Madame

by Antoni Libera

  Now, as before, my conjectures and attempts at analysis came to naught. I reached no convincing conclusion I could hold on to. But this time the thorn that pricked my heart was so deeply embedded I couldn’t bear the pain. I had to do something.

  Phone her, I thought the next morning. Make some use of the phone number I had found that day so long ago. Ask her to meet me and demand an explanation. And if she finds an excuse to avoid a meeting, turn up at her door.

  In my mind I began composing the speech I would make to her. ‘I’ve come. I had to see you,’ I would say. ‘We have to talk. Please tell me, tell me honestly and without hedging and beating about the bush, what you know about me and what you think of me and what you want from me. You can’t leave me with these questions unanswered. What did you mean by telling me to run away – to desert? Where to? When, and how? And why – what are your motives in telling me this? And what did you mean by that “one day” when my oeuvre is finished? Do you really believe that? Did you mean it seriously or was it just empty talk? It’s important to me, I’ve got to know.’

  I snatched up the phone and dialled her number. No answer. I kept trying, at first every half hour, and then every few minutes. Still nothing. Silence.

  I gulped down a double shot of vodka and set off for her flat.

  It was about one o’clock in the afternoon, and the weather was hot and sunny. The blinds in both windows were down. My pulse quickened. She’s asleep, I thought as I climbed the stairs, sleeping off last night. She’s unplugged the phone. She’s undressed. Is she naked? In a nightgown? A dressing-gown, perhaps? A push on the bell (of the ‘ding-dong’ type) brought none of the expected results. No footsteps, no ‘Who is it?’, no opening of the door; not a sound. Complete silence. I pressed my ear to the door and kept it there for a long time, trying to detect some sign of life, to see if perhaps she was skulking inside, pretending to be out. Not a murmur.

  Like Jean-Louis racing back to Deauville after not finding Anne at home, I jumped on the bus and went to the school.

  I found people in the process of cleaning up after the prom. Madame’s office was locked. Making up some story about a missing signature on my university application, I asked the secretary in the horn-rimmed spectacles where the headmistress was.

  ‘The headmistress,’ she muttered indifferently, not bothering to look up, ‘is not here. She’s gone away on a training course.’

  ‘Not here?’ I blurted out, unable to control my voice or even what I said. ‘But she was just here –’

  ‘Yes, but now she’s gone,’ observed Horn-Rims with a sour smile.

  ‘But . . . what am I going to do now?’ I said helplessly.

  ‘You could go to the train station, if it’s really so important,’ she advised with a sneer. ‘Maybe you can still catch her.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I clutched at the suggestion like a drowning man at the proverbial straw. ‘Which station? When does the train leave?’

  ‘How should I know?’ She shrugged. ‘I’m just the menial around here; no one ever tells me anything. Such information is not for the likes of me – a mere secretary. I only happened to overhear that it was the Gdansk station, apparently. Sometime in the afternoon. Around now.’

  I ran out of the secretary’s office and raced to the train station. From the viaduct I saw a long train made up of various carriages, both European and Soviet. Moscow–Warsaw–Paris, 15.10, announced the sign on the departures board. But this time the scene was like something from a bad film: when I ran onto the platform the train was just pulling out. I stood there as the different carriages passed me: first the green Soviet ones, then the French and German ones – the Western ones. Each displayed a board with the name of its destination. The one that rushed by most often said Paris-Nord, Paris-Nord, Paris-Nord . . .

  The melancholy that weighed me down in the days that followed did not dissipate until the university entrance exams. Being forced to concentrate on achieving a specific goal was a blessing: there were tasks to be accomplished, things to be done and seen to, new people to meet, the competition to be contemplated – all the excitement and flurry of being part of the ‘market’. The cloud lifted a little. But when it was over, when, in mid-July, my promotion to the status of university student had been confirmed and the prospect of summer holidays stretched before me, my ‘disorder and early sorrow’ threatened to return.

  To escape it, I decided to go away. But not, as in recent years, to the Tatra mountains. This time I would go to the Baltic coast – to Gdansk, where I had spent childhood summers and still had a childhood friend, a boy slightly older than I was whose company I used to enjoy. I had found it both stimulating and soothing, and hoped that it would have the same effect now. Andy, for that was his name, inhabited a world completely different from mine. It was a world both useful and quantifiable, a world of technical problems and practical concerns: he was a ham radio operator, a model-maker, an angler; he owned a bicycle and a motorcycle; he was studying shipbuilding. Art and literature had never much interested him. I hoped we could recapture the old, carefree atmosphere of the holidays of our boyhood; perhaps an immersion in his simple, practical life might allay some of my restlessness and repair my shattered nerves, even bring about a complete cure and make me forget Madame.

