Also, I’ve got swallows under the eaves. When the little ones hatch they start chirping for food right from first light, and I wake up with them. There’s fewer and fewer swallows in our village, ever since people started getting rid of their thatched roofs. Because swallows won’t just build their nests again when you change your roof. They won’t take to any old roof. For instance they can’t stand tar paper, metal sheeting the same. With the metal sheeting, when it’s hot the heat makes their nests all sticky, while tar paper stinks. Storks, now, they’re more likely to get used to a different roof, so long as you mount an old wagon wheel up there for them or a handful of sticks woven together. Doves can be lured back too, you just need to put down some grain for them. Not to mention sparrows — to them it’s all the same what kind of roof you have, as long as they’ve got food to eat. But swallows, even if they’ve lived under the same roof as humans for years, they’re constantly afraid. The fear of God, human fear, trembling like aspen leaves. And they’re forever in flight. Forever on the wing. Close by one minute, way far away the next. Up high and down low. One minute skimming the ground, the next up a height. Like they were always on the run from something. From what, though? Sometimes you look at them up there, and it’s as if they’re a blade of grass making the eye of the sky water. Other times, seems they feel hemmed in by the world and they’re bouncing about like they’re trapped in a cage between the sky and the earth. Like they’re losing their senses from all that flying. They keep chasing, chasing. Chasing what? Because even when they fly ever so low over the house they make such sharp turns that they almost cut your eye, it’s like they don’t want you to even remember them at all. If it wasn’t for the fact that they’re half black you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the sun glinting up in the sky. It’s only when they’re high up that they get a bit calmer. Though even then they’re nowhere near as calm as storks, or doves. There are times the whole world is broiling, the heat’s so sleepy even the dogs are too tired to bark, they just doze in their doghouses. Even the chickens move over to the shade and put their heads under their wings. There’s not so much as a leaf moving. The flies can’t be bothered to bite. There’s nothing but the swallows trembling high up in the air or plunging down close to the ground. You wonder how they have the energy, what they’re doing it for. Then the next day there’s either a storm or there isn’t. Because swallows know no peace.
People have one swallow’s nest, maybe two, but under my roof there must be ten of them. We got so used to each other that even in the hospital they’d wake up with me. It would usually start with a noise that sounded like a drop of dew falling on something soft. That was the first hungry nestling waking up. I’d open my eyes and look out the window. Dawn through the window looks like an empty tin pail. After the first drop there’d come a second, though this time it was like it hit the pail, it was hungrier. After that a third, a fourth, a tenth, each one hungrier than the last. Then the dawn would start to grow brighter. At first it was like someone was rinsing out the dark blue of the pail. Then after a bit someone else would bring milk in the pail from the milking and put it in the middle of the room. Right away the beds would start creaking. Someone would say something. Someone would give a sigh to God. Someone missing a leg or an arm would turn over on his other side and the whole ward would turn with them. After that you couldn’t sleep any longer.
It might even have been one of those dawns when I got the idea of maybe having a tomb built, so everyone would have a place they could be buried in. Because your thoughts after you’ve been asleep are like swallows at dawn. And in the hospital wanted and unwanted thoughts come to you alike. Even thoughts that would never have occurred to a healthy person. Because healthy people only think on this side of the world. When you try and think on the other side, your thoughts slip like they were on glass. Because if you’re going over there you need to go body and soul with your thoughts. For good.
It’s not surprising really. You’re lying there confined to your bed, you’ve got more time than there are flies on shit and you don’t know what to do with it. You don’t feel like sleeping any more, how much can a person sleep anyway. There’s nothing to talk about either, because it’s always about the same thing. An hour seems as long as a day, a day as long as a month, a month as long as a year. I doubt you’d have so much time even in eternity. And that kind of empty time is worse than the sickness itself. On top of that, you’ve got twelve beds on the ward. And in each one of them there’s either an amputated leg or a crushed arm, someone run over by a tractor, someone that broke their back, or someone else with a pipe in their Adam’s apple making this whistling sound, here someone’s had half their stomach cut out, next to them someone’s head is wrapped in bandages, and over there it’s hard to know exactly what’s wrong with him. Every day the whole place is sighing, hacking, groaning, dying. And everybody’s going on and on and on about his illness and all. There’s nowhere to run, so you run away in your thoughts, though it’s not much better in there.
I never did as much thinking in my whole life as I did during those two years in the hospital. When I got out I felt as if my head was twice as heavy. It kept buzzing like a beehive. But you couldn’t not think. Even if you didn’t want to, your thoughts thought themselves on their own. If you shooed them out of your head they just flew around you like a flock of crows driven out of a poplar tree. Cawing and squawking. There was no way you could stop them, even though they were your thoughts.
If someone had said to me before that I’d be the one to have a tomb built I’d have laughed them out. Me build a tomb. I wasn’t either the youngest or the oldest. And I had no intention of running the farm. I wasn’t drawn to the land. I did what I did because father told me to, but in my thoughts I was always somewhere else.
Of us four brothers Stasiek was the one most likely to take over the farm, he looked like a farmer ever since he was small. Father even used to imagine how Stasiek would probably have a new house built when he grew up. And Stasiek and him would discuss it back and forth, because Stasiek wanted it to have stone walls, with cellars and a verandah and rounded windows, with sheet-metal roofing and laid floors in all the rooms. While father wanted to leave an earthen floor at least in the kitchen, because how could you walk on floorboards in muddy boots when fall comes. And sometimes you needed to spit or stamp out a cigarette butt. Stasiek wanted three rooms. Two downstairs, one for him and his wife when he got married, and a separate one for father and mother. And a third one upstairs so that when one of us brothers came to visit we’d also have a room of our own to stay in. Plus a storeroom and a larder. You were supposed to get to all the rooms separately from the hallway. Father tried to convince Stasiek that at least him and mother should be able to go into their room from the kitchen. Their whole lives they’d lived like that and it would be hard to change. But Stasiek wouldn’t budge, it had to be from the hallway only, because he’d seen it done like that at the presbytery and at the miller’s, where you went into each of the rooms separately. You were supposed to take your boots off in the hallway and put slippers on, because he’d seen that at the presbytery and the miller’s as well. Though before he built the house, father would probably have persuaded him to let him and mother get to their room from the kitchen. They were old and they wouldn’t have used that doorway long. Then afterward he could’ve altered it. Or maybe he would have changed when he got older himself, and he’d want to get to his room straight from the kitchen just like father and mother.