I replied:
“Oh, let her stay on a while. She’s talkative, but honest. She doesn’t steal.”
But my wife started to act terribly, I would say disproportionately, upset.
“Czesia, why were you laughing with the concierge’s wife today?”
“It was nothing; we was just nattering.”
“There’s nothing to laugh at, my dear Czesia,” said my wife sourly. “You probably think that you’re quite clever.”
I don’t know what to ascribe it to, but my wife’s nerves utterly refused to obey her. She came to me all set to create a scene: a moment ago she had gone out on the balcony, and the maid from across the way had said something to their cook; the two of them had looked at her and had burst out laughing; she wanted me to go and give them a talking-to. I stuck my head out of the window and cried:
“What’s all this laughter! If you please! What’s all this foolish laughter!”
But it truly seemed as if my wife was developing a persecution complex.
“Tell her she’s fired from the first of the month. Her insubordination is growing worse. She’s spreading rumors about us. I forbade her to associate with the other maids, and today I caught her on the steps snickering with the concierge and the cook from the first floor. I can’t abide that foolishness of hers!”
“You want to sack her right away? Maybe she’ll improve.”
“Filip,” said my wife with sudden concern, “I wouldn’t have anything against rehiring our former maid, the younger one. Listen,” she added with an effort, “What’s the meaning of this? Czesia’s laughing at me in this vulgar way behind my back—someone put her up to it—I sense it, I sense it for sure, that the moment I turn my back she makes faces and sticks her tongue out, or follows behind me. I sense it.”
“I think you must be ill, my treasure. What could she possibly be laughing at, when there’s nothing laughable about you?”
“How should I know what she’s laughing at? At foolishness. Her own, naturally, not mine. She must have noticed something about me.”
“Maybe she’s amused by your manicure, the row of tiny little shining mirrors,” I said pensively, “or maybe the fact that you wipe your nose on a handkerchief. God alone knows what might amuse an uneducated and uncultured maid. Maybe she’s amused by your hair lotion?”
“Stop it!” she cried. “I’m not interested! It’s not just her; the others are laughing too! Such inane, vulgar laughter! The insolence! Go to the landlord! Their heads have turned! It’s going to make me ill!”
I gave Czesia a dressing-down:
“Czesia, why do you irritate the mistress? You know how delicate she is; she might easily fall ill!”
And I went to complain to the landlord about the disorder prevailing in the building—but the following day someone threw a rotting onion at me from a window. Indeed—it may have been—I also had the impression that amid the springtime noises of the courtyard I could detect a certain foolishness, a certain vulgarity, a certain suddenly excited, awful arousability—as if someone had tickled the heel of a mastodon with a feather. The maid from the back building had apparently had the impertinence to laugh in my wife’s face; some awful drawings had appeared on our front door —Lord, monstrous jokes written in chalk, in which my wife and I featured in monstrous shapes and in a monstrous pose. On my wife’s orders, the maid wiped these drawings off several times a day—my wife, driven to distraction, even lay in wait in the hallway and rushed out onto the stairs at the slightest rustle, but she was never able to catch anyone red-handed. All kinds of pranks were played.
“Police! Where’s the police?! Police! How dare they! All the maids should be thrown out, and the concierge, and his children! The concierge’s children are impertinent too! It’s a mafia! It’s a plot! You hear, Czesia?! Police! What are you looking at, Czesia?! I forbid you to look! Get out! Get out this second!”
But this shouting merely stirred up impudence and a terrible, insolent, hidden hatred.
“Filip,” said my wife, shaking with fear, “what is this? What does it mean? Some kind of dirt is breeding here; something’s brewing. There’s something inside me—what do they want of me? Filip ...” She looked at me then at once, ashen and extinguished, she crept away into the corner and sat down.
And I remained in my armchair, the newspaper in my hand, a cigarette burning down between my fingers, and thought for a long time. Doubtless it would have been possible to throw the maid out; we could also have changed apartments, even moved to another neighborhood; we could have—had I not been so feckless, so trembling and bashful. My wife asked me, what did this mean. What did what mean? For heaven’s sake, who here was laughable, untamed, and monstrous? If my wife hated the maid, why then, the maid also hated my wife. I bent over this hatred, took it in trembling hands, and stared at it with the feeble gaze of an old man, listening intently to the insistent voice coming from the kitchen:
“So I says to the mistress, I says, if I was to tell you all the things they say, I think I’d drop dead first with embarrassment, and you’d burst a blood vessel.”
