Antek’s household left poor and homeless

Antek’s household left poor and homeless is the condition created when Boryna drives Antek, Hanka, and their children from the paternal homestead. Their expulsion turns a family dispute into a daily struggle for shelter, food, and cash: they move to a wretched dwelling, live through a hard winter on potatoes and salt, and face the sale of the cow that is their mainstay. The episode also exposes how the cost of Antek’s pride and estrangement is borne by Hanka and the children, whose immediate needs cannot wait for reconciliation.

Expulsion and Relocation

The family’s departure is quiet rather than spectacular. Hanka is nearly overcome by misery as they pack and carry out their belongings; Antek gives her water and presses her to leave quickly, before his father can see them. The haste conveys their vulnerability: they are not negotiating a new place in the household but getting themselves and their possessions out of Boryna’s reach.

Antek borrows a horse from Kłąb rather than use his father’s, then drives their things across Lipce to Hanka’s father, at the village’s far end, beyond the inn. The borrowed horse marks their separation in a practical way: even the means of moving their goods must come from elsewhere. The distance is only within the same village, but their move places them outside the security of the paternal farmstead and into dependence on Hanka’s family.

A few farmers, led by Roch, come to try to reconcile father and son. Neither will listen. Boryna presents the expulsion as a lesson in freedom and earning one’s own bread, but the first consequence is not independence in any comfortable sense. Antek’s household has to make do without the farm and resources from which it has been cut off, while the dispute remains unresolved.

Shelter, Food, and Livelihood

Three weeks after the expulsion, the family’s poverty is still acute. Hanka reckons that they have been living on potatoes and salt, with not two groszy to spare. Jankiel will no longer extend credit, and she sees the sale of the cow as the next step if they are to get through. The lack of cash is therefore not an abstraction: it threatens the household’s food supply and the small stock of property on which its future depends.

Their dwelling makes the loss of the farmstead tangible. It is described as a hovel rather than a home: a clay floor full of hollows, frozen mud, and muck; damp, warped walls patched with clay, straw, and dung; and a sagging ceiling with more cobwebs and straw than beams. The few holy pictures, a clothes pole, and a chest offer only a thin screen against the surrounding dilapidation. Behind a partition, brushwood separates the living space from the animals. The contrast with Boryna’s cottage sharpens how far the family has fallen in material security.

The animals are almost the whole of Hanka’s remaining wealth: a cow, a heifer, a pig, a couple of geese, and a few hens. She calls the skewbald cow their little mainstay, and the prospect of its sale brings the economic crisis into the room. The cow is not merely one item among many; it provides the household with a resource that poverty is about to take away. Hanka embraces its neck and grieves over its likely departure, imagining it being haggled over, tethered, and led off into the wide world.

Antek and Hanka Under Pressure

The household’s hardship is intensified by Antek’s refusal to seek work. He spends whole days sitting and brooding, or goes out restlessly, while Hanka says he will not thresh even when asked. She calculates that a day’s hired labor could bring a zloty and twenty groszy—enough to buy salt and lard when there is no milk—but he will not take it on. To Hanka, the choice is urgent and concrete; to Antek, hired labor appears beneath him. His pride thus has an immediate domestic consequence, leaving his wife to contemplate selling their cow and finding a way to feed the family.

Hanka imagines that, if she were a man, she would work until her hands were worn out to save the cow and carry them through the winter. The thought registers both her determination and the limits imposed on her position. She is already doing the household’s daily tasks and watching the children, but she cannot simply substitute herself for the male labor and wages she believes the family needs. When she sees Antek sitting by the hearth, she wants to discuss the sale but fears provoking him; she slips off her clogs so their clatter will not irritate him and watches him with anxious tenderness.

The scene does not reduce Antek to indifference. He wraps the older boy in a sheepskin and rubs the child’s thin legs with a warmed hand while gazing into the fire. Yet his care for the child exists beside his silence and refusal to work. Hanka experiences him as emotionally inaccessible: she feels expected to keep house, cook, and care for the children while carrying worry alone, without kindness or conversation from her husband. The family’s deprivation therefore aggravates an already strained marriage, making ordinary acts of care coexist with resentment and isolation.

The Household’s Narrowing Choices

When Hanka goes to the animals and the skewbald begins panting and licking her head and shoulders, her composure breaks. She throws her arms around its neck and mourns the loss she expects, then returns to the room with a fierce resolve to confront Antek. The change from quiet grief to direct speech is one of the episode’s sharp turns: the cow’s impending sale makes the consequences of his inaction impossible for her to contain.

The family’s immediate choices are painfully limited. Credit has failed, their food is reduced to potatoes and salt, the cow may have to go, and Antek will not accept the work Hanka believes could keep them afloat until spring. Their poverty is bound to their expulsion from the farmstead, but it is also sustained by the unresolved father-son conflict and Antek’s refusal to adapt to his new circumstances. The move has not delivered the independent livelihood Boryna invokes; it has left the household trying to preserve a minimal foothold with scant property and little room for error.

Significance in the Novel

The household’s plight gives material weight to the novel’s wider concern with land, labor, and peasant survival. The family’s loss is measured not only in the homestead they leave behind but in the degraded shelter, dwindling food, and animals that must be counted one by one. Their experience shows how a land-based household can be pushed toward insecurity when access to the family farm is withdrawn, and how poverty narrows choices until a cow, a day’s wages, or the refusal of credit carries decisive importance.

The crisis also reveals an unequal distribution of its burdens. Antek’s estrangement and resistance to hired work shape the family’s predicament, while Hanka manages the children, household, livestock, and calculations of survival. Her attachment to the cow and her readiness to work are not sentimental details detached from the economic plot; they express her effort to preserve the household’s last supports. The episode makes their homelessness more than a change of address: it is an ongoing condition of exposure, in which the family has shelter but lacks the security, resources, and shared purpose that would make it a home.