The empusium, p.11
The Empusium, page 11
The amount of alcohol he consumed was having an effect on his figure, which no doubt he regarded as athletic; it was erasing the sharp lines, so it could be said that Longin Lukas was becoming increasingly blurred against the backdrop of the world, and though his face must once have been beautiful, bags and a slight puffiness had appeared beneath his eyes. He shaved carefully, but there were days when he was not up to this duty, and then a white stubble instantly aged him by ten years. But despite all, he was still handsome.
He had a habit of interrupting his interlocutors. It was a sign of impatience toward others, which was fundamentally the driving force of his existence. He was impatient because everything fell short of his imagination and expectations, as if what he thought about the world came from other, higher realms of the spirit. Moreover, since his youth he had been sure he was unique, but somehow the world was unable to accept the fact.
Everything about him said: I already know, I have long since known what you want to say. Over the years, this was joined by the feeling that he had experienced more than others—this fact gave him great satisfaction, but also locked him inside himself, for it confirmed his belief that it was a waste of time to enter into interaction with others, as they would not understand any of what he said, and he would not learn anything interesting from them. So he remained in the highly superior conviction that he was a thoroughly tragic creature.
Before the funeral he had accosted Wojnicz in a surprising way.
“Your female compatriots are famous for their beauty,” he had said. “It must be a question of miscegenation, as there’s the highest probability that hybrids will produce both the greatest beauties and the vilest creatures.”
Wojnicz was confused, unsure whether to regard this remark as a compliment or a reprimand.
On another occasion Lukas asked him: “Where did you acquire such perfect German? The people who live in Galicia are nothing but illiterate peasants.”
And yet Wojnicz liked him. Lukas’s condescension seemed purely paternal. He had no intention of fighting it and was happy to submit. This evidently flattered Lukas, and maybe that was why he sought opportunities to be in Mieczysław’s vicinity and to lecture him on the world’s mysteries, always in the same specific way—with a mixture of contempt and grievance.
* * *
They were approaching the end of the expedition. Their carriage was already waiting for them on the road below. Everyone stopped to take in the wonderful view for one last time before plunging into the valley. And as the horizon was high, they saw the mountainsides covered in patches of golden light, aflame with the reds and yellows of beech trees against the deep green of the spruces, with spots of white here and there that, to Wojnicz’s amazement, turned out to be flocks of sheep—with the speedy dots of sheepdogs and the black commas of shepherds buzzing around them.
Here we are watching them, as usual from below, we see them like big, strong columns topped by small, chattering projections—their heads. Their feet mechanically crush the forest litter, snap the small plants, tear up the moss, and squash the tiny bodies of insects that have failed to heed the vibrations heralding imminent annihilation. For a short while after they pass, beneath the forest floor the mushroom spawn quivers, that vast, immense, motherly structure transmits information to itself—where the intruders are, and in which direction they are bending their steps.
7.
WOE, WOE IS ME!
The great edifice of the sanatorium was plainly visible from every point in Görbersdorf. Its redbrick walls shone in the autumn sun, and the sharp, pseudo-Gothic turrets reminded Wojnicz of a gramophone needle, extracting concealed sounds from the record of the sky. Somewhere far away there was thunder. The huge building looked quite absurd in this deep valley, amid the modest homes of the locals and several grand villas for visitors taking cures scattered on the hillsides, erected as if in reserve for a settlement that would arise there in the future. Its tall, narrow mass and intense color made it look like a model set up just before Wojnicz’s arrival for an unknown purpose, perhaps as part of the set for a performance that was soon to begin.
