Some of them were lying in piles of two or three, like they’d been clinging to each other for warmth. Some looked as if they’d only fallen asleep, as if they’d gotten tired of the war the way you get tired at harvesttime, and they’d slipped their boots off to ease their feet. Everyone knows that war is worst of all on the legs and feet. Many a time, from the waist up you’d be raring to fight but your feet wouldn’t budge. You’d be shouting hurrah, but your legs had no life in them. And many a time the war would be won not so much by bullets as by feet. Because war and feet are like half sisters.
When I was at war we didn’t do a whole lot of fighting. Instead, we just walked and walked, and if we went in the wrong direction we’d walked in vain. And you didn’t even hope for the end of the war so much as for a chance to take your boots off, even for a moment, and cool your feet in a stream.
The bodies that still had socks or footcloths maybe didn’t feel the cold so much. But the ones with completely bare feet, it hurt to even look at them. One time I was made to walk across snow barefoot and I know how painful it is. You could read from those bare feet like from a book. They were swollen from the frost, cracked till they bled, and rubbed sore from marching and
from the boots. They were blue and dead. Though living feet also, you could read all sorts of sufferings from them, even more than from a person’s eyes, their face, or their words or their tears.
With some bodies the snow had covered their legs and all you could see were toes poking out of a snowdrift. Other ones were lying on their bellies with their bare heels jabbing at the sky. Or they’d be sticking out of the snow from the waist up, or from their belly button or their private parts, while their legs would be growing deep down in the snow like the roots of their body.
I found one under a sloe bush. He was some kind of officer – his epaulettes were all decorated with gold braid – so he ought to have had decent boots as well. Except his legs had been blown off at the knees, and it wasn’t even right to wish I could have had those boots, even though they’d probably been made of chamois leather, with stiffeners and pointed toes. All I did was pick a few sloes from over his head, because sloes taste best when they’re frozen.
Another one I found, I thought he was still alive. He was sitting outside a potato clamp leaning against his pack, his rifle in his lap, helmet on and playing his harmonica. I even thought I recognized the tune. But when I leaned over him I saw the harmonica was covered in dried blood, like he’d been blowing blood instead of air. He didn’t have any boots on either. Though if he had, I still wouldn’t have taken them. How could I do that – there he was playing the harmonica, and I come along and take his boots instead of listening? I used to play myself and I know, when you’re playing you get so carried away, someone could even steal your body and you wouldn’t notice, because at moments like that you’re pure spirit. There were times I could barely straighten my back from work but the moment I came home from the fields, instead of flopping down and sleeping, I’d go out in front of the house and play. Often the lights would go out in the village and the dogs would be chasing bitches, and I’d just play on and on.
The snow was trampled down everywhere and there was a path to each
corpse. You could tell a lot of people had been there before me, like mushroom pickers in the woods, from all the local villages.
I even met a guy I knew from Łoziny. Łoziny is two and a half miles from our village and the front passed through there as well just as bad as here, and he’d come all the way from there.
“A decent greatcoat’s what I’m mostly after,” he said. “But everything’s all cut up from the shrapnel, either that or it’s German.”
“You haven’t seen any boots, have you?” I asked.
“Boots? You’re wearing boots. Nice tall ones too.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for my brother. He hasn’t got any shoes to wear for school.”
“You’re a bit late for that.” He pulled out a bottle of moonshine. “Here, take a swig – you’re blue with cold. If you’re gonna go looking around here you need vodka. First off, you could freeze to death, and second, you might dream of these poor guys afterwards. Right when the front moved on, then there were boots. You could pick any kind you wanted, find a pair that fit. Wide ones, narrow ones, lace-ups, tall boots, ones with buckles. Black, yellow. Hobnailed or with rubber soles. There were even some fancy ones like yours. But now they’ve all been taken. You might still find some, but you’d have to go off the beaten track. And a shovel would be a good idea, ’cause some of them are buried up to their neck and you have to dig down to get to their boots. You need to get a move on though, because when the weather eases off they’ll be burying the bodies. The village chairmen have announced it already. Maybe if you went up by the woods there’d still be some with their boots on. Thing is, though, there are mines up there. You might end up losing a leg or an arm instead of finding boots. Or even lose your life for a pair of boots, after you’ve made it through the war. Here, have another drink.”
