Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
The Cinnamon Shops
DURING the period of the shortest, sleepy winter days, caught on both sides in the furry, crepuscular edgings of morning and evening, as the town branched deeper and deeper into the labyrinths of the winter nights, to be called back and shaken to its senses by a fleeting dawn—my father was already lost, sold, pledged to the other sphere.
His face and head became luxuriantly and wildly overgrown in those days with a covering of grey hair, protruding irregularly in bunches, bristles and long brushes, shooting up from his warts, eyebrows and nostrils—which lent to his physiognomy the appearance of a bristled up old fox.
His senses of smell and hearing became inordinately sharpened, and it showed in the agitations of his tense, silent features that he remained in continual contact, through the mediation of those senses, with an invisible world of dark nooks, mouse-holes, musty empty spaces beneath the floor, and chimney ducts.
All of that scratching and noisy nocturnal knocking, all the secret, creaking life of the floor, found in him an unfailing and vigilant observer, a spy and a co-conspirator. He was absorbed to the point of utter engrossment in that sphere, which was inaccessible to us, and which he made no attempt to explain to us. Often, when the antics of that invisible sphere grew too absurd, he could only flick his fingers and laugh quietly to himself. At such times, with a glance, he would commune with our cat, also initiated into that world—which raised its cold, cynical face, etched with stripes, and narrowed in boredom and indifference its slanting chinks of eyes.
During dinner, he might put aside his knife and fork in the middle of the meal, and rise with a feline motion, his napkin tied under his chin. He would creep on toe-pads to an adjacent door, an empty room, and peek with the greatest circumspection through the keyhole. Then he would return to the table with an air of shame, smiling sheepishly, purring, and indistinctly muttering something which pertained only to his own inner monologue.
In order to provide him with some diversion, and to tear him away from his morbid investigations, Mother would take him for evening walks, which he acceded to silently and without resistance, albeit half-heartedly, distracted, and miles away.
Once, we even went to the theatre.
We found ourselves once more in that great, dimly lit and dirty hall, all sleepy human hubbub and incoherent confusion. But once we had struggled through the human throng, the gigantic pale sky-blue curtain loomed before us, like the sky of another firmament. Great pink painted masks with puffed out cheeks undulated on its enormous canvas expanse. That artificial sky spread wide, and flowed down and athwart, swelling with an enormous gulp of pathos and great gestures—the atmosphere of that world, artificial and full of radiance, that had been erected there, on the clattering scaffolding of the stage. A shudder flowing through the great countenance of that sky, a breath of the enormous canvas in which the masks bulged and came to life, betrayed the illusoriness of that firmament, gave rise to that tremor of reality which we, in our metaphysical moments, perceive as a glimmer of the mysterious.
The masks fluttered their red eyelids, their coloured lips voicelessly whispered something, and I knew that the moment was approaching when the secret tensions would reach their zenith, and the brimming sky of the curtain would really rise, to reveal stupendous and enchanting things.
But it was a moment I was not destined to savour, because Father, who had meanwhile been displaying certain signs of anxiety, began to grasp his pockets, and announced at last that he had forgotten his wallet, along with his money and important documents. After a brief consultation with Mother, during which Adela’s honesty was subjected to hasty, comprehensive appraisal, it was proposed to me that I return home in search of the wallet. Mother judged that there was still plenty of time before the commencement of the performance, and that given my nimbleness I could easily be back in time.
I went out into a winter night coloured by the illumination of the sky. It was one of those bright nights in which the astral firmament is so immense and branching, almost fallen apart, broken into pieces and divided into a labyrinth of separate heavens, enough to be shared by whole months of winter nights, and to overlay with its silvered and painted globes all of their nocturnal phenomena, adventures, scandals and carnivals.
It is unpardonable recklessness to send a young boy out on an important and urgent mission on such a night, for in its half light the streets will become tangled and multifarious, each exchanged for another. Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious and delusive streets. One’s imagination, enchanted and misled, produces false maps of the town, ostensibly long known and familiar, where those streets have their places and their names, whilst the night, in its inexhaustible fecundity, has nothing better to do than produce continually new and fictitious configurations. Such temptations of winter nights usually begin innocently, with the intention of taking a shortcut, of chancing some unaccustomed or swifter alley. The enticing arrangements of an intersection arise, convoluted progress along some untried cross street—but this time, it began differently.
Having gone only a few steps, I realised I had left my overcoat behind. I was on the point of turning back, but on reflection it seemed a needless waste of time, for the night was not cold at all—quite the opposite, it was veined with streams of strange warmth, the wafts of some false spring. The snow dwindled into white strands, an innocent sweet fleece scented with violets, and into those very strands the sky began to thaw, where the moon showed itself twice and three times over, demonstrating in this multiplicity all of its phases and positions.
