today?” Without waiting for an answer, he quickly added, “Don’t worry, there’ll be bigos!” Anzelm slapped Stefan on the back, hunched his shoulders, and waded in among the relatives, who stood looking at the still-empty grave. He touched each of them with a finger, moving his lips as he did so. Stefan thought this quite curious until he realized that his uncle was simply counting the crowd. Then Anzelm whispered loudly to a village boy, who backed away from the black circle in rustic reverence, walked to the gate, and then broke into a run toward Ksawery’s house.
Having completed these host’s duties, Uncle Anzelm returned, whether by accident or design, to Stefan’s side and even found the time to point out how colorful the group around the grave was. Four stout boys then placed the coffin on cords and lowered it into the yawning hole, where it landed askew. One of the boys, holding onto the edge with dirty hands, climbed down and shoved it hard with his boot. Stefan was hurt by this rough treatment of an object that had so far been accorded uninterrupted respect. In this he found further confirmation of his thesis that the living, no matter how they tried to polish the rough edges of the passage out of life, could find no consistent and harmonious attitude to the dead.
The particular wartime aspect of the funeral was evident after the men with shovels, working with an almost feverish energy, closed the grave and formed the elongated mound of earth above it. Under normal circumstances, it would have been unthinkable for the mourners to leave the cemetery without strewing their relative’s grave with flowers, but flowers were out of the question in this first winter after the invasion. Even the greenhouses on the nearby Przetulowicz estate, where all the glass had been broken during the battle, left the Trzynieckis down, so only spruce boughs were laid on the grave. The prayers finished, their respects paid, the mourners turned from the green mound and made their way, one by one, down the snowy path to the muddy, puddle-strewn road back to the village.
When the priests, who were as cold as everyone else, removed their white surplices, things seemed more normal. Other changes, less explicit, came over the rest of the mourners. Their solemnity, a sort of slowing of movement and glance, fell away. A naive observer might have thought that they had been walking on tiptoe and had now got tired of it.
On the way back Stefan made sure to stay away from Aunt Aniela, not out of lack of affection or sympathy but because he was well aware of what a loving wife she had been to his uncle, and no matter how hard he tried, he would have been unable to utter a single phrase of condolence. In the meantime, panic spread over the mourners’ faces when they saw Uncle Ksawery take Aunt Melania Skoczynska by the arm. Stefan was dumbfounded at the strange and rare sight. Ksawery hated Aunt Melania, had called her an old bottle of poison and said that the ground she walked on ought to be disinfected. Aunt Melania, an old spinster, had long devoted herself to stirring up family quarrels in which she could maintain a sweet neutrality while going from house to house spreading venomous remarks and rumors that fostered bitterness and did great damage, since the Trzynieckis were all stubborn once their emotions were aroused.
When he saw Stefan, Ksawery called from a distance, “Welcome, my brother in Aesculapius! Have you got your diploma yet?!”
Naturally Stefan had to stop to greet them, and after he quickly touched his maiden aunt’s frigid hand with his nose, the three walked together toward the house, now just visible through the trees. It was yellow as egg yolk, the very essence of a manor house, with classic columns and a large veranda overlooking the orchard. They stopped at the entrance to wait for the others. Uncle Ksawery revealed an unexpected flair for acting the host, expansively inviting everyone inside as though he feared they would drift off into the snowy, marshy countryside.
At the door, Stefan suffered a brief but intense torment, as an avalanche of greetings suspended during the funeral descended on him. During the kissing of hands and pecking of cheeks he had to be careful not to confuse the men with the women, which he may have done, he was not quite sure, Finally, amid the wiping of boots and waving sleeves of shed coats, he entered the drawing room. The sight of the enormous grandfather clock with its inlaid pendulum made him feel instantly at home, because whenever he visited Nieczawy he slept under the deer-head trophy on the wall opposite. In the comer stood the battered armchair in whose hairy depths he rested during the day and in which he was sometimes awakened at night by the loud striking of the clock, its unearthly face shining round and cold in the moonlight, glowing in stillness like the moon itself. But the traffic in the room prevented him from wallowing in childhood memories. The ladies sat in armchairs, the gentlemen stood enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke. The conversation had barely begun when the double doors of the dining room opened to reveal Anzelm standing on the threshold. Frowning like a benevolent, somewhat absent-minded emperor, he invited everyone to table, A proper funeral dinner was out of the question, of course—the very term would have rung resoundingly false—and the weary, sorrowful relatives were instead invited to a modest snack.