I listened and said nothing ...
Until my wife took off her wedding ring one day and put it on the dining room table, and I—oh, entirely automatically, after all I was quite lost in thought—I took the ring and slipped it into my pocket. And later I said to my wife:
“Honey, where’s your wedding ring?”
My wife looked immediately at the maid, the maid at my wife; then my wife said:
“Czesia!”
Czesia replied:
“Yes ma’am!”
My wife exclaimed:
“Thief!”
The maid, her arms akimbo, yelled vulgarly:
“You’re a thief yourself!”
My wife:
“Quiet!”
The maid:
“You be quiet!”
My wife:
“Get out! Get out this instant!”
The maid:
“Get out yourself!”
Oh, the things that happened! Heads had already appeared in all the windows, shouts, curses, insults were flying from every direction, and a terrible laughter was rising; then all at once I saw the maid grab hold of my wife’s hair and tug, and tug, and as if through a fog I heard my wife’s voice:
“Filip!”
The Rat
The terror of the entire established and prosperous neighborhood was a ruffian, roisterer, and brigand widely known by the name of Hooligan. He had been born in open country and on the boundless plain—had been brought up in forest, mountain, dale, and wilderness—he never slept in any enclosed space—and this gave him a characteristic massivity and breadth of nature—a boundlessness of soul—a swinging expansiveness of temperament. Yes, his was a broad nature that rejected cramped corners and was fond of drinking; and expansive gestures were the only kind of gestures fitting to him. Hooligan the brigand hated anything that was cramped, narrow, or petty, for instance pickpockets; and if he had to choose between pinching someone and smashing him in the face, he would smash him in the face—and he trod heavily and broadly across the fields, singing at the top of his voice: “With a heigh and a ho! A heigh and a ho!”
People got out of his way. And if someone failed to get out of the way in time, Hooligan the bandit would smash him right in the face with his paw, or lift him in the air and crush him—or he would simply maul him—then toss him aside and walk on. But he never perpetrated any hidden or petty killings; all his murders were noisy, bold, expansive and thunderous, committed in a grand procession with singing: “O Marysia, my Marysia!” ... or: “With a nonny no, Marysia-o!” For he loved that Marysia of his more than anything else in the world; he loved her noisily, loudly, and broadly, with Cossack dancing, with vodka!
Yes, his was the broadest nature there could have been. He had no understanding whatsoever of quiet—and especially of quietening —the kind of quietening that, it could be said, is the principal thievish quality of
people of our times—and he even slept sonorously, with open mouth, snoring, filling the valleys with his snores. He could not abide cats, and when he saw a cat he would chase after it for ten or twenty kilometers; whereas women he used to catch in abundance and bellow as he did so: S-ing hell! S-ing hell!” Or he would shout: “With a heigh and a ho, hoo, hoo! Hup! Giddy up!” And that was exactly how he caught his one and only Marysia! Sometimes, however, he was oppressed by longing, and at such times the whole land was filled with his loud, sweeping elegies, which shimmered with dismal melancholy, and there rang out the bandit’s croakings to the moon, outdoor, prayerlike, Ukrainian, Romanian, villainous, steppe-bound, or homegrown lamentations: “With a heigh heigh ho,” he would sing, “O sorrow! O sorrow! Hey Marysia, Maryśka!” And the desperate dogs would bark down the lanes, howling dully and darkly. And in the end this howling also infected the people. And the entire neighborhood howled longingly, dully and blackly, straight at the pallid shining moon: “O sorrow! O sorrow!”
