CHAPTER VII

Beyond the Fence Was the World

The time of family idyll did not last long. The first crack did not open at home, but at another person's table. At the name-day gathering of Wanda Kamińska, by then Wanda Włochińska, Jadwiga learned that her husband was earning far more at the hospital than he had said.

The twelve hundred zlotys he brought home for the family's upkeep were only his basic wages. He earned nearly four times as much on the side in the local morgue. What he did with that money he never revealed. It was suspected that he passed it to his mother or to his sister.

From that moment on, every time he went out, every silence, every decision made without his wife took on a different meaning for Jadwiga. And so, when in April he announced that he would go to Dziekanów for the christening of his nephew Ryszard, the quarrel was no longer merely about one family ceremony.

The child's parents had "forgotten" to invite Jadwiga. That insult alone would have been enough to make her feel slighted. But there was more. She still remembered how, five years earlier, almost at night, they had had to search for a candidate to be godfather to their own child. Now she expected from her husband at least a reflex of solidarity. She did not receive it. Adam simply announced that he was going.

"Daddy won't go to that christening," the five-year-old said when he and his father entered the woods together.

They were going for milk. The way from the fields was shorter; it let them reach the farm of one of the peasants, as it were, from the rear. Piotr did not understand everything that had been going on at home for several days, but he knew one thing: his mother did not want his father to go to Dziekanów.

"Why?" Adam asked.

"Because Daddy has no suit," the child replied.

The man did not hesitate for an instant. Leaving his son in the woods, he ran toward the house. Piotr, standing on a rise, could see the buildings so close to him. No more than a hundred and fifty meters separated him from them. He saw them, and after a moment he heard a terrifying scream. His father, having guessed that the only suit he needed had been hidden in Aunt Chojnacka's room, headed there at once. He had no trouble finding the clothes. Seizing the hanger, he ran out into the yard. Marianna Chojnacka, suddenly recovering her strength, ran after him, but when she heard the coming quarrel she quickly turned back. By then Piotr had reached the yard. He could not go into the house. His father stood in the entryway; the kitchen door was closed, and from inside his mother was trying to get free. When shouting did not help, there came the dull sound made by blows of an axe against the door.

When the action moved inside, it turned into a proper brawl, and Piotr, too, decided to join in. First he tried beating with his hand the one he took to be guilty of the whole affair—his father—and, seeing no result, he grabbed the poker standing in the corner. To make it more effective, he put it into the fire and waited calmly until it reddened. With the instrument so prepared, he went up to his father and scorched his thigh. This treatment cooled both parents. The scuffle stopped. The man dressed and left the house. The pregnant woman did not protest, and her son, proud of his own deed, declared:

"My hand hurts, but I gave it to him, I surely gave it to him."

The next day, after the ceremonies in Dziekanów, the first conversation between husband and wife took place through the door of the little vestibule. One, standing inside, would not open the door; the other, kneeling outside, begged forgiveness and promised to improve.

"Come in. Be a father to the children. But to me you are no longer a husband," Adam heard after a long while.

The coming summer was to bring other changes, less painful ones. Already in June, in front of the house, close by the fence, a great mound of sand began to rise. Digging a well was among the last preparations for the birth of the child. In earlier days water had been carried from more distant plots; lately it had come from the Wierzbickis, the neighbors who had been tempted into such an investment a little sooner. From now on, water was to be only a few steps from the house. The weekly washing of bedding and clothes, the daily washing of diapers, and ordinary cooking were to cease being a torment. Day by day, on the boundary between the two plots, a heap of sand grew. A perfect place for children's games.

"I can see you," three-year-old Ewa rejoiced, seeing her playmate rolling his bare bottom in the sand. She did not at the same time realize that she herself was in the same condition.

In theory, the two properties were separated from each other. In practice, however, the paling fence that ought to have stood between them usually lay flat. Sometimes because it was flimsy, more often because that was more convenient for the children. The gate was whole yards away, and that was an unacceptable distance when one had to be on the other side immediately: to Ewa, to Iwonka, to Jacek, to Janusz, or to Grzesiek Żabowski.

