The Sunflowers

The Sunflowers

Thou shalt not steal

Maria was standing at her bedroom window. She looked over her garden to where the Kruks’ sunflowers stood in serried yellow and russet banks. How they swayed! “They’re so beautiful!”, she whispered, as she traced with her fingertips tiny circles against each flower in the distance. 

The flowers had appeared overnight. Surely they hadn’t been there yesterday! Maria certainly did not remember seeing them when she and Magda had walked past the Kruks’ fence on their way to and from volleyball practice.

But Maria had been expecting them. Ever since last year’s crop in the Kruks’ fields had hypnotised and enchanted her she had been looking out, waiting for them to raise their ponderous, melancholy-joyful heads. 

The tightly - wound spring uncoiled inside her. She bolted away from the window, stumbled out of her night clothes and into her tee-shirt, shorts and sandals and ran down the stairs and out onto the street. She would stop at Magda’s house first. Then the expedition.

As she walked along the dusty, compacted mud path that ran alongside the broken asphalt of her street Maria’s mind was racing. She had to do it; she had to get one of those beautiful sunflowers for her teacher of Polish, Miss Cichosz. 

Time and again over the past months – ever since her mother had told her that she couldn’t invite Miss Cichosz to her ninth birthday party – Maria had thought over this plan. Most nights as she lay in bed, or in any available quiet moments, she had pictured in precise detail the scene: standing together in Miss Cichosz’s yard under the towering flower trellises that framed a path up to the red front door (none of the flowers there were sunflowers, Maria knew), her beloved teacher wearing a long, pale blue dress that cooled her bright yellow hair like an ocean under the sun, taking the sunflower from behind her back and handing it to Miss, telling her “this is for you”, watching her starry blue eyes light up with pleasure. 

For Maria, this moment had already happened in her imagination hundreds of times and with each succeeding iteration the meeting had become more vivid than life itself.

The outcome of the meeting had expanded, too. Not only would Miss Cichosz invite her inside her big house for tea but she would certainly come to visit for her tenth birthday party. Who knows: wasn’t there even a chance that Miss could come to stay for a night or a weekend at her house? 

And, once, when Maria was in the garden under the kitchen window, hadn’t she heard own mother saying to her father that Miss Cichosz was in danger? “That one” Maria remembered how her mother had spoken – as if she were angry and laughing at the same time - “she parades around as if she was some kind of tramp – she won’t be happy until she has every man in the village knocking at her door in the middle of the night – then she’ll be in for some trouble, let me tell you!” Maria felt sure that if Miss was in danger there was no way that her own mother could refuse letting her live with them in their house!

Maria arrived at Magda’s house. They were best friends but Maria was not going to tell Magda about the reason for today’s ‘expedition’. Magda had a nice little dog, she was good at volleyball and they had lots of laughs together but she was not great at keeping secrets. Maria knew that not everyone would understand her plan to give a sunflower to Miss Cichosz so it had to remain a secret.

Magda’s mother opened their door and invited Maria inside. Maria didn’t enter. She didn’t want to go inside because Mrs Kozak always seemed to smell of fried onions and Magda’s brother, Pawel had tried to kiss her last week – “Ugh” she thought remembering his ugly little face and his open mouth with its disgusting little reptile tongue approaching her. 

Most of all, though, Maria wanted to get going; if they left it too late there would be more people working in the Kruks’ fields and that was what they had to avoid! 

“Um…Hello, Mrs Kozak”, Maria said, standing on the porch “Can you tell Magda that I’m here? We are in a hurry…we have…ah…something important to do!”. “Ooo” said Mrs Kozak through her oniony mouth, “that sounds very mysterious!” Maria felt the first tremors of panic in her tummy. She could feel her face changing colour, could feel her mouth turning dry. “Oh please” she thought “don’t ask any more questions!” 

Maria was about to betray herself with a stammering lie about going to volleyball that had shamed her before she’d uttered even a single syllable when Mrs Kozak turned around and shouted for Magda to come to the door. Maria’s relief was followed by the sound of footsteps on the stairs inside and the arrival of her friend on the doorstep. 

Seconds later they were making their way down the path, Maria leading the way at pace lest Mrs Onion or lizard tongue Pawel tried to capture them.

As it turned out Maria didn’t have to disguise or for that matter, invent a reason for stealing into the Kruks’ farm to take sunflowers. Magda was immediately in love with the idea: “Yeah!” she’d said in response to Maria’s proposal that they go on an expedition to the sunflower fields, “we can get some flowers and put them in water”. For Magda it was a simple mission to decorate their bedrooms with the bright yellow flowers, and as far as Magda was concerned, that’s all that it was for Maria, too.

