A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Chapter VII

I felt the rocking of the assassins’ postal ambulance car as it glided slowly along the tracks through the muddy plains. I awoke and fell asleep, again and again. I breathed in the smell of packing paper, hemp twine, and wax seals. In the darkness I saw pyramids of packages and parcels. Mr. Trąba, Father, and the postal guards sat in the middle of those pyramids. I heard the murmur of their conversations. They spoke of women: love stories, like the dark fields, stations, and lights we passed along the way, followed one after the other.

I listened to tales about women with fluent mastery of the pen, and I listened to stories about women with fluent mastery of foreign languages. I heard about romances with overworked widows and romances with lazy young ladies. I listened to complaints full of bitterness and longings full of despair. Here were the poetic landscapes of first encounters, detailed descriptions of apartments of extreme raptures, and curt sketches of the places of shameful separations. I listened to imprecations, admonitions, and aphorisms full of paradoxical wisdom about the power of women, or pamphlet-like treatises on the art of wearing a brassiere.

I listened to adventures full of arousing plot developments, but I wasn’t able to distinguish the voices, to say who told which story. Even Mr. Trąba’s theatrical whisper was difficult to distinguish. I don’t think Father spoke up at all. Maybe he was speaking just as I would fall off to sleep, or maybe I would fall off to sleep whenever he began to speak. I don’t remember.

•

I don’t remember a thousand scenes in which he took part. I don’t remember him playing soccer with me in the rocky courtyard. I don’t remember the gesture with which he would adjust his glasses. I don’t remember outings to Buffalo Mountain during which he would teach me the names of the trees and the birds. I don’t remember the way he would turn the huge sheets of the newspapers he read. I don’t remember his daily return from the post office. To tell the truth, I don’t really know very well what he did all those years after he took early retirement. I described the scene, but I don’t really remember whether Father ran with the other men through the high Asiatic grass in the direction of the morphinistes at the edge of the glade that evening. Or whether he walked with a very quick step. Or was it perhaps the opposite? That he didn’t budge from the spot?

Even today, it seems to me that although I remember every word of his unending disputes with Mr. Trąba, I don’t remember certain gestures, poses, his gait. I don’t remember how he sat on a chair. I remember him, but I don’t see him. Or is it perhaps the opposite: I see him all the time in one and the same scene, which repeats endlessly but is over in a moment?

Could it be that, in its quotidian obtrusiveness, that one, peculiar, although characteristic, picture has forced out and obscured all the others? It goes like this: Father sits at the table in our kitchen, which is as gigantic as a Greek amphitheater. Mr. Trąba says something to him. Father gets up, walks over to the sideboard, takes out a bottle, returns, and puts it on the table. That scene, repeating itself in my memory with absolute inevitability for the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time, slowly becomes monstrous. Father’s movements become more and more violent, as if they were shaped by internal spasms and resistance. The interior of the kitchen grows dark. Under the empty space an invisible fire burns. Ash falls from above. It is as if Mr. Trąba really did command Father, throughout his whole life and a hundred times a day: get up from the table, walk over to the sideboard, take out the bottle, get up from the table, walk over to the sideboard, take out the bottle, get up from the table, walk over to the sideboard, take out the bottle.

Perhaps I don’t remember anything more because, in a certain sense, I had my back turned to him my whole life. He would do something, bustle about, adjust something, rustle the newspapers, read, type at the typewriter, listen to Radio Free Europe. Perhaps he ran after me, but I, with my ruthless, perhaps even inhuman pig-headedness, went my own false and mad way.

When, after forty years, I finally looked around, I caught sight of four stools standing in the middle of our kitchen. On the stools lay the basement door, which had been removed from its hinges. On the door, dressed in his postal chief’s uniform, lay Father. Mother was lighting funeral candles. Mr. Trąba stood by the window. I went up to him. For a moment we looked at the pallbearers walking through the yard. On their shoulders, the lid and bottom of the coffin looked like the wings of an airplane, crashed long ago, that had just now been found in the grass.

“I know that people always say this, and in every latitude on the globe, but the Chief looks like he’s sleeping,” said Mr. Trąba.

