The dark was growing denser and denser in the house. In the gloom his face looked like it had gotten darker. People were still bringing in their crops.
“Remember,” I said, “there was a time you were supposed to come stay longer. We were going to talk. But don’t say anything if you don’t want to. If you want to live like that without a single word, be my guest. Though how would it be if everyone in the village fell silent? All they did was plow and plant and mow and bring in the harvest, and no one would say so much as a God bless you in greeting. And what if along with the people the dogs and cats went quiet, and all the other animals, and the birds stopped chirping and the frogs stopped croaking. Would there be a world? Even trees talk if actually you listen to them. Each kind has its own language, the oaks speak oak, the beech trees speak beech. Rivers talk, corn. The whole world is one big language. If you really listened carefully to it, you might even be able to hear what they were saying a century back, maybe even thousands of years ago. Because words don’t know death. They’re like see-through birds, once they’ve spoken they circle over us forever, it’s just that we don’t hear them. Though maybe from God’s heights every person’s voice can be heard separately. Even what I’m saying to you now. What they’re saying at Maszczyk’s, at Dereń’s, in every house. If you leaned your ear close to the world, who knows, you might be able to hear people whispering and make out what they’re thinking, what they’re dreaming about, whose house a cat is purring in, whose stable a horse is neighing in, whose child is sucking at its mother’s breast, whose is just being born, all that is language. God tells people to pray in words because without words he wouldn’t know one person from the next. And people wouldn’t be able to tell each other apart either if they didn’t have words. Life begins with a word and ends with words. Because death is also just the end of words. Start maybe from the first ones at hand, the ones that are closest to you. Mother, home, earth. Maybe try saying, earth. I mean, you know what earth is. Where do you spit? On the earth. You know, what you walk on, what houses are built on, what you plow. You’ve done your share of plowing. Remember father teaching us to plow? He taught us one by one, you, me, Antek, Stasiek. Whenever one of us had barely grown taller than the plow, he’d take us with him when he went out to do the plowing. He’d put our hands on the grips, then put his hands over ours and walk behind, like he was holding us in his arms. You could feel his warmth at your back, his breath on your head. And you’d hear his words like they were coming from the sky. Don’t hold it like that, it needs to be firmer, follow the middle of the furrow, it has to go deeper when the earth is dry, when your hands get bigger you’ll also be holding the reins in this hand and the whip in that one. You’ll learn, you will, you just have to be patient. Moles, they know how to dig in the earth, trees put down their roots in it, men dig trenches in it in wartime. Springs rise up out of the earth and people’s sweat soaks into it. It’s this earth, no other, that every person is born in. And remember when anyone was leaving the village, they’d always take a little bit of earth with them in a bundle. Or sailors, when the land’s still way far away, they say they want the earth under their feet again. And God came down to the earth. And when people die they’re buried in the earth. We’ll be put there too. I’m planning to have a tomb built. Eight places, so there’ll be room for all of us. Maybe Antek and Stasiek will agree to be buried with us. There’s a saying, may the earth weigh lightly on him. So wherever it’ll be lighter for them. They say that when a person’s born, the earth is their cradle. And all death does is lay you back down in it. And it rocks you and rocks you till you’re unborn, unconceived, once again.”