Zbigniews sleep had been so torn by nightmares, so
hounded by lawyers and Austrian soldiers, so crowded with
fugitives in cold valley caves where he found his daughter
wandering in pajamas, and then scrambling up a rushing winter
stream, cracking his knees against the rocks, skinning his hands
on the ice-crusted snow banks, that it felt much safer standing
up, cold in the middle of his bedroom floor. His big rumpled
bed had done nothing wrong. The windows were black and all
frosted over. Outside the valley was absolutely still. No one had
followed him back from the city, and yet he was overcome by
fear -- first of his mattress, then of the bedroom, then of the
library and, of course, the closet. He paced around barefoot,
straightening up, trying to make peace with his silent home. He
touched the body on Grazyna's crucifix. He touched the glass of
black currant juice that had been sitting unfinished since
yesterday morning, as if that nights horrible events had never
happened. But the cottage refused to make amends. He had to
get out. He shoved his naked feet into his boots and rushed out
the door in just a nightshirt.
If seen across the valley that morning before sunrise, he would
have seemed no more than a twitching in the dark. If seen from
the woods, from across the road, or from one of the dark
windows in the Moczulski cottage over on its hill across the
stream, across that winding ribbon of fog that made its way
through dark and scruffy fields, he would have seemed merely a
man up early, hacking away with shovel and hoe. But if seen
from up close, from inside his own cottage, from behind the
woodpile, or, say, from among the raspberries at the edge of his
garden, there would have been no mistaking the guilt on his
face, the bristly torment, the boots and nightshirt. As he rolled
his eyes from ground to horizon, focusing and unfocusing,
raising them up to the near-black sky, it would have been clear
to anyone nearby that his digging was neither for treasure nor
pleasure, but for distance, and madly, racing with the daylight
now blushing in the east. Gratefully, morning came gradually to
the valley.
His hoe hacked and scraped the topsoil, dragging up onions
and leeks and petunias, cleaning a roughly rectangular patch. He
stood back a moment and took it all in, measuring the patch
against the azaleas and peonies. It was half as large as the potato
quadrant, twice as large as the carrot crib. A fecund smell was
coming from the stream. It was the first of November and
harvest was past: later that day he would turn it all over so no
one could tell where the hole was hidden. He traded hoe for
shovel and set to digging, tossing dirt so wildly about the
garden that a watcher would have thought he had no intention
of replacing it. But of course he did. He looked around, saw no
one, and dug more quickly. The hole! The hole! the shovel
seemed to say. The hole! The hole! The hole! He dug as if
retreating back into the night, beyond black soil into muscular
brown clay.
Trotsky would have called this an endless revolution, this,
when capitalists fail and give way to communists, when they
fail each other and fail altogether and give way to a Church that
gives way to capitalists, who are not quite dead, alive and well,
zombies nuzzling from rock and clay, pushing up faces into the
dim light of day, returning for the communists in their tenured
professorships. But Trotsky must have meant something
different. Shovel struck rock, making it hard to shovel. For
what then, he thought, was Dick Chesnutt, if not, in essence, a
Trotskyite villain? Now American, now Pole, now capitalist,
now socialist, now a lecturer on a penis brigade, now a
transvestite with teats for muscles, a soggy and pathetic and
unshaven woman -- now alive, rebelliously alive, quiveringly
so, Dick Chesnutt was fretfully alive as Trotsky must have been
for those few last moments in 1940 before Stalin, or whoever,
finally put him to rest. Trotsky/Chesnutt. Chesnutt/Trotsky. It
didnt really matter at this point.
Hed been carving the sides of the hole too neatly, trying to
keep the shape of a box. He cursed himself and dug more
quickly, more carelessly.
One thought kept resurfacing: A body, even one with teats for
muscles, fights like mad for its last gasp of life. But life, though
precious, is basically gruesome, and a grown mans neck, thick
as a fencepost, red and stubbly and greasepaint slick, squirms
around like a new-caught toad when its trying to save its
whisky-stinking windpipe. Toes frozen, hands raw on the
wooden handle, Zbigniew wished for socks and gloves, but then
with an awful surge of sympathy he recalled Dick Chesnutt's
wild left eye, how it had swiveled inside its penciled lid, taking
last snapshots of the world it was leaving. The fishlike right eye
stayed very still, maybe amazed or already dead.
