One time I bought all the pairs she had, there must have been a dozen of them, all different sizes – large, small, medium – and in different colors, mouse gray, fox red, like scorched straw, like wholemeal bread, all as fine as gossamer.
“I’ll take the lot,” I said.
“Well she must be a real lady,” she said. “All these pairs. Some girls have all the luck. What size foot does she have?”
“Who would that be?”
“The woman you’re buying them for, your girlfriend or your wife, whoever.”
“Don’t know yet.”
“The thing is, these are different sizes and they might not fit. And they’re so fine you only need to scratch them with your nail and there’ll be a run. She needs to take care of her hands. You ought to buy her some hand cream. I’ve got that as well. Otherwise she’ll be bringing me stockings with runs in them, wanting her money back. And I won’t take them. I can’t be traveling all this way and come out at a loss.”
“They’ll be the right size. If not for one then for another. Why worry ahead of time.”
“Well I guess it’s none of my business. Shall I bring you more?”
“Sure, you do that.”
I hid the stockings up in the attic, in the rye, in a plaited straw barrel. I pushed them as deep as I could into the grain so father wouldn’t find them by chance when he went up to check that the rye wasn’t getting damp. Though
you didn’t need to dig down deep to see whether it was damp, all you had to do was scoop a little from the surface or just put your hand in and hold it there a moment, when it was damp you could feel it right away, like putting your hand over steam. I was certain there was no better hiding place. In the old days people would keep whole fortunes in barrels of grain, dollars, rubles, and in wartime weapons. Because grain arouses the least suspicion. What could be more innocent than grain. And who would ever want to dig down to the bottom of those things when they held ten bushels or more each.
But one day I come home from work and I see my stockings laid out on the table like on a market stall.
“Where are those stockings from?” I asked. I was shaken.
Father was sitting by mother’s bed, and he says calm as anything:
“You know what, they grew in the rye up in the attic. I went to check if it wasn’t getting damp, and I picked some of them to show your mother. But she won’t believe me. Maybe she’ll believe you. Tell her they’re stockings. What else could they be? Nylon ones. That’s all they wear these days. I wonder how much one of them pairs costs? Probably as much as a bushel of rye. And see how many pairs grew up there. We didn’t even sow or muck. Obviously it’s not worth keeping rye anymore. We’ll have to start growing stockings instead of rye, since God’s blessed us this way. Since the beginning of time only rye has grown from rye, but we’ve had a miracle.”
I was all set to grab the stockings, slam the door, and go wherever my feet took me. But I looked at mother. She was lying with her head turned to the wall as if she was embarrassed, and I suddenly felt sorry for her. I thought to myself, oh well. I took a bowl, poured myself some potato soup from the pot, sat down on the chair by the stove, because the table was covered with stockings, and I began to eat. Father was still going on about what had grown from what and how God had smiled on us, till in the end he got mixed up and forgot whether rye was growing from stockings or stockings from rye.
But I didn’t say a word. What could I say? He knew what he knew, I knew what I knew.
I wasn’t as young as I used to be and I wouldn’t just go running after a pair of beautiful eyes. But the girls weren’t as silly as before the war either. Not many of them went for you because of how much land you had. What kind of happiness was land? You work like a dog all the livelong day, day in, day out, and happiness only comes in the next life. And even that wasn’t a sure thing. These days, people were taken at face value. So they preferred to dress well rather than parade their virtue. On top of that you kept hearing how people were having their land taken away from them, and what use was virtue with shared land?
I gave out so many pairs of stockings that if one girl had gotten all of them she’d have been able to wear them for the rest of her life, and not just on Sundays. And she’d always be seen in a fresh pair. I sometimes spent my entire salary on those stockings when the trader woman came by. All I had left was cigarette money. It was another matter that the pay was lousy and if I hadn’t had meals at home I couldn’t have managed on that income. But of all the pairs I gave out, only one let me down.
