Unfortunately, the mistake was made at the very start, as were other errors too.
Luckily my sleep cycle was changing again; I’d nod off at dawn and wake in the afternoon, which may have been a natural defence against the daylight, against the day in general and everything that belonged to it. I’d wake up – or maybe it was all in a dream – and I’d hear my Little Girls’ footsteps pattering on the stairs, as if everything that had happened lately were just a tiresome hallucination prompted by fever. And those were beautiful moments.
In my somnolent state I also thought about the Czech Republic. The border would appear in my mind, and that gentle, beautiful country beyond it. Over there, everything is lit up by the Sun, gilded with light. The fields breathe evenly at the foot of the Table Mountains, surely created purely for the purpose of looking pretty. The roads are straight, the streams are clear, Mouflons and Fallow Deer graze in pens by the houses, Leverets frolic in the corn, and little bells are tied to the combines as a gentle way of scaring them off to a safe distance. The people aren’t in a hurry, and don’t compete against each other all the time. They don’t go chasing after pipe dreams. They’re happy with who they are and what they have.
The other day Dizzy told me that in a small bookshop in the Czech town of Náchod he found a nice edition of Blake, so let us now imagine that these good people, who live on the other side of the border, and who speak to each other in a soft, childlike language, come home from work in the evenings, light a fire in the hearth and read Blake to one another. And perhaps, if he were still alive, seeing all this, Blake would say that there are some places in the Universe where the Fall has not occurred, the world has not turned upside down and Eden still exists. Here Mankind is not governed by the rules of reason, stupid and strict, but by the heart and intuition. The people do not indulge in idle chatter, parading what they know, but create remarkable things by applying their imagination. The state ceases to impose the shackles of daily oppression, but helps people to realise their hopes and dreams. And Man is not just a cog in the system, not just playing a role, but a free Creature. That’s what was passing through my mind, making my bed rest almost a pleasure.
Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.
The first day I felt better I put on some clothes and, hounded by a sense of duty, went on my usual round. I was as weak as a potato sprout grown in darkness in the cellar.
It turned out that the melting snow had torn off a gutter at the Writer’s house, and now water was pouring straight down the wooden wall. Dry rot guaranteed. I called her, but of course she wasn’t at home, maybe she was out of the country. Which meant that I would have to deal with the gutter myself.
It’s a complete mystery that every challenge triggers vital forces within us. I really did feel better – only my left leg was still racked with pain, like an electric current, so I was walking on it stiffly, as if it were a prosthesis. But once I had to move the ladder, I stopped worrying about my Ailments. I forgot about the pain.
I stood on that ladder for about an hour with my arms raised, unsuccessfully struggling to replace the gutter in its semi-circular supports. On top of that, one of them had broken off and must be lying somewhere in the deep snow piled against the house. I could have waited for Dizzy, who was coming by that evening with a new quatrain and the shopping, but Dizzy is fragile, he has small, girlish hands, and to put it plainly, he’s a bit scatter-brained. I say this with all due love and respect for him. It’s not an imperfection on his part. There are more than enough traits and Characteristics in this world for each of us to be richly endowed, I thought to myself.
And from the ladder I viewed the changes that the thaw had brought to the Plateau. Here and there, especially on the southern and eastern slopes, dark patches had appeared – there the winter was withdrawing its army, but it was still holding out on the field boundaries and below the forest. The entire Pass was white. Why is ploughed land warmer than grassland? Why does the snow melt faster in the forest? Why do rings appear in the snow around tree trunks? Are trees warm?
I put these questions to Oddball, whom I had gone to ask for help with the Writer’s gutter. He gave me a baffled look but didn’t answer. As I was waiting for him, I examined his diploma for taking part in the mushroom-picking contest organised each year by the Penny Buns Mushroom Pickers’ Society.
‘I didn’t know you were so good at picking mushrooms,’ I said.
He smiled gloomily without speaking, in his usual way.
He led me into his workshop, which was like a surgery – there were all sorts of drawers and little shelves, with a Tool on each one, a special Tool designed to perform one particular task. He spent ages rummaging in a box until finally he extracted a piece of flattened aluminium wire, twisted into a ring that wasn’t quite closed.
‘Hose clamp,’ he said.
Slowly, word by word, as if battling progressive paralysis of the tongue, he confessed that he hadn’t talked to anyone for several weeks, and evidently his capacity to articulate speech had waned. Finally, hawking as he spoke, he also told me that Big Foot had died choking on a bone. Apparently the autopsy had proved it was an unfortunate accident. He knew this from his son.
I burst into laughter. ‘I thought the Police were capable of more astute discoveries than that. The fact that he’d choked was obvious at first glance…’
‘Nothing’s obvious at first glance,’ he snapped with uncharacteristic vigour, causing the remark to stick in my mind.
‘You know what I think about it, don’t you?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You remember the Deer that were standing outside his house when we got there? They murdered him.’
He stared in silence at the hose clamp in his hand. ‘How?’
‘How, how. I don’t know exactly. Maybe they just gave him a fright while he was so barbarously eating their sister.’
