So off he went to mother’s cousin to learn to be a tailor. He was there three years or so. Every other Sunday, sometimes even every one, he’d come home. And for each harvest or potato digging. He’d always bring mother at the very least a reel of thread, some needles, cigarettes for father, candy for Antek and Stasiek, a bottle of beer for me. Except he got really close mouthed. He wouldn’t say anything about what things were like for him there, good or bad, whether they fed him properly, how the cousin’s wife treated him. Father would ask:
“So do you know how to make pants yet?”
He’d never give you a straight answer yes or no. He’d just shrug and you couldn’t tell if he knew or not.
“Being a tailor evidently takes as much learning as being a priest,” father would have to say in answer to his own question.
Each time he went back, mother would give him whatever she could so he wouldn’t arrive back at her cousin’s empty-handed. Flour, kasha, peas, a slab of bacon, some cheese, sometimes a chicken. And eggs, every one we had she kept for when Michał would come. Us, we ate any old stuff, boiled noodles on their own, kasha with milk, because everything else was for the cousin. Once I caught a jackrabbit in a snare, that went to the cousin as well. Oh, he’ll be so pleased. We’d never dried our plums before, but now we did, so we’d have something to send to the cousin. We’d had that cousin up to here. Stasiek was little and he didn’t yet understand anything, one day he asked if mother’s cousin was a dragon, since he needed to eat so much. Even father would let out a sigh every now and then and say, a priest would have been better. But mother would just say, quiet now, hush, she’d calm us down. Sometimes you need to take the food out of your own mouth, when Michał is done learning he’ll make clothes for Stasiek, and Antek, and Szymuś, and for you too, father.
Then one Sunday he came and said he wasn’t at the cousin’s anymore, that he was working in the factory now, and mother didn’t need to get anything ready because he wouldn’t be taking anything from us anymore. It made us sad, because all that flour, kasha, peas, eggs, cheeses, everything had gone for nothing. Father just said:
“I thought we’d maybe buy some drill and you’d make me a new suit. But obviously it’s God’s will. This suit’s still fine.”
From that moment on he came less and less. Once a month, once every two months, for Christmas, Easter, harvest. Though he had problems mowing. He’d jerk the scythe and move forward too quickly, and he’d take such
big swings you’d think he was trying to cut down a whole acre at one go. He ended up jamming the scythe into the ground a couple times, it got blunted a bit, then after one swath he was as tired as if he’d mowed the entire field. Though the fact was he’d never been that good a mower. When could he have learned? They’d been going on about him becoming a priest from when he was tiny, and a priest has a farmhand, he doesn’t need to do his own mowing. Though if you ask me, I don’t think he’d have made much of a priest either. To be a priest you need to have a calling, you need the gift of the gab. Anew sermon each Sunday, plus for every wedding, every funeral. And all those people you have to remind in the confessional, don’t sin, don’t sin, God is watching you. God died for our sins. It’ll all be reckoned up on Judgment Day. Where could he find the talking for all that?
Also, if you’re a priest you need to believe in life after death. But here, one Sunday there were a few of the neighbors round, and father and mother, and they’d gotten to talking about life after death, one of them had seen one thing, another one something else. Michał was getting ready for the train, he was fastening his suitcase, he was running late and as if out of spite his case wouldn’t shut. All of a sudden he exclaims, there’s no life after death! All there is is what’s here, that’s what you have to believe in! The neighbors’ jaws dropped, mother and father went red as beetroots. Michał just grabbed the suitcase, even though it wasn’t properly closed, he charged through the door, and only from the hallway he threw out:
“Goodbye.”
I had to go with him whether I liked it or no, because I’d agreed to walk him to the station. But he didn’t utter a word to me the entire way. Though the fact was we were walking as fast as our legs would carry us, because the train had already whistled on the far side of the woods. It was only at the station, when we were quickly saying our goodbyes, that he muttered:
“Tell father and mother I’m sorry.”
He didn’t come again till Christmas, then after that only at Easter, and
from then on that’s how it always was. And when he did come he never said much, he’d just sit there thinking and thinking. Father asked him:
“So what is it you do in the factory?”
“What people usually do in factories. Different stuff.”
“Do they pay you well?”
“Not that much, but it’s enough.”
“And where do you live?”
“With this family.”
“Are they at least decent folks?”
“They’re okay.”
Mother asked him:
“Do you have a young lady? Just don’t worry about whether she has money, son. Take the poorest one, even if she only has the shirt on her back, so long as she’s an honest woman.”
“This isn’t the time for young ladies, mother, there are more important things.”
After that I didn’t ask him any more questions, because for me young ladies were the most important thing. What could be more important than that? You send a guy like that off to the city and he just goes strange on you. If it was me there, I’d for sure know how to enjoy life in the city. You heard various things. Sometimes Gienek Woś would come home on leave, he was a professional soldier, boy did he have stories to tell. It gave you gooseflesh. Florek Sójka would get so excited he’d jump up and down:
“Fucking hell! What are we waiting for! This I gotta see!”
