Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
Ulica Krokodyli
IN THE BOTTOM DRAWER of his fathomless desk, my father kept an old and beautiful map of our town.
This was a whole in-folio volume of parchment sheets, bound at one time with linen strips, which unfolded into an enormous wall map in the form of a panorama in bird’s-eye perspective.
Hung on the wall, it stretched almost to the full length of the room, and opened a distant view onto the entire valley of the Tyśmienica—a ribbon of pale gold weaving its tortuous way—onto a whole lake-land of widely scattered marshes and ponds, folding forelands drawing to the south, sporadically at first and then in ever more gathering layers, a chessboard of curved hills, smaller and paler the further they sank into the golden and smoky mist of the horizon. Out of that sagging, distant periphery our town came into view and rose to the fore, at first in complexes still undifferentiated, compacted blocks and clusters of houses cleft by deep ravines of streets. But looming closer, they separated into individual tenements, etched with the sharp distinctness of views seen through a telescope. The engraver had elicited in those finer details all the embroiled and manifold turmoil of the streets and alleys, the sharp distinctness of their mouldings, architraves, archivolts and pilasters, shining in the late and dark gilding of an overcast afternoon, which plunged all of their curves and recesses into a deep sepia of shadow. The blocks and prisms of that shadow cut like dark honeycombs into the ravines of the streets, submerging a whole side of a street here, a gap between the houses there in their warm, juicy mass—those shadows dramatised and orchestrated with gloomy Romanticism that manifold architectural polyphony.
On that plan, executed in the style of baroque panoramas, the region of ulica Krokodyli shone in empty white, as the Polar Regions are usually indicated on geographical charts, countries inscrutable and of uncertain existence. Only the lines of a few streets were drawn there, with black strokes, and afforded their names in plain, unembellished script, in contrast to the noble antiqua of the other legends. Apparently, the cartographer had been hesitant to acknowledge that district’s affiliation with the collective body of the town, and his reluctance showed in that contrastive and slighting treatment.
To understand that reserve, we must now turn our attention to the ambiguous and dubious character of that district, so very much at odds with the fundamental tone of the whole town.
It was an industrial and commercial district, with a glaringly emphatic character of sober utilitarianism. The spirit of the times, the economic mechanism, had not spared even our town; it had taken root in a patch of its periphery, where it had developed into a parasitical quarter.
Whilst an unlicensed, solemn and ceremonious nocturnal trade still held sway in the old town, in that new district modern and sober forms of commercialism had sprung up in a trice. Pseudo-Americanism, implanted in the musty old ground of the town, had shot up there, a lush but empty and colourless vegetation of shabby, paltry pretentiousness. Cheap, poorly constructed tenements were to be seen, their grotesque façades pasted over with monstrous stucco-work of cracked plaster. The old and ramshackle suburban houses had hastily acquired botched porticos, which were unmasked only on closer inspection as poor imitations of big city features. Their shaky, dim and dirty panes, fracturing the darkly mirrored street into wavy reflections, the unplaned wood of their entrances and the grey atmosphere of their barren interiors, with tufts of dust and cobweb settling on their high shelves and along their tattered and crumbling walls—had impressed on the shops there the stamp of a wild Klondike. And so, one after the other had come tailors’ emporiums, ready-made clothiers’ shops, china shops, chemists’ shops and barbers’ shops. Their great, grey display windows bore inscriptions of artistic gilt lettering, flowing obliquely or in a semicircle: CONFISERIE, MANUCURE, KING OF ENGLAND.
Natives of the town kept their distance from that region. They lived apart from the dregs, the rabble, the characterless wretches, away from the downright moral squalor and that tawdry variant of man that is born in such ephemeral environments. But on fallen days, times of base temptation, one or two of the inhabitants of the town might happen to stray, half by chance, into that dubious district. Occasionally even the best of them were not insusceptible to the temptation of wilful degradation, the levelling of barriers and hierarchy, of wallowing in that shallow mud of society, its easy intimacy and its grimy hubbub. That district was an El Dorado for such moral deserters, fugitives who had forsaken the banner of propriety. Everything there appeared dubious and ambiguous; everything beckoned with a secret wink, a cynically articulated gesture and a solicitous, suggestively narrowed eye—toward impure hopes. Everything there liberated base nature from its fetters.