There was nothing for it, I lent Stasiek my officer’s boots, because I mean
he couldn’t not go to school. School was like first communion. Everyone went. People who’d only finished second or third grade. People who’d never even started school before. People that couldn’t read or write, bachelors, married guys, folks with kids. He looked like a stork in those boots, they almost came up over his knees. But who was interested in whether your boots were too big or too small, the important thing was they were in one piece. To begin with he walked around like he was on stilts, he even fell over a couple of times, but then he got used to them, he started walking in long strides without really bending his knees, and he looked pretty good, even though it’s not that easy to walk in tall boots when they’re the wrong size. I mean real officer’s boots, of course. Because people say officer’s boots whenever their shoes have any kind of uppers at all. Or any boots that an officer’s wearing. But real officer’s boots you can tell not from the uppers, not even from someone’s rank. Real officer’s boots have to be made of chamois, the toe caps and straps and stiffeners need to be leather that’s hard as metal, and the boot has to be the exact same shape as your leg. And not just around the foot, but at the instep, the ankle, the calf, everywhere, like it was your own skin. You might have been walking around like you had two left feet your whole life, the Lord God himself might have decided that’s how you’re supposed to walk, but the moment you put on officer’s boots it’s like you’d been given new legs. Because it’s not just that you’re wearing footwear that goes all the way from your toes to your knees, also the straps hold your heel like it was in a vise, and the stiffeners do the same for your calves, and you have to walk the way the boots tell you to.
Kurosad, the guy in Oleśnica that made those boots for me, he measured each leg separately, and in different places. On the calf alone he took three measurements, by the ankle, in the middle, and under the knee. And he did it both on bare flesh and in breeches. And by the way, you won’t find another shoemaker like Kurosad for love nor money. He made boots for “Eagle” – that was my resistance name – and he wasn’t the only one that
knew who Eagle was. When you went into his shop you’d never know it was a shoemaker’s – there was a carpet and armchairs and mirrors, and Kurosad behind the counter with his, how can I help you, sir. He only made boots for SS officers, resistance fighters, and the gentry. And when it came to officer’s boots, he had no equal. When I tried them on, stood in front of the mirror and clicked the heels, I felt as if even dying in those boots would be a different kind of death than dying in ordinary shoes or barefoot. And Kurosad was licking his lips he was so pleased:
“All you need now is a pair of spurs and it’ll be: Mount up! mount up!”
I stayed in every morning with my feet in the straw slippers, waiting for Stasiek to come home from school and give me my boots back. It was only in the afternoon I could go down to the village. In the mornings I thought I’d go nuts with boredom. I couldn’t even watch the road from the window because the window was forever iced up and you had to breathe a hole in the ice to see out at all. Though father didn’t let me get too bored. He’d come right in with the horse-collar.
“If you’re just going to be sitting around doing nothing you can mend this.”
This, then that, then something else. Every day it was the same thing. I even got kind of depressed, to the point where I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Someone would come by and ask, so how was it in the resistance, but I didn’t even feel like talking about the resistance, and father would speak for me:
“Well, since he came back he’s just been thinking and thinking. But thinking’s no good. I mean, you’re not going to think something up unless you actually do it. People thought and thought, and what did they come up with? The world’s still the way it was, and all thinking does is make you want to think more and do less.”
There were times all I wanted to do was jump up, slam the door, and head out wherever. But how could I go without anything on my feet? So in the
end I started cutting the farmers’ hair and shaving them. Luckily, from the resistance I’d brought home my razor, my scissors and brush and shaving cream, and I started cutting hair and giving shaves. Right after I came back I cut father’s hair and Antek’s and Stasiek’s, because their hair was so long they looked like sheep, and I did a pretty decent job of it. Then one day I met Bartosz down in the village. He was over seventy, but he was a soldier to the marrow of his bones, he’d served way back in the tsar’s army, and he always wore a crew cut. But this time I see his hair’s so long he looks like Saint Joseph, and he’s scratching away at it.
