Word Document (draft of July 2008)
A Night of the Great Season
EVERYONE KNOWS that in the course of the usual, normal years, whimsical time occasionally brings forth from its bosom 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 since it rarely attains full growth. Like late begotten children it lags behind in its development — a hunchback month, an offshoot, half wilted and 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 from its touchwood it pushes 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, end p.97 unprinted sheets on which 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 imperceptibly take root between the yellowed pages of that most magnificent, crumbling book, and fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?
What I am here about to speak of 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 the entirely new taste in the air and the changed 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 full of 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 end p.98 p.99: ILLUSTRATION and endlessly peeling away layers of paper, letters and invoices.
The cross-ruled and empty existence of that room sprang from a rustling of pages, an endless sifting of papers; from the incessant shifting of sheaves and the countless company headings an apotheosis was recreated 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 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; all their 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 and increased and underwrote autumn’s abundant capital. That capital grew and darkened there and was dispersed ever wider on the shelves, as in the galleries of some great theatre, continually replenished and increased every morning with consignments of merchandise carried in by groaning, bearded porters, together with the cool of the dawn — 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 end p.100 a colossal register of all possible autumnal hues, ordered into layers and sorted into shades, running up and down as if on a resonating 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 a 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 that iron fund of the autumn and exchange it for ready cash. But he knew, he sensed that the time, the autumn gale was approaching — a ravaging and warm gale, it would blow over those cupboards and then they would be emptied; 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. end p.101
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, inflating them and sulking themselves, 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. They seemed, so puffed up and crowing, 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 they rode, screaming, on noisy little carts resounding with the coloured rattle of their wheels, spokes and poles. The carts ran downhill, loaded up with their screams, and 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. In quiet panic, people fled from the twilight, but that leprosy immediately caught up with them and broke out in a dark rash on their foreheads, and their faces, falling away in great, shapeless smears, were lost — and on they went, without features now, without eyes, casting off mask after mask along the way until the twilight was teeming with those discarded 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, went to ruin in that quiet turmoil, in the panic of a hasty schedule, end p.102 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 widened it. Bright nests were carved out in its multifarious labyrinth: shops, great, coloured lanterns full of heaped up merchandise and the bustle of their 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, 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 and 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 that river flowed on and on, full of hubbub, dark looks, cunning glances, broken conversations and shreds of gossip — a great pulp of rumours, laughter and tumult.
They resembled dried, autumnal poppy heads, moving in a crowd and 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. end p.103
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 — it chased away the least trace of shadow from every nook and cranny. The great, empty floor crackled in the silence; it added up all of its shining squares in that light, 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, 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 still and full of foreboding in the bright silence of the shop, his eyes shining, 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 end p.104 through all the empty and brightly lit rooms, leading downstairs, leading upstairs, until she had given them the slip, and fell into the bright kitchen where she barricaded herself behind a dresser.
She stood there breathless, shiny and amused, fluttering her great eyelashes and smiling. The shop assistants giggled, crouching at the door. The kitchen window was open 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 the wall red in the gleam of the distant light, and stole up to the window. Father shrieked in 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 onto the glistening panes. Father turned scarlet with distress and leaped onto the counter. And once the crowd had stormed that fortress, once the raucous throng had invaded the shop, my father climbed with a single step onto a shelf of cloth, and, suspended high above the crowd, blew with all 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 was grown gigantic with anger, his face bulging into a purple fist; he ran at the cloth ramparts like a prophet of war, and he began to rage against them. He pushed with his whole body into the huge end p.105 bales of wool and prised them from their place; 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; the shelves burst from all sides with explosions of drapery, waterfalls of cloth, as if under 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 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 a panorama of the 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 outspread prophetically 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, transgressed, and worshipped Baal — and traded. They grasped whole handfuls of those soft folds, draped themselves in the coloured cloth, wound themselves into improvised carnival masks and mantles, and chattered profusely although incoherently. end p.106
Suddenly my father, elongated with anger, rose up over those groups of traders and reproved their idolatry from on high with a powerful word. Then, afflicted with despair, he clambered onto 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 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, end p.107 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, reduced to absurdity the occasional transactions that were entered into, lacking as they did the serious intentions of the traders.
By degrees however, bored with their clownishness, that cheerful little multitude disbanded among the further regions of the landscape; they slowly became lost there amid the stone curves and valleys. Somewhere those jesters probably fell one after the other into the crevices and folds of the terrain, like children in the corners and nooks of an apartment, tired of 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 remote, winding roads. Their small, dark silhouettes populated that whole desert upland over which a dark and heavy sky sagged, end p.108 folded and cloudy, ploughed into long, parallel furrows, silver and white slices, exhibiting deep within itself 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 and 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 their 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; finally others — 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 end p.109 of that avian generation which 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.
A stupidly shot up manifestation, grown preposterously enormous, they were empty and lifeless inside. All the vitality of those birds had gone into their plumage, had expanded into fantasticality. It was, as it seemed, a museum of disused species, a lumber room of the avian Paradise.
Some were flying on their backs; they had heavy, ungainly beaks resembling padlocks or zip fasteners, weighted 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 the banished tribe had kept like a legend in their soul, finally to return after many generations to their primaeval homeland, on the last day before the extinction of their tribe.
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.
Father called the alert in vain — he warned them in vain with imploring gestures — 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 already nothing more than an ill-proportioned clump of feathers.
A rising in the street was covered in the blinking of an eye 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 shabby anatomy.
They were enormous bunches of feathers, carelessly stuffed like old carcasses. Many had no discernible head, since that club-shaped end p.110 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. Finally others were apparently made of a kind of paper, empty inside, albeit magnificently coloured on the outside. Some appeared at close quarters 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 hues of the 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.
end p.111
Notes
* … the daughters of men: “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” (Genesis 6: 1 and 2; King James Bible) [RETURN]