•

That very day Mother and I began to put Father’s death in order, to seek out the internal logic in it, and to look for the signs of its approach in the last days of his life. With fierce meticulousness we began to gather and remind each other of the facts and circumstances that could have brought the undying order of death into play. Hour by hour, minute by minute, we reconstructed the final days and weeks of Father’s life, describing precisely, attesting, emphasizing, laying out, and bringing to the surface all the seemingly accidental events, gestures, and objects in which the portent of his death might have been rooted. We collected specimens indefatigably, and, imperceptibly, our harmonious collaboration was transformed into fierce competition. I had discovered a broken shelf in the basement, while Mother, more or less at the same time, some two weeks before his death, had encountered a macabre customer in a clothing store who had tried on nothing but black things. In my opinion, the broken shelf was a clearer sign, for the oak plank had snapped as if cut by an unearthly power. The preserves had come crashing down from on high, and — what do you know? — not a single jar had broken.

The encounter in the clothing store with the woman trying on mourning clothes made a more accidental impression, but you had to admit that Mother told the story suggestively, the story of the shiver of terror that pierced her when she stood right next to this woman. She felt a cold breath coming from those black blouses, scarves, jackets, gloves, and hats, darker than all the mourning clothes in the world. And the woman herself, as tall as a basketball player, skinny, bony, with glowing sulfurous eyes — no two ways about it: she looked like death itself.

Mother also told how, exactly a week before his death — exactly a week, since he died on a Wednesday, and that was also a Wednesday — Father first saw Mr. Trąba off as far as the gate, which was strange in itself, since he did that very rarely. And he didn’t return for the longest time. He walked around the garden, examined the apple and plum trees, touched an old cherry tree, bent over, as if he were picking something up from the grass, and then he dawdled about the house, until Mother got irritated that he was dawdling and dawdling — didn’t that bother him, she wondered? But then he went up into the attic, down to the basement, wandered through all the rooms, rummaged about as if he were looking for something, but really he was saying goodbye, just saying goodbye to everything.

And Bryś the Man-Eater, I suddenly recalled, do you remember how Bryś the Man-Eater fled from him? That was about a month earlier, six weeks before his death. Of course, Mother said, the first signs always appear six weeks before someone’s death. Commandant Jeremiah was taking Bryś on a walk. They stopped by our gate. They didn’t even come inside. Mother exchanged some meaningless pleasantries about the weather with the Commandant. Bryś the Man-Eater obediently crouched by his leg. But as soon as he saw Father standing on the porch he began to howl desperately and heart-wrenchingly, and he rushed into awkward, disorderly flight. We laughed at him, that he’d completely gone off his head in his old age. The oldest dog in the world (after all, as the Commandant explained, he is fifty years old) has a right to stranger whims than that. We laughed at the moribund old geezer, but he knew what he was doing. He howled, and he tried so desperately to flee, as if he felt the unearthly smell of death coming from Father, as as if he saw that somebody invisible was standing next to Father, someone who strikes fear into all creation.

In silence, in complete silence, without a word, Mother showed me Father’s watch, which she had taken off his wrist. The watch had stopped precisely with his last breath at 3:20. And then she showed me her watch, the hands of which had also stopped at 3:20, and then she pointed to both second-hands, both equally and identically immobilized on the 12, and then she recalled that in the last week of his life Father had gotten it into his head that he had to go to Warsaw on some urgent business. She was at wit’s end. He insisted furiously, as if something had taken possession of him. Finally she was able to convince him, and he stayed home. He stayed, and he died at home. That too, after all, is a sign of God’s grace, for, be that as it may, at least he didn’t keel over somewhere out in the world.

And so, we reminded each other of signs, and we made signs. We investigated whether Father’s death was accidental, whether it was inevitable, whether it was foreordained, or whether he was to blame for it, whether he could have avoided it, and whether he had wanted to avoid it, or whether, on the contrary, he had consciously gone to meet it. We placed question marks, and we summoned for help the watch hand, the fleeing dog, and all the objects that the deceased had touched. We attempted to penetrate the darkness. We did all that, and yet, after all, we also knew that he had long suffered serious heart problems, and that a year before he died the doctors had given him at most a year to live.

