A Corpse with Folded Wings
I
Grandma Pech’s spirit doesn’t visit me. Nor do any other spirits. When I dream of the old house in the center of Wisła, it is always empty and lit. I walk through the swept courtyard, through the hallway, through the rooms. There isn’t anyone anywhere, but I hear someone’s steps ahead of me. I enter the kitchen, and sometimes someone is there. From time to time I see her. She sits at the enormous table covered with a sky blue oilcloth. On her head she has a carefully tied scarf with a pattern of black roses, on her shoulders a brown Silesian jacket. She sits at the table, but she is dressed as if she were going somewhere right away. Somewhere far. Not to Wojnar’s to go shopping, not even to the market. Somewhere far, and at an unusual time. In my dream, it is always a late hour. The majolica clock over the door to the hallway says that it is almost ten, and she is setting off somewhere. Someone is supposed to come for her. The gate is wide open, you can hear the rattle of a britzka crossing the bridge. The yellow light of the kitchen window makes a regular rectangle on the river stones of the courtyard.
Whenever we came late, and the gate was closed, we would look through the slits to see whether the light was on the stones. It usually was. It always was. We would knock on the window, or we would bang at the front. Grandpa Pech would come through the hallway and open the door. Suddenly the day, which was already over, gained extra hours. The evening, which was already almost night, became early evening. A fire burned anew under the cooled stove. Supper was long past, but we were just sitting down to supper. It was dark all over Wisła, but at our house the lights were on for a long time yet. I loved late arrivals and prolonged evenings — later on, it was never possible to outwit Time so easily.
For years now, the gate has been gone, as is the light on the river stones, the kitchen, the hearth, the table covered with the sky blue oilcloth. All are dead now, and their spirits do not come. They don’t come when I’m awake. They come in my dreams — but that is vanity. The dead came to Grandma Pech, both when she was asleep and awake, both day and night. Now there is complete stagnation — no one comes. Not she herself, or Father, or Uncle Ableger, or Janek Nikandy. They won’t come, although I focus like hell on them and on their other worlds. They don’t come, although I pray that they come. I summon them with biblical demagogy, and I even blaspheme against their memory in the desperate hope that, if in no other way, they would at least drop by to give us a little scare. But nothing. Neither hide nor hair. Is Warsaw too far away for them? A deadly joke, but I don’t cross people off the list for being dead.
Last evening the door bell rang. I was already certain that my old man had finally — exactly ten years after his death — made up his mind, and he was dropping by to pay a spectral visit. Nothing of the sort! The usual street fraud, claiming that supposedly her purse had been stolen and she didn’t have enough money to get home. Even a rather nice looking babe. I gave her five złotys. Not so much out of desire, as anger that it was she, and not the spirit of an ancestor. They don’t come. Although sooner or later someone will come. A destroyed city, an empty apartment, absolute twilight, complete solitude — ideal conditions for the dead. Eventually, they will come. At the worst, they will say of me that I went crazy.
Grandma Pech conversed with the dead. That’s an understatement. Well before someone died she often started to receive signs from the heavens. When Mila from Wierchy died, a half year earlier God struck the kitchen oven so forcefully that the pots almost fell. I was there. They were sitting at the table, drinking tea with rum, and suddenly it sounded like a stone quarry in the stove. They looked at each other for a fraction of a second and right away began to find thousands of reasons: wet coal was crackling in the hearth; a cast iron rib had cracked; the metal plate on one side had become completely bent; the badly positioned stove damper had fallen off; we have to throw away the old tea pot, because it’s going to pieces with a horrible bang; there’s something in the courtyard; something at the Nikandys’; something in the heavens.
But for that fraction of a second, as they looked at each other, they managed to ask themselves silently: Which one? Which one of them would soon die? They both knew the secret alphabets of death. The lot fell to Mila. She was a large, stout woman, and she had always had heart troubles. In half a year she would begin to feel sick. Not so very sick — she wouldn’t even lose consciousness — but still, sick enough that the ambulance would come, they would take her to the hospital, and basically no one knew what would come next. The kitchen was full of people, everyone was waiting for news, uncanny Pospiszil was calmly reckoning whether Mama — in my parts, to this day, men have the fatal habit of calling their wives “Mamas”—would return home for the holidays. Of course she would return, what do you mean for the holidays, what’s the date today? The tenth of December! What do you mean for the holidays! Mama will return well before the holidays! And even if! Even if, God forbid, there were some complications, because a person has to be prepared for everything, even so, they will certainly discharge her just in time for the holidays! They will discharge her for the holidays. They always discharge almost everybody for the holidays. How could this be: the holidays without Mama?
And here, for a good hour already, life without Mama had been going on. They couldn’t get through on the telephone from the hospital, what was the hurry with this news after all. Finally, Grandma will take the telephone call, and right away — despair, sudden lament, the first steps of the funeral dance. Mama has died! Mama has died! She was with us even yesterday, and today she is gone! Grandma will run in from the hallway, where the telephone on the wall, fastened to a special pedestal made of black metal, was now like an altar of evil. She will glide with a quick but at the same time solemn step, she will rush to uncanny Pospiszil, grasp him by the head, embrace him, and shout like in the circus: Mama has died! Mama has died!
The sudden expressions of despair were the most difficult to understand. After all, she well knew at whom the shot under the kitchen stove had been aimed. So what shock are we talking about? What surprise? She knew that it was about Mila, not about her.
This didn’t happen in my sleep. It was in the early morning of a certain winter day. All of Wisła was buried in snow up to the rooftops, and it must have been twenty below zero. Somebody was sitting then on the round stool at the sewing machine. She had recently gotten up, was walking about the room and braiding the plait that she never cut, and she wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t ashamed, because she sensed that that someone could be a messanger — frozen, dusty, dead tired, but from over there. Perhaps even the same one who once had visited Abraham, or the one who had dissuaded Joseph from leaving Mary, or the one we sang about in the Christmas caroclass="underline" “On earth are the earthly, in heaven, the angels.” You couldn’t see his wings, but it all fit. Can you see birds’ wings when they sit on branches? Has anyone ever seen a sparrow sitting with its wings spread? Or a titmouse? Or a blackbird? Birds spread their wings in flight; it must be the same with angels. True, on the lithograph that was hanging over the bed you could see the spread wings growing out of the angel’s back, but every time she looked at that picture, the thought came to her that the picture was painted nicely, but that the painter had probably never seen even a partridge in the grass, to say nothing of an angel. The one who was sitting on the round stool at the sewing machine must have had his wings folded. An angel with folded wings. A strange expression, but she liked it a lot. And he had just said — the stranger with the folded wings — that she would still, for many years, see signs and hear voices. It flitted through her mind to ask about Gustaw. Just how was he doing? Had his cracked skull grown back together? Did he remember her? But she let it go, since this might displease him. She has been with her second husband for a long time now, three children with him, grandchildren, and there she goes asking about the other one. God didn’t take him so that she could long for him. She didn’t ask.