Boundary

By Zofia Nalkowska

Available for the first time in English, Zofia Nalkowska's Boundary was originally published as Granica in Poland in 1935. The modernist novel was widely discussed upon its publication and praised for its psychological realism and stylistic and compositional artistry. Over the years, it has been translated into several languages and made into a feature film, and remains a standard text in the Polish secondary school curriculum.

Nalkowska was a pioneer of feminist fiction in Central Europe. Her observation of inequality in the treatment of men and women is at the heart of Boundary, which explores a transgressive love affair and its repercussions. She perceived that men—especially of the upper and middle classes—felt free to have sexual relations with lower class women, whereas it was not socially acceptable for women of any class to have sexual relations outside of marriage, or even admit to enjoying sex. This meant that working class women were seduced and then abandoned when they became pregnant, leaving them with the stigma of illegitimate children and the problem of finding work. Meanwhile, the higher class wives found themselves betrayed. While Boundary can be interpreted as a novel about power and its abuses, it contains several dimensions—philosophical, emotional, existential, moral—that render it a consummate piece of social criticism. An elegantly composed work of imaginative fiction, it does not preach or offer solutions. Ursula Phillips's excellent translation will interest readers of early twentieth century novels and scholars and students of Polish literature, feminist studies, and European modernism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781609092016

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Boundary

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115

© 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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978-0-87580-740-9 (paper)

978-1-60909-201-6 (e-book)

Book and cover design by Shaun Allshouse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

is available online at catalog.loc.gov.

Boundary

By Zofia Nałkowska

Translated by Ursula Phillips

NIU PRESS / DeKalb

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments­ ix

BOUNDARY 1

Notes to Text 229

Appendix on Polish Names 237

Afterword 243

Notes to Afterword 268

This translation is dedicated to the memory of Irena Wróblewska-Korsak (1947–2013)

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Nałkowska’s heirs Joanna Wróblewska-Kujawska and the late Irena Wróblewska-Korsak for permitting this translation to be published.

Special thanks are due to Helen Beer and Olive Duncan, who commented on earlier versions of the complete English text. As critics who do not read Polish, their suggestions for rendering Polish names and forms of address were especially useful. I likewise thank Dorota Hołowiak for her dedicated help in clarifying certain points in the original Polish and in compiling the pronunciation guide in the appendix.

I am most grateful to Hanna Kirchner for our discussions of the novel and her reading of an earlier version of the afterword, and to the two anonymous reviewers. Many thanks also to Łukasz Ossowski, Librarian of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw) and his staff, as well as to Marzena Kubacz and Agata Sobczak of the Muzeum im. Zofii i Wacława Nałkowskich Dom nad Łąkami (Wołomin).

Ursula Phillips, March 2016

1

The short and splendid career of Zenon Ziembiewicz, which ended so grotesquely and tragically, could now be totally reassessed from the perspective of its bizarre finale. Everything now received an entirely new evaluation: his everywhere familiar, slightly stooping silhouette flashing through the streets of the town almost every day in his long open motorcar, his face with its aquiline profile and ascetically elongated jaw, attractive and even aristocratic to some, jesuitical and odious to others, his behavior in various specific situations, some of his well-remembered words.

Nothing and no one seemed prepared for the catastrophe that struck Ziembiewicz and his family, like a potted geranium falling from an open window and hitting you on the head. It did not explain the situation but obscured it once and for all. The real reasons behind the disaster were not easily decipherable—especially when we take into account that Ziembiewicz had led a sober, well-regulated life, did not appear to seek casual affairs, and even had a reputation in the best social circles for being a thoroughly decent fellow—despite his modern views and unpleasant political affiliations.¹

Death can strike in any place in life.² And a person’s history contained between birth and death often seems like an absurdity. For who is able to remember in every passing moment—just to be on the safe side—that it could be their final gesture? Death often seizes a man in flagrante before he has managed to take precautions. The most logical life plan, the most meticulously worked out canon of values, suddenly crumbles when the last unknown manifests itself.

In Zenon Ziembiewicz’s case, perhaps this was mere objectification. Because when he was alive, he must have looked different from his own point of view—positioned at the center of his life, sheltered by his own consciousness and somehow vindicated by it. He had his own principles, motives, and reasons for behaving as he did and not otherwise. Even his attitude to the perhaps good-looking, yet ultimately quite commonplace girl must have made some kind of sense in his own understanding. But now any subjective considerations, motives, eventualities, imponderabilia, had been swallowed up along with him. He was seen only from the outside, from the street that had already judged him by his deeds, by his public words, and knew only the bare facts. There were no counter-arguments. The case was as it appeared: an ordinary scandal, the exposure of a romance with his wife’s ward or protégée—a tasteless affair he was unable to deal with decently or reasonably, like a man.

It was said of this girl, a certain Justyna Bogutówna, now awaiting trial in prison, that during her last visit to Ziembiewicz’s office she behaved hysterically and that her shriek was heard throughout the building. Following her arrest, she immediately calmed down and admitted her guilt, though she was unwilling to divulge her motivation. Still apparently in shock, she stated only that she had been sent from the dead and let herself be driven away to prison with no sign of protest.

Not much could be gleaned from the local newspapers, influenced most likely by powerful lobbies. According to Niwa, Bogutówna’s deed was insane. At the same time reports appeared elsewhere suggesting she was merely simulating madness and would be taken to the hospital for observation. Attempts were even made to exploit the tragedy for party political ends. One popular rag, for reasons unknown, dubbed her Charlotte Corday d’Armont.³

Bogutówna was the natural child of a widow who had been in service as a cook in local manors and had no one of her own family, so it seems, in these parts. Following this woman’s death, the girl found herself in town working as a maid in the home of a gravely sick woman. At about this time Pani Ziembiewicz took an interest in her. Thanks to her protection, Bogutówna was taken on first as a sales assistant and then cashier in Toruciński’s drapery store on Świętojańska Street, where apparently they were entirely satisfied with her. A few months later, of her own volition, she took up a different post in Chązowicz’s cake shop on the corner of National Square and Emerytalna Street. But there she disliked it from the start and soon gave it up too.

Pani Tawnicka, the silver-haired cashier of long standing in this institution, remembered Bogutówna. According to Tawnicka, she was an intelligent young woman, polite to customers, not at all flirtatious but rather lazy. At Toruciński’s, by contrast, she had the reputation of being hard-working.

Returning to Ziembiewicz, he was not at all the overseer’s son from the Boleborza estate, despite Bogutówna’s tendentious assertions during her memorable interview with the then Panna Biecka, still less of simple peasant origin. One could say precisely the opposite. For his father, ­Walerian Ziembiewicz, boasted to the end of his days of his family’s noble crest, whose painted image, along with the coat-of-arms of his wife Joanna, née ­Niemierówna, stood in odd-looking frames on top of a glass cabinet in a corner of the Boleborza parlor. Walerian was able to explain in precise detail both heraldic proclamations as well as the meanings of all the stars, crosses, severed hands, visors, and crescents of which the devices were composed. The mystical aura surrounding his ancestral origins contained in these symbols was one of little Zenon’s first metaphysical experiences.