He walked along the main street, still empty at this early hour, and although the weather had deteriorated a little over the past few days, he strode briskly, with a smile on his face, because some men loading sacks into a cart were also smiling broadly at him. The town was so neat and pretty that it reminded him of the drawing on a tin of gingerbread his uncle had once given him—lovely, shapely houses with lace curtains in the windows and beautiful door handles; outside they had little fences, flowers and signs, all spruce and clean, everything the perfect size for a human being—the best illustration of that word a Pole found difficult: gemütlich. Several of the houses had been built with the patients in mind, so they boasted ornate balconies, bay windows and terraces, some in the Swiss style, with beautifully decorated wooden porches and verandas. He was fascinated by the Kurhaus buildings scattered about the park. The oldest, called the Weisses Haus, had twenty rooms and was the first building in the naturopathic foundation established by Dr. Brehmer’s sister-in-law, who had unsuccessfully tried to practice hydrotherapy here in the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Brehmer had taken it over from her as a young man, and had successfully cured several of his first patients there. Walter Frommer had soberly filled in Wojnicz’s knowledge of Görbersdorf, and it was he who confirmed August’s revelation that Brehmer had tried to get a state concession to expand the foundation, but was refused it because of his communist past. Nearer the street stood the large Altes Kurhaus, opened in 1863, with forty rooms. The Neues Kurhaus, which was built later, accommodated patients from all over the world in its seventy rooms, and the basement of the north wing housed an inhalatorium and showers for therapeutic bathing in winter. The two buildings were neatly connected by a glassed-in passage, where a winter garden and a reading room had been established. As Wojnicz determined, the reading room stocked a wide range of periodicals in German. The one that interested him most was Kladderadatsch, an illustrated satirical weekly, which included lots of amusing cartoons; reading the jokes improved his mood for the entire day, though he could not understand all of them. He did not pick up the dailies, Kölnische Zeitung and Frankfurter Zeitung—these were read by the middle-aged gentlemen, who then discussed the more important articles over coffee. Wojnicz was too young to take a real interest in politics. What was happening inside him seemed far more intense than the world’s most dramatic political events. For the Poles there was Time, read to destruction, on top of which one of the patients had the dreadful habit of underlining entire sentences in pencil, after which the newspaper was not really fit for use. Among the books in Polish he found several by Kraszewski, and The Heathen by someone called Narcyza Żmichowska—this he had instantly appropriated, but a few days later he put it back on the shelf; he could not read novels. He was simply unable to concentrate on something so unreal. Anyone who donated a book to the sanatorium library wrote their first and last name on the title page. The Heathen had belonged to one Franciszka Ulanicka, and the Kraszewskis to Antoni Bolcewicz.
The books were lent out by a young man, not much more than a boy, named Tomášek—the same boy who had gazed at him so intently during the funeral mass. Thanks to his thick-lensed glasses he could have passed as a bookworm, and perhaps that was why he had been assigned to the library. He came from the Czech lands and was apparently a cousin of Sydonia Patek. For some reason, every time Wojnicz came for books, this dim-witted librarian stared at him insistently, and once, through his own woolgathering and inattention he had overturned a shelf full of newspapers. Wojnicz found this very unpleasant, and did his best to avoid the fellow. He would wait until Tomášek was occupied with something else, and then exchange his books and journals himself, writing down the titles on a sheet of paper.
One time Tomášek came up to him while he was examining the portraits of a dozen or more writers that decorated the walls of the sanatorium library. Most of them had beards, and they all looked very dignified. Tomášek stood to one side, slightly behind him. Then a strange thing happened that put Wojnicz off this alarming figure even more. The boy began to talk in a whisper, with a Czech accent, while also sighing and dragging out the sounds, so that Wojnicz was not quite sure if he had understood him properly.
“These old men are always waylaying the young ones,” he said, and Wojnicz could not tell if he meant the esteemed authors whose portraits were hanging on the wall, or the men at the Kurhaus, or perhaps old men in general. “They bewilder us, they tell us to do things that aren’t good. They turn us against each other, they get us into awkward situations so that later it’s hard to back out with honor. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about…They tell us to be devoted, they expect total sacrifice, they force us to swear oaths. They’re old, so they’ve had plenty of time to work it all out in their minds, but we are weaker, it’s harder for us to debate, we don’t have as many arguments to offer as they do. What’s more, they don’t lack money. We think to ourselves, ‘One day I shall be just as they are, with power and money. And then I shall reward myself for everything.’ ”
Wojnicz turned to him with raised eyebrows. The boy was red with excitement, and there were beads of sweat on his still-childish nose.
