The Brilliant Epoch: -I- -II- (III) -IV-
III
DURING the Easter holidays, at the end of March or the beginning of April, Szloma, son of Tobiasz, would come out of prison where he had been locked up for the winter after his brawls and carousals of summer and autumn. One afternoon that spring, I saw him through the window as he emerged from the barber’s shop — the town’s barber and surgeon in one person — as he opened the glazed, shining shop door and descended the three wooden steps, with dignity gained under prison discipline, refreshed and rejuvenated, his head precisely shorn, wearing a somewhat too short frock coat and with his checked trousers pulled up high — slim and youthful despite his forty years.
Plac Świętej Trójcy was empty and pristine at that time. After the thaws and muds of spring, later rinsed by pouring rains, the pavement was now washed clean, and dried throughout many days of quiet, temperate weather, throughout those now great days, perhaps even a little too spacious for that early season, drawn a little out of proportion, especially in the evenings when the twilight, still empty in its depths, was prolonged endlessly, vain, and sterile in its enormous expectation.
As Szloma closed behind him the glazed door of the barber’s shop, the sky entered it for an instant, as it had already all the tiny windows of that one-storey house, open and facing the empty depths of a shadowy skyscape.
Descending the steps, he found himself alone at the edge of the great, empty scallop of the square, through which a sunless azure sky was flowing.
That great, pristine square lay like a glass ball that afternoon, like a new, unbegun year. At its edge, Szloma, quite listless and grey, stood inundated by its azures, hesitant to break with a decision that perfect sphere of the unused day.
Only once a year, on the day of his release from prison, did Szloma feel so pure, so unburdened and new. Then the day would take him into itself, cleansed of his sins, reformed and reconciled with the world. It opened before him with a sigh the empty circles of its horizons, crowned with silent beauty.
He didn’t hurry. He stood on the verge of the day and was hesitant to cross over, to cancel out with his small, youthful and slightly limping steps, that gently vaulted conch of the afternoon.
A transparent shadow lay over the town. The silence of that third afternoon hour had extracted a pure, chalky whiteness from the houses, silently spreading it around the square like a pack of cards. Having dealt one round, it now began another, drawing its reserves of whiteness from the great, baroque façade of plac Świętej Trójcy, which, folded into pilasters, projections and embrasures, and bursting with the pathos of its volutes and archivolts, like God’s enormous shirt hanging from the sky, hastily drew that billowing garment around itself.
Szloma raised his face, sniffing the air. The gentle breeze carried with it the aroma of oleanders, of festive apartments and cinnamon. Then he powerfully sneezed his famous, powerful sneeze, at which the pigeons on the police guardhouse rose up in fright and flew away. Szloma smiled to himself. Through his nostrils, God had given the signal that spring was here. It was a sign more certain than the arrival of storks; and from that time onward the days would be interwoven with those detonations — lost in the bustle of the town, they would gloss its events, near and far, with their witty commentary.
‘Szloma!’ I called out, standing at our ground floor window.
Szloma saw me, smiled his pleasant smile, and saluted.
‘We are alone now, you and I, in the whole market square,’ I said quietly as the bulging sphere of the sky rang like a barrel.
‘You and I,’ he repeated with a sad smile. ‘The world is so empty today.’
It lay so open, so defenceless and unclaimed, that we could have divided and renamed it. On such a day the Messiah approaches, to the very edge of the horizon, and looks from there upon the land. And when He sees it, white and quiet, with its azures and its pensiveness, it may even be that He loses sight of the border. Bluish strands of clouds arrange themselves into a passage, and He, not knowing what He is doing, will descend onto the land. And in its reverie, the land will not notice Him who has stepped down onto its roads. And the people will awaken from their afternoon nap and remember nothing. And it will be as if the whole story has been erased, as it has been since time immemorial, before history began.
‘Is Adela at home?’ he asked with a smile.
‘There is no one here. Come in for a moment, and I will show you my drawings.’
‘If no one is at home, then I shall not deny myself that pleasure, if you’ll kindly let me in.’
And looking around in the doorway, in both directions with the stealthy motion of a thief, he came into the house.
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