I have already mentioned the small cellar near the entrance to the stairwell where there was a stove on which the women did the cooking. There were always several pots on the stove, close together, so that they could barely fit. There were quarrels because of this, and even that incident with the axes. Once two neighbors quarreled over whose turn it was. One of them was offended and went to her own apartment to cook. Upstairs, that is. Right afterward, a shell landed and she was hit by shrapnel. I was near the stairs when they brought her down. There was a commotion. Someone cried out, “A stretcher!”
And already she was on a stretcher. I don’t know if I helped, too. But I did become one of the stretcher-bearers right afterward. At the feet, I think. She’d caught the shrapnel in her heel. And I remember that the blood just came pouring out. They didn’t bandage her, probably because there wasn’t anything to do it with, and anyway, the hospital was nearby. On Prochownia.
Her children ran downstairs after us, howling. She was groaning. We reached the courtyard quickly. It was a bright day. Hot. Shells were falling. we ran into the street at a trot, carrying the stretcher. Rybaki was like a pot. Boom! Boom! The narrow passage near our barricade: we had to take the stretcher with that woman and with her foot pouring blood sort of at a tilt and squeeze through. Farther on, the driveway. The wall. Shells were striking the wall and those two niches. Whatever we passed went boom! And so it went until the corner. Until Prochownia.
There we set down the stretcher. In the middle — on the ground floor (I don’t know, was there room in the cellar?). I remember the gray light and the mood just like in Amicis or Saragossa in Żeromski’s novel Ashes. A single crowd, misery, and grayness.
“Just a moment, citizen.” I think that is how I was addressed. “We just have to transfer from a bed” (bed?) “onto” (onto something or other) “a wounded lieutenant who’s missing both his legs.”
“Very good.” I wait, in shock. But no. They let me go after a few minutes.
“It’s not necessary. There’s someone else by now.”
They kept on pounding. Onto that pot. Up and down Rybaki Street. I go home. They kept pounding. Oh, mother, how they were pounding! But I made it. In one piece.
However, the stove (or perhaps there was more than one, I don’t remember) was not so crowded at times. Because Swen’s mother used to set her pot on it. Meaning, food for all of us. Or sometimes Swen and I cooked pancakes on the stovetop. From dark flour.
People were eating twice a day then. So it wasn’t too bad. At times one might get something from the general allotment, too. But one day panic erupted: “We’ve lost the storehouses on Stawki!”
It was from just such a storehouse on Stawki that we once got potato flakes. Generally speaking, we didn’t even dream about potatoes. Throughout the entire uprising. So that was an exceptional occasion.
Another day Swen confided in me that his mother had confided in him that there was no longer very much flour left. In addition to what flour she still had there were also some rusks that Swen’s mother, with her marvelous foresight, had managed to dry. But that “not much,” for six people, wasn’t very much at all. There was also ersatz coffee. But that was only something to drink. Of course, it wasn’t sweetened — not even with saccharine.
So? What to advise? Something had to be done. And a way out was found. Once, as we were walking away from the altar, a kind little woman who “lived” near the pillar on the other side of our shelter beckoned to us.
“If you would be so brave as to go upstairs to my apartment for flour, because I have some up there but I’m afraid to go, you could bring me a little and take as much as you want for yourselves…”
We’d had courage on the first or the second day. It wasn’t August 7 or 8. We had gone upstairs once, I don’t remember if it was at the very beginning or a little later, but anyway it was during the days when there were still some peaceful moments. We went secretly. To the third floor. Why? For rusks, I think. There must have been some important reason. There was still a door then. Because I remember opening, going inside. And the couch. A green one. We used to sit on that couch staring out the window at the Vistula day and night. We had held our literary circle meetings here with Teik, Halina, Irena, and Zym. Once I’d even written a story about us on that couch. And I had described it as “threadbare.” For some reason Swen held that against me. Later, he laughed about it.
I had gone to Swen’s for the first time one night and naturally, like most people coming to see a friend or even paying a visit, I’d slept over. I was sitting on the windowsill. Looking at the Vistula out of the corner of my eye. I was telling Swen about something. At one point Swen opened up the couch, propped the seat against the back, and, squatting and stooped over, searched in it for something for a long time. I was surprised that he was so distracted. But later he explained to me that he’d been looking for a nightshirt for me and that it was a problem for him. Now the scene was being repeated. Right now. Swen squatted in front of the opened couch and hunted for something in it. I was standing near the door (the window was dangerous) and didn’t see what he was looking for. (We’d already found the rusks, if that’s why we were up there.) Swen dug out some spoons, I think. I’m not sure. He told me later, so I found out what it was. But I don’t remember.
Presumably on the third day, after a second prodding from the woman near the pillar, Swen and I persuaded each other and went upstairs. We were terrified. Perhaps there was a shelling, but onward. I think on our way we stopped first to look at Swen’s apartment. The situation had changed drastically. There was no question of opening the door. There was no door. The hall and the apartment were no longer divided. There wasn’t even a wall. Everything was all jumbled together and perforated by the shells. I glanced in the direction of the couch. A piece of it could be seen. Completely crushed by a piece of wall. We raced to the woman’s apartment. We grabbed the flour quick as lightning. As much as we could. And ran as quick as could be downstairs!
I was happy that the specter of hunger was staved off. For Swen’s mother, Swen, me, Aunt Uff., Zbyszek, and Celinka. It was a question of honor, too. I had stopped being a parasite.
I’m having problems again with the sequence of facts between August 12 and 18. I know that for my readers it’s not important exactly what happened when. But they shouldn’t be surprised. For me it’s important — this precision of dates and places (as I think I have already indicated) is my way of holding on to the grand design. I have also realized that in spite of myself I may be carelessly tying together or losing my various distant, more distant, and sometimes not quite so distant personae. But that’s how it was. People lost each other as suddenly as they found each other. They’d be close for quite some time. Then others became close. Suddenly these were lost and new people became important. That was common. A matter of herd instinct. It didn’t make any difference what herd you belonged to, as long as you were in a herd. Everyone was always flitting about, as happens (in any case) at such hours of death, people couldn’t find a place for themselves. The people from one cellar went to the one next door, and the people from next door went over to the first. Just as the people from lower Stare Miasto moved uphill and the people from above to the escarpment, downhill. Because anywhere else was better. And even if it occurred to someone that it was the same everywhere, that didn’t help at all.