  I was not disappointed. The older, taller and more manly version of Andy was not so very different from the little boy I had known. He was still the ‘good, reliable lad’ he had always been, cheerful and down-to-earth, untouched by the poison of disenchantment. He greeted me as before, as if there had been no break in our summer meetings, as if time had stood still. Once again we were ‘mates’, ‘best friends’, schoolboys playing together; cheerful, open, pure-hearted little boys with innocent boyish dreams and untainted boyish souls. We played tennis, we went to the beach, we took long walks in the forest; everything was just as it had been all those years ago. Andy was putting together a radio of his own devising (‘from the best transistors’); in the evenings we listened to ‘Western’ stations and Radio Luxembourg. We also rode, on his motorcycle, to the port and the shipyards, where from various spots on the jetty we could look at the ships – in the docks, sailing out of the harbour, on the horizon.

  It was a pleasant time, carefree and nostalgic, like a miraculous and unexpected extension of childhood. A kind of coming back, to things and experiences I had thought beyond recapturing.

  And then, one hot Sunday, when we were wandering aimlessly, ‘as in the old days’, around a quiet and remote part of the city, a strange thing happened. On Polanki Street Andy suddenly stopped, pointed to some old, dilapidated buildings horribly deformed by an ugly grey barracks and walls with barbed wire that had been built around them, and said something I would never have expected of him: ‘Look, that used to be the summer house of the Schopenhauer family. You know what it is now? A kind of prison: a reformatory. Interesting taste our government has.’

  I nodded, digesting this information in silence, betraying no interest, no hint that I knew the least thing about Schopenhauer. But the moment – the unexpected sight of that legendary house, its disrepair, the use currently being made of it – made an impression on me. I was strangely moved.

  I began to go back there, without Andy, just to stand and look – at the house and the surroundings. Then I went to the Old Town to see the house on the south side of Holy Spirit Street – the one in the frontispiece photograph of Joanna Schopenhauer’s memoirs. I didn’t find it, however. I learned later that it had not survived the war. There was nothing where it had once stood: just a flight of steps leading nowhere.

  I don’t know when the bubble burst, but suddenly the magic atmosphere of childhood regained was gone. Life was no longer cheerful and carefree. Andy’s company became wearisome. His way of thinking, his interests, his sense of humour – all the traits once so soothing to my aching soul – now irritated me, seemed merely childish and naïve.

  I wasn’t sure what had caused the change. The unexpecte
d sight of the Schopenhauers’ house, presumably, but why? What did that old ruin have to do with me? Was it because somehow, by a very tortuous route, it was connected with Madame and by some strange alchemy had rekindled thoughts of her? Possibly. But it was more complex than that, and it wasn’t until much later that I came to understand it fully. For the moment I wandered about in a fog, allowing myself to drift on the wave of thoughts and emotions which this strangely compelling atmosphere evoked.

  I returned to Warsaw in an odd state of abstraction and excitement. My head teemed with ideas and images, phrases and dialogues that seemed to be forming themselves into fragments of a story. I lay on my bed, surrounded by books about Schopenhauer (mostly about his life), going over various details in my mind and developing them into scenes and conversations. Finally I began to write.

  The idea was very simple, almost banal. Of the dozens of events in Schopenhauer’s life that I had read about, I picked the two most influential ones – the ‘load-bearing’ ones, as it were: the death of his father, probably suicide, although the motives were obscure; and his violent breaking-off of relations with his mother, in the 1810s, in Weimar.

  Both were tragic events, suffused with bitterness, disappointment and anger. The father departed this world a triply defeated and resentful man: because he had left Gdansk after the second partition of Poland, when that part of the country was occupied by the Prussians, and had never been able to get over it; because his marriage was not going well; and because his son Arthur, despite all efforts to make him a worthy successor at the head of a great merchant house, had failed to fulfil the hopes vested in him, and spent his time dreaming about . . . philosophy. After the father’s death, the mother, Joanna, by then a woman past forty who had somehow managed, despite successive blows of fate, to maintain her high position in the world and reconstruct a life for herself (entering into a relationship with a man who was both town councillor and writer, and establishing a literary salon frequented by Goethe himself), found herself suffering dreadful humiliations at the hands of her wunderkind son, in the two (in this case equally delicate) spheres of finance and morals: Arthur destroyed her reputation, calumnied her in public, demanded that she break off relations with ‘that man’, and finally gave her an ultimatum: ‘him or me’.

  My description of these events, reconstructed from the available accounts, was interwoven with the thoughts and memories of the two protagonists, flashbacks to the time of that memorable trip through Western Europe: the time that began with Joanna’s discovery of her pregnancy and ended with their return to Gdansk, her labour and Arthur’s birth.

  I created a sharp contrast between the dark, overcast mood of the present and the bright, sunny memories of the past. Arthur’s father, gnawed by bitter resentment and regret, weary of life and convinced that his death would be a relief to everyone – his wife, who has grown cold towards him, and his son, who finds the idea of trade repellent – cultivates thoughts of putting an end to his life. And we see him standing by the crane of the grain silo from which the next day, in circumstances which are to remain obscure, he will fall to his death, gazing for a long time at the waters of the harbour canal and letting his thoughts wander to that night in Dover when he stood on the ship’s deck, stood just as he is standing now, high up above the wharf, and, leaning over the railing, watched in suspense as the armchair containing his wife in her seventh month of pregnancy glided slowly upwards on its ropes. And he recalls the feeling and atmosphere of that moment: one that was, despite the suspense, cheerful and full of hope.