When one of the grown-ups set the fence back upright, Piotr did not walk around it. He stormed the obstacle over the top. Once it ended with his forearm torn open by an old, protruding nail; the scar remained forever. Another time, by the Wkra, a thin branch of a young pine broke beneath him. Through the cut he could see his own inside, but strangely there was no blood. The accident could therefore be hidden, and with it he avoided the worst possible punishment: being forbidden to leave the house.

The yards, the road, and the edge of the woods were enough to serve as whole countries, cities, stadiums, and racing tracks. A few beer caps, a stick, a patch of packed earth, or a toy pistol from a church fair were sufficient. The caps became cyclists; a circle traced on the road became a world divided among warring states; and the gate in front of the Wierzbickis' plot became a badminton net. In such games it did not matter where one property truly ended and the other began. Boundaries existed only to be crossed.

Most often there were Piotr and Ewa. Iwona, Mrs. Wierzbicka's niece, joined them; sometimes also the older Jacek Kielak, Janusz Nowakowski, or Grzesiek Żabowski. Other children appeared more rarely. Usually just that many were enough to make an entire world out of the yards, the road, and the fence.

Sometimes, however, the world beyond the fence ceased to be only a place of play and began to teach laws a child would rather not have known.

After one of the visits to Dziekanów, Piotr brought back a gift from Aunt Wanda: a beautiful glass syringe. He had never held such a thing in his hand before. He knew it only from the drama of vaccinations, so when he reached Szczypiorno he had to show his treasure to everyone who happened to be nearby. This time Jurek Radomski was there as well. He, too, examined the unusual medical instrument and then proposed a game. The syringe was buried in the ground so that it could be searched for later.

Piotr searched for a long time. He did not find the syringe. His companion was gone as well.

"His father once tricked me the same way," he later heard from his mother when he complained of the loss. The woman told her son a story from two decades earlier, when, at the suggestion that they "bury" her only doll, she had buried it in the ground.

The lesson apparently had not been painful enough, for several years later he took from the house the Virtuti Militari cross his father kept after his grandfather and went to show it off to Janusz. When the boy asked for it, Piotr gave him the precious keepsake without resistance. Later attempts to recover the decoration came to nothing.

Summer, in any case, was not solely a time of play. During their thirteen years in Szczypiorno, Adam and Jadwiga bought only one ton of coal. In the kitchen they burned mostly wood gathered in the forest. Pinecones, too, were valuable fuel, and enough of them had to be collected to last the whole winter. The whole family often set out on such expeditions.

"Piotruś, hand me the sack," Jadwiga asked, standing with her apron full of pinecones.

The boy stood a few meters away, right beside the sack lying on the ground, and pretended he did not hear.

"Hand me the sack," she repeated.

"No!"

"Hand me the sack!"

"No."

He did not hand it over. After they returned home, just before the gate, he learned what the pyta was for: several leather thongs fastened to a short stick. He remembered.

Alongside these children's matters ran the life of adults—heavy, frugal, and full of accounts. Marianna Chojnacka received no pension. All the money she had to live on consisted of two hundred, later three hundred, zlotys of assistance from the Commune Office. Even so, living with the family and very sparingly, she always managed to put something aside for a special need. So it was when she asked Jadwiga to buy her a gold chain with a cross "in town." So it was also in the summer of 1970, when she addressed her niece:

"Jadzia, go to Zakroczym, to the friars, and have a Mass said for my parents and for Stasiek. Here are two thousand zlotys. Give fifteen hundred for a month of Masses, and with the rest buy the baby a blanket."

She knew that a blanket was then among the more urgent needs.

Relations between the two women, however, were not always good. They could be bitter, sometimes very bitter. The older woman occasionally received packages from UNRA[1], American aid for Poles. Most often they contained oil or flour, and therefore things needed in every household. To get such a gift one had to go to the Commune Office in Pomiechówek.

When, late in the summer of 1970, such an opportunity arose, Jadwiga was already heavily pregnant and did not feel strong enough to drag home a package weighing many kilos by herself. She arranged with her husband that she would meet him on the bus as he returned from work and that they would go home together.

