“I’m sorry,” I said, just to be on the safe side.
“No need to tell me you’re sorry. I just don’t want you to imagine God knows what. Don’t imagine that I’m jealous over you, you snot-nosed kid,” she said flaring up, but then her voice grew milder, and she began to speak as before, rapidly and with gentle persuasion in her voice. “Jerzyk, it isn’t that those are two lascivious bodies—it’s that those are two lazy bodies. It mustn’t be, Jerzyk, that on the threshold of life you chance upon a lazy body, or indeed, horror and perversion, two whole lazy bodies. Look in the mirror, my transgressive boy.”
The angel of my first love grasped me by the chin, brought her face to my face, touched my forehead with her forehead, and stared into my eyes with incredible intensity, something between that of a hypnotist and an optometrist.
“In the depths of your green eyes, Jerzyk, you loafer, I can clearly see the land of laziness. I can see golden hills where you will bask. I can see the sofas of your many-houred snoozes. I can see heaps of notebooks you will never cover with writing. I can see the thousand peaceful cities where you will live from day to day, a thousand peaceful white cities of phlegmatic architecture and friendly climate. Torrid heat reigns from early morning. A streetcar, open on both sides, is making its way through green pastures. Oh, how sweet it will be, Jerzyk, to live in the heart of that life that is slowly waking but always nodding off again before the final awakening. Open windows, dark apartments, the somnolent dramas of the residents, an oval table covered with a cloth, the remains of banquets that never end, hammocks, easy chairs, old architecture, a thousand gentle rivers under a thousand old bridges, lazy girls going for walks along grassy shores . . .
“My dear boy, I’m afraid it’s already too late. If you have the misfortune to chance upon a lazy body at the very beginning of your youth, you’ll be lost for life. Your innate tendency toward laziness will be awakened and set for all time, and you’ll spend your entire life searching for the promised land of laziness. You’ll pass through a thousand peaceful cities. All your life you’ll hunger for lazy arms. You won’t live; you’ll sleep instead. You’ll sleep your entire life away. To live, or to sleep, that, of course, is the question. But ultimately, as a believing Protestant you should adhere to Scripture, and in Scripture it is written that everything has its time, there’s a time to live and a time to sleep. Don’t you understand? Those two bodies sleep constantly. They are just two eternally sleeping sisters who sleep walking, and sleep eating, and sleep standing, and sleep sitting. Can’t any of you understand that’s why they drag their Babylonian blanket into the depths of the forest? Because they always have to have the saving, magical prop of sleep with them? But suit yourself, Jerzyk.
“The third time I saw you was when, in the company of your Mom, Dad, and your eternally drunken house friend, you were walking to services at your church on a Sunday. I followed you, driven not only by the curiosity of the tourist. I sat in a pew at the back under the bell tower. I like the fact that in your Church you don’t have to kneel. But I didn’t like the sermon at all. The sermon was absolutely horrifying. I don’t wish to offend your religious feelings, but your local father pastor gives the impression of believing much more strongly in the devil than in God. Strictly speaking, he believes in the devil without question; whether he believes in God, however, remains undecided. If I’m not mistaken, Martin Luther had that same problem. Ultimately there’s no surprise here: either you make a schism, or you play tiddlywinks.
“The fourth time I saw you in the swimming pool. Jerzyk, you swim badly. You play soccer, however, like a Brazilian. Last week I stood on the road that runs above the playing field, and then I saw you for the fifth time. You dribbled the ball faultlessly. But that time, when you set out from almost the middle of the field, and in a sprint you passed two defenders, you faked out a third, and then, one on one with the goalie, with a crafty feint you laid him flat in one corner of the goal, and with a delicate grazing of your foot you placed the ball in the opposite corner—oh, Jerzyk, that was so beautiful that my hands brought themselves together in applause of their own volition.
