A Pensioner
I AM a pensioner, in the full and literal sense of the word, very far progressed in that eminence — greatly advanced, a quite sterling pensioner.
It may even be that I have transgressed certain set and acceptable limits in that respect. I don’t seek to conceal it — is there anything so unusual in that? Why then make such wide eyes, and look with that so disingenuous expression — with such grave seriousness, in which there lies so much hidden joy at the misfortune of a neighbour? How few people, when it comes down to it, have even the least rudiment of tact! Such truths are to be accepted with the straightest of faces, with a certain distractedness, in the spirit of pettiness inherent to such matters. One must rise above them, as I do, without a care, humming something quietly to oneself. Perhaps I am a little unsure in my legs, and must take slow and careful steps, one step at a time, watching very carefully where I go. It is so easy in this state of affairs to veer off course. My reader will understand that I cannot be too direct. My form of existence is dependent to a large extent on compassion, and a great deal of goodwill is required in that respect. More than once, I shall make appeals to it, to its very subtle shades, which may be spoken of only with a discrete wink — especially difficult for me due to the rigidy of my mask, unaccustomed to mimical gestures. Besides, I don’t force myself on anyone. Far be it from me to do that — to spill over with appreciation for the asylum granted to me through someone’s gracious understanding. I forgo that concession without emotion, coolly and with supreme indifference. I hate to be offered the benevolence of someone’s understanding, only to be presented with a bill, to be repayed with my appreciation. I prefer to be treated with a certain lightness, a certain healthy severity, in a joking and friendly manner. In that respect, my good-natured and simple-hearted colleagues from the office strike just the proper tone.
I sometimes go there, out of habit, around the first of every month, and stand quietly by the railings, waiting for them to notice me. The following scene is then played out:
At a certain moment, the head of the office, pan Kawałkiewicz, puts down his pen, gives a sign with his eyes to the office workers, and suddenly looking into the empty air behind me, cupping his hand to his ear, says: ‘If I’m not mistaken, the councillor is somewhere among us, here in the room!’ And as he says this, his eyes, fixed on the emptiness far above me, narrow to a squint. His face beams with a playful smile. He speaks loudly, with intensity, as if to someone very far away: ‘I heard a voice from somewhere, and at once I thought to myself, it must be our beloved councillor! Please, sir, make some sign. At least stir the air at the spot where you are hovering.’ ‘Surely you are joking, pan Kawałkiewicz,’ I say to him quietly, looking directly into his face. ‘I have come to collect my wages.’ ‘Your wages?’ pan Kawałkiewicz cries, squinting into the air. ‘Did you say, your wages? You cannot be serious, beloved Councillor; you were crossed off the payroll long ago! My dear sir, how long do you expect to go on drawing a salary?’
Thus they make fun of me, in that warm, lively and compassionate way. That rough heartiness, that unceremonious grip by the shoulder, gives me strange relief, and I leave there fortified and more sprightly, and head straight for home, so that I might carry back to my apartment a little of that pleasant internal warmth, which is already leaking away.
Other people, however... The intrusive, unspoken questions that I constantly read in their eyes — one can never be rid of them. Let us suppose that they are justified. Why then those elongated faces, those solemn expressions — and that silence, that wary tactfulness, recoiling a little in respect, merely in order not to jostle me, to pass delicately over my state without so much as a word... How easily I see through such games! They are simply an aspect of humanity, a kind of sybaritic self indulgence, the savouring of their fortunate difference, their fierce dissociation, masked by hypocrisy, from my condition. They exchange meaningful looks, and remain silent, and in silence they allow the matter to develop. My condition! Perhaps it is not quite proper. Perhaps there is a certain trifling flaw of fundamental nature in it. My God! What if there is! That is still no reason for that hurried and fearful complaisance. I am often roused to empty laughter when I see that understanding, suddenly growing serious, that willing acknowledgement with which they make certain allowances for my condition, as if it were a completely irrefutable, final and irrevocable argument. Why do they insist so on that point? Why is it so important to them — important above all things? And why does it give them assurance of that great satisfaction of theirs, in which they hide behind their mask of nervous devotion?
