The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  And now, palmistry. Anastatius’ mysterious passion for calendars sufficed to prompt this accusation. Anastatius has collected calendars for years, and on top of that he buys old almanacs in second-hand shops. He’s simply touched by the forecast for a good harvest in 1914, or the fact that Easter in 1881 fell on April 13.

  Anastatius goes to bed late. He is usually tired out by running around all day, but happy. No one can imagine what inner peace comes to a man who has given someone back world harmony in the form of a found wallet.

  Before falling asleep Anastatius softly says “good night”—whether to Mrs. Gut or someone else, I don’t know.

  And now, now do you understand that Anastatius sleeps the sleep of the just…?

  1950

  Benedict

  BENEDICT IS JUST IN the middle of writing a penetrating study on the necessity of cruelty when the phone rings. The melody of the approaching sentence fades, his train of thought withers, his mood swivels and falls. Benedict picks up the phone. From the depths of the ebony blackness comes a gentle feminine voice. A mundane, conventional conversation. Benedict controls his impatience and with well-feigned delight arranges a meeting in a café at six. Not until a moment later does he remember he is supposed to spend the afternoon translating a novella for which the editors have been waiting two months.

  In the view of many acquaintances, Benedict is the embodiment of politeness. Benedict never turns you down, it’s enough to say: “Hey, Ben, I have a big favor to ask you,” already he’s smiling and nodding in agreement. And it’s not only for people he knows; sometimes he insists on declaring his disinterested readiness to complete strangers.

  Benedict suffers greatly from the lack of composition in life, and perhaps for that reason he values it above all else in literature. He is entirely at the mercy of people who confide in him about their big problems and little problemlets.

  Besides, Benedict is an ideal person to confide in, especially for disappointed women. He is invaluable at times when you’re looking for someone who doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t give advice, but is silent and sympathetic. These confessions would furnish material for more than one novel. Fortunately, the temptation to be indiscreet is very weak with Benedict, because he is a poet and essayist, that is, he practices art forms beautifully remote from simple life experiences.

  His tireless inner hospitality and pathological readiness to sacrifice himself have all the marks of weakness. What is only a convention, this obsession with politeness, could be a virtue. But that would take strength, rigor of choice, and a pinch of cruelty.

  Those who don’t like Benedict accuse him of inner sophistry, spiritual obscurantism. But it is more a case of the untempered sensitivity of a boy unable to gather his diffuse gestures of tenderness, smiles, warm words, and comforting letters into one true manly love.

  But now Benedict has fallen in love. Spiteful tongues say he fell in love out of politeness. This casts a dark shadow on his sentiment. The wise, kind girl who loves him very much is worn out by Benedict’s incomprehensible arguments for love as a sacrifice. She doesn’t understand why they should constantly be denying themselves something; why complicate things that are in fact simple?

  Benedict, melting with unexpected happiness, is tormented by the thought that his love is not Christian because it demands exclusivity, commands him to be an egoist.

  After the first tearful scene Benedict decides to go away to another town whose only virtue is that no one knows him there. He leaves without saying goodbye, fully conscious of the shame of his flight. He decides to live in absolute solitude, to serve his friends anonymously through his art rather than by his helpfulness and doubtful knowledge of life.

  There’s a fat lady in his compartment. She is uninterruptedly eating a crumbling sweet bun. She doesn’t look very nice but when she starts to tell Benedict in confidence the whole story of her complicated court case…

  On the third day of his stay in the other town Benedict goes to see his accidental acquaintance with a bunch of flowers, having just had a great idea for rescuing her from her troubles. He doesn’t remember anything of his vow of solitude or his unfinished study on the necessity of cruelty, on the necessary dose of ruthlessness crucial both to a conscious art and to a good life.

