He was served tea, which he drank, but a piece of sugar remained on his little plate—so he reached for it to bring it to his mouth—but perhaps deeming this action not sufficiently justified, he withdrew his hand—yet withdrawing his hand was something even less justified—so he reached for the sugar again and ate it—but he probably ate it not so much for pleasure as merely for the sake of behaving properly … towards the sugar or towards us? … and wishing to erase this impression he coughed and, to justify the cough, he pulled out his handkerchief, but by now he didn’t dare wipe his nose—so he just moved his leg. Moving his leg presented him, it seemed, with new complications, so he fell silent and sat stock-still. This singular behavior (because he did nothing but “behave”, he incessantly “behaved”) aroused my curiosity even then, on first meeting him, and in the ensuing months I became close to this man, who actually turned out to be someone not lacking refinement, he was someone with experience in the realm of art as well (at one time he was involved in the theater). I don’t know … I don’t know … suffice it to say that we both became involved in a little business that provided us with a livelihood. Well, yes, but this did not last long, because one day I received a letter, a letter from a person known as Hipolit, Hipolit S., a landowner from the Sandomierz region, suggesting that we visit him—Hipolit also mentioned that he would like to discuss some of his Warsaw affairs in which we could be helpful to him. “Supposedly it’s peaceful here, nothing of note, but there are marauding bands, sometimes they attack, there’s a loosening of conduct, you know. Come, both of you, we’ll feel safer.”
Travel there? The two of us? I was beset by misgivings, difficult to express, about the two of us traveling … because to take him there with me, to the countryside, so that he could continue his game, well … And his body, that body so … “peculiar”? … To travel with him and ignore his untiring “silently-shouting impropriety”? … To burden myself with someone so “compromised and, as a result, so compromising”? … To expose myself to the ridicule of this stubbornly conducted “dialogue” … with … with whom actually? … And his “knowledge,” this knowledge of his about … ? And his cunning? And his ruses? Indeed, I didn’t relish the idea, but on the other hand he was so isolated from us in that eternal game of his … so separate from our collective drama, so disconnected from the discussion “nation, God, proletariat, art” … that I found it restful, it gave me some relief. … At the same time he was so irreproachable, and calm, and circumspect! Let’s go then, so much more pleasant for the two of us to go together! The outcome was that—we forced ourselves into a train compartment and bore our way into its crowded interior … until the train finally moved, grinding.
Three o’clock in the afternoon. Foggy. A hag’s torso splitting Fryderyk in half, a child’s leg riding onto his chin … and so he traveled … but he traveled, as always, correctly and with perfect manners. He was silent. I too was silent, the journey jerked us and threw us about, yet everything was as if set solid … but through a bit of the window I saw bluish-gray, sleeping fields that we rode into with a swaying rumble. … It was the same flat expanse I’ve seen so many times before, embraced by the horizon, the checkered land, a few trees flying by, a little house, outbuildings receding behind it … the same things as ever, things anticipated … Yet not the same! And not the same, just because the same! And unknown, and unintelligible, indeed, unfathomable, ungraspable! The child screamed, the hag sneezed …
The sour smell … The long-familiar, eternal wretchedness of a train ride, a stretch of sagging power lines, of a ditch, the sudden incursion of a tree into the window, a utility pole, a shed, the swift backward dash of everything, slipping away … while there, far, on the horizon a chimney or a hill … appeared and persisted for a long time, stubbornly, like a prevailing anxiety, a dominant anxiety … until, with a slow turning, it all fell into nothing. I had Fryderyk right in front of me, two other heads separating us, his head was close, close by, and I could see it—he was silent and riding on—while the presence of alien, brazen bodies, crawling and pressing on us, only deepened my tête-à-tête with him … without a word … so much so that, by the living God, I would have preferred not to be traveling with him, oh, that the idea of traveling together had never come to pass! Because, stuck in his corporality, he was one more body among other bodies, nothing more … but at the same time here he was … and somehow here he was, distinctly and unremittingly. … This was not to be dismissed—not to be discarded, disposed of, erased. Here he was in this crush and here he was. … And his ride, his onward rush in space, was beyond comparison with their ride—his was a much more significant ride, even sinister perhaps. …
