In the beginning, the atmosphere of the farmhouse and its surroundings was so repugnant to me that had it not been for my desire to uncover the truth, I would have gladly left. With time, I became used to the environment; it even became indispensable to me: I became familiar with it. The place began to transform me to its tone, and I succumbed to a law I would call ‘psychic mimicry’ - I conformed to the background. I allowed myself to become brutalized.
This transformation found its clearest expression in the sympathy I started to feel for the elements of force and compulsion as I surveyed the character of the farmhouse and what was occurring around it. I became wicked and vicious. With villainous pleasure, I helped birds persecute their young, the trees torture shoots. Human intelligence was terribly blunted at that time and turned into a desire for mindless destruction.
Months passed in this manner, while my madness increased and assumed greater dissolute forms. Along with me, the entire environment accelerated in frenzy, as if expecting a resolution soon. Even I had to have sensed this, for I remember how I would, near the end, stare for hours at the chimerical fragment on the wall, anticipating in its completion an answer to the problem of the farmhouse. Finally, I knew only this: I had to unravel something and make something clear - but what was happening to me, I was unaware of.
Concurrent with these symptoms, my relationship with my children changed dramatically. I would not say that I stopped loving them - on the contrary; but my love transformed itself into something horrible, into a joy at maltreating the objects of my feelings. I began to beat my children.
Terrified, astonished at the severity of a once gentle father, they ran away from me, hiding in corners. I remember those pathetic, bright little eyes flooded with tears, a silent grievance deep inside. I was roused only once. It happened when my poor son groaned out in the midst of being beaten:
‘Daddy, why are you hitting me?’
I choked up with tears, but the next day resumed my beatings...
One day I woke up in a considerably more peaceful frame of mind and feeling reborn, as if after a long, feverish sleep. I clearly understood the situation: to remain longer in this secluded spot would be dangerous. That’s why I decided to leave the next day, giving up further research. This was the last impulse of the will.
That evening, on the eve of our departure, I was sitting with my children in the house; all of us were gazing wistfully at the setting sun that trailed over the wheat fields.
The sun was bloody and sad. Cold coppery streaks of autumn light, wrapped in the chill of evening, lay on the fields in plaintive agony.
In the orchard it suddenly grew quiet; soporific ash-trees murmured, crickets chirped. The world waited with bated breath. A pregnant moment...
I slowly turned my glance to the puzzle on the wall.
‘This has to be completed; yes, it has to be completed...’
I am swept away by affection. I am warm, and my eyes are full of tears.
‘Jerzy! Come here, child!’
He sits on my knees, trustful, grateful. He must have sensed the sincerity in my voice. My hands stroke my son’s bloody head... and slowly encircle his neck....
‘Daddy! Don’t squeeze so strongly! Da-a-ad - ’ He wheezes.
My second child, terrified, runs quickly to the door.
‘You won’t get me!’
I cast aside Jerzy’s dead body, catch up to my daughter and smash her head against a beam...
Blood mingles with the sun’s crimson light.
I stare at the bottom of the wall, where lies my son. He is pressed against the picture, completing it perfectly. His body does not go beyond its contours even one inch.
And I recognize the hands that no longer clasp emptiness, but strangle his neck. They are my own...
The clanging caravan of insane thoughts has ridden over the bones of the dead to vanish in the storm...
The problem of the farmhouse was solved.
On a Tangent
Wrzecki left his house at three in the afternoon.
He embarked on a long walk about the city so that while aimlessly wandering its streets and worming between its buildings, he could drown out the nightmarish thoughts that had been tormenting him for a month and cut the thread of syllogisms stubbornly stretching through his poor neurasthenic mind.
He was extremely high-strung and sensitive to the most minor details of his inner life. Half a year ago he had gone through a severe mental illness that left permanent traces on his ganglions, like the ebb tide leaves dragged-up algae on seashore shoals. The arrived strata, alien and parasitic, branched out within him and eventually merged with organic cells to develop new connections and relationships.
