Not more than once a month my granduncle catches a chicken, puts its neck on a wood chopping block, and cuts its head off with an ax. Because the chicken is thrashing wildly, he releases it, so as not to be splashed with blood. The chicken runs for a few seconds, blood gushing out of the place where its head used to be, and then collapses. The family will enjoy chicken soup with homemade kluski.
Other than that, and the small fish we catch in the river, no meat is consumed during summer months, despite the extra energy needed for all the field work at harvest time. We have refrigerators in the city, but this invention has not reached the countryside yet. Besides, one would need a few of those just to store the meat from one pig. Chickens are in their egg-laying period, so not many are available for turning into meals. (The male chickens are at a clear disadvantage here, but their numbers are limited.)
Fall and winter are when almost all the butchering happens. I had a bout of jaundice, thanks to a teenager who ran me over with his bicycle, damaging my liver; I have been released from the hospital and can't go to school yet, so my grandma takes me along on her trip to Regów Stary to buy some meat and sausage. That meat and sausage are still inside a large and very much alive swine, so we have to wait a few days, but when the day arrives I'm allowed to watch.
My granduncle bestrides the pig. With another farmer holding the animal firmly by its leathery tail, he places a crushing blow to its skull with the blunt end of an ax. The animal's front legs fold and it kneels down squealing, at which point a large, broad knife is plunged into its neck from the side. Blood gushes out and collects in a metal basin placed underneath. It won't be wasted - it will be used to make kaszanka, a kind of sausage made of buckwheat, ground liver, and blood. I will watch my cousin stir the blood in the basin with his bare hand - red, steaming liquid reaching above his wrist - to prevent clotting.
I'm repulsed and horrified, but also very curious, so I will watch this to the end. A shiver runs through the pig's body and then the creature is still. It is hoisted by its hind legs with a rope and pulley. Boiling hot water is poured over its body, and the skin is shaved with a sharp knife to remove bristles and dirt. The belly is sliced open, and colorful, glistening innards spill out. Most will be consumed, or used up. (The intestines will become sausage casings, for example.) Only very few parts will be thrown away or given to dogs: skull, bones, testicles, penis, anus...
The disemboweled carcass will hang in the stall overnight, then be carved up into quarters. The remaining pigs seem subdued, skittish. I wonder if the fear of death was passed on to them from their butchered cousin. Or if they mourn him. I feel sorry that the pig's life ended in such violence, but I do not like pigs that much, and I can appreciate that there was no cruelty, nobody seemed to enjoy the killing itself. It was just another farm chore, like harvesting wheat or nailing shoes to the hooves of horses.
Yet I will look at my village cousins differently from that day on. I ask myself whether slaughtering pigs, and sheep, and calves makes one capable of killing fellow humans. The answer I seem to find in my own mind is "yes", so I'm a bit more fearful. I imagine that this ax may be wedged in my skull one day, so I need to be careful with what I say and do. Ironically, a few years later I'm teasing one of those cousins (Witek) about something. As he gets more and more angry I flee, laughing, from the wood-chopping place by the barn, where we have been talking. From the corner of my eye I see an ax flying by, a few inches from my head.
Showing posts with label village life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label village life. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Chapter 7
It is summer, so I'll be accompanying my grandmother to her village. She goes there every year - the only one of three sisters who had left the farm. Perhaps out of the obligation to her aging parents, or to help her younger brother establish his footing in farming. Or simply because, having no job in the city, she has nothing better to do.
It is only 100 kilometers, as the crow flies, from Warsaw, but it is quite a trek, requiring at least half a day. First we take a tram to the train station, which is quite a distance from the tramway stop. After two hours on the train we arrive in the city of Dęblin, where we carry our heavy suitcases a mile or so to the bus station. There we wait for the bus to the town of Gniewoszów. May be an hour or more of waiting, but there is a tiny kiosk right by the station, selling newspapers, cigarettes, candy, soap, batteries, postcards, etc. It is where my grandma's sister work, and, if we're lucky, it will be her shift, so she will let me sit inside, watch her interact with customers, and even pass on to her packs of cigarettes from the shelf behind. It is a great way to kill time. I think I want to have my own store when I grow up.
