I was the caretaker for my neighbours’ properties while they devoted themselves to winter jobs and amusements in the city – I spent the winter here for them, protected their houses against the cold and damp, and minded their fragile possessions. In this way I relieved them of taking part in the Darkness.
Unfortunately, my Ailments were once again making their presence known. In fact they always intensified as a result of stress and other unusual occurrences. Sometimes all it took was a disturbed Night’s sleep for everything to start tormenting me. My hands would shake, and I’d feel as if a current were coursing through my limbs, as if an invisible electric net were wrapped around my body and someone were inflicting minor Punishments on me, at random. And then a sudden, painful cramp would seize my shoulder or my legs. Now I could feel my foot going entirely numb, stiffening and tingling. As I walked, I dragged it behind me, limping. And there was more: for months my eyes had never ceased to water; my tears would flow for no reason, out of the blue.
I decided that today, despite the pain, I’d go up the slope and survey the world from above. Everything was sure to be in its place. Maybe that would calm me down, loosen my throat, and I’d feel better. I wasn’t at all sorry about Big Foot. But as I was passing his cottage from afar, I thought of his dead hobgoblin’s body in the coffee-coloured suit, and then the bodies of all my acquaintances came to my mind, alive and happy in their homes. And I thought of myself too, of my foot, and of Oddball’s thin, wiry body; it all seemed shot through with appalling sorrow, quite unbearable. As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau I realised that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.
The scenery that opened before me was composed of shades of black and white, and of trees woven together in lines along the boundaries between the fields. In places where the grass had not been cut, the snow had failed to blanket the fields in a uniform plane of white. Blades of grass were poking through its cover; from a distance it looked as if a large hand had begun to sketch an abstract pattern, by practising some short strokes, fine and subtle. I could see the beautiful geometric shapes of fields, strips and rectangles, each with a different texture, each with its own shade, sloping at different angles towards the rapid winter Dusk. And our houses, all seven, were scattered here like a part of nature, as if they had sprung up with the field boundaries, and so had the stream and little bridge across it – it all seemed carefully designed and positioned, perhaps by the very same hand that had been sketching.
I too could have sketched a map from memory. On it our Plateau would have the shape of a fat crescent moon, enclosed on one side by the Silver Mountains – a fairly small, fairly low range that we share with the Czech Republic – and on the other, Polish side, by the White Hills. There is only one settlement on it – ours. The village and the town lie below, to the north-east, just like all the rest. The difference in levels between the Plateau and the rest of the Kłodzko Valley isn’t great, but it’s enough for one to feel slightly higher up here, looking at everything from above. The road climbs laboriously from below, and fairly gently from the north, but the descent from the Plateau on the eastern side ends quite steeply, which in winter can be dangerous. During harsh winters the Roads Authority, or whatever that agency is called, closes this road to traffic. And then we drive down it illegally, at our own risk. Assuming we have good cars, of course. In fact I’m talking about myself. Oddball only has a moped, and Big Foot had his own two feet. We call this steep stretch the Pass. There’s also a stony precipice nearby, but anyone who thinks it’s a natural feature would be mistaken, for it’s the remains of an old quarry, which used to take bites out of the Plateau and would surely have consumed the whole thing eventually in the avid mouths of its diggers. They say there are plans to start it up again, at which point we shall vanish from the face of the Earth, devoured by Machines.
Over the Pass, a dirt road that’s only drivable in summer leads to the village. To the west our road joins another, bigger one, but not yet the highway. On this road lies a village that I like to call Transylvania, because of its general atmosphere. There’s a church, a shop, some broken ski lifts and a youth club. The horizon is high, so eternal Dusk prevails there. That’s my impression of the place. At the very end of the village there’s a side road as well, leading to the Fox farm, but I prefer not to go in that direction.
Past Transylvania, just before the slip road onto the motorway, we have a sharp bend on which accidents often occur. Dizzy named it Ox Heart Corner, because he once saw a box of offal fall off a lorry coming from the slaughterhouse that belongs to a local bigwig, and cows’ hearts were spilled across the road; or so he claims. I find it rather a gruesome story, and I’m not convinced that he didn’t just imagine the whole thing. Dizzy tends to be oversensitive on some topics. The surfaced road connects the towns in the Valley. On a fine day, from our Plateau the road is visible, and so are Kudowa and Lewin threaded along it, and far off to the north you can even see Nowa Ruda, Kłodzko and Ząbkowice, which before the war was called Frankenstein.
Now that world is far away. I usually drove my Samurai to town across the Pass. Beyond it, one could turn left and drive up to the border, which meandered capriciously, making it easy to step across it without noticing. I have often crossed it inadvertently when out that way on my daily rounds. But I also liked to cross it on purpose, deliberately stepping to and fro. A dozen times, or several dozen times. I’d amuse myself like that for half an hour, playing the game of crossing the border. It gave me pleasure, because I could remember the time when it wasn’t possible. I love crossing borders.
