Daniel Odija

Keeping up the manor

Nowadays, that era has passed into memory. You drove a kilometre into

the empty fields, which in summer were yellow with low-growing rape. At a

rural crossroads you turned left, went past a worm-ridden old farmhouse,

and two hundred metres further on, in a cloud of dry dust you came to

a stop at a half-closed gate. It was an expensive gate, a fancy iron one.

Three dogs greeted you, a big black Alsatian and two little dachshunds.

They weren’t aggressive, because they knew everyone. They wagged

their tails and barked happily at the car.

The farm entrance was lined with long rows of arthritic apple trees. The

little trees had been shaped by an invisible hand attempting to prove its

dubious gardening skills on their fragile bodies. From the uneven results

you could see that the skills of the invisible hand had never passed the

limits of the enthusiastic amateur, convinced that after reading a book or

two on orchards he could conduct a revolution in the successful union of

cherries and apple trees.

There were several hens running about among the trees. They were white,

because that was the only kind kept in the two big henhouses. Standing

grandly on a gentle rise, the buildings were like long, angular cigars,

coated in white plaster. Together they housed nine thousands hens, an

enormous holding merely by contrast with the other local farms where two

pigs was a lot. The henhouses indicated not just wealth, but also power.

And Bronisław Broda had it – he was a burly fellow, canny in his own way,

with a thick moustache and a petite wife called Irena, fragile as a crisp. He

greeted everyone effusively, without a glint of insincerity in his eyes, you

could say, a glint you so often suspect in people who are a bit too well-off

for the country they happen to live in.

As a farmer, husband and father Bronisław Broda had firmly established

principles. His opinions were irrevocable and his decisions were

irreversible. Everything had to be just as he wanted. His wife had to agree,

and silently take the belt blows, and when her husband had drunk too

much she had to swallow his hard fist like a tender caress. The kids had to

run like clockwork, with no rebellion in their minds or actions. What would

they have to rebel about anyway? He gave them everything they needed

– they had food to eat and a place to sleep.

Bronisław Broda loved animals. That was why he killed them himself,

rather than condemn them to the sort of needless suffering the butchers

were said to enjoy. He liked entertainment too. Sometimes he took the

gun his father had left him and did some shooting, at the sky, or at the

trees, or at tins to practise his aim, or at a pig’s snout. He shot the pigs

instead of whacking them with an axe, using a large-bore rifle and bullets

meant for boar hunting to make it humane. So what if the meat might get

imbued with gunpowder? All you had to do was to hang the carcass head

downwards, so the gunpowder ran out onto the ground with the blood

– that made the ground stink of powder, not the meat. But then the ground

went rusty and developed an animal hatred for the murderer. A vindictive

spirit hovered over the farmyard, shaking its clenched hoofs and swearing

to be revenged. But Broda thought nothing of it. He felt confident on his

own ground.

“I’ve always enjoyed hunting,” he liked to say with satisfaction as he

took out the airgun he used to shoot at the sparrows that held noisy

conferences on the barn roof. The sparrows were soon dropping like

hailstones. Some managed to fly away, but came straight back to the roof,

bewildered by all the banging, and fell cheeping into the cracks scored in

the air by a salvo as thick as buckwheat.

Sometimes Broda used to fire at the rats too. That summer they had

nested in the cowshed. The ceiling and beams were shot to splinters

and the pigs were in a panic, squealing loudly. The rats were hardest to

hit. Smarter than a man, they silently raced under the cowshed roof at

lightning speed. But they only had to shake down a straw or a cornstalk

without noticing, and at once Broda let loose with his gun, firing a dense

volley of shots at random. He never did shoot a rat, but he made plenty of

holes in the cowshed.

After his fun Bronisław Broda went home, a little tired and extremely

pensive. He stroked his sons and promised to buy them a video, so they

could watch foreign cartoons. It was the first video in the neighbourhood.

Even in town nobody had one yet, but he did. All the films had German

dubbing. Donald Duck quacked away in German, Mickey Mouse shouted:

“Hund Pluto!”, and even Bruce Lee had learned German. Mostly they

watched cartoons and karate films. To spice things up, Broda would throw

in some porn for himself – that was in German too. His head was soon

full of moaning and low-budget gymnastics. Irena was too embarrassed

to watch, so he scoffed at her, saying: “For shame! For shame! Look how

imaginative they are! It’s not like that with you!”

Whereas Irena made the best scrambled eggs in the world. Scrambled

eggs was what they ate most often. When you’ve got that many hens,

there are always going to be some broken eggs the shops won’t take, so

you have to eat them or give them away. Broda smiled to himself. In his

henhouses nine thousand hens were humbly forcing thousands of eggs

out of their back ends, completely unaware that nothing would ever hatch

out of them apart from scrambled eggs.

Everyone round here lived on scrambled eggs. Like a guy called Tosiek

Sobola, who lived at the end of the village in a tumbledown hovel he’d

inherited from his father. His stony field always lay fallow. Gradually it

became overgrown with a fleece of densely tangled weeds and infertile

grass. Freezing cold and hungry, Tosiek Sobola only just survived the

winter, until one night, half-starving and desperate, he knocked at

Broda’s door.

Broda just smiled and gave him a job. From then on Tosiek Sobola lived

in a small stall in the henhouse. Here, with three or sometimes four of the

neighbours he would wipe the hen shit off the dirty eggs with a wet rag

and carefully pack them in cardboard egg trays. The broken ones were set

aside to be fed to the animals, or sold off cheap to people from the village.

Tosiek used to make himself scrambled eggs out of them, frying up eight

or nine eggs at a time. No one ever saw him eat anything but scrambled

eggs and bread in those days. He didn’t drink – never a single glass. He

was a good worker, and he felt warm and cosy in his stall.

He carted the animal feed, shifted the chicken shit and monitored the

temperature in the henhouse – it had to be warm enough for the hens to

lay more often and more copiously than normal, but not so warm that they

began to suffocate. Bronisław Broda paid him very little, too little. If Tosiek

had liked to get drunk now and then, on an income like that one he’d have

had to go hungry as before, but he never complained. Bronisław Broda

reckoned he was an idiot for wanting to go on working for so little money.

Tosiek kept quiet, because it wasn’t his habit to talk. But after three years

at the job he announced that he was moving to town. Broda just shrugged

and said: “You’re longing to be somewhere else? Me too sometimes, but

so what …”

So one sunny morning Tosiek Sobola emerged from the henhouse

dressed in his Sunday best suit with his hair combed back, his face clean

shaven, though wrinkled by his difficult life, and got on the black “Ukraina”

bicycle he’d bought off some drunk. Without saying goodbye, sitting proudly

upright he rode through the gate. Now he cleans the streets in town, slowly

and meticulously, without any hurry, just as he did with the hens. Leaves

and dog shit, shovels and brooms. He’s happy. No one manages him,

and he doesn’t have to be grateful to anyone. Maybe he eats something

besides scrambled eggs. He has even found himself a woman – a good

fifteen years older than him, but she’s good and resourceful. They take

care of each other, and even love each other a bit. “So let them mate if

they want to,” quipped Broda at the news; to him Tosiek was the human

equivalent of a domestic animal.

But before Tosiek left the farm, the time came for the slaughter of the

layers. They had been laying for three years now, and had to be replaced

with fresher, younger ones. They were already laying far too few eggs. Life

had worn them out.

Broda hired some extra hands to help the “operation” run as smoothly as

possible, and rolled up his own sleeves too. Round-up time! The swarm

of bewildered birds didn’t know what was going on. Crowded into a dense

flock, they moved into the centre of the henhouse, with people surrounding

them on all sides. Each man grabbed three or four, tightly bundled

their convulsively flapping wings and set them under the axe, specially

sharpened for the hens’ necks. The astounded little heads fell off and rolled

to the feet of the sweaty Broda, who performed the executions himself. He

liked to watch the beaks gaping in surprise at what had happened to them,

as if asking: “Where’s the rest of my body?”

Deprived of their heads, the necks spat a stream of blood. The blind bodies

waved their wings, happily hopping about in a posthumous dance, as if

glad their chopped-off heads were no longer pressing them to find grain.

