She took off her blouse and her skirt. She didn’t tell me to turn around or not to look, she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. But why should I have been surprised, when you’ve gotten through a whole day you don’t have the strength or the desire to be embarrassed. Your body’s just an aching weight, and the eyes looking at it are blind. It probably would never have occurred to her that after all those years I could look at her any differently than the way I looked at the earth, at the landscape. After so many years I knew her body like I knew the earth and the landscape, and landscape and earth don’t know what embarrassment is. I knew it in health and in sickness, in joy and in sorrow, in laughter and in tears, at every hour of the day and the night. What was there to be embarrassed about? How many times had I poured water over her to rinse off the soap as she crouched in the bathtub, and looked down at her naked body like the Lord God who made her looking down from above. How many times had I pulled off her sweat-soaked blouse when she was in a fever and too weak to even raise her arms. Why should she be embarrassed now. Or how often in the night had I listened so closely to her breathing that I even had the same dream as her, because when body lives alongside body for so many years, they dream the same dreams together too, why would they need two different ones. I knew the whole of her and every part. I knew her belly, her thighs, her knees, her elbows. I knew each of her arms and each of her legs, and all the fingers on her hands and the toes on her feet separately and together. I knew every vein under her skin, every scar and every spot. I knew her belly button had been poorly tied after she was born, and I knew she had a way of sighing that sounded like a sob. I sometimes thought she was all of life, I sometimes thought she was no more than a speck of grass in my eye. Sometimes I could see death within her, sometimes only a broken fingernail. So it was no surprise that she couldn’t understand it when I still desired her. Something almost like fear came into her eyes. How could it be, her youth had passed and she’d even forgotten how to be embarrassed, why then? It’s only in youth that bodies desire each other for no reason. And here we were after a whole day of life and I desired her, and it felt as if it was after an entire life. Sleep was weighing on her eyes, her arms and feet ached, her body felt like it had just been taken down from the cross, and here you were desiring her. And in an ordinary way, as if you’d come home from mowing and wanted a drink of water.
“Unfasten my brassiere behind,” she said.
She bowed her head and as if she was afraid she waited to see whether my hands would touch her. There was only one button, unfastening it should have been the simplest thing in the world, I mean you fasten and unfasten buttons all your life. Yet that button kept slipping out of my hands like a fish. But she stood there with her head lowered and didn’t so much as sigh at my clumsiness. Though her back was covered with goose bumps. She slipped the brassiere from her shoulders, threw it on the chair, then turned around to face me and said:
“See, I’m not embarrassed in front of you. I’m not embarrassed at all.” Without warning she threw her arms around me. “Oh Szymek.”
I put my arms around her too, but she pulled away and jumped into bed as agilely as a she-goat, snuggling deep into the puffy quilt so even her head was barely visible.
“Are you coming?” I heard her whisper anxiously.
It was already dark in the room, though the remains of the day were still lingering in the windows like in a puddle. We lay side by side without moving, under the heavy quilt, because she wanted us to lie awhile like that. I put my arm around her, her head pressed into my shoulder like in the pillow before. I was hot, I could feel my skin covering with sweat, but I didn’t have the nerve either to move or to say anything. And she just lay there as well, she was just as afraid to move or speak. It was like we’d been scalded by our own nakedness, or as if being naked we only felt our own aches and pains, instead of desire.
She still smelled of her recent tears, I was on the verge of telling her she smelled of tears. But she must have sensed I was about to speak, because she put a finger on my lips to stop me talking. She told me to shut my eyes, and she shut hers too. When mine opened on their own, for the shortest moment, so I didn’t even have time to make anything out except the darkness, right away I heard her telling me off in a whisper:
“Did you open your eyes?”
“Only by accident. But they’re closed again now. What about you?”
“Mine have been closed the whole time.”
Maybe because she was cuddled up to me so trustfully, she seemed as fragile as a roadside wildflower, that all it would take would be to reach over, pull it up, and throw it away. Her heart was humming right by mine, under the arm I’d put around her, and into the pillow, but it was so soft it wasn’t like a heart. From that close up a heart usually pounds like a hammer, but hers was like the sound of grain being poured. Or maybe she was still nervous and she couldn’t calm down. I took even tighter hold of her. She must have thought I didn’t want to lie there anymore, because I heard another whisper:
“Let’s stay like this a bit longer. Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
The moon must have risen already, because the dogs began to bark, first the odd one, then more and more of them, howling, yelping, the way they only ever do to the moon, or when somebody dies. Someone was playing a harmonica far away, from time to time a couple of low notes reached us, sometimes part of a tune. There must have been a wagon on the road somewhere, because its axles squeaked. And we lay there like we were healing our aches and pains after a whole day of life or an entire life that we’d lived together, and the only thing left to do was die together. Except we didn’t know how. I even tried imagining that we were lying there after death, under the weight of the quilt, that had lain on us so long it had turned to stone. But once it had been real feathers. Real geese had worn them as they lived and ate and grew and went down to the water, they had red beaks and cackled the way geese do. Then the women plucked the feathers from the geese. The women lived once just like the geese did. Those might even have been their happiest moments, when they gathered on winter evenings to pluck feathers, because why else would they have lived? If you listened really closely, you could still hear the sound of their hands in among the down, and the songs they sang. Though it might also have been that one of them was unhappy at the time and she put a curse on the feathers. And that curse caused our sudden and unexpected death, so we barely had time to cling to each other in a final attempt to save ourselves.
“Does it hurt?” I heard her whisper.
“What?”
“The first time.”
“Everything hurts the first time.” Because I was still seeing our death.
The harvest came a little earlier than usual that year. It was another matter that it had been dry for a long time, there hadn’t been a drop of rain. Mother and father barely knew me. Mother thought God had answered her prayers, father reckoned I’d finally wised up, because everyone has to wise up in the end. I hammered out the blade of the scythe, cleaned out the mows in the barn, put new racks on the wagon. I went out to the field and brought back a handful of spikes, father crushed them on the palm of his hand, blew on them, studied them, put one grain between his teeth and bit it, bit another, and he reckoned we should wait another three or four days, but I said we should start right away.
We were among the first in the village to harvest our rye, people thought something must have happened, maybe my brothers had come to help? Małgorzata’s folks got her to help in the harvest as well, because there are no indulgences for getting out of the harvest, just like there aren’t any for mortal sins. So we didn’t see much of each other during that time. It was only when I’d finished storing the rye in the barn that I walked her home again one day, but I didn’t go in. She seemed odd to me, she wasn’t saying much and she wouldn’t look at me. I thought maybe she was just overworked, maybe a bit embarrassed too, because I found it hard to look her in the eye as well, I mostly looked at the sky or to the side, I just stole glances at her when she was looking the other way. Because with eyes it’s often the way that it’s easier to say a bitter word than look someone straight in the eye.