B005GEZ23A EBOK (11 page)

That evening, on this meadow, our walk elongated itself, like a snake. Somewhat behind us, diagonally across and to the left, walked Henia with Vaclav, both very courteous, civilized, settled in their own families, he—his mother’s son, she—her parents’ daughter, and the attorney’s body didn’t feel ill at ease with a sixteen-year-old, having the sum of two mothers and a father by his side. While Karol walked by himself, to one side, his hands in his pockets, he was bored, or perhaps he wasn’t even bored, he was merely putting his feet on the grass, left, then right, then left, then right, then left, then right, then left, in this spacious green-as-a-meadow loafing of his, while the sinking, setting sun was warming us and a breeze was cooling us—and so he was setting his feet down, setting them here and there, sometimes he slowed down, sometimes he went faster, until he finally caught up with Fryderyk (who walked with Madame Amelia). For a while they walked side by side. Karol said:

“You could give me your old jacket.”

“What for?

“I need one. For business.”

“So what if you need it?”

“I need it!” Karol repeated insolently, laughing.

“Then buy one yourself,” Fryderyk replied.

“I don’t have any dough.”

“I don’t have any either.”

“Just give me your jacket!”

Madame Amelia picked up the pace—so did Fryderyk—and Karol did too.

“Just give me your jacket!”

“Just give him your jacket!”

This was Henia. She joined them. Her fiancé stayed a bit behind. She was walking with Karol, her voice, her movements were like his.

“Just give him your jacket!”

“Just give me your jacket!”

Fryderyk stood still, lifted his arms jokingly: “Leave me alone, children!” Amelia began walking away faster and faster, not looking back at them, she therefore looked like someone who is pursued. Really—why didn’t she turn her head even once? This mistake turned her into someone running from juvenile scamps (while her son remained in the background). The question was whom was she running from: from them or from him, Fryderyk? Or from him with them? It didn’t seem likely that she had sniffed anything of the little affairs happening among those juveniles, no, she didn’t have a nose for it, they were too much her inferiors—because Henia meant something to her only with Vaclav, as his future wife, while Henia with Karol, they were just children, young people. So if she were running away it was from Fryderyk, from the familiarity that Karol was allowing himself with him—incomprehensible to her—the familiarity that was suddenly created here, next to her, striking a blow at her …
because this man, overtaken by the boy, was thereby destroying and losing the seriousness that he had created within himself and in relation to her. … And this familiarity had been reinforced by her son’s fiancée! Amelia’s flight was an admission that she had noticed it, had taken it in!

When she walked away, those two stopped pressing Fryderyk for his jacket. Because she had walked away? Or because their jocularity had run its course? I needn’t add that Fryderyk, though shaken by this youthful onslaught and looking like someone who had barely escaped a gang on the outskirts of town in the middle of the night, took the utmost precautions that some “wolf from the woods,” the wolf that he did not know, that he always feared, would not be called forth. Quickly joining Hipolit and Maria, he began to “talk away” these improprieties, he even called to Vaclav to engage him as well in this simple, relaxing conversation. And for the remainder of the evening he was quiet as a mouse, didn’t even look at them, at Henia with Karol, at Karol with Henia, his aim was to calm and defuse the situation. He was undoubtedly afraid of stirring up the depths to which Amelia allowed herself to go with regard to him. He was afraid of it, especially in a combination with that shallow, youthful frivolity, that recklessness, he sensed that the two dimensions could not coexist, so he was afraid of something blowing apart and irrupting into … what? What? Yes, yes, he was afraid of the exploding mixture, of the A (i.e., “Amelia”) multiplied by (H + K). So, swallowing his
pride, tail between his legs, he went mum, shush! At supper (it took place in the family circle, because the refugees from Lvov were served their food upstairs) he even went as far as to raise a toast in honor of the betrothed, wishing them all the best with his whole heart. It would be hard to match this propriety. Unfortunately, here too the mechanism by means of which Fryderyk was prone to sink deeper, even as he tried to back out, made itself known—but in this case it happened in a particularly violent, even dramatic way. His sudden rising to his feet and the emergence of his person among us who were seated created unwelcome panic, and Madame Maria was unable to hold back a nervous “oh”—because it wasn’t obvious what he was going to say, what he would say. Yet his initial sentences turned out to be soothing, they were conventional, spiked with humor—while waving his napkin, he gave thanks for making his bachelorhood pleasant with such a moving betrothal, and, with a few rounded turns of phrase he described the betrothed as a nice couple … but as his speech progressed, behind his words something was mounting that he was not saying, oh, constantly the same story! … In the end, and to the horror of the speaker himself, it became clear that his speech merely served to turn our attention away from his real speech that was taking place in silence, beyond words, and expressing what words did not encompass. Cutting through the courteous platitudes, his actual being gained voice, nothing could erase the face, the eyes expressing some relentless fact—and, sensing that he
was becoming frightful and thus dangerous to himself as well, he stood on his head to be nice, he conducted his conciliatory rhetoric in an arch-moral spirit, arch-Catholic, about “family as the unit of society” and about “venerable traditions.” At the same time, however, he was hitting Amelia and everyone else in the face with his face that was deprived of illusions and inescapably present. The power of his “speech” was stupendous indeed. The most shattering oration I ever happened to hear. And one could see that the power, so parenthetic, so incidental, carried the speaker away like a horse!

