When he’d shared them all out, without waiting for them to cool even a bit he’d take the first potato from his own pile and, as if it wasn’t burning his fingers in the slightest, he’d peel it and begin eating. Right away he’d start saying how good it was, that it was nice and well done, and what would we do if we didn’t have potatoes, and generally he’d talk and talk like he was describing some strange world. That though meat provides strength, potatoes give you patience. That you can find any kind of food you want in potatoes, if you only know how to eat them. Because eating is a skill just as much as reading and writing. But some people eat like hogs and for that reason they don’t know a thing. Or they only eat with their mouths and their bellies. Whereas you need to eat with your mind as well. That everything comes from the earth, and the earth has the same taste in all things. So potatoes can be beans and crackling, they can be cabbage and bacon, pierogies with cheese or with sour cream, even a chicken leg big as a mangel-wurzel. Even badness and goodness come from potatoes, because they come from the earth.
During the daytime he was gruff and tight-lipped, but over those baked potatoes he’d talk till he was blue in the face, he sometimes even forgot to take salt and mother would have to remind him:
“Put some salt on it.”
My grandparents had lived way longer than he had, and they must have eaten way more potatoes, but they paid attention just the same like they were listening to some kind of prophecy. Though one time grandfather interrupted to back father up, he said that potatoes are eaten by kings just as much as by their servants, by generals and ordinary soldiers, by priests and paupers, because potatoes make everyone equal. And that death makes people equal too, but it doesn’t taste nearly as good. At this father jumped on grandfather, what did death have to do with potatoes. Death was death, it had to come to everyone. Potatoes grow so people can have food to eat. Grandmother didn’t much like what grandfather had said about equality either:
“What a lot of nonsense you talk sometimes. Kings eating potatoes, when they have to rule the world.” But she evidently started feeling sorry for the kings, because she added: “Unless maybe they’re in a sauce, something you can’t even imagine is poured over them. And as much meat as there are potatoes, to go with them. With meat they could eat them.”
“They eat them with whatever they eat them with,” father barked at grandmother. “People don’t need to know everything about kings. People don’t even know everything about their neighbors, even though they live right there. And that’s how things should be.”
One day father went off to see the blacksmith and get the plowshare hammered out, because there was a breath of spring in the air. Someone had said they’d heard a lark singing, though there was still snow on the fields. Mother was out too, she’d gone over to the neighbor’s to borrow some sifted flour to make żurek. Grandmother was rocking Stasiek, and grandfather was dozing by the stove, though his sleep was shallow because every so often he’d open his mouth and mutter that it wasn’t spring yet, not by a long shot. Potato soup was making on the stove top.
I hadn’t gone to school because I’d said I had a stomachache. The whole time I sat bent double so it looked like it was true. Grandmother had given me some mint drops and every now and then she’d ask, how are you feeling, does your tummy still hurt? I groaned and said it did, but I’d been thinking about how to get out of the main room, because since early morning that slice of bread on the rafter up in the attic had been tempting me, it might even have made my stomach hurt a little. I didn’t have any bad intentions. I just wanted to look at it, to see what bread looked like.
“It’s a little better,” I said when grandmother asked me for the umpteenth time. Because I figured it had hurt enough by now, and besides, any moment mother could come back from the neighbor’s or father from the blacksmith’s and I’d have to stay sitting there bent in two with an aching stomach.
It was like grandmother had been waiting for me to say it, she started singing the praises of the mint drops. And when she was about to get carried away and say that sometimes the pain would just vanish as if by magic, I told her it had stopped hurting now, and I grabbed the bowl with the chicken feed and said I’d go see to the chickens. I put the bowl down in the passageway and quickly climbed up to the attic. At first, before my eyes got used to the dark, it looked like the thatched roof had collapsed onto the attic floor, it was so black up there. But I knew by heart the place where the bread was. I’d snuck up there a good few times when I had a particularly strong yen to take a look at it. Besides, all you had to do was tip your head back, open your eyes wide, and wait like that for a short while, the roof rose higher and higher, and the place became much much bigger, like you were standing in the middle of a church at dusk. Then it would gradually come into view out of the darkness, way up a height, like a sleepy pigeon huddled behind a rafter. It was gray like a pigeon. It even poked out from behind the rafter like a pigeon’s head, a little grayer than the gray of the thatch.
I suddenly had an urge to touch it, stroke it, on its head at least. But how could I get to it? Father must have pulled the ladder up into the attic when he put the bread up there on the rafter. I tried climbing up the crossbeams. It was hard, though the beams were no farther apart than the rungs of a ladder. The thing was though, they were planted tight against the thatch like feet on grass, and each time I took hold I had to push my hand under the thatch with all my strength to get a decent grip. If I’d let go I would have come down on the attic floor like a ton of bricks. Then it would have been judgment day downstairs. I could just see grandfather starting up out of his seat saying, what’s that, is the house falling down?! And grandmother would shout, Jesus and Mary! And Stasiek would burst out crying. And mother would happen to come back right at that moment and she’d be wringing her hands saying, where’s Szymek? And father would be back from the blacksmith’s and he’d be going, where’s that little monkey gotten to?
But I managed to clamber up to right by where the bread was, and hanging from a beam with one hand, with the other one I snatched the bread from the rafter and put it in my shirt. Getting down was easier. I sat down by the chimney flue, but for some reason I didn’t have the courage right away to take the bread out. I listened carefully to check there weren’t any suspicious sounds coming from downstairs. But all I heard was grandmother singing to Stasiek, “Oh my people, how have I wronged you?” I looked around nervously. Everything was quiet as could be, even the mice seemed to have gone from the attic for the moment. The only sound was my heart hammering so hard it felt like it was outside my body. I put my hand cautiously under my shirt and, first of all, felt the bread while it was still in there. It was all dry and cracked, not like bread at all. And I couldn’t tell if it was my heart or if the bread itself was pounding. I took it out carefully with both hands. I bent my head to get a better look. But all I could see was a rough gray piece of something that was supposed to be bread. What was so special about it, I asked myself, that the land couldn’t do without it?
I got the urge to break off a piece and try it. Maybe when it was in my mouth I’d taste whatever power was in it? A communion wafer isn’t anything special either, just flour and water, no taste at all, but it still contains Lord Jesus. Just a tiny bit. Father’ll never know. How can you remember a slice of bread from Christmas Eve till the springtime? It had been bigger and now it was dried up. People dry up in their old age as well.