I moved nearer to the door and tapped lightly on the window. I stuck my face close to the pane, trying to see in the darkness whether there wasn’t any movement inside. But the window was covered with a cloth. I tapped again, a bit louder. The chatter of the three men was almost by the farmyard. Finally, behind the door there was a creak no louder than the squeaking of a mouse. I tried the handle. There was silence. But I felt someone was standing behind the door, because it was as if the whole house was leaning up against it. I pressed the handle down again. Then I heard the fearful voice of the old man:
“Who’s there?”
“A friend. Open up,” I answered, more breathing than speaking. He would have expected someone from the next life sooner than me, so he didn’t recognize my voice. He unbolted the door, poked his shaggy head out, his eyes suddenly looked like an ox’s eyes, and he started to close the door again. But I’d expected that, and I put my foot in the jamb. He pressed his whole weight against the door, but I pushed back so hard he staggered across the hall.
“What do you want?” he hissed.
“Shut the door,” I said hurriedly. “There’re Germans outside.”
I moved quickly into the main room. I was struck by the stale smell of sour cabbage. There was a barely smoldering lamp on the stove that had obviously just been lit, because the oldest son, Wojtek, was putting the glass over it. He looked at me like he was about to reach for an ax, but he didn’t say anything. Jędrek and Bolek poked their heads out from under their bedding and stared at me, uncertain whether they should jump out of bed or stay there.
“Christ be praised,” I greeted them, catching my breath.
None of them responded, they just scowled at me like wolves, expecting the worst. Finally Wojtek finished with the lamp and sat at the table, but he was still on edge, because he even put his hands on the table, and there was bread and a knife on it. Then their old mother got out of her bed in the farthest dark corner and, like she was the most unforgiving of all of them, she said:
“What’s that fiend doing here?”
“I tried not to let him in, but he pushed the door open,” Prażuch said, trying to explain it wasn’t his fault. And as he stood there, barefoot, in his long johns, he dropped down on the bench and rested his arms helplessly on his knees, as if they were broken.
Then the two that were still in bed, Jędrek and Bolek, got mad and raised their voices at their father:
“Couldn’t you at least have grabbed a poker and let him have it over the head? There’s one standing right there!”
“You should at least have asked the bastard who he was before you opened the door!”
“They’re after me,” I said. “If you want, you can just turn me in.”
They lowered their heads, and none of them said a word. Wojtek suddenly grabbed the knife and cut himself a big slice of bread. He started biting off mouthfuls like he was about to starve to death. The two in bed got sleepy again. They fell back and pulled their quilts up under their chins. The wick of the lamp guttered and started to fizzle, and the faint light got even dimmer. But no one moved to turn it up. It even seemed that everyone was waiting for it to go out and plunge them in darkness again. And just when it seemed about to fail, the old woman spoke again from her corner:
“Turn the lamp up a bit, Wojtek.”
Wojtek stood, turned the lamp up, and sat back down at the table. He cut himself a second slice, but this time a smaller one, that he could have fit in his mouth in a single go. This time he picked at it with his fingers like he was eating sunflower seeds. The old lady spoke again:
“Sit yourself down. There’s some cabbage left over from dinner. I’ll heat it up for you.” She dropped her feet from the bed, slipped her clogs on, and tying on her apron she sighed: “We oughtn’t to be born if we don’t know how to live.”
Not long after that all three of them, Wojtek, Jędrek, and Bolek, joined my unit. All three of them died. Jędrek fell in an attack on a train outside Dębowa Góra. Wojtek was taken wounded as we were trying to escape from an encirclement at Maruszew. They hung him from a tree along the Kawęczyn road. As for Bolek, he was covering our retreat from the Olechów woods. He got hit in the legs by submachine-gun fire and he couldn’t get away. He’d fired every last round he had and he didn’t have anything left to shoot himself with, so he wrapped an old MPK submachine-gun strap around his neck and kept twisting it till he died.
Their old lady passed away not long after the war, when she finally realized none of them was coming back. She knew they were dead. But while the war had still been going on it was like she was holding out hope they’d be home. When Jędrek, the first one, died she started having problems with her heart and she couldn’t do much work around the farm, old Prażuch had to do everything. Then when Wojtek was lost, and after him Bolek, and the war went and ended without them, her heart couldn’t take it.
Prażuch, though, he just kept on living. And he never got funny in the head, and never let the farm go, though he had a right to and people would have understood. His land was always plowed on time, always sowed when it needed to be, and mowed and gathered in. And his house, whenever you went over it was clean and swept, there was fresh water in the pail and milk in clay pots souring for cheese, or already made cheese being dripped dry. The pillows on the bed were so white they shone. Every spring there’d be a brood hen in a basket under the table hatching eggs. Come Easter, he’d whitewash not just the hallway and the main room but the whole outside of the house as well. He even wove a wattle fence around the farmyard, though all those years they’d never had a fence. When he did the laundry he’d wash everything however clean or dirty it was, whatever there was lying around the room, whether it was his or his sons’ or his old woman’s. When he hung it all out to dry in the yard, you’d have thought an orchard had just bloomed at the Prażuchs’. On top of that he learned to read and write, because teachers were going house to house around the villages and teaching old folks to read and write.
From time to time I’d swing by and visit him, and I’d have to sit and listen how his reading was coming along, or check whether he hadn’t made any mistakes in his writing. The only thing he had trouble with was addition. But even with young people, not everyone does well at addition. You have to be born a good adder. And none of the animals at Prażuch’s — horse, cow, dog, cat, anything else — none of them could complain they had it bad there or that they had to lie in crap. Nor him himself, you couldn’t tell from looking at him that anything was bothering him except for just old age. Though sometimes a lust for life like that can also be despair. And it can happen that because of that, a person lives longer than their age ought to allow, longer than they’d have wanted to.
He even looked after my farm when I wound up in the hospital after my accident, and he did just as good a job with it as with his own. I didn’t have to worry about what was happening while I was gone. The animals were always fed. Michał always had enough to eat and he was properly dressed. Prażuch would sweep the house out every so often and clean up and light the stove. And most of important of all, the fields would be seen to. He didn’t do everything himself, he wouldn’t have been able to look after his own land and mine with just one pair of hands. But he’d at least watch over the work and make sure it was done well. Once a month, on a Sunday or a market day, he’d visit me in the hospital. And he’d never come empty-handed. He’d always bring something in a basket, some cheese, a dozen apples, cigarettes, an egg blessed at Easter time, or at Christmas a Christmas Eve wafer and a length of sausage. Then, when he was going to die he also came, and he said he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on my farm anymore, because it was time for him to die. Every night he could hear his sons calling him and his woman weeping for him.