The empusium, p.17
The Empusium, page 17
He was also reminded of childhood baths. There was always something nervous about them. His father would take a long time to test him on his prayers before reluctantly handing him over to Gliceria. He would lead the child to her kingdom, the kitchen, where a tin tub full of hot, steaming water would already be waiting on the floor. The scent of soap and clean towels was a festive smell, the fragrance of Saturdays. Wojnicz could not remember his father ever being present at bath time. Gliceria would receive him in her plump hands, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, ruddy from the heat and smiling, and from that point on little Mieczyś became a participant in the ritual of undressing, being immersed in the water, and being scrubbed with a washcloth moistened with the scented soap that Gliceria kept specially for his delicate skin and that nobody else used.
Throughout the bath she twittered away to him in Polish and Ukrainian as nobody else ever did. He was her “little pearl,” her “baby soap bubble,” her “buttercup,” her “little gem” and her “wee angel.” The profusion of names intoxicated the young Mieczyś, who could not absorb all the images magically revealed by these words: jewels, churches, forests, gardens—an entire world was contained in them and other worlds too, that he did not know from his own experience, but the shape of which he could imagine. The parts of his body were his “handies,” his “tootsies,” his “leglets,” his “wee chest”; addressed this way, he felt pleased with himself and somehow even proud of his existence, a feeling he never had when communing with his father. As he gazed at his protruding stomach it was a “tummy,” and the hole in it was his “belly button.” Gliceria would coo over him with sweat pouring from her brow, the entire kitchen now a steam bath.
Then she would pull Mieczyś out and onto the table, where a towel was spread, and rub the boy dry, tickling him under the arms or pretending she wanted to bite off his “wee toes.” Mieczyś remembered not to laugh too loud, for fear of alarming his father, who would probably race in here, trailing the cold from the corridor and halting this delicious game, so he just giggled quietly.
The freshly laundered flannel pajamas were stiff and unpleasant, but Mieczyś knew that next morning, after the first night, they would be the same as ever—nice and soft. The passage of time smoothed out the creases and roughness, making the world a friendlier place. Once he was sitting in his pajamas, Gliceria would fetch a comb and run it through his fair hair, cut in a pageboy, and could never resist trying to braid it into little plaits.
“It’s so strong, so thick,” she would say.
It was wonderful to find that the repertoire of valuable things he had at his disposal included his hair. Of course she quickly unplaited it, but she would comb it in curls on his brow, which his father instantly ruffled when he came to say good night, as Mieczyś lay in the cold room in freshly starched sheets, with a bedwarmer at his feet, reflecting on those weekly moments of bath-time endearments.
One day, on his way back to the guesthouse, Wojnicz went into the patisserie, Laugers Konditorei und Café, where he bought a box of pistachio macaroons—he thought their willow-green color looked refined, promising a flavor that would be hard to define precisely and that he was curious about. Later he would write in his diary: The actual cake is very light, the shell crunchy. Not as sweet as our macaroons from Zalewski’s. But the filling is flavorless, and the color may have been added artificially, made of spinach.
Just outside the guesthouse, hearing someone shout from far away in Polish: “A capital joke! You have quite an imagination!,” he instinctively quickened his pace to reach the shelter of the building as soon as possible.
* * *
How did he come to be at the edge of the forest that same afternoon? A light drizzle had scared off all the walkers, and a good thing too—nobody saw him leaving the guesthouse, and instead of walking the usual route under an umbrella like a good boy, he turned aside.