‘Are you trying to say it was collusion? The deer conspired against him?’
For a while I didn’t answer. He seems to need plenty of time to gather his thoughts, and then absorb them. He should eat more salt. As I have said, salt is good for quick thinking. He was also slow putting on his snow boots and sheepskin coat.
As we were walking across the wet snow, I said: ‘And what about the Commandant in the well?’
‘What’s your question? Do you want to know what the cause of his death was? I don’t know. He didn’t say.’
He meant Black Coat, of course.
‘No, no, I know what the cause of his death was.’
‘What was it?’ he asked, as if he couldn’t care less.
So I didn’t answer immediately, but waited until we were crossing the little bridge to the Writer’s house.
‘The same.’
‘You mean he choked on a bone?’
‘Don’t mock. I mean the Deer killed him.’
‘Hold the ladder,’ he said in reply.
He climbed the rungs and tinkered with the gutter, while I expounded my Theory. I had a witness – Dizzy. Dizzy and I knew the most, for we had been first on the scene of the incident and we had seen things the Police couldn’t see later on. When the Police arrived it was dark and wet. The snow was melting before our eyes, erasing the most vital thing of all – those strange prints around the well, lots of them, hundreds, maybe more – small and round, as if a herd of Deer had surrounded a Person.
Oddball listened but didn’t answer, this time because he was holding screws in his mouth. So I carried on, saying that maybe at first the Commandant had been driving along, and then for some reason he had stopped. Maybe a Deer, one of the killers, had feigned illness, pretended to be sick, and he’d been pleased to find some wild game. Then, when he got out of the car, they’d surrounded him and started pushing him towards the well…
‘His head was covered in blood,’ said Oddball from above, once he had driven in the final screw.
‘Yes, because he hit it falling into the well.’
&nbs
p; ‘There,’ he said after a long silence, and began to descend the ladder.
Indeed, the gutter was firmly fixed on the aluminium hose clamp. The old one was sure to be found a month from now when the snow had melted.
‘Try to keep your theory to yourself. It’s highly improbable and it could do you harm,’ said Oddball, and headed straight for home without looking at me.
It occurred to me that, like everyone else, he took me for a madwoman, and it hurt my feelings.
Tough. As it says in Blake: ‘Opposition is true friendship.’
I was summonsed for another interrogation by a registered letter the Postman brought. As he’d had to scramble up to the Plateau all the way from town, he was annoyed with me and did not fail to show it.
‘People shouldn’t be allowed to live so far away,’ he said at the front door. ‘What do you gain by hiding away from the world like this? It’ll catch up with you anyway.’ There was spiteful satisfaction in his voice. ‘Sign here, please – a letter from the Prosecution Service.’
Oh dear, he hadn’t been among my Little Girls’ best friends. They’d always made it very plain to him that they didn’t like him.
‘Well, what’s it like living in an ivory tower, above the heads of lesser mortals, with your nose in the stars?’ he asked.
That’s what I dislike most of all in people – cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others. Cold irony is Urizen’s basic weapon. The armaments of impotence. At the same time the ironists always have a world outlook that they proclaim triumphantly, though if one starts badgering and questioning them about the details, it turns out to consist of nothing but trivia and banalities. I would never venture to call someone a stupid Person, and I wasn’t going to condemn the Postman out of hand. I told him to sit down and I made him coffee, the sort Postmen like – strong, unfiltered, in a glass. I also offered him some gingerbread that I baked before Christmas; I was hoping it hadn’t gone stale and he wouldn’t break his teeth on it.
He took off his jacket and sat at the table.
‘I’ve delivered a lot of these invitations lately – it must be to do with the Commandant’s death,’ he said.
I was curious to know whom else the Prosecution had summonsed, but I didn’t let it show. The Postman waited for my question, which never came. He fidgeted on his chair and slurped his coffee. But I knew how to manage silence.
‘For instance, I’ve delivered these invitations to all his pals,’ he said at last.
‘Oh yes,’ I said indifferently.
‘They’re all birds of a feather,’ he began slowly, hesitantly, but it was obvious that he was getting into his stride and would find it hard to stop. ‘They’ve grabbed power. Where did they get those fancy cars and houses? Someone like Innerd, for instance? Can you believe he made a fortune out of the slaughterhouse?’ He meaningfully tugged on his lower eyelid, revealing his mucous membrane. ‘Or the fox farm? All that’s just a cover, Mrs Duszejko.’
For a while we were silent.
‘Apparently they were part of the same clique. Someone must have helped him into that well, I know that much,’ added the Postman with great satisfaction.
His need to speak ill of his neighbours was so great that there was no need to draw him out.
‘Everyone knows they played poker for high stakes. And as for that new restaurant of his, Casablanca, it’s a brothel for the white slave trade.’
I thought he was exaggerating.
‘Apparently they were smuggling luxury cars from abroad. Stolen ones. Someone told me – I won’t say who – that he saw a beautiful BMW driving along the dirt roads at daybreak. What on earth was it doing there?’ he asked rhetorically, surely expecting me to faint in amazement after all these revelations.
