The Comet

I

THE END of winter stood that year under the banner of an especially favourable astronomical conjunction. The calendar’s coloured predictions blossomed redly on the snow that lay on the outskirts of the mornings, and from the fiery red of those Sundays and holidays, a glow fell onto half of the week, and the days were coldly consumed in a false fire. For a moment, deluded hearts beat more rapidly, enthralled by that heralding redness, which heralded nothing, but was merely a premature alarum, coloured calendar boasting painted in bright vermilion onto the week’s binding. Every night since Twelfth Night, I had been sitting over the white parade of our table, gleaming with candlesticks and silverware, playing endless games of patience. The night beyond the window would grow brighter by the hour, all iced and glistening, filled with endlessly sprouting almonds and candies, whilst the moon, an inexhaustible transformist, utterly engrossed in its late lunar practices, assumed its phases in turn — brighter and brighter, it turned over all the court cards in a game of préférence, then it replicated all of their colours. Often now it was visible in the daytime, standing to one side and awaiting its turn, equipped too early, brassy and without radiance, a melancholy knave with his shining club. Meanwhile whole skyfuls of cloudy wisps would pass through its solitary profile, in a silent, white and immense motion, barely covering it with a shimmering and piscine shell of mother-of-pearl, into which the coloured firmament would curdle toward evening. Those days were leafed through vacantly. A gale gusted noisily over the roofs; it blew the chimneys cold to their very hearths; it erected imaginary scaffolding and gantries over the town, and then knocked those lofty, clattering constructions down in a tumult of rafters and beams. Occasionally, a fire would break out in a distant suburb. The chimney sweeps ran about the town on high roofs and little galleries, under a verdigris and torn sky. In that aerial perspective, stepping from the field of one roof to the next amid the pinnacles and pennants of the town, they dreamed that the gale had briefly opened up for them the lids of roofs over girls’ alcoves, only to slam them shut again on the great billowing book of the town — astonishing literature, enough for many days and nights! The breezes blew themselves out. The shop assistants were putting spring fabrics on display in the shop window. From the soft hues of the wool, the weather soon abated, tinted with lavender, flushed with pale mignonette. The snow dwindled and was pleated into a baby’s blanket, which drifted drily away into the air, sucked up by cobalt breezes, reabsorbed by an immense and concave sky without sun or clouds. Here and there, oleanders were already blossoming in people’s apartments. Windows were thrown open, and the mindless chirruping of sparrows filled the room, in the aimless reverie of a sky blue day. Vehement scuffles of chaffinches, bullfinches and tomtits converged for a moment above the empty squares, twittering dreadfully. They flew off in all directions, blown away by the breeze, annihilated, blotted out in empty blue. Coloured spots remained behind them momentarily in the eye, a handful of confetti tossed blindly into the bright expanse, and melted deep within the eye in neutral azure.
    A premature spring season began. Lawyers’ apprentices, the epitome of elegance and chic, were wearing thin moustaches curled up into spirals, and high, stiff collars. On days scoured by the gale, as if by a flood, as the wind gusted clamorously, high above the town, they doffed from afar their coloured bowler hats to ladies of their acquaintance. They leaned with their backs against the wind, their coat tails fluttering, and averted their eyes, all denial and gentility, not wishing to expose their lady-loves to scandal. For a moment, those ladies didn’t know where to look. They cried out in fright, beaten about by their dresses. Then, recovering their composure, they graciously returned a smile of acknowledgement.
    Often in the afternoon, the wind would die down. On the porch, Adela would clean great copper pans, which rattled metalically under her touch. The sky drew to a halt over the shingled roofs, exhausted, its blue roads branching. The shop assistants, sent forth from the shop on some errand, lingered near her for a long time on the threshold of the kitchen, leaning against the balustrade of the porch, drunk on the day-long wind, and with a jumble of thoughts in their heads, stirred by the strident chirruping of the sparrows. A breeze carried the lost refrain of a barrel organ from the distance. Their soft words were inaudible, enunciated in hushed tones, with an air of innocence as if in passing, although in truth they were calculated to scandalise Adela. Cut to the quick, she reacted violently. She admonished them in utter rage and exultation. And her face, clouded and grey from springtime dreams, flushed redly with anger and amusement. They lowered their eyes in their despicable devotion, with inappropriate satisfaction at having succeeded in provoking her.