  1950

  Timon

  THE CORNERS OF TIMON’S mouth are deposits of bitterness. They contain the summarized story of his wasted life. In his youth he studied art history. He even wrote an interesting (unpublished) dissertation that attracted the attention of his masters: The Evolution of the Acanthus Leaf in the Gothic Cathedrals of Northern France (a contribution to the history of ornamentation). A year before Timon finished his studies, his father died and as the oldest child, he had to take care of his mother and siblings. He took some idiotic job at the “Treasury” and worked relentlessly, without feeling the charm of voluntary sacrifice, waiting in tense anticipation for revenge, for a last fine gesture to pass himself on to posterity as he wanted to be, not as life had made him.

  His work and sacrifice were in vain. One of his brothers (the most talented) drowned himself, the other ran away to America and renounced his family (it appears he did pretty well for himself). One of his sisters made a terrible marriage. Her husband deserted her, leaving her a truckload of children. His mother died a slow death of some complicated illness in an expensive health care facility.

  In despair, Timon married a poor cowed girl who didn’t understand him or their children or their house, where she felt taken in like a stray cat. “Oh well”—Timon concluded every attempt to communicate with his wife—“you’re a poor dolt.” There was a gentle resignation and a spark of tenderness in these words.

  In spite of everything Timon (hats off here) remained faithful to his scholarly passions. He subscribed to a thick art history quarterly, read quite a bit, filled dozens of notebooks with summaries, polemics, outlines of projects, all of which perished during the war. No note was taken of this, however, in any statement of cultural war damage.

  After the war Timon and his family settled in the little town of M. in Warmia. M. had a magnificent Gothic cathedral. It was above its station, dissatisfied and indifferent to the bleak surroundings as if it had been brought from the capital for an exhibition. Timon studied the cathedral, its history, made a catalogue of its noteworthy features, ferretted around in source materials.

  It happened that a professor of art history, famous and, on top of everything, from Krakow, came to town. Two months later Timon read the professor’s article in the quarterly.

  The next issue of the quarterly carried a letter by Timon to the editors, correcting errors and inaccuracies. The affair had all the appearance of a major scholarly scandal. Some guy from the provinces without any kind of name was telling a professor his business. Each lengthy paragraph began with a spiteful phrase along the lines of: “if the professor had less confidence in his own erudition and regarded the sources with due respect” or “it would have been easy to avoid these unfortunate errors by seeking information from a random townsperson. But then one would have had to lower oneself to the level of the locals,” and so on. And in fact if you disregarded the style and the fact that this was revenge years in the making, everything in Timon’s letter was trivial and helplessly minor, it was all about inessential trifles, a few mixed up dates, some details of no importance omitted.

  A few months after that great day Timon died. The quarterly put a short notice in the obituary section. Next to Timon’s name they wrote: “Art Historian from M.”

  And I truly don’t know whether that was a belated tribute or a tactless joke. I only know that if human feeling had access to Timon, now looking at the world from the perspective of eternity, the fact would fill him with a new variety of bitterness.

  Adrian, Or the Limits of Intelligence

  SOMEONE APTLY SAID OF him that he was a child once and it appears he was the way he is now from the very beginning, he was born a statue. This is probably beca
use he is perfectly handsome, that is, he fits his own shape exactly, doesn’t overrun his limits and apparently has no desire to do so.

  Someone aptly said that Adrian fits wholly into his own chiselled head, into his own measured gestures and his own pure and passionless prose. After all, he is a writer, that is, he truly speaks only when he is silent. Every year he writes a new book that the public and the critics receive with cool recognition. Not once has his work provoked a debate, no one from the younger generation has attacked his reputation, no one has ever questioned his position, which is wrapped in a unanimous silence as if it weren’t occupied now but already belonged to history.

  And no one but he himself even guesses that it’s like this because Adrian isn’t simply an artist.

  When he sits down to a new book, its characters, structure, and all of its words lie clearly inside him, right under the surface, he doesn’t need to struggle to find them, nor does their birth give him joy. He covers blank sheets of paper with his even, legible writing, virtually without crossings-out, and only the hope of sudden vision can compensate for the bitterness of the “great Adrian’s” long bureaucratic hours.

