by Frank Wynne
However, he found the girl’s silence extremely worrying, as if it must be concealing some sort of ambush or secret that he wouldn’t be able to cope with. While driving at her side in the trap, or standing next to her in the forest, he would often take a sidelong look at her calm, pensive profile. There was so much cheerful serenity in it that it had a soothing: effect on his nerves. And his heart needed soothing; his nerves were in tatters, at night he was having hallucinations and he could hardly digest a thing. But whenever he looked at Malwina’s low brow, whenever he kissed it, his heart beat steadily.
He had decided not to ask her any questions or to tell her anything. He wouldn’t answer any questions about his life, or ask any about her past. He didn’t even want to know about Michał. But once he got home, for a long time he would be unable to fall asleep; he kept seeing her face before him and couldn’t stop thinking that now it was Michał’s turn. Yet Michał seemed to have stopped coming, for in all these days Staś never saw him once.
The whole day was filled with anticipation. In the morning he lay for a long time listening to the sounds of the house – the tapping of Katarzyna’s knife as she chopped onions for lunch, or the monotonous crowing of a cockerel shut up in the creaking henhouse. Slowly his body would come to life, drenched in cold sweat from a night full of bad dreams. A shiver, then a shudder would pass through his numb hands and feet, and only then would he have the strength to open his eyes. At once he would notice the windows curtained in green leaves and the light, either sunny or dull as the weather varied. When it was raining he liked to listen to its whisper before looking at the world. But he preferred bright sunlight and fine weather. Then he felt more alive and got up a bit sooner. He would have his breakfast, then sit at the piano, but all the time he would be waiting to hear Malina’s firm footsteps and rough voice. During the day she often had something to do in the kitchen and would come running in to see Katarzyna. At one point it did cross his mind that while leading such an idle, inactive life he shouldn’t really be listening out for Malina’s voice or footsteps. But those other, furtive footsteps seemed to have gone away. He too was starting to think the doctors had made a mistake, and although he didn’t feel too strong, he hadn’t noticed any changes for the worse. The progress of his illness wasn’t making itself apparent. He was hardly eating a thing, but nor was he aware of any particular symptoms. He only felt unwell until midday, but he didn’t know whether it was the burden of love or of illness. He knew nothing of either kind of feeling – he was experiencing both love and death for the very first time.
Only by about five did he feel his strength gathering. He was extremely happy with life, although he had a feeling of being obstructed at every turn, as if there were a barrier between himself and reality. At dusk Malwina finished work, smelling of earth and soapsuds. They would meet at a pre-arranged spot and be gripped by a meaningful silence. Sometimes the mere fact that their hands touched as they swayed along gave them pleasure and coloured Staś’s entire view of life. Indeed, he was brimful of emotion, he was overflowing with a pure joy he couldn’t even talk about, for Malwina wouldn’t have understood him.
Gradually he realised that the woman who went walking along the sombre forest paths with him was pure deceit from head to foot. Neither the cause nor the effect were apparent; suffice it to say that the few words Malwina spoke to him were all patent lies, so much so that Staś believed nothing she said, not even things which must have been true by force of nature. At first she denied whatever he asked her. He had soon given up his policy of not asking any questions. On the contrary, the more he could tell that they got him nowhere, the more it annoyed him, and the more inclined he felt to shower the girl with questions. To every single one she answered in the negative – no, she had never loved anyone; no, she had never had a lover; no, Michał wasn’t courting her; no, she didn’t know any lad intimately. She went so far as to claim that she had never known any man before Staś, which was patently untrue. He didn’t believe it, but eventually such a blur of ‘no, no, nos’ went running through his head that he stopped believing his own eyes and ears. Miss Simons had confided everything in him; she had been noble and sincere, telling him he wasn’t the first man she had loved, that she had had three lovers before him, even that she had stolen money from her father and was a bad daughter. It didn’t bother him at the time; he hadn’t let any of these confessions upset him. As he looked back at himself during that period of his life, what annoyed and infuriated him most was his own vacuousness. A single day in this wilderness seemed to him fuller than that entire life. He had stopped answering letters with foreign stamps. They had become rarer too; Bolesław no longer had the irritation of finding them in every post.
Malwina’s lies were like a cloud of butterflies swarming around her. They were all part of that special aura that both excited and intoxicated Staś. Every day before seeing the girl he promised himself he would keep his mouth shut, but every day he asked her the same questions, which soon became a stereotyped litany, as regular as a ritual. It always ended the same way, with ‘I’m boring you, aren’t I?’, which was met with the final, unfailing and adamant ‘No!’
There was only one question that she answered with a wholehearted, sincere ‘Yes’. Staś had risked it a couple of days after their first meeting – the question was ‘Do you love me?’ He realised that this ‘yes’ was just as false as all the ‘nos’, but even so it gave him such pleasure that he kept asking the same question, not just daily, but several times a day. What should he say, while she said nothing, as they lay in the bushes together on the damp fabric of the forest, feeling the grass and last year’s fallen leaves beneath their toes? As he tightly embraced her warm, ample body in his skinny arms, as he touched her skin, feeling its whiteness at the mere touch? So he kept on mindlessly repeating the same questions in various tones of voice, and she always gave the same answers, without changing her intonation in the slightest. Her answers were like dilatory raindrops falling from leaf to leaf. Only once did she give a different answer.
