“Szymek, what’s wrong?” She looked at me almost frightened.
“Nothing. I’m just saying what can happen sometimes.”
“Are you angry at me for cleaning?”
“Course not. Clean all you like. I’ll just sit here.”
She carried the pots out into the passageway. She took the bread from the table and put it away in the dresser, then she gathered the crumbs and threw them into the firebox under the stove. Though I hadn’t seen any crumbs on the table. The table stood by the window, the sun was shining in and you could see every smallest speck on the tabletop. She swept the floor. Then she opened the door and the windows. I thought to myself, any minute now we’ll be chasing flies, but she let the flies be and just aired the place out. Then she started wiping the plates from the stove and putting them away in the dresser.
I sat there watching her and looking out the window, but I didn’t say a word about her cleaning, I didn’t tell her to hurry up. When she asked me to put the chairs back in their usual places, I got up and did it. She thought Jesus in the Garden of Olives was hanging crooked, so I raised it a bit on the left like she wanted. Though if you asked me, it was straight to begin with. Then she told me to check if the kerosene in the lamp was low. I checked. It wasn’t. She didn’t want anything more after that, so I lit a cigarette and started blowing smoke rings, watching them float away and break up and disappear. Maybe I wasn’t even waiting for her to finish the cleaning. It was like it was always going to be that way. Me at the table blowing smoke rings, her drying dishes by the stove. Every now and then she said something, asked me something, nothing much, but for her it was like she’d almost
become talkative. Or maybe she was just annoyed that I’d agreed so easily to her doing the cleaning, that I wasn’t even asking if she’d be done soon. A couple of times she laughed, and it was such a joyful laugh I was taken by surprise, she never laughed like that. Maybe she wanted me to laugh with her. Except I wasn’t much feeling like laughing, and I didn’t completely believe in that laughter of hers.
The last yellow rays of the sun lay on the wall opposite the window, but the lower parts of the room were already getting dark. Where the water buckets stood in the corner, it seemed evening was beginning. All of a sudden there was a crash, she’d dropped a plate, the shards flew every which way across the floor.
“Oh, you clumsy thing,” I said but in a well-meaning way, why would I care about a plate.
She gave me a bitter, reproachful look, hid her face in her hands, burst into tears, and ran off into the other room.
“Małgosia, what’s wrong?” I called after her. “There’s no point crying over a plate. We’ll pick up the pieces and that’ll be that!” I bent down and got to work. I gathered every last little fragment, put it all into the biggest piece, laid it on the stove, and went to ask her where I should throw it out.
“All done.”
She was lying on the bed with her head thrust in the pillow, crying like a wronged child.
“There’s no need to cry,” I said. “A plate got broken is all. No big deal. Could have happened to anyone. One day I was taking myself some potato soup, the bowl knocked against the kettle and it shattered. Another time, I put a plate upside down on some cabbage to cover it and the plate slipped off and broke. If we cried over every broken plate we’d run out of tears to cry over people.” I sat down on the edge of the bed, by her head, and started stroking her hair. “Don’t cry now. Time was, when plates and bowls were made out of tin, a plate would last you your whole life. A young woman
would get a set of six plates in her dowry, and on her deathbed she’d be able to leave them to her daughter. Some had flowers on them, some not. When one of those plates fell on the floor the worst that could happen was it would get dented. You’d eat and eat from it. And you could put it down on a hot stove top. When one of them got a hole you’d fill it with a rivet and hammer it out, or plug it with a piece of rag, and you’d keep eating from it. Then when it was really old the cat would eat from it, the chickens, you’d carry the dog’s food out in it. Or you could give it to a kid as a toy to play with, it wouldn’t do itself any harm with a plate like that. Come on now, don’t cry.”
For the longest time she wouldn’t calm down, but gradually, gradually the crying eased off. Though she still lay there with her head in the pillow. I guessed she must be embarrassed because of her tear-stained face, worried that I’d think the crying made her look ugly. I got up intending to get rid of the broken plate.
“Where can I throw away the pieces?”
She didn’t answer right away. After a moment, in a voice still wet with tears, she said:
“Just leave them there.”
