Clay by Melissa Harrison Page A

food shortages in the cities, and there were many things – for instance, sugar – for which they had to queue, but his mother grew vegetables and they kept a pig for bacon, and they usually had enough to eat.
    Jozef was the middle child of five: two sisters preceded him, and two more came after. For him, the farm was everything: it was his future, and working on it every day with his father was a difficult but rewarding apprenticeship. By the age of twelve he could drive the jeep, trap rats, chop wood and plough a field, walking behind their gentle draught horse Aniolek and guiding the single-furrow plough through the soil. He would not have said that he loved the farm; his feelings about it were far less sentimental. It was only in exile from it that he understood how deeply implicated in its acres he had become.
    He left school as soon as he could, at fifteen; his mother wanted him to go on to agricultural college, but he was needed on the farm; and besides, he thought he could learn everything he would ever need to know from his father. During the day they worked, and in the evenings he would sit by the lamp and read their battered old veterinary manual or monographs on such things as lameness and hoof care. His father would listen to the radio and carve figures from linden wood: madonnas, pietàs and St Nicholases, mostly, but sometimes smiling peasant couples and little children.
    But then, when he was twenty-two, his father died. It was spring, but a sudden cold snap had iced the fields with rime and killed his mother’s cabbages in the ground; he could remember passing Stefan Gruszka’s orchard as he took the ancient jeep into the village and thinking that he would get no cider apples that year.
    The jeep, US-built, sold to Russia and abandoned in Poland with thousands of others after the war, was precious. As the only vehicle on the farm it had to do duty as tractor, and it was battered and patched and bodged far beyond its natural life. For the last week or so, though, the clutch had been slipping. He took it to see Karol Wieczorek; years ago Karol had made himself a kind of tractor from a motorbike and parts of a trailer, and his skill with anything mechanical was unsurpassed. He waited while Karol did the work, and gave him a bottle of his sister’s krupnik in thanks.
    On his way back to the farm Jozef found the herd blocking the road, the animals agitated and jostling in the narrow space, his father nowhere in sight. Their warm breath steamed and hung above them in a cloud.
    He left the jeep idling and climbed up the hedge bank, craned, called his father’s name. There was nothing. Then, pushing his way in sudden dread among the beasts, he found the body, as he had known he would, battered and despoiled.
    He drove back to the farm with his father slumped beside him, held in place absurdly, tenderly, with rope tied like a safety belt around the seat. He could still remember the terrible sound his mother made when he laid the body on the kitchen table and went back out to bring in the herd.
    Everything on the farm changed on that day, but within months the whole country had changed. Jozef remembered the euphoria of the election well, and the sadness that Poland was moving forward so fast without his father. But there was little time to mourn; with the fall of Communism farmers like him had to scramble to find a way to sell their produce. The village was suddenly full of men trying to sell their milk, and at first the price dropped below even what the government had paid; but it wasn’t long before new companies had sprung up, their milk tankers the same decrepit ones as before, but now bearing new, hastily painted logos.
    Jozef had grabbed the opportunity to make money with both hands, increasing the herd and buying milking machines for the dairy, and an Ursus tractor to replace the old jeep. By the time he was thirty the farm was prospering, his sisters married. His mother still cooked, tended the vegetable