It was a hot evening. Staś had been feeling reluctant to go out and had put off their meeting until late, at the edge of the forest in view of Maryjka’s cottage. That day he was exceptionally weak and could even feel how tired his fingers were from tinkling away at the piano. It was a postal delivery day and he had just received a letter from Miss Simons, who was off to Davos again. With a wry smile he thought of the landscape and houses, and the air smelling of medications, as if made up to a prescription. He rattled out a tune, slowly warbling each note as he hit it – the same old tango that he used to dance to in his former life. The heat was tiring him, but maybe it wasn’t tiredness that made him delay his departure for the edge of the forest. The chance of a meeting with Malina was his greatest joy – it was everything, it was his only privilege in life – and he thought of the forest where they met with immense, new-born love. The earth they lay down on was like a loving pet, a tame animal that he could cuddle up to. Malina, the earth, and the forest – it was all as if the good health he would never recover was still cosseting him. Very slowly he descended the veranda steps, looked around at the forestry lodge, dark and sloping, and took in the silence that slumbered in the forest. ‘There’s sure to be a moon tonight,’ he thought.
But there was no moon; as he went by the trees he passed between warmer and cooler streams of air, like a swimmer between currents of water. He found Malina lying stretched out, half asleep beneath a low leaning pine, which had often cloaked their caresses within the canopy of its lower branches. He woke her and passionately repeated his daily questions, and heard the daily answers. The only thing he didn’t feel like asking was if she loved him. He hesitated, kissing and embracing her. Only towards the end, when it was time to go home, did he fail to keep his promise to himself. ‘Do you love me?’ he said; to which came the stifled whisper, ‘Do you love me, sir?’
The memory of this unusual inquiry rocked him to sleep faster than usual that night, and wo
ke him earlier, giving him greater strength for the following day. But this strength proved illusory. Towards evening he could hardly lift his feet, but in the light of her gentle question of the night before Malina seemed quite another girl, and all the blatant lies she had told him before took on a ring of truth. He had found her to be capable of feelings he hadn’t expected. Strange hopes began to take possession of him. He thought that if all this were to develop into a passionate and impulsive love, his life would end in the clouds, in wonderland. It would be a fabulous finale. But even as he said it he no longer believed such an ending to be possible; he was just pretending to compose a finale for himself, but what he really felt was that he was only just beginning, with a great deal of effort, to construct some meaning for his life – he was only just beginning to live. All his thoughts revolved around the strong, white body which he held in his arms each day; he decided that from this body he was drinking in the juices he needed to conquer his infirmity.
He thought that from then on Malwina would change her replies to his constant questions, that she would answer with something akin to emotion and that maybe she would start to do the asking. But no, she was just as before – meek, quiet, shy and deceitful. She went on saying she had known no men before him and that Michał wasn’t courting her. And to the question whether she loved him she answered ‘yes’ again.
He wanted to change it all, stir it up and get to the heart of this frigid body, but his efforts were all in vain. Only once, a couple of days after that evening, when tired of her passivity, wanting to find out more, he shook her by the shoulders and demanded an answer, she again said something that revealed a darker side.
‘What about Michał?’ he had asked. ‘Do you love him?’
‘Yes, I love him too,’ she had answered very softly.
IX
That day they had met earlier than usual because it was a Sunday and Malwina didn’t have to work that afternoon. It had been unusually hot since early morning and Staś was very tired. He had walked all the way to the lake, a lifeless, black-and-white eye of water, as he had arranged to meet his lover there. At least it was far from home where no one could see them. It was there among the waterside reeds and grasses that Malina had told him she loved Michał too. At first he had taken no notice of this remark, and once he had left the girl, who wanted to stay and bathe, he trailed homewards. The trees stood rigid, perspiring in the hot, static air. All day the sky had been a pure and cloudless sapphire blue. Slender shadows cast a sparse net among the trees. The azure depths of the forest had become strangely crisp and sharply patterned. Bathed in sweat from heat and weakness, Staś could only drag his feet along, stopping now and then for a breath of air. But nothing could refresh him. Breathing was becoming torment. By the time he reached the lodge, it was already fairly late. His brother had gone off somewhere. Inside, the house was cool and pleasant. Ola was lying asleep on her father’s bed; flies were buzzing and crawling about her face. In Staś’s room the windows were curtained in the green coolness of the lime trees; he sat down at the piano and gazed out of the window at the leaves and trees beyond. Then he began to go over Malina’s words in his head.
Altogether it had been a bad day. He and his brother had quarrelled again at table. Bolesław had slammed the door and left his lunch unfinished before rushing out. And now there was Malina’s remark. There was something infinitely stupid in those words, as well as the deceit, the simplicity, the utter lack of ability to articulate emotions. For the first time he felt abased by the emotions that had taken such a firm hold on him.
