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Polish writing
also by the author:
White Raven
Nine
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from TALES OF GALICIA
by Andrzej Stasiuk
translated from the Polish by Margarita Nafpaktitis
Kosciejny
Simon Wasylczuk showed up at Kosciejny's and said "come on." Kosciejny took a long, narrow knife out from behind the
doorframe. They walked two houses further down. Simon led out a mournful-faced sheep and averted his gaze. Mount
Cergowa was holding up the sky as usual, and snow still lay on its peak between the trees. It was over in a second.
They lifted the animal up and hung it on a bare apple tree by a tendon in its hind leg.
Kosciejny looked like he usually did, a little like a scarecrow that had just escaped from the garden. That's exactly
how skinny, forty-year-old men in overalls look. Time rubs their features away, and it's only in old age, when they
have become reconciled with it, that they get their own one-of-a-kind faces back. Maybe so death can tell them apart.
But he wasn't thinking about death. Life was keeping him busy. He cut off the head with short, quick strokes. Two
mongrels were hanging around nearby. Then the tip of the knife slipped along the belly, along the legs, and the skin
came off like a stocking. Steam was rising in the cold morning air. It was already over — skin, carcass,
entrails, everything neatly separated. A simple and precise dissection of existence.
"Should I cut it up?" asked Kosciejny.
"I'll cut it up myself. I just don't like doing the killing," said Simon Wasylczuk. He went into the house and came
back with a bottle. They sat down against the wall of the barn, in the sun, and drank to each other and lit their
cigarettes, watching Cergowa hold up the sky.
"Well I like it," said Kosciejny. "The most important thing is that the little beast doesn't get scared. Makes a bad
job of it, and the meat's no good. Stinks of fear. It's worst with a pig. You can't fool a pig, it's smart. I'm doin'
a pig tomorrow at your sister's."
"Yeah," Simon Wasylczuk replied.
Who was Kosciejny? His restless spirit drove him to do so many things. In winter he wore a nylon cap with a brim, and
in summer he went bareheaded, shriveled by the sun and just as waterproof.
When there was a shortage of calves and pigs in the village, or when people's hunger was already satisfied, or when a
Lenten calm descended between weddings and christenings, he harnessed two horses to his ashwood cart and headed south.
His woman stayed at home. It was no big deal to beat a path a couple times a day between the house, the pigsty and the
cow barn, that's what he thought. That much one woman could handle. He started the journey in the morning and he could
have made it by afternoon, but there was a pub halfway there. No matter where you're headed, some pub or other is
always standing by the side of the road, like a reward for the peace and quiet at home.
He tied up the horses, tossed them a couple handfuls of hay and sat down to drink. And since everybody knew him, he
always managed to find himself an enemy. Come evening, the soberer ones heaved two grappling men out the door. They
landed in the mud or the dust, trying to get at vulnerable places, each trying to force the other to feel some pain.
Then Kosciejny continued on his journey south. Peaceful, drowsing, just like the horses, one foot after the other to
the edge of night, where darkness flowed over the mountains like rich, black milk. He unharnessed the horses in his
sleep, and in his sleep he fell on a bed where he lay on his back until morning. The men living in that barrack at the
end of the world said that Kosciejny slept with his eyes open, that he must have been afraid of something. But they
were the ones who were afraid, and they closed their eyes so they didn't have to look out at the dark. They got up in
the morning and left for the clearing. Kosciejny stayed behind and drank whatever he had brought with him. Rain was
falling beyond the window. The room was cluttered with the debris of objects essential for living. Empty cans, dry
bread crusts, leaky rubber boots, empty bottles ... dirt and freedom always intermingle. Kosciejny talked to himself
and sang songs that nobody ever heard. He slumped on the bed, and the men returning at dusk ran up against his
motionless gaze, which took in everyone and no one. On the third day he got up. He harnessed his horses and started
up through the wet clearings to the ridge of Uhryn, where the piles of cut wood looked like the ruins of a
fortification, like long walls eaten away by siege. He worked until evening, until the moment when neither the whip
nor the stick managed to give the animals any more strength. Half of that work consisted of cruelty to his animals,
and half of cruelty to himself. The rest was pure effort.