The guests included one of the priests who had led the procession to the cemetery, thin, sallow, and tired, but smiling as though happy that everything had gone so well. The priest, bending stiffly low, was talking to Great- aunt Jadwiga, the matriarch of the Trzynieckis, a small woman in a dress that was too big for her. She seemed to have withered and shrunk so much inside the garment that she had to hold her hands up as if in prayer to keep the sleeves from falling over her dry fingers. The distracted, contrary expression on her small, slightly flat, and childish face made it seem as though she were contemplating some senile, childish prank instead of listening to the priest. She looked up with her round blue eyes and, spotting Stefan, called him over with a finger bent into a hook. Stefan swallowed manfully and approached his great-aunt. She looked up at Stefan carefully and somewhat slyly before saying in a surprisingly deep voice, “Stefan, the son of Stefan and Michalina?”
“Yes, yes,” he acknowledged eagerly.
She smiled at him, pleased either by her memory or by her great-nephew’s appearance; she took his hand in her own painfully sharp grip, brought it close to her eyes, examined it from both sides, and then released it suddenly, as if it contained nothing of interest after all. Then she looked Stefan in the eye and said, “Do you know that your father wanted to be a saint?”
She cackled softly three times before Stefan had a chance to answer, and added for no apparent reason: “We still have his diapers somewhere. We saved them.”
Then she looked straight ahead and said no more. In the meantime, Uncle Anzelm had reappeared and vigorously invited everyone to the dining room, bowing perfectly in Great-aunt Jadwiga’s direction. He led her into the dining room first, and that drew in the others. His great-aunt had not forgotten Stefan, for she asked him to sit beside her, which he did with something like pleased despair. Sitting down at the table was a little chaotic. Then Uncle Ksawery, the host, unseen until now, came in with a huge porcelain tureen smelling of bigos. He served each of the guests in turn, his nicotine-stained doctor’s fingers ladling bigos onto the plates so forcefully that the women drew back to protect their clothes. This warmed up the atmosphere. Everyone talked about the same thing: the weather, and their hope for an allied offensive in the spring.
The tall, broad-shouldered man whose military coat Stefan had noticed earlier sat at his left. He was one of Stefan’s mother’s relatives, a tenant farmer from Poznan named Grzegorz Niedzic. He sat in silence, and froze as if he had been touched by a wand whenever he changed position. His smile was simple, shy, and somehow innocent, as if he were apologizing for the inconvenience caused by his presence. The smile made a peculiar contrast with his sunburned, mustached face and ill-fitting clothes, unmistakably sewn from an army blanket.
It was obvious at the table that post-funeral formalities were nothing new to this assembly, and it occurred to Stefan that the last family gathering he had attended was in Kielce at Christmas. The memory was triggered because unanimity in the family was rare, usually forthcoming only after funerals, and although nobody had died last Christmas, the intensity of shared sorrow had been similar—the occasion was the burial of the fatherland.
Stefan felt uneasy in this company. He disliked large groups, especially formal ones. What’s more, when he looked at the priest seated opposite him, he was sure that such a reverend presence would provoke Ksawery to blasphemy, and he had an innate aversion to scenes. He also felt bad because his father, whom he represented, did not enjoy the best of reputations here, being the only inventor in memory among a family of landowners and doctors and at that an inventor who had reached his sixties without inventing anything.
Nor was the mood lightened by the presence of Grzegorz Niedzic, apparently a born non-talker, who answered attempts at conversation by smiling warmly and peering sympathetically into his plate. And Stefan became especially eager to get a conversation going when he noticed that Ksawery’s eyes were sparkling darkly, a sure sign that trouble was brewing. And so it was. In a moment of relative silence broken only by the ringing of cutlery, Ksawery said to Stefan, “You must have felt as out of place as a eunuch in a harem in that church, eh?”
The crack was indirectly aimed at the priest, and Ksawery doubtless had a sharp rejoinder ready, but he had