The first house on my tour of inspection belonged to the Professor and his wife. It was my favourite – small and simple. A silent, solitary house with white walls. They were rarely here; instead it was their children who turned up with their friends, and the wind would carry their noisy voices. With its shutters open, illuminated and filled with loud music, the house seemed a little dazed and bewildered. One could say that those gaping window holes made it look rather empty-headed. It recovered as soon as they left. Its weak point was a steep roof. The snow would slide down it and lie against the northern wall until May, letting the damp seep inside. So I had to shift the snow, which is always a hard and thankless task. In spring my job was to take care of the small garden – plant some flowers and see to the ones already growing in the stony scrap of earth outside the house. This I did with pleasure. Occasionally, minor repairs were needed, so I would call the Professor and his wife in Wrocław, they’d transfer money to my account, and then I’d have to hire the labourers myself and keep an eye on the work.
This winter I’d noticed that a fairly large family of Bats had taken up residence in their cellar. One time I’d had to go in there because I thought I could hear water dripping down below. There’d be a problem if a pipe had cracked. And I saw them sleeping in a tight cluster, up against the stone ceiling; they hung there without moving, yet I couldn’t help feeling that they were watching me in their sleep, that the glare of the lightbulb was reflected in their open eyes. I whispered farewell to them until spring, and without finding any evidence of damage, I tiptoed back upstairs.
Meanwhile, there were Martens breeding in the Writer woman’s house. I didn’t give any of them names, as I could neither count them nor tell them apart. Their special Characteristic is being difficult to spot – they’re like ghosts. They appear and disappear at such speed that one can’t be sure one has really seen them. Martens are beautiful Animals. I could have them in my coat-of-arms, should the need arise. They seem to be light and innocent, but that is just an appearance. In fact they’re cunning and menacing Creatures. They wage their minor wars with Cats, Mice and Birds. They fight among themselves. At the Writer’s house they’d squeezed in between the roof tiles and the attic insulation, and I suspect they were wreaking havoc, destroying the mineral wool and gnawing holes in the wooden boards.<
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The Writer usually drove down in May, in a car packed to the roof with books and exotic foods. I would help her to unload it, because she had a bad back. She went about in an orthopaedic collar; it seems she had had an accident in the past. Or perhaps her spine was ruined by writing. She looked like a survivor from Pompeii – as if she were entirely coated in ash. Her face was ash-grey, including her lips, and her eyes were grey, and so was her long hair, which was tightly gathered into a small bun on the top of her head. If I hadn’t known her so well, I’m sure I would have read her books. But as I did know her, I was afraid to open them. What if I found myself described in them in a way that I couldn’t fathom? Or my favourite places, which for her are something completely different from what they are to me? In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.
She spent time here until the end of September. She didn’t come out of the house much; just now and then, when despite our wind the heat became sticky and unbearable, she would lay her ashen body on a deckchair and stay there in the Sun without moving, going even greyer. If only I could have seen her feet, perhaps it would have turned out that she was not a human Being either, but some other form of life. A water nymph of the logos, or a sylph. Sometimes her girlfriend came to see her, a strong, dark-haired woman who wore brightly coloured lipstick. She had a birthmark on her face, a little brown mole, which I believe to mean that at the hour of her Birth Venus was in the first house. Then they cooked together, as if they had suddenly remembered their atavistic family rituals. Several times last summer I ate with them: spicy soup with coconut milk, and potato pancakes with chanterelles. They cooked well – it was tasty. The girlfriend was very affectionate towards the Grey Lady and looked after her as if she were a child. She clearly knew what she was doing.
The smallest house, below a damp copse, had recently been bought by a noisy family from Wrocław. They had two obese, pampered children, teenagers, and a grocery store in the Krzyki district. The house was going to be rebuilt and transformed into a miniature Polish manor – one day they’d add columns and a porch, and at the back there’d be a swimming pool. So their father told me. But first it had all been enclosed by a precast concrete fence. They paid me handsomely, and asked me to look inside every day, to make sure no one had broken in. The house itself was old, in bad shape, and looked as if it wanted to be left in peace to carry on decomposing. This year, however, there was a revolution in store for it – heaps of sand had already been delivered and piled outside the gate. The wind was always blowing off its plastic cover, and replacing it cost me a major effort. They had a small spring on their land, and were planning to make fish ponds there, and to build a brick barbecue. Their family name was Weller. I spent a long time wondering if I should give them a name of my own, but then I realised that this was one of the two cases known to me where the official surname fitted the Person. They really were the people from the well – they’d fallen into it long ago and had now arranged their lives at the bottom of it, thinking the well was the entire world.
The final house, right by the road, was a rental home. It was usually hired by young couples with children, the type in search of nature for the weekend. Sometimes lovers rented it. Occasionally there were suspicious sorts too, who got drunk in the evening and spent the whole Night shouting drunkenly, then slept until noon. They all passed through our hamlet like shadows. Just for a weekend. Here today, gone tomorrow. The small, impersonally refurbished cottage belonged to the richest Person in the neighbourhood, who owned property in every valley and on every plain. The fellow was called Innerd – and that was the other instance where the name fitted its owner perfectly. Apparently he had bought the house because of the land it occupied. Apparently he bought the land to turn it into a quarry one day. Apparently the whole Plateau is fit to be a quarry. Apparently we’re living on a goldmine here, gold that’s known as granite.
