What happens now? he thought. What are they doing . . . and what am I supposed to do? Go on standing here like a martyr, waiting . . . for what? For something else to happen? Do you expect them to throw open the shutters, he asked himself, like the curtain in a theatre? And even if they did – would you really want to see it? To see ‘that most terrible of all things to be seen on this earth’?! He gave a scornful laugh. My God, what kitsch! he thought. Look at you: how low you’ve sunk! Much lower than the readers of soppy romances: you’ve become the hero of one! You reached the summits of knowledge, and now you’ve sunk right back down to the bottom. Come back to your senses! Run! Run away from here!
But he didn’t move. He continued to stand as if hypnotised, the opera glasses glued to his eyes, even though all he could see was a fragment of picture with a grey church spire.
Then he heard a familiar voice. There’s no art without kitsch, it said. Just as there’s no life without sin. What did Racine read under the school desk? And what do you think his love affairs with the stars of the stage, du Parc and Champmeslé, looked like?
That’s something no one knows, he said defiantly.
Ah, but they do, they do, the voice replied calmly. You just have to read a little. I’ll tell you what they looked like: they were pure kitsch. In the worst of taste.
That’s a risky argument, he said, unconvinced. With that kind of reasoning you could end up in hell.
You could, but not necessarily. It’s only a question of coming down to earth. And if you try to avoid that lest, God forbid, you dirty your nice clean little shoes, you’ll never get to heaven.
I know that tune. It’s Mickiewicz.
‘Too winged by far is your thought. It runs after a light breeze.’
Possibly, but who said that the earth was all dung, or at least kitsch?
You ought to know; you’re the Shakespeare scholar.
You can’t identify Antony with Shakespeare. It might have been meant ironically. Shakespeare could have made him say it to make him look ridiculous.
‘Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth; there’s no cure for that.’
He could think of nothing to reply. Instead, his thoughts, as if to counteract the lofty tone of this Platonic dialogue he was holding with himself, swerved and ran off in a different direction, like an unruly child.
Her boots! Those tight boots! Did she still have them on, or had she changed into something else? He could not determine this by recalling the champagne scene in the kitchen, still fresh in his mind. If she had taken them off, what had she changed into? A pair of old house shoes? Slippers? Pink fluffy mules? A pair of ordinary shoes? Pumps? Court shoes? Such a small detail, but so suggestive, so significant! And it would involve taking off the boots, the act of taking off the boots – a perfectly ordinary act, one would have thought, and yet so different from taking off a hat, or gloves, or a coat: more eloquent, more intimate, even, than taking off the jacket of a suit! Had she done it in front of François? In his presence? Or more discreetly, on the side somewhere, in the bathroom or the hall? But perhaps she hadn’t taken them off at all . . . which would mean –
Suddenly the room went dark. They had turned off the light.
Well, it’s all clear now, he said to himself. The show’s over. Have you any more questions?
Indeed I have. Several, in fact.
For instance?
Who turned off the light? And is this the first time? And how did they pass . . . from culture . . . to nature?
You want to know too much. The reply echoed Madame’s words to him in that lesson when, in trying to determine her age, he had overstepped the bounds. But it could not hold off the next swollen, tormented wave of questions that burst from him.
How is it possible, he thought, looking up at the stars, what is it that makes two grown-up people suddenly cast off all outward forms and agree to an act that degrades them? (If it didn’t degrade them, would they turn off the light?) How does it come about? How can it be explained; how can it be expressed in words?
Words are unnecessary, said the voice. You stop speaking . . . reading –
Reading?! he cried. He couldn’t understand himself.
Whatever that means in your life. And whatever the text. Like Paolo and Francesca, reading the book about Lancelot. Don’t you remember that scene from the second circle of Hell?
He remembered it very well. Constant had read it to him one day in the mountains. It had been raining, and they’d stayed in the shelter. He’d wondered then why Constant had picked that particular passage, why he had taken such pains to comment on various details. (It turned out later to have something to do with Claire.)
You have to betray the Word, then . . . He almost said it aloud.
