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A TANGLED clump of grass, weeds and thistles crackles in the afternoon fire. A garden’s afternoon doze resounds with a swarm of flies. A golden stubble field screams in the sunshine like red locusts; crickets cry out in the torrential rainfall of fire. Seed pods quietly explode, like grasshoppers.
Over by a fence, a sheepskin of grass rose up into a rounded hummock-mound, as if the garden had turned over onto its other side in its sleep and its broad, peasant shoulders were breathing the silence of the earth. On those shoulders of the garden, August’s unkempt and harridan luxuriance had expanded into silent hollows of enormous burdocks, holding sway with their flaps of shaggy, leafy tin plate, straggling tongues of fleshy green. Those distended rag dolls of burdocks abounded there like expansively settled hags, half devoured by their own crazy skirts. There, the garden was selling off at no extra cost its cheapest pellets of wild lilac, stinking soap, thick plantain gruel, a wild aqua vitae of mint, and all the worst of August’s rubbish. But on the other side of the fence, beyond that summer lair where a stupidity of idiotic weeds grew, there was a rubbish heap, overgrown wildly with musk thistle. No one knew that August was holding its great pagan orgy right there that year. On that rubbish heap, leaning against the fence and overgrown with wild lilac, stood the bed of Tłuja, the idiot girl. That is what we all called her. On top of that heap of debris and waste, old pots, shoes, rubble and dirt, stood her green painted bed, supported by two old bricks in place of a missing leg.
The air above that rubble—run wild in the heat and shot through with lightning flashes of glistening, sun-crazed horseflies—crackled as if with the shaking of invisible rattle-boxes, exasperating to the point of madness.
Tłuja squats amid her yellow blankets and rags. Her huge head bristles with a shock of black hair. Her face is as contractile as the bellows of an accordion—once or twice, a grimace of anguish folds that accordion into a thousand transverse pleats, but bewilderment soon stretches it back, smoothes out the folds, and reveals the chinks of her tiny eyes and the moist gums and yellowed teeth behind her snoutlike, fleshy lips. Hours pass, filled with heat and boredom, whilst Tłuja babbles in an undertone, dozes, grumbles quietly, and coughs. A dense swarm of flies covers the slumberer. But all at once that entire heap of dirty rags, tatters and shreds begins to move, as if brought to life by the scratching of a litter of rats newly born inside it. The flies awaken, startled, and rise up in a great resounding swarm, full of furious buzzing, flashes and flickers. And as the rags fall to the ground and scatter like startled rats over the rubbish heap, the nucleus extricates itself and slowly unwinds—the core of the rubbish heap is unpeeled. The half-naked and sombre idiot pulls herself slowly to her feet, and stands looking like a pagan goddess on stunted, puerile legs. And from her throat, swollen by a surge of fury, from her face, reddening and darkening with rage, where arabesques of distended veins effloresce like a barbarian painting—she lets out a shriek, a hoarse, animal shriek torn from every bronchus and pipe in that half-beast, half-goddess breast. The thistles scream, charred by the sun; the burdocks swell and parade their shameless flesh; the weeds drool their shiny poison—and the idiot, hoarse from shrieking, in convulsions of wild impatience, strikes with her fleshy bosom the trunk of an elder tree, which creaks softly at the insistence of that licentious lust, exhorted by that whole beggar-woman chorus to degenerate pagan fecundity.
Tłuja’s mother hired herself out to housewives, to scrub their floors. She was a small woman and as yellow as saffron, and with saffron she seasoned the floors, pine tables, benches and banisters that she cleaned in poor people’s quarters. Adela once took me to that old Maryśka’s house. It was early in the morning. We entered a blue-washed little room with a floor of trodden down earth and straw, where the early sunshine fell glaringly yellow in the silence of a morning measured out by the strident clanging of a country clock on the wall. In a crate of straw lay stupid Maryśka, as pale as a wafer and as still as a glove from which the hand has been withdrawn. And as if taking advantage of her repose, the silence prattled—the yellow, glaring and malevolent silence soliloquised; it disputed; it proclaimed in a loud and vulgar manner its maniacal monologue. Maryśka’s time, the time locked up in her soul, flowed out of her and ran riot about the room—frighteningly real, noisy, knocking and infernal, rising up in the glaring silence of the morning like bad flour from the loud, grinding-mill clock—friable flour, the stupid flour of the insane.
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