Читать книгу A Thousand Peaceful Cities - Jerzy Pilch - Страница 7

This time I had guessed it. From the beginning I knew that the last word in Mr. Trąba’s monologue would be the word “hands.” I had been divinely certain of it, and yet I didn’t feel the usual satisfaction that the world was falling into shape according to my plans, and that the tongues resounding in it said what I wanted them to say. I didn’t much care about the satisfaction. I sat in our kitchen, huge as the open heavens, and I waited for evening to fall and for the lights of the Rychter Department Store to be lit.

I didn’t much care about the lascivious secrets of the morphinistes, about the dying deeds of Mr. Trąba, or about mathematics. I continued to write, but in the depths of my heart I didn’t much care about the sentences I heard, and which I recorded mechanically in shorthand or noted at incredible speed in full graphic beauty.

That summer I was chasing after the angel of my first love, and except for those first transports I didn’t much care about anything. Actually, I wasn’t chasing the angel of my first love. All the later angels, granted—them I chased. But I didn’t so much chase the angel of my first love as attempt to establish any kind of contact with her whatsoever. I was like the village cloud-gazer who dreams of reaching the spheres beyond the stars.

True, the brick galaxy of the Rychter Department Store bordered upon our world, but the angel of my first love lived up high. Her floor was a thousand times further away than the attic of the morphinistes creaking just above our heads. Hounded by my lusts, I stared at the whitish planet of her window. My hands shook. I couldn’t keep the pen, with the Redis nib, in my hand. Black-green rivers of radio waves flowed gently through white and deserted centers of towns: Nice, London, Rome, Madrid . . .

WHY—I wrote in huge letters on the back of a piece of bristol board on which a few days ago I had drawn, for practice, the classic configuration of two concentric circles, the relationship of which creates a ring. WHY—I wrote in huge block letters. WHY DON’T YOU—I wrote, hoping that the size and contrast were sufficiently legible. WHY DON’T YOU SMILE?—I added a question mark, monstrous in its psychoanalytical depth. And then I thumbtacked the bristol board to the table. I pushed the table to the window. I turned the radio up to full volume. The black-green storms and deluges in the radio played for all they were worth. At any moment they would explode and reduce the bakelite and tubes of the Pioneer to dust.

But will this be enough? Will this explosion attract her attention? After a few, or perhaps after a dozen or so attempts, after a week, or perhaps after two weeks of strenuous labor—it came to pass. True, the radio didn’t turn to dust, nor did it fall to pieces, but even so, the worst came to pass. The angel of my first love appeared in the window and began to stare fixedly at the purely—as I hoped in the depths of my heart—rhetorical question written in giant letters on the bristol board. Jesus Christ, what to do? I found myself in an unusually uncomfortable position. Namely, I had pressed myself flat against the wall at the window, my face right up against the shutter. I was basically safe and invisible. Except that I’d forgotten that a significant part of my head must have been visible! It must have been visible, because it was protruding. It was protruding because, with my left eye (with the corner of my left eye), I was attempting to monitor the situation, and I kept checking to see whether the symphony of bedazzling sounds rising to the heavens would lure her, whether she would look at my window, whether she would look, whether she would notice, and whether she would read the inscription. And there you have it: it lured her, she looked, noticed, and began to read. I was determined not to budge, not to move even half an inch. After all, from that distance, considering the matter strictly and without cosmic poetry, she would still have to be looking in a straight line, and for quite a distance, several dozen yards at least. From that distance the fragment of my head could easily pass for a bulge in the window shutter that had been caused by moisture. Or for some accessory hanging on the wall (to tell the truth, that’s what I was, I was an accessory hanging on the wall)—some accessory hanging on the wall, a piece of which protruded. For example, an oval mirror in an oak frame. Why in the world, in this place, I tried to convince her telepathically, why shouldn’t there be an oval mirror in an oak frame, a piece of which was protruding, hanging here? After all, it is here, it is hanging, and it is protruding. Or, let’s say, a cloth bag for brushes sewn by a thrifty housewife . . . After all, in homes, especially in homes in the provinces, especially in Protestant homes in the provinces, you quite frequently see bags for brushes sewn by thrifty housewives affixed to the walls . . . True, Mother, eternally occupied with the ordering of her correspondence with the bishop, is not an especially thrifty housewife, but ultimately what business is that of yours? . . . And I would have floundered on endlessly in that tried-and-true, and therefore unchallenged, burlesque, if I hadn’t suddenly understood that something here wasn’t right, that this was going on just a little too long. After all, how long can you read the sentence “Why don’t you smile?” But apparently the lighting wasn’t good, the distance too great, or perhaps some other challenge had come into play. In any case, the angel of my first love wasn’t able to process the message, which, to be sure, had reached her, but wasn’t understood.

And do you know what that scamp did then? She stopped trying to decipher my communiqué, she raised her head as well as her hand, and she began to wave her unparalleled palm in my direction. For a moment yet I remained frozen in my new incarnations; for a moment I was still a bulge caused by moisture, a fragment of a mirror, a cloth bag, but since the angel of my first love saw—quite simply—me, there remained nothing to do but to return to myself. I closed my eyes. I closed my eyes, and I moved along the wall. I disappeared from her field of vision for good. I turned the radio down. I crawled over to the switch and turned off the light. The welcoming banner “WHY DON’T YOU SMILE?” sank into darkness. On the entire planet life came to a standstill.

•

I sat squatting in the darkness, and I was glad it was all over. Time—I repeated a lesson I had recently heard—time heals all. In a couple of weeks I won’t be ashamed of any of this anymore. We had come to the edge point, and we call the edge point of a figure that point in the environment at which points of that figure can be found, as well as points that don’t belong to it. The set of edge points of a figure we call its edge—I whispered this to myself, and I breathed a final sigh of relief.

•

A locomotive was climbing an embankment not far away. It stopped every little bit like a tired hiker. The engineer said something to his assistant. Someone was taking the shortest path in the world between our house and the Rychter Department Store. Someone was walking there at the edge of night, whistling, kicking an empty sardine can. Its impacts on the asphalt resounded with incredible smoothness. Someone guided the empty sardine can like Roman Lentner kicking a soccer ball. Someone kicked a can as great as a soccer ball. He was just about to make a shot in the direction of the goal when suddenly a defender emerged out of thin air. They battled without mercy. The racket and din were such that it might have seemed that they were wearing not team jerseys but thin metal armor. First individual whistles, then more and more frequent ones began to resound from the stands. One after another the strangest objects flew from the stands, and they crashed with a bang on the grass, which was hard as asphalt.

I jumped to my feet, turned on the light, and ran to the window. The angel of my first love was raving like a mad woman. She was whistling through her fingers, as she methodically stripped her room of all its objects, throwing them down onto the sidewalk. Sure—the thought flashed through my mind—after all, she must be something like twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, and at that age objects no longer have any significance. The angel of my first love drove me from the lair of my virginal fear with a hailstorm of ashtrays, silverware, mugs, glasses, all sorts of empty packages. The lights came on in every window of the Rychter Department Store. Accidental passersby were transformed into accidental witnesses. From afar you could hear the siren of an approaching ambulance or fire truck.

Now it was I who waved to her. I let it be known that I am here, that I consent to everything. I sent her missives to calm the air. I soothed her fury with the help of a mad alphabet of incoherent gestures. Finally she noticed me, and she stood stock-still. Now I slowly pointed my index finger at myself, and then I reached both hands out in her direction, which was to signify: “I will come to you right away, and I will allow you to make sport of my young and virginal body.” But she, to my great amazement, shook her head no, and she turned her unparalleled hand down, in the direction of the display window of the footwear section, which was covered with a green grating. I repeated my gesture. She doesn’t understand, I thought—or maybe she just doesn’t believe her own dumb luck. But no, she emphatically and definitively pointed in the direction of the massive grill which was guarding a few pairs of miserable Gomułka-era pumps. I raised the wrist of my left hand, and I pointed at the face of my watch, a Soviet Polyot with a calendar. When? Immediately, she responded, making the zero sign. Upstairs you could hear the spasmodic whispers of the morphinistes. Father sought out the truth between the lines of The People’s Tribune. “Dear and Beloved Reverend Bishop,” Mother wrote, but only as a draft version for now. My legs gave way beneath me. The night had in it the childish intensity of ink.