The sky had laid bare that day the interior of its construction, as if in many anatomical specimens, displaying spirals and veins of light, sections of the night’s turquoise solids, the plasma of its expanses and the tissue of its nocturnal reveries.
On such a night, one was unlikely to walk along Podwale, or any of the other dark streets that form the reverse side, the lining, as it were, of the four sides of the market square, without recalling that occasionally in that late season one or two of those curious and so alluring shops would still be open, which would slip one’s mind on ordinary days. I called them the cinnamon shops, after the dark hue of the wainscoting with which they were panelled.
Those truly noble businesses, open late into the night, had always been the object of my fervid dreams. Their dimly lit, dark and solemn interiors exuded a deep aroma of paints, lacquer and incense, a fragrance of remote countries and rare materials. There you might find Bengal lights, magic caskets, the stamps of long vanished countries, Chinese decals, indigo, colophony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in tiny pots, microscopes and telescopes, and above all, rare and peculiar books, old volumes full of astonishing illustrations and intoxicating stories.
I remember those merchants, old and dignified, who served their clients in discrete silence, and were full of wisdom and understanding of their most secret wishes. But most of all, there was a certain bookshop there, where I once saw some rare and forbidden editions, the publications of secret clubs, lifting the veil from tormenting and intoxicating mysteries.
It was such a rare occurrence to have an opportunity to visit those shops, and with moreover some small but adequate amount of money in my pocket, that it was impossible now to forgo this chance, notwithstanding the importance of the mission entrusted to my zeal.
According to my reckoning, I must make my way along a certain side street, passing two or three corners, in order to reach the street of the nocturnal shops. This led me away from my objective, but I could make good the delay if I returned by way of Żupy Solne.
Lent wings by my desire to visit the cinnamon shops, I turned into a street that I knew, flying more than walking, anxious not to lose my way. Thus I passed three or four cross streets, but still the street I sought was nowhere to be seen. And what is more, the configuration of the streets no longer corresponded to the image I had of them in my mind’s eye. No trace of the shops. I walked along a street where the houses had no entrances, only windows shut tight and blinded by a gleam of the moon—the correct street must lead along the other side of those houses, I thought to myself, where their entrances are. I anxiously quickened my step, beginning to relinquish deep down all hope of visiting the shops—merely with the intention of emerging swiftly from there into a region of town that I knew. I approached an exit, uneasy about where it would bring me out this time, and entered a broad, sparsely built-up highway, very long and straight. All at once, a blast from its broad expanse swept over me. Here, alongside the street or deep within gardens, stood picturesque villas, the decorative buildings of the wealthy. Parks and the walls of orchards were visible in the gaps between them. At a distance, the view was reminiscent of ulica Leszniańska in its lower and rarely visited regions. The moonlight was pale and as bright as day, unravelling into a thousand strands, silver flakes in the sky, and only the parks and gardens loomed black in that silver landscape.
Scrutinising one of the buildings more closely, I concluded that before me was the rear and hitherto unseen side of the gymnasium school. I went straight up to the entrance, which to my surprise I found unlocked, the hallway lighted, and entered to find myself on the red carpet of a corridor. I was hoping to steal unnoticed through the building and leave by the front gate, thus taking a magnificent shortcut.
Then it dawned on me that, at that late hour, one of Professor Arendt’s elective lessons must still be taking place, which he conducted late into the night in his classroom, and where we would gather in wintertime, burning with the noble enthusiasm for drawing exercises which our outstanding teacher inspired in us.
Our little group of students would be all but lost in that great dark room, the shadows of our heads growing enormous and fragmented on the walls, cast by two small candles glowing in the necks of bottles. In truth, not many of us used those hours for drawing, and the professor did not stipulate too exacting demands. One or two of us would have brought pillows from home, and now settled down on the benches for a light nap. Only the most studious would sit under a solitary candle, and draw some object in the golden circle of its radiance.
Growing bored, holding sleepy conversations, we usually had to wait a long time for the professor to arrive. At last the door to his study opened, and he entered—small and with a beautiful beard, all esoteric smiles, discrete concealments, and an aroma of mystery. He quickly closed his study door behind him, through which, for the brief instant it had stood open, a throng of plaster shades had huddled together beyond his head, classical fragments, mournful Niobids, Danaïds and Tantalids, a whole sad and barren Olympus withering throughout the years in that museum of plaster figures. Even in the daytime, that room was filled with a cloudlike haze, sleepily overflowing with plaster dreams, empty looks, fading profiles and musings receding into nothingness. We often liked to eavesdrop at that door, on the sighing, whispering silence of that rubble, crumbling in the midst of cobwebs, that twilight of the gods, decomposing in boredom and monotony.