•

Ambulance. In Father and Mr. Trąba’s conversations, the word “ambulance” appeared very frequently. It appeared so frequently and persistently that the game of foreseeing its constant presence was boring and sterile. “No problem for me, I’ll take the ambulance,” Father would say. “I’ll send that by the ambulance,” “The ambulance will take us there,” “Everything we need can be put on the ambulance.” Ambulance, ambulance, ambulance — I pondered the movement, darkness, and roundness of that word, and I sensed the smell of wax seals. Then, imperceptibly, “ambulance” disappeared from our household, perhaps it disappeared entirely from the Polish language. With all certainty, in none of the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of sentences I have read in the meantime has the word ambulance appeared. I would have noticed it without fail and with all intensity, just as right away, with Proustian, madeleine-inspired intensity, I noticed it in Father’s posthumous papers. I was looking through those yellowed petitions to the Ministry of Communication and the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications. I read the dim typescripts Father had laboriously tapped out on the old English “Everest” typewriter. I read accusations and notifications of the initiation of proceedings printed on the official forms of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications.

Disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against you on account of your infringement of official responsibilities, whereby, while employed in the position of Chief of an Office of the Post and Telecommunications, over the course of the year 1959 you exploited your position and sent private packages containing veal by postal ambulance, and at the same time you prevailed upon the personnel to transport those packages to the addresses of certain employees of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications.

I read findings of punishment, composed with no little stylistic virtuosity, and comprehensive justifications for the findings of punishment.

Since the above-cited proofs confirm irrefutably the commission by the accused of the deeds mentioned in the content of the accusation, to wit: the sending of private packages containing veal by postal ambulance, and the pressure put upon the personnel of the ambulances to transport said packages, I recommend the administration of severe disciplinary punishment. Disciplinary Spokesman for the District Office of the Post and Telecommunication, Okoński, M.A.

With an aching heart, my throat choking up, I deciphered barely legible copies of desperate explanatory letters and plaintive petitions. I read applications and negative replies to applications, requests and interventions and negative replies to requests and interventions. Line by line I studied that black-and-white record of Father’s dialogue with a Postal Service that was as vast as nothingness.

I explain as follows: In the year 1959, in the area of Katowice, there occurred a passing, although serious, lack of meat products, above all veal. In view of this, knowing that, in the area of Wisła and its neighboring Istebna, there existed the possibility of acquiring veal, some employees of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications in Katowice turned to me with the request that I buy meat and send it to them by the ambulance. I saw to this matter as a courtesy and without personal profit. I turn to you with the humble request for intervention in the matter of my removal from the position of Chief of the OPT and prejudicial transferal to the OPT in Cieszyn.

In reference to your letter, the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications informs you that, regarding the initiation of disciplinary action against you in the matter of the transportation by postal ambulance of private packages containing veal, the decision to transfer you remains in effect.

In view of the above, I once again ask for help and intervention. In view of my illness, the commute to work of nearly three hours in each direction is unusually onerous, and in winter practically impossible.

Regarding your letter concerning the matter of the prejudicial transferal, a final answer will be conveyed to you at a later date.

This is to inform you that your request concerning the granting of a two-month unpaid leave is postponed until the disciplinary hearing has taken place.

Regarding the initiation of disciplinary proceedings against me in the matter of transporting private packages containing veal by postal ambulance, I humbly request to be informed what stage my case has now reached. Eight months have already passed since the initiation of proceedings.

The Secretariat of the Ministry informs you that the disciplinary hearing against you concerning allegations by the Spokesman for Disciplinary Matters in the matter of your transportation by postal ambulance of private packages containing veal will be conducted by the Disciplinary Commission at the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications in Cracow. Attached is a finding for punishment as well as a list of the members of the full adjudicating assembly. You are informed herewith that the appointed time for the hearing has been set for 27 July of the current year at nine o’clock a.m. The hearing will take place in the auditorium of the Trade Union of Communications Employees in Cracow, Librowszczyzna Street 1. You are required to appear at the hearing in person.

Adjudication by the Disciplinary Commission of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications in Cracow. The object of the adjudication: accused. . born. . employed. . previously unpunished disciplinarily, accused of infringement of official duties committed by exploiting his position as the Chief of the Office of the Post and Telecommunications, that, using employees subordinate to himself, he did transport by postal ambulance private packages containing veal to the addresses of certain employees of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications, is, after the conclusion of an oral hearing, declared innocent and exonerated of the above-mentioned charges. The citizen is declared innocent on account of lack of evidence of official transgression in the deeds charged against him.

•

“You were debased by Moscow, Chief, debased through and through, and you will forgive me if I don’t share your premature joy.” Mr. Trąba seemed absolutely immune to Father’s enthusiasm that day.

