Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

^VIII URANUS IN LEO

Obviously, the first Horoscope a Person ever calculates is their own, and so it was in my case. And then a structure emerged, supported by a circle. I examined it in astonishment – is that me? Here before me lay the blueprint for the Person I am, my actual self in a basic written record, at once the simplest and the most complicated possible. Like a mirror that changes the sensory image of the face into a simple geometric chart. Everything about my own face that seemed to me familiar and obvious had vanished; what remained was a distinctive scattering of dots that symbolised the planets set against the celestial vault. Nothing ages, nothing is subject to change, their positions in the firmament are unique and permanent. The hour of birth divides the space within the circle into houses, and thus the chart becomes practically unique, like a fingerprint.

I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter – this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable.

Therefore I’m convinced that we should get to know our prison very well.

By profession I am a bridge-construction engineer – have I mentioned that already? I have built bridges in Syria and in Libya, and also in Poland – near Elbląg, and two in Podlasie. The one in Syria was a strange bridge: it spanned the banks of a river that only appeared periodically. Water flowed in its bed for two or three months, then soaked into the sun-baked earth, changing it into something like a bob-sleigh track. Wild desert Dogs would chase each other along it.

I always gained the greatest pleasure from transforming concepts into figures – from these figures a specific image arose, then a drawing, and then a design. The figures came together on my piece of paper and assumed a meaningful shape. My talent for algebra was useful to me for Horoscopes in the days when one had to do all one’s calculations on a slide rule. Nowadays that’s unnecessary; there are computer programs to do it for us. Who still remembers the slide rule, when the cure for any thirst for knowledge is just a mouse-click away? But it was then, during the best phase in my life, that my Ailments began, and I had to return to Poland. I spent a long time in hospital, but it still wasn’t clear what was really wrong with me.

For a time I slept with a Protestant, who in his turn designed motorways, and he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God. I wondered if this meant the shoulders, or the buttocks perhaps, and what this divine back looked like, since we’re incapable of imagining the front. Maybe it meant that he who suffers has special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend. So in a way the only Person who’s healthy is one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be in harmony with the rest.

For a year I couldn’t walk at all, and by the time my Ailments began to ease a little, I knew I would never be able to build bridges across rivers in the desert again, and that I couldn’t stray too far from a fridge with glucose in it. So I changed profession and became a teacher. I worked at a school and taught the children various useful things: English, handicrafts and geography. I always did my best to capture their attention fully, to have them remember important things not out of fear of a bad mark but out of genuine passion.

It gave me a lot of pleasure. Children have always attracted me more than adults, for I too am a little infantile. There’s nothing wrong with that. The main thing is that I’m aware of it. Children are soft and supple, open-minded and unpretentious. And they don’t engage in the sort of small talk in which every adult is able to gabble their life away. Unfortunately, the older they are, the more they succumb to the power of reason; they become citizens of Ulro, as Blake would have put it, and refuse to be led down the right path as easily and naturally any more. That’s why I only liked the smaller children. The older ones, over the age of ten, say, were even more loathsome than adults. At that age the children lost their individuality. I could see them ossifying as they inevitably entered adolescence, which gradually forced them to be hooked on being the same as others. In a few cases there was a bit of an inner struggle as they wrestled with this new state of being, but almost all of them ended up capitulating. I never made the effort to keep in touch with them after that – for it would be like having to witness the Fall, yet again. Usually I taught children up to this limit, at most until the fifth year.

Finally I was pensioned off. Far too early, in my opinion. It’s hard to understand why because I was a good teacher, with plenty of experience, and free of troubles, apart from my Ailments, but they only made their presence known from time to time. So I went to the education board, where I submitted the relevant certificates, references and applications to be allowed to go on teaching. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I had run into a bad moment – a time of reforms, overhauling the system, changing the program, and rising unemployment.

Then I looked for work in another school, and then another, half-time and quarter-time, by the hour – I’d have taken a job by the minute if only they’d offered one, but wherever I went I could sense an army of other, younger people standing behind me, breathing down my neck, impatiently treading on my tail, even though it’s a thankless, badly paid profession.