“Don’t say I haven’t warned you,” he said, and disappeared among the bookcases.
At the Villa Rosa, to which Wojnicz had taken a special liking during his walks, there were rooms for the patients who were only mildly unwell. This seemed to be where the woman in the hat lived. Above the villa there was a shrine in honor of Humboldt, with a bust of him; during Brehmer’s lifetime, summer concerts had been held at a small band shell near this shrine. Wojnicz liked the fact that in addition to these fine, lavish buildings for the wealthier patients, Görbersdorf also had the Volksheilstatten-Abteilung, meaning the therapeutic department for the masses—lodging for the worse-off patients, at a distance from the main grounds, scattered about the village in private houses. And if he were not waiting for a vacancy in the main Kurhaus, he could have been among them.
It all reminded him to some extent of Truskawiec, where he had once been with his father to take the waters, except that it was larger and more solid. On the short promenade leading to the sanatorium he would examine the patients—bright hats, parasols, suits that fell somewhere between everyday outfits and Sunday best; perhaps that was the fashion at the sanatorium. And the people moved in sanatorium mode too, slower than the slowest walk at home in Lwów, because by walking any faster they would instantly cover the length and breadth of this village and would have to walk the same route several times. So every few paces they stopped to chat and shoot glances at their fellow patients, and thus not a single detail of the costumes escaped them, not a single new face could remain unobserved. Every novelty of couture, every gesture, every hairstyle was bound to be noticed and duly remarked upon.
The Russians decidedly kept apart, and were distinguished by their exaggeratedly festive attire. Some had brought their whole families along, for a shorter or longer stay, but in those instances they stayed in villas on the side of Buchberg, a densely wooded mountain, and led the life of healthy people. One also saw Scandinavians, tall, pale and gloomy. Several times Wojnicz heard the Polish language, but he did not leap forward to make a connection. The Poles went about in small groups, and were either unnaturally quiet or excessively noisy.
In the colorful, relaxed crowd, among whom nobody would suspect illness, Wojnicz found himself seeking out the tall figure of the woman from the church. He supposed that perhaps she walked more often in the other direction, toward the little Orthodox church, which he already had an appointment to visit with Herr August. By now he could recognize her step—a little swinging, not at all refined. It was the walk of a busy person who was lost in thought, focusing on her own goals. And she always kept a hand in her jacket pocket.
Whenever he saw her, he was struck dumb, and a gentle blush rose to his cheeks—he did his best to hide it by pretending to feel cold, and then covering his mouth with his scarf, but he could already sense the attentive gaze of Lukas or the slightly ironical glance of Herr August. He knew that his confusion would become a topic for comment and allusion in their evening debates. Once he had vanished to his room, they were sure to thrash out the question of his blushing for some time. But whatever they had been talking about earlier, later on it was bound to come down to the same thing—women. Once called forth by the absurd death of Frau Opitz, the subject kept returning, and her lifeless figure continued to disturb them. Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.
