HEALTHY DEATH
(A Fragment)
I would like to remind readers who have not read (or do not remember) The Salt of the Earth, first published in 1935 as the first part of a trilogy entitled The Saga of the Patient Foot Soldier, that it is set at the time of the outbreak of the First World War, initially at the railway station of Topory-Czernielica in the Galicia-Bukovina borderlands, and later at the garrison of an Imperial and Royal Infantry regiment transferred after the Russian invasion to the town of Andrásfalva, deep inside Hungarian territory. Both Topory-Czernielica and Andrásfalva are figments of the author’s imagination, not to be found on any map. The chief protagonist of The Salt of the Earth, met in the first part of Healthy Death, is Piotr Niewiadomski, whose mother was a Hutsul, his father Polish. In the beginning he was a porter, later a signalman, at the said railway station of Topory-Czernielica. On his recruitment under the general mobilization he is transported with others for training at the Andrásfalva garrison. The next most important character of The Salt of the Earth, and to some extent also of Healthy Death, is Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk, the fanatical expert and high priest of Military Discipline. He considers it his mission in life to turn human beings into real people—soldiers, that is. The character Łeś Nedochodiuk, whose “soul is let out” by Bachmatiuk, appears in Healthy Death for the first and last time. “Healthy death” is Bachmatiuk’s term for the death of a soldier at the front line.
In the entire garrison there was not a single louse, not even for medicinal purposes, for Łeś Nedochodiuk, who lay in the sick-bay dying for the Emperor. They had been so thoroughly exterminated by the great de-louser Izydor Parawan, a man with a grey goatee and a yellow “intelligence stripe” on his sleeve, an unarmed reserve militiaman, category “C”. All the lice had left for the front line with King N’s Imperial and Royal 10th Infantry Regiment band and standard. A pity, that! They would have come in useful now at Andrásfalva, oh, so useful! But opinion was divided in the garrison as to whether reserve infantryman Łeś Nedochodiuk was really dying for the Emperor. Some claimed that you could only die for the Emperor on the battlefield, in the open air—where the lice were, actually—and not on a bed in the sick-bay. Others admitted that while you could die for His Illustrious Majesty only from an enemy bullet, bayonet or piece of shrapnel, it was—for goodness sake—of no consequence whether it occurred on the spot, on the bare earth of the battlefield or a little later in hospital. The main thing was that it was death in battle and not from some illness that you could equally well suffer in civilian life. But most of the countrymen were of the opinion that it made no difference. Every soldier who dropped dead in the Emperor’s tunic, even if he had not smelt gunpowder, died for the Emperor.
“You’ll see,” said reserve infantryman Bryczyński, a count’s valet in civilian life, a man of the world. “They will arrange his funeral with a parade and military honours, which means he croaked for the Emperor.”
“Croaked! He hasn’t croaked yet!” protested Piotr Niewiadomski, Bryczyński’s comrade-in-arms. “The man you’re talking about is still alive!” But he was fascinated by those military honours and he wanted to see them with his own eyes.
For the Emperor or not for the Emperor, Łeś Nedochodiuk gasped his last, although Regimental Doctor Badian did everything in his power to save him. But then, what did Dr Badian actually have at his disposal? Drips? Injections? Digitalis, coramine, camphor? Medicine like that was just a joke. It might do for officers, Jews, lawyers, but not for Hutsuls. Now Łeś Nedochodiuk was a true Hutsul, a farmer from Dzembronia by the river Dzembronia, not a hybrid, not someone from a village in some neighbouring territory, like that Piotr Niewiadomski, his comrade from the 3rd Company of the 2nd Battalion. Łeś Nedochodiuk had sixteen head of cattle in his shippen, sixteen head of cattle grazing on the Carpathian mountain pastures. And those sheep! A rudbeckia would have helped him, that magic herb! Just give him some hooch with toad, befuddle him with smoke from a burnt broom used to sweep a Greek Catholic church. Or with smoke from the dried testicles of a stallion! Nothing would have helped him so much now, nothing would have saved him from perishing in a foreign land, in a Hungarian brewery, as surely as the ancient tried-and-tested drug—half a dozen or a dozen lice downed in a gulp of vodka! But what can doctors know about this?
And why was it that Łeś Nedochodiuk had to die so young, without being granted his baptism of fire? What had struck down such a tough lad, leaving him lying there like a log, gasping like the bellows in Kłym Kuczirka’s forge at Żabie-Słupejka? Had some Hungarian devils overpowered him? Had some Hungarian seductresses beguiled him? They said Łeś was impervious to such inducements. He prayed regularly to St Nicholas, the favourite of the gods, to look after him and protect him from all dangers, and from evil fate, on the hills and on the water. The Lord’s Prayer had evidently been of no use, because Nedochodiuk did not even live until the Feast of the Veil of our Lady. What had happened to him?
The cattle were already returning from the mountain pastures in the distant Hutsul land, the beloved cattle, the Christian cattle. The lights had been extinguished in the shepherds’ cottages, where apparitions, the souls of people who had been killed, were settling back in for the winter (this year there were more apparitions than cottages, although it was only the third month of the war, the beginning of October). The land in the mountains was drying up, the herbs were dying, the larch trees, or rather dwarf pines, were turning black. The mullein, leaves drooping, protruded dismally and rigidly, like extinguished candles in the church. All the grasses dried up, losing the juices that nourished the cattle on the mountain pastures from St George’s Day until the feast of the Veil of Our Lady. So the cattle that did not go to the winter hay barns descended from the mountain pastures. Day and night, the valleys and ravines were echoing with lowing and bleating, the complaints of the driven beasts, drowning out the roar of the sacred Hutsul rivers, in full flood at this time of year—the White Czeremosz, the Black Czeremosz and the Prut. The whole Hutsul land vibrated with the pounding of hooves, cloven and uncloven. Thousands of bells, large and small, jingled on the fattened necks of cows, calves and rams on the march. The heavy stench of bovine excrement mingled with the smell of steaming hide and wool, the scents of trampled meadows, mown hay and milk yet to be collected. Only rarely were the shepherds’ long wooden horns to be heard.
Already the cattle were returning from the mountain pastures, and our men in the garrison were not yet real men. They could go to the front line now in the event of dire necessity, but only in the event of dire necessity. The garrison commander Lieutenant-Colonel Leithuber would have sent them, but he was not the one who decided whether the men were now real men. This decision belonged exclusively to Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk.
Rafting on the Czeremosz rivers had ceased. The sluices had been closed and the rafts had been immobilized, probably because the best helmsmen had been called up anyway and were rafting Serbs and Muscovites into the other world for the Emperor. The winter was coming, and our men at Andrásfalva were not yet real men. The Muscovites had now occupied Pokuttya, running affairs among the Greek Catholic people as they did back home, installing bearded Orthodox priests in the parishes, hanging images of Tsar Nicholas in offices, while our men in Hungary who were supposed to drive the Muscovites out of Galicia were not yet real men.