“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine. And what about her, Jerzy?”
“Her? Who do you mean?”
“The woman that owned the place.”
“What do you think? Just a couple of days later.”
“There, on her estate?”
“No, in town.”
“Had you arranged the requisition with her?”
“Of course. Why do you bring that up?”
“I’m going to die.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
“I’m sure. And first I want to know: who got her?”
“I did.”
“You?”
“I can die any time, too. I’ve got to settle everything first, everything there is to be settled.”
We were silent for a while. I remember where we had our talk — the smoky interior of a hut. In the corner, an old woman was muttering prayers; a forlorn cat was crawling on the window sill.
“Jerzy, are boys being admitted to the party today?”
“Two.”
“Take me in with them.”
He did not answer; he bent over me and looked at me fixedly. Without averting his eyes, he said in the same neutral tone, “We don’t know whether you’ll get out of this.” He smiled. He took the cat on his knees and stroked its flat head. “What use are dead people to the party?”
“If that’s the kind of man you are,” I said, “I’m glad I’m saying goodbye to you.”
He rose.
“You can tell each other jokes at my funeral,” I said.
“We don’t hold funerals,” he said. “There’s never enough time.”
He put the cat down gently, and walked away. I hovered between life and death, at some undefined point of existence, helpless, without a will, like a bird driven by a high wind; I vomited, I raved, I averted my eyes from the dressings stiff with my blood; the hours, the days, the weeks were like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point. I begged for life, for death, for medicines, for a gun; I choked with hatred for others who paid me back in kind, burdened as they were with my emaciated body that aroused their contempt — a bundle of pale purple bones covered with yellow skin. Then came a day when I knew I was ready to die every day at dawn if need be: I knew I was alive. I was already moving about unaided.
“Well,” Jerzy asked one day, “are you all right now?”
“Yes.”
He sat down. He began to roll a cigarette, frowning desperately. He had never learned to roll a cigarette properly, although his fingers were skillful and strong. In all the years of partisan warfare he had still not mastered an art that every boy learns in a week. I saw that his eyes were angry as he bent over his recalcitrant piece of paper. At last he lighted it. “Do you know why I talked like that — then?” he asked.
“It’s none of my business. You’re the commander. I don’t want to slosh around in your conscience.”
He smiled. “Listen,” he said. “I didn’t want you to think of the party as a sacrament. We’re at war; we must think about how to win it and survive. You’ve got to live, Franciszek; for people like you the war won’t be over soon, perhaps never. You can depend on a man’s will to live only if he has something to look forward to, something he wants to possess or to be a part of. Revenge, a man, a woman — something must get into your blood and say to you: Stand up and fight. When your life was running so low, you hadn’t made up your mind about that. Now you can go ahead; the sooner, the better.”
“You’re a hard man, Jerzy,” I said. “And what if I had reported to the clouds?”
He shrugged. “We would have given you a funeral, anyway,” he said. “Though you know yourself that there’s no time for such things.”
“You’re a hard man,” I repeated. “It takes a special kind of courage to talk like that.”
He struggled with his cigarette, rerolling the treacherous paper over and over. “I don’t know what courage really is,” he said. Despite his efforts, his cigarette kept falling apart. “I’ve thought about it all my life. As a boy, I had a different idea of it — rescuing somebody from fire or water, performing a heroic action in war, raping my grandmother, that kind of thing. Now these things have to be reconsidered. All the usual opinions about courage are based on the idea of exceptional circumstances. But at bottom a man’s behavior in battle or during a fire tells us nothing about him, but only shows how he reacts in such situations. In abnormal circumstances you get abnormal reactions; nothing that can be foreseen, and nothing to be surprised at.”
“Is there such a thing as normal courage?”
He was silent for a moment; his cigarette had disintegrated for good. He rolled the remnants of tobacco between his fingers. “I think there is,” he said. “Courage is probably just a matter of faith. People are nothing but a herd of swine wallowing in a sea of shit. It’s easy to define man in his lower aspects — he is infinitely beastly; he is capable of everything; he’ll believe everything and befoul everything. Courage in the truest sense is ability to find man’s upper, ultimate limits — the extent to which he can be trusted and is capable of achievement. That is how I understand Communism. As for you, I was sure you’d pull through.”
“In order to kill?”
“In the name of life.”
“And our enemies?”
“What about our enemies?”
“Don’t they think the same way?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know what they think,” he said. “I only know in the name of what they kill, and that is what matters to me in this war. I know what they did to man, and I know what I want man to be: this entitles me to take part in the game. I want an epoch and an earth that will make it possible for man to be truly courageous. That’s the only thing I’m interested in.” He rose; his boots creaked unpleasantly. “While the war is on, don’t try to find justifications that don’t exist,” he said. “The only thing you can do is to think about the world you want to go back to, the place you want to live in. Distance between dream and reality defines a man’s morality, nothing more. Haven’t you got a decent cigarette?”
He lighted one. We set out. Where? To what place of life, dream, war? I don’t remember. We were approaching a little town; there were only a few of us. We were supposed to find somebody in the market, a fellow who thought he was terribly smart, a secret agent of the Gestapo, and to blast him out of existence. It was noon. The August air was thick as cheese. When we emerged from the woods and saw the town spread out below us — a dirty little place — bells began to ring, gloomy and helpless in the torrid air. Then a factory siren began to wail; as far as I know there was only one factory in this hole.
“The siren operator must have been asleep,” Jerzy said.
“Why? Maybe he let the church have priority.”
“You go to the left, and we’ll go to the right …”
The taxicab stopped with a screech a few steps behind Franciszek. He jumped aside like a rabbit. The driver, furious, leaned out the window. “Didn’t you hear my horn?”
“I’m sorry; I was thinking,” Franciszek said, staring at his mud-spattered overcoat.