Why betray? You have to make it Flesh.
But that is betraying it. It’s a betrayal!
That’s how the world begins. It can’t begin any other way.
Not in glory, but in disgrace.
In silence and in darkness.
Then he wept, and he wept for himself.
And when, after a long time, the dying-and-beginning was at last over, and a light appeared once more in the room, fainter this time, and from somewhere to the side (a bedside lamp, perhaps?), and soon another, in the stairwell, showing the lover running downstairs, he took hold of himself, straightened himself up and, like Heyst on the bridge of the ship, again raised the opera glasses to his eyes.
The director, his head bent and his coat unbuttoned, a cigarette in his mouth, was walking slowly and wearily towards the Peugeot.
Like Antek after a hard day’s work, he thought exhaustedly, in a forlorn attempt to cheer himself up.
I turned the key in the lock of the front door as quietly as I could, and once inside I didn’t turn on the hall light. With precise, careful movements, like a mime’s, I took off my coat and started off on tiptoe for my room. But just as I felt for and found the doorknob, a light came on in my mother’s room, and a moment later she appeared in the doorway.
‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t realise . . .’ I tried to sound contrite.
‘What? What didn’t you realise?’
‘That it would go on so late.’
‘That what would go on so late? What are you talking about?’
‘The discussion . . . and the cocktails. At the Skarb Cinema, on Traugutt Street. There was an invitation-only screening. You know, that Lelouch film . . .’
‘A discussion? After a film by Lelouch? And that’s why you needed the opera glasses, I suppose?’ She pointed to my hand, in which I was still holding the case.
‘Oh, those.’ Involuntarily I raised my hand. ‘No, no, they weren’t for that. A friend just gave them back to me.’
‘A friend just gave them back to you. A pair of opera glasses. At the screening of the Lelouch film.’ She enunciated the words slowly through her teeth. ‘And you expect me to believe that?’
‘It would be best,’ I said sadly and shut my door. Then I locked it.
The Dream
I couldn’t sleep. I lay there, bewildered by what I was feeling, my head whirling with a confusion of images and fantasies, like a badly edited film, my thoughts circling obsessively, out of control. Finally, around dawn, I fell into an exhausted sleep. But my dreams were neither sweet nor consoling – although they began pleasantly enough. Blissfully, in fact.
I’m in an aeroplane. Jagged peaks outside, snowy and glittering in bright sunlight, and here, beside me, Madame. We’re flying to Geneva. I’ve won first prize in the competition for the best essay about romantic journeys; they’ve invited both of us, me and my teacher, to the prize-giving ceremony. I’m ecstatic, bursting with happiness and pride. I’ve won! I’m going to the West! And not just anywhere in the West: to Switzerland, the land of the legendary Alps! With her! And not just as her pupil: as her liberator! Her Heyst! I’m the one who has finally freed her from the Bolshevik yoke of
slavery. I can feel the warmth of her admiration and gratitude. And I can sense the direction of her thoughts:
Language, literature, her eyes seem to be saying, he knows all that. He’s a talented boy; he doesn’t need my help there. But life – passion, feeling, pleasure, the world of the senses . . . She smiles pityingly. He knows nothing of that. There’s something I could help him with. I could teach him about love, bring him down to earth. Become for him a goddess more powerful than a mother! Make him be born anew, make him reborn! Be his first victory!
Cut to another scene:
We’re going up Mont Blanc, or perhaps up the St Gotthard Pass, where the sources of the Rhine are. We reach the summit. I can see the Vallot refuge, which I recognise from the photograph. She is walking in front of me. Suddenly she stops to gaze at something in the distance. Then she turns, points upwards and says, ‘Look . . . There! Can you see? That,’ she says with a strange smile, ‘is where I was supposed to be born. But it didn’t work out that way. My father’s dream didn’t come true. So let his wish be fulfilled now, in a different way: let his grandchild, my first-born son, be conceived there. You will beget him. Tonight. I shall name him Arthur. He will be beautiful like me, and sad like the sadness of your soul. And he will write like . . . Simone de Beauvoir. Come to me!’ she says in a voice that brooks no denial and stretches out her hand like Michelangelo’s God to Adam.
