yesterday, or an hour ago. There were lights shining and a droning sound coming from below. But nothing seemed the same any more. In this safe, familiar view he could sense a falseness. He
sniffed the air, as if expecting to smell burning. After several
minutes, as his body went numb with cold, he realized that the
world had in fact ended , although it had retained the outward
appearance of continuity. So that was what the end was like.
For some reason people are unable to imagine endings, not
only the ends of momentous events, but even of the most minor
ones. Perhaps the very effort of imagining something has the
effect of exhausting reality; perhaps it doesn't want to be imagined, maybe it wants to be free, like a rebellious teenager, and that's why it's always different from how we imagine it.
From the next day Leo began to live in a world that no longer
existed, a pure illusion, a dream born of instinct, a habit of the
senses.
It wasn't at all hard to do; it was easier than the old life.
N owadays going into town was like stepping into a mist, like
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going on stage. He made faces at people and laughed when they
looked at him in amazement. He even allowed himself to pinch
the occasional item from the deli, but not much, just little
things, because otherwise it would have felt wrong somehow. He
stopped bothering about his clothes, only remembering not to
freeze. He put on odd shoes, and when he accidentally spilled oil
on his coat he swapped it for a blanket that he cut a hole in and
wore like a poncho. As he had thrown all his ephemerides and
other calculations into a corner he had a lot of time; he used to
sit in the park by the river and stare at every stone, every wall,
watching for signs of disintegration, and he found them all right.
The river changed colour almost every day - one day it was
brown, dark as coffee, the next pink as champagne. The stones
were starting to wrinkle. The little bridge was crumbling, and
Leo waited impatiently for some of the phantom people to fall
into the unreal water. He would walk among the stalls at the vegetable market and take the ripest fruits from their baskets. Some people shouted at him, others didn't. He would accost girls at the
gate, more for a joke than anything else, or to conquer his fear of
alluring women in tight skirts, but he didn't really want to do
anything with any of these non-existent people.
He also used to stare at the sky, which made him feel nostalgic; every day it looked different, like the coloured river, because the stars were moving about in a chaotic, unpredictable way. He
spent hours looking for Mars, because it wasn't where it ought
to be. The Milky Way had become almost impossible to sec.
Above Mount Anna a bright light would sometimes rise, but he
didn't know what it could be. Sometimes he saw phantom
people looking at the sky too, but they didn't seem worried.
They would kiss in the moonlight , although from that day it had
become hard to predict the moon's phases any more - it just did
what it wanted.
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Leo would go to sleep and dream that he was walking about
the town, pinching fruits from the stalls and watching the river.
Sometimes he would stick his finger in a wall and dig about in
its warm, decaying interior. The stone would give way beneath
his fingertip, crumbling and yielding to his touch, leaving a hole
that would never heal up again. Once he thought one of the
houses by the river had wilted. It looked as if it had become brittle and defenceless, then sunk under its own weight and quietly lain down on the ground. Only one wall vas left, which was
being held up by the neighbouring building. The phantom
people didn't seem to have noticed. They went past the empty
spot as if nothing had ever been there, as if the spot where the
house should have been had grown over.
This feeling of sad amazement made him start wondering
about himself too - about whether he existed or not. He touched
his hands and face, but he couldn't bring himself to touch his
stomach. He was afraid his finger would be tempted to start
drilling a hole in there, too, that would never heal up, and he'd
be stuck with it for ever.
He sometimes came across people whose faces looked familiar, though less and less often. The lady selling vegetables was replaced by a new, vague face, more like a cauliflower than a
person. And he didn't see the schoolmaster any more - his
neighbour from the first floor. There seemed to be someone
else living in his flat now, a glib, slimy fellow, completely
smooth-shaven every morning, always murmuring his bookish
knowledge into the phone and winning all the radio competitions. The two little girls weren't there any more either, the ones like two peas in a pod, who used to play on the garage
roof in the summer. Now whenever i t was warm some skinny
young women would be basking there, presenting their white
bellies to the washed-out rays of the sun, which didn't tan the
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
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skin the way it used to, but made it go grey, like a faded burlap
sack.
The familiar faces belonged to a woman whom he thought
had died long ago, as he had known her since the war, and a
young man with shoulder-length hair, a provincial hippy - he
saw him almost every morning on the bridge, by the weatherworn statue of Sai nt j ohn of Nepomuk; he would cross the bridge and spit into the river on his way. Maybe he was going to
work, thought Leo, because he assumed some sort of work must
be going on somewhere. For example, he could hear the
Blachobyt mill roaring over the hills, and some nights there was
a glow of dirty yellow light from over there.
