On the Hill of Roses

by Stefan Grabinski

  I returned to the armchair, not letting go of the overlay from my hand. I was sleepy, dazed by the atmosphere of the house; it worked on me like narcotic potion from ancient mythological times. I leaned back into the armchair and fell asleep...

  I was seized by a homely feeling of entering into the spirit of the house. Every object almost whispered to me its secret history, disclosing the life story of the place. Before my eyes began to play out a mime-like scene, without words, without sounds.

  The curtain from the neighbouring room parted and she entered the room - beautiful, as always, and, as always, sad.

  She was upset. With a rough movement she took off the satin overlay that covered her divine shoulders and threw it on the armchair where I now sat. She turned reproachfully to face the door from which she came, the movement of her lips showing that she was talking to someone who stood at the entrance. I saw no one, however.

  The conversation apparently took on an ever more testy character. Her movements took on shades of distress. She wasn’t being listened to; anger didn’t help - she resorted to entreaties.

  She stretched out her lovely hands and embraced someone’s neck with them, but they fell down due to a brutal shoving away by the other person. So she threw herself humbly on her knees. But her eyes betrayed hopeless despair: whomever she was speaking to was not listening. Suddenly she jumped to her feet, as if fatally wounded, and flung herself forward. Her hands, wanting to stop someone, encountered empty air, and she crumpled onto the floor.

  A long moment passed. Finally, ponderously and with effort, she raised herself up and went over to the mantelshelf. From her hands slipped out the lace kerchief, falling to where I had picked it up. At that moment she had her back to me, so that I couldn’t recognize from the motion of her hands what she was doing. When she approached the window, her eyes were glowing with a glassy stare. She was looking at something on her finger with a heart-rending smile of someone who has been forsaken.

  She stopped smiling and with a leisurely step, the step of dogaressa, she left the room. One more time her queenly figure flashed by at the garden door, one more time the sapphire arrow' pin in her hair sparkled, and she disappeared among the roses.

  I woke up. A strong glittering was striking my eyes. It was a reflection from the glass walls of the greenhouse, piercing the window' to reach me in the semi-darkness. I lowered my gaze and noticed that I was still holding the overlay in my hand. I started to examine it with interest:

  ‘So this was the point of entry... From here began my retrospection... Aha! yes - also the kerchief. Points of direction. And her, of course... naturally. And everything that relates to her. But who was that other figure, the unseen one? A man, for sure...’

  I remembered the hoof impressions I had seen on that first day. They began exactly at that place at the wall where the entrance was hidden.

  ‘Therefore, this happened then... Maybe even several minutes before my arrival...’

  I looked at the calendar standing on the desk: the last date on it was July 28th. That was also the day I began my sun treatment.

  I left the armchair and made my way toward the direction in which she had disappeared. After passing through two rooms, I found myself in the garden at the foot of the hill of roses. Several circular tiers led to the top, manicured pathways spiralling upward at every stage. With a beating heart, I started to ascend the hill. Along the way, I passed by roses blooming in all their loveliness and exuding intoxicating scents from within their curling petals; with indifference, I passed by statues, carved by first-rate sculptors, placed at each turn. On the footpath before the final circle of the mound, I paused, throwing an impatient glance at the summit that had been almost completely hidden from below by the silent mass of roses.

  Only now did I notice that the summit was surrounded by a natural bower of myrtle bushes, almost like a bulwark. In three of its walls, openings were cut out in the shape of windows, edged with a blue frame of periwinkles.

  The deep green of the path harmonized with the crimson surroundings.

  Enraptured by the masterpiece of this garden artwork, I reached the entrance of the bower. I looked through the nearest window and a thrill coursed through me.

