White Raven

Copyright © Andrzej Stasiuk, translation copyright ©Wiesek Powaga, reproduced by kind permission from Serpent's Tail

Chapter 1

"What a fucking mess," said Bandurko, stuck to his waist in slushy snow. All he could do was to start digging himself out.
It was early February and we got a bloody thaw. We'd been wading in snow for hours, getting soaked to the balls. It wouldn't be so bad if the snow were a bit firmer, but it wasn't. The south westerly wind blew hard, and every step meant a knee-deep hole with water sloshing underneath. The woods boomed above our heads without let-up, and this alone could drive anyone mad. We were halfway up the third mountain. Bandurko said it was a good short cut: even stray dogs didn't stray here. He was right about that. But not about the short cut. I was keeping my mouth shut but I was sure we were lost. That thaw was making a hell of a noise. To the boom above was added the sound of streams gushing through even the smallest valleys. The water was turbid, freezing cold, and the same everywhere.
When everything is frozen still, when it's quiet, the brain works better. I observed Bandurko as his head turned nervously in every direction. He claimed he knew the area well, so he should be pushing ahead like a blinkered horse. But we seemed to have got inside some kind of a massive mill, or a nightmare city of thousands of crossroads, each a wrong turn. Yes, that beech wood boomed like a mill. Roared and crashed. 1 wasn't hungry or thirsty; all 1 wanted was to go deaf, at least for a moment. Not a flake of snow on branches, everything bent in a motionless tension, giving to the southerly wind.
My eyes rested on Bandurko's buttocks, working rhythmically in tight, green drill trousers - an element of stability in the surrounding chaos - and pushing forward. We didn't fancy a night in the woods. With no food, no dry clothes to change into. We had three hours before it got dark.
When we reached the top of the ridge I said:
"All right, let's take five and have a smoke."
Bandurko looked around as if the view could have offered anything new. Then he pushed the snow off the trunk of a fallen tree and sat down.
"I don't know. I've done this route twice, but it was summer. One could see paths, trails, something."

I took out a packet of cigarettes. It was soaked through, hard to say whether with water or sweat. I thou lit of a cigarette case. Having a bit of metal about the person helps to face the world. Bandurko took a cigarette, but the moment he put it in his mouth the paper disintegrated and he was left with a little white fan fluttering at his lips. I dug out from the packet another, healthier looking cigarette. The third match struck lucky.
"Not a ray of sunshine. We can't tell which way is north, south or whatever."

