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, overlaid with enormous skies, still raw and without fragrance, leading through rough and open aerial spaces into pathless astral terrain, Father would take me to supper with him, at a little garden restaurant enclosed between the back walls of the last few houses on the market square.
We walked in the watery light of lanterns which rattled in gusts of wind, cutting across the great, vaulted market square — alone, and oppressed by 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 the astral gravel strewn over the shallows of its widely branching and diffuse whirls. Their irregular and countless condensations had not yet arranged themselves into any constellations — no figures governed those immense and barren flood waters. Whilst the sadness of those astral wastes hung over the town, down below the lanterns intertwined the night with pencil beams of light, binding them disinterestedly from crisscross to crisscross. Under those lanterns, passers-by lingered in twos and threes, in circles of light which created around them the transitory illusion of rooms lit by table lamps — in an uncaring and inhospitable night, disintegrating up above into irregular expanses, wild, wretched and homeless aerial landscapes, 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 roar of the stars, toward which all that night’s expanse was shooting 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, and gazed mindlessly at their glistening plates. Sitting there, they were inwardly calculating the moves and developments on the great black chessboard of the sky. They inwardly saw the jumping knights, the lost pieces among the stars, and the constellations that advanced immediately 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, the musicians would take them up and appraise them; they tuned them plaintively to the timbre of their own chests, which they tested by coughing. Then they set them aside once more, as if they were still unripe and did not measure up to that night, which flowed nonchalantly on. But suddenly, in the hush and the outflow of thoughts, while the knives and forks were clinking softly over the white-clothed tables, a solo violin struck up — prematurely developed and fully grown. So mournful and insecure only a moment ago, it now rose up eloquent, slender, drawn in at the waist; and it gave an account of its letters of attorney; it took up the momentarily postponed human cause; it went on contesting that lost trial before the disinterested tribunal of the stars, and in its midst a watery print was drawn of the f-holes and profiles of instruments, fragmentary keys, unfinished lyres and swans, an imitative, mindless astral commentary in the margin of the music.
The town photographer, who for some time now had been casting meaningful looks at us from a neighbouring table, joined us at last, transferrring his mug of beer to our table. He smiled evasively, wrestling 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. It had sunk into destitution, unable to meet its limitlessly growing debts to the night. For how could we oppose such abysmal wates? That night had cancelled out that human venture, that lost case that the violin had tried in vain 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, whilst our thoughts, having already left our bodies, were now running behind the rumbling clatter of its wains — too far away to be caught — the widely strewn astral rumble of those great and shining trails.
Thus we walked under the rockets of its stars, anticipating in our hearts, our eyes closed, the night’s ever higher and higher enthralments. Ah, that cynicism of the triumphant night! Having taken the whole sky into its possession, it now played dominoes on those expanses — indolently and without keeping scores, nonchalantly seizing victories in their millions. Then, growing 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 to the stars, and were strewn, perpetual now, amid astral indifference.
On our way, we entered a confectioner’s shop 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 at once, suddenly attentive and vigilant, curious as to whether we might not escape it. On guard at the door, it waited patiently for us the whole time, its motionless stars on high, shining through the panes, whilst we, in deep reflection, selected our pastries. That was when I first saw Bianka. Standing in profile at the counter, beside her governess, she was slender and calligraphic in a white dress, as if she had just stepped out of the zodiac. She did not turn around. Standing in a young girl’s faultless contrapposto pose, she was eating a cream cake. Still bedazzled by streaks of starry zigzags, I could not see her clearly. Thus it was that our still very confused horoscopes first crossed, first came together and disinterestedly separated. In that early astral alignment, we did not yet understand our fate, and we each went nonchalantly out, chiming the glass door.
We returned home by a roundabout route through a far flung suburb. The houses grew ever more squat and sparse, and finally the last houses parted before us and we entered a different climate. We had suddenly stepped into a gentle spring, a warm night, the light of its young and violet, only just risen moon shimmering on the mud. That late winter night sped on apace, feverishly anticipating its late phases. The air, seasoned only a moment ago with the usual pungency of that month, suddenly became sweet and sickly, full of the scent of rainwater, moist loam, and the first of the night’s snowdrops, blossoming somnambulistically out in a magical white light. It is a wonder that under that muneficent moon the night did not swarm with frogspawn on that silver swamp, or proliferate with progeny on those riverside gravel heaps, leaking incessantly from their glistening freshwater netting, or become garrulous with thousands of babbling proboscides. And some inventiveness was needed, a little guesswork, in order to catch the sound of that croaking in that grumbling, spring water night filled with subcutaneous shudders — suspended for a just moment, only to move on again, whilst the moon, growing whiter and whiter, as if pouring its whiteness from goblet to goblet, reached its zenith, higher and higher, and more radiant, ever more magical and transcendental.
We walked onward 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 asleep for a long time, walking, and I already held all the phosphorescence of the sky, full of luminous signs, signals and astral phenomena, under my closed eyelids — when at last we were standing in open countryside. Father laid me down on his overcoat, spread on the ground. With closed eyes, I saw the sun, the moon and eleven stars arrange themselves into a parade in the sky, marching before me. ‘Bravo, Józef!’ Father cried out in acknowledgement, and clapped his hands. This was a blatant plagiarism, committed against another Joseph, and applied to different circumstances entirely. But nobody gave me any reproach for it. My father, Jakub, nodded his head and clicked his tongue. The photographer spread his tripod on the sand, pulled out like an accordion the bellows of his camera, and submerged himself entirely in its folds of black cloth. And he photographed that curious phenomenon, that glistening horoscope in the sky, whilst I, my head swimming in brilliance, lay dazzled on the overcoat, and languidly held that dream up to exposition.
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