Szymek–Nastusia

Szymek–Nastusia is a relationship forged through the struggle to establish a home of their own. When Dominikowa blocks Szymek from inheriting or living on her farm, marriage cannot simply carry the couple into a household already prepared for them. Instead, they combine Nastusia’s savings, Szymek’s labor, a land purchase, and help from friends and neighbors to make a new beginning possible. Their union is presented not as a rescue from material hardship but as a shared undertaking to overcome it.

Love Under the Pressure of Inheritance

By the time the banns have been read, the wedding is set for Sunday, but the couple’s prospects are suddenly threatened by Dominikowa. She has announced through the village official that the farm has been transferred into her own name, that Szymek will receive no strip of land, and that he will not be allowed into her house. The wedding is therefore shadowed by a concrete question: where will the newlyweds live, and what land will sustain them? In Lipce, marriage and livelihood are inseparable; exclusion from a family holding threatens the practical conditions of setting up a household.

The announcement makes Szymek’s position precarious, but it does not leave him without options. He returns with a plan to buy six morgen from The Squire at Podlesie and pay by instalments. Nastusia has a thousand zlotys available for the initial payment, so her savings become an active contribution to their future rather than a passive reserve. The proposed purchase shifts the couple’s path away from dependence on Dominikowa’s property and toward a separately acquired holding. It is a costly commitment, but it gives their marriage a material basis of its own.

A Partnership Made Through Work

Szymek argues for the plan by pointing to the work he has already done on his mother’s farm: he ploughed, sowed, and brought in the harvest. He presents these acts as evidence that he can manage land and is not an idler. His appeal to the village for help joins personal confidence to a recognition that establishing a farm requires support beyond the couple alone. He is moved enough by the possibility that he laughs and cries in the same breath, his hope intensified by the fact that land may finally be within reach.

Mateusz agrees to stand as guarantor alongside Szymek, helping turn the purchase from an aspiration into a workable arrangement. The support matters in practical terms: credit and trust bridge the distance between having a down payment and obtaining land. Szymek’s household is not created by romantic feeling alone, but through a network of obligations and assistance that makes the couple’s independent start possible.

The pressure of the plan is felt most sharply in Nastusia’s fear that they have neither a cottage nor a cow nor anything else to begin with. Szymek wipes her tears and strokes her head, then takes up his shovel, answering distress with a promise to build. He imagines a cottage with a window and a stove, and says he will have it ready within three weeks, even if the work costs him every ounce of strength. The exchange brings their different contributions into view: Nastusia’s money helps secure the land, while Szymek commits his labor to making it habitable. Their plans are expressed through specific necessities, not an abstract vision of domestic happiness.

Building the Home and Keeping the Promise

The next morning, Szymek is at work at dawn as usual and labors indefatigably. When Nastusia brings his breakfast, he reaches for her lips more hungrily than for the food. The scene holds tenderness alongside the demands of work: affection interrupts, but does not displace, the labor on which their new life depends. He tells her ardently that he will never let her go, then turns toward a hope for a son, revealing his expectation that their marriage will extend into a family and a future beyond the immediate crisis.

The cottage rises through collective effort. Mateusz works hard for almost a week and urges others on; wood is carted from the forest by Adam from Kłąb’s household. By the time the work is finished on Saturday afternoon, the shack is so large that it can be seen from Lipce. Mateusz hangs a green wreath around the chimney, marking the completed building, then leaves for his own work. The detail gives the construction a communal as well as domestic character: this is the couple’s home, but its visible emergence depends on labor supplied by others.

The wedding follows the day after the cottage is finished, after vespers. Once the ceremony and gathering have ended, the young couple decide to move straight into their own place, despite Mateusz’s urging that they remain in the cottage a little longer. Szymek borrows a horse from Kłąb and loads their trunk, bedding, pots, and pans onto the cart. He seats Nastusia with ceremony, pays respects to her mother and their kin, crosses himself, and sets off with the others walking alongside to see them away. Their possessions are modest and plainly enumerated, but the departure marks the transformation of a promised household into an occupied one.

A Household Sustained by the Village

The move does not instantly remove the couple’s vulnerability. The community’s practical response becomes visible in the visits that follow: Kłębowa arrives carrying a hen under her arm and chicks in a basket, and thereafter housewives come by almost every day, each bringing something. These gifts help make the young household viable, extending the mutual aid that had already taken the form of guarantees, building labor, and transport. The narrative presents neighborhood support as material provision, not merely goodwill.

Szymek and Nastusia’s relationship thus develops through a sequence of linked decisions: they face Dominikowa’s denial of land and shelter, find a purchase that Nastusia’s savings can help secure, enlist Mateusz as guarantor and builder, complete a cottage, marry, and establish themselves there with assistance from the village. Their independence is real but not solitary. The couple’s new home answers a family rupture, while its construction and early provisioning show how household survival in Lipce depends on land, labor, credit, and reciprocal help. Their partnership takes shape in precisely that combination of desire and necessity.