“Mr. Szymek, he’s a trooper,” she said, like she sensed they were quarreling with me. “He’s in all kinds of pain, but he doesn’t breathe a word of complaint. He even likes to joke around.”
It was only then that they stopped. Though Stasiek evidently hadn’t had enough, because when she left he said:
“Or you should marry her. She works in a hospital, she’s used to hard work, she’d be able to help you in the fields as well.”
Dusk was gathering in the windows, it was getting dark in the room. We sat there drinking tea and eating bread and cheese. I’d left the chops for the next day. You could still hear wagons loaded with sheaves creaking on the road. Occasionally someone would shout, giddyup! Other times a horseshoe would scrape against a rock. On someone’s wagon the perch was rubbing against the bodywork. There was a squeak of axles that needed oiling, the rattle of traces against the shaft. I was waiting for him to at least ask:
“So where were you all this time?”
If he was a cat he’d have jumped up into my lap right away and nuzzled me like it hurt him not to be able to say a word in human language. If he’d been a dog he probably would have been straining at his chain, he’d be so pleased to see me back. Everyone that met me at the very least said, oh, you’re back. And here he was, my brother, and he wasn’t saying a thing.
“Did they tell you I was in the hospital?”
He lifted his mug to his lips and opened his eyes so wide they were round as little coins, but you could never have guessed anything from them. You couldn’t tell whether they were looking, thinking, or whether they just wanted to die and not know anything. Also, he was holding the mug in a kind of odd way, with only two fingers round the handle. I even checked to see if I was holding mine the same way. But I was holding it normally, with my whole hand round the middle. With his bread and cheese he broke it into crumbs in the palm of his hand and only then picked it up and ate it, like he was picking seeds out of a sunflower. Actually he’d always eaten differently than other folks. When we had żurek with potatoes in the morning, my spoon would be half potatoes and half soup, I could hardly stuff it in my mouth it was heaped so full. Him, he ate the potatoes and the soup separately, a tiny bit of potatoes and no more than a mouthful of liquid, on top of which he barely moved his jaws. That way he could scarcely eat his fill, and he was doing twice as much work with his hand. You eat so your belly will be full. It’s your belly that gives you strength. And strength lets you work. I sometimes asked him, when you eat like you do, does it taste better, does it make you fuller, or what? Tell me. Surely it isn’t a secret? Not that I wanted to learn how to eat that way, I was fine as I was. But I figured I could learn at least that much from him, because you can learn a lot from how someone eats.
Or when he cut himself a slice of bread, it was so thin you could see through it. And even if he was eating it without anything on it, he’d still always hold it flat on his spread fingers, as if it had slices of sausage on it that he didn’t want to drop. Or when he had an apple, he’d always first cut it into four equal-sized pieces, dig out the pips, peel the skin, and only then eat the pure white quarters. Or even when he drank water, you never heard a sound from his throat like thirsty people usually make.
But maybe over those two years I’d gotten unaccustomed to him. Now it was hard for me to go back to knowing that this old man in a white sheet was my brother Michał. Maybe he’d also forgotten we were brothers. What does that mean anyway, to be brothers? When we were kids I didn’t even like him that much. I preferred playing with other boys. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t shoot a catapult, couldn’t climb trees. When he crossed a stubble field barefoot he’d complain that it prickled. Whereas me and the other boys, we’d have races to see who could make it to the far edge of the field first. We’d even choose stubble that had been cut with a sickle instead of a scythe, because it pricked even more. Or where there were the most thistles growing in among the crops. It was usually on Waliszka’s fields or Boduch’s because their fields were long and thin like sausages. When you ran the length of a field like that your feet were covered in blood, but you wouldn’t dare let it hurt.
True, he was the best student of the four of us brothers. One time he even got a book as a prize for being the best in the school. They wrote on the book, For Michał Pietruszka for outstanding achievement and exemplary behavior, with gratitude also to his parents. It was because of the parents being mentioned that father often let him off working in the fields. When we went to church he’d give us one coin to give for the collection from the four of us, except Michał was the one who had to put it on the plate. When mother was carving up the chicken of a Sunday, father would supposedly make sure everyone got the same amount, but it would always turn out Michał had less, and father would tell her to at least give him the neck or the stomach as well. Michał could read his book late into the night and it was never a waste of oil. It was another matter that I didn’t like books. You had to read whatever they told you to at school, but that was all. I could never figure out why people read at all, it seemed a waste of time. Father would explain to me:
“You little monster, it’s so you can at least praise God with your reading.”
So one time I told him that when I grew up I wasn’t going to believe in God. Then I ran out of the house. I didn’t actually know what it meant to believe or not believe, I was just trying to needle him. The moment I stopped attending school, my books were thrown in the corner and I started going to dances. After the first dance father gave me a hiding. The same after the second one. After the third I grabbed a pitchfork, come on, father, just you try. That time he beat me with a chain off the wagon. I was covered in welts, mother had to dress them.
“What did you do this to him for?” she said tearfully. “Beating your own child like that, dear God in heaven!”
“He’s no child. He’s a bandit! He’ll throw you out of your own house in your old age.”
But Michał read. The years passed and he kept on reading. Then one day a distant cousin of mother’s came from the city, a tailor he was. Mother begged him to take Michał on, and he agreed. Let him at least learn tailoring, because what could he do here at home. Antek was already minding the cows, Stasiek looked after the geese. And there wasn’t so much land they couldn’t work it without him. Tailoring was a good trade, you’re sitting down, you have a roof over your head, and you can make your own clothes. There wasn’t any tailor in the village, so if he learned how to do it he could come back and be the tailor here. We could set up a room for him, maybe even buy a new sewing machine. For the moment he could use the one we already had.
“You won’t regret it, cousin. He’s a good boy, and he’ll be a good tailor. He doesn’t have a yen to go wandering every which way like the other boys. All he does is read books. We’ll make it up to you, in flour or with a chicken.”
“You know, being a priest would’ve been even better,” father said to back her up. “We were planning for him to be a priest. But we can’t afford it. Like you see, we still have three of them left at home. There won’t be enough land to go around. That way, we’d have one less mouth to feed.”
So off he went to mother’s cousin to learn to be a tailor. He was there three years or so. Every other Sunday, sometimes even every one, he’d come home. And for each harvest or potato digging. He’d always bring mother at the very least a reel of thread, some needles, cigarettes for father, candy for Antek and Stasiek, a bottle of beer for me. Except he got really close mouthed. He wouldn’t say anything about what things were like for him there, good or bad, whether they fed him properly, how the cousin’s wife treated him. Father would ask: