Ferdydurke (22 page)

"Listen, old fellow," I said, "here's fifty groszes. I'll give you one zloty this evening, but you must put this twig between your teeth and remain with it until nightfall."

The bearded man stuck the greenery in his mouth. I blessed the money that wins allies and returned to my room. I put my eye to the keyhole. The schoolgirl was moving about, as girls are wont to do in their rooms. She shifted things in her drawers, took out a notebook, placed it on a table, I saw her face in profile—the face of a typical schoolgirl looking at a notebook.

I went on peeping like a miserable wretch from four in the afternoon till six (while the beggar continuously held the twig in his mouth), I waited in vain for any sign of anxiety that may have resulted from the defeat sustained at lunch, such as biting her lip or wrinkling her forehead. But no. As if nothing had changed. As if I did not exist. As if nothing had disturbed her schoolgirlishness. Time passed, her schoolgirlishness became more and more cruel and cold, more and more indifferent, remote, and it seemed unlikely that there was any possible way to sully the schoolgirl, who behaved the same way in solitude as she did in public. As if nothing had happened at lunch. At about six o'clock the door to the girl's room opened suddenly, cunningly—Mrs. Engineer stood on the threshold.

"Are you working?" she asked with relief, scrutinizing her daughter. "Are you working?"

"I'm doing my German," the schoolgirl replied.

The mother breathed more easily.

"You're working—that's good. Keep working, keep working."

She stroked the girl's head, reassured. Had she too expected that her daughter might come apart? Zuta impatiently drew back her cute little head. The mother wanted to say something, opened her mouth and closed it—she checked herself. She cast around a suspicious eye.

"Work! Work! Work!" she went on nervously. "Keep busy—work hard. And this evening sneak out to a dance—sneak out to a dance-sneak out to a dance. Come back late, fall asleep like a log ..."

"Don't bother me, Mother!" Zuta exclaimed harshly. "I don't have time!"

Her mother looked at her, trying to conceal her admiration. The schoolgirl's harshness reassured her completely. She realized that her daughter hadn't gone to pieces at lunchtime. But the schoolgirl's brutal sharpness grabbed me by the throat. The sharpness was aimed directly at herself, and nothing pains us to the same degree as watching our beloved when she's not only inexorably sharp toward us but also, in our absence, as if in advance, is hardening herself. And with this her manifestation was painfully imprinted with the girl's brutality. After Mrs. Youngblood's departure she brought her profile back to the notebook and, self-sufficient, detached, and brutal, resumed her lessons.

I felt that I could no longer allow the girl to manifest herself in solitude, and unless I could establish contact between her and my peeping, things would take a tragic turn. Instead of defiling her, I was delighting in her person, instead of catching her by the throat, she was catching me by the throat. I swallowed my saliva loudly, right next to the door, so that she would hear me and realize that I was peeping. She shuddered but didn't turn her head—which was clear evidence that she had heard me—and she tucked her cute little head between her shoulders, as if wounded. But her profile instantly ceased to exist in and of itself, and therefore, all at once and quite remarkably, its beguiling manifestation breathed its last. The girl with the peeped-at profile fought long and hard in silence, and the fight consisted of her not batting an eye. She continued to move her pen on paper, and she behaved as if no one were peeping at her.

But lo and behold, after a few minutes the keyhole itself, as if looking at her with my eye, began to bother hef—and in order to proclaim her independence and affirm her indifference she sniffled loudly, she sniffled coarsely and repulsively as if to say: "See, I don't care a hoot, I can sniffle too." That's how girls show their greatest disdain. And that's exactly what I was waiting for. When she made the tactical error of sniffling, I too sniffled near the door, I sniffled obviously, but not too loudly, as if I couldn't help it, as if her sniffling were contagious. The girl became quiet as a mouse—the nasal duet was unacceptable to her—but her nose, once set in action, began to annoy her, and after a brief struggle she was forced to take out her handkerchief and blow her nose, and then at longer intervals she sniffled nervously, inconspicuously, which I went on repeating near the door, sniffle by sniffle. I congratulated myself on my success in so easily seizing that nose of hers, the girl's nose was infinitely less modern than the girl's legs and easier to conquer. By highlighting the nose and wresting it from her I took an enormous step forward. If only I could make the Youngblood girl catch a nervous cold, if only I could make her modernity catch a cold.

