makeshift way that he must destroy himself and arise again.
He didn't know how to start his destruction and regeneration.
One afternoon when Katka was out, he packed his things and
left the city.
Brother-Sister Fire - that was what the Cutlers called
Paschalis when he found his way to them. The rain was lash ing
down, the well-trampled paths were running with red water and
he needed shelter.
They weren't at all surprised by his clothing or his curled
hair. They gave him a place to sleep in one o f the little hms,
where he felt as if he were back in his old cell, though he was
still homesick. He lay almost naked on the bedding while his
things were drying out hy the fire in the stone house. It was so
dark that he couldn't sec a thing, and it seemed as il all h is days
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in the city had been brighter and longer, and the nights warmer,
as if the rainfall had been different there, coming down in large,
refreshing drops; even the milk had had a more subtle flavour.
Cities seemed so fascinating from a distance - the road to Rome
seemed so straight and easy.
They let him lie there for days on end while they worked; the
men went to the forge, from where you could hear the rhythmical knock of the hammer and the hiss of water as it tempered the red-hot iron all day long. All the women disappeared into one
hut together; maybe it was where they fitted the knives with
handles or baked their pies. Their children played in silence,
melancholy and grimy. Towards evening they were herded home
like poultry. At daybreak Paschalis heard the Cutlers chanting
plaintively. Their way of singing distorted the words, but whatever they were singing, it was full of grief and sorrow. What a miserable place, he thought, and waited for i t to stop raining so
that he could set off across the mountains.
Finally two days of bright weather came, when the air was
sharp as a knife, and half the world was visible from the hill. Far
away to the south Paschalis could see his convent.
'God has no features and no figure,' one of the gloomy men
told him as he helped to chop up a cherry tree. 'He manifests
Himself as and when He likes. Even the fact that He sometimes
doesn't manifest Himself at all, when we think He should - that
too is His form of manifestation.' For a long while he fell silent
as they both inspected the fallen log, and then he added: 'God is
inside us, but we are outside Him. He acts at random, but He
knows what He is doing. He is like bread - everyone gets his
slice and has his own way of looking at it, but no single slice
makes up the whole loaf.'
They gave him some bread for the journey. The first snow had
just fallen, but quickly melted because the ground was still
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f 0: i g h t
227
warm. As he went down into the valley and crossed the stream
that he had known since childhood, he considered what the
leathery old Cutler had told him. If God wants us to find peace ,
he thought, if He wants us to withdraw from the world and to
elevate our souls to a spiritual, rather than a material plane, if He
opens the gates of eternal life before us, if He allowed His Son to
die and found sense in it, and if death is the most perfect peace,
then indeed it must be the most divine of all God's creations.
And if that is true, then a person can offer nothing dearer to God
than his own death.
Every single thing is a sign , and some of them cannot be
ignored - that's why sharp things exist, thought Paschalis, that's
why the woods are full of poisonous mushrooms, that's why
bush fires reduce millions of insects to lumps of soot, that's why
floods rinse the life out of the valleys, that's why there arc wars,
lightning, catastrophes and illnesses, that's why old age exists,
that's why the Cutlers hang thousands of blades from the ceiling
and favour death.
what we should do.
T h e e n d
There are two versions of the end of Paschalis's story. One is to
be found, quite by accident, in Obcr den sclbscmonlcrischcn Tod
des Bruders im Kloster dcr rcgulierlcn Clwrhcrrcn Au,l;usrincr in
Rosenthal and reads as follows:
'At the time of the morning office the provost nouccd the
absence of Brother Paschalis, who never used to be late for
prayers. After the first two psalms, prompted by in�tinct, he
went to his cell to wake him up, as he supposed Paschalis had
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O l g a To k a r c z u k
ove rslept. On opening the door he saw the body of Brother
Paschalis hanging from a rail that served to hang clothes.
Despite a rapid attempt to cut him down and save him, Brother
Paschalis never came to, and soon after departed this life for
ever.'
The second version is rather vague and has no proper conclusion . Apparently he wandered about Europe, perhaps the world too, preaching the creed of his saint m ixed with the
sorrow of the Cutlers. This version is current among people
who were moved by the life and work of Brother Paschalis, after
hearing about him by chance from foreigners, amid rumours,
quotations, gossip, and other people's memories - no one really
knows where they heard it from . Conversely, there are those
like Professor von Goetzen , who discovered him while on the
trail of Kummernis; he found his life of the saint in the university library and read it between cigarette breaks, while drinking from a thermos and nibbling at his hangnails. There is nothing
about Paschalis's death in this version, but how could there be?