"Moss," 1 said.
"What moss?"
"On the tree trunks."
But we didn't even feel like laughing. We were cold. Bandurko took off his black woolly hat and scratched his head. His yellow hair was stuck flat to his skull. With a pink round face he looked like Piglet, a very bothered Piglet. He had bags under his eyes like pools of shadow, though the light was milky and dispersed, like during those white nights in Petersburg.
"Czetwiertne should be somewhere there," he said and nodded towards the nearest trees.
"It should be. Unless we're going in circles or coming to it from the other side. It should be left of the mountain-top, on the north side."
"What mountain?"
"This mountain."
"But we've already climbed several mountains."
"Those were just smaller crowns of the same mountain. We've been walking along the ridge."
1 thought I'd better keep quiet. It was his idea. 1 had none. Apparently there was no other way. We even got off the bus two stops earlier, at the hostel. The bus went on, but at the end of the line, in the village, where the old state farm used to be, everyone knew everyone and we didn't want to make ourselves conspicuous. So we got off at the hostel, just as any bunch of tourists would, and having passed the old wooden building with a rusting roof we entered the wall of forest. The road was well used by the sleighs, but after a few hundred metres Bandurko told us to turn right.
"Well, we could carry on along this road, but a few kilometres later there's a village, and we would have to march right through it. And you know these villages - five houses and five heads in every window. We can't risk it."
So we turned into a clearing. In the wet snow there were footsteps of rubber boots. That must have been the way lumberjacks took to work. But then the clearing disappeared and the forest barred our way. The last open vista was that of the hostel, far away in the valley. A tiny house against the vast expanse of white. A of smoke rose from the chimney; someone was filling red buckets with water from a nearby stream. We hoped that from now on we wouldn't see a soul.
The forest climbed up the mountain and we raced it, overtaking firs and beech trees. Bandurko walked fast and with confidence, as if guided by a path or an instinct. I could hardly keep up. We called the first stop after an hour, when the slope changed into a top and the wind became twice as loud. We didn't feel like sitting down. We didn't feel like smoking either, but we did. The cigarettes had a weird, kind of windy flavour, and they burned unevenly, sending off sparks and glowing flakes of paper.
"Did you hear that?" said Bandurko, and in a nonsensical gesture put his finger to his lips.
"No.”
"The Czetwiertne dogs."
In an equally nonsensical gesture I put my hand to my ear and maybe even heard something, but it could have been a falling branch, a figment of my imagination or fear of the empty forest, so .empty even dogs wouldn't live in it. Bandurko threw his cigarette to the snow and got up.
"Let's go." And he walked off as if he'd just got up from a park bench.
After a while the old beech wood grew thinner, then smaller, and it disappeared completely. The flat top was covered by puny willows and birch trees. A few gnarled and stunted pine trees were clawing at the air with the same tenacity as their roots at the ground. Here and there stood huge rotting firs, like pillars of a nonexistent nave. Their trunks had holes whistling with the wind. It must have been a woodpeckers' paradise, I thought.
"They really went for it," said Bandurko. "Shame they didn't know how to finish it properly."
The trees on the ground were not felled by the wind. From under the thawing snow protruded neatly cut trunks. It looked a bit like one of those morgues in the movies: bodies heaped higgledy-piggledy one over the other, intertwined, still, with worm-eaten innards and rotten, flaking skin. It took us ages to get over them. The slash looked like a great amphitheatre. The warm wind revealed stumps; one could climb to the top of the auditorium, sit down and watch the changing landscape: stretches of white replaced by the emerging black and grey. Bloody slow spectacle.
The forest disappeared and we finally felt we were in the mountains. On the left and on the right the horizon bordered with the sky - grey, angry and hurried.
"It could be the top of Ickowa," said Vasyl Bandurko.
"Ickowa. 1 remember it was shaven on the top like this. On a good day you could see Pisany Vrh."
"What?"
"Vrh. It's 'mountain' in Slovakian, and it's a Slovakian mountain."
Bandurko slowed down as if trying to find this vrh. But then he said, "Either way, we don't know where we are."
"I didn't know from the beginning."
"All right, then. Let's say this is Ickowa. As soon as we've passed the logging we turn left and go all the way down into the valley. There should be a stream, a big stream. We'll follow it. We should make it before night."







Chapter 2




I was staring at the black face of the watch. The reflection of red flames flickered on it, giving an impression of motion. But the golden hands stood still. Only the seconds were struggling in an effort to deal with the night. It was nearly twelve. From time to time I would fall into a kind of slumber, but it wasn't proper sleep. Thoughts didn't have enough weight to gel into images. I couldn't go with their flow and put my faith in them, the way one does with dreams. Bandurko lay on the other side of the bonfire, probably asleep. Head resting on a log, hands on his stomach, he breathed slowly and rhythmically. His face was still and peaceful. His steaming trousers must have been getting too hot for him for now and again he moved his legs.
1 lay on my side and moved my knees closer to the fire. The idea was to get dry and stop shaking.
it was no Ickowa. Bandurko had to have something to hold on to, so he came up with this name. After all, one needs to use names even when lost. We passed the clearing, went down the slope covered with young pines and then we saw the stream. But Bandurko was not sure.
"Looks small. And flows the wrong way. It should flow to the right. But it flows to the left. . ."
Yellow, turbid water rushed at our feet and we stared into the current, which insisted on flowing up itself At the bottom of the ravine the darkness thickened so much that our faces lost all their features. We looked like clay podges, mud creatures, brittle as everything around us, like that precipitous bank from which now and again tumbled down big lumps of earth.
"We should cross the stream and climb the slope."
"Fine," I said and slid down on my ass straight into the murky water. It was just above knee level, a bit deeper in the middle. Before we could get out of it we had to follow the stream for a good fifty metres as the opposite bank turned out to be a wall of clay.
Half an hour later we were on top of it.
"Fucking winter," mumbled Bandurko. "It will be dark soon."
The wood began to grow thin. We no longer tripped over felled or windfallen trees. Fields of blackberries were replaced by smooth sheets of snow, broken here and there by a solitary juniper bush, as if waiting for us. And then the blackness and the greyness disappeared. We entered whiteness in 3-D. Even if it wasn't pure whiteness it was material, tactile. The slope rolled away gently as we waded through a milky suspension, a giant candyfloss, an icy sauna.

