. “Get up, get upand don’t ask what for, because you know well enough, and Iremember. And you, out you go, and you too, move it, go out andwait by the entrance. All of you are under arrest.”

When the priest saw them, his arms, outstretched over thealtar, slowly began to fall. They squeezed themselves sidewaysthrough the half-open door and immediately came to a standstill.One, a second, a third, and another, and they were immediatelysubdued by the setting sun’s eternal light. The red-haired sergeantcame in last, closed the door behind him, and started pushing themfurther into the church, into the sunshine and swirling dust. Theyshuffled their feet along the floor, like blind people feeling for theroad. They were gray, sweating and quiet. The pub’s uproar, whichhad saturated their bodies, evaporated. The ones who had caps usedthem to cover their private parts. There was a white and red Coca-Cola baseball cap in Janek’s hands, and a green military-surplusfield cap in Zalatywój’s. The policeman grabbed Lewandowski bythe shoulders and steered him into the corner on the right side ofthe vestibule, where there was an old harmonium. The womenturned their faces away from the altar. Their eyes got round, their

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mouths shaped themselves into mute o’s. The prayer from thealtar lost its melodiousness and rhythm, the priest floundereduncertainly from word to word, and the syllables dripped in slowerand heavier drops.

The sun was already hanging at the height of the windows.The horizontal slash of its gold blade sliced off the roof and belltower. They stood under the open sky in the scent of resinouswood, rot, bird feathers, and nests clinging between the rafterbeams. Lewandowski played the best he knew how. Air leaked outof the harmonium through a hundred cracks. The clouds split,and light the color of honey and blood filled the church’s struc-ture like water, like a wave of flood. And for an instant Janek, andGrandma, and Zalatywój, and Lewandowski hunched over theyellowed keyboard, and the sergeant, and everyone became astransparent as angels or as their own most secret dreams that theynever remembered when they woke up on all of the dawns that hadbeen allotted to them. For a moment the radiance shattered theirbones, burned them to ashes and pulverized their bodies, so thatthey forgot about their own names and shapes, about their pain andtheir burdens, and about the time that had collected in their veinsand felt like hot sand or lead and never, but never, allowed themto know rest.

But there was no clock to measure the moment.The sun’s disk fell into Cergowa’s black money box and the red-

haired sergeant saw that KoÊciejny, standing right next to the altar,was smiling at him and motioning for him to come over and cockhis ear, before it was too late.

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Andrzej Stasiuk belongs to the generation of writers who made their debut

in the years immediately following the fall of communism in Poland.

Political, social and economic changes set in motion in 1989 created a

climate much more open to new and experimental literary voices, and

Stasiuk, along with his contemporaries (among them Stefan Chwin, Natasza

Goerke, Pawe∏ Huelle, Jerzy Pilch, Olga Tokarczuk, and Magdalena Tulli),

responded by creating a literature that engaged both Poland’s past and

recent Western literary, cultural and critical preoccupations. Among other

things, the new Polish prose is characterized by a strong centrifugal ten-

dency and a corresponding rootedness in so-called “little homelands.”

Stasiuk’s Beskid Mountains, the Gdaƒsk of Huelle and Chwin, the Silesia

of Pilch and Tokarczuk — all are essentially as far away from Warsaw as

one can be without crossing the border. A strong inclination toward generic

experimentation is also characteristic, manifesting itself, for example, in

Goerke’s rejection of conventional, realistic, cause-and-effect narrative

structure; in Tokarczuk’s mosaics of voices and styles; and in Stasiuk’s con-

tinual interrogation of canonical textual boundaries.

Where Stasiuk could be said to differ from his counterparts is in his

readiness to explicitly address the effects of transition in Poland’s here and

now. This engagement is not achieved at the expense of historical and myth-

ical sensibilities, but rather, Stasiuk deftly incorporates these sensibilities

into the broader sweep of his narrative. He also demonstrates a somewhat

grittier aesthetic — his protagonists are often murderers and alcoholics,

fugitives and wastrels, who are depicted in their respective elements:

killing, drinking, fleeing and idling. Stasiuk’s extraordinary range also sets

him apart. He has published poetry (indeed, he prefers to think of himself

133

as a poet), short stories, novels, screenplays, an autobiography, and numer-

ous essays on a wide variety of topics. Tales of Galicia owes much to both

his poetry and his work as a journalist.

