We vow to you, Prince, buried in an interval in the roar of guns and in our silence: sleeplessness, disquiet, ardor. We vow to you, Prince, buried in a small gap in the earth and in the deepest site of memory, that when the time of trial comes, we will choose the sharper rapier and the more difficult death.
1951
REQUEST1
PIETER BRUEGHEL, GOOD Pieter Brueghel: paint a little town, beginning with steep roofs laid out in warm shingles like a crust of homemade bread. An amorous bumblebee tries in vain to get under those roofs, but on the way it gets stuck in a heart-shaped opening in the shutters.
Let the streets be crooked, the walls yellow, the window-sills blue, the window panes like almonds, O let them be as if they were the first to see the sunset.
And now, since we have everything, even a church tower, where a bell blossoms covered with mosses and a powdery green sheen, now it is time to think about the townspeople. Take a crowd in your hands: children shrieking like white mice, women with angular elbows and ugly ears, peasants with drunkards’ faces, fathers with venerable purple noses. Then a few clowns, rope-dancers, trollops, a beggar with a bloody mug and a cripple with a blind face like a lily. Gather them all and before you let them out into the street, jumble them up in your hands for a while like dice and make sure they look like they’re in a hurry. One with a goose to market, one with a dagger in his sleeve to carve up a rich uncle, one to the astrologer who reads the stars at night and brews beer by day, and the mayor simply to his wife for supper. And show them so that the mayor’s step is as important as the slow trot of the dog escaping with a stolen bone (and for God’s sake, Pieter Brueghel, don’t forget the dog’s tail, which should be curling, as that dog—despite his poor material circumstances—has an even-tempered, gentle character and is the only philosopher in a radius of seven miles).
Let the town be called Haarlem. Well, now we can live in it, but that’s not all, a landscape must be set in swinging motion like water, far away, very far away, and mountains transparent as blue rock must rise. On the highest peak, a castle like a comb about to slide out from a head of hair, and above it a green, sour sky, and oh, trees too, of course, how can there be a landscape without trees, each branch calligraphed on the sheet of sky laid under it, each leaf clear as in a herbarium.
Between the trees two thrushes fly—no, not fly but hang suspended, and if they moved even a feather, this whole world would collapse.
On the nearest tree, on the highest tree, a dry pod, an unripe fruit: a hanged man. In life he was quite morose, but now he’s laughing his head off while the wind, a gay wind, caresses his heels.
1952
LEONARDO’S DISQUIET1
I THINK HE OFTEN repeated to himself the phrase “O Leonardo, why do you labor so?”—he who was able to look at himself from the perspective of “frozen time.”
It appears the whole restless labor of his life was overcome by a pure and controlled art. And yet his painting is filled with disquiet.
Leonardo’s disquiet—what do you mean? Haven’t his paintings been punctured with compasses, covered with networks of lines to prove the geometrical wisdom of his compositions, the balance of the spatial forms and the quietude of the isoceles triangles? Michelangelo is a different story, but Leonardo seems to dwell in the very self-enchanted and self-satisfied heart of the Renaissance. And yet his painting is filled with disquiet.
Leda, the Gioconda, Benci2, angels and women, goddesses and Madonnas; do you understand their smiles and the look in their widely set eyes? And the rocks, plants, and trees, the cold green waters, streams, and air—(how strangely he painted the early evening air).
So many questions, so many mysteries, or if that term irritates your reason—so many problems. And though it is a wise and self-conscious art, his painting is filled with disquiet.
LEONARDO THE PAINTER WAS the first to strive for a liberation of the arts. He dared to demand comparisons of painting with the other arts. With the zeal of one who reviles an age-old wrong, he raised painting above poetry. His argument was naïve: the eye is a nobler sense than the ear; and the next argument, a little more substantial: the superiority of the image of nature to its description, of form to expression.
But trampling on poetry wasn’t enough for him. He wrote of the superiority of painting to philosophy. And because the artist is a pupil of nature, he stands next to the student of nature. You see yourselves what going beyond your own discipline leads to.
