My Father Joins the Fire Brigade
IN THE FIRST days of October, Mother and I were returning from a resort situated in a neighbouring district of the country, in the wooded river basin of Słotwinka spa, seeping with the spring water trickle of a thousand streams. With the rustle of alder groves still in our ears, interwoven with the chirruping of birds, we rode in a great and sturdy old landau with an enormous hood, like a dark and expansive inn, crammed in along with our luggage in its deeply cushioned alcove, upholstered in velvet, where colourful landscape paintings fell by outside the window, as if slowly shuffled, card after card, from one hand to the other.
Toward evening, we reached a great, wind-blown plateau, an astonished junction of the country. The sky stood deep and exhausted over that junction, revolving at its zenith with coloured rose petals of wind. This was the furthest flung toll gate of the country, its last turning, beyond which, lower down, an immense and late autumnal landscape opened up. Here was the border, and here stood a rotting old border post, its inscription erased, rattling in the wind.
The landau’s great wheels began to grind, and became lodged in the sand. Their chattering, flickering spokes fell silent. Only its great hood still clattered dully, flapping darkly in the crosswinds of that junction, like an ark come aground on those wastes.
Mother payed the toll fee; the bar of the creaking toll gate lifted; and the landau drove laboriously on into autumn.
We drove into the withered tedium of an enormous plain, into discoloured, faded draughts, which opened their blissful and insipid endlessness above that yellow immensity. Some late and enormous eternity interposed, blowing from the faded distances.
The landscape turned its yellowed pages over like an old romance, ever more pale and delicate as if they must end in some great, scattered emptiness. In that scattered nothingness, in that yellow nirvana, we might perhaps have pulled in beyond time and reality, remained for ever in that landscape, in those warm, sterile draughts — a motionless diligence on great wheels, imprisoned amid the clouds on the parchment of the sky, an ancient illustration, a forgotten woodcut in an antiquated, crumbling romance — when the coachman, with the last of his strength, jerked the reins, pulled the landau out of the sweet lethargy of those winds, and steered into a forest.
We drove into its thick, dry downiness, its tobacco-coloured withering, and soon all around us it grew hushed and warm, like in a case of Trabucos, and in that cedar half-light, the tree trunks fell past as dry and fragrant as cigars. We drove onward, and the forest grew darker still. It became scented more and more aromatically with snuff, until at last it enclosed us, as if in the dry box of a cello, tuned dully by the wind. The coachman had no matches with which to light the lanterns. The horses, panting in the darkness, found the path by instinct. The clattering of the spokes slowed and fell silent; the rims of the wheels ran softly in frangrant conifer needles. Mother fell asleep. Time passed by uncounted, making strange knots, abbreviations in its lapsing. The darkness was impenetrable. With the dry sound of the forest still resounding over the hood, the ground under the horses’ hooves suddenly hardened and became a pavement. The carriage turned on the spot, and drew to a halt. It stopped close to a wall, almost rubbing against it, and just outside its little door, Mother could feel the front entrance to our house. The coachman unloaded our luggage.
We entered the great branching hallway. It was dark, secluded and warm there, like in an old empty bakery at dawn after the stove has gone out, or in steam baths late at night when the deserted bathtubs and buckets are growing cold in the darkness, in silence measured out by the dripping of water. A cricket patiently unpicked illusory seams of light from that darkness, its faint stitching, which illuminated nothing. Gropingly, we found the stairs.
When we came to a creaky landing, Mother said at the corner: ‘Wake up, Józef. You’re dropping off to sleep. There are only a few more steps to go.’ But I only clung to her more tightly, oblivious with tiredness, and fell sound asleep.
Afterwards, I never could learn from Mother how much truth there was in what I saw that night through my closed eyelids, overcome by deep sleep, falling headlong into muffled forgetfulness, and how much was the product of my imagination.
Some great dispute was taking place between my father, my mother, and Adela, the protagonist of that scene — a dispute of fundamental significance, as I now suspect. Certain gaps in my memory are to blame if I now try in vain to guess its still elusive meaning, blank smears of sleep which I strive to fill with guesses, suppositions and hypotheses. Languid and listless, I floated away over and over again into muffled unawareness, and a breeze of the starlit night, unbuttoned in the open window, fell upon my closed eyelids. The night breathed in pure pulses. It suddenly lifted its transparent veil of stars, and peeked into my dream from on high, with its old, eternal countenance. The ray of a distant star, tangled up in my eyelashes, spread in silver across the blind white of my eye, and through the crevices of my eyelids I saw our parlour by candle-light, embroiled in a knot of golden lines and zigzags.