From time to time he smiled at me and said something—probably just to make it bearable for me to be with him and make his presence less oppressive. I realized that pulling him out of the city, casting him onto these out-of-Warsaw spaces, was a risky undertaking … because, against the background of these expanses, his singular inner quality would necessarily resound more powerfully … and he himself knew it, since I had never seen him more subdued, insignificant. At a certain moment the dusk, the substance that consumes form, began gradually to erase him, and he became indistinct in the speeding and shaking train that was riding into the night, inducing nonexistence. Yet this did not weaken his presence, which became merely less accessible to the eye: he lurked behind the veil of nonseeing, still the same. Suddenly lights came on and pulled him back into the open, exposing his chin, the corners of his tightly drawn mouth, his ears. … He, nonetheless, did not twitch, he stood with his eyes fixed on a string that was swaying, and he just was! The train stopped again, somewhere behind me the shuffling of feet, the crowd reeling, something must be happening—and he just was and was! We begin moving, it’s night outside, the locomotive flares out sparks, the compartments’ journey becomes nocturnal—why on earth have I brought him with me? Why have I burdened myself with his company, which, instead of unburdening me, burdened me? The journey lasted many listless hours, interspersed with stops, until finally it became a journey for journey’s sake, somnolent, stubborn, and so we rode until we reached Ćmielowo and, with our suitcases, we found ourselves on a footpath running along the train track, the train’s disappearing string of cars in the clangor dying away. Then silence, a mysterious breeze, and stars. A cricket.
I, extricated from many hours of motion, of crowding, was suddenly set down on this little footpath—next to me Fryderyk, his coat on his arm, totally silent and standing—Where were we? What was this? I knew this area, the breeze was not foreign to me—but where were we? There, diagonally across, was the familiar building of the Ćmielowo train station and a few lamps shining, yet … where, on what planet, had we landed? Fryderyk stood next to me and just stood. We began to move toward the station, he behind me, and here are a carriage, horses, a coachman—the familiar carriage and the coachman’s familiar raising of his cap, why then am I watching it all so stubbornly? … I climb up, Fryderyk after me, we ride, a sandy road by the light of a dark sky, the blackness of a tree or of a bush floats in from the sides, we drive into the village of Brzustowa, the boards glow with whitewash, a dog is barking … mysterious … in front of me the coachman’s back … mysterious … and next to me this man who is silently, affably accompanying me. The invisible ground at times rocked our vehicle, at times shook it, while caverns of darkness, the thickening murkiness among the trees, obstructed our vision. I talked to the coachman just to hear my own voice:
“Well, how’s it going? Is it peaceful over your way?”
And I heard him say:
“It’s peaceful for the moment. There are gangs in the forests. … But nothing special lately. …”
The face invisible, the voice the same—yet not the same. In front of me only his back—and I was about to lean forward to look into the eyes of his back, but I stopped short … because Fryderyk … was indeed here, next to me. And he was immensely silent. With him next to me, I preferred not to look anyone in the face ?
?? because I suddenly realized that this something sitting next to me is radical in its silence, radical to the point of frenzy! Yes, he was an extremist! Reckless in the extreme! No, this was not an ordinary being but something more rapacious, strained by an extremity about which thus far I had no idea! So I preferred not to look in the face—of anyone, not even the coachman’s, whose back weighed me down like a mountain, while the invisible earth rocked the carriage, shook it, and the surrounding darkness, sparkling with stars, sucked out all vision. The remainder of the journey passed without a word. We finally rolled into an avenue, the horses moved more briskly—then the gate, the caretaker, and the dogs—the locked house and the heavy grating of its unlocking—Hipolit with a lamp …
“Well, thank God you’re here!”
Was it he or not? The bloated redness of his cheeks, bursting, struck me and repelled me. … He seemed to be generally bursting with edema, which made everything in him expand enormously and grow in all directions, the awful blubber of his body was like a volcano disgorging flesh … in knee boots, he stretched out his apocalyptic paws, and his eyes peeped from his body as if through a porthole. Yet he wanted to be close to me, he hugged me. He whispered bashfully:
“I’m all bloated … devil only knows … I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”
And looking at his thick fingers he repeated with boundless anguish, more softly, to himself:
“I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”
Then he bellowed:
“And this is my wife!”
