Dukla Read online

  He was about to toss his cigarette away and go back home when he heard something. Air was moving across the tops of the trees like a huge black kite. The branches tore open the taut covering and from its far side, somewhere by the narrow ravine or the top of the mountain, came scattered sounds. As if from over there, from under the sky, from the heart of the gloom, a frolicking band of children had run up with their calls and shouts and Indian war whoops. The sheet of the wind undulated, stretched, and all at once began to close up like a roller blind. He was left in a total vacuum. The air rushed off that way, reaching the mountaintop. He knew it from the heavy rumbling in the ancient beech trees there. A flurry ran across the crest and in a moment of stillness he heard a woman’s piercing, hysterical laugh, which, as it reached its highest note, turned into a sob. Then other, similar voices joined in, and it was only the next blast of cold air that drove the stolen echo into the depths of the night. He flicked his cigarette butt away. The red spark vanished at once. He couldn’t tell if it had fallen into the snow or if a gust had swept it out of sight.

  At moments the wind lifted up from the earth, passing over the peaks of the mountains, high up and far away, and the roar never died down even for a moment, as if over there, at the invisible frontier of the sky, a waterfall had opened up—as if, in the new Flood, air would take the place of water.

  Then he heard it again. A lot closer. About halfway down the mountainside. It was like a pack of dogs short of breath—that was what he thought to himself. Dogs whose barking had been thrust back down their throats by the wind, so the only sound they could make was a shrill, intermittent yelping. Dogs that were unable to bark. Then he heard one more sound and felt his skin crawl.

  *

  The next day he went there. The wind had stopped. The snow and mist had the color of milky glass. The trees looked like a detailed drawing on which water had been spilled. The blood had darkened already, but when he swept a little snow aside with the toe of his boot, he saw that underneath it was bright and live. He looked around. A broad, empty stretch of ground separated him from the woods. He thought to himself, come on, it’s daytime, but he couldn’t overcome his unease. He studied the tracks. This was where the animal had fallen, but it had still had the strength to get back up and keep running away. The marks of wolf paws were distinct. Tufts of dark brown fur with a gray underside had been left in the disturbed snow. The crows led the way from there.

  It was a young doe. It looked like a discarded bundle of sticks and dirty rags. He found pulled-off bones with the remains of flesh still on them. The wolves had each taken their own share, gone off a little higher up, and eaten at a safe distance from one another, in a wide semicircle around their main course. Then they’d descended, taken another portion, and returned to their places. It had probably lasted till morning.

  Now everything was so still it was as if nothing would ever happen here again. He thought about the nighttime commotion and remembered all those parties where people speak in raised voices, talking on top of one another, their hands occupied with gestures and silverware, and it’s only the ironic light of dawn that brings calm.

  He went back down. That was all the crows were waiting for.

  CRAYFISH

  The fish were dead already. The water had disappeared. The sky had burned itself a mirror in which it had been reflected for the last month. The bright, wan fire had reached the stones. It looked like a road made of white bones, something like that. The way wound across a ruddy-colored meadow, deep and absurdly convoluted, filled with the buzzing of flies. The willow green and ink-black insects had the hardness of metal, the mobility and gleam of mercury. Everything else—the air, the woods on the hillside, the buzzard circling around the sun—was motionless.

  We walked up the creek. The rounded rocks gave out a wooden thud when they were kicked. The short sound started up, rose into the air, and immediately ceased. A dozen or so alders grew in a bend by the crag. In the place where the current had once dropped down a series of steps, there was silence. The puddles had the color of dirty bottle glass. Kamil said a beer would be good, and I answered that it’d be better to wait till evening, because it was pointless to drink and drink like that.

  Then we saw them. Just the eyes. The round brown beads still retained their shine. The rest of their bodies had already come to resemble minerals. Their exoskeletons were covered with drying mud. They moved sluggishly, they didn’t so much as try to get away. They simply retreated among the rocks, pulling their pincers behind them. A low scraping noise could be heard. They moved like weakened mechanisms, like wound-up toys about to fall still. Some were already motionless, like the rest of the river.

