“Easy there now, don’t cry.”
Right off, two big brawny auxiliaries came in and took the lawyer away. Then Jadzia the orderly came in and changed his bed. She said, “So, the poor guy’s gone.” She checked around to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. There were a few small things, like there always are after someone dies, so she gathered them in her apron. There was the glass of compote he’d not finished, she asked if anyone wanted it. But no one did so she poured it down the sink. She wiped the top of the bedside table with a cloth. She took down the old temperature chart and put up a new one. She was going to take the books as well but I told her to leave them, that maybe I’d read them.
At one point I even took the book he’d left open by his bed and started to read it. It was about this guy that went around asking about a carpenter. It wasn’t really a carpenter he was interested in, but he didn’t know what he ought to ask about so he asked about a carpenter. Was he nuts or what? You ask about a carpenter when you need someone to make a door or a table or a chest. If he’d come to our village any little child would have told him where the carpenter is. Józef Kalembasa, on the way to the mill, third house after the roadside shrine, the one with the acacia in the yard.
I only read a few pages. I couldn’t get any further because his bed was taken by a damn kid that wanted to be my best buddy right from the get-go and talked my ear off from morning till night. His head was all wrapped in bandages, both his legs were broken, he’d crashed his motorbike when he was drunk, and he was all pleased because he was getting out of doing jobs for his father. He never shut his trap once, whether anyone was listening or no. Most of all he liked to go on about his girlfriends, though it was mostly just dirty stories. Which one he’d been with, and where, and when, and how. Lying down, standing up, from the front, from the back, kneeling, squatting, straight up, and upside down. You really felt sorry for the girlfriends.
One time one of them visited him, she was a nice, good-looking young lady. She brought a basket of apples and gave one to each of us, she even had me take two, and she picked another one out herself and put it on my table. She gave you the impression she was visiting her father and grandfather and uncles, not the kid. She even took her basket around the beds like she was embarrassed at being the only girl among all those men. Though they weren’t much in the way of men, they were all wrinkled and feeble and gray and bald, their teeth falling out, their eyes failing, some of them with one foot in the grave. But they were kind of embarrassed as well, they were supposedly just taking apples from her, but everyone lowered their eyes so as not to look at her without her clothes on, because it was like she was giving out her breasts instead of apples after that animal had undressed her in front of us all.
Not only did he undress those girlfriends of his, he laughed at them as well. He laughed so much sometimes he slapped himself on the thigh, on his cast. He laughed the way a fool laughs at the slightest thing. He laughed to himself. And though it was none of our business, everyone looked at him as he laughed like he was on his way to his own funeral. How could you laugh like that on a bed that was still warm after someone else had died. Maybe he was so stupid he didn’t even know that through all that laughter and all those undressed girlfriends he was just continuing the other man’s dying. Old men can see straight through the world, and they could see that too.
Besides, is it true that there’re so many different ways? Stallions don’t do anything like that with mares, nor dogs with bitches. Why would people? And what for? After all, whichever way you do it the result’s the same. I was a young man too in my day and I may even have had more girls than him, but I always did it the way you’re supposed to.
The only one to laugh was old Albin in the corner by the door, he’d squeal with delight whenever the kid would put his hand between his girlfriend’s legs, or she’d do the same to him. But Albin’s back was broken and he just lay there like a tree stump, and his arms and legs lay next to him like chopped-off boughs. He could only dream of sleeping with a woman one more time before he died. He was forever cursing his life, cursing his injury, his children, everything. He promised an acre of land to the ward orderly, Jadzia, if she’d only put her hand under his covers, it could even be right before he died. Jadzia laughed and said death was probably a lot nicer than her hand, her hand was all work-worn and chapped and not exactly young. Because Jadzia was able to laugh at even the saddest things. Another woman would have given him an earful, but she laughed. Another woman would have burst into tears, but Jadzia laughed. Often it’d be quiet as the grave on the ward, then Jadzia would come in and say something and everyone would be laughing.