Then he muttered for his own benefit:
“And this is my wife.”
Then he screamed:
“And this is my Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”
Then he repeated, to himself, barely audibly:
“And this is Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”
He turned to us, hospitably, his manner refined: “How good of you to come, but please, Witold, introduce me to your friend …” He stopped, closed his eyes, and kept repeating … his lips moved. Fryderyk, courteous in the extreme, kissed the hand of the hostess, whose melancholy was embellished with a faraway smile, whose litheness fluttered lightly … and the whirl of connecting, introducing us into the house, sitting, conversing, drew us in—after that journey without end—the light of the lamp induced a dreamy mood. Supper, served by a butler. We were overcome with sleep. Vodka. Struggling against sleep, we tried to listen, to grasp, there was talk of aggravation by the Underground Army on the one hand, by the Germans on the other, by gangs, by the administration, by the Polish police, and seizures—talk of rampant fears and rapes … to which the shutters, secured with additional iron bars, bore witness, as did the blockading of side doors … the locking and bunging up with iron. “They burned down Sieniechów, they broke the legs of the overseer of the farm laborers in Rudniki, I had people here who were displaced from the Poznań region, what’s worse, we know nothing of what’s happening in Ostrowiec, in Bodzechów with its factory settlements, everybody’s just waiting, ears to the ground, for the time being it’s quiet, but everything will come crashing down when the front comes closer … Crashing down! Well, sir, there will be carnage, an eruption, ugly business! It will be an ugly business!” he bellowed and then muttered to himself, absorbed in thought:
“An ugly business.”
And he bellowed:
“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”
And he whispered:
“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”
But here’s the lamp. Supper. Sleepiness. Hipolit’s enormousness besmeared with a thick sauce of sleep, the lady of the house is here as well, dissolving in her remoteness, and Fryderyk, and moths hitting the lamp, moths inside the lamp, moths around the lamp, and the stairs winding upward, a candle, I fall onto my bed, I’m falling asleep. The following day there’s a triangle of sunlight on the wall. Someone’s voice outside the window. I rose from my bed and opened the shutters. Morning.
II
Bouquets of trees forming graceful curving and curling paths, the garden was rolling gently beyond the linden trees where one could sense the hidden surface of a pond—oh, the greenery in the dappled, sun-sparkled dew! However, when we went out after breakfast into the courtyard—the white house, two-storied with dormer windows, framed by spruce trees and firs and arborvitae, footpaths and flowerbeds—the house overwhelmed us like an unspoiled vision from the now distant, prewar time … and in its untouched bygone state it seemed more real than our present time … while at the same moment the awareness that there was no truth to it, that it was inconsistent with reality, turned it into something akin to a stage set … so then this house, the park, the sky and the fields became both theater and truth. But here comes the lord of the manor, powerful, edematous, in a green jacket over his close-to-bursting body, and indeed he arrives as in the days gone by, greeting us from afar with his hand and he’s asking if we slept well? Chatting lazily, without haste, we went through the gate, onto a field, and with a wide sweep of our eyes we took in the swelling and undulating land, all the while Hipolit prattling to Fryderyk about something, about the harvest, about the good crops, while crushing clods of dirt with his boot. We were now walking in the direction of the house. Madame Maria appeared on the porch and called out: good morning, while a little brat ran across the lawn, perhaps the cook’s son? And so we moved about that morning—yet it was not so simple … because a kind of debility was creeping into the landscape, and again it seemed to me that everything, though still the same, was entirely different. What a disorienting thought, what an unpleasant, masked thought! Fryderyk walked next to me, in the light of this bright day, his body so real that one could count the hairs sticking out of his ears and all the flakes of his skin as pale as if he lived in a cellar—Fryderyk, I repeat, hunched, sickly, with sunken chest, with pince-nez, with the mouth of an excitable man, hands in his pockets—a typical city intellectual in a robust countryside … yet in this disparity the countryside was not the winner, the trees lost their self-confidence, the sky was blurry, the cow was not duly recalcitrant, the age-long past of the countryside was disconcerted, unsure of itself, as if tripped up … and Fryderyk was perhaps more real than the grass. More real? An irksome thought, disturbing, sordid, a bit hysterical, even provocative, insistent, destructive … and I didn’t know whether it came from him, this thought, from Fryderyk, or was it the result of war, revolution, enemy occupation … perhaps one as well as the other, perhaps both together? But he was behaving impeccably when asking about the farm, conversing in the way one would have expected, and suddenly we saw Henia coming toward us across the lawn. The sun burned our skin. Our eyes were dry, our lips chapped. She said:
“Mother is ready. I ordered the horses harnessed.”
