Taste of Dirt
Barbara Orlowska-Westwood
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Short Story Contest 2009 (view all the winners)
Highly Commended
When I was a child
the world went mad
standing on its head
shook dark and evil forces
from secret pockets
I was five. It was autumn, harvest time. In the orchard the branches of trees, heavy with ripe fruit, hung close to the ground. Apples, pears, plums warm from the sun were within reach of my hand. Smell of honey. Bees flew around red and yellow asters, their buzzing loud in the silence of late afternoon.
And then, I heard my mother's voice calling from the house, "Come here, to say goodbye to Dad. He is leaving."
I ran onto the verandah. He stood there in his officer's uniform, tall and straight like the soldiers I had seen in photographs. He was different but when he smiled and lifted me from the ground it was my same Dad. Only the fabric of his clothes was rough on my skin and he smelled of new leather.
He put me down on the floor and I saw my mother crying, my grandpa and my grandma were crying, and my aunt cried as well, and nobody talked. And then my father turned towards the door. I saw the back of his head, his cap, green uniform and the flash of light caught by his tall officer's boots. And he was gone. From the front of the house came the noise of the starting motorcar. It revved and was gone. Only the dust hung for a long time in the still air.
When the first bomb exploded in the town near us we were in the cellar. It was a small room under the house, cold and dark with cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, a storeroom for preserves, smoked meat, cheeses, empty jars and bottles. We sat there on the concrete floor. My mother hugged me close to her body, my head buried in her thick coat, her hand over my other ear.
First from the distance, later closer and closer we heard the roar of the planes and next the hissing screaming noise of bombs. I felt my mother's arm squeezing me and then came the explosion, and the silence. Only the jars and bottles on the shelves rattled, the dust settled on our faces and I tasted dirt in my mouth.
Meadows were bright
with wildflowers
but on that fragrant carpet
some gave their lives
Every day of the school holidays I met Janek in our secret place. It was a little creek on the edge of the forest. The willows spread their branches across the water catching one another with their twisted limbs. It was our hanging bridge. Below it the water ran fast over polished pebbles. It felt cold on our feet warm from the midday sun.
We sat on the stones, waiting for the fish to come. They were little, appeared suddenly like a cloud of silver commas only to swim away when we tried to catch them.
That day we were lucky and we already had a few in our bucket but we wanted more. We sat patiently with our toes in the cool water, our backs to the sun. The forest murmured in the light breeze and from the fields came the fragrance of lupin.
Our eyes were on the water, hands ready, when suddenly near us in the forest a machine gun rumbled. Like those fish that ran away from us, without a word we grabbed our bucket and holding hands ran towards my house.
Three days later when we met again at our secret place, we saw that near one of the willows had grown a grave. A birch cross, white in the sun, cast a shadow on the fresh dirt and a bunch of wild flowers left by someone.
Yellow chickens
were hatching
while on concrete streets
black Gestapo uniforms
spoke death
"We are going to the town, your Grandpa needs a few things," my Mother said, when she called me from the yard where I played with the dogs. In a few minutes we were in the carriage and driving towards the little town a few kilometres away from our property.
The first snow covered the fields and the world was white and quiet. The naked trees stood alongside the road, black against the snow. Sometimes a shower of snowflakes came from under the horse's hooves. The snow swirled in the clear air to settle on our faces, clothes and the sides of the carriage.
Dressed in a warm coat, hat and gloves I sat patiently watching the ice crystals dancing in the air and shining on the horses' backs. I licked from my lips those that were melting there. When we arrived in front of the general store and were getting out of the carriage a group of German soldiers marched on the road. They led four men. They were Polish, in torn clothes. Blood was on their faces, their hands tied behind their backs. The Germans pushed them with their machine guns, shouting Schneller, Schneller. I knew it meant faster.
My mother said, "don't look, don't look," and she covered my eyes with her hand. I still could hear the Germans' shouts, the sound of their heavy boots on the cobblestones. I smelled my mother's perfume but there was another smell around us, the smell of fear. Like smoke it clung to my skin and made it turn to goose pimples. I held my breath afraid to move.
When they had passed us my mother took away her hand from my eyes. "We can go now," she said. I saw the Germans disappearing behind the corner of the street and now Polish people, women and a few children were running towards that corner. The women cried and were pulling the children with them.
We went straight to the shop. We were there for some time. My mother did her shopping and I got my favourite sweets, which were like fruit jelly covered in icing sugar.
We left the shop and were on our way to the carriage when my mother stopped, grabbed my hand and pulled me back into the shop. From the corner of my eye I saw on the street a German soldier in a black uniform with the letters SS on his arm. He held a small child wrapped in rags. Before my mother pushed me inside the shop I had a glimpse of black hair and the face of a child, a face darker than mine. Through the noise of a shutting shop door came the sound of a single shot. "It was a Gypsy girl," said the shopkeeper. "I saw that soldier chasing her on the street some time ago."
After a few minutes we left the shop. On our way back through the town we had to ride on that road where the Germans were before. We passed the corner of the street where the Germans disappeared earlier and we came to the little square in the middle of town. We had been there many times before.
"Oh my God," my mother said and forced my head towards her lap, holding me firm. But she was too late. I had seen something tall in the middle of the square, something I had never seen there before. It looked like four tall wooden crosses. But the cross that stood in front of the church had two arms. These crosses in the square had only one arm and at the end of those arms hung people, long and dark shapes against the pale blue sky.
