The Dead Season
I
AT FIVE O-CLOCK in the morning, a dawn glaring with early sunshine, our house had already been bathing for a long time in the fervent and quiet morning brilliance. At that solemn hour, in total silence and unnoticed by all, whilst in the half-light of the lowered blinds the acquiescent breath of the sleeping still ran with one accord through the rooms, it had merged entirely with its own façade, burning in the sunshine in the silence of the early glow as if moulded all across its surface from eyelids closed in blissful sleep. And so, taking advantage of the silence of those ceremonial hours, its sweetly sleeping face had absorbed the first fire of dawn, melting in the heat, the lineation of its features trembling a little in its sleep from the reveries of that intense hour. The sharp-edged shadow of an acacia which stood at the front of the house waved across those warm eyelids, and went on repeating on their surfaces, as if on a grand piano, its same shimmering cliché, washed away by the breeze, trying in vain to penetrate deep into that golden slumber. Portion by portion, the linen blinds absorbed the morning heat, and burned redly, languishing in that boundless radiance.
At that early hour, sleep having eluded him, my father went downstairs laden with ledgers, to open the shop which occupied the ground floor of our tenement.
For a moment, he stood unmoving in the doorway, his closed eyes evading the powerful onslaught of the sun’s fire. And the sun-drenched wall of the house drew him sweetly into its blissfully levelled flatness, smoothed to obliteration. For a moment, he became a flat father, striking root in the façade, and he felt the golden stucco heal flatly over his outspread, warm and trembling hands. (How many fathers have, at five o’clock in the morning, just as they were taking the last step down from their stairway, taken root for ever in the façade of their own house? How many fathers have in this way become the keeper of their own gate for ever, carved in relief on the casing, with one hand on the door handle, their face disentangled into its parallel and blissful furrows — along which their sons would later lovingly run their fingers, in search of the last traces of their father, set now and for ever into the façade’s universal smile?) But with a last effort of will, he tore himself free again, and regained the third dimension, and, human once more, relieved the studded shop door of its padlocks and iron bars.
When he opened the heavy iron-clad door, sulky gloom backed away from the entrance, shrank by inches into the depths of the shop. It shuffled and slowly rearranged itself, far inside. The morning’s freshness stood timidly at the threshold, billowing unseen from the still cool flagstones, in a faint, shimmering stream of air. Deep inside, the darkness of many former days and nights lay in the unopened bales of cloth, arranged in layers, receding into the depths in lanes, muffled processions and meanderings, before rising up feebly at the very core of the shop — in the dark storeroom where it unravelled, undifferentiated now and saturated with itself, into dully looming, primal cloth matter.
Father walked along that high wall of serge and cord, running his hand over the edges of the cloth bales as if over the pleats of women’s dresses. At his touch, those rows of blind hulks were appeased — prone to perpetual panic, to breaking ranks, they were now consolidated in their cloth hierarchies and echelons.
Our shop was a site of perpetual torment and worry to my father. For some time now, this creation of his own hands, as it had grown, had begun to press upon him more and more, to outgrow him menacingly and unintelligibly. It had become an inordinate task for him, a task beyond his strength, a sublime and immeasurable task. The enormity of that requirement terrified him. Staring in horror at its immensity — to which he felt unequal, his whole life staked on that one card — he saw with despair the recklessness of the shop assistants, their frivolous, carefree optimism, their mischievous and mindless conduct, which ran along the margins of that great concern. He scrutinised with bitter irony that gallery of faces unclouded by the least concern, those foreheads unruffled by the vaguest of notions. He plumbed the depths of those eyes, their innocent trust unperturbed by even the faintest shadow of misgiving. What help was Mother to him, with all her loyalty and devotion? The import of those inordinate matters had not found its way into her simple and unthreatened soul. She wasn’t made for heroic deeds. Couldn’t he see her communicating with the shop assistants by a brief glance behind his back? Relishing every unsupervised moment when she too could join in with their mindless clowning?