He told himself to weep, because it seemed appropriate,
although he didn't really feel any sorrow. And sometimes he
managed it. Standing at the junction of Piast Street and
Podjazdowa Street he would weep, as the hideous cars drove
past, incapable of doing him any harm.
M i s m a n cy
I've found some strange things on the Internet - various kinds of
divination, for example:
Aeromancy, divination by observing the air.
Alectryomancy, divination using a cockerel .
Anlltropomancy, divination using human entrails.
Callabomancy, divination using vessels made of metal.
Gaslromancy, divination based on sounds coming from
the stomach.
Idolomancy, divination using statues, figurines and
effigies.
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Logaritlmwncy, divination with the help of logarithms.
Macharornancy, divination by knives.
Oirwmancy, divination by wine.
Omphalomancy, divination by the navel .
Sciomancy, divination b y shadows.
Stareomancy, divining the future through the elements.
Tephramancy, divination by means of ashes.
Theriomancy, divination by means of wild animals.
Tiromancy, divination from the way cheese is cut.
T h e S e c o n d - H a n d M a
n
In September they started reading a new novel on the local
radio, English or American I think, called The Second-Hand
Man. I don't remember the author's name; it was something
ordinary sounding. It was the sad, long-winded tale of a man
who had the persistent, pernicious feeling of being a duplicate, not genuine, as if he were nothing but a copy of someone who already existed , the substitute for someone original. For
example, he had been adopted from an orphanage, so although
he did have biological parents, he didn't know who they were.
He was adopted by some people whose own son had died, so
he wasn't a proper son himself, but a substitute for that other
child. The first three episodes described his youth. He grew up
convinced that he was just the dregs of someone else, someone
better. In episode four he went to university and became fascinated by Pla to. He understood perfectly what Plato had in mind when he wrote about the Idea and its Shadow, that something real and individual can exist, perfect in its uniqueness, along with something more hazy, reflected, and, like every
re nection, discontinuous, full �f imperfections and thus false,
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f i: i g h t
1 6 1
only a distant relation. This episode was a bit boring. The radio
was sitting on the terrace because I was painting the door, so
the workmen up on the roof also heard about the feeling of
being a duplicate and the resulting despair. The hero of the
book became obsessed with philosophy. He wrote his Ph. D.
on some follower of Plato, I don't remember what he was
called, some typical ancient Greek name, and in the end it
turned out that even this work of his was unintentional plagiarism because he had written the same thesis as someone else. In the next few episodes he got married to a divorcee - he
was her second husband, but she had never stopped loving
the other man. There was a scene - I heard it while sorting
things out in the attic - where the hero finds the other guy's
toiletries i n the bathroom cupboard, arranged like a museum
exhibit, and in the end he starts brushing his teeth with the
other man's brush, spraying himself with his aftershave , and
putting on his pyjamas, and the wife urges him to make love to
her the same way as the other man did. It remi nded me of
Polanski's The Tenant, maybe not the rHm itself, but just my
reaction the first time I saw it. Further on in the book it turned
out that the hero was of course a stepfather, a second father. He
couldn't have children of his own. Shadow People can't multiply, he thinks. He works as an editor at a publisher's and corrects o ther people's books. He dreams of wri ting his own
book, but in other people's he always discovers his own
thoughts, already written down. In the phone book there arc
several dozen other people with the same surname as his, and
the police keep harassing him because he has the sam<' name as
some bigamist. To cap it all , everyone mistakes him for a rather
unpopular politician whom he resembles.
I missed the last two episodes because I was out fe tching
planks from Vambierzyce, so I don't know how the story o f the
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O l g a To k a r c z u k
Second-Hand Man ended. He must have died, like everyone else.
Perhaps his body got mixed up and he was buried with someone
else's name. Or maybe there was another funeral going on alongside his, of someone more important, and the music from the brass band drowned out the priest's routine , photocopied
address.
W h i t e n e s s
They came in a white car. R. went out to meet them and help lug
their cases out of the boot, and they stood by the car for a
while
R. always admires our guests' cars. He asks how old
-
they are and how much fuel they consume. Both dogs were
bounding about with joy, and then Janka, as usual, sat herself
down in the driver's seat.