“I didn’t know you, Bartosz,” I say.
“I’m not surprised. I used to cut my hair the army way. Now look at me.”
“What are you scratching it for?”
“Lice, son, lice. The blasted things bite so much they won’t let you sleep, they won’t let you live. They bite when you’re praying. But in a mop of hair like this, of course they’re going to bite. Plus our house burned down and we’re sleeping with the cattle in the shed. Maybe you could cut my hair for me, I’d give you a rooster?”
I felt sorry for the man. I used to like listening to his army stories, he served with the heavy cavalry all the way over in the Caucasus.
“Come by tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’m at home then, because Stasiek wears my boots to school. Just bring a cloth I can wrap around you.”
I was never taught how to cut hair, but it’s no big deal. You can do harder things than that without being taught. Besides, the important thing wasn’t how you looked but feeling comfortable. If anyone doubted that, they could have told by looking at Bartosz what a relief it was to him. His eyes were brighter, he breathed more easily, and he held himself straight as a ramrod, like I’d taken twenty years off him. He looked at himself in a piece of mirror and he was so pleased his old soldier’s blood stirred in him.
“You’ve done a fine thing, young man. You weren’t in the resistance for
nothing, I see. Anyone that can succeed at being a soldier can succeed at anything.”
Afterward one guy or another who saw Bartosz would come, and anyone that bumped into me in the village, then they started coming by of their own accord. It wasn’t surprising really, every farm had lost something to fire, if it wasn’t the house it was the barn or the cattle sheds. If their horses hadn’t been requisitioned they’d been killed. The cows’ udders would dry up from lack of feed. In the fields there were mines. Anyone would have been glad to at least get rid of the shock of hair they’d grown, to feel freer. But there was no barber in the village. Under the occupation there’d been one, an newcomer. Jan Basiak they called him. He told people he’d been resettled, and he seemed to fit in. He made a decent living, rented a room at Madej’s place on the side next to the road and hung up a sign: Jan Basiak, Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Hairdresser, Permanent Waves, Water Waves. All the women in the village went crazy, the young girls, the married women, the ones with small children – everyone. They cut off their braids and they all started getting those perms.
The first one was the Siudaks’ Gabrysia. She had braids like ropes of wheat straw, but with her new hairdo she looked like a scarecrow and right away she started sleeping with a German corporal from the police station. One time Siudak beat her, in fact he cut her till she bled, because he used a whip handle, so she told her corporal and the corporal beat Siudak up. Siudak couldn’t get out of bed for a month or more. On top of that he had to pay a fine for being disorderly. Ever since then he was scared of Gabrysia like she was the devil himself, though she was his own daughter. She had them all wrapped around her little finger.
Once she started sleeping with the corporal she even learned to be picky, she got as finicky as a fine lady though she was just a regular girl. She made them buy her a fur coat and knee-length boots, and Siudak had to sell a cow to pay for it. As for the hairdresser, she could spend half the day there.
The thing that upset people even more than the corporal was the fact she had her hair washed at the hairdresser’s. Whoever heard of such a thing – a man washing a woman’s hair. The hairdresser fussed around her like he was dancing on eggshells, he’d do anything he could to satisfy her and it was always yes, Miss Gabryjela, no, Miss Gabryjela. In the end, as well as doing all those perms he became an informer. When the front got close, all of a sudden he disappeared overnight. And Gabrysia, she left for the West and married some official over there. She came back one year to visit her mother and father’s graves, but no one mentioned what she’d done when she was younger. What was there to mention? It was a different world, a different village; more than half the people from those times were in the cemetery. They were just lying there, what did they care about Gabrysia. From the other world it didn’t mean a thing that at one time, in this world, some Gabrysia used to sleep with a German corporal.