  He remembers the words in which he had expressed that feeling: ‘This is the most precious cargo I have ever transported,’ he had said then, with a shade of irony. ‘Well, he won’t be born in England, as I wanted him to be – never mind. He’ll be born in Gdansk. I’ll give him the best life and education I can. I’ll make him travel the world as early as possible; he’ll learn foreign languages and foreign customs. I want him to be more of a man of the world than I. I shall call him Arthur.’

  And we see Joanna after another round of ‘family negotiations’ devoted to abuse and invective from her ungrateful progeny, who treats her as if she were some vile Gertrude, hurling accusations of wanton shamelessness and betrayal, as she bursts into violent sobs and runs from the drawing-room, flees to her bedroom, and there, weeping, recalls the night in Westphalia when their carriage axle broke on a pothole and she was carried across the fields in the arms of an asthmatic giant who kept stopping and plumping her down unceremoniously every few steps to catch his breath.

  ‘Oh, I should have miscarried then!’ she cries bitterly. And when her daughter Adela, a kind-hearted but plain girl, reacts with a cry of shocked protest (‘Mother, how can you say such a thing!’), she remembers that spring soon after their return, when she felt, as a new mother, happier than she had ever felt in her life, and her newborn son seemed the most beautiful, wonderful child on earth.

  In short, it was a novella about the illusory nature of human hopes and dreams, darkly pessimistic and permeated by an unrelieved scepticism about the possibility of happiness. Happiness does not endure, the narrator seemed to be saying; it does not breed happiness. It can only be fleeting. Life’s melody is a sad one, and if it is sometimes heard in a major key, it always ends in minor. A joyful, hopeful beginning must always be viewed from the perspective of the end.

  I enjoyed writing it, and the process of writing brought a certain relief: it liberated me from something. It fulfilled an obscure longing. I seemed at last to have found the form in which I could assimilate love.

  It didn’t matter that what I wrote about had little to do with either my life or Madame’s. Through a certain twist of fate, a concatenation of circumstances, writing about the Schopenhauers gave me access to things that were otherwise unattainable. It released thoughts and emotions I could express in no other way, and gave new form to that first, uncertain leap of the imagination I had made at the cinema the night I’d watched Madame from behind the curtain and suddenly seen her whole life in a flash, encapsulated in one brief paragraph.

  I gave my novella the ironic title The Shape of Hopes Fulfilled, or Two Scenes from the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer, and realised suddenly that I was cured. Thinking of Madame no longer caused me pain. If I still desired anything, it was perhaps only that she should read what I had written.

  With the start of the new academic year, therefore, I went back to the school to see if she had returned. I rather doubted it, but I wanted to make sure. It was as I had suspected: the school was in chaos; the Tapeworm had taken over the reins of power. Whether his accession was permanent or merely an interregnum was unclear. The ‘ex-headmistress’ was not a subject anyone was eager to discuss with me.

  I showed my novella to Constant, who was pleasantly surprised. He suggested a few corrections and pronounced it publishable. It appeared in print about six months later, in a literary journal. By the end of my first year at university I had made my début on the literary scene.

  The summer holidays came round again. And then, in September, something happened to disturb my peace once more.

  The day after my twentieth birthday a package came from France. Although it was a small package, it was delivered by the parcel service, not by the postman. I even had to pay a charge before I could claim it. My name and address, both on the label and on the parcel service form, were not handwritten but typed, and the space intended for the return address bore the stamp and logo of a firm whose name meant nothing to me. I had not the faintest idea, as I unwrapped it, who it was from or what it could contain. Even when I had removed the brown paper and saw the object within – a flat black box with a coloured picture of Mozart as a small child and the words ‘Hommage à Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’ engraved in flowery gold letters – even then I still didn’t know.

  It didn’t hit me until I opened the box.

  Inside, held fast in a decorative support and cushioned on a bed of velvet, was a fountain pen. It was black a
nd extremely elegant. On the narrow gold band encircling the cap were three words: ‘Meisterstück’ and ‘Mont Blanc’.

  I gazed at it motionless, still unbelieving. After all, there was no evidence.

  Then I found it.

  There was an envelope stuck to the bottom of the box, and in it a colour postcard of Mont Blanc. On turning it over, I found a few lines of writing. Inscribed in pencil, and in a familiar hand, were the following words:

  Tout ce qui naît d’une source pure est un mystère.

  A peine si la poésie elle-même ose le dévoiler.

  Have you found the answer to my last question?

  Instructions inside.

  Shakily, I examined the box to see where else, apart from the velvet bed on which the pen reposed, ‘inside’ might refer to. Finally I found it. The box had a sort of false bottom: the black velvet covered a removable cardboard passe-partout. I removed it. Underneath was a gilt-edged card on which, neatly centred and in beautiful calligraphy, were six short, black lines of writing, in ink this time, in Madame’s hand. They read as follows:

  De la part du Verseau dans la force de l’âge

  pour la Vierge à l’âge viril

  (depuis le dix septembre)

  au lieu d’une plume d’oie