“I did.”
“Ah!—And ...?”
“And?
And what ?”
“Apparently you ...
found something there ...”
“Actually I did—a dead cockroach.”
“There are lots of dead cockroaches too; that is—just cockroaches ...
I mean to say—cockroaches that aren’t dead.”
“Did you love your father very much?”
I asked, picking up an album with views of Kraków that lay on the table.
This question clearly took him by surprise.
No, he was not prepared for it; he bowed his head, looked to the side, swallowed—and muttered with inexpressible constraint, almost with repugnance:
“I suppose.”
“You suppose?
That’s not very much.
You suppose!
Only so much?”
“Why do you ask?”
he said in a muffled voice.
“Why are you so artificial?”
I replied sympathetically, leaning toward him in paternal fashion, the album in my hands.
“Me?
Artificial?
Why do ...
you ...
?”
“Why did you just turn pale?”
“Me?
Turn pale?”
“Oh yes!
You’re scowling ...
You don’t finish your sentences ...
You expatiate about mice and cockroaches ...
Your voice is too loud, then too quiet, hoarse or somehow shrill, so it pierces the
ears,” I said solemnly, “and such nervous movements ...
In fact, all of you here are somehow—nervous and artificial.
Why is that, young man?
Wouldn’t it be better just to grieve in a straightforward way?
Hmm ...
You ...
‘suppose’ you loved him?!
And why did you persuade your mother to move out of your father’s bedroom a week ago?”
Utterly paralyzed by my words—not daring to move hand or foot—he was barely able to stammer out:
“Me?
What do you mean?
My father ...
My father needed ...
fresh air ...”
“On the night in question you slept in your room downstairs?”
“Did I?
Of course, in my room ...
in my room downstairs.”
I cleared my throat and went to my bedroom, leaving him on a chair with his hands on his knees, his mouth tightly shut and his legs pressed stiffly together.
Hmm—he obviously had a nervous nature.
A nervous nature, bashfulness, excessive sensitivity, excessive heartfeltness ...
But I was still keeping a tight rein on myself, not wishing to frighten anyone prematurely.
As I was in my room washing my hands and preparing for dinner, Stefan the serving boy slipped in and asked if I didn’t need anything.
He looked like a different person!
His eyes darted about, his figure displayed a servile cunning, and all his mental powers were aroused to the highest degree!
I asked: “So then, what can you tell me that’s new?”
He answered in a single breath: “Well, your honor, you were asking if I slept in the pantry the night before yesterday?
I wanted to say that on that night the young master locked the pantry door on the dining room side.”
I asked: “Has he ever locked that door before?”
“Never.
This one time he locked it, and he probably
thought that I was already asleep, because it was late—but I wasn’t sleeping yet and I heard him come up and lock it.
When he unlocked it, that I couldn’t say, because I dropped off—it was only at dawn that he woke me to say the master was dead, and by then the door was already open.”
And so in the night, for unexplained reasons, the deceased’s son locks the pantry door!
He locks the pantry door?—What could this mean?
“Only please, your honor, don’t say that I told you.”
I was not wrong to have labeled this death an internal one!
The door had been locked so no outsider should have access to the death!
The net was closing in; the noose tightening around the murderer’s neck was ever more visible.—Yet why, instead of manifesting triumph, did I only give a rather foolish smile?—For the reason that—alas, it must be acknowledged—something was missing that was at least as important as the noose around the murderer’s neck, and that something was the noose around the neck of the victim.
True, I had jumped over this stumbling block, I had leapt naively over his neck, which glowed with an immaculate whiteness; but nonetheless it’s not possible to be permanently in a state of absolving passion.
Very well, I agree (speaking aside), I was in a fury; for whatever reason hatred, repulsion, resentment had blinded me and forced me to persist in the face of a glaring absurdity—this is human, this anyone will understand; yet the moment will come when one must—settle down, there will come, as the Scriptures say, the Day of Judgment.
And then ...
hmm ...
I’ll say—he is the murderer, and the corpse will say—I died of a heart attack.
And then what?
What will Judgment say?
Let’s suppose Judgment will ask: “You claim the dead man was murdered?
On what basis?”
I will reply: “Because his family, your honor, his wife and children, and especially his son, are behaving suspiciously; they’re behaving as if they had murdered him—there’s no doubt about it.”
“Very good—but by what earthly means could he have been murdered, since he was
not
murdered, since it’s blindingly obvious from the forensic report that he simply died of a heart attack?”
And then the defense lawyer, that hired prevaricator, will stand up and in a long speech, waving the sleeves of his gown, will set about proving that there has been a misunderstanding rooted in my own base way of thinking, that I have confused crime and mourning—for that which I took as a sign of a guilty conscience was only a sign of the timidity of feelings which retreat and contract at the cold touch of a stranger.
And once again there will appear the exasperating, unbearable refrain—how could he possibly have been murdered when he was absolutely not murdered?
Since there are not the slightest marks of asphyxiation on his body?
This stumbling block so troubled me that at lunch—simply for myself, to quell my distress and bring relief to my nagging doubts, for no other reason—I began to explain that crime in its essence is not physical, but mental
par excellence.
