Rich Text Document (draft of December 2008)
The Cinnamon Shops
DURING the period of the shortest, sleepy winter days, enclosed within furry edgings of dusk on both sides — morning and evening — as the town branched out deeper and deeper into the labyrinths of the winter nights, only shaken to its senses by a fleeting dawn — my father was already lost, sold, pledged to the other sphere.
His face and head luxuriantly and wildly developed a covering of grey hair in those days, protruding irregularly in bunches, bristles and long brushes that shot from his warts, eyebrows and nostrils, which lent to his features the appearance of a bristled up old fox.
His senses of smell and hearing were inordinately sharpened, and it showed in the play of his taciturn and tense face that he was, through the mediation of those senses, in continual contact with an invisible world of dark nooks and mouse-holes, musty empty spaces beneath the floor, and chimney ducts.
All the scratches and nocturnal cracks, the secret, creaking life of the floor, found in him an unfailing and vigilant observer, a spy and co-conspirator. It absorbed him to the point of utter engrossment in that sphere, inaccessible to us, which he made no attempt to explain to us.
Many times, when those antics of the invisible sphere grew too absurd, he could only flick his fingers and laugh quietly to himself, and then, with a glance, he would commune with our cat, also initiated into that world, which raised its face — cold, cynical and 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 crept on toe-pads to an adjacent door, an empty room, and peeked with the greatest circumspection through the keyhole. Then, with a shameful air, he returned to the table, smiling sheepishly between purrs and indistinct mutters, pertaining to the internal monologue in which he had become engrossed.
In order to distract him somehow, and to tear him away from his morbid investigations, Mother would take him on 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 a gigantic pale sky-blue curtain loomed before us, like the sky of some other firmament. Great pink painted masks with puffed out cheeks undulated on the enormous canvas expanse. That artificial sky spread 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, which 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 grew and came to life, betrayed the illusoriness of that firmament, gave rise to that tremor of reality that we, in our metaphysical moments, sense 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, when the swelling sky of the curtain would actually be raised, revealing stupendous and enchanting things.
But I was not allowed to savour that moment, for Father had meanwhile begun to display certain signs of anxiety — he grasped his pockets and at last announced 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 given hasty, comprehensive appraisal, it was proposed 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 as immense and branching as if it had fallen to pieces, broken up and divided into a labyrinth of separate heavens, enough to be shared by whole months of winter nights, to overlay with its silvered and painted globes all of their nocturnal phenomena, adventures, scandals and carnivals.
It is unpardonable impudence to send a young boy out with an important and urgent mission on such a night, since in its half light the streets will become multifarious, entwined, and exchanged one 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 ostensibly long known and familiar town, where those streets have their places and names, while the night, in its inexhaustible fecundity, has nothing better to do than to produce continually new and fictitious configurations. Those temptations of winter nights usually begin innocently, with the intention of taking a shortcut, of chancing an unaccustomed or swifter alley. The enticing arrangements of an intersection arise, of convoluted progress along some untried cross street. But this time it began differently.
Having gone a few steps I realised I had left my overcoat behind. I was about to turn back, but on reflection this seemed a needless waste of time, for the night was not at all cold — on the contrary, it was veined with streams of strange warmth, the wafts of some false spring. The snow dwindled into white strands, into an innocent and sweet fleece scented with violets. The sky thawed into those strands, where the moon showed itself twice, three times over, demonstrating by this multifariousness all of its phases and positions.
The sky that day laid bare the interior of its construction, as if in many anatomical specimens, displaying spirals and veins of light, sections of the pale green solids of the night, the plasma of its expanses and the tissue of its nocturnal reveries.
On such a night it was unlikely to walk along Podwale or any of the other dark streets that are the reverse side, the lining, as it were, of the four sides of the market square, and not to recall that, occasionally in that late season, one or two of those curious and so alluring shops would still be open, which were forgotten about on ordinary days. I called them the Cinnamon Shops, after the dark wainscoting, of that hue, that they were panelled with.
Those truly noble businesses, open late into the night, were always the object of my fervid dreams.
Their dimly lit, dark and solemn interiors exuded a deep aroma of paints and lacquer, an aroma 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 full of dignity, who served their clients in discrete silence, full of wisdom and understanding for their most secret wishes. But, most of all, there was one 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 so rare to have an opportunity to visit those shops — and with, moreover, a small but adequate amount of money in my pocket. It was impossible to forgo this opportunity, notwithstanding the importance of the mission entrusted to my zeal.
According to my reckoning, I must press on into a side street, passing two or three cross streets, in order to reach the street of the nocturnal shops. This took me away from my objective, but I could make good the delay, returning by way of Żupy Solne.
