“This is true love. When I grow up, I’m going to marry her.”
“Jerzyk, first she would have to divorce her husband.”
“She will do it,” I said with absolutely charming certainty.
Elżunia giggled, but almost immediately her slightly asymmetrical features, ones that foretold incredible beauty, went into disarray. At that time, I didn’t yet know that speaking with a woman with whom you are not in love about another woman with whom you are in love is a deadly transgression, but I remembered the expression on Elżunia Baptystka’s face forever. It was not an expression of despair, or pain, or even of distaste. It was an expression of slowly mastered vulnerability. It was the look of the helpless woman who is trying to come to terms with male thoughtlessness, since there is nothing else to be done. Elżunia Baptystka got the better of my thoughtlessness and said:
“Before she divorces her husband for you, before you grow up, at least visit her. When you go to Warsaw in November with your father and Mr. Trąba to kill Gomułka, drop by and see her, while you have the opportunity.”
She looked me in the eyes and added:
“You’re very amorous, Jerzyk. Grow up as quickly as possible. Amorousness combined with erotic illiteracy is a deadly combination.”
I was certain that she would say something about the Pastor’s Wife just then. I was so irrefutably certain of it that I was feverishly working on a ruthless and brutal answer that would strike her to the quick, but Elżunia pointed to the edge of the glade and said:
“There they are, Jerzyk. They have returned, because they can’t live without you.”
As narrators of old used to say, I rubbed my eyes in amazement. At the edge of the forest, on the outskirts of the glade, on the border between radiance and darkness — there stood the morphinistes. They had lightened their hair and let it grow out. They were not wrestling with their Babylonian blanket. They had thrown broad men’s jackets made of quilted nylon over their shoulders. They were thus, especially to my unskilled eye, changed beyond recognition. But there they were.
“Yes, it’s them,” Elżunia Baptystka dispersed the shadows of my doubts, “it’s them, the morphinistes, otherwise known as Anka and Danka. Of course they aren’t morphine addicts. They are psychology students, and shortly they’ll begin to write their master’s theses. One of them will write about the psychology of a woman who is waiting for a man, and the other about the psychology of a man who is waiting for a woman. Run to them as fast as you can, my sweet lover boy.”
I had the irresistible urge to do so, but something beyond the sensory realm told me that if I set off in an ecstatic rush, I would make an utter fool of myself in front of Elżunia. I had all the greater urge for that mad, welcoming rush, since everyone had noticed them now, and everyone (strictly speaking — all the men) was already running in their direction. Even Father, even Father ran nimbly through the high, dark-blue grass. Or if he wasn’t running, he was walking with a very hurried step. Mother, the Pastor’s Wife, and Małgosia Snyperek stood up from their places and observed the welcoming ovations with gloomy faces, but I took Elżunia by the hand, and, with a dim presentiment that occupying the last place in the popular game of appearances wasn’t a bad thing, I said:
“Come on, Elżunia, let’s go greet them.”
She looked at me with a suddenly brightened gaze and whispered:
“Well, you learn quickly. That’s comforting.”
•
We embraced them, kneeled before them, squeezed their divine hands. They were beautiful. In their faces, slimmer now and flogged by Lutheran winds, there wasn’t a trace of the old defects. They were beautiful, but oddly abashed. They kept looking around, whispering something, exchanging knowing glances, behaving as if they were waiting for something or someone. And indeed, when, after a short while — so short that no form of their further being had had time to emerge after the chaotic greeting — male choral singing resounded in the nearby thickets, they smiled with obvious relief.
“Our boyfriends,” said one of them.
“Our Czech boyfriends are drawing near and singing,” added the other.
The singing became louder and louder, the words of the songs more and more distinct: “Yesterday I was at the dance, at the dance all day,” the invisible Czech boyfriends of the morphinistes sang, and when they became visible, it didn’t surprise any of us that there were five of them; five choristers, handsome as Czech hockey players, came out into the glade and sang: “My blue-eyed girl, I didn’t grind, I didn’t grind, the water took our mill;” then they sang “To a Circle, a Circle” and “Slavonice Polka.” They sang beautifully and sonorously in five beautiful and sonorous voices, and they didn’t interrupt their singing of the old Czech songs for even a moment. They sang “Beer Barrel Polka” and “Wedding Ring” and “Treacherous Hošíček.” We invited them to join us at the table. Grand Master Swaczyna delivered a welcome address that was filled with heartfelt internationalism, and the inspired singers, dressed in dark-green track suits, walked across the meadow and sang: “Shepherdess Annie, You Don’t Have a Fiddle at Home” and “My Charlie,” and they sat down at the table and sang “We Won’t Get Up in the Morning on Time” and “The Time has Long Passed.” And then they sang, “Where beer is brewed, there we prosper. Where beer is drunk, there we thrive. Let us go there and drink” until the foggy autumn dawn, and our unending dialogue about killing was conducted throughout that sweltering and holy night to the lively accompaniment of their singing. “I planted a convally, but a lily grew.”
•
Father Pastor Potraffke raised up his arms and said, or rather, shouting over the singing Czechs who were deaf to everything but their own song, he cried out:
“It was as it was, but one always somehow muddled through; but for us Protestants it was sometimes neither the one way nor the other. More precisely, it often is neither the one way or the other for us. On the one hand, in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, we find the pertinent commentary concerning absolute civic obedience toward the higher authority. On the other hand, it isn’t true that Protestants haven’t ever taken part in assassinations. .”
“The Apostle Paul writes about authority that comes from God. If Gomułka’s authority comes from God, I fear I’ll lose my faith,” said Sexton Messerschmidt acidly.
“In the first place, the apostle says that every authority comes from God,” Father Pastor Potraffke interrupted him, and with a gesture of his hand he quieted the polemicists who were ready with immediate ripostes. “I agree. I agree, that it is doubtless a matter here of true authority, and that the false, usurpatory authority of the brother Communists does not come from God. But the Fifth Commandment, brothers and sisters, does come from God, and there are no exceptions to it.”
“Maybe you don’t make any exceptions, but we do. This is the basis of our superiority over you. The Catholic Church is the Church of elastic intellectuals, and your Lutheran Church is the Church of dogmatic doctrinalists,” Station Master Ujejski smiled venomously.
“People, hold me back, or I’ll have to remind him of the Second Schmalkaldic War,” cried out Sexton Messerschmidt.
“He who lacks arguments resorts to fisticuffs,” said Station Master Ujejski in a voice that vibrated with rage, though it was still rather calm. After a moment, however, fury took possession of him entirely. He leaned out in the direction of the Sexton and began to hiss hatefully: “The Battle of White Mountain didn’t teach you a thing, it didn’t teach you a thing! St. Bartholomew’s Night didn’t teach you a thing. .”