Only here did I succeed. Once I’d moved out of the city, bought this house and taken on the job as guardian of my neighbours’ properties, a breathless young headmistress came across the hills to see me. ‘I know you’re a teacher,’ she said – and she used the present tense, which instantly won me over, for I regard my profession as a mental attitude rather than a set of isolated activities. She offered me a few hours teaching English at her school, working with small children, the kind I like. So I agreed, and once a week I started teaching English to seven- and eight-year-olds, who approach learning very enthusiastically but who just as quickly and suddenly get bored. The headmistress wanted me to teach music too – she must have heard us singing ‘Amazing Grace’ – but that would have been beyond my strength. It’s quite enough for me to scurry down to the village every Wednesday, to have to dress in clean clothes, brush my hair and put on a little make-up – I paint my eyelids green and powder my face. All this costs me a great deal of time and patience. I could have taken the PE class too, I am tall and strong. I used to go in for sports. Somewhere in the city I still have my medals. Though I had no chance of teaching PE any more because of my age.

But I’ll admit that now, in winter, it’s hard for me to get there. On teaching days I have to get up earlier than usual, when it’s still dark, stoke the fire, clear the snow from the Samurai, and if it’s parked away from the house on the surfaced road, I must wade through the snow to reach it, which isn’t fun at all. Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.

Unfortunately, neither Dizzy nor any of my friends shares my passion for Astrology, so I try not to flaunt it. They regard me as a crank already. I only spill the beans when I need to obtain someone’s date and place of birth, as in the case of the Commandant. For this purpose I have questioned almost everyone from the Plateau and half the town. In giving me their date of birth, people are actually revealing their real name to me, they’re showing me their celestial date-stamp, opening their past and future to me. But there are many people whom I shall never have the opportunity to ask.

Obtaining a date of birth is relatively easy. All it takes is an identity card, or just about any other document, and sometimes, by chance, it turns up on the internet. Dizzy has access to all sorts of lists and tables, though I won’t elaborate here. But what really matters is the time of birth. That’s not recorded in the documents, and yet it’s the time that’s the real key to a Person. A Horoscope without the exact time is fairly worthless – we know WHAT, but we don’t know HOW and WHERE.

I tried explaining to the reluctant Dizzy that in the past Astrology was much the same as socio-biology is today. Then at least he seemed a little more interested. There’s nothing outrageous about this comparison. The Astrologer believes that the heavenly bodies have an influence on human personality, while the socio-biologist thinks it’s the mysterious emanations of molecular bodies that affect us. The difference is in scale. Neither of them knows what’s behind this influence or how it is transmitted. They’re really talking about the same thing, except that they’re using different scales. Sometimes I’m surprised by the similarity, and by the fact that while I adore Astrology, I have no respect for socio-biology at all.

In a natal Horoscope the date of birth determines the date of death as well. That’s obvious – anyone who has been born is going to die. There are many places in the Horoscope that point us towards the time and nature of death – one simply needs to know how to spot and connect them. For example, one has to check the transitory aspects of Saturn to the hyleg, and what’s going on in the eighth house. Also to cast an eye on the relative position of the Lights – meaning the Sun and Moon.

It is quite complicated, and it could be boring for anyone who isn’t an expert. But when you look carefully, I told Dizzy, when you join up the facts, you’ll see that the concurrences of events down here with the position of the planets up there are crystal-clear. It always puts me into a state of exhilaration. But the source of my excitement is understanding. That’s why Dizzy cannot feel it.

In my defence of Astrology I’m often forced to use statistical arguments, which I hate, but which always appeal to young minds. Without any thought but with religious zeal, young people believe in statistics. It’s enough to give them something expressed as a percentage, or as a probability, and they take it in good faith. So then I referred to Gauquelin and his ‘Mars effect’ – a phenomenon that seems bizarre, but the statistics confirm it. What Gauquelin did was to demonstrate that, statistically, in the Horoscopes of sportsmen, Mars – the planet of fitness, competition and so on – is more frequently found in one particular location than in the Horoscopes of non-sportsmen. Of course Dizzy made light of this proof, and of all the other evidence that he found uncomfortable. Even when I offered him a whole string of examples of predictions that had come true. For instance, concerning Hitler, when Himmler’s court Astrologer, Wilhelm Wolf, predicted ‘eine grosse Gefahr für Hitler am 20.07.44’, meaning great danger for Hitler on that day, and as we know, that was the date of the assassination attempt at the Wolf’s Lair. And later on, the same sinister Astrologer predicted impassively: ‘dass Hitler noch vor dem 7.05.45 eines geheimnissvollen Todes sterben werde’, meaning that Hitler would die a mysterious death before the seventh of May.