Let us suppose that I am an unburdensome passenger, weighing almost nothing in fact. Let us suppose that certain questions disconcert me — how old am I to be, for example, on my next name day. Is that any reason to deliberate incessantly over such questions as if they costitute the very heart of matters? Not that I am ashamed of my state. Not by any means! But I cannot bear the exaggeratedness with which they overblow the significance of some point, make some distinction, when it ir really no more than splitting hairs. All that fake theatricality amuses me, the solemn pathos that they heap up on the matter, that draping of the moment in a gloomily pompous, tragical costume. While in reality... nothing in the world could be more devoid of pathos, more natural or banal than my state. Lightness, independence, irresponsibility, and... musicality — the extraordinary musicality of one’s limbs, if I may put it that way. I can no longer walk past a barrel organ without breaking into a dance — not with joy, simply because I no longer care, and because the melody, its obstinate rhythm, has a will of its own, and so one must yield. ‘Margaretta, treasure of my soul...’ — it is too airy, too charming to resisit! And besides, in whose name would I resist such an inconveniently rousing, unpretentious proposition? And so I dance, or rather skip in time to the music, with my pensioner’s small, gentle trot, every once in a while cutting a caper. Hardly anyone ever notices, wrapped up in themselves, in their workaday bustle.
One thing I should like to avoid — that the reader gain any excessive conceptions regarding my state. I would clearly forewarn against overstating it, be it in plus or in minus. No romanticising, please — it is a condition like any other — any other that bears the stamp of the most natural intelligibility and ordinarinesses. Once one finds oneself on this side of affairs, all paradoxicality vanishes. A great refreshment is what I should call my state, a casting aside of all burdens, a dancing lightness, emptiness, and irresponsibility — a levelling of differences, a loosening of all bonds, the dissolution of all borders. Nothing holds me back. Nothing stops me. I meet with no resistance. Boundless freedom! The strange indifference with which I slip lightly between all the dimensions of being — ought it really to be so pleasant? I have no idea. That chasm, that ubiquitousness, that seemingly carefree and light impassivity... I certainly don’t wish to complain. There is a saying: Never stay in one place long enough to warm the earth beneath your feet. The truth is, it is a long time since I have warmed any place.
When I look out from my loftily situated window, onto the town, the roofs and the fiery walls and chimneys in the dun light of an autumn dawn — onto that whole densely built up landscape in bird’s-eye perspective, barely emerged from the night, dawning palely over a golden horizon slashed into bright shreds by black, undulating knives, the cawing of crows — I feel: here is life. Here they all are, wrapped up in themselves, on some day that they wake up to, at some hour, at some moment, which belongs to them. Somewhere out there, in a semi-dark kitchen, coffee is being made; the cook has gone out, and a dirty reflection of the flame dances on the floor. Time, misled by the silence, flows for a moment back beyond itself, and for those uncounted seconds the night regrows on the cat’s waving fur. Zosia from the first floor gives a long yawn, and stretches to her full length before opening the window to do her housework. Having overslept, breaking off from its snoring, the night air strolls idly to the window, and goes beyond it, slowly advancing into the dun and smoky greyness of the day. The girl sinks her hands lingeringly into the cake of her bedclothes, still warm and inert with sleep. At last, with a shudder inside, her eyes filled with the night, she shakes out her cumbersome eiderdown through the window, and tufts of feathers fly into the town — fluffy stars, a languid scattering of nocturnal reveries.
Then I dream that I am a baker’s delivery boy, a mechanic of the electrical system, or a collector for the Health Service. Or at least a chimney sweep, who in the morning, at sunrise, enters by the light of his watchman’s lantern some gateway slightly ajar, nonchalantly, with a joke on his lips, putting two fingers to the peak of his hat. He enters that labyrinth, to leave it only late in the evening, somewhere at the far end of the town; to go all day long from one apartment to the next, carrying on one convolutued and unending conversation from one end of the town to the other, divided into parts among the occupants; to ask about something in one apartment, and hear about it in the next; to tell a joke in one place, and reap the reward of laughter long into others; to pass along narrow corridors amid the banging of doors, through bedrooms crammed with furniture — overturning chamber-pots, jostling the squeaking carriages where children lay crying, and bending down to pick up babies’ lost rattles; to linger longer than necessary in kitchens and antechambers where domestics do their cleaning — those girls, writhing, stretch their young legs and tense their rounded insteps; they playfully allow their cheap footwear to sparkle; they clack their loose slippers...
