Then from the very first page you realize that the novel you are holding has nothing to do with the one you were reading yesterday.
Outside the town of Malbork
An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page, of onion in fact, onion being fried, a bit scorched, because in the onion there are veins that turn violet and then brown, and especially the edge, the margin, of each little sliver of onion becomes black before golden, it is the juice of the onion that is carbonized, passing through a series of olfactory and chromatic nuances, all enveloped in the smell of simmering oil. Rape oil, the text specifies; everything here is very precise, things with their nomenclature and the sensations that things transmit, all the victuals on the fire at the same time on the kitchen stove, each in its vessel exactly denominated, the pans, the pots, the kettles, and similarly the operations that each preparation involves, dusting with flour, beating the egg, slicing the cucumbers in fine rounds, larding the hen to be roasted. Here everything is very concrete, substantial, depicted with sure expertise; or at least the impression given to you, Reader, is one of expertise, though there are some foods you don’t know, mentioned by name, which the translator has decided to leave in the original; for example, schoëblintsjia. But on reading schoëblintsjia you are ready to swear to the existence of schoëblintsjia, you can taste its flavor distinctly even though the text doesn’t say what that flavor is, an acidulous flavor, partly because the word, with its sound or only with its visual impression, suggests an acidulous flavor to you, and partly because in the symphony of flavors and words you feel the necessity of an acidulous note.
As Brigd kneads the ground meat into the flour moistened with egg, her firm red arms dotted with golden freckles become covered with particles of white dust with bits of raw meat stuck to them. Every time Brigd’s torso moves back and forth at the marble table, her skirts rise an inch or two behind and show the hollow between her calf and femoral biceps, where the skin is whiter, crossed by a fine, pale-blue vein. The characters take on form gradually in the accumulation of minute details and precise movements, but also of remarks, shreds of conversation, as when old Hunder says, “This year’s doesn’t make you jump the way last year’s did,” and after a few lines you understand he means the red pepper; and “You’re the one who jumps less with every passing year!” Aunt Ugurd says, tasting something with a wooden spoon and adding a pinch of cinnamon to the pot.
Every moment you discover there is a new character, you don’t know how many people there are in this immense kitchen of ours, it’s no use counting, there were always many of us, at Kudgiwa, always coming and going: the sum never works out properly because different names can belong to the same character, indicated according to the circumstances by baptismal name, nickname, surname or patronymic, and even by appellations such as “Jan’s widow,” or “the apprentice from the corn shop.” But what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines—Bronko’s gnawed nails, the down on Brigd’s cheeks—and also the gestures, the utensils that this person or that is handling—the meat pounder, the colander for the cress, the butter curler—so that each character already receives a first definition through this action or attribute; but then we wish to learn even more, as if the butter curler already determined the character and the fate of the person who is presented in the first chapter handling a butter curler, and as if you, Reader, were already prepared, each time that character is introduced again in the course of the novel, to cry, “Ah, that’s the butter-curler one!” thus obligating the author to attribute to him acts and events in keeping with that initial butter curler.
Our kitchen at Kudgiwa seemed to be made deliberately so that at any hour many persons would be found in it, each intent on cooking himself something, one hulling chick peas, another putting the tench in marinade, everybody seasoning or cooking or eating something, and when they went away, others came, from dawn till late at night, and that morning I had come down at this early hour and already the kitchen was in full operation because it was a different day from the others: Mr. Kauderer had arrived the night before with his son, and he would be going away this morning, taking me in the son’s place. I was leaving home for the first time: I was to spend the whole season on Mr. Kauderer’s estate, in the province of Pëtkwo, until the rye harvest, to learn the working of the new drying machines imported from Belgium; during this period Ponko, youngest of the Kauderers, would stay with us and acquire the techniques of grafting rowans.
The usual smells and noises of the house crowded around me that morning as if in farewell: I was about to lose everything I had known till then, and for such a long period—so it seemed to me—that when I came back nothing would be as it had been before, nor would I be the same I. And hence this farewell of mine was as if forever: to the kitchen, the house, to Aunt Ugurd’s knödel; so this sense of concreteness that you perceived from the very first lines bears in it also the sense of loss, the vertigo of dissolution, and you realize that you perceived this, too, alert Reader that you are, from the first page, when, though pleased with the precision of this writing, you sensed that, to tell the truth, everything was slipping through your fingers; perhaps it was also the fault of the translation, you told yourself, which may very well be faithful but certainly doesn’t render the solid substance those terms must have in the original language, whatever it may be. Each sentence, in short, wants to convey to you both the solidity of my relationship with the Kudgiwa house and my regret at losing it, and further—perhaps you didn’t realize it, but if you think back you’ll see this is exactly the case—the drive to break away from it, to run toward the unknown, to turn the page, far from the acidulous odor of the schoëblintsjia, to begin a new chapter with new encounters in the endless sunsets beyond the Aagd, on the Pëtkwo Sundays, at the festivities in the Cider Palace.