Hand in hand we climb, higher and higher.
The sun sets blood-red, and with it ends my last day of innocence.
But what’s this? Where are we now? These aren’t the Alps – these are the Tatra mountains! I know those crests. I can see red-and-white poles and a sign that says: ‘Warning! National Frontier.’
‘Just a moment, citizen!’ booms a stentorian male voice, and the stocky, moustachioed sergeant looms up before me. ‘Your documents, please.’
I search nervously through my anorak pockets and hand him my monthly bus pass.
‘I’m not a ticket inspector,’ he growls at me. At this moment two men in plastic raincoats with little round tin badges pinned under their lapels appear beside him. One of them takes the ticket.
‘You want to cross the border with a monthly pass?’ he sneers in disbelief.
‘Sneak across the border,’ puts in the other one, with emphasis.
‘ID or passport, please!’ demands the sergeant menacingly.
I look through my pockets again and, not finding these documents, hand him my trusty chess club ID.
‘What’s this?’ he asks.
‘It’s my chess club card. Marymont Workers’ Club. I’m supposed to play in a tournament in Slovakia. I’m a junior champion.’
‘First of all, he’s not any kind of champion,’ Kugler’s voice floats up from somewhere. ‘Maybe a vice-champion at most. And secondly, even that’s a title he won by sheer luck.’ Then Roach appears from a cave in the rock face, with a contingent of ‘rabble’, strangely dressed, in grimy black trousers and red shirts. Are they Spanish fighters? Splendid Dabrowski-ites? No! They’re the men of marble, dressed as brigands: the miners, steelworkers and peasants from the statues in front of the Palace of Culture and the Young People’s Housing District, with hard, brutal faces and enormous paws.
In his right hand Roach is clutching a huge hammer, like one of the miners’ pickaxes; in his left he wields a huge hook.
‘So, comrade, you say you’re going to a tournament in Slovakia,’ he says with mock gravity. ‘And that’s what you need these field binoculars for, I suppose?’ He gestures at my torso, where, sure enough, a pair of field glasses dangles from a cord around my neck. ‘And you expect someone to believe that?’ He grins contemptuously. ‘Your mummy, perhaps. But not me. You can’t lie your way out of it this time.’
‘¡No pasarán! No more!’ shouts the band of activists.
‘There you are,’ says Roach, pointing with his hook to the rabble, ‘the voice of the people. It demands your unmasking, comrade.’
‘Expose him! Punish him!’ cries the rabble chorus.
‘I have no choice. The people have spoken,’ says Roach, spreading his hands in insincere apology, and launches into an accusatory tirade in the style of Vyshynsky (Andrei, that is, the prosecutor): ‘You wish to know, honoured comrades, who this chess master, this virtuoso and mountaineer, this multitalented stage artist and lover of truth who walks the path of virtue really is? I’ll tell you. Let the facts speak for themselves. Let us start from his childhood.
‘When the working people and the youth of our villages and towns were trying to encourage mass tourism, organising trips and hikes along Lenin’s trail, he preferred to go his own way, privately, with a certain Mr Constant of bourgeois stock (he wore breeches!) as his guide, lolling around in a double in a hostel near Morskie Oko.
‘When the pioneers of the Service for Poland work brigades were sweating to strengthen their muscles by rebuilding cities and working in the fields, he preferred to take music lessons, privately, from a certain “piano lady” of landed gentry (she wore a velvet ribbon!), not wishing to sully his lily-white hands.
‘When the juniors in the chess club, to which I also belonged, were studying the games of Botvinnik and Tal, he preferred to go his own way and, besotted with an instructor from the intelligentsia (he went around with a flask of vodka in his pocket!), studied Reti and Capablanca.