The angel of my first love stood before the footwear section. She was wearing an unbuttoned black sweater that reached down to the middle of her thigh. Under her arm she clasped something that looked like a purse, or a document case, or a teacher’s day planner.

“What did you write?” she asked with the greatest impatience. In deathly horror I saw, noticed, and remembered everything. In my madness I was quite simply able to foretell not only the final word of as-yet-unuttered sentences—I was able to perceive all of the entire near future. The black sweater meant nothing more and nothing less than that here before me stood—and spoke to me—a woman in a miniskirt. I didn’t believe, nor did I know, that this would ever come to pass. It would be a year before skirts and dresses would be cropped, a year before several hundred million women’s legs would see the light of day, a year before the earth would become as graceful as the kneecap of a high-school girl. It would be a year and a few months before Małgosia Snyperek, who ran the church-fair shooting gallery in the center of town, would let the unimaginable whiteness of her thighs and knees shine forth, and from one day to the next she would be transformed from an inconspicuous duckling, accessible to all, into an unattainable goddess of sex. It would be a year before all the Małgosias of the world would unravel a band of more or less thirty centimeters’ width from their garments, display to our astounded eyes their divine legs, from foot to thigh, and immediately slip away on those naked legs to an insurmountable distance. It would be a year before women again became unattainable. They would become unattainable in the twinkling of an eye, for, in the twinkling of an eye, this laying bare gives the appearance of unattainability. It would all happen in a year.

But meanwhile, the precursor of this revolution stood before me and spoke:

“What did you write?”

“Why don’t you smile?” I managed to stutter.

She remained silent for a moment. She looked at me with the intense inquisitiveness of the innate psychoanalyst, and then she said:

“Because that’s how I am. I don’t smile, and that’s all there is to it. Understand?”

And she smiled mysteriously, took me by the arm, and said:

“Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

It was strange, and, to tell the truth, neither earlier nor later (especially not later) did I ever meet such a peculiar example of the female body: from up close she looked younger.

•

And it was as it always would be in my life: weakness prevailed, but contrariness also prevailed. I ought to have led her. But it was the other way around. It was she who led me, led me through the park that smelled of alcohol, through the soccer field that was going to weed, along the warm river, there and back again. I knew all those places so well that I had long ago ceased noticing them. Long ago those places had left my head. But now she, a scantily clad vacationer, returned being to that which lacked it. I breathed in the smell of her hair. It smelled of Tatar-hop shampoo. I breathed in that smell, and I distinctly felt the gravel of the park lane under my feet. I felt the touch of her hand, and I saw the dark surface of the playing field, the outline of the rotting goals, rooted together with the black stalks of dill, intertwined with the nets that had not been taken down for years. I listened to her peculiar voice, as if stifled, as if struggling with an incessant giggle, and I breathed in the air coming from the river. I didn’t know yet that my situation could be described using classical aphorisms: “You will come to know the lands of childhood, known to you through and through, only at the side of the woman of your life,” said the first aphorism. “You won’t grow up until your beloved looks at your baby photograph,” declared the second piece of wisdom. “The first day of your first love is the last day of your childhood. Until then you didn’t exist,” went the next truth, unshakable in its arbitrariness. To this day I don’t know who the authors of these immortal maxims were. I don’t even recall where I read them or where I heard them. Their author could just as well have been King Solomon as Mr. Trąba, a forgotten classic or a chance traveling companion, the author of school texts or a young poet whose verses no one wanted to print. Even today it is a question without significance. But then, more than thirty years ago, when the angel of my first love led me through the very middle of the land of my childhood, it was absolutely without significance. At that time, not only didn’t I know who wrote the aphorisms that described my situation, I didn’t even know that there were any aphorisms that described my situation. At that time, some indistinct creature, the winged reptile of fear and lust, began to move slowly in the depths of my entrails and in the depths of my soul. I was happy then that I didn’t have to say anything, since she, the angel of my first love, talked incessantly.

