In any case, it soon turned out that she was making bizarre faces the whole time, that, for the entire length of her walks, she fought back spasmodic laughter, weeping, coughs. Contrary to appearances, this mitigated the terror — it is always better when someone has some sort of permanent attack, and not only at our sight.
The most bizarre were her dresses, inappropriate for either the time of day or the season of the year. Some sort of sophisticated creations with long sleeves, made of heavy materials like brocade, mandarin collars under the neck, lace collars, some sort of gigantic embroideries, cream-colored on green, orange on dark blue — by that time, even then, nobody dressed like that, not for any occasion. Today, I think that Janek Nikandy — always in black pants and always in a white shirt — suited her perfectly.
II
He played soccer as if he were composing music to accompany his runs along the length of the field, to accompany the smell of the grass, the ball darkening from the dampness, always falling upon his foot as if from heaven. He swam in the deepest part of the river as if he were composing music to accompany swimming in the deepest part. He collected stamps as if he were composing music to accompany stamp collecting. He read everything he came upon, as if he heard song in everything that had been written. He would raise a mug of beer, throw back his head, and drink, just as the greatest composers in the world must have drunk.
He examined the girls at the swimming pool, and it was clear that he knew everything about them. We set our sights on the middling ones, he scorned even the best. He was waiting for the most beautiful one among the most beautiful; but even she couldn’t be certain that she would be accepted. This didn’t surprise anyone. It was clear to everyone that Janek could have any woman in the world at any moment, that he would go far: that he would complete the entire blacksmith’s training course in a year, two at most; that he would then, likewise in a flash, complete a few majors, go abroad, go through Oxford, Harvard, fly into the cosmos, win the Chopin competition, be the first Pole to buy Real Madrid, discover new stars, construct an everlasting battery for a flashlight, discover a vaccination for cancer, or do other miracles.
Janek had everything: stacks of books in the attic; collections of incredible objects in the drawers; a one-eyed father who forbade him nothing; a mother as beautiful as an Egyptian priestess; two unbearable sisters; three dissolute brothers, who could fix anything; a mentally ill grandmother, who never left her room; and a grandfather, who had been dying for years, and who barely spoke Polish. Supposedly before one of the old wars he had had a different name and had been a famous Viennese tailor. It is uncertain whether Robert Musil had his suits sewn by him, whether Hermann Broch had his pants shortened, but it is possible.
III
The Nikandys didn’t go to church, they held their religious services at home. The entire family sat at the table every day, the one-eyed father read from the Bible, prayed with concentration, then he spoke about the presence of God in our lives and about various spirits, mostly about the Spirit of Light and the Spirit of Darkness.
I feared the God of the Nikandys — He was too near. The Spirit of Light would show himself and disappear, the Spirit of Darkness lurked in every corner. In our Church, God was at a safe distance, and there weren’t any spirits at all.
But much worse than the Spirit of Light, than the Spirit of Darkness, than all the other spirits known to Janek, was the Spirit of Miraculous Discoveries. I think he kept it under his collar, I think it sat on his shoulder and whispered where he should look. Janek happened upon everything. I would be walking next to him on the banks of the same river, treading the same earth, but it was he who would bend down and pick up parts of Stalin-era motorbikes, feathers from Caribbean birds, cogwheels on quartz pivots, silver keys to God knows what safes. It was he who would pull out from the bottom of the deepest part of the river washed out dials from submerged clocks, fish skeletons coated with phosphorus, stones as symmetrical as octagons, brittle teacups without a single crack, bracelets of thick glass shining like green stars, Austrian, German, Russian, and even Swiss coins. I came upon nothing but unremarkable things: a tin cup, a smashed thermos, a penknife covered with rust, a fork with the inscription “Silesian Gastronomy.” Nothing worth talking about.
You could beat him at soccer sometimes, especially when he had too many bush leaguers on his team. I swam almost as well as he did. I had the same sort of household, maybe even a gaudier mixture. I was definitely better at chess — except that this remained somewhat in the realm of theory, since, once he realized that he couldn’t beat me, he ceased playing entirely. In any event, I had no complexes, I didn’t suffer. I was in his shadow, but I rather admired than envied him. The harmony full of perfect lights that he had within him aroused my adoration, not my envy.
But whenever he found the next remarkable object, whenever he would bend down, and, the next time, pull out, literally from under my shoe, the moveable fragment of some sort of phenomenal mechanism, or the brass buckle from a Red Army belt, or a retort overgrown with moss, which a group of wandering alchemists must have lost on this spot centuries ago — then I hated him with all my heart. There was an abyss between us in the art of observation: he was a master, I an abject loser. I always lost that match and always by a score of something to zero. I lost for a time. Not so much until the time of my desired victory as until the time of the final disaster. Until the time of the disaster of disasters.
Janek would receive his discoveries with manly self-restraint: no leaps or euphoria — it was just the norm; and, in fact, it was the norm that he always found something. But one day, when we had traversed the length and breadth of Wisła in pursuit of the vacationer in brocade dresses; once we had accompanied her practically to the very doors of Villa Almira and then run back down and descended, next to the swimming pool, to the water of the river, warm after the sultry day, and we set off along its twists and turns toward the reddish-brown sky over Czantoria Mountain, and when, under the third bridge, Janek bent down and dug something up from the river’s stone chippings — this time even he shouted, even he lifted his arms in victory. He held something very nondescript in his hand and waved it feverishly in my direction. I was in no hurry to celebrate his most recent triumph. I pretended that the water was offering greater resistance than it did. I approached slowly, but still — even when I was already quite near — I couldn’t recognize what he had come upon this time. Finally, seeing that I still didn’t get it, he put the thing to his eyes, and I understood that this was a pair of binoculars left behind by the Germans, similar to a fossilized crab, overgrown with gravel and algae. (And anyway, the number of binoculars left during the war by the retreating Wehrmacht is shocking. Sometimes it is impossible not to think that our earth, saturated with the blood of heroes and filled with the ashes of martyrs, is also overgrown with the lenses of Carl Zeiss.)