  Adrian is too intelligent to make mistakes, but he knows that if he managed to write under his own level, he would be alive, someone worthy of quarrels, someone disturbing. The cold intellect that carefully protects him from mistakes with equal scrupulousness protects him from inspiration.

  Franciszka, or Belated Love

  FRANCISZKA LIVES IN HARMONY with the library, engulfed by its gray background, sucked into the leather bindings of the books that line the walls. She doesn’t disturb the gravity of the institution with the color of her dress, or a smile, or with a busy search for books. She has a solemn, hushed voice, her gestures are controlled and quiet. Looking at her you would hardly imagine that apart from her life at the library she had any kind of private life. And so readers joke that when the library closes she is fitted out with a shelf code and shut up in the rare manuscripts cabinet.

  For some time now Franciszka hasn’t left work with the other library employees but has stayed on into the evening under the pretext of ordering books or checking the catalogue. During this time a young man paces up and down the dark street, between two islands of light—the patient footman of love.

  Franciszka is always surprised that he waits for her so patiently, and worse, she tells him so. She says that after all she is old and ugly, she doesn’t deserve love, it must be a mistake that will soon be cleared up. She behaves this way so the farewell scene will find her prepared, so she can say she has long been expecting it.

  When they walk together in silence, she feels the warmth of his arm and perishes at the thought that this arm will abandon her one day. But now, while it lasts, she feels an undeserved happiness she is afraid to admit to and which she can neither capture nor keep.

  For this love has come at the wrong time. She is unable to capture it and fence it in. Just as the special “Beauty” soap she secretly uses is unable to return the “matte sheen of youth” to her face.

  Everything in life must be cultivated. Even the use of a rare and singular happiness.

  Barbara

  BARBARA IS JUST PUTTING on her shabby but well-cut fur coat; smiling, she rubs her lips against the sealskin collar as if to say she likes it. She has a wide plain face, tranquil dark eyes and a perpetual, somewhat passive, smile.

  Barbara is young, but neither travel nor psychology appeals to her. On the other hand she likes her dresses, her knick-knacks, her one-room sublet filled with flowers and napkins, well and she likes herself too.

  However, Barbara is not so wrapped up in herself that it limits her. She studies a subject that testifies to the originality of her interests, but she does so partly to feel the pleasure of returning from ancient history, as if from a house filled with tempests and currents, to the warm present filled with us.

  She only pays attention to people who are in some way connected to her. But in seeking such connections, multiplying and inventing them, Barbara is indefatigable and full of ingenuity. That’s why it’s hard to pigeonhole her as an ordinary egoist.

  Barbara only likes people when they are with her and pay attention to her. She talks a lot, interestingly and colorfully, giving the most minor episodes in her life an epic twist, building artful dramas from everyday scenes.

  “So, imagine, I was on the 4 yesterday. It was crowded as usual, so I made my way up toward the front. In the middle I bumped up against a lady with a poodle on her lap. The poodle looks at me and suddenly goes grrrr. It didn’t look at anybody else, just me—everyone on the tram noticed. There I’m standing, heroically, not even blinking, while shivers are going up and down my spine, and the poodle is going grrr and grrrrrr, louder and louder. So what do you know, the lady had to get off, she was afraid her little mutt would tear me limb from limb.”

  (She is now gazing into the listener’s eyes, organizing his forced hilarity and laughing her own exuberant laugh.)

  When the person she’s talking to doesn’t feel like listening anymore and gets up to go, Barbara holds his hand a long time in her warm, broad palms, which somehow nobody wants to make their permanent home.

  HAMLET ON THE BORDER OF SILENCE1

  Reconstruction of space and time

  I CAN SAY “ELSINORE, Elsinore” over and over again, holding my head in my hands, but no image rises from the depths of my imagination to the surface of my closed eyes. Nor can I accept what others’ fancies offer me; even a real photograph of the castle at Kronborg clashes with my irrational certainty that it could not have happened there. The guide to the castle points at a marble urn called Hamlet’s grave and says with solemn irony: “This is the one place on earth where we are sure the remains of the Danish prince do not rest.”