•

“I saw you seven times,” she said in a stifled voice that constantly seemed to herald an outburst of heartfelt laughter. “I saw you seven times. Yes, Jerzyk—you man, you—I saw you seven times. You see, I even know your name. But I won’t tell you my name. OK, OK, don’t get your feelings hurt, don’t go away, don’t leave me, don’t break off so suddenly a romance that has barely begun. OK, I’ll tell you my name. But in a moment. The first time, I saw you in front of the Ruch kiosk. To tell the truth, I was standing in line just behind you, and your shoulders, shamefully clothed in a white shirt, captivated me. Don’t be angry, Jerzyk, but by that white shirt, I recognized that—how should I say this to you so that you won’t fly into a rage again—well, by that white shirt, I recognized that you don’t spend vacations here; you spend life here. OK, in general, you dress very well, but here and there one could improve this and that. In any case, I, a poor sleeping beauty, lulled to erotic sleep for seven years, living in amatory lethargy for seven years, saw before me a teenage boy with very manly shoulders, and I felt that I was waking up. Well, maybe I shouldn’t exaggerate that bit about waking up. In any case, I strained to hear the sound of your voice with great anxiety, Jerzyk. I was afraid that you would speak with the macabre tone of a boy whose voice was changing. I was afraid that I would get over it immediately, but my fears were premature. ‘I’d like a copy of The People’s Tribune and The Catholic Weekly,’ you said in a calm voice that was low and just as harmoniously shaped as your shoulders.

“The second time I saw you, you were hot on the trail of the two bodies who rent a room in your attic. Oh, Jerzyk, Jerzyk, I don’t like those two bodies at all. You mustn’t take any interest in them, Jerzyk. Why do you spy on them? Why did you go creeping after them? If you absolutely must, why not just climb the stairs to the second floor, today even—knock, and it shall be opened unto you; ask, and it shall be given unto you. I’m not at all worried about the lawlessness of those two. After all, they aren’t all that lawless. For instance, the absurd rumors everyone repeats about the morphine. Come on, come on. Those bodies are too lazy to get morphine. They’re too languid to figure out how to use a hypodermic needle. They’re not buoyant enough for even morphine to give them wings. Jerzyk, you are wrong,” said the angel of my first love, and, with all her strength, she painfully dug her fingers into my shoulder and stopped talking.

Although at first I greeted the sudden silence with relief, I won’t attempt to hide the fact that, on the whole and in the long run, it didn’t suit me. I was completely under the spell of her frenzied and omniscient narration. Even if I had brought along my saving props—a notebook and pencil—I wouldn’t have been able to record a thing, to say nothing of predicting the final word. Besides, none of her words gave the impression of being the last. Her mind moved with alarming speed and in all directions. It was faster than sound and at least as fast as light, for just like light it reached everywhere. I listened to her avidly, losing myself in the listening, and then I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say, how to interrupt a silence that was becoming more and more troublesome in its profundity.

“I’m sorry,” I said, just to be on the safe side.

“No need to tell me you’re sorry. I just don’t want you to imagine God knows what. Don’t imagine that I’m jealous over you, you snot-nosed kid,” she said flaring up, but then her voice grew milder, and she began to speak as before, rapidly and with gentle persuasion in her voice. “Jerzyk, it isn’t that those are two lascivious bodies—it’s that those are two lazy bodies. It mustn’t be, Jerzyk, that on the threshold of life you chance upon a lazy body, or indeed, horror and perversion, two whole lazy bodies. Look in the mirror, my transgressive boy.”