The professor strolled, solemn and dignified, along the bare benches where we, dispersed in small groups in the grey gleams of the winter night, made some drawing or other. It grew hushed and sleepy. Here and there my colleagues were settling down to sleep. The candles slowly burned out in their bottles. The professor was engrossed in a deep glass case full of old volumes, antiquated illustrations, etchings and prints. Making esoteric gestures, he showed us old lithographs of evening landscapes, dense nocturnal forests, and the avenues of winter parks, looming black on white, moonlit pathways.
Amid our sleepy conversations, time passed imperceptibly and ran unevenly, seeming to tie knots in the lapsing of the hours, somewhere swallowing whole periods of their duration. Imperceptibly, without actual transference, we seemed to rediscover our group already making its way home along a lane white with snow and flanked by a dry, black thicket of bushes. We walked along that shaggy edge of darkness, brushing against the bearskin of the bushes, which cracked under our feet in the bright, moonless night, the false, milky daylight long after midnight. The diffuse whiteness of that light, drizzling with snow, the pallid air and the milky space, was like the grey paper of an etching, where the strokes and hatching of compact brushwood were tangled in deep black. The night, deep into the early hours, now replicated those series of nocturnes, Professor Arendt’s late night etchings, and carried further his imaginings.
In that park’s black forestation, its shaggy fleece of brushwood, its mass of brittle twigs, there were niches and nests, places of the deepest, downiest darkness, full of embroilment, secret gestures and incoherent conversations in finger language. It was hushed and warm in those nests. There we sat in our shaggy coats on the soft summery snow, gorging ourselves on nuts which the hazel bushes were replete with that springtime winter. Martens, weasels and ichneumons wound their way silently through the brushwood—furry, sniffing little animals stinking of sheepskin, elongated, on short little paws. We suspected that among them were specimens from the school cabinet, which, albeit disembowelled and moulting, had heard in their empty innards on that white night the voice of an old instinct, a mating call, and returned to their lair for a short, illusory lifespan.
But slowly the phosphorescence of the spring snow grew cloudy and died away, and the thick, black murk before daybreak set in. Some of us fell asleep in the warm snow, whilst others scrabbled in the dense thicket for the entrances to their houses. Gropingly they entered those dark interiors, into the dreams of their parents and siblings, falling into a continuance of the deep snoring they had tracked down on their belated ways.
Those nocturnal assemblies were full of mysterious charm for me, and I could not forgo this opportunity to peek for a moment into the art room, resolving to spare only a few moments for the visit. But as I ascended the cedar backstairs, filled with ringing echoes, I realised that I had now reached some hitherto unseen, unknown part of the building.
Not the slightest sound disturbed the solemn silence here. The corridors were more spacious in this wing, lined with plush carpet and full of finery. Small, dimly glowing lamps shone at the corners. Having passed one such turning, I found myself in an even wider corridor, bedecked in palatial sumptuousness. One of its walls, through wide glazed arches, opened onto the interior of an apartment. Before my eyes a long enfilade of rooms began, vanishing into the depths and furnished with dazzling magnificence, drawing my eye along its lane of silk hangings and gilded mirrors, expensive furniture and crystal chandeliers, into the downy pulp of those extravagant interiors, full of coloured whirling, shimmering arabesques, winding garlands and budding flowers. The profound silence of those empty parlours was inhabited only in the secret looks that the mirrors exchanged, and a panic of arabesques running aloft in friezes along the walls, which became lost in the stucco-work of the white ceilings.
I stood in admiration and awe before that sumptuousness—I suspected that my nocturnal escapade had led me unexpectedly into the headmaster’s wing, and before his private apartment. My heart pounding, I stood transfixed with curiosity, ready to take flight at the slightest noise. How, if discovered, could I justify this—my nocturnal espionage, my audacious snooping? The headmaster’s little daughter might be sitting, unobserved and silent, in one of the deep, plush armchairs, and suddenly raise her eyes to me from behind her book—her black, sibylline and calm eyes, with their look that none of us could hold. But it would be cowardice, I thought, to withdraw in mid-course, without having fulfilled my objective. And besides, absolute silence reigned everywhere in those interiors, full of sumptuousness, in the dimmed light of the indeterminate hour. Through the arches of the corridor, I could see a large glazed door at the far end of a great parlour, which led onto a terrace. It was so quiet all around that I mustered my courage. There didn’t appear to be too great a risk attached to descending the few stairs to floor level and crossing the great, expensive carpet in a few bounds, to reach the terrace, and quite easily from there, a street that I knew.
