My First Suicide

A Corpse with Folded Wings

I

Grandma Pech’s spirit doesn’t visit me. Nor do any other spirits. When I dream of the old house in the center of Wisła, it is always empty and lit. I walk through the swept courtyard, through the hallway, through the rooms. There isn’t anyone anywhere, but I hear someone’s steps ahead of me. I enter the kitchen, and sometimes someone is there. From time to time I see her. She sits at the enormous table covered with a sky blue oilcloth. On her head she has a carefully tied scarf with a pattern of black roses, on her shoulders a brown Silesian jacket. She sits at the table, but she is dressed as if she were going somewhere right away. Somewhere far. Not to Wojnar’s to go shopping, not even to the market. Somewhere far, and at an unusual time. In my dream, it is always a late hour. The majolica clock over the door to the hallway says that it is almost ten, and she is setting off somewhere. Someone is supposed to come for her. The gate is wide open, you can hear the rattle of a britzka crossing the bridge. The yellow light of the kitchen window makes a regular rectangle on the river stones of the courtyard.

Whenever we came late, and the gate was closed, we would look through the slits to see whether the light was on the stones. It usually was. It always was. We would knock on the window, or we would bang at the front. Grandpa Pech would come through the hallway and open the door. Suddenly the day, which was already over, gained extra hours. The evening, which was already almost night, became early evening. A fire burned anew under the cooled stove. Supper was long past, but we were just sitting down to supper. It was dark all over Wisła, but at our house the lights were on for a long time yet. I loved late arrivals and prolonged evenings — later on, it was never possible to outwit Time so easily.

For years now, the gate has been gone, as is the light on the river stones, the kitchen, the hearth, the table covered with the sky blue oilcloth. All are dead now, and their spirits do not come. They don’t come when I’m awake. They come in my dreams — but that is vanity. The dead came to Grandma Pech, both when she was asleep and awake, both day and night. Now there is complete stagnation — no one comes. Not she herself, or Father, or Uncle Ableger, or Janek Nikandy. They won’t come, although I focus like hell on them and on their other worlds. They don’t come, although I pray that they come. I summon them with biblical demagogy, and I even blaspheme against their memory in the desperate hope that, if in no other way, they would at least drop by to give us a little scare. But nothing. Neither hide nor hair. Is Warsaw too far away for them? A deadly joke, but I don’t cross people off the list for being dead.

Last evening the door bell rang. I was already certain that my old man had finally — exactly ten years after his death — made up his mind, and he was dropping by to pay a spectral visit. Nothing of the sort! The usual street fraud, claiming that supposedly her purse had been stolen and she didn’t have enough money to get home. Even a rather nice looking babe. I gave her five złotys. Not so much out of desire, as anger that it was she, and not the spirit of an ancestor. They don’t come. Although sooner or later someone will come. A destroyed city, an empty apartment, absolute twilight, complete solitude — ideal conditions for the dead. Eventually, they will come. At the worst, they will say of me that I went crazy.

Grandma Pech conversed with the dead. That’s an understatement. Well before someone died she often started to receive signs from the heavens. When Mila from Wierchy died, a half year earlier God struck the kitchen oven so forcefully that the pots almost fell. I was there. They were sitting at the table, drinking tea with rum, and suddenly it sounded like a stone quarry in the stove. They looked at each other for a fraction of a second and right away began to find thousands of reasons: wet coal was crackling in the hearth; a cast iron rib had cracked; the metal plate on one side had become completely bent; the badly positioned stove damper had fallen off; we have to throw away the old tea pot, because it’s going to pieces with a horrible bang; there’s something in the courtyard; something at the Nikandys’; something in the heavens.

But for that fraction of a second, as they looked at each other, they managed to ask themselves silently: Which one? Which one of them would soon die? They both knew the secret alphabets of death. The lot fell to Mila. She was a large, stout woman, and she had always had heart troubles. In half a year she would begin to feel sick. Not so very sick — she wouldn’t even lose consciousness — but still, sick enough that the ambulance would come, they would take her to the hospital, and basically no one knew what would come next. The kitchen was full of people, everyone was waiting for news, uncanny Pospiszil was calmly reckoning whether Mama — in my parts, to this day, men have the fatal habit of calling their wives “Mamas”—would return home for the holidays. Of course she would return, what do you mean for the holidays, what’s the date today? The tenth of December! What do you mean for the holidays! Mama will return well before the holidays! And even if! Even if, God forbid, there were some complications, because a person has to be prepared for everything, even so, they will certainly discharge her just in time for the holidays! They will discharge her for the holidays. They always discharge almost everybody for the holidays. How could this be: the holidays without Mama?

And here, for a good hour already, life without Mama had been going on. They couldn’t get through on the telephone from the hospital, what was the hurry with this news after all. Finally, Grandma will take the telephone call, and right away — despair, sudden lament, the first steps of the funeral dance. Mama has died! Mama has died! She was with us even yesterday, and today she is gone! Grandma will run in from the hallway, where the telephone on the wall, fastened to a special pedestal made of black metal, was now like an altar of evil. She will glide with a quick but at the same time solemn step, she will rush to uncanny Pospiszil, grasp him by the head, embrace him, and shout like in the circus: Mama has died! Mama has died!

The sudden expressions of despair were the most difficult to understand. After all, she well knew at whom the shot under the kitchen stove had been aimed. So what shock are we talking about? What surprise? She knew that it was about Mila, not about her.

This didn’t happen in my sleep. It was in the early morning of a certain winter day. All of Wisła was buried in snow up to the rooftops, and it must have been twenty below zero. Somebody was sitting then on the round stool at the sewing machine. She had recently gotten up, was walking about the room and braiding the plait that she never cut, and she wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t ashamed, because she sensed that that someone could be a messanger — frozen, dusty, dead tired, but from over there. Perhaps even the same one who once had visited Abraham, or the one who had dissuaded Joseph from leaving Mary, or the one we sang about in the Christmas carol: “On earth are the earthly, in heaven, the angels.” You couldn’t see his wings, but it all fit. Can you see birds’ wings when they sit on branches? Has anyone ever seen a sparrow sitting with its wings spread? Or a titmouse? Or a blackbird? Birds spread their wings in flight; it must be the same with angels. True, on the lithograph that was hanging over the bed you could see the spread wings growing out of the angel’s back, but every time she looked at that picture, the thought came to her that the picture was painted nicely, but that the painter had probably never seen even a partridge in the grass, to say nothing of an angel. The one who was sitting on the round stool at the sewing machine must have had his wings folded. An angel with folded wings. A strange expression, but she liked it a lot. And he had just said — the stranger with the folded wings — that she would still, for many years, see signs and hear voices. It flitted through her mind to ask about Gustaw. Just how was he doing? Had his cracked skull grown back together? Did he remember her? But she let it go, since this might displease him. She has been with her second husband for a long time now, three children with him, grandchildren, and there she goes asking about the other one. God didn’t take him so that she could long for him. She didn’t ask.

