The violent clash between Dominikowa and Szymek begins with a practical demand that exposes a deeper conflict over marriage, authority, and property. Szymek wants money to arrange the banns; when his mother refuses to let him marry, he decides to find the money himself. Their dispute escalates into a physical struggle that ends with Dominikowa badly burned and Szymek refusing to leave the family home.

The demand and the fight

After breakfast, Szymek sits by the window with a cigarette and considers how to approach his mother. He asks for money to pay for the banns, explaining that the priest has told him to come before vespers for the prayers. Dominikowa responds with a mocking question about whom he intends to marry. When Szymek presses her, she refuses outright to give him the money or allow the wedding. He insists that he will manage without her permission, then threatens to search for the cash himself.

Szymek lunges at the chest and pulls off its lid, scattering the clothes across the floor as he searches. Dominikowa tries to drag him away, then attacks him, pulling his curls, striking his head and face, and kicking him. He pushes her off; she grabs a poker and charges again. As he tries to take it from her, the struggle carries them around the room, against its walls and furniture. Jagna arrives and tries to separate them, but Dominikowa keeps rushing at Szymek, and he begins to fight back. Their quarrel has become a spectacle: people hurry in from outside, while Jędrek runs about crying and pleading with his mother.

The decisive blow changes the argument’s stakes. Szymek punches Dominikowa between the eyes, grabs her by the sides, and throws her across the room. She falls onto the hot baking plate among the boiling pans, bringing down the stove. The women pull her from the rubble; although badly burned, with her skirts smouldering, she continues to struggle toward Szymek. Others put out the fire and restrain her so they can press damp rags to her face, but she still orders him away.

Injury, expulsion, and the claim to land

The violence does not end when Dominikowa is pulled from the collapsed stove. Still badly burned and in acute pain, she breaks free of the women restraining her, tears Szymek’s clothes from the pole by the range, and throws them through the window into the orchard. She declares that nothing in the house is his: she will give him neither land nor food, even if he starves. Only after she has exhausted herself does she fall, moaning, and the others carry her to bed. The room, crowded with neighbors who have rushed in from all sides, becomes the setting for a public rupture in the family.

Szymek, meanwhile, is beaten and bloody, barely able to breathe. The account emphasizes his stunned fear after the struggle: he can only stare at his mother, shaking and unable to speak. His condition contrasts with the force of his earlier insistence. The attempt to secure money for the banns has turned into a fight that leaves both mother and son injured and makes the household’s conflict over marriage impossible to keep private.

Mateusz arrives soon afterward and takes Szymek by the hand, urging him to come to his own home. Szymek refuses. He maintains that the land is his through his father and that he will stay on what belongs to him rather than surrender it. As he grips the corner of the room, his refusal turns the immediate quarrel into an explicit claim of inheritance and residence: Dominikowa has thrown his clothes outside, but he does not accept that her expulsion settles who has a right to the family land.

Jędrek gathers the garments from the orchard and ties them in a sheet, placing the bundle beside his brother. He offers to go with Szymek into the world, a response that gives the conflict another consequence beyond the mother and son: the younger brother, crying, is prepared to leave with him. Mateusz remains beside Szymek, unsure what to do, while Szymek will not move or speak. The episode closes not with reconciliation or a settled departure, but with the family divided around the claim to land and the clothes cast out of the house.

The household as contested territory

The clash turns the house itself into the material ground of the dispute. The chest that Szymek opens in search of money, the poker Dominikowa takes up, the collapsed stove, and the clothes thrown into the orchard mark successive shifts from a request about marriage to a struggle over possession and belonging. In the aftermath, Dominikowa’s declaration that the house, food, and land are hers meets Szymek’s insistence that the land came to him from his father. Neither claim is resolved by the fight: the scattered garments can be gathered, but the family’s competing rights to remain cannot be settled by force.

The scene also makes a private rupture public. Jagna intervenes, Jędrek pleads with his mother, and neighbors crowd into the room and hallway, witnessing the violence and its consequences. Their presence does not restore order; it surrounds the family at the moment when Dominikowa casts Szymek’s belongings outside and he refuses to leave. The episode thus ends with the dispute exposed before the community, while its central question—whether inheritance gives Szymek a right to stay—remains open.

Jagna’s interrupted arrival

Jagna reaches Dominikowa’s home after inferring from half-spoken words and Hanka’s actions that Antek is returning; the news has stirred a quiet hope in her, and she hurries to her mother’s without knowing what awaits her. She arrives in the middle of the quarrel and tries to separate Szymek and Dominikowa, but cannot stop the struggle. Her abrupt passage from private elation into the family’s public violence brings another strand of the story into the room: the news about Antek does not pause the household’s conflict, and Jagna is drawn into it as an unsuccessful mediator.