by Jerzy Pilch
II
He played soccer as if he were composing music to accompany his runs along the length of the field, to accompany the smell of the grass, the ball darkening from the dampness, always falling upon his foot as if from heaven. He swam in the deepest part of the river as if he were composing music to accompany swimming in the deepest part. He collected stamps as if he were composing music to accompany stamp collecting. He read everything he came upon, as if he heard song in everything that had been written. He would raise a mug of beer, throw back his head, and drink, just as the greatest composers in the world must have drunk.
He examined the girls at the swimming pool, and it was clear that he knew everything about them. We set our sights on the middling ones, he scorned even the best. He was waiting for the most beautiful one among the most beautiful; but even she couldn’t be certain that she would be accepted. This didn’t surprise anyone. It was clear to everyone that Janek could have any woman in the world at any moment, that he would go far: that he would complete the entire blacksmith’s training course in a year, two at most; that he would then, likewise in a flash, complete a few majors, go abroad, go through Oxford, Harvard, fly into the cosmos, win the Chopin competition, be the first Pole to buy Real Madrid, discover new stars, construct an everlasting battery for a flashlight, discover a vaccination for cancer, or do other miracles.
Janek had everything: stacks of books in the attic; collections of incredible objects in the drawers; a one-eyed father who forbade him nothing; a mother as beautiful as an Egyptian priestess; two unbearable sisters; three dissolute brothers, who could fix anything; a mentally ill grandmother, who never left her room; and a grandfather, who had been dying for years, and who barely spoke Polish. Supposedly before one of the old wars he had had a different name and had been a famous Viennese tailor. It is uncertain whether Robert Musil had his suits sewn by him, whether Hermann Broch had his pants shortened, but it is possible.
III
The Nikandys didn’t go to church, they held their religious services at home. The entire family sat at the table every day, the one-eyed father read from the Bible, prayed with concentration, then he spoke about the presence of God in our lives and about various spirits, mostly about the Spirit of Light and the Spirit of Darkness.
I feared the God of the Nikandys—He was too near. The Spirit of Light would show himself and disappear, the Spirit of Darkness lurked in every corner. In our Church, God was at a safe distance, and there weren’t any spirits at all.
But much worse than the Spirit of Light, than the Spirit of Darkness, than all the other spirits known to Janek, was the Spirit of Miraculous Discoveries. I think he kept it under his collar, I think it sat on his shoulder and whispered where he should look. Janek happened upon everything. I would be walking next to him on the banks of the same river, treading the same earth, but it was he who would bend down and pick up parts of Stalin-era motorbikes, feathers from Caribbean birds, cogwheels on quartz pivots, silver keys to God knows what safes. It was he who would pull out from the bottom of the deepest part of the river washed out dials from submerged clocks, fish skeletons coated with phosphorus, stones as symmetrical as octagons, brittle teacups without a single crack, bracelets of thick glass shining like green stars, Austrian, German, Russian, and even Swiss coins. I came upon nothing but unremarkable things: a tin cup, a smashed thermos, a penknife covered with rust, a fork with the inscription “Silesian Gastronomy.” Nothing worth talking about.
You could beat him at soccer sometimes, especially when he had too many bush leaguers on his team. I swam almost as well as he did. I had the same sort of household, maybe even a gaudier mixture. I was definitely better at chess—except that this remained somewhat in the realm of theory, since, once he realized that he couldn’t beat me, he ceased playing entirely. In any event, I had no complexes, I didn’t suffer. I was in his shadow, but I rather admired than envied him. The harmony full of perfect lights that he had within him aroused my adoration, not my envy.
But whenever he found the next remarkable object, whenever he would bend down, and, the next time, pull out, literally from under my shoe, the moveable fragment of some sort of phenomenal mechanism, or the brass buckle from a Red Army belt, or a retort overgrown with moss, which a group of wandering alchemists must have lost on this spot centuries ago—then I hated him with all my heart. There was an abyss between us in the art of observation: he was a master, I an abject loser. I always lost that match and always by a score of something to zero. I lost for a time. Not so much until the time of my desired victory as until the time of the final disaster. Until the time of the disaster of disasters.
Janek would receive his discoveries with manly self-restraint: no leaps or euphoria—it was just the norm; and, in fact, it was the norm that he always found something. But one day, when we had traversed the length and breadth of Wisła in pursuit of the vacationer in brocade dresses; once we had accompanied her practically to the very doors of Villa Almira and then run back down and descended, next to the swimming pool, to the water of the river, warm after the sultry day, and we set off along its twists and turns toward the reddish-brown sky over Czantoria Mountain, and when, under the third bridge, Janek bent down and dug something up from the river’s stone chippings—this time even he shouted, even he lifted his arms in victory. He held something very nondescript in his hand and waved it feverishly in my direction. I was in no hurry to celebrate his most recent triumph. I pretended that the water was offering greater resistance than it did. I approached slowly, but still—even when I was already quite near—I couldn’t recognize what he had come upon this time. Finally, seeing that I still didn’t get it, he put the thing to his eyes, and I understood that this was a pair of binoculars left behind by the Germans, similar to a fossilized crab, overgrown with gravel and algae. (And anyway, the number of binoculars left during the war by the retreating Wehrmacht is shocking. Sometimes it is impossible not to think that our earth, saturated with the blood of heroes and filled with the ashes of martyrs, is also overgrown with the lenses of Carl Zeiss.)