Grandma Pech outwitted death by her eternal readiness for it. That was how she lived to be ninety. For as long as I could remember, she had been saying that it was time to leave this world, that she had just one desire, to fall asleep in the evening and not wake up in the morning, and she always wore black. Even when she wasn’t entirely in black, she always wore something funereal, even if it was only a scarf with black roses. In other words, she was ready for death every day, she had the angel’s assurance that she would live to see a thing or two, she had been forewarned about God’s decisions. She was doubly, or perhaps even repeatedly, fortified; she had been expecting Mila’s death for half a year. But in that case, what was the reason for her race from the hallway to the kitchen, feverish and stately, like an up-tempo cortège? Why, and for whom, that grabbing of uncanny Pospiszil by his gray mane? Why, and for whom, those theatrics?

For the Lord God. For half a year, day after day, Grandma Pech had awaited Mila’s death with a heavy heart, but also for half a year she had been gearing up for her performance on the occasion of that death. She couldn’t foresee all the circumstances, but it turned out almost ideally. Grandma Pech was the Lord God’s dancer. She didn’t have the slightest doubt that He never took His eye off her, and that in important moments He scrutinized her carefully. Her faith was pure and steadfast, but it plunged her into an aesthetic of despair, because it seemed to her that the Lord God, the angels, and, in general, all the inhabitants of heaven were the audience before which she was performing. She did her best, but she didn’t know the duplicitous art of solemn gestures. She couldn’t even feign sorrow over someone’s death very well. And when she thought about herself, she went numb with fear. Just how would that be? Through one’s whole life, a person hadn’t been anywhere, hadn’t traveled, hadn’t met anyone. A person hadn’t even been to Warsaw, and now you have to exchange a few words with Lord Jesus, greet the archangels from up close. God! How will this be? My Grandma Zuzanna, née Trzmielowska, primo voto Branna, secundo voto Pech, wasn’t afraid of death — she was afraid of leaving Wisła.

II

She died in long drawn-out agonies. I saw her for the last time two weeks before her death. For the previous nine years, ever since Grandpa Pech had died, she had lived alone. For the last year, she lay in bed in the small room. I sat on the round stool at the sewing machine. She told stories about the church fair, about gingerbread, and about the taste of freshly pickled cucumbers. I realized that she was talking about the taste of cucumbers from the year 1912. Twenty years later she fell in love with the young butcher Gustaw Branny. A dark, almost indecipherable photo from their wedding party was hanging over the little chess table. Today it is easy to say that clouds were gathering over the young couple. If you stare at the background, you can see more than clouds, and more than the black trunks of pine trees — you can see corpse-white lightning bolts slashing through the darkness.

To the left of the groom sits his sister Mila, with uncanny Pospiszil. Pospiszil’s uncanniness, in my mind from back then, was based on three circumstances. First: he had a twin brother. Second: a year after my aunt’s death, the devils carted him off to hell, and he cursed horribly, horribly. Third: he was an enthusiastic phillumenist.

He showed me his collection once. Oh, the varieties and origins of matchbox covers he had there! Egypt, The Congo, Bechuana, Tanganyika, Laos, Oran, Siam — God knows what else. Everything the same size, poor pictures, wretched paper, zero serration. In those days, I collected stamps, and Pospiszil’s phillumenalia made a gloomy impression. It seemed to me that he, too, really wished to collect stamps, but, as some sort of punishment, he was only allowed this pathetic stuff. Or that those were stamps, but that the devil cut the edges at night and spilled acid on them, which made the colors fade, the paper get thin, and the glue come off the back. Pospiszil was amazingly proud of his collection. He presented it with the superiority of the magician initiated in who knows what sort of arcana. With the proficiency of the old pedant (before the war he had taught at the conservatory), he tested me to see whether I was reacting with the proper humility, and I felt ashamed of him with the terrible shame of the child who is ashamed of adults. To make matters worse, the Pospiszils’ house in Wierchy was huge and unfurnished. All the rooms were painted yellow, and there was not even a stool in a single one. In the living room, there was a piano covered with a shiny violet dust sheet — and that was that. Maybe they lived on the second floor, maybe they were remodeling just then, painting, changing the stoves — the explanation wouldn’t be complicated, but in my mind there remained the yellow light of the walls, the empty rooms, and Pospiszil showing me, with pomp and solemnity, the most pathetic little scraps of paper in the world.

When he died a year after Mila’s death, his identical twin brother came to the funeral. I suppose they didn’t get along, because I had never seen the twin before. Supposedly he lived in Gdynia. Or on some other moon. Actually, I don’t have to elaborate on the images and circumstances. Just imagine the funeral of a twin, which is attended by the other twin. Maybe you have been at such a funeral? It is obvious what sort of irresistible thoughts one has then. And what is more, I was seeing the other Pospiszil for the first time in my life, and I didn’t really know that he was — perhaps didn’t even really know what it was: twinness. My Aunt from Wąwóz had twins, but they weren’t similar. And here you had the identical voice, the identical motions, height, gait, hair, even clothing — all identical. It couldn’t be anything other than that the corpse had crawled out of the coffin and was standing over its own grave. Years later I feel like laughing, but then? Horror! And there were the amazing stories: that the deceased — if he was deceased, if the coffin wasn’t empty — had died horribly, how he howled, cursed, blasphemed. Horror! Fear, genuine, piercing to the marrow like frost. Fear that somewhere here, over the cemetery on Gróniczek Hill, emissaries of hell were circulating, that, granted, Father Kalinowski conducted the right services, that we sing and pray, but that the devil already has everything in his care. Years later — when Father died and over his grave a black, July downpour broke out — I recalled a shadow of that fear.

III

On the photo hanging over the little chess table, black clouds and the black branches of pine trees bend over the wedding guests. Black pine needles rain down upon my Grandma’s bonnet, but she doesn’t know about it. Leaning on the distinctive shoulder of the young butcher, she has before her yet a year of faith in love, a year of faith in the world’s sense, a year of faith in God’s goodness. In nine months, she would give birth to a son. In twelve months, on a sunny September afternoon, someone would drive up in front of the house on a motorcycle. Someone with dark folded wings? Most likely yes, although this isn’t all that important. What is important is the motorcycle — a DKW Sport 500, the 1929 model. A black, shining spider, which could reach the unprecedented speed of seventy-five miles per hour.

As late as the fifties, when some stranger from Katowice left a Junak in the courtyard, the neighbors gathered, and the Nikandy boys, by some miracle (to tell the truth, by using a common nail), got it started and made laps, there was a great spectacle. And twenty years earlier? Before the war? Almost ten years before the arrival, with an infernal clatter, of motorized Wehrmacht troops through the Kubalonka Pass? In the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and thirty-two? At that time, the good citizens of Wisła didn’t gather out of curiosity at the sound of an approaching motorcycle. They locked themselves in their houses, maybe they even barricaded themselves. They definitely prayed.