  Framed by the myrtle was the outline of the chest and head of a woman. The raven hair was combed into a Grecian knot; the neck was clasped by a high collar of a white cashmere dress, a la Mary Stuart. From my position, I couldn’t see her face, as it was turned opposite from where I stood. The gentle backward tilt of her slender waist gave her the appearance of being engrossed in some type of exquisite dreaming, in which she was staring into the distance, quietly contemplating the south. Not wanting to interrupt, I delayed my approach, as I plucked up my courage. When she didn’t move for a long while, I overcame my trepidation and, taking the last serpentine turn, I finally stood inside the bower.

  One glance in the direction of the unknown woman rent from my breast a cry of horror. Against the background of myrtle, pressed into a wide, bamboo chair with handrails, sat the mortal remains of a young woman in a state of the highest decomposition. Her aristocratic oval face was rent apart by a repulsive, decayed nasal cavity. On the decrepit finger of her left hand, dangling over the arm of the chair, an emerald signet threw out a sparkling gleam. The signet was open; the ajar lid revealed a hollow the size of a thimble: the interior was empt...

  The midday sun was overpowering. The sweltering quiet of the scorching heat exuded a lazy, swooning potion, which hung around the brain and ensnared the will. The world about panted feverishly, waves of compressed fire crowed in. The black lips of a monstrously scorched mouth were parted and thirsting, thirsting, thirsting...

  The roses are going mad, those crimson roses...

  And among this orgy of roses, among this unrestrained banquet, the stifling smell of human rot.

  The Frenzied Farmhouse

  I stand in the shimmering light of the sun and bathe in its blood-red streams while the deeply melancholic wind wails so loudly above my head.

  I look at the vast, empty steppe, disfigured by weeds, while the mournful crows weep so profusely above me.

  I stand alone in the rubble, a homeless, childless father, and despair lives and breathes in the ruins.

  Clouds are gathering on the horizon, converging along the slopes. A layer of smoke stings my eyes, soot gets stuck in my throat, cutting into it like a knife -

  Yesterday I returned from the institution: I am no longer dangerous. Let it be so. But I swear that anyone, under similar circumstances, would have eventually the done the same thing.

  I am not sick, nor was I ever sick - even then, yes, even then. What I did was not an aberration but was as necessary as the forces of nature, as necessary as life and death. Without a doubt, what happened occurred as a result of my surroundings. I am not, nor was I ever, a psychopath.

  Instead, I was a complete sceptic. I did not adhere to any principle or doctrine; my temperament was not a suggestible one. In this respect, my friend K., whom I had always considered to be extremely superstitious, stood at the opposite extreme. His strange, at times crazy views and theories constantly raised strong opposition on my part, and we quarrelled continually, which resulted in us frequently severing contact with each other for long periods of time. And yet it appears he was not mistaken in everything.

  At least one of his views fulfilled itself with fatal consequence in regard to me - maybe precisely because I came out most fiercely against it, as if sensing that I would serve as an example of its veracity.

  K. maintained that in certain places certain events had to occur. In other words, that places exist whose character, nature and spirit await the fulfilment of events connected with them. He called this a ‘stylistic consequence,’ though I sensed in all this a pantheistic element. Whatever else he might have understood by this, I did not hold a similar view, and I steered clear of even a hint of any mysteries that life could possibly offer.

  Yet this concept gave me no pe
ace, and a desire to prove its groundlessness tempted me even after my final parting with K. I would soon satisfy my curiosity, and when that happened, it left me, in my thirtieth year, with the white hair of an old man and broken forever. My flesh crawls at the thought of that unforgettable moment of horror that has crushed me so completely.

  I don’t know why I still live and for what, and how I can live after all that has happened. Yet I don't believe in punishment; besides, I do not feel guilty...

  Even though the setting sun is bleeding and its crimson light gushes over my head, I don’t feel at fault...

  Yet my agony has been too long and my torment too intense.

  Though my blood curdles at the memory of what I’ve done and my mind is drenched in pools of blood, my forehead is clean and my hands are deathly pale...