From the office to the bus stop it was very close, perhaps only a few steps. Even the downpour that suddenly fell from the sky did not seem a great misfortune. Jadwiga, carrying the package on her great belly, reached the bus. Her husband, however, was not on it.

When the bus stopped at the Szczypiorno loop, one of the local women helped her. After three hundred meters they reached that woman's farm. From there Jadwiga had to go on alone, more than a kilometer. As she approached the house, she heard her aunt's piercing cry. Marianna, most likely having been quietly watching for her niece for a long time, came out before the house and cried so that the whole "ghetto" could hear her:

"They give me nothing to eat! They are starving me!"

Such malicious behavior on Chojnacka's part repeated itself many times, but it was almost always preceded by visits from her brother Ignacy. An even greater role was played by Antoni Szcześniak. The Szcześniaks, after a period spent in Bobolice, had settled in Koszalin, and later returned to their native parts and bought a house in Wymysły. Both men, counting on some money from Marianna, convinced her that she was receiving insufficient care. Her yielding to these intrigues led her, less than three years later, to a tragedy in life.

Meanwhile summer went on. Far off beyond the village, among fields stretching toward Wymysły, a wild pear tree grew on a boundary strip. Each year its handsome, sweet fruit tempted passersby. In August 1970 Jadwiga went there to gather pears. She took a large sack for herself and gave her son a wicker basket. When they had finished picking, they sat down to rest and to wait for Adam, who was supposed to come and help carry the fruit home.

They waited in vain.

The child, screaming at the top of his lungs, would not let her pour the wild pears onto the ground. Jadwiga therefore had to carry the sack a little way, set it down, go back for the basket, and set out again. Thus, meter by meter, she brought everything home.

Neither that adventure nor the earlier trip for the package from UNRA taught the pregnant Jadwiga caution. The first signs of approaching labor overtook her on September 14 in the woods. She was gathering mushrooms.

A few hours later, just before five in the morning, in the hospital in Nowy Dwór, a daughter was born to Adam and Jadwiga.

"Get yourself ready. Grandma has come for you," the midwife advised Jadwiga only a few days later. Indeed, a taxi waited in front of the hospital—but not with a grandmother inside. It held Aunt Jadwiga Kamińska and Piotr.

The car was already passing the woods bordering Śniadówek when one of the women realized they had gone too far. They had not been watching the road. The mother was occupied with the newborn; the other woman with the older child, who had just grown faint. They later laughed that it had been from jealousy over his new sister. That was probably not true, for not long afterward, seeing her son lying beside his sister with his arm around her, his mother admonished him:

"Careful. Don't crush her."

"I know. I'm being careful," he answered thoughtfully.

The boy also took part in the family council that was to lead to the choice of his sister's name. When "Urszulka" was proposed, he agreed without hesitation:

"Let it be Kosiulka."

Later, when they were walking through the woods to the Szcześniak relatives and were crossing an antitank ditch, Adam, pushing the baby carriage, joked:

"Now I'll let her go down there... and you'll be alone again."

To his parents' surprise, Piotr protested:

"It would be better if she weren't here, but since she is, let her live," he declared, though with time he felt more and more what it meant to be an older brother. "Give way, she's little," "take care of her," or "play with her" became phrases out of nightmares. Worse still, although "Kosziulka" often strayed from the truth in her testimony against her brother, for their parents she was always credible. Whenever she announced that she would tell their parents something, the boy was already bracing himself for the consequences, regardless of what had actually happened. In time he even stopped denying his sister's words. Unable also to free himself from the company of his sibling, he recorded his life experience for the first time: "Ulka is a tail," he carved into a brick of the house.

He was not always a good guardian, and especially not a prudent one.

In the corner of the plot stood the so-called summer house, a building that included a chicken coop, a woodshed, and a room into which the whole life of the family moved in summer. Each spring there came the eagerly awaited day of moving from the house to the summer house. In autumn they moved the other way, which was also no small attraction for a child. On the other side of the plot, by the Wierzbickis, stood a second building. The two shared one wall. The roofs of both became places for many games and amusements, but also for dangerous challenges.

