the mountain peaks. Not a single enemy soldier was yet in sight.
but you could feel their presence in the air. A nasty booming
sound, like muffled thunder, had already begun to in'ade the
back streets above the river. For the first time in his life 'Oil
Goetzen's head began to ache. He called at a pharmacy and asked
for some powders.
'It's terrible,' he said.
'Ve're staying here,' replied the pharmacist and offered to
lend him his car, a nimble black DKV with streamlined . shining
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mudguards and a steering-wheel so rarely used that it still bore
traces of the factory wrapping. Its leather seats hadn't yet had
time to get used to the shapes of its owners.
'Oh no, it's a new car. I couldn't possibly accept such a generous loan from you .'
'Please don't worry. You can return it to me when you come
back.'
Von Goetzen began to search his pockets for some sort of
deposit, a guarantee that the transaction would be honest, but he
had nothing valuable on him. He glanced regretfully at his signet
ring, which was white gold with a huge ruby set into it, engraved
with the family coat of arms. He pulled it from his finger and
placed it on the pharmacy counter.
On his way back to the mansion , from the road above he saw
Soviet army vehicles parked in the courtyard. He realized that
the soldiers would take the car away from him as soon as they
saw it. They would ask politely, then add that it was an order. So
he crossed the road into the meadow and drove into the birch
forest up a steep path , barely wide enough for the DKV, though
it wasn't a large car. He stopped in front of a dense spruce copse
and knew it was as far as he could go. Drops of sweat were
forming on his smooth young brow. Hesitantly his tongue stammered out the only filthy word he knew: bugger! Then he released the handbrake and pushed the car into the copse. He
hadn't expected it to be so effective - the DKW vanished, simply
dissolved among the restless spruce branch�s. By some sort of
alchemy its black colour blended with the black of the bark and
the forest floor. The glossy veneer and windows reflected the
forest, camouflaging the body of the car with interwoven images
of earth and sky. Von Goetzen's highly developed aesthetic sense
set the blood in his veins racing. How beautiful the world is, he
thought, in spite of what people say.
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
20 l
He ran home downhill through the undergrowth, ruining his
tweed trousers.
The family were si tting in cars and lorries , hugging their
favourite belongings to their chests - valuable clocks, photographic prints, jewellery boxes, china sauce boats, photo albums, dahlia and anemone bulbs, copies of paimings by Watteau, and
satin bolsters. One more lorry contained the most valuable furniture, the mirrors and the books. The Soviet soldiers were harnessing thoroughbred horses from the von Goetzen stables to
their cannon. As he viewed the scene from a distance, von
Goetzen thought they looked as if they were all off on a bizarre
expedition. In a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes the procession
moved off up the hill towards Waldenburg.
My m a n s i o n
I feel as if I've got a mansion too, but it's inside me - a huge edifice with lots of storeys. Its shape is neither permanent nor predictable. The mansion is alive and changes along with me. In
fact, we both live inside each other - it is in me and I am in it.
though sometimes I feel like a guest, while at other times I feel
certain that I am the owner. At night my mansion becomes more
noticeable, shining through the darkness with a greenish light.
In the sunl ight it is too vivid, so during the day it makes itself
invisible, but I can still feel it inside myself.
Its cellars are like labyrinths, with tiny windows looking out
on to weed-choked inner courtyards. In the damp u nderground
rooms, divided by thin walls, there arc heaps of sprouting potatoes and barrels full of pickled gherkins, long forgotten and coated in a thin layer of mould. I know that the cellars extend
deep into the earth, and I think there arc even paso.;agn,·ays
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leading to underground caves. Finding them is as exciLing as it
is dangerous - you can easily lose your way back.
The mansion is sometimes inhabited, sometimes deserted.
Occasionally academic conferences are held here, a lot of guests
come to stay, hold debates and attend magnificent dinners. Then
the mansion functions like a hotel. But sometimes it is empty,
abandoned even. All the furniture vanishes, the parquet floors
are torn up, the fireplaces are destroyed, and the staircases
become rotten and unstable, suddenly giving way beneath your
feet. Animals take up residence in the deserted mansion. I have
seen deer sleeping on piles of cardboard boxes and dogs curled
up on faded sofas, and I have heard the light, fluffy tread of cats'
paws in an empty corridor. I have also heard something clattering noisily up the marble steps, but I have never been able to guess what sort of animal that might be.
