“When a war is over,” Piotr told himself, “the emperors sit down in their palaces, take paper and pencil and count corpses. It would seem to be just like a game of cards; whoever lost more is the loser. But what actually happens? Quite the opposite. At Kraśnik too we probably lost more men than the Muscovites did.”
He ate the soup. Next to him sat a soldier, Dmytro Tryhubiak from Czernielica. An old acquaintance. He had lent Piotr his bowl. He talked about relations at the garrison, explained the mysteries of parade-ground drill and the sequence of military training, and complained about the NCOs. They hit you in the gob, although physical assault was banned in the army. Victims of physical violence could complain on parade, but woe betide anyone who did so. Tryhubiak talked at length about punishments. He described the different forms of detention. It apparently gave him satisfaction. Personally, he even preferred detention to marching in the heat in full equipment. You could always get some rest.
The things the soldier was talking about seemed trivial compared with the real war in which people killed one another. Piotr was surprised to hear the soldiers exaggerate the importance of garrison life, as if “the field” existed for the benefit of the barracks and its detention regime, rather than the other way round. Suddenly he stopped listening to Tryhubiak, because he saw a woman’s face emerging from the tin mess bowl. The eyes and mouth immediately seemed familiar. Whose face could it be, unless, unless… Piotr had a shock. He recognized her. It was his mother’s face. Not the worn-out, hieratic woman she became in the last years of her life (Wasylina Niewiadomska’s face looked like that in the photograph he kept in the trunk). It was still a young, wrinkle-free face, as he barely remembered it from his childhood. He had never seen it with such clarity before. And that is what scared him. In other circumstances, he would undoubtedly have been very pleased. But why, after all these years, had this forgotten face appeared to him? What paths had it taken to make it all the way here, to Hungary, to find the troops? She became clearer and clearer to him. He recognized the red scarf on her head. He recognized the strings of corals around her neck, corals hanging over him.
It was the aroma of the Imperial soup that had lured his young mother from the netherworld. Memories sped at a staggering pace on invisible waves of fragrance. They floated around in disorderly heaps like thawing ice floes on the Prut. Suddenly they came to a standstill, gathering around clearly recalled events. Into Piotr’s mind came a now distant winter, as severe as the disease which, as he was only a small boy, debilitated him for weeks. In Śniatyn district illnesses have no names. They visit people namelessly and namelessly they pass. Piotr lay for weeks on end behind the stove, wrapped up in any scarves and any rags that were to be found in the house. It was as though his mother concentrated all the heat in the cottage on her dying child. For Piotr was dying. Hutsul children’s illnesses mostly end in death, since there are no doctors to treat them. A mother’s last resort in that part of the world is a bath. In the case of chest pains and fever, a bath of incense, sage and thyme. Wasylina Niewiadomska repeatedly bathed her son according to this ancient superstition, but in vain. So she took to fumigation. She fumigated the boy with smoke from burning horses’ hooves and from wild poppies, but it was no use. The Jewish divine commandments propagating fumigation of a sick child, and the Jewish matzah blessed in the church with the paskha at Easter, were not accessible to her. Well, she gave up her superstitions. She had stopped believing in them. But she took advice from a certain wise old woman who in her younger days had been in domestic service in the town. This old woman believed passionately in God and in hot soup. From then on, Wasylina prayed every day before the holy images and daily brewed greasy, hot broth with beef bones. She bought the bones from a Jew in Bogatyn. She added liberal amounts of groats to the soup—millet, barley or ordinary buckwheat, Piotr didn’t remember which it was now.
Meanwhile Dmytro Tryhubiak kept on complaining. During night exercises in the fields he had lost three blank cartridge shells. “I thought—silly me—‘Your pay will be docked slightly and that’s the last you’ll hear of it.’ But you don’t know the army, my lad! The army doesn’t tolerate the slightest loss. For something like that you have to join the left flank, to answer on parade. Each lost cartridge means one day confined to barracks, so for three cartridges you get three days. That’s the going rate.”
Piotr listened with one ear. He could not distinguish blanks from live rounds. And he had no idea where the left flank and the right flank were. And anyway, what had flanks to do with making a report on parade? Flanks were what beasts had. The aroma of Imperial soup acted like chloroform. It was destroying the present, desensitizing him to the real and imaginary threats of all military penalties. Piotr saw only his young mother and a glimpse of his childhood. But he could not for the life of him remember what kind of groats they were—millet, barley or ordinary buckwheat. The long journey and the intense heat had made him drowsy. The apparitions summoned up by the aroma of the soup were becoming blurred. Blank cartridge casings were floating in his soup. He would have fallen asleep if he had not been suddenly reminded of his mother’s words:
“Eat up. Piotr, eat up, it will keep you alive!”
These words drifted soundlessly from the abyss of forgetfulness like birds from warm countries, playing in his ears and scaring away sleep. Piotr sat bolt upright and an expression of strained attention came over his face as he listened intently, absorbing all the resurrected music of the past. Perhaps he would hear something more, perhaps some more words would come from his mother’s lips. He heard no more. “Eat up. Piotr, eat up, it will keep you alive!” That’s all.
“Keep me alive? Of course it will!” The soup had saved him at the time. But what meaning did that have now? Could the Imperial soup also save you from death? Who knows? Was that why the Emperor feeds it to his soldiers, his children, every day?
His mother’s young face vanished into thin air. In vain Piotr tried to recall her with all the forces of imagination he could muster. He closed his eyes. It was in vain. God alone knows what powers govern apparitions of the dead! An opportunity like that occurs once in a blue moon. If you squander it, that’s your own fault. Piotr lost the opportunity. There was no need to think about barley! Instead of his young mother he was only able to summon up an image of old Wasylina as he had seen her for the last time. There was nothing special about that memory, which often haunted him. His mother lay dead in her coffin, in all her glory, on a bed of wood shavings. Her eyes were closed. Piotr had closed his mother’s eyes himself, though he was under the impression that it was done by the hand of death. What horrified him most was the large wart on the dead woman’s upper lip, and her thick black moustache. While his mother was alive he had not paid any attention to it, but he was surprised that the wart and the moustache did not disappear after she died. (He considered the blemish on his mother’s skin and the mannish hair on her lip to be the effects of pipe-smoking.) There was something shameful about the wart which his mother took with her to the grave. It was indecent to look at it.