The angel of my first love grasped me by the chin, brought her face to my face, touched my forehead with her forehead, and stared into my eyes with incredible intensity, something between that of a hypnotist and an optometrist.

“In the depths of your green eyes, Jerzyk, you loafer, I can clearly see the land of laziness. I can see golden hills where you will bask. I can see the sofas of your many-houred snoozes. I can see heaps of notebooks you will never cover with writing. I can see the thousand peaceful cities where you will live from day to day, a thousand peaceful white cities of phlegmatic architecture and friendly climate. Torrid heat reigns from early morning. A streetcar, open on both sides, is making its way through green pastures. Oh, how sweet it will be, Jerzyk, to live in the heart of that life that is slowly waking but always nodding off again before the final awakening. Open windows, dark apartments, the somnolent dramas of the residents, an oval table covered with a cloth, the remains of banquets that never end, hammocks, easy chairs, old architecture, a thousand gentle rivers under a thousand old bridges, lazy girls going for walks along grassy shores . . .

“My dear boy, I’m afraid it’s already too late. If you have the misfortune to chance upon a lazy body at the very beginning of your youth, you’ll be lost for life. Your innate tendency toward laziness will be awakened and set for all time, and you’ll spend your entire life searching for the promised land of laziness. You’ll pass through a thousand peaceful cities. All your life you’ll hunger for lazy arms. You won’t live; you’ll sleep instead. You’ll sleep your entire life away. To live, or to sleep, that, of course, is the question. But ultimately, as a believing Protestant you should adhere to Scripture, and in Scripture it is written that everything has its time, there’s a time to live and a time to sleep. Don’t you understand? Those two bodies sleep constantly. They are just two eternally sleeping sisters who sleep walking, and sleep eating, and sleep standing, and sleep sitting. Can’t any of you understand that’s why they drag their Babylonian blanket into the depths of the forest? Because they always have to have the saving, magical prop of sleep with them? But suit yourself, Jerzyk.

“The third time I saw you was when, in the company of your Mom, Dad, and your eternally drunken house friend, you were walking to services at your church on a Sunday. I followed you, driven not only by the curiosity of the tourist. I sat in a pew at the back under the bell tower. I like the fact that in your Church you don’t have to kneel. But I didn’t like the sermon at all. The sermon was absolutely horrifying. I don’t wish to offend your religious feelings, but your local father pastor gives the impression of believing much more strongly in the devil than in God. Strictly speaking, he believes in the devil without question; whether he believes in God, however, remains undecided. If I’m not mistaken, Martin Luther had that same problem. Ultimately there’s no surprise here: either you make a schism, or you play tiddlywinks.

“The fourth time I saw you in the swimming pool. Jerzyk, you swim badly. You play soccer, however, like a Brazilian. Last week I stood on the road that runs above the playing field, and then I saw you for the fifth time. You dribbled the ball faultlessly. But that time, when you set out from almost the middle of the field, and in a sprint you passed two defenders, you faked out a third, and then, one on one with the goalie, with a crafty feint you laid him flat in one corner of the goal, and with a delicate grazing of your foot you placed the ball in the opposite corner—oh, Jerzyk, that was so beautiful that my hands brought themselves together in applause of their own volition.

“The sixth time—anyway, it’s not important where it was; I saw you for a sixth time . . . And the seventh and perhaps thousandth time I saw you in your room, where you peep at me, always in the same infantile pose. A thousand identical poses I count as one pose. You see, Jerzyk, I know everything about you. But don’t be afraid that I’m a state functionary who keeps an eavesdropping apparatus under her pillow. Or maybe, do be a little afraid. But now, to make it fair, I’ll tell you everything about me. Or rather, there is no question here of any sort of fairness. After all, you haven’t told me a thing, since you don’t say anything at all, and your silence, to tell the truth, is just as captivating as your shoulders. Men, Jerzyk, shouldn’t speak at all before forty, and even after forty—not very much. The infrequent exceptions confirm the rule. You do quite right, Jerzyk, by not speaking very much, by mostly attempting instead to record the sentences you hear. If, in addition, you could succeed in shaking off your inclination for lazy bodies (although I know you won’t manage it, you scoundrel), who knows, who knows—perhaps you could become a real man. Come here, we’ll rest a bit.”