When 1 was ten, steam engines were all black and only their big sprocket wheels were red. We lived near the railway tracks. Passing freight trains made our house shake, sending clouds of flour-like dust from the ceiling. The noise wasn't too bad, as we were fenced from the tracks by a line of birch wood. If 1 wanted to see a train, I had to go for a walk. Best was a walk to the station - two brown gravel platforms and a little wooden hut painted green. The brown of the gravel, the green of the paint, the black and red of the locomotives ... Come to think of it, some of them weren't black but dark olive-grey...
On that little station, the last in the chain of musty little stations called Warsaw-this or Warsaw-that, only slow trains stopped. Yes, it was their trains that had olive locomotives. Freight and fast trains had black ones. The thing to do was to go to the end of the platform, stand on its very edge and wait for the great cloud of steam to emerge from under the machine's greasy belly and swallow me up. 1 felt its warm, furry touch on my face. It smelled of oil, coal, smoke, hot metal and of something else, probably the stuff they treat railway sleepers with. I imagined that's how it must have been in heaven. up in the clouds, that's what it must have been like for the angels, which I saw on the blue ceiling in the church one station down the line. The devil-like driver looked on my ascension from his little window, and if he happened to be waiting for a semaphore and in a good mood he would send out more clouds.

But what we were going through on that slope was more like purgatory, a mean, northern, Slavic Elysium, a rarefied solution of cold, damp and twilight.
With dusk came frost. The surface snow hardened into a crackly glaze, and we rolled down the slope with a dry, insect-like crunch. Bandurko crushed through first, and I tried to follow his trail.
"Down there! I can see something!" he shouted against the wind, his words barely audible as they flew past.
Out of grey darkness emerged a wall and a tall steep roof
"It's a hut."
"A hut? Would that be an African hut, Vasyl? Or an Indian pueblo?"
"A kolkhoz hut. They had sheep pastures around here. 1 know where we are. More or less."
The door hung on one hinge. Inside was filled with a rank smell of rotting rags. But it was windproof The wind banged on the walls and the roof but failed to get inside except for an occasional high-pitched whistle. Bandurko squatted by the hearth, raked in some rubbish and an old box and kindled the fire. He spotted a plank in the corner, leaned it against the wall and broke it with a kick. Then we found remnants of an old bench, some branches, and finally pulled down a few loose rafters from the roof Soon the fire lit the room. The little demolition job warmed us up. We propped up the fallen door, and there was nothing else left to do but to sit down, take our sodden boots off and start getting dry. The smoke billowed, desperately looking for an escape, but we didn't give a damn. We lay down on the ground. At least this way we could breathe.
"I know where we are. It could be worse. Two kilometres from here is a road, but it's no use in winter. We'll sit it out here until the morning and then it's all easy-peasy. I got it figured. Do you know how far we've covered today?"
"Haven't got a clue."
"Some twenty kilometres. About ten too many. We wanted to steer clear of the village and got blown off course. By fear or excessive caution. Maybe just as well. The only house in the area is five kilometres from here. A forester's lodge. Lumberjacks never pass this way. We'll check anyway. About that road. It was proper prewar tarmac. Two years ago there was a flood here. That stream we crossed flushed it clean away. Germans. Russians, even Poles couldn't destroy it, but that stream did. It's undrivable now. A vertical wall on one side, sheer drop into the river on the other. You can't squeeze through even on a bicycle. If there's no fog in the morning we'll check it out. And then - two hours and we're there. I'm hungry."
But we had nothing to eat. Only cigarettes. And the fire. The warmth, like vodka, made him talkative.
"It's a fucking desert. There's a house nearby but it's been abandoned. A whole farm. The owner's name was Voron-Raven in Russian. Hanged himself. People say he went mad. He was always mad, but in the end he went completely off his head. He had two sons. His wife died some time ago. People say he made his boys pull the plough. They were a bit slow up here. Maybe they couldn't tell the difference between men and beasts? If there is any. Look at Voron. Later he bought himself a new wife. A fifteen-year-old girl, bought her with money, from some greedy beggars. First he kept her to help him around the farm. When she was sixteen he married her. The new Mrs Voron pulled the plough too. People say he sometimes made her bark like a dog. Honest. And then he hanged himself, Mr Voron did. Have you ever seen those scarecrows in gardens? Dead crows hung on a pole? The sons and the girls have disappeared since."
The wind made a racket with loose asbestos roof tiles. It was getting in through a triangular gap above the door. We had to close our eyes and cover our faces with our hands when it spread the smoke low on the ground. Bandurko shut up and waited until the air cleared, wiped the tears with his dirty thumbs and started again.
"When the kolkhoz was here, they even had a regular bus line. Some three kilometres from here there is a proper road. These here, were sheep and cattle pastures. Quite wild. They would go into the mountains for half a year and let the herds loose. They ate, slept and fucked here, whatever they could. Probably sheep. When someone spends all his life with animals he domesticates them in more than one way. It was a prison kolkhoz. When they did their time they stayed on. Daughters of screws married thieves, office screws fell in love with bandits. New mutation, new nation. Freedom? The clever ones figured there was not much difference. And they were right. Even when they closed down, the bars were left in the windows for several years. Barbed-wire fences too. Just think - bars, barbed wire and in the middle of it all kids and nappies. And now there's nothing left. Ruins. How they must have cursed and cried when they learned they could - and had to - leave the place. And no one knows where to."
He carried on talking but I stopped listening. I didn't think he wanted me to anyway. Staring at the fire, squinting his smoke-red eyes, he carried on telling those stories probably only because he wanted to convince himself the place he was in was real. Space betrayed him, led him astray, so he turned to memory. A good move. He fell asleep with a cigarette end between his fingers. I delicately took it out.
I couldn't sleep. I looked at the fire, at the watch, at my friend. In the pile of broken wood in the corner I noticed something that looked like a skeleton. Regular construction of a ribcage, dog's or a sheep's.




