Bruno Schulz

***

Everybody knows that whimsical time, in the course of mundane and ordinary years, occasionally will bring forth from its womb other years, odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, a spurious thirteenth month sprouts up; spurious, we say, since it will seldom grow to full size. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development: a hunchback month, a half-wilted offshoot, and more conjectured than real.

It is the intemperance of summer’s age that is to blame for it, its licentious, belated vitality. It may happen, though August has already gone by, that summer’s thick and hoary stem continues to burgeon by force of habit, and from its touchwood it pushes out those wilding days, barren and idiotic weed days, and for good measure it throws in cabbage-stump days for free—empty and inedible, white, bewildered, and unnecessary days.

They sprout up irregular and misshapen, formless and fused together like the fingers of a monstrous hand, sprouting buds and coiled up into a fist.

Others liken those days to apocrypha slipped in furtively between the chapters of the great book of the year, to palimpsests inserted secretly among its pages, or to those white, unprinted sheets upon which one’s eyes, having read their fill and become replete with content, might be drained of visions and relinquish colours, ever paler on those empty pages, reposing on their nothingness before being drawn into the labyrinths of new adventures and chapters.

Ah, that old, yellowed romance of the year! That great, crumbling book of the calendar! It lies forgotten, somewhere in the archives of time, where its contents continue to grow between the covers, endlessly swollen by months of garrulousness, a rapid autogeny of gibberish, all the storytelling and the reveries that multiply within it. Ah! And in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these tales of my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that, someday, they will strike root imperceptibly between the faded leaves of that most magnificent, scattering book; that they will fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?

The matters of which we shall speak here took place then, in the thirteenth, supernumerary, and somewhat spurious month of that year, on those dozen or so empty pages of the great chronicle of the calendar.

The mornings were strangely pungent and invigorating then. From a serene and cooler pace of time, an entirely new taste in the air, a change in the consistency of the light, it was plain to see that a different run of days had arrived, a new region of the Holy Year. One’s voice resonated beneath those skies with the sonorousness and freshness of a still new and unoccupied apartment, its aroma of lacquer and paint, incipient and speculative matters. That new echo was tested with a strange stirring of emotion, sliced into with curiosity, like a ring cake on some cool and sober morning, on the eve of a journey.

Once more, my father was sitting in the rear office of the shop, a vaulted little chamber crisscrossed like a beehive into multi-cellular registries, endlessly shedding its layers of papers, letters and invoices. The cross-ruled and empty existence of that room sprang from the rustling of those pages, the endless shuffling of those documents, and from the incessant sifting of those letters, with their innumerous company headings, an apotheosis was created in the air in the form of a factory town as birds in flight see it—bristling with smoking chimneys, surrounded by stacks of coins, its limits described by the flourishes and meanderings of grandiloquent &s and Sons.

There sat Father on a high stool, as if in an aviary, as the dovecotes of the filing cabinets rustled their paper sheaves and all of their birds’ nests and tree-hollows chimed throughout with a twittering of numbers.

The depths of the great shop were darkened and enriched every day with new supplies of cloth, serge, velvet and cord. On those dark shelves, in those storehouses and repositories of cool, felty hues, the dark and mellow pageantry of things yielded its hundredfold interest and autumn’s abundant capital was increased and consolidated. That capital grew larger and darker there, distributed ever more widely on the shelves as if in the galleries of some great theatre, replenished and supplemented each morning with new consignments of merchandise, which arrived along with the cool of the dawn, in boxes and crates carried in on the great, bearlike shoulders of groaning, bearded porters, in mists of autumn freshness and vodka. The shop assistants unpacked those new supplies of lavish, deep-blue hues. They filled with them, neatly plugged with them, all of the chinks and gaps in the tall cupboards. It was a colossal register of all possible autumnal hues, ordered into layers and sorted into shades, running up and down as if on a ringing flight of stairs, a scale of all variegated octaves. It began at the bottom, where, plaintively and timidly, it ventured alto slides and semitones, then it passed to the faded ashes of the distance, to tapestry azures, and rising to the heights in ever broader harmonies, it arrived at deep royal blues, the indigo of distant forests, the plush of murmuring parks, and from there it entered the rustling shade of wilting gardens, through all of their ochres, rich reds, russets and sepias, finally to arrive at a dark aroma of mushrooms, a waft of touchwood in the depths of an autumn night, to the muted accompaniment of the deepest double basses.

My father walked along those arsenals of the cloth autumn. He placated and silenced those hulks and their rising force, the calm power of the Season. He wanted to keep those reserves of stowed-away hues intact for as long as possible. He was reluctant to break up that endowment fund of the autumn and exchange it for ready cash. But he knew, he sensed, that the time was at hand, that soon an autumn gale, ravaging and warm, would blow over those cupboards and they would empty. There would be no restraining their outflow, those torrents of colourfulness about to burst over the whole town.

For the time of the High Season was approaching and the streets were growing busy. At six o‑clock in the evening, the town blossomed with fervour: the houses blushed and the people wandered, animated by some inner fire, glaringly made up and painted, their eyes shining with some beautiful and evil, festival fever.

In the side streets, in quiet alleyways leading nowhere now but into an evening district, the town was empty. Only children played on the little squares, beneath their balconies. They played breathlessly, raucously, and nonsensically. They put tiny balloons to their lips, to inflate them and suddenly, glaringly to scowl themselves into great, gurgling, swashing excrescences, or to cock-a-doodle-doo themselves into stupid cockerel masks, autumn apparitions, red and crowing, colourful, fantastic, and absurd. So puffed up and crowing, they seemed about to soar into the air in long, coloured chains, to be strung over the town like autumn “V” formations of birds, fantastic flotillas of tissue-paper and autumnal weather, or they rode, screaming, on noisy little carts, which resounded with a coloured rattling of wheels, spokes, and poles. Loaded up with their screams, those carts rolled to the bottom of the street, all the way down to a yellow evening brook that was surging in a crevice, where they fell to pieces in a wreckage of splinters, wheels, and sticks.

And as the children’s games grew noisier and more confused, the town’s blushes deepened, flushed with crimson. The whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken, and an hallucinatory twilight rapidly seeped out and infected everything. That pestilence of the twilight spread everywhere; insidiously and venomously, it went from place to place, and whatever it touched quickly mouldered, blackened, and crumbled into dust. The people fled the twilight in silent panic, but that leprosy caught up with them at once, breaking out in a dark rash on their foreheads, and their faces were lost, falling away in great, shapeless smears as they ran, without features now, without eyes, casting off mask after mask until the twilight teemed with those discarded masks and dominoes, tumbling in the wake of their flight. Then everything began to develop a patina of putrefying black bark, infected scabs of darkness peeling away in great flakes. But as everything down below fell into confusion and ruin in that silent turmoil, the panic of its hasty schedule, the silent alarum of sunset remained up above, rising ever higher and higher and trembling with the tinkling of a million silent bluebells, surging with the ascent of a million silent skylarks, all flying together into one great, silver infinity. And suddenly it was night-time, holy night, still growing, the gusts of wind that swelled it still gathering their strength. In its multifarious labyrinth, bright nests were carved out—shops, great coloured lanterns, heaped up with merchandise and filled with the bustling of customers. Through the bright panes of those lanterns, the ritual of autumn shopping could be discerned, noisy and full of bizarre ceremony.

That great, voluminous autumn night, dilated by the wind, its shadows lengthening, concealed bright pockets in its dark folds, pouches of coloured trinkets and gaudy merchandise, a grocer’s shop miscellany of chocolates and biscuits. Botched from confectionery boxes, brightly wallpapered with advertisements for chocolate bars and filled with tablets of soap, cheerful rubbish, golden trifles, tinfoil, trumpets, wafers and coloured mints, those kiosks and stalls were stations of frivolity, rattle-boxes of blitheness strewn along the creepers of an enormous, labyrinthine night flapping in the winds.

Huge, dark crowds flowed in noisy confusion in the darkness, the shuffling of a thousand feet and the uproar of a thousand mouths, a teeming, tangled migration dragging along the arteries of the autumnal town. And that river flowed on, full of turmoil and dark looks, broken into conversations and shreds of gossip, a great pulp of rumours, laughter and tumult, as if dried autumnal poppy heads were moving in a crowd and scattering their seeds—rattlebox-heads, doorknocker-people.

Restless, tinged with blushes, his eyes shining, my father wandered about the brightly lit shop, listening intently. Through the display window and portal, the noise of the town, the muffled hubbub of the flowing throng, arrived from afar. Above the silence of the shop, suspended from its great vault, a paraffin lamp shone brightly, and it silently chased the last trace of shadow from every nook and cranny. The vast, empty floor crackled softly in its light, calculating, down and across, all of its gleaming squares, its chessboard of great tiles, which spoke to one another in a silence of crackles, and replied, now here, now there, with a loud crack. But the layers of cloth lay quiet, voiceless in their felty downiness, passing looks back and forth behind Father’s back, all along the walls, exchanging silent, knowing signs from cupboard to cupboard.

Father listened. His ears seemed to grow elongated in that nocturnal silence, to branch out beyond the window like a fantastic coral, an undulating red polyp in the sediment of the night. He listened and he heard. He heard with growing unease the distant tide of the approaching crowd. He looked around the empty shop in dismay, searching for the shop assistants, but those dark, red haired angels had flown away somewhere, and he was left alone in fear of the crowd that soon would swamp the silence of the shop in a raucous, plundering multitude and divide it among themselves, auction off all that rich autumn accumulated throughout the years in its great, secluded storehouse. Where were the shop assistants? Where were those handsome cherubs who ought to be defending the dark cloth ramparts? Father had the awful suspicion that, somewhere deep inside the house, they were sinning with the daughters of men. Standing motionless, filled with foreboding, his eyes shining in the bright silence of the shop, he heard with his inner ear what was going on deep inside the house, in the rear chambers of that great, coloured lantern. Room after room, chamber after chamber, the house opened before him like a house of cards. He saw the shop assistants’ pursuit of Adela through all of those empty and brightly lit rooms—upstairs, downstairs, until at last she gave them the slip and fell into the bright kitchen, which she barricaded with the credenza. She stood breathless, shiny and amused, smiling, and fluttering her great eyelashes. The shop assistants giggled, crouching at the door. The kitchen window was open onto a great, black night filled with reveries and confusion, its black, half-open panes ablaze with a reflex of distant illumination. Here and there stood shining pots and demijohns, in perfect stillness, their greasy glaze gleaming in the silence. Adela, her eyelids fluttering, cautiously leaned her tinged, rouged face out of the window. She was looking in the dark courtyard for the shop assistants, certain of their ambush. And she saw them. They were making their way in cautious single file along a narrow ledge at first-floor level, along a wall red in a glow of distant illumination, and stealing up to the window. Father shrieked with fury and despair. But just then, the uproar of voices grew very loud and suddenly the bright shop window was populated with faces up close and contorted with laughter, garrulous faces flattening their noses onto the glistening panes. Father turned scarlet with distress. He jumped onto the counter, and when the crowd had lain siege to that fortress, when that raucous throng had stormed the shop, he leaped in a single bound onto a shelf piled high with bales of cloth, where, suspended high above the crowd, he blew with all his might into a huge shofar and trumpeted the alert. But it was no sound of angels hurrying to his aid that came to fill that vault. In reply to each wail of his trumpet there came only the great, laughing chorus of the crowd.

“Jakub, trade with us! Jakub, sell to us!” they called out in unison, and those continually repeated cries fell into the rhythm of a chorus, which slowly became the melody of a refrain sung by every throat. My father conceded defeat. He jumped down from the high ledge and ran, shrieking, toward the barricades of cloth. He was grown gigantic with anger, his face bulging into a purple fist. He ran at the cloth ramparts like a prophet of war and began to rage against them. He pushed with all his might into the huge bales of wool and prised them from their places. He pushed his way with his whole body under the enormous bales of cloth and heaved them onto the counter, where they fell with a dull flop. The bales flew out into enormous banners, unwinding and fluttering in the air. The shelves burst forth from all sides with explosions of drapery, waterfalls of cloth, as if smote with Moses’ rod.

