“Oh, Szymek, please, don’t drink, you need to change. Change, son, stop drinking.”
But father hadn’t forgiven me for going to work in the registry office at the district administration, and the moment he saw me having trouble making it across the threshold he’d come down on me like a ton of bricks, that I was bringing shame on the family, that this had been a God-fearing family for generations, that they were born in God and died in God, that one of them had even planned to travel to the Holy Land, one of them had bought a picture for the church, one of them had held the baldachin over the bishop when he came to visit, Michał would have been a priest if we’d only been able to afford it, but I was a disgrace. I had no education, I had no holy orders, I had no God, and there I was giving ungodly weddings.
“I don’t know what we did to deserve this. The devil’s got you in his clutches, that much is clear, you monster.”
“Well if you can’t go with God you have to go with the devil, father,” I’d answer him out of spite. “Besides, what do we know about the devil? No more than we know about God. Maybe God didn’t insist on having the whole world, maybe he divided it up with the devil. What do we know? All we do is plow and plant and mow over and over, God’s nowhere close and the devil’s far away as well.”
“But people are laughing at us, damn you! You wanted a priest in the family, you got one, that’s what they’re saying. You just need to buy him a cassock.”
“I don’t need a cassock, and people can kiss my ass. What are they, jealous that I work for the government?”
“Government, my eye. You’re a bad seed. Maybe you should start giving confession? Baptizing children? Burying the dead? Get yourself a censer. Though you’d have to put vodka in it — holy water would burn you. Why God is doing this to us, I’ll never know. What have we done? What have we done?”
“Stop doing all those things, son,” mother would say to back him up. “You’ll drive us to our graves. We’ve little enough time left as it is. Think about what you’re doing. You ought to get married.”
“How’s he supposed to get married?” father would say sarcastically. “Priests aren’t allowed to marry. They have to marry other people. Besides, who’d marry a no-good like him? He was so smart, he found a way to get out of working the land. You just wait, you good-for-nothing, you’ll come back to the land.”
Father’s predictions went in one ear and out the other. I mean, why would I go back to the land. I wasn’t wed to it and I didn’t owe it anything, and at the registry office I didn’t even work a quarter as much as I’d have had to on the land, because it was like Mayor Rożek had said, there was hardly any work. No one came to get married there, so all I did was sit at my desk and stare at the ceiling or go look out the window, chat with people that were waiting in front of the building, or read the newspapers. But you can’t fill the day with newspapers, even a day divided in two like at the administration. Often I’d get a tad bored. Once I was done reading I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. And so it went till four o’clock came around. Also, to begin with no one seemed to visit from the other offices. Maybe they were afraid of me, or were they deliberately keeping their distance? Only the district secretary would sometimes come by, his little eyes darting into the corners of the room, and he’d ask:
“How’s it going there, pal, still no takers? You need to make more of an effort.” Then he was gone.
Sometimes Mayor Rożek would call me in when he had a speech he needed to make at a farmers’ meeting, or to the children at some school.
“Here, Pietruszka, read this through. If you can think of anything smart to add, write it in. You were in the police, you know how things are. It shouldn’t be too antichurch, cause otherwise my old lady’ll chase me out the house with holy water if she finds out, plus the farmers might take offense. And correct any mistakes.”
Then he’d have me make a clean copy in good handwriting. Because he could read more or less okay, but his handwriting looked like chicken scratches. He couldn’t even sign his own name properly. The district secretary showed him several times how to do it in a single go with a flourish underneath instead of printing one letter after another like a schoolboy, because no one’s going to respect a signature like that. So whenever you went into his office you’d see piles of papers covered in practice flourishes.
“See, I’m learning. But I’m never going to get the hang of it, I can see that. Your hand would have to be born all over again. It wasn’t like that for the mayors before the war. Back then, Kurzeja or Zadruś or whoever would just put three crosses and the thing was signed. Nowadays you can’t get away with that. The nation’s educated. Back then, what did they have to think about? Filling a hole in the road. Now there’s politics as well.”
It was hardly surprising. He’d been a wagon driver at the manor all his life till suddenly he became mayor, his hand was used to holding a whip, not a pen. But when the speech went well he’d always bring a half-bottle. And when it went badly he’d bring one also, to get over his disappointment.
“It didn’t go off well, Pietruszka, it really didn’t. There were barely two or three of them clapping, the rest just stood there with their heads down, staring like wolves. It wasn’t like when I was a driver. You’d sit on your ass and the horses would pull the wagon. Plus, back then there were masters and so there was someone to rebel against. Who are you supposed to rebel against these days? Maybe if I rose higher, cause it’s always easier when you’re high up. The lowest place is always the worst, Pietruszka, and it’s always worst nearest the earth. I’m telling you, a mayor’s life is crap. And there I was thinking it’d be all sweetness. What do you reckon, maybe I could learn to drive a tractor? There aren’t going to be any horses anymore. The horses around the villages are just gonna die off and then there’ll be no more horses. The future is tractors.”
But he didn’t have time to learn. They shot him not long after that, no one knew why. He was going home on his bicycle like he did every day, because he lived in the old farmhands’ quarters in Bartoszyce, and something went wrong with the gears on his bike, so he was pushing it through the woods. In the morning they found him on the road, he had three bullets in his chest and a piece of paper pinned to his jacket: Death to the red stooges. His bicycle was lying on top of him.
The first wedding I gave was for Stach Magdziarz from Lisice and Irka Bednarek from Kolonie. Irka wore a kind of green outfit, Stach had a brown pinstriped suit. Stach’s mother was getting on, Irka worked at the mill. Stach hadn’t gone to church since the war because the priest wouldn’t give him absolution. It was because one time the priest had been on his way to administer last rites to a sick man, and here there was a fire at Sapiela’s place in Kolonie. All the horses were out working in the fields and there was nothing to hitch to the fire engine. So without a second thought Stach flagged down the priest’s wagon and hitched his horses to the fire engine, and off they went. It wasn’t such a big sin, because the sick man was only at the end of the village and it wouldn’t have hurt the priest to walk the rest of the way.
The mayor came, and the district secretary, and two other officials, to see how I did with my first wedding. I felt a bit awkward and a couple of times I got the words wrong, but it went more or less okay. Afterwards, Stach and I went to the pub and got so drunk we passed out. Because Irka would only have one drink, we couldn’t convince her to have another. She sat there like she was all worried and kept asking over and over whether they were going to be happy now they were married. I had to swear at least three times that they would be. I even stood them a bottle out of my own pocket, for that happiness of theirs. And they were happy, till Stach got ulcers in his stomach and died.