During the time I was still giving weddings they hired this one girl from Łanów. Łanów is a village about two and a half miles from ours. It’s on the other side of the woods, but it still belongs to the żabczyce administration. She worked in the tax department. Małgorzata was her name. To begin with I didn’t pay much attention to her. Obviously we saw each other almost every day, because in the offices you couldn’t help it, there was only one entrance and one hallway and everyone arrived at the same time and left at the same time. But I’d pass her just like one office worker passing another. Good morning. Good morning. Nothing more. She seemed somehow unapproachable. Any of the other girls, you could pat them on the backside or pinch them or rub up against them in the hallway and you knew they wouldn’t take offense. With her, though, you’d be afraid she’d
slap you. Maybe because she’d graduated from junior high. Back then, finishing junior high meant more than going to college today. There’s a few folks from the village studying at college now, and what of it? They won’t even take their cap off to an older person, they expect them to be the one to say hello first, because they’re educated. Only one of them, Jasiu Kułag, he’s nice and polite, he always stops and offers you his hand and asks how things are. He’ll be a decent guy.
I admit I liked the look of her, plus she always dressed nicely, she always had a fresh blouse and dress and jacket. Plus, on rainy days she’d bring a little umbrella, she was the only girl in the offices that had one. That was probably how the rumor got started that she was living with the chairman, because how could she afford everything. They’d just changed from having mayors to having chairmen. Mayor Rożek was followed for a short time by Mayor Guz, then after him was the first chairman, a guy by the name of Maślanka. He wasn’t from our village but his wife was, Józia Stajuda. No one knew where he was from. Whenever anyone asked him what he’d done in the war he’d squirm like an eel. They sent him from the county for us to elect as chairman.
I found it hard to believe she’d be living with Maślanka. She didn’t look like that kind of girl. And I can say of myself that I know people, life’s taught me who to trust and who not to. In the resistance I didn’t trust a soul, and that mattered more than having a good eye or cold blood or a heart of stone. It might have been because of that that I survived. Because truth be told, you can only ever trust the dead. And not all of them, because with some folks even their death has something bogus about it.
Though on the other hand, why should I have trusted her. I didn’t even know her, and there’s always a bit of truth in gossip. Maybe she just knew how to cover her tracks. She wouldn’t have been the first one to set her sights on the chairman. He was the chairman, after all, and he could always make life difficult for you if you weren’t careful. What else could they have seen
in him? Pudgy little guy, always sweating up a storm. But he knew how to turn on the charm. When he’d do his rounds of the offices in the morning he’d always have a nice word for each of them, smile at one, kiss the hand of another, stroke another one’s hair like a father. And he wore this big ring with a red stone, supposedly it was a keepsake from his father, he’d flash it in front of every girl. Except that when someone came from the county administration he’d slip it off and hide it in his drawer. Some people said it wasn’t anything to do with his father, that Maślanka had been a hog trader during the war and done well for himself. Whatever the truth was, after a guy like Rożek, whose every second word was “fuck,” because with him what was in his head was on his tongue, the new fellow was almost like a squire. So she could have been one of those that gave in to temptation.
I thought to myself, give it a try, what do I have to lose. If that’s what she’s like it won’t be hard. If he can do it so can I. We’ll see who’s better, chairman or no. When I put my Sunday suit on, you could never look as good, however many suits you were wearing. And you should see me in my officer’s boots. Have you ever even worn officer’s boots? You’d look like a bucket on a stool. Me, they said I could have served in the uhlans. Maybe I would have if things had worked out differently. So what if he was chairman. If the farmers had voted for you the way they used to choose the mayor, you’d have been village policeman at most. As for the ring, I used to wear one myself, and it was a whole lot bigger than yours, it had a stone like a twenty-pound carp. And it didn’t come from selling hogs, I got it from my father and his father before him, it’s been in the family for generations. You loser.
I got shot in the thigh during an attack on a mail train in Lipienniki. They drove me by cart to the manor, they said that was the safest place for me. They put me right under the roof in the attic, so I’d be hard to find if anyone came searching. I wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of my life in a place like that. Their attic was bigger than our whole house. There was a
carpet covering the entire floor, a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, elk and stag antlers on the walls. A whole family could have slept on the couch I was lying on. Plus I had a window right by my bed with a view of the grounds, so I could hear birds chirping close by from morning to night. It was like there was no war at all.
