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The essential for little Agnes was to remain hidden; in hiding she found other pleasures but the same security as Joseph had found under A
Perhaps, since I am burning to a
The trouble began in August, 1913 when, as every summer, Koljaiczek was to help man the big raft that floated down from Kiev to the Vistula by way of the Pripet, the canal, the Bug, and the Modlin. Twelve raftsmen in all, they boarded the tugboat Radaune, operated by their sawmill, and steamed from Westlich Neufähr up the Dead Vistula to Einlage, then up the Vistula past Käsemark, Letzkau, Czattkau, Dirschau, and Pieckel, and tied up for the night at Thorn. There the new manager of the sawmill, who was to supervise the timber-buying in Kiev, came on board. By the time the Radaune cast off at four in the morning, word got around that he had come on. Koljaiczek saw him for the first time at breakfast in the galley. They sat across from one another, chewing and slopping up barley coffee. Koljaiczek knew him right off. Broad-shouldered and bald, the boss sent for vodka and had it poured into the men’s empty coffee cups. In the midst of chewing, while the vodka was still being poured at the far end, he introduced himself: “Just so you know what’s what, I’m the new boss, my name is Dückerhoff, I like order and I get it.”
At his bidding, the crew called out their names one after another in their seating order, and drained their cups so their Adam’s apples jumped. Koljaiczek drank first, then he said “Wranka,” looking Dückerhoff straight in the eye. Dückerhoff nodded as he had nodded each time and repeated “Wranka” as he had repeated the names of the rest of the crew. Nevertheless it seemed to Koljaiczek that there was something special about Dückerhoff’s way of saying the dead raftsman’s name, not exactly pointed, but kind of thoughtful.
The Radaune pounded her way against the muddy current, deftly avoiding sandbanks with the help of changing pilots. To right and left, behind the dikes the country was always the same, hilly when it wasn’t flat, but always reaped over. Hedges, sunken lanes, a hollow overgrown with broom, here and there an isolated farm, a landscape made for cavalry attacks, for a division of Uhlans wheeling in from the left across the sandbox, for hedge-leaping hussars, for the dreams of young cavalry officers, for the battles of the past and the battles to come, for heroic painting. Tartars flat against the necks of their horses, dragoons rearing, knights in armor falling, grand masters in blood-spattered mantles, not a scratch on their breastplates, all but one, who was struck down by the Duke of Mazowsze; and horses, better than a circus, bedecked with tassels, sinews delineated with precision, nostrils dilated, carmine red, sending up little clouds and the clouds are pierced by lowered lances hung with pe
Off Wloclawek, Dückerhoff tapped Koljaiczek on the shoulder: “Tell me, Wranka, didn’t you work in the mill at Schwetz a few years back? The one that burned down?” Koljaiczek shook his head heavily, as though he had a stiff neck, and managed to make his eyes so sad and tired that Dückerhoff kept any further questions to himself.
When Koljaiczek at Modlin, where the Bug flows into the Vistula and the Radaune turned into the Bug, leaned over the rail as the raftsmen did in those days and spat three times, Dückerhoff was standing beside him with a cigar and asked for a light. That little word, like the word “match”, had a strange effect on Koljaiczek. “Man, you don’t have to blush because I want a light. You’re not a girl, or are you?”
It wasn’t until after they left Modlin behind them that Koljaiczek lost his blush, which was not a blush of shame, but the lingering glow of the sawmills he had set on fire.
Between Modlin and Kiev, up the Bug, through the canal that joins the Bug and the Pripet, until the Radaune, following the Pripet, found its way to the Dniepr, nothing happened that can be classified as an exchange between Koljaiczek-Wranka and Dückerhoff. There was surely a bit of bad blood aboard the tug, among the raftsmen, between stokers and raftsmen, between helmsman, stokers, and captain, between captain and the constantly changing pilots; that’s said to be the way with men, and maybe it really is. I can easily conceive of a certain amount of backbiting between the Kashubian logging crew and the helmsman, who was a native of Stettin, perhaps even the begi
But if I had to keep a journal of Koljaiczek’s thoughts or of Dückerhoff’s i
And with gruff bonhomie, smiling shamefacedly into each other’s manly eyes with a twinkle that might almost have been a tear, they would have clasped one another’s diffident but horny hands.
We know the scene from the movies: the reconciliation between two enemy brothers, brilliantly performed, brilliantly photographed, from this day onward comrades forever, through thick and thin; Lord, what adventures they’ll live through together!
But Koljaiczek found opportunity neither to drown Dückerhoff nor to snatch him from the jaws of death. Conscientiously, intent on the best interests of the firm, Dückerhoff bought his lumber in Kiev, supervised the building of the nine rafts, distributed a substantial advance in Russian currency to see the men through the return trip, and boarded the train, which carried him by way of Warsaw, Modlin, Deutsch-Eylau, Marienburg, and Dirschau back to his company, whose sawmill was situated in the timber port between the Klawitter dockyards and the Schichau dockyards.