“It won’t take a second,” I said. “I’ll get rid of them and that’ll be the end of it.”
I stood over her, waiting for her to say:
“Go throw them out then.”
There’d be a bucket for rubbish outside the shed. Or under the verandah. Or by the fence. Or at the edge of the orchard, by the apple tree. Different people kept it in different places. They buried it, or tossed it in the river. I’d even have gone down to the river, but there was no river in their village. Otherwise I thought her crying would never end, it’d subside, but it wouldn’t end.
It looked like she’d stopped crying, that she was just lying there hugging
the pillow. But she was still full of tears. You could smell them in the air, like the smell of roasting salt.
“Don’t go,” she whispered. “I don’t want to be left on my own.”
“Fine,” I said. “I just thought that you did all that cleaning, but there’s still the broken plate.”
“Sit by me. Where you were sitting before.”
I sat down. Dusk had slipped into the room for good, like smoke from a bonfire. Underfoot you could barely tell whether the floor was boards or earth. The ceiling overhead, even though it was high and painted white, it looked like it was covered with mold. On the wall they had a stuffed hawk on a branch, in the daytime it looked like it was swooping down on a chicken in the yard, that it already had it in its talons, Małgosia’s folks were running out and shouting, let it go, you bandit! Now, it was like someone had hung out a hawk carcass to scare off the other hawks. It was the same with the Apostles at the Last Supper. They were already old but the dusk made them even older, like they were tired of sitting at the same table for two thousand years, when would they finally be able to get up? And Małgosia’s parents in their wedding portrait over the bed, they’d also gotten darker, as if they hadn’t just gotten married but had just died, though her mother was still in her white veil like a bride.
“I want to be yours today,” she said, suddenly raising her head from the pillow. She said it in an ordinary way like she was saying, the sun’s rising. The forest is rustling. The river’s flowing. “Do you want that?”
I leaned over and kissed her hair, because what could I say? It would be like someone asking, “Do you want to live?” And you answered: “I do.” A better answer would be: “No, I want to die.” So as to feel how painfully you want to live.
“I’ll get the bed ready.”
She got up, took off the bedspread, folded it in four and hung it over the armrest of a chair. She arranged the pillows, shook out the quilt. It was
hard to believe she’d been crying just a moment ago. It was like she’d been making the bed for us every day before nightfall, and today another of those nights had come. And not even a Sunday night but a regular weekday one, like Tuesday to Wednesday, Wednesday to Thursday, and it was time to go to bed after a full day of life. It seemed like any minute now she’d go down on her knees at the bedside and start saying her prayers and telling me off, saying I should at least cross myself, because all the two of us had inside was exhaustion after that whole long day of life. Though it was the same as other days, no harder and no easier. Maybe I’d been mowing, and she was gathering. Maybe I’d been plowing and she’d been doing the laundry.
She took off her blouse and her skirt. She didn’t tell me to turn around or not to look, she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. But why should I have been surprised, when you’ve gotten through a whole day you don’t have the strength or the desire to be embarrassed. Your body’s just an aching weight, and the eyes looking at it are blind. It probably would never have occurred to her that after all those years I could look at her any differently than the way I looked at the earth, at the landscape. After so many years I knew her body like I knew the earth and the landscape, and landscape and earth don’t know what embarrassment is. I knew it in health and in sickness, in joy and in sorrow, in laughter and in tears, at every hour of the day and the night. What was there to be embarrassed about? How many times had I poured water over her to rinse off the soap as she crouched in the bathtub, and looked down at her naked body like the Lord God who made her looking down from above. How many times had I pulled off her sweat-soaked blouse when she was in a fever and too weak to even raise her arms. Why should she be embarrassed now. Or how often in the night had I listened so closely to her breathing that I even had the same dream as her, because when body lives alongside body for so many years, they dream the same dreams together too, why would they need two different ones. I knew the whole of her and every part. I knew her belly, her thighs, her knees, her elbows. I knew each
of her arms and each of her legs, and all the fingers on her hands and the toes on her feet separately and together. I knew every vein under her skin, every scar and every spot. I knew her belly button had been poorly tied after she was born, and I knew she had a way of sighing that sounded like a sob. I sometimes thought she was all of life, I sometimes thought she was no more than a speck of grass in my eye. Sometimes I could see death within her, sometimes only a broken fingernail. So it was no surprise that she couldn’t understand it when I still desired her. Something almost like fear came into her eyes. How could it be, her youth had passed and she’d even forgotten how to be embarrassed, why then? It’s only in youth that bodies desire each other for no reason. And here we were after a whole day of life and I desired her, and it felt as if it was after an entire life. Sleep was weighing on her eyes, her arms and feet ached, her body felt like it had just been taken down from the cross, and here you were desiring her. And in an ordinary way, as if you’d come home from mowing and wanted a drink of water.
