Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
A Night of the High Season
EVERYONE KNOWS that in the course of ordinary, normal years, whimsical time will occasionally bring forth from its womb other years—odd years, degenerate years—somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger on a hand, there sprouts up a spurious thirteenth month.
I call it spurious, for rarely will it grow to full size. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development—a hunchback month, a half-wilted offshoot, and more conjectured than real.
The aged intemperance of summer is to blame for it, its licentious, belated vitality. It often happens that August has already gone by, and yet by force of habit summer’s thick old stem continues to burgeon, and from its touchwood it pushes out those wilding-days, those barren and idiotic weed-days. And for good measure it throws in cabbage-stump days at no extra cost—empty and inedible, white, bewildered and unnecessary days.
They sprout up, irregular and misshapen, unformed and fused together like the fingers of a monstrous hand, budding, and coiled up into a fist.
Others liken those days to apocrypha, slipped in furtively between the chapters of the great book of the year, to palimpsests secretly inserted among its pages, or to those white, unprinted sheets where one’s eyes, having read their fill and replete with content, might be steeped in visions, relinquishing all colours, paler and paler, on those empty pages, reposing on their nothingness before being drawn into the labyrinths of new adventures and chapters.
Ah, that old, yellowed romance of the year, that great crumbling book of the calendar! It lies forgotten, somewhere in the archives of time, where its contents continue to grow between the covers, endlessly swollen by months of garrulousness, a rapid autogeny of gibberish, all the storytelling and reveries that multiply within it. Ah, and in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these tales of my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that some day they will strike root imperceptibly between the faded leaves of that most magnificent, scattering book, that they will fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?
The events which I am here about to relate took place then, in the thirteenth, supernumerary and rather spurious month of that year, on those dozen or so empty pages of the great chronicle of the calendar.
The mornings were strangely pungent and invigorating then. From the serene and cooler pace of time, from an entirely new taste in the air and a change in the consistency of the light, it was plain to see that an entirely different run of days had been arrived at, a new region of the Holy Year. Under those skies, one’s voice resonated with the sonorousness and freshness of a still new and unoccupied apartment, with its aroma of lacquer and paint, incipient and speculative matters. That new echo was tested with a feeling of strangeness, sliced with curiosity, like a ring cake on some cool and sober morning, on the eve of a journey.
My father was sitting once more in the back office of the shop, a vaulted little chamber crisscrossed like a beehive into multi-cellular registries, endlessly shedding its layers of papers, letters and invoices. The cross-ruled and empty existence of that room sprang from the rustling of those pages, the endless shuffling of those documents. From the incessant sifting of those letters, with their innumerous company headings, an apotheosis was created in the air in the form of a factory town as birds in flight see it, bristling with smoking chimneys, surrounded by stacks of coins, its limits described by the flourishes and meanderings of grandiloquent &s and Sons. And there sat Father, on a high stool as if in an aviary, whilst the dovecotes of the filing cabinets rustled their paper sheaves, and all of their birds’ nests and tree-hollows rang throughout with a twittering of numbers.
Every day, the depths of the great shop were darkened and enriched by new supplies of cloth, serge, velvet and cord. On those dark shelves, those storehouses and repositories of cool, felty hues, the dark, mellow pageantry of things yielded its hundredfold interest, and autumn’s abundant capital was increased and consolidated. That capital grew larger and darker there, and was distributed ever more widely on the shelves as if in the galleries of some great theatre, replenished and supplemented each morning with new consignments of merchandise, carried in by the crate load on the great, bearlike shoulders of groaning, bearded porters, along with the cool of the dawn, in mists of autumn freshness and vodka. The shop assistants unpacked those new supplies of lavish deep-blue hues, and filled with them, carefully plugged with them all the chinks and gaps in the tall cupboards. It was a colossal register of all possible autumnal hues, ordered into layers and sorted into shades, running up and down as if on a ringing flight of stairs, a scale of all multi-coloured octaves. It began at the bottom, where it plaintively and timidly ventured alto slides and semitones; it passed on to tapestry azures, the faded ashen hues of the distance, and then, rising to the heights in ever broader harmonies, it arrived at deep royal blues, the indigo of faraway forests, the plush of murmuring parks, and from there it entered the rustling shade of wilting gardens, through all of their ochres, deep reds, russets and sepias, to arrive at last at the dark aroma of mushrooms, a waft of touchwood in the depths of an autumn night, to the muted accompaniment of the deepest double basses.
