The Gifted Epoch: -I- -II- -III- (IV)
IV
‘THESE ARE splendid drawings,’ he said, holding them at arms length with a connoisseur’s gesture. His face was lit up by reflections of their colours and lights. Now and again 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, in order to moult in them and shed its skin like a wonderful lizard. Ah, do you suppose that I would have become a thief and committed a thousand outrages if the world had not grown so outworn, had not fallen into such decline, if its affairs had not lost so much of their gilding, that remote gleam of the divine hands? What can one do in such a world? How can one not grow desperate? How can one not lose heart when everything is locked up so tightly, its meaning walled up so high, and everywhere you knock only against brick, just like the walls of a prison? Oh, Józef, you should have been born earlier.’
We were standing in that deep, semi-dark room, drawing out in perspective toward a window open onto the market square. Waves of air reached us in gentle pulses from there, their silence spreading. Each tide brought its new cargo from the distance, blended with its colours, as if the former were already used up and exhausted. That whole dark room was vibrant only in reflections of the distant houses outside the window; in its depths it reflected their colours like a camera obscura. The pigeons on the police guardhouse, puffed up, strolling along the cornice of its attic, were visible through the window as if in the tube of a telescope. At times they all started up together and wheeled in the market square in a semicircle. And then, for a moment, the room was lit up by those outspread flight-feathers, was widened by the gleam of their distant fluttering, and when at last, flagging, they folded their wings again, it fell into darkness.
‘To you, Szloma,’ I said ‘I can reveal the secret of these drawings. Doubts beset me from the very outset about whether I really was their creator. At times they seemed to be an unintended plagiarism, something which had been suggested, imputed to me... As if something alien was using my inspiration for purposes unknown to me. For I must tell you,’ I added quietly, looking him in the 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 forth 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, long unseen fragment lay and glowed.
Moved, I said, ‘Look, Szloma. Here lies...’
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 into the very core of things, like a flash of lightning. How will you veil yourself, with what will you oppose it, once you yourself have been bribed, outvoted and betrayed by your most faithful allies? Six days of creation were divine and bright. But on the seventh day, He felt an unfamiliar thread beneath his hands, and He lifted his hands from the world in terror, even though his creative enthusiasm had reckoned on many more days and nights. Oh, Józef, beware the seventh day...’
And lifting Adela’s narrow shoe in awe, as if spellbound by the sparkling, 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...’
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 once more turned his grey, quite indistinct face and raised a hand to his mouth in a motion of reassurance. He was already out of the door.
> -Spring- >