Hayrick

The Hayrick is a haystack beside a track that becomes the secret meeting place of Antek and Jagna. Its importance lies in the contrast between what the lovers make of it—a refuge for their affair—and what Maciej Boryna sees in its disturbed surroundings: possible evidence of an approaching arson attack. The stack is not merely a hiding place. Its repeated use binds desire, concealment, household labor, and mistrust to one conspicuous point in the farm’s landscape.

Setting and first rendezvous

Antek tells Jagna that he has watched for her every evening by the Hayrick since Yuletide, but that she never came. Their first meeting in this sequence begins not with a planned escape but with Jagna’s bodily stillness: hearing his voice, she loses her strength and cannot speak, continuing to milk the cow distractedly until milk spills over her skirt and onto the ground. The interruption of ordinary work makes the encounter’s force visible. She is at the cows, yet her attention has been seized by the man waiting nearby.

Antek asks her to come to the Hayrick and wait, but Jagna admits that she is afraid. The meeting is delayed by Witek, whose return gives Antek time to slip out of his hiding place. Once he is gone, Antek repeats the invitation and begs Jagna to come even if she waits an hour or two. She finishes the milking in a daze, forgets to strain the milk, and moves about the cottage unable to remember what she had intended to do. At last she throws an apron over her head and leaves.

The approach is as carefully concealed as the meeting itself. Jagna creeps past the windows and follows the gable wall along a narrow path between the orchard and the shed, stooping beneath snow-laden branches. Antek is waiting by the stile. He carries her over it and pulls her under the Hayrick, where they exchange kisses in the hay. Their attempt at privacy is immediately broken when Maciej Boryna calls Jagna by name. The stack therefore offers cover, but no guarantee of secrecy.

A recurring meeting place

The Hayrick becomes more than the setting for one near-discovery. Jagna arranges to meet Antek there every few days, turning the first rendezvous into a recurring pattern. Its location beside the track and near the farm’s buildings makes it accessible to the lovers but also exposes their movements to anyone watching the household grounds. The same proximity that makes the stack useful as a hiding place makes it legible as a sign of clandestine activity.

Their meetings depend on assistance from others. Witek helps them, having lost sympathy for the farmer after a dispute involving the stork and attached himself to Jagna. Her better suppers encourage that loyalty, while Antek’s frequent payments of a few groszy give Witek another reason to help. The affair thus leaves practical traces in household life: food, small sums of money, and the participation of a young member of the household support what the lovers are trying to keep secret.

Jagustynka is their most important intermediary. She cultivates Jagna’s favor, wins Antek’s trust, and guards the meetings from Maciej Boryna and unexpected discovery. Her assistance is not presented as affection for the lovers: the narration stresses her bitterness and spite, and says she can bear neither Jagna nor Antek. She helps them while resenting them, making the Hayrick’s secrecy depend on an alliance shaped by grievance rather than shared devotion.

Suspicion and the meaning of the traces

For Maciej Boryna, the Hayrick acquires a different significance. Despite efforts to overcome his mistrust, he watches Jagna closely, while she remembers his temper and harsh words and grows increasingly resentful. He fears that Antek will burn him down. From that point, he patrols the house and outbuildings at dusk, inspects the thatch, and wakes at night to listen and check the corners with his dog.

A trampled patch beneath the Hayrick, partly swept away, becomes one of the clues that intensifies his alarm. Later he notices tracks by the stile. He interprets these signs as Antek coming at night to assess how a fire might be started; the secret meetings themselves do not occur to him. The reader, however, has already seen Antek waiting at that stile and pulling Jagna beneath the stack. Dramatic irony turns the lovers’ route into evidence of a different danger in Maciej Boryna’s mind: he reads traces of desire as preparation for arson.

This vigilance has consequences beyond the Hayrick. Maciej Boryna buys a savage dog from The Miller, provokes and starves it, and keeps it near the shed; at night it attacks people, and some bring charges. The old man’s watchfulness also wears him down: he grows thin and hunched, lets no one close, and has no one to confide in. The Hayrick’s double role—hideout for the lovers, suspected point of entry for a feared attack—helps turn private mistrust into a sustained household crisis. Its significance rests in that gap between the traces left on the ground and the different stories the lovers and Maciej Boryna read in them.