Such are my reveries in the irresponsible, marginal hours. I do not renounce them, although I do recognise their senselessness. Everyone should know where lie the borders of his condition, and what is befitting to him.
Autumn, generally, is a dangerous season for us pensioners. If only you knew how difficult it is in our state to arrive at some kind of stability, to keep a straight path and not let oneself go astray, then you would understand why autumn, its gales, its storms and atmospheric confusions, is unfavourable to our already so imperilled existence.
There are, however, other days in autumn, days full of peace and contemplation, which do favour us. Such sunless, warm and hazy days do occasionally arrive, amber at their remotest edges. Suddenly, deep inside them, a view opens up, in a gap between the houses, in a patch of a sky sinking more and more oppressively, down to the final windswept yellowness of its furthest horizons. In those perspectives, opening far into the day, one’s eye wanders as if into the archives of the calendar, and perceives the stratifications of the day as if in section — endless records of time withdrawing in lanes into bright and yellow eternity. All of this accumulates, and is arranged in the sky’s tawny and lost formations, while the present day and the moment remain in the foreground. Rarely does anyone lift their gaze to the faraway shelves of that illusory calendar. Stooping toward the ground, all are heading somewhere; they pass by each other impatiently, and the whole street is furrowed with their paths, their bearings, their meetings and passings-by. But in that space between the houses, where the view escapes into the bottom of the town, into a panorama of broken architectural brightness, streaked, and viewed from the rear, vanishing toward the dim horizons — there is a break, a pause in that tumult. There, on an expanded, bright little square, they are chopping wood for the local school. There they stand in heaps and quadrangles of healthy, solid wood — slowly dissolving, log after log, under the woodcutters’ saws and axes. Ah, wood — the faithful, friendly and wholesome material of reality, bright and reliable through and through, embodying the honesty and prose of life. No matter how deep you go, searching into its deepest core, you will find nothing that is not already revealed, simply and without reservations on its surface — always evenly smiling, and bright with that warm and certain brightness of its fibrous pulp, interweaved with the image of a human form. In every fresh split of a chopped log a new face appears — always the same, smiling and golden. O, astonishing complexion of wood, inexuberantly warm, healthy throughout, fragrant, and sweet.
Truly sacramental deed — full of intent and symbolism — to chop down a tree! I could stand there for hours, in that bright space, open far into the late afternoon, watching those melodiously ringing saws and the regular work of those axes. Here is a tradition as old as the human race. In that bright indentation in the day, in that break in time open onto the yellow and withered eternity, they hew the logs of a beech tree from Noah’s time. Those same patriarchal and immemorial movements, the same hunched shoulders, the same blows. They stand shoulder deep in that golden carpentry, slowly plundering those stacks and lengths of wood, and — coated with sawdust, with the tiny spark of a reflection in their eyes — they hack deeper and deeper into its warm, healthy pulp, its solid mass, and every stroke leaves behind it a golden gleam in their eyes, as if they were searching for something at the core of the wood, as if they wanted to cut out its golden salamander, that shrill, fiery creature constantly escaping, far into the core. No, they are simply chopping up time into small logs — husbanding time, filling cellars with a fine and evenly cut future for the winter months.
Superseding that critical time, those few weeks, morning frosts and winter soon arrive. I enjoy so much that step into winter, as yet without snow, but with a smell of frost and smoke in the air. I remember those Sunday afternoons in late autumn. Let us suppose that rain fell all last week, a long, autumn inundation, until the earth was sated with water at last. And now it begins to dry out, losing the gleam on its surface and exuding a powerful, healthy coolness. On one side of the horizon, they have raked up like mud the week-long sky, along with its tattered covering of clouds, and it grows dark there in voluminous and crumpled heaps, whilst to the west the hues of an autumn evening, ruddy with health, slowly begin to pervade and colour the clouded landscape. And as the sky is slowly purged from the west, emanating its transparent purity, housemaids in their Sunday best go out walking in threes and fours, holding each other’s hands — along an empty, Sunday washed and dried street between suburban houses — colourful in those pungent hues of the air, reddening before twilight. And they grow swarthy and round in the face from that healthy winter. They put forth their elastic legs in new, over tight footwear. How pleasant it is to stir up recollections, wrested from some nook of one’s memory!