The portrait of a girl with short-cropped black hair and a long face had emerged for a moment from Ponko’s little trunk; then he immediately hid it under an oilskin jacket. In the bedroom beneath the dovecote, which had till now been mine and from today on would be Ponko’s, he was unpacking his things and arranging them in the drawers I had just emptied. I watched him in silence, sitting on my already closed little trunk, mechanically hammering at a stud that stuck out, a bit crooked; we had said nothing to each other after a grunted hello; I followed him in all his movements, trying to be thoroughly aware of what was going on: an outsider was taking my place, was becoming me, my cage with the starlings would become his, the stereoscope, the real Uhlan helmet hanging from a nail, all my things that I couldn’t take with me remained to him; or, rather, it was my relationship with things, places, people, that was becoming his, just as I was about to become him, to take his place among the things and people of his life.
That girl... “Who is that girl?” I asked, and with an ill-advised movement I reached out to uncover and grasp the photograph in its carved wooden frame. This girl was different from the girls in these parts who all have round faces and braids the color of bran. It was not until this moment that I thought of Brigd; in a flash I saw Ponko and Brigd, who would dance together on the Feast of Saint Thaddeus, Brigd who would mend Ponko’s woolen gloves, Ponko who would give Brigd a marten captured with my trap. “Let go of that picture!” Ponko yelled and grabbed both my arms with iron fingers. “Let go! This minute!”
“To remind you of Zwida Ozkart,” I managed to read on the picture. “Who is Zwida Ozkart?” I asked, and already a fist had struck me full in the face, and already with fists clenched I had flung myself on Ponko and we were rolling on the floor trying to twist each other’s arms, knee each other, break ribs.
Ponko’s body had heavy bones, his arms and legs hit sharply, the hair I tried to grab in order to throw him backward was a brush as stiff as a dog’s coat. While we were clutching each other I had the sensation that in this struggle the transformation was taking place, and when he rose he would be me and I him, but perhaps I am thinking this only now, or it is only you, Reader, who are think
ing it, not I; indeed, in that moment wrestling with him meant holding tight to myself, to my past, so that it wouldn’t fall into his hands, even at the cost of destroying it, it was Brigd I wanted to destroy so she wouldn’t fall into Ponko’s hands, Brigd, with whom I had never thought I was in love, and I didn’t think I was even now, but once, only once, I had rolled with her, one on top of the other almost like now with Ponko, and she and I were biting each other on the pile of peat behind the stove, and now I felt that I had already been fighting for her against a Ponko still in the future, that I was already fighting him for both Brigd and Zwida. I had been seeking to tear something from my past so as not to leave it to my rival, to the new me with dog’s hair, or perhaps already I had been trying to wring from the past of that unknown me a secret to add to my past or to my future.
The page you’re reading should convey this violent contact of dull and painful blows, of fierce and lacerating responses; this bodiliness of using one’s own body against another body, melding the weight of one’s own efforts and the precision of one’s own receptivity and adapting them to the mirror image of them that the adversary reflects. But if the sensations reading evokes remain scant compared to any sensation really experienced, it is also because what I am feeling as I crush Ponko’s chest beneath my chest or as I block the twisting of an arm behind my back is not the sensation I would need to declare what I would like to declare, namely the amorous possession of Brigd, of the firm fullness of that girl’s flesh, so different from the bony solidity of Ponko, and also the amorous possession of Zwida, of the melting softness I imagine in Zwida, the possession of a Brigd I feel already lost and of a Zwida who has only the bodiless substance of a photograph under glass. In the tangle of male limbs opposing and identical, I try in vain to clasp those female ghosts that vanish in their unattainable difference; and I try at the same time to strike myself, perhaps the other self that is about to take my place in the house or else the self most mine that I want to snatch away from that other, but which I feel pressing against me and which is only the alienness of the other, as if that other had already taken my place and any other place, and I were erased from the world.
The world seemed alien to me when in the end I broke away from my adversary with a furious push and stood up, planting my feet on the floor. Alien was my room, the small trunk that was my luggage, the view from the little window. I feared I could no longer establish a relationship with anyone or anything. I wanted to go find Brigd, but without knowing what I wanted to say to her or do to her, what I wanted to have her say to me or do to me. I headed toward Brigd thinking of Zwida: what I sought was a two-headed figure, a Brigd-Zwida, just as I was double-faced moving away from Ponko, trying in vain with my saliva to remove a spot of blood from my corduroy suit—my blood or his, from my teeth or from Ponko’s nose.
And double-faced as I was, I heard and saw, beyond the door of the big room, Mr. Kauderer standing, making a broad horizontal gesture to measure the space before him and saying, “And so I found them before me, Kauni and Pittö, twenty-two and twenty-four years old, with their chests tom open by wolf bullets.”
“When did it happen?” my grandfather asked. “We knew nothing about it.”
“Before leaving we attended the octave service.”
“We thought things had long been settled between your family and the Ozkarts. That after all these years you had buried the hatchet, that the whole horrible business between you was over.”
Mr. Kauderer’s eyes, which had no lashes, kept staring into the void; nothing moved in his gutta-percha-yellow face. “Between Ozkarts and Kauderers peace lasts only from one funeral to the next, and the hatchet is not buried, but our dead are buried and we write on their graves: This was the Ozkarts’ doing.”