My father walked along those arsenals of the cloth autumn; he placated and silenced those heaps and their rising force, the calm power of the Season. He wanted to keep intact for as long as possible those reserves of stowed-away hues; he was afraid to break up and exchange for ready cash that fund of the autumn. But he knew, he sensed, that the time was at hand, and that soon an autumn gale, ravaging and warm, would blow over those cupboards, and they would empty. There would be no restraining their outflow—those torrents of colourfulness about to burst over the whole town.
For the time of the High Season was approaching, and the streets were growing busy. At six o-clock in the evening the town blossomed with fervour. The houses blushed, and the people wandered, animated by some inner fire, glaringly made up and painted, their eyes shining with some festive, beautiful and evil fever.
In the side streets, in quiet alleyways now leading only into an evening district, the town was empty. Only children were playing on the little squares, under their balconies. They played breathlessly, raucously and nonsensically. They put tiny balloons to their lips, to inflate them and suddenly, glaringly, scowl themselves into great gurgling, swashing excrescences, or else to cock-a-doodle-doo themselves into stupid, red and crowing cockerel masks, autumn apparitions, coloured, fantastic and absurd. So puffed up and crowing, they seemed about to soar into the air in long, coloured chains, to be strung over the town like autumn ‘V’ formations of birds, fantastic flotillas of tissue-paper and autumnal weather. Or else they rode, screaming, on noisy little carts, which resounded with the coloured rattling of their wheels, spokes and poles. Loaded up with their screams, those carts rolled to the bottom of the street, all the way down to a yellow evening brook surging in a crevice, where they fell to pieces in a wreckage of splinters, wheels and sticks.
And as the children’s games became ever noisier and more confused, the town’s blushes deepened and were flushed with crimson. The whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken, and an hallucinatory twilight rapidly seeped out and infected everything. That pestilence of the twilight spread everywhere; it passed insidiously and venomously from place to place, and whatever it touched quickly mouldered, blackened, and crumbled into dust. The people fled in silent panic from the twilight, but that leprosy caught up with them at once, breaking out in a dark rash on their foreheads; and their faces were lost, falling away in great, shapeless smears, whilst they ran on, without features now, without eyes, casting off mask after mask on their way, until the twilight teemed with discarded masks and dominoes, tumbling in the wake of their flight. Then everything began to develop a patina of putrefying black bark, infected scabs of darkness peeling away in great flakes. And as everything down below fell into confusion and ruin in that quiet turmoil, in the panic of its hasty schedule—the silent alarum of sunset remained up above, rising ever higher, trembling with the tinkling of a million quiet bluebells, surging with the ascent of a million quiet skylarks, all flying together into one great silver infinity. And suddenly, it was night-time—holy night, the gusts of wind that swelled it still gathering strength. In its multifarious labyrinth, bright nests were carved out—shops, great coloured lanterns, heaped up with merchandise and filled with the bustling of customers. Through the bright panes of those lanterns one could observe the ritual of autumn shopping, noisy and full of bizarre ceremony.
In its dark folds, that great voluminous autumn night—dilated by the wind, its shadows lengthening—concealed bright pockets, pouches of coloured trinkets, gaudy merchandise, a grocer’s shop miscellany of chocolates and biscuits. Those kiosks and stalls—botched from confectionery boxes, gaudily wallpapered with advertisements for chocolate bars, filled with tablets of soap, cheerful rubbish, golden trifles, tinfoil and trumpets, wafers and coloured mints—were stations of frivolity, rattle-boxes of blitheness, strewn along the creepers of an enormous, labyrinthine night flapping in the wind.