* * *
Wojnicz found the rest-cure hours deadly boring until he learned to make use of them as time for himself, conducive to thinking. He had noticed that when one participates intensively in life, one has no time for thinking or examining everything precisely, if only in one’s imagination. So for the first few days he always lay down beside Thilo, knowing that Thilo would immediately doze off, or even snore gently. Then Wojnicz set to work, transforming his impressions into experience and constructing meaning for everything surrounding him. He never managed to finish reading a single page, though it should have been easy. But he was overcome by a strange sense of peace, in which thoughts flowed through his mind freely, emerging from who knows where and departing to who knows where, to be replaced by others. It was definitely not a state of sleep, but nor was it ordinary waking consciousness. It was as though in between these two conditions some unappreciated layers of thought existed that one could not actually control, but that one could set in motion, providing one then allowed them to follow their own paths. If Wojnicz had been familiar with the practice of self-reflection and introspection, which at their next meeting Dr. Semperweiss recommended to him, he might certainly have noticed how thoughts arise and what they are like—they are wisps of sensations carried by time like gossamer, moved by the wind, trails of tiny reactions that arrange themselves into random sequences eager for meaning. But their nature is volatile and impermanent, they appear and disappear, leaving behind an impression that something really did happen and that we took part in it. And that what we are stuck inside is stable and certain. That it exists.
In this state some individual words came back to him like an echo; taken out of context, some sentences resounded. His mind wandered to Lwów, and to the manor house in Glinna where he had spent his early childhood, as his horizontal position adopted unnaturally in the middle of the day revealed to him forgotten details of his brief life. For example, he remembered that whenever his uncle Emil was due to arrive in Lwów, special preparations were made. Józef would run to the shops and always returned with a duck in a basket, while a boy from the market helped him to bring in the vegetables and apples—apples were a must.
At the time, January Wojnicz’s younger brother, Emil, was already a cavalry officer in the Austrian army, a tall, handsome, fair-haired young man with a perfect figure and impeccable manners. He wore a flaxen mustache, which gave his youthful, delicate features gravity and manliness. His blue-gray jacket beautifully hugged his slender torso and lent his skin a refined pallor. But the finest thing of all—as Mieczyś saw it—were the red breeches tucked into knee-high, wonderfully polished boots. Emil would arrive, click his heels and immediately light a cigar, in which the boy’s father kept him company. Mieczyś would receive from his uncle a box of cakes from the patisserie and some military trinket or other: cartridge cases, a penknife or a mess tin. Then he would have to answer his uncle’s questions, which, as he had learned it all inside out, he did convincingly and with great self-confidence:
“A cavalry division consists of two brigades with two regiments each.”
Or: “A cavalry regiment includes six troops.”
He also had to add that each division had under it a special horse artillery division and four machine-gun sub-units. It was from the cartridges for these guns that the cases came, though Mieczyś was not quite sure what to do with them. He simply carried them in his pocket and felt their pleasant weight.
The day before his uncle’s arrival, as soon as he had done the shopping, Józef would go down to the cellar to cut off the duck’s head, and then all afternoon, the bird hung tied to the metal trim above the tile stove, with the stump of its neck downward over a bowl, into which the blood dripped slowly, drop by drop.
Mieczyś had already learned from earlier pain and regret that on no account should he befriend the duck brought home from the market, he must not feel sorry for it, so he ignored the pitiful, sometimes most indignant quacking before it went to the slaughter, and blocked his ears to avoid witnessing its brief presence in the house.
But the bleeding, feathery shred tied to the edge of the stove filled him with despair and induced doleful, helpless weeping, which he was obliged to hide from his father, his uncle and even Józef. They would have said he was whining like a woman. The horrible sight of the dark red, almost brown blood congealing on the stump forced him into painful ambivalence—to feel afraid, while also feeling a strange, indescribable fascination close to pleasure, far mightier than picking scabs off his knees, or teasing an already wobbly milk tooth. His chest was racked by sorrow that could not change into weeping or relief of any kind, but just went on pushing from the inside, paralyzing his lungs. For there was a mysterious bond between him and the dead, headless duck as the blood dripped from it, a physical sensation, a feeling of faintness and weakness arising from total defenselessness. The horror was completed by the beauty of the feathers, sticky with blood but shimmering wonderfully in the light of the kitchen, dark blue and golden, inky and greenish, azure, sapphire—there were no names for them, but they unerringly reminded him of the wings of the Four-Fingered Angel. So the duck’s death became blasphemy, an attack on the entire world.
