Antek and Hanka’s poverty

Antek and Hanka’s poverty is not merely a shortage of money but a pressure that reaches into food, work, marriage, and the village’s sense of justice. It makes the household sell the cow that Hanka’s father gave her, leaves the family anxious about milk and fodder, and places their private struggle beside the hunger of laborers and other poor villagers. The cow’s departure makes this insecurity tangible: a valued animal is converted into cash, but the sale cannot make the underlying need disappear.

Household insecurity and the sale of the cow

The household’s finances are so constrained that keeping two animals is not feasible: there is not enough fodder, and the family needs money. Antek explains the decision quietly, acknowledging that selling the cow is a shame but insisting that necessity leaves them little choice. He reassures Hanka that they still have a heifer and might get it in calf by mid-Lent, preserving the hope of having at least some milk. In that moment, his gentle manner matters to her as much as the practical plan; his kindness turns her attention away from the cow and toward the prospect of being close to him.

The sale nevertheless exposes how need weakens a seller’s position. Antek knows the cow is worth more: another farmer might pay fifty roubles for it in spring. But the Jewish merchants bargain against his urgent circumstances, raising their offer only by small amounts and threatening to leave. Antek holds out, and the deal is finally made for forty roubles, plus two zlotys in tether money for Bylica. The merchants pay immediately, and the cow is led away to a sleigh at the inn. The difference between what the animal might later fetch and what the family accepts now measures the cost of having to sell at once.

For Hanka, the loss is also personal. She walks with the cow toward the road, stroking its muzzle and leaning against it, then watches it go. Back inside, the empty stall seems to her like the space left after someone has been taken to the graveyard. She keeps looking toward it and toward the trampled path, and repeatedly breaks into tears. The cow had been given to her by her father, so its sale joins immediate household necessity to a loss she experiences as her own.

Money, work, and domestic strain

The cash does not resolve the conflict between the spouses. Antek sits at the table with the money spread out and rebukes Hanka for crying; she answers that the sale costs him less because he is not the one who feels the pain. She sees the household falling into ruin: they have no milk or comforts, and her labor has not prevented the loss of the cow. Antek pushes money toward her, telling her to pay what is owed, buy what is needed, and put the remainder away, while keeping five-rouble notes in his wallet. Their exchange shows that money has a practical destination, but also that the decision over how to use it is entangled with resentment and unequal emotional burdens.

Wage work offers no easy escape. Antek comes home after dusk frozen, exhausted, and aching throughout his body; after supper he climbs under the quilt and sleeps. Hanka does not question him. She quiets the children, asks the old man not to stomp about, walks barefoot so as not to wake her husband, and boils milk for his potatoes before he leaves again at dawn. Her care sustains the worker whose earnings the household needs, while adding another round of domestic labor to her own day.

As the weeks of hard work pass, Antek appears to change. He hands his wages to Hanka, helps on the farm, plays with the children, and becomes quiet and peaceful. Yet this outward improvement does not bring her security. She notices his sad looks and quiet sighs and senses that he is containing a deeper distress. The narration likens his hidden feeling to water moving beneath ice: work and silence cover it without stopping it. Poverty here is inseparable from emotional strain, but earnings alone do not explain or cure that strain.

Scarcity beyond the household

The family’s hardship belongs to a wider pattern. In one account of the winter, at least twenty hired hands in Lipce are desperate for work. Snow and frost have ruined some villagers’ potatoes, money is not coming in, and some people already eat a hot meal only once a day before going to bed hungry. They had expected the squire’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow woodland to provide employment, but he refuses to hire men from Lipce after a complaint was lodged against him. The threatened loss is therefore more than a missed wage: the work had been counted on as a way to survive until spring.

Hanka also hears of families whose need is more acute still. Filipka’s eldest daughter is gravely ill from hunger in a freezing cottage where the windows are stuffed with straw and the family crowds together in one bed. They have run out of potatoes and sold their quilt; the groats they obtain from The Miller must be begged on credit. Filipka’s husband is in prison with the other men, leaving the family without his labor or earnings. Elsewhere, a woman who has just given birth is sick, has no savings, and has no milk for her newborn; her husband is also imprisoned, and the fields are standing fallow. The account connects poverty to cold, hunger, lost household goods, absent labor, and the danger facing a child who may not survive.

These stories sharpen the contrast between neighbors who share a village and those who can afford not to notice one another. Hanka condemns farmers who worry over food or the interest on loans while the poor suffer nearby, and who shelter themselves from the sound of their complaints. Invoking divine order, she argues, does not relieve anyone when those with resources refuse to help. Her words make poverty a question of communal responsibility as well as private misfortune.

From need to collective protest

The threatened employment at Wolf’s Hollow woodland becomes part of the larger dispute between Lipce and the manor. At a public gathering, Antek addresses farmers and hired hands together, recalling the injuries they have endured and naming the manor’s refusal to employ them alongside its felling of the forest. The villagers answer with calls to stop the work and drive the cutters away. His speech gives collective form to grievances that include lost access to work and the feeling that complaints and court action have achieved nothing.

The connection is not that every household’s poverty has the same cause, but that immediate need makes the manor’s decision consequential for the whole village. Hanka’s cow sale shows one family converting an essential animal into cash because fodder and money are short; the forest dispute shows workers hoping for wages from the same landscape whose use they contest. Across both situations, people confront choices made under pressure, while wealthier authorities and landholders have greater power to decide who receives work and who bears the loss.

Significance

The household’s poverty is repeatedly rendered through concrete absences: an empty stall, no drop of milk, a lost quilt, frozen potatoes, and fields left uncultivated. Those details prevent hardship from remaining an abstraction. At the same time, the episode of the cow resists a simple picture of money as rescue: the sale brings in forty roubles, yet Hanka’s grief, the couple’s quarrel, and the other villagers’ hunger remain. The state of poverty thus links domestic vulnerability to labor relations and collective conflict, revealing how survival depends not only on effort but also on access to animals, food, wages, credit, and help from others.