January Wojnicz, a retired civil servant and a landowner, was a splendid man, as they said in Lwów, handsome and dignified. As a man of fifty-plus, he had dark hair with hardly any gray and thick stubble; he shaved with great tenacity, leaving only his magnificent mustache, which he cared for and curled with the use of a pomade, the base ingredient of which was tallow. As a result, his son, Mieczysław, forever associated the smell of rancid fat with his father; it was his second, aromatic skin.
January could easily have made a good second marriage, but he had lost all interest in women, as though his wife, who had died several months after giving birth, enfeebled by the effort of producing a child and by some sort of inexplicable depression, had permanently destroyed his trust in the fairer sex—as if he felt cheated by this, or even disgraced. She had given birth and promptly died! What nerve! His mother had passed away prematurely, too. There was something wrong with these mothers; they seemed to do a terribly dangerous job, risking their lives tangled in lace in their boudoirs and bedrooms, leading a lethal existence among the bedclothes and the copper pans, among the towels, powders, and stacks of menus for every day of the year. In Mieczysław Wojnicz’s family world, the women had vague, short, perilous lives, and then they died, remaining in people’s memories as fleeting shapes without contours. They were reduced to a remote, unclear impulse placed in the universe temporarily, for the sole purpose of its biological consequences.
Later, Mieczysław’s nanny would exist in his memory as a blurred figure, always veiled by something, out of focus, on the run, a long, thin streak. But as a child he played with her, with her hands and the wrinkled skin on them. He would grip that skin between his thumb and forefinger, pretending to be a gander (they called it “tweaking”), and in doing so he would smooth out her hands until they became almost young. He used to fantasize that if he could figure out how to smooth out all of Gliceria (this bizarre name was very popular in those days among the peasants in the Lwów region), to tighten up her outer form, maybe he would succeed in saving his nanny from old age. But he couldn’t.
His father believed that the blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness, and passivity, nowadays fashionably termed “individualism.” He did not approve. What counted were manliness, energy, social work for the public good, rationalism, pragmatism. He was especially fond of the word “pragmatism.”
In the name of Mieczysław’s education and appropriately masculine upbringing, January decided to sell some of the land and property that his wife had left him and to buy a bright, comfortable apartment in Lwów. He took Gliceria with them, to serve as cook, maid, and nanny. From then on, as befitted a respectable, if incomplete, family, they became citizens of Lwów.
It was a good decision. By investing his money in modernity, January had behaved very pragmatically, and in fact he gained many advantages from living in the city. His new business interests picked up; it was easier to take care of them on the spot than it had been from sluggish, provincial Galicia, from which every trip to the city was like a voyage across the ocean.
January Wojnicz was an enterprising, courageous man. He put some of the money from the property he had sold into a small apartment house and a brickyard in a village near Brzeżany, and he placed the rest in shares in the Galician railway; all together this provided him with a tidy income, easily enough to support himself and his son in perfectly decent style. He was sensible and cautious, bordering on stingy. On the rare occasions when he bought an object, it was always of the best quality.
Naturally, attempts were made to marry him off for a second time, but in January Wojnicz’s mind his late wife had become such a unique, perfect creature that no woman on earth could be more than a poor shadow of her, a figure unworthy of attention, or even annoying, as if she were clumsily trying to imitate that wondrous being.
As a result, the only woman Mieczysław Wojnicz remembered having seen up close and in detail was Gliceria. She mothered him a bit in the kitchen, supplying him with tasty morsels, but, as her authority did not extend beyond the thresholds of the other rooms, it was only there that little Mieczyś (as he was known to his father and his uncle in those days) was pampered. She tried to compensate him for the loss of his mother by pouring a little buckwheat honey onto his plate, or by cutting the crunchy heel off a loaf of bread and thickly spreading it with fresh butter. Food always had good associations for him.
He received these manifestations of warm feeling with a gratitude that might have had a chance of developing into affection and love, but his father would not allow that. January treated Gliceria as nothing more than a servant, never with familiarity, and was full of mistrust toward this plump, elderly woman, hidden among skirts, flounces, and bonnets. He despised her corpulence and, suspecting her of stealing food, paid her less than he should have.
There was always something uneasy about Mieczyś’s childhood baths. His father would take a long time to test him on his prayers before reluctantly handing him over to Gliceria. He would lead the child to her kingdom, the kitchen, where a tin tub full of steaming hot water would already be waiting on the floor. Mieczyś could not remember his father ever being present for bath time. The scent of soap and clean towels was a festive smell, the fragrance of Saturdays. Gliceria would receive him in her plump hands, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, ruddy from the heat and smiling, and from that point on little Mieczyś became a participant in the ritual of undressing, being immersed in the water, and being scrubbed with a washcloth moistened with the scented soap that Gliceria kept specially for his delicate skin, for his use only.
