So one evening the cows were coming back from the pasture. And as usual with cows in those days, the road was all theirs. Also, they’d eaten their fill so they were moving slow and sleepy, you couldn’t have gotten them to go faster even with a stick. They wouldn’t let so much as a wagon get past them, let alone an automobile. They weren’t like the cows these days, that walk along with their ears pricked up and their skin twitching the whole time. The minute they hear the slightest noise behind them or in front, they move to the side of the road of their own accord. They’ve even learned to walk on the left. But back in the day cows were the masters of the road. Except that the young squire thought he was master of everything. And instead of stopping and waiting till they went their way, he started honking his horn and flashing his lights, he didn’t even slow down. And the cows just moved even closer together. He smashed one of them to pieces and broke another one’s legs, and he ended up a corpse himself.
I moved my finger across the inscription. It was even as a ditch, first name and last name, and, died tragically, you could read it all, and in front of the last name Count. The manors didn’t survive, though you’d have thought manors were a whole lot stronger than tombs.
When the front passed through, of all the tombs Chmiel’s survived the best then as well. And there’s no harder test for tombs than a war. For six weeks there were two German artillery batteries stationed at the cemetery, firing to the east day and night. And they were huge guns, every one of them. On top of that they were half dug into the ground so only their muzzles were poking out from among the graves, and with every round the whole hill with the cemetery on it would jump, and each time the crews working the guns had to open their mouths so as not to go deaf. And all those trees they cut down to make room for the guns.
And from the east the Russki guns fired day and night the same, for six weeks. It looked as though the cemetery hill would turn into a valley. It was so hellish even the worms couldn’t take it anymore, let alone the dead. It was like the earth itself was turned inside out, and all of eternity was flung to the surface.
There were skeletons, bodies, coffins, all over the place, like death had suddenly gone on the rampage all on its own because it had run short of living people and it had dragged the dead out of their graves so it could kill them all over again. Like even though they were supposed to already be dead, they were part of the earth now, some of them had rotted and some were nothing but dust — still they had to die a second time. And without even knowing they were dying. So when the front moved on they had to be buried again, like real dead people. And for years later the cemetery looked like a battlefield.
Any time you went there you’d see ruins and stumps of trees, the place was empty and silent, there was only the odd tomb or tree that had survived intact. As for the birds, it was like they’d vanished, you wouldn’t see even the lousiest little sparrow. And for the longest time afterward, even though there wasn’t any danger or anything for them there, they avoided the place like it was infected. They didn’t even perch there on their way to someplace else and sit and chirp. They didn’t even turn up there by accident. Or visit their old nest the way birds will do.
Before, the cemetery had been a paradise for birds. There were cuckoos, blackbirds, goldfinches, titmice, orioles, bullfinches, woodpeckers, crows, doves. Who could have even counted them all. The trees just about shook with them. They’d sing and chirp all day long, and cuckoo and caw. The moment you went into the cemetery you’d find yourself right in the middle of a hullabaloo of birds, before you even got to the graves. When you prayed, the words of the prayer would sometimes get lost in the din. Every so often Franciszek the sacristan would climb up into the trees and knock down the nests of the noisier ones, because he thought it was too cheerful for a cemetery. Though they didn’t just nest in the trees, but on the crosses and the Lord Jesuses and in the grass on the ground. But after the front had passed through, whenever a bird happened to fly over the place it would rise up higher in the sky, sometimes as high as its wings would carry it. As if it was suddenly hemmed in by something and its only escape was to climb higher and higher.
Franciszek the sacristan, who used to think that because of the birds the cemetery wasn’t sad enough — now, he’d make bird feeders and put them up here and there where a tree was still standing, or even just a branch, or even on the crosses and the Lord Jesuses and angels, he’d hang them wherever he could. You’d see a cross over a grave and on its arms there’d be two bird feeders hanging, as if Jesus was holding them in his crucified arms to attract the birds. Or in the place where there’d been the head of an angel that had gotten blown off by a shell, the angel would have a feeder for a head. He put up so many of those feeders that when you saw them you’d be forgiven for thinking there were all kinds of birds at the cemetery. But there wasn’t a single one, they wouldn’t touch the feeders.
He also set out water in old tin cans from army rations, so the birds would have something to drink if they came. People kept removing the cans to put flowers in for the graves, so he put new ones down, luckily there was no shortage of tin cans. The front had been stationed there for months and the soldiers had emptied piles of cans. They were lying about all over the place along the roadsides, in ditches, in dugouts and trenches. People used them as containers for sugar and salt, if need be you could make a bowl or a mug out of a can like that. Boys even used them for goalposts. Sometimes you’d read the label in Russian, svinskaya tushonka, and that would be the closest you’d get to eating all day.
Some days you could find Franciszek at the cemetery at the crack of dawn wandering like a spirit with his pockets full of millet, flaxseed, wheat, poppy seed, bread crumbs. He’d be scattering it all among the tombs and calling to the empty sky: cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep. Every few steps he’d drop his eyes from the sky to the ground, stop, and look to see if there wasn’t some starling or bullfinch or waxwing he’d managed to attract, pecking the grains and skipping about. Then he’d move on his way like someone sowing in the fields: cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep.
Some folks reckoned Franciszek was scattering sand instead of grain, and that the birds weren’t stupid and they wouldn’t let themselves be fooled by sand. I mean, think how much grain you’d need for a cemetery the size of ours. People didn’t even have enough to bake bread with. The fields were all churned up and trampled, and how could they harvest anything from under all the shells? But the birds must have been hungry too. And a hungry bird’ll be tempted even by sand. Besides, when you’re a bird and you’re flying way up a height, from up there you can’t see who’s scattering what down on the ground, whether it’s sand or grain. And if he’s going cheep-cheep and looking up at the sky, why shouldn’t you trust him?
Franciszek would teach the new altar boys how to serve at mass. The old ones had grown up because of the war and they preferred spending their time defusing mines and unexploded bombs. But anyone who had a yen to be an altar boy had to make a trap to catch starlings. And Franciszek would take his altar boys over to the hill along the edge of the woods. Then for days on end they’d try and trap starlings there. Whenever they caught one they’d bring it to the cemetery and release it there.
It sometimes happened that Franciszek would be lying there in the grass and bushes, with the ends of the strings from the traps in his hand and his altar boys all around him, and he’d forget about the church. Because trapping starlings is easier said than done. You can spend the entire day and not catch a single one. All it takes is for someone to whisper to someone else right at the moment the starling’s getting close, or even to just give a louder than usual sigh, and the bird’ll get spooked and fly away. And altar boys are altar boys, they see a starling coming close and their heart immediately starts pounding, and with starlings, they can even hear your heart if it’s beating too loud. But anyone who scared a bird away wouldn’t be an altar boy any longer.