Late that evening he was awakened by a pounding on the door. It was Joseph with a telegram from Aunt Skoczynska: Stefan’s father was seriously ill and he should come home immediately.
He asked Staszek to take over for him on the ward and had no trouble getting several days’ leave from Pajaczkowski.
“It’ll be all right,” the old man croaked as he stroked Stefan’s hand warmly. “And as long as you’re going anyway, try to find out what the Germans are up to.”
“Excuse me?”
“Take a look around, see what people are saying. There’s been a lot of bad news lately.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing, really.”
When he went to say good-bye to Sekulowski, Stefan found the poet composing, his hair standing on end as if electrified. His eyes jerked every so often in a strange inward gaze. His sonorous, metallic voice carried into the corridor, and Stefan stood in the door listening:
My heart is a planet of red termites
Fleeing in horror down a narrow path
My body—a plaything of sluts and Stylites—
Is murdering me. My expiring breath
O Night, tears away the veil at last
As that dusky girl with bloody thighs, Death,
Touches my face, a desolate nest…
Stefan went in and the poet stopped. A moment later, Stefan was telling him about the sculptor.
“Strangling Angel?” said Sekulowski. “That’s interesting, very interesting.” He filled a page with his careful, impassioned script. “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he read.
Then he looked at Stefan with twinkling eyes. “Because you’ve helped me a little, I want to show you something.”
He shuffled through the sheets of paper covering his bedspread. “I’ve been dreaming of writing the history of the world from the point of view of another planetary system. This is a sort of introduction.” He began reading from a piece of paper. “It is a festering uterus of suns: the universe. It teems with trillions of stellar eggs. Furious procreation bursting forth in grit and black dust, moving beat by beat, darkness by darkness.” He was improvising— there were only a few sentences on the paper.
“Where is this other system?” Stefan could not resist asking.
“Nowhere. That’s the whole joke.”
“And you believe that?”
Sekulowski held his breath. When his bright eyes looked up, he seemed inspired and beautiful.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I know it.”
Stefan’s journey was a nightmare. The filthy dark railroad car smelling of sour sweat was searched three times for lard or butter. There were police, and wild crowds attacked the doors and windows. He could not maintain his personal dignity in the incredible crush, since he was invisible in the darkness and silence was taken as a sign of surrender. Within an hour he was cursing like a sailor.
The city had changed. The streets had German names now, and jackbooted patrols tramped along the cobblestones. Airplanes with black crosses on the wings appeared above the houses from time to time: the sky was German.
The usual smell of boiled cabbage greeted him as he entered the building, and on the second floor the sweet-rotten smell from the furrier’s workshop triggered a complex of memories.
He found it hard to control his emotions when he saw the scratched brown door with the lion’s head carved in the transom.
The entrance was full of tinware, shelves, and odds and ends, and the cobwebbed frame of his father’s unfinished projects rose to the ceiling like macabre animal prototypes. His mother, as Aunt Skoczynska immediately told him in a dramatic whisper, had moved to the village a month before, since there wasn’t enough money to keep the household going. His aunt embraced him in the open doorway and he fell into the naphthalene abundance of her bosom. She kissed him, cried a little, and pushed him into the dining room for bread with jam and tea.
As she brought out the labeled jars of homemade preserves, she talked about the high cost of fat and about a local lawyer. It was a long time before she finally mentioned his father. But then she launched with satisfaction into a detailed account of the events of the past few months. She painted a picture of a misunderstood, unlucky man of greatness, tormented by kidney and heart disease. She alone had supported the great inventor, distant relative though she was. “Your father,” she kept repeating, until Stefan began to suspect her of malice, as though she was accusing Stefan of coldness. But no—apparently she was simply expressing heartfelt sympathy. Years ago she had been beautiful. Stefan had even fallen in love with an old photograph of her that he had stolen from her room. But now accretions of flesh drowned what remained of her looks.
After eating and washing, Stefan was at last admitted to the bedroom.
His aunt played the envoy, scurrying back and forth on tiptoe, her hands rowing at her sides as though she was fighting the air resistance. The atmosphere was charged: the Return of the Prodigal Son, thought Stefan as he entered quietly, at which point the Rembrandtian contours in his mind dissolved.
The first thing that struck him was that his mother’s collection of cactus, asparagus, and other plants had been mercilessly crammed into the darkest comer of the room. His father lay in bed with a blanket drawn up to his chin. His lemon-colored hands with their gnarled fingers looked like ugly dead ornaments on the blanket border.
“How are you, Father?” he croaked.
His father said nothing, and Stefan yearned for a pleasant, rapid conclusion to the visit. It flashed through his mind that it would be convenient if his father died right at that moment. Then Stefan would be able to kneel at that pathetic spot at the bedside, say a prayer, and leave. That would make everything so much easier.
But his father did not die. On the contrary, he lifted his head and said in a whisper that turned into a groan, “Stefek, Stefek, Stefek,” in disbelief and then in joy.
“Father, I heard you weren’t feeling well, and I was so upset,” he lied.
“Oh,” said his father dismissively. He tried to sit up. He needed help and Stefan found the task terribly awkward. He could feel the bones under his touch, the gaps between his father’s ribs just beneath the skin, and the feeble remnants of warmth for which the emaciated, helpless body fought.
“Does it hurt?” he asked with sudden concern.
“Sit on the bed. Sit,” his father repeated with some impatience.
Stefan perched obediently on the edge of the bedframe; it was uncomfortable, but also very touching. What could he talk about?
He could remember only one expression on his father’s face; a vacant gaze into that other world where his inventions took shape. His hands had always been scratched by wire, burned by acid, or dyed some exotic color. Now all that was gone. The last of life trembled gently in the thick dark veins under his freckled skin.
It was painful for Stefan to see.
“I’m so tired,” his father said. “It would be better to just go to sleep and not wake up.”
“Father, how can you say that?” Stefan blurted, but at the same time he thought: What else is there for a body like this, for a skull that seems to rattle like the meat in a dried-up walnut? His joints are squeaky hinges, his lungs asthmatic moss, his heart a jammed, leaky pump. The body was a decrepit tenement whose inhabitants feared it would collapse on their heads. Stefan recalled Sekulowski’s poem: it was our bodies that murdered us, obeying the only law they knew—not our will, but nature.
“Father, would you like to eat something?” he asked uncertainly, disturbed by the lightness of the hand now stroking his own. It sounded so stupid, he felt ashamed.
“I don’t eat. I don’t need anything now. I wanted to tell you so many things, but now… I lie awake all night. I can’t even sleep anymore,” he complained.
“Well, I’ll give you a prescription,” said Stefan, reaching into his pocket for his pad. “Who’s treating you, Marcinkiewicz?”
“Forget it. Don’t bother. Yes, Marcinkiewicz. It doesn’t matter now.” He burrowed deeper into his pillow. “Stefan, this time comes for everyone. When it really hurts, you wish a vein would burst in the brain at night. It