Leonardo wanted to contain in his paintings the moods and emotions of poetry, the wisdom of science and philosophy. He, who warned himself that “one should not desire the impossible,” it seems, desired it above all things. He is the Great Usurper.
Looking at the paintings of Watteau, Chardin, Renoir, you see that they possess the same beauty of surface, the same tranquillity, the same grace of color. Leonardo knew too much for a painter. It seems that painting his beautiful heads, he couldn’t free himself from the thought of the skull, the brain, the network of veins, of everything he learned from the autopsy of corpses. Shouldn’t a painter know only the skin of the world? At every step, Leonardo the painter was ambushed by Leonardo the anatomist. And hence the sad wisdom and the melancholy of knowledge in his paintings.
Among his writings there is a fragment that seems not only an excellent introduction to the Madonna of the Rocks but also a commentary on his whole art:
“…often lost amid shadowy rocks, I came to discover a great cave, before which I, standing, somewhat astonished and unknowing of such things, with my back bent in an arch and my weary hand leaning on one knee, I covered my lowered and half-closed eyelids with my right hand.
“And when I stood there a moment, leaning here and there to see whether there were not something hidden from me by the great darkness reigning inside the cave, suddenly two forces awoke in me, fear and desire; fear of the terrifying dark cave, and desire to look if there was some extraordinary thing inside.”
Let us repeat: fear and desire. That is the formula for Leonardo’s disquiet.
The peculiarity of Leonardo’s disquiet is that it does not manifest itself in violent gestures. It is disquiet that respects the line, disquiet controlled and therefore doubly disquieting. How great is it and how great is he who mastered it.
And one more thing: “if there was some extraordinary thing”—is written by the same man who said “every thing derives from every thing, every thing becomes every thing, every thing returns to every thing,” the man who wrote a treatise on the elements and wanted to catch nature in a net of causes. Fear and desire of an extraordinary thing.
O Leonardo, what do you so infinitely desire?
1952
GUINEA PIG, OR ON THE POWER OF REASON
FOUR GENTLEMEN WERE sitting in the garden of a small café, talking about the power of knowledge. Three of them represented the humanities. The fourth was drinking his third cup of tea in a row without speaking.
“Whenever I think about these things,” said a plump little linguist, “I remember a story from the more remote days of my youth. With your permission, I’ll give you a brief account.”
The gentlemen nodded, all except for the mathematician, who was stirring sugar into his tea and was entirely caught up in that action.
“Well, it was at the time when I was studying at the university, before the first war. I was friends with a young and extraordinarily talented doctor. In the period I’m going to tell you about he was working on his PhD. He had sent his wife and little daughter to stay with her parents in the countryside so he could have some peace.
“My friend had one peculiarity: he was pathologically incapable of solitude. On the day after his family had left he came to me in despair, asking me to move in with him: “I really can’t bear silence in the house,” he confessed ashamedly. Of course I agreed.
“After a few days he appeared with a cage. There were guinea pigs in the cage. They’re the most wonderful creatures under the sun, believe me, gentlemen, not cats, not dogs, but
guinea-pigs. I was appointed stable-boy. I prepared them a mixture of beets and carrots, I refreshed their litter—all to touch their warm fur and hold them tightly enough to feel their hearts beating. But the fun didn’t last for long. Three days later my friend said solemnly: “Now we begin the experiment. My career depends on this. I count on your help.”
This was a lot less fun. I was supposed to catch my charges by their silly little legs, turn them on their backs and hold them down firmly while my friend’s needle administered death.
“Are they all going to die?” I asked.
“All of them,” he replied. “I infected them with tuberculosis, and now I’m going to cure them. We’ll inject them with a medication in use today; I want to demonstrate its complete inefficacy. They’ll get different doses of the medication and they’ll die at different times. That’s important for the experiment too.”