“And what about your bunch, then?” Bronko asked, a man who called a spade a spade.
“The Ozkarts also write on their graves: This was the Kauderers’ doing.” Then, rubbing one finger over his mustache, he said, “Here Ponko will be safe, at last.”
It was at this point that my mother clasped her hands and said, “Holy Virgin, will our Gritzvi be in danger? They won’t take it out on him?”
Mr. Kauderer shook his head but didn’t look her in the face. “He isn’t a Kauderer! We’re the ones who are in danger, always!”
The door opened. From the hot urine of the horses in the yard a cloud of steam rose in the icy, glassy air. The stableboy stuck his flushed face inside and announced, “The buggy is ready!”
“Gritzvi! Where are you? Hurry up!” Grandfather shouted.
I took a step forward, toward Mr. Kauderer, who was buttoning up his felt greatcoat.
[3]
The pleasures derived from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental. Progress in reading is preceded by an act that traverses the material solidity of the book to allow you access to its incorporeal substance. Penetrating among the pages from below, the blade vehemently moves upward, opening a vertical cut in a flowing succession of slashes that one by one strike the fibers and mow them down—with a friendly and cheery crackling the good paper receives that first visitor, who announces countless turns of the pages stirred by the wind or by a gaze—then the horizonal fold, especially if it is double, opposes greater resistance, because it requires an awkward backhand motion—there the sound is one of muffled laceration, with deeper notes. The margin of the pages is jagged, revealing its fibrous texture; a fine shaving—also known as “curl”—is detached from it, as pretty to see as a wave’s foam on the beach. Opening a path for yourself, with a sword’s blade, in the barrier of pages becomes linked with the thought of how much the word contains and conceals: you cut your way through your reading as if through a dense forest.
The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed. Immersed in your reading, you move the paper knife mechanically in the depth of the volume: your reading has not yet reached the end of the first chapter, but your cutting has already gone far ahead. And there, at the moment when your attention is gripped by the suspense, in the middle of a decisive sentence, you turn the page and find yourself facing two blank sheets.
You are dazed, contemplating that whiteness cruel as a wound, almost hoping it is your dazzled eyesight casting a blinding glare on the book, from which, gradually, the zebra rectangle of inked letters will return to the surface. No, an intact blank really reigns on the two sides that confront each other. You turn another page and find the next two are printed properly. Blank, printed; blank, printed; and so on until the end. The large sheets were printed only on one side, then folded and bound as if they were complete.
And so you see this novel so tightly interwoven with sensations suddenly riven by bottomless chasms, as if the claim to portray vital fullness revealed the void beneath. You try jumping over the gap, picking up the story by grasping the edge of the prose that comes afterward, jagged like the margin of the pages separated by the paper knife. You can’t get your bearings: the characters have changed, the settings, you don’t understand what it’s about, you find names of people and don’t know who they are—Hela, Casimir. You begin to suspect that this is a different book, perhaps the real Polish novel Outside the town of Malbork, whereas the beginning you have read could belong to yet another book, God only knows which.
It had already occurred to you that the names didn’t sound particularly Polish: Brigd, Gritzvi. You have a good atlas, very detailed; you turn to the index of places: Pëtkwo, which should be a fairly important town, and the Aagd, which could be a river or a lake. You track them down in a remote plain of the north that wars and peace treaties have successively awarded to different countries. Perhaps also to Poland? You consult an encyclopedia, a historical atlas; no, Poland has nothing to do with it; this area, in the period between the two wars, was an independent state: Cimmeria; capital Örkko; national language Cimmerian, belonging to the Bothno-Ugaric family. The “Cimmeria” article in the encyclopedia concludes
with not very reassuring sentences: “In successive territorial divisions between her powerful neighbors the young nation was soon erased from the map; the autochthonous population was dispersed; Cimmerian language and culture had no development.”
You are impatient to get in touch with the Other Reader, to ask her if her copy is like yours, and to tell her your conjectures, the information you have gathered.... You look in your pocket diary for the number you wrote next to her name when you and she introduced yourselves.
“Hello, Ludmilla? Have you seen? It’s a different novel, but this one, too, or at least my copy...”
The voice at the other end of the wire is hard, a bit ironic. “Look, I’m not Ludmilla. I’m her sister, Lotaria.” That’s right, she did tell you: “If I don’t answer, my sister will be there.” “Ludmilla is out. What is it? What did you want?”
“I just wanted to tell her about a book.... It’s not important, I’ll call back....”
“A novel? Ludmilla always has her nose buried in a novel. Who’s the author?”
“Well, it’s a kind of a Polish novel that she’s also reading. I thought we might exchange some impressions. Bazakbal’s novel.”
“Polish? What sort?”
“Um, it doesn’t seem half bad to me.”
No, you misunderstood. Lotaria wants to know the author’s position with regard to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems That Demand a Solution. To make your task easier she furnishes you with a list of names of Great Masters among whom you should situate him.
Again you feel the sensation you felt when the paper knife revealed the facing white pages. “I couldn’t say, exactly. You see, I’m not actually sure even of the title or the author’s name. Ludmilla will tell you about it: it’s a rather complicated story.”
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Page 4