O unhappy Gustaw Branny! Why didn’t you hide in the back room? Why did you allow yourself to be tempted by the devil on the motorcycle? Why did you want to go for a ride? O master butcher, who obtained all those licenses from the Butchers’ Association in Skoczów! Granted, if you had hidden and not set off on your last ride, I wouldn’t be singing you this little song, because neither I nor my Mother would be in this world, but Grandma would be happy. Was that the reason almighty God, or the devil on a motorcycle, smashed your skull — so that my life might be possible? And it is possible only because I defend myself from its anguish by writing? Are those the sorts of pranks you have in Your head, Lord God?

For half her life, Grandma told the story of the scene of his departure. Gustaw sat on the motorcycle, they set off in the direction of Oasis, he turned back, waved, and that was that. I heard this sentence a thousand, a billion times. Nothing more. Gustaw sat on the motorcycle, they set off in the direction of Oasis, he turned back, waved, and that was that. Her story about the tragedy was a single sentence. Never a single word about who came running with the news. Never a single word about how she flew to that bend in the road. Never a single word about the stump that Gustaw’s unhappy head hit. Never a single word about how he looked in the coffin. Never a single word about washing and dressing the corpse. Never a single word about the funeral. I hear her wailing in the ice-cold house of Wisła butchers, and she recalls the wailing that was the omen of his death. She was sure that it had been caterwauling. The windows of the back room look out on a garden full of wild apple trees, tomcats from the entire Principality of Cieszyn constantly prowl there, and often, in their amatory frenzies, bawl their heads off precisely like year-old infants. Six weeks before Gustaw was killed, you could hear the screaming cry of a child in the back room. She was certain that it was tomcats’ laments, although something didn’t fit. Only when she went in there on the evening after the wake did she recall her own anxiety.

In the back room stands a stove made of cornflower blue tiles, a gigantic armchair, a pear wood wardrobe, a double bed, a small table covered with a lace table cloth. On the wall hangs an image of a Guardian Angel and a Becker clock. You couldn’t hear it ticking. It is quiet, dreadfully quiet. My twenty-five-year-old Grandma looks through the double window at the outline of Jarzębata Mountain. Never would she put it this way, but her skin is dead, her soul is in ruins, her heart is burnt to ashes. Not only is the Jarzębata beyond the double window. The entire world is beyond the double window. She herself is beyond the double window. Her legs, her arms, her head — they have been separated from her; she walks, sits, moves her arms, sees, and hears only because, with her last reserves of strength, she commands her legs and arms to move, her eyes to see, and her ears to hear. And now there is quiet over the entire field, now it is quiet like in Gustaw’s coffin. Even the tomcats have fallen silent, they aren’t in the garden, the child isn’t crying.

Suddenly, it was as if a windowpane had shattered, as if the band at a fair had started to play. Suddenly she hears that cry, suddenly she hears the cry from six weeks before and recalls that it hadn’t come from the garden, but as if from behind the armchair, and the armchair doesn’t even stand under the window. And she recalls that her heart shuddered then, because that sound was not only unusually loud, it was also horribly distinct; it was full of syllables, as if a crying baby were saying something, shouting something, as if it wished to say, to shout out some word. And with all her strength, she recreates that meowing, that whimpering, which was not meowing and was not whimpering. God, it is good that You give me signs, but why are they so unclear? Grandma Zuzanna listens intently and with a sort of tension, as if she were praying for Gustaw’s resurrection and had a chance at it. She listens and suddenly hears, suddenly she hears precisely and runs through the entire house, and just as she was standing there in her Silesian attire, which she hadn’t yet changed after the funeral and after the wake, she runs to the stable, leads Fuks out, harnesses him to the britzka, which is standing by the shed, opens the gate, and off she goes! Giddy-up! Giddy-up! Fuks! Giddy-up to Wierchy!

I’m not able to describe her life as I would wish. I don’t know how to recreate it day by day, page by page. Isolated images flare up, and I approach them, but I, too, am helpless. The lonely ride of Grandma Zuzanna at dusk through a lifeless prewar Wisła is like a Handel aria. A few hours after the funeral of her beloved, a young woman stands on the rushing carriage, turns onto the bridge, drives into the dark valley, a gust ripped the scarf from her shoulders and unbraids her plait. Fuks gallops lightly, the wheels rattle, the river flows toward them, and above them, in the dark blue sky, an angel sings: Lascia ch’io pianga mia cruda sorte, e che sospiri la libertà.

At the Pospiszils’, the lights are shining in the windows, Grandma walks through the yellow rooms, no one is surprised. It was almost as if Mila had been waiting for her. First they embrace, then they look at each other for a long time. They sit in the living room. There is no question of eating, but a sip of pepper vodka can’t hurt. Mila’s famous pepper vodka. Old Roth buys it all the time and does great business with it. He served it at the wake. After two rounds, the hubbub of voices was louder and louder. Lord Jesus, let me wake up. Lord God, wake me up. After the funeral, they asked to go to Roth’s, because — where else? She didn’t really know where she was. A year ago she hadn’t believed that she was at her own wedding party. Now she is supposed to believe that she is at the wake after Gustaw’s funeral? She drank about three glasses, but she didn’t feel a thing, not even the fiery taste.

“Mrs. Professor, Mrs. Professor,” old Roth bowed and scraped to Mila, “Mrs. Professor. When Mrs. Professor makes her pepper vodka from Wierchy, it is paradise mixed with hell! It is as if you were drinking fire mixed with sky. It is as if a cloud pierced by lightning had passed through your throat! Mr. Professor,” he addressed Pospiszil. “Mr. Professor, you have a genuine Eden in your cellar!” “Eden in the cellar, hell on the ground floor,” responded Pospiszil, who was well known for his splendid ripostes, and the laugh of the funeral-goers rose to the heavens.

Not only Mila’s pepper vodka, not only the other liqueurs, but especially the preserves, jams, cucumbers, mushrooms, home-made wine were delicacies. When the summer or the ski seasons came, Roth made out like a bandit on those delicacies. With Mila’s compotes alone he did better business than with the Brannys’ mutton. Which does not mean that he lost money on the meat.

“I don’t lose on anything,” he used to say. “I don’t lose on anything, because I like the Christian verse that says ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ In my tavern I, too, give the word at the beginning. Before the dill soup, I give the word dill soup; before the omelet, I give the word omelet; before the schnitzel, I give the word schnitzel; before the apple torte, I give the word apple torte — but what words they are! How they are written, and on what paper! How they are bound! Garnished with what additional words! Officers’ soup! Omelet á la Lisbon! Emperor’s schnitzel. Apple torte cumulonimbus!”

When, toward the end of the fifties, I found among some old papers a Menu of the Restaurant and Confectionery of Maurycy Roth in Wisła—covered with fossilized dust, but practically without damage — it seemed to me that I had discovered an illuminated Benedictine manuscript or a folio from a biblical papyrus. It was as if my delight was supposed to survive old Roth, murdered in Auschwitz.

