Dukla Read online

  But with the end of September everything changes. It’s enough to leave the house and walk twenty yards, and instead of a country alleyway, instead of an avenue of old trees there’s just an inferno, columns of fire and blazing bushes. The flames rise from the depths of the earth and, coming up through the thick trunks of sycamore and linden and chestnut, burst into the sky like fiery feather headdresses. If a wind is blowing, the air is filled with smoldering scraps. Even the dark elderberries, which look like polished pieces of coal, seem to be alight, as if they held glowing embers in their moist interiors. Leaves spin, drop into the water with a hiss and turn to ash. After the first frosts the wild vine turns red and runs down the walls of houses like thick blood.

  At eight on a Tuesday morning temptation emerges from every corner. The cigarette has the same taste as always, children roll about like colored balls, milk cans rattle, nothing changes, but everything suggests that the soul is a fiction of the mind, which is trying to use it to equal the visible world. Yet it’s all in vain, because even thought vanishes in the incandescent aura of early morning. The sky is blue, distant, cold. Sparks crackle along the rusty wire fences. Yellow explosions, crimson, slanting rays melting and spilling into the air like golden wax, magma and malignant fever, fear and trembling, the praise and glory of matter whose red tongue is licking reality down to the bone.

  FROST

  In the night the temperature fell to twenty-two below. A round moon hung beneath the dark blue vault of the sky and it all resembled a dream in which the outlines of events leading us into temptation can barely be made out. We know it’s perilous, but we don’t want to wake up.

  The air hung in place, strained to its limits, and not a single sound could hide in it. Noises that usually would fall silent after a moment now went on without end, because a frost like that makes even time freeze solid, fusing it with light and air. This newly produced substance had the resonant quality of metal.

  We were walking along an old logging road that had been smoothed over by sleds hauling timber. The tiniest things cast a shadow. A lump of ice, the track left by a runner, the imprint of a winter horseshoe, a broken branch—everything had its own black double. The bark of the beech trees shone with a glassy burnish. White, silver, and black entered into subtle combinations with one another, thus placing reality under a question mark. And if not reality, then at least the purpose and meaning of perception. The landscape breathed death: the rivers had frozen solid, birds were dying in flight, and the woods resounded with the crack of splitting trees. That sound was pitiless, because the silence lengthened it into infinity. The hard, dead snap endured in space as in eternity, endured as an ideal model of hopeless sorrow.

  Then the road ended and we came out by a scarcely trodden path onto an exposed pass.

  Down below lay the earth. It was turned on its back, spread-eagled, given over to icy light. An unseen immobility seeped down from the heavens, filling the crannies, the hollows in trees, the holes beneath the bark, the crevices in the rocky cliffs above Zawoja, the insides of the trees, the bodies of animals, the skin of humans, the porous structure of stones, walls, houses, blades of dry grass, straw mulch around plants, stocks of food, dogs’ kennels, cats’ baskets in attics, thoughts, dreams and fears before falling asleep—everything lost its fluid nature, shifting toward immutability, toward the fulfillment of dreams, in the direction of the place where alpha entwines with omega, and essence creeps into existence like the delicious tingling in the feet and hands felt by a drunk in the frost.

  The snow shone with a luciferous shimmer. Temptation always assumes an aesthetic form. The stars were dim glittering pinpricks. Things that are unencompassable, indifferent, and beautiful draw us to their rim and perhaps watch as we sway at the edge of the abyss, touched in equal part by desire and fear. The mercuric moonlight grew ever colder, trembling in the valley at our feet. The vividness of the dark landscape surpassed its realness. We heard dogs. The barking came from the south, but there were no villages there, and so the sound must have been circling amid the frozen expanses of air like an acoustic fata morgana. It was quite possible that the concentrated space had preserved these noises since the previous winter, and that our faint, half-whispered conversation would also be kept, and we’d be heard by others a year or a century later. In the end, by an effort of will, we forced ourselves to push on. There was something cowardly in this motion of ours. We were slipping out the back way, a little like scurrying animals intent on preserving a modicum of heat in their tiny bodies, while the rest of the world was simply enduring in its magnificent prodigal way.

  RAIN IN DECEMBER

  On Monday it began to rain. For several days there’d been a thaw. We were on our way home. Darek cursed, turned the wheel, and the car skidded on wet ice. We tried to use the sides of the road, where there were rocks sticking up. The way was clear, straight, climbing gently for four or five miles. The houses on both sides looked abandoned. Their windows reflected blackness, though the sky was the color of dirty water. A motorcycle was coming down the hill. The rider was sliding along the sheer surface, his feet spread wide. He looked like a stiff horseman whose mount had suddenly shrunk to the size of a WSK motorbike.