Father isolated himself more and more from that world of flippant lightheartedness; he fled into the strict discipline of his calling. Dismayed by the profligacy spreading all around, he enclosed himself in solitary service to a lofty ideal. His hand never loosened its grip on the reins. He never allowed himself any relaxation of rigour, any easy compromise.
Perhaps that would do at Bałanda & Co., or those other dilettanti of the trade, to whom a hunger for excellence and the asceticism of great artistry were alien. Father looked with dismay on the decline of the trade. Who of the present generation of cloth merchants still observed the fine traditions of the ancient art? Which of them still knew, for example, that a column of cloth bales, arranged on the shelves of a cupboard in accordance with the principles of the mercantile art, would at the touch of a finger running down them emit a tone like the scale of a keyboard? For whom today were the finer points of style to hand, in the exchange of notes, memorandums and letters? Who still knew all the charm of mercantile diplomacy, the diplomacy of the fine old school — the whole anxious course of a negotiation, begun in inflexible stiffness, with closed reserve at the appearance of a plenipotentiary envoy of a foreign company, progressing toward a gradual thaw under the influence of the diplomat’s indefatigable solicitations and blandishments, to a shared supper with wine, laid out on the papers on the desk, in exulted mood and with the occasional pinch of Adela’s bottom as she served the meal — amid peppery and liberal talk, as among men who know what the moment and the circumstances call for — and concluded with a deal profitable to both sides?
In the quiet of those morning hours, as the heat intensified, my father waited to discover the apt and inspired phrase he needed in order to finish his letter to Messrs Chrystian Seipel & Sons, Spinners and Mechanical Weavers.
A pointed reposte was required to certain unfounded claims made by those gentlemen, a rejoinder plucked at just the right, decisive place, where the style of the letter would rise to a powerful, witty and cutting implication, at a moment when short-circuits of electricity would produce a mild internal convulsion, and for which nothing would suffice but a conclusive, definitive phrase executed with elegance and dash. He could sense the shape of those phrases that had been eluding him for days. He had almost had them in his grasp; but they remained impalpable. At that moment he lacked the good humour, the flash of happy verve, to storm the obstacle that he had come to grief against over and over again. Again and again he reached for a clean sheet of paper, as if he might overcome by its fresh impetus the quandary confounding his efforts.
Meanwhile, the shop assistants were gradually amassing in the shop. They entered flushed from the early heat, giving a wide berth to Father’s desk, and peeking at it timidly, filled with bad conscience. All feebleness and guilt, they felt upon them the weight of his silent, indefatigable disapprobation. Nothing could appease their master, wrapped up in his own concerns; no amount of zeal could mollify him, crouching behind his desk like a scorpion, from where the lenses of his spectacles radiated venomously, and rustling amid his papers like a mouse. His agitation grew. His vague passion deepened the more the sun’s heat continually increased. On the floor there shone a quadrangle of brilliance. Metalic, glistening meadow flies sliced the shop entrance with flashes of lightning. They paused for a moment on the door surround, seeming to be made of metallic blown glass — glass bubbles inflated from the sun’s hot blow tube, from the glass factory of that fiery day. They stood with their wings outspread, agitated and ready to take flight. They swapped places in furious zigzags. In the bright quadrangle of the doorway, the distant lime trees in the municipal park wilted in the light, and the far off little bell of the church loomed close in that transparent and shimmering air, like in the lens of a telescope. The tin roofs shone. A huge golden bubble of heat bulged over the world.
Father’s exasperation grew. He looked helplessly around, painfully hunched and worn out by diarrhoea. There was a taste in his mouth more bitter than wormwood.
The heat intensified. The flies’ rage sharpened, and luminous points flashed on their metallic abdomens. The quadrangle of light reached the desk, and the papers burned like the Apocalypse. No eyes lit by that surfeit of light could contain any longer its white uniformity. Through his thick chromatic lenses, Father saw all objects fringed in crimson, with violet-green edges, and he was seized with despair at that explosion of hues, that anarchy of colours raging in illuminated orgies over the world. His hands trembled. His palate was dry and bitter, as before a seizure. In the slats of his wrinkles, his alert eyes closely followed the events unfolding deep within the shop.
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