‘Incredible,’ said Dizzy. ‘How’s that possible?’ he asked himself, but then instantly forgot it all, and let his incredulity flare up again.

I tried using other methods to convince him, by showing him the perfect harmony between what happens down here and what’s going on up there.

‘Look at this, for example, look carefully – the summer of 1980, Jupiter in conjunction with Saturn in Libra. A powerful conjunction. Jupiter represents the authorities, and Saturn the workers. What’s more, Wałęsa has the Sun in Libra. Do you see?’

Dizzy shook his head dubiously.

‘What about the Police? Which celestial body represents the Police?’ he asked.

‘Pluto. It also represents the secret services and the mafia.’

‘Well, yes, yes…’ he repeated, unconvinced, though I could see he had a lot of goodwill and was doing his best.

‘Keep looking,’ I said, and showed him the position of the planets. ‘Saturn was in Scorpio in 1953 – the death of Stalin and the political thaw; 1952 to 1956 – repression, the Korean War, the invention of the hydrogen bomb. The year 1953 was the toughest for the Polish economy. Look, that’s just when Saturn rose in Scorpio. Isn’t that incredible?’

Dizzy fidgeted in his chair.

‘Well, all right, look at this: Neptune in Libra – chaos, Uranus in Cancer – the people rebel, the decline of colonialism. Uranus was entering Leo when the French Revolution erupted, when the January Uprising occurred and when Lenin was born. Remember that Uranus in Leo always represents revolutionary power.’

I could see he was finding it painful.

No, it was impossible to persuade Dizzy to believe in Astrology. Never mind.

Once I was alone and was laying out my research Tools in the kitchen, I felt pleased that I could keep track of these amazing conformities. First I deciphered Big Foot’s Horoscope, and straight after that the Commandant’s.

Generally speaking, the tendency of a particular Person to have accidents is shown by the Ascendant, its ruler and the planets in the Ascendant. The ruler of the eighth house indicates a natural death. If it is in the first house, it means that his death will be the Person’s own fault. Maybe he was a careless Person, for instance. If the signifier is connected with the third house, the Person will be aware of the cause of his death. If it is not connected, then the poor fellow will not even realise where he made the fatal error. In the second house death occurs as a result of wealth and money. In this configuration the Person might be attacked and killed for the purposes of robbery. The third house is typical for road and transport accidents. In the fourth we find death because of land ownership, or because of family, especially the father. In the fifth because of children, abuse of pleasure, or because of sport. In the sixth house we bring illness on ourselves through lack of caution or by overworking. When the ruler of the eighth house is in the seventh house, the cause of death is a spouse; that could mean a duel, or despair resulting from infidelity. And so on.

In the Commandant’s Horoscope in the eighth house (a threat to life, the house of death) we find the Sun, the body that symbolises life itself, but also a position of power. It is located in quadrature – a very difficult aspect – to Mars (violence, aggression) in the twelfth house (Murder, assassination) in Scorpio (death, homicide, Crime). The ruler of Scorpio is Pluto, and thus power may be to do with organisations such as the Police, or… the mafia. Pluto is in conjunction with the Sun in Leo. In my view, all this means that the Commandant was a very ambiguous and enigmatic Person, mixed up in various sinister affairs. That he was capable of being cruel and ruthless, and gained distinct advantages from his position. It’s highly possible that as well as his official authority within the Police, he had a lot of power somewhere else, within something secret and ominous.