Wild strawberries
were ripening in a forest
fresh blood
on the green ferns
It was summer again and the fields of grain shimmered like gold in the sun. The first cherries tasted sweeter than ever and the long days were for play with the dogs and cats and the dwarf chickens, which I got for my birthday.
That evening we were sitting at the table, having our supper, my grandparents my mother and my father. He had come back wounded. I sat at the end of the table with my Auntie, my mother's sister. She often played hide and seek with me. Auntie was my friend and I loved her with all my heart. We finished eating and the adults were drinking their tea when the house-keeper called my Auntie to the kitchen. We were ready to leave the table when Auntie came back. She was crying; her whole body trembled. My mother rushed to her asking, "What happened, Marysia, what happened? Tell us, please."
"Janusz is dead," Auntie said through her sobbing. "The ranger brought the news," she said. Later I heard the adults talking. They didn't realise I could hear them. Janusz was Auntie's fiancè. I knew he fought in the Underground Army against the Germans. Two days before that evening he had been shot in both legs. He had realised that his colleagues would not be able to escape if they were to carry him. So he had shot himself.
Bedtime story read
my mother's kiss
but I awoke to the shout
of man with a gun
aimed at my father
Our house stood among the conifers, chestnuts and acacias. From the front of the house I could see the farm buildings and I could hear the distant muffled sound of cows mooing, horses' hooves clapping on the cobblestones, people shouting. Sometimes the rooster gave his call and the dogs barked somewhere near the kitchen. At night the house was quiet, only my parents and I slept there.
That night my mother wasn't there and my father allowed me to sleep in their bedroom in mum's bed. I loved that room. It seemed huge, full of light and the scent of my mother's perfume. In the late afternoon the shadows of maple branches danced on its walls.
It was still dark that night when I awoke to the shout of men. The light was on but my father wasn't there. His bed was empty. In the doorways I saw two men, one in each doorway. They had machine guns, they both looked at me, the men and machine guns; I saw the black holes at the end of the barrels. I closed my eyes as if I was asleep. I didn't move and I waited for my father to come back.
I waited a long time. When he was back and the men were gone and it was quiet again my father explained to me that those people were bandits who pretended to be a part of the Polish Underground Army, and they had taken a cow and two pigs from the yard.
The warm summer nights
waited for lovers
In Warsaw
not Jasmine fragrance
but smoke was in the air
and darkness red
over the burning city
July 1944 was unusually warm. It was still holiday time for me and Janek and we swam in the river every day and played in our little creek. The dogs and cats were still there. We ran with them around the orchard, picking the red apples and plums sticky with drops of juice that looked like little tears. Sometimes we took a carrot and without much cleaning ate it, feeling the grains of dirt between our teeth.
Everything was the same and it wasn't. Somewhere around us were secrets. Adults talked long into the night, or suddenly stopped talking when we approached them, but I heard the word "Warsaw" repeated, and once I overhead the word "uprising".
Different people, I had not seen them before, were coming to our house. Sometimes they stayed for a night or two. They were mostly young men; sometimes there was a young woman with them. Often they had horses and carriages full of something, and they put those carriages in our barns. Once I saw them there and I saw the men covering the carriages with hay. No one could see them after that. One day four of those young men were in our house. They must have come late at night; I saw them first in the morning when we had breakfast together. When I went to the garden there was a table under the big pear tree and another five men were eating breakfast there.
Janek couldn't come and I had to play alone. My parents stayed in the house all the time talking with those young men. Those in the garden I saw later sleeping on the grass, under the trees. It was hot and black clouds were crawling from everywhere. My mother said a storm was coming. We were halfway through lunch, those four men still with us, talking and laughing, drinking fruit vodka from little glasses when we heard a motorcar engine at the front of the house.
My father went there and after some time came back to the room with three Germans in green uniforms. My father was explaining something to them in German. They nodded their heads and barked something back and my father said, "Yes, yes, of course," those words I understood, and they were all near us.
I saw my mother getting very pale and there was sudden silence at the table. My father introduced my mother and me and the young men. He told the Germans it was my mother's birthday and we were celebrating it with our friends. It wasn't true. My mother's birthday was three weeks earlier. The Germans sat with us at the table and had a glass of vodka and we ate the dessert together. But my mother didn't talk much. She went to the kitchen a few times and she was still looking pale and somehow strange.
I remember, before we had the dessert, the young man sitting next to me whispered, "Can you count?" When I whispered "I can," he said, "Please, go outside and see if there are any more Germans in the car or somewhere around it, and if there are, count them and tell me later how many." I said, "Yes," and went to the front of the house.
But there was only one German soldier sitting behind the steering wheel. He must have been their chauffeur, I told the man, when I got back to the table.
Soon the Germans left. My mother went to the bedroom. She said, she needed to lie down. I went to feed my rabbits and chickens. The young men stayed and had supper with us but at breakfast we were alone. They must have left during the night.
Later, I overheard my parents talking and my father saying, that the young men had a carriage full of arms, which they were taking to Warsaw. They had been ready to fight those Germans in our place, and then we would all have been killed, my father said. But fortunately the Germans came only because they wanted to check if my father had delivered the grain to the German Army, according to the order.
A few weeks later the sky over Warsaw was red. We saw it, day and night, for a long time and we could smell smoke when the wind was coming from that direction.
We never saw again any of those young people who had gone through our house that year.
That time is now sealed
in history books
but alive
in my nightmares.