You sinister son of a bitch.
Those were Dick Chesnutts last words in life, his last
escaping breath before his trachia clamped shut. Pregnant as any
last words would be, they raised all kinds of menacing
questions: Who was sinister Zbigniew or Chesnutt? Who was
the son? Who was the bitch? Was Zbigniew's mother hovering
near? At the time hed managed to fight back the feeling, but
itd been awful watching that darting left eye, watching that
quiet and compacent right eye. For he himself had always hoped
to go with dignity, among family and friends. Live with pride
and die with dignity. The dead man had lived the life of a
savage, and so he died accordingly. Its hard to kill a man, even
a savage. But its easy, too. Its hard not to kill a man once
you've gotten started -- like its impossible to retract when
you're already coming. Nothing can sway that beautiful drive. In
fact, it was so very much like coming, cette petite mort, this
little death of Dick Chesnutt, that hed topped if off with a cry
of pleasure, a big noisy finishing off. And then there he was, an
exhausted murderer. And now there in the closet were the cold
leftovers.
When the eye had stopped darting, when the bodyd fallen
slack and irrevocably dead, he had shaken its shoulders and
pleaded with it to breathe. Hed even uttered a fatuous apology.
But then he sobered. He let it drop to the scratched-up floor
bent and grotesque in its red velvet dress.
Like it or not, thats what he had gone there to do.
The cock crowed behind the raspberries. He was incapable of
digging any faster. Pani Moczulski appeared in her yard. She
was a true peasant, a creature of habit, awake every morning at
the blast of the cock, out to do her goat and eggs then back
inside to push her beads. And there she was now, bucolic,
Catholic, hunching over some filthy beast. He didn't wave, and
neither did she, but he knew she'd seen him. She had her own
idea why he was up so early and digging in his garden, but her
darkest fantasies couldn't approximate the truth. They had
owned this cottage for ten years now, but only his wife had
befriended the Moczulskis. He'd told his daughter that they were
child-eaters, for probably they were, and hed forbidden her ever
to go over there or to speak to their gap-toothed punk of a
grandson. Hed assured her it wasnt a question of class, though
of course it was. Hed told her it was a question of intellectual
integrity.
He himself had encountered them only once. In 1979, he took
a retreat at the cottage to escape the hype of the Pope's visit to
Kraków, only to find the Moczulskis had draped their roof with
His Pious Face. All day long, it glared through his windows.
That night, drunk with vodka, he staggered across the river
stones, vaulted over their limestone wall, and landed clumsily
onto their property. Bring out your Jesus! hed shouted out.
Give me a Jesus! Any old Jesus! Bring him on, thorns and all,
let me stick my finger in him! Hed stomped and clomped in
their flowers and manure, shouting at the unflappable Jan Pawel
II, not stopping until the now-dead Pan Moczulski appeared at
the door with a spade over his shoulder. He threatened
Zbigniew who responded with a fart. Shortly, wisely, he turned
and shut the door.
Not only had Zbigniew been at the height of his strength, but
at the time he was President of the Academy of Metallurgy and
publicly favored by the local Party. No man in the valley, not
even the Pope, would have dared clunk him over the head with a
spade. Yet now that the Party was good and gone, Zbigniew
bothered no one but himself. He was divorced, unemployed,
hiding in the woods, living in a cottage that could be reclaimed
at any time. Maybe, so far as Mrs. Moczulski was concerned as
she pulled warm darts of milk into her pail, Zbigniew
Zamoyski, at this unholy hour, was at last out digging a grave
for himself.
The sky was bluing, birds singing near and far, making the
enterprise riskier and riskier. Beyond the fence, his own goat
watched him with the yellow eyes of a devil.
Maybe the hole was deep enough now. Standing inside, he had
to tiptoe to see over the carrot tops, but then another foot
deeper could be a good investment, maybe another hundred
years for the body to rot, another century of privacy between the
worms and Pan Chesnutt. Who would suspect a seven-foot
grave? Surely not the widow Moczulski. She was a
traditionalist. But to see him in broad daylight dragging body
from his cottage -- dumping it in the hole and covering it over --
that would be certain cause for alarm. He cursed himself and
shoveled faster. He shouldn't have gone to sleep at all. He
should have started it the moment he got home. He should have
kept working the whole night through. Stupid to obsess over the
goddamn hole. But still he dug deeper and thought of his
vegetables, wondering if his garden might someday be fertilized
by this pedophilic Johnny Appleseed.