"A whip lasts him two days," said the ones who dealt with the dead mechanisms of their motorized saws. But they said
it quietly. They remembered the winter when Kosciejny walked six kilometers barefoot, because he had bought new boots
and thrown out the old ones but then felt sorry for those new ones when he saw the snowdrifts. Or that night when they
found him in the stable. It was October. Silver dust sprinkled down from the moon and crunched like frost underfoot.
It was quiet, so they heard the sobbing. He was kissing the sides of his horses, smearing their necks, which had been
rubbed sore, with snot and tears.
"I didn't come to visit," said Kosciejny when Simon Wasylczuk offered him a chair. He stood at the threshold.
Warmth escaped through the open door and a white hen was scrabbling in the hallway. Wasylczuk sat under a religious
painting and smoked, peering through the heavy air. Outside the window, the puddles of mud were overflowing.
"I came to tell you that my woman doesn't need your help."
"You were gone a long time. She said she needed it."
"No she didn't. Get married, Simon. Then you won't have to be goin' around the village with your help."
"Did you come to make me a proposition?"
But Kosciejny wasn't saying anything more. The door stayed open, he walked through the flood in the yard and
disappeared behind the dark gray curtain of rain, where earth, mountains, sky, animals and people mingled with each
other, dissolved in a multitude of waters, in a land of darkness, chaos and innocence. That same day he left for the
barrack in the wilderness, where the men had almost finished drinking up their monthly wages.
Who was Kosciejny? The two fiery substances in his body — blood and alcohol — made him resistant to
seasons and to weather. But sometimes the soul needs cold and the heart a bit of rest. And even when he slept, he
still watched the darkness closing in on him.
"Take it easy, Kosciejny," the gamekeeper told him. "You could work for fourteen hours and still not get the work done,
just like with a woman you can't ... you know."
"It's too late, gamekeeper, I'm past forty."
"I don't feel sorry for you, I just pity the horses."
And then it happened like this.
The ones who saw it said that Kosciejny was wearing a white shirt, and maybe that's why the whole pub went quiet
when he walked between the tables over to the corner where Simon Wasylczuk was sitting. Nobody moved, nobody blinked,
nobody said a word, and everything happened quickly and calmly with the help of that long, narrow knife. Kosciejny
wiped it on his pants and stood there another second to make sure. And then with that knife still in his hand, he
went just as calmly to the door to go down the concrete steps, through the patches of light and shade underneath the
three chestnut trees, and straight to the police station, where the fat, red-haired sergeant in his unbuttoned uniform
said, "For the love of God, Kosciejny."
He got twelve years. Did his time in Rzeszów. He could watch the bare, furrowed fields and the slow change of colors.
They all emerged from winter white and to it they returned, as if December actually had the power to abolish time. On
a snowy night, when the fluorescent lights glowed with a quiet hum, it always looked like the start of eternity. On
fine days, the silhouettes of planes from the nearby airport moved through the sky. To Kosciejny, they looked like
little gold crosses.
After three years he got out on a weekend pass. He was calm, quiet, and orderly, so he got out, because everybody
thought he would be back at the appointed time. Just like, at the appointed time, he got up, went to bed, and
performed all those activities that helped to give the infinity of imprisonment the appearance of a finite form.
He got a cloak for the road. Once again, there was snow lying in the fields.
He sat in that same corner in the pub. The waitresses kept dropping things. The red-haired sergeant showed up to
clarify whether he was a fugitive or a ghost.
"Take it easy, officer, it's only for three days."
He left last, showed up first, ate a little, drank a little, and lit one cigarette off of another. He sat with his
back to the room, and it seemed like his figure was shrouded in perpetual twilight. On the last day he left a tip for
the barmaid and walked out into the night. The snow crunched under his feet, and the echoes of his footsteps mingled
with the soft tinkling of the frozen stars.
They found him a week later, at dusk, but it wasn't him anymore. It looked like him, sleeping, curled up in a ball.
You could give it a few taps. Then it would make a wooden sound. In the distance, Cergowa was trying to hold up the
sky, but darkness still tumbled down over the earth.
© Twisted Spoon Press
© Andrzej Stasiuk
translation © Margarita Nafpaktitis
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ISBN 978 80 86264 05 9
140 pp.
145 x 205mm
softcover with flaps
fiction / novel
Order in the US ($14.00):
Amazon
Powells
SPD
Order in the UK (£9.00):
Amazon UK
The Book Depository
Central Books
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