More and more songs multiplied and poured out around the bandit. He gradually passed into legend, and thus songs were composed about him too, either broad, outdoor ones or noisy, swaggering ones, though always with the same monotonous refrain: “With a heigh and a ho! A heigh and a ho! Ah ha, heigh, a heigh and a ho!” And there was more and more singing, rolling about, and killing. Yet in a crumbling and isolated manor house that stood nearby, for many years there had lived a certain old bachelor, a former judge, Skorabkowski, who was exceedingly irritated by the expansive exuberance of the neighborhood. He was constantly sneaking to the authorities to complain—all in the greatest secrecy, by the way.
“I don’t understand how it can be tolerated,” he would whisper. “Murders committed in broad daylight .... Rolling and sprawling about .... Roistering in the inns. And that singing, oh, that singing, that roaring, those eternal lamentations and howling .... And that Marysia, Marysia ...”
“What do you expect?”—The chief of police was a corpulent man. “What do you expect, the authorities are powerless. Powerless,” he repeated and stared through the window at the endless fallow fields, in which single trees grew here and there. “The people like him. They support him.”
“How can they support him?!” burst out the retired judge, releasing his gaze through half-closed eyelids across the plain for many kilometers, all the way to the distant sand dunes of Mala Wola, then bringing it back beneath his lids. “They’re afraid to leave their homes! He kills people ...”
“Yes, but only some people,” the chief of police muttered in reply against the background of the endless plain. “The others just watch .... Don’t you understand? For them it’s fun—to see a decent murder .... Aha,” he muttered and pretended not to see, for from a clump of trees not far away a corpse suddenly flew up in the air, followed immediately by a magnificent roar, as if thousands of buffalo were trampling the crops and the wildflowers.
The sun was dropping into the west. The chief of police closed the window.
“If you aren’t willing to catch him, I will,” the judge said, almost to himself. “I’ll catch him and lock him up. I’ll lock him up and constrict that broad nature of his. I’ll constrict it and make it a little less generous.”
But the chief of police merely sighed:
“Magnificent! Magnificent! ...”
Skorabkowski returned to his deserted manor and, pacing through the empty rooms in his tobacco-brown dressing gown, dreamed up plans for seizing the ruffian. The miser’s hatred of the rover gathered in strength with every minute. Catching him, seizing him, imprisoning and somehow quietening him became an imperative need of his rather constricted mind. In the end he decided to exploit the hellish straightforwardness of the ruffian, who would always assail his victims in a straight line, and—what was more—he also wished to exploit the excessive way in which the brigand had run rampant. In effect Hooligan had run so rampant that he was used to everyone running away from him, and the sight of a person who did not run away but stood still he took as a personal provocation. Accordingly Skorabkowski ordered his butler Ksawery to walk up to a tree on a nearby hill—and when the old servant carried out his master’s command, the latter suddenly threw a chain around him and chained him to the trunk of the tree. After this, he dug a large pit with his own hands in front of the servant, set an iron trap in the pit, and hurriedly took refuge in his house. Dusk fell. For a long time Ksawery laughed at the “young master’s” little jokes, but when the moon rose and illuminated the entire neighborhood as far as the distant woods on the horizon, the manservant slowly began to understand why he had been secured to a tree trunk on a hill and left so cruelly to the mercy of night’s expanses. Dogs started to howl, and from the reeds there sounded the plaintive call of the brigand, who was beginning to yield to one of his steppe-wrought nostalgias. And gradually the great and terrible howling “Heigh ho Maryśka, Maryśka, Maryśka,” began to surge through the night, plaintive and drunken, disheveled, limitless, seemingly unrestrained. First the bandit howled inexorably, wildly, without tremor or curb, giving free rein to his soul; after him the tethered dogs howled—and then the people howled, timidly and anxiously, through the casements of their bolted-up cottages.
“Young master!” Ksawery tried to call. “Young master!” But a shout would have attracted the attention of the bandit, and his anxious whisper failed to reach Skorabkowski, who was closely following the course of events from his casement. Ksawery cursed the fact that we humans cannot disappear, that we have to be exposed, though we do not want to be, though we cannot be, that someone else can put us on view and do with us in our stead that which is beyond our strength. The old servant cursed the visibility of our bodies, which is independent of us! But the bandit was already standing, already rising from his lair, and whether he liked it or not the old man had to catch his eye—irritate his pupil—via his optic nerve penetrate to his brain ... and now Hooligan was already taking great strides to shatter his jaw, smash his nose and breast, crush his exposed and revealed neck! Haa! Ahaa! All at once he fell into the pit and was caught in the trap set by Skorabkowski, who immediately ran up and after a few hours’ labor managed to transfer the thug’s immense body to the secluded cellars of the old manor.
