Wasyl Padwa was poor. He never ate a hot meal—so said the people that remembered him. Bright golden-colored tubs of jam would be standing on the counter in the store. Bread was delivered twice a week. Padwa didn’t have anyone. He grazed the herd of cows that belonged to the PGR, the collective farm. At dawn in the summer the meadows are leaden and glisten like mercury. The sun still smells of underground coolness. Wasyl’s rubber boots shone like officer’s boots as he moved among the cattle, warming himself in the cloud of ruddy-colored heat. It may have been from the spectacle of boundless silver that he grew obsessed with one insistent thought: to be rich, to have more than he’d had up till now.
He ate less and less. His denim clothing turned grayer and grayer, and hung so loose it could have fit two of him.
*
Once a month a hunchbacked Warszawa would pull up in front of the store, and there, in the cherry-red glow from jars of conserves, amid the smell of raw bacon, beneath the eyes of the man in the fez on the Turek ersatz coffee tin, the cashier would lick his finger slowly and give him his wages. The shop clerk would make the same gesture as she turned the pages of her credit ledger, taking back what was hers and what was the government’s. Wasyl Padwa always stood at the very end of the line, as if he was afraid someone might look over his shoulder, cast a spell on his growing treasure, or with a look erase one of the two zeros written by his name.
The banknotes, bearing a fisherman, a factory worker, or a miner, reminded him of postcards from distant lands. Sea, factory, mine—these were things he only knew from stories. Those who went there never came back. They disappeared like adventurers searching for El Dorado.
He would take his small wad of bills, fold it in two, then stow it in his inside button-up pocket, and people would laugh and say he didn’t take his suit off even when he went to bed. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t buy drinks for others. He left at sunrise with the cows, vanishing into the white mist.
Then one July there was a storm. The guys mowing hay ran down into the valley and took shelter wherever they could. Wasyl stayed up on the mountain, near the edge of the Sweet Woods. The cows stood out in the rain, their heads lowered, while he squatted under a hazel bush. The thunder licked at the peaks as usual, striking now here, now there; loose windowpanes rattled in the houses, and the purple flare of lightning made the children’s faces look like someone was taking pictures of fear.
At that moment an old shed with a thatched roof caught fire. It stood high up on the meadows, right by the woods. People said later that Wasyl had run so fast it was like the wind was carrying him along; he rushed toward the shed through the lightning and rain. But storms are always more fire than water, and before he got there the thatch had turned into a red banner; then it split apart and collapsed. Wasyl’s riches, hidden for years under the roof, burned along with the swifts’ nests. Hundreds that were the color of the fire, fifties green as water, and twenties as gray as smoke.
*
But that isn’t the end of the story, because true love is untouched even by fire. Wasyl Padwa began again from nothing. Now he changed all his banknotes into coins. Silver ones with a fisherman, and faded brown ones with Kościuszko and Copernicus. He went about jangling, then from time to time he’d stop making noise and everyone thought he must be burying his riches somewhere. But he had a simple, open nature, and since he’d suffered at the hands of fire, he decided to place his trust in water. Under Banne Hill there’s a stream that twists and turns like a snake, and flows like a green carpet down cracked steps. It contains many dark and deep places. He put tens and fives in an old jam jar and lowered it gently into the current. The metallic disks reminded him of medals from long-ago wars. Some days the store clerk would chase him away, so he’d walk three miles to another store and there he’d exchange his paper phantoms for indestructible ore.
Then one summer there were such terrible rains you couldn’t see further than ten feet. Wasyl’s creek, which normally you could jump over in a single bound, carried off trees, set boulders rolling, and its waters grew thick with dull-colored mud. Wasyl Padwa waited day and night by the bank for it to return to its former course and turn clear again. But he found nothing aside from silt. Till autumn he walked up and down the bank searching for his hoard. The rocks had the faded hue of Copernicuses, and baby trout glinted in the sun like silver fives. He wandered up and down the bank the whole time till the fall, and the herd of cows, which naturally he couldn’t leave untended, turned the meadow there into barren earth.
*
The third time, Wasyl Padwa entrusted his treasure to the earth. He chose a hiding place somewhere in the Sweet Woods. This story is the least clear of all. The exact place was known only to him and the person who discovered it after a year and stole his money. People laughed as they always do, and Padwa, who had finally grown tired of the elements, became the same as everyone else.