We began to scrub it while we were still in the water, then on the shore, then in our neighboring courtyards, and the more its original shape emerged out of the chaos, the higher my heart soared. And when, finally, it was entirely restored—that is, when, through one of its tubes, you could see some sort of image that was foggy, but brought nearer all the same—I became triumphally certain: this time I would be better. I didn’t even need to summon the Spirit of Miraculous Discoveries. I knew where to look.
IV
I searched the back room inch by inch. I looked under both beds. I dug out everything that was under the beds, and there was quite a lot of it. I looked into each and every shoe. I checked the straw mattresses. Night stands—so filled with objects that they were practically inflated—took me a lot of time. Then I checked the interior of the clock, the hearth under the stove, the ash pan under the hearth, and finally I stood before Grandma Pech’s wardrobe, heavy, deep, and dark as the ocean.
To say that no one but her had access to that wardrobe is to say nothing. Grandma herself seldom opened that wardrobe, and always with some sort of uncertainty or fear. She would then close the doors behind her; she would chase away anyone who just then happened to look in on the back room and ask her about something; just like in a film—she would block out the wardrobe with her own body, so that no one could even glance into it.
All the domestic furniture made themselves known: the table creaked, the stools were falling apart, the upholstery on the armchairs was tearing, the sideboard was headed for collapse, the stoves smoked—there was constant talk about pieces of equipment that were falling to pieces. We talked about them, and we talked to them; it was as if constant conversation with the dying objects was supposed to keep their spirits up. We talked especially frequently about all the cupboards: what to put in which one, what to bring from which one, in which one hymnals stand on the shelves, in which one Grandpa’s postal un
iform was hanging, in which one there was a box of winter socks, in which one the bottom was falling out, in which one the locks needed to be oiled, in which one mice had danced the night before; this, that, and the other thing. All the cupboards were constantly on our tongues. But about the wardrobe in the back room—never even a single word. As if it didn’t exist, or rather, as if it were a wall-less specter, as if it didn’t have hinges, as if no one knew what was in it. As if demons with unpronounceable names lived in it, or as if the path to the abyss opened up in the wall behind it.
I stood before that wardrobe as before the gates to a forbidden city; there was a terrible silence in the entire house. The spirits of the world’s leading burglars sat on my shoulders and whispered advice about what I should do. My hands glided over the dark pear wood and correctly felt out the weak places. I guessed the most secret codes; invisible keys slipped into locks that had been oiled just a moment before; the tree rings in the wood were like a legible map leading straight to the treasure. The wardrobe in the back room, brittle like a decayed cork, or perhaps heavy like lead, opened slowly. I smelled the scent of silk blouses from the twenties. On hangers hung patterned and light dresses from those times—one with a deep décolletage in the back, a second made of pleated yellow crêpe de Chine; two satin jackets (one matte, the other shiny), a raincoat with circus designs, a jersey bathing suit—no ghosts, no werewolves: the spirit of a young girl lived in this wardrobe. The spirit of the young body of Grandma Pech, sprinkled with naphthalene as if with slaked lime, was imprisoned there. This was its kingdom, this was what was guarding—as if they were precious jewels—the brown suit and the green hunting outfit, which were hanging there on the other side; the yellowed curtains, which were lying on the shelves, and which, in their time, had hung in the windows; it watched over the bed linens, which fell apart in your hands; it dusted the stack of books from the bordeaux-colored series entitled Library of Masterpieces, which was hidden away in the depths; it was the spirit that looked through the album, wrapped in brittle oilcloth, with photographs from her first wedding; it had in its care all the ties, hats, neckerchiefs, scarfs; it was what hovered over the boxes that stood on the floor of the wardrobe.
I took into my hands object after object, opened box after box. In the first were tangles of fossilized yarn and a million buttons. In the second, promissory notes, bills, postcards. In the third, daguerreotypes—fragile as emigration—of old man Trzmielowski and old lady Mary, with Humphrey the cat in her hands; they stand, smiling broadly, before an iron gate leading to a gold mine in Nevada. No wonder they are laughing. They would return to Wisła soon thereafter, and, in addition to the eccentric custom of giving Anglo-Saxon names to the household animals, they would bring with them so many dollars that there would be enough for satin jackets and dresses with décolletage for Zuza. The fourth box was full of burned out prewar light bulbs. A collection that was not sorrowful or comical, but lofty and romantic. Who among you women has loved like this? What woman in the world got the idea of saving the light bulbs that had shined during the lifetime of her beloved? As a memento of that by-gone light over their heads; as a memento of those moments when they were gently extinguished over their bed?