Boleborza belonged to the complex of properties owned by the local landed family, the Tczewskis. It was a small, neglected manor farm lying on the periphery of these estates, with sandy soil alternating with marshland. After losing two properties in a row, his own and his wife’s, Walerian Ziembiewicz obtained the position of steward at Boleborza several years before the war.⁴ He managed the farm honestly, but every bit as incompetently and badly as he had his own. He did not like farming. Shut away for hours on end in his study, known as the office, he made his own cartridges for his double­-barreled gun or repaired various household objects: glued, tightened, screwed together, and even planed on a small workbench. He was proud there was nothing he could not repair, from the yellowing long grand piano in the parlor, where time after time a key fell silent, to his wife’s wristwatch. He also had a very sensitive conscience and would confess his frequent sins of lechery not only to his acquaintance, the parish priest from Chązebna, but also to his tall lean wife, whom he would implore on bended knee with tears in his eyes to pardon his guilt. As proof of her forgiveness, he would receive the jammed lock of a sideboard drawer to repair, or the broken chain of a lorgnette. Fortified in this way, he would immediately send for a bottle of rye vodka from the cellar. Alas, even a small drop of alcohol put him in a state of heightened eroticism, and then everything depended on what direction a given moment and particular circumstances appointed to this elemental, life-giving force. Adultery would again lead him astray, its consequences giving rise to fresh short-lived tensions and lyrical scenes, which did much to enliven the musty, monotonous atmosphere of Boleborza, as stagnant as its carp pond.

Things only looked so bad from the outside, of course. From the inside, subjectively, they were evaluated entirely differently. In his own estimation, Walerian Ziembiewicz was a man attached to the land, and on this land, be it his own or someone else’s, he intended to work to his last breath. He genuinely loved and deeply respected his companion in life, while he would not have begrudged his own blood for the sake of his only child. While they had means, everything was fine. Now, when they had nothing, it was fine too. They knew how to be content with little and quietly get on with their own lives.

Ziembiewicz was hopeless at making money. Too bad. Unlike other men, he had no idea how to work in his own interests. He would still allude now, in Boleborza, to the nobleman’s court, which he had no intention of sponging off, or to thresholds he had no intention of crossing. Pani Żańcia had a high estimation of her husband’s independent character and no doubt found support in it to counteract her life’s disappointments. The emptiness of those noble symbols did not offend her in the least. Although no such courts or thresholds existed within the orbit of Boleborza, they would have been inaccessible anyway. The only person they had to reckon with was plenipotentiary Czechliński, a man indifferent to anything local, since he had cultivated his own affairs in the war and in politics, far removed not only from the fortunes of Boleborza but of the whole demesne. On the other hand, a glimpse of one of the Tczewski family at church in Chązebna or his own rare participation in one of the Count’s hunting expeditions, when it chanced to take place on the Boleborza marshes, was for Ziembiewicz the topic of tales and reflections for weeks to come.

The cogs of war had revolved slowly around the Boleborza manor in almost decorative fashion, more like in a film than reality, as illusory as the gruesome panorama of Racławice.⁵ The requisitioning of horses and cows had been no problem for Ziembiewicz. Farmhands conscripted into the army were even easier to replace. Peasants in the village suffering from dysentery had died out without causing serious harm, since the infection never reached the manor. The occasional march past of small army units down the track beyond the garden, or the reverberation of guns from over the horizon, or a few graves in the field he drove to inspect at Gwarecki Grange, that was all. First Russian, then German, and eventually Polish officers sat around the white tablecloth beneath the hanging lamp, into the reservoir of which Ziembiewicz fixed a carbide burner that emitted a delicate garlic aroma and spluttered with small explosions. But the scenery of such banquets changed very little, even the uniforms were similar. The main thing was always to embrace your guests with open arms and unforced simplicity. So a turkey would be slaughtered and fine liquors rolled out from the cellar. On heartier occasions, when tongues were loosened, Ziembiewicz would speak in elated yet modest tones:

And so I, as a growing lad, dear God, would carve all manner of objects out of wood with a penknife. Like for instance those photograph frames over there, picture frames. Or I’d make a heart, and then carve an eagle in the heart. Or produce tiny models of Kościuszko on horseback. Hardly any of it now survives: one thing was given away as a keepsake, something else to someone else; objects vanished when we moved from estate to estate. And yet, one way or another, we always thought of Poland, dreamed of something, thirsted for something, on the quiet, secretly . . .

Yet the realization of those secret dreams had failed to bring Walerian Ziembiewicz the anticipated satisfaction. On the contrary. Certain things aroused in him a distinct feeling of despondency.