    Days and afternoons went by. Everyday events, seen from the height of our porch, flowed in confusion over the town, over the layrinth of the roofs and houses in the hazy glow of those grey weeks, weeks crowded with tinkers proclaiming their services. And occasionally in the distance, Szloma’s powerful sneeze lent comical emphasis to the town’s effusive, faraway tumult. On some far removed square, Tłuja, the mad girl, driven to despair by the teasing of boys, began to dance her wild sarabande, kicking her skirts high, to the delight of the crowd. A puff of wind smoothed and levelled those outbursts, distributed them amid the monotonous and grey tumult, and dragged them around incessantly on a shore of shingled roofs in the afternoon’s milky, smoky air. Resting her hands on the balustrade, leaning over that distant, tempestuous roaring of the town, Adela could catch all of its louder emphases. Smiling, she rearranged those lost syllables, trying to connect them, to read something meaningful in that great grey, rising and falling monotony of the day.
    The epoch stood under the banner of mechanics and electricity. From under the wings of human genius, a whole swarm of inventions was showered upon the world. Cigar boxes fitted with electric lighters appeared in bourgeois homes — a switch was thrown, and a swarm of electric sparks ignited a petrol-soaked wick. On this, stupendous hopes were founded. A musical box in the shape of a Chinese pagoda, wound up with a key, immediately began to play its miniature rondo, rotating like a carousel. Tiny bells trilled at its edges. Wings of tiny doors opened on its opposite sides to reveal its revolving, barrel-organ core, playing a snuffbox triolet. Electric doorbells were installed in every home. Domestic life stood under the banner of galvanism. A coil of insulated wire became the symbol of the times. Fashionably dressed young men in salons demonstrated Galvani’s phenomenon, and received the radiant looks of ladies. An electrical conductor opened the door to women’s hearts. The experiment succesfully concluded, those heroes of the day would blow kisses amid the applause of those salons.
    It wasn’t long before the town was overrun by velocipedes of all shapes and sizes. A philosophical view of the world had become obligatory, and whoever acknowledged the notion of progress had to accept the consequences, and mount a velocipede. First, of course, came the lawyers’ apprentices, that vanguard of new ideas, with their their curled up moustaches and coloured bowler hats, the hope and flower of our youth. Scattering the raucous crowd, they ploughed into its throng on enormous bicycles or tricycles, their wire spokes chiming. Holding tight to the handlebars, they manœuvred their enormous, lofty front wheels, cutting their way through the amused rabble in a winding, wobbling line. Some were seized with apostolic frenzy — rising up on their whirring pedals, like stirrups, they addressed the people from on high, foretelling a new and happy era for mankind — salvation through the bicycle... And they rode on amid the cheers of their audience, doffing their hats in all directions.
    And yet there was something woefully compromising in those magnificent and triumphal excursions, some painful and unpleasant grinding which caused them to incline dangerously at the height of their triumph, and fall headlong into self-parody. Surely they felt it themselves, suspended spiderlike in their filigree apparatus, straddling the pedals like great hopping frogs as they executed, amid widely rolling wheels, their ducklike movements. A mere step away from the ridiculous, they lurched desperately forward, leaning over the handlebars and pedalling ever faster, a gymnastic cloud of vehement contortions, flying head over heels into a somersault. Is it any wonder? On the strength of this illicit practical joke, mankind was encroaching on a realm of stupendous facilitation, bought too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing. And that disproportion between cause and effect, that blatant fraud on nature, that excessive reward for a brilliant trick, had in the end to be offset by self-parody. And so they rode onward — pitiful victors, the martyrs of their own genius — amid elemental outbursts of laughter, so great was the comedic power of those miracles of technology.
    The first time my brother brought an electromagnet home from school, when we all experienced, with a shudder inside, the secretly vibrating life locked up inside an electric circuit, Father gave a condescending smile. A far reaching thought had taken shape in his mind, which brought together and connected certain suspicions that had beset him long ago. Why was Father smiling to himself? Why did his eyes, watering, revolve in comical mock-sincerity into the backs of their orbits? Who knows? Did he perhaps have some inkling of a crude trick, some vulgar intrigue, transparent machinations lying behind the stupendous revelations of mysterious power? That was the moment that marked Father’s return to his laboratory experiments.