  We went home. We took a child’s pink toy pail. An open Gazik jeep drove down the road. The firefighters wore dark glasses and were naked to the waist. “A patrol,” I said. “Right,” answered Kamil, and we entered the cloud of hot dust from the car.

  They didn’t put up any resistance. We took them in our hands. They moved their pincers. They cut the dense, stinking air at an infinitely slow tempo. We threw them into the pail. They made a grating noise like a handful of pebbles. The dried-up creek entered a larger one that was still flowing. We went there. The water was cold and clear. Small trout were twisting in patches of sunlight. We dropped the crayfish in one by one. The small ones swam away at once, the larger ones sank slowly, their limbs spread wide, and came to rest without moving on the bottom. They became less gray. Now they resembled those kinds of shalelike stones that acquire a vivid, greenish color when you immerse them in water. Red showed through at their bent joints. They crawled slowly, stunned by the sudden chill; they paused, moved on, and eventually disappeared in the tangle of roots hanging from the bank. We went to get more, and then one more time again. On the way we found a slow worm. It was flat and stiff, completely dry. We picked out anything that moved. Even the tiny little ones no bigger than grasshoppers.

  In the evening we went for that beer. The sun was done for the day and had gone behind the mountain, leaving strips of red like scraps of meat in the sky. The firefighters were also drinking.

  Later, the other creek dried up too.

  BIRDS

  In winter no one walked that road.

  January was sunny and almost snowless. We were plodding along up to our ankles and Wasyl said, “Look at them all in a huddle.”

  Before we reached them they flew off. Crows, white-beaked rooks, ravens, chattering jays, and jays with their wings touched with pale blue.

  And some smaller kinds. In the place they took off from we found a deer.

  In place of its eyes it had red cavities in a smooth white frame of bone.

  Wasyl looked for the wound that had killed it, but the skin was torn in many places. Tufts of drab fur were scattered here and there.

  “Maybe it dropped dead, maybe it was shot,” he said, and we walked back.

  *

  A week later we returned to the same place. From far off you could hear the warning screech of the magpies. Last to fly off was a raven. We heard the air whistle between its flight feathers.

  The deer had become a complex white structure. Its ribs spanned an empty place and resembled beams, the rafters of some hall or hangar. I thought of the pavilions at the World’s Fair, perhaps the one in Osaka, or somewhere else. There was no trace of flesh, no trace of blood, just clumps of hair blown by the wind to the edge of the undergrowth a few yards away. Dry thistles decorated with brown and white fluff.

  “Look,” said Wasyl, kicking at the snow around the skeleton. His boot slipped on the solid white shell. Birds’ feet had trampled the powdery snow like a threshing floor, into white rock. Even inside, under the tent of bones, it was hard and glistening. Skeleton and snow had fused into a single whole. In a nearby grove of young pines the crows and magpies flapped from branch to branch, waiting for us to be done marveling at th
eir weight.

  STORKS

  They appeared at the beginning of April, when frogs were already starting to teem in the stagnant ponds. The dusk had been mild, wisps of cloud speeding southward. The weather turned in the night.

  In the morning almost a hundred of them had gathered. In the gray sleet they looked like remnants of snow, they could barely be told apart from the patches of dirty white that lingered in ditches and under bushes. They stood motionless, given away only by the red of their bills and legs. Moisture was freezing on the bare branches. The tiniest blade of grass was encased in a little sheath of ice. From time to time one of the birds would spread its wings. I couldn’t hear it, but the awkward flapping must have been accompanied by a crunching sound. The hardiest of them wandered toward puddles. They shuffled about on the ice. The half-asleep frogs were less than an inch away.

  By evening nothing had changed. The wind brought alternating waves of snow and drizzle.

  The next day it was even colder. That kind of wind in winter always brings a snowstorm. From time to time the towering ring of clouds cracked open from end to end, and for a moment there appeared blue sky or a glint of sun; then darkness set in again.

