Rich Text Document (draft of December 2008)
A Night of the Great Season
EVERYONE knows that in the course of ordinary, normal years, whimsical time occasionally brings forth from its womb other years — odd years, degenerate years in which an aberrant thirteenth month sprouts up somewhere, like a little sixth finger on a hand.
I call it aberrant, for rarely does it attain full growth. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development — a hunchback month, a half wilted offshoot, more conjectured than real.
The aged intemperance of summer is to blame for it — its licentious and belated vitality. Often, August has already gone by, and yet, out of habit, a thick old stem of the summer continues to grow, and it pushes from its touchwood those wilding-days, those barren and idiotic weed-days, and, for good measure, it throws in cabbage-stump days for free — empty and inedible, white, bewildered and unnecessary days.
They sprout, 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 furtively between the chapters of the great book of the year, to palimpsests secretly slipped in among its pages, or else to those white, unprinted sheets where one’s eyes, having read their fill and replete with content, might be steeped in visions and relinquish all colours — paler and paler on those empty pages, to repose upon their nothingness before straying, retracted, into the labyrinths of new adventures and chapters.
Ah, that yellowed old romance of the year — that great deteriorating book of the calendar! It lies forgotten, somewhere in the archives of Time, while its contents continue to grow between the covers, to swell endlessly from the garrulousness of the months, the rapid autogeny of their boasting, the tale-telling and reveries that multiply within it. Ah, in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these stories about my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that someday they will take root imperceptibly between the yellowed pages of that most magnificent, crumbling book, and fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?
The events of which I am about to speak took place then, in the thirteenth, supernumerary and rather aberrant 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 one could tell that another series of days had been embarked on, a new region of God’s year.
Voices vibrated sonorously and freshly under those skies, as if in a still new and unoccupied apartment, filled with the aroma of lacquer and paint, incipient and untested matters, and its new echo was explored with strange emotion, sliced with curiosity, like a ring cake on some cool and sober dawn on the eve of a journey.
My father was sitting in the back office of the shop, in a vaulted little chamber cross-ruled like a beehive into multi-cellular registries and endlessly peeling away its layers of paper, letters and invoices.
The cross-ruled and empty existence of that room sprang from the rustling of pages, the endless sifting of papers; an apotheosis was recreated in the air, from the incessant shifting of sheaves and the countless company headings, like a factory town as birds in flight see it, bristling with smoking chimneys, surrounded by stacks of coins and enclosed between the flourishes and meanderings of grandiloquent &s and Sons.
Father sat on a high stool as if in an aviary, and the dovecotes of filing cabinets rustled their paper sheaves while birds’ nests and tree-hollows were filled with a twittering of numbers.
The depths of the great shop were darkened and enriched day by day with new supplies of cloth, serge, velvet and cord. On the dark shelves — those storehouses and repositories of cool, felty hues — the dark, mellow pageantry of things yielded a hundredfold interest, increased and underwrote autumn’s abundant capital. That capital grew and darkened there, was dispersed ever wider on the shelves, as in the galleries of some great theatre, continually replenished and increased each morning with new consignments of merchandise, carried in along with the cool of the dawn by groaning, bearded porters, in crates and cases on their bear-like shoulders, in fumes of autumnal freshness and vodka. The shop assistants unpacked those new supplies of cloying, 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, on a scale of all multi-coloured octaves. It began at the bottom, where it plaintively and timidly ventured alto slides and semitones; then it passed to the faded, ashen hues of the distance, to tapestry azures; and, rising to the heights in ever broader harmonies, it arrived at deep royal blues, an indigo of faraway forests and a plush of murmuring parks, entering then into the rustling shadow of wilting gardens, through all of their ochres, deep reds, russets and sepias, arriving 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 and the autumn gale was approaching — a ravaging and warm gale, it would blow over those cupboards and they would empty; there would be no restraining their outflow, those torrents of colourfulness about to burst upon the whole town.
The Great Season’s moment was approaching. The streets were growing busy. At six o-clock in the evening the town blossomed with fervour; the houses blushed as people wandered, animated by some inner fire, glaringly made up and painted, their eyes shining with a festive, beautiful and evil fever.
In the side streets, in quiet alleyways withdrawing now into the evening district, the town was empty. Only children played on the little squares, under the balconies — they played breathlessly, raucously and preposterously. They put tiny balloons to their lips to inflate them, and to sulk, suddenly and glaringly, into great gurgling, swashing excrescences, or else they cock-a-doodle-dooed themselves into stupid cockerel masks, red and crowing autumn monstrosities, 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 resounding with the coloured rattle of their wheels, spokes and poles. Loaded up with their screams, these carts ran downhill, rolled to the bottom of the street, all the way to a yellow, evening brook surging in a crevice, where they fell to pieces in a wreckage of splinters, wheels and sticks.