Some hopped from foot to foot in perfect rhythm, lined up in a neat row

like inspired ballerinas performing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake – until they

fell, struck down by a muscle spasm; only their wings still went on beating

against the ground, gathering the dust of the earth beneath them. Finally

they lay still in heaps of white feathers, in praise of the God of birds.

Tosiek Sobola gathered up the heads in a sack, because by now the dogs

were puking from overeating. Once in a while he scattered sand around the

chopping block so Broda wouldn’t slip on the blood, and went to fetch the

next lot. Some of the hens may have realised this meant death, that their

numbers were decreasing rather than increasing, and that the area around

them was getting empty. They began to stamp their feet harder. Inanely

rebellious, they anxiously cocked their not-yet-chopped-off heads, blinked

and tried to dive from under the men’s hands.

Some of the hens were playing tag. As they ran away, they swayed

awkwardly from side to side. But the men drove them down a narrow

corridor in the henhouse and barred the way. The kids had fun, because

it was their job to chase the hens towards Tosiek Sobol and his gang. The

men’s hands were as nimble as pincers. Meanwhile, the women plucked

the headless corpses, filling buckets with feathers and innards. Although

the hens were drained of all their meat by long years of egg-laying,

they would still do for a thin stock. Apart from that, Broda sold them at a

reduced price for pies.

A pungent, acrid smell wafted about the farm. The axe flashed in the sun

like a mirror reflecting the boundary of life. The sun illuminated the drops

of blood that fell on the sweaty Broda in a bracing shower. Its posthumous

nerves apparently emitting a sort of super-hen power, with the full force

of its stiffened limbs one of the headless hens went running towards the

fence. The careering corpse did a perfect imitation of life until it crashed

into a wire railing. The hen was thrown backwards, its bleeding neck

began to sway and, finding no support, plunged into the sand like an

ostrich. The black Alsatian gently grasped its tail end and carried the body

to his master’s feet. Broda smiled and stroked his favourite pet, promising

him lots to eat.

The slaughter had been going on for a while now, and the kids were bored.

It had all gone crazy – the only difference between the dead hens and

the live ones was the lack of a head. But the initial attraction had worn

a bit thin by now, and the surfeit of entertainment provided by the hen

Holocaust had ceased to amuse them. Their interest had waned with each

successive flapping bird. The agony of the individual is rarely very moving

when it turns into mass extermination.

Both Marek and Janek, Bronisław’s sons, preferred to play at the foot of

the rise, where there were eight piles of carefully stacked planks. They

had a fun time running about between them. Best of all was playing at war.

But they forgot there was a wasps’ nest among the planks, big fat yellowand-

black ones with stings in their tails, capable of injecting a poison that

spread like wildfire, turning your body into a swollen lump, where pus

gnawed away under the skin depressingly. Four of these wasps stung

little Janek on the back as he ran by their nest. They must have thought

that was the way to discourage a potential attacker. Fools! Janek’s crying

provoked a greater evil. On Broda’s orders, once he had finished with the

hens, Tosiek was to destroy the nest and put an end to the wasps. Tosiek

merely nodded and said nothing – just as usual.

Next day he went in among the planks with an armful of kindling wood and

a small pot of lime granules. He set the kindling alight so the wind would

blow smoke at the nest. The wasps must have been suffocating, doing the

insect version of snorting like horses, or coughing like people. Meanwhile

Tosiek cautiously approached the nest, unobserved by the stupefied

insects, who were flying about pell-mell, doused in poison and swollen with

asphyxiating smoke, and calmly began to scatter lime on the nest. He had

thick gloves and overalls to protect him from being stung. The day after

that he repeated the entire procedure. The ground was soon littered with

dead insects. That was Tosiek’s final task at Broda’s farm.