Huge dark crowds flowed in noisy confusion in the darkness—the shuffling of a thousand feet, the hubbub of a thousand mouths, a teeming, tangled migration dragging along the arteries of the autumnal town. And that river flowed on, full of hubbub and dark looks, broken into conversations and shreds of gossip, a great pulp of rumours, laughter and tumult. It seemed as if dried autumnal poppy heads were moving in a crowd, scattering their seeds—rattlebox-heads, doorknocker-people.
My father, restless and coloured by blushes, his eyes shining, wandered about the brightly lit shop, intently listening.
Through the display window and the doorway, the noise of the town, the muffled hubbub of the flowing throng, reached us from afar. A paraffin lamp shone brightly above the silence of the shop, dangling from its great vault, and chased every last trace of shadow from every nook and cranny. In its light, the great empty floor crackled in the silence. It added up, down and across, all of its shining squares, a chessboard of great tiles, which spoke to one another in a silence of crackles, and replied, now here, now there, with a loud crack. But the layers of cloth lay quiet, voiceless in their felty downiness, passing looks back and forth, all along the walls, behind Father’s back, exchanging quiet, knowing signs from one cupboard to the next.
Father listened. His ears seemed to grow elongated in that nocturnal silence, to branch out beyond the window like a fantastic coral, an undulating red polyp in the sediment of the night. He listened and he heard. He heard with growing unease the distant tide of the approaching crowd. He looked about the empty shop in dismay. He was searching for the shop assistants, but those dark, red-haired angels had flown away somewhere. He was left all alone, in fear of the crowd that soon would swamp the silence of the shop in a raucous, plundering multitude, and divide it among themselves, auction off all that rich autumn gathered over the years in its great secluded storehouse.
Where were the shop assistants? Where were those handsome cherubs who must defend the dark cloth ramparts? Father had the awful suspicion that somewhere deep inside the house they were sinning with the daughters of men. Standing motionless, filled with foreboding, his eyes shining in the bright silence of the shop, he heard with his inner ear what was going on deep inside the house, in the rear chambers of that great coloured lantern. Room after room, chamber after chamber, the house opened up before him, like a house of cards, and he saw how the shop assistants pursued Adela upstairs and downstairs, through all the empty, brightly lit rooms, until at last she gave them the slip and fell into the bright kitchen, where she barricaded herself behind a dresser. She stood breathless, shiny and amused, smiling and fluttering her great eyelashes. The shop assistants giggled, crouching at the door. The kitchen window, its black, half open panes ablaze with a reflex of distant illumination, opened onto a great black night full of reveries and confusion. Here and about, shining pots and demijohns stood, their greasy glaze gleaming in the silence. Adela, her eyelids fluttering, cautiously leaned her coloured, rouged face out of the window—she was looking in the dark courtyard for the shop assistants, certain of their ambush. And she saw them, cautiously making their way in single file along a narrow ledge at first-floor level, along a wall red in a glow of distant illumination, stealing up to the window. Father shrieked with fury and despair. But at that moment the hubbub of voices drew very near, and the shop’s bright window was populated by faces—faces up close and contorted with laughter, garrulous faces, flattening their noses onto the glistening panes. Father turned scarlet with distress, and leaped onto the counter. And when the crowd stormed that fortress, when the raucous throng invaded the shop, my father leaped in a single bound onto a shelf piled high with cloths, and suspended high above the crowd, he blew with all his might into a great shofar, and trumpeted an alert. But the vault did not fill with the sound of angels hurrying to his aid. It was the great chorus of the crowd that replied to each wail of his trumpet, and burst into laughter.
‘Jakub, trade with us! Jakub, sell to us!’ they all called out—and those continually repeated cries fell into the rhythm of a chorus, which slowly became the melody of a refrain sung by every throat. My father conceded defeat. He jumped down from the high ledge and ran, shrieking, toward the barricades of cloth. He was grown gigantic with anger, his face bulging into a purple fist. He ran at the cloth ramparts like a prophet of war, and began to rage against them. He pushed with all of his might into the huge bales of wool, and prised them from their place; with his whole body he pushed his way under the enormous bales of cloth, and heaved them onto the counter, where they fell with a dull flop. The bales flew out into enormous banners, unwinding and fluttering in the air, and the shelves burst from all sides with explosions of drapery, waterfalls of cloth, as if struck with Moses’ rod.