If anything happened, the story was that I was a cousin of the owners and I was sick with the consumption. Why not, I could be their cousin. I’d already been a chimney sweep when we had to carry out a death sentence on the mayor of Niegolewo. And a monk when I had to get out of the town and there were roadblocks everywhere. One time I was even transported as a dead man in a coffin, they were pretending to be taking me back to my parish to be buried in my own cemetery. Being the cousin of the owners of the manor was a piece of cake. Especially when all I had to do was lie there with only my face and hands outside the sheets. My face was fine, in fact it was a bit scrawny so it even looked right for the consumption. In addition they gave me a pair of glasses so if need be I could put them on and read a book. Except they made everything blurred, because even today I’ve got eyes like a hawk. I never opened the book once, though it lay right there the whole time on the nightstand. Right away a maid came in with water and soap and a towel, and to begin with she soaked my fingers for a long time, then she trimmed the quick around all my nails till they bled. I asked her why she was doing it. She said the mistress had told her to. Then she trimmed my nails so short they were almost even with my fingertips, and when I tried to scratch myself all it did was tickle. And on this finger, the middle one, they put a big gold ring with a huge stone like I said, big as a twenty-pound carp. With the ring on, my hand felt like it wasn’t mine anymore, I was afraid to move it so I just kept it stiff on the quilt. They put one of the master’s nightshirts on me and for the first night I barely slept a wink. How can you sleep in something that’s more like a priest’s surplice than a shirt? It had lace and frills, and there
was so much material two people could have fit inside it. On the nightstand they put the master’s gold watch. To my darling Maurycy, with love, Julia, it said on the cover.
To begin with I thought I was dreaming. But it didn’t take long for me to get used to it, and then I regretted I’d have to go back to the woods. It wasn’t going to be easy after I’d been lying there like the owners’ cousin, having my food brought to me in bed. Having a gunshot wound would have been one thing, but it had to be the consumption. What kind of illness was that? Franek Marciniak had the consumption before the war. He’d eat slices of bread spread twice as thick again with butter, and he drank endless amounts of dog lard and ate eggs and cream, they took the food from their own mouths so he could have it, and the young Marciniaks would say they wanted to have the consumption too. Because he looked like a doughnut in butter.
I’d occasionally think I could actually be one of the owners’ cousins, why not. For instance that Maurycy from the inscription on the watch. Though who had Julia been? Because neither the master nor his wife were Maurycy or Julia. Sometimes I imagined their life one way, sometimes another, but it was always a happy one. They wouldn’t have given each other a gold watch if they hadn’t been happy. And though they were probably long dead and in the ground, their happiness was still there, ticking inside the watch. When you listened carefully you could hear it clear as day, like far-off bells ringing over them in a dewy morning. I even wondered if time didn’t move forward but instead turned in circles like the hands of the watch, and everything was still in the same place.
From all that lying I put on weight and they started worrying that I didn’t look like I had the consumption anymore. Perhaps it’d be better if I was ill with something else. Except that nothing scared people off so much as the consumption, only typhus was better. But if they’d said it was typhus then word might get around and they’d come and take everyone to the hospital, and lock up the manor. On the other hand, I was looking more and more
like I was their cousin. The maid, to begin with she treated me like I was just more work for her, when she brought my dinner she’d snap: “Dinner.” Now, she’d say:
“Here’s your dinner, your grace. Here’s your breakfast. Here’s your afternoon tea, see how tasty it is today. You’re looking better, your grace. For supper it’ll be butter rolls, tea, ham, cottage cheese, and plum tart.”
I had the feeling she was staring at me more and more. Till I started thinking, maybe I am her grace, I ought to check. So one day when she was putting the breakfast tray down on the bedside table, I put my hand under her dress and moved it up her thigh all the way to the top, and the only thing that happened was the plates rattled on the tray.