CROSSING THE ZBRUCZ

The sixth division commander reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn. The staff has moved out of Krapivno and our transport sprawls in a noisy rearguard along the highway that runs from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of peasant men by Nicholas the First.

Fields of scarlet poppies blossom around us, a midday breeze plays in the yellowing rye, and virgin buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn bends. Volyn recedes from us into the pearly mist of birch groves and creeps into the flowery hills, its feeble arms getting tangled in thickets of hops. An orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head, a gentle light glitters in the ravines of clouds, and the banners of sunset flutter over our heads. The scent of yesterday's blood and dead horses seeps into the evening coolness. The blackened Zbrucz roars, twisting the foamy knots of its rapids. The bridges are destroyed and we are fording the river. A stately moon lies on the waves. The horses sink up to their backs and sonorous streams trickle between hundreds of horses' legs. Someone is drowning, loudly disparaging the Mother of God. The river is strewn with the black squares of carts, filled with rumbling, whistling, and songs that thunder over snakes of moonlight and glistening pits.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In my assigned billet I find a pregnant woman, along with two red-haired, thin-necked Jews; a third Jew is sleeping, huddled up against the wall with the blanket over his head. In my assigned room I find two ransacked wardrobes, scraps of women's fur coats on the floor, human excrement and shards of the sacred plate that Jews use once a year—on Passover.

"Clean this up," I say to the woman. "You live in filth, hosts ..."

The two Jews spring into action. They jump around on felt soles, picking debris off the floor. They jump silently, monkey-like, like a Japanese circus act, their necks swelling and swivelling. They spread a torn feather mattress on the floor and I lie down, facing the wall, next to the third, sleeping Jew. Fearful poverty closes in above my bed.

Silence has killed everything off, and only the moon, with its blue hands clasping its round, sparkling, carefree head, tramps about under the window.

I stretch my numbed legs. I lie on the torn feather mattress and fall asleep. I dream of the Sixth Division commander. He's chasing the brigade commander on a heavy stallion and plants two bullets in his eyes. The bullets pierce the brigade commander's head, and both his eyes fall to the ground.

"Why'd you turn the brigade back?" Savitsky, the Sixth Division commander, shouts at the wounded man—and here I wake up, because the pregnant woman's fingers are fumbling over my face.

"Pan," she says to me. "You're screaming in your sleep, thrashing around. I'll make your bed in the other corner, because you're shoving my papa ..."

She raises her skinny legs and round belly off the floor and removes the blanket from the huddled sleeper. It's a dead old man, flat on his back. His gullet is ripped out, his face is hacked in two, and blue blood sits in his beard like a hunk of lead.

"Pan," says the Jewess, giving the feather mattress a shake. "The Poles were slashing him and he kept begging them, 'Kill me in the back yard so my daughter doesn't see me die.' But they did it their way—he died in this room, thinking of me. And now you tell me," the woman said suddenly with terrible force, "you tell me where else in this whole world you'll find a father like my father ..."

Novograd-Volynsk, July 1920

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN NOVOGRAD

Yesterday I took a report to the military commissar, who was staying at the house of a priest who had run off. In the kitchen I met Pani Eliza, the Jesuit's housekeeper. She gave me amber tea with biscuits. Her biscuits smelt like the crucifixion. They contained the sly sap and sweet-scented fury of the Vatican.

The bells in the church next door were roaring, set into motion by the maddened ringer. The evening was full of midsummer stars. Pani Eliza, shaking her attentive grey tresses, kept slipping me biscuits, and I took pleasure in the Jesuit food.

The old Polish woman called me "Pan", grey old men with ossified ears stood to attention near the threshold, and somewhere in the serpentine twilight a monk's cassock was fluttering. The pater ran off, but he left his assistant—Pan Romuald.

A snuffling eunuch with the body of a giant, Romuald addressed us respectfully, as "comrades". He'd draw a yellow finger across the map, tracing the circles of the Polish rout. Overcome with raspy enthusiasm, he'd recount his fatherland's wounds. Let gentle oblivion engulf all memory of Romuald, who betrayed us without pity and was shot dead in passing. But that evening his narrow cassock flitted at every door-curtain, furiously sweeping all the roads and grinning at anyone who wanted vodka. That evening the monk's shadow tailed me relentlessly. He would have made bishop, Pan Romuald—if he hadn't been a spy.

I was drinking rum with him. The spirit of a mysterious way of life still flickered beneath the ruins of the priest's house, and its insidious temptations weakened me. O crucifixes as tiny as a courtesan's amulets, the parchment of papal bulls, and the satin of women's letters worn thin in the blue silk of waistcoats! ...

I can see you from here, faithless monk in a lilac robe—your hands swollen, your soul as tender and pitiless as the soul of a cat; I see the wounds of your God, oozing seed, a sweet-smelling poison that intoxicates virgins.

We were drinking rum, waiting for the military commissar to return from headquarters, but he wouldn't show. Romuald dropped down in a corner and fell asleep. He sleeps and trembles, and outside the window the garden path shimmers beneath the black passion of the sky. Thirsty roses sway in the darkness. Bursts of green lightning flare in the church's domes. A naked corpse sprawls at the foot of the slope. Moonbeams stream across the dead legs jutting wide apart.

There's your Poland, there's the haughty grief of the Commonwealth! A violent intruder, I spread a louse-ridden mattress in a temple abandoned by the clergyman and rest my head on folios full of...