From Gniewoszów, a tiny town that used to be a Jewish shtetl before the war, we have to walk a few miles to Regów Stary, the village where Babcia Bronia grew up. It's a scenic walk, along a dirt road with giant puddles after a rain, bordered by willow trees and fields on the one side, and a tall, grassy dike on the other. The village - and other around it - lies on the floodplain of the Vistula river, and the extensive system of dikes, two or three meters high in most places and several meters wide at the base, is the only thing that stands between the river, swollen with melted snow in springtime, and the hundreds of farms eking out meager existence along its banks.
Soviet-style collectivization never took hold in Poland. Perhaps because, by the time Poland became a Soviet satellite after the war, it was already pretty clear what a disaster that had been in the Soviet Union itself, resulting in terrible famines that took the lives of millions of peasants, while failing to make Soviet agriculture efficient enough to feed the rapidly industrializing state. Perhaps because Poles were reluctant to embrace the ideals of communism, so the newly setup puppet government felt is had to strike a delicate balance between appeasing Stalin and avoiding popular uprising, what with many resistance groups refusing to disarm after the war and making trouble in forests and villages.
There were, of course, attempts at promoting collectivization through the establishment of PGRs (State Agrarian Enterprise, modeled after the Soviet kolchoz) on lands bought or confiscated from individual farmers, and the promotion of farming cooperatives, which farmers could join voluntarily, receiving subsidies and preferential treatment from the state. Those efforts met with indifference or hostility in Polish countryside, where land ownership was something Polish peasantry dreamed of for centuries, having had to work the fields belonging to aristocratic landowners. The communists knew that the best way of winning the staunchly religious and conservative peasants to their side was through land reform - breaking the back of the patriotic and anti-communist Polish gentry by carving their land holdings and handing parcels of 12-20 acres to the peasants. That was their trump card and they played it well. Interestingly, they did not touch the lands belonging to the catholic church - allegedly on Stalin's insistence...
As usual, we find the fenced-in area with farm buildings (house, barn, stables, pigsty, chicken coop) completely deserted, with everybody working the fields. The house is locked with a latch held by a piece of wood - not to prevent theft, since there is nothing to steal, but to keep the animals out - so we can leave our heavy luggage and go in search of them.
The family we're visiting has seven members: my great-grandparents, their son (my grandma's much younger brother), his wife, and their three kids: two boys - one slightly older, the other slightly younger than me - and the much younger girl. They share a log house; in the US it would be called a cabin: two square rooms, each with a wood-burning oven, separated by a tiny mud room and a pantry behind it. There is no plumbing or electricity - the latter will be added several years later, while plumbing will wait till a new, brick house is built in the 1980s.
My great-grandfather built that house himself, with notched logs locking into one another in the corners. Hemp fibers mixed with clay have been used to fill the cracks. Rough plaster, painted very pale aquamarine blue, covers the walls on the inside. The room my great-grand-parents occupy is very sparsely furnished: one bed with a straw-filled mattress; small wooden table; three chairs; large commode. There are two metal buckets: one with water, one with food waste (to be fed to the pigs).
There is no room for us to sleep there - Granny and I will sleep in the barn, on top of the pile of hay taller than a grown man. I'm actually relieved no to have to sleep in that house. It's the flies that bother me. They are so many, you can't chase them away. They keep landing on my face and arms, drinking my sweat. Their tiny feet seem itchy somehow. You have to watch your spoon while eating, lest you will swallow one of them caught in your soup.
Next day I will go to war with the flies. Armed with a folded newspaper I will swat at them every time they try to sit on the walls or the furniture. They are not easy to kill - many manage to fly away before the newspaper finds them - but I quickly perfect my technique and pretty soon their squashed bodies start covering the floor. I'm no longer satisfied killing singles - I pump my fist only when I get two or three at a time, a feat that becomes more difficult as their numbers dwindle. Soon there is only one or two left flying. I'm proud of myself, although I know how futile this is; once people start opening the doors, the flies will again fill the room.
My great-grandmother is not too happy with my handiwork, seeing the walls covered with bloody splotches, and dead flies covering the floor. I make a mental note to limit myself to killing only those on the furniture, where their blood and guts are less visible. And sweep the floor.
