This was how Piotr understood the point of his last task on the railway.
He found the state of the platform even more upsetting. Rifles were propped against the wall outside the waiting-room. Piotr counted them: eight. Nobody was looking after them. Litter was strewn about everywhere, paper, debris, cigarette ends and trampled straw. The waiting-room floor was covered in straw as well. There were backpacks, haversacks and mess tins on the benches. Three soldiers were lying in the straw. They were smoking pipes and speaking some foreign language. Piotr reluctantly passed through the waiting-room turned into a soldiers’ billet. He spat ostentatiously into the spittoon clogged with rubbish. He went to the storeroom to fetch a ladder. On his way back, he noticed that the oil lamp was missing from the lantern guarding the shed containing the ladies and gents. They had already nicked it, the bastards!
Piotr set about removing the sign. He placed the ladder against the wall. The elongated, shapely sign hung between the waiting-room and the stationmaster’s apartment on the first floor. The apartment consisted of three rooms and a kitchen, but only two windows looked out over the platform. Piotr climbed the ladder and stood on the next-to-last rung. Under the stationmaster’s windows, petunias, geraniums and nasturtiums in green wooden window-boxes were on their last legs. The stationmaster’s wife had planted them—she was passionate about flowers. Piotr turned his head to contemplate the flowers for a while. They gave off no scent. Then he took a pair of pliers from his pocket and loosened the hooks. The head of a boy, attracted by the noise, poked out of one of the windows. It was the stationmaster’s son, Tadzio. He recognized Piotr.
“What are you doing there, Piotr?”
“I’m taking the sign down.”
“What for?”
“Your dad’s orders.”
Tadzio chortled sarcastically and immediately disappeared.
Piotr pulled out the hooks. The white sign with its black devil’s symbols tilted to one side. Piotr held on to it with his left hand, but the sign was too heavy. If he took it in both hands, Piotr could lose his balance. For a moment he stood on the ladder and hesitated. Finally, he decided to drop it. He looked like Moses destroying the tablets of stone. The sign fell with a loud metallic crash, but it came to no harm. Not a single letter came adrift.
Piotr climbed down the ladder like a hangman who had just carried out an execution. He lifted the sign as though it was a dead body and carried it off to the store-room. The soldiers on the platform looked on with indifference as the station was humiliated. From that moment on, Topory-Czernielica station actually ceased to exist. All that remained was a lonely little building beside the railway line, nameless, headless and soulless.
Late that evening, Piotr took his leave of the stationmaster. The “old man” handed him his overdue wages, adding two crowns from his own pocket. He also administered the last rites, as it were.
“Do your duty well in the army—don’t get yourself killed, because if the devil takes you not even a dog will bark for you!”
This favourite saying of the stationmaster’s came from the days of his own military service. Some lieutenant at the one-year service school, wanting to express utter contempt for one of his trainees and to convince him of the total worthlessness of his existence, would exclaim: “I’ll shoot you, and not even a dog will bark for you!” Of course, the dog served merely as a flexible metaphor, and as such it entered the stationmaster’s verbal repertoire.
The parting was an emotional occasion, but it passed without tears being shed. Piotr was not one to weep easily. His tough life had not only given him a thick skin; certain glands had ceased to function as well. Piotr kissed the stationmaster’s hand. Parting with inanimate objects saddened him more than parting from living people. He felt a greater affinity with that world than with people. He was himself something of a station-supporting beam. Did not the track, the ballast and the points bear traces of his hands, were they not soaked in his sweat? Invisible as they were, those traces existed and would continue to exist until new people came to lay new tracks, to spread fresh gravel on the Lwów–Czerniowce–Ickany line. The inert, silent permanence of things to which human hands gave meaning—this is the greatest reward for heavy, rough, transient exertion. If Piotr had possessed the stationmaster’s classical education, he could have said at that moment: “Non omnis moriar—not all of me will die.”
As he walked down the track, he could recognize each object that had ever had anything to do with his work, even in the darkness. Here was the pump at which the locomotives stopped to take on water. Its blackness loomed in the dark like some weird, stiff, gigantic bird with a brass beak. So many times Piotr had packed it with straw in the winter! And over there, a little farther on, some very familiar old friends, retired rails, lay rusting in the grass.
Piotr returned home. The village lay three kilometres beyond the station. Beside the railway line stretched lush meadows, full of buttercups in spring. At this time of the year, the meadows were being mown and tall stooks of hay stood motionless like spellbound troops. Suddenly, Piotr had the impression that the stooks were moving forwards. But the illusion soon vanished. As far as the eye could see there was not a living soul about. Unless the grasshoppers, whose loud, relentless trilling penetrated the night air, have souls. The earth, ravaged somewhere in the distance by shelling, groaned at measured intervals. The night was cool. The moon had not yet crept out of its lair, which was behind the hill, beyond Czernielica, though it was already sprinkling Topory with its silvery powder. The stars twinkled encouragingly at him, but they were minute and pale, flickering like the flames of tiny oil lamps. The moon bided its time; it was up to something that night.
The village was wafting its strongest odours in Piotr’s direction—the smell of over-ripe onions and parsley. As he approached the nearest cottages, he sensed the eternal reek of peasants’ dwellings nestling amid the calm of rural existence—a fusion of smoke from log fires, cheese, whey, poultry droppings and poverty. Unglazed black pots, earthenware pots planted with poppies and little jugs were ranged on top of the fences like helmets on the heads of crusaders. The lights were on in many of the cottages, as many of their occupants would be setting off to Hungary on the following day—the reserve militia. Their bundles and their little boxes were being packed and food was being prepared for the journey. Hryć Łotocki’s was the only cottage in darkness. He was sleeping soundly, being over sixty and not called up for military service by the Emperor. Łotocki’s dog leapt out of his kennel on hearing Piotr’s footsteps. Rattling his chain, he kept barking at the passer-by for some time, as though he was a burglar. Aroused by the barking, other dogs started pulling on their leads, but they didn’t show their solidarity with Łotocki’s sheepdog for long. One by one, they returned to their dens.
Bass, however, recognized Piotr’s footsteps from a distance and joyfully rushed to greet him. He had been waiting in front of the house with Magda, who had learnt of Piotr’s imminent hurried departure. She had resolved to spend the night with him. They went indoors.
Piotr lit the lamp. It was stuffy. Magda opened the window. At once, nocturnal butterflies, moths and fireflies flew in. Many of them perished soundlessly in the seductive flame, like the soldiers who were falling that night in gunfire on the Drina, the Sambre and the Moselle, for at that moment began the return of the Austro-Hungarian army from Kragujevac in Serbia, and Russia’s Fourth and Fifth Armies were just then on the move from the north, and from the north-east the Third and Eighth were converging on the Przemyśl–Lwów line. The rattling of the grubby windowpanes in Piotr Niewiadomski’s cottage announced the intensification of action by the armies fighting in Galicia.