Edzio: -I- (II)
II
AT DUSK, when the crockery has been washed up after an early supper, Adela sits on a balcony on the courtyard side of the house, near Edzio’s window. Two long porches surround the courtyard at ground floor and first floor level, each being bent in two places. Grass grows through the slits of these wooden balconies, and in one crack between the beams even a small acacia has shot up and sways high over the courtyard.
Apart from Adela, neighbours sit here and there in front of their doors, dimly perceptible, drooping in the twilight; they slouch on kitchen chairs and armchairs, sitting like sacks, tied up and dumb, filled with the labours of the day and waiting for the twilight to untie them gently.
The courtyard below is rapidly permeated with wave upon wave of darkness, but the air above it does not want to relinquish the light, and it shines all the brighter the more everything down below mournfully chars and darkens — shimmering and flickering with the barely distinguishabe flights of bats.
But twilight’s hurried and secretive work is underway down below; those impatient, rapacious ants are swarming there, who strip, who tear to shreds the substance of things, who gnaw them down to their white bones, their skeletons, rib-cages left to phosphoresce mesmerisingly on that gloomy battlefield. Those white papers, strips blowing on top of a rubbish heap, and those indestructible shinbones of the light remain the longest in the maggoty darkness, never decomposing. Time after time the twilight seems to absorb them, and yet there they are again, and they shine, lost to sight every few moments or so, vibrating and covered with ants — but it is no longer possible to distinguish between those remnants of things and the eye’s internal swarms, which begin just then to chatter as if in their sleep, until everyone is sitting in his own aura as if in a cloud of mosquitoes, in the midst of the dance of the astral throng pulsating his brain — the mesmerising anatomy of halucinations.
Those thin veins of breezes now begin to rise from the depths of the courtyard, still unsure of their existence, relinquishing it before they reach our faces — those streaks of freshness by which the voluminous summer night is conquered from beneath, like a silk lining. And while the first flickering and continually blown stars are being lit in the sky, that sultry veil of twilight, woven from whirling and apparitions, parts very slowly and the deep summer night opens with a sigh, full of astral dust and the distant croaking of frogs.
Adela goes to bed without a light, into bedclothes left crumpled and rolled up the night before, and barely has she closed her eyes before a chase begins around all the storeys, all the apartments of the building.
Only to the uninitiated does a summer night mean rest and oblivion. The activity of the day is barely concluded, and the overworked brain would like to go to sleep now and forget, when that disorderly bustle, that enormous tangled chaos of a July night begins. At such times all the apartments in the building, all the rooms and alcoves, are filled with comings and goings, with hubbub and meandering. Table lamps with shades stand in all of the windows, and the corridors too are brightly lit; doors open and close unceasingly. Amid continuous misunderstandings, one great half ironic conversation branches and twists its way through all the chambers of that hive. No one on the first floor knows what the people on the ground floor are saying, and so they dispatch emissaries with urgent instructions. These couriers fly through all the apartments, up and down the stairs; they forget their instructions on the way and are continually called back to be given them anew. And there is always something more to add, the matter always remains unexplained, and amid the laughter and joking, all that bustle leads to no solution.
Only the side rooms, not drawn into this great muddle of the night, have their own separate time, measured out by the ticking of clocks, the monologues of the silence and the deep breathing of sleepers. Wet nurses sleep there, expansive and swollen with milk, avidly attached to the womb of the night, their cheeks burning in ecstasy, while babies with closed eyelids stumble over their slumber — they wander caressingly like sniffing animals over the blue map of tiny veins on the white plains of their breasts; they traipse delicately, their blind faces searching for the warm opening, the entrance to that deep sleep, until their sensitive mouths have found the nipple of sleep, its dependable teat, full of sweet oblivion.
Those who seize sleep in their beds do not let it go; they wrestle with it as if with an angel, which they shake until they have overcome it and pinned it down to the bedclothes, and they snore in turn with it as if they are both engaged in a quarrel, each blaming the other for beginning their ages old dispute. And when those rancours and discords are assuaged and quietened, when that entire chase has dispersed, lost in the corners of the rooms, then one room after another falls into silence and nonexistence — and Leon, one of the shop assistants, climbs the stairs gropingly with his shoes in his hands and cautiously enters, his key seeking out the keyhole in the darkness. He returns in the same way every night, from the brothel, with bloodshot eyes, shaken by hiccups and with a thread of saliva hanging from his open mouth.
In Jakub’s room a lamp is burning on the table, and Jakub sits alone, hunched over the table, writing a letter to Chrystian Seipel & Sons, Spinners and Mechanical Weavers — a letter many pages long. There is already a long row of sheets lying on the floor, filled with writing, but he is far from finished. He occasionally rises from the table and runs about the room, his hands in his tousled hair; and as he runs in circles it seems as if he will suddenly climb the wall in the passage, fly across the wallpaper like a great, indistinctly visible mosquito, deliriously colliding with the arabesque patterns on the walls, only to return to the floor again and continue his impulsive circular run.
Adela is sleeping soundly; her mouth is open and her face is elongated and vacant — but her lowered eyelids are transparent, and the night is writing its satanic pact on their thin parchment, half text, half picture, full of erasures, amendments and scribbles.
Edzio stands half undressed in his room, excercising with dumbbells. He needs a lot of power, twice as much power in his shoulders which take the place of his lifeless legs, and so he excercises ardently, exercises in secret, all through the night.
Adela floats away backwards, beyond herself and into vacancy, and she cannot shout, cannot cry out to prevent Edzio from clambering out of his window.
Without the aid of his crutches, Edzio clambers onto the porch, and Adela looks with terror to see whether his legs will carry him. But Edzio is not attempting to walk.
He approaches like a great white dog, with the knee bends of a quadruped, in great shuffling bounds along the clattering boards of the porch, and now he is at Adela’s window. With a pained grimace, just like every other night, he presses his pale, fat face to the window pane, gleaming in the moonlight, and says something, tearfully, insistently — weeping, he insists that they have locked his crutches away in a wardrobe, and now he must run at nights on all fours like a dog.
But Adela is lifeless, completely surrendered to the deep rhythm of the sleep which is flowing through her. She does not even have the strength to draw the coverlet up over her bare thighs, and she can do nothing to prevent the bedbugs, the rows and columns of bedbugs, from wandering across her body. Those light and fine leaf-trunks run over her so delicately that she does not feel their slightest caress. They are flat bags for blood, tiny red bellows for blood, without eyes or facial features, and now they are marching in whole clans, a great migration of peoples divided into generations and families. They run up from her feet in scores, an innumerable procession, larger and larger, as big as moths, like flat pocket-books, great red and headless vampire bats, light and papery, on legs more delicate than spiders’ webs.
But when the last tardy bedbugs have gone past, one of them particularly enormous, and the last of them has disappeared, then everything turns utterly silent, and deep sleep runs through the corridors and apartments, while the rooms gradually soak up the greyness of the dawn.
In every bed someone lies with their knees drawn up, their face turned resolutely to the side, deeply attentive, immersed in sleep and unlimitedly surrendered to it.
Anyone who has attained sleep clasps it tightly, with a zealous and frenzied face, while their breathing, leaving them far behind, blunders onward, alone on far removed pathways.
And really, it is one great story divided into passages, into chapters and rhapsodies shared among those sleepers. When one of them breaks off and falls silent, another picks up his thread, and so the broad epic zigzag of that tale continues under its own steam, while they lie in the rooms of that house, as lifeless as seeds in the compartments of some great muted poppy, and upon that breathing they rise toward the dawn.
> -A Pensioner- > (pending)