When I look at everything nowadays, see this and that, it pains me. Since boyhood you’ve been imagining what it’ll be like, and now it’s only the Jews who’ve got something out of it. You feel like arresting those people, feel like screaming: For God’s sake, pull yourselves together, stop doing what you’re doing! But what of it? Those who could do something don’t want to, or don’t know how. And the one who would have known . . .⁶ But what’s the point in talking . . . ?

It was possible, however, to observe the entire Boleborza phenomenon from a different perspective, namely through the eyes of Zenon, as the object of his first serious childhood tragedy.

Zenon, an exemplary and conscientious pupil, would come home from the town for holidays or school vacations bearing excellent marks and reports. Each time he returned, he was different, increasingly alien, cut off from life at home, full of the importance of the knowledge he had acquired and the things he had already experienced, shaken to the quick by his youthful insights into the world. To be young: Oh, this was no laughing matter. Zenon’s youth was burdensome and bitter, at loggerheads with the world and with itself, grappling from the start with tenderness and suffering. Zenon would come back and watch his parents with ever more adult eyes. His heart grew cold, while bitter shame triggered a lump in his throat, like tears, in response to what he saw. Every schoolmaster, spoken of at home with such contempt as if he were a pedant (The things they teach them nowadays!) was a fount of wisdom compared to his next of kin—people who had once impressed him and whom, after all, he still somehow loved. His mother’s French phrases, repeated to the servants ever since he could remember, would have gained a below-average grade in the third year of gymnasium. Or her music! Her waltzes in the unlit parlor, which he had listened to long ago with such emotion, the faltering strains of the long yellow never-tuned Zakrzewski piano—the Dolores Waltz, Beautiful Venice—and her singing: Lorsque tout est fini, quand se meurt vo-o-o-tre beau rêve . . .⁷ Or what his father remembered of history, and the things he claimed about his own coat-of-arms from the eleventh century! His sole Latin quotation, which he had no idea was taken from Terence: Homo sum . . . , always ended in a mistake.⁸ Or his attitude to the peasants! All he knew about them was that they stole. This was the only thing he could say about them. He understood nothing of the historical and social reasons for peasant illiteracy. But now he laughed at them for being given free schooling, because when they start studying, it will be interesting to see who’ll do any work.

It was only during his final school holidays that Zenon made the incredible discovery that his father did nothing! Walerian would rise at first light and wander from early morning across the meadows and fields, keeping an eye on the work, always carrying his double-barreled shotgun and firing irrespective of the time of year at whatever crossed his path, even if it were only crows, or other people’s cats and dogs. If he was angry he would kick his pointer dog and shout at people in a wild hysterical voice. He would complain about modern times and stand more and more on ceremony, yet he beat young girls and little boys. When it came to doing the accounts, he would summon Zenon’s mother into the office. He would clean his gun in the candlelight observing how the radiance flowed into the barrels and whirled about, while she entered the figures in the logs and did the calculations. His only function was to keep an eye on people and make sure they did not pilfer from the masters, keep an eye on the property of those unknown, mysterious, distant Tczewskis.

By then Zenon was already familiar with the town house owned by Pani Kolichowska on Staszic Street (formerly Zielona Street), a massive, ugly, three-story mansion with iron balconies, as well as with its garden located at the back, the site of springtime anguish.⁹ There fruit trees mingled with beds of iris, lilac, and jasmine, unlike at Boleborza, where the orchard was separate. The blossoming apple trees spread their boughs so low over the bright green, blunt-toothed leaves of the gooseberry bushes that he had to take care as he walked down the muddy alleyway toward the white-painted bench at the end, ducking his head again and again. Even so the white, faintly pinkish petals would spill from the jostled branches and settle on his hair and clothes. Beside him would walk the small, hostile, bad-tempered occupier of that house and garden, Elżbieta Biecka, nicknamed by the pupils at her school: Panna Elżbiebiecka.¹⁰ Incapable herself of performing the stupidest of tasks, she behaved as if she were cleverer than he. She was spiteful and rude. But whenever he felt like leaving, she told him to stay. And when he really did leave, she told him to come again tomorrow. Elżbieta, Elżunia, Ela. Zenon became acquainted with the bad seductive happiness that resides in suffering.

