by Jerzy Pilch
I was overflowing with repeated waves of pride. Not only had I had enough courage and skill to break into a dresser that was, perhaps, inhabited by evil spirits. Not only did the discovery extracted from there slightly trump Janek’s discovery. Not only did it give the gift of bringing everything near. Not only did it bestow the overwhelming power that all the peeping toms of the world savor. It was also the key to a fundamental secret. It allowed us to solve the greatest mystery of that summer! Janek could just go ahead and keep that optical ruin of his on the top of the dresser, he could venerate it, worship it like the golden calf. But just let him attempt to climb up the diving platform at the swimming pool, and just let him attempt to see from there into the depths of the yellow light under the roof of the Almira. Lord God! What preeminence You have finally given me supremacy over my always prevailing friend! Of what pride have You given me to drink! You have even permitted me to see humility—let’s say: a certain humility—in his eyes and in his motions. For it was with humility, with the humility of the subordinate that Janek Nikandy climbed up the diving tower at the swimming pool that evening.
Granted, it was he who, one fine day, drew an ideal line in the air, connecting the top of the tower to the window in question; granted, it was he who forced me to climb that Mount Everest and pointed out the distant rectangle, entirely dark in the blinding sun; granted, it was under his leadership that we sneaked over to the swimming pool one evening and, trembling in the darkness, which was lit up by the leaden surface of the water, climbed up to the highest platform of our observatory and stared at the yellow light as if at a distant, motionless star; granted, it was he who said at that time: If only we had a telescope, or at least the pair of binoculars; granted, it was he who, about a week later, dug up from the bottom of the river his treasure of treasures; granted, granted, granted! All of it granted! But now, at the decisive moment, now, at the threshold of the night that was to settle everything; now—under my leadership—we climbed the tower! Now I had slung over my shoulder a set of Carl Zeiss lenses of the highest, prewar quality, which would allow us to see into—and this was no time for modesty—the fundamental mystery of existence.
I was the leader, and I knew that I was the leader, and I knew what sort of leader I wanted to be. Magnanimity—as befitted the greatest leaders of humanity—never left my heart. When we found ourselves at the top, when the delicate, dark blue breeze embraced our heads. And when we had turned our faces toward the yellow light, I took Gustaw Branny’s hunting binoculars off my shoulder, and I passed them to Janek. He, in turn, took them without a word, lifted them to his eyes, and looked for a long time. A long time. A very long time. For an inordinately long time, he scrutinized the unfathomable lighthouse pulsating with yellow splendor. For a long time, he sought out the mysterious lighthouse keeper in brocade dresses who was living there. For a long time. A very long time. For a long time, he stared at the peak of Olympus covered with a yellow cloud, and for a long time, he waited for the figure of the goddess to emerge from the clouds of glory. For a long time. A very long time. An exceptionally long time.
“What, for fuck’s sake? What do you see?” My nerves got the better of me, and I lost the dignity of the leader.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Well, fucking nothing.”
“What nothing?
“Nothing.”
“You have to see something. Do you see her?”
“I do.”
“So why are you bullshitting me that you’re not seeing anything?”
“I’m not bullshitting. I’m not seeing anything.”
“What do you mean you’re not seeing anything, when you are?”
“I’m not seeing anything.”
“Do you see her?
“I do.”
“So what is she doing?
“Nothing, fuck it, she isn’t doing anything. She’s sitting at a table and writing.”
I couldn’t stand any more tension; my nerves were completely shot. I fell out of not only the role of leader, but out of all roles and all functions. And with some incomprehensible sorrow in my heart; with some sort of desperate grievance toward the world, that it doesn’t have any mysteries; or perhaps with the terrible suspicion that my friend was lying, that he was deceiving me and didn’t want to tell about the unprecedented things that he was seeing—with a sudden and violent motion, I reached for the binoculars. Too suddenly and too violently, a thousand times too suddenly and a thousand times too violently, because not only did I not manage to grasp them, lift them to my eyes; not only did I not manage to catch sight, dumbfounded, of the bizarrely dressed female vacationer sitting at the desk and writing; but I didn’t manage to do anything. I didn’t manage to do anything, because, suddenly, everything was over. Suddenly everything—speaking both metaphorically and literally—came crashing down. With a precise and strong blow—which, if I had really wanted to inflict it, I would never have been able to do with such precision and strength—with an unprecedented, and unintentional, simple boxer’s punch, or perhaps a volleyball player’s spike, I dislodged the binoculars from Janek Nikandy’s hands, and they, like a flighty, nocturnal creature slipping through our fingers, flew to the ground. Unfortunately, this was not the desperate leap of the escapee attempting to regain his freedom, it was not the liberating leap into the water: it was a suicidal leap onto the cement.