  The strongest ones tried to fly, making a long run-up and an unnaturally quick ascent into the wind, then dropped immediately, like failed paper airplanes. When the gale eased a little, they would shift a couple hundred yards farther on, then settle amid equally frozen pools of water. And though there were alder thickets close by, not one of them took shelter there.

  At dawn on the third day the wind died down and the sun came out. I didn’t see them fly away. One was left behind. It looked like an overturned plaything.

  GREEN LACEWINGS

  “My mother used to call them ‘glass bugs,’ ” said Wieś, blowing the insect from his hand.

  We would come across them from time to time over the summer. They possessed a beauty rare among the hymenopterans. Their transparent wings were a delicate yet at the same time vivid shade of green. Their eyes were not at all golden, despite their Polish name of złotook or “gold-eye.” Rather, they looked like flecks of copper, or the eyes of lizards. In full sunlight, the juxtaposition of the two colors created an impression of extraordinary purity: metal, precious stone, and light. The glare passed through them; they barely cast any shadow.

  As they crawled across the table they tested the way with their curving feelers. Most of all they liked scattered sugar granules. Perhaps they were attracted to forms resembling their own.

  As autumn progressed they began to gather in the house. At that time it turned out that, as well as belonging to the mineral realm, there was also something about them that linked them to the world of plants. As there was less and less sunlight, the green of their wings began to fade. By November they looked like a precision drawing made with the finest pencil.

  In the evenings, when we lit candles, these scarcely visible sketches would flutter from dark corners, from crevices in the wooden walls, and speed toward the flames, till in a final flare even their outline was lost.

  THE SWALLOWS

  At the beginning of September everything changed. It was exactly as if the sky had an inside. Early one morning the blue burst and released a wind mixed with an icy downpour.

  It was perfect weather for vodka. The house shook from the gusts, the roof trusses creaked like the hull of a sailing ship. We rocked to and fro, it took great effort not to spill even a drop from the tiny brimming glass. We drank to the cold and to the wind.

  From the north came drops of rain like drab threads; they vanished somewhere to the south without touching the ground at all. In this dull-colored blizzard all shapes disappeared. The woods and the river could be told by the increasing roar. But it was quite possible they’d both been swept away and were hurtling somewhere across the world, tangled in a ball.

  “Like it was let off its leash,” said Wieś. He probably meant the air.

  The next day the swallows appeared. They were always there and so we paid no attention to them. But their numbers . . . Two, three, ten times as many as usual. They flew ponderously just above the ground, like they were trying to avoid the wind, to escape from it, hide. Some of them hung beneath the eaves, their claws latched to the wall. That was the only dry place.

  The following morning we found their dead bodies. They weighed next to nothing. It was then we understood how much strength a bundle of feathers like that has to have to ride out a gale.

  The rain didn’t ease up even for a moment.

  In the afternoon we cracked open a window. Five swallows flew into the house. They settled on the stove, close to the ceiling. We were able to take them in the palms of our hands. They made no attempt to fly away. The tiny drumbeat of their hearts was unimaginably fast.

  The next morning was sunny. We let the birds out. We gathered the dead bodies scattered around the outside of the house. When the fire was going, we put them gently into the stove.

  THE RIVER

  We were exhausted. Animals and humans. The heat wave had gone on for two months. July and August melted into a liquid double month, while we floundered in that interminably long, torrid time like flies in a jar of honey. The sun would disappear over the horizon, yet its swelter lingered till dawn. It was extinguished only by the dew that came down an hour before sunrise.

  We tried to drink beer, but it refreshed only for a brief, sickly moment, then plunged us back into lethargy.