  We crawled higher. The village was left behind. The rain was trying to wipe it off the map. A mile before the pass Darek said, “Dammit, it’s raining and freezing.” The windshield wipers were scraping against the glass like they were trying to get inside the car.

  Then we came to the woods: it was strange, translucent, like something from a dream. Young alders leaned over the road. Their crowns rubbed against the roof of the car. Elder bushes, pussy willow, hazel trees, all spread like clumps of silvery seaweed frozen still in their underwater swaying. Everything was covered in ice. Every branch, every tiniest blade of grass was sheathed in a transparent cover. Once, long ago, they sold colored candies in glass tubes with a stopper at one end. It was a little like that: glass tubes, and in each one a stalk, a twig, even the pine needles had been dressed individually, with great care. A blackthorn plunged in ice looked like a living corporeal being surprised by the flash of an X-ray.

  We pulled over. We’d never seen anything like it. The snow was covered by a hard skin. Drops of rain fell with a soft rattling sound. Trees were bent every which way in the motionless air. The tips of the huge firs by the pass leaned toward one another in a puppetlike dance. It was exactly as though a great wind had passed over the area and had suddenly come to a halt. It had ceased, but had kept on blowing. It had stopped dead in place. I thought to myself that the feathers of birds, if there were any birds at all that day, must be making a crunching sound in flight, from their icy carapace.

  We drove on. The gray-green trunks of the young ashes had the glassy shine of man-made things.

  It rained all night. The world seemed about to turn into an icicle. It seemed about to become like one of those glass spheres containing a little house and a snowman, with little flakes falling from a blue sky. Only the loud roar in the darkness clashed with that image.

  NIGHT

  It looks as if it was rocking a moment ago, and it was only your gaze that stopped it moving. A blade, or a shaving from a silver disk, hanging above the hump of Ubocze Mountain like one side of a curved pair of shears over a sheep’s back, or like a hook right by the mouth of a big fish. It’s the first night of the first quarter of October, when the moon has barely an hour in the sky. Then it’s swallowed up by the earth near Grybów and you’re left alone in the darkness.

  You can’t see your own hand, or other people, you can’t see the things whose shape existence usually takes, you can’t even see the air moving between your fingers. To believe in your own life you have to take hold of yourself, or escape into memory. Without the world, without the variety of forms all around, a person is naught but a mirror in which nothing is reflected. During the day this cannot be seen, because light is thinner and more wei
ghtless than air. It sneaks into every crevice, which is to say all shapes—the tangible, the visible, and at times the invisible too. Now things are different. The primal matter of the dark enters the veins and circulates like blood.

  Somewhere a dog barks. In their houses, people make the day last longer with lamps and television sets. They want to see their lives, their objects, all they’ve accumulated between their four walls since the beginning of the world, since the time they made the first fire. From above, from very far up, the towns and villages look like the remains of campfires.

  In the beginning was darkness and now, at six forty in the evening in 1996, the oldest time is in progress. In my pocket I have Marlboro cigarettes and other things that people carry with them at the end of the twentieth century, but if it weren’t for the vagaries of memory I’d only be a piece of matter barely brought to life and plunged into the dark of ages. It’s quite possible that the body is a warm, compact variety of darkness, and that at moments such as this one the night is simply reaching out to claim its own. The black extends into infinity. Nothing greater comes to mind. This is what a droplet must feel like when it falls into water.

  The remnants of the glow over Ubocze fade soundlessly and the mountain disappears in a gulf of dark blue. The village of Ropa reminds you of a legend about a drowned world in which, in order to see anything, people have to emit their own light.

  Darkness and time—weightless, invisible substances that expose human frailty. The mind is nothing but a match flame in the wind. The soul cowers in the body from fear of the gloom, while the body double-checks its existence by touching its own skin. And so in the end what remains is that simplest of the senses, thanks to which insects crawl in the earth, and we can distinguish what’s living from what’s dead, and very little else.

  BEYOND THE THRESHOLD

  It’s enough to cross the threshold. The open door lets out the warmth of the house, the smell of cigarettes and food; the calm aroma of the last few hours enters the turmoil of the southern wind. In this way life combines with the rest of the world and the circle closes. It’s the same with other people. The ephemeral infusions of their presence pass through loose windows, old walls, rotten floorboards, and join with the primal kingdom of the elements. Oxygenium, Natrium, Hydrogenium, Nitrogenium, Ferrum . . . First comes the stale warmth of living rooms, then cold gusts along country lanes, air masses over Ubocze Mountain, the stratosphere, and the constellations; it makes my head spin as I inhale it all deep into my lungs a few minutes after midnight, while everyone else is sleeping and utterly indifferent to the fact that they’re circulating among states of concentration.