And while the children’s games became more and more noisy and tangled, the town’s blushes deepened and were flushed with crimson — the whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken; a hallucinatory twilight rapidly seeped out of it, and it infected everything. That pestilence of twilight spread all around; it passed insidiously and venomously from place to place, and whatever it touched soon mouldered, blackened, and crumbled into dust. People fled in quiet panic from the twilight, but that leprosy immediately caught up with them and broke out in a dark rash on their foreheads, while their faces became lost, falling away in great, shapeless smears — and on they went, without features now, without eyes, casting off mask after mask along the way until the twilight teemed with those discarded carnival half-masks, 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 went to ruin in that quiet turmoil, in the panic of a hasty schedule, the silent alarum of sunset remained up above, growing higher and higher, the tremulous tinkling of a million quiet bluebells, surging with the ascent of a million quiet skylarks, flying together into one great silver infinity. And suddenly it was night time — holy night, still swelling with gusts of wind, which broadened it. Bright nests were carved out in its multifarious labyrinth: shops, great, coloured lanterns full of heaped up merchandise and a bustle of customers. Through the bright panes of those lanterns the ritual of autumn shopping could be discerned, noisy and full of bizarre ceremony.
Dilated by the wind, its shadows lengthening, that great voluminous autumn night kept bright pockets hidden in its dark folds, pouches of coloured trinkets, gaudy merchandise, a grocer’s shop motley of chocolates and biscuits. These kiosks and stalls — botched from confectionery boxes and gaudily wallpapered with advertisements for chocolate, full of tablets of soap, cheerful rubbish, gilded 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.
Great dark crowds flowed in the darkness, in noisy confusion, 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 thus that river flowed, full of hubbub, dark looks, cunning glances, broken conversations and shreds of gossip — a great pulp of rumours, laughter and tumult.
They seemed to surge like a crowd of dried autumnal poppy heads scattering their seed — rattlebox-heads, doorknocker-people.
My father, restless and coloured by blushes, his eyes shining, wandered about the brightly lit shop, listening intently.
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 it chased away the least trace of shadow from every nook and cranny. The great, empty floor crackled in the silence; it added up in that light all of its shining squares, down and across, a chessboard of great tiles which spoke to one another in a silence of crackles, and replied to one another, now here, now there, with a loud crack. But the cloths lay quiet, voiceless in their felty downiness, and passed looks between themselves, exchanged quiet, knowing signs from one cupboard to the next, along the walls and behind Father’s back.
Father listened. His ears seemed to grow elongated in that nocturnal silence, to branch out beyond the window — 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 around the empty shop in dismay. He was searching for the shop assistants, but those dark and red-haired angels had flown away somewhere. He was left all alone, in fear of the crowd, which would soon swamp the silence of the shop in a plundering, raucous 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 painful suspicion that, somewhere deep inside the house, they were sinning with the daughters of men. Standing motionless and 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 back chambers of that great coloured lantern. The house opened up before him like a house of cards, room after room, chamber after chamber, and he saw the shop assistants’ pursuit of Adela through all the empty and brightly lit rooms, leading downstairs, leading upstairs, until she finally gave them the slip and fell into the bright kitchen, where she barricaded herself behind a dresser.
She stood there breathless, shiny and amused, smiling and fluttering her great eyelashes. The shop assistants giggled, crouching at the door. The kitchen window opened on to the great black night, full of reveries and confusion. Its black, half open panes glowed with the reflection of a distant illumination. Here and there stood shining pots and demijohns, their greasy glaze gleaming in the silence. Adela cautiously leaned her coloured, rouged face through the window, her eyelids fluttering. She was looking in the dark courtyard for the shop assistants, certain of their ambush. And, lo and behold, she caught sight of them as they cautiously made their way in single file along a narrow ledge at first-floor level — along a wall red in the gleam of the distant light — and stole up to the window. Father shrieked with anger and despair, but, at that moment, the hubbub of voices drew very near and the bright shop window was populated by faces up close, contorted with laughter, garrulous faces flattening their noses on the glistening panes. Father turned scarlet with distress and leaped on to the counter. And, once the crowd had stormed that fortress, once the raucous throng had invaded the shop, my father climbed in a single step on to a shelf of cloth, and, suspended high above the crowd, blew with all of his might into a great shofar, trumpeting the alert. But the vault did not fill with the sound of angels hurrying to his aid — it was instead the great chorus of the crowd that replied to each wail of his trumpet, and burst out with 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 had 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 his whole body into the huge bales of wool and prised them from their place; he pushed his way under the enormous bales of cloth and heaved them on to 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 and waterfalls of cloth, as if from a tap of Moses’ rod.
Thus the cupboards’ violently retched reserves poured out, and flowed in broad rivers. The shelves’ colourful contents flowed out, grew, multiplied, and swamped all of the counters and tables.