Few had the detachment to notice an odd peculiarity of the district—its lack of hues, as if colours were a luxury unaffordable in that shabby town sprung up in haste. Everything there had the greyness of monochrome photographs or illustrated catalogues. And that resemblance went beyond an ordinary metaphor, for occasionally, wandering about that part of town, one really seemed to be browsing through the boring advertising sections of some catalogue, where suspect announcements, indecent notices, and dubious illustrations had parasitically nested. And those wanderings, furthermore, were barren and profitless, like the excitation of a fantasy provoked by the proofs and galleys of pornographic publications.
One might enter a tailor’s shop to order a suit, a suit of the cheap stylishness so typical of this district. The premises would be vast and empty, lofty and colourless. Many storeys of enormous shelves would tower one after the other into the indistinct heights of that hall. Those tiers of empty shelves led one’s eye up to the ceiling, a ceiling that might be the sky, the paltry, colourless and dilapidated sky of this district. Storerooms further off, moreover, visible through an open door, would be crammed to their ceilings with boxes and crates, heaped up into an enormous card index—which fell apart in the heights, beneath the jumbled sky of the attic, in the cubature of its vacancy, the empty timbers of its nothingness.
No light comes in through the great, grey windows, cross-ruled many times over like sheets of chancellery paper, and an indifferent, faint grey light fills the expanse of the shop like water, casting no shade and accentuating nothing. Presently, some slim youth appears, astoundingly servile, compliant and amenable, to indulge our desires and swamp us with his shop assistant’s cheap and easy eloquence. But as he chatters and unwinds enormous rolls of cloth, as he folds, arranges and tries on the unending stream of material flowing through his hands, its waves forming illusory overcoats and trousers, all that manipulation appears to be something inessential, an appearance or a comedy, a veil flung ironically over the true meaning of affairs.
Salesgirls come and go, slender and black, each with some blemish in her beauty (appropriate in this district of faulty goods), and they stand in the doorway leading to the storerooms, their eyes inquisitive as to whether a certain deal (entrusted to the experienced hands of the shop assistant) is being brought to a close. The shop assistant wheedles and minces, and occasionally has the air of a transvestite. One wants to squeeze him under his soft, weak chin, or pinch his pale, powdered cheek when he discretely, with a knowing half-glance, calls our attention to a trademark, a label of transparent symbolism.
The matter of choosing a suit gradually gives way to a new proposal. Full of sympathy for his client’s most intimate stirrings, that debauched and effeminately limp youth now passes curious trademarks before his eyes, a whole library of trademarks, a room housing a sophisticated connoisseur’s collection. It is now apparent that the ready-made clothier’s shop is merely a façade, behind which is concealed a shop dealing in out-of-print books, an assortment of highly ambiguous publishing houses and private editions. The servile shop assistant opens up further emporiums, crammed to the ceiling with books, drawings and photographs. These vignettes and drawings surpass a hundredfold our boldest dreams. Never have we envisaged such culminations of debauchery, such ingenuities of immoderation.
The salesgirls slip with increasing rapidity between the rows of books—grey and parchmentlike, yet full of dark pigment in their debauched faces, the dark pigment of brunettes, a glistening greasy blackness which lurks in their eyes, and then suddenly darts out of them along a sleeking, zigzag cockroach path. But also in their scorched blushes, in the piquant stigmata of their beauty-spots and their shy indications of dark down, they disclose their breed of black, clotted blood. That colouring, with its too intense force, that dense and aromatic mocha, appears to smear the books they take into their olivaceous hands. Their touch seems to tinge them and leave a dark rainfall of freckles in the air, a streak of snuff like the rousing, bestial aroma of a puff-ball. Meanwhile, the general profligacy has been breaking more and more free of the restrictions of appearances. The shop assistant, having exhausted his insistent endeavour, has slowly succumbed to feminine listlessness. In silk pyjamas, displaying a woman’s décolletage, he now lies on one of many sofas dispersed among the regions of books. Some of the salesgirls, taking turns, re-enact figures and positions from the book-cover illustrations; others go to sleep on makeshift beds. The pressure on the client has eased. He is released from the encirclement of insistent dealing, and left to his own devices. The salesgirls, busy with their conversations, pay no further attention to him. Turning away or aside from him, they strike an arrogant contrapposto pose, shifting their weight from foot to foot, flaunting their coquettish footwear. They allow a snaking play of their limbs to pass from top to bottom along their slender bodies—in this way taunting the aroused onlooker from the safety of their nonchalant irresponsibility, whilst at the same time ignoring him. Thus they withdraw, and slip calculatedly into the depths, leaving their guest to do as he pleases. Let us take advantage of that unguarded moment, sneak away from the unforeseen consequences of that innocent visit, and escape into the street.