I did so. And as soon as I had stepped down onto the parquet floor of that parlour, beneath the great palms that stood in vases there, shooting up as far as the arabesques of the ceiling, I noticed that, in fact, I had reached neutral ground, because the parlour had no front wall whatsoever. It was a kind of loggia, connecting by a few steps to the town square—an offshoot, as it were, of that square, where a few items of furniture had been placed on the pavement. I ran down the few stone steps, and once more I was in the street.
The constellations were now standing precipitously on their heads; all the stars had turned over onto their other sides in their sleep, whilst the moon, buried in an eiderdown of little clouds, which it illuminated with its invisible presence, still appeared to have an endless road before it—absorbed by its convoluted heavenly procedures, it spared not a thought for daybreak.
A few worn out and rickety droshkies loomed black in the street, like crippled, dozing crabs or cockroaches. A coachman leaned out from his high seat. He had a small, red and good natured face. ‘Shall we go, young sir?’ he asked. The coach shook in all the joints and ligatures of its many limbed body, and moved off on its light wheels.
But who on such a night will entrust himself to the whims of an irresponsible droshky driver? Amid the clattering of the spokes and the rumbling of the box and roof, I tried to make my destination known to him. Heedless and indulgent, he shook his head at everything I said. He hummed a tune to himself, driving by a circuitous route through the town.
A group of droshky drivers was standing in front of some tap-room, and they waved to him amiably. He cheerfully made some reply, and threw the reins onto my knees, not even drawing the carriage to a halt. He got down from his seat and went to join the group of his colleagues. The horse, a wise old droshky horse, looked around nonchalantly, and continued on his way with a steady, droshky trot. This horse, as a matter of fact, filled me with confidence—he seemed to be smarter than the coachman. But I didn’t know how to steer him; I had to submit to his will. We proceeded along a suburban street enclosed by gardens on both sides. Those gardens, the further they extended, slowly gave way to parks of many trees, and they to forests.
I shall never forget that luminous drive on the brightest of winter nights. The coloured map of the heavens had expanded into a vast cupola, where fantastic lands, oceans and seas were amassed, etched in lines of starry whirlpools and currents, luminous lines of heavenly geography. The air became easy to breathe, and was lit up like a silver gas. There was a scent of violets. From under the snow, woolly like white karakul furs, tremulous anemones began to appear, a spark of moonlight in each delicate chalice. The whole forest was illuminated as if by a thousand lights, stars that the December firmament was plentifully shedding. The air heaved with some secret spring, the inexpressible purity of snow and violets. We entered hilly terrain. The lines of the hills, shaggy with the bare twigs of trees, rose up like blissful sighs into the sky. I caught a glimpse on those exultant hillsides of whole groups of wanderers, amid moss and bushes, gathering up the fallen and snow dampened stars. The road grew steeper. The horse skidded and struggled to pull the carriage, all of its ligatures screeching. I was elated. My breast imbibed that delightful spring air, the freshness of the stars and the snow. A bank of snowy white foam piled up higher and higher before the horse’s breast, and the horse arduously dug a passage through its pure, fresh mass. At last we drew to a standstill. I got down from the droshky. He was breathing heavily, his head bowed. I held his head to my breast. Tears glistened in his great black eyes. Then I noticed a round, black wound on his belly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I whispered in tears. ‘My dear, it is for you,’ he said, suddenly growing very small, like a little horse made of wood. I left him. I felt strangely light and happy. I wondered whether I ought to wait for the local train, the little narrow-gauge train that stopped there, or return to town on foot. I set off walking along a steep serpentine in the depths of the forest, going at first with light, flexible steps, and then, gathering momentum, in an ambling, euphoric run, which soon turned into a ride, like skiing. I found I could adjust my speed at will, and steer the ride with nimble turns of my body.
Upon reaching the edge of town, I curbed my triumphal run, modifying it to a sensible, leisurely pace. The moon was still high; the transformations of the sky, the metamorphoses of its multitudinous vaults in ever more masterfully described configurations, were unending. The sky had opened up that night, like a silver astrolabe, its bewitching internal mechanism; it exhibited in endless acrobatics the gilded mathematics of its cogs and wheels.
In the market square I came across people out taking strolls. Enchanted by the spectacle of that night, their faces were all turned heavenward, and silvered by the magic of the sky. All concern about the wallet had left me. Caught up in his eccentricities, Father had surely forgotten by now that he had ever lost it. And I didn’t care about Mother.
On such a night, unique in a year, propitious thoughts come—inspirations, prophetic touches of the divine finger. Filled with ideas and inspiration, I was about to head for home when my school friends sidetracked me, carrying books under their arms. They had set off for school too early, awoken by the brightness of that night that didn’t want to end.
We set off walking in a group, along a steeply descending street where a breeze of violets blew, uncertain whether it was still the night’s magic that shimmered on the snow, or whether the dawn was finally rising...