What’s more, the ruler of the Ascendant is in Aries, which governs the head, and thus violence (Mars) is in direct relation to his head. And I also remembered that Saturn in an animal sign – Aries, Taurus, Leo, Sagittarius or Capricorn – portends a threat to life caused by a wild or aggressive Animal.

‘In Dante’s Inferno Virgil says that as their punishment the astrologers had horribly twisted necks,’ said Dizzy to wrap up my argument.

‘Come on, my friend, don’t let me down,’ I said to the Samurai, which was growling at me, but then instantly it fired up. It’s a form of loyalty. When you’ve lived together for such a long time and you’re reliant on each other, a sort of friendship develops. I know it has reached quite an age by now, and with each year it’s finding it harder to move about. Just like me. I also know that I neglect it, and that this winter had made its life a misery. Mine too. In this car I have everything I need in case of an Accident. A rope and shovel, an electric saw, a petrol can, some mineral water and a packet of crackers that are sure to be completely damp by now – I’ve been carrying them about since the autumn. There’s also a torch (so that’s where it is!), a first-aid kit, a spare wheel and an orange camping cooler. I also have a can of pepper spray in case anyone were to attack me on the road, though it’s highly unlikely.

We drove across the Plateau towards the village, through meadows and wonderful wilderness. Gently and timidly, everything was starting to go green. Young nettles, still weak and tiny, were poking their tips above the ground. It was hard to imagine that two months from now they’d be sticking up stiffly, proud and menacing, with fluffy green seedpods. Close to the ground near the road I could see the tiny little faces of daisies – I could never help feeling that they were silently inspecting everyone who came this way, casting their stern judgement on us. An army of flower folk.

I parked outside the school and at once the children from my classes ran up to the car – they were always impressed by the Wolf’s head stuck to the Samurai’s front door. Then they escorted me to the classroom, twittering away, all chattering at once, and pulling at the sleeves of my sweater.

‘Good morning,’ I said in English.

‘Good morning,’ the children replied.

And as it was Wednesday, we started our Wednesday rituals. Unfortunately, half the class was absent again – the boys had been excused from their lessons to attend rehearsals for first communion. So we’d have to repeat this lesson again next week. I taught the next class some nature vocabulary, and that meant making a lot of mess, which earned me a scolding from the school cleaning lady.

‘You always leave a pigsty behind you. This is a school, not a kindergarten. What on earth are these dirty stones and seaweed for?’

At this school she was the only Person whom I feared, and her screeching, resentful tone drove me up the wall. The lessons tired me, physically even. I reluctantly trudged off to do my shopping and go to the post office. I bought bread, potatoes and other vegetables, in large quantities. I also went to the expense of buying some Cambozola, to cheer myself up if only with a bit of cheese. There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there’s something I haven’t done, something I’ve forgotten, that I’m not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I’m lagging behind the rest. The newspapers may very well be right. But when one takes a careful look at the people passing in the street, one might assume that many others have the same problem too, and haven’t done what they should with their lives either.

The first feeble signs of spring hadn’t yet reached the town; it had probably settled in beyond city limits, in allotment gardens and in stream valleys, like enemy troops in the past. The cobblestones were covered in sand left over from the winter, when it was scattered on the slippery pavements, but now, in the Sunshine, it was raising dust, soiling the springtime shoes brought out of the closet. The town flower beds were small and miserable. The lawns were fouled with dog dirt. Along the streets walked ashen people, squinting. They looked stupefied. Some were queuing at the cash machines to withdraw twenty zlotys to pay for today’s food. Others were hurrying to the clinic, armed with a ticket for an appointment at 13.35, while others were on their way to the cemetery to change the plastic winter flowers for real spring daffodils.

I felt deeply moved by all this human hustle and bustle. Sometimes an emotional mood of this kind assails me – I think it’s to do with my Ailments – and my resistance weakens. I stopped in the sloping market square, and gradually I felt flooded by a powerful sense of communion with the people passing by. Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent and easily destroyed. We trustingly went to and fro beneath the sky, which had nothing good in store for us.

Spring is just a short interlude, after which the mighty armies of death advance; they’re already besieging the city walls. We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognised. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.