No one detains us. Through the corridors of books, between the long shelves of periodicals and prints, we emerge from the shop. And here we are at that part of ulica Krokodyli where, from its highest vantage point, one can see almost the whole length of that broad highway, all the way down to the distant, unfinished railway station buildings. It is a grey day, as it always is here, and for a moment the entire vista seems no more than a photograph from an illustrated newspaper, so flat and grey are the houses, people and carriages. That reality is paper-thin, and betrays its imitativeness in every chink. One occasionally has the impression that only upon the tiny patch before one’s eyes does everything arrange itself appropriately into that pointillist image of big city boulevards, whereas to the sides, that improvised masquerade has come undone and is unravelling, and unable to persevere in its role, is falling to pieces above us into plaster and oakum, into the lumber room of some enormous empty theatre. Tense poses shudder on that outer skin, the artificial solemnity of masks and ironic pathos. But far be it from me to want to unmask the spectacle. Despite my better judgement, I too am drawn to the tawdry charm of this district. And besides, even certain traits of self-parody are not lacking in the town’s aspect. Rows of small suburban houses alternate with tenements of many storeys, seeming to be made of cardboard, a conglomeration of sign-boards, blank office windows, grey display windows, advertisements and other ruses. The river of a crowd flows between the houses; the street is as wide as a city boulevard, although it is only a walkway of trodden down mud, full of pot-holes, puddles and grass, like a village square. The street traffic of the district is a byword in the town, which the locals speak of with pride, a knowing glint in their eyes. That grey and impersonal crowd is most earnest in its role, full of zeal for flaunting its imitation of a big city. But in spite of all the preoccupation and enterprise, one merely has the impression of the erratic, monotonous and aimless wanderings of a sleepy pageant of marionettes. An atmosphere of strange triviality pervades the whole scene. The crowd moves ploddingly on, and strangely, is never more than indistinctly visible. Figures flow in a docile, tangled commotion, not quite coming into clear focus. At times we might just catch, in that hubbub of many heads, some dark, lively look, a black bowler hat pulled down low over a head, a face seen in profile, rent into a smile, the lips having only just spoken, or some leg, put out to take a step, and rigidified now and for ever.
Driverless droshkies are a speciality of the district, racing about the streets on their own. It is not that there are no droshky drivers here, but mingling with the crowd, and occupied with their thousand different affairs, they don’t care about their carriages. In any case, it hardly matters in this district of semblance and the empty gesture where one’s ride eventually ends, and the passengers subject themselves to those erratic carriages with the same recklessness that characterises everything here. Occasionally, one sees them at dangerous bends, leaning far out of the crooked carriage hoods as they execute with considerable effort, taking the reins into their own hands, the tricky manœuvre of overtaking.
We also have trams in this district, and in these the town councillors’ ambition displays its highest triumph. But the sight of those wagons is lamentable, made of papier-mâché, their sides battered and crumpled after many long years of use. Often they have no front end whatsoever, and the passengers can be seen as they go by, sitting stiffly and bearing themselves with great dignity. Those trams are pushed along by municipal porters. But strangest of all is the railway system on ulica Krokodyli.
Sometimes, at irregular hours of the day, somewhere toward the end of the week, one might catch sight of a crowd of people waiting at a street corner for a train. They are never sure that it will arrive, or where it might stop. Often, they wait in two different places, unable to agree among themselves where the stand is actually located. Standing in a black, taciturn crowd along the barely perceptible traces of the track, they wait for a long time, their faces in profile like a row of pale, paper masks, drawn out into a fantastic line of contemplation.
And finally, unexpectedly, it arrives. It emerges from that side street where it was looked for, as low as a snake, a miniature train with a squat, chugging little locomotive. It pulls into that black lane, and its wagons, scattering coal dust, darken the street. The dark chugging of the locomotive, a breeze of strange solemnity, filled with sadness, and the subdued flurry and excitement—for a moment, it all transforms the street into the hall of a railway station in the rapidly falling winter dusk.
Bribery and a street trade in railway tickets are a plague of our town.