"Go on, jump. It isn't high," the brother urged Urszula. A leap from the roof into the Wierzbickis' garden had already been made by Ewa, Iwonka, Grzesiek Żabowski, and even by Tomek, Ewa's brother, two years younger than she. It was not a great feat, since little more than a meter from the edge of the roof lay the soft earth dug up for planting. Piotr, urging his sister to jump, failed to think of one thing: the wooden fence separating the garden from the yard, with its sharply cut stakes. Urszula jumped. Fortunately she did not try to land where all the others had. She chose the hard ground of the yard, close by the wall.

For reasons known to no one, Marianna Chojnacka did not show the same interest in her niece's next child. She kept a steady distance, even a coldness. At the same time her concern for the older child increased. A similar reaction could be seen in Uncle Kazik from Janów. The boy, overwhelmed by the new duties that had fallen on him after his sister's birth, did not hold her in unconditional esteem either. And so he liked the conversation that, one afternoon and in his presence, the uncle and the aunt conducted in half-whispers. He did not understand or remember the words, but of one thing he was certain: those two saw some problem, perceived some danger in the very fact that a daughter had appeared in the house. For many years afterward the incident did not trouble his thoughts very much, especially since new duties appeared.

The September forenoon remained in Piotr's memory in images, not in a date. It was warm, though the day held a faint haze. They walked through the meadows near the banks of the Wkra. After crossing the ravine, from a clump of alders came the croaking of frogs. Then there was the climb beneath the high escarpment. Such was his first road to school.

He liked school at once. It was small, almost his own. There were only six children in the class, among them his cousin Jacek Pawelski. The only teacher in the school, Mr. Lipko, taught the first and second grades at the same time. When he finished, two more grades entered the school. The old, solid desks, with holes for inkwells and shelves for satchels, stood in two rows; in each row a different grade studied.

Piotr sat in the first grade, together with Marzena Marciniak. Watched over at home by his mother and better prepared than most children, he quickly began to be regarded at school as someone exceptional.

"He will go far," the teacher foretold.

Jadwiga swelled with pride.

School was not far away. Through the ravine it was scarcely a kilometer. By the road one had to add several hundred meters, but in return one could pick up Janusz along the way. Once they were walking together, they often stopped for the only girl in the class as well. One day that "stopping for her" lasted longer than usual, because Marzenka was not ready to leave. All three reached the classroom late.

Mr. Lipko lined them up and asked for the reasons. Then he meted out punishment. Januszek had his ear pulled quite soundly. Piotr—rather symbolically. At Marzena the teacher merely wagged his finger.

After years, no one else likely remembered the incident. Piotr remembered. From the school in Szczypiorno he took away not only his first praises, but also his first lesson about unequal treatment of children and about the fact that girls were sometimes allowed more. He did not like it.

The school year was ending. The children, staring out the window, were already thinking of vacation. On the road, which was seldom traveled, there appeared an enormous truck, and on it a Ruch kiosk.

"That's for my mother," Piotr boasted.

Indeed, Jadwiga was beginning seasonal work as a saleswoman. Szczypiorno was a relatively small village. In winter a kiosk had no reason to exist there, but in summer? In summer, in the recently built blocks, there lived several hundred children, vacationers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. There was no shortage of customers. The boy came to like sitting in the kiosk, but for that summer his parents had prepared him a surprise. While in Szczypiorno, right beside his house, there lived children from distant places, he himself was sent away to a summer camp in Gołotczyzna. He was to be there two weeks. He stayed only one, and during that time he accomplished the impossible. The postal service in the Polish People's Republic was not known for its reliability. Letters could search for their addressee for weeks, months, even years. Meanwhile, in the course of one week, several letters managed to arrive in Szczypiorno from Gołotczyzna, at times two at once. Inside were pleading requests to be taken home and... candies.

