The Graveyard by Marek Hlasko Read Free Book Online

Franciszek walked up to him, spellbound.
    “I’ll have coffee this afternoon …”
    Once again he ran in his unbuttoned overcoat through the wet, muddy streets. He stopped suddenly. “And me?” hethought. “My name is Franciszek—” He heard the furious screech of brakes behind him, and jumped aside.
    “What are you waiting for?” the driver screamed, “For applause?”
    “For socialism,” someone said on the sidewalk. The crowd roared with delight; Franciszek turned a bright red, and was about to answer something when he heard a familiar voice: “So you don’t like it here? Come on, speak up: what is it you don’t like?” He turned around: it was the same young sergeant who had picked him up the night before, and he was already reaching out for identification papers. Franciszek hunched his head between his shoulders and ran on in the direction of the tram stop, where a crowd of people were already lined up ahead of him in the rain.

VI
    HE TURNED IN AT HIS FACTORY, AND ENTERED THE porter’s lodge. He thrust his card into the time clock, and it registered his tardiness. The mustachioed old porter walked up to him and, showing his yellowed teeth in a friendly smile, said, “The tramcar?”
    “What tramcar?”
    “You couldn’t get on the tramcar?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “You’re late, Comrade Kowalski.” He sighed, and spread his hands. “I’ll have to keep your card,” he added sadly.
    Franciszek handed him his card. “Too bad.”
    He wanted to go, but the porter stopped him. “The best excuse you can give,” he said in a dramatic whisper, “is the tramcar.” He winked a brown eye; in the maze of white wrinkles it looked like a little star. “That can never be checked,” he whispered; “the cars are always in such a mess …”
    Franciszek muttered something unintelligible and went out. He walked along a blackened wall of bricks covered with posters showing the faces of smiling Stakhanovites; of peasants, men and women, with sheaves of grain; of schoolboys and soldiers; of diversionists and traitorous priests; of kulaks and saboteurs. They stared straight at his tired, unshaven face as though to ask, “Well, what now, my friend?” He had toclose his eyes. Opening them, he saw before him a picture of an American soldier piercing a Korean child with his bayonet. The soldier looked like an orang-outang, and the child like a smaller species of monkey. He recoiled with a shudder, and almost groping his way reached the locker room. There he quickly put on a greasy gray apron, then went to the office of the party organization—it was situated in a barracks specially built by volunteer workers. He stopped before a door bearing a sign; once again he passed his hand over his unshaven face, smoothed his thinning hair, and, as though in an effort to master his weakness, knocked briskly.
    “Come in,” a voice boomed.
    Franciszek walked in. A corpulent man with a friendly face rose from his seat behind the desk. He had the clay-colored complexion of those who never get enough to eat, live in stuffy rooms, and breathe large amounts of stale smoke. His cheeks were pendulous and his eyes red from constant lack of sleep; most of the people entrusted with looking after the souls of others have such faces. He held out his hand—it was heavy and hairy, but it squeezed Franciszek’s warmly and cordially. “Take a seat,” he said. After Franciszek sat down, he asked, “Well, what’s the good word?”
    “Good word?” Franciszek echoed. For a second he took the question to be ironical; then he looked at the secretary’s tired, kindly face, and suddenly the nightmare he had been through seemed to him unreal—more than that, ridiculous. “But the whole thing is absurd,” he thought. He sighed with relief: “Now at last I can have a sensible talk.” He smiled for the first time in many hours. “I’ve had a little trouble,” he said. “It was like this—”
    There was a knock at the door.