He finished with wishes for happiness. He said something like this:

“Ladies and gentlemen, they deserve happiness, so they will be happy.”

Which meant:

“I’m talking just to talk.”

Madame Amelia hurriedly said:

“We are very, very grateful!”

Clinking our glasses erased the horror, and Amelia, exceedingly gracious, concentrated on her duties as the lady of the house: More meat, anyone? Perhaps vodka? … Everyone started talking, just to hear his own voice, and in this chatter we all felt better. Cheesecake was served. Toward the end of supper Madame Amelia rose and went to the pantry, while we, warmed by the vodka, joked around, telling the young lady what and how one had eaten on similar occasions before the war, and what delicacies she was missing. Karol
laughed good-naturedly and sincerely, handing in his empty glass. I noticed that Amelia, who had returned from the pantry, sat on her chair in a strange way—first she stood next to it, then, after a moment and as if on command, she sat down—I had no time to think about it as she fell to the floor from the chair. Everyone jumped to his feet. We saw a red stain on the floor. A woman’s scream sounded from the kitchen, then a shot rang outside the windows, and someone, probably Hipolit, threw a jacket over the lamp. Darkness and a shot again. Abrupt closing of doors, Amelia was carried to the couch, feverish activity in the darkness. The jacket on the lamp began to smolder, they trampled it, somehow things immediately quieted down, everyone was listening intently, while Vaclav pressed a shotgun into my hand and pushed me to the window in the adjoining room: “Be careful!” I saw a quiet night in the garden, moonlit, while a partially dried-up leaf, on a branch that looked into the window, twirled every now and then with its little silver belly. I was clutching the weapon and watching to see if anyone was emerging from there, from the spot where the dampness of the twisted tree trunks began. But only a sparrow moved in the thicket. Finally a door banged, someone spoke loudly, people were saying something again, and I realized that the panic had passed.

Madame Maria appeared next to me. “Do you know anything about medicine? Come. She’s dying. She was stabbed with a knife. … Do you know anything about medicine?”

Amelia was lying on the couch, her head on a pillow, the room was full of people—the refugee family, the servants. … I was struck by the immobility of these people, impotence wafted from them … the same impotence that was often apparent in Fryderyk. … They stood back from her and left her alone so she could deal with her dying. They were merely assisting. Her profile stood out immobile, like a rocky promontory, and near by were Vaclav, Fryderyk, Hipolit—standing … Will she take long to die? On the floor a bowl of cotton wool and blood. But Amelia’s body was not the only body lying in this room, there, on the floor, in a corner, lay another … and I didn’t know what that was, where it had come from, I couldn’t tell who was lying there, and at the same time I felt there was something erotic … that something erotic had come straggling in here … Karol? Where was Karol? Leaning with his hand on a chair he was standing, like everyone else, while Henia was kneeling, her hands on an armchair. And everyone was leaning toward Amelia so I couldn’t get a closer look at the other body, supernumerary and unexpected. No one stirred. But everyone watched anxiously, with questioning looks. How will she die—because one would have expected from her a death more dignified than an ordinary death, and this is what her son, and the Hipolits, and Henia were expecting of her, and even Fryderyk, who wasn’t taking his eyes off her. This was paradoxical, because they were demanding action from a person who was unable to move, frozen in powerlessness, and yet she was the only one here called
upon to act. She knew it. Suddenly Madame Hipolit ran out and returned with a crucifix, this was like a call to action addressed to the dying woman, and the burden of waiting fell from our hearts—now we knew that something would soon begin. Madame Maria, cross in hand, stood next to the couch.

