Edzio: -I- (II)
II
AT DUSK, when the crockery has been washed up after an early supper, Adela sits on the balcony on the courtyard side of the house, near Edzio’s window. Two long porches surround the courtyard, each bent twice over, one on the ground floor, the other at first floor level. Grass grows through the slits of these wooden balconies, and through one crack between the beams even a small acacia has shot up, and sways high over the courtyard.
Besides Adela, neighbours sit alone and dimly perceptible, in front of their doors. Drooping in the twilight, they slouch on kitchen chairs and armchairs, sitting like sacks, tied up and dumb, filled up with the labours of the day, waiting only for the twilight to come and gently untie them.
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 — it shimmers, and flickers with the almost indistinguishabe flights of bats.
But twilight’s hurried and secretive work is underway down below. Those impatient, rapacious ants are swarming there, stripping, tearing to shreds the substance of things, gnawing 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, those indestructible shinbones of 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 own 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 even before they reach our faces — those streaks of freshness by which the voluminous summer night is conquered from beneath, like a silk lining. And as the first flickering and continually blown stars are being lit up in the sky, that sultry veil of twilight, woven from whirls 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.
It is only to the uninitiated that a summer night means rest and oblivion. The activity of the day is barely concluded, and the overworked brain would like to go to sleep now and forget, but that disorderly bustle, that enormous tangled chaos of a July night begins nontheless. At such times, all the apartments in the building, all the rooms and alcoves, are filled with comings and goings, hubbub and meandering. In all the windows stand table lamps with shades; the corridors too are brightly lit; and doors incessantly open and close. One great, half-ironic conversation, amid continuous misunderstandings, branches off and wends its way through all the chambers of that hive. No one on the first floor knows what is happening on the ground floor, and so they dispatch emissaries with urgent instructions. These couriers fly through all the apartments, up and down the stairs, forgetting their instructions on their way and continually called back to be given them anew. And always there is something to add — the matter is never explained, 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, possess 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, and babies with closed eyelids stumble across their slumber, wandering 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 that warm opening, the entrance to that deep slumber, until their sensitive mouths have found the nipple of sleep, its dependable teat, filled with sweet oblivion.
Those who have seized sleep in their beds will not let it go; they wrestle with it as if with an angel, and they shake it until it has been overpowered, pinned down to the bedclothes; then they snore in turn with it as if they both are engaged in some quarrel, each blaming the other for beginning their ages old dispute. And when those rancours and discords are assuaged and quietened, when that whole chase has run its course, lost in the corners of those rooms, then one room after the other falls into silence and nonexistence, and Leon, one of the shop assistants, gropingly climbs the stairs and cautiously enters, his shoes in his hands, his key seeking out the keyhole in the darkness. He returns in this way every night from the brothel, shaken by hiccups, his eyes bloodshot, 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. Discarded sheets of paper are already strewn on the floor, scribbled over 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 in this way it happens that he suddenly climbs the wall, and flies like a great, indistinctly visible mosquito across the wallpaper, 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 lips are parted, her face 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 on to 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 that flows through her. She hasn’t even the strength to draw the coverlet up over her bare thighs, and she can do nothing to prevent the bedbugs, rows and columns of bedbugs, from wandering over her body. Those light and fine leaf-trunks run over her so delicately that she feels not their slightest caress. They are flat bags for blood, tiny red bellows for blood, without eyes or facial features, and now they march in whole clans, a great migration of peoples divided into generations and families. They run up from her feet in scores, an innumerable procession, bigger and bigger, 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 becomes utterly silent, and deep sleep runs through the corridors and apartments, and the rooms gradually begin to soak up the greyness of the dawn.
In every bed someone lies with their knees drawn up and their face turned resolutely to the side, deeply attentive, immersed in sleep, and surrendered to it unlimitedly. Anyone who has attained sleep clasps it tightly, with a zealous and frenzied face, whilst their breathing, leaving them far behind, blunders onward alone, along distant and divergent pathways.
And really, it is all one great story, divided into passages, into chapters and rhapsodies, shared among those sleepers. As one of them breaks off and falls silent, another picks up his thread, and so the broad epic zigzag of that tale continues on its own impetus, whilst they lie as lifeless as seeds in the rooms of that house, as if in the compartments of some great, muted poppy, and upon that breathing, they grow toward the dawn.
> -A Pensioner- >