The guinea-pigs sank into despondency. They stopped singing, their fur turned bristly. They sat in a corner, breathing with difficulty. Their little heads hung on the ground—apart, somehow. Every two hours they were given a dose of the medication. The next day a period of revival followed. They began to eat a little. Heartened, I ran to get the freshest new lettuce. But my friend dampened my spirits.
“The improvement is an illusion, now death will come irrevocably. I give them 48 hours at most.”
And indeed one after another they started to tremble and fall on their sides like toppled toys. My friend recorded his observations in a notebook, and I lifted out the still warm bodies and carried them to the freezer.
In the end only one guinea-pig was left, white with little red eyes, bristly like the others. I now never left the cage for a minute, as I was supposed to report the exact time of its death. After an hour, pushing with her paralyzed legs, she crawled to the edge of the cage, and reached out her dry hot little nose to me. “She’s saying good-bye,” I thought sentimentally. I put a dish of water under her nose without any conviction. She drank it. And another one. We went to sleep certain we would find her dead in the morning.
The first voice to reach me when I woke up was the high, piercing song of my white guinea-pig. I jumped out of bed and ran over to her. She was alive. She was scuttling around the cage digging out bits of carrot from the straw. I immediately prepared her a breakfast fit for a queen.
My friend, on the other hand, didn’t eat any breakfast and called the clinic to say he wasn’t coming in. He sat down to make calculations and I helped him. This experiment was just a control; the phenomenon had been studied previously in a large number of cases. We began by checking the protocols and initial reckonings. We found an error right at the beginning. We had to draw up new rows of figures. Naturally, mean and standard deviation underwent certain changes. We worked for many hours stubbornly, without rest. From time to time we heard the guinea-pig’s chirping. Now you understand, gentlemen, that to each of us that voice meant something completely different. And I could not find it in myself to feel solidarity with my friend. Solidarity with life is a primal feeling. At the end my friend prophesied: “Taking our corrections into account, my hypothesis stands. The guinea-pig must die. The error didn’t exceed the acceptable margin of error.”
We went over to the cage. The guinea-pig was turned over on her side like a toy. And that head was lying there, apart, somehow.”
Although this was only the death of a guinea-pig, the gentlemen listening were silent, and only after a moment did one of them say:
“The finest thing in that story is your friend’s faith. The young man believed in his realistic vision in the face of the facts. That’s how science is done,” he added, with irony.
“I’m struck by the fact that the death of that rogue guinea-pig came at the moment when the calculation error had been corrected,” said another. “At that moment the necessity of death had been proven.”
A third remarked: “Say what you like: for me as a humanist this story is optimistic, after all. I would entitle it: The Guinea-Pig, or That Life Cannot Be Weighed.”
Here the mathematician spoke up:
“For me, my friends, there is nothing irrational or mysterious about this. Of course it’s hard to determine causes in a case described in literary form. I suspect that here—as often happens in bacteriology—the law of small probabilities was at work. Poisson’s model, in particular, if applied to the calculations, might explain a lot. Perhaps you can remember whether your friend used the Poisson model1?”
The linguist couldn’t remember. On the whole he thought the question made no sense at all.
1956
A BITTER ROSE PETAL
WHEN SALOMON ANKER came home from the camp, people wouldn’t let him pass. They crowded around him in a circle. Salomon leaned against the wall and told them what went on behind the barbed wire. He was often invited to people’s homes; he sat in the kitchen or the sitting room surrounded by faces open with curiosity, drank milk diluted with water and told his stories again. Just like a merchant returning from distant parts.
At the beginning people listened, full of horror and shame that a man was able to endure so much. Later with profound understanding and knowledge. It was enough to say: “Hermann Goeth1,” and there was no need to add: “camp commander at Kamienna3,” because people knew from the papers about what he’d done and his death by hanging. Until one day they stopped listening altogether. They buried their dead and returned to their spinning-wheels. Once again, life turned out to be stronger than memory. Photos in stripes were no longer valued. On the bank of the thundering elements stood Salomon—a useless old Jew kept by his daughter Fryda.