Lately, I have been going to the office almost every day. Sometimes, someone happens to fall ill, and they allow me to work in his place. Occasionally someone merely has some urgent business in town, and this means I am able to replace him in the office. It is not regular work unfortunately, but it is pleasant, if only for a few hours, to have one’s own chair and leather cushion, one’s own pen, pencil and ruler. It is pleasant to be jostled, and even scolded in a friendly way, by one’s colleagues. Some person will turn my way, will utter some word, make a jibe, a jest, and for a moment I come back into bloom. I latch onto someone, attach my homelessness and nothingness to something alive and warm. And that other, walking away, does not feel my weight, does not notice that he is carrying me on his back, or that for a moment, I parasitise his life.
But that all came to an end with the arrival of the new head of the bureau.
Now I often sit — if the weather is fine — on a bench in the little square that faces the local school. From a street alongside comes the knocking of axes and saws, the cutting down of a tree. Girls and young women are returning from the market. A few have serious and regularly drawn eyebrows, and walk glowering from under them, slender and sullen — angels with baskets filled with vegetables and meat. Sometimes, they pause in front of shops and regard themselves in the display windows; then they walk away again, casting a proud and castigating glance behind them from on high, at the tips of their own shoes. At ten o-clock, the beadle emerges at the school doorway, and the din of his clamorous bell fills the street. Then the interior of the school suddenly seems to explode with a rampageous tumult, all but bursting the building apart. Like fugitives from that general riot, little vagabonds fly out of the gate as if from a sling, and, shrieking, fly down the stone steps — to venture insane leaps, now that they are set free; to rush into mad and blindly improvised stunts before one can look twice. Sometimes in these frantic chases they advance as far as my bench; in their flight they throw incomprehensible insults in my direction. Their faces seem to come unhinged in the frantic grimaces they make at me. Like a troop of embarrassed monkeys commenting parodistically on their own clownish feats, the group flies past me head over heels, gesticulating and screaming infernally. Then I see their upturned and barely discernible little noses, which they cannot stop from dripping, their mouths torn open in shrieks and edged with pimples, their little clenched fists. Sometimes they happen to come to a halt near me. Strangely enough, they mistake me for one of their own number. For a long time now I have been shrinking in height. I have taken on a childlike appearance in my loose and flabby face. I am a little confused when they unceremoniously use first name terms with me. The first time one of them unexpectedly thumped me in the chest, I curled up under the bench. But I wasn’t offended. They dragged me out again, blissfully befuddled and beguiled by so warm and enlivening a procedure. This quality — that I am in no way offended by the boisterousness of their impetuous savoir-vivre — has gradually gained me esteem and popularity. One can easily guess that, since that time, I have been diligently filling my pockets with a suitable collection of buttons, pebbles, reels of thread and scraps of rubber. This facilitates exquisitely the exchange of ideas, and constitutes a natural platform in the establishment of friendships. And so, consumed with such businesslike interests, they don’t much notice what I am, and I, protected by an arsenal drawn from my pocket, need not fear that their curiosity and inquisitivess about me might become too obtrusive
At length I resolved to put into practice a certain idea that, for a certain time, had been nagging me more and more persistently.
It was a windless, gentle and contemplative day, one of those late autumn days when the year, having used up all the colour and shades of that season, seems to revert to the calendar’s spring-like registers. Its sunless sky was arranged in coloured streaks, gentle layers of cobalt, verdigris and turquoise, enclosed at the furthest edges by a streak of whiteness, as clear as water — the colour of an unutterable and long forgotten April. I put on my best clothes and set off for town, not without some trepidation. I walked quickly, encountering no obstacles in the agreeable atmosphere of that day, never once deviating from my straight line. Out of breath, I ran up the stone steps. ‘Alea iacta est,’ I said to myself as I knocked on the office door. I adopted a modest posture before the headmaster’s desk, as befitted my new role. I was a little abashed.
From a glass box the headmaster took out a May bug on a pin, and brought it close to his eye, examining it in the light. His hands were ink-stained, the fingernails cut short and level. He regarded me from behind his spectacles.