As soon as he left, a storm broke. Water poured from the sky, and not

even the oldest villagers could remember a storm like this one. Dragged

across the district by its leaden body, it oppressed the fruit trees,

henhouses and houses. Some people whispered that it marked the onset

of powerful spirits that were forcing their way from the invisible world into

the visible, lured by the murder and blood of animals. Shafts of lightning

snapped at the ground, melting it to stones. The nearby river flooded,

giving the world a new shape. The wind ripped trees up by the roots. The

dwarfish apple trees flew in the air as if salvation were waiting for them

somewhere up there. But it was just nature’s way of being ironical, for

having grown from earth, they were bound to crumble to earth.

The gale, the river and the downpour made a muddy mire of Bronisław

Broda’s farm. The roar of thunder mingled with his curses. Broda’s world

lay in ruins. Before his very eyes the barn roof dissolved into tattered

shreds of tin, fluttering overhead like flimsy flakes of burned paper. Despite

its stone foundations, the cowshed was soon being undermined by the

raging surge of stinking sludge. A few hours later the wind dropped, but the

water went on pouring. And so it would be for forty days. Soon there would

be no time left to take shelter.

And once the water level in the cowshed drops, bloated pigs and cows

will be left there. Drunk to excess, slung over the fence and wedged into

the troughs, the corpses will start to stink, attracting clouds of flies. Broda

will work himself into a proper sweat cleaning up the remains. So they

wouldn’t have to wade about in carcasses he took his wife and children to

his mother-in-law’s place in town. The town was better prepared for this

sort of disaster. Nature doesn’t have quite so much supremacy over man

there. Concreted over and cleared of trees, it keeps quiet, buried by an

avalanche of engines.

But for now all Broda could see was a flood. He stayed at the farm – he

couldn’t abandon his hens. Someone had to take care of the property,

feed the stupid birds and watch the water make the walls of the house

disintegrate. The henhouses weren’t flooded, because they stood on a

small rise. Broda moved into the stall where Tosiek used to sleep, as nine

thousand fresh layers impatiently did their own sort of grumbling. In a

few days they would get used to the steady patter of rain and would feel

unsettled once it began to ease.

So Broda gazed at the sea, which had no end. He looked up, down and

all around. Still it went on raining. And as he looked around, he felt as if

he were standing on Mount Ararat, knowing why the people had been

inundated. These small islets of dry land were left for the corpses. They

stuck out from under the doleful veneer of water like pangs of remorse. “I

wonder if the whole world is flooded? Perhaps there’s dry land somewhere

else,” he thought.

He felt very lonely. He missed the buzz of people talking, which often

drove him wild, and the chaotic noise of the animals, which were now

floating about dead. For the first time he longed for his wife and wanted to

hug his sons. He saw a bird fly by. Hell’s bells, what sort of a bird was it?

What mattered was its presence. He knew that once the flood ended he’d

prove right. The main thing was that the henhouses weren’t flooded. So

what if people said the devil rocks the rich man’s cradle – he didn’t give a

damn. Let them think what they liked. Misfortune isn’t handed out in equal

shares to everyone.

A bird. It renewed his strength for new exploits. Those two henhouses

were his strength. Just let the bloody flood end and everything would be

fine. Meanwhile, every day of the downpour crushed him to the ground.

After a while he began to stoop, roaming around the henhouses with his

nose close to the mud. He looked as if he were searching for grain, or a

precious keepsake that he’d lost somewhere, roughly hereabouts, and

now an irresistible need to find it had come over him. He was sure that if

he found it he would be forgiven and the waters would recede – if he found

what he had lost, his sense of superiority over others would be gone for

ever, and respect for everything that lived would flow over him.

He got up from all fours and drank another bottle of vodka. A watery

inferno flooded his throat, but it helped him to get up. Stooping slightly,

he grabbed some buckets full of feed for the hens and went among the

clamorous fowl. Never before had he felt so good among them, safe in

his own way. He felt warm and cosy among these birds, better than in the

house, which had already flowed away with the water.

The hens started pecking at the grain before he had finished tipping it out

of the buckets. They nipped at his shoes and gently pecked his hands.

He sat down among them and gave in to this strange form of caress.

Not on the eyes! Not on the eyes!, he thought. Now he was smiling. He

could have gone on sitting like that for years on end, but once the waters

dropped, there would be a lot of work waiting for him. First he’d have to do

away with death.