Hanka takes control of the Boryna farm

Hanka takes control of the Boryna farm in the upheaval after the forest battle, turning a moment of apparent family collapse into a determined struggle over the household and its land. With Maciej Boryna barely conscious and Antek likely to be taken away, she acts before the blacksmith can establish a claim, bringing her children into the homestead and making herself its vigilant keeper. Her authority is won through work and persistence: within two weeks, despite opposition from several quarters, the farm is operating according to her will.

The crisis after the battle

The news reaching Hanka comes in fragments. A boy runs up shouting that Boryna, Antek, Mateusz, and the others are finished, then collapses from exhaustion. Hanka is overcome with fright; before the boy can be revived, people emerging from the wood begin to explain what has happened. She then sees Antek alive beside his father’s cart. Maciej lies in it, bloodied, deathly pale, and almost unconscious. Relief that her husband has survived is overtaken by the sight of his condition and the danger surrounding the family’s future.

Her father, Bylica, frames that danger bluntly: Maciej may soon die, Antek is out of his mind, and there is nobody at Boryna’s. He warns that the blacksmith may move in and prove impossible to dislodge. The crisis is therefore not only medical or emotional. With the household’s men incapacitated or at risk of imprisonment, possession of the farmstead and the inheritance is suddenly unsettled. Hanka understands that delay could have lasting consequences.

Hanka moves into the homestead

She acts at once. Hanka hurries to her cottage, takes the children and whatever clothes are close at hand, leaves the remaining belongings in Weronka’s care, and moves to her old place across from Boryna’s cottage. The movement is deliberate and practical: she brings her family within reach of the threatened homestead before the blacksmith can take possession. Ambrozy is still nursing Maciej, and the village has not yet dispersed from the aftermath of the battle; amid its celebration and pain, Hanka quietly settles into the cottage for good.

She stays to watch over the property because, as she sees it, the land belongs to Antek as well, while Maciej is near death. In her view, whoever seizes the inheritance first may be difficult to remove and will have the law behind them. The blacksmith shouts and forbids her entry, angry that she has forestalled him, but she refuses to treat his permission as decisive. Hanka clutches to the land and guards it as she would protect her young. Her resolve is shaped by the prospect that Maciej will die and Antek will be taken away, as Rocho has warned her.

A household held together by work

The decision makes Hanka responsible not just for asserting a claim but for carrying the farm through a period when its usual labor force is in danger of disappearing. The novel has already shown how narrow the family’s margin is: in winter, Antek and Hanka are reduced to potatoes and salt, without money, and the cow is at risk of being sold. Antek refuses to take hired work, while Hanka fears that the family will not endure until spring. Against that earlier scarcity, her return to the farm is also a bid to preserve the means of household survival.

The labor crisis becomes visible on a village-wide scale in spring. With the working men in jail, women are left to manage fields, gardens, livestock, and domestic work, as well as pregnancies and the demands of children. The earth is ready for ploughing, but the hands needed to cultivate it are missing. Hanka’s stand thus anticipates a broader struggle to keep agricultural life from stopping altogether when men are absent. Later, neighboring villagers help bring the fallow fields back to life: carts, horses, and ploughs move across the land, and the work of sowing begins with a shared pause and a crossing of themselves. That communal recovery throws into relief the burden Hanka first takes on within a single threatened household.

Opposition and consolidation

Hanka does not secure the farm by acting alone in an uncontested space. Jagna opposes her, the blacksmith and his associates are set against her, and the Voyt favors Jagna and is energetic on her behalf. The Parish Priest is also against Hanka, urged on by Dominikowa. The danger is therefore both material and social: Hanka must hold her ground against people who challenge her presence or support a rival, while assuming duties for which she is still inexperienced.

She believes that lamenting will achieve nothing and that she must protect what is hers herself. The struggle is exhausting. She snatches at food and sleep and works from dawn until late at night, but the work does not come easily: she is unused to managing every matter, naturally timid, and cowed by Antek. At times she throws up her hands. Yet she does not give in. Each day, in the narrator’s image, she sinks her roots deeper into the ground and tightens her hold. Before two weeks have passed, everything runs under her will and direction. The decisive change is not simply that Hanka enters the cottage, but that she converts a precarious act of possession into practical command of the farm.

Significance

Hanka’s takeover makes domestic labor a form of defense. Faced with a possible death, an impending arrest, and a rival’s attempt to establish himself, she does not wait for formal protection or for the family crisis to resolve. She secures the household first, then sustains it through the unglamorous work of daily management. The farm’s land is inheritance and livelihood at once; leaving it unguarded could imperil both.

The episode also marks a change in Hanka’s position within the family. Earlier, poverty and Antek’s refusal to work leave her grieving and powerless to change their circumstances. Here, with the farm at risk and her husband absent, she takes on responsibility on her own behalf and her children’s. Her authority remains contested, and the evidence does not make the contest disappear; instead, it shows her establishing control through vigilance, labor, and refusal to retreat. In the aftermath of violence among the men, Hanka’s persistence keeps the farmstead in the family’s hands and gives the household a chance to endure.