It may be, after all, that this scene took place at another time. There is a great deal to suggest that I witnessed it only much later, when Mother, the shop assistants and I had returned home after shutting up the shop.
At the entrance to our apartment, Mother let out a cry of admiration and amazement. The shop assistants, dazzled, stood speechless. At the centre of the room there stood a magnificent brass knight, a veritable St George with an enlarged cuirass and golden bucklers of brassards, a whole clanking uniform of polished, golden plate. With admiration and joy, I recognised my father’s stiff moustache and bristling beard protruding from the heavy praetorian helmet. The armour rose and fell on his heaving chest; its segments breathed, moth-like and slatted, like the abdomen of some huge insect. Made enormous by this armour, in the glare of its golden metal plate, he resembled an arch-strategist of the heavenly host.
‘Sadly, Adela,’ said Father, ‘you have never been able to comprehend matters of a higher order. Always and everywhere you have thwarted my actions with your outbursts of mindless animosity. But today, clad in my armour, I mock your tickling, by which you once drove one helpless to despair. Impotent rage has today reduced your tongue to helpless gibbering, its crudeness and derangement at one with your foolishness. Believe me when I say that it fills me with only sadness and pity. Devoid of noble flights of fantasy, you burn with unconscious envy toward everything that rises above the commonplace.’
Adela eyed Father up and down with boundless contempt, and turning to Mother she said in a flustered voice, shedding involuntary tears of exasperation: ‘He takes all of our syrup! He carries from the house all the jars of raspberry syrup we made together this summer! He wants it for those ne’er-do-well firemen to drink. And what is more, he showers me with impertinences.’ Adela sobbed briefly. ‘Captain of the fire brigade? Captain of scoundrels!’ she cried, looking resentfully at Father. ‘I’ve had enough of the whole lot of them. In the mornings, when I try to go down for the bread, I can’t open the door. Two of them have gone to sleep in the hallway, of course, barring the exit. On every step of the stairway one of them lies asleep in his brass helmet. They force their way into the kitchen, and they poke their rabbitlike faces in brass cans through the slit in the doorway. They hold up two fingers, like schoolboys in class, moving them like a pair of scissors, and whining imploringly for “Sugar, sugar...” They snatch the bucket out of my hand and fly off to fetch water. They dance me around and around. They simper. They practically wag their tails. Time after time, they leer with their red eyelids, and lick their lips abominably. It is enough for me to look sharply at one of them, and all at once his face swells up with shameless, red flesh, like a turkey’s. And to think of giving our raspberry syrup to that sort!’
‘Your vulgar nature,’ said Father, ‘defiles everything it touches. You have drawn a picture of these Sons of Fire that is worthy only of your own small mind. For myself, all my fondness is for this unhappy race of salamanders, these poor, disinherited fiery creatures. The only fault of that once magnificent race lies in their having given themselves up to the service of mankind, that they sold themselves to humanity for a spoonful of wretched human fare. And they have been repaid with contempt. There is no limit to the stupidity of plebeians. These delicate creatures have been reduced to the deepest ruin, to the ultimate ignominy. Is it any wonder that they find their victuals distasteful, those crude and nauseous victuals prepared by the wife of the local school janitor, for them and for the arrested of the town? Their palates, the delicate and refined palates of fiery spirits, demand noble and dark balsams, aromatic and coloured fluids. And so, this ceremonial night, as we all sit festively at white-clothed tables in the town’s great Stauropegion Hall — that hall with its tall and brightly lit windows which cast their glow far out into the autumn night, whilst the town outside is flooded all around with a thousand illuminations, we shall dip our bread rolls in cups of raspberry syrup, with reverence and connoisseurship appropriate to Sons of Fire, and slowly sip that thick and noble liquor. That is the way to fortify the inner beings of firemen, to regenerate the richness of their colours, which these individuals have scattered like fireworks, like rockets and Bengal lights. My soul is filled with pity for their poverty, for their undeserved degradation. If I have accepted from their hands the captain’s sabre, it is only in the hope that I shall be able to raise this tribe up from its ruin, lead them out of indignity, and unfurl over their heads the standard of a new idea.’
