Father’s Last Escape

IT WAS a late and lost period of utter mayhem, the time of the final liquidation of our business. The sign board had been taken down from above the shop doorway long ago, and through half lowered blinds Mother was carrying on an illicit trade in remnants. Adela had departed for America. They say that the ship she was sailing on had sunk, with all of the passengers losing their lives. We never received confirmation of this rumour, but all news of the girl disappeared, and we heard nothing more of her. A new era began, empty, sober and joyless, as white as paper. The new servant girl, Genia, anemic, pale and boneless, maundered softly around the rooms. Should anyone ever stroke her back, she would writhe and stretch like a snake, purring like a cat. She had a dull-white complexion; even under the lids of her enameled eyes there was no pink. Sometimes in her absent-mindedness she made roux from old invoices and ledgers — vile and inedible.
    At that time, my father was definitively dead. He had died many times, but never quite completely, always with certain reservations which forced a revision of the fact. This had its positive side. Breaking up his death into installments in this way, Father accustomed us to his departutre. We grew indifferent to his ever more reduced returns, each time more sorrowful. In his absence, his physiognomy had dissolved, as it were, into the room he had lived in. It branched out, forming at several points astonishing knots of resemblance, incredible suggestiveness. In places, the wallpaper would imitate the convulsions of his twitches. Its arabeques were shaped into the pitiful anatomy of his laughter, divided into symmetrical limbs, like the fossilised imprint of a trilobite. For some time now, we had given a wide berth to his coat of stiff polecat fur. Its fur breathed. A panic of animals, biting themselves and each other, that flew through it in helpless convulsions and became lost in the folds of its linings. Putting one’s ear close to it, one could hear the melodic purring of their peaceful sleep. Their murders and nocturnal ovulations might have prevailed throughout the years in that well-dressed form, with that faint odour of polecats. But even that was not to last for long.
    One day, Mother returned from town with a look of amazement. ‘Look, Józef,’ she said. ‘What a find! I trapped him on the stairway, hopping from step to step.’ And she lifted the corner of a handkerchief to reveal what it was she that had carried in on a plate. I recognised him at once. The resemblance was unmistakable, even though he was a crab now, or perhaps a large scorpion. A look of acknowledgement passed between us, profoundly amazed by the distinctness of that resemblance, which despite such alterations and metamorphoses continued to insinuate itself with simply irresistible power. ‘Is he alive?’ I asked. ‘I think so. I can barely hold him. Should I put him down?’ And she set the plate on the ground. Leaning over him, we could now examine him more closely. Esconced amid his multitudinous, bowed legs, he wriggled them almost imperceptibly. He raised his pincers a little. His tendrils seemed to betoken alertness. I tilted the dish, and Father, cautiously, hesitantly, stepped down onto the floor. But once he touched the flat ground under him, he suddenly took off on all of his dozen or so legs, clattering along with his arthropod’s hard joints. I barred his way; touching the obstacle with his waving tendrils, he hesitated. Then he raised his pincers and moved on again, sideways. We allowed him to run where he pleased. Fom that time onward no item of furniture would be safe. At length, running in convulsive curves on his various appendages, he came to a wall, and before we could realise it, without stopping, he had dragged the whole armature of his limbs some distance up it. I shuddered with involuntary repugnance, watching that many-legged ramble, that fluttering advance across the wallpaper. Father, meanwhile, had arrived at a small cupboard set into the wall; he bent for a moment over its edge, exploring its terrain with his pincers, and then dragged himself fully inside.
    He acquainted himself with the apartment as if anew, from his new, crab’s-eye perspective. He apprehended its objects by smell, perhaps, since so far as I could tell, and despite close inspection, he had no organ of sight. He seemed to ponder somewhat the objects he met on his way — he came to a halt by them, lightly touching them with his waving tendrils — he even clasped them with his pincers, as if to test them, acquaint himself with them, and after only a moment he extricated himself from them, and ran on again, pulling his abdomen behind him, raised slightly above the floor. He treated in the same way the pieces of bread and meat that we left on the floor, hoping that he might eat them. He toyed with them only in passing, and ran on again, not taking such objects for edible things.
    Seeing those patient reconnaissances of his over the territory of the room, one might have thought he was searching for something, doggedly and tirelessly. Every once in a while he would run into a corner of the kitchen, under a leaking barrel of water, and on reaching the puddle, he seemed to drink. Sometimes he would be lost for whole days. He seemed to do very well without food, and we noticed no signs of lost vitality in him on that account. During the day, with mingled feelings of shame and repugnance, we nurtured a secret anxiety that he might visit us in our beds at night. But it never happened, not once, even though he wandered by day over all the furniture, and he especially liked to linger in the gaps between the wardrobes and walls.
