Spring: -I- (II) -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
II
ON THOSE wild and expansive late winter nights, overlain with enormous skies, still raw and unscented, leading into rough and open aerial spaces on pathless astral terrain, Father would take me with him to supper at a little garden restaurant enclosed between the back walls of the last houses on the market square.
We walked in the watery light of lanterns rattled by gusts of wind, cross-country over the great vaulted market square — alone and oppressed by the tremendous aerial labyrinths, lost and disorientated in the empty expanses of the atmosphere. Father lifted his face to the sky, bathed in its faint glow, and gazed with bitter preoccupation into that astral gravel scattered over the shallows of its widely branching and diffuse whirls. Their irregular and countless condensations were not yet arranged into any constellations; no figures curbed yet those immense and barren flood waters. Over the town the sadness of the astral wastes hung; the lanterns below intertwined the night with pencil beams of light, binding them disinterestedly from crisscross to crisscross. Under those lanterns passers-by in twos and threes lingered in circles of light, which created around them the transitory illusion of rooms lit by table lamps — in a disinterested and uncomfortable night disintegrating into irregular expanses up above, into wild aerial landscapes, wretched and homeless, frayed by the beating of the wind. Their conversations made no headway; their eyes were deeply shaded by their hats; they smiled, listening pensively to the distant sound of the stars, toward which all that night’s expanse shot rapidly upward.
In the restaurant garden the footpaths were strewn with gravel. Two lanterns on posts hissed pensivenely. Gentlemen in black frock coats sat in twos and threes, hunched over tables draped in white, mindlessly gazing at their glistening plates. Sitting thus they inwardly calculated the moves and developments on the great black chessboard of the sky; they inwardly saw the jumping knights and lost pieces among the stars, and the constellations immediately advancing onto the lost positions.
Musicians on a stage dipped their moustaches into mugs of bitter beer; they remained vacantly silent, gazing far into themselves. Their instruments, violins and cellos with noble contours, lay to one side, discarded under the voicelessly roaring downpour of the stars. From time to time they were taken up and appraised — the musicians plaintively tuned them to the timbre of their own chests, which they tested by coughing. Then they were set aside again, as if still unripe and not equal to that night, which flowed on disinterestedly. But in the hush and the outflow of thoughts, while the knives and forks were softly clinking over the white-clothed tables, a solo violin suddenly struck up, prematurely developed and fully grown — so mournful and insecure only a moment ago, it now rose up eloquent, slender and drawn in at the waist, and it gave an account of its letters of attorney;it took up the momentarily postponed human cause, and it went on contesting that lost trial before the disinterested tribunal of the stars, amid which the f-holes and profiles of instruments, fragmentary keys, unfinished lyres and swans were drawn in an aquatint, in an imitative, mindless starry commentary in the margin of the music.
The town photographer, who had for some time now been casting meaningful looks our way from a neighbouring table, finally joined us, transferring his mug of beer from his table to ours. He smiled evasively; he wrestled with his thoughts; he snapped his fingers, losing over and over again the elusive point of the situation. We had sensed its paradoxicality from the outset. That improvised restaurant camp, lacking assistance, had gone bankrupt under the auspices of the distant stars; wretchedly, it had gone under, unable to meet its limitlessly growing debts to the night. How could we oppose those abysmal wates? The night had cancelled out that human venture whose case the violin had vainly tried to plead; then it had invaded that gap and moved its constellations onto the retaken positions.
We saw the disarrayed camp of the tables, the battlefield of the discarded serviettes and cloths, which the luminous and innumerous night had outdone in its triumph. We all stood up together, while our thoughts, leaving our bodies behind, had already been running for a long time behind the rumbling clatter of its wains — too far away — the widely strewn astral rumble of those great and shining trails.
So, inwardly anticipating with half-closed eyes the night’s ever higher and higher bedazzlements, we walked under the rockets of its stars. Ah, that cynicism of the triumphant night! Having taken the whole sky into its possession, it now played dominoes on its expanses, indolently and without keeping scores, disinterestedly seizing victories in their millions. Then, bored, it traced transparent scrawls on a battlefield of upturned boards — smiling faces, continually one and the same smile in a thousand repetitions, which instantly passed — perpetual now — to the stars, and were strewn into the astral disinterestedness.
We went into a confectioner’s shop along our way, to buy pastries. Barely had we entered through the chiming glass door, into that white, iced interior full of glistening candies, when the night and all of its stars rose up straight away, suddenly attentive and vigilant, curious as to whether we might not slip away from it. It waited patiently for us the whole time, on guard at the door, its motionless stars shining from on high through the panes, while we, in deep reflection, chose our pastries. Then, for the first time, I saw Bianka. Standing in profile at the counter, beside her governess, she was slender and calligraphic in a white dress, as if she had stepped out of the zodiac. She did not turn around, standing in the faultless contrapposto pose of young girls, and she was eating a cream cake. I could not see her clearly, still bedazzled by streaks of starry zigzags. Thus it was that our still very confused horoscopes first crossed. They came together and separated disinterestedly. In that early astral alignment, we did not yet understand our fate, and, disinterestedly, we went out, chiming the glass door.
Then we returned home by a roundabout route through a far flung suburb. The houses grew ever more squat and ever more sparse, and finally the last ones parted before us and we entered a different climate. Suddenly we stepped into a gentle spring, a warm night silvered on the mud by the young and violet moon, only just risen. That late winter night sped on at a rapid pace, feverishly anticipating its late phases. The air, only just now seasoned with the usual pungency of that season, suddenly became sweet and sickly, full of the scent of rainwater, moist loam and the first of the night’s snowdrops blossoming out somnambulistically in a magical white light. It is a wonder that the night, beneath that generous moon, did not flood with frogspawn on the silver swamp, did not proliferate with progeny and was not garrulous with thousands of proboscides gossiping on those riverside gravel heaps, leaking a glistening net of sweet water the whole time. And one had to break off from speaking to discern that croaking in that night, grumbling and springwatered, full of subcutaneous shudders, suspended for a just moment, only to move on again — and the moon reached its zenith, whiter and whiter as if pouring its whiteness from one goblet to another, ever higher and ever more radiant, ever more magical and transcendental.
Thus we walked under the waxing gravitation of the moon. Father and the photographer carried me between them when my legs gave way in my overwhelming sleepiness. Our footsteps crunched in wet sand. I had already been sleeping for a long time while walking, and I already held all the phosphorescence of the sky beneath my eyelids, full of luminous signs, signals and astral phenomena, when at last we were standing in open countryside. Father laid me down on his overcoat, spread out on the ground. With closed eyes, I saw the sun, the moon and eleven stars as they arranged themselves into a parade in the sky, marching before me. ‘Bravo, Józef!’ Father cried out in acknowledgement, and clapped his hands. This was an obvious plagiarism, committed upon another Joseph and applied to different circumstances entirely. Nobody gave me any reproach for it. My father, Jakub, nodded his head and clicked his tongue, while the photographer spread his tripod on the sand, pulled out the bellows of his camera like an accordion, and submerged himself entirely in its folds of black cloth: he photographed that curious phenomenon, that glistening horoscope in the sky, while I, my head swimming in brilliance, lay dazzled on the overcoat and languidly held that dream up to exposition.
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