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The forest was quiet. The August heat had made the air soft, ripe with the smell of earth and growing things. Tall, old trees arched over us like an ancient church. Here and there, rays of sun poked down to dot plants with specks of light. A few small white and blue flowers showed shy faces while an occasional mushroom had popped up from the ground, like a moist brown bubble.
Animals were there — red deer, foxes, martens, snakes. Not that we saw or heard them. Our constant jabber and laughter would have chased anything away.
There were seven of us: Drugi, Jurek, Makary, Raclaw, Ulryk, Wojtex, and me, Patryk — all eleven or twelve years old. Nothing like a club, or a gang — more like a flock of wild goats. We’d race around our village, roam nearby fields, steal some fruit, kick an old ball up and down the street, play hiding games or dash in and out of one another’s homes to share news, such as “Wojtex’s sister cut her finger!”
We even dressed pretty much the same: baggy trousers, dark shirts, cloth caps, plus old shoes or patched boots. Of course, there were differences. Raclaw, whose father was well-off, wore mostly new clothes with jet buttons. Jurek, at the other end of things, seemed to keep his clothing together with bent pins.
Didn’t seem to matter. We seven always did things together. That’s why when Jurek said he was going to the ruins because his sister had gotten mad at him and told him to get out of her house, we went with him. “Anyway,” he said, “that’s my real home.”
About a mile into the forest, we left the road — Jurek in the lead — and tramped under the dark trees until we reached higher ground. That’s when we saw collapsed foundations and fragments of old walls, the stones mottled green-gray with moss and lichens. Most of it was half sunk in the earth. There also was a crooked chimney with a usable hearth.
I thought that it had once been a farm.
Makary was sure the place was an abandoned bandits’ hideout.
Ulryk believed it was an old church.
Jurek insisted the ruins had been a castle, which had belonged to the ancient Polish king Bolesław the Brave. What’s more, Jurek claimed he was the true descendent of Bolesław, so he was the real owner of the ruins, the forest, and even our village.
Knowing Jurek had invented the story to make himself feel important, we treated his notion for what it was, a joke. Jurek was no more royal than he was the man in the moon. Other kids in the village may have been as poor as Jurek; I didn’t know them.
When we got to the ruins, we did what we always did: set out to collect wood to make a fire in the hearth. It didn’t matter that the day was warm. Sitting in front of a fire made us feel as if we were having an adventure.
Jurek and I went off together, walking side by side, looking for wood.
“Your sister going to let you back home?” I asked.
“She always does,” he said with a shrug and grin to tell me he didn’t care.
As we were grabbing sticks, I saw something small sticking out of the dirt. I bent over and picked it up.
“Let me see,” cried Jurek. “I saw it first,” not that he had.
I swung around, my back to him, even as I brought the small thing close to my eyes.
“What is it?” said Jurek. “What?”
As far as I could tell, it was just a plain old rusty button.
“Is it money?” demanded Jurek. “A jewel?”
“Button.”
“I need it.”
I looked at him. “No, you don’t. You use pins.”
That shut him like a slammed door. He stood there, mouth open a bit, face puke pale. In fact, he looked so stupid, I laughed.
My laugh was like a trigger. He lunged forward and tried to snatch the button. “Belongs to me!” he cried.
“Doesn’t,” I said, evading him.
“Does. The whole forest belongs to me.” He was dancing around, trying to get the button.
I kept shifting so he couldn’t.
“Come on!” he yelled. “It’s mine!”
I stepped away and looked at him. He was breathing hard, his hands were balled into fists, and his cheeks were red. I’d never seen him so angry. I said, “What’s the matter with you?”
“Everything on this land is mine!” he shouted. “Give it. I’m king here!”
“That’s so stupid.”
“Isn’t!” he screamed, and made another grab, but I twisted away.
I’ll admit: I had no use for the dumb button. As far as I was concerned, Jurek was acting stupid because of that King Bolesław story. It made me not want to give him the button.
Next moment, he snatched a big stick from the ground and lifted it high, as if about to bring it down on me. “Give!” he roared, face full of rage. He was waving that stick around like a club.
Suddenly scared, I retreated a few steps and stared at him, unable to understand what was happening.
“I’m warning you!” he cried, and came closer, the stick hovering. “Everything on this land is mine. All of it! Give!”
My heart was thumping, but I didn’t want to back off.
“Fine,” I said, and threw the button as far away as I could. “You want it, get it.”
He didn’t even glance where I had thrown it. He just stood there, holding up that stick, panting, trembling. I couldn’t believe the hate I saw on his face.
He lowered the stick gradually but kept glaring at me.
I found my voice. “I’m going back,” I said, and ran off, leaving Jurek where he was, gripping the stick, still furious.
