Stone Upon Stone

by Wieslaw Mysliwski

  “Putting all this on trial. Measuring out punishments. There’ll be more work than you can shake a stick at,” he said.

  “Who’s going to believe in the law after the war, are you daft?” I tried to convince him. “And what kind of profession is the law. All they’ll do is curse you out. Even being a farmer’s better than that, though that’s no profession either. But at least you don’t get in anyone’s way. You’d be better off being a dentist. People’s teeth are going to be all messed up from the war, then you’d really have all the work you could handle. And Dentist sounds better than Prosecutor.”

  Before the war he’d worked for the town hall. He’d graduated high school, he was a smooth talker and he had nice writing. So I thought to myself, he could write the death sentences, if he’s so keen on being Prosecutor. Because no one was willing to write them. And there were orders from above, you weren’t allowed to kill even the biggest bastard without a sentence. No one knew why, because why did a son of a bitch like that need a written judgment, but that’s how it was. His eyes sparkled and he got to work right away. We were supposed to rub out this restaurant owner in Tylice, because he’d turned out to be a snitch. So write it down, Prosecutor. He brings it to me, I read it and I can’t tell if it’s a sentence or a sermon.

  “Make it shorter,” I tell him. “Write it again.”

  He brings it again and it’s the same thing. I start explaining to him, but I’m already getting annoyed.

  “When you’re killing someone, there’s no time to be reading stuff. Why would you even want to? He’s not gonna remember it. Write it again.”

  He brings it once again, and this time I’m really pissed off.

  “Are you nuts? We’re just going there to kill him, what the heck have you written here? Who’s even going to listen to any of this? God? Not the guy, for sure! Even a son of a bitch like him, when he’s about to die death’ll stop up his ears and his eyes. What the hell are you talking to him about Satan for?! Have you ever seen Satan? No! Then don’t talk bullshit! When someone doesn’t see the person inside them, they’re not going to see Satan. They’ll either go to hell or they won’t. You don’t know, and neither do I, even though I’m your commanding officer. No one knows. There are times you could be sent there for less, then for worse things you repent and you’re not sent. Piece of work like him, he could have all kinds of ways to get out of being sent. If he wants he’ll pull the wool over God’s eyes, and Satan’s as well, and he’ll do a bunk while you lot are still reading to him. Plus, how do you know a guy like that isn’t going to be better off in hell than in heaven. I mean look, we’ve got hell on earth down here but him, the scumbag, he’s opened a restaurant and on top of that he’s selling people out. Besides, what’s it to you whether he goes to hell or not? Hell or heaven, he just needs to be gone from here. Got it? Hell doesn’t have to be what you think. You can spend your whole life working in the fields or going to your office with your briefcase, and that can be hell. Did you used to have a briefcase? There you go then. Write it again.”

  But nothing came of it even though he kept trying and trying, and in the end we had to kill the restaurant owner without a sentence. Afterwards Prosecutor moped around all dejected, and in the end I felt sorry for him and I called him in again.

  “Try writing a couple more,” I told him. “Make up some bad guys. You’ll get the hang of it, you will.”

  Maybe I’d been wrong to throw him in at the deep end like that, I thought. Doing anything well takes hard work. Sometimes you need to go one small step at a time, for years sometimes. Take mowing, no one’s born knowing how to pick up a scythe and just start mowing. Their father has to teach them, they have to watch other people doing it, they have to make a mess of a good few swaths, even bang up their scythe. I think I gave him good advice when I said to make up bad guys as an exercise. What else was I supposed to tell him? He was an office worker that had graduated high school, I’d barely finished seventh grade. Also, in the spring of seventh grade father took me out of school for good because he’d started the plowing, he happened to be doing the hill up by the woods, and he didn’t have anyone else to lead the horse by the head to make sure the furrow was straight. Of course there was Michał. Except Michał was afraid of the horse’s head, and besides, he always got headaches from the sun. But it didn’t matter, no one ever went anywhere after seventh grade, they just kept working the land, so leaving school a couple months early made no difference. So he says to me, I have a request. Go on? He says, if he had a typewriter he’d learn to write sentences in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. He just couldn’t get the hang of it when he wrote in longhand. Besides, what kind of sentence is it when it’s written by hand.

  “A typewriter?” I was taken aback. But he used to work in an office, I guessed he must know what you could write on a typewriter and what you could write by hand. “Well, if we can get one somewhere it’ll be yours.”

  A short time later we organized a raid on the Arbeitsamt in Kołomierz. We were after the lists of people being sent to do forced labor. He was supposed to just take a typewriter, but he also got writing paper, carbon paper, paper clips, pencils, erasers, other things as well, even a hole punch. He carted a whole sack full of stuff into the woods. He was as pleased as a little kid with a bag full of toys.

  After that he’d take the typewriter off into the woods, hide himself away in the bushes, and write. He’d put it on a tree stump and kneel in front of it. Often you could hear him, it was like a woodpecker pecking away far off in the woods. The lads made fun of him, they said he must be writing love letters to his girlfriends or maybe poetry, and some of them wanted him to write a poem for them so they could send it to their own girlfriends. Because other than me, no one knew what he was actually writing.