2

Pani Cecylia Kolichowska, Biecka by birth, widow of public notary ­Aleksander Kolichowski, was fifty years old, and everything in her life had already come to an end. She had been married twice. Her first husband, Konstanty Wąbrowski, with whom she had spent ten tough years in her youth, had been a socialist who committed suicide shortly before the war for reasons that remained obscure. She remembered a number of things from that period of her life but had little to say about them. On the other hand, her second marriage, to the notary fifteen years her senior, a rich man head over heels in love with her, provided ample material for fruitless reminiscences and acrimonious tales. He had left her nothing except the aforementioned mansion and garden on Zielona Street, as it was then still called, which generated almost no income and devoured a great deal of cash in taxes. Meanwhile, after his death, she discovered, in the fireproof safe that had adorned his desk throughout his working life, instead of money and shares, something of quite a different nature.

She had married Konstanty out of true love, so perhaps she had only herself to blame. Shortly after their wedding he had grown a black beard and begun to disappear and reappear at inappropriate moments, assuring her there was nothing to worry about, while he regarded the house searches and arrests as unquestionable proof that everything was coming to a head. For years he tormented her by forcing her to read at least Menger, which she eventually did, but only out of loyalty to him. He also insisted for a time that she remember the differences between Godwin and Owen.¹¹ He had messed up her life. Despite this she had respected his ideas, trembled for his fate, and loved him to the bitter end. From this period of her life Pani ­Cecylia retained a sentimental affection for a melody to which they had sung at the time: Our standard streams o’er thro-o-nes,¹² as well as for the foolish operetta song: The glow-worms are flying, ah, flying, flying,¹³ which she recalled from rare happy evenings when they had had a little money and could afford to eat supper in a restaurant with music. This life ended abruptly when Konstanty Wąbrowski was forced to emigrate, leaving his wife and eight-year-old son without means of support, and later without even any news. She had learned of his suicide from the newspapers.

Well yes, but it was all her own fault, she had wanted it, driven by emotion against her better judgment. Whereas the second time, when she had acted with deliberation, she had made an even worse mistake. The elegant older man, so lyrically in love, proved to be a morose, obsessive womanizer who imprisoned her in their own house, never allowing her to see other people, forbidding her to dress up, dance, or travel. He would make hysterical scenes like a jealous woman, threatening suicide, pretending to swallow glass or feigning convulsive sobs. Often he went out of an evening to play cards, but only to bars or houses where there was a telephone, so that he could call home and make sure his wife had not gone out. Pani Cecylia endured this nightmare for years relying on the two things she regarded as axiomatic: the knowledge that she was exclusively and fatally loved, and, whatever else might happen, that her old age was secure. In this respect the mysterious safe had prepared a double disillusionment.

Both husbands in turn, Konstanty and Aleksander, had shaped her moral being. Every phenomenon in life was now double-edged, simultaneously good and bad, since she would grasp it from two different angles at one and the same time. The two opposing views would persist side by side, mutually reinforcing and complementing one another, and thereby creating an image of a world that was eminently relativistic.

Pani Cecylia Kolichowska had aged badly. The wrinkles on her thin face were the direct result of her irritated demeanor. Even the creases at the sides of her mouth, usually caused by laughter, were so firmly dragged downward they looked like the personification of bitterness itself. Pani Cecylia truly believed that she had been abused by life, and was only now retaliating. Since the death of the wicked unfaithful notary, she had taken over the day-to-day running of the house. She continued to lead a solitary life, spread-­eagled as it were on her cross between collecting the rent and paying the taxes. The enormous mansion, a menacing symbol of duty and defeat, depended on the services not only of herself but also of the caretaker, the caretaker’s wife, their children, the cook, the maid, and eventually little Elżbieta Biecka.