‘Let us continue, as Comrade Stalin says (and writes!):
‘What kind of thing does this noble spirit learn at home? Marxism, biology, the history of the All-Russian (Bolshevik) Communist Party, perhaps? Does he at least study the language of our Great Brother? Or Soviet literature? Oh no, my friends. That would be a miracle, and we, comrades, don’t believe in miracles. He spends his time studying French! That symbol of intellectual bourgeois culture, of aristocracy and landed gentry, that relic of a past rotting on the rubbish-heap of history! And the rest of the time he listens to Radio Free Europe! Breathing the miasma of the West!
‘The fruit is according to the seed; as is the soil, so is the harvest, comrades! An individual brought up in this way cannot but turn out rotten and warped. He sows anarchy wherever he goes. He conspires, he foments plots, he stirs up rebellion.
‘You want evidence? There’s plenty of it. Let us take three examples.
‘How does this artist begin his career in his collective? To what use does he put those lily-white hands of his, those delicate, coddled little fingers with which he has learnt to tickle the ivories? Perhaps he helps out the singing teacher? Or the choral society? Does he support and encourage the Exotic Trio in their noble attempt to compete for the Golden Nightingale? No, my friends – not he! He prefers jazz. He wants his own jazz band. The model he worships is Tyrmand, renegade and slanderer who fled to the West.
‘Isn’t that how it was? First witness! Comrade Eunuch!’
‘If not worse,’ confirms the Eunuch’s voice.
‘Hardly had we ripped off the ugly head of that foul Hydra,’ continues Roach, ‘than another sprang up in its place. He takes over the dramatic society. And what kind of play does he put on? And by whom? Soviet playwrights, or at least Russian ones? Or at worst by his own native Polish ones? Oh no, my friends – not at all! He wants only Western plays. Shakespeare! Aeschylus! That vindictive barbarian Goethe! His activities are cut short at once and their resumption is strictly forbidden.
‘Second witness! Comrade Tapeworm! Isn’t that how it was?’
‘It was far, far worse,’ replies the Tapeworm’s voice.
‘There you are! But this subversive element makes light of the decree forbidding his hostile activities. He goes on with them, pulls the wool over the jury’s eyes and hoodwinks them into awarding him the first prize. He is presented with a watch, manufactured in the GDR, our ally and friend in the Soviet bloc. And what does he do with this precious gift, when he decides that it’s of no use to him? Does he give it to the poor? Does he exchange it for something else? Does he at least pawn it? Oh no, my friends! He does
none of these things. He savagely, barbarically destroys it, giving vent to his deep contempt for the light industry of a socialist country and endangering our neighbourly relations with it.
‘And here is the third of our examples.
‘In spite of his unconcealed hostility towards our political system and his acts of what can only be called terrorism, we, in our magnanimity and our belief in man’s goodness, still refuse to cast him off. We give him another chance; we hold out a hand to him. We ask him to participate in the celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. Let him be of some use for once. Let him play us some of those revolutionary songs so dear to us. And how does he respond to this generous gesture, this honour we have deigned, in our munificence, to bestow upon him? First he makes fun of it; he mocks and he jeers. Then, greedy for more selfish gratification, he cynically bamboozles the school into giving him a note excusing him from lessons. And finally he hatches his plot and performs an act of sabotage!
‘Naturally, we checked out his proposed programme – as we said we would. And what did we discover? That this Rodrigo of his was a fanatical reactionary and a loyal follower of Franco! It was a blatant attempt to subvert the masses! What did they shout, those primitive, backward, ignorant peasants, when he had deliberately inflamed them by his treacherous musical interludes? Revolutionary slogans? “Arriba parias”? “Down with Franco”? I call the next witnesses! Fighting comrades, how do you testify?’
‘They shouted, “More flamenco!”’ the band of socialist brigands replies in chorus.
‘Honoured comrades!’ Kugler continues indefatigably. ‘The time has now come to pose the fundamental question: was he acting alone? Or was it a conspiracy?’
‘A conspiracy! The coward wouldn’t have done it alone!’
‘Yes! You’re quite right, comrades! And do you know who he plotted with? Who his co-conspirator was? You won’t believe your ears when I tell you. It was she! She who stands before you now: the beautiful headmistress! Oh, his betrayal is rank, it stinks to heaven!
Madame Page 38