The Dead Season: -I- (II) -III- -IV-
II
WHEN MY FATHER, bordering on madness now, helpless in the heat and trembling with aimless agitation, withdrew at midday to the upper rooms, and the ceilings on our floor banged, now here, now there under his furtive crouching, a moment’s pause and relaxation came upon the shop. The hour of the noontime siesta had arrived.
The shop assistants turned somersaults on the bales of cloth; they pitched cloth tents on the shelves and constructed drapery swings. They unwound the silent bales, releasing their downy, hundred times rolled up and hundred years old darkness. A felty gloom, gone stale over the years, and now set free, filled the loftier spaces with the aroma of another time, a scent of past days, patiently arranged in countless layers over ancient, cool autumns. Blind moths spilled out into the darkened air, and along with that propagation of darkness, tufts of feathers and wool circled around the shop. The smell of sizing agent, deep and autumnal, filled that dark, cloth and velvet encampment. Bivouacking in the midst of that camp, the shop assistants dreamed up pranks and stunts. They allowed their colleagues to wrap them tightly, up to their ears, in the cool, dark cloth. And they lay there all in a row, blissfully immobile under a stack of bales — living rolls, cloth mummies, their eyes rolling in feigned dismay at their immobility. Or else they allowed themselves to be swung on enormous outspread blankets of cloth, and tossed up as high as the ceiling. The dull flapping of those sheets and the gusts of fanned air sent them into frenzied raptures. The whole shop seemed about to take flight. The cloth rose up in inspiration. The shop assistants soared into the air, their coat-tails flapping, like prophets in short-lived Ascentions. Mother would turn a blind eye to such pranks; in her eyes, the respite of those siesta hours excused even their worst antics.
In summer, the shop became wildly and unkemptly overgrown with greenery. On the backyard side, the whole storeroom window was green with weeds and nettles, as if underwater, shimmering with leafy glints and undulating reflexes. There, with incurable melancholy in the half-light of the long summer afternoons, flies buzzed as if at the bottom of an old green bottle, ailing and monstrous entities raised on Father’s sweet wine, hairy recluses bemoaning their accursed fortunes the whole day through in long, monotonous epopees. Disposed to wild and surprising mutations, that degenerate breed of shop flies abounded in whimsical specimens, products of incestuous hybridisations, and degenerated into some super-breed of ponderous giants, veterans with a deep and mournful timbre, wild and dismal Druids of true suffering. Toward the end of summer, those sad epigones, the last of their line, finally hatched out, resembling great blue dung beetles, dumb and voiceless now, their wings wasted away, and they ended their sad lives ceaselessly running about the green panes in tireless and errant wanderings.
The rarely opened door became overgrown with cobwebs. Mother slept behind the desk in a hammock of cloth suspended between the shelves. The shop assistants twitched, tormented by flies, all grimaces, stirring in their uneasy summertime sleep. Meanwhile, the weeds grew rank in the backyard. Under the wild and scorching heat of the sun, the rubbish heap became covered with generations of nettles and mallows.
On that patch of earth, as the sun came into contact with a splash of groundwater, a malignant green substance fermented, a scathing decoction, a venomous derivative of chlorophyll. There in the sunshine, that febrile brew was extracted, and spread into multidudnous, light and leafy formations, creased and serrated, repeated a thousandfold according to a single pattern, the one and only idea concealed within them. And now that its moment had arrived, that contagious conception, that crazy notion, spread like wildfire. Kindled by the sun, it spread under the window in empty and spongelike, babbling green pleonasms, herbaceous paltriness repeated a hundredfold into shoddy, arrant rubbish — a cheap paper repair, ever thicker rustling patches of wallpaper pasted onto the storeroom wall, swelling shaggily, sheet upon sheet. The shop assistants rose from their brief doze with flushed cheeks. Strangely aroused, they awoke from their errands full of feverish enterprise, imagining heroic buffonades. Consumed by boredom, they swung on the high shelves and drummed with their feet. In vain they gazed out into the empty expanse of the market square, swept clean by the scorching heat, looking for some, for any adventure.