He doggedly climbed uphill—thank goodness he had put on his old shoes—occasionally struggling to catch his breath. Now and then he stopped and looked around carefully, trying not to miss a single detail of the forest floor. He was looking for a sign, sticks arranged in a cross, pine cones set out in a particular order, unusually shaped roots, something to imply that he was close. The moist air, bloated with fragrance, was as meaty as food. Wojnicz’s head was spinning, he kept having to stop and hug a tree. He felt feverish—perhaps his temperature had risen sharply—so he promised himself he would head back in a moment, as Dr. Semperweiss would be horrified by this escapade. And he knew perfectly well that he had already crossed the boundary of common sense, that Holy Grail of Herr Lukas, who would certainly not shove his way through the bushes to climb the hill. Or perhaps he would do just that? Maybe he went there too, when nobody was looking? And maybe Herr August appeared there, gasping and perspiring, wiping beads of sweat from his brow with the hem of his foulard? And what about Opitz? Did he go off pretending to be picking those little liberty cap mushrooms of his, when in fact they were just an excuse to come out here? Because Raimund—Wojnicz was in no doubt about this—definitely went there.
Where the brush ended and the beech forest began, Mieczysław slowed down. He found a huge cèpe and hesitated before picking it because he had neither a knapsack nor a string bag to put it in, but he could not ignore such a great gift, so he carried it in his hand.
No woods are lovelier or more intoxicating than a beech forest. At this time of year the leaves were already dark red, spreading a purple vault overhead that separated Wojnicz from the gray of the autumn sky. Silvery tree trunks supported this colossus, creating naves and chapels. The light that fell in here was mottled by the stained-glass windows of the treetops, where every leaf was like a piece of crystal playing with the light according to its own rules. Wojnicz walked along a central nave toward an altar in the distance, not yet visible, but everything foretold it—this was a church full of labyrinths, side naves, crypts beneath the stones, tabernacles hidden in holes in the trees, altars materializing on the mossy trunks of toppled beeches. This church was not at all definite, like a man-made church, but a place of constant change: of water into life, and of light into matter. Everything here was rustling, swelling, gathering, growing and multiplying, budding and trilling. The green moss and gray lichen made the forest seem carpeted in Persian rugs—in velveteen, sheepskin, woolly felt and soft flannel. Why on earth hadn’t he come here sooner?
He came to a glade where numerous spruce trees had been planted in disciplined ranks—imported from Bavaria in the belief that they would take root in Silesia too, they were an alien element. The spruces reminded Wojnicz of Prussian troops, but what about the beeches? Those he associated with a colorful, exotic army that never went into battle but proudly flaunted its costumes, its plumes and the golden glints of metal on its helmets, and then stood immobile, to be admired rapturously for years on end. This was an army for the opera, not for war.
He almost trod on it.
He was in a clearing where there were several birches and a small oak, and plenty of stones and moss that had already covered the mouths of the boulders, muting them. It was another Puppe, not the one he had seen with Opitz and Raimund, but slightly smaller. It was lying in the moss, in fact it was moss, its body was drawn clearly and abundantly, the breasts were two stones, and this time the face was made of birchbark on which someone had painted a pair of charcoal eyes. Moisture in the air had already blurred them, so they looked like two dark stains. The entire body culminated at a single point below the “hips,” where the legs parted; a hole yawned between them, like a mouse’s shelter or the entrance to a mole’s den—a frequently used path, smoothed and polished.
Wojnicz stepped back cautiously, staring underfoot in fear of treading on something live. With a mixture of horror and fascination he gazed at the effigy, carefully made of whatever was to hand in the forest—stones and moss, twigs, bark, mushrooms, leaves and loam. All he could hear was his own rapid breathing; the forest seemed to have fallen silent, and to be watching this encounter between human being and something not human, but boldly pretending to be. Yes, everything was staring at him. He felt as if some ultra-vision were seeing through his hand-knitted sweater, his linen shirt and his cotton vest. It was an extremely unpleasant sensation, similar to the way he felt while Dr. Semperweiss was examining his body. He took a step backward, ready to return to the village immediately. But he had not yet had his fill of looking at this would-be creation of nature. He knew it was the work of those charcoal burners with the sooty faces. Involuntarily Wojnicz imagined them copulating with the Puppe, in his mind’s eye he could see the violence of male desire, its impatience and overpowering force. He had only seen something like it once, in a barn in the countryside—the steadily moving buttocks of a nameless village boy whose body was covering the maid who milked their cows. It was like a vague portent of violence and bloodshed. He felt a hot wave of fear rising from the pit of his stomach before it surged right through him, to the tips of his ears. Then it was as if the shape on the forest floor were groaning and moving its hips, as though an underground force were pushing it upward. He stared with his eyes wide open, but the illusion vanished.
