“I don’t recall. I’ve drunk all kinds of things, maybe I had this one time.”
“You sip it. Not like vodka.”
“Then I don’t think so.”
Miss Hania brought glasses and coffee on a tray. She passed right close by me, she sent a gust of air towards me from her body. She smelled of perfume and youth. I thought to myself, this isn’t the same place I used to work. We ate on sheets of newspaper, and here they were bringing things in on a tray. She had slim hands. You could almost see through the skin, and her fingernails were painted red. It was like she’d never worked the land, like she’d worked in these offices since she was a child.
“I made yours a bit weaker, director,” she said with an ingratiating smile, putting tiny little spoons on the saucers next to the coffee cups.
“Good job.” And he patted her on the backside like she was his Józka. She acted like she was embarrassed, but probably because it was in front of me, and she bounded out of the room like a deer. “Ha!” he laughed. “She’s a cute one, huh?”
“Do you pat all of them like that?”
“If you were in my place you’d be patting them too. When you’re in authority you have to pat the girls. You pat one of them, another one you don’t, and you know everything that’s going on in the building. Besides, they like it. You forget to give one of them a pat and she’ll sulk. You should see her without her clothes on. It makes you want to live twice as long. The fact is, when they’re properly fed everything else is the way it should be. Not like when we were young. Remember how many of the girls had crooked legs? They’d have the face of a Madonna and legs like a hoop on a barrel. These days it’s all vitamins. And bread, friend, bread, no one has to go without, and so the young women grow up so fine all you want to do is climb on top of them. But what of it, when a guy’s stuck with his Józka. And you might say it’s all because of the reforms. Sometimes I might do the odd thing, but you have to watch out. Someone else’ll knock her up and she’ll say it’s the director’s. And even if it wasn’t true they’d boot me out in a flash. Let’s drink.”
We clinked glasses. He drank a little bit, I did the same, because I was watching to see how much he took so I wouldn’t come out looking like a bumpkin, since it was this strange kind of vodka that you only sip. It was disgusting, like moonshine watered down with tea and soapsuds. On top of that you had to slurp it like a bird. There’s nothing like pure grain vodka, it slips down like a roaring stream. It makes you shudder and scrunch your face up, and it jabs you so hard you feel from the top of your head right down to your feet that it’s you. And no one else has the right to be you. Not like with this pisswater.
“Well?” He looked down at me.
“Not bad,” I said.
“There you go. You have to know what’s what. And it’s good for the heart. Do you take sugar? I don’t. I learned to drink it without.” He pushed the sugar bowl over.
“You’ve got a sugar bowl now as well.”
“Life’s not actually that bad when you think of it. And it’s going to be even better. There’ll be more cement, more of everything. There won’t need to be allocations, or applications, or signatures. Remember way back when, it was the same with buckets. If you wanted to buy a bucket you had to buy a book as well. Nowadays you can buy all the buckets you want. Zinc-plated ones, enamel ones, plastic ones, yellow, red, blue. And the district administration won’t care who’s buying stuff or what it’s for, whether they’re building a silo or a tomb. All you need is what you might call the right attitude. Not demand too much. It’s all right to complain a bit, so long as it’s harmless. The most important thing is to look boldly into the future. Not backwards. Efficiency, plans, cultivation, investment, indicators — these are measures for today. Not blood and wounds. No one’s yet lost out on the future, but the past has left a good many folks stranded. If you can get that into your head you won’t come out the loser. Don’t think I’m arguing for cooperatives. Even if that was what I wanted, this isn’t the right moment. Today it’s doing things of your own free will. Course, you have to help out when people want to join their farms, cancel someone’s loan, or give them priority. But individual farmers count with us also. And they can do well for themselves. We’re not standing in their way. Take Sieniak for instance. He has an apartment building, a car, his wife’s got a fur coat, he’s got a fur coat and his daughter too, and he’s got two million in the bank. From what? Flax. No problem. The government gets a cut, let him have his share too. Kulaks and middling peasants and poor peasants, those labels don’t hold anymore. Back then it had to be that way because of the dialectics, friend. You had to grab the peasants by the shoulders and shake them so they didn’t sleep through the revolution. And also so they believed less in God and more in us. Besides that, we had to show people who was in charge. But that’s all been and gone. There’s no turning back. You have to change your