One summer we bring a can of Azotox - spray insecticide produced, incidentally, in the large chemical plant up the river. This stuff robs me of the pleasure of hunting and killing the flies, but it is remarkably effective. We close the windows and door and spray it liberally in the air. A few minutes later all the flies are dead, littering the floor, but no splotches. I ask about spraying this in the pigsty, where the dense carpet of flies covers every inch of the walls and ceiling, but receive a firm no; my great-grandparents are concerned about this poison harming their animals.
It is only 100 kilometers, as the crow flies, from Warsaw, but it is quite a trek, requiring at least half a day. First we take a tram to the train station, which is quite a distance from the tramway stop. After two hours on the train we arrive in the city of Dęblin, where we carry our heavy suitcases a mile or so to the bus station. There we wait for the bus to the town of Gniewoszów. May be an hour or more of waiting, but there is a tiny kiosk right by the station, selling newspapers, cigarettes, candy, soap, batteries, postcards, etc. It is where my grandma's sister work, and, if we're lucky, it will be her shift, so she will let me sit inside, watch her interact with customers, and even pass on to her packs of cigarettes from the shelf behind. It is a great way to kill time. I think I want to have my own store when I grow up.
From Gniewoszów, a tiny town that used to be a Jewish shtetl before the war, we have to walk a few miles to Regów Stary, the village where Babcia Bronia grew up. It's a scenic walk, along a dirt road with giant puddles after a rain, bordered by willow trees and fields on the one side, and a tall, grassy dike on the other. The village - and other around it - lies on the floodplain of the Vistula river, and the extensive system of dikes, two or three meters high in most places and several meters wide at the base, is the only thing that stands between the river, swollen with melted snow in springtime, and the hundreds of farms eking out meager existence along its banks.
Soviet-style collectivization never took hold in Poland. Perhaps because, by the time Poland became a Soviet satellite after the war, it was already pretty clear what a disaster that had been in the Soviet Union itself, resulting in terrible famines that took the lives of millions of peasants, while failing to make Soviet agriculture efficient enough to feed the rapidly industrializing state. Perhaps because Poles were reluctant to embrace the ideals of communism, so the newly setup puppet government felt is had to strike a delicate balance between appeasing Stalin and avoiding popular uprising, what with many resistance groups refusing to disarm after the war and making trouble in forests and villages.
There were, of course, attempts at promoting collectivization through the establishment of PGRs (State Agrarian Enterprise, modeled after the Soviet kolchoz) on lands bought or confiscated from individual farmers, and the promotion of farming cooperatives, which farmers could join voluntarily, receiving subsidies and preferential treatment from the state. Those efforts met with indifference or hostility in Polish countryside, where land ownership was something Polish peasantry dreamed of for centuries, having had to work the fields belonging to aristocratic landowners. The communists knew that the best way of winning the staunchly religious and conservative peasants to their side was through land reform - breaking the back of the patriotic and anti-communist Polish gentry by carving their land holdings and handing parcels of 12-20 acres to the peasants. That was their trump card and they played it well. Interestingly, they did not touch the lands belonging to the catholic church - allegedly on Stalin's insistence...
As usual, we find the fenced-in area with farm buildings (house, barn, stables, pigsty, chicken coop) completely deserted, with everybody working the fields. The house is locked with a latch held by a piece of wood - not to prevent theft, since there is nothing to steal, but to keep the animals out - so we can leave our heavy luggage and go in search of them.
The family we're visiting has seven members: my great-grandparents, their son (my grandma's much younger brother), his wife, and their three kids: two boys - one slightly older, the other slightly younger than me - and the much younger girl. They share a log house; in the US it would be called a cabin: two square rooms, each with a wood-burning oven, separated by a tiny mud room and a pantry behind it. There is no plumbing or electricity - the latter will be added several years later, while plumbing will wait till a new, brick house is built in the 1980s.
My great-grandfather built that house himself, with notched logs locking into one another in the corners. Hemp fibers mixed with clay have been used to fill the cracks. Rough plaster, painted very pale aquamarine blue, covers the walls on the inside. The room my great-grand-parents occupy is very sparsely furnished: one bed with a straw-filled mattress; small wooden table; three chairs; large commode. There are two metal buckets: one with water, one with food waste (to be fed to the pigs).