And we sat down on a bench on the river bank. Behind us the lights were burning in the windows of the Sports Center. Our multiplied shadows were laid out upon the water. Time and again a single coin of radiance fell upon her restless knees. It turned out that what she had been squeezing under her arm was neither a purse, nor a document case, nor a teacher’s day planner. Although all my cognitive powers remained absolutely dominated by her, nonetheless this amazing bit of information managed to reach me. And so, I watched with the greatest amazement as the angel of my first love placed a small photo album on our contiguous thighs and turned sheet after sheet.

I glanced at photos of people I didn’t know with the aversion and disgust that a motionless crowd always arouses. It was as if random passersby suddenly stopped in their tracks, approached, and forced you to contemplate their repulsive randomness. To be sure, her face appeared in this crowd time and again, but every time it was altered, in other hairstyles and in other eras. She began speaking to me again. Her hand moved from photo to photo. She told me the story of her family, episodes from the life of closer and more distant acquaintances. I listened, and I looked attentively, but nothing here settled into a whole.

“Here I am, standing on the balcony. A bad picture, but in the background you can see a little bit of Żoliborz. Trusia lived in this house, my best girlfriend. Her picture is also here somewhere. She’s no longer living. What can I say? My grandparents on their way to Biały. They had struck up a friendship with a certain German, but you can’t see the German; he must have taken the picture. My father, but I’m not sure where. Look, he seems to be standing in the middle of a huge field with a bottle of beer in his hand. So much time has passed, but I still can’t figure out where, when, and by whom this picture of him was taken. He’s looking somewhere in the distance. He still had his sight then, poor fellow. He’s looking as if he wanted to take in the whole world, the plain and the grass. The entire family and everybody else laughing. This was truly a rarity. No one would ever have thought that that was me, and yet that’s me in the very middle. I’m even younger than you in this picture. Here I am during my apprenticeship at Mr. Mentzel’s drugstore. You see how beautiful I was, how well that white chiton became me. Aunt and Uncle Fiałkowski with little Tommie on a sleigh. To this day I don’t like him. Already as a child he had the eyes of a devil. With mother in the window. Do you know that the same curtain is hanging in my apartment to this day? My brother on vacation. With friends on the Cracow Market Square five minutes before such a downpour—I’ve never been so wet in my life. And this, Jerzyk, is my wedding photo. Just don’t be jealous. I had a green dress. Just imagine what went on. My handsome husband in a grey suit. Do you know how much he earns? Her earns a lot. In addition, he’s intelligent and good with children. He adores playing chess. I don’t love him, and I’ve probably never loved him. He’ll be coming here day after tomorrow, on Sunday. If you know how to play chess, come over and play a game with him. I beg you, Jerzyk. If he doesn’t have someone to play chess with, he plays by himself, and I am always afraid something terrible will happen then. Those are my children. That’s Jaś, and that’s Małgosia, and that’s me, Baba Yaga. No, not Yaga. Teresa. I keep my word. I always keep my word, because that’s just how I am. Understand? My name is Teresa. Teresa, and that’s it. No diminutives, distortions, transpositions, forms of endearment. I hate that. I hate that, because that’s just how I am. Understand? Just Teresa. No Terenia, Renia, Tereska, Kareska, no Tessa, Tereńka, Eśka, no Teresiuńka. Teresa. The whole story. Teresa at her high-school graduation. Teresa at the beach. Teresa in a ball gown. That one in the uniform is my husband’s boss. There’s a full vodka glass in the foreground, of course. You understand, Jerzyk, there is no joking with these gentlemen. They mostly don’t smile. Even if you were to tell them a delicious joke about an assassination attempt on the life of the First Secretary, I assure you—they won’t laugh. And that is mother and father half a year before their deaths. By the end of their lives they had come to hate each other so much that the one couldn’t live without the other, and Dad died six weeks after Mom. And half a year earlier they both had passport photos taken. This appalls me, Jerzyk. A horrible secret lurks here, a terrible mystery.”