  Yet my end is overly delayed, and I understand everything too clearly, too keenly. My thoughts have become unusually focused. I am cold like steel, and like steel I cut into my arteries...

  The sun flickers and covers me with crimson.

  I am dripping with blood, genuine blood...

  I was the father of two children, our poor children. Agnes loved them madly, perhaps even more than I. She left them prematurely, dying a couple of years after the birth of our girl.

  My Agnes! My sweet Agnes!...

  Her death upset me greatly. Unable to be pacified by a structured lifestyle, I began to travel with my children, who were my only comfort during those times. In order to tear my thoughts away from painful memories, I read a lot, jumping from subject to subject, from books full of licentiousness and brutality to those replete with mysticism and symbolism. And on top of that, I never forgot about K. and his theories.

  One day we stopped for a longer time at * with the intention of spending the autumn there. What charmed me most about this bustling, cultural city were its beautiful outlying districts. My children and I started out for one such district on a sunny August Sunday. As we left the city borders, our carriage passed between two rows of poplars, cut across railroad tracks and hurried along fields. We were already a few miles beyond the city, when I noticed, on the right side of the road, in a barren area a small distance away, a rather strange, seemingly uninhabited solitary structure in the midst of a neglected orchard. I stopped the carriage and went to inspect the building.

  While I was examining its details, a shrivelled old woman suddenly came out from behind a pile of rubble in front of the building, and, with fear in her eyes, whispered to me:

  ‘Leave this house while there is still time, leave it if you love God and if your life and the lives of your children are dear to you!’

  Afterwards, she dashed to the side, disappearing in the bent grass.

  This incident merely strengthened my curiosity and stimulated a desire to solve the problem - if, in general, one could speak of something like this here. After my return to the city, I already had a plan: I decided to move into the abandoned farmhouse immediately. It seemed to have been created to test the theories of my eccentric friend. If these theories had any validity, then they could be proven here. I was struck, namely, by the aforementioned scene at the ruin, as well as by certain details of the place that corresponded to what K. had once told me.

  As to my scepticism, it did not lessen at all. I continually maintained the cold reserve of an objective investigator. Eventually I would shift from this role to that of an actor; but this occurred later and without my awareness.

  Meanwhile, the temptation was too great, and the following day, taking everything with me, I moved to the secluded farmstead with my children.

  What surprised me was that not even the smallest difficulty arose when I wanted to come to an understanding with the community concerning the lease, and I was allowed to occupy the place at a dirt-cheap price. I had complete freedom and didn’t have to concern myself with snooping villagers, as people kept away from my house, and often I saw them superstitiously making a sign of the cross as they passed it in the distance. Thus, weeks would go by and I would not see a human face, unless someone came along the road, a rare occurrence as traffic here had already died down for several years, moving a couple of kilometres to the west.

  Therefore, I began my observations.

  What intrigued one, above all, was the farmhouse itself. The structure did not at first glance differentiate itself from the typical farmsteads that one came across in the suburbs or on country roads, and yet...

  As a result of a certain proportional arrangement, it appeared narrower toward the bottom, so that the base, in comparison to the highest point, was amazingly small and thin; the roof, with its upper section, simply weighed down the foundation.

  The entire building was comparable to a human freak who bends under the weight of an abnormally large head. This construction gave the building a brutal character, like that of the strong bullying the weak. I never understood how this structure could have arisen and how it could ever stand.

  The small, almost non-existent windows made a similar impression in comparison to the walls. Squeezed into the thick avails, they were almost lost in their grip. At least that’s the way they looked from the outside; though, as I found out eventually, the windows were not really so narrow, and they let in as much light as, under normal circumstances, windows much larger.

  Added to this, was the predatory look of a ruin tainted with a multitude of holes and gouges. Exposed bricks dotted the outside walls like splattered pustules of congealed gore.

