Boryna’s hayrick

Boryna’s hayrick is both a hiding place for Antek Boryna and Jagna’s secret meetings and the setting of Maciej Boryna’s attempt to burn them out. The rick’s deep opening offers concealment, but when Maciej blocks it with straw and sets it alight, the same structure becomes a trap. Its destruction makes private desire visible to the village and brings the household conflict into public danger.

Concealment and clandestine meetings

The hayrick’s low, dark opening gives Antek and Jagna a place to meet beyond the immediate reach of the household. In one encounter, they listen for a long time, watch anxiously, and approach cautiously before slipping inside. The surrounding winter night intensifies their precautions: the silence makes distant sounds audible, while stealthy footsteps outside suggest that someone may be searching for them. The rick is not simply background to their affair; its enclosed interior temporarily shelters them from discovery.

Jagna’s later movements show that her secret meetings with Antek continue amid the routines of farm work. While draining water from the potato pit, she works only enough to appear obediently occupied and watches for Maciej to go indoors. When he does, she covers her head with her apron and climbs over the stile by Płoszka’s barn. Antek is already waiting. This passage confirms the persistence of their clandestine relationship, though it does not identify the hayrick as the meeting place on that occasion.

The fire and escape

Maciej turns the hayrick’s concealment against the lovers. After moving away and returning with an enormous sheaf of straw, he uses it to stop the opening, strikes a match, and sets the straw alight. He waits nearby with a pitchfork. Inside, Antek and Jagna see flames forcing their way in as acrid smoke fills the confined space; they leap up, shout, and struggle to find an exit.

Antek discovers a corner of the rick’s covering, pulls it down, and tumbles out. Maciej charges with the pitchfork, intending to pin him, but misses. Antek strikes Maciej in the chest with his fists and runs. Jagna escapes separately, slipping away into the night. The rick, which had kept the pair hidden, cannot protect them once its opening is sealed and its straw catches fire.

Destruction and public exposure

After the lovers escape, Maciej runs around the burning rick shouting for help. The fire engulfs the entire structure, rises in a pillar of flame and smoke, and sends sparks toward nearby buildings and across the village. People run to the scene, shouts spread, and an alarm is rung. The hayrick’s destruction therefore extends the consequences beyond the confrontation between husband and lovers: an attempt to expose and punish them creates an immediate threat to the surrounding settlement.

The object’s changing function gives the episode its force. First a shadowed refuge, then a deliberately blocked enclosure, and finally a blaze visible across the village, the hayrick converts secrecy into spectacle. Its fire exposes the physical vulnerability of the lovers’ hiding place and makes a private household conflict impossible to keep private.