The Brilliant Epoch: -I- -II- -III- (IV)
IV
‘THESE are splendid drawings,’ he said, holding them at arms length with the gesture of a connoisseur. His face was lit by reflexes of their colours and lights. Once or twice he curled his hand around his eye, and looked through that improvised telescope, screwing his features into a grimace of earnestness and erudition.
‘One might say,’ he said, ‘that the world has passed through your hands in order to be renewed, to moult in them, and shed its skin like a wonderful lizard. Ah, do you suppose that I would have become a thief, that I would have committed a thousand outrages if the world had not become so outworn and fallen into such decline, had its affairs not lost so much of their gilding, that remote glimmer of divine hands? What is one to do in such a world? How is one not to despair? How is one not to lose heart when everything is locked up so tightly, its meaning walled up so high, and everywhere you knock only against bricks, like the walls of a prison? Oh, Józef, you should have been born earlier.’
We were standing in that deep, semi-dark room, which drew out in perspective toward a window open onto the market square. Waves of air reached us from there in gentle pulses, their silence spreading. Each tide brought its new cargo from the distance, blended with colours, as if the previous wave were now spent and exhausted. That whole dark room was vibrant only in reflexes of the distant houses beyond the window, and reflected their colours in its depths like a camera obscura. Through that window the pigeons on the police guardhouse, puffed up and strolling along the cornice of its attic, were visible as if in the tube of a telescope. At times they all started up together and wheeled in a semicircle over the square; and for a moment the room was lit by those outspread flight-feathers, widened by a reflection of their distant fluttering; and when at last they flagged and folded their wings, it fell into darkness.
‘To you, Szloma,’ I said, ‘I can reveal the secret of these drawings. From the very outset, I was beset by doubts about whether I really was their creator. At times they seemed to be an unintended plagiarism, something suggested, imputed to me... As if something alien were using my inspiration for purposes unknown to me. For I must tell you,’ I added quietly, looking into his eyes, ‘I have found the Authentic...’
‘The Authentic?’ he asked, his face illuminated by a sudden gleam.
‘Quite so. Anyway, look for yourself,’ I said, kneeling before the chest of drawers.
I brought out Adela’s silk dress, a box tied with ribbons, and her new high-heeled shoes. An aroma of powder or perfume hung in the air. Then I lifted out a few books. At the bottom, the dear and long unseen fragment lay glowing.
‘Look, Szloma,’ I said, moved. Here is...’
But he stood deep in meditation, holding Adela’s shoe in his hand, regarding it with profound solemnity.
‘God did not say this,’ he said. ‘And yet how deeply it convinces me, pins me to the wall and disposes of my last argument. These lines are irresistible, and shockingly accurate. They are definitive. They strike like a flash of lightning into the very core of things. How will you veil yourself? With what will you oppose them, when you yourself have been bribed, outvoted and betrayed by your most faithful allies? Divine and bright were the six days of creation. But on the seventh day, He felt an unfamiliar thread beneath his hands, and He lifted his hands in terror from the world, although his creative enthusiasm had reckoned on many more days and nights. Ah, Józef, beware the seventh day...’
And lifting Adela’s narrow shoe in awe, as if spellbound by the shimmering, ironic suggestiveness of that empty, polished shell, he said: ‘Do you understand the monstrous cynicism of this symbol on a woman’s leg? The provocativeness of her profligate stride on these ingenious heels? How can I leave you under the power of this symbol? God forbid that I should do so...’
And saying this, he slipped with practised movements Adela’s shoes, dress and beads under his jacket.
‘What are you doing, Szloma?’ I asked in astonishment.
But he hastily withdrew toward the door, limping slightly in his rather too short checked trousers. In the doorway, he turned his grey, quite indistinct face to me once more, and raised his hand to his mouth in a motion of reassurance. He was already out of the door.
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