“I’m going out to get more. Maybe they’re still there.” And he starts getting up to go.
“Where are you off to? Sit the hell down, you’re fine here.”
“I’ll bring some more and you can have some.”
“What are you, nuts? The Germans are out there.”
“So what? You heard the old man — they already chose the ones they’re gonna hang. Maybe they already hung them.”
“They’ll kill you,” I said, trying to stop him. “There weren’t any sunflowers there. I was making it up. The sunflowers were in a different village.”
“You weren’t making it up. I remember them. And I remember the girl. She brought me a knife. She told me to take the one with the big seeds. And I did. But now I’m out of seeds.”
I buried him in the same cemetery, in the bare earth, without a casket or a funeral. I patted down the mound of earth, made him a cross. I took the wreath from the tomb we’d been hiding in, from the Siewierskis — if they were bastards they could do without a wreath — and I played him a tune on my mouth organ, because I always had my mouth organ with me. Honeybee, you damn fool. You should’ve stuck to picking sunflower seeds.
That was mostly how we buried people in the resistance, wherever they fell. Without a casket, in the bare ground. For the cross you’d cut down a birch branch. You wouldn’t even strip the bark off, just fasten two pieces together with a bit of wire or a strip of leather and you had a cross. And you didn’t leave any information, no first name or last name. The person just lay there and they didn’t know who they were. Anyone who stopped by on their way wouldn’t know either. The Lord God himself might not have known. Though every one of them had some kind of name. Grzęda, Sowa, Smardz, Krakowiak, Malinowski, Buda, Gruszka, Mikus, Niecałek, Barcik, Tamtyrynda, Wrzosek, Maj, Szumigaj, Jamroz, Kudła, Wróbel, Karpiel, Guz, Mucha, Warzocha, Czerwonka, Bąk, Zyga, Kozieja, Donda, Zając, Lis, Gałęza, Kołodziej, Jan, Józef, Jędrzej, Jakub, Mikołaj, Marcin, Mateusz. There wouldn’t have been enough room in the calendar of saints. And all of them had to deny their own names and rot like carrion.
Sometimes you’d just hang a forage cap on the cross, if the man had one. And it was, Sleep beneath the earth and dew, May you dream of Poland true. But not many of them had a forage cap. They mostly had caps with peaks, berets, ski caps. There were a few hats, a handful of four-cornered army caps, and once in a while someone would have a sheepskin hat or a fur hat. Some of them had hats that you didn’t even know what to call them, because they were whatever they’d brought from home or had come by during their soldiering. Mikus and Łukasik even had balaclavas like mothers make their children wear in the winter, with earflaps and a strap buttoned under the chin. But those two weren’t even sixteen, we’d found them sleeping in the woods in a clump of juniper, because the Germans had burned their village and killed their fathers and their mothers, they were the only ones from the whole village that had managed to escape. And if you didn’t have anything else you just wore a plain goddam cap. You just had to give it a good wash first, not to clean it so much as get rid of all the bad thoughts from the cap that might have taken root in the dirt. And you pinned a little eagle on the front, and under the eagle a tiny strip from a white-and-red flag.