I wasn’t certain whether I was hearing the crack of the bursting casing, the crunching of the lenses as they were ground to dust, or Janek’s diabolical snicker. Sometimes, in the famous least appropriate moments, a strange laughter came over him. Once, with precisely that same sort of snicker, he told us that one of his sisters, fourteen-year-old Regina, was pregnant, and that his father would probably kill her; or that May First was no holiday at all, but an invention of the Communists; or that his mother, Mrs. Nikandy, beautiful as a Grecian goddess, goes to the WC at night completely naked—in none of these stories was there anything comic. Nor was there even a hint of consolation over the smashed binoculars lying below the diving platform. I was too innocent and too young for the phrase—“it’s so terrible that it’s funny”; Janek, too—except that he laughed. He didn’t know that it was so tragic that it was funny; but he had already been blessed by the household deity of the Nikandys with the gift of laughter that surpasses consciousness. And tragicomic events now followed with unprecedented speed, and one after another. First, in the glowing yellow window of the Almira there appeared—fear had sharpened our senses, for we could see it even without the binoculars—a dreadfully tall and thin silhouette, and right away thereafter, as if it had God knows what sort of volatility, it began, like a skier schussing in the darkness, to fly in our direction. Before we managed to climb down, on entirely wobbly legs, she was already there, shining a flashlight thin as a pencil, and gathering the glassy gravel, to which the binoculars had been reduced, into a plastic bag.
At first, we thought it wasn’t her, that it was one of the female sprinters, who were at their training camp Start. For the bizarrely dressed female vacationer was not dressed bizarrely at all this time. She wasn’t wearing any brocade dresses with incredible patterns, but a dark green sweatsuit, which made her look a hundred years younger. On her head—no curls, buns, or bouffants, instead her hair was drawn into a pony tail. From time to time, a lively beam of the flashlight illuminated her face, and then it became clear what beautiful, what expressive, and what—I have no better word for it—quick features she was hiding on a daily basis under vulgar make-up.
My God, how miraculous it would have been to have made all these discoveries through the binoculars! To peep at her every evening! To discover, every evening, a different secret—now the secret of the dress, now the secret of the hairdo, now the secret of the make-up! And You, Lord God, knocked the binoculars from my fingers, You commanded the bizarre angel, with make-up rinsed off and her hair combed out for sleep, to fly directly down to us. You commanded us
to experience all the epiphanies at once. You commanded us to stare at her from right up close, without the binoculars. And You condemned—me at least—to a life-long mania for distinctively beautiful female loonies that are slightly past thirty!
We stood completely motionless, like a couple of complete dunces. The phantom in the green sweatsuit seemed not to pay us the least attention, and only once she had finished her work, once she had gathered up the smashed lenses, down to the last speck of dust, then she stood up straight and came up to us, and one by one she took first me, then Janek by the chin, and then shined the flashlight, first in our eyes, and then in her own—as if she were performing some sort of shamanist presentation—and she said, Bandits, complete bandits, with some sort of stifled and passionate voice. To this day, I remember that flash of light in her grey pupils, and I remember the intensity of those pupils, and I remember the dark hieroglyphs in their depths, and I am absolutely positive that in those signs were recorded the beginnings of all my amorous prayers.
“Now one of you bandits will follow me. I will give him the address in Katowice at which, after a certain time, the binoculars, like new, will be ready for pick-up. Whole and like new. Precisely the same. He, from whom you took them, he, from whom you borrowed them, and he, to whom you will return them, won’t notice a thing.”
She saved us, perhaps she even saved our lives, but—for the saving of life—she had a voice that was inappropriate. “Which of the bandits will follow me? Oh, of course, the more dangerous one. You’ll come,” she took Janek by the hand, “you’re the dangerous one, perhaps even menacing. You’ve got an evil look in your eyes. And you,” she turned to me, “you will wait here for your friend like a good boy. It won’t take long.”