‘You would like, Councillor, to enrol in the first form?’ he said. ‘Very praiseworthy and commendable. I understand that you wish to rebuild your education from the ground up, from the foundations. As I always say, grammar and the multiplication tables form the basis of education here. Naturally, we cannot treat you, Councillor, like an ordinary pupil subject to compulsory education. More as a hospitant, a veteran of the alphabet, to signify one who, after a long exile, has returned to the school bench once more. He has, so to speak, steered his wrecked navy into this harbour. Indeed, Councillor, very few show us such appreciation, such recognition of our service, that after an age of work, an age of troubles, they return to us and settle here in perpetuity, as a voluntary, lifelong repetent. This stands you in excellent stead here, Councillor. As I always say...’
‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted him ‘but so far as my excellent stead is concerned, I should like to renounce it entirely... I wish for no personal privileges. Quite the reverse... I wish in nothing to stand out. My greatest concern, in fact, is how best to merge with and disappear into the general crowd of my schoolmates. It would utterly defeat my purpose should I be in any way privileged over the others. Even if it comes to the matter of corporal punishment,’ and here I raised my finger, ‘I fully acknowledge its salutary and edifying influence. I make this statement unreservedly, in order that no exeptions be made in that respect.’
‘Praiseworthy indeed. Highly pedagogical,’ said the headmaster in acknowledgement. And besides,’ he added, ‘it is my judgement that your education, as a result of its remaining for so long disused, is already displaying certain gaps. We usually surrender to optimistic illusions in that respect, which are easily dispelled. Do you still remember, for example, how much is five times seven?’
‘Five times seven,’ I repeated, confused, feeling my confusion welling up to my heart in a warm and blissful wave, which obscured all the clarity of my thoughts. As if dazzled by the revelation of my own ignorance, half in rapture that I was indeed reverting to a child’s state of unawareness, I began to repeat: ‘Five times seven, five times seven...’
‘And so you can see’ said the headmaster ‘that it is high time you enrolled in school.’ Then, taking me by the hand, he led me to a classroom where a lesson was taking place.
Once again, like half a century before, I found myself in that tumult, that room teeming and darkened by a swarm of animated heads. At its centre, I became tiny, holding on to the headmaster’s coat-tails, and fifty pairs of young eyes regarded me with the nonchalant and cruel matter-of-factness of an animal catching sight of another specimen of its own race. I saw on all sides their contorted expressions; they pulled faces at me in quick, perfunctory hostility; they poked out their tongues. I ignored these taunts, mindful of the good manners I had acquired over the years. Looking around at those lively faces full of clumsy grimaces, I was reminded of that same situation from fifty years before. Then, I had been standing beside my mother as she settled my affairs with the teacher. Instead of my mother, it was now the headmaster who whispered something into the professor’s ear, and he in turn shook his head and looked at me gravely.
‘He is an orphan,’ the headmaster said to the class. ‘He has no mother or father. Do not tease him unduly.’
Tears welled up in my eyes at that speech, real tears of emotion, and the headmaster, affected too, pushed me in the direction of the first bench.
From that time onward, a new life began for me. School absorbed me at once and entirely. Never in my former life had I been so preoccupied with a thousand matters, intrigues and affairs. I lived in one single great preoccupation. A thousand supremely diverse matters criss-crossed above my head. I received signals and telegrams; knowing signs were made, which hissed, winked, and reminded me by every possible means of the thousand obligations I had incurred. I could hardly wait for the end of a lesson, during which, with innate propriety, I stoically endured all attacks, in order not to lose a single word of the professor’s teaching. No sooner had the bell begun to ring than that screaming horde flocked to me, tormenting me with spontaneous avidity, almost pulling me to pieces. They came running from the back, across the benches, their feet clattering on the desktops; they leaped over my head, turning somersaults above me. They all screamed their demands into my ears. I became the focal point of all of their affairs. The most serious transactions, the most involved and sensitive matters, could not be dispensed without my participation. I walked along the street always surrounded by a raucous, violently gesticulating rabble. Dogs passed us by at a distance, their tails curled up; cats jumped onto roofs when we approached; solitary little boys whom we met on our way hunched their heads between their shoulders in meek fatalism, prepared for the worst.