“From the beginning I knew that justice would be done,” Father triumphed, “from the very beginning. And when I learned that Cracow had been designated as the place of the hearing, I no longer had a hint of fear or doubt. Cracow is Cracow! There were only prewar chiefs, gentleman chiefs, on the board of the adjudicating commission.” Father choked on his own saliva. “Chief Czyż, Chief Holeksa, Chief Kozłowski, every inch the gentlemen, suits, good manners, broad horizons. .”

“I see that you, Chief, have developed a taste for disciplinary hearings,” Mr. Trąba allowed himself an almost openly contemptuous tone.

“If you only knew, Mr. Trąba, if you only knew. It is worth meeting people like Chief Kozłowski under any circumstance.” Father swaggered at the table and sought, however unsuccessfully, to pose like a victorious sailor who had just returned from a dangerous expedition.

I well remember Father’s return, not simply declared innocent and exonerated, but quite triumphant. I remember not only the words, but also the gestures, for that day abounded in particularly frequent risings from the table, walks over to the sideboard, and removals from it of successive, very successive, bottles.

“What fairytales are you trying to tell me, Chief? You can’t have become that Bolshevized! I understand that you spent some time in Russky bondage and that you have a right to certain complexes, but — by a billion barrels of beer — you aren’t a young poet who needs to base his entire life on traumatic events! The very fact that a proceeding was initiated against you was a crime.”

“To tell the truth, what I did wasn’t entirely in order.” Father now attempted to speak in a sort of boldly canny manner.

“Chief, don’t fall prey to any illusions, and don’t make yourself into some sort of capo of the meat mafia who not only ran afoul of the organs of justice but even hoodwinked them. What did you do? You did nothing. Once a week you sent a little bit of veal by train so that your so-called friends wouldn’t croak from hunger. That’s what you did. And for that you were debased.”

“I was declared innocent, and exonerated,” Father answered with puffed up dignity.

“Do you know, Chief, what’s the most terrible thing about Moscow? The most terrible thing is the fact that, in her omnipotence, Moscow wishes to imitate God, that it is the Antichrist.”

“You exaggerate, Mr. Trąba, as usual you exaggerate.” Sunk in an absolute state of bliss, intoxicated with his evanescent relief, and, quite simply, already pretty well potted, Father wouldn’t hear any arguments. He didn’t realize that all of Mr. Trąba’s admonitions and ominous suppositions would be fulfilled to the letter, that they had already begun to come true.

“Just as almighty God works with the hands of his servants, the people, so Moscow debased you with the hands of its servants, the employees of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications. They declared you innocent, but all the same, you won’t return to your position, or to your office. You will continue to commute for now in rain, heat, and stormy weather to far-away Cieszyn. You will lose your health. You will hand over generous bribes in an attempt to obtain the sick leave that is coming to you. In your apparently innocent, but in reality endless degradation, you will continue to experience constant humiliations. You will continue to write and to send petitions:

“‘In connection with the fact that I have been declared innocent of the charge that, in transporting packages containing veal by ambulance, I had infringed upon my official duties, I humbly ask for transferal, return, and annulment.’

“And the Antichrist will continue to respond to you by the hands of his secretaries:

“‘In answer to your question, you are hereby informed that your petition was not accompanied by the appropriate attestations and attachments. . will be examined at a later date. . was settled negatively.’

“Yes, that’s how it will be, that’s how it will be, Chief. Too bad I can’t take your picture, because if you could take a look tomorrow at a daguerrotype of your face, lit up as it is with childish happiness, you would grasp that three months outside of Moscow in Serpukhov is a trifle in comparison with true bondage.”

Mr. Trąba looked for a moment at Father’s irregularly nodding head (it was flying through golden spaces), and he added in a jauntier tone:

“And yet, as they say, there isn’t anything so bad that it couldn’t get worse. When you come to your senses, when you finally make a hard landing on earth, when you grasp that the nightmare hasn’t ended, rather that it has taken on definiteness, this will give you strength. You will grow manly in your disaster. You will become a little bitter. You will become a little cynical. Perhaps even a note of gallows’ humor will arise in your noble nature. Don’t be angry, but, from my point of view, this will be better. You would become a more interesting disputational partner, more inclined to resistance. Yes, Chief, we will chat, we will drink a little, we will philosophize. We will be like the heroes of a novel that has come unglued. We will be like literary figures that, instead of acting lazily though comprehensively, will talk over our fates from all sides. But that, too, only for a time. For a time, Chief. For a time, since the hour of our deed will also ring forth.”