Before the pepper vodka was the word pepper vodka, and after the pepper vodka was the word pepper vodka. People were still talking about Mila’s pepper vodka long after the war. And now, as I record this story, pepper vodka from Wierchy is warming the blood of Grandma Zuzanna. She didn’t feel the icy wind during her ride, she was completely numb from the cold, and finally there was a tiny bit of warmth, minimally deeper breaths, a trace of relief. Mila raises the lid of the grand piano. Gustaw had visited them a few weeks before the accident. “‘Sister,’” he said, “for that was how he always addressed me, with strange solemnity and tenderness. I loved him very much, and he loved me too. We were good siblings, even very good, but sometimes when he lost all moderation with that sister of his—sister this, sister that, sister the other thing, when he never said the shortest sentence to me without that sister—you know what I’m talking about, because you often heard it: ‘Gustaw, what time is it?’ ‘Three, sister;’ when he was often as if completely possessed by that sister, I would lose my temper. Was he making a joke or a mockery of me. But not then, on that occasion there wasn’t time to feel offended, on that occasion there wasn’t time for anything, because he was in a hurry. He said that he was going to Ram Mountain for a sacrificial lamb. He was always joking, not always in an appropriate manner. In any case, he was in a terrible hurry, and he dropped by as if for fire, or rather for water, because he called from the threshhold: ‘Sister, I need to drink, sister, I’m horribly dry, sister, I will die of thirst before I return home, sister, save me!’” And she ran down to the cellar for a jar of gooseberry compote — gooseberry, when you need to drink, is the best, slightly tart, invigorating; when she makes it, she never overdoes it with the sugar — and she took the biggest jar she could find, and she returned quickly.

He stood by the grand piano, the lid had been raised, and he had a hand on the keys, and she was certain that he would immediately hammer out a few bars of “When the morning stars are rising…” that was all he could more or less play. But no, he didn’t start to play, he turned around to her and smiled, and in his turn, and smile, there was something light — as if that turn were the beginning of flight. That became fixed in her mind. How wouldn’t it become fixed. That’s how she saw him the last time alive, and now it constantly seems to her that he is standing with his hand raised over the keyboard like some sort of composer, but the poor devil didn’t have an ear worth a plugged nickel, just those disastrous notes of “When the morning…” desperately tapped out. He had probably learned while still in school. Not so much to play, as to find the right keys by memory, and whenever he found himself at the instrument, he immediately began to hammer away. All his life, that one and only melody, and barely at that. Even after death, he couldn’t manage any better. Precisely an hour after his death, she heard someone playing, but, after all, there wasn’t anyone at home; the grand piano was closed and covered with a cloth, but she clearly, very clearly — she wasn’t imagining anything — she hears precisely the first bars pounded out by Gustaw’s hard fingers. He had already been killed, he was already a corpse, he already lay, crushed by the accursed motorcycle, already his wings were folded, already blood was flowing from his head as if from a faucet; but he came once more, wanted to play once more, wanted to pound out the melody, as if he were thanking her for the gooseberry compote.

They embrace and cry, and it is a cry of despair, but also a cry of relief, for since both had heard, since both had received signs, there is no mistake, there is no doubt. Perhaps it was even for this reason that God had taken Gustaw, so that, through hearing, and sometimes later even seeing, He might let it be known that He is. He is. It could have been this way: until now, it had been up and down with their faith. They were too young, too fine looking, and too flighty. Zuza and Mila. It was up and down with them, and especially with their thoughts. But now God had poured His Spirit into them.

Grandma Zuzanna drinks off one more shot of pepper vodka and feels the surge of strength and hope. If the Lord God has given these sorts of signs, that means that there is a Paradise, there are angels, and there is eternal life. And Gustaw will be waiting for her there. Lord Jesus, this is all true! Everything she had learned in Sunday School, in religion, in confirmation classes — this is all the truest truth. She will live well — diligently and piously. She will bring up the little one so that Gustaw will be proud of both of them. And when she should, at some point, die, when she should finally die, what is she saying — finally? — right away, in a moment; life is like a spark, time flies ceaselessly, perhaps even when she falls asleep tonight, she won’t wake up in the morning; it will be right away, it will be right away, as soon as she gets to Heaven, and Gustaw comes out to meet her, smiling so lightly, as Mila said, and they go to some corner where no one will bother them, and she will tell Gustaw everything, every little thing, week by week, day by day, how she raised the little one, how she lived. O Jesus, this is all true! O Jesus, how good that You had the baby start to cry in the back room! How good that on the way to Ram Mountain You sent thirst upon Gustaw and commanded him to drop by Wierchy for gooseberry compote.

And late, very late in the evening, Grandma Zuzanna will return home under heavens so star-strewn it was as if they were covered with snow. The cart goes calmly, the crowns of the trees almost bright, the clatter of the river and the great quiet over the mountains. Fuks pulls up to the gate by memory, a shadow rises from the bench standing before the front entry, runs up to the britzka, and offers her a firm hand, holds her a second longer, presses greedily, knows that he can. God is on his side.

IV

Honor to the Lord on High and thanks be to His grace! No longer can the power and might of Evil bring us doom! Lord Jesus, this is all true! You are! He is! Everything that my Grandpa, Andrzej Pech, taught in Sunday School, religion, and confirmation class — it’s true! God listens to prayers! His prayers were heard. After a year of imploring, his beloved was finally widowed. God has given a sign. No, God hasn’t given a sign. God has given significantly more — God has killed her husband, God has left her with a small child, God has pushed her into his arms.

His arms were ready for the labor of life. They helped her get down from the britzka, then they skillfully unharnessed Fuks, guided him to the stable, and poured out some oats. He returned to the courtyard paved with river stones, but she was no longer there. A yellow light fell from the great window. He glanced up. The edge of the roof under which he was to spend the rest of his life was sharply silhouetted, the heavens were white with stars. He walked all around the house. In her room, which faced the garden, it was already dark. She hadn’t turned on any of the lights, she had felt a surge of exhaustion so terrible, as if she were about to lose consciousness. She undressed in the dark, blindly threw her skirt, blouse, and corsette on Gustaw’s bed. She fell asleep with a light heart. Only just before falling asleep did she recall the hand offered to her as she got down from the cart, and then the skillful unharnessing of Fuks. “Why does that postal clerk feel so much at home?” she thought and, fortunately, tumbled into the deep well of sleep. Fortunately, because if she had begun to search for divine signs in this question, she could have gone mad. There is no reason to exaggerate about the divine signs. They are everywhere. In any case, they were there in the question she asked before she fell asleep: “Why does that postal clerk feel so much at home?” He had helped her down from the cart, and a year later she married him.

