We need courage and stubbornness, because we must stick to our purpose even if it does look like lascivious swinishness. The swinishness will cease to be swinishness if we stick to it! We must press on, because, if we let up, the swinishness will drown us. Don’t be thrown off balance—don’t let on! There is no retreat.
My greetings. Best regards. Burn this.
“Burn this” he commanded. But it had already been written. “THE POINT IS HENIA WITH KAROL …” Whom was this addressed to? To me? Or to Her, to nature?
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
Vaclav entered.
“May I talk to you?”
I gave him my chair, which he took. I sat on the bed.
“I’m very sorry, I know you’re tired. But I realized I won’t be able to sleep a wink until I talk to you. In a different way than I have so far. More frankly. I hope you don’t hold it against me. You probably know what it’s about. About … about this thing on the island.”
“There isn’t much I can …”
“I know. I know. Forgive me for interrupting you. I know that you don’t know anything. But I’d like to know what you’re thinking. I’m having a hard time coping with my thoughts. What do you think about that? What do you—think?”
“Me? What can I think about it? I merely showed it to you, considering it my du …”
“Of course. I’m much obliged. I really don’t know how to thank you. But I’d like to know your point of view. Perhaps I should state my view first. I think it’s nothing. Nothing important—it’s because they’ve known each other since childhood and … It’s more silliness than … And at their age too! No doubt in years past there was … something between them … perhaps something half-childish, you know, teasing and intimacies, and it had acquired some more specific form—quirky, yes? And now they sometimes return to it. A beginning, a budding sensuality. One must also allow for an optical illusion because we were looking from a distance, from behind the bushes. I mustn’t doubt Henia’s feelings. I have no right to. I have no basis for it. I know she loves me. How could I ever compare our love to such … childishness. So nonsensical!”
Body! He sat directly across from of me. Body! He was in his bathrobe—he was here with his corpulent, pampered, plump and whitish, groomed and robed body! He sat with his body as if it were a suitcase, or a toiletry case. Body! I was furious at the body and, for that reason, carnal myself, I watched him mockingly, I was mocking for all I was worth, almost whistling. Not one iota of compassion. Body!
“You can believe me, or not believe me, but this really would not have upset me. … Except that … one thing is torturing me. I don’t know, perhaps it’s an illusion. … That’s why I wanted to ask you. I beg your pardon in advance if it’s a bit … far-fetched. I must admit that I don’t know how to put it. What they were doing … you know, they fell so abruptly, then they rose … you must agree it was … somewhat peculiar. One doesn’t do it like that!”
He fell silent and swallowed his saliva, and he was embarrassed that he was swallowing.
“Is that your impression?”
“It didn’t happen normally. If they were kissing, you know—just simply … If he, let’s say, knocked her off her feet—just simply. Even if he had simply taken her right before my eyes. All that would have … disconcerted me less … than this strangeness … the strangeness of their movements. …”
He took my hand. He looked into my eyes. I cringed with disgust. I hated him.
“Please tell me frankly, am I right? But perhaps I didn’t see it as I should have? Perhaps it’s my own quirkiness? I don’t know myself. Please tell me!”
Body!
Scrupulously hiding my frivolous yet merciless maliciousness, I said—actually nothing much—nothing that would add oil to the fire: “I don’t know. … Actually … Perhaps to some degree …”
“But I don’t know what importance I should attach to it?! Is it something—significant? And to what extent? First of all tell me: do you think that she and he? …”
“What?”
“I’m sorry! I’m thinking of sex appeal. What we call sex appeal When I saw them together for the first time … this was a year ago … it caught my eye right away. Sex appeal Attraction. Sexual attraction. He and she. But at that time I wasn’t serious about Henia. Later, when she aroused my feelings, that other thing moved to the background, compared with my feelings the other thing lost its meaning, I stopped paying attention to it. It was childish after all! But now …”
He took a deep breath.
“Now I’m afraid that it may be—worse than anything I could have imagined.”