School learning had lost nothing of the charm of novelty for me. The art of syllabication, for example. The professor simply appealed to our ignorance. He was able to wrest it from us with great agility and cleverness, and at length he reached that tabula rasa in us that is the basis of all learning. Having uprooted in this way all of our prejudices and habits, he began his teaching from first principles. With difficulty, we strained to stammer out the melodiously resounding syllables, sniffing in the pauses and pressing a finger to the book, letter by letter. My primer bore those same traces of an index finger as the primers of my colleagues, thicker at the more difficult letters.
I no longer recall what the matter was, but one day the headmaster came into our classroom, and in the silence which suddenly fell he pointed out three of us, myself and two others. We were to go with him immediately to his office. We knew what was coming, and my two co-culprits were already bleating to the high heavens. I regarded with indifference their untimely remorse, their suddenly deformed, crying faces, as if the human mask had fallen from them along with the first of their tears, laying bare a shapeless pulp of sobbing flesh. For myself, I remained calm. I yielded to the course of events with the determination innate to moral and upright natures, stoically prepared to face the consequences of my actions. But that strength of character, as we three culprits all stood before him in his office, was displeasing to the headmaster, having an appearance of intransigence. In attendance at these proceedings was the professor, cane in hand. I nonchalantly unfastened my belt; but the headmaster, at seeing this, cried out: ‘For shame! Can it be possible? At your age?’ He cast a scandalised look at the professor. ‘A strange trick of nature,’ he added with a grimace of disgust. Then, having sent the other boys away, he gave me a long and serious sermon, full of anguish and disapprobation. But I could make no sense of it. Vacantly biting my nails, I looked blankly beyond him. Then I said: ‘Pweathe pwofethor, it wath Watthek who thpat at the pwofethor’s bwead woll.’ I really was a child now.
For art and gymnastics, we went to another school, where there was special equipment and rooms for those subjects. We marched by twos, chattering heatedly, carrying the sudden tumult of our mingled sopranos to every street we turned into.
This school was a great wooden building, converted from a theatre hall, old, and with many annexes. The interior of the art room resembled an enormous bath complex, its ceiling propped up with wooden poles, with a wooden gallery running all the way around, under the ceiling, which we at once ran to the top of, storming its stairways, which clattered like thunder under our feet. It had numerous side rooms, highly suitable for games of hide-and-seek. The art teacher would never turn up, so we could play all we liked. Once in a while, the headmaster of that school entered the room, stood a few of the noisiest of us in the corner, and twisted the ears of the most unruly; but barely had he turned toward the door, and the tumult resurged behind his back.
We could not hear the bell announcing the end of the lesson. Suddenly it was the short and coloured autumn afternoon. Some of the boys’ mothers came to collect them, to recapture, with reprimands and blows, those deserters. But for the others, those deprived of such tender domestic care, the real fun began only then. And it was not until the late twilight that the old beadle, locking up the school, chased us away home.
The next morning, at the hour when we made our way to school, thick darkness still prevailed — the town still lay in silent sleep. We made our way gropingly, our hands outstretched, our feet rustling the dry leaves that lay in heaps in the street. As we went along, we held on to the walls of houses so as not to go astray. Unexpectedly, in some recess, our hands would stroke the face of a colleague going in the opposite direction. How much laughter that gave rise to! How many guesses and surprises! Some had tallow candles; they lit them, and the town was sown with the wanderings of those stumps, making their way in trembling zigzags, low to the ground, converging and combining to illuminate some tree, some circle of earth, or a few withered leaves, where the boys went in search of chestnuts. Also, on the first floor in some of the houses, the first lamps were being lit; they emitted their dim illumination, magnified by the squares of window panes in the municipal night, falling in great shapes onto the square in front of the house, or onto the wall of the town hall, or the blank façades of the houses. And should anyone pick up one of those lamps and carry it into the next room, then those enormous rectangles of light would turn outside like the pages of a colossal book, and the tenements would appear to meander upon the square, its shadows and houses moving as if from a gigantic pack of cards it were dealing a round of patience.