Once a little disorderly in his thinking, he now reasoned with unparalleled logic to the point of agony, forming entire series of the most improbable theories and would-be theories, and surrendering to their pseudo-obviousness.
Undoubtedly, a major contributing factor to this could be found in something similar in his childhood. At that time, the basis was of a religious-mystical nature. For instance, some insignificant activity not performed or some gesture not made threatened incurring God’s punishment, damnation and all sorts of misfortune. At times this type of self-torment drove him to boundless despair, for a child’s mind could find no way out of this torture chamber. As he developed intellectually, he bypassed madness. But after recovering from his unfortunate mental illness, he became considerably altered.
He began to devise with cold logic wild opinions and to formulate insane theorems, and was always watchful for any sign of confirmation. Even the faintest shadow of any sort of proof assumed in his unrestrained imagination features full of import, forcing him to succumb to conclusions fiercely logical.
He experienced strange joy whenever it appeared in him that a ‘theory’ of his found substantiation in reality.
One should mention a curious fact that to some extent vindicated him in certain cases: circumstances did occur that provided him with evidence. Life seemed to aid this eccentric individual in justifying his thinking. But here begins that blurry boundary between day and night, light and darkness - an uncertain, peaty area continually smoking with clouds of dizzying fumes.
Was Wrzecki insane? Was Wrzecki right? Perhaps he was both one and the other. An insolvable dilemma.
In life's glaziers, the sun kindles crimson flames
Their peaks suffocate with blood...
Veils of mist obscure the glaziers,
Night glimmers on the promontories...
What is real - the mist or the blood?
And mists are born of the sun...
For an hour Wrzecki had been cutting through cross-streets, wandering along the most crowded squares and sidewalks, standing in front of stores, and clinging with a glassy eye to garish colours and figures.
It was an autumn day, permeated with smoky dimness and drizzly humidity. Ghostly faces, enigmatic masks, and symbolical tight lips emerged from loose mists. He thought everyone was looking at him with a special, knowing expression and a dreamy, dull grimace behind which was hidden an awareness of a truth so well known to both parties that there was no point in even attempting to underline it.
The faces wearied him: he passed onto a secluded street.
It was filled to the brim with milky layers of fog. He walked carefully, so as not to bump into a lamppost. After a while, he felt a person’s hand on his shoulder:
‘Hi, Wladek!’
‘Oh, it’s you!... I didn’t recognize you - this damn fog!’ Wrzecki sincerely shook the hand presented to him. ‘Where are you off to?’
‘To the prosectorium.’
‘Oh! to the mortuary - an operation? Slicing up a dead person?*
‘Something of the sort.’
‘What are those sheets of paper in your pocket?’
‘Something quite interesting: Auto-intoxication in Snakes. A fascinating topic! Who knows - perhaps there are some good stories there?’
&nb
sp; ‘Hmm! Indeed. But you seem to be in a rush. Hope to see you soon!’
They bid each other farewell. Wrzecki was just about to turn right, when his medical friend caught up with him.
‘Look here. Take advantage of the opportunity before a mania once again strikes you to idle away weeks at home. Mon cher, I urge you to take a walk to the exhibition. Here’s the ticket Splendid works, on my honour! Several priceless sketches and landscapes and our old man in the company of his assistants - a savage depiction! All of us are captured like thieves caught in the act. What a dear fellow! Well, be seeing you!’
Slipping the ticket into Wrzecki’s hand, he quickly walked away.
Wrzecki turned mechanically in the direction of the exhibition. After a while, a question emerged:
‘Why was he so keen on my looking at paintings?
Yes, why...’
A moment later he reflected on his own curiosity regarding those papers peeping out of the young doctor’s overcoat.
‘But if I hadn’t I asked, I wouldn’t have learned the title of the essay. Why am I so concerned about this?’
As if in a dream, two men in lively conversation flashed by him. He overheard a snippet of dialogue:
‘For heaven’s sake, do you know what the madman used?’
