Ferdydurke (8 page)

He trembled at the thought and, pale with fear, looked uneasily at the door.

"And what if the school inspector should catch us? Gentlemen, I warn you, the inspector is visiting the school! That's right!... I warn you, gentlemen ... This is no time for foolishness!" he groaned with fear. "In the face of this higher authority, let's pull ourselves together.

Well . . . hmm . . . which one of you has mastered the subject for today? Cut out this nonsense, this is no time for joking around! Come on, speak up. What?! Nobody knows anything? You'll be the ruin of me! Come on, maybe at least one of you, come on, my friends, come forward, don't hesitate ... Ahh, boys—Syphon Pylaszczkiewicz, you say? God bless you, Pylaszczkiewicz, I've always thought you an admirable fellow. Well, Pylaszczkiewicz, and what have you mastered?
Konrad Wallenrod?
Or
Forefathers' Eve?
Or maybe the general characteristics of romanticism? Tell me, Pylaszczkiewicz."

But Syphon, the "lad" now well entrenched in him, stood up and answered:

"I'm sorry, Professor, but I cannot. If you call on me when the school inspector is here, I'll answer to the best of my knowledge—but in the meantime I can't reveal what I have mastered, because by revealing it I would not be true to myself."

"Syphon, you'll be our ruin," said the others, terror-stricken, "c'mon, speak up!"

"Well, well, Pylaszczkiewicz," Ashface said in a conciliatory tone, "why don't you come out in the open, Pylaszczkiewicz? We're among friends, aren't we? Tell me the truth, Syphon Pylaszczkiewicz. Surely you don't mean to ruin the two of us, do you? If you don't want to speak openly, let me know somehow..."

"Sorry, sir," replied Syphon, "but I can't do it because I'm above wheeling and dealing, and I am not about to betray my principles, nor to betray myself."

And he sat down.

"Tut, tut," mumbled the teacher, "these are honorable sentiments, Pylaszczkiewicz, and much to your credit. And don't take all this to heart, I was just making a private joke of it. Yes, of course, one should always remain incorruptible, so, what do we have for today?" he said sternly and checked his worksheet. "Ah, yes! Elucidate and explain to the students why Slowacki inspires our love and admiration? Well then, gentlemen, I'll recite for you my lesson, and then in your turn you'll recite yours. Quiet!" he yelled, and they all sprawled themselves on their desk tops, resting their heads on their arms, while Ashface inconspicuously opened the appropriate textbook, tightened his lips, sighed, stifled something within himself, and began his recitation:

"Hmm... hmm ... Well then, why does Slowacki inspire our love and admiration? Why do we weep with the poet when we hear the Aeolian strings of his poem
In Switzerland?
Or, why are we swept away when we hear the heroic and stalwart verses of the
Spirit King?
And why can't we tear ourselves from the wonders and magic of
Balladyna,
why do the wails of
Lilla Weneda
tearour hearts to pieces? And why are we so willing to rush and speed to the rescue of the hapless king? Hmm . . . why? Because, gentlemen, Siowacki—oh, what a great poet he was! Walkiewicz! Why? Repeat why, Walkiewicz. Why the admiration and love, why do we cry, why the rapture, why the heartbreak, why do we rush and speed? Why, Walkiewicz, why?"

It seemed to me I heard Pimko all over again, but a Pimko on a more modest salary and lacking the wider horizons.

"Because Slowacki—oh, what a great poet he was!" Walkiewicz repeated, while other students carved their desk tops with pocket knives or made tiny paper balls, the tiniest they could make, and pitched them into their inkwells. They pretended these were fish in make-believe ponds, and, using their hair as fishing lines, they tried to catch the fish but, alas, the paper would not bite. So instead they tickled their noses with the hair, and they signed their names in their notebooks over and over again, with or without curlicues, while one of them practiced his penmanship all over the page: "Why, w-h-y, w-h-y, Slo-wac-ki, Slo-wac-ki, Slo-wac-ki, wac-ki, wac-ki, Wa-cek, Wa-cek-Slo-wac-ki and a f-l-y and a f-l-e-a." They all looked miserable. What happened to the fervor, to the disputes and discussions of just a few moments ago? Only a few fortunate ones seemed to have forgotten the world around them as they immersed themselves in E. Wallace's writings. Even Syphon had to exert all the strength of his character to keep his principles of self-discipline and self-amelioration intact, but he could do it only because, for him, distress was a source of bliss and a measure of the strength of his character. Whereas the others cupped their hands into hollows and hillocks and blew air through them, Russian-style: hey, hey, hillocks and hollows, hillocks and hollows . . . The teacher sighed, stifled something within himself, looked at his watch, and continued:

"A great poet! Remember that, it's important! And why do we love him? Because he was a great poet. A great poet he was indeed! You laggards, you ignoramuses, I'm trying to be calm and collected as I tell you this, get it into your thick heads—so, I repeat once more, gentlemen: a great poet, Juliusz Slowacki, a great poet, we love Juliusz Slowacki and admire his poetry because he was a great poet. Please make note of the following homework assignment: 'What is the immortal beauty which abides in the poetry of Juliusz Slowacki and evokes our admiration?' "

At this point one of the students fidgeted and groaned:

"But I don't admire it at all! Not at all! It doesn't interest me in the least! I read two verses—and I'm already bored. God help me, how am I supposed to admire it when I don't admire it?" His eyes popped, and he sat down, thus sinking into a bottomless pit. The teacher choked on this naive confession.

"For God's sake be quiet!" he hissed. "I'll flunk you. Galkiewicz, you want to ruin me! You probably don't realize what you've just said?"

Galkiewicz

"But I don't understand it! I don't understand how I can admire it when I don't admire it."

Teacher "How can you not admire it, Galkiewicz, when I told you a thousand times that you do admire it."

Galkiewicz "Well, I don't admire it."

Teacher "That's your private business. Obviously, Galkiewicz, you lack the intelligence. Others admire it."

Galkiewicz "Nobody admires it, I swear. How can anybody admire it when nobody reads it besides us, schoolboys, and only because we're forced to ..."

Teacher "Quiet, for God's sake! That's because there aren't many people who are truly cultural and up to the task..."

Galkiewicz "But the cultural ones don't read it either. Nobody does, nobody. Absolutely nobody."

Teacher "Listen, Galkiewicz, I have a wife and a child! Have pity on the child at least! There's no doubt, Galkiewicz, that we should admire great poetry, and Slowacki was, after all, a great poet... Maybe Slowacki doesn't move you, Galkiewicz, but you can't tell me that Mickiewicz, Byron, Pushkin, Shelley, Goethe don't pierce your soul through and through..."

Galkiewicz "They pierce nobody. Nobody cares, they're bored by it all. Nobody can read more than two or three verses. O God! I can't..."

Teacher "This is preposterous! Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it."

Galkiewicz "Well, I can't. And nobody can! O God!"

Sweat covered the teacher's brow like dew, he took a snapshot of his wife and child out of his wallet and tried to move Galkiewicz, but the latter repeated his "I can't, I can't" over and over again. And the piercing "I can't" proliferated and grew infectious, mutterings of "we can't either" came from all corners, and a generalized inability threatened everyone. The teacher found himself at a terrible impasse. Any moment there could be an outbreak of—of what?—of inability, at any moment a wild roar of not wanting to could erupt and reach the headmaster and the inspector, at any moment the whole building could collapse and bury his child under the rubble, and here was this Galkiewicz with his "I can't, I can't."

The hapless Ashface felt that he too was threatened by inability.

"Pylaszczkiewicz!" he yelled, "you, Pylaszczkiewicz, why don't you show me, and show Galkiewicz and everybody else, the beauty of some splendid passage! But hurry up, or else
periculum in mora!
Pay attention, everybody! If I hear as much as a squeak I'll give you all a class assignment! We must shake this inability, we must, or woe to my child!"

Syphon Pylaszczkiewicz stood up and began to recite a poem.

And he recited. Not for an instant did he succumb to the general and suddenly prevailing inability, on the contrary—he was totally able, because he derived his ability from the inability of others. He recited then, and he recited with the proper intonation, he recited with emotion and from the depths of his soul. What's more, he recited beautifully, and the beauty of his recitation, enhanced by the beauty of the poem, by the greatness of the poet, and by the majesty of art, imperceptibly transformed itself into a monument to all possible beauty and greatness. What's more, he recited mysteriously and with reverence; he recited in all earnestness and with inspiration; and he sang the song of the bard as a bard's song should be sung. Oh, what beauty! What greatness, what genius, and what poetry! Wall, fly, ink, fingernails, ceiling, blackboard, windows, oh, the danger of inability was averted, the child saved and the wife likewise, everyone said yes, yes, because they now could, and they implored him to stop, because it was all too much. I also noticed that my neighbor was smearing my hand with ink—he had already smeared his own and was now starting on mine (because he couldn't very well take off his shoes to smear his feet), yet someone else's hands were awful too because they were actually just like one's own, but so what? Nothing, that's what. How about legs? Swing them? What for? After a quarter-of-an-hour even Galkiewicz groaned that he'd had enough, that he gets it, that he retracts all he said and agrees with everything, that he apologizes, that now he can.

