Little by little there wouldn’t be a single square inch in the house where some deceased person hadn’t rapped. Thank God the Communists are in power, and there is peace and no turmoil, because if it were a time of war, pestilence, or earthquake, then all the dead people that Mother knew would have torn the house down with their knocking alone. Even the baby, who died a couple days old, managed to stop the clock after its death. Her other three children throve. One son became a lawyer, the other a fitter, the girl a doctor. But they made tragic marriages. One to a spineless sataness, the other to a woman with no mind, the son-in-law in Krakow joined the Party.
They all always gathered for the holidays, but the true time of joy, of rejoicing, would arise when they departed. Finally you could hear the ticking of the clocks. All five. One in the ice house, one in the back room, one in the entrance, one in the kitchen, and also the cuckoo clock in the hallway. An ambition, unclear at first, that all of them strike simultaneously gradually turned into a maniacal obsession. He would grab the round stool standing next to the sewing machine, holding it like a four-legged pike set upright, carry it before him, place it forcefully under one clock after the other, climb up to the high mechanisms — not without quiet curses — and work for hours on their coordination. It often seemed that Grandpa Pech, standing on the stool, had become paralyzed, his arms stretched out to each subsequent clock face, and that he would remain in that pose for the ages. And, in fact, he did spend whole ages minding the clock hands and listening to the ticking, and he would freeze in the hope that all the bells would ring out in unison at last, and he never managed it.
Sometimes, on a dark winter night, he would wake up and, numb with hope and fear, he would await the coming hour. When he heard five or six tolls it was all the worse, because it was time to get up right away. But when the eternally unsynchronized clocks rang two o’clock, or best of all midnight, he didn’t fault them for their irregularity. Sometimes even a shiver of delight would come over him: so much more time for sleeping until morning.
The five regularly wound clocks were like the breathing of the house. The dreadful offspring with their dreadful spouses and their even more dreadful progeny would depart after the holidays. The house became deserted and deadened, but it recovered its circulation, the mechanical hearts began to beat, the ticking crickets hidden in the corners regained their vigor, and that was good.
Icy, black January arrived, after that an even icier and blacker February. He would get up with Mother in the darkness, light the fire under the kitchen stove, put on his postal clerk’s jacket, tie the cornflower blue tie of the Postal Chief, eat breakfast, and walk slowly through the gray center of town to the office. He would return for lunch, Mother would serve a thick and almost brown chicken broth with noodles, he would eat, then lie down for a bit, close his eyes, listen to the absolutely undisturbed five-fold ticking. Today I think that he also kept watch over the clocks so that their brittle, earthly ticking might stand up to the unearthly rattlings.
March was brighter. Whenever they had to go anywhere a bit further away, Fuks would now be harnessed to the cart, not the sleigh. In April, they stopped heating the rooms, even the coldest air was lined with the scent of the grasses’ stormy onset, larks began to appear over Partecznik. By the beginning of May, summer uniforms were the rule at the post office, the winter ones landed in storage. The underwater city was covered with successive layers of postal uniforms. In June, heat waves smelling of hay burst forth, the first female vacationers were sunbathing on the river bank. In July, carters brought coal for the winter, and wood was cut; then came the rains and the floods. In August, the air in the kitchen became as thick as quince syrup; Mila would come and help Mother with the compotes, pickles, and plum jams. In September, there were occasional blades of grass whitened by the first light frosts. In October, the smoke that backed up from the cold stoves filled the house like tear gas.
His birthday was on the twenty-seventh of November. The postal workers would take up their seats at the table. Mother served everything she had — chicken broth, cutlets, potato pancakes. A gallon jar of marinated mushrooms went from hand to hand and seemed to diminish like a rapidly melting, huge, red-brown candle. For his fiftieth they gave him a tableau beautifully executed by an artist from Ustroń. Gold letters proclaimed the glory of Mr. Chief, inserted among which, wrapped in gleaming ribbons, were the photos of all the female clerks and the postmen, then he himself in the middle, suitably enlarged. All of it in a cherry wood frame, which on the next day came to hang next to the likeness of the Guardian Angel in the back room.
How many Novembers have passed since that time? Ten? More than ten, because at his sixtieth he still saw very well, glaucoma wasn’t yet blinding him, and Mother was also still in good form. Her legs hurt, and a sore under her knee just wouldn’t heal, but she was still in good form. They didn’t put on birthday parties any more, because they didn’t have the energy for such things, and their pension wasn’t enough for it, but they were still in good form. So more than ten Novembers have passed. Fourteen, maybe fifteen.
When December came, Mother would always turn the house upside down in preparation for the holidays, but this time she turned it upside down and back again, a hundred times over. She must have done it to spite him — after all, they were supposed to go to their daughter’s for Christmas Eve. “Woman, verily I say unto thee: cease thy labor”—whenever he got boiling mad, the language of the Bible would take possession of him. The greater his fury, the more solemn the rhetoric. In the depth of his heart, Christmas Eve at their daughter’s suited him even less than it suited Mother, but of what significance is the depth of one’s heart? In the depth of his heart, even the son-in-law who had joined the Party was pious.
In the new house, which he had built at the foot of Jarzębata Mountain, there was enough room to put up eight Christmas Eve tables and eight Christmas trees. You could have Christmas Eve in the dining room, Christmas Eve in the hearth room, Christmas Eve in the salon downstairs, you could have Christmas Eve everywhere. And there was half — and maybe even an eighth — of the work with the cooking and the baking, because there were also eight burners and ovens in the kitchen, and maybe eighty-eight. And you don’t have to wash the dishes, because there is a machine that washes them for you. They have amazing things there: all the furniture in the world, even a rocking chair.
“You two take a rest, have real holidays for once in your lives, I’ll take care of everything,” their daughter practically choked with joy at the prospect of the first Christmas Eve in the new house. Everything she said was indisputable, and yet you had the impression that she was talking nonsense — the nature of the world is unfathomable. Please yourself. Peace be to this house. You can have a chair that rocks, a machine that washes dishes, verily I say unto you: you can even have, brothers and sisters, a toilet that will wipe your rear for you. But they agreed, because how could they not agree. Before long, they would be sitting at the Christmas Eve table by themselves.
So Mother got down to resting. She began to rest with a vengeance. Every year it was a horror from morning to night: cleaning, sweeping, putting things in order, but now it seemed that she would jump out of her skin. She scrubbed the runners and the rugs on both sides. She totally emptied all the wardrobes, and she laundered every blouse, skirt, shirt. The same thing with the sideboard: she washed and polished sets of silver that hadn’t been used since the war, she lined shelves with parchment paper, she brought every knife, every fork, every spoon to a jeweler’s sheen. She wiped the hobs on the kitchen stove with an emery cloth. She went through the attic. She almost tackled the store, which is practically impossible to enter by now. She almost set out upon the impassable ocean of objects. Luckily, she gave up. But now she scrubbed every lamp — not just every lamp — she unscrewed and scrubbed every bulb from every lamp. She washed the walls, which were covered with oil paint. She dug out from under the benches old ugly shoes that no one would ever again put on a foot, and she gave them a good shine. It isn’t worth talking about waxing the floors, washing the windows, laundering the drapes and the curtains, that was a constant — now, it goes without saying, the variants increased infinitely. His blood boiled, he did his best to restrain her, but she didn’t respond. After one of the times, when, on the verge of apoplexy, he roared for the hundredth time—“Woman, verily I say unto thee: cease thy labor!”—she raised her head and said with a colorless, tired voice: “A person has lost everything in life, and now even the holidays are gone.”