    Father’s was a somewhat basic laboratory. A few lengths of coiled wire, some jars of acid, zinc, lead and coal — such was the entire workshop of that bizarre esotericist. ‘Matter,’ he said, stifling a cough and modestly lowering his eyes. ‘Matter, good sirs...’ He left the sentence unfinished, although he let it be understood that he was on the trail of some crude deception, which we, even as we sat there, had all been taken in by. With downcast eyes, Father quietly mocked that age old fetish. ‘Panta rei!’ he said, and demonstrated with movements of his hands the eternal circulation of substance. For a long time he had wanted to mobilise the hidden power that circulates within matter, to melt its rigidity, to clear its path to thorough penetration, to transfusion, to universal circulation, its only true nature. ‘Principium individuationis be damned,’ he cried, giving vent to his boundless contempt for that primal human principle, although this was thrown in incidentally, in passing, as he ran his fingers along a length of wire. He closed his eyes, feeling different places in the circuit, his sensitive touch discerning faint differences in potentials. He made cuts in the wire, and leaned forward, listening intently. And suddenly he was off again, repeating this activity at another place in the circuit. He seemed to have ten hands and twenty senses. His divided attention was turned in a hundred different directions at once. No point in space evaded his suspicion. He leaned forward again, tapping the wire in a certain place, and suddenly jumping back. Then he shot like a cat to the place he had been looking for, and with faint embarrassment, missed his target. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, turning suddenly to an amazed spectator, who was closely following his actions. ‘Excuse me. This little space here is what interests me, which you yourself, sir, are occupying. If you would kindly move aside for a moment...’ And he made his brief measurements hurriedly, as agile and nimble as a canary hopping blithely in convultions of its somatic system.
    Metals dipped in acid solutions, saline and corroding in their pitiful bath, became conductive in the darkness. Roused from their numb lifelessness in the unending twilight of those funereal and late days, they buzzed monotonously, sang metallically, and glowed intermolecularly. Invisible cargoes amassed at their poles, and superceded them, emptying into the whirling darkness. A barely perceptible prickliness coursed through space — blind, teeming currents polarised into concentric lines of power, the circulations and spirals of a magnetic field. Now here, now there, pieces of apparatus signalled from their slumber and replied to one another belatedly, too late, in despondent monosyllables — a line, a dot, at intervals in muted lethargy. Father stood in the midst of those wandering currents, with a pained smile, shocked by that stuttering articulation, that irrevocably closed and inescapable distress, signaling monotonously in crippled half-syllables from its unliberated depths.
    Father arrived at stupendous conclusions on the basis of these investigations. He proved, for example, that an electric bell, based on the principle of the so-called Neef’s hammer, is a rather commonplace mystification. It was not man who had broken into nature’s laboratory — it was nature itself that had drawn him into its own machinations, achieving through his experiments its own ends, heading who can say where. During lunch, my father touched the handle of his spoon, dipped in his soup, with the nail of his index finger, and lo and behold, Neef’s bell began to rattle in the lamp. The whole apparatus was an unnecessary pretext, meaningless in reality. Neef’s bell was only a meeting place for certain impulses of substance, finding their way through human ingenuity. What nature wanted, nature produced — man was merely an oscillating arrow, a weaver’s shuttle, soaring here, soaring there in accordance with its will. He was a mere element, a component of Neef’s hammer.
    Someone proposed the term ‘mesmerism’, and Father seized on it eagerly. The range of his theory narrowed, until it came to its fundamental cell. According to this theory, man was a mere transit station, a momentary knot of mesmeric currents, entwined here, entwined there in the womb of eternal matter. All of the inventions he had gloried in were merely snares that nature had led him into — mantraps of the unknown. Father’s experiments began to take on a character of magic and prestidigitation, with a faint tinge of parodistic jugglery. I shall say nothing of the various experiments with doves, which with a wave of his wand he arranged in twos and threes, into dozens, and then reincorporated, with a great show of effort, one by one back into the wand. He tipped his hat, and out they flew in a fluttering stream, their full compliment returning to reality, filling the table-top in a bustling, waddling, cooing cluster. At times he would come to a halt at an unexpected point in the experiment. He stood uncertainly, his eyes closed. And after a moment’s pause, he went with tripping steps to the hallway, where he thrust his head into the chimney shaft. Deadened by soot, it was dark and blissful there, like the very core of nothingness. Warm currents trailed up and down, and Father closed his eyes, remaining awhile in that warm, black nothingness. We all considered this incident to be meaningless in reality. It extended, as it were, behind the scenes of affairs, so we inwardly turned a blind eye to that extramarginal fact, part of an entirely different order of things.
    My father had some dispiriting tricks indeed in his repertoire, to pierce the heart with true melancholy. The chairs in our dining room had high backrests, with flower and leaf garlands beautifully carved in a realistic style. But all Father had to do was flick these carvings with his finger and suddenly they took on an unusually comical physiognimy, some vague suggestion. They began to flicker and twinkle knowingly — which was extremely, almost unbearably embarrassing — until at last that twinkling began to follow a quite definite course, an irresistible compulsion, and someone or other in the room began to exclaim: ‘Aunt Wanda, by God! It’s Aunt Wanda!’ And the ladies began to squeal, for indeed it was Aunt Wanda, true to life. Or rather, it was the real aunt Wanda, who had come to vist us. She really was sitting there, conducting her endless discourse, allowing no one else the opportunity to speak. Father’s miracles had cancelled themselves out, for this was not an apparition, it was only Aunt Wanda in all of her ordinariness and commonness, which precluded all thoughts of the miraculous.