The cupboards’ reserves poured out; they surged forth and flowed in broad rivers. The shelves’ many-hued contents were disgorged. They expanded, increased, and flooded all of the counters and desks. The shop walls disappeared behind the huge formations of that cloth cosmogony; those mountain ranges piled up in enormous heaps, and in the midst of those mountainsides, wide valleys opened, amid the broad pathos of their plateaux, the contours of continents thundered. The shop’s expanse widened into the panorama of an autumn landscape, full of lakes and distances, whilst Father wandered against the backdrop of that scene, between the folds and valleys of a fantastic Canaan. He walked with great strides, his hands outspread prophetically in the clouds; and with inspired strokes, he fashioned a country.
But down below, on the foothills of that Sinai grown out of Father’s anger, the multitude gesticulated and transgressed; they worshipped Baal, and they traded. They grasped whole handfuls of those soft folds, and draped themselves in that coloured cloth. They wound themselves up in improvised carnival masks and mantles, and chattered incoherently, but profusely.
Suddenly my father, grown tall with anger, rose up over those groups of traders, and with a powerful word he reproved their idolatry from on high. Then, seized by despair, he clambered onto the high gallery of the cupboards, and ran madly over the beams of the shelves, over the clattering planks of their bare scaffolding, pursued by an image of shameless licentiousness which he sensed behind his back, deep inside the house. The shop assistants had now reached the iron balcony at the kitchen window, and clinging to the balustrade, had seized Adela by the waist and were pulling her out of the window, her eyelids fluttering and her slender legs in silk stockings trailing behind her.
As my father’s gestures of fury, in his mortification at the odiousness of sin, became as one with the menace of the landscape, Baal’s carefree multitude down below began to succumb to immoderate gaiety. Some parodistic passion, some pestilence of laughter, had taken possession of that mob. But how could one expect solemnity of them, that multitude of doorknockers and nutcrackers! How could one expect those hand-mills unceasingly grinding out a coloured pulp of words to comprehend Father’s great concerns! Deaf to the thunder of his prophetic anger, those dealers in their silk frogged coats squatted in small clusters around the folded hills of the material, where effusively and amid laughter they thrashed out the merits of the merchandise. Eagerly those black marketeers besmirched the noble substance of the landscape, ground it up into a hash of idle talk, and all but consumed it.
Elsewhere stood groups of Jews in coloured gabardines and great fur kalpaks, before the high waterfalls of bright material. These were the men of the High Council, gentlemen venerable and full of solemnity, stroking their long, well kept beards and conducting restrained and diplomatic conversations. But even in that ceremonious talk, in the looks they exchanged, there was a flash of smiling irony. The vulgar multitude wound its way among those groups—an amorphous crowd, a mob without faces or identities. They filled the gaps in the landscape; they carpeted its background with bluebells, and rattle-boxes of mindless talk. They were a clownish element, a crowd of Pulcinellas and Arlecchinos dancing with abandon, who, lacking as they did the serious intentions of traders, reduced to absurdity with their clownish pranks those occasional transactions that were entered into.
By degrees however, grown bored with their clownishness, that cheerful little multitude disbanded among the further regions of the landscape, and slowly became lost there amid its stone curves and valleys. Most likely they had fallen somewhere, one after the other, into the folds and crevices of the terrain, like children in the corners and nooks of an apartment, weary of the revelry on the night of a ball.
Meanwhile, the Town Fathers, the men of the Great Sanhedrin, strolled in solemn and dignified groups, and conducted quiet, profound disputes. They were dispersed all over that great mountainous country; they wandered in twos and threes on its remote, winding roads. Their small, dark silhouettes populated that whole desert upland, above which a dark and heavy sky sagged—folded and cloudy, ploughed into long, parallel furrows, silver and white slices, exhibiting, deep within, the ever more distant layers of its stratification.
In that country, the lamplight had created an artificial day, a strange day, a day with no morning or evening.