"See, Galkiewicz? There's nothing like school to inculcate the adoration of great genius!"

But strange things were happening to the listeners. All differences had vanished, and everyone, be it under the colors of Syphon or of Kneadus, writhed equally under the weight of the bard and the poet, of Ashface and his child, and—of stupor. The bare walls, the black school desks with their inkwells, ceased to provide diversion, and through a window one could see a brick sticking out of a wall with an inscription gouged in it: "He's been kicked out." The only choice remaining was between the pedagogic body and one's own body. Therefore those who were not busy counting the hairs on Ashface's scalp or studying the complex lacing of his shoes tried to count their own hairs and to dislocate their necks. Mizdral fidgeted, Hopek tapped mechanically, while Kneadus kneaded himself, so to speak, in painful exhaustion, some were lost in reverie, others gave in to the awful habit of whispering to themselves, some tore off their buttons, destroying their clothes, and jungles and deserts of eerie gestures and bizarre actions blossomed everywhere. The only one among them who thrived was the perverse Syphon—the greater the general misery the better he felt—because he had that special inner mechanism for turning poverty into riches. And the teacher, still preoccupied with his wife and child, went on and on: "Towiahski, Towiahski, Towiahski, his messianism and his 'forty and four,' Poland—the Christ of Nations, flame eternal, sacrifice, inspiration, suffering, redemption, heroes, and symbols." The words entered my ears and tortured my mind while faces, contorting more and more horribly, mangled, weary, crumpled, and stripped of any notion of a face, seemed ready to assume any face—one could make those faces into anything one wished—oh, what an exercise for the imagination! And reality was also spent, also wrung out, crumpled and ruined—
all that had been real slowly, imperceptibly turned into a world of ideals, oh, let me dream now, let me!
{5}

Ashface went on: "He was a bard! He sang! Gentlemen, I beg you, let's repeat once more—we admire him because he was a great poet, and we revere him because he was a bard! That's the key word. Ciemkiewicz, please repeat!" Ciemkiewicz repeated: "He was a bard!"

I realized that I had to run away. Pimko, Ashface, the school, my schoolmates, all my experiences since this morning suddenly whirled in my head and, as in a lottery, the ticket dropped out at— run away. But where? Where? I didn't know, but I knew I had to run, otherwise I would fall prey to all the freakishness that was crowding in on me from all sides. Yet instead of running away I wiggled my toe inside my shoe, and the wiggling paralyzed me and foiled my intentions to run, because how was I to run while I was still wiggling my toe, here on the first floor of the school? Run—run! Run from Ashface, run from unreality and boredom—but in my head was the bard, squeezed in there by Ashface, while down below I wiggled my toe, how could I run then—my inability to run was more serious than the inability that had earlier affected Galkiewicz. In theory nothing seemed easier—just walk out of the school and don't come back—Pimko would not call the police to look for me, the tentacles of his pupa pedagogy surely did not extend that far. All I needed was—the will to run. But I lacked the will. Because to run one needs the will, but where is the will to come from when one is wiggling one's toe and one's face is nothing but a face of boredom. And I now understood why no one could run from the school—it was their faces, their whole being in fact, that killed their ability to run, everyone was a prisoner of his own ghastly face, and even though they should have run they couldn't, because they no longer were what they should have been. To run meant not only running from school but, first and foremost, running from oneself, oh, to run from oneself, from the sniveling brat into which Pimko had turned me, abandon the brat, be the man I once was! But how is one supposed to run from something one i s, where is the reference point, the foothold from which to oppose it? Our form permeates us, imprisons us from within as well as from without. I felt sure that, had reality asserted itself for one moment, the incredibly grotesque situation in which I found myself would have become so glaringly obvious that everyone would have exclaimed: "What is this grown man doing here?" But against the background of the general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost. Oh, give me one uncon-torted face next to which I can feel the contortion of my own face, but instead—all around me were faces that were twisted, mangled, and turned inside out, faces that reflected my own like a distorting mirror—and this mirror image of reality truly held me down! Was it a dream? An apparition? At that moment Kopyrda—the one in flannel pants, suntanned, the one who, that time in the school yard, had smiled superciliously at the word "schoolgirl"—drifted into my field of vision. Equally indifferent to Ashface as to Kneadus and Syphon, he bent over nonchalantly, looking just fine, normal, in fact—his hands in his pockets, well groomed, spry, easygoing, just so, and pleasant—he sat rather disdainfully, crossed his legs, and watched one of his legs. As if sidestepping school with his legs. A dream? An apparition? "Could this be an ordinary boy at last?" I wondered. "Not a lad, not a guy, but just an ordinary boy? Maybe thanks to him we would regain the ability we had lost..."