Throughout the bath, she twittered away to him in Polish and Ukrainian as nobody else ever did. He was her “little pearl,” her “baby soap bubble,” her “buttercup,” her “little gem,” and her “wee angel.” The profusion of names intoxicated the young Mieczyś, who could not absorb all the images magically revealed by these words: jewels, churches, forests, gardens—an entire world was contained in them, and other worlds, too, that he did not know from his own experience but the shape of which he could imagine. The parts of his body were his “handies,” his “tootsies,” his “leglets,” his “wee chest”; addressed this way, he felt pleased with himself and somehow even proud of his existence, a feeling he never had when communing with his father. As he gazed at his protruding stomach, it was a “tummy,” and the hole in it was his “belly button.” Gliceria would coo over him with sweat pouring from her brow, the entire kitchen now a steam bath.
Then she would pull Mieczyś out and onto the table, where a towel was spread, and rub the boy dry, tickling him under the arms or pretending she wanted to bite off his “wee toes.” Mieczyś remembered not to laugh too loudly, for fear of alarming his father, who would probably race in, trailing the cold from the corridor and halting this delicious game, so he just giggled quietly.
His freshly laundered flannel pajamas were stiff and unpleasant, but Mieczyś knew that the next morning, after the first night, they would be the same as ever—nice and soft. The passage of time smoothed out the creases and roughness, making the world a friendlier place. Once he was sitting in his pajamas, Gliceria would fetch a comb and run it through his fair hair, cut in a pageboy, and could never resist trying to braid it into little plaits.
“It’s so strong, so thick,” she would say.
It was wonderful to find that the repertoire of valuable things he had at his disposal included his hair. Of course, she quickly unplaited it, but she would comb it in curls on his brow, which his father instantly ruffled when he came to say good night, as Mieczyś lay in his cold room in newly starched sheets, with a bed warmer at his feet, reflecting on those weekly bath-time endearments.
His father had often repeated to him, though Mieczysław did not actually remember when and in what situations he had heard him say it—“repeated” meant that he expressed it somehow, sometimes without even opening his mouth—that women were, by nature, treacherous and fickle. Weepy. It was impossible to know what to grab on to, what to trust in them. They were elusive, as slippery as snakes or silk (a peculiar juxtaposition, indeed). It was hard to catch hold of them; they slithered out of your hand and then laughed at your ineptitude. There was an old saying that Uncle Emil, January’s younger brother and a cavalry officer in the Austrian Army, frequently quoted, and this Mieczysław remembered well. It had to do with Gliceria, or maybe with a fiancée of his uncle’s, the only one, who had walked out on him and married someone else. On these occasions, his uncle—who normally had such impeccable manners—would remove the spoon from his soup and brandish it above his plate.
“Woman, frog, and devil, these are siblings treble.”
The little Wojnicz did his best to fathom the meaning of this adage, but he had no idea what exactly his uniformed uncle, who usually expressed himself precisely, was trying to say. Was there really a connection between a woman, a frog, and a devil? This damp, murky threesome removed the woman from wallpapered, tidy bourgeois bedrooms and dragged her into the woods and the marshy zones of peat bogs; apparently the trio were relatives from the same abyss in the depths of the forest, where no human voice or eye could reach, and where every traveller lost his way. Oh, well, there were no such forests in the vicinity of Lwów, maybe only somewhere in Volhynia, or on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. He found it easier to imagine what Gliceria might have in common with a frog than with a devil, though he had never seen a devil, and to tell the truth he did not believe in them. “Folktales,” his father would say. As for the frog, then yes, indeed: she was fat and shapeless, and her apron-topped skirts deformed her figure even more. If she were to squat down on the kitchen floor and raise her head the right way—yes, she would look like a frog.
Gliceria grew older. It became harder and harder for her to carry out her duties—to launder, cook, iron, and clean—and she left when Mieczyś was seven years old, having seen him through to school age. By then, his father had decided that she was no longer needed in any case; a boarding school would replace her. Once he had established all the terms with the headmaster, Mr. Szuman, he handed the boy over to him. Unfortunately, Mieczyś did not stay at this institution for long, for reasons that with friends his father referred to as “sensitivity” and “an inability to conform,” which for the boy meant total humiliation and for the father a desperate attempt to make sense of the whole disappointing situation.
Proving the old saying “There is no evil that does not bring good,” Mieczyś was, from then on, taught at home by a full-time tutor, first one, then a second, and a third, which cost his father a lot of money and anxiety, because teachers were the most chimeric species in existence—nothing pleased them, and they were always finding something to complain about.
