The Dead Season: -I- -II- (III) -IV-
III
WHAT LITTLE meaning such episodes really had, despite all appearances, was clear from the fact that my father, that very evening, was again sitting over his papers as usual, and the incident now seemed a long forgotten, deep resentment, overcome and erased. We of course refrained from any allusion to it. We watched contentedly as he, apparently with a completely balanced spirit, in serene contemplation, busily filled page after page with his neat calligraphic wrtiting. For all that, it seemed all the more difficult to efface the traces of our exposure to ridicule of the figure of the poor yokel. It is well known how obstinately that kind of residue strikes root on certain levels. We scrupulously disregarded him in the course of those empty weeks, dancing on the counter in his dark corner, smaller and greyer by the day. Become almost imperceptible, he continued to hop on that same spot on the counter, at his post, hunched and smiling good-naturedly. Tirelessly tapping his foot and listening intently, he muttered something quietly to himself. That tapping had become his true vocation, in which he was irretrievably engrossed. We didn’t call him down. He had gone too far away now ever to be reached.
Summer days have no dusks. Before we knew it, it was night-time in the shop. The great paraffin lamp was lit, and the shop’s business continued. On those short summer nights, it wasn’t worth returning home. As the nocturnal hours flowed by, Father sat in apparent concentration, marking the margins of letters with touches of his pen — with black shurikens, inky imps, the shaggy tufts whirling erratically in his field of vision, atoms of darkness abstracted from the great summer night outdoors. That night outside sprayed like a puffball; that black microcosm of darkness, the contagious rash of summer nights, was strewn in the shadow of the lampshade. His spectacles rendered him blind; the paraffin lamp hung before him like a fire, surrounded by a jumble of lightning flashes. Father waited, waited impatiently, and listened, staring into the bright whiteness of the paper, through which those dark galaxies of black stars and dust particles flowed. The great conflict that was the shop’s business was being conducted, as it were, behind Father’s back, without his participation. Strangely enough, it was conducted in a picture hanging behind his head, between a filing cabinet and a mirror, in the bright light of the paraffin lamp. This was a picture-talisman, an unfathomable image, a picture-riddle endlessly reinterpreted and wandering through the generations. What did it show? It showed a perpetual debate conducted through the ages, a never-ending dispute between two divergent principles. Two merchants faced one another, two antitheses, two different worlds. ‘I sold on credit,’ one of them cried — thin, ragged and dumbfounded, his voice breaking with despair. ‘I sold for cash,’ replied his fat counterpart, sitting in an armchair, his legs crossed and his hands entwined on his stomach, twiddling his thumbs. How Father hated the fat one! He had known them both since childhood. Even as a schoolboy he had been filled with disgust at the sight of the bloated egoist who devoured endless numbers of buttered rolls at break time. But neither was he on the side of the thin one. He watched in amazement as all initiative slipped from his hands, to be scooped up by those two disputants. Bristled up and deeply perturbed, with a fixed squint from behind his slipped down spectacles, Father was still awaiting the outcome with bated breath.
The shop — the shop was inscrutable. It was the focus of Father’s every thought, of all his nocturnal investigations and terrified contemplations. Unfathomable and limitless, it grew dim, and became universal, no matter what else might happen there. In the daytime, those cloth generations lay full of patriarchal solemnity, arranged according to seniority, lined up according to generations and descendence. But at night the rebellious cloth darkness would break loose, and storm the heavens with pantomimic tirades and Mephistophelean improvisations. In autumn, the shop roared, and flowed out of itself, suffused with a dark assortment of winter merchandise, as if whole hectares of forests, in a great roaring landscape, were shifting from their place. In summer, in the dead season, it grew dim and withdrew into its dark sanctuary, inaccessible and sulky in its cloth lair. And at nights the shop assistants beat with their yardsticks, like flails, the dull sides of a bale of cloth, listening as it bellowed deep inside with pain, immured at its ursinal cloth core.
On those deadened felt steps, Father descended far into his lineage, to the bottom of times. He was the last of his line; he was the Atlas on whose shoulders lay the burden of an enormous testament. By day and by night, Father mused over the thesis of that testament; he strove to comprehend its essence in a flash of inspiration. Often, he looked questioningly, expectantly, to the shop assistants. Alone, with no signposts in his soul, no glints, no directives, he expected those young, those naïve, those barely spawned, suddenly to reveal the meaning of the shop, which so far had remained hidden. He pressed them to the wall with obstinate winks; but they, foolish and gibbering, shirked his look, fled his glance, and spread rumours intermixed with arrant nonsensicalities. In the mornings, Father wandered like a shepherd, leaning on his great staff, amid that blind, wooly flock, those great congestions, those undulating, bleating trunks, headless at the watering hole. He was still waiting. He was delaying still further the moment when he would bid his people rise, and lead that densely packed, teeming and hundredfold Israel out into the stormy night.
The night outside was leaden. It was spaceless, windless and pathless. After a few steps, it came blindly to an end. At that sudden border, they took small steps, on the spot as if half asleep. Their legs became caught, having exhausted that scanty space, whilst their thoughts ran on endlessly, incessantly enquiring, plied with questions, led through all the detours of that black dialect. The night’s differential self-analysis was underway. At length they came to a complete standstill, in that silent alley with no exit. There it happened, in the darkness, in the night’s most intimate recess, before its urinal, as it were — in dead silence, for hours on end, with a sense of blissful disgrace. Only thought was slowly unravelled now, left to its own devices. The convoluted anatomy of the mind was slowly unwound like a ball of string, and amid its scathing dialectic it endlessly propouned the treatise of the summer night. It turned somersaults amid logical contortions, sustained on both sides by unremitting and enduring enquiry, sophistic questions to which there were no answers. In this way it was arduously philosophised through all the speculative expanses of that night, and now it merged, disembodied, with the last wilderness.