When he was finished it was already day, a gray sky framed by
the edges of the hole. He leapt up to gain purchase on the rim of
the grave a good three feet above his head, but it crumbled in
his grasp and showered with him to the muddy floor. He tried
again and again, each time crumbling a different wall, filling his
boots and nightshirt with soil. His arms ached. His head was
weary. The real work was finished -- now he had only to get
himself out, throw in the body, cover it over like blackbirds in a
pie. It was so simple! Beginning to whimper with anger and
frustration, he stopped himself. He propped the shovel at a
ramp-like angle. He'd nearly climbed the length of it before he
slipped off and fell back down. Slipping from it twice more, he
collapsed and wept in the crotch of the grave, raking his fingers,
beating his fist into sticky clay. Then he collected himself. He
balanced himself against the two walls and carefully walked up
the shovel stick. This time he gained a good hold on the edge
and smeared his way out of the hole.
Are you quite alright, Pan Zamoyski? Pani Moczulski called
from her gate. Some kind of animal was clutched under her arm.
Shed heard him shouting.
He didn't respond. He was overcome by fear and fatigue. His
nightshirt was filthy. The garden was cluttered with mammoth
heaps of dirt. The valley was larger than he remembered it
being, and the sky was filling with beautiful black
thunderclouds.
Are you quite alright? she called again.
Why, yes, Pani Moczulski, he yelled across, his voice high and
weak and gravelly. Quite alright. Very good. It rather looks like
rain.
She stood there watching him, petting her animal, then closed
her gate and returned to her cottage. He hurried inside.
Everything was dim hard and sober like saints and angels. He
tracked clay across the kitchen tiles, sliding along the bare
boards in the hall. He caught himself on the closet door. It was
open a crack. His heart fluttered, his throat restricted. Had the
body moved? Was it possible? He eased it open, releasing a
stench of feces and urine. The body was hunched in a sitting
position, head on its knees, wrapped in a sheet. He reached one
dirty hand beneath its legs, clutched another behind its back. He
tried drawing the body close together, but it was stiff and
wouldnt give. It was an awkward job getting it through the
door, its stiffened shoulder knocking the frame, but eventually
he managed and left it tipped over in the hall.
Wrapped in a sheet, the corpse was helpless and pitiable.
Childlike. Once more, as he stretched out the resistant shroud
on the floor, he found himself shuddering with something like
sorrow. Not the sorrow he'd felt when his father died, nothing
like grief. This was purely sorrow for himself -- not self-pity,
but bony regret, wiry regret, dread that his life could have gone
so wrong. How could it have happened in such a short time, that
Zbigniew Zamoyski, boy perfectionist, one of the Universitys
most decorated scholars, a model husband and responsible
father, could have become an adulterer, exile, and murderer.
That such an honest and hard-working communist could have
so easily become a speculator, a venture capitalist a casino
shareholder smelling the shit of a murder hed committed. It
had all happened so quickly. It was all right there in that rigid
shroud. Looking at the crooked length of it, unwashed,
unburied, he searched for any indication that hed truly become
a murderer. Yes, hed committed a murder, but Zbigniew
wondered if he had intrinsically changed, as iron ore changes
into steel and coke, and he wondered if he was capable of
killing again or if that primogenital temper, once his charm,
once his birthright, had now become an army of cancers in his
heart, rotting the fibers and sinews of his morals. Had life in
America cheapened his soul? Had life in the country made him
a beast?
Stocking feet extended from the shroud. The toes were
blistered and poking through nylons, caked with blood from a
night in spiked heels. At the thought of this man dressed as a
woman, in a dress that once belonged to Jane -- whom Zbigniew
adored more than maybe any woman; at the thought of this fop
swishing the streets, sashaying around on his American holiday,
at the thought of him savoring souvenirs of Wanda, the memory
of kissing her, of swirling his venomous tongue in her mouth,
the mouth of a pubescent child, he tore back the sheet. He
clutched the cold ashen face by the chin. Its stupid eyes were
half open, its smeary mouth fixed in a grimace. He grasped it by
the neck and the front of its dress and dragged it along the
wallpaper. Its joints stayed locked in a sitting position.