Her world was divided into floors, into rooms at the front and rooms at the back, into the attic and the basements. Certain names were repeated every day: Chąśba, Wylam, Gołąbski, Posztraski, Goroński—mysterious sounds charged with the dynamics of anger and worry. Driven by necessity, Pani Kolichowska had won a triumphant battle against the local health authority and converted half the cellars into flats, laying floors, installing iron stoves, and whitewashing the walls directly onto the brick. The anarchic elements of urban destitution that had taken up residence there were a source of constant anguish. Two small studios, comprised of one room and a dark kitchen built into the attic and adjacent to the gable walls, were likewise a great disappointment. A couple named Gołąbski, professing to be civil servants, had moved into one of them. The wife had no situation at all, earning her keep by doing piece work for dress shops, and, even though she seemed no more than a little girl, had given birth to her first child soon after moving in. He, however, was a clerk in a small private haulage company, but began from the very start to fall behind with the rent and pay it only in fits and starts, citing his complicated and impossible personal situation. The impossibility of Gołąbski’s situation consisted in the fact he had no money. What he called his complication was his right lung, shot through at Radzymin,¹⁴ since it rendered him incapable of holding down any decent government position. The second gable flat had been occupied for a long time by the Posztraskis, and they too paid nothing, since here the situation really was impossible and in certain respects even exceptional. Pani Łucja Posztraska was a longstanding friend of Pani Kolichowska from former days, once a rich and good-looking woman, now completely ruined and saddled with an alcoholic husband. For Pani Kolichowska this friendship was both a financial and a social burden, but there was nothing she could do about it and so she bore her obligation as best she could, which only deepened her resentment.

Pani Kolichowska’s own spacious private apartment, reduced however to half its size since her husband’s death (the other half, with built-on kitchen, was occupied by the Gierackis), was located on the low-level ground floor to the right of the gate, set back slightly from the street and shaded by two acacia trees. The whole interior was dark as a result of this abundant greenery, and cluttered with heavy oak and walnut furniture, full of plush upholstery, carpets, door curtains, settees, ottomans, and tablecloths. Especially cramped was the sitting room, into which the notary’s leather-bound former study had been incorporated in its entirety, along with its huge desk and bearskin lying on the carpet. Lamps converted from oil to electricity with stands and silk shades the size of umbrellas, black rounded pillars, embroidered and painted screens, jardinières holding gigantic philodendrons and rubber plants, pictures in heavy gilt frames acquired from the old Zachęta raffles: it all proliferated and grew dense, and was reflected in two huge mirrors stretching from floor to ceiling. On the grand piano covered by an embroidered silk cloth with tassels, on the desk, tables, side tables, and étagères, on the two small walnut consoles propping up the bases of both enormous mirrors, between elephants of varying dimensions (from an average-sized cat to a medium-sized beetle), among the vases, porcelain figures, candelabra, epergnes, and sweet bowls, beside a whole orchestra of fiddling terracotta cats (caterwauling)—everywhere there stood framed photographs of members of the three families, Bieckis, Wąbrowskis, and Kolichowskis, and people bound to them by marriage or friendship.¹⁵ Still more photographs lay in fat plush-covered albums beside albums of places visited on family travels, albums of postcards, and luxury editions of reproductions of Andriolli and Siemiradzki.¹⁶

Dusting the surfaces, beating the carpets, keeping in exemplary order this lumber room, this wonderfully preserved museum piece from the dying years of the nineteenth century, required considerable effort capable in itself of filling an entire existence.