I noticed a pregnant girl sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper, and suddenly it occurred to me what a blessing it is to be ignorant. How could one possibly know all this and not miscarry?

My eyes began to stream again; by now it was becoming truly awkward and problematic. I couldn’t hold back the tears. I hoped Ali would know what to do about it.

Good News’ shop was in a small side street off the market square, and one entered it straight from the car park, which wasn’t the best incentive for potential buyers of second-hand clothes.

I looked in there for the first time last year in late autumn. I was frozen through and hungry. Damp November darkness was hanging over the town and people were feeling drawn to everything bright and warm.

From the entrance, some clean and colourful rugs led inside, then diverged among the rails, on which the clothes were classified by colour, playing a game with the different shades; the place smelled of incense, and it was warm, almost hot, thanks to some large industrial radiators beneath the windows. This had once been home to the Tailors’ Cooperative for the Disabled, as indicated by a sign still visible on the wall. There was a large plant in the corner, a huge chestnut vine that must have outgrown its previous owner’s flat long ago; its strong shoots were climbing the walls, aiming for the shop window. The whole thing was a mixture of socialist cafe, dry cleaner’s and fancy-dress costume hire. And in the middle of it all was Good News.

That’s what I called her. This name suggested itself irresistibly, at first sight. Irresistibly – that’s a beautiful, powerful word; when we use it, we shouldn’t really need to provide any further explanation.

‘I’d like a warm jacket,’ I said shyly, and the girl looked at me intelligently, with a gleam in her dark eyes. She nodded encouragingly.

So after a short pause I continued: ‘To keep me warm and protect me from the rain. I want it to be different from all the other jackets, not grey or black, not the kind that’s easily mistaken in the cloakroom. I want it to have pockets, lots of pockets for keys, treats for the Dogs, a mobile phone, documents – then I won’t have to carry a bag, and can keep my hands free.’

As I made my request, I realised that I was placing myself in her hands.

‘I think I might have something for you,’ replied Good News, and led me into the depths of the long, narrow space.

At the far end stood a circular clothes rail with jackets hanging on it. Without having to think, she reached out and extracted a lovely down coat in a crimson shade.

‘How about this one?’ The large surfaces of the bright windows were reflected in her eyes, which shone with a beautiful, pure light.

Yes, the jacket was a perfect fit. I felt like an Animal that has been given back its stolen fur. In the pocket I found a little shell, and decided it was a small gift from the previous owner. Like a wish: ‘May it serve you well.’

I also bought some gloves at this shop, two pairs. I was just about to rummage in a basket full of hats when I noticed a large black Cat lying in it. And next to it, among the scarves, there was another one, identical, but bigger. Mentally, I named the Cats Hat and Scarf, though afterwards I always found it very hard to tell them apart. Good News’ black Cats.

This sweet little shop assistant with Manchurian beauty (she was also wearing a fake-fur hat) made me a cup of tea and pulled a chair up to the gas heater for me to warm myself.

That was how our friendship began.

There are some people at whom one only has to glance for one’s throat to tighten and one’s eyes to fill with tears of emotion. These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature, not entirely battered by the Fall. Perhaps they are messengers, like the servants who find a lost prince who’s unaware of his origins, show him the robe that he wore in his native country, and remind him how to return home.

She too suffered from her own special illness – a very rare and bizarre one. She had no hair. No eyebrows, or eyelashes. She’d never had any – she was born like that. Genes, or Astrology. I of course think it’s Astrology. Oh yes, I verified it in her Horoscope: Damaged Mars close to the Ascendant, on the side of the twelfth house and in opposition to Saturn in the sixth (this sort of Mars also produces covert activities and unclear motives).

So she drew herself lovely eyebrows with a pencil, and tiny little lines on her eyelids to look like lashes; the illusion was perfect. She always wore a turban, a hat, occasionally a wig, or else she wound a scarf around her head. In summer I gazed in amazement at her forearms, entirely devoid of those little darker or fairer hairs that we all have.

I often wonder why we find some people attractive and not others. And I have a Theory about it, which is that there is such a thing as a perfectly harmonious shape to which our bodies instinctively aspire. We choose in others the features that seem to match this ideal. The aim of evolution is purely aesthetic – it’s not to do with adaptation at all. Evolution is about beauty, about achieving the most perfect form for each shape.