  So then I cross the threshold, there’s a full moon and I can see all the way to Chełm Mountain, whose top looks like an animal moving at a steady trot, and I know that nothing extraordinary is circulating in my veins or settling in my bones. Ferrum, Calcium . . . The same as in the black skeletons of fences, the ruins of cellars out in the wasteland, in the river beneath the ice and in the ice itself, sliced up by the skates of children, who also contain the same thing; whichever way you turn, whatever mental somersault you perform, still everything returns to its primal form, which iridesces, turns shapes inside out, and pulls the mind by its hair to get it to reflect everything like a mirror.

  So I go back, close the door, and sit at the table, but a quarter of an hour later uncertainty impels me out again and I go check whether this is really how things are.

  The constellations are turning and sprinkling light on the houses. The sharp rooftops slice the glow in two, and it falls and soaks into the earth like rain. And there’s nothing else in this landscape except the light; I’m looking for evidence of my separateness, but in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep, it can’t be found. So I retreat one more time, in order with the aid of coffee and a cigarette—those indubitable signs of humanity—to get a grip on myself. And only two minutes later I’m ensconced in an armchair like the crown of creation, the ashtray within easy reach.

  But the elements and the groups of stars were in cahoots, and they rubbed temptingly against the windowpane and the vast space above the village in an attempt to lure me out and deprive me of salvation, because it wasn’t about the beauty of the Gorlice region but about the existence of the soul as an insubstantial substance not included in the periodic table of the elements. It was about whether I would derive being from nonbeing, or if I would equal nonbeing with being and the cosmos would swallow the logos the way a goose swallows a noodle.

  And I didn’t go out a third time, because I was overcome by fear. To put it differently: I’d lost my nerve. For how can the invisible be distilled from the visible except by a perilous experiment involving, with all due respect, the integrity of one’s own coherence?

  SKY

  When all else has passed, there’ll still remain the sky that spreads now over the town of Dukla, over the village of Łosie, over southern Poland, over the whole world. There won’t be people anymore, but this image of the human soul, human intelligence, human essence, will endure in time that’s slowly turning into eternity, till in the end it too disappears like everything else. In any case there’s one sure consolation: the Image, twin brother of our mind, will outlive us.

  On certain days the meteorological metaphor moves toward an actual representation. At such times the swollen matter of the clouds resembles the folds of the human brain. Windless, warm, damp weather forms water vapor into regular coils and infuses them with the grayish purple light of tedium. In these moments we pace from wall to wall, bouncing around the inside of the house, our mind taking leave of our head yet finding only itself.

  Or when the wind blows from the east and drives air masses from over Ukraine, Siberia, and Alaska, propelling them around the world, and the clouds tear apart, burst, form together again, no shape lasting more than a moment and none repeating, just as there are never two waves alike on the ocean, nor two snowflakes in winter; yet the chaos is universal in scope and what is happening over Tokarnia and Berd and Ubycze is merely a fragment of the atmosphere of the entire globe, though even this tiny instance is enough to grasp the fact that the madness, mutability, and infinity of forms ends up acquiring a cosmic monotony and is reminiscent of the human mind, whose freedom and mobility tend toward stupefaction and terror, in the moment when it comprehends that all that was merely play, merely chasing one’s own tail. The former collective farm of Moszczaniec to the left continues its unreal existence, and we’re running on empty. The nearest gas station isn’t till Komańcza.

  Or when the sun is setting and the edges of the clouds look like wounds. The road from Tylawa climbs to the crest of Słonna Mountain and the entire south burns like an allegory of atrocity. Blood is bright, it shines with its own glow. The view brings to mind all those things we desire and are afraid of, because gold is always light, and red always blood and fire, which is to say the most enticing forms of death. Of course, driving down to Załuże we’re moving on the borderline of good taste. But we cannot avoid the horror that comes when the senses open themselves to the infinite. Time is only an idea, while space alas resembles a fact. That’s why it agitates the imagination, which does in fact consider itself to be boundless, but doesn’t actually exist. Luckily, immediately afterward we come to Sanok.

  Or high, bright afternoons. At these times the blue looks like painted glass. Hot air rises from the bottom of the Ciechań and between Czumak and Czerteż you won’t see a living soul. There are only adders warming themselves on the old gray roadway. But they’re merely flesh, as everyone knows. And if a weather front happens to be passing through, in the chasmic depths of the blueness long white clouds will show up. They look like bones, like a scattered and hazy vertebral column. Because that’s how things will be at the very end. Even the clouds will vanish and all that will remain will be an endless blue eye hovering over the ruins.

  ANDRZEJ STASIUK has rece
ived numerous awards for his work, including the NIKE, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, for his collection of essays On the Road to Babadag. His novelNinewas published in English to great acclaim in 2007.

  BILL JOHNSTON is the leading translator of Polish literature in the United States. His translation of Tadeusz Różewicz’s new poems won the 2008 Found in Translation Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award.