“The sixth time—anyway, it’s not important where it was; I saw you for a sixth time . . . And the seventh and perhaps thousandth time I saw you in your room, where you peep at me, always in the same infantile pose. A thousand identical poses I count as one pose. You see, Jerzyk, I know everything about you. But don’t be afraid that I’m a state functionary who keeps an eavesdropping apparatus under her pillow. Or maybe, do be a little afraid. But now, to make it fair, I’ll tell you everything about me. Or rather, there is no question here of any sort of fairness. After all, you haven’t told me a thing, since you don’t say anything at all, and your silence, to tell the truth, is just as captivating as your shoulders. Men, Jerzyk, shouldn’t speak at all before forty, and even after forty—not very much. The infrequent exceptions confirm the rule. You do quite right, Jerzyk, by not speaking very much, by mostly attempting instead to record the sentences you hear. If, in addition, you could succeed in shaking off your inclination for lazy bodies (although I know you won’t manage it, you scoundrel), who knows, who knows—perhaps you could become a real man. Come here, we’ll rest a bit.”
And we sat down on a bench on the river bank. Behind us the lights were burning in the windows of the Sports Center. Our multiplied shadows were laid out upon the water. Time and again a single coin of radiance fell upon her restless knees. It turned out that what she had been squeezing under her arm was neither a purse, nor a document case, nor a teacher’s day planner. Although all my cognitive powers remained absolutely dominated by her, nonetheless this amazing bit of information managed to reach me. And so, I watched with the greatest amazement as the angel of my first love placed a small photo album on our contiguous thighs and turned sheet after sheet.
I glanced at photos of people I didn’t know with the aversion and disgust that a motionless crowd always arouses. It was as if random passersby suddenly stopped in their tracks, approached, and forced you to contemplate their repulsive randomness. To be sure, her face appeared in this crowd time and again, but every time it was altered, in other hairstyles and in other eras. She began speaking to me again. Her hand moved from photo to photo. She told me the story of her family, episodes from the life of closer and more distant acquaintances. I listened, and I looked attentively, but nothing here settled into a whole.
“Here I am, standing on the balcony. A bad picture, but in the background you can see a little bit of Żoliborz. Trusia lived in this house, my best girlfriend. Her picture is also here somewhere. She’s no longer living. What can I say? My grandparents on their way to Biały. They had struck up a friendship with a certain German, but you can’t see the German; he must have taken the picture. My father, but I’m not sure where. Look, he seems to be standing in the middle of a huge field with a bottle of beer in his hand. So much time has passed, but I still can’t figure out where, when, and by whom this picture of him was taken. He’s looking somewhere in the distance. He still had his sight then, poor fellow. He’s looking as if he wanted to take in the whole world, the plain and the grass. The entire family and everybody else laughing. This was truly a rarity. No one would ever have thought that that was me, and yet that’s me in the very middle. I’m even younger than you in this picture. Here I am during my apprenticeship at Mr. Mentzel’s drugstore. You see how beautiful I was, how well that white chiton became me. Aunt and Uncle Fiałkowski with little Tommie on a sleigh. To this day I don’t like him. Already as a child he had the eyes of a devil. With mother in the window. Do you know that the same curtain is hanging in my apartment to this day? My brother on vacation. With friends on the Cracow Market Square five minutes before such a downpour—I’ve never been so wet in my life. And this, Jerzyk, is my wedding photo. Just don’t be jealous. I had a green dress. Just imagine what went on. My handsome husband in a grey suit. Do you know how much he earns? Her earns a lot. In addition, he’s intelligent and
good with children. He adores playing chess. I don’t love him, and I’ve probably never loved him. He’ll be coming here day after tomorrow, on Sunday. If you know how to play chess, come over and play a game with him. I beg you, Jerzyk. If he doesn’t have someone to play chess with, he plays by himself, and I am always afraid something terrible will happen then. Those are my children. That’s Jaś, and that’s Małgosia, and that’s me, Baba Yaga. No, not Yaga. Teresa. I keep my word. I always keep my word, because that’s just how I am. Understand? My name is Teresa. Teresa, and that’s it. No diminutives, distortions, transpositions, forms of endearment. I hate that. I hate that, because that’s just how I am. Understand? Just Teresa. No Terenia, Renia, Tereska, Kareska, no Tessa, Tereńka, Eśka, no Teresiuńka. Teresa. The whole story. Teresa at her high-school graduation. Teresa at the beach. Teresa in a ball gown. That one in the uniform is my husband’s boss. There’s a full vodka glass in the foreground, of course. You understand, Jerzyk, there is no joking with these gentlemen. They mostly don’t smile. Even if you were to tell them a delicious joke about an assassination attempt on the life of the First Secretary, I assure you—they won’t laugh. And that is mother and father half a year before their deaths. By the end of their lives they had come to hate each other so much that the one couldn’t live without the other, and Dad died six weeks after Mom. And half a year earlier they both had passport photos taken. This appalls me, Jerzyk. A horrible secret lurks here, a terrible mystery.”