    Certain appearances of understanding, and even a certain mischievous playfulness, did not go unnoticed. At meal times, for example, Father never failed to turn up in the dining room, although his would be a purely platonic participation in the meal. If by chance the dining room door were closed, Father being in the adjoining room, then he would scrape against the door, running back and forth along the slit, until it was finally opened. Later, he learned how to insert his pincers and legs into that slit at the bottom of the door, and by rocking his body somewhat strenuously, push sideways under the door and into the room. He seemed pleased with that. He would then lie unmoving under the table, quite silent, only his abdomen gently pulsating. What that rhythmical pulsation of his shiny abdomen meant, we could not guess. But it was something ironic, obscene and malicious, which seemed to express at the same time some low and lecherous satisfaction. Our dog, Nimrod, approached him slowly and half-heartedly, took a cautious sniff, sneezed, and walked away indifferently, having reached no definite conclusions.
    The mayhem in our house encompassed ever widening spheres. Genia slept for days on end. Her slender body undulated bonelessly with her deep breathing. We often found cotton reels in our soup — she had thrown them in along with the vegetables in her innattention and strange absent-mindedness. The shop was open in continuo, day and night, and, amid haggling and persuasion, the transactions through the half lowered blinds took their intricate course day after day. To make matters worse, Uncle Karol arrived.
    He was strangely disconcerted and taciturn. With a sigh he declared that, after his recent unhappy experiences, he had resolved to change his way of life, and take up the study of languages. He never left the house. He locked himself in the remotest room — from which Genia removed all the rugs and hangings in disapproval of its new occupant — and immersed himself in a study of old price lists. Many times he maliciously tried to tread on Father’s abdomen. Screaming and terrified, we forbade it — he only smiled to himself malignly, unconvinced, as Father remained quite still, not realising the danger, only curious about some stain on the floor.
    My father, swift and agile so long as he remained standing on his legs, had in common with all crustaceans the property that, having rolled over on to his back, he would become completely defenceless. And it was unpleasant, that pitiful sight, when, desperately wriggling all of his legs, he span helplessly on his back around his own pivot. One could not look without distress on the too explicit, too intelligible, almost shameless mechanics of his anatomy, now lying on the top, as it were, and unprotected on that naked, many-limbed side of his body. It fascinated Uncle Karol so much that at times he wanted to stamp on him. I ran to the rescue, and held out to Father some object or other, which he gripped tightly with his pincers, deftly regaining his normal position; and he immediately broke into a circuitous run, a lightning zigzag, with redoubled speed as if he wanted to erase the memory of his discreditable mishap.
    I must surmount myself in my distress, in order to relate truthfully an incomprehensible fact, from which I recoil with my whole being. To this day, I can hardly believe that we were the fully conscious perpetrators of that deed. In this light, that fact takes on the features of some strange twist of fate. For fate does not shun our consciousness and our will, but incorporates them into its own mechanism, so that we allow and accept, as if in a lethargic dream, things that we would shy away from under normal circumstances.
    When I asked her, in despair, shocked by her fait accompli: ‘How could you do such a thing! Had it at least been Genia... But you yourself...’ — Mother wept. She wrung her hands. She could give no answer. Did she think it would be better for Father that way? Did she see it as the only way out of his terrible situation? Or had she simply done it out of some incomprehensible mindlessness and recklessness? When it comes down to the exacting of its incomprehensible will, fate has recourse to a thousand contrivances. To smuggle a deed between the Scylla and Charybdis of our decision, a fleeting, trifling clouding of our thoughts will suffice, a moment’s blindness or oversight. The motives may be interpreted endlessly in the aftermath, explained ex post, the impulses investigated — but the fait accompli will remain irrevocable, ordained once and for all.
    We were stirred from our blindness and brought to our senses only when my father was carried in on a dish. He lay swollen and huge as a result of boiling, pale grey and jellied. We sat in silent mortification. Only Uncle Karol reached toward the dish with his fork, but he left it hanging uncertainly in the air, and looked at us in confusion. Mother ordered that the dish be removed to the parlour. And there he lay on the table, covered with a soft cloth, beside a photograph album and a musical cigarette box — he lay unmoving, and we took to avoiding him.
    But my father’s earthly wandering — its continuance, that prolonging of his story beyond, as it seemed, the set and acceptable limits — did not end there. The most painful part was still to come. Why would he not give up, even now; why would he not accept that he was finally defeated — now that he had every reason to do so, when fate had done everything it could to crush him utterly? After several weeks of lying motionless, somehow he rallied himself; he seemed to slowly muster his strength. One morning, we found the dish empty. Only a single leg lay on the edge of the plate, dropped in his escape in congealed tomato sauce and trampled aspic. Boiled, his legs falling off as he went, he had dragged himself on again with the last of his strength, into homeless wandering, and no more did we see him.