The Gifted Epoch: -I- -II- (III) -IV-
III
THOSE SAME Easter holidays, at the end of March or the beginning of April, Szloma, son of Tobiasz, came out of prison, where he had been locked up for the winter, following his brawls and carousals of summer and autumn. One afternoon that spring I saw him through the window as he was coming out of the barber’s shop — the town’s barber and surgeon in one person — as he opened the glazed, shining door of the shop and descended the three wooden steps, refreshed and rejuvenated, his head precisely shorn, with dignity gained under prison discipline, wearing a somewhat too short frock coat and checked trousers pulled up high, slim and youthful despite his forty years.
Plac Świętej Trójcy was empty and pristine at that time. The pavement had been washed clean after the spring’s thaws and muds, rinsed by pouring rains and dried throughout many days of quiet, discrete weather — those already vast days, perhaps too spacious for that early season and drawn out a little beyond measure — especially in the evenings when the twilight, although empty in its depths, was endlessly prolonged, vain and sterile in its enormous expectation.
As Szloma closed the glazed door of the barber’s shop behind him, the sky entered it for an instant, as it did all the little windows of that one-storey house, open and facing the empty depths of the shadowed skyscape.
Having descended 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, open square lay like a glass ball that afternoon, like a new, unbegun year. Szloma, quite grey and extinguished, stood at its edge, inundated by its azures, and was hesitant to break by a decision the perfect sphere of the unused day.
Only once a year, on the day of his release from prison, did Szloma feel so pure, unburdened and new. The day then took him into itself, cleansed of his sins, reformed and reconciled with the world, and, with a sigh, it opened before him the empty circles of its horizons, crowned with quiet beauty.
He did not 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 extracted the pure white of chalk from the houses, and quietly spread 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, bursting with the pathos of its volutes and archivolts, folded into pilasters, projections and embrasures, 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 bore with it an aroma of oleanders, an aroma of festive apartments and cinnamon. Then he sneezed powerfully with his famous powerful sneeze, at which the pigeons on the police guardhouse rose up, startled, 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, which, now here, now there, lost in the bustle of the town, would gloss its events 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 distended ball of the sky rang like a barrel.
‘You and I,’ he repeated with a sad smile. ‘The world is so empty today.’
We could have divided and renamed it — it lay so open, defenceless, and unclaimed. On such a day, the Messiah approaches, to the very edge of the horizon, and looks from there upon the earth. And when He sees it, white and quiet, with its azures and its pensiveness, it may be that He loses sight of the border — bluish strands of clouds arrange themselves into a passage, and, not knowing what He is doing, He descends onto the earth. And, in its reverie, the earth does not even 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, smiling.
‘There’s no one here. Come in for a moment. I’ll show you my drawings.’
‘If there’s no one there, then I shan’t deny myself that pleasure, if you’ll kindly let me in.’
Looking around in the doorway, in both directions with the stealthy motion of a thief, he entered.
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