Grzela Boryna

Grzela Boryna, also identified as Grzegorz, is Maciej Boryna’s younger son. His brief appearance during a tense visit by the gendarmes shows him caught between personal fear and concern for a fellow villager: after investigating why the authorities have come, he rushes to warn Rocho that he may be in danger.

Identity and family

Grzela is the younger son of Maciej Boryna, and the younger brother of Antek Boryna. The family account also identifies Józka as Maciej’s younger daughter, from his second marriage. The scene with the gendarmes supplies no further account of Grzela’s household or his usual work; instead, it introduces him through his conduct in a moment of communal alarm.

The gendarmes’ arrival

Grzela first looks over the vehicles outside the presbytery and questions their drivers. He also peers at the gendarmes sitting on the porch. Their presence unsettles him, but the villagers do not yet know why they have come. He leaves to find Mateusz the Young Villager, who is working at Stacho Płoszka’s cottage, notching the ridge’s top beams in preparation for mounting the rafters.

The talk there reveals the political unease beneath the uncertainty. Mateusz suggests that the visit may concern a meeting: the prefect has threatened the villagers, and the gendarmes have been asking who has been inciting Lipce. Hearing this, Grzela fears that he himself may be the person they have come to take. The account marks his alarm physically: he looks around uneasily, pales, and struggles for breath.

From self-preservation to warning

Stacho Płoszka proposes that the authorities are more likely looking for Rocho, whom they have already asked about. Grzela accepts this possibility with visible relief, but his relief is immediately troubled by worry for Rocho. He concludes that if anyone is to be taken, it will surely be him. Mateusz rejects the idea of simply surrendering Rocho, while Bylica voices the practical difficulty of opposing the gendarmes and suggests that Rocho should be warned and hidden.

Grzela acts on that suggestion. He calls out that he is going to warn Rocho, then cuts through the wheat field and gardens toward the Boryna family farmstead. There, Antek Boryna is on the porch hammering a sickle on an anvil. Antek, frightened by the news, springs to his feet and calls for Rocho to come over, who has only just arrived. The scene thus places Grzela at the point where rumor becomes urgent action: he carries the warning from the uncertain gathering at the cottage to the household where Rocho can be alerted.

Narrative role

Grzela’s importance in this episode lies less in an account of his past than in the quick turn of his response. At first he imagines himself as the target of the authorities; once Rocho is named, his attention shifts to another person’s peril. His alarm does not disappear, but it becomes a reason to move rather than a reason to stay hidden. Through this small chain of observation, suspicion, discussion, and warning, the episode conveys how the gendarmes’ unexplained presence reaches into village life: even before anyone knows what the authorities intend, the prospect of arrest makes ordinary building work and household routines part of a wider atmosphere of fear.