There is no room for us to sleep there - Granny and I will sleep in the barn, on top of the pile of hay taller than a grown man. I'm actually relieved no to have to sleep in that house. It's the flies that bother me. They are so many, you can't chase them away. They keep landing on my face and arms, drinking my sweat. Their tiny feet seem itchy somehow. You have to watch your spoon while eating, lest you will swallow one of them caught in your soup.
Next day I will go to war with the flies. Armed with a folded newspaper I will swat at them every time they try to sit on the walls or the furniture. They are not easy to kill - many manage to fly away before the newspaper finds them - but I quickly perfect my technique and pretty soon their squashed bodies start covering the floor. I'm no longer satisfied killing singles - I pump my fist only when I get two or three at a time, a feat that becomes more difficult as their numbers dwindle. Soon there is only one or two left flying. I'm proud of myself, although I know how futile this is; once people start opening the doors, the flies will again fill the room.
My great-grandmother is not too happy with my handiwork, seeing the walls covered with bloody splotches, and dead flies covering the floor. I make a mental note to limit myself to killing only those on the furniture, where their blood and guts are less visible. And sweep the floor.
One summer we bring a can of Azotox - spray insecticide produced, incidentally, in the large chemical plant up the river. This stuff robs me of the pleasure of hunting and killing the flies, but it is remarkably effective. We close the windows and door and spray it liberally in the air. A few minutes later all the flies are dead, littering the floor, but no splotches. I ask about spraying this in the pigsty, where the dense carpet of flies covers every inch of the walls and ceiling, but receive a firm no; my great-grandparents are concerned about this poison harming their animals.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Chapter 3
Babcia (Granny) Bronia and Dziadzio (Gramps) Miecio don't like one another very much. I sense a real antipathy there, especially coming from Grandma. She does not seem to find a nice word for her husband, only snapping at him angrily. Not that he is a terribly likable character. They both come from small villages, a few kilometers apart, in the Kielce region in southeastern Poland. They are the oldest among their siblings, and since it is the youngest who will inherit the farms, the older siblings have to scatter. The idea being, I suppose, that the kids staying on the farm will take care of the parents, and since they are younger, there is less of a chance that the parents will outlive them. That's your social security, agrarian style. In fact, it is a bit more complicated, since all the siblings have a stake in the farm, and those who stay will eventually have to purchase the shares from their older brothers and sisters.
My grandparents move to Warsaw, where my grandfather finds work as a simple laborer, and eventually gets apprenticed as an electrician. My grandmother stays home with the kids: one son, two daughters. She has no money for trams or for shoes for that matter, so she walks to her errands barefoot. That does not seem terribly out of place in the 1930's capital of Poland, where there is always an inflow of migrants from the endemically poor countryside. My grandmother is young and strong, significantly taller and, perhaps, stronger than my diminutive grandfather. She is lively and open-minded, forever regretting that she was able to get only to the fifth grade of the elementary school in the nearby town of Gniewoszów. She did not mind the daily long walks to the school - several miles each way; barefoot, of course, except in winter - but her father decided that all a peasant daughter needed was to read and write, and five grades were more than enough for that. There was plenty of work at the farm.
Farm life is tough. Girls have to take care of their younger siblings while their parents work the fields. There are cows to milk, geese to pluck, pigs to feed, meals to cook, linen to weave, floors to sweep. Work is endless and hard. Clothes get very dirty, so women take them to the river to wash. There is no detergent - the clothes soak in a caustic mixture of water and wood ash. (The best comes from a cherry tree, I am told). Washing those clothes makes your hands bleed, but the linens come out white.
This is a nearly self-sufficient way of life. Almost everything is made in the village, or the nearby town, even clothes themselves. There is no cotton, so you grow flax in a patch of perpetually moist soil. You harvest that flax by pulling the stalks out of the ground by hand, so that nothing is wasted. You dry the stalks and tie them into bundles. You soak the bundles in a pond under heavy stones. You dry them again. You pound them in a wooden, hand-powered tool to separate and soften the fibers. You comb the fibers to get rid of the short, useless ones. You spin the long fibers into yarns. You weave the yarns into a fabric. It will make tough but comfortable clothing. Unfortunately, it starts falling apart after several washings with the cherry-tree ash.