The ground floor is a vast hall divided in half by an ornate
metal grille. This is where my father keeps his fish tanks. Time
slows down as the fish move slowly and gracefully through the
greenish water. They're saying something, their lips are moving,
but I can't hear them. The fringetails, those Marilyn Monroes of
the goldfish world, sweep their tulle dresses along behind them,
while shoals of neon tetra fish shimmer by. The fish tanks are
buried among agaves, whose fleshy, pointed arms pierce the
empty space around them. Someone has been unable to resist
scratching his initials on their green leaves, or the legend 'I love
Eve'. The agave heals these wounds, immortalizing other
peoples declarations on its body. The hall leads into the library.
Somewhere among the hundreds, possibly thousands of books
'>Tapped in grey paper with numbers on their spines is the first
book I ever read - a dense, fat volu me crammed full of letters,
parallel lines of text offering the promise of many different lives,
many different worlds. The book lured my eyes away from the
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
203
sky and the treetops, from the pond and the paths winding
among the trees to one small rectangle in front of me - its pages,
where at any moment a performance might begin.
A broad , carpeted staircase leads upstairs, where there arc
bedrooms and two large lecture halls. Or maybe they're ballrooms? Their parquet floors have witnessed all kinds of dance steps. In the far hall, the one with a door on to the terrace and
the park, there's a huge fireplace with a mirror. A fire burns
there once a year, on All Souls' Day. I can climb up the marble
columns and stand in front of the mirror, which is so big that it
reflects all of me, as well as the terrace, the park and the hall.
Before I discovered the truth about mirrors, I was sure it provided a way into another part of the mansio
n that everyone else had forgotten about. This part has narrow passages hacked into
the rocks, cloisters and tall courtyards. I found some stone
sculptures scattered about in there. I realized that they had had
to be put away here, in exile; apparently they were aesthetically
unacceptable, even to the most eccentric of art lovers - they
were rough-hewn effigies, half-people and half-animals. The rain
fell on them, washing away the details.
Above the top floors, which are small and stuffy, is the attic.
The stairs that lead up there start off wide, with ornate banisters
and slippery handrails, then they suddenly spiral in the air and
become narrow, decaying steps. You have to stick close to the
wall, leaning against its smooth surface, or else your foot might
get trapped in a hole.
The attic is enormous. The wooden floor is covered in dust.
and there's a thick layer of it on every object up here , so the
smallest things are just unrecognizable heaps - a withered apple
core is transformed into a fluffy, double-ended knob, and a
broom handle left lying here creates an amazing ripple on the
floorboards.
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It's easy to lose your way in the attic, whose layout is too
large to be memorized. I know that in some corner or other
there's an old mattress, a place of long forgotten forbidden
games, although I can't remember whose. But the most astonishing thing in here is the windows set into the sloping roof they're not large and they're a little too high, so you have to reach up on tiptoes to see out of them. But the view from them
is extraordinary and unforgettable - what you see shows just
how large and imposing the mansion is. From the attic windows everything looks tiny and unreal - like an artificial world made specially for an electric train set, like something made of
Lego, or a scene from a Disney cartoon. And you can see so
much of it - forests, fields, rivers and railways, great cities and
ports, deserts and motorways. You can actually - though I'm
not sure how this is possible - see the curve of the globe from
here. It's a breathtaking view; afterwards downstairs you miss it,
and think you might just summon the energy to go back up the
precarious stairs to the attic, stand among the rays of sunlight
and stretch up on tiptoe again to see the world outside.
I told Marta that each of us has two homes - one actual home
with a fixed location in time and space, and a second that is
infinite, with no address and no chance of being immortalized
in architectural plans - and that we live in both of them simultaneously.
R o ofs
In the von Goetzen family there was a professor, a real professor,
who spent his whole life reading books, studying and travelling,
and who wasn't interested in gardens . His name was Jonas
Gustaw Wolfgang Tschischwitz von Goetzen. During his long
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205
life ( 1 862- 1 945) he wrote many books about the history of reli gion, o f which the most importan t were Das Hci lige. Ubcr Schlesiens Myslih (The Holy - on Silesian Mysticism', 1 9 1 -+) and
Der Ursprung der Religion (The Origin of Religion', 1 9 1 8) . H e
had two passions i n life: religion and roofs. H e reckoned these
two subjects must have something in common, or must somehow complement each other. He became interested in religion as a boy, during a Christmas mass at the village church, where he
saw an oval icon of the Virgin Mary surrounded by saints with
the symbols of their martyrdom. Roofs were a passion that
developed later on , during the latest reconstruction of the mansion, when the entire roof had to be replaced with modern tiles.
