The Empusium, page 15
Whenever his nocturnal visit to Thilo came to an end, instead of going straight back to his room, he usually went barefoot upstairs to the attic, for a brief visit to Frau Opitz’s room, while the others were still asleep (he could hear snoring from Frommer’s room and August coughing in his sleep). He also went there during the day, once he was sure that Raimund and Opitz had driven to Waldenburg or were out of the house on business of their own. He did not do anything in particular here. As he sat down on the bed, the mattress sagged under him; despite the discomfort, he would gradually feel inertia sweeping over him, like a stupor. He would cover his shoulders with the fringed tablecloth and then simply sit and stare.
Here on the bedstead lies a neatly folded nightshirt made of faded linen, trimmed with silk-twist lace. In one place the threads are broken and pilling. Wojnicz leans over the shirt and inspects the wound in the lace at close quarters. Suddenly he remembers an impression from that first day when he entered the dining room and saw what he saw. The details of that afternoon have been gradually fading from his memory, but now a concrete scene comes back to him, like a picture lost from a file and by chance recovered. A cheek, the outline of the jaw, peach-like skin covered in fine down, and the corner of the mouth, a dainty line the shape of a comma, ever so slightly curved, as if those lifeless lips were just about to smile.
Wojnicz is surprised by this memory. He was not expecting to remember this image. He was not even aware of having looked at it.
* * *
From mid-October, fine, sunny days set in. A few cold nights had caused the trees to turn red and yellow, and in the second week of the month Wojnicz suddenly awoke to an entirely altered setting—now he was surrounded by every possible shade of yellow, orange and red, still interwoven here and there with retreating green. The frenzy of colors, highlighted by the blue chill of the sky, was intoxicating, and Wojnicz even felt like asking Thilo for some paints so that he could document this astonishing transformation. Colored leaves were falling onto the cobbled streets, as though some force were trying to carpet the hard surface in a mosaic pattern. How much the world had softened, how much it had mellowed! Masses of swallowtail butterflies as big as sparrows, suddenly awakened by the sunlight, were bouncing off the windowpanes as they sought shelter from the approaching cold, only to die helplessly on the sills. Their crumbled, faded wings would be swept away with the first spring cleaning.
After four weeks’ treatment, each patient went to see Dr. Semperweiss for a thorough examination.
After auscultating Wojnicz’s lungs at length, an extremely boring examination, the doctor seemed entirely satisfied.
“Could you please undress fully?” he asked.
Wojnicz was standing before him in nothing but his drawers, which came down to his knees and were of very thin, soft cambric. His father had bought him a dozen pairs, as well as some cotton underwear, four new shirts and a very smart russet-colored morning coat, possibly not the height of fashion, as he had now confirmed. His underwear too seemed rather outmoded when he compared it with that of patients from all over Europe during the hydrotherapy devised by Father Kneipp.
“I must refuse,” he replied with a determination that showed on his face.
Busy arranging his tools for examining the throat, Dr. Semperweiss spun around in amazement.
“What did you say?”
“That I must refuse.”
“But why on earth? You’re at the doctor’s!”
“For—for religious reasons,” said Wojnicz, stammering.
“But you’re a Catholic, and Catholics undress for the doctor.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Savages,” retorted Dr. Semperweiss after a pause. “I haven’t the strength to deal with you. How can you be treated the modern way if you refuse to uncover your own arse?”
Wojnicz listened to this calmly, as if accustomed; one might even have thought he shared the doctor’s indignation.
“I should throw you out of here. Go and be cured by quacks and witches.”
Wojnicz remained silent.
“So how do you cope with the baths, you prudish youth? You have to undress there, don’t you?”
“I keep my vest and drawers on.”
“What a good little Catholic you are! Well, I’m not going to fight against prejudices and I’m not going to examine you either. I’ll make a note of it in your records. Ha, I’ll put that he refused to undress,” quipped Dr. Semperweiss, and changed the subject, his mind already elsewhere. “Five proper meals a day, don’t forget. Plenty of milk and butter. It must all be hot. Daily walks and rest cures. The best friendships are formed in the rest-cure area, and who knows what else. Is there anything more to say, young man with the unpronounceable name?”
Wojnicz dressed in haste.
“No. No.”
“How does that Opitz fellow feed you now that his cook has died?” the doctor suddenly asked with concern, as if feeling a surge of guilt. “You can transfer to us with full board. You’d like our chef, he’s from Italy.”
“I have breakfast and lunch at the Kurhaus, and I value the chef’s talents highly. I have supper at the guesthouse and I can’t complain. There are always fresh cheeses. The proprietor goes to Friedland for goat cheeses. For now we’re coping, and Herr Opitz is looking for a woman to do the cooking.”
Semperweiss folded his arms across his chest and sighed.
“A woman to do the cooking. Do you know that it’s our mothers who bear the blame for our failures? They’re the ones who shape our attitude to the world and to our own bodies. These are the latest discoveries of the science known as psychoanalysis.”
Wojnicz was already at the door, but Semperweiss gestured to him to come back and sit down.