•

In addition to the smell of packing paper, hemp twine, and wax seals, perhaps there still smoldered in the rocking ambulance the smell of calves’ blood. But I didn’t smell it; I didn’t know the necessary details at the time. If the specter of any sort of blood flitted through my half-conscious head at all, it was quite certainly the blood of Władysław Gomułka, which we were supposed to shed in less than twenty-four hours. I continually awoke and fell asleep, and I listened to the voices of the men as they told the story of one love-affair after another.

“And in that way I came to the conclusion,” someone’s dark, subdued voice was finishing a sad, or perhaps a happy, story, “in that way I came to the conclusion that the only thing I demand from a woman is that she wear a brassiere with style. That’s right. I demand style in the wearing of a brassiere. Nothing else.”

“A proper demand,” a second subdued voice added to the discussion, “a proper demand. After all, this is something no man can do.”

Suppressed giggles resounded, glasses clinked delicately, and the train slowed down.

“I had the misfortune,” someone had clearly succumbed to the spell of Mr. Trąba’s narcotic manner of speaking, although this was certainly not him; the unfamiliar half-whisper sounded too youthful and unstable, “I had the misfortune to start a romance, once upon a time, with a woman with fluent mastery of the pen. I was never keen about people who had fluent mastery of the pen, but my knowledge about the fact that there existed women who had fluent mastery of the pen was highly theoretical. In any event, I had never met a writing woman, to say nothing of one who wrote so ecstatically, so greedily, and — I’m aware that this sounds risqué—who wrote in every situation. She buried me under piles of letters and letterlets, little slips of paper, hundreds of confessions, thousands of notes, occasional poems, and accidental short stories, inspired descriptions of what she did yesterday, and what she would do today. Everywhere I came upon sheets of paper covered with her sprawling handwriting and folded in her characteristically refined manner. Every time I reached into my pocket, I came upon some text. I constantly removed them, and I constantly found them. I removed them not only because I was quite simply afraid that they would fall into my wife’s hands, which were not itching, or rather were itching, to kill me — that too; but this woman with fluent mastery of the pen produced such quantities of records that the quantity itself was the main problem. One way or another, I had to reduce their monstrous number. I didn’t have any doubt that sooner or later one of these scraps, which were lying about everywhere and flying out from every corner, would fall into my wife’s hands. And that is just what happened. To tell the truth, it happened many times. Luckily, a significant portion of the writings of the woman with fluent mastery of the pen were hermetic writings, and, thanks to happy coincidences, on each occasion my wife came upon statements that were unclear, basically incomprehensible. Nonetheless she always attentively unfolded and flattened out the little notes that she found everywhere, put on her glasses, and read. Or rather, she studied them carefully. And then, she would raise her glance and look at me with a sympathy that was full of pain, as if she were aware what sort of forced labor there is in a romance with a graphomaniac, with such a pampered soul that is compelled to pour out all — that’s right—all her emotions onto paper. But the woman with fluent mastery of the pen was not a graphomaniac. This thirty-year-old, who measured 40-24-38. .”

“Our congratulations,” someone’s voice spoke up, and then a round of applause resounded behind the wall of packages and parcels that separated me from the narrators and listeners.

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” the narrator clearly bowed to his listeners, who had rewarded him with bravos. “So you see, this dusky thirty-year-old had literary talent, without a doubt, and she also had the sometimes troublesome awareness of her talent. Just imagine, she even offered me her shopping lists, since she believed that she had worked out those litanies wittily and deftly from the literary point of view. And — would you believe it? — they were worked out wittily and deftly. She wrote quickly, without reflection, and almost every one of her texts merited attention.” I heard a delicate rustling. “Every one of her texts. Even a shopping list. Even a little note left at the head of my bed. Listen, gentlemen. I quote:

“‘It’s 9:00 in the morning. Monday. 10 July (1961). I’m going out. You, dear M., try not to do that, i.e., don’t go out. I’ll return. I kiss you, in spite of the fact that my kiss has to penetrate the yellowish cloud that shrouds your unfortunate body. Herbal liqueurs at this hour (I remind you — it’s 9:00 in the morning) clearly change one’s state of concentration. They have transformed themselves into a yellow cloud; by the time of my return, may it have moved somewhere else. Let it lower over any other district of our capital bourg, over Żoliborz or over Saska Kępa. Let it move in the direction of Upper Silesia, or in the direction of the Land of the Thousand Lakes. Let it cross the borders of our Piast State and lower over one or the other of the oppressed Baltic republics. Let it flow further and stop over the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from which Yuri Gagarin blasted off, or over the little village of Smetovka, near which he landed. Let it lower with its mournful shade over the state of Idaho in order to honor the suicidal death of Ernest Hemingway. Let the yellow cloud with the unclear outlines of your unconscious body lower wherever. Let it even lower over the fighting Congo. I wouldn’t wish, dear M., to excite you too much, but I want you to put it you know where. All I care about is that you not drink anything more. Take a bath. Eat something. I’ll be back at 7:00 p.m. Your F. .’

“You’ll have to agree. .”

“Indeed,” this time I didn’t have a shadow of a doubt: this was Mr. Trąba’s whisper, “indeed, as far as the literary genre is concerned, which we might casually term the ‘personal note,’ there is a certain magisterial quality, but was there anything more? Did the undoubted, although — how to put it? — rather specialized, talent of your friend develop somehow further?”

“I don’t know. I lost sight of her. One day one of her notes fell into my wife’s hands that were itching to kill me, and, unfortunately, this time it wasn’t a hermetic note, either in content or in form. To tell the truth, it was a text that was glaring in its ostentatious effusiveness. For obvious reasons I remember every word:

“‘You won’t believe it,’ wrote my mistress with fluent mastery of the pen, ‘you won’t believe it, but I like everything, I like it everywhere. I like it when you are delicate, and I like it when you are brutal. I like it when you do it in a flash, and I like it when you do it for a long time. As the poet says, all the gates to my body open before you with identical eagerness. I like the smell of your sweat, and I like the smell of your cologne. I like pain, and I like the lack of pain. And besides that, I don’t know whether you know, my Big Bear, what beautiful eyes you have.’”

A moment of silence fell. The train rumbled. There was something unusual in the fact that I heard each word of the more and more shamefaced whispers in spite of the constant rumbling.

“And how did your esteemed spouse react?”

“She stamped her foot.”

“Yes, that usually suffices,” said Mr. Trąba with distinct satisfaction, and he continued in a subdued voice. “I fear that your talented friend wasn’t conscious of her talent after all, because, in my opinion, women aren’t conscious of their talents in general. I’ll say more: they aren’t even conscious of the talent of their bodies. Gentlemen! I saw the most beautiful woman in the world in Cracow on Wiślna Street. She stood on the curb. She was looking in the direction of the Market Square, and under her gaze the lights of the square were going out. I won’t describe the details, since this is not about entrancing, absolutely entrancing, corporality, but rather about a fundamental psychological question. In any case, she had an exceedingly daring shape. Gentlemen, restrain your ill-timed giggles. I want you to understand me well. Obviously, having the choice between shape and lack of shape, on the whole, in the course of my sufficiently long life, I have regularly chosen shape. But for shape alone to be the goal of the assault — never, no, not ever. In this regard, I was always a hunter of integrality per se. And besides, you gentlemen certainly know at least this much: granted, the lack of shape doesn’t give any guarantees, but it also doesn’t have to be an obstacle to achieving the greatest raptures. Finally, however many times I recall my unfortunate ward Emilia, my most dramatic moment of non-fulfillment (and I recall her more and more often), every time I come to the conclusion that Emilia and I would have achieved everything and reached everywhere. Yes, I’m absolutely certain that if it hadn’t been for my lack of magnanimity, Emilia and I would have climbed the amorous summits. . I’m absolutely certain of this, but, after all, the shapes of my ward Emilia, God rest her soul, were — at least from the point of view of elementary spacial categories — an absolute disaster. . But here you have it — the absolute summit, wrapped in supple whites, stands on the curb on Wiślna Street, stands on the curb in front of a sports shoe store, stands and strains her eyes looking for someone. She waits. She doesn’t while away the time of expectation by, for example, looking at the display in the sports shoe store — she doesn’t examine the world while she waits. No. She waits. Now is her time for waiting. And she doesn’t need to examine the world any more, because she knows everything about the world. Her world has been put in order. Everything in her world has its time, and now is the time for waiting. She has lots of things to do, and now, between one thing and another. . she waits. Gentlemen, I sense that I’m not expressing myself clearly: it’s that this absolute incarnation of carnal perfection had no right to have any non-carnal things to do; and yet, with feminine duplicity, she made it clear that she had such things to do. She succumbed to the female delusion that, since the problem of the form of her body had been solved perfectly, all the problems in the world that that body may have had also had been solved perfectly. Gentlemen, she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and because of this she thought that life was logical. Men who passed her took leave of their senses at the sight of this sex goddess, while she unsuccessfully pretended to be higher than her own body.