Fryda patched up worn out shirts and turned ragged collars. It was thanks to those collars that I met Salomon. I choose one of his stories. It’s the story about Róa. It isn’t typical or even the most horrifying. I can’t explain why I chose it above the others.
“She had hair like gold. And generally, she was gorgeous. She didn’t look Jewish at all. She had Aryan papers, but she was caught by some accident. I don’t know whether she knew Edek Mendelewicz before that. Maybe they met in the camp.
At first both of them got light work, cutting wood in the forest. You could tell the ones who worked in the forest from the ones in the workshops right away. The ones from the forest looked better, and it’s not true that the fleas bit them more. Fleas are equitable, they bite everybody the same. Everyone envied the forest workers.
Every couple of weeks the Germans performed a selection. They picked out the ones in the worst shape from the workshops and transported them to Krgielna. That was a place in the forest enclosed by a fence made of mats and paper. On three sides there were signs reading: “Das Betreten dieses Platzes ist unter Todesstrafe untersagt2.” You heard shots coming from there.
It seemed for the time being that neither Róa nor Mendelewicz would ever go there. Until once at roll-call von Hecht was doing the review. We all know what that meant: he was selecting people for Werk C, where the worst work was with grenades, picric acid, and TNT. Hecht had his eye on Róa from the start and so he picked her, not Mendelewicz who was big and strong.
Werk C was deep into the forest and separated from the rest. The workers there had a separate barracks.
Three weeks later Róa came to see Mendelewicz. It’s hard even to say it was Róa. This was an emaciated creature in a paper cape tied up with wire. She was yellow, like all the picric workers, and her hair was red—not ruddy, but red as poppies. Her nails were broken and her arms were covered with sores. And all that wasn’t even so bad—the worst was the smell. A terrible acridity came off her. It was winter so she sat down by the stove. Within a minute it had become unbearable. The bitter smell, so bitter, the whole air smelled foul. We made a sign to Mendelewicz to get her out of there. Somebody gave her a few potato peelings for on the way.
“You, Mendelewicz,” said the Stubeältester when he came back—“don’t bring your canary in here anymore. She’s not fit for human company. Picrics live on their ow
n. That’s the law.”
Voices went up to say that even the bread turned bitter after Róa had been there, it would have to be thrown out.
Mendelewicz didn’t say anything, didn’t defend her. Three weeks later (we were free every three weeks) he went to see her himself. He came back very quickly. He vomited all night.
That was already near the end, but even so the Germans were making various improvements. There was no shooting at Krgielna anymore, and on the camp road there was now a kind of transport: a small car with four SS officers, a truck with 30 guards, sitting as if cut from cardboard, and bringing up the rear, the strangest vehicle. It looked like a circus or gypsy wagon, only much bigger, with a car’s bonnet stuck to the front. There was a tiny barred window high up and a chimney on the roof, or really just a big pipe like the one off a cast-iron stove. You heard cries coming from that wagon. The whole transport went to Krgielna. At night a huge red-blue flame flared up there.
You can’t really say that Mendelewicz helped Róa. He split every ration he got in two and hid it in a bag. But he didn’t go to her himself, he sent someone else. It always cost him something but he could afford it. Because he was stronger than the others he made extra money doing various jobs.
When Róa fell ill with typhus no one wanted to go to her. Typhus was more terrifying than Goeth, von Hecht and all the guards put together. Then I said I’d go. I felt sorry for Róa, and I also needed that bread that Mendelewicz paid for carrying her food. I was sick with hunger and I’d already sold everything I had, down to my last tooth.
She was lying in the hospital barracks on a bare plank-bed, covered with paper. They didn’t give picric workers blankets because they stained them yellow. She hadn’t been to work in two weeks and she still smelled that way. She had a high fever but she was conscious.
The Collected Prose Page 73