Lent wings by my desire to visit the cinnamon shops, I turned into a street I knew, and flew more than walked onward, eager not to lose my way. Thus I now passed three or four cross streets, but the looked for street still did not appear. And the configuration of the streets no longer corresponded to my remembered image of them. No trace of the shops. I went along a street where the houses had no entrances, only windows shut tight and blinded by the gleam of the moon. The correct street must lead along the other side of those houses, where their entrances are, I thought to myself. Anxiously, I quickened my step, having now given up all hope of visiting the shops. Merely hoping to emerge swiftly from there into a region of town that I knew. I approached an exit, anxious as to where it might bring me out this time. I entered a broad, sparsely built-up highway, very long and straight. A blast from its broad space immediately 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; only the parks and gardens loomed blackly in that silver landscape.
Scrutinising one of the buildings closely, I concluded that the rear and hitherto unseen side of the gymnasium school was before me. I went straight up to the entrance, and, to my surprise, found it unlocked, the hallway lighted. I entered and found myself on the red carpet of a corridor. My intention was to steal unnoticed through the building and leave by the front gate, thus taking a magnificent shortcut.
Then I remembered that, at that late hour, one of Professor Arendt’s elective lessons must be taking place, which he conducted in his classroom late into the night, where we would gather in wintertime, burning with a noble enthusiasm for drawing exercises, which that outstanding teacher inspired in us.
Our little group of students would be all but lost in that great dark room, where the shadows of our heads grew enormous and fragmented on the walls, cast by two small candles glowing in the necks of bottles.
In truth, not many of us drew during those hours, and the professor did not stipulate too exacting demands. One or two would bring pillows from home and settle down on the benches for a light nap. And only the most studious would draw beneath a solitary candle, 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 silences and an aroma of mystery. He quickly fastened the study door shut behind him, where, in that brief instant it had stood open, a throng of plaster shades had huddled together behind his head — classical fragments, sorrowful Niobids, Danaïds and Tantalids, a whole sad and barren Olympus withering for years in that museum of plaster figures. The dusk of that room was cloudy even by day, and overflowed sleepily with plaster dreams, empty looks, fading profiles and musings receding into nothingness. We often liked to eavesdrop at his door, on the sighing, whispering silence of that rubble crumbling in cobwebs, that twilight of the gods decomposing in boredom and monotony.
Solemn and dignified, the professor strolled along the bare benches where we, dispersed in small groups in the grey gleam of the winter night, were drawing something 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. He showed us, making esoteric gestures, old lithographs of evening landscapes, nocturnal thickets and the avenues of winter parks, looming blackly on white, moonlit pathways.
Between our sleepy conversations, time passed imperceptibly and ran unevenly, making knots, as it were, in the lapsing of the hours, somewhere swallowing whole periods of their duration. Imperceptibly, without actual transference, we rediscovered our gathering already making its way home along a lane white with snow, flanked by a dry, black thicket of bushes. We walked along that shaggy edge of the darkness, brushing against the bearskin of the bushes, cracking under our feet in the bright, moonless night, in the false, milky daylight long after midnight. The diffuse whiteness of that light, drizzling with snow, the pallid air and milky space, was like the grey paper of an etching, where the strokes and hatching of compact brushwood tangled in deep black. The night, deep into the early hours, now replicated those series of nocturnes, Professor Arendt’s nocturnal etchings, and carried further his imaginings.
In that black thicket of the park, in a shaggy fleece of brushwood and a mass of brittle twigs, 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. We sat there on the soft summery snow, in our shaggy coats, gorging ourselves on the nuts that the hazel thicket was replete with in that springtime winter. Martens, weasels and ichneumons soundlessly wound their way through the brushwood — furry, sniffing little animals, stinking of sheepskin, elongated, on short little paws. We suspected that were specimens from the school cabinet among them, which, although disembowelled and moulting, had heard in their empty innards the voice of an old instinct on that white night, a mating call — and had returned to the lair for a short, illusory lifespan.
But the phosphorescence of the spring snow slowly grew cloudy and died away, and the thick and black murk before daybreak set in. Some of us fell asleep in the warm snow, others scrabbled in the thicket for the entrances to their houses; gropingly they entered dark interiors, entered their parents’ and siblings’ slumber, into a continuation 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 now forgo the opportunity to peek for a moment into the Art Room, resolving to allot myself only a brief moment for the visit. But, ascending the cedar backstairs, full of ringing echoes, I realised I had reached an unknown, hitherto unseen part of building.