A pair of hunting binoculars, which were older than World War II and had belonged to Grandma’s first husband, were in the fifth box. I knew about their existence, because, from time to time, whenever unique astronomical phenomena occurred—when bizarre air vehicles glided over the mountains, or on a summer night something unusual happened in the sky: the Big Dipper made such a big dip that its handle cracked, or the North Star shined ever more strongly from minute to minute, as if it were flying straight toward our yard—whenever such spectacles occurred in the cosmos over our heads, Grandma Pech went to the back room, meticulously shut the door behind her, and returned after a moment with the binoculars.
Once, we observed a biplane circling over Wisła; once, a comet over Czantoria Mountain. The biplane circled desperately and in vain and couldn’t find a way to straighten out its flight or make the decision to land; it looked tragic to the naked eye, but entirely different with the binoculars. The plates of the fuselage were about to drop off, its flight was about to end, but through the binoculars we saw the plane soaring calmly in the sky, the solid riveting of the wings, the equally shining dials on the control panels. Janek was even able to catch sight of the pilot’s face. Supposedly he wasn’t in a panic at all, supposedly—quite the opposite—he was in sovereign control of the rudders, and this was most likely accurate, for suddenly, after one of the circlings, he stepped hard on the gas and disappeared over Jarzębata Mountain. The motors fell silent; we were sure that he had landed on the peak. We rushed up there as if on wings, in an absolutely full sprint. Usually it takes at least an hour to walk to the peak of the Jarzębata—we were there in a few minutes. I will never forget the sudden silence of our thudding hearts and the yellow meadow, in the middle of which the biplane ought to have stood, its propeller still revolving, and yet there wasn’t a trace—only the great calm of the Beskid peak, the warm breath of the sun, the gentle ocean of the blue sky, and a partridge suddenly shooting upward.
From a distance, the comet over Czantoria Mountain looked like normal fire, except that it was slowly floating through the air; but from up close, it looked like a red-hot bulldozer driving in first gear. The binoculars brought everything close: the pieces that were incessantly falling off the humming machinery, the meteors that were constantly revolving—as in a cauldron—in its very center, the blizzards of snow creating an ideal fan, the spotlights wandering across the peaks of the mixed forest.
V
I carefully erased the traces of a plundering expedition that had been crowned with complete success. I arranged all the boxes and all the objects in their proper places. Then, with the treasure hidden under my shirt, I flitted through the house; then, along the steep path up the railway embankment. I was the happiest person in the world: I was running toward certain victory; Janek didn’t have a chance.
An image that was foggy, but nonetheless brought nearer? I had exaggerated in the first euphoric moment. The binoculars found on the river bottom didn’t bring anything nearer, literally not a thing. They were suitable for placing on an altar. For the very peak of the old bureau, in which Janek kept all his discoveries. That is where he put it, and there—like the crown of miraculous discoveries—he worshipped it. I had a hard time believing it, but a few times I caught him casting glances that seemed uncanny to me, because I didn’t know that they were tender. I swear. I was jealous of his love for the old German binoculars, and I offered him—I know that this will sound terrible—much more attractive goods. All of this took place blindly and in the dark, but I simply agreed that he could love his, while using mine. Blindly and in the dark, I attempted to convince him to commit infidelity. Everything I did, I did instinctively. He—as it would turn out—not only knew everything; he also knew how to give everything a name.
We stood on the embankment, and we turned in all directions, and we saw right in front of our noses the clock on the church tower, a swimmer jumping from the diving platform into the pool, the border patrols walking along the border on the top of Stożek Mountain, women sprinters practicing in the stadium, clouds on Ram Mountain, perhaps even the tower of the Cieszyn Castle. We saw everything! Everything at every moment could be brought near! Every meadow, every courtyard, every car, every swimming suit, every head, all the legs, all the shoulders. The carnival of unbridled close-up peeping had begun! Everything! With details! The unprecedented season of bringing near all that is far had begun!
It had begun, but we didn’t give a damn. The binoculars, which were as rare as the comet over Czantoria Mountain, brought everything probably a thousand times nearer, but we were interested in bringing only one thing nearer. Only one. No couples disappearing into the woods, no girls changing clothes on the river bank, no women’s dressing rooms at the swimming pool, no female athletes standing under the sh
owers after practice, no rooms in which God knows who was doing what! No mythological meadows near Bukowa, on which nymphs from Gliwice danced with Chorzów satyrs! No wide open windows in the tourist hotels! None of them!
None—except for one! You smile, because you know right off the bat—just like us—what window we’re talking about here. You smile, because—just like us—you don’t know what sort of tragedy would immediately follow! That’s right! The unprecedented season of looking at everything from up close basically never even got started. Or rather, strictly speaking, it ended before it could get started! That’s right. It ended before we understood that it had dawned.
It goes without saying: among all those wide open Wisła windows, among all the wide open windows of the Principality of Cieszyn, among all the wide open windows in the world—only one window came into play. You guessed it. Her window. Under the very roof of the Almira, on the left side, a window that was open round the clock—even when summer downpours came—and lit up every evening with a thick, yellow luster, which didn’t go out until late in the night. The window of the bizarrely dressed female vacationer. Who knows what sorts of secrets would finally be revealed! Finally, we would discover what that freak did in the evening! What she was up to! What her life consisted of! How many more dresses—and just how bizarre—did she still have in her wardrobe!