Chapter 3




"Live or die. If you want to die, die."

That's the kind of shit Bandurko was selling to us in a bar called Crossroads, late autumn of last year. It was evening. Down the concrete gutter of Lazienkowska thoroughfare foamed a colourful sewage of cars, a stream of glistening vomit flowing from east to west and from west to east, while we sat in what felt like a terrarium, among people with dead faces and slow-motion gestures. There were five of us and each drank his favourite.
Bandurko drank red wine, Shorty sipped vodka, Goosy was on
beer because he was driving. Kostek also drank beer, while I savoured cheap brandy. It was raining. We sat by the glass wall. The glass was wet, and people in the street looked like black kites struck down from the sky and blown by the wind towards the gaping entry of the subway, or towards the iron banisters leading down to the bottom of the concrete ravine. Articulated buses packed to bursting crawled towards Ursynów, passing the returning half-empty ones. Everything shook. The earth and the glasses on the table. Only cigarette smoke seemed to withstand the tremor.
"Socialism or death. Socialism, Bandurko. That's what Commendante Castro said, and that's what we say." Kostek's face was motionless, as if it wasn't him who uttered these words. Black-haired, thin and swarthy, he looked like a Gypsy, or at least like someone who was there merely by accident. He always looked as if he was with us only because he'd just taken a spare seat at the table. He thought, jeered and got bored, all off his own bat. With his hands stuffed in pockets, legs stretched under the table, the collar of his jacket up and his eyes fixed on the label of the Okocim beer, he sat like a fan at a boring match. We - elbows firmly dug into the table, faces resting on hands holding smoking cigarettes, staring at the ashtray in the middle. Focused, one might say. Vasyl talked crap, but no one minded. Perhaps the crap was simply too great, too interesting in its crappiness, like an article in Hello!.
"You're talking crap, Bandurko, because you're a bourgeoisie."
"Typical class bias. I'm not a bourgeoisie: merely a receiver of private scholarship, and you're a tramp."
"Yes, I'm a tramp. That's why I demand you buy me another beer. And a round of what they like for the rest. I assume you do want us to hear you out."
"I got money," piped up Goosy.
"We all know that. Wait your turn, it'll come," muttered Kostek and straightened up in his chair to call the waitress. There was a break, like during a party meeting. Bandurko fell silent. He sat looking into his wine glass, probably offended by the silly jokes that interrupted his flow, unable to pick up the thread anew, or rather unable to muster the emotion that allowed him to be carried away and talk for half an hour at a stretch. It was a matter of inspiration. Bandurko was a man of vision. Everyone knew that. And a proselytiser. A keen but sensitive soul, easily wounded. Which is why we sat listening to him in silence until Kostek took out a pin and let some air out of Vasyl's balloon. So when the waitress arrived our circle broke and we started talking all at once, about what we did yesterday, what we should and what we'd rather do tomorrow, and who with. Goosy jabbered on about his latest business scheme, his car, his latest business scheme, his car, and he was getting excited just like Bandurko, except that in his case the excitement manifested itself through stammer and beads of sweat on his forehead.
"Shit! 1 forgot I'm driving." He'd push away his freshly started beer, take his glasses off and clean them with his jacket, ready to resume where he left off. But Shorty was already talking to Vasyl, trying to persuade him about something in a slow, measured voice, his hand cutting the air into thick juicy slices. Kostek sat quietly as before, sipping his beer, giving no sign that in a minute he'd put the empty glass on the table, say "See ya" and leave, which I would follow with "I'll be off too" and rush after him. 1 caught up with him in the cloakroom, looking at the glass box with various brands of cigarettes, finally asking the cloakroom granny for a packet of extra strong. I didn't stop him, he didn't look back. I waited for a bit and walked out on to the wet street to think about Vasyl Bandurko.