Gliceria was succeeded by Józef. He usually made pierogi, and fried fish bought at the market. Sometimes he sent Mieczyś to the cellar for potatoes and sauerkraut. This was one of the “Indian brave” tasks his father had devised, for which the little Wojnicz received badges. Going down into the cellar meant having to conquer a sudden attack of fear and disgust that made his fingers tremble as they lit the candles. The cellar was L-shaped, leading first to the left, then to the right. The potatoes lay in the darkest, dampest corner, fenced off behind some boards, in a heap that dwindled by the day and in spring sprouted white shoots, desperately seeking the light. Beside them stood barrels full of cabbage and gherkins.
Once, he saw a large toad in there, sitting motionless on top of the potatoes, staring at him with its bulging yellow eyes. He screamed and raced upstairs, but, despite his pleading and tears, his father told him to go back down. Luckily the toad was not there anymore. Afterward, every time he went into the cellar, he inevitably had it in mind; whenever he thought about it, it was there, and would remain there forever. The idea of killing it, as he at first imagined, by taking a large stone down with him from the sunlit world and throwing it at the soft, warty body, gave him a strange thrill that made his pulse run faster. But he was afraid that the consequences of this murder would be even more terrible. Crushed by a stone, the toad would contaminate the potatoes, and he would never be able to forget about it. From then on, whenever he put his hands into the barrel of gherkins, he was afraid that by some miracle it had got in there, and that he would accidentally take hold of it as it lurked among the pickles, as if it had the power to change into anything damp and slimy. Yes, it was a great school of courage—he earned those badges the hard way.
On Sundays, father and son went out to a restaurant on Trybunalska Street, where they had a ritual lunch consisting of soup, a main course, and dessert—and, for the father, an alcoholic drink and coffee—to convince themselves that one could get by without women and incompetent cooks.
Their apartment on Pańska Street in Lwów was cozy and sunny. The drawing-room and dining-room windows overlooked the street, quite a noisy one, because the cobblestones paving it changed every movement into a rumble, a drumroll. But, after a few years, their brains grew so accustomed to the noise that January thought of their abode as quiet.
When Mieczyś reached the age of thirteen, he was enrolled at a German-language gymnasium on Governor’s Ramparts. Twice a day, he walked the route from home to school and back, passing the Bernardine monastery and then looking at the shop displays on Cłowa Street and Czarnecki Street. Then he went past the fire station, feeling decidedly greater respect for this institution than for the monastery. Several times he was witness to the firemen mustering to sally forth, whether as an exercise or to attend to a real fire, and the coördination of these agile men in uniform always delighted him. The terse commands, shouts, and gestures reminded him of dances he had seen in the countryside, with foot stamping and bizarre figures performed by human bodies. The firemen danced for a purpose—to respond to a blaze, to prevent destruction or even death. Their well-practiced movements were measured to perfection, faultlessly effective. Whatever move one of them started, others finished. They passed one another hoses and buckets, they reported, leaped up and down, one-two-three, and the fire engine was ready for the road, ready to fight the element, and they sat motionless on their seats like lead soldiers. Then one of them started the siren, which drew the whole world into the orbit of their service. Little Mieczyś was so awed that goosebumps appeared on his skin. In just two minutes, the fire engine was prepared for battle—wrapped in hoses, equipped with pickaxes, crowbars, and hatchets, and encrusted with shining brass helmets—and it moved through the open gate into the city.
He walked on through the shady old trees in the park on the Ramparts and reached the school, which towered over the city, elevated, like the Dormition Church with its three cupolas standing opposite. In this church—he sometimes looked in there—was a painted angel that made him especially joyful. He called it the Four-Fingered Angel, ignoring the name Gabriel, which was written next to it, because the way the artist had depicted its hand, extended in a gesture of blessing, made it look as if it were missing a thumb, and the ring finger was slightly too short as well. Little Mieczyś felt a sort of strange relief as he gazed at this imperfection in perfection. Thanks to this minor flaw, the angel seemed closer to him, not to say human. Captured in motion, standing firmly on the ground in a green, shimmering robe (yes, there were spots of light on it), with one wing visible—not made of feathers, like a goose’s wing, but as if woven from hundreds of tiny beads, and lined in red—it held a reed and looked busy, somehow preoccupied. Angels were described as “he,” but it seemed obvious that the Four-Fingered Angel was exempt from these brutal divisions and had its own separate place, its own angel’s sex, its own divine gender.
At the gymnasium, Mieczyś was taught German by Mścisław Baum, a large, good-looking Jew with the physique of a Viking, and although in the lessons the students constantly did their best to pronounce the words carefully, to speak the German of Goethe, something always pulled them toward Galicia and its singsong, slanting, Polonized and Yiddisher version of the language, in which the words seemed slightly flattened, like old slippers—one could feel safe and at home in it.