‘Yes, they say it was an American single-barrelled gun! Apparently he took out a black - ‘
The rest of the conversation was drowned out by the racket of a passing wagon, then absorbed by the fog.
‘Why, it’s complete idiocy to be concerned with such a conclusion,’ he thought.
He felt very tired: a pounding headache was bothering him immensely. At a nearby square he sat down on a bench, took out a cigarette and lit it. The secluded place was surrounded by blooming autumnal rose bushes. Fine tea-rose petals, falling from peduncles, paused here and there on branches, or were scattered on the lawn in a disorderly arrangement. Drops of mist tearily meditated on twigs; a narrow, transparent trickle appeared, drank too much water, swelled, hesitated, and finally rolled down in a recognizable ball shape. Something stealthily crept into his consciousness, slipping in ever more clearly, more persistently - it became crystallized.
Let’s think this thing over. Didn’t you notice a connection between your meeting with Brzegota and that fragment of overheard conversation. Aha! We’re on the right track The auto-intoxication of snakes and the consequence of drawing out a black bullet. Excellent! Wonderful! These points betray a stylistic pattern; we can join them.
Wrzecki was now in an excellent mood: he smelled evidence for one of his ‘theories.’ A special fervour he possessed for mathematics exerted its influence here.
Inspired by the planetary system, he depicted graphically the progress of the lives of various individuals and events as lengthy ellipses, along which a given individual wandered in a mathematical manner.
These lines were complete unto themselves, with their own organization, conception, plan, their own exclusive construction.
Certain ellipses, like those depicting human relations, had to obviously cross each other, cutting through with the most varied of combinations and being affected according to the uniplane grouping. All had to describe their circles exclusively on one plane. The ellipses that were crooked, those depicting events and the life course of individuals, did not have points of intersection, for they were mutually connected to one another. But Wrzecki noticed in this intricate system that the curves could arrange themselves according to points of greatest momentum, so that one could draw’ a straight line through them. This straight line would be tangential to the ellipses and be connected at the extreme points extending beyond their sphere. Temporary positions, which in the next immediate moment would change because of the others and speed on in chosen directions within their own system, would nevertheless at that moment serve as points of an unswerving straight line! A line of completely chance occurrences, amusingly aimless compositions, absurdly strange coincidences.
Yet Wrzecki saw something more. He had learned to detect a certain stylistic pattern in the arrangement of points at their greatest deflection. He saw something more than accidental ranking. According to him, one could trace a special relationship that had as its aim some sort of indication, some sort of uncovering, a fulfilment of some fated role the exceptional line pointed toward.
So far, Wrzecki remained in the sphere of theory: he understood. He still had not come upon his tangent in reality, though he believed in the possibility of its existence. His life, like everyone’s, still whirled along a normal ellipse, patiently submitting to the centripetal forces of ordinary occurrences and not awakening any suspicion concerning the results of events, or psychological and mechanical consequences. He was ready at any moment, however, with slightest external push, to fall out of the track and rush with fatal speed along a stray groove. He sensed that a centrifugal force would prevail emphatically and propel him at that moment, like a smooth wheel in a conveyor bell, into giddy distances. He would be drawn there by the spell of the unique and the flattering verification of his theories and perhaps by... destiny. Wrzecki adored mysterious things...
Where this hypothetical road would lead, he did not know. That would depend on the directional points. At this moment he had the impression that the road was beginning to deviate; he arrived at this conclusion from the two preceding occurrences. A dark force was knocking him slowly from the prescribed orbit and pushing him straight ahead. Where to? He still had no idea.
The end of the tangent was lost in boundless expanses. But perhaps he was simply deceiving himself! Perhaps the curves were, after all, close to the straight liner. He decided to be patient and wait.
He got up from the bench and set off toward the fine-arts building. Along the way he completed his reasoning.
