BUTCHERS

Before I was born, my mother spent two months in jail.

During the 1950’s Poland was stricken with poverty. Stalin ruled in Russia with his deadly iron fist, his long shadow falling over the Eastern Bloc. Our cities stood in ruins, reminding everyone of the nightmare that was thrust upon our country in 1939. Even in the countryside, the greyness of everyday life washed over the sunniest summer days. My father joked that Stalin liberated us and we’d been living as his captives ever since.

My parents were farmers, and owned a small piece of land outside of Kielce. They had a few pigs, rabbits and chickens. In the field behind the barn, they grew potatoes and cabbage. Every month, the communist agents from the agriculture office would come with their little notebooks in hand.
These inspectors went from farm to farm and counted the livestock, taking note of their size and weight. They measured the crops in the spring and stood on guard during harvest to make sure every sack of grain and bushel of produce was accounted for. They took the majority of what our families produced and gave us little in return. Their little notebooks reminded us that nothing we owned truly belonged to us.

Everyone prayed for good weather, but when drought or disease struck the crops or livestock, there was no mercy. The summer of 1955 was particularly bad. The rains never came and the crops were minuscule by the time fall arrived. My father harvested the land and the inspectors balked when they saw his yield. He pleaded with them, and explained the drought was to blame. But their quota was set in stone and they took the lion’s share of the food our family needed to survive the winter.

My older brothers were only three and seven at the time. As the winter wore on, they grew pale and thin. My mother traded and bartered whatever she could to get food, but it was never enough. For weeks, the family had been eating stale potatoes and cabbage. Hunger had become a habit. In February my brothers came down with fevers and my mother couldn’t stand by and watch them deteriorate any more. As the frost thickened on their windows, she stood up and said to my father, “Tonight we kill the pig.”

At dusk she went to the barn with her sharpest knife in hand. My father, fearful of the authorities finding out about the unauthorized slaughter tried to convince her not to. But in the end, he succumbed to her arguments, they would tell the inspectors that the pig had escaped from their barn.

Usually, the whole village would come watch and help on the day of the slaughter. But that time they told nobody. Some people in the village couldn’t be trusted. They informed the communists if someone broke the rules, or criticized the regime, in order to gain favor. Some days their loyalty was only worth a bottle of vodka or a sack of coal.

My mother pulled the oldest and fattest pig out of the sty and my father strung it up from the rafters. With her skilled hand my mother sliced open its throat, careful to collect every ounce of blood. They worked all night, butchering the carcass and carefully planning what to do with each piece.

For the next week, my parents cured the bacon, rendered the fat into lard, and smoked the ham. The head and feet were boiled and eaten. The bones were used for stock. My father ground up all the trimmings and my mother made her famous sausage, rich with garlic and dill she’d grown in the garden. Soon my brothers recovered from their illness and regained the color in the cheeks. Bacon in the morning and pork stew for dinner revived their young bodies.

There was so much meat. My mother slowly began trading her precious delicacies with the neighbours and friends she could trust. Some had nothing to trade but my mother could see they were famished and gave them food anyway. My mother’s sausage was known to be the best in town and everyone was grateful.

The trouble started later that month. One of my mother’s friends was cooking breakfast for her family, the fresh sausage sizzling in the pan. The smell wafted from the chimney to the road just as a neighbour was passing the house. The neighbour stopped and sniffed the air, and unfortunately his love of vodka was greater than his loyalty to us.

The agriculture agents arrived the next day and paid my mother’s friend a visit. She told them she had gotten the sausage from a friend visiting from Krakow but they saw through her lie. They pulled out their notebooks and went from home to home checking all the livestock to make sure it matched their ledger. When they arrived at my parents’ house, my mother immediately told them one of their pigs had escaped.

My parents had meticulously cleaned the barn of any evidence of the slaughter. But they weren’t prepared for this surprise visit. The inspectors pushed past them and began raiding the cupboards and the ice box. Soon, the table was lined with the different pork cuts and both my brothers watched in dismay from the doorway fearful that their precious meat would be taken. They were too young to understand the repercussions for my parents and only worried about their bellies being full.

My father tried to take the blame for killing the pig, but my mother stood up and confessed that it was her idea. She tried to plead with the inspectors, telling them her boys were sick and famished and she had no other choice. But they wouldn’t listen. They snapped the irons on her wrists and hauled away every scrap of meat. My brothers began to cry as they watched their mother being taken away along with the delicacies that revived them.

My mother was sentenced to two months for ‘stealing from the state’. Though she had raised that pig with her own two hands it didn’t belong to her, it belonged to everyone. My father had to take care of the boys by himself while also preparing the fields for sowing that spring. He joked that my mother was really just tired, and needed a two-month vacation to sit and do nothing before the summer season began.

For the first time since she was a child, my mother had others cooking for her.

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Adam Bialo:
This story is about the state of Poland after the Second World War ended and the banalities of life under Communism where the state controlled everything, down to your last piece of meat. I’ve been seeing sentiment in Canada for Communist ideologies and want this story to serve as a reminder how people, like my uncle’s mother in “Butchers” were treated by the system. My business was severely affected by the pandemic so I shifted gears and started writing daily. I recently finished a few screenplays that I am currently pitching but am new to writing fiction and getting published. This piece is from a collection of short stories I’m working on based on my family’s struggles in Communist Poland and my childhood after immigrating to Canada. I recently started submitting my work and one of my stories is about to be published in Schoolcraft College’s The MacGuffin.