I had to make quite an effort to take care of it all. And the little bridge too – I had to check it was in one piece, and that the water hadn’t washed away the brackets that were fixed onto it after the last flood. And that the water hadn’t made any holes. At the end of my tour, I would take a final look around, and I should have felt happy that everything was there. After all, it could just as well not have been. There could have been nothing but grass here – large clumps of wind-lashed steppe grass and the rosettes of thistles. That’s what it could have been like. Or there could have been nothing at all – a total void in outer space. Perhaps that would have been the best option for all concerned.
As I wandered across the fields and wilds on my rounds, I liked to imagine how it would all look millions of years from now. Would the same plants be here? And what about the colour of the sky? Would it be just the same? Would the tectonic plates have shifted and caused a range of high mountains to pile up here? Or would a sea arise, removing all reason to use the word ‘place’ amid the idle motion of the waves? One thing’s for sure – these houses won’t be here; my efforts are insignificant, they’d fit on a pinhead, just like my life as well. That should never be forgotten.
If I went beyond our bounds, the landscape changed. Here and there exclamation marks stuck out of the ground, sharp needles piercing the scenery. Whenever my gaze caught on them, my eyelids began to quiver; the eye cut itself on those wooden structures erected in the fields, on their boundaries, or at the edge of the forest. In total there were eight of them in the Plateau, I knew the exact figure, for I’d had dealings with them in the past, like Don Quixote with the windmills. They were knocked together out of wooden beams, set crosswise; they consisted entirely of crosses. These grotesque figures had four legs, and a cabin with embrasures on top. Pulpits, for hunting. This name has always amazed and angered me. For what on earth was taught from that sort of pulpit? What sort of gospel was preached? Isn’t it the height of arrogance, isn’t a diabolical idea to call a place from which one kills a pulpit?
I can still see them. I squint, as a way of blurring their shape and making them disappear. I only do it because I cannot bear their presence. But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger and does not take action merely spreads the infection. So says our Blake.
As I stood there, gazing at the pulpits, I could turn around at any moment to take gentle hold of the sharp, jagged line of the horizon as if it were a strand of hair. To look beyond it. Over there is the Czech Republic. The Sun flees over there, once it has seen enough of these atrocities. There my Damsel goes down for the Night. Oh yes, Venus goes to bed in the Czech Republic.
This is how I’d spend my evenings: I’d sit at the big kitchen table and devote myself to my favourite occupation. Here on the table sat the laptop Dizzy gave me, though I only ever used a single program. Here were my Ephemerides, some notepaper and a few books. The dry muesli that I nibble while working, and a small pot of black tea; I don’t drink any other kind.
In fact I could have done all the calculations by hand, and perhaps I’m a little sorry that I didn’t. But who still uses a slide rule nowadays?
Though if I ever had to calculate a Horoscope in the desert, with no computer, no electricity or Tools of any kind, I could do it. All I would need are my Ephemerides, and therefore if anyone were suddenly to ask me (though sadly no one ever will) which book I would take to a desert island, my answer would be: The Complete Ephemerides, 1920–2020.
I was curious to know if the date of a person’s death can be seen in their Horoscope. Death in a Horoscope. What does it look like? How does it manifest itself? Which planets play the role of the Fates? Down here, in the world of Urizen, the laws apply. From the starry sky down to moral conscience. These are strict laws, without mercy and without exception. As there is an order of Births, why should there not be an order o
f Deaths?
In all these years I have gathered 1042 dates of birth and 999 dates of death, and my minor research is still in progress. A project without funding from the European Union. A kitchen-table project.
I have always believed that Astrology should be learned through practice. It is solid knowledge, to a large extent empirical and just as scientific as psychology, let’s say. One must closely observe a few people from one’s own environment, and match moments in their life with the planetary system. One must also monitor and analyse the same Events in which various people participate. One will soon notice that similar astrological patterns describe similar incidents. That’s when one’s initiation occurs – oh yes, order does exist, and it is within reach. The stars and planets establish it, while the sky is the template that sets the pattern of our lives. Extensive study will make it possible to guess the arrangement of the planets in the sky from tiny details here on Earth. An afternoon storm, a letter that the postman has pressed into a crack in the door, a broken lightbulb in the bathroom. Nothing is capable of eluding this order. It works on me like alcohol, or one of those new drugs that, so I imagine, fill a person with pure delight.
One must keep one’s eyes and ears open, one must know how to match up the facts, see similarity where others see total difference, remember that certain events occur at various levels or, to put it another way, that many incidents are aspects of the same, single occurrence. And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate. That is how it works. Like a Japanese car.
Dizzy, who’s prone to effusive digressions on the topic of Blake’s bizarre symbolism, has never shared my passion for Astrology. That’s because he was born too late. His generation has Pluto in Libra, which somewhat weakens their vigilance. And they think they can balance hell. I don’t believe they’ll manage it. They may know how to design projects and write applications, but most of them have lost their vigilance.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Page 5