It had never happened that anyone had died on a Monday. They died on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, sometimes even on a Sunday, but on Monday they were always alive. The afternoon passed. The market was at its busiest.
“Are you not reading your book today, Mr. Kazimierz?” I asked. There was a book lying open on the bedside table and I was a bit surprised he wasn’t reading, because a day didn’t go by without him reading. His cupboard was full of books, there were even some on the windowsill. Often he’d read a whole book in a single day. When he lost himself in his reading he didn’t hear what people said to him. We couldn’t get over the fact that he kept wanting to read. Because on the whole ward he was the only one that read. Didn’t it hurt his eyes? Didn’t it give him a headache? And after all, what was the point? You read and read, and in the end it all went into the ground with you anyway. With the land it was another matter. You worked and worked the land, but the land remained afterwards. With reading, not even a line, not a single word, was left behind.
Evening had begun to set in. The nurse came in, she gave him a sort of funny look and hurried out. A moment later the doctor arrived, held his arm for a moment then left again. The nurse came back and gave him an injection. She asked if he wasn’t thirsty, and she brought him some compote. Someone wanted to put the lights on but I said no, it wasn’t time yet. No one was reading, and it was far from dark.
You couldn’t tell anything from looking at him. Though people say that when someone’s going to die, you can tell two days before. But truth be told, what were you supposed to be able to see? He was always pale as can be, he couldn’t have gotten any paler. He was skinny as a rake and he couldn’t have gotten thinner. As the dusk fell his eyes grew sort of dim, and you’d have needed to lean over him for him to see anything. Only that open book on the bedside table that he didn’t feel like reaching for even just to close it — that might have been the only sign he was dying.
I sat on the edge of his bed and it seemed strange to me that you couldn’t tell anything from looking at him, but that he was dying. Things went quiet on the ward, though there were twelve of us in there. No one said a word, no one coughed, no one sighed, and if anyone was in pain, they kept it to themselves. Though more than one of them could have died right after him. But it was always the way that when someone on the ward was dying, everyone else died a bit with him, and they set their own deaths aside. Someone started whispering the rosary in the corner, though it was so quiet every word could be heard all around the ward like pebbles falling on the floor.
“Don’t pay any mind to him,” I said. “In the country they always pray in the early evening.”
And I took him by the hand, the way you take a child’s hand to lead him across a footbridge over the river. His hand was actually like a child’s, it was so small and scrawny both of them would have fit in my one hand. At one moment he squeezed my hand so hard and so desperately it was like he was falling off a cliff, and I felt my hand and my arm were dying with him.
“Mr. Szymon” — his whisper reached me like something moving down a bumpy road — “you’ve been in the next world. What’s it like there?”