The horrible feeling that he was being watched had reached its zenith. He began to sweat. And felt terrified by the rapid speed at which dusk was falling. Gradually, trying not to make a noise, he backed out of the glade, and then, stretching his long legs, he virtually ran down to the village, swearing never to come here again.
10.
THE CULMINATION OF GEOMETRY
All the curtains in Thilo’s room had been drawn wide open to let in as much light as possible, and only now could one see the red patches on his face caused by fever. His fair hair, damp with perspiration, was twisted into little curls, and he looked like a small boy who has overheated while playing an intense game. A painting covered with frayed muslin stood on a rather primitive easel, probably knocked together by Raimund, or else bought from a local craftsman, while some chromolithographs interleaved with tissue paper lay on the table. Against the wall there was a large, flat cardboard portfolio, in which Thilo kept his treasures.
“Have you been to see Dr. Semperweiss?” asked Thilo, with hope in his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything about me?”
“Well, yes, he did, he said you’re going through a worse period now. But that it’s normal.”
“Normal?”
“That it works like amplitude, now better, now worse.”
This explanation plainly reassured Thilo.
“Didn’t he urge you to move into the Kurhaus? Didn’t I hear that some rooms have been vacated?” he asked suspiciously.
Wojnicz was arranging pistachio pastries on a small plate, removing them from the cardboard box with his long fingers.
“I think we’re better off here, and the daily walk to the Kurhaus does us good,” he replied. “Besides, as you know, I’m trying to save money…”
“Take a seat,” commanded Thilo, pulling a chair up for his friend. “He hasn’t been receiving me since last week, so maybe I’m doing badly.”
“What are you saying?” Wojnicz scolded him, aware that he did not sound convincing enough.
“Have you ever seen a swamp on fire? That’s how I feel. As if the moisture I have in my body were burning inside me. I’m choking on the smoke.”
They were looking at reproductions and prints. Thilo talked of his good friend György, whom he missed—that is what he said: “I miss him badly.” Virtually deprived of contact with his family, Thilo had to cope on his own and take advantage of the help of others. György had also made sure Thilo could have his albums and reproductions here, in order to work on his doctoral thesis about the significance of landscape in art, with particular reference to the Flemish painter Herri met de Bles. The work was demanding and difficult, because de Bles’s paintings were scattered about minor collections, and his authorship was in many cases uncertain.
“We rarely notice what a painted landscape is really like. We fix our focus on the horizon and look at the depicted image. There we see the lines of hillocks and hills, woods and trees, the roofs of houses and the course of roads, and because we know what they are, and we know their names, we see everything in these categories, all separately. Ah, we say, the road winds through a valley. Or: The forest is growing on a hillside. Oh, there are some bare mountaintops. That’s how we see.”
He glanced at Wojnicz with glittering eyes.
“But I tell you, there’s another kind of looking too, total, complete and absolute. I call it transparent looking.” He repeated these words twice, as if Wojnicz was to drum them into his head forever. “It goes beyond the detail, it leads, as Herr August would say, to the foundations of the view in question, to the basic idea, leaving out the minor features that continually scatter a person’s mind and vision. If you look this way,” he said, squinting, and even crossing his eyes a little, or so it seemed to Wojnicz, “and shift yourself here as well”—at this point he tapped his head—“you would see something else entirely.”
Once again the blush appeared on his cheeks that made him look like a child. Wojnicz was infected by his passion but still did not understand.
“Do you know this? Have you ever played it?” He opened a drawer and took out a very precise geometric drawing, showing some cubes joined together into a sort of cluster.