He rose.
“They fell to the ground … not as they normally would have. And they rose right away—also not quite normally. And also they left not quite normally. … What is it? What does it mean? One doesn’t do it like that!”
He sat down.
“What? What? What’s the point of it?”
He looked at me.
“Oh, how it twists my imagination! You tell me! Just tell me something! Don’t leave me alone with this!” He smiled wanly. “Forgive me.”
So this one was also seeking my company, preferring “not to be in this alone”—I was popular indeed! However, unlike Fryderyk, he was begging me not to have his madness confirmed and, with a trembling heart, he awaited my denial that would push everything into the realm of the chimerical. It was up to me—whether to calm him down. … Body! If only he talked to me solely as a soul! But the body! And this levity of mine! I didn’t need to exert myself in order to settle him once and for all in hell, it was enough, as I had done before, to mumble a few indistinct words: “I must admit … Perhaps … It’s hard to say … It’s possible that …,” I said. He replied:
“She loves me, and I know beyond a doubt that she loves me, she loves me!”
He was defending himself, in spite of everything.
“She loves you? I don’t doubt it. But don’t you think that between them love is superfluous. With you she needs love, with him she doesn’t.”
Body!
He said nothing for a long while. He sat quietly. I too sat and said nothing. Silence enveloped us. What about Fryderyk? Was he asleep? And Siemian? And Józek in the pantry? How about him? Is he asleep? The house seemed to be harnessed to many horses, each one pulling in a different direction.
He smiled, embarrassed.
“This is really unpleasant,” he said. “I just lost my mother. And now …”
He thought for a while.
“I really don’t know how to apologize for this nocturnal intrusion. I was—beside myself. I want to tell you one more thing, if you’ll permit me. I’m anxious that it be said. What I will tell you will be … Well. Listen. I’m often surprised that she … feels something for me. As far as my feelings are concerned—that’s a different matter. I feel what I feel for her because she’s created for love, she is for love, to be loved. Yet what is it that she loves in me? My feelings, my love for her? No, not just that, she also loves me for myself— but why? What does she love in me? You know what I’m like. I have no illusions, I don’t like myself much, and I really don’t know, I can’t understand what she sees in me, I admit it even offends me. If I have anything to reproach her for, it’s exactly that she … accepts me so graciously. Would you believe it, that in moments of the most passionate ecstasy I resent this very ecstasy, the fact that she succumbs to it with me? And I have never been able to feel at ease with her, it has always felt like a favor, a concession granted me, I even had to summon up cynicism in order to take advantage of this “convenience,” this kindhearted arrangement created by nature. Well and good. All in all—she loves me. That’s a fact. Undeserved or deserved, convenient or inconvenient, she loves me.”
“She loves you. Undoubtedly.”
“Wait! I know what you want to say: that theirs is outside love, in another realm. True! That’s why this affair that’s happening to me is …
immorally barbarous, exceptionally fanciful in its maliciousness—it’s hard to understand how by some devilish miracle this could have happened. If she were to be unfaithful to me with a grown man …
“My fiancée is running around with someone like this,” he suddenly said with a different tone of voice and looked at me. “What does this mean? And how am I to defend myself? What am I to do?
“She’s running around with someone outside …,” he elaborated, “and in a manner that’s strange … unique … unheard of … one that touches, permeates me, you know, because I taste its flavor, I grasp its … Would you believe that on the basis of this sample that we watched, I have mentally reconstructed everything that is possible between them, the totality of their relation. And this is so … erotically brilliant, that I don’t know how they happened upon it! It’s like something out of a dream! Which one of them thought it up? He or she? If it was her—then she’s quite an artist!”
After a moment.
“And you know what I think? That she didn’t give herself to him. And this is more awful than if they were sleeping together. Such a thought is sheer madness, isn’t it? Indeed! Because, if she had given herself to him I could defend myself, but this way … I can’t … and it’s possible that she, by not giving herself to him, is even more his. Because everything between them is happening differently, differently! It’s something different! It’s something different!”