Whatever jonas Gustaw Wolfgang did, it always had to be done
precisely, carefully and painstakingly. So he read about roofs,
coverings, tiles and shingle. I n a revolutionary act of boldness,
which was the Oavour of the Zeitgeist at the beginning of the
century, he decided to replace the traditional Oat, scale-like tiles
for more versatile brick-red tiles in the Gothic style, a reference
to the architecture of the West. From then on the mansion was
a curiosity in Silesia because of its roof tiles. Neighbours, priests
and architects came from ncar and far to admire it. The mansion
looked like a Burgundian chateau , like a Bavarian priory.
Wherever Jonas Gustaw Wolfgang went, his eyes sought out
the rooftops. From inside trains his gaze would gradually, almost
inadvertently, wander along the upper reaches of each town 1 hey
passed, taking in every chimney and every slope. Just by looki ng
at the roofs, Jonas could establ ish which part of Europe he wa�
in.
He studied in Lausanne and Geneva, where he got 10 know
Freud, Frazer and Durkheim. Rudolf Ollo, the German theologian, made a tremendous impression on him. Swiss roofs arc among the finest in the world. They make roof tiles there out of
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unusual, multi-coloured clay, so no roof is uniform in colour.
The surfaces keep changing hue, with the thousand shades that
the clay can assume producing an amazing patchwork effect. I n
Switzerland you should always book a room o n the top floor of
a hotel to get a view of these fascinating roofs. They don't lay the
tiles the same way as in Silesia, but like scales, so the houses
look like enormous fishes turned belly up, cast on to land from
seas beyond the imagination.
Later on, in Heidelberg, jonas Gustaw Wol fgang wrote a
thesis on the life and works of the legendary Silesian saint
known as Kummernis. He also lectured at the university and
wrote articles, specializing in sects active in Silesia during the
Reformation period, in particular the followers of Kaspar von
Schwenkfeld and the Cutlers.
The roofs in Heidelberg are typically German - red and steelgrey. The slender coping on the churches is coal-black in colour, soothing to look at. After lectures j onas would take a walk up to
the castle and look down on the city, bustling in the evenings
with students drinking cheap cider and discussing academic
theories.
There are some tangential connections between religion and
roofs. The first is banal - that both represent the highest sphere.
This association leads nowhere, but there's another one that
does have some significance. jonas Gustaw Wolfgang thought of
it one day as he was gazing down on the city from the terraces of
that same Heidelberg castle - a roof, like a religion, is the crowning point that closes off an area, dividing it from the rest of space, from the sky, from the height and soaring immensity of
the world. Thanks to religion we can live normally and not get
upset by any kind of infinity, which otherwise would be beyond
endurance; while thanks to roofs we can hide safely at home
from the wind , rain and cosmic radiation . It's something l ike
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207
opening an umbrella, covering yourself up, or closing a hatch,
and thus dividing yourself off, escaping into a safe and familiar
area.
T h e C u t l e r s
They spent their days singing psalms and making knives. They
made blades beuer than anyone in the whole of Silesia and filled
them with carefully polished handles made of ash wood, which
every human hand fell in love with instantly. They sold them
once a year in early autumn when the apples were ripening on
the trees. They held a sort of fair, which auracted people from all
over the district; they each bought several knives, sometimes as
many as a dozen, in order to sell them on at a profit. During
these fairs people forgot that the Cutlers were of a different faith
and believed in a different God, and that it would have been easy
to produce evidence and drive them away. For who would make
such good knives then?
Whenever they bore a child they mourned instead of rejoicing. Whenever someone died , they undressed him, laid his naked corpse in a hole in the ground and danced around the
open grave.
Their seulement was at one end of a line of hills that divided
two mountain chains. There was a stone bu ilding in the middle
of a few small, windowless mud huts that looked like dog kennels. These huts were full of knives. They stored them the " ay cheeses are hung up for �moking, with the blades hanging
downwards from the wooden ceilings. They swung in the
draught, clanging against each other like hel ls People walked
fearlessly beneath this sky full of blades, the steel t ips touch i ng
their heads.
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They had a very curious belief about how the world began -
they believed that all matter is the 'affect' of the spirit: the spirit
grew forgetful, slOpped concentrating and experienced something that it is not supposed lO - an affect, that is, an overpowering emotion . (The theologians later puzzled over
what son of an emotion it might have been - terror perhaps, or
maybe despair at the idea of existing and having no escape from
existence? But there is no clear explanation.)
The Cutlers believed that the soul is a knife stabbed into the
body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call
life. It animates the body, while at the same time killing it, for
every day of life takes us further away from God. If man did not
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