V

The photo from the second wedding party hangs lower, it is much clearer, and I look at it much more often. There are significantly fewer guests, not even twenty. Grandma Pech is again wearing Silesian dress, Mila again sits on her left with uncanny Pospiszil. They look exactly the same as in the first photo. The strangest of all is the fact that the elder Brannys also look exactly the same. At the wedding party of their son, they look exactly like they do at the wedding party of their widowed daughter-in-law. No change in facial expressions. Between the first and the second photograph, they had lost their first-born son. Now a woman, a stranger to them, who had been his wife, is marrying a postal official, to whom she would bear children under their roof, but you can’t see any of this in their faces. Perhaps because they are just as gloomy at the first wedding party as at the second.

Heavenly musicians play and angelic choirs sing for the groom. He listens to them, dressed in a tailcoat with silk facing. He has crossed his legs in a worldly manner, his shoulder touches Zuzanna’s shoulder, no further miracles are necessary. But in order to honor that miracle, he had Master Potulnik sew him a tailcoat. And he looks out of this world in it. There is no darkness in the background, nor are there evil signs. One dark window foretells how much misfortune is allotted to each.

The background is a white wall, behind which an ocean of objects reaches as high as my shoulders. Piles of prewar newspapers will be like lighthouses, decaying dresses and jackets like shifting sand dunes. Chowderhead the cat will go carefully along the treacherous bank, over which I will fish out from the depths occult novels and forbidden romances. In the middle, snatched up by a vortex, a golden trumpet — which came from who knows where the day after the festivities — circles in a pillar of sunlight. There I would find wooden heads from a puppet theater; there, one day, would come to the surface the skeleton of a leviathan completely plastered with fantastic account books; there I would come upon the menu from Roth’s tavern.

Diving in there took courage, but once you got down below, once you passed the shoal of Austrian coins, the keys to long-forgotten doors, spare parts for all the mechanisms in the world, once you had gone through the darknesses, and finally through the thickest layers strewn with mothballs, as low as possible — then you could see the white outlines of a sunken city: the ruins of marble counter tops, a gigantic scale, an amazing tree stump, an incredible ax, hooks bared and incomplete like the fangs of a mammoth. Even today, it is with the greatest difficulty that I realize that my Atlantis was a prewar butcher shop. Business was still booming during the war. No one ever spoke about it, but supposedly things were going well, even very well. The Germans had taken Roth and his entire family. There was less competition.

The last clients were soldiers of the Red Army. They rode down into Wisła through the Kubalonka Pass, just like the Wehrmacht, except that they came on horses. Grandpa Pech used to say that they had been fortunate enough to get an exceptionally honorable unit. They wanted to pay for everything, but they didn’t have any money. And you could see that they were hungry: at the very sight — at the very scent — of sausage they started shaking. No wonder — come war, come occupation, we always had sausage. One had a Turkmen kilim or a Kyrgyz carpet strapped to his saddle, or perhaps a Persian rug, in any case an amazing fabric in a pagan design. But it was out of the question, he wouldn’t give it up. He jabbers something feverishly, you could guess that he wants to get to Berlin with it, but probably not in order to hoist a colorful banner on the Brandenburg Gate, rather in order to return from Berlin with this treasure to Alma Ata, or God knows where. It was out of the question, he wouldn’t give it up, he wouldn’t give it up for any sausage. He wouldn’t give it up for anything. Not for anything in the world. Grandpa went off to his hiding place and returns with two quart bottles of moonshine. The moonshine has the same color as Mila’s prewar pepper vodka. The comparison means nothing to the stubborn Bolshevik, and he continues to shake his head no, although no longer with the same conviction. But his buddies, unusually honorable Soviet soldaty, were in favor of the transaction. They attacked him furiously. It was as if the horses had caught the smell, they began to snort. Finally, the kamandir himself issued a prikaz: let there be a strengthening in Polish-Soviet trade relations. And so there was. They each got a ring of sausage all the same. They ate, they drank, and off they went. And the marble countertops, tree stump, scales, hooks, and gigantic ax slowly began to sink to the bottom.

VI

The older Brannys, one after the other — it was still during the German occupation — died of distress, in other words, a natural death. “Mother supposedly heard that there was a knock, once, twice. I didn’t hear anything,” Grandpa Pech’s blood didn’t yet boil on account of the signs that were constantly coming to Mother, but he was already jealous of them. In accepting the fact that one amazing miracle had occurred in his life, and not expecting any further miracles, not even small ones, he had probably committed an error. He didn’t lose faith in God, but it is not so much faith as life itself — if it is not strengthened by signs — that weakens. “I don’t need any divine rumblings. Mother hears all the rumbling of this world and the next for me,” he repeated with with a sneer, although in the word “Mother” there was the least amount of sneering. Liberated from the majority of the local customs, he was liberated from the dreadfully suicidal constant “Mother-ing” only by his intonation, but in my Lutheran parts even that is quite a lot.

They had four children, one died. Depraved by her excessive caresses, the boy from the first marriage had barely finished school when he ran away from home and vanished like a stone in water. Mother must think about him from time to time. She doesn’t let on, but she thinks. How is he faring? What is he doing? Is he even alive? He must be, because if he had died, she would have heard a sign. A knocking. Usually at the window. The deceased mainly knock on the kitchen window. Old Lady Mary — three clear knocks on the pane. Uncle Paweł—the same thing. Old Man Trzmielowski — six strokes, precisely half a year before he died. Master Sztwiertnia — a clatter in the hallway. Adam Czyż—a clatter in the attic. One-eyed Mr. Nikandy — again on the pane. Pastor Morowy — a lightning bolt over the cemetery. Bandmaster Jan Potulnik — a knock on the wall. Sister Ewelina — on the ceiling. Ferdynand Pustówka — on the table. Uncle Ableger — for a very long time on the window pane. Emma Lunatyczka — lightly on the window sill. Wolfgang Kleist — a racket in the pantry.

Little by little there wouldn’t be a single square inch in the house where some deceased person hadn’t rapped. Thank God the Communists are in power, and there is peace and no turmoil, because if it were a time of war, pestilence, or earthquake, then all the dead people that Mother knew would have torn the house down with their knocking alone. Even the baby, who died a couple days old, managed to stop the clock after its death. Her other three children throve. One son became a lawyer, the other a fitter, the girl a doctor. But they made tragic marriages. One to a spineless sataness, the other to a woman with no mind, the son-in-law in Krakow joined the Party.

They all always gathered for the holidays, but the true time of joy, of rejoicing, would arise when they departed. Finally you could hear the ticking of the clocks. All five. One in the ice house, one in the back room, one in the entrance, one in the kitchen, and also the cuckoo clock in the hallway. An ambition, unclear at first, that all of them strike simultaneously gradually turned into a maniacal obsession. He would grab the round stool standing next to the sewing machine, holding it like a four-legged pike set upright, carry it before him, place it forcefully under one clock after the other, climb up to the high mechanisms — not without quiet curses — and work for hours on their coordination. It often seemed that Grandpa Pech, standing on the stool, had become paralyzed, his arms stretched out to each subsequent clock face, and that he would remain in that pose for the ages. And, in fact, he did spend whole ages minding the clock hands and listening to the ticking, and he would freeze in the hope that all the bells would ring out in unison at last, and he never managed it.