“What I have to say might interest you. It’s the mothers,” he went on, “who infect the child with excessive emotionality, which eventually leads to all sorts of illnesses and feebleness of spirit, and above all inner effeminacy. Women are volatile and fickle, quite incapable of shaping a child’s awareness that the world is our challenge, that its rules are tough, and its order requires us to have a solid attitude, to stand firmly on our feet and not give in to any delusions.”
“You talk the way my father would if he…” Wojnicz hesitated; Semperweiss cocked an ear.
“If he what?” he asked with curiosity.
“If he talked about my mother at all.”
“Doesn’t he? I’m sure you have a close relationship with your mother, hence your—so to speak—ladylike fragility.”
In a few sentences, Wojnicz explained his family history.
“Oh well, it’s a pity she died,” said the doctor, “but that doesn’t mean she’s blameless. She left you when you needed her most! But I can tell you, dear Herr Wojnicz, I too was raised almost entirely without women. That’s to say without other women, because I am very close to my mother. She’s coming up to her eightieth birthday. But she is an extremely special woman. Yes, yes…sometimes I think…” Here Dr. Semperweiss paused, then changed the subject. “A man can get to know himself thanks to psychoanalysis, this new science. These days the psychology of the unconscious is the only way to gain real answers to real questions. Do you analyze your dreams?”
Wojnicz blinked in amazement.
“I don’t dream much. And I don’t dream at all here, because there are pigeons cooing in the attic all night.”
“If you were to dream of water, or frogs, wet things, and, oh, caves for example, it could mean that you have a complex to do with your absent mother…”
Wojnicz remembered the toad sitting on the pile of potatoes. He flinched imperceptibly.
“Then you would have to fortify your virility, stand up to this softening energy. That’s what you need, Wojnicz! You must kill in yourself your mother who abandoned you—”
“She died, I don’t have to kill her,” Wojnicz corrected him.
“Even so, she abandoned you, and that is taking strength away from you. To make up for her absence, you identify with her in a dangerous way, hence this ladylike effeminacy, this softness.”
Wojnicz shrank inside himself.
“Now, now, my lad,” said Semperweiss, who must have noticed this change, “don’t snivel, don’t capitulate. You must get a grip on yourself. Even the toughest men melt like jelly when they’re subjected to women’s tricks. And that includes women acting from beyond the grave.”
For a moment Wojnicz felt as though it were his father talking. He could even see him—standing against the patterned wallpaper, against the windows and the asparagus ferns, cigar in hand, as the smoke formed beautiful swirls in the air, meandering threads that never repeated the same shape. Now he should go up to him and kiss his hand, as he usually did. And say: “Yes, Father.” His father seemed to relish his subordination, this gesture of submission calmed him down, at least for a while. Mieczyś could then leave the room and see to his own affairs: the chess pieces, his herbal and his beloved Latin. His father would remain outside his son’s closed door, unaware that his control and influence did not reach beyond it and had no effect on the fern leaf pressed between sheets of tissue paper and its regular, standard spirals.
“We could actually get by without them. Without women, of course. If we were only capable of being strong,” concluded Dr. Semperweiss, and gave Wojnicz a friendly clap on the back, enough to make him wince with pain.
At the door, Wojnicz asked quietly about Thilo, but staring out of the window, the doctor replied, “Don’t get attached to him, my boy. He hasn’t much time left.”
* * *
Wojnicz spent ages watching a sluggish fly that was roaming around the table, closely inspecting the dried plants. It was plainly living on reserve energy, perhaps only because Raimund had stoked the stoves today, and the pleasant warmth was reminding every living thing of the sunny days of summer. The fly’s fellows lay dead on the windowsills, like black crumbs. With disgust, Wojnicz tried to pick them up by the leglets and throw them out, but his fingers were too clumsy, so he had to use the postcard he had just written to his father.
That night the cooing from upstairs drove him to despair, so he went to Opitz’s medicine cabinet in the corridor and took out a small bottle of valerian drops. Not bothering to measure the correct amount, he poured half its contents into a glass, watered it down, and drank it.
Now we can see Wojnicz sitting on the bed of the late Frau Opitz again; he places his hands on his thighs and stares ahead, the crossed pattern of the window reflected in his blue irises. He is breathing calmly as waves of fragrance meet in his nose—an herb to deter clothes moths, some very cheap perfume, dust, starch, and the indeterminate odor that human beings leave behind after they die.
He sits like that for a quarter of an hour, maybe a little longer, and now he is sure that the cooing ceases entirely whenever he comes in here.
9.
THE TUNTSCHI
Willi Opitz and Raimund were standing in the courtyard behind the house, dressed in rubber boots, hats and capes. They were holding light wicker baskets. Wojnicz was on his way out for a solitary walk when he bumped into them. From the sitting room he had taken a hiking stick with a spiked tip; it was covered in badges from the local mountain hostels. He had thought that if he went out through the courtyard he would not encounter anyone, and now he tried to conceal his disappointment and surprise.
“Ah, gentlemen, you look as if you were off to pick mushrooms!” he said with a laugh, aware that it did not sound quite natural.
The glances the other men exchanged seemed to forge an unspoken agreement between them, as though they had hit upon an excellent idea at the same moment.
