The Graveyard Read Free

drunks.”
    “Who? Me?”
    “No. Mrs. Malinowska.”
    “Come on, now. Don’t take that attitude,” Franciszek said indignantly.
    “Now it’s our attitude you don’t like. But a minute ago you had the nerve to call us drunks.” He looked at Franciszek with superiority and said distinctly, “You’re insulting the uniform, Citizen.”
    “It’s a lie!” Franciszek cried heatedly.
    The corporal turned to the sergeant, who all this time had calmly been writing in his black notebook. “Did you hear that? This citizen says we’re liars. Take that down.”
    Franciszek looked again at their young faces, and was overcome with rage. Raising both arms, and shaking them fiercely, he roared: “Take it down, you stinker, take it down! And take down that you can stick it all up your ass, and that I s— on everything …”
    He was beside himself with fury. His own words came to him as through a fog; he could neither understand nor distinguish them. He shouted incoherently, desperately waving his arms. When his rage had passed, and he came to, he saw that the sergeant was putting his identification papers into his own leather bag.
    “Let’s go,” the sergeant said dryly.
    And, quite helpless, Kowalski went with them to the nearby police station.

II
    THEY WALKED LESS THAN TEN MINUTES, AND during that time Franciszek, whose strength had completely evaporated after his fit of rage, gradually recovered his composure. After a while he decided to put a good face on it, and even began to whistle a tune. He assumed an attitude of injured innocence. He held his head high, strode along with assurance, and once, when he stumbled and noticed the quick glance of one of the policemen, he smiled with ironic superiority. When they entered the long dark passageway leading to the police station, he thought: “There was no need to fly off the handle. It was all because I was too tired and drank too much. Vodka is really a gift of the devil. I’ll never get anywhere with these stupid kids. Maybe I really did make an ass of myself. I must talk to someone sensible.”
    They crossed a small courtyard and entered a room where there was a man on duty. Their entrance took no more than a moment, but it made Franciszek feel ill at ease for the first time since the incident in the street. First the younger policeman opened the door, then stepped back, and only after Franciszek had entered did the two policemen follow, closing the door behind them. The door made a particularly unpleasant squeak. “A fine state of affairs,” Franciszek thought. “The one place where things should run smoothly; they might have oiled it. If only I could talk to someone sensible now.”
    He looked about him attentively, his face still impassive. It was an unpretentious room, with walls of a nondescriptcolor, the room itself divided in two by a railing. Near the middle of the railing the paint which had once covered it was rubbed off; Franciszek thought that this must be because so many “customers” had leaned against it. On the walls hung portraits of government officials, and above them the Polish eagle. A wooden bench stood by one of the walls; a man was asleep on it, his back turned to the room. “You wouldn’t say this place was very well run,” Franciszek thought once again, and the thought gave him a kind of malicious satisfaction.
    Meanwhile the policemen were behaving as though Franciszek did not exist. They were talking in an undertone with a man seated behind the railing. Franciszek heard his nasal voice but could not see his face, which was hidden by the backs of the policemen. For a minute or so he did not move, expecting to be asked to step up and make a statement, but nothing happened. Then, after listening awhile, Franciszek realized that they were not talking about him, but about a bicycle that had been reported stolen a week earlier. One of the policemen maintained that the thief was a certain Pasterka; the other, that the bicycle owner had