“Since she herself paid no attention — she made it clear that she paid no attention — to her own body, which was perfect, she certainly couldn’t, it is clear, pay attention to other bodies that were, after all, less perfect. How in the world could someone so absolute and steeped in her own perfection bother herself with the imperfect corpuses of others — who were imperfect because they exhibited their interest in her, because of their own physiological effusiveness toward her? In that far-reaching manner, delusion in pretended indifference toward her own body condemned her to indifference toward the world. In short, in that masterpiece of tail there was nothing but sex, while she made it clear that there was everything in her but sex. .”

“That’s the basis of their power over us,” someone said after a moment full of piercing bitterness.

“As for me, I like women’s power.” I immediately sensed that the greatest joker, jester, and rogue among the guards was now speaking. That’s what I thought, and I wasn’t mistaken. “As for me, I like women’s power, because I like the kind of power you can make a fool of.”

And once again, suppressed laughs and giggles resounded, glasses clinked delicately, and the train again slowed down.

“And I was once with an overworked widow with three children,” said someone with a trembling voice who seemed prone to tears. “And I was once with an overworked widow with three children,” he repeated once more, perhaps he repeated it for the nth time, in spite of the inaudible murmurs of disbelief, which, although they were inaudible, nonetheless must have given him strength, for he finally cast himself desperately into the whirlwind of narration.

“Yes. I was with an overworked widow. Although she was a widow, she had no financial difficulties. I think that you could even call her a rich widow. Her deceased husband — what he died of, I don’t know, she never wanted to talk about it — her deceased husband quite clearly had left her a considerable estate and income. The widow drowned out her widowhood with innumerable duties and obligations, as well as with a certain excessive zeal in performing everyday tasks. It always seemed to me that she cooked broth a little bit ‘more,’ that she vacuumed the rug a little bit ‘more,’ that she ironed a blouse a little bit ‘more.’ She took care of her three half-orphaned children especially fiercely — that is to say, with unusually fierce motherhood. She brought up all three of them in a perfectionist manner in the general sense, but each of these brats, whom I hated intensely, also had their own specialization, which their mother had imposed upon them. The youngest girl took ballet lessons, the middle one played the piano, and the youngest boy learned foreign languages. Obviously, my overworked widow closely supervised each of these educations, and she supervised them in the rapacious manner so typical of her that I got the impression that it was she herself who practiced the ballet, played the piano, and learned foreign languages. Moreover, in a certain sense that’s how it was: she did indeed practice, play, and learn. You understand, gentlemen, these were all very difficult things: her excessive zeal in performing everyday tasks was difficult, her widowhood was difficult, her cult of her deceased husband was difficult (for example, I asked her what time it was, and she said that the deceased’s Delbana was still going and that it hadn’t yet needed any winding), the presence of her children was difficult, her wide ranging interests were difficult. I would say that her most painful mania was framing. That’s right. Framing. My overworked widow had a pathologically extensive palette of interests, and in addition a considerable portion of that palette was enclosed, literally and metaphorically, in frames. What was it about? Trivially simple things. For example, my overworked widow was a weekend painter, and, in the most ordinary manner in the world, she would mount her works, paintings, and drawings in frames and hang them on the wall. She took photographs (she had several cameras — one for black-and-white pictures, one for color pictures, one for shiny pictures, and a different one for matte pictures), and she would mount the photographs she took in frames and hang them on the wall. She would buy old etchings in antique shops, mount them in frames, and hang them on the wall. She would compose interesting flower arrangements (she was an ardent tourist, and she often took trips out of town), which she would subsequently dry, mount in frames, and hang on the wall. .”