The person telling the story is always alive, in a way i mmortal he's beyond the reach of time.
T h e a l o e
I suspect it of being immortal, somehow. I t stands on windowsills and lets you propagate it by gently pinching off one of its dozens of side shoots. I have long since forgotten which plant is
the mother and which the child. I have distributed it to friends
from the city and to Marta, Agnieszka and Krysia, handing out
cuttings in little clay flowerpots, or old yoghurt and cream pots,
so thanks to me it has set off on its wanderings. I'm not sure how
to calculate the age of these cuttings; whether I should only
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s c o f N i g h t
229
count the years since the limbs were replanted, or the whole
length of time its green flesh has existed. The limbs have their
own time and space, which they soon outgrow, piercing it with
their sharp edges; you could stick labels in their pots marked
'Specimen Y' or 'Specimen 2439', and thus follow the plant's
development. But the green flesh that fills the leaves to bursting,
that juicy, fragrant fluid that you can put on a scalded finger, and
that sucks all the burning heat and pain into itself, is an immortal substance. l t's the same stuff in every single aloe, in all the pots that have ever stood on all the window-sills in the world.
I t's the very same substance that sat in the window at my parents'
house years ago, and
before that in the window of the furniture
shop, and before that, who knows . . . lt must have done some
travelling, obviously, because aloes don't grow wild in our climate. There must have been a ship that sailed along the eastern shore of Africa and squeezed its way through the Suez Canal,
loaded with cocoa beans, exotic fruits, monkeys and vibrant
parrots in cages. There must have been plant pots on the lower
deck, containing sleeping aloes, immune to sea sickness, hesitant conquerors of new lands, soon to be the involuntary rivals of all sorts of other plants - myrtle, pelargoniums, rue and
heather - and to become the inhabitants of window-sills, the
gatherers of fitful northern sunlight.
I'm sure that things, quite casually, whether alive or dead.
record images, so the aloe could still have the sunlight of its original home inside it, those incredibly dazzling skies and huge raindrops that silently wash away at the low coastal horizons.
And each part of the plant takes pride in this shining presence
inside itself, and duplicates the image of the sun , the god of
plants, silently worshipping it from the window s
-
ills of my home.
This evening when l took Marta one of these both-old-andyoung plants, it occurred to me that it must he boring tP last for
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ever like that, and that the only feeling the plants can possibly
have must be boredom. Marta agreed with me, and as she put
the aloe on the window-sill she said, 'If death were nothing but
bad, people would stop dying immediately.'
T h e b o nfi re
Last night the peasants from Pietno came to do a deal with us.
We discussed it round a bonfire. They had bottles of vodka
hidden under their jackets like a magician's white rabbit, and
just as much of a joy to behold. They stood them on a makeshift
table with triumph in their eyes. Marta and I sliced bread and
extracted pickled gherkins from their jars. R. brought the
glasses.
Mr Bobol, whose hair has grown down to his shoulders since
last year, said: 'There'll be cocktails for the ladies - women don't
drink neat vodka.' We didn't protest. I was worried that beetles
would come and crawl over the tomato quarters we served, as
there were lots of them about.
There were three guests - Mr Bobol, his neighbour Mr Zezula,
and Mr Bronek, whom everyone calls 'the farmhand'. We sat
down on logs by the fire; the vodka was poured from the narrow
throat of the bottle in silence. The men knocked back half a
glass, while we sipped our cocktails, made with Marta's blackcurrant juice. We talked about the man with the chainsaw -
apparently the police have hauled him in for stealing wood from
the forest. I t reminded me of early spring, of snow, and darkness
lit by Oashes of torchlight, the sinister rasp of the saw and the
crash of a falling spruce. Never accost a wood thief, someone
said, it's better to pretend you can't see or hear him. Trees are
meant to be cut down - anyone who doesn't know that might
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
2 1 1
end up with an axe in his skull. So how many cubic metres of
wood do you want for the living-room floor? we were asked .
Let's have another round, said Bobol.
Mr Bronek was the only one who didn't drink. In the silence
that fell at one point we heard him solemnly say, 'Do you know
how much blood I've given?' No one knew. 'How much do you
ladies think?' Ten litres?' I replied boldly. All faces tu rned
towards Mr Bronek. He smiled and seemed to be smacking his
lips. 'How much then, Bronek?' Bobol urged him to tell us.
'Sixteen buckets of blood.' Mr Zezula said something about how
many black puddings you could make from that amount of
blood and lit a cigarette.
But Mr Bronek coughed timidly, as if expecting admiration.