Surging, flowing in broad rivers, the cupboards’ reserves poured out. The shelves’ colourful contents were disgorged. They grew; they increased; they flooded all of the counters and desks. The walls of the shop disappeared under the mighty formations of that cloth cosmogony, those mountain ranges towering into lofty peaks. Wide valleys opened between the mountainsides and the contours of continents thundered amid a broad pathos of uplands. The shop’s expanse widened into a panorama of an autumn landscape, full of lakes and distances, and against the backdrop of that scene, Father walked between the folds and valleys of a fantastic Canaan. He walked with great strides, his hands outspread prophetically in the clouds, and with inspired strokes he fashioned a country.

But down below, on the foothills of that Sinai grown out of Father’s anger, the multitude gesticulated and transgressed; they were worshipping Baal, and trading. They grasped whole handfuls of those soft folds and draped themselves in that coloured cloth. They wound themselves up in improvised carnival masks and mantles, and chattered profusely, though unintelligibly.

Grown tall with anger, my father rose over those groups of traders, and with a powerful word he reproved their idolatry from on high. Seized by despair, he clambered onto the high gallery of the cupboards and ran madly over the beams of their shelves, over the clattering planks of their bare scaffolding, pursued by an image of shameless licentiousness which he sensed behind his back, deep inside the house. The shop assistants had now reached the iron balcony at the kitchen window, and clinging to the balustrade, had seized Adela by the waist and were pulling her out of the window, her eyelids fluttering and her slender legs in silk stockings trailing behind her.

As my father’s gestures of fury, in his mortification at the odiousness of sin, became as one with the menace of the landscape, Baal’s carefree multitude below began to succumb to immoderate gaiety. Some parodistic passion, some pestilence of laughter, had taken possession of that mob. But how could one expect solemnity of them, that multitude of doorknockers and nutcrackers! How could one expect those hand-mills, incessantly grinding out a coloured pulp of words, to comprehend Father’s great concerns? Deaf to the thunder of his prophetic anger, those dealers in their silk frogged coats squatted in small clusters around the folded foothills of the material, where they thrashed out, effusively and amid laughter, the merits of the merchandise. Those black marketeers eagerly besmirched the noble substance of the landscape; they ground it up into a hash of idle talk, and all but consumed it.

Elsewhere stood groups of Jews in coloured gabardines and huge fur kalpaks, before the high waterfalls of bright material. These were the men of the High Council, gentlemen venerable and full of solemnity, stroking their long, well-kept beards and conducting quiet, diplomatic conversations. But even in the midst of that ceremonious talk, there was a flash of smiling irony in the looks they exchanged.

Among those groups, the vulgar multitude wound its way: an amorphous crowd, a mob without faces or identities. They began to fill the gaps in the landscape; they carpeted its background with bluebells and rattle-boxes of mindless chattering. They were a clownish element, a crowd of Pulcinellas and Arlecchinos, dancing with abandon, who reduced to absurdity with their clownish pranks, lacking as they did the serious intentions of traders, the occasional transactions that were entered into. But gradually, grown bored with their clownishness, that cheerful little multitude began to disband among the further regions of the landscape, and slowly they became lost there, amid its stone curves and valleys. It seemed likely that they had fallen somewhere, one after the other, between the folds and crevices of that terrain, like children in the corners and nooks of an apartment who are weary of revelry on the night of a ball.

Meanwhile, the Town Fathers, the men of the Great Sanhedrin, strolled in solemn and dignified groups and conducted quiet and profound disputes. Dispersed throughout that great, mountainous country, they wandered in twos and threes on its remote, winding roads, and that whole desert upland was populated with their dark, tiny silhouettes, above which there sagged a dark and heavy sky, cloudy and folded, ploughed into long, parallel furrows, silver and white slices, exhibiting in its profundities the ever more distant layers of its stratification.

The lamplight created an artificial day in that country, a strange day, a day with no morning or evening.

My father slowly grew calm. His anger settled; it cooled down in the layers and strata of the landscape. He was now sitting in the galleries of the high shelves and gazing out into an immense country passing into autumn. He could see people out fishing on distant lakes. Those fishermen sat in pairs in little cockleshell boats, casting their nets into the water. Boys on the banks carried baskets on their heads, filled with a flapping, silvery catch.

Then he noticed groups of wanderers in the distance, turning their heads to the sky and pointing at something with upraised hands.

And the sky broke out in a colourful, teeming rash; it spilled over with undulating smears, which grew, developed, and rapidly filled the sky with a strange multitude of birds. They circled and wheeled in great, overlapping spirals, and the whole sky was filled with their soaring flights, the flapping of their wings and the majestic lines of their quiet gliding. Some floated, like enormous storks, unmoving on their calmly outspread wings, whilst others, reminiscent of colourful plumes waving in barbarian adulation, flapped clumsily and heavily to remain aloft on currents of warm air. Others, finally, inept conglomerations of wings, huge legs and plucked necks, called to mind badly stuffed vultures and condors with sawdust spilling out of them. Among them were two-headed birds, many-winged birds, and cripples, hobbling in the air in ungainly one-winged flight. The sky began to resemble an old fresco, full of abnormities and fantastic beasts, which circled, crossed each other’s paths, and returned once more in colourful ellipses.

My father, bathed in sudden radiance, hoisted himself aloft by the joists. He stretched out his hands, calling to the birds with an old incantation. Filled with emotion, he recognised them: It was the remote, forgotten progeny of that avian generation that Adela, once upon a time, had driven off to every fringe of the sky. And now it had returned, degenerate and luxuriant, that artificial progeny, that internally wasted avian tribe. Grown preposterously huge, a stupidly shot up manifestation, they were empty and lifeless inside. All the energy of those birds had gone into their plumage, expanded into fantasticality. They resembled some museum of disused species—rejects of bird paradise. Some were flying on their backs; they had heavy, ungainly beaks, like padlocks or zip fasteners, weighted down with coloured excrescences, and they were blind. How that unexpected return affected Father! How he marvelled at their avian instinct, their attachment to their Master, whom that banished tribe had kept like a legend in their souls, finally to return after many generations to their primæval homeland, on the last day before the extinction of their tribe.

But those blind, paper birds could no longer recognise Father. He called to them in vain with the old incantation, in forgotten avian speech. They heard him not, nor did they see him.

Suddenly stones began to whistle through the air. It was the jesters, the stupid and mindless tribe; they had begun to aim projectiles into the fantastic avian sky.

In vain, Father called the alert. In vain, he tried to warn them with imploring gestures. They could not catch his words. They could not make him out. And the birds fell. Each one, struck by a projectile, drooped ponderously and sagged in the air. Before they hit the ground, they were nothing more than ill-proportioned clumps of feathers.

That upland was strewn in the blinking of an eye with that strange, fantastic carrion. Before Father could reach the site of the massacre, the whole magnificent avian brood already lay dead, scattered over the rocks. Only now, at close quarters, could Father perceive how utterly paltry was that impoverished generation, how truly comical its tawdry anatomy. They were enormous bunches of feathers, old carcasses stuffed any old how. Many had no discernible head, since that club-shaped part of their body bore no indications of a soul. Some were coated with fur, clotted with a pelage, like bison, and they stunk abominably. Others were reminiscent of hunchbacked, bald and sickly camels. And others, finally, were apparently made of a kind of paper, empty inside, albeit magnificently coloured on the outside. And some, at close quarters, were shown to be nothing more than huge peacock tails, coloured fans into which, by incomprehensible means, some semblance of life had been breathed.

I saw my father’s woeful return. The artificial day had already begun to take on the hues of an ordinary morning. In the ravaged shop, the highest shelves were replete with the colours of a morning sky. Among the fragments of a dead landscape painting, in the devastated wings of a nocturnal stage, Father saw the shop assistants rising from their sleep. They rose from among the bales of cloth and yawned to the sunshine. Upstairs in the kitchen, Adela, warm from sleep, her hair tousled, was grinding coffee in a mill, pressing it to her white bosom, from which the grindings derived their sheen and their heat. The cat was washing itself in the sunshine.

The post A Night of the High Season appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Bruno Schulz

***

1

The end of winter stood that year under the banner of an especially favourable astronomical conjunction. The calendar’s coloured predictions blossomed redly on the snow which lay on the outskirts of the mornings. From the fiery red of those Sundays and holidays, a glow fell onto half of the week, and those days burned coldly in a false fire. For a moment, deluded hearts beat more rapidly, enthralled by that heralding redness, which heralded nothing, but was merely a premature alarum, coloured calendar boasting painted onto the week’s binding in bright vermilion. Every night since Twelfth Night, I had been sitting over our table’s white parade—gleaming with candlesticks and silverware—and playing endless games of patience. The night beyond the window grew brighter by the hour, all iced and glistening, filled with endlessly sprouting almonds and candies, whilst the moon, an inexhaustible transformist, utterly absorbed in its late lunar practices, assumed its phases by turns. Brighter and brighter, it turned over all the court cards in a game of Préférence, then it replicated all of their colours. Often now, it was visible in the daytime, standing to the side and awaiting its turn, equipped too early, brassy and without radiance, a melancholy knave with his shining club. Meanwhile, whole skyfuls of cloudy wisps passed in a silent, white, and immense motion across its solitary profile, barely covering it with their shimmering and piscine shell of mother-of-pearl, into which the coloured firmament would curdle toward evening. Those days were leafed through vacantly. A gale gusted noisily, high above the roofs; it blew the chimneys cold to their very hearths; it erected imaginary scaffolding and gantries over the town; then it knocked those lofty, clattering constructions down in a tumult of rafters and beams. Occasionally, a fire would break out in a distant suburb. The chimney sweeps ran about the town on high roofs and little galleries, under a verdigris and torn sky. In that aerial perspective, stepping from the field of one roof to the next amid the pinnacles and pennants of the town, they dreamed that the gale had briefly opened up for them the lids of roofs over girls’ alcoves; then it slammed them shut over the great, billowing book of the town—astonishing literature for many days and nights. The breezes blew themselves out and were still. The shop assistants were putting spring fabrics on display in the shop window, and from the soft hues of the wool, the weather soon abated, was tinted with lavender and flushed with pale mignonette. The snow dwindled. It was pleated into a baby’s blanket, which drifted drily away into the air, sucked up by cobalt breezes, reabsorbed by an immense and concave, sunless and cloudless sky. Here and there, oleanders were blossoming in people’s apartments. Windows were thrown open, and in the aimless reverie of a sky blue day, the mindless chirruping of sparrows filled the room. Vehement scuffles of chaffinches, bullfinches, and tomtits converged for a moment above the empty squares, twittering dreadfully. They flew off in all directions, blown away by the breeze, annihilated, blotted out in empty blue, and coloured spots remained behind them for a moment in one’s eye, a handful of confetti tossed blindly into the bright expanse, and melted deep within the eye in neutral azure.

A premature spring season began. Lawyers’ apprentices, the epitome of elegance and chic, wore thin moustaches curled up into spirals and high, stiff collars. On days scoured by the gale, as if by a flood, as the wind gusted clamorously, high above the town, they doffed their coloured bowler hats from afar to ladies of their acquaintance. They leaned with their backs against the wind, their coat tails fluttering. They averted their eyes, all denial and gentility, not wishing to expose their ladyloves to scandal. For a moment, those ladies didn’t know where to look; they cried out in fright, beaten about by their dresses. But then, recovering their composure, they graciously returned a smile of acknowledgement.

Often in the afternoon, the wind would die down. On the porch, Adela cleaned huge copper pans, which rattled metallically at her touch. The sky drew to a halt over the shingled roofs, exhausted, its blue roads branching. The shop assistants, sent forth from the shop on some errand, lingered near her for a long time on the threshold of the kitchen, leaning against the balustrade of the porch, drunk on the day long wind, a jumble of thoughts in their heads, stirred by the strident chirruping of the sparrows. A breeze carried the lost refrain of a barrel organ from the distance. Their soft words were inaudible, enunciated in hushed tones, with an air of innocence, as if merely in passing; although in truth they were calculated to scandalise Adela. Cut to the quick, she reacted violently. She admonished them in utter rage and exultation, and her face, clouded and grey from springtime dreams, flushed redly with anger and amusement. They lowered their eyes in their despicable devotion, with inappropriate satisfaction that they had succeeded in provoking her.