  In the end, curiosity got the better of one of the men, he took the sentences out of the other guy’s knapsack while he was asleep and he brought them straight to me to read. I started reading and my hair stood on end. Every one of them was for someone in the unit. Carp, Rowan, Honeybee, Pinecone, Birchtree, Stag, Cricket, Burdock, Knothole. There was one for me too. On every one there were crimes like the worst son of a bitch. And every one of them was sentenced to death. The higher ranking ones were sent to hell as well. Naturally that included me. I thought to myself, that damn typewriter’s driven him insane. Maybe there’s something inside a machine like that, if it makes a man stop trusting his own hand.

  “Get Prosecutor in here this second! What the hell have you written here, you bastard? Who told you to do this?”

  “You did, sir.”

  “Me?! I told you to make up some bad guys! Dear God, if I wasn’t your commanding officer I’d smack you in the face!” I ripped up all the sentences. “From now on, no more writing!” I changed his code name from “Prosecutor” to “Skylark,” and I ordered the typewriter to be smashed against a tree, who needed a typewriter in the woods.

  After that he went around with a wild expression in his eyes, like he was looking but not seeing. He didn’t talk to anyone. They even said he wasn’t eating much, he’d just poke his spoon in his mess can a bit then throw the food out for the birds. A few days later he disappeared from the unit and we never heard from him again.

  Dawn was just breaking when first from the river, then from the woods, we heard shots, and the dogs in the village started barking. To this day I can’t figure out how it could have happened. We had lookouts posted, and for several days before there hadn’t been any outsiders in the village, no one from the village had left. It was another thing that they took us from the woods, and from the south side at that, where no one would have expected them. There wasn’t even a cutting through the trees that way. And the Germans were scared to death of the woods. Especially woods like around Kawęczyn, where there was no telling where they began or where they ended. Maruszew was surrounded by woods on three sides, and half on the fourth. There was just the one road led there, and that was only a track. It was a good three and a h
alf miles to the dirt road and twice as far to the highway, and you had to ride a whole day by wagon to get to the railroad stop. No German had ever appeared there, they might not even have known there was such a village. God himself seemed to have forgotten about Maruszew. As well as being far away from the rest of the world, people had a poor life of it there. The earth was sandy, and what can you grow in sandy soil. Rye, oats, potatoes, and that was how they lived out their days. Though in front of every house there was a little garden, and in each garden there were sunflowers, so you could have thought people led happy lives there. Because the sunflowers shone like little suns, even when the big sun went behind the clouds.

  Whenever we wanted to clean up and wash our clothes, lick our wounds and get our strength back, and live like humans at least for a bit, we’d go to Maruszew even just for a couple of days. They’d take us in and share whatever they had with us, and though they didn’t have much, when you were there you felt the war wasn’t happening. You ate potato pancakes, drank homebrew vodka, and slept in beds. I even had a girl there. Tereska was her name. She was pretty as a picture and the kindest soul you could hope to meet. Her parents never said anything, even though when I was there we’d live like husband and wife. I never said anything about marrying her. Sometimes I’d promise to visit after the war if I lived, but maybe they didn’t believe I’d survive, and they preferred me to leave their daughter sinful and single than a widow. I still have the little religious medal she gave me one time so I’d always come back safe and sound. I’d often not see her for half a year or more, but every time she’d greet me like the dry earth greets the rain. Right away she’d bring the bathtub, set the water to heat in the kettles, and make the bed. Her parents would go off without a word and busy themselves with something, or go in the other room, and she’d tell me to take my clothes off and get in the tub. She’d soap up my back, pour water over me out of a mug, then help me dry myself. Who knows, maybe I might have married her after the war, but they burned her along with the whole village. She had broad hips, breasts like cabbage heads, she would have made children, two, maybe three.

  I pulled on my pants and boots in a flash, grabbed my Sten from the chair, and put my jacket on as I ran. As I was crossing the hallway, behind me I heard her sob, Szymek! But there wasn’t even time to turn around and say, Tereska. I rushed outside. A few of the lads were crouching and moving along outside the house, firing straight ahead. But there were furious bursts of machine-gun fire coming at the village from every direction, from the fields, the woods, the river. I tried to give orders, but there was no one to carry them out and no one to pass them on. The village wasn’t at all big, but in the confusion everyone was trying to escape however they could. They fired every which way, without rhyme or reason, from attics, round the corners of houses, the men were pressed against the ground, against walls, a tree, a fence. Some of them I had to shake, I gave an order, didn’t you hear? No firing at random! Retreat to the end of the village! We’ll take up positions there! On top of it all, the villagers starting running out of their homes. What’s happening?! It’s the end of the world! Jesus and Mary! There was shouting, wailing. Women, men, mothers with babies, children woken from their sleep.

  There was some witch of a woman in a long nightshirt, her hair like a crow’s nest and holding a crucifix, she started going on about how the whole world was taking revenge because of us, it was all our fault, because we kept coming here to have our way with the local girls and do bad things, because we’d made whores of them all. Maruszew had become Sodom and Gomorrah! And now God was sending down a punishment! But why Maruszew of all places? Lord, why Maruszew?!

