The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass: -I- -II- (III) -IV- -V-
III
THUS IS LIFE LIVED in this town, and thus time passes. The best part of the day is spent in sleeping — and not only in bed. No — they are not too fussy on that point. The people here are always happy to take a sound nap, anywhere at all, at all hours of the day — in a restaurant with their head resting on the table, in a droshky, or even standing up at the roadside, or in the hallway of some house, where they have dropped in for a moment to surrender to their irresistible need for sleep.
Waking up, still befuddled and swaying, we carry on a conversation broken off earlier, we press on, continuing along a wearisome path, with some complicated business matter without beginning or end. And as a result, whole periods of time are lost somewhere inadvertently along the way. We lose control over the continuity of the day; and in the end we cease to insist on it — we relinquish the skeleton of incessant chronology without regret, our attentive supervision of it, which — in our addiction to it, to its tender, commonplace discipline — we once grew accustomed to. We sacrificed long ago that constant readiness to file our receipt for spent time, that scrupulousness in accounting down to the last penny for hours used — the pride and ambition of our economics. Those cardinal virtues in which we once knew neither indecision nor infringement — we forsook them long ago.
Let a few examples serve to illustrate this state of affairs. At some hour of day or night — these eras are distinguished by the barely perceptibly altered shade of the sky — I wake up by the handrail of the little bridge that leads to the Sanatorium. It is twilight. I must have been wandering for a long time, unconscious, all around the town, overcome by sleepiness, before finally dragging myself to this bridge. I cannot say whether Doctor Gotard was accompanying me on that whole journey, but he stands before me now, concluding some long explanation, drawing out reasoned inferences. Carried away by his own eloquence, he takes me by the arm and leads me behind him. I follow, and before we have crossed the clattering planks of the bridge — I am asleep again. Unclearly, through my closed eyelids, I see the doctor’s pointed gesticulations, and the smile deep inside his black beard, and I strive in vain to grasp that splendid logical snare, that ultimate trump card by which he triumphs — at the zenith of his argument, striking a pose with outstretched arms. I have no idea how much longer we walk side by side, talking at cross purposes, before, at a certain moment, I really do wake up. Doctor Gotard is no longer there. It is totally dark, if only because my eyes are still closed. I open them, and I am in bed, in my room, and I have no idea how I got here.
An even more drastic case:
At lunchtime I enter a hotel restaurant in the town, into its incoherent hubbub and confusion of diners. And who is there? Sitting at a table heaving with dishes, at the centre of the room? — Father! All eyes are turned toward him, while he, his diamond tie-pin gleaming, affects a bow to all sides in effusive conversation with the entire room, ecstatically happy and uncommonly animated. With forced bravado that I can look on only with the greatest anxiety, he orders dish after dish, which he stacks high on his table. He gathers them all up with delight, not even having finished the first one that he ordered. Clicking his tongue, chewing and speaking at once, he feigns with gestures and mimcry his supreme satisfaction with this feast, and he follows with admiring eyes the waiter, Adaś, continually calling him back to give him another order, with a smile of infatuation. And when the waiter, waving a napkin, runs to fill them, Father appeals to all with an entreating gesture, and calls for everyone to bear witness to the irresistible charm of that Ganymede.
‘A priceless boy,’ he cries with a blissful smile, half closing his eyes. ‘An angelic boy! Don’t you agree, sirs, that he is charming!’
I back out of the room in disgust, unnoticed by Father. Even if he had been placed there deliberately by the hotel management, as an advertisement, to enthuse the patrons, he could hardly have behaved more provocatively, more ostentatiously. I head for home with faltering steps, my head fogging with sleepiness. For a moment I rest my head on a pillar box and take a brief siesta. At length I am scrabbling in the darkness for the entrance to the Sanatorium, and I enter. The room is dark. I press the light switch — the power is off. Cold blows in from the window. The bed creaks in the darkness. Father raises his head from the bedclothes and says, ‘Oh, Józef, Józef! I’ve been lying here for two days now, unattended. The bells are all broken and no one calls in to see me. And now even my own son has forsaken me — a seriously ill man — and gads about the town chasing girls. See how my heart is pounding!’
How can I reconcile this? Is Father sitting in the restaurant, taken with the unhealthy principle of gluttony, or lying in his room, seriously ill? Can there be two Fathers? Nothing of the sort! The rapid disintegration of time, not being supervised with ceaseless vigilance, is the reason for all of this.
We all know that this undisciplined element is only held in check by pulling on certain reins, by incessant cultivation, solicitous attention and a painstaking regulation and correction of its antics. Without such attentive strictures it immediately becomes prone to transgressions and wild aberration, to cutting incalculable capers, and to shambolic clowning. The incongruence of our individual times was more and more distinctly noticeable. My father’s time and my own no longer fitted together.
To clarify matters, the accusation of moral profligacy laid against me by my father was a groundless insinuation. Thus far I have not approached any of the local girls. Reeling from one bout of sleep to the next, like a drunkard, I am even in my most wakeful moments barely able to pay attention to the fairer sex here.
Besides, the chronic dusk in the streets does not even allow their faces to be distinguished clearly. All that I have been able to observe — being, all the same, a young man, and having a certain interest in this topic — is the singular walk those young ladies have.
It is a step along an inexorably straight line, taking no obstacle into account, obedient only to some internal rhythm, some law that is unwound as if from a ball of the unswerving thread of their gentle trot, full of precision and measured grace.
They each carry with them some other, individual rule, like a wound-up spring.
As they walk in this way, directly, full of concentration and attention, their eyes fixed on that rule, they seem to have but one concern: that they should lose nothing of it, not transgress their exacting rule, never even by a millimetre deviate from it. And then it becomes clear that what they carry with them with such attention and earnestness is nothing other than an idée fixe of their own perfection, which is all but made real by the power of their conviction. It is an expectation without sanction or guarantee, which they have taken on at their own risk — their own inviolable dogma, beyond all doubt.
What flaws and what blemishes, what snub or flattened noses, what freckles and pimples are not recklessly smuggled in under the flag of that fiction! There is no ugliness or vulgarity that they cannot carry off — in those fictional perfect heavens, in the flights of that belief.
Their bodies, as that belief determines, grow distinctly beautiful, and their legs, legs shapely indeed, and elastic, in irreproachable footwear, speak by their gait, eagerly express in their full strides, in a fluid, shimmering monologue, an idea that their faces, sealed up with pride, never could disclose. They keep their hands in the pockets of their short, close-fitting jackets. In a café or at the theatre, they cross their legs, which, exposed to the knees, maintain a meaningful silence. So much for one of the town’s curiosities. I have already mentioned the black vegetation here; but a certain species of black fern merits special attention — enormous bunches of it adorn the vases in every apartment and in all public premises. It is practically a symbol of mourning — this town’s funereal coat-of-arms.
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