  “Goddamn metabolism,” Wieś would say, and shake his head to another bottle. We would go back home along the bank of the river, which with every day looked more and more like a road paved with white rocks. No birds could be heard in the bushes. Discolored yellowhammers stirred little clouds of dust on the path. The distant trees, the bluffs, and the great stone cross on the hill took on a supernatural distinctness. The transparency of the air increased the dimensions of the world, but our gaze, whetted on the sharply defined edges of objects, still seemed to retain complete control over it. And then there were the insects. Despite the windless weather the air quivered constantly. Green and blue dragonflies, wasps and hornets, bumblebees and damselflies infused the motionless landscape with an imperceptible, oppressive resonance.

  In the bleached grass we would find torpid frogs. Their gold-tinted pupils were glazed, their skin had lost its luster. Soon we began to step on their bodies. Swollen and dry, they made a noise like little boxes of thin, stiff cardboard.

  One day—it would have been early afternoon, since we were on our way back from our single beer—we saw that the river had disappeared. “Look,” said Wieś, and we immediately left the path. The riverbed looked like a white scar. Flies stirred amid the burning hot rocks. We smelled the stench of rotting fish. The last live ones were writhing in muddy pools. The sky had the look of hard, pale blue porcelain.

  Nothing disturbed the cruelty of that moment.

  RAIN

  At five in the morning it started raining again. The first drops hit the rocks with the soft sound of bursting flesh. The glare of dawn was still glowing over the black rim of the mountain and the downpour was filled with silvery light. But it only lasted a moment. The covering of cloud moved along soundlessly, its woolly edge could be seen from below, then things went back to normal. For weeks now we’d been in a strange world where light had no strength. It lurked in corners, tried to detach itself from the surface of things, but it was as if objects were magnetized. They’d not only absorbed the glare; they themselves were also slowly disappearing, shrinking, collapsing in on themselves. In the middle of the day you had to light a lamp in order to find them.

  We watched the gray comb of the drizzle grooming the bushes. The tall grasses lay down on their sides, while the water seeped between the blades into spongy earth, murmuring in the tunnels of insects and mice, finding its way to underground lakes that swelled and rose with ev
ery day. Dark mirrors began to shine on the flat meadows. But they reflected nothing. Every last shard of glow had gone from the air. True, the landscape was still in place, but its colors had all grown more alike, and the whole world was now somewhere between black and leaden green.

  We were slowly disappearing too. Cigarettes, one coffee after another—nothing did any good. Our blood had been thinned. It flowed ever more slowly. One day I cut my finger, and what came out was a transparent liquid like the sap of a plant. After all, people are made up mostly of water, and two weeks of rain are enough for their bodies to turn back into what they used to be at the beginning. Watery dust, mist, and drizzle had soaked through the skin and remained inside. Even vodka, usually volatile and hot, now burned up in the veins with a sorry hiss: the glass was like a damp match, and that was that.

  In the short moments at dawn or before sunset when the sky brightened, the light took on a sickly intensity. At these times it expanded abruptly and sought release. A rumbling and whistling could be heard, and the tattered edges of the clouds glowed orange. But it only ever lasted a moment, then the murmuring, sodden gloom set in once again.

  One day the mailman came in a waterproof overcoat. The envelopes were limp as wet handkerchiefs. “Everything’s damp,” he said. “It’s wet when it gets to us.” Nothing was legible. The words must have melted away even before they were written. At that point we lost whatever hope we still had.

  END OF SEPTEMBER

  Once through the gate you turn right. The village lane is narrow, it runs along the bank of the creek. After the rains the water has the color of lusterless emerald with an undertone of silt. The houses are mostly wooden, from before the war. They have glassed-in verandas. When someone slams a door, the small rectangular panes rattle like in an old dresser. Footbridges hidden in the bushes lead to the houses on the other side of the creek. In gaps between the tall trees you can see the mountains. Their distant, essentially decorative presence gives the lane something of the look of a resort or a fairy tale. At the end there’s a preschool. That’s why you mostly meet children there, and a black-and-white dog. On sunny days the place is mostly plunged in shade interspersed with a trembling greenish glow in which a golden light is diluted as if in water, and at such moments the air becomes visible. The borderline where the atmosphere meets people and objects is softened. It’s like an innocent attempt at proving the primal unity of all things.