My father slowly grew calm. His anger settled, and cooled in the layers and strata of the landscape. He was now sitting in the galleries of the high shelves, and gazing into an immense country passing into autumn. He saw people going fishing on distant lakes. Those fishermen sat in twos in little cockleshell boats, casting their nets into the water. Boys on the banks carried baskets on their heads, filled with their flapping, silvery catch.
It was then that he noticed groups of wanderers in the distance, turning their heads to the sky and pointing at something, their arms upraised.
And soon, the sky broke out in some kind of coloured rash, spilled over with undulating smears, which grew and ripened—and soon, its expanses were filled with a strange multitude of birds, circling and wheeling in great overlapping spirals. The whole sky was filled with their soaring flight, the flapping of their wings and the majestic lines of their quiet gliding. Some floated, like enormous storks, unmoving on calmly outspread wings, whilst others, resembling colourful plumes waving in barbarian adulation, flapped heavily and clumsily to remain aloft on currents of warm air; finally others, inept conglomerations of wings, huge legs and plucked necks, called to mind badly stuffed vultures and condors with sawdust spilling out of them.
Among them were two-headed birds, many-winged birds, and cripples, hobbling in the air in listless, one-winged flight. The sky began to resemble an old fresco, full of abnormities and fantastic beasts, which circled, crossed one another’s paths, and returned once more in colourful ellipses.
My father, bathed in sudden radiance, hoisted himself aloft by the joists; he stretched out his hands, calling to the birds with an old incantation. Full of emotion, he recognised them—it was the remote, forgotten progeny of the avian generation which Adela, once upon a time, had driven off to every fringe of the sky. And now it had returned, degenerate and luxuriant, that artificial progeny, that internally wasted avian tribe.
Grown preposterously huge, a stupidly shot up manifestation, they were empty and lifeless inside. All of the energy of those birds had gone into their plumage, expanded into fantasticality. They were almost a museum of disused species, the rejects of Bird Paradise.
Some were flying on their backs—they had heavy, ungainly beaks, like padlocks or zip fasteners, weighted down with coloured excrescences, and they were blind.
How that unexpected return affected Father; how he marvelled at their avian instinct, that attachment to their Master, whom that banished tribe had kept like a legend in their soul, finally returning at last, after many generations, on the last day before the extinction of the tribe, to their primæval homeland.
But those blind, paper birds could no longer recognise Father. In vain he called to them with the old incantation, in forgotten avian speech. They heard him not, nor did they see him.
Suddenly, stones went whistling through the air. It was the jesters, the stupid and mindless tribe—they had begun to aim projectiles into the fantastic avian sky.
In vain Father called the alert—in vain he tried to warn them with imploring gestures. But they could not catch his words. They could not make him out. And the birds fell. Each hit by a projectile, they drooped ponderously, and sagged in the air. Before they hit the ground they were nothing more than ill-proportioned clumps of feathers.
In the blinking of an eye, that upland was strewn with that strange, fantastic carrion. Before Father could reach the site of the massacre, that whole magnificent avian brood already lay dead, scattered over the rocks.
Only now, at close quarters, could Father perceive how utterly paltry was that impoverished generation, how truly comical its tawdry anatomy.
They were enormous bunches of feathers, old carcasses stuffed any old how. Many of them had no discernible head, since that club-shaped part of their body bore no indications of a soul. Some were coated with fur, clotted with a pelage, like bison, and they stunk abominably. And others were reminiscent of hunchbacked, bald and sickly camels. Finally others were apparently made of a kind of paper—empty inside, although magnificently coloured on the outside, and some, at close quarters, appeared to be nothing more than great peacock tails, coloured fans in which, by incomprehensible means, a semblance of life had inhered.
I saw my father’s woeful return. The artificial day had already begun to take on the hues of an ordinary morning. In the ravaged shop the highest shelves were replete with the colours of a morning sky. Among the fragments of a dead landscape painting, among the devastated coulisses of a nocturnal play, Father saw the shop assistants rising from their sleep. They rose from among the bales of cloth and yawned to the sunshine. Upstairs in the kitchen, Adela, warm from sleep, her hair tousled, was grinding coffee in a mill, pressing it to her white bosom, from which the grindings took their sheen and heat. The cat was washing itself in the sunshine.