Days and afternoons went by. Everyday events, seen from the height of our porch, flowed in confusion over the town, over the labyrinth of the roofs and houses in the hazy glow of those grey weeks, weeks crowded with tinkers proclaiming their services. Occasionally in the distance, Szloma’s powerful sneeze lent comical emphasis to the town’s effusive, faraway tumult. On some far removed square, Tłuja, the mad girl, driven to despair by the teasing of boys, began to dance her wild sarabande, kicking her skirts high, to the delight of the crowd. A puff of wind smoothed and levelled those outbursts, distributed them amid the monotonous and grey tumult, dragged them around incessantly on a shore of shingled roofs in the afternoon’s milky, smoky air. Resting her hands on the balustrade, leaning over that distant, tempestuous roaring of the town, Adela could catch all the louder emphases. Smiling, she rearranged those lost syllables, trying to connect them, to read something meaningful in that great, grey, rising and falling monotony of the day.

The epoch stood under the banner of mechanics and electricity. From under the wings of human genius, a whole swarm of inventions was showered upon the world. Cigar boxes fitted with electric lighters appeared in bourgeois homes. A switch was thrown, and a swarm of electric sparks ignited a petrol-soaked wick. Stupendous hopes were founded on this. A musical box in the shape of a Chinese pagoda, wound up with a key, immediately began to play its miniature rondo, rotating like a carousel as tiny bells trilled at its edges, and on its opposite sides, wings of tiny doors opened to reveal its revolving, barrel-organ core as it played its snuffbox triolet. Electric doorbells were installed in every home. Domestic life stood under the banner of galvanism. A coil of insulated wire had become the symbol of the times. Fashionably dressed young men in salons demonstrated Galvani’s phenomenon and received the radiant looks of ladies. An electrical conductor opened the door to women’s hearts. The experiment successfully concluded, those heroes of the day blew kisses amid the applause of those salons.

There was not long to wait before the town was overrun with velocipedes of all shapes and sizes. A philosophical view of the world had become obligatory, and whoever acknowledged the notion of progress had to accept the consequences and mount a velocipede. First, of course, came the lawyers’ apprentices, that vanguard of new ideas with their curled-up moustaches and coloured bowler hats, the hope and flower of our youth. Scattering the raucous crowd, they ploughed into its throng on enormous bicycles and tricycles, their wire spokes chiming. Holding tightly to the handlebars, they manœuvred their enormous, lofty front wheels, cutting their way through the amused rabble in a winding, wobbling line. One or two were seized with apostolic frenzy, and rising up on their whirring pedals, like stirrups, they addressed the people from on high, foretelling a new and happy era for mankind—salvation through the bicycle… And they rode onward amid the cheers of their audience, doffing their hats in all directions.

And yet, there was something woefully compromising in those magnificent and triumphal excursions, some painful and unpleasant grinding which caused them to incline dangerously at the height of their triumph and fall headlong into self-parody. Surely they sensed it themselves, suspended spiderlike in their filigree apparatus, straddling their pedals like huge hopping frogs as they executed, amid their widely rolling wheels, their ducklike movements. A mere step away from the ridiculous, they lurched desperately forward, leaning over the handlebars and pedalling ever faster, a gymnastic cloud of vehement contortions, flying head over heels into a somersault. Is it any wonder? On the strength of that unlawful practical joke, Man was encroaching on a realm of stupendous facilitation, bought too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and in the end, that disproportion between cause and effect, that blatant fraud on Nature, that excessive reward for a brilliant trick, had to be offset by self-parody. And so they rode onward, pitiful victors, martyrs of their own genius, amid elemental outbursts of laughter, so great was the comedic power of those miracles of technology.

The first time my brother brought an electromagnet home from school, when we all experienced, with an inward shudder, the secretly vibrating life locked up inside an electric circuit, Father gave a condescending smile. A far-reaching thought had taken shape in his mind, which drew together and connected certain suspicions, which had begun to beset him long ago. Why did Father smile to himself? Why did his watering eyes revolve into the backs of their orbits in comical mock-sincerity? Who knows? Did he perhaps have some inkling of a crude trick, some vulgar intrigue, certain transparent machinations lying behind the stupendous revelations of mysterious power? That moment marked Father’s return to his laboratory experiments.

Father’s laboratory was rather basic: a few lengths of coiled wire, some jars of acid, zinc, lead, and coal—such was the entire workshop of that bizarre esotericist. “Matter,” he said, stifling a cough and modestly lowering his eyes. “Matter, good sirs…” He left the sentence unfinished; although he let it be understood that he was on the trail of some crude deception, which we, even as we sat there, had all been taken in by. His eyes downcast, Father quietly mocked that age old fetish. “Panta rei!” he cried, demonstrating with movements of his hands the eternal circulation of substance. For a long time, he had wanted to mobilise the hidden power which circulates within matter, to melt its rigidity and clear its path to thorough penetration, transfusion, and universal circulation, its only true nature. “Principium individuationis be damned,” he declared, giving vent to his boundless contempt for that primal human principle; though this was thrown in incidentally, in passing, as he ran his fingers along a length of wire. He closed his eyes, feeling different places in the circuit, his sensitive touch discerning faint differences in potentials. He made cuts in the wire; he leaned forward, listening intently, and suddenly he set off again, repeating this activity at another place in the circuit. He seemed to have ten hands and twenty senses. His divided attention was turned in a hundred different directions at once; no point in space evaded his suspicion. He leaned forward once more, tapping the wire at a certain place, and suddenly jumping back, he shot like a cat to the place he had been looking for, and with faint embarrassment, missed his target. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, turning to an amazed spectator who had been following his actions closely. “Excuse me. It is this little space here which interests me, which you yourself, sir, are occupying. If you will kindly move aside for a moment…” And he quickly made his cursory measurements, as agile and nimble as a canary hopping blithely in convulsions of its somatic system.

Metals dipped in acid solutions, saline, corroding in their pitiful bath, had become conductive in the darkness. They buzzed monotonously, sang metallically, and glowed intermolecularly, roused from numb lifelessness in the unending twilight of those funereal and late days. Invisible charges amassed at their poles, and superceded them, emptying into the whirling darkness. A barely perceptible prickliness coursed through space, blind, teeming currents polarised into concentric lines of power, the circulations and spirals of a magnetic field. Now here, now there, pieces of apparatus signalled from their slumber and replied to one another, belatedly, too late, in despondent monosyllables—a line, a dot, at intervals in muted lethargy. Father stood with a pained smile in the midst of those wandering currents, shocked by that stuttering articulation, that irrevocably closed and inescapable distress, signalling monotonously in crippled half-syllables from its unliberated depths.

On the basis of these investigations, Father arrived at stupendous conclusions. He proved, for example, that an electric bell, based on the principle of the so-called Neef’s hammer, is a rather commonplace mystification. Man had never broken into Nature’s laboratory; it was Nature itself that had drawn Man into its own machinations, achieving, through his experiments, its own ends, heading who can say where. At lunchtime, my father touched with the nail of his index finger the handle of his spoon, dipped in his soup, and lo and behold, Neef’s bell began to rattle inside a lamp. The whole apparatus was an unnecessary pretext, with no meaning in reality. Neef’s bell was merely a meeting place for certain impulses of substance finding their way through human ingenuity. What Nature wanted, Nature produced. Man was merely an oscillating arrow, a weaver’s shuttle, soaring here, soaring there, in accordance with its will. He was merely an element, a component of Neef’s hammer.

Someone proposed the term, “mesmerism”, and Father eagerly seized on it. The range of his theory narrowed until it had found its fundamental cell. According to this theory, Man was a mere transit station, a momentary knot of mesmeric currents, entwined here, entwined there, in the womb of eternal matter. The inventions he had gloried in were all merely the snares which Nature had drawn him into, mantraps of the unknown. Father’s experiments began to assume a character of magic and prestidigitation, not lacking in a faint tinge of parodistic jugglery, to say nothing of his various experiments with doves, which, with a wave of his wand, he arranged into twos and threes, into dozens, and then, with a great show of effort, reincorporated, one by one, back into the wand. He tipped his hat, and out they flew in a fluttering stream, their full compliment returning to reality, filling the tabletop in a bustling, waddling, cooing cluster. Sometimes, he would come to a halt at an unexpected point in the experiment. He stood uncertainly, his eyes closed, and after a moment’s pause he went with tripping steps to the hallway, where he thrust his head into the chimney shaft. It was dark and blissful there, deadened by soot, like the very core of nothingness, and warm currents trailed up and down. Father closed his eyes and remained awhile in that warm, black nothingness. We all considered this incident to be meaningless in reality. It had retreated, as it were, into the wings of affairs, and we inwardly turned a blind eye to that extramarginal occurrence, part of an entirely different order of things.

My father had some truly dispiriting tricks in his repertoire, to pierce the heart with true melancholy. The chairs in our dining room had high backrests with flower and leaf garlands, beautifully carved in a realistic style, but Father had only to flick these carvings with his finger, and suddenly they took on an unusually comical physiognomy, some vague suggestion. They began to flicker and twinkle knowingly, which was extremely, almost unbearably embarrassing, until at last that twinkling began to follow a quite definite course, an irresistible compulsion, and someone or other in the room began to exclaim, “Aunt Wanda, by God! It’s Aunt Wanda!” And the ladies began to squeal; for there, indeed, was Aunt Wanda, true to life. Or rather, it was the real Aunt Wanda, who had come to visit us. She was really sitting there, carrying on her endless discourse, leaving no one else an opportunity to speak. Father’s miracles had cancelled themselves out. It was not an apparition: it was just Aunt Wanda, in all her ordinariness and commonness, which precluded all thoughts of the miraculous.

Before considering the further events of that memorable winter, I ought briefly to mention a certain incident which has always been ruefully hushed up in the chronicle of our family. What happened to Uncle Edward? Unsuspecting, bursting with health and enterprise, he came to visit us at that time. He had left his wife and daughter in the country, dutifully awaiting his return, and arrived in the best of spirits, to take a break from his family and to have some fun. And what happened? Father’s experiments made an electrifying impression on him. Having witnessed the first few examples of his accomplishments, Edward stood up at once and took off his overcoat. He placed himself entirely at Father’s disposal. “Unreservedly!” as he proclaimed, with a steadfast look and a firm shake of the hand. My father understood, and began by ensuring that Uncle had none of the traditional prejudices regarding the principium individuationis. It appeared he had none whatsoever. Uncle was broad-minded and unsuperstitious. His one passion was to serve Science.

At first, Father allowed him a certain latitude. He was laying the foundations for a radical experiment. Uncle Edward made use of his freedom by exploring the town. He purchased a velocipede of impressive size and circuited the market square atop its enormous front wheel, looking in at first-floor windows from the heights of his saddle. Passing by our house, he tipped his hat elegantly to the ladies standing at the window. He had a moustache curled up into spirals and a small, pointed beard. But he soon became convinced that a velocipede could never lead him to the deeper secrets of mechanics, that so brilliant an apparatus was, nonetheless, incapable of providing lasting metaphysical shudders. And then the experiments began, to which Uncle’s lack of prejudices regarding the principium individuationis were so indispensable. Uncle Edward had no qualms whatsoever about being reduced physically, for the benefit of Science, to the naked principle of Neef’s hammer. He agreed ungrudgingly to the progressive paring away of all his characteristics, with the aim of laying bare his deepest essence, identical, as he had long felt, to the aforementioned principle.