“They stand on the sidewalk in the evening like street lamps. They give you a nice friendly smile as if they’ve known you forever. And they’re all dressed up like royalty, their dresses barely come down over their asses. Some of them have this fox fur thing on, and under that they’re bare. You take the fur off and she’s yours. You don’t even have to go far, round the corner where it’s dark, just make sure the cops won’t see you. Some of them
stand there in their underwear or in their stockings, everything’s on view. You can get ahold of their tits like you’d take a cow by the udder, and all you do is ask, how much? Their perfume takes your breath away. Whatever you want, a short one, a tall one, a thin one, two at once if you like. You say, come on, and they go with you. Plus they’re not afraid you’ll make them a baby. They don’t ask you if you’ll marry them. They don’t give a damn who you are. But it’s best not to say you’re from the country. And it’s not wham-bam, you on her, her under you. There’s all kinds of different ways. Left, right, and center. Any way you want, I’m telling you. There’s any number. Though those ways cost more. Or there’s others that wait in horse-drawn carriages, except they charge even more. You get into the carriage, it sets off, it’s a ride to heaven. The most expensive are those that one of them takes you one way, one the other, and you have three more of them at your feet.”
“Christ, how much would that cost? How much would it be, Gienek?”
“You’d need maybe a couple hundredweight of rye per person. Not that much actually. But you could enjoy it all for yourself. What’s there to enjoy out here?” Gienek would try and get us going when he’d had a few. Because for the time being we’d just gone to the pub to get drunk. “Though it depends. Bondarek now, he’d have to pay one and a half times that much cause he’s a redhead and a shortass. You, Szymek, it would only cost you half. Come visit sometime, the two of us’ll go out have some fun. I know this one carriage driver. He’ll take us all over town.”
The dark was growing denser and denser in the house. In the gloom his face looked like it had gotten darker. People were still bringing in their crops.
“Remember,” I said, “there was a time you were supposed to come stay longer. We were going to talk. But don’t say anything if you don’t want to. If you want to live like that without a single word, be my guest. Though how would it be if everyone in the village fell silent? All they did was plow and plant and mow and bring in the harvest, and no one would say so much
as a God bless you in greeting. And what if along with the people the dogs and cats went quiet, and all the other animals, and the birds stopped chirping and the frogs stopped croaking. Would there be a world? Even trees talk if actually you listen to them. Each kind has its own language, the oaks speak oak, the beech trees speak beech. Rivers talk, corn. The whole world is one big language. If you really listened carefully to it, you might even be able to hear what they were saying a century back, maybe even thousands of years ago. Because words don’t know death. They’re like see-through birds, once they’ve spoken they circle over us forever, it’s just that we don’t hear them. Though maybe from God’s heights every person’s voice can be heard separately. Even what I’m saying to you now. What they’re saying at Maszczyk’s, at Dereń’s, in every house. If you leaned your ear close to the world, who knows, you might be able to hear people whispering and make out what they’re thinking, what they’re dreaming about, whose house a cat is purring in, whose stable a horse is neighing in, whose child is sucking at its mother’s breast, whose is just being born, all that is language. God tells people to pray in words because without words he wouldn’t know one person from the next. And people wouldn’t be able to tell each other apart either if they didn’t have words. Life begins with a word and ends with words. Because death is also just the end of words. Start maybe from the first ones at hand, the ones that are closest to you. Mother, home, earth. Maybe try saying, earth. I mean, you know what earth is. Where do you spit? On the earth. You know, what you walk on, what houses are built on, what you plow. You’ve done your share of plowing. Remember father teaching us to plow? He taught us one by one, you, me, Antek, Stasiek. Whenever one of us had barely grown taller than the plow, he’d take us with him when he went out to do the plowing. He’d put our hands on the grips, then put his hands over ours and walk behind, like he was holding us in his arms. You could feel his warmth at your back, his breath on your head. And you’d hear his words like they were coming from the sky. Don’t hold it like that, it needs
to be firmer, follow the middle of the furrow, it has to go deeper when the earth is dry, when your hands get bigger you’ll also be holding the reins in this hand and the whip in that one. You’ll learn, you will, you just have to be patient. Moles, they know how to dig in the earth, trees put down their roots in it, men dig trenches in it in wartime. Springs rise up out of the earth and people’s sweat soaks into it. It’s this earth, no other, that every person is born in. And remember when anyone was leaving the village, they’d always take a little bit of earth with them in a bundle. Or sailors, when the land’s still way far away, they say they want the earth under their feet again. And God came down to the earth. And when people die they’re buried in the earth. We’ll be put there too. I’m planning to have a tomb built. Eight places, so there’ll be room for all of us. Maybe Antek and Stasiek will agree to be buried with us. There’s a saying, may the earth weigh lightly on him. So wherever it’ll be lighter for them. They say that when a person’s born, the earth is their cradle. And all death does is lay you back down in it. And it rocks you and rocks you till you’re unborn, unconceived, once again.”