I believe I am right in saying that apart from me, no one else spoke.
Mr.
Antoni did not say a word—I don’t know whether it was because he regarded me as unworthy, as he had the previous evening, or because he was afraid his voice might come out a little hoarse.
The widowed mother sat pontifically, still mortally offended, it seemed, and her hands trembled, striving to secure immunity for themselves.
Miss
Cecylia was quietly swallowing the scalding liquids.
While I, for the aforementioned inner motives, and oblivious to the faux pas I was committing, or of certain tensions in the air, discoursed eloquently and at great length.
“Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, the physical shape of the act, the mistreated body, the disorder in the room, all the so-called evidence—these are entirely secondary details, a supplement, to be precise, to the real crime, a forensic formality, a tip of the hat by the criminal toward the authorities, nothing more.
The real crime is always committed in the soul.
The external details ...
oh my Lord!
Take for instance the following case: A charitable uncle is suddenly stabbed in the back—with an old-fashioned hat pin—by a nephew whom he has been showering with kindnesses for thirty years.
And if you please!—such a huge mental crime and such a small, imperceptible physical sign, a tiny little hole from a pinprick.
The nephew subsequently explains that he absentmindedly mistook his uncle’s back for his cousin’s hat.
Who is going to believe him?
“Yes indeed, physically speaking crime is a triviality; it is mentally that it is hard.
Given the extreme fragility of the organism, it’s possible to murder by accident, like that nephew, by absent-mindedness—out of nowhere, all at once, bang, there’s a corpse.
“One woman, the most upright person in the world, head over heels in love with her husband—this was right in their honeymoon period—notices on her husband’s plate of raspberries an elongated white worm—and you should know that her husband hated these revolting grubs more than anything else.
Instead of warning him, she watches with a playful smile, and then says: ‘You ate a bug.’
‘No!’
the horrified husband exclaims.
‘Oh yes,’ replies
the wife, and describes it—it was like so, fat and white.
Much laughter and banter; the husband, pretending to be angry, raises his hands in the air at his wife’s mischievousness.
The matter is forgotten.
Then, a week or two later, the wife is most surprised when the husband starts to lose weight and waste away; he rejects any kind of food, he’s repulsed by his own arms and legs, and (please excuse the expression) he spends all his time on his knees praying to the porcelain god.
Progressive disgust at oneself—a terrible illness!
And one day there’s great weeping and great moaning—he’s died suddenly—he threw himself up, only his head and throat remained, he expelled the rest into a bucket.
The widow is in despair—only in the crossfire of questions does it come to light that in the most hidden depths of her being she felt an unnatural fondness for the large bulldog her husband had beaten shortly before eating the raspberries.
“Or in one aristocratic family there was a son who murdered his mother by continually repeating the grating phrase: ‘Please sit down!’
At the hearing he acted innocent to the very end.
Oh, crime is so easy it’s a wonder that so many people die of natural causes—especially if one throws in the heart, the heart—that mysterious link between people, that twisting underground passageway between you and me, that lift-and-force pump which knows so perfectly how to lift and so wonderfully forces ...
It’s only later that there comes the mourning, the graveside faces, the dignity of grief, the majesty of death—ha, ha—and all for the purpose of ‘respecting’ suffering and not accidentally looking too closely into that heart, which has quietly, cruelly murdered!”
They sat quiet as mice, not daring to interrupt!—Where was
that pride from the previous evening?
All of a sudden the widow threw down her napkin and, pale as death, her hands trembling twice as much, stood up from the table.
I spread my hands apologetically.
“I’m terribly sorry.
I didn’t mean to offend.
I’m merely speaking in general terms about the heart, about the heart sac, in which it’s so easy to hide a body.”
“Despicable man!”
she blurted out, her breast heaving.
Her son and daughter jumped up from the table.
“The door!”
I exclaimed.
“Very well—I’m despicable!
But tell me please, why was the door locked that night?”
There was a pause.
All at once Cecylia burst out in nervous, plaintive sobs and said through her tears:
“The door wasn’t Mama.
I was the one who locked it.
It was me!”
“That’s not true, Cecylka—I was the one who ordered the door to be locked!
Why are you humiliating yourself in front of this man?”
“Mama ordered it, but I wanted to ...
I wanted to ...
I also wanted to lock the door and I locked it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “just a moment ...
What’s this?”
(After all, it was Antoni who had locked the pantry door.) “Which door are you talking about?”
“The door ...
the door to Daddy’s bedroom ...
I locked it!”
“No, I locked it ...
I forbid you to talk like that, do you hear?
I ordered it!”
What was this?!
So they had also locked a door?
On the night when the father was to die, the son locked the pantry door and the mother and daughter locked his bedroom door!
“And why did the two of you lock that door?”
I asked abruptly, “Exceptionally, on that particular night?
For what purpose?”
Consternation!
Silence!
They did not know!
They bowed their heads!
A theatrical scene.
Suddenly Antoni’s perturbed voice was heard:
“Are you not embarrassed to explain yourselves?
And to whom?
Be quiet!
Let’s go!”
“Then perhaps you’ll tell me why on that night you locked the door of the pantry, cutting the servants off from the other rooms?”