Books

from Chapter 1. The Book of Sacrifice

It was at the time when my grandfather, brushing himself off from stacks of crisp collards, began going to Harm’s Den more frequently. Every morning, waking angry and disheveled, he would massage the throb of his clotted veins, pour a ladleful of icy water over his head, and, with a frenetic edginess that wasn’t like him, begin bustling around the goats, geese, and piles of damp feathers. With each day he seemed to shrink, his skin sagging, as if the summer, almost gone now, was abandoning him for good, leaving behind the usual: an empty, soured husk and black tunnels of memory, which he tried to stuff with anything that came to hand as he rummaged frenziedly in the chaff piles. From day to day his eyes whitened, like those of a distracted hen at first, until one night they collapsed altogether, sending me, horrified, into a spell of exhausting nightmares. At that time I used to sleep on top of the oven or with my grandmother, nestled into her warm, plump thighs, always waking her and upsetting her sleep with my excursions to the chilly outhouse to force the last drops of milk out before midnight. Then my grandfather began his somnambulic dances with the candle. In those days the drunken half-turns and about-faces – upon which my grandmother and I, well accustomed to them, would usually look with slight mocking – gained momentum: a starfish of fiery glow, my grandfather would end up chasing himself, spinning like a top, doubling and redoubling, dissolving in reflexes, until, swallowed up, he vanished from our sight. My grandmother would get up a little later, and even though, searching for some explanation and a bit of comfort, I gazed pleadingly into her eyes, cast down on a bowlful of sour barley soup, her silence only deepened.

It hadn’t yet got cold enough for grandfather to start burning wood in the stove, but the woodshed was already filled to the brim with colossal logs, their different cross-sections on display. He and the Constable had been bringing them there all summer. Stacked into a pyramid, at night the logs would whine softly, and mornings my grandfather, as if out of malice, would tug branches from out the middle, until the whole load came crashing down into mounds of sawdust that rose, sparkling, calf-high. My grandmother and I would wake screaming, and when we met grandfather, now returned from the barn, over a morning mug of milk, we saw that, in spite of all that commotion, he hadn’t salvaged the lost thoughts which, not so long before, had allowed him to run big things.

It was just then, as I sat on a low stool out on the porch, leaning over a small bucket into which I flipped potato peelings with my thumb, that I saw in my grandfather someone I didn’t recognize. It was the way he slipped through the door – his step brisk, timid – all covered in gore, gazing somewhere far beyond the orchard. Resting on his shoulders was the axe, and fresh blood was trickling over his hands, between his fingers, seeping down his swarthy, balled-up muscles onto his trouser legs, hardening in the folds of his rolled cuffs. Without telling me, my grandmother, or even the Constable, he decided – before winter, or perhaps eternity, set in – to slaughter all the gabbling gaggle. From that day on, a delta of pungent blood coursed the farmyard, oozing through slits in the wooden poles, down furrows in the heated-up earth, to mix with kitchen scum and set under the fence into berry-black ponds, with sun-bleached white worms lazing at the edges.

I looked on in astonishment as my grandmother, wont to shout and bang the table with her fist during grandfather’s bouts of madness, now only sat in the hall with her back turned, until the dark stripped her of her right to existence. Nor did the following days bring any change. At that time we had thirty-four hens, a few more geese, not quite as many ducks. Plucking the feathers off one goose took up at least an hour, and I know this because ever since I learned to peel potatoes to a thinness almost translucent, my grandfather began bringing me along for that stern butchery.

I slid into the stifling gully of the barn, caught at one of the long wooden joints, set the right-hand door ajar, and for the first time watched up close how grandfather rounded up the terrified geese in a corner of the yard, brought his chosen prey down with the rake, grabbed its legs with his right hand and the beak with his left, strode up to the blood-blackened oak stump, placed the swanlike neck on its edge, and ordered me with his unseeing eyes to grip the handle. Rearing his head up to the sky, he half-closed his eyes and waited for me to do what had to be done, because from now on that part of the job would fall to me.

The axe, heavy with July rainwater, bent my joints the wrong way. Taking a deep breath, I heaved it up above my chin, but, too weak to master its trajectory, I let it drop straight on the ruffled neck, which spouted thin blood like a geyser into our faces. Grandfather opened his eyes, pushed me aside so hard that I tripped on a fodder trough and fell right under a bleating goat’s teat, while he grunted, scornful, and with gritted teeth, lifted the axe, blotting out the sun, and slammed it so hard on the surviving tendons that the goose head rolled all the way into a curled loop of wood shavings. He brought the trunk – hung by the feet, neck down – over to a high well brickwork to let the blood run out, and hurled the quivering carcass into a huge wicker basket.

An hour, I’ve said. Yes, we would sit down facing each other at a tall table bristling with nails as our thoughts delved in the essence of anserine non-being. Sometimes grandfather would leave me on my own, going out to the kitchen to take the whistling teapot off the stove or to soak the feathers, hard as a stirrup. At first he had me holding the goose, clotted gullet down, while he doused all of the carcass with boiling water, which seeped into the most secret recesses of the thighs, wings, and the bristly crotch. He would put away the empty bucket, take the scalded piece from me, toss it onto the greasy tabletop, and once again sink into the timelessness of feather-plucking. An hour – but with two of us at it. Because each took up his chosen portion, took it as a point of honor to be quicker than his rival to glance, underneath the plumage, the pink, lumpy skin, and the eyes would stint on blinking to keep up with the fiendish hand gymnastics. I would get sleepy. Taking advantage of our distraction, the world around us dissolved into a liquid mosaic: objects broke loose from the eye’s leash, numb fingers scrabbled mechanically in the fuzz, and then, all of a sudden, grandfather would wake me, roguishly flipping the goose bulk upside down.

Translated by Krzysztof Majer