Normally he walks fast, in the same way that he drives cars fast. He doesn’t take risks, for he’s aware there are too many anyway. With his large hands and shoulders, he’s not somebody you would think of pushing aside. His eyes, though, are unexpected, for in them there is a reflective, almost hesitant, questioning. Is it this questioning which explains his success with women? We need to make promises, he told me one day, without promises life is too hard for anybody, but if you make a promise you don’t believe in, it’s not a promise! Maybe this is why he prefers actions to words. As I say, he normally walks fast.
On that particular morning, he had reduced his pace and from time to time squatted to examine the earth between the pine trees. I want to show you the Lion of the Ants, he said, there ought to be one here. A sort of ant? No, a larva, a grub. About the size of a fingernail. When he gets wings he’s like a dragonfly, and silvery like satin. The soil between the pines where he was looking was sandy and in the sunlight. He couldn’t find one.
He approached a tree stump and touched the sticky, cut wood. Just the place for oprinka miodowa. They’re a mushroom, he said, that taste of the deep forest. If they knew how to cook, the wild boar would eat them! Boil them for a moment to get rid of a certain bitterness — don’t include the stalks, they’re slender but stringy — and serve them with fresh cream! He said this smiling. What makes Mirek smile most frequently is the pleasure of outwitting the routines and tired rules of daily life, and when his smile gets too big, he breaks into laughter. He has the eye and imagination of a poacher.
We walked on in silence for half an hour. Abruptly he stopped in his tracks, knelt and pointed at a small crater in the sand, the diameter of a saucer. It was shaped like a funnel that got narrower and narrower.
See his head and pincers? He’s hiding there in the sand, waiting for the next ant to slide down the funnel into his mouth! The Lion of Ants! He begins, Mirek explained, by making a circle on the ground, he makes it walking backwards — he can’t walk forwards because his hind legs have evolved into diggers. The sand he extracts he shovels aside with a quick toss of his head. Then he makes a second circle, a little narrower and a little deeper. And he goes on like this, circle after circle, till he’s at the bottom, where he hides. Once an ant lurches into that shifting sand, he can’t help himself. When he hasn’t eaten for days and is very hungry, the Lion will draw a wide circle so that more ants fall down the slope for him to eat. When he’s not so hungry, he draws a small circle. He writes his menu on the sand!
Mirek’s smile broke into laughter, then he looked up at the sky above the trees as if to acknowledge the mystery of why things have come to be exactly the way they are.
There is no other house like Mirek’s. Probably one can say that about any house if one knows it well enough. Anyway I know what to expect. I follow the grass track which leads off the road, I cross the bridge, made of wooden planks, over the stream, I pass the tree to the left of the door with apples the size and colour of dark cherries (incredibly bitter to taste), and I look for the key in my pocket. There are no steps leading to the front door — one has to step up fifty centimetres on to a concrete platform. The wooden door has two locks which I undo. It doesn’t open. Putting my fingers under the bevel of one of its panels, I succeed in lifting it. The door yields and swings open. I step in. The house smells of dust, wood-smoke and fern. I wander from room to room — there are six. In each there is at least one butterfly or moth, either flying around calmly, or fluttering its wings against a windowpane with the fast flicking sound of a banknote counting-machine.
The house was built more than a century ago. Only three of the eight dining chairs don’t collapse when sat upon. There is an image of the Madonna in every room. Nobody is clear about the house’s exact history, or perhaps everybody wants to forget a different chapter of its history. Doubtless it has served many purposes. The unhidden electrical circuit, with its wires, sockets, connections, points, fuses and switches all tacked to the walls, looks as if it was improvised in great haste, to meet some emergency forty years ago. Perhaps when electricity first came to the village?
Fix it! From next week we’re operating from here — day and night, summer and winter, understood? There’ll always be just one of us here. So fix it, you’ve got till Monday.
Or could it be that the house then belonged to an old woman living far away, one of whose local nephews, when the electricity came, seized the chance to pretend to be an electrician, and in exchange for the work done, demanded enough money to buy himself a mobylette?
I switch on the electricity. I put the bacon and the śmietanie I have brought with me on the kitchen table. I’ve promised to have some soup ready for them when they arrive. Within an hour and a half there’ll be hot water.
At about the same moment as the electricity was installed, the windows were changed. There are many more of them and they are far larger than they could have been originally. What lay behind this mania for windows?
A step towards modernity or another proposal by the nephew to the old woman? Unlike installing the electricity, creating and enlarging the windows must have taken many months of work and he would have earnt himself enough for a small second-hand car.
Or was it a Committee Decision?
If there’s plenty of light, we’ll use less electricity. No problem with getting the window frames, they’ll be delivered direct from the factory. Proceed room by room, we’ll be occupying the others! OK?
Only three of the twenty double window frames now open. Several have been painted over and are opaque, and a number have been broken and the panes of glass replaced by sheets of polystyrene. There are no curtains.
In the larder, which is a blind passage with a door leading off the kitchen (there is no refrigerator), I find a bottle of beer. It was brewed in the village of Zwierzyniec, which means place of the animals, twelve kilometres from here. I take the bottle into one of the front rooms where there is an armchair.
On the wall hang a pair of stag antlers, and opposite them an old framed photo of a hunter with shotgun and dog. The photo is difficult to date. Mirek doesn’t know who the man is. Probably at one time he was living here.
The antlers are in fact a joke: they are branches of a spruce, hung on the wall to give the impression of a pair of antlers.
Liane is a Romanian painter. She sent me a drawing she had made in the Berlin Natural History Museum. It showed a large tree trunk, with real antlers growing out of it on each side. She explained that a stag must have one day died beside the roots of a young tree, which subsequently grew around its skull and lifted them up and preserved them. I told friends who were going to Berlin to go to the museum and look at it and I showed them her drawing. Each reported back to me that they could find no such exhibit. Finally I asked Liane. Of course, she said, smiling, only I can find it. We’ll have to go to the museum together, maybe it’s gone now.
The hunter in the photo is wearing a cap. Today baseball caps, as worn by the young all over the world, with the peak pointing backwards, have superseded the traditional cap with its polished peak and its particular claims. The claims of the Polish cap were: an indestructible patriotism; a right to command; a willingness to serve; a familiarity with nature and all her extremes; a gift for secrecy and for bargaining; a very long experience of history.
Anybody could buy and wear such a cap. It was a thousand times easier than acquiring a passport. During the nineteenth century, when occupied Poland did not exist as a nation, the wearing of this cap bestowed and preserved a strange authority. The hunter in the photo might have been able to explain the mystery of the tree with the antlers.