Sometimes, on a dark winter night, he would wake up and, numb with hope and fear, he would await the coming hour. When he heard five or six tolls it was all the worse, because it was time to get up right away. But when the eternally unsynchronized clocks rang two o’clock, or best of all midnight, he didn’t fault them for their irregularity. Sometimes even a shiver of delight would come over him: so much more time for sleeping until morning.

The five regularly wound clocks were like the breathing of the house. The dreadful offspring with their dreadful spouses and their even more dreadful progeny would depart after the holidays. The house became deserted and deadened, but it recovered its circulation, the mechanical hearts began to beat, the ticking crickets hidden in the corners regained their vigor, and that was good.

Icy, black January arrived, after that an even icier and blacker February. He would get up with Mother in the darkness, light the fire under the kitchen stove, put on his postal clerk’s jacket, tie the cornflower blue tie of the Postal Chief, eat breakfast, and walk slowly through the gray center of town to the office. He would return for lunch, Mother would serve a thick and almost brown chicken broth with noodles, he would eat, then lie down for a bit, close his eyes, listen to the absolutely undisturbed five-fold ticking. Today I think that he also kept watch over the clocks so that their brittle, earthly ticking might stand up to the unearthly rattlings.

March was brighter. Whenever they had to go anywhere a bit further away, Fuks would now be harnessed to the cart, not the sleigh. In April, they stopped heating the rooms, even the coldest air was lined with the scent of the grasses’ stormy onset, larks began to appear over Partecznik. By the beginning of May, summer uniforms were the rule at the post office, the winter ones landed in storage. The underwater city was covered with successive layers of postal uniforms. In June, heat waves smelling of hay burst forth, the first female vacationers were sunbathing on the river bank. In July, carters brought coal for the winter, and wood was cut; then came the rains and the floods. In August, the air in the kitchen became as thick as quince syrup; Mila would come and help Mother with the compotes, pickles, and plum jams. In September, there were occasional blades of grass whitened by the first light frosts. In October, the smoke that backed up from the cold stoves filled the house like tear gas.

His birthday was on the twenty-seventh of November. The postal workers would take up their seats at the table. Mother served everything she had — chicken broth, cutlets, potato pancakes. A gallon jar of marinated mushrooms went from hand to hand and seemed to diminish like a rapidly melting, huge, red-brown candle. For his fiftieth they gave him a tableau beautifully executed by an artist from Ustroń. Gold letters proclaimed the glory of Mr. Chief, inserted among which, wrapped in gleaming ribbons, were the photos of all the female clerks and the postmen, then he himself in the middle, suitably enlarged. All of it in a cherry wood frame, which on the next day came to hang next to the likeness of the Guardian Angel in the back room.

How many Novembers have passed since that time? Ten? More than ten, because at his sixtieth he still saw very well, glaucoma wasn’t yet blinding him, and Mother was also still in good form. Her legs hurt, and a sore under her knee just wouldn’t heal, but she was still in good form. They didn’t put on birthday parties any more, because they didn’t have the energy for such things, and their pension wasn’t enough for it, but they were still in good form. So more than ten Novembers have passed. Fourteen, maybe fifteen.

When December came, Mother would always turn the house upside down in preparation for the holidays, but this time she turned it upside down and back again, a hundred times over. She must have done it to spite him — after all, they were supposed to go to their daughter’s for Christmas Eve. “Woman, verily I say unto thee: cease thy labor”—whenever he got boiling mad, the language of the Bible would take possession of him. The greater his fury, the more solemn the rhetoric. In the depth of his heart, Christmas Eve at their daughter’s suited him even less than it suited Mother, but of what significance is the depth of one’s heart? In the depth of his heart, even the son-in-law who had joined the Party was pious.

In the new house, which he had built at the foot of Jarzębata Mountain, there was enough room to put up eight Christmas Eve tables and eight Christmas trees. You could have Christmas Eve in the dining room, Christmas Eve in the hearth room, Christmas Eve in the salon downstairs, you could have Christmas Eve everywhere. And there was half — and maybe even an eighth — of the work with the cooking and the baking, because there were also eight burners and ovens in the kitchen, and maybe eighty-eight. And you don’t have to wash the dishes, because there is a machine that washes them for you. They have amazing things there: all the furniture in the world, even a rocking chair.

“You two take a rest, have real holidays for once in your lives, I’ll take care of everything,” their daughter practically choked with joy at the prospect of the first Christmas Eve in the new house. Everything she said was indisputable, and yet you had the impression that she was talking nonsense — the nature of the world is unfathomable. Please yourself. Peace be to this house. You can have a chair that rocks, a machine that washes dishes, verily I say unto you: you can even have, brothers and sisters, a toilet that will wipe your rear for you. But they agreed, because how could they not agree. Before long, they would be sitting at the Christmas Eve table by themselves.

So Mother got down to resting. She began to rest with a vengeance. Every year it was a horror from morning to night: cleaning, sweeping, putting things in order, but now it seemed that she would jump out of her skin. She scrubbed the runners and the rugs on both sides. She totally emptied all the wardrobes, and she laundered every blouse, skirt, shirt. The same thing with the sideboard: she washed and polished sets of silver that hadn’t been used since the war, she lined shelves with parchment paper, she brought every knife, every fork, every spoon to a jeweler’s sheen. She wiped the hobs on the kitchen stove with an emery cloth. She went through the attic. She almost tackled the store, which is practically impossible to enter by now. She almost set out upon the impassable ocean of objects. Luckily, she gave up. But now she scrubbed every lamp — not just every lamp — she unscrewed and scrubbed every bulb from every lamp. She washed the walls, which were covered with oil paint. She dug out from under the benches old ugly shoes that no one would ever again put on a foot, and she gave them a good shine. It isn’t worth talking about waxing the floors, washing the windows, laundering the drapes and the curtains, that was a constant — now, it goes without saying, the variants increased infinitely. His blood boiled, he did his best to restrain her, but she didn’t respond. After one of the times, when, on the verge of apoplexy, he roared for the hundredth time—“Woman, verily I say unto thee: cease thy labor!”—she raised her head and said with a colorless, tired voice: “A person has lost everything in life, and now even the holidays are gone.”

What was he supposed to do? He helped as much as he could, although by evening he was barely alive and could hardly see anything. And when, two days before Christmas Eve, he finally went in the late evening into the back room and began to prepare himself for bed, and he glanced at the wall, and he saw what he saw — he thought at first that this was finally the last straw and that his eyes had entirely given out from the stress. True, he hadn’t gone completely blind, he wasn’t plunged into eternal darkness, but from that time forth, he would see only apparitions. From today, only terrible visions would present themselves to him. The first of them was this: that, on the wall over the bed, in the place where, ever since his fiftieth birthday, the golden-silver tableau had been hanging, there now hangs the portrait of Gustaw Branny.