You sinister son of a bitch!
He said, knocking the head against the wall. The face was
slack, alcoholic but its whiskers grown from the night before.
All in all it was the same Dick Chesnutt, the lowly bastard who
had disgraced the University, humiliated his students, parading
them around the Collegium Maius, chanting Fuck
Communism! Fuck Capitalism! Fuck Mother Russia! making
them swing their peckers from their pants. Then and now,
Zbigniew muttered, you are out of control. He knocked the head
against the wall. He hiked the body off the ground. This body
was wasted on your lousy soul!
Yet of course Dick Chesnutt's political life, if you could call
it that, wasn't the thing that enraged him so. Dick Chesnutt was
a political clown, and the papers had destroyed him in one fell
swoop. So, no. What provoked his superhuman strength, sliding
the body further up the wall until its head was bent against the
ceiling, then to hurl it to the floor with a vegetable thud -- to
kick it --swipe at it -- slather it with insults -- this was provoked
by elemental jealousy. Simple jealousy. Revenge is delectable, a
one-inch slab of seared red steak --but jealousy burns inside like
poison, it scorches and bleeds like a ten-year ulcer. Hed kept
his cool on weekends with Jane, as cars whispered through the
Vienna streets and she refused her expensive breakfast because
the short-cut marmalade brought back memories. And hed tried
to contain himself the morning before, lying in the bath at the
mercy of Jane as she told him in detail what Dick Chesnutt had
done. And strangely enough, hed even controlled it well
enough to be sure he saw the man good and dead. But now there
was simply no keeping it in. This husk of a man had made him a
murderer and mad jealous poison flooded his body, soaking like
acid through his walls and membranes and turning him into a
different sort of man a poisonous man, a murderous man
and then, like piss welled up in an bladder, his fury cut free with
utmost pleasure, and up and down the hall, cursing and
coughing, he bashed the body from wall to wall, slapping its
face, punching its gut, tearing its dress, dragging it around in a
delirious dance. You sinister American son of a bitch, he said,
tearing a hole in its filthy dress. It had been such pleasure to be
in control, to master this filthy body that he had killed, this man
he had killed with his two bare hands that he was getting hard
under his nightshirt. But no need for alarm, he thought. Nobody
would know how much he liked it.
He went to the window. From what he could see Pani
Moczulski was inside, but he couldn't tell if the curtains were
drawn. The cottage was yellow, the sky had grown blacker. He
was about to turn away when she rushed from her door and
began closing the shutters. Perfect! he said. She's afraid of the
storm! In her efforts to unlatch the shutter she had somehow
broken the bottom hinge, and now it seemed she was
determined to fix it. He watched her make little progress in her
work. He slid the currant juice out of the way and rested his
head down on the wood. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Deep cracks of thunder woke him up. Rain drummed the roof
and rushed through the gutters. The distance was obscured by
slanting sheets of rain. Beyond heaps of mud in the gouged-out
garden, Pan Moczulski's right shutter still banged in the wind. A
black rectangle of glass peered back at his property. Despite the
weather, he had to do it. He put an oilcloth coat on over his
nightshirt, rewrapped Dick Chesnutt in the dirty shroud, and
hastily dragged him out to the garden. The body made a splash
in the puddle that had already collected at the bottom of the
grave. Muddy water seeped through the shroud, which pinkly
clung to the dress beneath. The unholy position in which the
body would spend eternity provoked a Hail Mary from deep
inside Zbigniew. He stopped it midstream and cursed himself.
He shoveled clay back into the hole.
Rain kept pounding as Zbigniew finished up. First he packed
the clay down hard, then he replaced the soil as he'd found it.
Last thing, he took a rake to the garden until the grave was flat
and flush with the rest. He was catching cold. The sky was
rumbling, flashing, pouring. Earthworms rejoiced in the
growing puddles. Before returning inside to bathe, he paused to
look at his lonely work. He leaned on the rake. The last person
he had spoken to had been his daughter, and he regretted he
hadn't been so kind. He hoped, in any case, that she was
enjoying her gift.