“To church, to Mass, because it’s Sunday,” Hipolit explained. And he said softly to himself: “To church, to Mass.”
He announced:
“If you gentlemen would like to come with us, you are most welcome, no pressure, merely broad-mindedness, ha, right?! I’m going because as long as I’m here, I’ll go! While there is a church I’ll go to church! And with the wife, the daughter, in the carriage—because I don’t need to hide from anyone. Let them look at me. Let them gawk—as if I’m on camera … let them take photos!”
And he whispered: “Let them take photos!”
Fryderyk was already most obligingly offering our readiness to take part in the holy service. We are riding in the carriage whose wheels, sinking into the sandy tracks, are groaning dully—and when we ascended a hill, the expanse of the land appeared gradually, spreading low at its very bottom, below the tremendous heights of the sky, and it became solidified in immobile undulation. There, far away, was the railroad. I wanted to laugh. The carriage, horses, coachman, the hot aroma of leather and lacquer, the dust, the sun, the tiresome fly at my face and the groan of the rubber tires grinding into the sand—ah yes, familiar from time immemorial, and nothing,
nothing at all has changed! But when we found ourselves at the top of the hill and felt the breath of the expanse at whose perimeter loomed the Swiętokrzyskie Mountains, this journey’s duplicity almost struck me in the chest—because we appeared as if in a lithograph—like a lifeless photograph from an old family album—where a long-dead vehicle could be seen on this hill even from the farthest limits—and, as a result, the land became maliciously derisive, heartlessly disdainful. Thus the duplicity of this lifeless journey spread to the black-and-blue topography, passing us by almost imperceptibly under the influence and pressure of this very journey of ours. On the backseat next to Madame Maria, Fryderyk looked around and admired the colors, riding to church as if he were actually riding to church—he’s probably never been so sociable and courteous! We drove down into the Grocholicki ravine where the village begins, where it’s always muddy …
I remember (and this is not insignificant in terms of the events to be told later) that my dominant feeling was futility—and again, just as on the previous night, I would have leaned to look the coachman in the face, but this was not the proper thing to do … so we both stayed behind his inscrutable back, and our journey continued behind his back. We drove into the village of Grocholice, a little river on the left, while on the right, still sparsely set, were peasants’ cottages and fences, a hen and a goose, a trough and a mud hole, a dog, a peasant or an old woman decked out for Sunday, strutting along a footpath to the church … the calm and sleepiness of this village … But it was as if our death was bending over a sheet of water, evoking its own image, our entry’s past was reflecting itself in this eternal village and rumbling with frenzy—a frenzy that was merely a mask—that only served to hide something else … But what? Whatever the meaning … of war, of revolution, violence, debauchery, degradation, despair, hope, struggle, fury, screaming, murder, slavery, disgrace, lousy dying, of cursing or of blessing … whatever was the meaning, I say, it was too weak to break through the crystal of this idyll, and this little scene, long after its time, remained untouched, it was only a facade. … Fryderyk chatted with Madame Maria most courteously—or was he keeping up the conversation so as not to say anything else? We arrived at a wall surrounding the church and we began to dismount … but I no longer know what’s what, what’s it like … are the steps that we’re climbing to the square at the front of the church ordinary steps or are they perhaps … ? Fryderyk gave Madame Maria his arm and, taking off his hat, he led her to the church entrance as people watched—but perhaps he did this so as not to do anything else?—while Hipolit rolled behind him and pushed forward with his big body, unwavering, steadfast, knowing full well that tomorrow they might slaughter him like a pig—he pushed with all his force, in spite of all their hatred, grim and resigned. The lord of the manor! However, was he, he too, the lord of the manor in order not to be something else?