Only when I saw this girl did I realise how ugly our body hair is – those brows in the middle of the forehead, the eyelashes, the stubble on our heads, armpits and groin. Why on earth do we have this peculiar stigma? I think that in paradise we must have been devoid of hair. Naked and smooth.

She told me she was born in a village outside Kłodzko, into a very large family. Her father drank and died before his time. Her mother was sick, seriously so. She suffered from depression and had ended up in hospital, drugged into a stupor. Good News coped as best she could. She had passed her final secondary-school exams with flying colours, but hadn’t gone to college because she had no money, on top of which she was taking care of her siblings. She decided to earn the money for her studies, but couldn’t find a job. Finally the owner of this chain of second-hand shops had taken her on, but the salary was so low she was barely able to survive on it, and from year to year her studies were further and further postponed. When there was nobody in the shop, she read. I knew what books she liked, because she put them on a shelf and lent them to her customers – gloomy horror stories, Gothic novels with crumpled covers featuring a drawing of a Bat. Perverted monks, severed hands that murder people, coffins flushed out of graveyards by floods. Evidently reading this sort of thing confirmed her in the conviction that we are not living in the worst of worlds, and taught her optimism.

When I heard Good News’ account of her life, I mentally began to formulate questions that start with the words ‘Why don’t you…’, followed by a description of what – in our view – one should do in this sort of situation. My lips were on the point of producing one of these impertinent ‘why don’t yous’ when I bit my tongue.

That’s just what the colour magazines do – just for a moment I’d wanted to be like them: they tell us what we’ve failed to do, where we’ve messed up, what we’ve neglected; ultimately, they set us on ourselves, filling us with self-contempt.

So I didn’t say a word. Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate. So I told Good News about my life too, and invited her to my home to meet my Little Girls. And that’s what happened.

In an effort to help her I went to the local authority, but I found out there’s no support, no grants for people like Good News. The woman behind the desk advised me to arrange a bank loan, the kind you pay back once you finish your studies and start to work. There are also free computer, dressmaking and flower-arranging courses. But those, unfortunately, are only for the unemployed. So she would have to quit her job in order to go on one.

I made a trip to the bank as well, where I was given a stack of forms to complete. But there was one vital condition – Good News had to secure a place at college first. And I knew that eventually she would achieve her aim.

It’s good to sit in Good News’ shop. It’s the cosiest place in town. Mothers with children meet up here, and old ladies on their way to lunch at the pensioners’ canteen. The car park security guard and frozen saleswomen from the vegetable market come here. Everyone is given something hot to drink. One could say that Good News runs a cafe here.

Today I was to wait for her to lock up this sanctuary, and then we’d be off to the Czech Republic with Dizzy to visit the bookshop that sells Blake. Good News was folding some bandanas. She never said much, and if she did speak, she did it quietly, so you had to listen to her very carefully. The last few customers were still browsing the clothes rails in search of a bargain. I stretched out on a chair and closed my eyes blissfully.

‘Have you heard about the foxes that have been seen out on the Plateau, near where you live? Fluffy, white foxes.’

I froze. Near where I live? I opened my eyes and saw the Gentleman with the Poodle.

‘Apparently that rich fellow with the funny name released some from his farm,’ he said, standing in front of me with several pairs of trousers slung over his arm. His Poodle was looking at me, a doggy smile on its face – it clearly recognised me.

‘Innerd?’ I asked.

‘That’s the one,’ confirmed the man, and then addressed Good News. ‘Would you please find me some trousers with an eightycentimetre waist?’ Then at once he went back to his story. ‘They can’t locate the man. He’s gone missing. Vanished without trace. Like a needle in a haystack,’ the old gentleman went on. ‘He’s probably run away with his lover to a warmer country. And as he was rich, he’ll find it easy to hide. Apparently he was mixed up in some sort of racket.’