With a fear that I didn’t know how to name—it certainly wasn’t fear for the smashed binoculars—I watched as the doubled shadow, hers and Janek’s, receded from me, as it climbed the steep slope in the direction of the Almira, as it vanished among other shades—then a completely dark and very long night ensued. Someone ran, or perhaps fled, through the center of Wisła, you could hear his panicky foot patter; then someone’s cry resounded, strangely joyous and triumphal; then the 11:23 train to Zawiercie gathered speed on the embankment. Had I fallen asleep? Was it the first time that I dreamed the best dream of my life, that I was walking through a gentle blizzard of butterflies?
I sat at the bridge table made of stone, at which deeply-tanned regulars played for unprecedented stakes, allegedly sometimes even for women. The surface of the water, permeated with suntan oils, gleamed like a roof that has just been tarred, or perhaps like the back of a Leviathan. It got colder and colder, my head kept nodding, and suddenly Janek stood next to me like a specter. I didn’t know whether half the night had passed, or half an hour; most certainly less than half the night, but more than half an hour. At The House of the Spa the dance was still going on, but it seemed to be drawing to a close. You could hear a slightly relaxed version of Rossini’s Tarantella—always toward the end, and always, when they were slightly relaxed, the Potulnik brothers played classical pieces from memory. Without a word, we set off home. When we were on the bridge, I asked:
“Do you have that address? When are we supposed to go there? To Katowice? Right?”
Janek remained silent; out of the corner of my eye I noticed the quick motion of his hand and a scrap of paper flying over the railing.
“Let it sail to the seas and the oceans?” I made sure I was understanding what he had done.
“Sail to all the seas of the world. To the Black Sea, the Yellow Sea, the White Sea, and the Red Sea,” he pronounced the colors like incantations.
Suddenly I felt an incomprehensible feeling of relief. It was as if a warm, Caribbean sea current had passed over me from head to foot. Nothing bad had happened, my God! The world was now missing one object—granted, it was exceptional—but what of it? Nothing! My God, that is nothing! It wasn’t certain whether Grandma would even notice the loss, whether she would ever look into the box where the binoculars were kept. She looks into the wardrobe in the back room two, three times a year, but into the box? When? I knew when. When a comet appears over Czantoria Mountain, or when the Big Dipper flies to pieces in the heavens. When would that be? Perhaps in twenty years, and perhaps never. Not only Grandma, not only we, but perhaps not even anyone in the whole world would live to see the next comet fly across the sky like a red-hot bulldozer.
“Did you fuck her?” I asked, when we were saying goodbye in front of our houses, and the question itself was proof of what soaring euphoria had seized me, and what mad boldness. I knew perfectly well that my friend couldn’t stand intimate questions. “Did you fuck her?”
“I didn’t feel like it,” Janek Nikandy replied, and he disappeared behind the gate to the dark gardens surrounding our houses.
VI
Last night, after several decades, I again dreamed of the butterfly blizzard. Back then they were yellow, today’s were white; this time my daughter Magda was with me in the dream, she held my hand, and I think she was coming to my rescue, because the number of butterflies was increasing, and they slowly began to suffocate me, but, all the same, it looked like it was going to be a beautiful death. All the more beautiful in that, just before dawn, in a flash of half-consciousness, it suddenly occurred to me that I am someone who understands the terrible randomness of the world. I suddenly saw that the world is a great field full of asymmetrically laid out campfires; you have to go incessantly from fire to fire; extinguish and kindle; go through the darkness, go through the light; someone tells of dangerous charges that could explode any moment. Suddenly it dawned on me that I knew how to write about—and how to take account of—the randomness, because other than that, there is nothing; how to show the campfires and the paths between them, and how to remember about the force of the charges planted everywhere, and how to liberate oneself from life for the sake of the spasm of love. I awoke slowly. The entire irrefutable transparency of the argument was vanishing. Grandma Pech was standing over my bed and saying something. She was repeating a sentence over and over that, at first, was completely indistinct, but then became more and more distinct. She said something, asked about something. It was almost half a century ago when I awoke for good, got dressed, traipsed into the kitchen. Nobody was there. I was tempted to run right over to Janek’s place without breakfast, but my hunger was stronger, and in those days the preparation of scrambled eggs didn’t drive me into such an abysmal depression as it does now. I got a frying pan covered with an eternal layer of grease from the pantry. I began to consider whether I would eat seven, or only five eggs. Grandma Pech was walking across the fieldstone-paved courtyard. Two steps behind her, Janek. Suddenly both of them—as if they were back in my dream—appeared in the kitchen.