And so Hooligan was in his clutches! And so Hooligan the brigand had been dragged into a dungeon, locked up in a cramped space, gagged, chained to a hook, at someone else’s mercy! The appeals judge rubbed his diminutive hands and smiled composedly, after which he spent the entire night thinking up appropriate tortures. He had no desire whatsoever to execute the roisterer—cramped, narrow and formalistic as he was, he wished to straiten and constrict his victim a little. Death was no tasty morsel for him; all he cared about was constriction. The retired man was in no hurry. For the first few days he did nothing but relish the notion that he had Hooligan in his cellar—that the brigand could not roar or make a racket, for he was gagged. And it was only when he realized that the noisy ruffian would be unable to make any noise, that he was quiet—it was only then that Judge Skorabkowski plucked up the courage to go down to the cellar and in absolute silence begin his practices, aimed at constricting and diminishing. Oh, how quietly! How powerful was the silence that rose from the cellars of the house and froze into stillness. There followed weeks and months of great quiet, the quiet of unroared roars ...
And every day at seven in the evening Skorabkowski would descend into the torture chamber, wearing his tobacco brown housecoat, with little sticks or little wires in his hand. And every night, from seven onward, the appeals judge would labor in the sweat of his brow over the voiceless villain, silently, silently .... Silently he would approach him and to begin with would tickle him on the heel for a long, long time, so as to stimulate him to a spasmodic dainty giggle; then he would administer petty mortifications with the sticks and constrict his field of vision with the aid of boards; he would prick him with pins and show him peas, beans, and small beets .... But the brigand did not take it silently, but
in silence. And his silence grew, surging and thrusting through the darkness, becoming equal to his most magnificent roars—and it was in vain that the judge attempted with his own silentness to vanquish the broad silence of the bandit—and hatred filled the dungeons! What was it that Skorabkowski actually wanted? He wanted to change the bandit’s nature, refashion his voice, transform his broad laugh into a narrow giggle, reduce his roar to a whisper, shorten and diminish his entire figure; in a word, he wished to make him resemble himself, Skorabkowski. With the assiduity of a tracker he sought his weak points, subjecting him to particular and terrible examinations in order to find that point minoris resistentiae, the weak spot through which he could properly set about the bandit. Yet the bandit exhibited no weak spots, but only remained silent.
Time and again it seemed to the old gentleman that in the course of his strenuous operations he had succeeded in achieving a certain constriction—but every week there would come a time of truth, and for the torturer this was a terrible moment which the wretched, tight-lipped judge feared more than anything in the world. Because every week he had to take the gag from the bandit’s mouth in order to feed him—oh, with what numb mortal terror he would stick mountains of cotton wool in his ears, place a bowl of food before the felled thug, and with a single convulsive gesture remove the cork from his mouth. And every time he would delude himself into hoping that despite everything he had succeeded in quietening the villain somewhat, that just maybe, this time he would not erupt ... And every time the uncorked roisterer would burst out in an infernal orgy of shouts, curses, and roars! “S-ing hell! S-ing hell!”—he would roar. “You louse! Beat it! Beat it! Wait till I get my hands on you! I’ll smash you in the mug, right in the mug .... Me, Hooligan, S-ing hell, S-ing hell, S- your mother! I’ll kill you!” he would roar. “I’ll kill you! Marysia! Marysia! Where’s Marysia, heigh ho Marysia!” And he would fill the cellar with a roar that would spread throughout the neighborhood; he would spit curses, sing songs, vent his soul; and the miserly, shrunken torturer, white as a sheet, would thrust food into his gob ... while he roared between mouthfuls. And the people in the local villages would repeat among themselves: “That’s Hooligan roaring! Hooligan’s still roaring!” After these sessions the former appeals judge would return upstairs paralyzed with fear and would go on searching for the point minoris resistentiae.
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