When I got to the ruins, I didn’t say anything to the others. It was all too creepy. And senseless.
After a while, Jurek returned. He seemed calm, though at first he wouldn’t look at me. Or say anything. And I didn’t ask him if he had found the button. Or why he had acted so insane. Instead, we all sat by the fire the way we always did, talking, fooling around.
When it began to get dark, we got up, prepared to go back. Jurek held back.
Trying to smooth things over, trying to be nice, I called, “You coming home?”
He looked at me, his face a blank. “This is my home,” he said.
We went off. He stayed.
As I walked back to the village, I kept thinking about what had happened. The truth is, I’d never seen such hatred on anyone’s face as I’d seen on J
urek’s. Baffled, I tried to forget his craziness, hoping it wouldn’t happen again.
But it did.
When I think about it now, I guess Jurek and I were like two dogs in the same pack. Sometimes we’d circle each other and wag our tails. Other times we’d snarl and threaten each other, the way we did in the ruins. In other words, we were friends, you might say even best friends, but at the same time, rivals. Not that he and I — or anyone else — spoke about it. Or understood why it was that way. It just was what it was.
But if we seven boys had a leader, it was Jurek. He was the one who came up with new ideas about things to do. Living in a small village the way we did, new ideas were hard to come by. He was good at that.
Some of Jurek’s schemes were fine: races, fishing contests, fort building. Others were not so nice: toppling Mr. Konstanty’s ancient apple tree, stuffing the magistrate’s house chimney with straw, running away and hiding in the forest for a week without telling anyone. They weren’t exactly wicked, but close.
Thing is, we boys were always daring one another to do this or that. But understand, we almost never did the bad stuff. Mostly, it was fun to challenge one another, like roosters in a farmyard. Only, instead of crowing, we laughed. Dares were the way we measured one another, tested one another, who was strong, who was weak.
I was the one who usually objected to Jurek’s bad ideas, the dares that were against someone. I suppose it was because my parents were strict, insisting I tell them what I was doing, and passing judgment. Of course, I didn’t tell them everything.
It was funny how, though Jurek and I were friends, we were so unalike.
Both twelve years old, but I was taller, bigger.
He had long brown hair, a narrow face, and pale-blue eyes.
I had short blond hair, a round face, big ears, and was mostly easygoing.
Jurek was always saying how important he was, that King Bolesław junk. It was the worst when we were at the ruins.
My parents were always telling me I had to take care of people.
Since Jurek’s mother and father died a long time ago, he lived with his eighteen-year-old sister. We boys thought she was pretty. He also had another older sister, but she had married and left town. I had no idea where.
The place Jurek and his sister lived was a one-room shack at the end of a narrow alley at the far edge of the village. A tumbledown place.
My parents and I lived in a three-room wooden house on a narrow street near the village center. There was a main room with my parents’ bed, covered with a feather-stuffed quilt, a kitchen with three chairs, a table for eating, plus a glass window. My father had his workshop in the back. Beyond that was an outhouse.
Jurek’s sister washed laundry for the Russian soldiers who lived in the old barracks west of town. She used the river to do washing and then hung the uniforms out to dry on a rope strung between trees behind her house. The washing brought her just enough money to pay rent and buy food. But her hands were always red from using lye soap in cold water.
Once the laundry was dry and folded, Jurek brought it to the Russians and brought back dirty clothing. He also collected the pay for his sister, but he didn’t always give her the full amount. At least that’s what he told me, swearing me to secrecy. But since he was always exaggerating and bragging, I wasn’t sure it was true.
My father was a wheelwright, repairing and making wooden wagon wheels. It was what his father and his father had done — back, I supposed, since the world began. In fact, my father liked to say, “The world has always rolled on wooden wheels. Always will. Remember that and you’ll have a living.” So, to learn the skills, I worked in his shop.
In our small kitchen, my mother cooked on a wood-burning stove — me supplying wood and water. There was always an iron pot of soup that never cooled or emptied. She also patched farm workers’ clothing in exchange for food, which went into that pot. Every night the three of us had supper together. My mother insisted.
Jurek rarely took meals with his sister. The two of them fought a lot, and she was always telling him to go away, like that day when we went to the ruins.
At school I was an okay student. Jurek? Everybody knew he was the worst.
I slept on a high, wide wooden shelf in our warm kitchen. To get there, I climbed a ladder my father had built when I was younger.
On that sleeping shelf, I had a small box with a lid that my father made for me when I was confirmed. I kept special things inside it: a piece of silver thread, a butterfly with shimmering green wings, a colored picture of Saint Adalbert, and a pure white stone, which had a blue streak like a cat’s eye.
I don’t think Jurek owned anything.