My grandmother's hands tell a story of her life. They are larger than many a man's hands, full of calluses and cracks and old scars, with stone-hard nails that are prone to driving large splinters of wood into the soft flesh underneath. Scrubbing the wooden floor with a brush and rags is the most frequent source of these splinters. My grandmother has to pull them out with pliers, sometimes asking me for help. I feel close to fainting whenever I pull out an inch-long splinter, with blood gushing afterwards, but I'm the man, I have to take this on. Plus, I'll do anything for my grandmother.
I'm not very fond of my grandfather - Dziadzio Miecio - but sometimes I feel sorry for all the anger and disdain directed at him. Those are fleeting moments, though, as he is difficult to like. He is simple and simple-minded - he speaks rarely, but when he does, his utterances are hard to parse; they don't seem to make a lot of sense. He also hasn't quite shaken off his village dialect, which makes him sound uneducated and very provincial. His only interest in life is his "działka" - a tiny parcel of fenced-in dirt on an old, drained swamp between apartment complexes. It is a 20-minute walk from his apartment and it is his own tiny paradise. It is perhaps 1,200 feet square, surrounded by hundreds of other such parcels. The swamp had been parceled-out by the city of Warsaw and given to the members of the working class through a byzantine system of awards, bribes, and nepotism. (My grandfather works for the city repairing street lights - that probably explains how his lucky number came up...)
These little parcels are a source of enormous pride for their owners, and enormous envy for many other families. Some of them, including Dziadzio Miecio, spend all their free time there, from spring till fall, including their vacations. That 20-minute walk is all it takes to transfer him from a cramped apartment where he gets no respect, to his very own Garden of Eden, where there is a cherry tree, an apricot tree, gooseberry bushes, red, white, and black currants, wild strawberries, peonies, roses, cucumbers, tomatoes, dill, chives, onions - everything but potatoes and rye. There is a little wooden hut (altanka) he had built, with a table and a metal bed. He can take a nap there, or have his friends come over and drain a bottle of vodka, each shot chased down with pieces of dark bread, słonina (bacon, but without the meat layers), and thick slices of his own tomatoes, which can grow as large as a child's head and taste like heaven.
My grandfather, having come from peasant stock, knows how to make things grow. His little garden is one of the lushest, at least among his closest neighbors. Some of the plot owners go for flowers or ornamental bushes. He, true to his roots, tries to grow everything. (Occasionally he even hides live chickens in his hut, although that is against the bylaws of the gardens.) Part of his success has its source in a big, metal drum behind the altanka - there he stores liquefied cow manure purchased from a farmer who visits the gardens twice a year, with a horse-drawn cistern full of that "black gold", which he sells by bucketfuls.
This little garden, his refuge, will be my grandfather's undoing, but that's many years away. Now, in his gruff way, he tries to entice us kids to come over, have some fresh fruits or veggies, like baby kohlrabi, or sweet peas, or the incredibly hot radishes, but we know there is price to pay. We'll have to listen to him mumble under his breath about having to do all this gardening himself, with no one helping, people just want to come and partake, take what they did not grow. Suddenly, the sweetest white currants start tasting sour. I feel guilty, so I ask how I can help, but he just shrugs and says, "Oh, just keep stuffin' ye'self. That's all you lads are good for anyway."
My grandparents move to Warsaw, where my grandfather finds work as a simple laborer, and eventually gets apprenticed as an electrician. My grandmother stays home with the kids: one son, two daughters. She has no money for trams or for shoes for that matter, so she walks to her errands barefoot. That does not seem terribly out of place in the 1930's capital of Poland, where there is always an inflow of migrants from the endemically poor countryside. My grandmother is young and strong, significantly taller and, perhaps, stronger than my diminutive grandfather. She is lively and open-minded, forever regretting that she was able to get only to the fifth grade of the elementary school in the nearby town of Gniewoszów. She did not mind the daily long walks to the school - several miles each way; barefoot, of course, except in winter - but her father decided that all a peasant daughter needed was to read and write, and five grades were more than enough for that. There was plenty of work at the farm.