The summer of 1973 brought the end of an era. Marianna Chojnacka, convinced for years by relatives of how badly neglected she was, wished to live in an old people's home. Her niece, who for a long time had tried to treat these demands as whims, at last gave in. In Piotr's memory there remained the sight of Aunt Chojnacka walking with her cane toward the gate. Before she got into the ambulance waiting to take her away from home forever, she did not even look back. She settled in a home run by nuns near Ciechanów. Her former room was quickly put to use.

The family used the electricity installed not long before with remarkable thrift. If a light burned at all, it always came from the weakest bulb. Yet a thick, long cable was connected to the network; it ran outside, crossed the fence, and disappeared into the Wierzbickis' temporary dwelling. The neighbors had torn down their old house and were building a new brick one in its place. During that time they lived in the summer house, using the electricity lent to them. This neighborly favor seemed natural, necessary. No one grudged them the current.

"Well, they might at least turn it off during the day," Jadwiga complained many times, seeing the light burning all day. Her companion and friend, Stasia, did not know how to save and did not even suspect how much she irritated Jadwiga by it.

"They turn on that light and go out, and electricity costs money!"

Piotr listened many times to such lamentations. He also saw how the adults complained and did practically nothing about it. One day, the current stopped flowing through the long black cable. A careful search for the cause of the trouble ended when it was discovered that the wire had been cut. For a long time the culprit was not established.

The following years were distinguished by nothing in particular except for a few meaningful events. The school in Szczypiorno was closed, and the pupils were forced to move to the school in Pomiechówek. There, in a very large class, Piotr was no longer at the center of the teachers' attention. He was one of thirty children. What was more, because there were so many of them, the pupils were divided into classes "A" and "B." The first consisted of children from Pomiechówek; into the second were enrolled mostly children from the surrounding villages, the worse ones, those of the "second category." At the sight of the first poor mark in his life in his notebook, Piotr was sincerely scandalized. How could anyone give him a two? How dared they? He had come down from the podium. He had become one of many, ordinary.

On May 23, 1974, in the church in Pomiechów, he received his First Holy Communion.

By October 13 the family was already living in Aunt Chojnacka's old room. Piotr was not a fearful child. He went into the woods alone and was not afraid of the dark. That day was different. He woke in the night frightened by a terrifying dream. He was standing over his own bed. When he drew back the quilt covering him, he saw a skull. Having awakened, he tried to calm himself. Unfortunately, whenever the nine-year-old merely closed his eyes, he again saw skulls gliding everywhere. He asked for the light to be turned on. The only time in his life.

The next day came the news that Grandfather Władysław had died of a heart attack.

Two years later, after passing his examinations, Piotr, as a fourth-grade pupil, received the General Communion, while from September Urszula became a pupil in the local "zero grade." Every September, after the kiosk closed, the family acquired another important appliance. The first year it was a Saturn 201 television set, the next a refrigerator, later a washing machine...

In summer they went to pick strawberries or raspberries. Most often this was at the Zawadewiczes' place on the Cegielnia, a part of the village hidden beyond the woods. When the season was ending, they were allowed to gather fruit for their own use. Then came the time for making stores for winter. Adam would also sometimes go to Edmund Pawelski's to pick apples in the autumn. The money earned was useful at home, but here, too, it mattered that afterward he could bring home as much fruit as he wanted.

"You see, even there there are still no clouds," he explained to his small son, throwing an apple high into the sky. Piotr was astonished that something could be so high that even Daddy could not throw an apple up to it.

Twice a year Jadwiga took her son to visit Aunt Chojnacka. Each time it was not only an expensive journey but an exhausting one, requiring travel by three PKS buses and several kilometers on foot. Already during the first of these trips it became clear that the older woman had understood her mistake too late and would now gladly return to Szczypiorno. She never said it directly, and her niece also pretended not to understand.

The spring of 1978 brought great unrest to Szczypiorno. Every few or dozen days a fire broke out, consuming someone's house or some farm buildings. Everyone lived in dread, fearing each approaching night. People commonly suspected arson, but the culprit was not caught.