Their car was white, white as white can be. I went out on to
the steps and waved at them. She was already coming towards
me, peering at the steep path underfoot. The whiteness of the car
provided a background for her slender profile. She came floating
out of a white screen, like a figure emerging from a film and then
disappearing into the darkness of the auditorium. And I was
the audience.
As I was looking at her and smiling, I realized that any form
of whiteness is at odds Vith the natural order of things, and
doesn't exist in nature. Even snow isn't white; it is grey, yellow,
shining gold, it can be blue as the sky or dark as graphite. That's
why white tablecloths and sheets rebel and insist on going
yellow. as if they want to rid themselves of their unreal colour.
The usual washing powders are no help - like many human
inventions they just produce an illusion by reflecting light.
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1 63
j u l y fu l l m o o n
Marta saw that we had carried chairs out on to the terrace and
arranged them in two or three rows. We kept pushing our way
through the door with trays full of tumblers and wine glasses;
teaspoons jangled in cups and stools scraped across the Ooor.
Some of us had already taken our places and were challing in
lowered voices, in the same monotone as a theatre audience
while the auditorium is filling up. Nothing comes of these
words, they're barely audible, they just pretend to offer opinions
and set the air in motion like dandelion seeds. Meanwhile we
took white cigarettes out of rustling packets.
Someone was passing a mug or a side plate over other people's
heads, and someone else was going back into the hall for a
sweater. R. brought out two hollies of wine and put them down
on the garden table. A pair of binoculars hung round his neck.
One of the women was leaning against the wooden balustrade
checking the setting of her camera. A young man with a beard
was looking at his watch, and then everyone began to check the
time, the light in the hall went out and the house went dark.
Only the small red nares of the cigarettes, like fat fireflies, 1110'ed
up and down , marking the route of hands to mouths in the
darkness.
Marta buttoned up her cardigan, because waves of cold air
were already rolling in from the forest. The night was still and
silent. The crickets had not come to life yet.
Now Marta could hear a sudden commotion on the terrace.
We were emitting rapturous sighs, and a woman's voice said,
There it is.'
Marta turned and saw the same thing we were seeing - a thin
but intense, blood-red stripe on the horizon, right between two
spruce trees. The camera cl icked and the binoculars tapped
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gently against plastic shirt buttons. The red line started to grow
and change into a cupola - a huge, luminous mushroom sprouting on the horizon. It was visibly growing, becoming a semicircle, and by then it was obvious that from behind the
edge of the world the moon was being born, the two spruce
trees holding
it between them like a child. The camera clicked
discreetly again and again. until finally the moon freed itself
from the earth, detached itself from the black line of the horizon
and, swaying precariously, drifted upwards. It was enormous.
One of us began to clap solemnly, and soon other hands were
joining in with the applause. As the moon was leaving the safe
space between the two spruces, its colour gradually changed -
first i t was yellow, then white, and then greenish. We could
clearly see the features of its face above the crowns of the trees.
But Marta was looking at the people on the terrace, where the
wineglasses were chinking. The pop of a champagne cork made
her jump. After a while people started talking, first in an undertone, then louder and louder, until everything was back to normal.
H e a r i n g
As there were a lot of people in the house and not enough beds,
I went to sleep in the orchard, on the red iron bedstead where I
sometimes sit and read in the daytime. I made it up with pure
white bed-linen, which looked a luminous shade of grey in the
darkness.
I could see the outside of the house; light was pouring from
the bathroom window, casting a long, bright trail on the pond,
and then the pump came rumbling on. When it fell silent a
minute later, the house went dark and vanished. Now the sky
looked brighter.
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1 65
The night is not as dark as they say. It has softer lights in it
that drift from the sky to the mountains and valleys. The earth
shines too, emitting a wintry glow, slightly phosphorescent , like
the glow of bare bones and sawdust. This faint glimmer can't be
seen in the daytime, or during bright moonlit nights or in welllit towns and villages. Only in total darkness does the light of the earth become visible.
There are also the stars and the moon, so it was bright.
I took a careful look at each area of empty space that I could see
from my bed, each tree, each clump of grass, each bit of the horizon. It all looked as if it were scattered with ashes, dusted with flour. The nocturnal light had rubbed out all the sharp angles and
brought opposites closer together. The borders between one thing
House of Day, House of Night Page 19