Marta alone, compassionate Marta, raked the embers with a stick
and said, That's a great deal . That's a whole sea of blood.'
Bobol made us another cocktail. Only then did I see that it
was almost a full glass of vodka, with a drop of water and a
little of Marta's blackcurrant juice. I was unable to stand up.
To t h e L o rd G o d fro m t h e P o l e s
They were amazed that it was all so badly organized , but what
did they expect? The war had only j ust ended, and, as t hey
made their two-month train journey across a coumry devastated by war, the piles of rubble they passed were still smoking.
The train stood for weeks on end in sidi ngs overgrown with
grass, where cows grazed between the t racks. so they lit bonfi res
and the women made potato soup. No one knew where t hey
were going. There was a train driver, of course, but he rarely put
in an appearance , and when he did, kept saying mysteriously.
Tomorrow we'll be off.' Rut when tomorrow came the tralll \Tilt
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O l g a To k a r c z u k
on standing there, and they didn't know whether to get out their
hastily packed pots, relight the fire and peel some more potatoes
for soup. He said there were whole villages waiting for them at
the other end, empty stone houses with furniture and fittings
beyond their wildest dreams, and that they could have the lot they'd just go in and it'd all be theirs. As they breast-fed their children the young women dreamed of wardrobes full of silk
dresses, leather shoes with heels, handbags with gold-plated
clasps, lace napkins and snow-white tablecloths. They fell asleep
with this image of household goods before their eyes, but when
they awoke in the morning i t was cold and wet with dew
because the carriages had no roofs, just boards that their husbands had ingeniously made i nto rafters.
Sometimes the train moved off without warning, and anyone
who was looking the o ther way had to chase after it, trying to
pull up their trousers as they ran along the tracks. Lovers were
left behind in haystacks, absent-minded old people got lost on
crowded platforms, and children went crying after pet dogs that
were busy marking the local trees. You had to shout at the engineer to stop. Sometimes he didn't hear or was in a hurry, and then you had to look for the train, catch it up, ask soldiers for a
lift, make enquiries at temporary evacuation offices and leave
messages on station walls. The worst thing was that the trains
had no destination, no final aim; all they could be sure of was
that they were heading west. They would turn left or right at
junctions, but essentially they were following the sun, running
a race with it.
There was no one in charge - there was no state, and the
authori ties were only just dreaming themselves up, but they
suddenly appeared one night on the platform at a small station
where the evacuees had been ordered to disembark.
'The authorities' was a man in jackboots, whom everyone
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
233
addressed as 'Chief'. He chain-smoked cigarettes - his lips had
gone soft with smoke. He told them to wait, and they did , for
several hours, until they heard the clatter of wagons looming out
&nb
sp; of the darkness; the horses were sad and sleepy. They loaded
themselves on to the wagons in the dark and set off down the
empty, narrow little streets of the town. The rumble of the
wooden wheels was like the thunder of aeroplanes, and made
the shop signs shake. A pane of glass fell into the darkness and
crashed on to the paving stones. Everyone shuddered, and the
women clutched at their hearts. That was when Bobol's old
father realized that he was still afraid, that he had been constantly afraid for several years on end - but so what? A military jeep escorted the caravan to the suburbs, then out of town and
down a cobbled road along a valley. Dawn was breaking, so they
could see high, shady hills rising on either side. At their foot
stood houses and barns, not village houses, but large brick farmhouses. Old Bobol's eyes were not used to such broad landscapes or to such houses, so he said a silent prayer that this would not
be the place.
They turned gently uphill, crossed a bridge over a stony, turbulent little river and climbed on to a rolling plateau. To their right the sun was rising. It was only visible from up here . as it
illuminated the distant mountains and the sky, mouldy with
morning mist. The whole scene was gently undulating. It made
the weaker among them, the women and old men, feel sick; the
whole place was so empty and alien that someone even let out a
sob, as memories of those gold-green plains they had ldt behind
went through their heads - it was safe there, God's own land.
Even the dogs that were running by the cartwheels kept close
and didn't dive off into the grass and bushes. They sniffed the air
anxiously, with their tails between their legs. Their fur was rui
Oed and dirty from the journey.
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0 I g a To k a r c z u k
At last they saw a few cottages scattered along the valley
below. The jeep stopped and the official in jackboots got out of
it with a cigarette between his lips. He read the names from a list
and pointed: Chrobak here , Wangeluk here, Bobol there. No
one argued or protested; the official and his cigarette were like
the finger of God - they created order, and whatever that order
might be, it was sure to be better than disorder.
The Bobols drove up to their cottage. It looked solid enough.