And indeed, there was something peculiar in the seemingly normal passport photos of two old people. She had smiled at the camera, but it was a smile that was not so much artificial as stamped with some sort of desperate determination. In the widely gaping eyes of the blind man you felt the childish hope that in a moment he would see the flash of the magnesium cutting through the all-encompassing darkness.
“Neither of them ever went out of the house: not for the newspaper, not for bread, not to the neighbors. The fourth floor, without an elevator, on Francesco Nullo Street. Jerzyk, I was their doom. And those are photos made in the shop on Wiejska Street.” The angel of my first love spoke now in an entirely different manner. Her previous style of speaking had been a sovereign mastery over me and the world. She was ahead of both me and the world by several steps. She knew everything about us, about me and the world. But now her speaking was a desperate defense against utter capitulation. Now she didn’t know, wasn’t familiar with the secret. In vain she attempted to unravel the mystery. I, in turn, liberated from the shackles of her narrational domination, slowly began to surmise how her final, though absolutely and in-no-way parting words, would go.
“. . . Yes, in the photographer’s shop on Wiejska Street. When I first came upon those pictures, about a month after father’s funeral, I thought that perhaps someone had taken them at home, that they had set up an appointment by telephone, who knows with whom, with someone at any rate who knows how to make passport photos. But no, no way. Here, look, there is a plush curtain in the background. I checked, I was there. They made it there. They were there. Each of them had six passport photos taken in that place. I won’t even mention the fact that this must have been a sizable expenditure for them. They had to dress up. Look, father is in a tie, and mother is in the dress she wore the last time for Małgosia’s baptism. They had to go downstairs. She had to lead him, although she herself could barely move. Then they had to reach the corner and go down almost all of Frascati Street, and then a certain bit of Wiejska. How did they do it? And what for? What for? Why did they need those passport photos? Where did they want to go? On what dying trip did they wish to embark? Where did they wish to flee before they died? To America? To Australia? To warmer lands?”
The angel of my first love closed the album and stood up clumsily from the bench, and we set off back home through the park and through the playing field that was overgrown with white Asiatic grass. And when, after a few minutes, we stood again before the display window of the footwear section that was screened by a massive green grate, what ought to have happened didn’t happen. The angel of my first love didn’t take me by the hand, didn’t embrace me, nor did she say: “Come, Jerzyk. Come. I too am basically very, very lazy.” I was certain that was just how it would happen, but that is not how it happened. The angel of my first love once again extracted the album from under her arm and once again began to turn over sheet after sheet. At first I thought she wished to investigate the secret she hadn’t fully unravelled further, that suddenly some idea had come to her mind, and now she knew on what sort of expedition her infirm and dying parents had wished to embark. But this supposition was false too. My first love with the undiminutizable first name extracted a small scrap of paper from among the sheets of the album, and she handed it to me and said:
“Here’s my address, Jerzyk: Warsaw, 20 Francesco Nullo Street, apartment 23. You haven’t been to Warsaw yet, but some day you finally will be there, and then you must drop by, you must visit me. I’m giving you this address now because I’m afraid that the day after tomorrow you won’t feel like playing chess with my husband. And after that we are leaving. We are leaving, you stay—somebody said that to me, I don’t remember who. Farewell, Jerzyk. See you on Francesco Nullo.” And she turned her back and disappeared, and I also turned my back and disappeared. I disappeared because, after all, no one saw me. No one saw me put the piece of paper with the address into my pocket and look toward the morphinistes’ window. And no one heard the Biblical sentence: knock, and it shall be opened unto you; ask, and it shall be given unto you. Even I myself didn’t hear how loudly that immortal verse resounded in me, and I didn’t know on what distant false paths it would lead me.
