The Book
I
I SIMPLY call it the Book, without qualifications or epithets, and in this abstinence and restraint there is a helpless sigh, a silent capitulation in the face of the immeasurableness of the transcendent, for no word, no allusion can glisten, scent the air, or drift with that shudder of terror, any inkling of that thing without a name, the very first taste of which on the tip of the tongue exceeds our capacity for rapture. For what can the pathos of adjectives or the haughtiness of epithets avail against that measureless thing, that magnificence beyond reckoning? The reader, in any case, the true reader on whom this novel* relies, will surely understand when I look deep into his eyes and shine far inside with that very same radiance. In that short but forceful look, in a fleeting grip of the hand, he will apprehend, accept, anticipate — and he will close his eyes in rapture at that profound recognition. For indeed, under the table that separates us, do we not all secretly hold one another by the hand?
The Book... Somewhere at childhood’s daybreak, on the first dawn of life, the horizon shone with its gentle light. It lay in its full glory on Father’s desk while Father, quietly engrossed in it, patiently rubbed the ridge of those decals with a licked finger until the blank paper began to mist, to blur and loom with blissful anticipation, and it suddenly peeled away shreds of tissue-paper and disclosed a peacock-eye and mascaraed rim, and my gaze fell swooning into a virgin dawn of godly colours, into a wonderful dampness of the purest azures.
Oh, the wearing through of that film — Oh, that invasion of splendour — O blissful spring — O Father...
Sometimes Father would rise from the Book and leave the room. I was left alone with it at such times, and a wind moved through its pages, and visions arose.
And as the wind silently turned those pages over, blowing the colours and figures away, a shudder ran through the columns of its text, releasing flocks of swallows and skylarks from among the letters. And then it rose into the air, scattering page after page, and gently suffused the landscape, which it sated with its hues. Sometimes it slept and the wind quietly blew it around like a cabbage rose, and opened its leaves sheet after sheet, one eyelid under another, all of them blind, velvety and lulled to sleep, concealing deep within them, in their essence, their azure pupil, their peacock core — a screeching nest of humming-birds.
That was very long ago. Mother had not yet joined us. I spent the days alone with Father, in our room, as great as the world in those days.
Prismatic crystals dangling from the lamp filled the room with scattered colours; a rainbow was dispersed over all the corners; and as the lamp turned on its chains, the whole room meandered in fragments of the rainbow, as if the spheres of the seven planets, spinning around, were each passing one another by. I liked to stand between Father’s legs, clasping them at either side like columns. He sometimes wrote letters. I sat on his desk and observed with rapture his flourished signature, convoluted and swirling like the trills of a coloratura soprano. Smiles budded in the wallpaper; eyes hatched out; somersaults turned. To amuse me, Father blew soap bubbles into the rainbow-hued space from a long straw. They bounced off the walls and burst, leaving their colours in the air.
Then Mother arrived, and that bright, early idyll ended. Seduced by Mother’s caresses, I forgot about Father; my life trundled along a new, different track without holidays and without wonders, and I might have forgotten about the Book forever, had it not been for that night and that dream.
> -II- >
Notes
* … this novel… this appears to be a textual leftover from the time when this story and ‘The Gifted Epoch’ were originally conceived as parts of Schulz’s lost novel, The Messiah. [RETURN]
> -II- >