He remembered that portrait from before the war. For a while yet, after their wedding, that likeness of Mother’s first fellow had been hanging in the icehouse. Whether it was there until the deaths of the old Brannys, he wasn’t sure. But after their deaths, for certain after the war, it had been taken down and carried off to the store, and it had vanished for the ages in the avalanche of junk. Perhaps it had even gone up in flames one winter in the stove? But it is unlikely that Mother cast it into the fire, and he would most likely have remembered such a distinctive action as burning the portrait of his predecessor. And he thought that he was not now seeing the portrait of the Gustaw who was killed on the motorbike, but rather his prewar specter; that everything had gotten mixed up in his head and that, instead of the genuine one, the prewar wall was presenting itself to his half-blind eyes, and the wall from another room to boot. I won’t believe it until I touch it. So he touched it. And still he didn’t believe.

The dawn of the next day came nonetheless, and in the snowy bright it was impossible — either through tricks of sight or through losses in the field of vision — to avoid the painful truth: that Mother, in the fervor of her cleaning, had introduced a new order. No illusions. She had taken the little homemade birthday greeting down from the wall and hung Gustaw’s portrait in its place. He had never been jealous of him. Never did he harbor in his heart even a hint of despicable male sorrow that he hadn’t been the first. Perhaps even on the contrary. Perhaps he was so happy that the other one had gotten himself killed that he had understanding for him even in this? All the joy the guy experienced in his short life was during that year after his wedding. And what could his joy have been, when Death was circling around him the entire time? Perhaps he even knew that a sudden end had been allotted him? Perhaps he had heard or seen signs? What is there to envy in this? God protect us against everything that Gustaw Branny had in life.

Nor was he jealous of anyone later on. It was more likely Mother — a far sight more likely that it was Mother — who could have been jealous of various female postal clerks. And she was jealous. And she had reasons for it. And what reasons they were! Jesus Christ! I was nine years old, Grandpa Pech often took me along to the post office, and at least three girls in tight-fitting navy blue smocks awakened mad desires in me. I stared at them greedily, and I was absolutely certain that at least two of them were reciprocating my gazes. I was ready for everything, and they were ready for everything. In any case, at least one of them was most certainly ready.

Someone will try to explain to me now, with psychoanalytic erudition, that, in the postal pinafores that highlighted their shapes, they looked like thoroughly mature versions of my female classmates, and that is why they turned me on so much. That’s right. That was precisely their appearance — thoroughly mature fourth-graders. And what of it? This doesn’t change the tension they aroused in me, and I in them. And the tension Grandpa aroused in them? Mr. Chief? Who had passed his matura before the war? A romantic lover, the strength of whose feelings was so great that it blew his rival off a speeding motorcycle as if he were a feather? A man whose fervent prayers were answered for the return to him of a woman betrothed to another? The hero, for that reason, of local ballads and incredible love stories? A lieutenant from the September campaign? A well-built man in the prime of life? A believer, and yet intelligent? A drinker, and yet refined? Born here, but speaking like a Varsovian? A connoisseur of the Bible, and of chess? That’s right: my Grandpa Andrzej Pech was a man of panache and eroticism. In my parts, to this day, these are exotic attributes. My parts are not the land of panache and eroticism. My parts are the land of divine signs, suppressed passions, and photographs of young boys in Wehrmacht uniforms hidden away in secret drawers.

No two ways about it. Grandma Pech, even if nothing ever happened, had countless reasons to be jealous. He didn’t have any. But now, when the portrait of Gustaw had appeared over his bed, he realized that for several decades in his wife’s life there had existed a stream about which he hadn’t had a clue and about which he hadn’t guessed in the least. A story long ago finished — it turns out — wasn’t finished at all.

The thought never crossed his mind that Mother, who was in cahoots with dead people, had some sort of particular contact with her deceased husband. He hadn’t connected the one with the other. In his jealousy over otherworldly signals, there wasn’t a hint of jealousy over Gustaw. But now there appeared not the hint, but the jealousy itself, painful to boot, the sort of jealousy that is aroused not by trysts, but by letters written in a hidden and secret cipher. Were they engaged in some sort of spiritualistic correspondence? In some sort of occult communication? Was he speaking from the other world? Was he making some sort of signs? Maybe all that constant knocking of various dead people, or of those preparing for death, was a smoke screen covering uninterrupted signals and signs? Had the deceased Gustaw Branny been pounding on the kitchen window since before the war? Was he assuring her of a love that had outlasted death? Was he whispering to her, telling her what to do? Now, in the course of the holiday cleaning, had he tapped out the request to return his portrait to its place over the bed? Lord God, forgive the short temper, but this version of life beyond the grave, this version of repenting souls, or even this version of the resurrection of the body—this is out of the question. Entirely out of the question. In any case, he certainly didn’t hear anything. He didn’t hear anything, but he certainly sees the portrait over the bed. Until yesterday his birthday tableau had been hanging there, and now it was the portrait of the other one. Now it was over the other one that the Guardian Angel was keeping watch. At least Mother didn’t clear the bed away. Verily, woman, I render you grateful obeisance that you didn’t take my marriage bed from me! A marriage bed, moreover, that is not my marriage bed, but the bed of your first betrothed, from almost half a century ago! Jesus Christ! You have to stop thinking. Life has already passed, and there is no point in recreating it anew in one’s thoughts. Especially if it was different than you thought. You have to stop thinking. You have to go to your daughter’s for Christmas Eve.

VII

Across the bridge, around the sports center, then right and a little bit more toward Partecznik, and there you are. The whole time, a level, straight road, only later, just before the house, does it get steep, but also not for more than twenty yards. On Christmas Eve itself, it snowed the entire afternoon, but the ploughs were out driving like God knows what. It was probably because some Party mandarin in the little castle on Kubalonka was putting on a Christmas Eve fête, and the whole vicinity was on alert. They dressed up as was fitting, they strapped to the sled the net with the presents and the great pot of cabbage that Mother cooks every year for Christmas, and giddy-up! Giddy-up to Jarzębata Mountain! They went, and all the time it seemed to them that this wasn’t Christmas Eve, because, after all, on Christmas Eve you don’t budge from the house. Even in thirty-nine, in order to get home in time for Christmas Eve, Grandpa Pech had made a run for it from a German transport. And he got there on time. But now they are leaving home, and, wrapped in thick blankets up to their ears, like a couple of vagrants, they drag the sled with the bundles behind them.

