“I’m going.”
“Going where?” asked father.
“Away.” He was so pleased he actually danced around the room.
“Away, you say?” Father thought he’d misheard.
“Away, that’s right. Away! Away!”
“When’s this?”
“On the five o’clock train tomorrow morning.”
“I won’t even have time to iron your shirt for you!” Mother was in despair.
“What do I need a fresh shirt for? The one I’ve got on will do just fine.”
“You might at least take a bath. I can bring the bathtub and put water on to heat.”
“I’ll take a bath there. Wojtek said in his letter they go to the bathhouse there.”
“But you haven’t even got a decent pair of shoes. And I could make you some new clothes.”
“They’ll give me shoes there, clothes as well.”
“We could sell the heifer, you’d have a bit of money to take with you. I could bake you a cake.”
“What are you talking about, bake him a cake,” said father, though he was more upset than angry. “His train’s at five, didn’t you hear? And the heifer’s still growing. It’ll be another two weeks or so.”
“So he could wait. The world’s not going to run away. Instead of rushing off the minute he gets back from the fields.” The poor thing started to cry.
“And what exactly are you planning to do there?” Father could be tough when he had to be.
“What am I going to be doing? You’ll see!” He waved the letter. “Wojtek says they go to the cinema every day. As for work, they only work eight hours a day, and they get paid for it as well.”
“Perhaps you should go to confession, son,” mother started to beg him through her tears. “When people used to go away they’d always go confess their sins before they left. There might not be anywhere you can go confess when you’re there. Or they won’t let you.”
“They go to the cinema, you say?” said father as if to himself, because he didn’t really know what a cinema was.
The cinema even came to our village soon after that. The day it was supposed to arrive, a crowd of people went out to the edge of the village in the morning and waited for it. Someone even drew in the snow with a stick, “Welcome to our village, Cinema.” People thought it would be a car or at the very least a carriage drawn by two horses. No one believed at first that it was the cinema. Two men on a wagon and some bundles. Plus, the horse was so skinny its ribs stuck out. Instead of a proper seat there was just a sheaf of straw covered with an old cloth. The sides of the wagon were all smeared with something as if they’d been transporting manure. And the wagon driver and the other guy were so drunk they could barely see straight. They tried to nail up a poster on the firehouse but neither of them could even hit the nail on the head, the guys had to do it for them. But almost the whole village came to the cinema, because it was wintertime, there wasn’t much work, and also the watchman had gone around beating his drum to say the cinema was coming. So there were almost as many people outside as in the firehouse, because there wasn’t room inside. People blocked each other’s view, but they stood there anyway. It spoiled it a bit, but they still stood there.
Father went down there as well to see what it was that was taking Antek away from the village. He didn’t say what it had been like, but afterward from time to time he’d burst out:
“It’s because of the cinema, it’s all because of the cinema. Who’s going to do the work around here when you leave? Your mother and I are getting on. Stasiek’s too young to plow or mow. It’ll be another three or four years before he’s ready.”
“What about Szymek?” Antek started up like he’d been stung by a horsefly.
“True,” said father. “But it’s like he’s not here. He’s not drawn to the land and the land’s not drawn to him.”
“The land! The land! I’m sick of that land of yours! Out there I’ll at least learn something! What can I learn from the land?!”
“The land can teach you if you only want to learn from it. But you go, you go. I just hope you won’t come crawling back on your hands and knees.”
And he left, in a huff at father, mother, Stasiek, me.
Though at that time I was away from home. I was in the police and we were going around the villages searching the farms for guns. He slammed the door so hard whitewash came down from the ceiling. Father jumped up and shouted after him:
“Don’t you go slamming doors when it’s not your house anymore!”
I came back a week or so later, soaked to the skin, frozen to the marrow of my bones, covered in mud up to my knees and more exhausted than after the hardest plowing. On top of all that, father greeted me the moment I walked in the house:
“Oh, it’s Mr. Policeman. He’s been chasing so many people he can barely move his legs. We wanted a priest in the family and God gave us a policeman. What did we do to deserve that?”
I didn’t say a word. I stood my rifle in the corner by the door and flopped down on the bench. I didn’t even have the strength to pull the cap off my head. Water was dripping down my face. Mother begged me, come on now, take off your cap, take off your jacket, pull your boots off, but I could feel sleep wrapping around me like a rope, round my body and my eyes and my will. On my back, underneath my shirt I could feel the lice starting to itch from the heat. But I couldn’t even be bothered to reach back and scratch.
We’d been searching all sorts of barns and cattle sheds and wagon houses and cellars and attics, not to mention the houses themselves. And as it happened the harvest had just been taken in and the barns were filled to the roof, in the cellars there were potatoes and carrots and beets, the attics were packed with hay, and on top of everything else it rained day and night without a break as if the flood was coming. And wherever you went it’d be:
“You got any guns?”
To which everyone would answer meek as lambs:
“Guns? What would we need guns for, officer? What are we, soldiers? We don’t even know how to use a gun. We work with plows, scythes, rakes — those are the tools the Lord meant for us. Not guns. Who would we even shoot at? The enemy’s all gone. There’s nothing but our own people everywhere. When you’re among your own, even if someone gets mad at someone else they just call them names, get even with them, threaten them. Maybe go after them with a fence post. But a fence post isn’t a gun. Besides, the war’s barely over. We’ve had enough gunfire to last us a lifetime. These days, you hear a bee buzz close to your ear and you think you’ve been hit. All we did was cry and pray for it to stop. So when it did, were we going to keep on shooting? The land was waiting for us. The land suffered too. It was tired out as well like everyone else. That Lord Jesus or Our Lady up there in that picture, they can be our witness — we don’t have any guns.”
But you only needed to reach behind the Our Lady or the Lord Jesus and pull out a pistol. You’d look in the stove, and inside there’d be a rifle. Have them open the chest, and there under a pile of headscarves, rounds and grenades. Or go up to the attic. Their Sunday suit was hanging from a rafter like it was just waiting for mass, but you’d nudge it and there’d be a clank of metal. Not to even mention what was in the hay, among their clothes, in with the onions, in the thatch, in barrels full of grain, in old shoes — everywhere you’d find stuff. Where did they not hide things. In dogs’ kennels, in chaff-cutters, in cows’ and horses’ mangers, in holes up in old trees.