It had worked—I returned in triumph, exhilarated and sure of myself, but also curiously perturbed by that to me incomprehensible giggling and narrowing of the eyes.
“You know what?”
I said on the playground.
“I’m also a wild one, a rogue, a little Pole; it’s a pity you couldn’t have watched me yesterday in the park, or you’d have seen a thing or two ...”
And I told them everything.
“Moron!”
they said, but for the first time they listened to me with interest.
Then one of them shouted: “A frog!”
“Where?
What?
Smash the frog!”
They all rushed off, and I followed them.
We set about lashing it with sticks till it died.
In a fever of excitement, proud that I had been admitted to their most exclusive pastimes and seeing in this the beginning of a new era in my life:—“You know what!”
I exclaimed.—“There’s a swallow too.
A swallow’s gotten into the classroom and it’s banging against the windows—just wait a minute ...”
I brought the swallow and, to stop it flying away, I broke its wing, and then picked up my stick.
Meanwhile everyone had gathered round.
“The poor thing,” they said, “the poor little bird; give it some bread and milk.”
And when they saw me raising my stick, my classmate Pawelski narrowed his eyes till his cheekbones stood out distinctly and smacked me painfully in the mug.
“He got it in the mug!”
they shouted.
“You’ve got no honor,
Czarniecki, don’t let him, fight back, smack him in the mug.”—
“How can I?”
I replied.
“I’m the weaker one.
If I try to fight back I’ll get smacked again and I’ll be doubly humiliated.”—Then they all descended on me and beat me up, showering me with mockery and malicious taunts.
Love!
What bewitching, incomprehensible absurdity—pinching, squeezing, even snatching in an embrace—how much it contains!
Bah!
Today I know what to hold onto; I see here the secret affinity with war, because in war too the purpose is in fact to pinch, to squeeze, or to seize in an embrace; but at that time I was not yet one of life’s bankrupts—quite the opposite, I was full of goodwill.
To love?
I can say boldly that I was drawn to love because I hoped in this way to break through the wall of the mystery; and with enthusiasm and faith I bore all the eccentricities of this most bizarre of emotions in the hope that I would nevertheless eventually understand what it was all about.—“I desire you!”—I would say to my beloved.
She would fob me off with generalizations.
“You’re nothing but a nothing, Mr.
Czarniecki!”
she would say enigmatically, staring into my countenance.
“A daddy’s little pet, a mama’s boy!”
I shuddered: a mama’s boy?
What did she mean by that?
Could she have guessed ...
because I myself had already guessed to some extent.
I had understood that if my father was well-bred to the marrow of his bones—my mother was also well-bred, but in a different sense, in the Semitic sense.
What had inclined my father, that impoverished aristocrat, to marry my mother, the daughter of a rich banker?
I now understood his anxious looks as he inspected my features, and the nocturnal excursions of this man who, going
to waste in his abominable symbiosis with my mother, was following the higher dictates of the species in seeking to pass on his race to worthier loins.
I understood?
In truth I did not understand, and here once again there rose the bewitching wall of the mystery—I knew in theory, but I personally felt no aversion toward either my mother or my father; I was a devoted son.
And today too I do not entirely comprehend; not knowing the theory, I do not know the color of a rat born of a black male and a white female; I imagine only that I constitituted an exceptional case, an unheard-of instance, namely, that the antagonistic races of my parents, being of precisely the same strength, were so perfectly neutralized in me that I was a rat without color, without hue!
A neutral rat!
This is my fate, this is my mystery, this is why I was always unsuccessful and, taking part in everything, I was unable to take part in anything.
And it was for this reason I was overcome by unease at the sound of the phrase: mama’s boy—the more so because it was accompanied by the slight lowering of the eyelids by which I had been burned a number of times already in life.
“A man,” she would say, narrowing her beautiful eyes, “a man ought to be bold!”
“Fine,” I would reply; “I can be bold.”
She would have whims.
She would order me to jump over ditches and carry heavyweights.
“Go trample on that flower bed—but not now, rather when the groundsman is looking.