He placed his hands on the keyboard and stared at them mindlessly. Then he noticed that his fingers had grown terribly thin and were extremely bony. From this alone he could tell that the end was getting nearer, but he didn’t want to summon up the thought of it. On the contrary, he started imagining a long life.
Later he started to play his favourite Hawaiian song, the one that had played as he danced with Miss Simons. He could remember that occasion perfectly. Now something was starting to happen – a rare event that only occurred when he heard an exotic song. With a deep, cold shudder he was beginning to sense the enormity of all the things he would never, ever see. The great expanse of cold, green oceans, blue seas full of palm trees and islands, ice-cold and blazing hot lands. Women in ports and villages, people, people, people. All the people he might have known, or loved, or simply come across. They weren’t here, and he would never get a glimpse of them now. Whenever this feeling had come over him in Switzerland he had immediately obliterated the scenes conjured up by his imagination. ‘I shall have far more in life,’ he had told himself. But now he knew he would have nothing more in life than the body of a very simple woman, and the flood of unknown, inexpressible worlds engulfed him to the point of choking and gasping for air. How much of it there was in one simple Hawaiian tune, which he had drawn out of the old piano with an easy bit of fingering. The fact that not only would he never know those worlds, but wouldn’t even be able to express the thrill they sent running through him was even worse torment. He could feel the omnipotence of nature, the menace of its inexorable rights, its vastness and its indifference. He was staggered by its indifference to his little death – it made his blood run cold, in spite of the heat; it made his hair stand on end to think that death was gradually consuming him, while nature would do nothing, nothing at all to alter the fact – it would just stand by and watch his demise impassively. Billions of people died just as young. He stood up and slammed the piano lid shut with a crash. He was overcome with terror. In the doorway stood Ola, awoken by his music, pale and as if hypnotised.
He took her by the hand, drew her onto the bed and in a tired voice began to tell her once again about the lunar eclipse he had seen in the mountains, how the lifeless red disk hung suspended above the frosty peaks; about the sense of space created by the shadow of the earth as it falls on the moon; how the stars appear larger, more deeply set in the frosty black sky; how the dogs howl with fear in the mountains; and about the eternal murmur of torrents and waterfalls which slowly and relentlessly erode great rocks and sweep them away into the valleys. In the face of this great game of the elements, human life is nothing.
Ola didn’t understand any of this, and it frightened her. Staś kept nervously repeating, ‘I know you don’t understand, but it doesn’t matter.’
Then he left her on the bed and walked about the room, bumping into the piano. The little girl sat startled, holding her threadbare doll dangling from her hand.
‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand, there’s no harm done,’ he repeated, ‘but I’ve got no one to tell, and once I’m in the ground you’ll remember, when you grow up you’ll remember. Just don’t remember in the middle of the night or you won’t be able to sleep … Or maybe you will. People do sleep, in spite of being surrounded by such terrible things – trees, clouds, animals. But none of it means a thing, people do sleep …’
He prattled on in this vein, until all of a sudden it grew dark. It took them a moment to realise that it wasn’t just nightfall but a storm as well. Now and then Stanisław had a strange but pleasant taste in his mouth, and wiping his tongue on his handkerchief he saw that his spittle was pink. A few drops of blood had trickled from his nose as well. ‘That’s brought on by the storm,’ he thought.
Finally he felt weak from all this chatter. He glanced at Ola, who was sitting on the bed weeping quietly and clutching the doll to her chest in fright. He stopped talking abruptly; moved to emotion, he seized the child in his embrace. And it all ended in tears. They both cried, and along with the tears their fears melted away. They were back on solid ground again, they could no longer see any terrors, just the walls that shielded them from the approaching storm.
They heard the first sough of the wind, and at the same time Bolesław’s footsteps on the dark veranda, then in the house, now dark as pitch. ‘Shut the windows,’ he shouted in a harsh, down-to-earth voice that made them both shudder. They rushed to t
he windows and shut them quickly. By now it was pouring.
Bolesław lit a lamp, put it in the dining room and stood quietly in the middle. Suddenly a stream of rain dashed against the windowpanes and drops of water lay flattened against the glass. Thunder and lightning came one after another at regular intervals. The sky kept opening, pale blue, revealing the incredible shapes of twisted trees.
‘Go to your room,’ said Bolesław abruptly to Ola in a menacing tone, his face flashing sternly, doubly illuminated by the lamp and the lightning.
Staś was puzzled by his tone of voice, but before he had worked out the reason for it, Bolesław had explained it.
‘Fine things you’re up to here,’ he said.
Staś was unspeakably alarmed by the start of this scene, not because he feared what Bolesław had to say to him, but because it would be nothing but futile, idle nonsense, which would not only make no difference to his inner state but which could not change his feelings for Malina in the slightest – his final refuge before plunging into the vortex. He just made a wry face in reply. ‘Well, what?’ he said after a short wait, since Bolesław was still standing there without moving.