A young man with a shaved head who’d been asking about Nike or Puma track suits and was now rummaging among the clothes rails responded. ‘It wasn’t a racket, it was the mafia,’ he said, hardly opening his mouth at all. ‘They were importing furs illegally from Russia, using his farm as a cover. He hadn’t settled up with the Russian mafia, so he got scared and did a runner.’

I found this topic alarming. I was starting to feel afraid.

‘Is your Poodle a Dog or a Bitch?’ I politely asked the old gentleman, in a desperate attempt to divert the conversation onto less sinister tracks.

‘My Maxy? He’s a boy of course. Still a bachelor,’ he said, laughing. But he was clearly more interested in the local gossip, because he turned to the skinhead and continued: ‘He was very wealthy. He had a hotel on the main road out of Kłodzko. A delicatessen. A fox farm. A slaughterhouse and meat-processing plant. A stud farm. But how much more there was in his wife’s name!’

‘Here’s a size eighty for you,’ I said, handing him a pretty good pair of grey trousers.

He examined them carefully and put on his glasses to read the laundry label.

‘Oh yes, I like these, I’ll take them. You know what, I like things that are trim, nice and close-fitting. They emphasise the figure.’

‘Well, sir, how different people can be. I always buy everything too big. It gives me freedom,’ I said.

Dizzy had received some encouraging news. The local weekly, the Kłodzko Gazette, had offered to publish his translations of Blake in its poetry corner. He was excited and intimidated all at once. We drove along the almost deserted highway towards the border.

‘First I’d like to translate his Letters, and only then go back to the poetry. But if they’re asking for poetry… My God, what can I give them? What shall we give them first?’

To tell the truth, I couldn’t concentrate on Blake any more. I saw that we were passing the shabby buildings at the border crossing and entering the Czech Republic. The road here was better and Dizzy’s car stopped rattling.

‘Dizzy, is it true about those foxes?’ Good News asked him from the back seat. ‘That they escaped from Innerd’s farm and are going about the forest?’

Dizzy confirmed that it was. ‘It happened a few days ago. At first the Police thought he’d sold all the animals to someone before disappearing. But it looks as if he let them go. Strange, isn’t it?’

‘Are they searching for him?’ I asked.

Dizzy replied that no one had reported him missing, so there was no reason to look for him. His wife hadn’t come forward, nor had his children. Maybe he’d given himself a holiday. His wife claimed it wasn’t the first time it had happened. Once he’d vanished for a week, and then called from the Dominican Republic. Until the banks were after him there was no reason for alarm.

‘A man’s free to do what he wants with his life, until he falls foul of the banks,’ Dizzy sermonised with contagious certainty. I think he’d make a superb press spokesman for the Police.

Dizzy also said the Police were trying to establish the source of the money that the Commandant had under his trouser belt. It was a bribe. By now they were sure he’d been on his way back from a meeting with Innerd. It takes the Police a long time to establish things that seem obvious.

‘And there’s another thing,’ he said finally. ‘The weapon that must have been used to kill the Commandant had traces of animal blood on it.’

We called at the bookshop at the last moment, just as it was about to close. When silver-haired Honza handed him the two books he had ordered, I saw a blush appear on Dizzy’s cheeks. Beaming with joy, he looked at us, then raised his arms, as if to give Honza a hug. They were old editions from the 1970s, properly annotated. Like gold dust. We all went home in a state of elation, and no one mentioned the sinister incidents again.

Dizzy lent me the Selected Letters for a few days, and as soon as I got home, I lit the stove, made myself some strong tea and started to read.

One passage particularly appealed to me, so I translated it quickly for myself on a paper bag.

‘I believe my Constitution to be a good one,’ wrote Blake, ‘but it has many Peculiarities that no one but myself can know. When I was young, many places always laid me up the day after, & sometimes two or three days, with precisely the same Complaint & the same torment of the Stomach. Sir Francis Bacon would say, it is want of Discipline in Mountainous Places. Sir Francis Bacon is a Liar. No discipline will turn one Man into another, even in the least particle, & such discipline I call Presumption & Folly.’

I found this captivating. I read and read, unable to stop. And perhaps it was just as the Author would have wished – everything that I read pervaded my dreams – and all Night I saw visions.