Go break some branches off that bush, go throw that gentleman’s hat into the water!”
I refrained from reasoning, mindful of the incident in the school playground; and besides, when I asked for a reason or a purpose, she would reply that she herself did not know, that she was an enigma, an elemental
force.
“I am a sphinx,” she liked to say, “a mystery ...”—when I failed she was concerned, and when I succeeded she rejoiced like a child and as a reward permitted me to kiss her on her little ear.
But she would never respond to my “I desire you.”—“There’s something about you,” she would say embarrassedly—“I don’t know what it is—some kind of unpleasant taste.”—I was well aware what that meant.
All this, I confess, was strangely charming, strangely lovely—yes, lovely, that’s exactly it; but it was also strangely unconvincing.
Yet I never lost heart.
I read a lot, especially the poets, and acquired as best I could the language of mystery.
I remember an assignment—The Pole and Other Nations.
“Of course, it is unnecessary even to mention the superiority of the Poles over the Africans and Asians, who have repulsive skin,” I wrote.
“But the Pole is also unquestionably superior to the nations of Europe.
The Germans are uncouth, violent, and flatfooted; the French are petty, undersized, and depraved; the Russians are hairy; the Italians have bel canto.
What a relief it is to be Polish, and it is no wonder everyone envies us and wants to wipe us from the face of the earth.
Only the Pole does not arouse our disgust.”
I wrote thus, without conviction, but I felt that this was the language of mystery, and it was precisely the naïveté of my assertions that was sweet to me.
3
The political horizon darkened, and my beloved betrayed an odd agitation.
Oh, those great, fantastical days of September!
They smelled, as I once read in a book, of heather and mint; they were
airy, bitter, fiery, and unreal.
On the streets there were crowds, songs, and processions; there was consternation, madness, and ecstasy, captured in the rhythmic step of the endless battalions.
Here—an old man who had taken part in the uprising, tears, and a blessing.
Elsewhere—mobilization, the farewells of newlyweds.
Elsewhere still—bunting, speeches, outbursts of zeal, the national anthem.
Oaths, consecrations, tears, posters, outrage, noble-mindedness, and hatred.
Never before, if the artists were to be believed, had the women been so handsome.
My beloved ceased to pay any attention to me; her gaze deepened and darkened and became expressive, but she looked only at the men in uniform.—I wondered what I should do.
The world of the enigma had suddenly intensified to an extraordinary degree, and I had to be doubly on my guard.
I cheered with everyone else and expressed my patriotism, and a few times I even took part in the summary lynching of spies.
But I sensed that this was merely a palliative.
In the eyes of my Jadwisia there was something that led me as quickly as possible to sign up, and I was assigned to an uhlan regiment.
And right from the beginning I realized that I was on the right path, for at the army medical commission, standing naked with my papers in my hand, in the presence of six clerks and two physicians who instructed me to lift my leg and then studied my heel—I encountered the same scrutinizing, grave, as it were contemplative, and coldly evaluative gaze I had seen in Jadwisia, and I was only surprised that back then, in the park, when she accused me of various shortcomings, she had not taken a look at my heel.
And here I was—a soldier, an uhlan; and I sang along with the
others: “Uhlans, uhlans, bright-colored boys, there’s many a maiden will make you her choice.”
Indeed, though individually speaking none of us was a boy—yet when a host of us passed through a town singing that song, inclined over our horses’ necks, with our lances and the peaks of our caps, a most curiously wonderful expression appeared on the mouths of the women and I felt that this time hearts were beating for me too....
Why, I do not know, since I was still Count Stefan Czarniecki, whose mother’s maiden name was Goldwasser, only in high-topped boots and raspberry-red facings on my collar.
My mother, appealing to me not to stand for anything, blessed me for battle with a holy relic in the presence of all the servants, among whom the chambermaid was the most affected.—“Cut, burn, kill!”
cried my mother, inspired.
“Let no one pass!
You are an instrument of the wrath of Jehovah, that is, I mean, of the Lord God.