Chapter 4




And now 1 was looking at his still, quiet face and 1 swear 1 could see a smile lurking in the corner of his lips. It wasn't playing shadows or shimmering specks of golden red glow. It was a triumphant smile. It radiated even through the mask of sleep. For Bandurko triumphed, he convinced us that our lives were shit and so we should do something. He was the one to tell us what.
That speech he made in the bar, although it shocked us, was merely a beginning. After that he worked on us individually He must have been spying too, for we tended to bump into him in the street, on buses, in bars. He never tried to catch us at home, as if he knew we would be more resistant there, that a more ordered world would protect us from madness.
. So it was streets, bridges, laying traps. Once he dived after me into a taxi only to tumble out ten minutes later in some useless place, Industrial Sluzewiec or something. On a Sunday there was no living soul in sight. He must have wandered among the huge glass and steel cubes, halls and hangars perfecting the art of rhetoric, fasting in the desert, receiving visions and prophesying to the Jerusalem of corrugated iron.
I can't remember who it was he converted first. We continued our meetings, but every time he tried we invariably concluded Vasyl was still off his rocker.
Who was first, then? Shorty? Kostek? Goosy? Funny little game. I didn't have to play it but the night was long. So - Shorty? Or Goosy? Goosy certainly not. He had the most to lose and wouldn't have the balls. On the other hand he was sentimental and could, at the last moment, summon the courage to shout, "Guys, I'm coming with you!" Just as the guys were disappearing round the corner of a narrow street of wooden huts, similar to the station hut but never painted. "Guys! I'm coming with you!”, - although he knew we were going for one of those dangerous excursions that usually ended in a crazy run with some mad bastard charging stark-naked behind us, courtesy of Ginger Grisha who, bored with open-air porn, was stepping out of the bushes with a line: "Excuse me, do you have the time?" or "Shut up, baby, fucking doesn't kill."
Shit, did we run. Not out of fear, for there are natural limits to the speed even the maddest bare-assed fucker can develop in pine wood undergrowth or a wild rose thicket. Normally they didn't bother. So we ran like the stealers of forbidden fruit, bewinged, cursed and free. The youngest didn't have a clue as to what really happened in paradise. They felt fear, the breeze of the unknown. The oldest, like Ginger Grisha, would spit with a special, masculine contempt, turning their eyes away in order to give their friends - and themselves - to understand that it was no hypnosis.
So, Goosy was probably the last. But then he could be just as well the first, caught in Vasyl's Machiavellian snares. Bandurko knew his weak spots well; we all knew: "Listen, Goosy, everyone has agreed, you are the last, we care about you, think about it. We can't wait for ever." And if it was like that, the order didn't matter. Each of us could be first or last, and all deceived.
The fire was going out. I picked up a few sticks from the pile and gently laid them on the coals. They began to crack. Sparks shot up but darkness was putting them out like water. The cold had gone, or I had got used to it. There was only hunger. My guts twisted themselves into a knot and ached. Even cigarette smoke couldn't untwist them. I thought of the Indians, who swallow the smoke. The thought made me burp.
The previous night, on the train, we had a hamburger and a beer, and that was it. Warsaw Central, Warsaw West, and then the black screen of the window with the blurred beads of the light of passing stations, cigarettes, and no vodka. It was supposed to be better that way. I fell asleep before Radom. We didn't feel like talking. We had talked ourselves out. I curled up in the corner and lost Vasyl from my sight. Some time after Sandomierz I was awakened by his voice.
"They nicked our rucksacks." He stood with his hand on the lightswitch, looking around the compartment as if that barren, empty cube of space could hide two massive canvas bags.