As for that button business at the ruins, I forgot about it, so things went on as they usually did — until something astonishing happened.
It was still August, and I was going to school, running down the main street, when I noticed an enormous black bird flying out of the bloodred western sky. It was heading toward my village.
Though the old wooden schoolhouse with its stubby bell tower was only fifty yards away, I stopped and stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
I took a glance around to see if any of my friends were about. I didn’t see any. But the village was busy, with plenty of people on the street. Mr. Kaminski was opening the shutters to his tiny pots and pans store. Mrs. Kaczmarek was laying out her used boots. I saw Mr. Zajac and his donkey-pulled milk wagon go by. And there were lots more, such as the farmworkers walking out to the fields that surrounded the village. But no one seemed to have noticed that big bird but me.
After a few minutes of staring at the bird — if that’s what it was — I realized it had double wings, one over the other. That wasn’t like any bird I’d ever seen before. Made me think it wasn’t a bird but a gigantic insect, something like a dragonfly, with its multiple wings. To see such an enormous one would be amazing; in my village, I didn’t get to see unusual things very often.
As I stood there, gawking, I noticed that the wings on this creature weren’t moving. Was it a raven soaring on the wind? But there was no wind and the hot, humid air was already as limp as a dead fish in Mrs. Zielinski’s fish store.
Then I began to hear a steady beating sound that seemed to come from this flying thing. Wasn’t a buzzing or humming noise, nothing like a bumblebee, or mosquito; more a clatter-clatter. Made me think of grasshopper wings. The only other sound I could think of was a banging ax — crack, crack, crack — very fast. Of course I knew that whatever it was, it couldn’t be an ax up there.
Now a few people did turn and look up, but they didn’t do anything other than stare for a moment before going about their business.
I stood there, fascinated.
Whatever the thing was, it dropped lower until it was about three hundred feet above the ground. Even so, it continued to fly on, drawing nearer to where I was standing.
More people on the street stopped whatever they were doing and, like me, watched it.
Then I realized that there were wires and sticks on those double wings, as well as what looked like smoke flowing out from what I supposed was its nose. It was almost as if it were a fire-breathing flying dragon. Except I didn’t believe in dragons.
Then I saw something like a gray disk in front of this thing’s nose — if it was a nose. It seemed to be spinning. Maybe, I told myself, I was seeing a machine, a machine that could fly. I thought of it because of what Raclaw had told me, that people had invented machines that could fly.
People talked about all kinds of new inventions in what we called the “far world.” Things that weren’t in our village. Even so, when Raclaw told me about machines that could fly, I didn’t believe him.
“How can a machine fly?” I said.
“They just do.”
“Where’d you hear about them?”
“From a newspaper my father gets. Tells about things like that. They’re called aeroplanes.”
“You ever see one of those
. . . aeroplanes?” I found it hard to say the word.
“Just a picture.”
“Well, then, I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t care if you do or don’t. It’s true.”
As I stood there watching, I began to think that Raclaw might have been right, that I was seeing a flying machine.
Behind the machine’s nose was a bump, which, after more staring, I realized was a man sitting in the machine. The man’s head was huge, with round, shiny eyes that didn’t seem human. If anything was an insect, he was. Which was strange. Unsettling.
I looked around to see if anyone was acting fearful. Although a lot of people were now looking, no one seemed alarmed.
With a burst of speed, and loud clatter-clatter, the aeroplane — if that’s what it was — flew over my head so that I had to lean way back to see how big it was. As it went by, a black shadow passed over the village. Now everyone on the street stopped whatever they were doing and gawked. People were even peering out of open windows.
The aeroplane flew past me, whipping up a whirl of wind. As it did, I saw black crosses on its wings, plus wheels and some kind of mechanical tail, so that I decided it really was one of those flying machines. I was thrilled.
Next moment, I saw something drop from it. My first thought was that it was a part of the machine or (still thinking of birds) an egg. Wanting to grab it, I started to run toward where I thought it had fallen.
Then there was a red flash, followed by a huge explosion. In less than a second, plumes of yellow, blue, and red flames burst from the schoolhouse.
The force of the explosion punched me hard in the chest, staggering me. Even so, I managed to stay on my feet and stare at the school. It was engulfed in flames, with dense black smoke pluming into the air. There was a sour stench in the air, too, something that stung my eyes.
I looked for the flying machine. It had soared high into the sky, turned a wide circle, and was now heading back in the direction from which it had come, the west.
Next moment, panicky people — shouting, crying, screaming — were racing toward the burning school.
The building right next to the school was the church. People — mostly women — were pouring out of it, too, including our old priest, Father Stanislaw.
There were also Russian soldiers running from the village barracks, some with rifles in their hands.