Not even the slightest sound disturbed the solemn silence here. The corridors were more spacious in this wing, lined with plush carpet and full of refinement. Small, dimly glowing lamps shone at their corners. Having passed one such turning I found myself in an even wider corridor, bedecked with palatial sumptuousness. One of its walls was open, through wide glazed arches, to the interior of an apartment. Before my eyes a long enfilade of rooms began, disappearing into the depths, furnished with dazzling magnificence. My eye was led 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 filled only with the secret looks that the mirrors exchanged, and a panic of arabesques running aloft in friezes along the walls and losing themselves in the stucco-work of the white ceilings.
I stood in admiration and awe before this 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 flee at the slightest noise. How, if discovered, could I justify this 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 a book — black, sibylline and calm eyes with a look that none of us could hold. But I would have considered it cowardice to withdraw in mid-course, not having fulfilled my determined objective. Besides, absolute silence reigned everywhere in those interiors, full of sumptuousness and lit by the dimmed light of the indeterminate hour. Through the arches of the corridor I saw, at the far end of a great parlour, a large glazed door leading to a terrace. Everything was so quiet that I mustered my courage. It did not seem too great a risk to descend the few stairs leading to floor level, and, in a few bounds, to cross the great, expensive carpet and reach the terrace, from which I could easily make my way to a street I knew.
This I did. Having stepped down on to the parquet of the parlour, beneath great palms that stood in vases there, shooting up to the height of the arabesques on the ceiling, I noticed that I had in fact reached neutral ground, since the parlour had no front wall whatsoever. It was a kind of loggia, connecting to the town square by means of a few steps. This was an offshoot, as it were, of that square, where one or two items of furniture were arranged on the pavement. I ran down the few stone steps and was once more in the street.
The constellations were now standing precipitously on their heads; all the stars had turned over on to their other sides, while 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, and it spared not a thought for daybreak, absorbed in its convoluted heavenly procedures.
A few worn out and rickety droshkies loomed blackly in the street, like crippled, dozing crabs or cockroaches. A coachman leaned out from his high seat. His face was small, red and good natured. ‘Shall we go, young sir?’ he asked. The coach shook in all the joints and ligatures of its many limbed body, and it moved off on its light wheels.
But who on such a night can trust 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 him understand where I wanted to go.
He shook his head at everything, heedlessly and forbearingly, and hummed to himself, driving through the town by a circuitous route.
There was a group of droshky drivers standing before some tap-room, amiably waving their hands to him. He joyfully made some reply to them, then he threw the reins on to 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 its way, with its steady, droshky trot. Actually, this horse filled me with confidence — he seemed to be smarter than the coachman. But I did not know how to drive, and had to submit to his will. We went along a suburban street enclosed by gardens on both sides. These gardens, the further they extended, slowly passed into parks of many trees, and they into forests.
I shall never forget that luminous drive on the brightest of winter nights. The coloured map of the heavens grew enormous, 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. It was scented with violets. From under the snow — woolly like white karakul furs — tremulous anemones began to appear, a spark of moonlight in each of their delicate chalices. The whole forest was illuminated as if by a thousand lights, stars that the December firmament was plentifully shedding. The air, the inexpressible purity of snow and violets, betokened some secret spring. We entered hilly terrain. The lines of the hills rose up like blissful sighs into the sky, shaggy with the bare twigs of trees. I caught a glimpse of hapless hikers on those exultant hillsides, gathering amid the moss and the bushes, slumped and damp from the snowfall of stars. The road grew steep; the horse skidded and struggled to pull the carriage, all of its ligatures screeching. I was happy. 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 still, before the horse’s breast. The horse arduously dug a passage through its pure and fresh mass. Finally he came 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, becoming very small like a little horse made of wood. I left him. I felt strangely light and happy. I pondered whether I ought to wait for the local train, the little narrow-gauge train that went by here, or to 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 became a ride, like skiing. I could adjust my speed at will and steer the ride by means of nimble turns of my body.
At the edge of town I curbed that triumphal run, modifying it to a sensible, leisurely pace. The moon was still high. The transformations of the sky were unending — the metamorphoses of its multifarious vaults in ever more masterfully described configurations. The sky that night opened up its bewitching internal mechanism like a silver astrolabe, exhibited the gilded mathematics of its constantly turning cogs and wheels.
In the market square I came across people out taking strolls. Their faces were all upraised and silvered by the magic of the sky, enchanted by the spectacle of that night. All concern about the wallet had left me. Father, engrossed in his eccentricities, had surely forgotten that he had even lost it — and I didn’t care about Mother.
On such a night, unique in a year, happy thoughts come, inspirations, prophetic touches of the divine finger. I was about to head for home, filled with ideas and inspiration, when my school friends sidetracked me, carrying books under their arms. They had set off for school too early, awakened by the brightness of that night that did not 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 was silvered on the snow, or whether the dawn was now rising...