Father, shutting himself away in his study, set about the gradual disassemblement of Uncle Edward’s convoluted essence, an exhausting process of psychoanalysis extending over days and nights. The table in his study began to fill with the scattered complexes of Uncle’s ego. In the early stages, Uncle Edward still turned up at mealtimes. Drastically reduced, he attempted to participate in our conversations. He took one last ride on his velocipede, and then, seeing himself more and more dismantled, gave it up. He seemed to be burdened by something shameful, something characteristic of the stage that he had reached, and he took to avoiding people. Father, meanwhile, was drawing ever nearer to the goal of his efforts. Removing all the inessentials, one by one, he had reduced Uncle to the indispensable minimum. He placed him high up in a niche in the wall of the stairwell, arranging his elements on the basis of the Leclanché cell. The wall was mouldy in that spot; mildew had spread its whitish pleating there. Without scruple, Father availed himself of all the capital of Uncle’s enthusiasm, pulling him out in a long thread, all along the hallway and the left wing of the house. Advancing on his stepladders along the dark corridor, he drove little nails into the wall, all along the trail of Uncle’s remaining being. Those smoky and yellow afternoons were almost totally dark, and Father held a lighted candle close to the rotting wall, illuminating it inch by inch. Accounts vary, but it appears that Uncle Edward, so heroically self-possessed until that point, betrayed at the last moment a certain impatience. They even say that this culminated in a violent, though belated, outburst, which all but wrecked the work in its final stages of completion. But the installation was ready now, and Uncle Edward, who had been a model husband, father, and businessman all his life, submitted also in the end, of higher necessity, to this, his final role.

Uncle functioned splendidly. On no occasion did he refuse obedience. Having left his embroiled complications behind, in which he had become lost and entangled so many times before, he had at last discovered the purity of a uniform and straightforward principle, to which he would remain subordinate from that time onward. At the cost of his barely manageable multifacetedness, he had acquired simple, unproblematic immortality. Was he happy? There is no point in asking. Such a question has meaning only in cases of beings replete with a wealth of alternatives and possibilities, wherein actual reality may stand in opposition to possibilities incompletely real, and be reflected in them. But Uncle Edward had no alternatives; for him, there was no such thing as the dichotomy of happy and unhappy. He was fully integrated, entirely self-identical. One could not suppress a certain admiration at seeing how punctually, how precisely he functioned. Even his wife, Aunt Teresa, who came looking for her husband some time later, could not restrain herself from pressing the button now and then, to hear that sonorous, resonant tone in which she recognised the former timbre of his voice at moments of irritation. As for his daughter, Edza, one might say that she admired her Father’s career. Later, it is true, she did take a certain revenge on me for my father’s deed, but that is part of another story now.

2

DAYS WENT BY. The afternoons grew longer. There was nothing to be done with them. A surfeit of time, still raw, still vain and useless, dragged the evenings out into empty twilights. Adela, having washed the dishes early and cleaned the kitchen, was standing bemused on the porch, gazing vacantly into the evening’s palely reddening distance. Her beautiful eyes—large, convex, and shining, so expressive at other times—were frozen in blank contemplation. Her complexion, clouded and greyed at the end of winter from the kitchen’s fumes, was now imbued with milky reflexes, iridescent shades, and enamel sparkles, rejuvenated under the influence of that month’s springtime gravitation, waxing quarter-moon by quarter-moon. She had now prevailed over the shop assistants. They had lost face under her dark looks. They had abandoned their role as jaded frequenters of taverns and bordellos, and, shaken by her new beauty, now sought another basis on which to approach her, ready to concede to relations on new terms, to acknowledge empirically established facts.

Despite all expectations, Father’s experiments produced no upheavals in everyday life. The grafting of mesmerism onto the body of modern physics had not proven fertile; not because there was no grain of validity in Father’s discoveries; it is not truth that determines the success of an idea. Our metaphysical hunger is limited, easily sated. Father was standing at the very threshold of new and sensational discoveries when disinclination and anarchy began to sneak into all of us, the ranks of his supporters and neophytes. The signs of impatience came ever more frequently, building up to open protest. Our natures rebelled against the relaxation of fundamental laws. We could take no more new wonders; we wanted a return to the old, solid, and reliable prose of the eternal order. And Father understood this. He understood that he had gone too far, and curtailed the flight of his ideas. The circle of his elegant disciples—men with twirled-up moustaches, and their ladyfriends—began to melt away by the day. Father, hoping to withdraw with honour, was about to deliver his last, decisive lecture, when a new event suddenly turned everyone’s attention in an entirely unexpected direction.

One day, my brother, returning home from school, brought us the news, improbable but true, of the impending end of the world. We made him repeat it, certain that we had misheard. But no. Here is precisely that incredible, that inconceivably incomprehensible news that we heard:

Just so, as it stood, unready and unfinished, at a chance point in time and space, without closing its accounts or reaching any goal, in midsentence, so to speak, with no full stop or exclamation mark, without God’s judgement or wrath, on the friendliest of terms, dutifully, and in accordance with common consent and mutually acknowledged principles, the world was about to come simply and irrevocably to grief.

No; it was not to be the eschatological and tragical End augured long ago by prophets, no last act of The Divine Comedy. No. Rather, it would be a trick cyclist’s hoopla-prestidigitatory, magnificently hocus-pocus and tyro-experimental end of the world, amid the applause of all the spirits of progress. Almost no one was left unconvinced. The terrified and the protesting were shouted down immediately; for why did they not understand that this was a simply stupendous chance, the most progressive, free thinking end of the world, befitting the times, plainly honourable, and a credit to the Supreme Wisdom? Fervent conviction held sway. Sketches were made ad oculos on pages torn from notebooks. Irrefutable demonstrations were performed, and the opponents and sceptics were defeated. Full-page drawings appeared in illustrated magazines, images anticipating the disaster in spectacular staging, wherein populous cities were shown in panic at night beneath a sky resplendent with glowing signs and astral phenomena. The astounding motion of a distant bolide was portrayed, its parabolic course levelled unwaveringly at the terrestrial globe, hanging in the sky in motionless flight, approaching at a speed of many miles per second. Like a circus farce, top hats and bowler hats flew into the air, hair stood on end, umbrellas opened by themselves, bald patches were revealed under wigs which flew away—all beneath a huge, black sky and the flickering, simultaneous alarum of all the stars.

Something festive became infused in our lives, a kind of enthusiasm, an eagerness. A kind of ponderousness and solemnity entered our movements. Cosmic sighs swelled our breasts. By night, the terrestrial globe was ebullient with ceremonial uproar, the unanimous ecstasy of the thousands. Black and enormous nights came, and nebulæ of stars amassed around the Earth in untold swarms, and those variously arranged swarms, suspended in the black, interplanetary expanses, sprinkled meteor dust from abyss to abyss. Lost in the infinite spaces, we all but abandoned the terrestrial globe beneath our feet. Disoriented, losing our way, we hung over the inverted zenith with our heads downward, like antipodeans. We followed in the wake of astral throngs; we ran a licked finger along all the light years between star and star. In this way, we meandered in an incoherent, chaotic line-formation in the sky, dispersed in all directions on the endless rungs of the night, emigrants from a forsaken globe, plundering the vast multitude of the stars. The last barricades were breached, and into the black, astral space rode cyclists, standing upright on their velocipedes. They hung in motionless flight in the interplanetary vacuum, amid the perpetual opening of ever newer constellations. Flying down a siding, they blazed their trails of sleepless cosmography. But in truth, they were caught up in interplanetary lethargy, blackened with soot as if they had thrust their heads into the ventilator shaft of a stove, their ultimate goal, the finishing line of all those blind flights.

At the end of one short, incoherent, and half-slept-through day, the night opened like a great, teeming homeland. Crowds turned out onto the streets, spilled onto the squares, a mass of heads like a barrelful of shining caviar, pouring out in streams of glistening scattershot, flowing in rivers under a night sky as black as pitch and raucous with stars. Ladders broke under the weight of the thousands. Anguished figurines appeared at every window. Matchstick people, standing on shifting kindling, jumped over parapets in somnambulant fervour. They formed living chains, moving clusters and columns, like ants, standing on each other’s shoulders, streaming from the windows onto the platforms of the squares, illuminated by the glow of burning tar barrels.

Please forgive me if, in describing these scenes full of enormous congregation and tumult, I fall into exaggeration, inadvertently following the example of certain old engravings in the great book of the calamities and catastrophes of the human race. Why, they all incline toward a single proto-image, and that megalomaniacal exaggeration, the enormous pathos of those scenes, tells us that here, we have smashed the bottom of the eternal barrel of memories, some proto-barrel of myth, and broken into a prehuman night filled with the babbling of the elements, the bubbling of anamnesis, and no longer can we hold back the rising of the deluge. Ah, those teeming, piscine nights, stocked with a spry of stars, glistening with scales! Ah, those shoals of mouths, tirelessly swallowing in small gulps, hungry mouthfuls, all the swelling, undrunk streams of those black and torrential nights! But what fatal traps, what woeful dragnets were those dark, thousandfold propagated generations drawing toward?

O skies of those days, all in illuminated signals and meteors, delineated by astronomers’ calculations, traced a thousandfold, monogrammed, and marked with watery algebraic signs. We wandered in the wake of heavens pulsating with explosions of distant suns, in sidereal dazzlements, our faces lit by the cerulean glory of those nights, human swarms drifting in a broad trail across the shallows of a Milky Way spilled across the whole sky, a human stream, over whose heads rose cyclists on their spiderlike apparatus. O starry arena of night, inscribed to your furthest limits by the evolutions and spirals, the lariats and nooses of those elastic rides. O cycloids and epicycloids, executed inspiredly along the sky’s diagonals, losing your wire spokes, unconcerned at discarding your glimmering wheels, and reaching, to a truly illuminating degree, the bare, pure, and singular principle of cycling! Why, a new constellation dates from those days, a thirteenth figure ranked now and for ever among the zodiacal number, resplendent in our night sky from that time onward: The Cyclist.

The apartments, open on every side during those nights, stood empty in the light of their insistently smoking lamps. Their curtains blew, streaming far into the night, and those enfilades stood in the midst of an unending and all-embracing stream, which weaved through them in one incessant, insistent alarum. It was Uncle Edward, sounding the alert.

There it was. In the end, he had lost his patience and broken free from his bonds. He had trampled on his categorical imperative, torn himself free from the rigours of his lofty morality, and sounded the alert. Hastily, he was rendered speechless with the aid of a long washing pole. His insistent outburst was strenuously stifled with kitchen rags. But even gagged in this way, he went on wildly insisting, frantically and unrestrainedly rattling. He was past caring now; his life drained out of him together with that rattle. He bled openly in the sight of all, in terrible vehemence, with no help at hand.

Occasionally, someone might fall into an empty room pierced by that vehement alarum, amid lamps burning with tall flames. He would take a few steps from the threshold on tiptoe and come hesitantly to a halt, as if looking for something. Without a word, the mirrors would take him into their transparent depths, divide that taciturn soul among themselves. Throughout all of those bright and empty rooms, Uncle Edward would be insisting at the top of his voice, and the lonely deserter of the stars, filled with a bad conscience, as if he were there to commit some indecent act, would withdraw furtively from the room. He made his way to the door, marched out by the vigilant mirrors, which opened their gleaming lane to him, whilst in their depths, a swarm of doubles, also frightened away, dispersed in different directions on tiptoe, each holding a finger to his lips.

The sky, its immensities strewn with stardust, opened up above us once more. In that sky, night after night at an early hour, that terrible, obliquely tilting bolide would appear, suspended at the apex of its parabola, levelled motionlessly at the Earth, swallowing, to no effect, some number or other of thousands of miles per second. All gazes were levelled at it—cylindrical, glowing metallically, somewhat brighter at its bulbous core—as it fulfilled its daily quota with mathematical precision. One could scarcely believe that that tiny maggot, shining innocently among the innumerable swarms of the stars, was Balthazar’s fiery finger writing the destruction of our globe on the tablet of the sky. But every child knew by heart that fatal formula, its domain delimited, bracketed by the curling tips of a multiple integral symbol, its final result our inevitable perdition. What could save us now?

