Pity I wasn’t an airman, or I’d have put up a propeller like the Króls’ lad Jasiu has on his tomb. I really like that propeller. But a person’s neither fish nor fowl. As for Jasiu, the last time he visited he’d made captain. His jet crashed when they were practicing for a flyby. They brought him back in a metal casket in a separate van. His pals were in another van. There were twenty of them, every one an officer. Each of them had silver cord on his shoulder, there were medals on their chests, bayonets at their sides. They carried him six at a time all the way from the house to the cemetery. They wouldn’t let anyone else do it even for one shift, though Jasiu had friends here in the village too. They’d minded the cows together and been at school with him.
The whole village came to the funeral. The fire brigade turned out. Schoolchildren. Two older gray-haired colonels walked behind the casket and gave their arms to Jasiu’s folks, Król and Mrs. Król, one on each side. Old Król wasn’t that tall to begin with, and he seemed to have shrunk, either from being on the colonel’s arm or from his son dying, though he didn’t cry at all. Afterward people said no one would have cried at the compensation the Króls got from the government. But it could have been that when he walked next to the colonel old Król felt like a soldier too.
Mrs. Król didn’t look like she’d been crying either. But at the cemetery, when everyone was standing at the graveside and one of the colonels said he’d died like a hero, she collapsed into the arms of the other one and they had to bring her round. She only started crying the day after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. Since then it’s been all these years and she’s still crying away.
Then some guys came and brought sheet metal. They cut it and bent it and welded it, and it turned into a propeller. Some people didn’t think a whole lot of that propeller, they said that the parents were Christians and Jasiu himself was christened, and here there’s a propeller instead of a Lord Jesus on the tomb. If you ask me though, that propeller is sadder than a good many Lord Jesuses. Aside from anything else, it’s designed so that when the wind blows you can hear something in it, as if a plane was flying across the sky. Maybe it’s the one Jasiu crashed in? And when you stare at it for long enough, you even think the propeller’s spinning. Except it’s going so fast you can’t see it. You can just see a blur of light over the tomb. If someone wanted, that propeller could stand for a crucifixion.
I wonder what a propeller like that might cost? Even the labor alone. An ordinary tinsmith couldn’t make one. Covering a roof is one thing, making a propeller is a whole other business. The men that put it up on Jasiu’s tomb kept checking some papers they had and measuring lengthways and width-ways and from a distance, like the guys that merged land together for the big farms. Except that at government prices it probably wasn’t that expensive. But then you have to die for the government first.
When I worked in the district administration, whenever one of the office workers died the administration would at least send a wreath for free, with fir and spruce branches and a few flowers woven into it, and on the ribbon it would say, from your friends at the district administration. And at the graveside someone would always say a few words about how he was liked, how he was good with people, farewell, may the earth weigh lightly on you. But when a person’s on their own they have to pay for the whole thing on their own, with their own money. Even if you borrow from someone, they’ll suck the blood out of you afterwards, anything to make sure you don’t accidentally die before you’ve paid them back.
Actually, the tomb alone might not have cost me all that much. But I’d a yen to have a vestibule as well. And a vestibule is almost a third the size of the tomb, and of course that means the cost is one third more. On the other hand, with a vestibule you can go in and turn around properly. The casket can be put in like it should be, not just shoved in there like a barrel of cabbage. The deceased isn’t being tugged about and twisted and shaken. That way people aren’t distracted from their mourning. And you can tell just from their behavior that this is for all eternity.
Also, I had partitions built to make separate compartments, broad ones because I can’t stand being cramped for space, even in a tomb. Not like other people’s, where they’re all on top of each other like beetroots in a beet pit, on rails. Then they rot and collapse onto each other. In my tomb the deceased is slipped in like bread into an oven, and walled in, and at least in the next world no one’s going to come poking their nose in there. Because let me tell you, there’s no lack of people who’d be snooping around in there if they only could. There are eight compartments, four on top, four below. That’s how many I counted there ought to be in our closest family. Mother, father, Antek, Stasiek, their wives, Michał, and of course me.
I didn’t include our grandparents either on mother’s side or father’s. They say grandparents are close family too, but it’s been so many years since they died. And they were buried just normally, in the earth, so the earth will have worked them over long ago. On top of that, the war mixed all the graves up in our cemetery, so it’d be hard to even find where they are. Today there’s probably someone else in their place.
Besides, on mother’s side I never even knew my grandfather Łukasz or my grandmother Rozalia. Way back in the last century grandfather killed a farm overseer and had to run away to America. And he stayed in his new land. Apparently the overseer was a brute and he would make passes at grandmother, while grandfather wasn’t the type to take any nonsense even from the lord of the manor himself. One time when they were in the fields during harvest, the overseer patted grandmother on the backside. Grandfather grabbed him by the throat and squeezed him against the sheaves till his eyes almost popped out. To get his own back, the overseer counted two days less work when grandfather was mowing the barley. Grandfather couldn’t count, but he remembered every day he’d worked. He got furious. He grabbed the tally stick that the overseer wrote the days of work on, tore it from his hand, snapped it over his knee, and tossed it aside. How do you like that, you son of a bitch! Grandfather thought he’d taken revenge on him big time. But all the overseer did was laugh so loud the field rang. And after he was done laughing he said to grandfather, get the hell out of here! Without a second thought grandfather swung his scythe at the other man’s neck, and the overseer’s head went rolling all the way to the horses’ hooves. The horses took fright and tipped over a cart full of grain, and one of them broke its leg and had to be put down. The Cossack militiamen came; they turned the house upside down and combed the village from one end to the other, but grandfather was already on his way to America.
For a long time he gave no sign, no one even knew he was there. It was only a few years later, when everyone thought he was dead, that he sent Grandmother Rozalia a few dollars and a letter. He wrote to say he wasn’t ever coming back to the village, and that he didn’t regret what he’d done, because at least there was one less villain in the world, so it was a little bit of a better place. Though it wasn’t easy for him over there. For days on end, in the heat and dust, through the wilderness they drove cattle to the town to be slaughtered. They traveled farther than it took when you had to go to the war back home. And once they were done driving one herd, there was another. Sometimes when there was a drought they had to drink their own piss, because the rivers had all run dry, and the cattle would drop like flies. And even when there were clouds the rain would dry up in the sky before it reached the ground. But he would cut the overseer’s head off all over again if he tried it on with grandmother. One time he turned the food table over in a pub in America because he suddenly saw her kissing the overseer. “Get down on your knees before Lord Jesus, Rozalia, swear on His Passion. Maybe you’ve got some other feller now? Then hope the good Lord is watching over you, Rozalia, and may your brother Felek look out for you. And you, Felek, brother-in-law, keep an eye on her, because if anything happens, remember we’ll meet in the next world and we’ll have to settle our accounts there.” And he said the next time he’d write he would tell grandmother when she should come and join him. And it wouldn’t be soon, because this letter cost him five dollars, and five dollars, do you know what a fortune that is, Rozalia? The letter to grandmother was written by Blume the tailor, that he went to to get his pants patched when they were driving cattle, and he turned out to be a good Christian even though he was a Jew.