A Visitation: -1- (2)
2
MY FATHER was slowly atrophying, wilting before our very eyes.
Crouching before his great pillows, wildly bristling with tufts of grey hair, he conversed with himself in an undertone, entirely engrossed in convoluted inner matters of some kind. We had come to suspect that his personality might have had fallen apart, broken up into many discordant and antagonistic selves, since he would quarrel aloud with himself, negotiate insistently and passionately, urge and plead — or even seem to preside over a council of many clients, appeasing them with every possible outlay of eagerness and earnestness. But those raucous meetings of angry disputants would disperse time after time amid curses, abuses and insults.
A period of some quietude would follow, of inner consolation and a cheerful disposition of his spirit.
The great volumes were spread on the bed once more, on 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, late in the evening when Mother returned from the shop, Father would be reinvigorated; he would summon her and proudly show her end p.18 the magnificent, coloured decalcomania with which he had been assiduously lining the pages of the ledger.
We all noticed at that time that father had begun to shrink, day by day, like a nut shrivelling 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. Occasionally, he would get out of bed and clamber onto the top of the wardrobe, and, squatting under the ceiling, set about arranging things there, amid rusty and dusty old oddments.
Sometimes he would place two chairs side by side, and, supporting himself with his hands on their backs, swing his legs back and forth, his radiant eyes searching our faces for expressions 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 the unfamiliar expanses of dreaming 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.
Many a time during dinner, as we all sat down to table, Father would be absent. Then Mother had to call out: ‘Jakub!’ over and over again, and knock on the table with her spoon beforer he would emerge from some wardrobe, smeared with rags of cobweb and dust, with an oblivious gaze and engrossed in disturbing matters, complicated and known to him alone. end p.19
Sometimes he would clamber up onto a pelmet and adopt a static pose, in symmetry with the great stuffed vulture hanging on the wall at the opposite side of the window. He remained for hours on end in that static, squatting pose, with a hazy gaze and a cunningly smiling air — 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 was more deeply embroiled from one day to the next. Seemingly rid of all bodily needs, not eating for weeks, he was engrossed more deeply with every passing day in complicated and bizarre affairs of which we had no understanding. Inaccessible to our persuasions and pleas, he responded disconnectedly only to his own internal monologue, the course of which nothing from the outside could disturb. Perpetually perplexed, morbidly animated and with flushes in his dry cheeks, he excluded and ignored us.
We grew accustomed to his harmless presence and his quiet warbling — that childish, self-absorbed twitter whose trills ran, as it were, in the margin of our time. He was already going missing by then, sometimes for days on end; he would be lost 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 appeared again many days later, a few inches shorter and thinner, it no longer arrested our attention. We had simply ceased to take him into consideration, so far withdrawn had he become from everything human, everything real. Knot by knot, he untangled himself from us; point by point, he shook off the bonds of association with human society. What remained of him, that barely corporeal husk and that handful of nonsensical eccentricities, might disappear someday, as unnoticed as the grey cluster of dirt, gathering in the corner, that Adela took out to the rubbish heap every day.
end p.20
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