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barked at everything, people, horses, cows, chickens, geese, ducks. He even barked at father. In the end, one night he broke loose from his chain and disappeared. People said they saw him running across the fields like a mad dog.
    And father kept digging. When the mood struck him he wouldn’t even go out plowing but he’d dig holes instead. War came, the planes flew right over the thatched roofs, people ran away into the fields with their cattle and their bedding, and he just seemed to get more single-minded with his digging, and he’d make bigger and bigger holes.
    He kept digging after the war too, though he seemed to have lost faith, because often he’d just walk round and round the farmyard not knowing where to start, and all of a sudden he’d toss his spade down and go off to do the threshing or cut chaff. When he got old and his strength began to fail, once in a while he’d still go and do some digging. Sometimes he’d dig a pitas deep as half a man right in the middle of the yard, and it’d have to be filled in straightaway because the wagon couldn’t even drive in.
    When I wouldn’t let him dig in the yard he’d go into the orchard and dig there. From all that digging my russet tree withered up, and my
masztan
sweet plum. The plum tree used to bear plums like cow’s eyes. Some years there’d be so many that its branches were weighed down to the ground. I had to keep an eye on it the whole time to stop the local boys pulling the leaves off with the fruit. They were the best plums of all for fruit soup.
    Then, when he was dying he gave me a sign that he had something to say to me, and in a croaky voice that already seemed to come from the next world he told me I should keep digging, because although he never found the papers, I would for sure. Now, now he would know where to dig. But now it was too late for him.
    Father and mother were both buried in regular graves in the ground, and they’re lying there now waiting for me to finish this tomb. There’s probably not much left of them, it doesn’t take long for the earth to make them over. There may be more of father, because he was buried a lot later, but mother, after they brought Michał back she only lived another six months or so, that was all those years ago, and she first fell ill soon after the war. Maybe they even think I’ve forgotten about them. They’ve been lying there all this while, the earth working them over, perhaps they reckon I’ve turned to drink. “Szymek, Szymek, think what you’re doing.” Soon there won’t be the littlest bone left of them. But I made myself a promise that as soon as I finish that tomb I’ll have new caskets made for them and I’ll move whatever’s left of them. They’ll be in there next to each other, on the left lower side, that’s what I decided, because the bottom right is for me and Michał, and on top there’ll be Antek and Stasiek and their wives. In that way we’ll all be together and none of them’ll be able to say that I got the farm and they were left with nothing. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be building a tomb, I wouldn’t have gone to all that expense and all that effort. I mean, when it comes down toit is it all that much better in a walled tomb than in the ground? If it was just me I’d actually rather be in the ground. So long as I had a mound of earth smoothed over with a spade, some kind of cross stuck in there, and the thirty years of eternity a person’s officially entitled to, I’d be fine. Then someone else could come lie in my place. And after them there’d be somebody else, and somebody else, and so on till the very end, as long as there are people in the world. Because there’s no point separating yourself from the earth with a stone wall after you’re dead. A person lives from the earth, and they should give their eternity back to the earth. The earth deserves something from people too.
    One time in the resistance I spent three days alive in one of those