"They fucking nicked them…” as if it were something beyond human comprehension, something supernatural.
"They fucking did. I think it must have been thieves," I suggested helpfully from my corner. "We asked for it."
We had thrown them on the seats as if we didn't care, like they do in the movies, like old troopers, those who have nothing to lose. And on top of that it was so hot inside the carriage we had to sleep with the door open. Well, I couldn't care less. Sleeping-bags, longjohns, food, the stove, a bottle of meths.
"The map! We lost the fucking map!" moaned Vasyl. "Half a year of work. A tourist map but with lots of notes, corrections, every hole in the ground marked, bus timetables. .
"It's not Siberia. We'll manage."
"What do you know?"
"I do. I was there."
"Not there. You were more to the east. And it was summer."
"Money?"
"I got it on me."
"We'll buy the necessary stuff when we get there."
"We will - condoms in a bar. It's a Sunday."

I was pissed off but didn't want to crawl out of my corner into the middle of the brightly lit metal cage. Suddenly we felt naked without those shitty bags. Soon after, we arrived in Tarnobrzeg, and Bandurko stuck his head out of the window. But the guy who had stolen the bags wasn't stupid and had probably thrown them out into the bushes before the train got to the station, possibly even a few hours earlier. Good start, I thought. We've already had a theft, now it's time for murder, with a rape thrown in somewhere in between, say at Debica.

But we saved our asses. When we got off in Grobow it was dawn. The street from the station was clean and quiet. Wooden villas with gardens, old-fashioned signs recommending homecooked dinners, glass display cases with saints. Above the white roofs the sky was getting pinker. It was a terrible colour, bright and ice-hard. Even a stone would bounce off a sky like that, I thought. On the hill in front of us, a coal wagon loaded to the brim was coming down the road. A skinny white horse was practically sat on its rear while the bridle cut into its mouth so deep we could see its red tongue and gums.

"On a Sunday?"

"Maybe he's been going since Saturday, maybe Thursday?"
On a slanted, cobblestone town square we found the bus stop.

The bus arrived not too long after. Seeing us, it skidded and stopped sideways. We hopped into the empty coach as the driver was sending everything to fucking hell - icy roads, sand-sprayers, capitalism and quite possibly us, but we hid right at the back.
"Do you remember when all the coaches were blue?" asked Vasyn.
"I do."
And then we travelled south-east. The sun was rising a bit to the left. On the right spread a wide, flat valley. Well-trodden paths and sleigh-tracks led off the main road to huts and sheds, barns and pigsties. Over the whole vista, a blue veil of morning chimney smoke hung on the black-green mountain line. The light was so bright, so translucent, as if we were heading not for the geographical but some mythical, ideal south-east.
The driver put on a pair of shades and switched on the radio. It crackled like hell, but he must have liked it for he turned it up. Through the electric storm came scraps of Warsaw news. Like a hue and cry, like a memento, or an exhortation.
After an hour we reached Gardlica. The sun had disappeared. There were no clouds; more like a whitewash. Warm, sticky currents flowed in the air, the sort that drives people to madness. We bought a bag of cigarettes, different sorts, and read the poster: "Katyn, Kozielsk, Ostaszków - by bus in two days."
"Cheap," I said. "Three hundred."
"Competition," explained Vasyl.
And then we got on another coach, together with a big family and three sober citizens. Half an hour into the journey Bandurko remarked: "So, to all intents and purposes we're in a different country now."