  If one can see an abyss, then an abyss is what I see: a cliffside with a sea roaring down below, the places where the Ghost led Hamlet. Farther on a little mist and stone, clouds and blackness. I clearly feel a north-west wind on my face, that wind of inspired madness. Clouds, sea, and wind, the frail framework holding a world full of impaired visibility.

  The inability to place the tragedy in any setting constituted an important juncture in my personal experience. I understood that Elsinore means everywhere, that it is a nameless space, a flat table on which fate throws its dice.

  The other abstract hero of the tragedy, time, is more tangible and sensual. In ancient tragedy it is a merely objective factor, seemingly independent of the author. The heroes move on the regular feet of verse towards peaks on the ridge of their destiny. The eye of the poet and spectator observes things that cannot be contained in any historical category. Orestes eternally raises his innocent criminal’s sword, Antigone presses her stubborn lips together (no! no!), Prometheus suffers without end. In tragic Tartarus, the history of the protagonists is granted the grace or curse of lasting absolutely.

  Anyone who wants to use the same scale for a modern tragedy will encounter the problems of commentators and their misunderstandings at the very outset. If you don’t understand how the subjectivization of time is manifested, if you aren’t able to read time’s changing current, you will make the error of all who, saving the work’s regularity of structure, distort its meaning and the characters’ inner truth.

  How does time flow in Hamlet, in those twenty scenes artificially divided up into acts? How many hours, days, weeks, are contained in the black frame of two nights: the night on the ramparts and the night over the Prince’s dead body? Who has studied and who has tried to read the changing pulse of the tragedy? The dividing lines of the acts roughly indicate changes of tempo: Acts I, III, and V carry a condensed charge of time and are separated by restful acts, especially the leisurely fourth, written as if to prepare the tragedy’s finale, in which the sword assaulting the Prince strikes sparks off the quick seconds.

  Whenever his figure appears on the stage we experience a pervasive sense of time thickening. Not only because he is the main char
acter in the tragedy and not because we are aware that he will do the deed. Hamlet accelerates time by his very own existence, by the pain of his remembrance, the effort of his thought. He strives toward the denouement not only in action and in word but in his stubborn silence, his feverish existence. In the face of this immediately felt truth the lame theory of hesitation and “Hamletizing” breaks down, the theory of those who, paralyzed by the time of watchmakers, forgot time’s old measure, the contractions of a human heart.

  Over the stage hangs a sultry air that quickens the luxurious vegetation of beings, passions, and fates. In the course of a few hours an entire life can play itself out: one scene has room for many deaths. That intensity of theatrical life stifles any question about the heroes’ past.

  However, I cannot refrain from thinking about who Hamlet was before, beyond the stone ring of Elsinore, back when he was simply a student at the university of Wittenberg. I know it’s tactless, justified only as the tactlessness of curious lovers who want to be told about every day of the past, every moment of separation. If only commentators, instead of fantasizing about what is written, would reconstruct what is missing and has to be completed by the effort of a faithful imagination.

  Some trace must have been left. Volumes of the Prince’s love sonnets lie in old antiquarian bookshops, and in the cellars of Elsinore his Wittenberg trunk has been moldering for ages; to students of Hamlet’s prehistory it would have the same value as Priam’s treasure to those searching for Troy.

  Amid piles of papers and artifical flowers, a bundle of Ophelia’s letters (“It’s raining here. The sea is pounding so. Father has worries at the office. Laertes goes hunting. I’m alone all day. Yesterday I wept and father said I was impossible. But I’m not, I’m just very sad. When are you coming?” No style at all, right?). There’s a costume, and the masks and props of Hamlet’s amateur theatricals. Lecture notes, a Montaigne torn down the middle and held together with a ribbon, which if untied would lead to very intimate things. And an instrument with a broken string. On the bottom of the trunk, a treatise by the Prince entitled Barbar’s Syllogism and its Application to our Knowledge of Reality. At that time Hamlet, like his friends, had succumbed to a superstitious rationalism and believed that people could avoid suffering and misfortune by applying the principles of logic.