Ha! There was one thing he didn’t know. Namely, that what he saw on the island was happening for Fryderyk and through Fryderyk—it was a kind of bastard child, created by them with Fryderyk. And what satisfaction—to keep him in ignorance, he, not having a clue that I, his confidant, am on the other side, with the elemental force that is destroying him. Even though this was not my elemental force (because it was too young). Even though I was his contemporary, not theirs—and by ruining him I was actually ruining myself. Yet—what wonderful levity!
“It’s because of the war,” he said. “It’s because of the war. But why do I have to carry on a war with those kids? One of them killed my mother, and the other … This is too much, a little bit too much. It’s going too far. Do you want to know how I’ll conduct myself?”
Since I didn’t answer, he repeated with emphasis.
“Do you want to know how I will act?”
“I’m listening. Tell me.”
“I won’t back down an inch.”
“Aha!”
“I won’t let her be seduced—nor be seduced myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know how to hang on to what’s mine and how to keep my eye on it. I love her. She loves me. This is the only important thing. The rest must give way, the rest must be of no significance, because that’s how I want it. I’m capable of wanting it. You know, I don’t actually believe in God. My mother was a believer. I’m not. But I want God to exist. I want it—and this is more important than if I were merely convinced of his existence. And in this case I’m also capable of wanting it and I will hold my ground, my morality. I’ll call Henia to order. So far I haven’t spoken to her, but early tomorrow I’ll have a word with her, I’ll call her to order.”
“What will you tell her?”
“I’ll behave decently, and I’ll force her into decency. I’ll act with respect—I’ll treat her with respect and I’ll force her to respect me. I’ll deal with her in such a way that she won’t be able to refuse her affection and fidelity to me. I believe that respect, reverence, you know—create obligation. And I’ll treat that brat to his due. Now, recently, he made me lose my composure—it won’t happen again.”
“You want to act … with importance?”
“You took the words out of my mouth! Importance! I’ll call them to—what’s important!”
“Yes, but ‘importance’ derives from ‘import.’ A man of importance deals with what is most important. What then is most important? For you one thing can be the most important, for them—another. Everyone chooses according to his judgment—and his measure.”
“What do you mean? I’m the important one, they’re not. How can they be important when these are childish things—rubbish—nonsense. Idiotic things!”
“But what if—for them—childishness is more important?”
“What? Whatever is important to me has to be more important to them. What do they know? I know better! I’ll force them! You can’t deny that I’m surely more important than they are, it’s my argument that must be the decisive one.”
“Wait a minute. I thought you considered yourself more important because of your principles … but now it appears that your principles are more important because you yourself are more important. Personally. As a person. As an elder.”
“Club it or cudgel it!” he exclaimed, “it’s all the same thing! I’m very sorry. These confidences at such a late hour. I thank you very much.”
He left. I felt like laughing. Well, what a lark! He swallowed the hook—he was thrashing about like a fish!
What a trick our little couple had played on him!
Was he suffering? Suffering? Well, yes, he was suffering, but it was a pudgy kind of suffering—weary—balding. …
The charm was on the other side. So I was “on the other side” too. Everything that came from there was—delightful and … skilled in enticement … endearing … Body.
That bull, who was pretending to defend morality, was in reality bearing down on them with all his weight. Bearing down on them with his very self. He was inflicting on them that morality of his for no other reason than that it was his “own”—it carried more weight, was older, more developed … the morality of a grown man. Inflicting it by force!
What a bull! I couldn’t stand him. The only thing … wasn’t I just like him? I—a grown man … I was thinking about that when I again heard a knocking on my door. I was sure it was Vaclav returning—but it was Siemian! I began coughing in his face—I did not expect this!
“Forgive me for troubling you, but I heard voices, so I knew you weren’t asleep. May I ask you for a glass of water?”
