“Do you have that address? When are we supposed to go there? To Katowice? Right?”
Janek remained silent; out of the corner of my eye I noticed the quick motion of his hand and a scrap of paper flying over the railing.
“Let it sail to the seas and the oceans?” I made sure I was understanding what he had done.
“Sail to all the seas of the world. To the Black Sea, the Yellow Sea, the White Sea, and the Red Sea,” he pronounced the colors like incantations.
Suddenly I felt an incomprehensible feeling of relief. It was as if a warm, Caribbean sea current had passed over me from head to foot. Nothing bad had happened, my God! The world was now missing one object — granted, it was exceptional — but what of it? Nothing! My God, that is nothing! It wasn’t certain whether Grandma would even notice the loss, whether she would ever look into the box where the binoculars were kept. She looks into the wardrobe in the back room two, three times a year, but into the box? When? I knew when. When a comet appears over Czantoria Mountain, or when the Big Dipper flies to pieces in the heavens. When would that be? Perhaps in twenty years, and perhaps never. Not only Grandma, not only we, but perhaps not even anyone in the whole world would live to see the next comet fly across the sky like a red-hot bulldozer.
“Did you fuck her?” I asked, when we were saying goodbye in front of our houses, and the question itself was proof of what soaring euphoria had seized me, and what mad boldness. I knew perfectly well that my friend couldn’t stand intimate questions. “Did you fuck her?”
“I didn’t feel like it,” Janek Nikandy replied, and he disappeared behind the gate to the dark gardens surrounding our houses.
VI
Last night, after several decades, I again dreamed of the butterfly blizzard. Back then they were yellow, today’s were white; this time my daughter Magda was with me in the dream, she held my hand, and I think she was coming to my rescue, because the number of butterflies was increasing, and they slowly began to suffocate me, but, all the same, it looked like it was going to be a beautiful death. All the more beautiful in that, just before dawn, in a flash of half-consciousness, it suddenly occurred to me that I am someone who understands the terrible randomness of the world. I suddenly saw that the world is a great field full of asymmetrically laid out campfires; you have to go incessantly from fire to fire; extinguish and kindle; go through the darkness, go through the light; someone tells of dangerous charges that could explode any moment. Suddenly it dawned on me that I knew how to write about — and how to take account of — the randomness, because other than that, there is nothing; how to show the campfires and the paths between them, and how to remember about the force of the charges planted everywhere, and how to liberate oneself from life for the sake of the spasm of love. I awoke slowly. The entire irrefutable transparency of the argument was vanishing. Grandma Pech was standing over my bed and saying something. She was repeating a sentence over and over that, at first, was completely indistinct, but then became more and more distinct. She said something, asked about something. It was almost half a century ago when I awoke for good, got dressed, traipsed into the kitchen. Nobody was there. I was tempted to run right over to Janek’s place without breakfast, but my hunger was stronger, and in those days the preparation of scrambled eggs didn’t drive me into such an abysmal depression as it does now. I got a frying pan covered with an eternal layer of grease from the pantry. I began to consider whether I would eat seven, or only five eggs. Grandma Pech was walking across the fieldstone-paved courtyard. Two steps behind her, Janek. Suddenly both of them — as if they were back in my dream — appeared in the kitchen.
“I wonder whatever could have happened to those binoculars?” Grandma asked in an amazingly cheerful tone.
“They fell into the river on us and got wrecked. Completely wrecked… It took us a long time to find them.” Janek produced the binoculars we had found under the bridge from inside his jacket, and at first he made a motion as if he wished to place them on the table, but then, with sudden desperation, he handed his greatest treasure to Grandma. Everything fell into place. I had stolen out of love for him, he was giving up his treasure out of love for me. Everything fell into place. Everything except for Grandma Pech’s reaction. She turned the old German ruin over in her fingers, and it was absolutely impossible that she would be taken in, that she would believe that this wreck, which had been lying in the water close to twenty years, had once belonged to Gustaw. This was completely out of the question, she was infallible in much more difficult matters, she infallibly recognized much more difficult objects, she couldn’t be taken in by such crude frauds. And yet. And yet, without a single word, or perhaps even with an almost inaudible sigh of relief, she turned on her heels and moved off into the depths of the house, and after a moment there reverberated the sound of the doors to the back room being opened and closed.
VII
After we moved to Krakow, I lost contact with Janek, and the bits of news about him that reached us were most strange. Supposedly, he didn’t study at all before his entrance exam to the blacksmiths’ technical college. This, in itself, wasn’t so strange. Janek generally knew everything even without studying, or he would catch up in a flash at the last minute — but this time he even let the “last minute” slide. The whole night before the exam, he sat in the attic and read old Cross Sections. It was incredibly stuffy; not even the night, not even the air over the gardens, which were going to seed, was cooler. In the morning, he went to take the exam, pale and as if in a fever, and — in short — he didn’t pass. Janek Nikandy didn’t get into the Blacksmiths’ Technical College in Ustroń! A gigantic sensation, perhaps even cosmic, but, finally, transitory, justifiable on account of health problems, although — to be honest — even confined to his bed he ought to beat all the healthy ones hands down. But after all, there’s luck in leisure. Everyone knew that he would pass the exam in a year, wherever he felt like it, and that he would make up for the year of delay whenever he felt like it. Except that in a year he didn’t take the exam anywhere, and he didn’t make up for any lost time, nor did he intend to make up for it. It was then I saw him for the last time in my life. We got off the Krakow train; there was a fantastic, rust-colored sunset, Janek stood on the platform. At first I thought he was waiting for someone, that perhaps by some miracle he had found out when I would be arriving with my folks, and that he had come out to the station. But he wasn’t waiting for me, or for anyone. He stood on the platform, and he was looking at the train that was just about to set off further toward Głębce. What’s new? Nothing. Playing soccer? No. Nothing — a russet sky over Czantoria Mountain.
Supposedly, a year later, maybe two, he began to study the Bible under the tutelage of one-eyed Mr. Nikandy, and it was announced that he would study theology and become a pastor in their Church. But before they managed to go into the details of the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, Mrs. Nikandy, as beautiful as an Italian actress, fled the house with a certain wandering preacher, who was lacking any principles whatsoever, and both father and son lost, for some time, their zeal for studying the Bible. Some time—as it often happens — became time eternal. One-eyed Mr. Nikandy died of a heart attack less than a year later. After some time, Janek got a professional driver’s license, and he became a driver in a quarry. He drank. He had an accident in which someone died. He landed in prison for a few years. When he got out he didn’t really have any place to go; his sisters had found husbands, his brothers wives, and harboring a criminal under their roofs wasn’t to their liking. He wandered a bit here and there. Then he disappeared. Supposedly he moved to Silesia, supposedly he found work there and married a woman who was much older. Supposedly as long as she was alive, things were OK. But when she died — a total decline. The last two years spent in rats’ nests, under a sky of denatured spirits, over reptilian sewers. Basically, I don’t even know whether he froze on the street that year, or the carbon monoxide in a makeshift mine shaft suffocated him. People say various things.