And yet, after all that sniffling, she couldn't simply get up and cover the keyhole with a piece of cloth—this would have been tantamount to admitting that the sniffling was a sign of anxiety. But shush, let us sniffle wretchedly, hopelessly, let us conceal our hope! I underestimated, however, the girl's skill and craft. Suddenly, with a wide sweep of her hand—with her whole forearm—she wiped her nose from ear to ear, and this bold, sporty, feisty, and amusing gesture changed the situation to her advantage and adorned the sniffling with charm. She grabbed me by the throat. At the same time—I barely managed to jump away from the keyhole—cunningly, unexpectedly, Mrs. Youngblood stepped into my room.

"What is our young man doing?" she asked suspiciously when she saw me vacillating in the middle of the room. "Why is our young man ... standing here? Why isn't our young man doing his lessons? Doesn't our young man participate in sports? You have to get busy with something," she cried out in rage. She was afraid for her daughter. She sniffed some vague design on her daughter in my ill-defined stance in the middle of the room. I made no move to clarify anything, I continued to stand listlessly and awkwardly, arrested in motion, till the Youngblood woman turned sideways. She then saw the beggar in front of the house.

"What's this, he's got... ? Why the twig ... in his mouth?"

"Who?"

"The beggar. What's the meaning of this?"

"I don't know. He stuck it in and he's holding it."

"You have talked to him, young man. I saw it through the window."

"Well yes, I did."

She scurried over my face with her eyes. She swung like a pendulum. She suspected that the twig had a hidden meaning, a message of hostility and malice toward her daughter. But she had no idea what associations I had in mind, she had no way of knowing that for me the twig in the mouth had become an attribute of modernity. Her suspicion that it was I who told the bearded fellow to hold the greenery between his teeth was such nonsense that it could not be put into words. She surveyed my mind with mistrust, suspecting that it had fallen prey to a whim, and she left. Giddy-up, follow her! Hit her! Hold her! In swift pursuit! She's the prisoner of my fantasy! The prey of my whim! Quiet, quiet! I jumped back to the keyhole. As events developed, I found it more and more difficult to maintain my originally hopeless and miserable posture—the fight heated me up, monkey spitefulness gained the upper hand over exhaustion and resignation. The schoolgirl had disappeared. Having heard voices on the other side of the wall she realized that I was no longer watching her, and this enabled her to escape the trap. She went downtown. Will she notice the twig in the beggar's face, will she guess for whose benefit the bearded man is holding it? Even if she didn't guess—the twig in the bearded man's mouth, the acrid, green bitterness in the beggar's mouth, would have to weaken her, because it would have been too much at odds with her modern perception of the world. Dusk was falling. Street lamps bathed the city in violet. The caretaker's little son was returning from the corner market. In the clear and limpid air, trees were losing their leaves. A small airplane whirred above the houses. The front door slammed, announcing the Youngblood woman's departure. Mrs. Engineer, anxious, ruffled, sensing something bad in the air, went to her committee meeting to fortify herself with a breath of something civic-minded, worldly, and mature.

M adam Chair Dear ladies, on today's agenda we have the plague of abandoned infants.

Mrs. Youngblood Where are the funds coming from?

Dusk was falling, and the beggar was still under the window with the young greenery, like a discordant note. I was all alone in the apartment. A Sherlock Holmes situation began to evolve in the empty rooms, some kind of a detective plot was developing here as I stood in the semi-darkness, looking for the continuation of this happily begun adventure. Since the two of them had fled I decided to trespass their rooms, perhaps I'd succeed in reaching them through that small part of their aura which they had left behind. In the Youngbloods' bedroom—a bright, cramped, clean, and frugally furnished room—there was the scent of soap and bathrobe, the sweetish warmth of the intelligentsia, modern, orderly, yet at the same time smelling of nail clippings, gas heaters, and pajamas. I stood in the center of the room for a long while, breathing in its ambience, examining its elements, and searching for some distasteful essence, something with which to contaminate it all.