They don’t know the word unreality; on the contrary, everything they pass on the way — that was their world. The park, the Monument to the Silesian Woman, the bridge, the mill buried up to its roof, the completely frozen Mill Stream, the Stawarczyks’ house and the Mitręgas’ cottage, the prewar villa of Professor Gawlas, the footbridge over the stream, the turn toward Partecznik. The lights at the house of Janek from Wymowa were on, probably he is already sitting down to supper with Hela. Then another bit, as if through a gigantic corridor of snow; finally, the white wall of the forest and the dark silhouettes — ours are already waiting for us.

But no one runs out to meet them, they stand as if frozen, from close up they all also look strange and uncomfortable. What, in the name of God the Father, has happened on this Christmas Eve? Nothing has happened. Nothing big has happened. It was just that the snowplow hadn’t removed the snow right up to the house, because it is too steep, and now it wasn’t clear how Mama would make it up there. Grandpa would somehow manage, but Grandma — with those legs of hers? She can manage on level ground, even uphill, but not in snow like that. Somehow we’ll manage. But how? Maybe we should take the bundles off the sled and come up with some way to slide her up there on the sled? Out of the question. She would sink and be suffocated, on Christmas Eve to boot. So how? No idea. We’ve got to come up with something, because everyone will freeze to death here; they were forecasting minus twenty-five degrees for that night. My Christmas Eve story is silence full of helpless shame. Grandma Pech’s story about Gustaw’s death was a single-sentence. In my Christmas Eve story there is no room for even one sentence.

Suddenly an absolute idea flashes in my head, suddenly I feel like the writer who, finally, after a long silence, has composed a phrase that is not only beautiful, but also thoroughly true, and who knows that after that phrase others would follow, equally beautiful and true. Suddenly, he feels the pride of the group leader, the ship captain, the troop chief, perhaps even the pride of the family father, who, with one gesture and one thought, finds the way out of a stalemate. And so I say, with hasty enthusiasm, that it would be best and safest for Grandma to force a safe passage through the snow on the wicker rocking chair, which is standing by the fireplace. We’ll seat her comfortably and, as if on a throne with runners, as if on a royal sleigh, we’ll haul her right up to the threshold. And I’m already half turned, at a half run, already as if on angel’s wings, I fly to get the rocking chair, which will immediately become a novelistic vehicle, and I hear how Father and Mother suddenly begin spasmodically to shout each other down: Out of the question! The chair will be destroyed! Absolutely out of the question! The new piece of furniture will be destroyed! Out of the question. And I freeze, and everyone freezes, as if the whole frost forecast for that night, and even a frost two hundred degrees colder, had come falling down from the heavens at precisely that moment.

My aunt, the pious bigot, explains that perhaps there wouldn’t be great damage, and perhaps none at all — after all, the snow was fresh, and as clean as a whistle to boot. But what are you talking about! You have to have air for brains to say such reckless things! Who wastes things that were acquired with the sweat of one’s brow? Who? What is more, everything, every little thing was wangled through connections! Where are you going to find a chair like that now? Where? Nowhere! And everyone understands, and Grandma Pech understands, and Grandpa Pech understands, and he says: Peace be to this house! And with a firm motion he takes Grandma by the arm, and off they go.

They move decisively, and they walk quickly. The way now seems shorter, the sky full of stars, the snow crunches under their feet. It is as if Grandpa even sees a bit better, and her leg — miracle of miracles! — hurts less. She has a bit of a guilty conscience that she has made such a muddle, but she feels his hand, he feels her arm, and he knows that this is the arm of the woman of his life. The closer they get to home, the more sprightly their expressions, the more their moods improve. It is good to return home for Christmas Eve.

Right off, Grandma will warm up the rest of the cabbage, which she had left in the pantry for New Year’s. They will sit down to the table, say a prayer, share the Host with each other, and sing: “The time of joy and cheer to this world has arisen! For a Savior, a Redeemer, to sinful man is given!” And then Grandpa, in a surge of euphoric spirits, which he hadn’t felt for years, will grab the round stool and head off toward the clocks. He hadn’t wound them for God knows how long. Already the year before — even after lugging a painter’s ladder into the house and climbing up on it as high as he could — instead of clock faces he saw blurry white spots. Now, on Christmas Eve, he didn’t regain his sight, but, so it seems, he counts on a more spectacular miracle.

He winds one after the other, he turns the key with youthful verve, he moves the hands by intuition, which is to say — blindly. The last clock in the last room hangs directly across from the portrait of Gustaw Branny. Granted, in his all-embracing euphoria, Grandpa does not come to the sudden conclusion that the old photograph fits in here quite nicely, that perhaps it is an even better decoration than the faded tableau from ages ago; the entire burden did not disappear from his heart, but he shrugs it off as a mere trifle: one has other truly important matters to deal with! He winds the last clock and, weary from his high-wire stunts, he returns to the kitchen and waits for the new hour. And the minutes drag on, as in sleepless nights, and finally it is nine, and at first, for a long time, for a very long time, nothing happens, and nothing but an even more dramatic ticking is to be heard. Then — as if someone were taking an endlessly deep breath, as if someone in the depths of the house were pushing on a door handle, as if a dropped ten-złoty coin were rolling endlessly long across the floor — the slowly gathering racket of the springs, finally one clock, with the greatest difficulty, tolls three times, another not at all, the third rasps and wheezes, like a patient attempting in vain to come around from general anesthesia, the fourth begins to toll feverishly and ceaselessly, as if it were announcing fire or war, the fifth is carried away with the volcanic cough of the dying consumptive. Grandma hides her head in her arms, she has a terrible desire to laugh, but she doesn’t want to hurt Grandpa with her laughter; she leans over the table and doesn’t see that he, too, more and more heartily, and more and more proudly, smiles to himself.

VIII

She died nine years after his death, and she behaved dreadfully at the time. Not as dreadfully as Pospiszil, but, nonetheless, as if she didn’t believe in God at all. She didn’t want the pastor. In the end, it was only after long persuasion and urging that, not even so much with reluctance as with hostility, she received communion. Then for three days she howled and shouted; we weren’t certain whether it was in delirium. I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, she repeated with a voice so hoarse it seemed absolutely not hers. From her leg flowed puss mixed with blood, as if from an open faucet. Before her very last breath, she livened up so much that it seemed that her strength had really returned, as if she had recovered and arisen from the dead. Then she collapsed somehow strangely into the depths of the damp sheets. It was clear that this was the end. The end, but not quite. Suddenly, with yet another strangely energetic motion, she reached her hand out in our direction, and with a bent finger she indicated that someone should follow her. She wanted to take someone with her. There’s no point in trying to hide it: everyone had real shivers going up and down their spines. Father died a year later. Death never ends. As we were burying him, a black tropical storm passed over one half of the cemetery. Ten yards away there was still sun, but over his grave it poured so much that it seemed that any moment his coffin would float to the top.

The rocking chair is still like new. No one has sat in it for thirty years. Once it suddenly rocked in the void. As if a powerful draft had passed through the closed doors and windows. As if someone nearby had spread their wings darkened by the damp.