One of the most striking, omnipresent features of Stasiuk’s work,

regardless of genre, is a fascination, verging on obsession, with borders,

thresholds, margins, limits, peripheries. While this might be character-

istic of the new Polish prose in general, Stasiuk arguably pushes these

limits with an exceptional intensity, not only seeking out borders, but

then crossing and recrossing them, as if to test their permeability. In the

process of negotiating this passage, he also deliberately, provocatively even,

inhabits the in-between space, exploiting the tensive energies generated

by the overlapping, displacement and collapse inherent in crossing from

one side to another. In no other work does Stasiuk so thoroughly realize

this border-crossing potential as he does in Tales of Galicia. Indeed, the entire

text is constructed as a site for testing the limits of a densely mapped

ground of explicit and implicit lines of demarcation.

The setting for Tales is a fictional village on Poland’s periphery, on its

southern border with Slovakia. The action of the book takes place a few

years after 1989, and this peripheral setting offers a prime vantage point

from which to view the effects of transition spreading out from the cen-

ter. Stasiuk also uses this setting to activate a diachronic awareness of the

region as a centuries-old palimpsest created by a succession of migrating

(or invading) cultures. A prominent theme is the cyclical efflorescence and

decay of a series of belief systems brought from over the border: the

migrant Lemko population brought their own Greek Catholic, or Uniate,

church (itself suspended over the boundary of two confessions, observing

the rites of Eastern Orthodoxy but looking to the Pope in Rome); mate-

rials were salvaged from the demolished Lemko settlement to build the

collective farm, a monument to communism; and a kiosk selling Western

134

consumer products rises out of the ashes of the gray economy of deficit,

bathed in the shining aura of capitalism.

Resonating throughout is the attempt to identify what Stasiuk calls the

“fissure in existence,” where boundaries dissolve between the natural and

the supernatural, and where passage can be made from one side to another.

The character, KoÊciejny, whom Stasiuk has identified elsewhere as the

book’s protagonist, is alive in the first half of the narrative and a ghost in

the second half. After death, he wanders restlessly between heaven and

earth, feeling uneasy and alien in both. Thus KoÊciejny becomes the

embodiment (and disembodiment) of the tension between matter and spirit

that lies at the core of Stasiuk’s metaphysics. Other significant vehicles

for expressing this tension include television, dreams, alcohol, forces of

nature, and time, all of which have the power to suspend Stasiuk’s char-

acters for at least a moment over the fissure in existence that makes death,

as well as life, less certain.

Testing implicit lines of demarcation plays out on several structural

levels as well. For example, Stasiuk problematizes the narrative persona

of Tales. The narrator is not only semi-autobiographical, but he simulta-

neously assumes two roles: he is an outsider to the villagers, but a local to

tourists. In constructing the book’s narrative trajectory, Stasiuk deliber-

ately plays with the limits between fallibility and omniscience, several

times surrendering the narrative (to a greater or lesser degree) to another

persona altogether. On another level, the book is rich in intertextual ref-

erents, which almost hypertextually transgress the lines of demarcation

between his work and others’. His eclectic allusions range from the Bible

to William of Occam to fin-de-siecle 19th-century Russian philosophy to

French proto-surrealism to late-20th-century Western pornography.

Genre, too, is implicated in Stasiuk’s border-crossing project. What is

presented and indeed begins as a collection of individual stories gradually

135

metamorphoses into a single, coherent work, even developing a mystery

plot as the stories become interdependent chapters.

Stasiuk’s predilection for setting up oppositions and then subverting

or subsuming them presents a number of challenges to the translator.

Keeping the text suspended above boundaries, re-activating the energy of

in-between spaces through another language, is hard and not always

entirely successful work. The exigencies of language may sometimes pro-

pel the text too far to one side or the other, or precipitate new slippages

that lose the semantic weight and structure of the crossed and collapsed

borders plotted by the author.

These challenges take on an additional element of complexity because

they play out not only on a lexical, syntactical and grammatical level, but

also on a thematic one as conventional categories are deliberately broken

down. For example, liquid qualities and movement are applied not only

to water, alcohol, and blood, but also to light, time, dream and memory.

English verbs do not have the same nuanced possibilities of motion,

quantity, and force offered by Polish affixes. Verb tense shifts back and

forth easily in the original — this is allowable, even neutral in Polish, but

Stasiuk knowingly exploits its potential to efface boundaries between

past, present, and future. The translator is faced with the task of mark-

ing this purposefully constructed synchronicity without offending the

sensibilities of readers accustomed to narratives in a uniformly past tense.