“I wonder whatever could have happened to those binoculars?” Grandma asked in an amazingly cheerful tone.
“They fell into the river on us and got wrecked. Completely wrecked… It took us a long time to find them.” Janek produced the binoculars we had found under the bridge from inside his jacket, and at first he made a motion as if he wished to place them on the table, but then, with sudden desperation, he handed his greatest treasure to Grandma. Everything fell into place. I had stolen out of love for him, he was giving up his treasure out of love for me. Everything fell into place. Everything except for Grandma Pech’s reaction. She turned the old German ruin over in her fingers, and it was absolutely impossible that she would be taken in, that she would believe that this wreck, which had been lying in the water close to twenty years, had once belonged to Gustaw. This was completely out of the question, she was infallible in much more difficult matters, she infallibly recognized much more difficult objects, she couldn’t be taken in by such crude frauds. And yet. And yet, without a single word, or perhaps even with an almost inaudible sigh of relief, she turned on her heels and moved off into the depths of the house, and after a moment there reverberated the sound of the doors to the back
room being opened and closed.
VII
After we moved to Krakow, I lost contact with Janek, and the bits of news about him that reached us were most strange. Supposedly, he didn’t study at all before his entrance exam to the blacksmiths’ technical college. This, in itself, wasn’t so strange. Janek generally knew everything even without studying, or he would catch up in a flash at the last minute—but this time he even let the “last minute” slide. The whole night before the exam, he sat in the attic and read old Cross Sections. It was incredibly stuffy; not even the night, not even the air over the gardens, which were going to seed, was cooler. In the morning, he went to take the exam, pale and as if in a fever, and—in short—he didn’t pass. Janek Nikandy didn’t get into the Blacksmiths’ Technical College in Ustroń! A gigantic sensation, perhaps even cosmic, but, finally, transitory, justifiable on account of health problems, although—to be honest—even confined to his bed he ought to beat all the healthy ones hands down. But after all, there’s luck in leisure. Everyone knew that he would pass the exam in a year, wherever he felt like it, and that he would make up for the year of delay whenever he felt like it. Except that in a year he didn’t take the exam anywhere, and he didn’t make up for any lost time, nor did he intend to make up for it. It was then I saw him for the last time in my life. We got off the Krakow train; there was a fantastic, rust-colored sunset, Janek stood on the platform. At first I thought he was waiting for someone, that perhaps by some miracle he had found out when I would be arriving with my folks, and that he had come out to the station. But he wasn’t waiting for me, or for anyone. He stood on the platform, and he was looking at the train that was just about to set off further toward Głębce. What’s new? Nothing. Playing soccer? No. Nothing—a russet sky over Czantoria Mountain.
Supposedly, a year later, maybe two, he began to study the Bible under the tutelage of one-eyed Mr. Nikandy, and it was announced that he would study theology and become a pastor in their Church. But before they managed to go into the details of the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, Mrs. Nikandy, as beautiful as an Italian actress, fled the house with a certain wandering preacher, who was lacking any principles whatsoever, and both father and son lost, for some time, their zeal for studying the Bible. Some time—as it often happens—became time eternal. One-eyed Mr. Nikandy died of a heart attack less than a year later. After some time, Janek got a professional driver’s license, and he became a driver in a quarry. He drank. He had an accident in which someone died. He landed in prison for a few years. When he got out he didn’t really have any place to go; his sisters had found husbands, his brothers wives, and harboring a criminal under their roofs wasn’t to their liking. He wandered a bit here and there. Then he disappeared. Supposedly he moved to Silesia, supposedly he found work there and married a woman who was much older. Supposedly as long as she was alive, things were OK. But when she died—a total decline. The last two years spent in rats’ nests, under a sky of denatured spirits, over reptilian sewers. Basically, I don’t even know whether he froze on the street that year, or the carbon monoxide in a makeshift mine shaft suffocated him. People say various things.