It was already late afternoon when my father suddenly raised his head from over his papers. Urgently, wide eyed and all ears, he stood up. ‘Here he is,’ he said, his face lighting up. ‘Open the door.’ But before Teodor, the elder shop assistant, had reached the glazed entrance, bolted for the night, a magnificent and smiling Blackbeard, laden with luggage — Father’s long awaited guest — had already squeezed his way in. Deeply affected, Jakub ran to greet him, bowing and spreading his hands. They embraced. For a moment, it seemed as if a low, black and shiny locomotive had pulled in silently before the very entrance of the shop. A porter in a railwayman’s cap carried in an enormous trunk on his shoulders.
We never did learn who this prodigious guest really was. Teodor swore up and down that it was Chrystian Seipel & Sons (Spinners and Mechanical Weavers) in person. There was scant evidence for this, and Mother clearly had reservations regarding the idea. But however the matter stood, doubtless he was a powerful demon, a pillar of the Internal Association of Creditors. His face, fat, shiny and eminent, was framed by a black, scented beard. Bowing, with Father’s arm around him, he strode toward the desk.
Understanding none of the foreign language they spoke, we listened respectfully to that ceremonious conversation full of smiles, winks, and gentle, affectionate slaps on the back. Having exchanged these preliminary favours, the two gentlemen proceeded to the matter at hand. Books and papers were spread on the desk, and a bottle of white wine was uncorked. With spiced cigars in the corners of their mouths, their faces tightened into grimaces of gruff contentment, the two gentlemen exchanged brief, monosyllabic words and knowing signs, a finger holding tightly to the relevant place in the ledger, playful glints of clairvoyance in their eyes. The discussion began to grow more heated; clearly, it was an effort to hold their agitation in check. Their lips curled. Their cigars hung bitter and dead from their faces, suddenly defeated and filled with doubt. They trembled with inner perturbation. My father breathed through his nose, with flushes under his eyes, and his hair bristled up above his perspiring forehead. The situation worsened. At one point, both gentlemen sprang up from their places and stood frantic and panting heavily, the glass in their spectacles radiating blankly. My terrified mother began to pat Father imploringly on the back, hoping to avert a catastrophe. At the sight of a woman, the gentlemen recovered their senses. They reminded themselves of the social code, and bowed to one another with a smile, sitting down to further work.
Around two o-clock in the morning, Father at last slammed shut the heavy cover of the ledger. We watched the faces of both discussants with unease, to see which side victory had fallen to. Father’s humour seemed to us artificial and forced, but Blackbeard sprawled in his chair languorously, his legs crossed, exuding benevolence and optimism. With ostentatious generosity he distributed tips among the shop assistants.
Having put the papers and invoices away, the two gentlemen rose from the desk. There was a most promising air about them. Winking knowingly to the shop assistants, they let it be understood that they had some enterprise in mind, and behind Mother’s back they feigned a readiness for hearty revelling. But this was empty swaggering, and the shop assistants knew what to make of it. That night led nowhere. It ended in the usual place, in the gutter, at a blank wall of nothingness and shamefulness. Every foootpath leading through it ended back at the shop. Any escapade ventured into the depths of its expanses was futile from the outset. And the shop assistants winked back only out of politeness.
Blackbeard and Father, their arms linked, stepped out of the shop in exhilaration, followed by the indulgent looks of the shop assistants. Just outside the door, the night’s guillotine chopped off their heads at a single stroke. As if into black water, they splashed into the night.
Who has explored the hopelessness of a July night? Who has paced out the fathoms that rush into its void, deep inside it, where nothing happens? Crossing all that black endlessness, they stood once more before the entrance to the shop as if they had only just left it — regaining their lost heads, and with yesterday’s unused words still hanging on their lips. Standing there for no one knows how long, they mumbled monotonously, as if returning from some distant expedition, bound by the camaraderie of adventures and nocturnal scandals. Their hats were pushed back in woozy merriment, and they reeled on their unsteady legs.
Avoiding the shop’s lighted entrance, they came in furtively through the back door of the house, and stole secretly up the creaking stairs, making their way to a gantry at the back, before Adela’s window, to try to look in at her, sleeping inside. They couldn’t make her out. She lay in shadow, her lips parted, quivering languidly in the embrace of sleep, her head tossed back and burning, fanatically devoted to her dreams. They rapped on her black window panes, and sang lewd and salacious seranades. But she, with a lethargic smile on her parted lips, wandered numb and cataleptic on her own distant roads, miles away and unattainable.
Then, sprawling over the balcony railings, they yawned deep and wide, and knocked with their feet against the posts of the balustrade. At some late and unknown hour of the night, who can say how, they returned to their bodies on two narrow little beds, riding on deep piles of bedding. They flowed parallel to one another, rivals in sleep, each by turns leaving the other behind in their diligent, galloping snoring.
On some kilometre of sleep — but were their bodies conjoined in the current of sleep, or had their dreams brought them imperceptibly together? — at some point in that black emptiness, they came to understand that they were in the throes of a battle — eternal and attritious. Panting, face to face, they were now at loggerheads. Blackbeard wrestled with my father like the Angel with Jacob; but Father, with all the strength in his knees, threw him off, and retiring dazed to his corner, stole a secret nap between rounds, and came back fighting. And so they fought. For what? For reputation? In God’s name? For a contract? They struggled on in mortal combat, each plundering the other’s resources of strength, as waves of sleep swept them on into ever stranger and remoter regions of the night.
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