To offer a final example, Stasiuk makes use of several different language

registers simultaneously, and this signals both his narrator’s otherness

and his gradually acquired status as local, but this idiom is exceedingly

difficult to render in a translation. Nonetheless, the guiding principle

throughout has been to remain as faithful to the original as a translation

will allow.

I am especially grateful to Bogdana Carpenter for her encouragement,

136

judicious advice, and superb translation workshop. Signal thanks are also

due to Howard Sidenberg, W. Martin, El˝bieta Wójcik-Leese, and Ewa

Ma∏achowska-Pasek for their essential, invigorating editorial suggestions

and their commitment to the translation of Polish literature. Without the

help of the following people, several linguistic, cultural, and metaphysi-

cal conundrums posed by this text would have remained arcane: Zdenka

Brodska, Piotr ForyÊ, Rachel Harrell, Kelly Miller, Daniel Reynek, Andrzej

Stasiuk, Agnieszka Âwidniewicz, Monika Sznajderman, Kamil Targosz,

Andrzej Wajda, Barbara and Jerzy Wajda, Ewa Wampuszyc, Piotr

Westwalewicz, and the anonymous business traveler Piotr coopted in the

train car on our way to Gdaƒsk. Grants administered by the University

of Michigan’s Center for Russian and East European Studies and

International Institute offered pivotal opportunities for continuing my

study of Polish language and literature. This translation was made with

the support of a Fulbright award and the sponsorship of the Jagiellonian

University Institute of Polish Philology.

Margarita NafpaktitisAnn Arbor, 2002

137

NOTES TO THE TEXT

p. 9 pgr: Paƒstwowe Gospodarstwa Rolne [State AgriculturalFarms], the official title for state collective farms in the People’s Republic of Poland from 1949–1976. Renamed Paƒstwowe Przedsi´biorstwaGospodarki Rolnej [State Enterprises for Agricultural Farming], orppgr, in 1976, they had their subsidies abolished and assets privatized inthe 1990s.

p. 15 Populars [Popularne]: made from the poorest quality tobacco,were some of the cheapest domestic cigarettes available during the com-munist era.

p. 16 Gomu∏ka, W∏adys∏aw: (1905–1982); First Secretary of the PolishUnited Workers’ Party (pzpr), 1943–48, 1956–70; Deputy PrimeMinister of the People’s Republic of Poland, 1947–51.

p. 16 Gierek, Edward: (1913–2001); First Secretary of the PolishUnited Workers’ Party, 1970-80. Successor to Gomu∏ka.

p. 16 Pepiki: a pejorative colloquialism referring to Czechs andSlovaks. It derives from “Pepi,” the common diminutive of Josef inCzech.

p. 16 Zetors: a Czech make of tractor.

p. 19 Fifty thousand z∏otys: roughly $3.50 in the early 1990s.

p. 20 Team [Gomada] and Polish Farmer [Rolnik Polski]: communist-eranewspapers that were often the only ones available in the villages. Inaddition to the usual ideological propaganda, they also offered practicaladvice and tips. Urban readers looked upon these newspapers as symbolsof unsophisticated village life.

p. 21 Similac Isomil: a foreign brand of baby formula.

p. 21 Fort Moka Desert: a widely available foreign brand of coffee.

p. 21 John Players Stuyvesant: a well-known foreign brand of cigarettes.

p. 22 Syrenka: “Syrena” is the brand name for a Polish-made sedanproduced from 1953 to 1983. The Polish government commissioned the

138

Syrena, requesting a design that would be inexpensive and suitable forthe general public. No longer in production, replacement parts areharder and harder to find.

p. 22 Rymanów: (pop. 3,600) a town in the Krosno province, in theBeskid Niski mountains near the Slovak border. Founded in 1378, it issituated on the Bukowski Plateau, on the left bank of the Tabor River.

p. 23 Fiat compact: a maluch in Polish, or “little one,” is a very small(1.3 meters tall and 1.3 meters wide), almost miniature, domestically pro-duced hatchback car with room for only two seats.

p. 23 Soloviev’s magus Apollonius: a reference to Vladimir Soloviev’sShort Tale About the Antichrist.

p. 24 ˚uk [beetle]: the brand name of a widespread, Polish-made van(similar to a Volkswagen bus).