The two girls followed the stream behind the Kruks’ farm for a few minutes. Maria wanted to get as far away from the Kruks’ house before they made their approach. “Here” whispered Maria pointing to a gap in the old rough-hewn plank fence, “we can get through here”. They crawled along the dry, grey dirt, through the gap in the fence, scrambled down and up the irrigation ditch, sprinted across the darker, damper soil of the field and dived into the dark green covering of the forest of tall sunflowers.

The girls crouched together in the semi darkness, their eyes slowly adjusting, their ears straining to hear an approaching footstep or vehicle behind the undulating swish of the flowers moving in the gentle breeze. “What will we do now” asked Magda in a whisper. Maria realised that her friend was scared.

She realised that she was scared, too. Both of the girls had heard stories about Old Man Kruk – the “Scarecrow” as people called him (but not to his face) – that he chewed rocks with his enormous teeth and that he kept a dragon in his attic to which he fed cats and even children. Sure enough, hadn’t Mrs Konwicka’s cat gone missing last year? And what about Mr Kaminski’s son, Rafal? Hadn’t he gone missing around the same time?

Of course, Maria had seen Mr Kruk at the dog show in the school last year and out of curiosity had gone up to where he was speaking with their teacher of Mathematics, Mr Jankowski. “Yes, indeed, Mr Jankowski”, Mr Kruk had said in a surprisingly small voice, much like a woman’s “I think we can all say that you are as pure as those dogs here”. Maria had seen Mr Kruk’s mouth moving, she had looked inside, terrified, but she had not seen teeth that looked like they could chew stones.

Despite this, her fear of the Scarecrow was engulfing her as she waited in the sunflower field.

“Maria!” Magda was speaking again, but Maria could not connect the voice to the place where she was right now. She was paralysed. She closed her eyes and waited for the Scarecrow to come. A pin prick of light shone in her mind. This pin prick expanded and as it did she recognised the familiar scene that she had rehearsed and nurtured for so long. She could see Miss Cichosz’s beautiful, smiling face, her warm, loving voice, her smile as Maria held out the sunflower. The sunflower. Its simple cartoonish beauty struck her and she was brought back to the present moment.

“Maria, I can hear dogs” Magda was crying. Sure enough, Maria could hear dogs, too. She had to act “Ok, here, help me pull this up” Maria said as she gripped the cable – like stalk of a sunflower. The girls pulled the sunflower stalk and it came out easily. “Let’s get out of here!” Maria shouted to her friend as she grabbed the sunflower in one hand, Magda’s hand in the other and ran out of the dense mass of stalks into the blinding sunlight.

The girls ran for the ditch and fence. Maria, pulling her crying friend with all her might got to the edge first. She stopped and looked up and down the path and irrigation ditch and saw nothing. Perhaps the dogs had been in her and Magda’s imagination? But then she heard them again. Definitely closer this time. Maria pushed Magda ahead of her down the irrigation ditch. They jumped across the water at the bottom, clambered up the other side, found the gap in the hedge and ran frantically along the stream behind the Kruks’ farm with the sound of the dogs behind them fuelling their panic. Maria had almost arrived at her front gate before she noticed that the sunflower she held in her fist had long since broken to pieces.

Maria didn’t want to cry in front of Magda but she couldn’t help it; she simply started and then couldn’t stop. Magda, however had recovered from her own tears. “My God!” Magda said “what a laugh! I can’t believe we got away from those mutts!” To Maria, Magda sounded like she was asking a question, like she was still too terrified to believe that it had been a laugh; as if she needed Maria to agree with her. Maria could not answer her friend. With tear-heavy eyes she saw Magda home and set off to her own house one hundred metres away.

Maria’s day ended in shame. Opening the back door to her house she saw, with astonishment and utter horror, the Scarecrow sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with her mother. The two adults looked at her as she stood frozen in the doorway. Mr Kruk spoke first in his light voice, far too small for his bulk. “Ah there she is” he oozed with disgusting over familiarity “I saw you earlier, young girl, I saw you”. Maria could neither speak nor move; she was skewered in place by the farmer’s eyes. “Ho ho ho yes” he went on, all the time looking at her with a smile on his face that made Maria feel like she needed to go to the toilet and vomit at the same time, “I saw you, yes indeed, I saw you, and my dogs, oh they were hungry, let me tell you! But my dear, I have something for you!” Maria looked at what was in his hand. A bunch of sunflowers. He stood up with a waddle (the man was quite fat) and held out the flowers - how they swayed! – to her.

“Well, Maria” Maria’s mother spoke as the Scarecrow held the bunch of flowers out to her “aren’t you going to apologise to Mr Kruk for trying to steal his flowers? And he has been so nice as to bring you some!” Maria could hear these words but they had no sense. All that filled her ears was the torrent of blood that raged through her head. She could see the flowers that the neighbour was holding out towards her and in a reflex she raised her hand to take them. 