A sudden silence fell. Perhaps I had suddenly fallen into the black abyss of sleep. Perhaps the poor devil had stopped talking, had lost the thread, smitten with incomprehensible pain. Probably both occurred. I must have fallen asleep for a moment, but the ill-starred guard, the lover of the overworked widow with the three children, wasn’t in any state to continue his terrible story.

“And then, and then?” I was awakened by slow and drowsy questions. “Well? And then? What happened then? What happened with her later? What’s next?”

“Nothing. There wasn’t anything. There wasn’t anything next.” His voice, which sounded prone to tears at the beginning of the story, now became unusually solemn and dignified. “There wasn’t anything next. When I realized that I too was one of her fiercely performed duties, which, moreover, she would most prefer to mount in a frame, I felt humiliated, and I left.”

Someone said:

“It won’t be long now. You can see the Palace of Culture.”

“You can’t see anything yet. It’s still dark. We have almost a whole hour to go,” said someone else, who yawned terribly and fell asleep. And this time, toward the end of the journey, I fell into a deep sleep, like a man sleeping for eternity in a Dutch painting, or like an apparatchik of sleep. And then, when I awoke, I heard Father’s voice, or perhaps it was still in my sleep that I heard Father’s whisper, as he told the story of the man who was particularly excited by women who spoke foreign languages. Father made up stories as if he were possessed, narrated about this man as if he were talking about himself. He invented and lied fantastically. This didn’t surprise me either asleep or awake. In the dark-blue depths of the postal ambulance, gliding slowly through the muddy plains, all of them invented things. After all, the story about the woman with fluent mastery of the pen was invented and entirely fictitious, and so was the one about the beauty standing on the curb on Wiślna Street, and even the one who told the story about the deadly, overworked widow with the three children made everything up. The invention of stories about oneself is the duty and irresistible temptation of the true man. The made-up story is the song of his life and death. The story of the loser, the invented story of the loser, is the sign of the winner.

“I don’t know any foreign languages,” Father’s voice said in the darkness. “I don’t speak languages, and maybe that is why I want to be — not so much exclusively as especially — with women who speak languages. But I also wish to state most emphatically that there wasn’t any simple equation here; the more the better: one language — good; two languages — very good; three languages — very, and I mean very, exciting; and with a polyglot you have a genuine orgy. No. Unbridled symmetry arouses my resistance. I prefer restrained symmetry. One language and one woman were enough for me. After all, and finally, there is one woman,” Father lied to the very faces of the guards and Mr. Trąba, although they were plunged in darkness.

And he continued his story about some completely made-up love of his who spoke dazzling French. Supposedly Father’s nonexistent mistress especially liked to speak indecent sentences in French, for example: Fouts-moi à mort. Et puis ecris sur ma tombe que j’ai pris mon pied, she would tenderly whisper in his ear. With odd relish, that dark-haired Romanist supposedly also repeated, time and again, three words that sounded like a magic spell: mille, villes, tranquilles, mille, villes, tranquilles, she supposedly said time and again, and tens of times, in every situation.

“I loved her,” Father lied. “We wanted to flee together to the ends of the earth. We imagined that some day, some sweltering year, we would drive with all we possessed into a city full of ginger-haired dogs, grimy children, and mysterious women wrapped in veils and turbans (with whom, after several years — such is life, gentlemen — I would doubtless betray her), and an outdoor festival, Mille villes tranquilles, would be in progress there. She will speak with rapture, with amazement, and we will live in a house with a view of the ocean, or with a view of meadows, or with a view of a girls’ dormitory, and we will live there forever, and every night we will dream of a thousand white architectural constructions, a thousand downtown commons, a thousand sleeping streetcar sheds, and a thousand rivers crossing downtowns that are as crusty and dark as rye bread.”

Everything in Father’s story was invented, even the dreams were invented, which isn’t so bad — dreams are always invented. But he lied even at the very beginning of this imagined romance. He even lied when he said that he didn’t speak any languages. Father already knew French before the war. In those unfortunate papers he left behind, in addition to Petitions, Appeals, Pleas, Verdicts, and Accusations, there is also his Postal Practicant’s Certificate, which is brittle and yellow like his buried bones: 4 May 1933, having passed the examination before the Commission of the Head Office of the Post and Telegraphs in Katowice, he received the following grades: Postal Transport — good; Postal Service — good; Bookkeeping Regulations — good; French, Speaking and Writing — very good. Mille. Villes. Tranquilles.