soul, friend, your soul. These days you can’t live with a peasant soul anymore. And things’ll get even worse. They put aside class reckonings long ago. Now we’re all children of the same mother again. There’s no more orphans, no more stepsons, no one that doesn’t belong to anyone. There’s an enemy, of course. There’ll always be an enemy. That’s the nature of enemies. But it’s not the same enemy that burned haystacks or that killed Rożek. That enemy, we could more or less live with them. These days people are their own enemy. And that’s the worst kind of enemy, because he’s hidden in your thoughts, in what you feel, he’s tied up like a dog on a chain. In the old days, when someone had the devil in them it was easy to see. But how can you tell today, when there aren’t any more devils? Me, if I’d been trying to live with the same soul as before I’d be long gone. Better folks than me lost the fight. But me, I sense things before they’re even coming. I don’t need swallows to know the spring. You just have to constantly believe, not just once in a while, but each day, every hour. And during working hours you have to believe twice over. Exactly what you believe in might change, but you just keep on believing. Because the worst thing of all is when you run out of steam, then it’s all over for you. You’re gone before you can say Jack Robinson. Looks like you’re still there, but in reality you’re not. My Józka says to me, Leon, it’s like you were born a second time. You know everything in advance, you understand everything. Me, I keep praying and praying and I don’t understand a thing, all I feel is regrets. You see? And you’d have thought she’s just a dumb woman. Shall we have another? I’m glad you came. Ever since morning I’ve been feeling like having a drink with someone. Though I’m not supposed to. Because of my heart. Before you know it you’re left behind. And you’ll never catch up ever, friend. Because the peasant soul only ever travels by foot, or on a pony, it’s never in a hurry, God forbid you should ever overtake the day. For the peasant soul every road leads to death, every life leads to the cross. These days people fly by jet, they overtake centuries, not just days. You ever been in a plane? I flew to France. I brought Józka a handbag back, got myself a pipe. Maybe I’ll start smoking it. Pipes are fashionable these days. The trees, the fields, rivers, houses, it’s all underneath you. It’s so tiny you could take a whole village in the palm of your hand and watch the little people living there. You feel like you’re an angel, or God himself. On top of that they give you things to eat and drink. Administrating from up there would be a piece of cake. All you’d need to do would be point your finger. This guy gets this, that guy gets that. And if you touched someone on the head he’d think he’d been struck by lightning out of a clear sky. If any of them complained you’d just squeeze them a bit, here, they could squeal away. Or when you needed to organize a day of community service, you could just drum your fingers on the village and it’d be like an earthquake, they’d all come rushing out of their houses. You wouldn’t have to talk them into it, persuade them, beg them. You’d just grab them by the hair and here, here’s your spade, here’s your pickax. When you think how much time I’ve wasted on those kind of things. I’m telling you, when I get home from work all I wanna do is collapse on the bed and sleep. Just as well there’s the television, it can talk to the missus for you, and the children, keep them entertained, do some of your worrying for you. Even better than you. All you do is press a button and you can go to sleep. Who’d’ve thought there’d be such wonders? People didn’t believe there’d be the radio, or telephones. And here you have pictures flitting around your house like they were dreams. Yours, other people’s. And you can watch. Maybe people’ll stop dreaming one of these days? I mean, when it comes down to it why do they need to? You get all tired, all sweaty, you jerk about and run away and get scared, and on top of everything you never know what it all means. Back in your time what did they use to calculate on in the office? The abacus. There was only one in the whole building. It was on Rożek’s desk so you could tell he was the mayor. Now, you saw, there’s a machine on every desk, and they do all the adding on their own. Hundreds, thousands, millions, in a split second — all it does is hum for a moment. That peasant soul of yours is applesauce, if I say so. It was thought up by the masters to stop the peasants rebelling. But the masters are all long gone. There’s no more manor houses. Did we have a reform? We did. Did you get your five acres? You did. In other words, your hunger for land was satisfied. If it wasn’t, we can give you another five. The Walichs’ land is standing fallow, they handed it over to the government in return for a pension. If you want it it’s yours, help yourself. But you ought to know that with a peasant soul, you could have a hundred acres and you’d still be eating