V
The photo from the second wedding party hangs lower, it is much clearer, and I look at it much more often. There are significantly fewer guests, not even twenty. Grandma Pech is again wearing Silesian dress, Mila again sits on her left with uncanny Pospiszil. They look exactly the same as in the first photo. The strangest of all is the fact that the elder Brannys also look exactly the same. At the wedding party of their son, they look exactly like they do at the wedding party of their widowed daughter-in-law. No change in facial expressions. Between the first and the second photograph, they had lost their first-born son. Now a woman, a stranger to them, who had been his wife, is marrying a postal official, to whom she would bear children under their roof, but you can’t see any of this in their faces. Perhaps because they are just as gloomy at the first wedding party as at the second.
Heavenly musicians play and angelic choirs sing for the groom. He listens to them, dressed in a tailcoat with silk facing. He has crossed his legs in a worldly manner, his shoulder touches Zuzanna’s shoulder, no further miracles are necessary. But in order to honor that miracle, he had Master Potulnik sew him a tailcoat. And he looks out of this world in it. There is no darkness in the background, nor are there evil signs. One dark window foretells how much misfortune is allotted to each.
The background is a white wall, behind which an ocean of objects reaches as high as my shoulders. Piles of prewar newspapers will be like lighthouses, decaying dresses and jackets like shifting sand dunes. Chowderhead the cat will go carefully along the treacherous bank, over which I will fish out from the depths occult novels and forbidden romances. In the middle, snatched up by a vortex, a golden trumpet — which came from who knows where the day after the festivities — circles in a pillar of sunlight. There I would find wooden heads from a puppet theater; there, one day, would come to the surface the skeleton of a leviathan completely plastered with fantastic account books; there I would come upon the menu from Roth’s tavern.
Diving in there took courage, but once you got down below, once you passed the shoal of Austrian coins, the keys to long-forgotten doors, spare parts for all the mechanisms in the world, once you had gone through the darknesses, and finally through the thickest layers strewn with mothballs, as low as possible — then you could see the white outlines of a sunken city: the ruins of marble counter tops, a gigantic scale, an amazing tree stump, an incredible ax, hooks bared and incomplete like the fangs of a mammoth. Even today, it is with the greatest difficulty that I realize that my Atlantis was a prewar butcher shop. Business was still booming during the war. No one ever spoke about it, but supposedly things were going well, even very well. The Germans had taken Roth and his entire family. There was less competition.
The last clients were soldiers of the Red Army. They rode down into Wisła through the Kubalonka Pass, just like the Wehrmacht, except that they came on horses. Grandpa Pech used to say that they had been fortunate enough to get an exceptionally honorable unit. They wanted to pay for everything, but they didn’t have any money. And you could see that they were hungry: at the very sight — at the very scent — of sausage they started shaking. No wonder — come war, come occupation, we always had sausage. One had a Turkmen kilim or a Kyrgyz carpet strapped to his saddle, or perhaps a Persian rug, in any case an amazing fabric in a pagan design. But it was out of the question, he wouldn’t give it up. He jabbers something feverishly, you could guess that he wants to get to Berlin with it, but probably not in order to hoist a colorful banner on the Brandenburg Gate, rather in order to return from Berlin with this treasure to Alma Ata, or God knows where. It was out of the question, he wouldn’t give it up, he wouldn’t give it up for any sausage. He wouldn’t give it up for anything. Not for anything in the world. Grandpa went off to his hiding place and returns with two quart bottles of moonshine. The moonshine has the same color as Mila’s prewar pepper vodka. The comparison means nothing to the stubborn Bolshevik, and he continues to shake his head no, although no longer with the same conviction. But his buddies, unusually honorable Soviet soldaty, were in favor of the transaction. They attacked him furiously. It was as if the horses had caught the smell, they began to snort. Finally, the kamandir himself issued a prikaz: let there be a strengthening in Polish-Soviet trade relations. And so there was. They each got a ring of sausage all the same. They ate, they drank, and off they went. And the marble countertops, tree stump, scales, hooks, and gigantic ax slowly began to sink to the bottom.
VI
The older Brannys, one after the other — it was still during the German occupation — died of distress, in other words, a natural death. “Mother supposedly heard that there was a knock, once, twice. I didn’t hear anything,” Grandpa Pech’s blood didn’t yet boil on account of the signs that were constantly coming to Mother, but he was already jealous of them. In accepting the fact that one amazing miracle had occurred in his life, and not expecting any further miracles, not even small ones, he had probably committed an error. He didn’t lose faith in God, but it is not so much faith as life itself — if it is not strengthened by signs — that weakens. “I don’t need any divine rumblings. Mother hears all the rumbling of this world and the next for me,” he repeated with with a sneer, although in the word “Mother” there was the least amount of sneering. Liberated from the majority of the local customs, he was liberated from the dreadfully suicidal constant “Mother-ing” only by his intonation, but in my Lutheran parts even that is quite a lot.
They had four children, one died. Depraved by her excessive caresses, the boy from the first marriage had barely finished school when he ran away from home and vanished like a stone in water. Mother must think about him from time to time. She doesn’t let on, but she thinks. How is he faring? What is he doing? Is he even alive? He must be, because if he had died, she would have heard a sign. A knocking. Usually at the window. The deceased mainly knock on the kitchen window. Old Lady Mary — three clear knocks on the pane. Uncle Paweł—the same thing. Old Man Trzmielowski — six strokes, precisely half a year before he died. Master Sztwiertnia — a clatter in the hallway. Adam Czyż—a clatter in the attic. One-eyed Mr. Nikandy — again on the pane. Pastor Morowy — a lightning bolt over the cemetery. Bandmaster Jan Potulnik — a knock on the wall. Sister Ewelina — on the ceiling. Ferdynand Pustówka — on the table. Uncle Ableger — for a very long time on the window pane. Emma Lunatyczka — lightly on the window sill. Wolfgang Kleist — a racket in the pantry.