As the mob ran hither and thither in that great night, ever more lost among astral splendours and phenomena, Father stayed furtively at home. He alone knew the secret way out of that predicament, the stage door of cosmology. And he gave a mysterious smile. As Uncle Edward, stifled by rags, went on desperately sounding the alert, Father put his head quietly into the ventilator shaft of the stove. It was muffled there, as black as pitch; it smelt of warm air and soot, his refuge and his harbour. Father settled down comfortably and closed his eyes in bliss, and into that black diving bell of the house, raised high above the roof and into the starlit night, fell the dim ray of a star, bent as if in the lenses of a telescope. It sprouted with light at the focal point; it germinated in the dark retort of the alembic of the chimney. Father cautiously turned the screw of his micrometer, and that dreadful manifestation slowly came into view in the visual field of his telescope, as bright as the moon, brought within hand’s reach by magnification, in chalky relief, plastic, and glowing in the silent blackness of the planetary emptiness. It was rather scrofulous and pockmarked, a full brother of the moon, its lost double, returning, after its thousand year journey, to its maternal globe. My father brought it close to his protruding eye: it was riddled throughout with holes, like a slice of Swiss cheese, pale yellow, sharply lit, its surface everywhere pimpled as white as leprosy. Father, his hand on the screw of the micrometer, his eye dazzled by the light from the eyepiece, cast a cold glance over that calcareous globe, and he saw on its surface the convoluted image of the sickness eating away at it from within, the sinuous channels of a bookworm tunnelling through its cheesy, maggoty surface. Father gave a start. He realised his mistake. No! It wasn’t Swiss cheese at all. Quite clearly, it was a human brain, an anatomical dissection of a brain in its entire, complicated structure. Father could distinctly see the edges of its layers, its rolls of grey matter, and straining his eyes still further, he was even able to read the faint letters of inscriptions running in different directions on the convoluted map of that hemisphere. The brain, seeming to have been chloroformed, was fast asleep, smiling as it slept. Penetrating through that complicated surface picture to the core of that smile, Father caught a glimpse of the essence of the phenomenon. And he, too, smiled quietly to himself. For what might we not find in our own, trusted chimney, as black as snuff in the corner! Father discerned, shining distinctly through the rolls of grey matter, through its minute granulation of bumps, the contours of an embryo in its characteristic head-over-heels position, its tiny fists before its face, sleeping its blissful sleep upside-down in the clear water of the amnion. Father left it in that position. He got up, relieved, and closed the tiny door of the chimney shaft.

Thus far and no further.

But why? And what has happened to the end of the world? What has become of that magnificent finale, after so magnificently expounded an introduction? Downcast eyes and a smile. Had an error crept into the calculations, a tiny mistake of addition, a misprint in the transcription of the figures? Nothing of the sort. The calculations were exact. No errors had crept into the column of digits. So, what had happened? Please listen. The bolide was advancing dauntlessly, coming at a gallop like an ambitious horse, in order to finish first, and the fashion of the times kept pace with it. For a while, it flew at the head of the epoch to which it lent its form and its name. Those two bold courses then came into alignment. They ran at a powerful gallop in parallel, and our hearts, too, beat in time to them. But fashion drew ahead by a nose. Slowly, it began to outpace the indefatigable bolide. That millimetre decided the comet’s fate. It was doomed now, outdistanced once and for all. Our hearts now beat in time to fashion’s pace and gradually left the magnificent bolide behind. We watched with indifference as it grew pale, receded, and at last stood resignedly on the horizon, tilted to the side, attempting in vain the last bend on its curving path, distant and blue, harmless now and for ever. It came nowhere in the race. Its newsworthiness was all used up. Nobody was interested in the loser. Left to its own devices, it wilted quietly amid universal indifference.

We returned to our daily tasks with our heads bowed, richer by one disappointment. Hurriedly, the cosmic perspectives were rolled up, and life returned to its usual paths. We slept incessantly in those days, by day and by night, making up for time of lost sleep. We lay side-by-side in dark apartments, overcome by sleep, borne by our own breathing down a siding of starless dreams. Drifting in this way, we undulated—squeaking bellies, bagpipes, and banduras—making our way in time to our melodious snoring over all the rough terrain of a now closed and starless night. Uncle Edward had fallen silent for the ages. An echo of his alaruming despair still hung in the air, but he himself was dead. Life had escaped him along with that rattling paroxysm. The circuit had opened, and he had stepped out unhindered onto ever higher rungs of immortality. In the dark apartment, Father kept his solitary watch, silently wandering through rooms filled with melodious sleep. Sometimes, he would open the ventilator of the chimney, and smiling, peek into its dark chasm where a smiling Homunculus slept its illuminated sleep for the ages, enclosed in a glass ampule, surrounded by a flowing plenitude of neonlike light, doomed now, crossed out and filed away, an archival entry in the great record office of the sky.

The post The Comet appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I

It was a long journey. Barely one or two passengers travelled on that forgotten branch line, where the train ran just once a week. Never had I seen those carriages before: archaic in style, withdrawn from the other lines long ago, as spacious as rooms, dark and with many nooks. Those corridors, breaking off at different angles, those cold, empty and labyrinthine compartments—there was something oddly forlorn about them, something almost ghastly. I made my way from carriage to carriage in search of some snug corner. It was windy everywhere; freezing draughts threaded their way through those interiors, piercing the entire train from end to end. People were sitting here and there on the floor beside their bundles, afraid to occupy the vacant and excessively high seats. Those bulging oilcloth seats were icy cold, anyway, and sticky with age. No passengers boarded at the empty stations. Without a whistle, without a puff, the train continued slowly, and as it seemed, pensively on its way.

            For a time, a man in a torn railwayman’s uniform accompanied me, silent, engrossed by his thoughts. He pressed a handkerchief to his swollen, aching face. Then he was lost somewhere; he got off unnoticed at some halt. In the straw strewn on the floor, he left his imprint behind, and an outworn, black valise that he had forgotten.

            Wading in straw and litter, I went with tottering steps from compartment to compartment. The doors, standing open at both ends of every carriage, all swung in the wind. Nowhere was there even a solitary passenger. At last, I met a conductor wearing the black uniform of the railway service of that line. He was winding a thick scarf around his neck and packing away his bits and pieces, a torch and an official book. “We are pulling in, sir,” he said, casting a look at me, his eyes almost totally white. Without a puff, without a rattle, the train drew slowly to a standstill, as if life had slowly escaped it along with its last exhalation of steam. We stopped dead. Silence and emptiness. No station building. He pointed out to me, stepping down from the train, the direction in which the Sanatorium lay. With my valise in my hand, I set off walking along a narrow, white highway, which led by and by into the dark copse of a park. I regarded the landscape with a certain curiosity. The path along which I was walking rose up and led out onto the crest of a gentle knoll, from where I took in a vast horizon. The day was utterly grey, dreary and without highlights; perhaps under the influence of that heavy and colourless atmosphere, the entire great bowl of the horizon darkened, upon which an immense wooded landscape was arranged like stage scenery, in ever more distant and greying strands and layers of forestation, flowing in streaks, in gentle slopes, here from the left side, there from the right. That whole dark and thoroughly solemn landscape seemed to flow almost indiscernibly into itself, to displace itself like a clouded and gathering sky full of unfathomable movement. The liquid belts and trails of those forests rustled, and seemed to be carried along by that sound, like a tide rising imperceptibly toward the land. The white road meandered like a melody, receding amid the dark dynamic of the wooded terrain, along a ridge of wide chords struck with the force of huge, musical massifs, which finally engulfed it. I snapped off a twig from a wayside tree. The green of its leaves was intensely dark, practically black. It was oddly saturated blackness, deep and generous, like curative, nourishing sleep; and all the greys of the landscape were derivatives of that one colour. At times, our own landscape assumes such a colour, on cloudy summer twilights awash with long rainstorms; that same deep and peaceful abnegation, that same resigned and final numbness, having no further need of the consolation of colours.

            It was as dark as night in the forest. I groped my way on soundless conifer needles. As the trees grew sparser, the beams of a wooden bridge began to clatter under my feet. On its far side, amid the blackness of trees, the grey and many-windowed walls of a hotel loomed, signposted as the Sanatorium. The glazed double doors stood open; one stepped through them directly from the bridge, which had a shaky handrail of birch branches on either side. In the corridor, all was gloom and solemn silence. I tiptoed past door after door, reading their numbers with my fingertips in the darkness. Finally, at a corner, I chanced upon a chambermaid. She was hurrying out of one of the rooms, breathless and flustered, as if tearing herself free from someone’s importunate hands. She barely understood what I said to her. I had to repeat myself. She fidgeted helplessly.

            Had my telegram been received? She spread her arms and glanced to the side. She was waiting for an opportunity to skip back to the half-open door, at which she was squinting.

            “I have come a long way,” I said with some impatience. “I booked a room here by telegram. To whom shall I report?”

            She didn’t know. “Perhaps you would like to try the restaurant?” she stammered. “Everyone is asleep now. I will announce you when the doctor wakes up.”

            “Asleep? But it is daylight. Nightfall is still a long way off…”

            “They always sleep in this place, didn’t you know?” She raised her inquisitive eyes to me. “And besides,” she added coquettishly, “here, night-time never comes.” She composed herself, no longer trying to escape. As she fidgeted, her hands plucked at the lace of her pinafore.

            I left her. I went into the semi-dark restaurant. Here stood tables; a huge buffet extended to the length of one wall. I felt my appetite returning after a long time without eating, and was gladdened at the sight of plates abundantly crammed with pastries and cakes. I set my valise down on one of the tables; they were all unoccupied. I clapped my hands—no response. My eyes were drawn to a neighbouring, larger and brighter room. This room, through an expansive window or loggia, was open onto a landscape that I had already come to know, and which now, in its deep sadness and resignation, stood in the frame of the embrasure like a memento mori. The remains of a recent sitting cluttered the tablecloths; opened bottles and half-empty glasses; even the tips still lay there, uncollected by the staff. I returned to the buffet and appraised the cakes and pies; they looked most appetising. Feeling a surge of the most singular ravenousness, I pondered whether I ought to serve myself. One short-cake in particular, with apple jam, made my mouth water. I was on the point of levering one of those cakes with a silver spatula when I sensed the presence of someone behind me. The chambermaid had entered, wearing soft, silent slippers, and gently touched my back. “The doctor will see you now,” she said as she scrutinised her fingernails.

            She walked ahead of me, not once turning completely around, confident of the magnetism that she exerted with the motion of her hips. She played with the intensity of that magnetism, adjusting the distance between our bodies as we passed by dozens of doors, all in numbered order. The corridor grew increasingly dark. Finally, in total darkness now, she leaned against me. “Here is the doctor’s door,” she whispered. “Please go in.”

            Doctor Gotard received me, standing in the centre of the room. He was a short man, broad in the shoulders, with a black beard.

            “We received your telegram only yesterday,” he said. “We sent a carriage to meet you at the station, but you arrived on a different train. It’s not the best of connections, I’m afraid. So, how are you feeling?”

            “Is my father alive?” I asked, looking anxiously into his smiling face.

            “Alive? Why, naturally,” he said, steadily holding my eager look. “Within, of course,” he added, narrowing his eyes, “the limits determined by the situation. You know as well as I do that from the point of view of your family home, from the perspective of your own country, your father has died. That cannot be completely undone; and that demise casts a certain shadow over his existence here.”

            “But Father himself does not know, does not suspect?” I asked in a whisper.

            He shook his head with deep earnestness. “You may rest assured,” he said, lowering his voice, “that our patients do not suspect. They cannot suspect…

            “The whole process rests,” he continued, demonstrating the mechanism on his fingertips, poised in readiness for this, “on our having set back time. We fall behind time here by a certain interval, the extent of which no one really knows. It all boils down to simple Relativism. Here, your father’s death, the death that has caught up with him in your homeland, has simply not yet run its course.”

            “In that case,” I said, “Father is dying, or his death is imminent…”

            “You misunderstand me,” he replied in a tone of tolerant impatience. “Here, we reactivate past time, with all the possible outcomes; even, therefore, the possibility of a recovery.”

            Still looking at me, he smiled and stroked his beard.

            “But no doubt you would like to see your father now. We have reserved for you, in accordance with your instructions, the other bed in your father’s room. I will show you the way.”