To Zenon Ziembiewicz, a pupil in the eighth year of gymnasium, lodging in the house of his gymnastics master, Pani Kolichowska’s sitting room was the most beautiful of its kind he had ever seen. Compared to the penury and shabby desolation of the parlor at Boleborza, this cramped, upholstered, wall-papered, draped interior was the ultimate in splendor, taste, and culture. Here, for the first time in his life, he saw silk cushions covered in gold or colored embroidery lying directly on the floor next to sofas, cushions on which you could sit and nestle your head against the knees of the woman you loved. For the first time he saw a porcelain owl with electric lights for eyes, and also a large, real pink shell with a light bulb fixed inside, which ­Elżbieta would switch on in the early twilight before it grew properly dark. The sitting-room air, choked by the plush of door curtains and tablecloths, damask of upholstery, silky wool of carpets, felt thick and heavy like Tokay wine, warm and softly undulating. Everything induced a dream-like state, making him feel strangely moved and certain that a different, hostile, yet unbearably longed-for world really did exist and that his youth was the pathway leading to it, full of hatred and anguish.

In the presence of Elżbieta, Zenon was in no fit state to gaze at Żmurko’s two women slumbering in their golden frames with nostrils flaring, half-closed eyelids, and naked breasts. Nearby on the same wall hung a portrait of the notary by Lentz, painted in yellow and black, made blacker still by the passage of not quite thirty years, and looking like a precious artifact of the Dutch school.¹⁷ Aleksander Kolichowski, depicted in gown and mortarboard, his face closely shaven, seemingly so noble that nothing could possibly lie in his fireproof safe except money and government bonds, likewise represented that hated, higher-order world destined for destruction and ruin, hostile yet at the same time seductive.

But it was the portrait of the notary’s first wife, hanging beside him and greatly respected by Pani Cecylia, that most attracted Zenon’s attention. She was a blond lady in a very low-cut ball dress and large black hat with black feather. How odd she was, so slender in the waist. And did one really attend balls in those days in a hat? Elżbieta supposed it must have been in a box at some theatrical performance. She said the first Pani Kolichowska died young because she could not have children. First she went crazy, and then she died. Can you really go crazy from that? Zenon was horrified. Evidently you can, replied Elżbieta, offended that he could doubt it.

Zenon did not dare to sit on any of the embroidered silk cushions lying on the carpet, still less nestle his head against Elżbieta’s knees. Despite this, Elżbieta deduced from his various gloomy and tragic looks that he was in love with her. He kept coming to see her even though he should have been sitting at home preparing for his written examinations. He came almost every day, and not always to help her with her algebra.

It was hard to respect a man whose trousers were too tight and too short, even if he was top of the class. Elżbieta had to tease him. She liked him only when he was offended and fell silent, when he wanted to leave yet did not leave, as if he had no pride. Instead, his good moods, moments of idiotic self-satisfaction, aroused in her the worst kind of feelings. Likewise when he appeared on Sundays dressed differently, scrubbed clean, reinvigorated, his long bony face freshly shaved and his hair plastered down better than on other days, she felt nothing but disgust. Because then she had to admit that some things about him were actually attractive. That plastered down hair, very thick and straight, had a strange, unusual color—darkish, but with golden streaks—and when it was combed back so smoothly from forehead to the nape of the neck, it looked like a little cap. But Elżbieta was incapable of thinking well of him without feeling physical abhorrence. Sensual reactions, no doubt: that was how she explained it to herself.

Elżbieta at that time was in love with someone else—with a genuine, serious, unrequited, and tragic love. The man, a cavalry captain, was called Awaczewicz. He had such an odd, un-Polish sounding name, and was himself odd, different from everyone else.¹⁸ Elżbieta saw him rarely and then only at the home of Panna Julia Wagner, her French tutor. It would happen that Panna Julia, instead of coming for their lesson, would send a confidential little note on squared paper saying she felt unwell and could Elżbieta please come to her. Elżbieta was sure she would find him there. He would be in town only when back from the front.¹⁹ If he was not there, then it meant he could perish at any moment; hence the tragic nature of her love.

