Free Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski

survive, though you’d have thought manors were a whole lot stronger than tombs.
    When the front passed through, of all the tombs Chmiel’s survived the best then as well. And there’s no harder test for tombs than a war. For six weeks there were two German artillery batteries stationed at the cemetery, firing to the east day and night. And they were huge guns, every one of them. On top of that they were half dug into the ground so only their muzzles were poking out from among the graves, and with every round the whole hill with the cemetery on it would jump, and each time the crews working the guns had to open their mouths so as not to go deaf. And all those trees they cut down to make room for the guns.
    And from the east the Russki guns fired day and night the same, for six weeks. It looked as though the cemetery hill would turn into a valley. It wasso hellish even the worms couldn’t take it anymore, let alone the dead. It was like the earth itself was turned inside out, and all of eternity was flung to the surface.
    There were skeletons, bodies, coffins, all over the place, like death had suddenly gone on the rampage all on its own because it had run short of living people and it had dragged the dead out of their graves so it could kill them all over again. Like even though they were supposed to already be dead, they were part of the earth now, some of them had rotted and some were nothing but dust – still they had to die a second time. And without even knowing they were dying. So when the front moved on they had to be buried again, like real dead people. And for years later the cemetery looked like a battlefield.
    Any time you went there you’d see ruins and stumps of trees, the place was empty and silent, there was only the odd tomb or tree that had survived intact. As for the birds, it was like they’d vanished, you wouldn’t see even the lousiest little sparrow. And for the longest time afterward, even though there wasn’t any danger or anything for them there, they avoided the place like it was infected. They didn’t even perch there on their way to someplace else and sit and chirp. They didn’t even turn up there by accident. Or visit their old nest the way birds will do.
    Before, the cemetery had been a paradise for birds. There were cuckoos, blackbirds, goldfinches, titmice, orioles, bullfinches, woodpeckers, crows, doves. Who could have even counted them all. The trees just about shook with them. They’d sing and chirp all day long, and cuckoo and caw. The moment you went into the cemetery you’d find yourself right in the middle of a hullabaloo of birds, before you even got to the graves. When you prayed, the words of the prayer would sometimes get lost in the din. Every so often Franciszek the sacristan would climb up into the trees and knock down the nests of the noisier ones, because he thought it was too cheerful for a cemetery. Though they didn’t just nest in the trees, but on the crosses and theLord Jesuses and in the grass on the ground. But after the front had passed through, whenever a bird happened to fly over the place it would rise up higher in the sky, sometimes as high as its wings would carry it. As if it was suddenly hemmed in by something and its only escape was to climb higher and higher.
    Franciszek the sacristan, who used to think that because of the birds the cemetery wasn’t sad enough – now, he’d make bird feeders and put them up here and there where a tree was still standing, or even just a branch, or even on the crosses and the Lord Jesuses and angels, he’d hang them wherever he could. You’d see a cross over a grave and on its arms there’d be two bird feeders hanging, as if Jesus was holding them in his crucified arms to attract the birds. Or in the place where there’d been the head of an angel that had gotten blown off by a shell, the angel would have a feeder for a head. He put up so many of those feeders that when you saw them you’d be forgiven for