"If our house burned down, they would have to give us an apartment from the cooperative," Jadwiga, known for her timidity, startled them with such a confession. The couple had long been members of the housing cooperative in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki and had even set aside money to furnish themselves. Unfortunately, the wait for the allocation of such an apartment lasted many, many years. Such conversations were repeated at home quite often, and the teenager, listening to them, followed in his thoughts the vision of his parents and saw the family's happiness in a new apartment.

It was early summer. The family was living in the room after the Chojnackis. The remaining part of the house stood empty. Jadwiga was afraid of storms. When she heard the first, distant sound of thunder, she sent her son to fetch something from the empty rooms.

"Come back quickly," she instructed, fearing the approaching storm. Piotr did not return quite as soon as usual. Lightning struck somewhere closer, stirring greater anxiety in Jadwiga. She felt relief when at last she saw her son in the doorway.

"What took you so—"

"Mama, the house is burning," he interrupted, placing in her hand a small metal case that held the money scraped together over the years and had been buried in the cellar of the house. "When I saw it was burning, I dug this up."

They ran outside. From the roof, at the boundary between the brick building and the old wooden house, great billows of smoke were already pouring out. The first flames could be seen. They had also been noticed from the nearby Róża, so someone was just then running to the telephone available there to call for help. Jadwiga stood motionless for a moment, clutching in her hands the rescued little casket that contained the whole material future of the family. For a moment she looked with admiration at her son, who, in her mind, had saved what she had been gathering for years. She did not know how deeply she failed to appreciate that day, that moment. She did not know how profoundly that son, admired by her perhaps for the only time in his life, had changed the future fate of the family that day.

The house was not badly destroyed. The firefighters who arrived on the scene managed to put it out rather quickly, but the family did not decide to remain in it. Living in the summer house gave them an opportunity to alarm the offices and demand the apartment in a block of flats for which they had all waited so many years. The fire was investigated by the fire brigade, by the electric company, and also by the militia. The first considered an electrical short circuit the probable cause, since the fire had broken out right beside the wires protruding from the wall, while the second blamed a lightning strike. The militia, though for a moment it suspected the teenager of setting the house on fire while secretly smoking cigarettes, quickly abandoned that idea. He had to be innocent. He answered every question so well... As the officer was leaving, he said casually,

"You had some luck, kid. A fire, and you just happened to be nearby—and those savings rescued, too..."

Piotr only shrugged.

"Yes, I was lucky," he answered quietly, and there was no joy in his voice, only a strange, long-awaited relief. The investigation was discontinued.

Autumn was coming, and the family with two children remained without a roof over their heads. The housing cooperative in Nowy Dwór, despite declaring its good will, had no apartments ready for occupancy.

The situation seemed hopeless, and all hopes vain.

"We have an apartment!" Adam shouted, returning from Warsaw. "I arranged it," he added with joy.

His wife, not really believing that her husband could arrange anything at all, must have had a poor expression on her face, because instead of bursting into joy, she began asking for details in disbelief.

"I went to the Party."

"Where?"

"To the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party in Warsaw."

"They let you in there? To see whom?"

"They let me in. I don't know who it was. I went in, told him everything, and he asked me whether I belonged to the Party. I answered that I did not, but asked if that meant they would not help me. And he said no, absolutely not, that it made no difference and of course they would help. And then he picked up the telephone right away and called somewhere. Later he told me that in Nowy Dwór they had no apartments, but we could get one in Legionowo. We were to go to the cooperative and take care of everything. Everything, because we had to transfer from one cooperative to the other," Adam recounted chaotically, while Jadwiga still did not know whether to believe her own ears. It had come so suddenly and so unexpectedly.

The next events moved at lightning speed. On an October forenoon, taking with them nothing but a handful of clothes, the whole family set out.

Piotr stood for a moment leaning against the frame of the emptied house. In the air still hung the smell of damp autumn leaves lying underfoot, a smell he knew so well from previous years. From beyond the fence Ewa looked out; in her eyes appeared the same bewilderment he himself was feeling.

"Will you come back?" she called, but he only nodded, unable to speak.

On the plot there remained only the lonely hens, fed in the evenings by the neighbor. Szczypiorno remained behind them—not as a burned house, but as a childhood that could not be loaded onto a trailer.