“Look,” he said, pressing the drawing into Wojnicz’s hands. “First find the distance and keep looking until you see three-dimensional movement.”
Wojnicz did not fully understand what he was meant to do. Copying Thilo, he squinted and crossed his eyes a bit; his vision doubled strangely and went misty, but after a while, to his astonishment, the cubes were moving! How hard it was to maintain that eye position, as if looking consisted of strips, as if he had just hit upon one of these thin paths, and now that he was following it, he was seeing the cubes in a completely different way than before. This involved heightened attention, a new kind of concentration in order not to lose this mode of looking, but he was not quite in control of it yet. Just a slight movement of the head and the spell was suddenly broken; once again he saw an ordinary drawing, a flat collection of squares and rhombuses. So out of pure curiosity he started looking for the way back onto the path; it eluded him, but finally he caught sight of it again and saw the moving blocks. This change of perspective gave him great intellectual rather than visual pleasure—it was a bit like discovering a new drink or a new dish, as though this unimaginable capacity, until now hidden and rendered idle by inactivity, had been in him since birth. He amused himself with it for about a quarter of an hour.
“Do you have any other drawings?” he asked.
Thilo said yes.
“But it’s not about entertainment. It’s a deadly serious matter.”
Thilo shifted the easel to face the window.
“Why should I refuse you this? Let’s not wait, take a look!”
He presented Wojnicz with a small oil painting of a mountain landscape. It was hard to say which part of the world it depicted, because the mountains had a slightly fantastical, exaggerated shape, as if they were built out of air. There were also some impossible buildings towering on them. At the center there was a swirling green olive grove, but Wojnicz’s sight was instantly drawn to a group of colorful, dramatic figures.
“That’s Abraham. And there’s Isaac. Any fool would recognize it,” said Wojnicz, sure of himself.
“The people don’t matter. Narrow your eyes.”
Mieczysław smiled hesitantly. He looked once, and again. He was expecting to see movement in the picture, as in the case of the cubes that had suddenly started to dance, but here there was nothing going on.
“Look, don’t jabber,” Thilo admonished him.
The painting was of Abraham’s sacrifice and everything that the average person raised in the Christian religion knew about those events from the remote mythical past. To test his faithful servant, God had demanded that he sacrifice his beloved son. And so Abraham had taken Isaac off into the wilderness, to a place where sacrifices were made, and there he intended to take his son’s life with a sword. God was so highly satisfied with the man’s obedience that at the last moment he sent his angel to stay both the hand and the sword. The picture that Thilo had now shown him caught the most dramatic moment—steered by the father’s hand and the forces of gravity, the sword was already aiming for the boy’s nape. Quite oblivious, the child was waiting humbly for what would happen next. Hovering in the air, with all its angelic might, the angel was trying to stay the father’s hand. Judging from the position of its body, this was not easy, because Abraham’s hand had already gathered impetus and the blade was just about to strike the child’s delicate neck with great force. One could have learned a great deal by looking at the angel’s face, but it was hidden behind golden angel hair, in a shadow that seemed unexpected on the face of a heavenly creature; it could have been mistaken for the face of a bearded man, though angels did not have genders, let alone beards. Behind the father’s back a gaping hole in the vegetation attracted Wojnicz’s attention—there was something going on in this dark patch, something was glittering or shimmering, or some eyes were looking out of there.
He moved the picture closer to his own eyes, which were tired but focusing hard enough to make them water—the scene blurred a little, and the landscape changed into spots of ocher and green, brown and diluted gray. The image converted into its essential components—spots and streaks, brushstrokes and tiny flecks that grouped into vague, imprecise shapes. And once the viewer’s attention was well and truly put to sleep, a new sight loomed out of the picture, the old contours arranged themselves into something completely different that had not seemed to be there before, but must have been, since now he could see it. Wojnicz cried out in horror and turned to look at Thilo, who was gazing at him with satisfaction.
