no chance to use it, because the relatives, as if on command, began speaking loudly and fast. Everyone knew that Ksawery was wont to do such things, and the sole remedy was to drown him out. Then one of the village women called Ksawery into the kitchen to look for the cold pork, and the meal was interrupted.
Stefan amused himself by looking at the collection of family faces. First prize unquestionably went to Uncle Anzelm. Well-built, stocky, massive rather than fat, Anzelm had a face that no one would call handsome, but it was perfectly lordly and he wore it beautifully. That face, along with the bearskin coat, seemed to be the sole remnant of the great manorial possessions he had lost twenty years earlier, supposedly consequent to the indulgence of a variety of passions, although Stefan did not know for sure. What he did know was that Anzelm was dynamic, benevolent, and short-tempered, able to stay angry longer than anyone else in the family—for five, even ten years, so that not even Aunt Melania could remember the cause. No one dared try to settle these marathon quarrels, because an admission of ignorance of the original offense automatically triggered a special wrath reserved for clumsy mediators. Stefan’s father had once been burned this way. But the death of a relative silenced all of Anzelm’s hostility, and everyone else’s too. The
As a boy, Stefan had been immensely impressed by how resistant to time Uncle Anzelm and his emotions were; later, as a student, he partly understood the mechanism. His uncle’s great anger had once been bolstered by the power of his possessions, in other words, by his ability to threaten family members with disinheritance, but Anzelm’s unbending character had allowed his anger to outlive his financial collapse, so that he was still feared even without the threat. But this understanding had not freed Stefan from the mixture of respect and dread he felt for his father’s oldest brother.
The missing cold pork turned up unexpectedly inside the black sideboard. When the enormous block of meat was removed from the depths of the ancient piece of furniture, its dark color reminded Stefan of the coffin and made him uneasy for a moment. Then, with a stamping of feet and a clatter, a spit of roast duck was carried in, along with a jar of tart cranberries and a bowl of steaming potatoes. The modest snack thus became a feast, especially since Uncle Ksawery pulled bottle after bottle of wine from the sideboard. All along, Stefan had felt distant from the others; but now his sense of estrangement grew. He had been bothered by the tone of the conversation and the skill with which the subject of death was avoided, though that, after all, was the reason they were all together. Now his indignation peaked, and everything seemed to ring false, including grief over the lost fatherland, accompanied as it was by the brisk motion of silverware and the chomping of jaws. No one seemed to remember Uncle Leszek lying underground in the empty cemetery. Stefan looked with distaste at the flushed faces of his neighbors, and his disgust spread beyond the family and became contempt for the world. For the time being he could express it only by refraining from eating, which he did so well that he left the table hungry.
But before he left, a change came over Grzegorz Niedzic, Stefan’s silent neighbor to the left. For some time Grzegorz had been wiping his mustache with irritation and glancing obliquely at the door, as if measuring the distance. He was plainly preparing for something. Then suddenly he leaned toward Stefan and announced that he had to leave to catch the train to Poznan.
“What do you want to do, travel all night?” Stefan asked without thinking.
“Yes, I have to be at work tomorrow morning.”
He explained that the Germans barely tolerated Poles in Poznan, and he had had a lot of trouble getting a day off. It took all night to get to Nieczawy, and he had to start back right away. Without finishing his clumsy explanation, he drew a deep breath, stood up so violently that he almost took the tablecloth with him, bowed blindly in all directions, and started for the door. There was an outcry of questions and protest, but the man, stubbornly silent, bowed again at the threshold and disappeared into the hall. Uncle Ksawery went after him, and a moment later the outside door slammed. Stefan looked out the window. It was dark. The tall figure in the skimpy overcoat loomed in his imagination, tramping the muddy road. Looking at the abandoned chair to his left, Stefan noticed that the starched fringes of the tablecloth had been carefully combed and separated, and he felt a warm rush of compassion for this unknown distant cousin who would spend two nights being jostled in dark trains to accompany a dead relative for a few hundred steps.