At the last moment, as the train is standing at the station, hurried entreaties are made to corrupt officials of the railway service. Before these negotiations are concluded, the train moves off, pursued by the slowly moving, disappointed crowd, who follow it far down the street, finally to disperse.
The street, narrowed for a moment into that improvised railway station, all twilight and a hint of distant travels, brightens up again, widens, and once more allows a carefree, plodding crowd of pedestrians along its walkway, who wander in a cloud of gossip past its shop displays—dirty, grey quadrants filled with shoddy goods, great waxen mannequins, and barbers’ dolls.
Prostitutes pass through, provocatively attired in long, lacy dresses. They walk with long, predacious strides, notwithstanding that they might be the wives of barbers or restaurant bandleaders. And in each of their impish and debauched faces there is a trifling blemish, which negates them—they have a squint, a black eye, a crossed walleye, or a harelip, or the tip of their nose is missing.
The inhabitants of the town are proud of the odour of debauchery which pervades ulica Krokodyli. We needn’t deny ourselves anything, they think with pride. We too can afford genuine big city licentiousness. They maintain that every woman in this district is a coquette. And in fact, one need only turn one’s attention to one of them, and immediately one meets with that obstinate, cloying look that chills us with pleasurable assurance. Even the schoolgirls here tie their ribbons in a certain characteristic way. They comport their slender legs in a certain manner, and in their glance there is that impure flaw in which lies, preformed, their future debauchery.
And yet—and yet, am I to betray the ultimate mystery of this district, the carefully concealed secret of ulica Krokodyli?
Several times in the course of my account, I have given certain warning signs. I have, in a delicate way, given expression to my reservations. The attentive reader will not be unprepared for this conclusive turn of affairs. I refer to the imitative, illusory nature of the district—but such terms are too definitive, too explicit in their meanings to delineate the incomplete and undecided character of its reality.
Our language possesses no epithets fine enough to weigh, as it were, the degrees of its reality, to estimate its capriciousness. Let me say it bluntly: the tragedy of this district is that nothing here is ever brought to completion—nothing transcends its definitivum. All movements, once begun, hang in the air. All gestures are prematurely exhausted and cannot proceed beyond a certain deadlock. We can now appreciate its great luxuriance and prodigality—in the intentions, the projects and anticipations that characterise this district. It is all nothing more than a fermentation of desires, prematurely luxuriant and therefore impotent and empty. Every merest whim germinates here, in this atmosphere of inordinate facility. Every fleeting tension swells and grows into an empty, puffed out excrescence, a rapidly shot up, flimsy and grey vegetation of downy weeds—colourless, shaggy poppy heads composed of a weightless tissue of illusion and hashish. A languid and profligate aura of sin rises over the whole district, and the houses, shops and people sometimes seem only a shudder on its fervid body, the gooseflesh of its feverish reveries. Nowhere so much as here do we feel so threatened by possibilities, so shocked at the approach of fulfilment, scared pale and stiff by the pleasurable fear of realisation. But it ends there.
Having gone beyond a certain point of tension, the tide ebbs and turns back. The atmosphere dies away and dissipates. Possibilities shrivel and crumble into nothingness. The crazy grey poppies of excitation scatter into ashes.
We shall eternally regret having stepped, if only for a moment, outside the ready-made clothier’s shop of dubious repute. We can never find our way back to it now. We will blunder from sign board to sign board, and be mistaken hundreds of times. We will visit dozens of storerooms, even finding some quite similar. We will wander through lanes of books. We will browse through periodicals and prints. We will confer at length and convolutedly with salesgirls of excessive pigment and tainted beauty, who are unable to comprehend our wishes.
In our unavailing pursuit, we will become embroiled in misunderstandings, until our fruitless effort entirely dissipates our excitement and arousal.
Our hopes were a misconception, the ambiguous appearance of the premises and its employees a semblance. The ready-made clothier’s shop was only selling off-the-peg suits; the shop assistant had no ulterior motives. The domain of the women on ulica Krokodyli exhibits a really quite mediocre debauchery, steeped in thick layers of moral misconception and banal vulgarity. In this town of cheap human material, the exuberance of instinct is lacking, the dark and unusual passions.
Ulica Krokodyli was our town’s concession to modernity and big city debauchery. Apparently, we could afford nothing better than a paper imitation, a photomontage made up of cuttings from last year’s mouldered newspapers.