Then something happened that was so outrageous that in spite of all its nicety it looked like a blow. … The dying woman, barely touching the cross with her gaze, turned her eyes sideways toward Fryderyk and she united with him with her gaze—this was unbelievable, no one would have thought of the possibility of her avoiding the cross that now, in Madame Maria’s hands, became superfluous—and this very avoidance added to Amelia’s gaze, now fixed on Fryderyk, so much weight. Poor Fryderyk froze, caught by the dying and therefore dangerous gaze, and, pale, he stood almost at attention—they were looking at each other. Madame Maria continued to hold the cross, but minutes passed and it remained idle—the doleful, unemployed crucifix. Could it be that for this saint, in her hour of death, Fryderyk had become more important than Christ? So was she really in love with him? Yet this was not love, this had to do with something even more personal, this woman saw in him her judge—she could not accept the fact that she would die without having brought him around to herself, without having proved that she was no less “ultimate” than he, equally fundamental, a phenomenon that was essential, no less important. That’s how much she relied upon his opinion. However, the fact that she was turning not to
Christ for recognition and for validation of her existence but to him, to a mortal, albeit endowed with uncommon consciousness, was an astounding heresy on her part, a repudiation of the absolute for the sake of life, an admission that not God but man is to be man’s judge. Perhaps I didn’t understand it so clearly at the time, nonetheless, shivers went through me at this uniting of her gaze with a human being, while God, in Maria’s hands, remained unnoticed.

Her dying, which actually did not progress at all, became, under the pressure of our concentration and our waiting, more tense from moment to moment—we were the ones loading it with our tension. And I knew Fryderyk well enough to worry that, while facing human death, something so special, he would no longer be able to bear it and would commit some impropriety. … But he stood, as if at attention, as if in church, and the only thing one could reproach him for was that every so often his eyes would abandon Amelia against his will to reach into the back of the room where the other body lay, mysterious to me, that I actually could not see well from my spot, but Fryderyk’s progressively more frequent forays with his eyes made me finally decide to go and look … and I approached that corner. Oh, what terror, what agitation I felt when I saw (a boy) whose leanness was a duplication of (Karol’s) leanness, he lay there and was alive, and, what’s more, he was the embodiment of blond charm with dark, huge eyes, and his darkness and swarthiness were drowning in the wildness of his hands and bare legs curled on the floor!

A wild, predatory, blond youth, barefoot, from the village, yet breathing forth beauty—a gorgeous, grimy little god who was here on the floor acting out his surly seductions. This body? This body? What did this body mean here? Why was he lying here? And so … this was a reiteration of Karol but in a lower register … and suddenly youth was mounting in the room not only numerically (because two is one thing, three is another), but in its very quality as well, it became something different, wilder and lower. And straight away, as if in repercussion, Karol’s body came to life, more intense and powerful, while Henia, though pious and kneeling, came tumbling down with all her whiteness into the realm of sinful and secret understanding with these two. At the same time Amelia’s throes of death became tainted, somehow suspect—what was her connection with this young, rustic, good-looking fellow, why did this (boy) come straggling up to her in her dying hour? I realized that this death was happening in ambiguous circumstances, much more ambiguous than they seemed on the surface. …

Fryderyk, forgetting himself, put his hand in his pocket, then quickly took it out, then dropped his hands by his side.

Vaclav was kneeling.