And indeed, there was something peculiar in the seemingly normal passport photos of two old people. She had smiled at the camera, but it was a smile that was not so much artificial as stamped with some sort of desperate determination. In the widely gaping eyes of the blind man you felt the childish hope that in a moment he would see the flash of the magnesium cutting through the all-encompassing darkness.

“Neither of them ever went out of the house: not for the newspaper, not for bread, not to the neighbors. The fourth floor, without an elevator, on Francesco Nullo Street. Jerzyk, I was their doom. And those are photos made in the shop on Wiejska Street.” The angel of my first love spoke now in an entirely different manner. Her previous style of speaking had been a sovereign mastery over me and the world. She was ahead of both me and the world by several steps. She knew everything about us, about me and the world. But now her speaking was a desperate defense against utter capitulation. Now she didn’t know, wasn’t familiar with the secret. In vain she attempted to unravel the mystery. I, in turn, liberated from the shackles of her narrational domination, slowly began to surmise how her final, though absolutely and in-no-way parting words, would go.

“. . . Yes, in the photographer’s shop on Wiejska Street. When I first came upon those pictures, about a month after father’s funeral, I thought that perhaps someone had taken them at home, that they had set up an appointment by telephone, who knows with whom, with someone at any rate who knows how to make passport photos. But no, no way. Here, look, there is a plush curtain in the background. I checked, I was there. They made it there. They were there. Each of them had six passport photos taken in that place. I won’t even mention the fact that this must have been a sizable expenditure for them. They had to dress up. Look, father is in a tie, and mother is in the dress she wore the last time for Małgosia’s baptism. They had to go downstairs. She had to lead him, although she herself could barely move. Then they had to reach the corner and go down almost all of Frascati Street, and then a certain bit of Wiejska. How did they do it? And what for? What for? Why did they need those passport photos? Where did they want to go? On what dying trip did they wish to embark? Where did they wish to flee before they died? To America? To Australia? To warmer lands?”

The angel of my first love closed the album and stood up clumsily from the bench, and we set off back home through the park and through the playing field that was overgrown with white Asiatic grass. And when, after a few minutes, we stood again before the display window of the footwear section that was screened by a massive green grate, what ought to have happened didn’t happen. The angel of my first love didn’t take me by the hand, didn’t embrace me, nor did she say: “Come, Jerzyk. Come. I too am basically very, very lazy.” I was certain that was just how it would happen, but that is not how it happened. The angel of my first love once again extracted the album from under her arm and once again began to turn over sheet after sheet. At first I thought she wished to investigate the secret she hadn’t fully unravelled further, that suddenly some idea had come to her mind, and now she knew on what sort of expedition her infirm and dying parents had wished to embark. But this supposition was false too. My first love with the undiminutizable first name extracted a small scrap of paper from among the sheets of the album, and she handed it to me and said:

“Here’s my address, Jerzyk: Warsaw, 20 Francesco Nullo Street, apartment 23. You haven’t been to Warsaw yet, but some day you finally will be there, and then you must drop by, you must visit me. I’m giving you this address now because I’m afraid that the day after tomorrow you won’t feel like playing chess with my husband. And after that we are leaving. We are leaving, you stay—somebody said that to me, I don’t remember who. Farewell, Jerzyk. See you on Francesco Nullo.” And she turned her back and disappeared, and I also turned my back and disappeared. I disappeared because, after all, no one saw me. No one saw me put the piece of paper with the address into my pocket and look toward the morphinistes’ window. And no one heard the Biblical sentence: knock, and it shall be opened unto you; ask, and it shall be given unto you. Even I myself didn’t hear how loudly that immortal verse resounded in me, and I didn’t know on what distant false paths it would lead me.