“Indeed we are off to pick mushrooms,” they said simultaneously.
Then, as if this remark, uttered spontaneously and sincerely, was to have consequences in the material world, Willi Opitz added: “Perhaps you’d like to come with us?”
Wojnicz could find no reason to refuse. He had not planned his walk in detail, he had considered that “anything might happen,” and now it had. So he nodded and joined them.
Before entering the forest, they fortified themselves with a few swigs of Schwärmerei from a bottle Opitz suddenly pulled from his bosom, and at once they were filled with excitement, because they discovered that there at the edge of the woods they were standing right in the middle of a patch of wonderful yellow chanterelles. Once Wojnicz’s eyes had grown accustomed to the subtle differences between the leaves and the mushrooms, he was carried away by such elation that he fell to his knees and began to pull chanterelles, one after another, from the soft carpet of moss. He was moved to the point of tears by their abundance. From the corners of his eyes, he could see the two other men moving around on their knees, and it looked as if their baskets would soon be full to the brim. It was impossible to gather all the mushrooms. Finally Opitz sat down, took another slug of liqueur and handed the bottle to his companions.
“We’ll have a splendid supper,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less. All we need is cream.”
They started chatting in their dialect, and Wojnicz did not even attempt to understand them. He reached out to pick the most beautiful specimens. Soon the higher they went, the thicker the forest became, and marvelous velvety bay boletes began to emerge from the forest floor, and in among the beech trees there were cèpes too. These fabulous mushrooms prompted only moderate delight in Opitz and Raimund. It was Wojnicz who kept jumping up and down with excitement, emitting high-pitched shrieks, until finally he stepped aside to remove his vest to use as an extra receptacle for his harvest. As he picked up leaves with the tip of his walking stick, he realized that he was looking for morels, the mushrooms of his childhood—in those days he and his father would wander the groves for hours in search of those beautiful, mysterious fruits of the forest, which tasted like no other on earth. Afterward, he always wanted to help Gliceria peel them, clean their bodies of dry leaves, pine needles and soil, and peep under their crumpled caps, but his father was against it. They would leave the basket in the kitchen, and then his father would make him copy entire passages from Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy to practice his handwriting. Gliceria was to take care of the mushrooms.
Having dropped behind, from afar Wojnicz saw the stooping figures of the two men picking something in a clearing. Excited, they had fallen silent.
“What wonder is this?” he asked as he approached.
They did not answer. Between finger and thumb, they were carefully taking hold of some tiny mushrooms on spindly stalks, miserable, uninteresting-looking things. Wojnicz squatted to examine them more closely—they were wretched little creatures with grayish Phrygian caps.
“For the liqueur,” said Opitz, without looking at him. “Schwärmerei.”
So that’s what it is, thought Wojnicz, and leaned over to join them.
“What are they called?”
“There are various names,” replied Opitz. “Spitzkegelige Kahlköpfe, our local sweet liberty caps,” he said, smiling, and for the first time Wojnicz saw his teeth, large and widely spaced.
Wojnicz was happy to join in this harvest, and soon they had filled every empty space in the baskets with these fragile oddities on their long, thin stalks, the jewels of the fungus world, delicate and very valuable as an ingredient in that illustrious drink. Wojnicz sat down on the soft moss without worrying about getting his trousers wet or dirty, and once again closely inspected these inconspicuous items. In comparison with the fat, sumptuous cèpes or the elegantly upholstered bay boletes, the little liberty caps looked quite insubstantial. Frail and brittle, they seemed to quake at the mere sound of human footsteps, and a careless grip could easily destroy their fragile little caps, no, they were more like hoods, the kind that are put on infants’ heads; even the freshest specimen was already damaged, its little hood going black from the bottom, as if aging were a special feature of this species. And yet once you grasped it by the stalk, you could feel its surprising elasticity, the resistance of matter that only appeared to be fragile and easily destroyed—yes, in it lay that strength of the weak, so common in nature, camouflaged and deceiving the senses. If not for this quality, the world would consist of nothing but strong, delicious, perfect specimens, nothing but the noblest cèpes.
With his less than agile fingers Opitz grabbed a mushroom below the cap and carefully pulled it from the ground, then placed it in the basket as if it were very precious. Wojnicz did his best to copy him. He asked how much liqueur this number of mushrooms would produce and how Schwärmerei was made, but Opitz was so engrossed in what he was doing that he gave only perfunctory answers, and Mieczysław learned nothing specific.
Once they had picked this beautiful glade clean, they went back into the forest and set off toward home—at least so it seemed to Wojnicz, who had lost his bearings. They walked downhill along the edge of a young spruce wood, passing on the right a lovely beech forest carpeted in bright green moss.
“Look over there,” said Raimund suddenly, in a strange, husky voice, and gave a cackle. “It’s over there. What a big one.”
Wojnicz did not immediately understand what he was referring to, and it took him a while to spot a worrying, strangely familiar shape on a small rise in the forest floor. They went closer—Raimund giggling the whole time—and then Mieczysław could make out that it was indeed a human shape. An unpleasant shiver ran through him, and he felt the alarm of seeing a fellow creature in danger.