You are an instrument of wrath, abhorrence, revulsion, hatred.
Wipe out all the libertines who feel disgust even though they swore at the altar not to feel disgust!”
My father, on the other hand, an ardent patriot, wept discreetly.
“Son,” he said, “with blood you can wash away the stain of your origins.
Before battle think always of me, and avoid the memory of your mother like the plague—it could be your downfall.
Think of me and have no mercy!
No mercy!
Wipe out all those villains to the last man, so all other races perish, and there remains only my race!”—And my beloved gave me her lips for the first time; it was in the park, to the sounds of a café quartet, on an evening scented with heather and mint—just like that, without any introduction or any explanation she gave me her lips.
It was profoundly beautiful!
It made one want to cry!
Today I understand that it was
a matter of compensating in terms of corpses; that since we men had begun the slaughter, they, the women, had set about the job from their side; but at the time I was not yet a bankrupt, and that idea, though I was familiar with it, was for me empty philosophy and could not stem the tears flowing from my eyes.
O war, o war, what lady are you?
Pardon me for returning once again to the mystery that troubles me so.
A soldier at the front flounders in mud and in flesh; he is prey to fungus and filth, and in addition, when his belly is blown open by a shell, often his guts spill out ...
How is it then?
Why is a soldier a swallow and not a frog?
Why is it that the soldier’s profession is beautiful and longed for on all sides?
No, that’s the wrong word; it’s not beautiful but lovely, lovely to the highest degree.
Precisely this—the fact that it is lovely—gave me strength in my struggle with the abominable traitor of the soldier’s soul—fear; and I was almost happy, as if I were already on the other side of that impassable wall.
Each time I managed to shoot my rifle accurately, I felt that I was suspended on the inscrutable smiles of women and on the bars of an army song, and after many attempts I was even able to win the good graces of my horse—the pride of an uhlan—who up till then had only bitten and kicked me.
4
But then came an incident that propelled me into an abyss of moral depravation from which to this day I have been unable to extricate myself.
Everything was going splendidly.
War was raging across the entire world, and with it—the Mystery; people stuck bayonets in each other’s bellies, hated one another, were disgusted
by one another, despised one another, loved and adored one another; where previously a peasant had quietly threshed his corn, now there lay a heap of rubble.
And I did what others did!
I was in no doubt about how to act or what to choose; strict military discipline was for me a signpost toward the Mystery.
I rushed into the attack, or lay in the trenches amid the asphyxiating gases.—Already hope, the mother of fools, was showing me joyful visions of the future, how I would return home from the army, liberated once and for all from my disastrous ratlike neutrality ...
But alas, it happened otherwise ...
In the distance the cannon rumbled ...
On the ravaged field before us night was falling; tattered clouds raced across the sky; there was a cold, driving wind, and we, more lovely than ever, for the third day were stubbornly defending a hill on which there stood a broken tree.
Our lieutenant had just ordered us to remain to the death.
Suddenly an artillery shell flew over, burst its sides, and exploded, blowing off both of Uhlan Kacperski’s legs and tearing open his stomach; and Kacperski was at first confused, not grasping what had happened; then a moment later he also exploded, but in laughter; he was also bursting his sides, but with laughter!—holding his stomach, which was gushing blood like a fountain, he squealed and squealed in his comical, loud, hysterical, farcical high-pitched voice—for minutes on end!
How infectious that laugh was!
You have no idea what such an unexpected sound can be like on the field of battle.
I barely managed to survive till the end of the war.—And when I returned home I realized, my ears still ringing with this laughter, that everything by which I had lived up till then had crumbled into dust; that my dreams of a happy
new existence with Jadwisia had all been laid to waste; and that in the wilderness that had suddenly opened up there was nothing left for me but to become a communist.
Why a communist?
But first—what do I understand by “communist”?
By this term I do not refer to any precise ideological meaning nor any particular program or ballast; quite the opposite, I employ it for what it contains that is alien, hostile, and incomprehensible, forcing the most serious individuals to shrug their shoulders or emit wild cries of revulsion and horror.