Chapter III
“WHY ARE YOU SO troubled, Mrs. Chief? The Lord promised that He wouldn’t send a flood upon the earth again.”
Mother didn’t pay any attention to Mr. Trąba’s unremitting arguments. She threw an oilcloth cape over her shoulders and ran out to the bridge, under which brown waters were gathering. I held her by the hand; the massive planks and stone spans shook beneath our feet. St. John’s rains had come crashing down a few days earlier. We glanced up, in the direction of the first bridge by the cemetery, and down, in the direction of the third bridge by the swimming pool. The world was the same in all directions. The swimming pool was missing, as was the cemetery. The waters had no top and no bottom. The waters were everywhere. The house a few hundred meters away rested in the depths, at the bottom of a grey ocean. We returned, conquering the elements. We removed our thoroughly wet cloaks in the entryway. Streams of water flowed from Mother’s cape. Mr. Trąba’s voice came from behind the door; he was finishing who knows how long a citation: “. . . neither shall all flesh, Chief, be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth . . .”
•
Mr. Trąba was almost always sitting at our huge kitchen table, but when the heavy rains, snow storms, and floods came, his presence became truly permanent.
“The time of natural disasters is your time, Mr. Trąba,” Father would say. And indeed, our eternal guest did seem to bestow a peculiar honor upon the elements that locked him beneath our roof and chained him to our table. From morning to evening he would sit on the wide wooden bench. When it came time to sleep, he made himself a pallet there, and, covered with blankets or sheepskins, he lay down to sleep, or rather he slipped away into semi-consciousness and listened to the undying gales with an enigmatic smile.
Mother mechanically combed her wet hair with her fingers, approached the window, and stared at Buffalo Mountain, which was barely visible beyond the wall of rain.
“It’s quite another matter, however, that the Lord’s promise applies to the entire globe. The Lord God promised our first father that He would never again take the globe, overflowing with iniquity, into His Fatherly hand and submerge it in the abyss, that He wouldn’t submerge it even for a day, to say nothing of forty days. Nonetheless, there have been lesser deluges, I have
to admit, and there still are. And—however objectively we look at the matter—we do live in a valley.”
“Of course, of course,” said Mother, glancing irritably at Father, “we are at the bottom, at the very bottom.”
“What are you talking about, Ewa?” responded Father. “My ancestors didn’t build this house, yours did.”
“That was all that was missing,” Mother unexpectedly erupted in elemental despair, “that was all that was missing—for me to have moved in with my parents-in-law, may the earth rest lightly upon them.”
“It was what it was.” I heard a sinister note in Father’s voice; this was rare for him. “It was what it was, but it was high up.”
“High, but at the same time low,” Mother hissed.
“That’s just it, my dears,” Mr. Trąba sought to mollify them. “High, but at the same time low. That’s just it. Let’s not forget about the relativistic character of reality. After all, in our lowland country we are relatively high up, but at the same time, in relation to the same local altitudes, we are low, which still gives us a chance of salvation . . .”
“What chance of salvation? What are you talking about?” Father asked in an unbearably official tone.
“Oh, the chance of salvation, Chief, that when the bell tolls, and the waters rise, we will gather the most necessary things, and we will clamber up Mare Mountain, or Goat Mountain, to say nothing of Buffalo Mountain.”
“You, Mr. Trąba,” Mother exploded, “you, Mr. Trąba, certainly will not make the ascent. Instead, you will float to Mare Mountain or Goat Mountain. Yes, you will float. In the best case scenario, straddling that unsinkable bench of yours, first you will rise lightly with the level of the water, and then you will reach your goal, rowing with your vodka bottle.”
Jerzy Pilch Page 4