‘You are completely transformed, Jakub,’ said Mother. ‘You are magnificent. But you won’t be going out for the night, after all. Don’t forget, we have not had an opportunity for a good talk together since my return. Although, as far as these firemen are concerned,’ she said, turning to Adela, ‘it seems to me that you are, when all is said and done, misled by prejudice. They are pleasant enough fellows, ne’er-do-wells notwithstanding. I always look with pleasure upon those slender young men in their neat uniforms, a little too tight in the belt. They have a gread deal of natural elegance, and it is touching to see the enthusiasm and zeal with which they are ready at any moment to render service to ladies. How often will my umbrella fall from my hands in the street, or a ribbon come undone on my shoe, and always one of them comes to my aid, full of earnestness and eager readiness. I haven’t the heart to refuse such fervent attentions, and I always wait patiently as he comes running to serve me, which seems to please him immensely. And when he walks away, having fulfilled his knightly duty, he is immediately surrounded by a group of his colleagues, excitedly discussing the whole incident with him, whilst the hero re-enacts in mime how it all happened. In your place, I should gladly take advantage of their gallantry.’
‘I consider them loafers,’ said Teodor, the elder shop assistant. ‘After all, in the light of their childish irresponsibility, we don’t allow them to put out fires. To assess their hare-brained maturity, it is enough to see how enviously they always loiter near a group of boys amusing themselves with throws of buttons against a wall. Should you ever hear a wild shriek of merriment from the street, then looking out of the window you are almost certain to catch sight of those lanky individuals, confused, and rounded up in the midst of a group of boys, almost frantic in the riotousness of the chase. The sight of a fire transports them with joy; they clap their hands and dance like crazy. No, they are no use for putting out fires. We employ chimney sweeps and the municipal police force to do that. This leaves only fairs and folk celebrations to them, at which they are indispensable. On a dark autumn morning, for example, at the so-called Storming of the Capitol, they dress up as Carthaginians and lay siege to the Basilian Hill, and they make an infernal din, and everyone chants: “Hanibal, Hanibal ante portas.”
‘And what is more, toward the end of autumn they become languid and sluggish; they fall asleep standing up. They are hardly ever to be seen when the first snows are falling. A certain old stove-fitter once told me that he often discovers them when he is repairing chimneys, wearing their scarlet uniforms and gleaming helmets, clinging to an air duct, as lifeless as pupae. Thus they sleep standing up, drunk on raspberry syrup, bloated with its sticky sweetness and fire. Then they are dragged out by the ears and led to the barracks, drunk with sleep and oblivious, through autumn morning streets coloured by the first frosts, and street urchins throw stones at them, and they smile their embarassed smiles, all guilt and bad conscience, staggering like drunkards.’
‘Be that as it may,’ said Adela, ‘I shan’t give them any syrup. Not for that did I ruin my complexion at the kitchen stove, to boil it up for those ne’er-do-wells to drink...’
Instead of replying, my father raised a whistle to his lips, and blew it shrilly. As if they had been eavesdropping at the keyhole, four slender young men fell into the room and lined up by the wall. The room was illuminated by the glare of their helmets, under which their faces were dark and tanned, whilst they, striking a military pose, waited to be given their orders. At a signal from Father, two of them seized at either side a great jar in a wickerwork basket, full of crimson liquid, and before Adela could stop them they were already clomping down the stairs, carrying with them their precious loot. The remaining pair, giving a military salute, did likewise.
For a moment, Adela seemed about to be swept away into deeds of insanity, such fires perturbed her beautiful eyes. But father did not stand in wait of her outburst of anger. In a single bound, he was now standing on the window sill. And he spread his arms wide. We ran after him. The market square, plentifully sown with lights, teemed with a colourful crowd. Eight firemen at the side of our house stretched a large canvas out into a circle. Father turned around for one last time, shining in all the splendour of his gear, and saluted us in silence. And then, as bright as a meteor, his arms outspead, he jumped out into that night, burning with its thousand lights. It was such a beautiful sight that we all clapped our hands in admiration. Even Adela, forgetting her resentment, applauded that leap, executed with such elegance. My father meanwhile, his tin shells clattering, nimbly hopped down from the canvas and took up his position at the head of his detachment, which, breaking off by twos, their brass cans of helmets shining, spread into a long column and marched slowly away past the dark row of onlookers.