  The interior presented a no less sorry state. Consisting of three rooms, it was full of cracks and holes, through which the wind freely slipped in, rolling into the half-collapsed hearth, swirling the ashes there and pounding the smoke hole.

  The comer room, however, where I frequently spent my time, proved to be the most bizarre. Lichens, formed on one of the walls where the plaster had fallen off, had created a puzzling image.

  From the beginning I wasn’t able to get a proper fix on it. I copied it down roughly on a piece of paper and got a fairly strange picture, or rather, a fragment of a picture.

  At the bottom of the wall, right above the floor, were the contours of a child’s legs. One leg, bent at the knee, had the foot resting against the other leg, which was stiffened tensely toward the ground. The backwardly inclining body was depicted as far as the chest - the rest was missing.

  Small, frail arms were raised in a helpless gesture of self-defence.

  The entire form, which could have represented the body of a several-year-old boy, had a corpse-like inertia to it.

  Somewhat higher, in the direction of the non-existing head, two hands were clenched about something - unknown. The space between the fingers was empty. These hands, however, belonged to someone else: they were considerably larger and veined. To whom they belonged, the picture didn’t tell. The arms stopped short above the elbow, disappearing somewhere on the white background of the wall.

  This image, as well as the entire room, had a special illumination during sunny days. The sun’s rays that fell through the windows refracted in such a way that the light split into blood red whorls, bathing one of the rafters; then, it seemed, thick drops of blood dripped from it into a pool below.

  I explained this unpleasant phenomenon on an optical illusion and the particular chemical composition of the glass, which was otherwise clean and completely transparent.

  After exploring this abode, I passed to the orchard, or garden, which formed with it a single, inseparable and stylistic whole.

  It was very old and neglected. Luxuriant thickets had enclosed it for many years from the outside, jealously guarding its mysterious interior. Slender, prematurely-decayed young trees rotted away amidst sickly rampant grass and thorn-apples. They had not been overthrown by winds, which didn’t have access here, but by the slow, malignant sucking of their sap by older trees. And so they had dried up like skeletons, their leaves a dry eczema. Those younger trees that had not yet been reached by the many sucking branches of the old col
ossuses were withering in shadows created by a brutal overgrowth.

  In one place a young alder leaned out from the spans of a neighbouring oak, and with a yearning for liberation, was wallowing in the sun; a muscular branch had overtaken it, however, burying itself into the still-soft core and breaking through to the other side. The young alder’s roots hung in tatters, its fibres and grains were twisted in forceful contractions. The young tree was dying...

  Elsewhere, lipped polypores covered shoots with poisonous kisses, taking them in with the milk of forgetfulness. Some type of hideous, blood-swelled parasites ensnared juvenile stems and then, swallowing, strangled them. Elongated sycamore boughs rested their weight on barely robust seedlings, pressing them to the ground. Under this excessive pressure, the seedlings either bent sorrowfully to the subsoil, or gave birth to monstrous, odd scrubs...

  The orchard was never quiet. There was always some twittering, always some disruptive howling. With an unpleasant uproar, birds wailed strange things about the shrubs; they wandered from branch to branch, nestled in the hollows of trees. Sometimes hellish chases began about the entire garden, and a dangerous battle of life and death ensued. Parents went after their young. In futile endeavours, the poor chicks, unaccustomed to flight, smashed themselves against trees, broke their wings, tore their feathers, until fatigued and bleeding, they sank to the ground; then their persecutors struck from above with their beaks until no sign remained of the mutilated bodies.

  This strange orchard possessed my children with instinctive fear, and they avoided it, confining their play to the front of the cottage. I, on the contrary, almost never left it. I studied its degenerate manifestations and penetrated ever deeper into its secrets. Somehow, imperceptibly, I allowed myself to be drawn into its enchanted circle and become tangled up in the swarm of crime and madness. I wasn’t able to follow the progression of the spiritual process I went through - everything developed almost unconsciously. Only today are its more subtle phases becoming apparent.