‘Let’s state the facts. Besides the concept of their connection, extraneous circumstances are now' appearing quite clearly. Running here is actually a double line in this link. Why did Brzegota urge me to see the exhibition? Apparently to steer me onto the street where I would meet those two strangers. If I had gone my own way, I wouldn’t have met them. That’s obvious! But I could have gotten to the gallery through Harmony Square! No! In that case I would have had to retrace my steps needlessly. No! I definitely had to turn in this direction. That’s clear: there was just one way to go. So Brzegota pushed me directly into the arms of those gentlemen. Period! A proven connection. So far, so good. But how’ in the devil does this all concern me? Where is this leading? Slowly, now, slowly! The affair will clarify itself.’
He quickened his step. Excitement and tense uncertainly seized him by thick reins. A hoarse voice interrupted the evolution of his further reasoning: a drunken workman was staggering along the sidewalk. Wrzecki wanted to pass him, but in a second saw the swollen face in front of him, and the nauseating stink of alcohol hit his nostrils. The man stared at him with bloodshot eyes and the mindless amazement of a drunkard. Suddenly his face took on the expression of hellish terror; he jerked backward and, half-roused, began to jabber:
‘Walek! Dear God! What are you doing here? Frightening people in the day? What a ghost!’
‘Stop this nonsense! Please get out of my sight or I’ll call a policeman! Well! Do you hear?’
At the sound of a human voice the drunk completely sobered up.
'Don’t be so angry, sir. There’s no cause for it. Really, sir, no cause for it. I’m just seeing things. Right before a Sunday a person gets a little sloshed. And you look so much like Walek, like two drops of water. Only you’re dressed like a gentleman, and, well, look a bit smoother. That boy walked around in rags his whole life. Upon my word! He looked so alone when they cut him clown from the rope. You see, sir - that rascal hung himself from hunger.’
Wrzecki became uneasy. He wanted to make a detour into a neighbouring passage, but the labourer, making his own way in that direction, started to plead with a drunkard’s stubbornness: 'If you would he so kind as not to go along with me this way. I feel
so strange, as if I had death on my back. It’s best if we part. Ah! the coast is clear...’ And he moved toward the narrow alley, a few steps away. To be rid of the intruder, Wrzecki yielded. The labourer plunged into an archway.
‘He’s sped off on his own ellipse,’ murmured Wrzecki automatically. ‘He’s going on his self-appointed way. For him this episode means nothing. He doesn’t suspect his role.’
He rubbed his forehead; it was drenched in a cold sweat. The instinct of self-preservation was awakened within him.
‘This affair is starting to really clarify itself, the signs are coming up a bit too effusively.’
The end of the obsessive line flashed in glaring brightness. But he attempted to extinguish the vision with the argument:
‘But this doesn’t concern me! What of it, if that drunken fool saw in me some hanged person? It absolutely doesn’t concern me; I’ve always a distaste for that type of death.’
Soon, however, he acknowledged the deficiency of his reasoning, and he drew the line to the third point. Nearly resigned, he slowly succumbed to the suggestions of the newly-revealed path. In the midst of this, it did not escape his vigilant notice that he would not he able to take in the exhibition, for, having submitted to the drunk’s stubbornness, he had diverged from his path. This merely strengthened his conviction that what had been important was not admiring a painting of an impressive group of young doctors, but being present for the two previous meetings; when these had materialized, he had been pushed in another direction.
Transparent scarves whirled about the pediments of tenement buildings and hung in the sky between roofs. Through their faint fabric the sun’s timid, dull gleams penetrated into the foggy streets.
‘Interesting? Just when the affair is beginning to take definite shape. Is this related?’
He got a nervous twitch along his eyelids. His legs felt strangely non-compliant, and thin, grey spots blinded his vision. With difficulty he dragged himself to the open veranda of some café and sank heavily onto a settee. He was given new papers and black coffee. He swilled down the cup and dug into the leading article in Figaro. Something interfered, though; he couldn’t read calmly. Several times he turned his head away and shifted uneasily in his seat, vainly trying to shake off the impression. He felt with his nerves someone’s eyes on him.
On the Hill of Roses Page 3