Then it happened that a village yokel, barefoot and ragged, stopped hesitantly at the shop doorway, and put his head in timidly at the entrance. This was an opportunity of the highest order for the shop assistants, and they descended the ladders in a flash, like spiders catching sight of a fly. The fellow, quickly surrounded, pushed, pulled and showered with a thousand questions, responded to the prying of his interrogators with an abashed smile. He scratched his head. He smiled. He looked warily at those ingratiating Lovelaces. So, was it tobacco he was after? What brand? The very best? Macedonian? Amber-golden? No? Would ordinary pipe tobacco do? Shag? Please come in — just a little closer. Don’t be afraid. And with compliments and gentle prods, the shop assistants conducted him far into the shop, to a side counter by the wall, where shop assistant Leon, who stepped behind it, attempted to pull open a fictitious drawer. Oh, poor soul, how he exerted himself, how he bit his lip in his vain efforts. No! Someone would have to thump hard on the counter with his fists, with all of his might. And the attentive and determined yokel, at the shop assistants’ encouragement, obliged with zeal. At last, when this accomplished nothing, he clambered up onto the counter and, hunched and grey, began to stamp with his bare feet. We whooped with laughter.
Then that regrettable incident happened, which filled us all with sadness and shame. None of us was faultless, although we did nothing with an ill will. It was more our impudence, our scant consideration and comprehension of Father’s great worries, it was more our heedlessness that, due to Father’s nature — unpredictable, threatened, and inclined to extremes — gave rise to those truly disastrous consequences.
While we were amusing ourselves so greatly, standing in a semicircle, Father silently entered the shop.
We overlooked the moment of his entrance. We noticed him only when, like a flash of lightning, sudden understanding of what we were up to ran through him, contorting his face into a wild paroxysm of horror. Mother ran up, terrified. ‘Jakub, what’s the matter?’ she cried breathlessly. Desperate, she wanted to slap him on the back, as one might with someone choking. But it was too late now. Father bristled all over, and scowled. His face rapidly decomposed into symmetrical segments of dismay, pupated unstoppably in our sight under the burden of some limitless calamity. Before we were able to comprehend what was happening, he began to vibrate vehemently, to buzz, and hover before our eyes — a monstrous, hairy and droning, steely-blue fly, thrashing against every wall of the shop in its crazy flight. Deeply moved, we listened to his helpless lament, his dull, emphatically modulated complaint, ranging up and down through all registers of bottomless pain, his inconsolable suffering beneath the dark ceiling of the shop.
We stood dismayed, avoiding each other’s eyes, deeply ashamed by that deplorable event. In our heart of hearts we felt a certain relief that he had, at the critical moment, nontheless found this escape from his profound mortification. We admired the uncompromising heroism with which he had so rashly lunged into that blind alley of desperation, from which there now seemed to be no returning. In any case, one had to take cum grano salis the step my father had taken. It was more an internal gesture, a vehement and desperate demonstration, albeit based on the minimum dose of reality. It must be remembered that most of what I speak of here can be chalked up to those summertime aberrations, that canicular semi-reality, those irresponsible marginal notes running without surety on the outskirts of a dead season.
We listened in silence. It was Father’s subtle revenge, his vengeance wreaked on our consciences. From that time onward we were condemned to hear for ever that doleful low drone, ever more insistently accusing, ever more painful, suddenly falling silent. For a moment, we lavished relief on that silence, that benevolent pause, during which a timid hope was awakened in us. But a moment later, it returned, unassuaged, ever more tearful and irritable, and we understood that there could be no remedy, no liberation for that boundless pain, that wailing curse condemned to homeless knockings against every wall. That tearful monologue, deaf to all persuasions, exasperated us deeply, as did those pauses, during which it seemed to forget itself for a moment, only to reawaken with louder and angrier wails, as if rescinding in despair its earlier moment of relief. Suffering without end, suffering obstinately locked in the circle of its own mania, suffering with abandon, doggedly self-flagellating suffering, will in the end become unbearable to its powerless witnesses. That unceasing, angry appeal to our mercy had an all too distinct reproach in it, an all too clear indictment of our own happiness, to be met without some resistance. In our heart of hearts we all responded; not with remorse, but full of rage. Did he really have no other way out than to rush blindly into that wretched and hopeless state? And having fallen into it — whether through his own fault or ours — could he find no more fortitude of spirit, no more dignity, in order to bear it without complaint? Only with difficulty could Mother could contain her anger. The shop assistants, sitting on the ladders in vacant astonishment, had bloody dreams. In their minds they chased him over the shelves with a leather fly swatter, red mist clouding their eyes. The linen awning above the entrance waved brightly in the heat; the sweltering afternoon ran through miles of bright plains, ravaging the faraway world beneath it, and my father continued to spin in the half-light of the shop, under the dark ceiling — crazy, caught up with no escape in the noose of his flight, winding himself up in the desperate zigzags of his flurrying.
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