Witek offers prayers for invented parents

Witek the Stork-Keeper’s attempt to offer prayers for the dead becomes a public encounter with the family history he lacks. At the crowded All Souls’ observance, he cannot supply the names that others recite with ease. His distress drives him out of the crowd, but he returns to the table and gives names anyway: Józef, Marianna, and Antoni, the first that come to mind. The gesture lets him take part in the village’s ritual while exposing how profoundly he wants the kinship it presumes.

The Rite and the Crowd

The scene begins amid a crush of people in the sacristy, where the organist records names and accepts offerings. Kuba reaches the front first and recites a prepared list. The customary payment is six groszy for each soul, or three eggs from anyone without cash. Witek, delayed as people tread on his bare feet, pushes forward with his money clenched in his fist. The ritual is at once devotional and practical: each name is entered, each offering counted, and the dead are remembered through the living people who speak for them.

At the table, Witek sees farmers and their wives, including the miller’s wife in a hat like a squire’s lady, the blacksmith and his wife, and the Village Head. Their presence makes the gathering feel like the whole village. One after another, people list relatives, sometimes whole families: fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. The abundance of named generations forms the scene’s sharp contrast. For the others, remembrance is inherited and collective; Witek has no family names ready to give.

The Pain of Having No Names

When his turn comes, Witek is tongue-tied. The attention of the assembled villagers intensifies the question he cannot answer: who were his mother and father, and is there anyone for whom he can make an offering? He stands motionless, unable to speak, then is shoved back into a corner beneath the stoup. There he leans against the pewter basin, struggling to keep from collapsing as tears run down his face. His grief takes over his body: he trembles, can barely breathe, and crouches out of sight.

The episode gives this pain a distinctively social setting. Witek is not simply alone with a private memory; he is surrounded by a community whose ritual makes family ties visible and publicly speakable. The names spoken at the table trace descent across generations, while his silence marks the absence of any known lineage. Inside, he cries out for his mother, unable to understand why everyone else has parents and he alone is an orphan. His distress is therefore bound both to bereavement and to exclusion from the ordinary language of belonging.

Inventing a Place in the Prayers

Kuba finds Witek in the corner and asks, “Witek, have you sorted the prayers?” The question breaks the stillness of his collapse and brings him back to the task. Witek answers that he has not, then springs up, wipes his eyes, and forces his way back to the table. Rather than remain unable to participate, he decides that the absence of known parents is something he can keep to himself. He is a foundling, he reasons, but the villagers need not know it.

Witek gives the organist three names—Józef, Marianna, and Antoni—chosen as the first that come to mind. The text presents them as an improvised answer to his predicament, not as a recovered fact about his parentage. He hands over his money, takes the change, and goes with Kuba into the church. There he prays and listens as the priest recites the names of the dead. His offering does not resolve the uncertainty of his origins; it gives him a way to enter the communal act despite it.

Prayer, Companionship, and the Ending

Inside the church, Witek kneels beside Kuba, who takes a chaplet from his bosom and repeatedly recites the Hail Mary and the Creed, as the priest has directed. Witek says one prayer and then another. The shared observance follows his anguished isolation in the sacristy, but it does not erase what happened there: his place in the rite depends on names he has made up because he cannot name his own parents.

Exhausted by crying, the monotonous chanting, and the warmth of the church, Witek leans against Kuba’s hip and falls asleep. The ending is quiet and bodily after the earlier intensity of his grief. Kuba’s presence offers immediate companionship, while the invented names preserve Witek’s fragile claim to participate in a rite of family remembrance. The scene makes the offering both an act of devotion and an improvised response to orphanhood: Witek cannot recover a family history, but he can still give names, money, and prayers to the dead.