On the face of it I couldn't find fault with anything. Cleanliness, order, sunlight, thrift, and simplicity—and the scent of cosmetics was even better than in old-fashioned bedrooms. And I didn't know why the modern engineer's bathrobe, his pajamas, face cloth, shaving cream, his slippers, his wife's Vichy lozenges and rubberized sports gear, the bright little yellow curtain in a modern window pointed to something disgusting. Standardization perhaps? Philistinism? Bourgeois narrow-mindedness? No, that wasn't it, no—then what? I stood there unable to discover the formula for my disgust, because there was no word, no gesture or act with which I could catch that distasteful essence and call it my own—and then my eyes fell on a book lying open on a bedside table. It was Chaplin's memoirs, opened to the page on which he tells how H. G. Wells had danced before him a solo of his own arrangement. "... Then H. G. Wells magnificently dances a fantastic dance." An English writer's solo dance helped me to catch that distaste, as if on a fishing line. Here was an appropriate commentary! This room was Wells himself dancing solo for C h a p l i n. Because who was Wells in his dance?—a Utopian. This old modern man thought that he was free to express his joy and to dance, he insisted on his right to joy and harmony... he pranced with a vision of the world as it was to be thousands of years hence, he pranced solo, overtaking our time, he danced conceptually because he thought he had the right to .. . And what was this bedroom?—a Utopia. Where was there any room for those gasps and moans that a man lets out in his sleep? Where was there room for his better half's obesity? Where was there any room for Youngblood's beard, a beard actually shaven off but nonetheless existing
in potential
After all, the engineer had a beard even though he threw it into the sink every day with the shaving cream—and this room was clean shaven. In times gone by, the soughing forest was mankind's bedroom, but where was the room for soughs, for the darkness and blackness of the forest in this bright room amid the towels? How stingy was this cleanliness—and cramped—light blue, incompatible with the color of earth and of a human being! And the engineer and his wife seemed to me just as dreadful in this room as Wells in the dance of his own invention in front of Chaplin.

But not until I abandoned myself to my solo dance—not until then did my thoughts acquire flesh and become action, ridiculing everything around me and drawing out a foul taste. I danced—and my prancing without a partner, in emptiness and in silence, swelled with frenzy, oh, give me courage! When I finished dancing around the Youngbloods' towels, pajamas, shaving cream, beds, and sports gear I retreated quickly, closing the door behind me. I had filled their modern interior with dancing! But onward, onward, now to the schoolgirl's room, now dance and spoil everything there!

But Miss Youngblood's room, actually a parlor where she slept and did her lessons, was infinitely more difficult to turn into something distasteful. The mere fact that the girl didn't have her own room and merely slept in the hallway gave off delightful and intoxicating meanings. There was in it the great transiency of our century, the schoolgirl's nomadic life and something like
carpe diem
that linked up, through mysterious transfigurations, with the sleek, automobile-engendered nature of present-day youth. One would suppose that she falls asleep instantly, as soon as she lays her little head (not just head; schoolgirls had eyes—but they still had "little heads") on her pillow, and this in turn brought to mind the speed and intensity of contemporary life. Moreover, in the absence of a bedroom,
sensu stricto,
it was impossible for me to do again what I had done in the Youngbloods' bedroom. The schoolgirl actually slept in public, not in private, she had no private life at night, and this hard public life united her with Europe, America, with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, with labor camps, flag waving, hotels, railroad stations, giving her an immensely wide scope, eliminating the need for a room of her own. Her bedsheets, stashed in the hideaway sofa, had an auxiliary character, they could at most be an accessory to sleep. There was no dressing table. The schoolgirl looked at herself in a wall mirror. She had no little hand mirror. By her sofa there was a small black table, such as any schoolgirl might have, on which lay books and notebooks. On the notebooks—a nailfile, on the window-sill—a penknife, a cheap pen for six zlotys, an apple, a sports program, photographs of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a pack of opium-laced cigarettes, a toothbrush, a tennis shoe with a flower in it, a carnation, discarded inadvertently. And that was all. How modest, yet how powerful!

I stopped by the carnation in silence—I couldn't help but admire the schoolgirl! What skill! By tossing the flower into the shoe she killed two partridges with one stone—she spiced love with sports, and she seasoned sports with love! She had tossed the flower into a sweaty tennis shoe rather than into an ordinary shoe because she knew that flowers aren't hurt by athlete's sweat alone. By associating athletic sweat with the flower she was imposing a favorable connection with her sweat in general, she made it into something flowerlike and sporty. Oh, masterful girl! While the old-fashioned, naive, and ordinary girls grew azaleas in flowerpots, she had tossed a flower into a shoe, and a sports shoe at that! And—oh, the rascal—she surely did it unconsciously, inadvertently!