    Before considering the further events of that memorable winter, I ought to briefly mention a certain incident, which has always been ruefully hushed up in the chronicle of our family. What happened to Uncle Edward? He came to visit us at that time, unsuspecting, and bursting with health and enterprise. He had left his wife and daughter in the country, dutifully awaiting his return, and arrived in the best of spirits, to take a break from his family and have some fun. And what happened? Father’s experiments made an electrifying impression on him. Having witnessed the first few examples of his accomplishments, Edward stood up at once, took off his overcoat, and placed himself entirely at Father’s disposal. ‘Unreservedly!’ as he proclaimed, with a steadfast look and a firm shake of the hand. My father understood, and began by ensuring that Uncle had none of the traditional prejudices concerning the principium individuationis. It appeared he had none whatsoever. Uncle was broad-minded and unsuperstitious. His one passion was to serve science.
    At first, Father allowed him a certain latitude. He was laying the foundations of a radical experiment. Uncle Edward made use of his freedom by exploring the town. He purchased a velocipede of impressive size, and circuited the market square atop its enormous front wheel, looking in at first-floor windows from the heights of his saddle. Passing by our house, he tipped his hat elegantly to the ladies standing at the window. He had a moustache curled up into spirals, and a small, pointed beard. But he soon became convinced that a velocopede could never lead him to the deeper secrets of mechanics, that so brilliant an apparatus was nonetheless incapable of providing lasting metaphysical shudders. And then the experiments began, to which Uncle’s lack of prejudices concerning the principium individuationis were so indispensable. Uncle Edward had no qualms whatsoever about being physically reduced, for the benefit of science, to the bare principal of Neef’s hammer. He ungrudgingly agreed to the progressive paring away of all of his characteristics, with the aim of laying bare his deepest essence, identical, as he had long felt, to the aforementioned principle.
    Father, shutting himself away in his study, began the gradual disassemblement of Uncle Edward’s convoluted essence, an exhausting process of psychoanalysis extending over days and nights. The table in his study began to fill with the scattered complexes of Uncle’s ego. To begin with, Uncle Edward would still turn up at mealtimes. Drastically reduced, he attempted to take part in our conversations. He took one last ride on his velocipede, and then, seeing himself more and more dismantled, gave it up. He seemed burdened by a kind of shame, characteristic of that stage he had reached, and he took to avoiding people. Meanwhile, Father was drawing ever closer to the goal of his efforts. He had reduced Uncle to the indispensable minimum, removing one by one all of the inessentials. He placed Edward high up in a niche in the wall of the stirwell, arranging his elements on the basis of the Leclanché cell. The wall was mouldly in that spot. Mildew had spread its whitish pleating there. Without scruples, Father availed himself of all the capital of Uncle’s enthusiasm, and pulled him out in a long thread all along the hallway and the left wing of the house. Making his way down the dark corridor on his stepladders, he drove little nails into the wall, all along the trail of Uncle’s remaining self. Those smoky and yellow afternoons were almost completely dark, and Father held a lighted candle close to the rotting wall to illuminate it inch by inch. Accounts vary, but it does appear that Uncle Edward, so heroically self-possessed until that point, betrayed at the last moment a certain impatience. They even say that this culminated in a violent, if belated, outburst which all but wrecked the work in its final stages of completion. But the installation was ready now, and Uncle Edward, who had all his life been a model husband, father and businessman, also submitted in the end, of higher necessity, to this, his final role.
    Uncle functioned splendidly. On no occasion did he refuse obedience. Having left behind his embroiled complications, in which he had so often before been lost and etangled, he had finally discovered the purity of a uniform and straightforward principal, to which he would from that time onward remain subordinate. At the cost of his barely manageable multifacetedness, he had now acquired simple, uncomplicated immortality. Was he happy? There is no point in asking. Such a question has meaning only in the case of beings replete with a wealth of alternatives and possibilities, in which actual reality can stand in opposition to possibilities incompletely real, and be reflected in them. But Uncle Edward had no alternatives. For him there was no such thing as the dichotomy of happy and unhappy, since he was fully integrated, entirely self-identical. One could not suppress a certain admiration at seeing him functioning so punctually, so precisely. Even his wife, aunt Teresa, who came looking for her husband some time later, could not restrain herself from pressing the button every once in a while, to hear that sonorous, resonant tone in which she recognised the former timbre of his voice at times of irritation. As for his daughter, Edza, one might say that she admired her Father’s career. Later, it is true, she did take a certain revenge on me for my father’s deed, but that is part of another story now.

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