“I tell you, Mr. Kubica, it’s the most beautiful horse I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s the most beautiful horse in the world,” the merchant has been repeating to him for more than six months. “Mr. Kubica, Marshal Piłsudski’s chestnut mare can’t hold a candle to your chestnut mare. Name your price; for what I pay you, you’ll be able to build a new house.”
Old Kubica would smile, stroke the horse’s mane, and listen to it stamping its feet, snorting, neighing; his head was raised like an orchestral conductor listening to perfectly played music, like a drunkard drinking his glass of delight.
Early this morning his hands had been trembling and his heart pounding irregularly, while his brow was bathed in sweat, and insistent thoughts roared in his head: everything is lost, everything is gone, all is wasted. The bailiff will come, and he’ll have to take his woman and his child and move out.
In the room where he slept it was perhaps thirty, perhaps twenty-five degrees fahrenheit. He was standing at the window; waves of heat and cold struck him in turn. He rested his forehead on the frost-covered pane, gazing at the empty yard in front of the house, gazing at the path that my ten-year-old father had diligently swept clean of snow, down which the merchant was approaching.
“He must have gotten up early,” Old Kubica whispered to himself, and for a moment he thought about how people who get up early, wash in ice-cold water, eat scrambled eggs and bacon, drink hot coffee, then hitch their horses to a sleigh, cover themselves in blankets, and ride in absolute silence and whiteness the whole six miles from Ustroń to Wisła — that such people must be happy, that they must not feel pain. Maybe he himself should hitch up and head out for nowhere in particular? My proud grandfather grimaced in disgust and was annoyed at himself for entertaining such women’s notions. “Head out for nowhere in particular? Where on earth would I go?” He gave a sour smile. “Except to the pub.”
“Right,” he murmured, “the furthest I’d get would be the pub in Ustroń.”
The merchant was standing in the doorway, his hands spread in a half-hearted gesture, a smile of collusion on his face.
“Mr. Kubica. .”
“All right,” grandfather interrupted him. “What you said, and another twenty zloties.”
The other man immediately reached for his wallet.
“And one more thing.” The merchant’s smooth hand paused amid the folds of his warm jacket. “The money today, the horse tomorrow. Come back tomorrow at the same time.”
The merchant was about to say something, but the expression on my grandfather’s face must have been such that he said nothing. He dug around much less briskly in his pockets, and eventually pulled out a wad of banknotes.
“I’ll bring the extra twenty tomorrow,” he said in a voice so wan it seemed the longed-for transaction that was finally taking place had suddenly ceased to interest him. “I trust you, Mr. Kubica — everyone hereabouts knows you to be a man of his word.”
“Till tomorrow then,” said Kubica, and, paying no more attention to the merchant, he left the house first.
Out in front he stooped down, took a handful of snow, and wiped his face. The merchant saw him standing motionless in the middle of the yard; he saw his snow-covered eyebrows and forehead. He didn’t go up to him, and even strayed a little from the cleared path. Once he was sure the other man was at a safe remove he said:
“Goodbye, see you tomorrow.”
Old Kubica saw nothing and heard nothing. He did not hear the bells of the merchant’s sleigh fading into the distance, and he did not see the children on their way to school. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses, the sound of wood being chopped came from somewhere far off, and in the forest on Ochodzita Mountain someone was calling: “Come on, come on.” An almost completely black cat was cautiously crossing the yard at a diagonal.
“Something has to be done, but what?” grandfather was saying to himself. “Something has to be done. .”
He gazed about distractedly, though not so distractedly as to look at the gate leading to the stable. At the far end of the farmyard he saw a fir tree leaning against the wall; just two weeks earlier it had been decorated with apples and candies. Christmas had come and gone, though it would have been better if it hadn’t come at all.
He had been in no state to say prayers, or to sing carols. At the Christmas Eve supper hardly anyone had spoken; the children were tearful. His heart had been like a stone exploding in the fire. Grandma Zofia served undercooked cabbage. The white-enameled serving dish of barely warm food tipped the scales toward the evil spirits; one of them entered into him. He leaned across the table, took the ill-fated vessel in his hands, and hurled it against the opposite wall, on which there hung a likeness of Martin Luther after the portrait by Cranach; the candle on the table went out, and the portrait of our reformer fell to the ground. Everyone ran away — my father always told stories about running away from Old Kubica — everyone hurried, they fled down the hallway and across the unlit yard, put the ladder against the trapdoor to the loft in the barn, and agilely climbed up one after another, like a well-trained fire brigade. Old Kubica was knocking over chairs, knocking over the table, knocking over the dresser. He took his shotgun down from the wall and summoned my ten-year-old father. They crossed the farmyard together; grandfather had the gun slung over his shoulder and a bottle in his hand, and he was singing carols:
God grant a merry eve and night.God grant a merry eve and night.First to the farmer on his farm.First to the farmer on his farm.Then to the farmer’s wife so fine.Then to the farmer’s wife so fine.And to his farmhands, good men all.And to his farmhands, good men all.
He drank from the bottle, and his splendid voice carried across the valleys. My father tried to sing too, but he was seized by a fear stronger than the twenty-below frost — the shadow of that fear would remain with him forever. At that time, on Christmas Eve in the winter of 1932 or 1933, my nine- or ten-year-old father was afraid that an angel hurrying to Bethlehem would pop out from behind one of the buildings. He was afraid that somewhere very close there was an angel who had gone astray or had decided to take a brief rest on its flight. On the night of Christmas Eve the sky was crisscrossed with angels flying in swooping arcs like swallows; on this night angels stopped in fields and flew over roofs, and a person could sometimes hear the sound of their wings and their choral singing. My father was afraid because he was convinced that Old Kubica would shoot at the angel. They’d come round the corner of the house; a white-winged creature would be standing before them under a snow-covered apple tree, and without hesitation my grandfather would take the gun from his shoulder and fire almost without taking aim, and he would hit the angel. And on its wing there would appear a single drop of blood, and that single drop would have such power that if it fell to the ground, everything would catch fire and everything would burn. Everything would catch fire, even the snow. But they made it all the way across the yard and through the orchard behind the house, and nothing happened; the fear slowly dissipated, Old Kubica’s movements became ever more sluggish. He had stopped singing and had stopped looking for the one responsible for the evil, who needed to be killed. He went back to his freezing room, stood the bottle on the floor by the iron bed, and fell asleep.