'How should he go to see them? He has got clump feet, he has lost his toes with frostbite. When the wounds are closed he can just manage, but when they are open he cannot even move about in his room.'
'How does he manage to live?'
'He does a little carpentering; he has a beautiful workshop and all sorts of tools, but I tell you when he can't stand on his feet he can't do carpentering. Then he is glad when people come and give him orders for brushes—he can make beautiful brushes as well—for sweeping rooms or for brushing clothes. But the rooms here are not swept much, and people rarely brush their clothes either. Now he is ill again.'
'Where does he come from? How long has he been here?'
'He has been here a long time, there were only a few like us when he came. But where he comes from, who he is—I see you don't know Kowalski, or else you wouldn't ask. For you see, when I ask him, or one of the gentlemen, or even the priest, who comes from Irkutsk, he only answers: "Brother, God knows very well who I am and where I come from, but it serves no purpose and is quite unnecessary that you should know it too!" There you are! That's like him. So nobody asks him.'
I inquired very particularly all the same where Kowalski lived. In my imagination the 'Bilak' of the legend who fled from men and this lonely carpenter were blended into one personality, I could not say why. I felt that there must be a mysterious connexion as between all things repeating themselves in the circle of time. Perhaps the great sorrow which—I imagined—had died at the death of the Bilak was still living on quite close to me, in a different shape, but just as great, no less unbearable and fateful to him in whom it now dwelt.
Since that day I had often guided my steps in the direction of Kowalski's yurta. No fresh shavings were added to the old ones lying about near the door and the little windows. They grew drier and blacker every day; perhaps the man who had thrown them there…. I had not the courage to enter. I kept on waiting for another day when perhaps fresh shavings would be added, but none appeared and no noises of work were audible.
At last I made up my mind not to put it off any longer. I left my home with this decision and had already reached a corner of his yurta, when I heard a trembling, weak but pleasant voice singing.
I sat down on the bench in front of the yurta, and I could distinctly hear every word of a sentimental, gently melancholy little ditty which had once been very popular in Poland:
'When the fields are fresh and green.
And the spring revives the world.'