To judge by the caps you might have thought we were a bunch of riffraff and pansies, not an army. A rabble that was only good for digging ditches, or building dikes, or beating game when the masters go hunting, not an army. But inside each man there was a devil, and each one of them had a heart of stone. They forgot about God and they forgot how to cry. And even when we were burying one of our own, no one shed a tear. It was just, Ten-shun! Because sometimes tears make bigger holes than bullets. No one dared so much as let their stomach rumble, even if they hadn’t had a bite to eat in three days and were hungrier than during Lent. Or even swallow loud. Or even sniff. And no one was allowed to whisper amen. I’d just look at everyone’s eyes to make sure none of them were wet. Because in my command, attention didn’t just mean feet together and hands at your buttocks. It meant attention in your mind, and standing up straight in your soul. Everything was at attention. I had a voice like a bell, I sang bass in the church choir and sometimes the priest even had to ask me to sing quieter, our church isn’t that big, you don’t want the Lord God to go deaf, do you? Remember you’re singing right in his ear. He doesn’t like it to be too loud, he even prefers it when someone’s feeling the hymn more than singing it, just like he prefers humbler people over greater people. So when I called Ten-shun! even a hunchback would have straightened up. But then, in the resistance my name was “Eagle,” and the difference between attention and at ease was the same as the difference between life and death. People might find it hard to believe that one word could have so much power. But it did. Like the power of fate when it settles on someone. Like the power of hell and heaven together. At attention a person can do anything, however much he doesn’t want to, or it’s beyond his strength. Like they say, he could knock over mountains and turn back rivers. At attention the heart beats slower and the mind thinks straighter. Who knows, maybe at attention you could even die without regrets. I sometimes wonder how so much power can fit in a single word like that. Whoever thought up that word must have known life through and through. Because there are times when you have no other choice than to say to your own self, attention!
If I died they were forbidden the same to shed a tear, they had to just stand at attention. At most someone could play a song for me on the mouth organ. “Stone upon stone, on stone a stone.” Because if I had to choose only one tune to take with me to the next world, that would be the one. Of all the tunes in all my life.
Sometimes I regret it didn’t happen that way. I’d have had it all over and done with, I wouldn’t have had to struggle with everything like I do now. Like with the tomb for instance. On top of that the district administration folks are always telling me how much grain I have to sell them, how many potatoes, how much beet, how much of this, how much of that, and every year it’s more and more. I’ll sell however much grows. A bitch won’t pup ten times a year, she’ll do it twice at the most. Likewise the earth’ll only give birth to what it can. And from you it’ll only buy the same shit. Though when I die you’ll take my land away anyway, it’s not like I have anyone to leave it to. You’ll be able to sell it and buy ten times as much. But while I’m alive it’s my land, and it’s just as well I feel like working it, because otherwise it’d be standing fallow. Yet you won’t get those folks to understand. They’ve never worked the land in all their lives, though they know all about it because they went to school. But you can only learn about the land from the land itself, not from any books.
For years they went on at me to get rid of the thatch on my house and put up tiles or tar paper, because there was an ordinance against thatched roofs. But it’s in perfectly good shape, it’s not leaking or anything. They say it’s an eyesore. If you ask me, though, that thatched roof of mine is handsomer than any amount of tile or tar paper or even sheet-metal roofing. Besides which, I’ve got the attic. Come take a look, goddammit, you’ve probably all forgotten what an attic looks like. Where are you going to find an attic like that under tiles and tar paper and sheeting? Those aren’t attics, they’re boxes. Crates. When it’s hot they’re hot as hellfire itself, and when it’s cold, up there it’s even colder. In my attic it’s warm in winter and cool in summer. Grain, flour, onions, garlic — it can all be kept up there without going moldy or without freezing. You can dry cheeses there, or hang clothes up to air. Or just go take a nap, when you’ve been working like a dog or you’ve had enough of everything it’s cozier than downstairs, there aren’t as many flies and it’s as if the thatch keeps the rest of the world at bay. What the heck have you got against thatched roofs? You know, you’d be better off building a road to the mill, because in springtime a pair of horses isn’t strong enough to pull a wagon out of the mud that’s there. Or find a blacksmith for the village, so people don’t have to go all the way to Boleszyce to get their horse shod. There’s not going to be an ordinance against horses any time soon. Have you heard the sound of rain on thatch? You won’t ever hear that sound under tiles or tar paper or metal sheeting — those make it sound like gravel falling from the sky. Under thatch it sounds like pure white grains of semolina pattering down. You can lie there forever listening to the rain making that sound. And if you need to gather your thoughts, you won’t find a better place to do it than under thatch. Not in the fields, not in the orchard, not by the river or in the church.