He drank slowly, in small sips, not looking at me. Without a tie, his shirt open, his features wrinkled—his hair, though pomaded, was sticking up and he fingered it from time to time. He drained the glass but was not leaving. He stood fingering his hair.
“What an arabesque!” he mumbled. “Unbelievable!…” He went on standing as if I weren’t there. Purposely I said nothing. He said under his breath, not to me:
“I need help.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You know that I’m having a total nervous breakdown?” he asked indifferently, as if this did not apply to him.
“I must admit … I don’t understand.”
“Yet you must be au courant,” he laughed. “You know who I am. And that I have broken down.”
He was brushing out his hair and waiting for my response. He could have waited indefinitely, since he was deep in thought, or rather he was concentrating on a thought while not thinking. I decided to find out what he wanted—I replied that indeed I was au courant. …
“You’re a nice man. … I just couldn’t stand it in my room any longer … in isolation. …” he pointed to his room with his finger. “How shall I put it? I decided to turn to someone. I decided to turn to you. Perhaps because you’re a nice man, or perhaps because you’re next door. … I can no longer be alone. I can’t and that’s that! May I sit down?”
He sat down, while his movements were as if he had been ill—cautious, as if he didn’t have full control over his limbs and had to plan each move ahead. … “I’d like to ask you for some information,” he said. “Is there something being schemed against me?”
“Why?” I asked.
He decided to laugh, then he said: “Forgive me, I’d like to be frank … but first I need to make it clear in what role I’m appearing before you, dear sir. I’ll have to give you some account of my life. Please be kind enough to listen. You probably know a lot ab
out me from hearsay. You’ve heard of me as a courageous, dangerous man, one might say. … Well, yes … But now, just recently, something came upon me … the evil eye, you know. A frailty. One week ago. I’m sitting by a lamp, you know, and suddenly a question comes to mind: why, thus far, hasn’t your foot slipped? And what if it slips tomorrow and you’re in trouble?”
“Surely you must have thought this many times.”
“Of course! Many times! But this time it wasn’t the end of it—because right away another thought came to mind, that I shouldn’t think this way because it may, should the occasion arise, soften me, leave me wide open, devil only knows, lay me bare to danger. I figured I had better not think that way. But, as soon as I thought that, I couldn’t chase the thought away, it just caught me, and now I’m constantly, constantly thinking that my foot will slip, and so it goes in circles. Listen! It caught me!”
“Nerves.”
“It’s not nerves. You know what it is? It’s a transformation. A transformation of courage into fear. It can’t be helped.”
He lit a cigarette. He inhaled, blew out the match.
“Imagine, only three weeks ago I had a goal ahead of me, a task, I had a battle ahead, some object or other. … Now I have nothing. Everything fell away from me, my pants are down, if you’ll excuse the expression. Now my only thought is that nothing should happen to me. And I’m right. Whoever fears for himself is always right! The worst of it is that I’m right, not until now have I been right! And what do you all want from me? This is my fifth day here. I ask for horses—they won’t give them to me. You’re holding me like a prisoner. What do you all want to do with me? I’m writhing in that little room upstairs. … What is it you want?”
“Calm down. It’s all nerves.”
“You want to finish me off?”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“I’m not so stupid. I’ve let people down. … Unfortunately I blabbed about my fear, now they know. As long as I wasn’t afraid of them they feared me. Now that I’m scared, I’ve become dangerous. I understand that. I can’t be trusted. But I’m turning to you, as a human being. I made the following decision: to get up, come to you, and speak directly. This is my last chance. I come to you directly because someone in my situation has no other choice. Please hear me, it’s a vicious circle. You’re all afraid of me because I’m afraid of you, I’m afraid of you because you’re afraid of me. I can’t extricate myself from this except with a jump, and that’s why, boom, I bang on your door at night, even though we don’t know each other. … You’re an intelligent man, a writer, so please understand me, offer me your hand, so that I can extricate myself from this.”