We finally arrived at school. The candle stumps went out, and darkness seized us, in which we groped our way to our seats on the benches. Then the teacher entered, pushed a candle into a bottle, and began the tedious round of tests on vocabulary and declension. In that lack of light there was teaching only by speech and memory. As one person monotonously recited, we looked on with squinting eyes, as if golden arrows, intricate zigzags, were shooting from the candles, and entangling, rustling like straw, in our fluttering lashes. The professor poured ink into the inkwells, yawned, and gazed out into the black night beyond the low window. It was utterly dark under the benches. We ducked under them, giggling, and wandered on all fours, sniffing our way like animals, and concluded our everyday transactions in darkness and whispers. I shall never forget those blissful morning hours in school, as the dawn rose slowly beyond the window panes.
The season of autumn gales finally ensued. That day, the sky at dawn was aready late and golden, modelled against that background in dull-grey lines of imaginary landscapes, great misty wildernesses, withdrawing in perspective, in receding coulisses of hills and creases, congealing and diminishing far to the east, where suddenly it broke away, like the undulating edge of a rising curtain, to reveal another, more distant map, a deeper sky, a gap of terrified paleness — the pale and terrified light of the furthest distance, colourless and clear as water, where that horizon ended and was enclosed, like the ultimate astonishment. On those days, like in Rembrandt’s etchings, one could see under that streak of brightness, distant, microscopic and distinct lands, which, although having never been seen before, rose up now from beyond the horizon — under that bright, cleft sky, splashed with bright, pale and panicked light as if raised from anothor epoch and another time, like a promised land that appears only for a moment, and only to lost people. In that bright, miniature landscape, with strange distinctness, an iron locomotive could be seen wending its way, weaving along a tortuous track, barely discernible in the distance and adorned with a silvery-white ribbon of smoke, and dissolving into bright nothingness.
But then the wind got up. It rushed out as if from that gap in the sky; it ran in circles and was dispersed over the town. It was made entirely of softness and mildness, but in its strange megalomania it mimicked a fiend and a brigand. It churned, disturbed and clouded the air, which died of bliss. Suddenly it stiffened in space and reared up, unfurled like a ship’s sails, enormous, taut, clapping sheets, like a whip cracking — it was tied into difficult knots, trembling with tensions, with a stern countenance as if it wanted to lash all the air to dust. But then it unfastened a slip-knot, opened a false noose, and a mile further on, threw its hissing lariat, its hitching hobble, which did not lasso a thing.
But what did it not shape out of the smoke from the chimneys! The poor smoke had no idea how to evade its conceits, how to dodge to the left or the right to avert its head from its blows. Thus the wind prevailed over the town, as if it wanted to enact that day, once and for all, a memorable example of its unlimited lawlessness.
Since morning, I had sensed a calamity. I struggled to make progress through the gale. On street corners, amid its criss-crossing gusts, my colleagues held on to my coat tails. In this way I made my way through the town, and all was going well. We went to our gymnastics lesson at the other school. On our way we bought bagels. In a long line by twos, chattering intensely, we went in through the gate and up to the front entrance. Another moment, and I might have been safe, in a secure place, free at least until the evening from danger. If necessary, I could have even stayed in the gymanstics hall until the next morning. My faithful colleagues would have kept me company for the night. All that the calamity needed was for Wicek to let go of his brand new spinning top before the school entrance. It went whirring. A congestion built up before the doorway. I was pushed out of range of the gate, and suddenly I was caught. ‘My friends, save me!’ I cried out, hanging in the air now. I could still see their outstretched hands and their round, screaming mouths. At the last moment, I turned a somersault, and drifted in a magnificent, ascending line. Now I was flying high above the rooftops. Flying in this way, out of breath, I could see with my mind’s eye how my colleagues in the classroom were stretching out their hands, desperately spreading their fingers and shouting to the teacher: ‘Please, professor, Szymiec has been swept away!’ The professor looked at them through his spectacles. He went calmly to the window and surveyed the horizon, shielding his eyes. But I could no longer be seen. In the dim reflection of the fawn sky, his face seemed to be made entirely of parchment. ‘We must cross him off the register,’ he said with a bitter look, and walked back to the rostrum. And I was carried higher and higher into the yellow and unfathomable autumn expanses.
> -Solitude- >