The shop walls disappeared under the huge formations of that cloth cosmogony, behind those mountain ranges piled up in enormous heaps. Wide valleys opened up amid mountainsides, and the outlines of continents rumbled amid a broad pathos of plateaux. The shop’s expanse widened into the panorama of an autumn landscape, full of lakes and distances, while, against the backdrop of that scene, Father wandered between the folds and valleys of a fantastic Canaan, wandered with great steps, his hands prophetically outspread in the clouds, and, with inspired strokes, he shaped a country.
While down below, on the foothills of that Sinai grown out of Father’s anger, the multitude gesticulated and transgressed, worshipping Baal — and traded. They grasped whole handfuls of those soft folds and draped themselves in the coloured cloth, wound themselves into improvised carnival masks and mantles, and chattered incoherently, albeit profusely.
Suddenly my father, elongated with anger, rose up over those groups of traders and reproved their idolatry with a powerful word from on high. Then, afflicted with despair, he clambered on to a tall gallery of 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 just reached the iron balcony at the high 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, dismayed by the odiousness of sin, angrily thrust his gestures into the menace of the landscape, Baal’s carefree multitude down below was surrendering itself to immoderate gaiety. Some parodistic passion, a pestilence of laughter, held sway over that mob. 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, loquaciously thrashing out, amid laughter, the merits of the merchandise. That black market eagerly besmirched the noble substance of the landscape, broke it up into a hash of idle talk, and all but swallowed 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 face or personality. It filled the gaps in the landscape, carpeted the background with bluebells and rattle-boxes of mindless talk. It was a clownish element, a crowd of Pulcinellas and Arlecchinos dancing with abandon, who, with their clownish pranks, lacking as they did the serious intentions of the traders, reduced to absurdity the occasional transactions that were entered into.
By degrees, however, bored with their clownishness, that cheerful little multitude disbanded among the further regions of the landscape, and slowly became lost there amid the stone curves and valleys. Probably, those jesters had fallen somewhere, one after the other, into the crevices and folds of the terrain, like children in the corners and nooks of an apartment, tired of the revelry on the night of a ball.
The Town Fathers, meanwhile, 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.
The lamplight created an artificial day in that country — a strange day, a day with no dawn or evening.
My father slowly grew calm. His anger settled and cooled in the layers and strata of the landscape. He was now sitting on the galleries of the high shelves and gazing into an immense country passing into autumn. He saw men going out fishing on distant lakes. These fishermen sat in pairs in little cockleshell boats, casting their nets into the water. On the banks, boys carried baskets on their heads, full of their flapping, silvery catch.
It was then that he noticed groups of wanderers in the distance, turning their heads to the sky, pointing at something with upraised hands.
And soon the sky was flooded with a kind of coloured rash, covered with undulating smears, which grew, which ripened, and soon its expanses were filled with a strange multitude of birds, circling and wheeling in great overlapping spirals. The entire 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, while others, resembling coloured plumes waving in barbarian adulation, flapped heavily and clumsily in order to remain aloft on currents of warm air; others, finally — inept conglomerations of wings, huge legs and plucked necks — resembled badly stuffed vultures and condors with sawdust spilling out of them.
Among them were two-headed birds, many-winged birds, and also 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 coloured ellipses.
My father, bathed in sudden radiance, hoisted himself up 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 that avian generation that Adela, once upon a time, had driven off to every fringe of the sky. It now returned, degenerate and luxuriant, that artificial progeny, that internally wasted avian tribe.
Grown preposterously enormous, a stupidly shot up manifestation, they were empty and lifeless inside. All the energy of those birds had gone into their plumage, expanded into fantasticality. It was like like a museum of disused species, the rejects of Bird Heaven.
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 to return after many generations to their primæval homeland, on the last day before the tribe’s extinction.
But those blind, paper birds could no longer recognise Father. He called to them in vain with the old incantation, in forgotten avian speech. They heard him not, nor could 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.
Father called the alert, to no avail; he tried to warn them with imploring gestures, to no avail — 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 no more than an ill-proportioned clump of feathers.
In the blinking of an eye a rising in the street was covered with that strange, fantastic carrion. Before Father could reach the site of the massacre, that whole magnificent avian brood lay dead, scattered on the cobblestones.
Only now, at close quarters, could Father observe the utter paltriness of that impoverished generation, all the comicalness of its tawdry anatomy.
They were enormous bunches of feathers, carelessly stuffed like old carcasses. Many had no discernible head, since that club-shaped part of their body bore no indications of their soul. Some were coated with fur, clotted with a pelage like bison, and they stunk abominably. Others were reminiscent of hunchbacked, bald and sickly camels. Others, finally, were apparently made of a kind of paper, empty inside albeit magnificently coloured on the outside. Some, at close quarters, appeared to be nothing more than great peacock tails, coloured fans in which, by incomprehensible means, some 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 deserted shop the highmost 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 — warmed by 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 washed itself in the sunshine.