“Unfasten my brassiere behind,” she said.
She bowed her head and as if she was afraid she waited to see whether my hands would touch her. There was only one button, unfastening it should have been the simplest thing in the world, I mean you fasten and unfasten buttons all your life. Yet that button kept slipping out of my hands like a fish. But she stood there with her head lowered and didn’t so much as sigh at my clumsiness. Though her back was covered with goose bumps. She slipped the brassiere from her shoulders, threw it on the chair, then turned around to face me and said:
“See, I’m not embarrassed in front of you. I’m not embarrassed at all.” Without warning she threw her arms around me. “Oh Szymek.”
I put my arms around her too, but she pulled away and jumped into bed as agilely as a she-goat, snuggling deep into the puffy quilt so even her head was barely visible.
“Are you coming?” I heard her whisper anxiously.
It was already dark in the room, though the remains of the day were still lingering in the windows like in a puddle. We lay side by side without moving, under the heavy quilt, because she wanted us to lie awhile like that. I put my arm around her, her head pressed into my shoulder like in the pillow before. I was hot, I could feel my skin covering with sweat, but I didn’t have the nerve either to move or to say anything. And she just lay there as well, she was just as afraid to move or speak. It was like we’d been scalded by our own nakedness, or as if being naked we only felt our own aches and pains, instead of desire.
She still smelled of her recent tears, I was on the verge of telling her she smelled of tears. But she must have sensed I was about to speak, because she put a finger on my lips to stop me talking. She told me to shut my eyes, and she shut hers too. When mine opened on their own, for the shortest moment, so I didn’t even have time to make anything out except the darkness, right away I heard her telling me off in a whisper:
“Did you open your eyes?”
“Only by accident. But they’re closed again now. What about you?”
“Mine have been closed the whole time.”
Maybe because she was cuddled up to me so trustfully, she seemed as fragile as a roadside wildflower, that all it would take would be to reach over, pull it up, and throw it away. Her heart was humming right by mine, under the arm I’d put around her, and into the pillow, but it was so soft it wasn’t like a heart. From that close up a heart usually pounds like a hammer, but hers was like the sound of grain being poured. Or maybe she was still nervous and she couldn’t calm down. I took even tighter hold of her. She must have thought I didn’t want to lie there anymore, because I heard another whisper:
“Let’s stay like this a bit longer. Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
The moon must have risen already, because the dogs began to bark, first
the odd one, then more and more of them, howling, yelping, the way they only ever do to the moon, or when somebody dies. Someone was playing a harmonica far away, from time to time a couple of low notes reached us, sometimes part of a tune. There must have been a wagon on the road somewhere, because its axles squeaked. And we lay there like we were healing our aches and pains after a whole day of life or an entire life that we’d lived together, and the only thing left to do was die together. Except we didn’t know how. I even tried imagining that we were lying there after death, under the weight of the quilt, that had lain on us so long it had turned to stone. But once it had been real feathers. Real geese had worn them as they lived and ate and grew and went down to the water, they had red beaks and cackled the way geese do. Then the women plucked the feathers from the geese. The women lived once just like the geese did. Those might even have been their happiest moments, when they gathered on winter evenings to pluck feathers, because why else would they have lived? If you listened really closely, you could still hear the sound of their hands in among the down, and the songs they sang. Though it might also have been that one of them was unhappy at the time and she put a curse on the feathers. And that curse caused our sudden and unexpected death, so we barely had time to cling to each other in a final attempt to save ourselves.