1944 (Part VI)

We children slept on some cleverly constructed lodges placed on the shelf. In the event that the Ukrainians would want to attack us here, no one slept at night. Everywhere many guns were kept, which were always at hand. 

The grown-ups constantly smoked cigarettes, but this did not bother anyone at all, and even if so, no one at that time thought anything of it. The whole time, but especially at night, among the grown-ups there were bridge tournaments at two tables made by covering suitcases and bundles with a blanket, and we children from the height of our lodging had everything under full control. 

This would definitely be one of the most beautiful periods of my childhood if not for the presence of the engineer Swiechło, who I honestly despised. 

Representing the forest service, the engineer Swiechło was also one of the eighteen residents of the farm house and was friendly with my mother, who to my distress also liked him. My mom was then a young and attractive woman and when I strain my memory, there were always some men hanging around her, which drove my father to frenzy. 

As through a fog I remembered different scenes of jealousy in his execution, apparently there were even efforts at duels, of course everything exactly according to the honor code of Boziewicz, that luckily never reached follow up, my father was a master shot with a pistol, which everyone knew, because at every opportune moment in shooting he always made a great show of it. 

Only once did my parents’ marriage hang by a thread, but I know this rather from stories, because I was then not a whole three and a half years old. And so it was wonderful, sunny late autumn weather and my mother, because it was very warm, in a thin dress played with me on the porch. 

At this time my father arrived on horseback and I, as always, when seeing him on a horse, started to scream for him to put me in front of him on the saddle and for a short distance gallop, which my father, as always, happily rendered. 

On the property from the spring full steam ahead there carried on at this time irrigation work, and my father, wanting to check something, galloped with me in that direction. For companionship we were also chased by three hunting dogs of the race German pointer that roamed the property. 

My father also rode horseback very well, just as he handled the pistol, and maybe even better. He went full speed, in order to jump over a wide ditch filled with water, at this segment most resembling a river. Nearly every day, for sport, sometimes even several times, he beat this hazard, but just this time, and this in front of my mother’s eyes, and additionally also with me, he fell into the deep. 

My mom from a distance saw only the high column of dark water and three dogs in terrifying panic running off in the direction of the manor, about which they were later very embarrassed. Ominous silence followed. 

She lit a cigarette and made haste to get to the scene of the accident. She realized that, however, this was more than a half kilometer away, and by the flowerbed after all there stood an Opel, into which she immediately jumped and beating a world record of terrain driving, in a moment stopped by the deep water. 

There was no one there, only ominous brown water, as if it were still slightly undulating. 

When she was about ready to faint, she heard from a distance the yells of my father, who unable to get out of the ditch at this place, with me in hand led the horse down a bend and then, as if nothing, only that from heel to head covered in brown mud similar to shit, we jogged over to the Opel, from which my mother did not even get out, because when she oriented herself that everything was okay with me, she only hit the gas to set out on a longer trip, so that in the town of Sochaczew she could arrange a meeting with a lawyer on the matter of divorce. 

Now, during the war, yet my father somewhere in the hills bravely fought the fascists and there was no possibility of him to appear here. Apparently the Germans even placed some bounty on his head, and for this reason my father had the most trouble after the war in terms of the state authorities. 

The more than two hundred kilometer distance which separated us from my father, in this time, and in this situation, stood as an impassable distance. Naively I counted that maybe he would appear in some disguise, if even disguised as an old beggar woman. The Germans however knew these numbers well, and my father was well aware of this.