Farm life is tough. Girls have to take care of their younger siblings while their parents work the fields. There are cows to milk, geese to pluck, pigs to feed, meals to cook, linen to weave, floors to sweep. Work is endless and hard. Clothes get very dirty, so women take them to the river to wash. There is no detergent - the clothes soak in a caustic mixture of water and wood ash. (The best comes from a cherry tree, I am told). Washing those clothes makes your hands bleed, but the linens come out white.
This is a nearly self-sufficient way of life. Almost everything is made in the village, or the nearby town, even clothes themselves. There is no cotton, so you grow flax in a patch of perpetually moist soil. You harvest that flax by pulling the stalks out of the ground by hand, so that nothing is wasted. You dry the stalks and tie them into bundles. You soak the bundles in a pond under heavy stones. You dry them again. You pound them in a wooden, hand-powered tool to separate and soften the fibers. You comb the fibers to get rid of the short, useless ones. You spin the long fibers into yarns. You weave the yarns into a fabric. It will make tough but comfortable clothing. Unfortunately, it starts falling apart after several washings with the cherry-tree ash.
My grandmother's hands tell a story of her life. They are larger than many a man's hands, full of calluses and cracks and old scars, with stone-hard nails that are prone to driving large splinters of wood into the soft flesh underneath. Scrubbing the wooden floor with a brush and rags is the most frequent source of these splinters. My grandmother has to pull them out with pliers, sometimes asking me for help. I feel close to fainting whenever I pull out an inch-long splinter, with blood gushing afterwards, but I'm the man, I have to take this on. Plus, I'll do anything for my grandmother.
I'm not very fond of my grandfather - Dziadzio Miecio - but sometimes I feel sorry for all the anger and disdain directed at him. Those are fleeting moments, though, as he is difficult to like. He is simple and simple-minded - he speaks rarely, but when he does, his utterances are hard to parse; they don't seem to make a lot of sense. He also hasn't quite shaken off his village dialect, which makes him sound uneducated and very provincial. His only interest in life is his "działka" - a tiny parcel of fenced-in dirt on an old, drained swamp between apartment complexes. It is a 20-minute walk from his apartment and it is his own tiny paradise. It is perhaps 1,200 feet square, surrounded by hundreds of other such parcels. The swamp had been parceled-out by the city of Warsaw and given to the members of the working class through a byzantine system of awards, bribes, and nepotism. (My grandfather works for the city repairing street lights - that probably explains how his lucky number came up...)
These little parcels are a source of enormous pride for their owners, and enormous envy for many other families. Some of them, including Dziadzio Miecio, spend all their free time there, from spring till fall, including their vacations. That 20-minute walk is all it takes to transfer him from a cramped apartment where he gets no respect, to his very own Garden of Eden, where there is a cherry tree, an apricot tree, gooseberry bushes, red, white, and black currants, wild strawberries, peonies, roses, cucumbers, tomatoes, dill, chives, onions - everything but potatoes and rye. There is a little wooden hut (altanka) he had built, with a table and a metal bed. He can take a nap there, or have his friends come over and drain a bottle of vodka, each shot chased down with pieces of dark bread, słonina (bacon, but without the meat layers), and thick slices of his own tomatoes, which can grow as large as a child's head and taste like heaven.
My grandfather, having come from peasant stock, knows how to make things grow. His little garden is one of the lushest, at least among his closest neighbors. Some of the plot owners go for flowers or ornamental bushes. He, true to his roots, tries to grow everything. (Occasionally he even hides live chickens in his hut, although that is against the bylaws of the gardens.) Part of his success has its source in a big, metal drum behind the altanka - there he stores liquefied cow manure purchased from a farmer who visits the gardens twice a year, with a horse-drawn cistern full of that "black gold", which he sells by bucketfuls.
This little garden, his refuge, will be my grandfather's undoing, but that's many years away. Now, in his gruff way, he tries to entice us kids to come over, have some fresh fruits or veggies, like baby kohlrabi, or sweet peas, or the incredibly hot radishes, but we know there is price to pay. We'll have to listen to him mumble under his breath about having to do all this gardening himself, with no one helping, people just want to come and partake, take what they did not grow. Suddenly, the sweetest white currants start tasting sour. I feel guilty, so I ask how I can help, but he just shrugs and says, "Oh, just keep stuffin' ye'self. That's all you lads are good for anyway."
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