p. 40 Zaporozhian Cossacks: Cossacks from Zaporozhets, which mightbe an allusion to Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba. According to Stasiuk, thismetaphor was prompted by imagining “somewhere around thirty menwho set sail in a craft — a chaika. They are armed with swords, flintlockrifles, and maybe some light artillery. They set off across the Black Seato conquer Constantinople. Of course there are, let’s say, maybe severaldozen of these chaikas, against the capital of a sultanate . . . And theyactually land at the gates of Constantinople. They don’t conquer it, to besure, but they ravage the surrounding area, take their plunder and headout again to sea — for a journey of just under a thousand kilometers”(from a correspondence with the author).

p. 40 Haidamaks: 18th century Cossack rebels.

p. 40 Chaikas: Cossack canoes.

p. 43 Practica: a German camera that was manufactured for export toEastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

p. 43 Thirty thousand Don Cossacks were marching to India: In 1800,Russia’s Czar Paul, having lost Malta to the British, sent the DonCossacks to invade distant India over unmapped territory. After Paul’sdeath in a palace revolution in March 1801, which brought Alexander Ito power, the Cossacks were recalled.

139

p. 67 Golesz and Tytan: the names of cheap fruit wines, referred tocollectively in Polish as “alpaga.” They are “synonyms for boozing,drinking in the bushes, a major hangover. Positively the cheapest alcoholin Poland” (from a correspondence with the author).

p. 67 Wyspiaƒski: a 10,000 z∏oty bill with a picture of the Polishdramatist, poet, and artist, Stanis∏aw Wyspiaƒski (1869-1907), on it.

p. 81 ppr: the abbreviation of Polska Partia Robotnicza, the PolishWorkers’ Party, which existed from 1942–1948. It eventually mergedwith the Polish Socialist Party in 1948 to form the Polish UnitedWorkers’ Party (pzpr; Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza), whichwas the official name of the Polish Communist Party until the collapse ofcommunism in Poland.

p. 81 mz: the abbreviation for Motorradwerk Zschopau, a Germanmotorcycle manufacturer.

p. 82 rmf: the abbreviation for Radio Muzyka Fakty [Radio MusicFacts], one of the most widespread and popular radio stations in Poland.On January 1, 1990, rmf broadcast the first commercial radio in Poland,and it has several affiliates in the sub-Carpathian region.

p. 84 The News [Nowiny]: a communist newspaper published inRzeszów that had fairly wide circulation, especially in southeasternPoland. It is still published today.

p. 122 Szewiƒska, Irena: (b. 1946), Polish track-and-field champion,recipient of many gold, silver, and bronze Olympic medals, five-timeEuropean champion, world record holder in sprint and relay events, andthe first woman in the world to run 400 meters in under 50 seconds.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Novelist, poety, essayist, and literary critic, Andrzej Stasiuk was

born in 1960 in Warsaw, Poland. After being kicked out of high

school he was involved in the pacifist movement of the early 1980s

and spent a year and a half in prison for deserting the army in a

tank. Upon his release, he began writing for underground newspa-

pers, and his first book, The Walls of Hebron, a collection of twelve

stories based on his prison experience, achieved cult status. With

little interest in Warsaw literary life, he moved in 1987 to an iso-

lated hamlet in the Carpathian Mountains, where he keeps a herd

of goats, breeds llamas and writes for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s

leading daily newspaper. From here he and his wife run the inde-

pendent publishing house Czarne, which they founded in 1996.

Stasiuk is the recipient of the 1994 Foundation of Culture Prize,

the 1995 KoÊcielski Prize, and has been nominated three times for

the Nike Prize, Poland’s National Book Award.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Margarita Nafpaktitis is currently a doctoral candidate in Slavic

Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her

translations of Polish writers Stefan Chwin, Ewa Lipska, and

Andrzej Stasiuk have appeared in a number of journals.

TALES OF GALICIAby Andrzej S tas iuk

Translated by Margarita Nafpaktitis from the original PolishOpowieÊci galicyjskie (Kraków: Znak, 1995)

Design by Jed SlastText set in Janson

Frontispiece: Zetor 3011 tractor

This is a first edition published in 2003 by twisted spoon press

P.O. Box 21—Preslova 12, 150 21 Prague 5, Czech Republicinfo@twistedspoon.com / www.twistedspoon.com

Printed in the Czech Republic

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the followingpublications where earlier versions of the translation first

appeared: Chicago Review; prezk∏adaniec

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