            As we stepped into the dark corridor, Doctor Gotard began to speak in a whisper. I noticed that, just like the chambermaid, he was wearing felt slippers. “We allow our patients long hours for sleeping. We are conserving their vital energies. There is nothing better for them to do here, after all.” He stopped before one of the doors, put a finger to his lips. “Go in quietly. Your father is asleep. You should go to bed, too. That would be for the best, for the time being. Goodbye for now.”

            “Goodbye,” I whispered, feeling my beating heart rise to my throat.

            I pressed the door handle. The door yielded of its own accord, opened halfway like lips parting without resistance in sleep. I went inside. The room was grey and bare, practically empty. My father lay asleep in a heap of bedclothes, on a plain wooden bed under a tiny skylight. His deep breathing discharged untold layers of snoring from the depths of his slumber. The whole room seemed to be lined with those snores, from floor to ceiling, and still new snores were forthcoming. I looked with affection upon Father’s emaciated, wasted face, now thoroughly absorbed by its stertorous labours, a face in a distant trance, which, having cast off its earthly covering, was making its confession on some far removed bank of its existence, in a solemn enumeration of its minutes.

            There was no other bed. A piercing chill was sucked in at the window. The stove was unlit. They don’t seem to care very much about their patients here, I thought to myself. Such a sick man at the mercy of draughts! And certainly, nobody here ever does any cleaning. A thick layer of dust covered the floor; it had overgrown the night stand and the medicine bottles upon it, and a glass of coffee that had long gone cold. There are cakes piled high in the restaurant, I thought, and yet they give pure black coffee to their patients, instead of something nourishing! But in view of their good deeds in setting back time, this was naturally a trivial matter.

            I undressed slowly, slipped into Father’s bed. He did not awaken, but his snoring, apparently dammed up too high, now fell an octave lower, relinquishing the grandiloquence of its declamation. It had become private snoring, as it were, for own use. I tucked the eiderdown around Father, to protect him as far as possible from the draught blowing in at the window. I soon fell asleep beside him.

II

The room was dusky when I awoke. Father was sitting at the table, already dressed and drinking tea, into which he dipped iced biscuits. He was wearing the still new, black suit of English cloth that he had made for himself the previous summer. His tie was a little carelessly knotted.

            Seeing that I was not asleep, he said with a pleasant smile on his pallid face, “I’m truly happy you’ve come, Józef. What a surprise! I’m so lonely here. But of course, I can’t complain in my situation. I’ve suffered worse things. And if one wanted to draw the facit from all positions… But no more of that. Imagine, on my first day here, straight away, they served me with a magnificent filet de boeuf with mushrooms. That was an infernal piece of meat, Józef. I must warn you most strongly, should they ever offer you filet de boeuf here… I still feel the fire in my stomach. And diarrhoea upon diarrhoea!.. It was quite beyond my endurance.

            “But I must tell you my news,” he continued. “Don’t laugh, but I have rented premises here, for a shop. It’s true! And I congratulate myself for that idea. I was awfully bored, you see. You can’t imagine how dreary it is here. And now, I at least have a pleasant occupation. Don’t imagine anything too grand. Nothing of the sort. They are far more modest premises than our old shop, a mere shack in comparison; I should be ashamed of such a stall in our hometown. But here, where to some extent we must shake off our pretentions—don’t you agree, Józef?” He gave a pained laugh. “And so, somehow one must live…”

            This struck me unpleasantly. I was embarrassed by Father’s confusion, his realisation that he had used an inappropriate word.

            “I can see that you’re tired,” he said after a moment. “Sleep a little longer, then you can visit me in the shop—yes? I’m in a hurry to get back there, to see how the business is doing. You have no idea how difficult it was to get credit here, with what incredulity they treat old merchants, merchants with a reputable past. Do you recall the optician’s shop in the market square? Our shop is right next door. There is no sign board yet, but you will be able to find it. You can hardly miss it.”

            “Father, are you going out without your overcoat?” I asked anxiously.

            “They forgot to pack it, just imagine. I couldn’t find it in my trunk. But I don’t miss it at all. This gentle climate, this sweet air…”

            “Wear my overcoat, Father,” I said. “Take it, I insist.” But Father had already put on his hat. He waved his hand in my direction and slipped out of the room.

            No, I was no longer tired. I felt well rested, and… hungry. I remembered with pleasure the buffet crammed with cakes. As I dressed, I imagined indulging myself in the various kinds of delicacy there. I would begin with the short cake with apple, not forgetting a magnificent sponge cake that I had noticed, trimmed with orange peel. I stood before the looking glass to knot my tie, but its surface, like a spherical mirror, held my image back, somewhere deep inside, swirling in its murky depths. I adjusted my distance from it, stepping back and forth, but to no avail; no reflection was willing to loom into view out of that flowing, silvery fog. I must request a different mirror, I thought to myself, and stepped out of the room.

            The corridor was extremely dark. A faint gas lamp, burning in a corner with a small, bluish flame, heightened still further the impression of solemn silence. In that labyrinth of doors, recesses and nooks, I found it difficult to retrace my steps to the restaurant. I will go into town, I thought with sudden decisiveness. I will eat somewhere in town. No doubt I shall find a good confectioner’s shop there.

            Outside the doorway, the heavy, sweet and humid air of that extraordinary climate blew over me. The chronic greyness of the weather sank a few shades deeper, like a day seen through a funeral pall.

            My eyes could not absorb the velvety, juicy blackness of the darkest places, their scale of listless greyness, of soft ash, coursing in passages of stifled tones, notes stopped by a pipe organ valve—that nocturne landscape! A sheet of soft, voluminous and abundant air struck my face. Inside it, it held the nauseous sweetness of stale rainwater.

            Once more, that roar of the black forests, recurring endlessly within itself, its unheard chords churning up the heavens, beyond the scale of audibility! I was standing in the rear courtyard of the Sanatorium. I turned and looked at the high walls, bent into a horseshoe, of the rear of the main building. All the windows were secured with black shutters; the Sanatorium was sound asleep. I came to a gate in an iron fence, beside which stood a kennel of extraordinary proportions—empty. The black forestation embraced and absorbed me once more. In the darkness, as if with closed eyes, I once more went gropingly on soundless conifer needles. As the light rose a little, the contours of houses were discernible through the trees. A few steps further, and I was in a spacious town square.

            Strange, its beguiling resemblance to the market square of my hometown! How similar, when it comes down to it, are all the market squares of the world! Practically the same shops and houses!

            The pavements were almost deserted. The mournful and late half-gleam of the indeterminate hour was sprayed from a sky of indefinite greyness. I could read all the posters and signs quite easily; and yet I should not have been surprised to learn that it was the middle of the night! No more than one or two shops were open; the blinds of others, hastily shutting up, were half drawn. In some places, the dense and luxuriant, rich and intoxicating air had consumed part of the view; it washed away, like a moist sponge, a few houses, a lamp post, part of a sign board. At times, one could barely raise one’s eyelids, heavy with sleepiness or some strange abandon. I began to search for the optician’s shop that Father had mentioned. He had spoken of it as if it were known to me, appealing to my presumed knowledge of local conditions. Didn’t he realise that I was here for the first time? His mind must have become confused. But what could be expected of Father, after all?—only half real, living a life so conditional, so relative, curbed by so many contingencies! It was difficult to deny that a great deal of goodwill was required in order to accord him his particular form of existence. His was a wretched surrogate of life, which hung on a general understanding, that consensus omnium whence he drew his thin juices. Clearly, it was only thanks to a collective determination to turn a blind eye to the obvious and striking deficiencies of that state of affairs that his pitiable appearance of life could remain even momentarily in the web of reality. The slightest opposition might shake it, the faintest breeze of scepticism knock it down. Could Doctor Gotard’s sanatorium really provide it with that greenhouse atmosphere of kind tolerance? protect it from the icy winds of criticism and indifference? One could only marvel that, in such an endangered and questionable state, Father was still able to maintain his so remarkable bearing.

            I was heartened by the sight of the display window of a confectioner’s shop, filled with pastries and cakes. My appetite returned. I opened the glazed door—it bore a sign board that read, “Ices”—and entered the dark premises. They were fragrant with coffee and vanilla. A salesgirl, her face daubed with the dusk, emerged from the depths of the shop to take my order. Finally, after such a long time, I could eat my fill of excellent doughnuts, which I dipped into my coffee. In the darkness, amid a dance of whirling, crepuscular arabesques, I consumed cake after cake, feeling the darkness squeezing its way stealthily under my eyelids, secretly gaining power over my insides with its warm pulsation, a swarm of millions of delicate touches. At length, only the rectangle of the window was still glowing, a grey smear in the utter darkness. I rapped on the tabletop with my teaspoon, in vain. No one came forward to take payment for my meal. I left a silver coin on the table and went out into the street. A light was still shining in a bookshop adjacent, where shop assistants were busily sorting books. I enquired about Father’s shop. It was, they informed me, the one next to theirs. One accommodating fellow even ran up to the door and pointed it out. It had a glazed entrance; the display window, not yet dressed, was covered with brown paper. I was surprised to see from the doorway that the shop was, nonetheless, filled with customers. My father stood behind the counter, adding up the items on a long bill, occasionally licking his pencil. He ran his index finger over each figure in turn and counted under his breath, whilst the gentleman for whom this bill was being preparing leaned over the counter, and the other patrons looked on in silence. He cast a glance at me over his spectacles. Marking his place, he said, “A letter has arrived for you. It’s on the desk, among my papers.” And he returned to his engrossing calculations. Meanwhile, the shop assistants were piling up delivered goods, wrapping them in paper and tying them with string. The shelves were only partially filled with new cloth; most of them were still empty.

            “Why don’t you sit down, Father?” I said quietly, stepping behind the counter. “You’re not looking after yourself at all, being so unwell.” But he raised his hand in refusal, as if dismissing my persuasions, and went on with his counting. He had a thoroughly miserable appearance. It was as plain as day that only artificial arousal, feverish activity, was holding up his strength, warding off the moment of complete breakdown.

            I rummaged on the desk. It was more a package than a letter. I had written several days beforehand to a bookshop in the matter of a certain pornographic volume, and it had arrived here. They had discovered my address, or rather, Father’s address, notwithstanding that his shop had only so recently opened and still had no business name or sign board. How incredible their administration of the transaction! How admirable their competence in dispatching! Such uncommon efficiency!

            “You can read it in the office at the back,” Father said, directing a dissatisfied look in my direction. “You can see for yourself that this is not the place.”

            The office at the back of the shop was empty. Some scant illumination fell in through the glass door. The shop assistants’ overcoats hung on the walls. I opened the letter and began to read in the faint light from the door. They wished to inform me that the book I had requested was, unfortunately, out of stock. A search had been instigated, but since they could not guarantee the result, the firm was meanwhile willing to send me, without obligation, a certain item in which, they anticipated, I would doubtless be interested. There followed a convoluted description of an extendable refracting astronomical telescope with great light-gathering power and sundry other properties. Curious, I pulled the instrument from its wrapping paper. It was made of black oilcloth or stiff canvas, folded into a flat accordion. I have always had a passion for telescopes. I began to unfold the instrument’s endlessly pleated cover, which grew in my hands into the enormous bellows of a view camera, stiffened with thin rods, its empty hood drawing out to the full dimensions of the room—a labyrinth of black chambers, a long complex of light-proof boxes, each slotted halfway into the next. It was shaped not unlike a long motor car, some theatrical prop made of meadow linen, its light fabric of paper and stiff canvas imitating the solidity of reality. I looked into the black funnel of the eyepiece, and saw, deep inside, the faintly looming outlines of the courtyard façade of the Sanatorium. Curious, I slipped a little further into the rearmost chamber of the apparatus; now I spied the chambermaid in the visible field of the telescope, walking along a shadowy corridor of the Sanatorium with a tray in her hands. She turned and smiled. Can she see me? I wondered. A mist of irresistible sleepiness beclouded my eyes. I was now, in fact, sitting in the rear chamber of the telescope, as if in the passenger compartment of a carriage. A gentle upward pull of a lever, and lo and behold, the apparatus began to rustle, fluttering like some paper moth. I felt it move, with me inside it, and turn toward the door.