...Her hand, the stalks, his face, her heartbeat – the burning shame of being a thief – her heart and the sound of the blood rushing through the veins of her head as her hand held the stalks of the flowers that she had taken from the Scarecrow, as her body trembled with the shame of being caught stealing the broken flower that she had taken from the field...

For an instant Maria had a flash of the idyll that she had imagined on Miss Cichosz’s doorstep but she refused it – how could she pollute that vision with this filthy ending to the day’s expedition? No. She could not. Maria took the flowers and went to her room.

The next day in school Maria could not look at or speak to Miss Cichosz. And so it continued in the days, weeks and months that followed. As time passed Maria thought less and less of the day in the Kruks’ field and the scene in her kitchen. Maria still enjoyed her classes with Miss Cichosz -who else could read Pan Tadeusz so wonderfully? Who else played Chopin’s Nocturnes in her classroom as the students read? Who else – and this was knowledge that Maria gained as she grew up to be a teenager and young woman – could dismiss the moral conventions of the small town in which they lived, moral conventions that Maria realised her mother had been referring to on that day she’d spoken about a queue of men outside the teacher’s house at night, with such elegance, such grace, such pride?

Some lessons are learned explicitly. Those most fundamental to any individual’s character are learned between the lines. There is irony, therefore, in the observation that the best teachers are those who appear not to teach, those whose lessons find their targets in the darkness of a field of sunflowers.

So, years passed and Maria went to study at the University of Warsaw. As a child of a farming community it was natural enough that she should enrol as a student of veterinary medicine. Towards the end of her training she went to work on a placement in her own village. The work was repetitive – of course, how else could she become proficient in dealing with bovine parturition, equine parasitology, large and small animal diagnostics, to say nothing of the personality skills needed to cope with hysterical cat owners and brutish farmers.

One day in early summer - when the sunflowers are first in bloom – Maria answered the phone at the practice: “Hello, this is the Moc Veterinary Practice” she said. The voice that answered was viscerally disgusting, instantly recognisable: “ Ah hello there, young girl.” It was him. “I’ve been having a problem with my dogs! You see, like any bitches they just keep looking for it! They place is overrun with their little bastards. I need to get them fixed!”. Maria took the name and address, though she knew well who and where he was, and arranged to have his three female and three male dogs neutered at the clinic two days later.

The dogs arrived on time, though Maria, wanting to be certain that he would not see or recognise her arranged to be out of the clinic. Later in the day, she arrived back. They were good dogs: Blackfoot, Tracker, Hunter, River, Racer and Gnasher; Maria spoke to them lovingly, reassuringly: “Good dogs, don’t you worry, I’ll make sure everything is ok!”.

So, days passed and Jacek Kruk could not contact the veterinary surgery. He needed his dogs and so the time had come to take action. He got into his car and set out for the Moc Veterinary surgery. As he drove along the road that ran parallel to his fields he looked with contentment at his rows of sunflowers – how they swayed! – and then his eyes fell - as was their wont – on the pretty girls that were out on this beautiful summer’s day. “Oh yes” he slimed “I can see you! I can see you!”

Farmer Kruk arrived at the veterinary surgery. He parked his Syrena (a warning!) in front of the building, switched off the engine and got out. The first thing that struck him was the emptiness; there were no cars at all in the parking lot. “Surely they’re not on holiday” he thought. He walked over to the door. Sure enough, his first and worst fears compounded, there was a notice on the door that announced that the practice was closed for summer holidays. “That fucking cunt” he hissed to himself, “just like all of them, can’t rely on a word they say. Why didn’t she tell me they were going on holidays? I gave them my dogs two weeks ago”.

Kruk was irate. He wanted to get his dogs. “They have to be here” he thought. He moved away from the notice on the door and went to a fence at the side of the main frontage. There was no way he could scale its 2 metre height. When he touched the fence, however, it gave easily.

He went into the yard behind the practice. He could hear whimpering. He could smell dog shit and something even more vile; decay. When he got to the cages where his six dogs had been imprisoned with plentiful water but absolutely no food he vomited. 

So emaciated were his dogs that he recognised them only by the names that were pinned to their cage: Blackfoot, Tracker, Hunter, River, Racer and Gnasher. Kruk walked to the cage, furious and appalled. “This is why you can’t give a woman a job – they’re just so unbalanced!” These were the last words he uttered.

He opened the cage and his dogs, driven insane by the hunger, wasted no time in falling as a single, six-mouthed beast on their erstwhile master, devouring him, ripping him limb from limb, burrowing into the fat hollows of his enormous bulk and savaging his liver, his intestines, his heart, his lungs, his genitals, the bones beneath the fat, his brains.

Not too far away the sunflowers in the Kruks’ fields stood aloof, following the sun and swishing, swaying  - how they swayed! - in the wind.