Much of what he was saying was certainly pure fiction.
‘They took enormous bribes. Where did they get cars like the Commandant’s, for instance? On a police salary? You’ll say power goes to the head in a nasty way, and you’ll be right. A man loses all sense of decency. They’ve sold off Poland for a song. I knew the Commandant for years. He used to be an ordinary militiaman – he joined the force to avoid going to the glassworks, like the rest. I used to play football with him twenty years ago. But these days he didn’t even recognise me. How much our roads diverge in life… I’m a common postman, while he’s a big police chief. I drive a Fiat Cinquecento, he drives a Jeep Cherokee.’
‘Toyota,’ I said. ‘A Toyota Land Cruiser.’
The Postman sighed heavily, and suddenly I felt sorry for him, for once upon a time he must have been one of the innocent too, but now his heart was flooded with bile. His life must be hard indeed. And it must have been all the bitterness that was making him so angry.
‘God made Man Happy and Rich, but cunning made the innocent poor,’ I quoted Blake, more or less. Anyway, that’s what I think.
Except that I place the word ‘God’ in inverted commas.
When Dizzy arrived that afternoon, he’d caught a cold. We were now working on The Mental Traveller, and right at the start a dispute arose over whether we should translate the English word ‘mental’ as mentalny – ‘mental’ in the literal sense, meaning ‘of the mind’ – or duchowy – more like ‘spiritual’. Sneezing, Dizzy read out the original text:
I travel’d through a Land of Men,
A land of Men & Women too,
And heard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth wanderers never knew.
First, we each wrote out our own translation, in the trochaic meter more natural to Polish verse, then we compared them, and started to wind our ideas together. It was a bit like a game of logic, a complicated form of Scrabble.
Over Human Lands I wandered,
Lands of Men and also Women,
Seeing, hearing Things so fearful,
Such as no mind ever summoned.
Or:
Through the World of Man I journeyed,
Realms of Men as well as Women,
Hearing, seeing sights so awful,
No pure soul would ever dream on.
Or:
Throughout the World of Men I wandered,
Crossing Realms of Men and Women,
What I saw and heard was ghastly,
Such as None would ever dream on.
‘Why have we insisted on putting the word ‘women’ at the end?’ I asked. ‘What if we made it: “Men’s and Women’s Land”? Then the rhyme would be with “land”. “Hand” or “stand”, for instance.’
Dizzy said nothing, chewed his fingers and at last triumphantly suggested:
As I wandered human countries,
Men’s and women’s shared domain,
Dreadful things did I encounter,
Horrors none on Earth had seen.
I didn’t like the word ‘domain’, but now we were up and running, and by ten o’clock the whole poem was done. Then we ate parsnips roasted in olive oil. And rice with apples and cinnamon.
After this splendid supper, instead of probing the subtleties of the poem, somehow we found ourselves returning to the case of the Commandant. Dizzy was very well informed about what the Police knew. After all, he had access to the entire police network. Of course he didn’t know everything. The enquiry into the Commandant’s death was being conducted by a higher authority. Besides, Dizzy was sworn to strict professional confidentiality, but not with regard to me. What could I possibly do with a secret, even of the highest importance? I don’t even know how to gossip. So he usually confided in me a lot.
For example, they knew by now that the Commandant had died of a blow to the head, probably when he fell with force into the half-collapsed well. They had also discovered that he was under the influence of alcohol, which should have cushioned his fall, because people are more supple when they’re drunk. At the same tim
e, the blow to the head looked too mighty for an ordinary fall into a well. He would have to have fallen from a height of several metres. Yet no other possible explanation had been found. The blow was to his temple. There was no potential murder weapon. And no clues. Some bits of rubbish had been collected – sweet wrappers, carrier bags, old cans and a used condom. The weather had been awful, and the special team had arrived late. There was a strong wind, it was raining, and the thaw was advancing at lightning speed. We both remembered that Night very well. Photographs had been taken of the strange marks on the ground – deer hoof prints, as I continued to maintain. But the Police weren’t sure if those tracks had been there at all, and if they were, whether they had any connection with the death. In those conditions it had been impossible to confirm. And the human footprints weren’t distinct either.
But there had also been a revelation, which was that the Commandant had twenty thousand zlotys on him, in a grey envelope tucked under his trouser belt. The money was evenly divided into two wads secured with elastic bands. This had puzzled the investigators the most. Why hadn’t the murderer taken it? Didn’t he know about it? And what if it was the killer who gave him the money? And what for? If it’s not clear what a crime is about, it’s sure to be about money. So they say, but I think that’s a gross simplification.
There was also a version involving an unfortunate accident, which seemed rather far-fetched. The idea was that, in a drunken state, he had been looking for a place to hide the cash, but had fallen into the well and been killed.
Dizzy was adamant that it must have been Murder. ‘Every instinct is telling me. We were the first on the scene. Do you remember the sense of crime that was hanging in the air?’
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Page 8