            Like a great, black caterpillar, the telescope advanced into the lighted shop—a many-limbed trunk, an enormous paper cockroach with two replica headlamps at the front. The customers crowded together, retreating before that blind paper dragon; the shop assistants threw wide open the door to the street; and I slowly rode out in that paper motor car, amid the row of patrons, who followed with looks of outrage that essentially scandalous exit.

III

This is how life is lived in this town, and how time passes. The best part of the day is spent in sleeping; and not just in bed. No, there is no great fastidiousness over that point. Anywhere at all, at any hour of the day, a native of these parts is ready to take a light nap—in a restaurant with his head resting on the table, in a droshky, or even standing up at the roadside, or in the hallway of some house where he has dropped in for a moment to succumb to his overwhelming need for sleep.

            Upon waking, befuddled and swaying, we continue some conversation broken off earlier; we set off once more down some wearisome path, or press on with some complicated business matter that has neither beginning nor end; and as a result, whole periods of time are inadvertently lost somewhere along the way. We lose control over the continuity of the day; until at last, we cease to insist upon it. We renounce without remorse its skeleton of unbroken chronology, the watchful supervision of which, habitually, and with careful day to day discipline, we were accustomed to in days long past. We sacrificed long ago our constant readiness to file receipts for time spent, our scrupulousness in accounting down to the last penny for hours used, the pride and ambition of our economics. Those cardinal virtues, in which we once, in days long past, knew neither indecision nor infringement—we forsook them long ago.

            A few examples may serve to illustrate this state of affairs. At some hour of the day, or the night—these periods are distinguished only by a barely perceptible nuance of the sky—I wake up by the handrail of the little bridge that leads to the Sanatorium. It is dusk. I must have been wandering for a long time, unconscious, overcome by sleepiness, all around the town before finally dragging myself to this bridge. I cannot say whether Doctor Gotard has accompanied me the whole time on my journey; but he stands before me now, concluding some long explanation, drawing out reasoned inferences. Carried away by his own eloquence, he takes me by the arm and leads me with him. I follow. And even before we have crossed the clattering planks of the bridge, I am asleep once more. Unclearly, through my closed eyelids, I see the doctor’s pointed gesticulations and the smile deep inside his black beard. I strive in vain to grasp that splendid logical snare, that ultimate trump card by which, at the zenith of his argument, striking a pose with outstretched arms, he triumphs. I have no idea how much further we walk, side by side, talking at cross purposes, before at a certain moment, I really do wake up. Doctor Gotard is no longer here. It is extremely dark, but that is because my eyes are still closed. I open them. I am lying in bed in our room, with no idea how I got here.

            Another, even more drastic case:

            At lunchtime, I enter a hotel restaurant in town, into its incoherent hubbub, its confusion of diners; and whom should I see at the centre of the room, sitting at a table heaving with dishes, but Father! All eyes are turned his way, whilst he, his diamond tie-pin gleaming, unusually animated, exultant to the point of ecstasy, affects a bow to all sides, holding effusive court with the whole room. With forced bravado, which I can look upon only with the greatest anxiety, he orders one dish after another, stacking them high on his table. He gathers them up with delight, although he has not finished eating the first of his orders. Clicking his tongue, speaking and chewing at the same time, he feigns with gestures and mimicry his supreme satisfaction with this feast; and he follows the waiter, Adaś, with admiring eyes, calling him back repeatedly with an infatuated smile, and places yet another order. And as the waiter runs to fill them, waving a napkin, Father appeals to all with a gesture of entreaty, calls for everyone to bear witness to the irresistible charm of that Ganymede.

            “A priceless fellow!” he cries with a blissful smile, squeezing shut his eyes. “An angelic fellow, sirs! Don’t you agree that he is charming!”

            I back out of the room in disgust, unnoticed by Father. Had he been placed there deliberately by the hotel management, as a ruse to motivate the clientele, he could not have conducted himself more provocatively, more ostentatiously. With faltering steps, I make my way home, my head foggy with sleepiness. I rest my head on a pillar box for a moment and take a brief siesta. At length, I am once more scrabbling in darkness for the entrance to the Sanatorium. I go inside. Our room is dark. I press the light switch. The electricity is not working. Cold blows in from the window. The bed creaks in the darkness. Father raises his head from the bedclothes and says, “Oh, Józef, Józef! I’ve been lying here for two days now, unattended. The bells are all broken. No one calls in to see me. And now, even my own son has forsaken me, a seriously ill man, to traipse about the town chasing girls. See how my heart is pounding!”

            How can I reconcile this? Is Father sitting in the restaurant, seized by the unhealthy ambition of gluttony, or lying in his room, seriously ill? Are there two Fathers? Nothing of the sort! It is the rapid disintegration of time, no longer supervised with ceaseless vigilance, that is to blame for all this.

            We all know that, in the end, it is only with incessant cultivation, solicitous attention and a painstaking regulation and correction of its antics, that that undisciplined element may be held in check. Bereft of such care, it immediately falls prone to excesses and wild aberrations, to cutting incalculable capers, to shambolic clowning. The incongruence of our individual times was more and more distinctly noticeable; my father’s time and my own no longer ran in accord.

            By the way, the accusation of moral profligacy laid against me by my father was a groundless insinuation. I have not approached any of the local girls. Reeling like a drunkard from one bout of sleep to the next, I am barely able in my wakeful moments to pay attention to the fairer sex here.

            And besides, in the chronic dusk in the streets, one cannot even discern their faces clearly. All that I have been able to observe—being a young man, all the same, with a certain interest in such matters—is the singular walk that those young ladies have.

            It is a step along an inexorably straight line, taking no obstacle into account, obedient only to some internal rhythm, some law that they unwind, as if from a reel, into the unswerving thread of their gentle trot, all precision and measured grace.

            Each one carries with her some individual rule of her own, like a wound-up spring. They seem to have but one concern, as they walk straight ahead, all concentration and attention, their eyes fixed on that rule—that nothing of it is lost, that they never once transgress that exacting regulation, never deviate from it, even by a millimetre. Then it becomes clear that what they are carrying with them, with such earnestness and attention, is nothing other than an idée fixe of their own perfection, almost made true by the power of their conviction, an unwarranted expectation taken on at their own risk, their own inviolable dogma, elevated above all doubt.

            What flaws, what blemishes, what snub or flattened noses, what freckles and pimples are not recklessly smuggled in under the flag of that fiction! For there is no ugliness, no vulgarity, that they cannot carry off in the flights of that belief, those fictional heavens of perfection.

            Their bodies, as that belief determines, grow distinctly beautiful. Their legs, shapely indeed, and elastic, in irreproachable footwear, speak with their gait. In the flowing, sparkling monologue of their steps, they willingly explicate the richness of that idea of which their faces, aloof and closed, say nothing. They keep their hands in the pockets of their short, close-fitting jackets. When they sit in a café, or at the theatre, they keep their legs crossed, which, exposed to the knees, maintain a meaningful silence. So much for one of the town’s curiosities. I have already mentioned the black vegetation here, but a certain species of black fern merits particular attention, enormous bunches of which adorn the vases in every apartment and public premises. It is practically a symbol of mourning, the funereal coat-of-arms of this town.

IV

Conditions in the Sanatorium are becoming more insufferable by the day. It is hard to deny that we have fallen straight into a trap. Since the time of my arrival, when certain appearances of hospitality were displayed before a newcomer, the Sanatorium management has not made the slightest effort to provide us with even the illusion of care. We are simply left to our own devices. No one shows any concern about our needs. I realised a long time ago that the wires of the electric bells have all been torn out, right above every door, and lead nowhere. No servants are to be seen. The corridors are engulfed in darkness and silence by day and by night. I have the firm conviction that we are the only guests in this sanatorium, and that the mysterious and discreet manner in which the chambermaid closes a door whenever she enters or leaves a room is mere mystification.

            Sometimes, I want to throw those doors open, one after the other, and leave them gaping wide, to unmask the ignominious intrigue that we have been drawn into.

            And yet, I cannot be entirely certain of my suspicions. Sometimes, late at night, I see Doctor Gotard in a corridor, hurrying somewhere in his white surgeon’s coat, holding an enema syringe in his hand, the chambermaid going before him. It would be awkward at such moments to detain him and pin him down with an obstinate enquiry.

            Were it not for the restaurant and the confectioner’s shop in the town, one might die of hunger here. Thus far, I have been unable to procure a second bed. There is never any mention of fresh bedclothes. I have to admit that I, too, have begun to succumb to the general laxity in mannerly habits.

            It has always been simply unthinkable to me, a civilised person, to go to bed fully dressed and wearing one’s shoes. But now, I return home late, drunk with tiredness; the room is dusky, the curtains swollen by the cold breeze from the window; I fall listlessly onto the bed and bury myself in the eiderdown. In this way, I sleep through entire irregular expanses of time, for days, for weeks, travelling through empty landscapes of sleep, continually on my way, continually on steep highways of respiration; at times, sliding lightly and flexibly down their gentle slopes, or struggling to clamber up a vertical wall of snoring, where, having reached the summit, I take in the enormous horizons of that rocky and soundless desert of sleep. At some late hour, somewhere at an unknown, sharp turning point of snoring, I half awaken. Half conscious, I can feel Father’s body with my feet. There he lies, curled up into a ball, as tiny as a kitten. I go back to sleep with my mouth open, and the entire enormous panorama of a mountain landscape, undulating and majestic, unfolds unbidden before me.

            In the shop, Father vigorously pursues his interests. He makes transactions, exerting all his volubility in order to persuade his clients. His cheeks are pink with exuberance; his eyes shine. In the Sanatorium, he lies seriously ill, just as in his final weeks at home. It is hard to conceal that the process is rapidly approaching its awful conclusion. In a weak voice, he says to me, “You should call in more often at the shop, Józef. The shop assistants are robbing us. You can see, after all, that I am no longer equal to the task. I have lain here sick for weeks now, whilst the shop goes to ruin, left to the mercies of fate. Has there been no letter from home?”

            I am beginning to regret this whole venture. One can hardly call it a good idea that we, seduced by fine sounding advertising, sent Father to this place. Time set back… On the face of it, it sounds wonderful. But just what does it really amount to? Is it time at full value, genuine time that passes here? time unwound, as it were, from a new bale, redolent of freshness and dye? On the contrary, it is time entirely used up, time that people have worn thin, ragged time, riddled everywhere with holes, as transparent as a sieve.

            And no wonder, since it is just a kind of regurgitated time. Understand me plainly, it is second-hand time—God help us!

            And then there is all this highly improper manipulation of time, these indecent dealings, sneaking into its mechanism at the back, dangerously tampering with its precarious secrets. Sometimes, one wants to bang on the table and shout at the top of one’s voice, “Enough of this! Keep your hands off time! Time is untouchable! It is not permissible to aggravate time! Space is for man; in space you may go where you please; you may turn somersaults, fall head over heels, leap from star to star… But for the love of God, leave time alone!”

            But for all that, can I really be expected to give notice to Doctor Gotard? No matter how miserable Father’s existence may be, I can, all the same, see him, be with him, talk to him… The truth is, I ought to be infinitely grateful to Doctor Gotard.

            Several times, I have wanted to have a frank discussion with him; but Doctor Gotard is never available. “He has just gone to the restaurant,” the chambermaid announces. I am on my way there when she catches up with me, to inform me that she has made a mistake. “Doctor Gotard is in the operating theatre.” I hurry to that floor, wondering just what sort of operations can possibly be performed here. I enter an anteroom, where I am told to wait. “Doctor Gotard will be out in a moment. He has just finished operating, and is washing his hands.” I almost catch sight of him, small, hurrying with great strides, his coat billowing, through a row of hospital wards. A moment later, what am I told? He was never there at all. No operations have been performed here in years.

            Doctor Gotard is asleep in his room, his black beard sticking up into the air. His room fills up with his snoring, like swirls of clouds that rise, heap up, and carry Doctor Gotard at once, with his bed, ever higher and higher on their billows—a great, exalted Ascension on waves of snores and swelling sheets.

