The cow finally planted herself firmly on the ground with her four feet rigidly fixed, and looked at Slimak with rolling eyes as if to say: 'Look, gospodarz, what they are doing to me…for six years I have been with you and have honestly done my duty, stand by me now.'
Slimak did not move, and the cow at last allowed herself to be led away, but when she had been plodding along for a little distance, he slowly followed. He pressed the Jews' money in his hand and thought:
'Ought I to have sold you? I should never have done it if the merciful
God had not been angry with us; but we might all starve.'
He stood still, leant against the railings and turned all his misfortunes over in his mind; now and then the thought that he might still run and buy her back stole into his mind.
He suddenly noticed that old Hamer had come close up to him.
'Are you coming to see me, gospodarz?' he asked.
'I'll come, if you will sell me fodder.'
'Fodder won't help you. A peasant among settlers will always be at a disadvantage,' said the old man, with his pipe between his teeth. 'Sell me your land; I'll give you a hundred roubles an acre.'
Slimak shook his head. 'You are mad, Pan Hamer, I don't know what you mean. Isn't it enough that I am obliged to sell the beast? Now you want me to sell everything. If you want me to leave, carry me out into the churchyard. It is nothing to you Germans to move from place to place, you are a roving people and have no country, but a peasant is like a stone by the wayside. I know everything here by heart. I have moved every clod of earth with my own hands; now you say: sell and go elsewhere. Wherever I went I should be dazed and lost; when I looked at a bush I should say: that did not grow at home; the soil would be different and even the sun would not set in the same place. And what should I tell my father if he were to come looking for me when it gets too hot for him in Purgatory? He would ask me how I was to find his grave again, and Stasiek's, poor Stasiek who has laid down his head, thanks to you!'
Hamer was trembling with rage.