“…that under no circumstances will we desert our fellow soldiers, our flag, our standards or our weapons, nor will we enter into any form of understanding with the enemy whatsoever.”
No, no, no! Piotr Niewiadomski will not desert the standards and will not enter into any form of understanding with the enemy whatsoever. He would not even be able to converse with them. But why is that officer maintaining such an ominous silence? If only he would make some slight movement. Everyone would undoubtedly feel more relaxed if he did. The young officer, the Emperor’s emissary, moved. The long mirror of his sabre swayed. The gilt tassels on his sword-tail swayed. He raised a hand and covered his mouth in order to conceal a yawn. He had already had enough of all this. From morning till night—nothing but the endless “Before God Almighty”. Enough to drive you mad. Better to set off for the front line. But no, actually, it’s not better to set off for the front line. It’s better to listen from morning till night to:
“…As obliged by military regulations and as befits honest soldiers, we wish always to behave in such a way as to live and die honourably.”
The sergeant followed this with a solemn, pregnant pause, then he intoned the finaclass="underline"
“So help us God. Amen.”
The god of the military, before whom this oath was taken, actually had no particular identity. He was inter-confessional—unlike in civilian life, where he listened to some people only when they bared their heads and knelt down, recognizing others only when standing and wearing their hats. The Imperial and Royal military god was not Jehovah, nor the Holy Trinity, nor Allah; rather, he could have been the deity of agnostics, deists and Robespierre. He abandoned any attributes of particular faiths, renounced forms given him by dogma and legend, and was insensitive to incense and wax candles. He represented that highest being to which even freethinkers and freemasons bow down. The army recognized no doubts unforeseen in the military regulations, therefore it obliged also the souls of atheists, socialists and anarchists to serve the Emperor in the name of God, regardless of what those people actually thought of him. Every non-believer, once he was judged fit for military service, thereby became a believer in God. As for God, whose existence it was forbidden to doubt, he indeed had to be an abstraction, as bland as an algebraic symbol. In the Imperial and Royal military’s algebra, God was that infinite number of zeros added to the highest possible figure, which was the Emperor. That God was summoned to bear witness when the souls promised that their bodies would be faithful to the Emperor. At this spoken, obligatory agreement between the peoples of Austria and the Supreme Monarch, God acted as regent.
As the final words of the oath were being spoken, fear struck Piotr’s soul. However, with his own lips he assured God that he was willing to die for the Emperor. Had the Emperor heard him make this promise? Where is the Emperor? There was not even a portrait of the Emperor in that room, and there was no cross either. The Emperor is somewhere in space, like God, whom nobody sees with their own eyes either. So they took the oath in the air. The oath rose to heaven through the ceiling of the gymnasium, puncturing the ceiling, flying up to the first floor, to class IIb, where at that moment a contingent of recruits was waiting to be transported to the front line. It soared up over the heads of the recruits from the first floor into the attic, through the layer of hot dust, between the roof tiles out into the open air. It rushed up the chimneys and vents. It also rushed out into the street through three wide-open windows. There was a clear blue sky, so the oath met no obstructions on its way to God.
But for some people God was present in that room, hovering above the souls, above the bodies, above the gymnastic apparatus.
Piotr Niewiadomski turned his gaze to the floor, as in church during mass. For he had no doubt that somewhere high up under the ceiling, on the highest rung of the yellow ladder, the Holy Spirit was sitting with folded wings. Not in the form of a white dove, but as a black two-headed eagle. In its talons, it was convulsively gripping an iron rod with black spheres at each end.
Thus Piotr Niewiadomski took the oath to the Emperor. Afterwards, he received his documents and went with his fellow countrymen to S.C. Schames’s pub, where he got drunk on ninety per cent pure spirit.
Chapter Four
Blind organ-grinders at fairgrounds and carnivals had been predicting the end of the world since time immemorial. But that the predicted day of God’s wrath should fall precisely on 21st August 1914—no, not even the wisest people in Topory or in Czernielica had anticipated that. Not even Hryć Łotocki had anticipated it, though no one doubted that he was the wisest man in Topory, illiterate as he was. The parish priest himself, Father Makarucha, frequently sought his advice on many important matters, for example regarding his beehives, which he looked after as enthusiastically as the Lord’s vineyard. Father Makarucha had not had any inkling of such an imminent end of the world, and a man of the cloth, of all people, probably ought to have an idea about at least some of God’s intentions. After all, the church does not just care for people’s souls, it does not just smooth the way to eternity. The Creator also put the church in charge of all time, everything temporal, in particular the measuring and reckoning of passing time, that is to say the calendar. It was by the will of the church that a Thursday was a Thursday, that a Sunday was a Sunday, and it was by the will of the church that the current year was 1914.
All Father Makarucha knew was that the end of the world favoured round numbers. He remembered from his time at the seminary that God had already once before felt inclined to destroy the world. That was in the year 1000. However, at the last minute the Creator changed his mind, or was moved to pity; at any rate, he extended the world’s sinful life indefinitely. However, the stay of execution did not amount to an amnesty. So if God felt like carrying out his sentence, he would certainly delay it at least until the year 2000. That was a round figure that had a dramatic effect. But so suddenly, out of the blue, in the year 1914? And not even on the 1st of January or the 31st of December, but the 21st of August? Father Makarucha did not attribute such idiosyncrasies or lack of awareness of their impact to celestial accounting, which, as always, was concerned with numbers on a grand scale, hundreds and thousands.
Piotr Niewiadomski had also heard something to the effect that the world was supposed to come to an end in the year 2000, so he was calm on his own behalf, and on behalf of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. He had no children. And as he had no children, by what miracle could he have grandchildren and great-grandchildren? May God’s will be done—the Niewiadomski line would die out with him, and before the year 2000.
The Hutsul countryside was calm in those days, in spite of the approaching war. The wheat had already been gathered in, though the fields of stubble had not yet been ploughed. The old Hutsuls were in no hurry to get on with that, having a more pressing task in mind—the haymaking. They would set off in leisurely fashion to the fields at dawn, and at midday the women would bring them milk and potatoes, or even dumplings, in double earthenware pots. They ate their meal in silence, then mowed until nightfall. From time to time they would take a break, stop puffing at their pipes and contemplate the Grim Reaper, sharpening his scythe for their sons in far-away Serbia.
Fear never deserted the old mothers. It burgeoned in their wilting laps like a monstrous, fiendish bastard. They dragged themselves out of their warm straw beds covered in cold sweat brought on by the horrible haunting dreams they had been suffering. They shook off these nightmares like filthy worms, making triple signs of the cross, for themselves, for their sons who had gone to war and for their children who remained at home. Then, feeling calmer, they went to see to the cows and were soothed by the steady chiming of the brass bells hanging from the necks of their cattle. Occasionally, though, the mere sight of milk was a heartbreaking reminder for these mothers of the times long gone, when it had surged from their own breasts. After all those years, they felt a painful throbbing in their nipples, as though they were being bitten by toothless lips which might even now be biting the dust. The Hutsul mothers envied their bovine counterparts their blissful ignorance of the fate of their offspring, butchered in abattoirs. And they took it out on the cows. Wildly and furiously they wrenched at their udders, as though they wanted to draw their blood rather than their milk. And the innocent, white, warm milk flowed, sounding like a stream of peas drumming into the metal pails.