            Even stranger things happen here, things that I keep even from myself, things fantastic precisely because they are so absurd. How many times do I leave my room, and it seems that someone has quickly retreated from the door, sidestepped around a corner? or that someone is walking ahead of me, not turning around? It is not a nurse. I know who it is. “Mother!” I call out, my voice agitated and trembling. And for a moment, Mother turns and looks at me with an imploring smile. Where am I? What is happening here? What is this snare that I am caught in?

V

I do not know if it is the influence of the late season, but the days are growing ever more sombre in colour, murkier and darker, as if the world were seen through almost totally black spectacles.

            The whole landscape resembles the bottom of an enormous aquarium, filled with pale ink; the trees, people and houses liquefy into dark silhouettes, waving like subaqueous plants against the background of those inky depths.

            Packs of black dogs roam all around the vicinity of the Sanatorium; all different shapes and sizes, silent, tense and alert, they run in the twilight, close to the ground, along every road and footpath, engrossed by their canine affairs. They run in twos and threes, with outstretched, vigilant necks and pricked up ears, the doleful tone of a quiet growl torn involuntarily from their voice boxes, signalling their supreme agitation. Always in a hurry, always on the move, absorbed by their own concerns, consumed by their incomprehensible purpose, they pay almost no heed to a passer-by. Occasionally, one of them will glower at him, its eyes darting, its rage emerging from that sly, black squint, its impulses held in check only because it has no time to spare. Sometimes, giving vent to its animosity, it will even run at his feet with a baleful snarl, its head lowered; only to abandon its purpose in mid-course and fly onward with great, canine dance steps.

            That plague of dogs cannot be helped; but why should the Sanatorium management keep an enormous Alsatian dog chained up? a terrifying beast, a veritable werewolf of simply demonic wildness?

            Shudders run through me every time I pass by its kennel, alongside which it stands perfectly still, on a short chain, a collar of fur sticking out wildly around its moustachioed, bristly and bearded head, all fangs in the machinery of its mighty jaws. It never barks; but at the sight of a human being its savage face grows even more terrible; its features freeze into an expression of utter rage, and in a quiet convulsion, slowly raising its terrible muzzle, it lets out an intense, low howl, torn from the depths of detestation, in which the sorrow and desperation of its powerlessness echoes.

            My father walks past the beast nonchalantly whenever we leave the Sanatorium together. For myself, I am deeply shocked every time by that elemental manifestation of impotent hatred. I am now two heads taller than Father, who trots beside me, small and thin, with his tiny, old person’s steps.

            Approaching the market square, we caught sight of some unusual movement. Crowds of people were running about the streets. The unlikely news reached us that an enemy army was about to encroach on the town.

            In general consternation, people were passing alarming and contradictory news back and forth, from which one could glean almost no sense. A war with no preliminary diplomatic moves? A war in a time of blessed peace, undisturbed by any conflict? A war? With whom? Over what? We learned that this invasion by an enemy army had emboldened a party of malcontents in the town, who were now running armed about the streets, terrorising the peaceful townsfolk. We even caught a glimpse of a group of those assassins, in their black civilian clothes, white bands crossed over their chests, advancing silently, their rifles lowered. The crowd backed away before them, huddling on the pavements; and they strode past, casting dark, ironic looks from the shade of their caps, looks that displayed a clear sense of advantage, a flash of malicious amusement, a knowing glint as if holding back snorts of laughter, lest they unmask the whole mystification. Some of them were known to the bystanders; but it was their lowered rifles that persuaded the crowd to let out restrained shouts of joy. They went past, accosting no one. Once more, an ambling, gloomily taciturn crowd filled all the streets; a dull hubbub flowed over the town. We seemed to hear the rattle of artillery fire in the distance, the rumble of batteries moving into position.

            “I should be in the shop,” said Father, pale, but determined. “You needn’t come with me. You would just get in the way.” And he added, “Go back to the Sanatorium.”

            A cowardly voice bid me to obey. I saw my father push his way into the dense wall of the crowd, and lost sight of him.

            I stole hurriedly through side streets to the top end of the town. It seemed to me that, by those steep paths, I might make my way in a semicircle around the centre of the town, which was congested by a multitude of people. The crowds were sparser here, in the higher parts of the town; they eventually dwindled away completely. I calmly made my way along those empty streets and came at last to the municipal park. Lanterns burned there with dark, bluish little flames, like funerary asphodels. Around each one, a swarm of May bugs was dancing, as heavy as bullets, carried in oblique, sideways flight by their vibrating wings. A few, having fallen to the ground, scrambled awkwardly on the sand, their hunched backs crooked by their hard elytras, under which they tried to refold the delicate films of their flight wings. Passers-by strolled on the lawns and footpaths, engaged in light-hearted conversations. A few last trees hung over courtyards lying deep in a valley, hard against the park wall. I strolled along that wall, which on my side barely reached the level of my chest, but which fell away on the other side with buttresses many storeys high, down to the level of those courtyards. In one place, a ramp rose up from the compacted earth below, to the full height of the wall. I could easily cross over to that other area. I squeezed along that narrow embankment between the tightly packed structures of the houses, and onto the street. My calculations, backed up by outstanding spatial intuition, were correct. I was almost directly opposite the Sanatorium building, its rear side looming whitely through a black covering of trees. I entered as usual by the rear entrance, through the courtyard and the gate in the iron fence. I could already see the dog in the distance, at its post. As usual, a shudder of aversion ran through me at that sight. I decided to try to get past it quickly enough to avoid hearing that growl of detestation torn from the bottom of its soul, when, to my horror, not believing my eyes, I saw it unleashed, scampering quickly away from its kennel and running about the courtyard, its barks resounding hollowly, as if from a barrel, as it tried to cut off my retreat.

            Numb with terror, I backed into the opposite, furthest corner of the courtyard, instinctively looking for a hiding place. I took shelter in a small summerhouse that stood there, utterly convinced of the futility of my efforts. The shaggy beast approached with rapid steps. Its snout was now at the very entrance of the summerhouse—it had me in its trap. Almost expiring with fear, I saw that its chain, dragging through the courtyard in its wake, was pulled tight. The summerhouse was just beyond the reach of its fangs. Aghast, crushed by horror, I felt barely any relief at this. Staggering, close to fainting, I raised my eyes; never before had I seen it at such close quarters; only now did the scales fall from my eyes. For how great is the force of credulity! how powerful the suggestion of terror! Such incomprehension! But this was a man! A chained-up man, whom I, by incomprehensible means, in a simplifying, metaphorical and comprehensive elision, had taken for a dog.

            Please don’t misunderstand me. A dog he was, to be sure, but in human shape. The quality of the canine is an internal quality; it can manifest itself quite as well in human as in animal form.

            Standing before me at the entrance of the summerhouse, his jaws inside-out, as it were, and unwrapped, all his teeth bared in a terrible snarl, was a man of medium stature, with a black beard. His face was yellow and bony, his eyes black, angry and distressed. Judging from his black clothes and the cultivated shape of his beard, he might be taken for an educated person, a scholar, perhaps the older, unsuccessful brother of Doctor Gotard. But that first impression was mistaken. His huge hands, smeared with glue, the two brutal and cynical furrows etched at either side of his nose, disappearing into his beard, the vulgar, horizontal wrinkles across his low forehead, quickly dispelled that first illusion. He was, rather, a bookbinder, a tub-thumper, a rally speaker and a party member, a fierce man with dark and explosive enthusiasms. And right there, in those depths of passion, in that convulsive bristling of all his fibres, in his mad rage, barking furiously at the end of a stick pointed at him—he was a hundred percent dog.

            Were I to escape over the back wall of the summerhouse, I thought, then I should be completely out of range of his fury and might reach the Sanatorium gate in safety by a side path. But as I was about to hop over the railing, I stopped in mid-motion. I simply felt it too cruel to walk away, to leave him like this, his helpless fury surpassing all limits. I imagined his terrible disappointment, his inhuman pain at seeing me walking away for ever, escaping his trap.

            I stayed. I stepped up to him. In a steady, natural voice, I said, “Remain calm. I will untie you.”

            His face, rent by twitches, perturbed by the jarring of a snarl, was reintegrated at this, became smooth; from deep within, an almost completely human face rose to the surface. I approached him without fear, unfastened the buckle at his neck, and we set off walking side by side. The bookbinder wore a decent black suit, but was barefoot. I attempted to engage him in conversation, but nothing save unintelligible gibbering came from his mouth. Only in his eyes, those black, expressive eyes, could I read the wild rapture of his attachment, his fondness, which gripped me with terror. Once or twice, he stumbled against a stone or a clump of earth; his face broke up in shock at once; his dread emerged halfway, poised in readiness to jump out; behind it, his rage only awaited its moment to transform that face once more into a nest of hissing vipers. At such moments, I brought him to heel with a gruff but friendly reprimand. I even patted him on the back. At times, a bewildered and suspicious smile, not quite trusting itself, strove to rise to his face. Oh, what a burden that terrible friendship had become! How that alien fondness had begun to terrify me! But how could I be rid of this character, striding beside me, his eyes fixed upon me, all the eagerness of his canine being intent on my face? But I could not betray my impatience. I took out my wallet and said in a businesslike way, “No doubt you need money. I will lend it to you with pleasure.” But his face took on such terrible wildness at this sight that I quickly put the wallet away. For a long time afterward, he would not be placated, unable to control his features, contorted by convulsions of howling.

            No. I can stand it no longer. Anything but this! Matters have become altogether too complicated, hopelessly tangled. I can see the glow of a distant fire over the town. Father in the burning shop, somewhere in the fire of a revolution! Doctor Gotard unavailable! And what is more, the inexplicable appearance of Mother, incognito, on some secret mission! They are the links of some great, incomprehensible chain of intrigue drawing tightly around my person.

            Escape! I must escape from this place! Anywhere at all! I must be rid of this terrible friendship with a bookbinder that stinks of dog, and keeps a constant watch on me. We are now standing at the entrance to the Sanatorium. “Please, come to my room,” I say with a courteous gesture. My civilised motions fascinate him, lull his wildness to sleep. I gesture him into the room, seat him in a chair.

            “I will go to the restaurant,” I say, “and bring cognac.”

            He starts up in dread at this, wanting to accompany me. I calm his panic with gentle firmness.

            “Sit down. Wait quietly,” I say in a deep, wavering voice, at the bottom of which my concealed terror resounds. He sits down with an uncertain smile.

            I leave the room and walk slowly along the corridor. I descend the stairs. I proceed along the corridor that leads to the exit, and leave by the door. I cross the courtyard, slam the iron gate shut behind me, and set off running, out of breath, my heart thumping, my temples pounding, along the dark avenue that leads to the railway station.

            Visions accumulate in my mind, each more terrible than the last—the monster’s impatience, his dread and despair at realising that he has been cheated, his resurging fury, his renewed rage, exploding with uncontrollable power—my father’s return to the Sanatorium, tapping at the door, suspecting nothing, and coming face to face with a terrifying beast.

            It is for the best that Father is dead, I think with relief; that now, strictly speaking, it cannot catch him. Before me, I see a row of black railway carriages, waiting to depart.

            I take a seat. As if it has been waiting for me, without a whistle, the train moves slowly from its place.

            In the window, that huge bowl of the horizon passes by and revolves once more, swollen with dark, blustering forests, in the midst of which the Sanatorium walls loom whitely. Farewell Father. Farewell town that I shall see no more.

            Ever since then, I have been travelling, travelling endlessly. I have made myself somewhat at home here, on the railway; they tolerate me, wandering from carriage to carriage. The compartments, as enormous as rooms, are filled with rubbish and straw. Draughts penetrate them from end to end on grey, colourless days.

            My clothes became tattered and torn; I was given an outworn railwayman’s uniform; there is a dirty rag tied around my face due to a swollen cheek. I sit in the straw, and doze. And when I am hungry, I stand in the corridor before the second-class compartments, and sing. And people toss loose change into my conductor’s cap, my black, railwayman’s cap, its peak torn off.

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