House of Day, House of Night

by Olga Tokarczuk

  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.

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  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

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  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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  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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  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 sr />
  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