The Graveyard by Marek Hlasko

Author:Marek Hlasko [Hlasko, Marek]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Literary Collections, European, Eastern, Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781612192956
Google: LI8ddfNy-PAC
Goodreads: 17704708
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 1975-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

IX

HE WAS WIFELESS; HIS WIFE HAD DIED A FEW weeks after the end of hostilities; though of poor health, she had managed to stay alive until his return from the woods. He lived with his son and daughter. His son’s name was Mikołaj, his daughter’s Elzbieta. Mikołaj, a magnificently handsome boy, was twenty-four; Elzbieta was younger. They occupied two small rooms in a new housing project. The day after the meeting, when Franciszek came home, he found his daughter with her fiancé, Roman. They attended the same courses, and planned to marry immediately after getting their degrees. Both looked happy.

“Got something for supper?” Franciszek asked. He stood in the middle of the room without removing his overcoat and hat.

“I’ll warm up something for you,” Elzbieta said. She rose. She was tall, towheaded, attractive. Franciszek’s heart sometimes tightened when he looked at her: he had the feeling that he was seeing the woman with whom he had lived his happiest moments twenty years earlier. No one could have discovered any difference between Elzbieta and her mother; both were the image of health, though both spent their time complaining. “I’ll warm the macaroni for you,” Elzbieta said. “I can make you an omelet too.” She went to the kitchen. Franciszek sat down stiffly on a chair.

“Well, Pop,” said Roman, a black-haired, swarthy boy with fiery eyes, “what’s the matter? Troubles?” Roman called Franciszek “little father-in-law,” “old man,” or “Pop.” The dry and forbidding Franciszek forgave him much for the sake of his daughter’s love-drenched eyes.

“Everybody has troubles,” he said, and broke off, crushed by the stupidity of his own words.

“Clever observation,” Roman said. “Elzbieta and I got drunk today.”

Franciszek started. “Really?”

“Really. We drank a bottle of wine after passing our exams. Ha-ha-ha.”

Franciszek sighed with relief. “Thank God.”

“What?”

“Thank God.”

“A metaphysical notion. You surely know, Pop, that religion is opium for the masses. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And who said it?”

“I’m tired,” Franciszek said gently. “Let me alone, Romek.”

“You just don’t remember. That’s bad, bad. Once your memory begins to fail, you can make all sorts of blunders. Lenin wrote brilliantly about memory. It’s in a letter to a friend, saying he needed money for an abortion.”

Franciszek opened his eyes wide. “Roman, what are you talking about? Where did he write that?”

Roman expressed surprise. “Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

“Come, come.”

“Really, I don’t.”

Roman wrung his hands. “Why, that’s impossible.”

“My word of honor.”

Roman laughed triumphantly. “Of course it’s not true,” he said. “I just wanted to see whether you’d be taken in by such rot.”

He went on talking, very fast and loud, emphatically and stiffly—he was active in student party affairs, and when he spoke to one man it was as if addressing millions. The shadows cast by his vigorous gestures ran back and forth across the ceiling. Franciszek did not hear him; he looked at him with half-closed eyes, and although Elzbieta was not in the room, he saw her pure and austere face beside Roman’s. “So that’s how it is,” he thought. “This little black beetle, and you—so clear and pure.

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