Antek and Boryna’s fight over the settlement and Jagna

The fight between Maciej Boryna and Antek Boryna over the land settlement and Jagna brings a long-running inheritance grievance to its breaking point. What begins as a tense household appeal over six morgen becomes a physical struggle, as competing claims to family land give way to threats, accusations, and blows. The scene exposes the difference between Maciej’s authority as the man who holds the property and Antek’s conviction that the land belongs to the family across generations; it also shows how Jagna’s marriage to Maciej has made the inheritance dispute intensely personal.

The gathering and its purpose

As darkness falls, Maciej changes into his work clothes and makes his rounds of the farmstead, inspecting the horses, cows, barn, and pigs. He scolds Kuba for a misdeed and Witek for letting calves out among the cows. Returning to his room, he finds the others waiting in silence, their eyes on him. His sarcastic comparison of the gathering to a courtroom captures the adversarial mood before anyone has stated the complaint.

The people present include Antek, Hanka, the Blacksmith’s Wife, and Józia. The Blacksmith’s Wife explains that they have come to ask Maciej for something. Antek, meanwhile, sits by the window, visibly impatient and struggling to decide what to say. Hanka nurses her boy at the threshold, watching Antek anxiously, while Józia peels potatoes and tends the fire, curious but unaware of the dispute’s purpose. The ordinary domestic tasks continue around a confrontation whose subject is the future of the household.

Six morgen and competing claims

When Maciej demands that the visitors speak plainly, the Blacksmith’s Wife raises the settlement. Maciej replies that it is already settled and that his wedding will take place on Sunday. The visitors know about the wedding, she says; their concern is that he has settled six whole morgen of land. Maciej answers that he made the decision because he wanted to, and could sign over all of it if he chose.

Antek challenges his father’s right to make that choice. The land, he insists, belongs to the children. Maciej rejects this claim and declares that the land is his to do with as he pleases. The disagreement is not simply about the size of Jagna’s settlement: it is about who has authority over property that Antek regards as the children’s inheritance. The six morgen make that conflict concrete. To Maciej they represent property under his control; to Antek they are part of what the family is owed.

Antek says that he and the others will stop the settlement, appealing first to their collective opposition and then to the courts. Maciej treats the threat of legal intervention as an affront and advances on him with raised fists. Hanka jumps up to say that they will not allow themselves to be wronged. Antek also grounds his claim in ancestry, insisting that what is theirs is there, inherited from grandfathers and great-grandfathers. His appeal to generations makes the land more than an asset in dispute: it is the foundation of his sense of family entitlement and belonging.

The argument becomes a family reckoning

Maciej answers by insisting that the land is his and dismissing the value of what Antek’s wife brought into the marriage. Antek and Hanka counter that they have worked like farmhands, laboring enough for many people. Maciej tells them to seek a better life elsewhere if they consider themselves wronged. Antek refuses: they will not leave because what they claim as theirs is here. The exchange pits Maciej’s power to order them out against their insistence that their labor and ancestry give them a claim to remain.

The visitors say they do not oppose Maciej’s marriage; they want him to withdraw the settlement. Hanka repeats the request through tears. Maciej responds by shouting her down and throwing the poker toward the fire so forcefully that burning brands scatter into the room. Antek rebukes him for speaking to Hanka as if she were his to abuse, while Maciej demands to know why she is answering back. Antek then insists that she has a right to ask about what belongs to her. The argument over land has become a dispute over who may speak within the household and whose grievance counts.

The Blacksmith’s Wife proposes that Maciej can proceed with the settlement while assigning the remainder to the family. He refuses, accusing her of dividing what is his and rejecting the idea that he will provide for them in old age. The visitors insist that they will not back down and want justice. Maciej answers with a threat of physical punishment, and Antek warns him not to try it. Their exchange makes the gathering’s courtroom image bitterly apt: each side advances a claim, but the scene’s authority is enforced not by judgment but by the threat of force.

Jagna enters the conflict

Hanka’s grief breaks into a lament that the family will be driven to beg after working like servants day and night. She connects the six-morgen settlement to the clothes and beads left by Antek’s mother, then condemns Jagna as the person for whom Maciej is making the provision. Her attack turns the land dispute into a charge against the bride and the marriage that has reshaped the household’s inheritance.

Maciej springs toward Hanka and demands to know what she has said. Hanka repeats the accusation, claiming that the whole village knows Jagna is wanton. Maciej orders her to leave Jagna out of it and shakes her. Antek leaps to protect his wife and joins in the insult against Jagna, shouting that anyone who wanted could have her. He is beside himself and says the first thing that comes into his head; the accusation is not a considered settlement of the dispute but an outburst in the middle of a family crisis.

The moment reveals a sharp contradiction in Maciej’s response. He has fought Antek and Hanka over the land he has promised Jagna, yet when Hanka attacks Jagna’s sexual reputation, Maciej turns on Hanka instead. The bride whose settlement has become the immediate cause of the quarrel is absent from the confrontation, but what the family says about her intensifies it. Maciej’s anger at Antek’s insult does not resolve the inheritance dispute; it supplies the trigger for the violence that follows.

Blows, separation, and unresolved anger

Maciej punches Antek in the face, sending his head against a glazed cupboard. The cupboard falls, and Antek goes down with it. He quickly rises with blood on his face and throws himself at his father. The two men grab one another by their shirts, drag and hurl each other across the room, strike beds, chests, and walls, and roll on the floor locked together. The women try to separate them as the children scream; Kuba and Witek rush to the window from the yard but cannot make sense of the shouting inside.

Neighbors intervene and pull the men apart. Antek is carried into the other half of the house, exhausted and weakened by blood loss, with cuts from the broken glass across his face. Maciej is less seriously hurt, though his spencer is torn and his face is scratched. He drives away the people who have gathered, shuts the hallway door, and sits by the stove. The immediate fight has ended, but reconciliation has not occurred: what Hanka and Antek said about Jagna continues to trouble him.

The scene therefore ends on two unsettled injuries. Antek bears the visible wound of the broken cupboard glass, while Maciej remains inwardly pierced by the accusations against the woman he is about to marry. Neither the appeal to ancestry nor the appeal to justice has settled who owns the land, and the family’s attempt to negotiate has instead made its divisions physical. The six-morgen settlement, the wedding, and the household’s claims are now bound together in a conflict that cannot be contained within a quiet conversation.