A Visitation: -1- (2)
2
MY FATHER was slowly atrophying, wilting before our very eyes.
Crouching amid his great pillows, his tufts of grey hair wildly bristling, he conversed with himself in an undertone, utterly engrossed in his convoluted inner concerns. We had come to suspect that his personality might have broken up into many discordant and antagonistic selves, since he would quarrel with himself aloud, urging and pleading, insistently and passionately negotiating; or it might seem that he was presiding over a council of many clients, appeasing them with every possible outlay of eagerness and earnestness—but every time, those raucous meetings of angry disputants would be drawn to a close amid curses, abuses and insults.
A period of some quietude would follow, of inner consolation and a cheerful disposition of his spirit. Once more the great volumes were spread on the bed, the table and the floor, and an assiduous, industrious calm hung in the lamplight, over the white linen of the bed, over my father’s bowed, grey head. But when Mother returned from the shop late in the evening, Father would be reinvigorated. He summoned her and proudly showed her the magnificent, colourful decals with which he had lined the pages of the ledger.
We had all begun to notice by now that Father was shrinking, day by day, like a nut that shrivels up inside its shell. By no means was any diminishment of strength associated with this atrophy. Quite the reverse, his health, humour and mobility appeared to improve. He often laughed now, loudly and nonsensically. He simply choked with laughter, or else he would knock on the side of his bed and reply ‘Come in!’ to himself, in different tones, at all hours.
Every so often, he would get out of bed and clamber onto the top of his wardrobe. Squatting under the ceiling, he would set about arranging things there, amongst rusty and dusty old oddments. He sometimes placed two chairs back to back, and supporting himself with his hands on the backrests, swung his legs back and forth, his radiant eyes searching our faces for looks of admiration and encouragement. He had, it seemed, become entirely reconciled with God. Sometimes at night, the face of the bearded Demiurge would loom at his bedroom window, bathed in the dark crimson of a Bengal light, and look benevolently for a moment on the deep sleeper whose melodious snoring seemed to wander far over unknown expanses of dream worlds.
During the long, dusky afternoons of that late winter, my father would be immersed, sometimes for hours on end, in nooks densely crammed with old oddments, relentlessly searching for something; and many a time during dinner, when we were all seated at table, he would be absent. Then Mother had to call out: ‘Jakub!’ over and over again, and knock on the table with her spoon, until he emerged from some wardrobe, smeared with rags of cobweb and dust, with an air of obliviousness, and engrossed in those matters that so disturbed him—complicated and known to him alone.
Sometimes, he would clamber up onto a pelmet, and strike a pose in symmetry with the great stuffed vulture that hung on the wall at the far side of the window. He would remain for hours on end in that static, squatting pose, with a hazy gaze and a cunningly smiling expression—suddenly, upon anyone’s entrance, to beat his arms like wings and crow like a cock.
We ceased to pay attention to these eccentricities, in which he became ever more deeply embroiled from one day to the next. Seemingly rid of all bodily needs, not eating for weeks, he became more deeply engrossed with every passing day in complicated and bizarre affairs of which we had no comprehension. Inaccessible to our persuasions and pleas, he responded disconnectedly only to his own inner monologue, the course of which nothing from the outside world could disrupt. Perpetually perplexed, morbidly animated, and with flushes in his dry cheeks, he excluded and ignored us.
We grew accustomed to his harmless presence, his quiet warbling, that childish, self-absorbed twitter—those trills that ran, as it were, in the margins of our time. Sometimes by now, he would be missing for days on end; he was lost somewhere in out-of-the-way nooks of the apartment, and there was no finding him. By degrees, these absences ceased to make any impression on us—we grew accustomed to them; and when he did reappear, many days later, a few inches shorter and a few inches thinner, it no longer caught our attention. We had simply ceased to take him into consideration, so withdrawn had he become from everything human, everything real. Knot by knot, he untangled himself from us; he shook off one by one the bonds of association with human society. What remained of him, that barely corporeal husk and that handful of nonsensical eccentricities, might even disappear some day, as unnoticed as a grey cluster of dirt gathering in the corner, which Adela took out every day to the rubbish heap.
> -The Birds- >