August

1

IN JULY my father went to take the waters, and he left me with my mother and older brother, prey to the glowing white and stunning days of summer. We browsed — stupefied by the light — through that great book of the holiday, in which every page was ablaze with splendour and had, deep inside, a sweetly dripping pulp of golden pears.
    Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona^* out of the fire of the enkindled day, tipping the sun’s colourful beauty from her basket — glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skin, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed what would be realised in their taste, and apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons. And alongside that pure poetry of fruits she unloaded slices of meat and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with energy and goodness, and algae of vegetables calling to mind slaughtered octopus and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner, its flavour still unformed and sterile — dinner’s vegetative and telluric ingredients with their wild and field aroma.
    Through a dark apartment on the first floor of a tenement on the market square, every day of that whole great summer, there passed: the silence of shimmering veins of air, end p.3 radiant squares dreaming their fervid dream on the floor, a barrel organ melody struck from the deepest golden vein of the day, and two or three measures of a refrain played over and over again on a grand piano somewhere, swooning in the sunshine on the white pavements, lost in the fire of the deep day. Her housework done, Adela threw a shadow over the rooms, drawing the linen blinds closed. Then the colours deepened by an octave; the sitting room filled up with darkness as if plunged into the luminosity of the sea’s depths, still dimly reflected in mirrors of green, while all the day’s torrid heat breathed on the blinds, swaying gently to the reveries of the midday hour.
    On Saturday afternoons I would go with Mother for a stroll. From the duskiness of the hallway we stepped straight out into the sunbath of the day. Passers-by, wading in gold, squinted in the glare as if their eyes were glued with honey; their drawn back upper lips bared their teeth and gums. And everyone wading through that golden day wore that same sweltered grimace, the golden mask of a solar cult, as if the sun had bestowed the same mask upon all of its disciples. And everyone walking along the streets that day, who met or passed each other by, young or old, every man, woman and child, hailed one another with that mask as they went, with gold paint daubed thickly on their faces — they grinned back and forth that bacchanalian grimace — a barbarian mask of pagan worship.
    The market square was empty and yellowed by the heat, swept clean by hot winds, like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias springing up from the emptiness of the yellow square frothed above it with their shining foliage, their bouquets of graciously gesturing green filigrees, like trees on old tapestries. Those trees seemed to be affecting a gale, theatrically twirling their crowns in order to show off by their pompous gesticulations the courtliness of the leafy fans end p.4 of their silvered abdomens, like noblemen’s fox pelts. The old houses, burnished by the winds of many days, were tinged with reflections of the vast atmosphere, echoes and reminiscences of hues diffused deep within the coloured weather. It seemed that whole generations of summer days (like patient stucco workers scrubbing the mouldy plaster from old façades) had worn away a fallacious varnish, eliciting more distinctly day by day the true aspects of the houses, a physiognomy of the fortunes and life which formed them from within. The windows fell asleep, blinded by the radiance of the empty square; the balconies confessed their emptiness to the sky; open hallways were fragrant with coolness and wine.
    A few ragamuffins, sheltering in a corner of the market square from the fiery broom of the heat, were beleaguering a stretch of a wall, testing it over and over again with throws of buttons and coins, as if the true mystery of the wall, inscribed with hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks, might be divined in the horoscope of those metal discs. Otherwise, the market square was empty. The good Samaritan’s donkey might arrive at any moment, led on by the bridle in the shade of the swaying acacias, at that vaulted entrance with the wine barrels before it, and two attendants would carefully lift the stricken man down from its burning saddle, to carry him gently inside and up the cool stairway to the storey which was exuding the aromas of a Sabbath meal.
    Mother and I strolled onward, along the two sunlit edges of the market square, casting our crooked shadows over all the houses as if along a keyboard. The paving stones fell steadily past under our weightless, flat footsteps — some of them pale pink like human skin, others golden or greenish-blue, all of them level, warm and velvety in the sunshine, like various kinds of sundial trodden underfoot beyond all recognition, to blessed nothingness. end p.5
    And finally, at the corner of ulica Stryjska^**, we stepped into the shadow of the chemist’s shop. An enormous jar of raspberry juice in the chemist’s spacious window symbolised the coolness of the balsams there, by which any suffering might be assuaged. And after a few houses more, the street could no longer uphold municipal decorum, like a peasant returning to his native village who casts off his stylish town attire on the road, slowly turning into a country vagabond again, the nearer he approaches home.
    The suburban cottages were sinking, windows and all, subsided within the lush and tangled efflorescence of their tiny gardens. Overlooked by the magnificent day, all kinds of herb, flower and weed luxuriantly and quietly proliferated, delighting in that pause in which they could dream beyond the margin of time, on the outskirts of the unending day. An enormous sunflower, hoisted aloft on its huge stem and stricken with elephantiasis, stooping under the hypertrophy of its monstrous corpulence, awaited in yellow mourning its sad, final days of life. But the naïve suburban campanulas and unsophisticated cotton print flowerlets stood helplessly by in their starched little pink and white camisoles, without sympathy for the sunflower’s great tragedy.

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Notes

* Pomona: in Roman mythology, the domestic goddess presiding over fruit trees; Thomas Bulfinch in Age of Fable describes her as follows:

No one excelled her in love of the garden and the culture of fruit. She cared not for forests and rivers, but loved the cultivated country, and trees that bear delicious apples. Her right hand bore for its weapon not a javelin, but a pruning-knife. Armed with this, she busied herself at one time to repress the too luxuriant growths: and curtail the branches that straggled out of place; at another, to split the twig and insert therein a graft, making the branch adopt a nursling not its own. She took care, too, that her favourites should not suffer from drought, and led streams of water by them, that the thirsty roots might drink. This occupation was her pursuit, her passion; and she was free from that which Venus inspires.

She had, nonetheless, many suitors, including Fauns and Satyrs, Sylvanus, and Pan. Her love was finally won by Vertumnus, who sought her company in various disguises, gaining her trust at last in the guise of an old woman, who was of course eager to sing the praises of a certain Vertumnus.
The British Hallowe’en tradition of ‘bobbing for apples’ derives from the addition of features from the Roman conquerors’ harvest festival, held on November 1st in honour of Pomona, to the local celebrations. [RETURN]

** Ulica Stryjska: a street in Schulz’s hometown of Drohobycz, quite possibly the street described in the story ‘Ulica Krokodyli’. [RETURN]

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