Captain Awaczewicz had graying hair, although he was not an old man, and such unusual eyes that this in itself sufficed for women to fall in love, eyes that were totally ash-gray, cold, squinting intently and supercilious. Panna Julia addressed him as cousin, and there was nothing strange in this since she herself, a Pole by birth, had been raised in France. Besides, she admitted the family connection was rather distant. The captain would smile, screw up his eyes, and remark that, in his opinion, it was very close.

He was not only an officer but an artist. The only two pictures hanging in Panna Julia’s flat were painted by him. He showed them pencil sketches of the war: horses, corpses, Bolshevik prisoners of war or soldiers. Among them were drawings of hanged people, which made a terrible impression on Elżbieta. The captain explained that one could not pity them, because they were traitors.

Elżbieta was entranced by him, while her admiration was mingled with a sadness that seemed to have no cause. Because she did not dream of her love being reciprocated; this was not what she desired at all. Her sole salvation lay precisely in the fact that he did not love her. She would sometimes imagine nevertheless how happy his wife must be. She never saw the woman but knew she existed and had two little daughters. But at this point dimensions impossible to imagine opened up.

Her love, the love of a fifteen-year-old girl, assumed gigantic proportions. It was the only real thing in her life. Everything outside of it: school, her contemporaries, the house, her aunt, Zenon, the wars that had been raging unceasingly since her childhood,²⁰ her parents living somewhere abroad, a long way away and separately: all this was but a flat, hazy, distant backdrop to her solitary drama.

Alas, this gigantic and only real affair was to end swiftly and in great disillusionment.

3

The house was old and everything in it was old, facing back to a time that had vanished forever for everyone, when things worked better. It might have been fifty years ago or fifteen, simply before the war or merely previously: whenever, so long as it was not today, not today. As if the only proper time to be alive were the past.

The house was old and almost always empty. Pani Cecylia led a solitary life and never invited guests. The various elderly ladies who showed up uninvited, infrequently, timidly, were greeted with little enthusiasm. The most regular guest, her friend Pani Posztraska, would steal into the house by way of the kitchen, like a thief almost, driven always by some urgent need. Over-solicitous, gay and talkative, endeavoring not to notice the mistress’s hostile demeanor and distracted eyes, she would attempt to redeem herself with some piece of information prepared especially for the purpose—news about one of the tenants, a precious denunciation or warning. Pani Cecylia was not easily impressed. She already knew these tactics. Few things genuinely interested her. Yet she would rise to the bait and ask without first sitting down: Well, what is it, Łucja? Tell me. And Pani Posztraska would cling to this tiny scrap of ground in order to expand upon it and make herself at home, take a seat, enjoy a friendly chat, and eventually settle her problem. She would start by relating how her neighbor in the attic, Gołąbski, had lost his position at the haulage company following an illness and was now applying for something at the bank, but all to no avail, so he would not be paying the rent, because how could he? Later on, by means of some natural, logical, roundabout way, the stove-pipe would emerge, totally scorched and burnt through and now collapsed for the second time. Their whole room was blackened by soot, while she and her husband looked like golliwogs. Pani Posztraska did everything she could to humor her friend with this tale so as to eventually secure the purchase of a new pipe. Pani Tawnicka, a woman who had known better days before becoming a cashier in Chązowicz’s cake shop and for whom talking about such life vicissitudes was a moral necessity, would likewise enter on the sly. And then there was the elder Pani Gieracka, Pani Cecylia’s closest neighbor, sickly and pathetic, wronged by her son, her daughter-in-law, her grandchildren and the whole of creation, but kept on a long leash by Pani Cecylia and received with cold formality.

And yet occasions would arise several times a year when these busybodies plucked up courage and appeared in greater numbers. It might be a relapse in Pani Cecylia’s health, of which they immediately learned by some inexplicable means, or a public affair which suddenly reunited them, or a celebration or feast-day that reanimated the frail worn fibers