The table looked mournful, as after any big meal, the plates piled with picked bones coated with congealed fat. There was a moment of silence as men reached in their pockets for cigarettes, the priest wiped his glasses with a chamois cloth, and the great-aunt fell into a rapt trance that would have been a nap except that her eyes were wide open. Against this background of quiet, the widow Aniela spoke for the first time. Immobile, head down, she said into the tablecloth, “You know, it’s all somehow ridiculous.”
Her voice faltered. No one broke the even deeper silence that followed. This was unprecedented; nobody was prepared for it. The priest went at once to Aunt Aniela, moving with the strained competence of a doctor who feels he ought to administer first aid but is at a loss what to do. He simply stood murmuring over her, both of them black, she in her dress, he in his cassock, his face lemony, his eyelids puffy, until they were all saved by the servants—or rather by the two village women acting as servants for the occasion, who entered and began noisily clearing the table.
Uncle Ksawery conferred in hurried whispers with the relatives in the gloomy drawing room, near the shiny glass of the oak bookcase, under the inlaid, lightly smoking oil lamp with the orange shade. He insisted that some stay the night, informed others about train schedules, and gave directions about who was to be wakened and when. Stefan had planned to start for home, but when he found that there was no train until three in the morning, he let himself be persuaded to stay the night. He would sleep in the drawing room opposite the clock, so he had to wait for the others to leave. It was nearly midnight when they did. Stefan washed quickly, undressed by the light of the flickering lamp, blew out the flame, and climbed between the cold sheets with an unpleasant shudder. He had felt sleepy before, but the feeling now left him as if plucked away by an invisible hand. For a long time he lay on his back trying to fall asleep, but the clock, invisible in the darkness, seemed to strike the quarters and hours with exaggerated emphasis.
His thoughts, indefinite and vague, meandered through bits and pieces of the day’s experiences, but they tended inevitably in one direction. The whole family was made of fire and stone, passion and inflexibility. The Kielce Trzynieckis were famous for their greed, Uncle Anzelm for his rage, his great-aunt for some romantic madness lost in the mists of time. This force of destiny showed differently in different people. Stefan’s father was an inventor who did all other things strictly out of compulsion; he waved the world away as though it were a fly; sometimes he lost days, living Thursday twice and then realizing that Wednesday had been lost. This was not true absentmindedness, just excessive concentration on whatever idea was driving him at the moment. If he was not sleeping or ill, you could bet that he would be sitting in his tiny attic-workshop, among Bunsen burners, alcohol lamps, and glowing instruments, wreathed in the smell of acid and metal, measuring, polishing, welding. These actions that went into the process of inventing never ceased, though the planned inventions changed. His father went from one failure to the next with undiminished faith and a passion so powerful that strangers thought he was obtuse or oblivious. He had never treated Stefan like a child. He spoke to the small boy who appeared in his dimly lighted workshop the way he would have talked to an adult who was hard of hearing, the conversation full of interruptions and misunderstandings. Paying them no mind, moving from lathe to jig and back again, his mouth full of screws and his smock singed, he spoke to Stefan as if he were delivering a lecture, with pauses for particularly absorbed tinkering. What did he talk about? Stefan no longer really remembered, for he had been too young to grasp the meaning of those speeches, but he thought they went something like this: “What has happened and passed no longer exists, just as if it had never been. It’s like a cake you ate yesterday. Now there’s nothing left. That’s why you can make yourself a past you never had. If you just believe in it, it will be as if you really lived it.”
Another time he said: “Did you want to be born? You didn’t, did you? Well, you couldn’t have wanted to, because you didn’t exist. I didn’t want you to be born, either. I mean, I wanted a son, but not you, because I didn’t know you, so I couldn’t want you. I wanted a son in general, but you’re the reality.”
Stefan seldom spoke and never asked his father questions, except once, when he was fifteen. He asked his father what he would do once he had finally perfected his invention. His father’s face darkened, and after a long silence he replied that he would start inventing something else. “Why?” Stefan asked rashly. This question, like its predecessor, arose from a deeply repressed distaste, which had been crystalizing over the years, because his father’s peculiar career, as the boy knew only too well, was an object of widespread scorn—and the odium fell upon