  Someone galloped by on horseback shouting, run! run! They’ll burn the place down! They’ll throw people into the flames! Someone herded their cattle out from the farmyard into the road and drove them along, lashing their backs and legs. Two small children in ragged hemp shirts ran by hand in hand, crying. They were followed by their mother, her hair all awry, she was crying even louder than them and shouting, Iruś, Magda, come back! Where do you think you’re going, you little fools, come back! The first house at the edge of the village by the woods was already on fire.

  Finally I managed to gather together some of the unit. We divided into three groups that were supposed to follow each other, and I gave the order to try and break through towards the river. I was in the last group. It was a good ways down to the river, plus the fields were bare because harvesttime was long past. Luckily it was just before the potato digging. We could crawl along the furrows in the potato fields, or at the very least hide our heads among the stalks. The nearest and surest way would have been to the woods, but they’d closed the woods to us like a barn door. In the first moment a dozen or so of the men had headed for the woods, with Sorrel in the lead. They’d been mowed down, hardly a handful made it back. It seemed like there wouldn’t be as many of the Germans around the fields, because that was the direction they’d least expect us to take. And in the fields they could be seen just like we could.

  The last group started shooting first so we’d draw their fire, they immediately let loose a vicious barrage of shots. During this time the first two groups were crawling across the potato field. When they were about halfway the second group suddenly started firing, and under their cover the first group got even closer. Then, when the first group let them have it from right close up, you could even move forward in jumps. We started lobbing grenades. And we made it out. The only thing left was for us in the third group to provide cover for the other two groups to cross the river.

  Suddenly, I felt a jolt in my stomach and my eyes went blank. It was even good not to feel or see anything. I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I opened my eyes I thought I was in the next world. And maybe the lark in the sky was Tereska’s soul that had risen from her burned body and was singing over me so as not to let me die. And the farmer that way far off in the distance was plowing something that seemed half like earth, half like sky – maybe that was her father, and he was only a spirit as well. And maybe only her mother was in this world, keening, “Lord Jesuuuus!”

  Almost a third of our unit perished, including the ones they caught alive, and the wounded. They packed them into trucks, threw in the menfolk from the village they’d not already burned or shot, and on the same Kawęczyn road we’d taken that time on the pilgrimage, they hung them from the acacia trees. They didn’t have enough nooses so they took all the halters off the cows in the squire’s herd. They didn’t have a high enough ladder so in Wicentów, where the procession had spent the night that time, they sounded the alarm and stuck the firefighters and their ladder in another truck. And once they started hanging they couldn’t stop, it was like when a drunk starts drinking and he just can’t stop himself. Actually they were also drunk, some of them couldn’t stand up straight, and one of them, when he clambered up the ladder to tie the noose to a branch, he fell off with a crash. The whole way there they were singing dirty songs. When they ran out of our men to hang and there were still some trees left, they hung whoever came down the road.

  There was a doctor from Młynary came along in a wagon, he was on his way to a woman that was about to give birth. He even knew German but it didn’t do him any good, the bastards still hung him. They hung him higher up and the guy that had been driving the wagon, who was the husband of the woman having the baby, they hung him lower down on the same tree. Some musicians came up the road on bicycles on their way to play at a wedding somewhere, an accordionist, a fiddler, clarinet, trombone, and drums, five of them. First they made them play something. When they started up, the trees actually shook, though there was no wind at all. Truth be told, they couldn’t play as well as they played that day, because they weren’t the best musicians in the world, like Bargiel from Oleśnica, for instance, or Wojcieszko from Modrzejów. When Kużyk’s daughter over at Stary Bór got married, Wojcieszko’s band played at the wedding for three days without sleeping. They just kept their eyes open, ate, drank, a
nd kept playing. But maybe the Lord God helped them out, or they were so afraid of death that they played better than they were really able. And they were probably already thinking they’d play for a while then hop back on their bikes and ride off on their way. But those sons of bitches were enjoying it so much they stomped their feet and shouted, more, more! Turns out you can keep death away with music.

  There was an accordionist lived in our village once. Grab was his name. He was a band all on his own, all he needed extra was a drum. He could make that accordion sound like a fiddle, a clarinet, a trombone, even a church organ. He didn’t stretch it out, he just ran his fingers over the buttons and played. His fingers bent both ways, like they were made of wicker. You couldn’t find another musician to equal him in the whole neighborhood, probably even farther. When he finally took to his bed, because he was really old, he put his accordion on a stool right by the bedside and whenever death drew close to him, he’d play. And death would go away again. He’d probably have lived till he got tired of life. But something went wrong with his accordion, the buttons still kind of worked but the bellows were somehow short of breath. And he died. People said that the kind of music he played for death, no one had ever heard it in their lives, there may never have been music like that ever before. It gave you gooseflesh, cats would run from the house, dogs would howl, horses would rear up as they were pulling their wagons. And if anyone happened to be passing by his house when he was playing they couldn’t help but stop and stand there like a dead man.