Authors: Stefan Grabinski
‘Therefore you acknowledge me?’
‘No. This is different. Even you will one day have to yield to a new symbol. Let us not forget about the relativity of ideas. Everything depends on one’s point of view.’
‘Exactly. Even so, where do you get that certainty that runs through your articles?’
‘It springs from a deep conviction about the usefulness of what I proclaim.’
‘Ah, that’s true. You belong to that generation whose ideal is practical reality.’
‘Yes, yes. You, on the other hand, reach beyond it; at least it appears so to you. And you fall into a hazy
mare tenebrarum.
For people of flesh and blood this is not enough; they need reality and everything that confirms it.’
‘You are mistaken. I only wish the deepening of life. Life flows in wide, dense waves, in occurrences tied together so compactly that their division into years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds is absurd. Your notion of time is simply a fanciful concoction drawn from imaginary theories.’
‘Isn’t time a beautiful idea? Have you read
The Time Machine
by that famous English author?’
‘Certainly. In fact, I had it on my mind. It is the best example as to where the imagination can lead. The very idea of a “time machine,” doesn’t it offend life’s virginity with its abundance of constant surprises? These are the results of the vivisection you perform on it. This is an example of how one mechanizes life.’
‘A fabulous story. The quintessence of the mind and its majestic might.’
‘You are the fool, my dear sir. Rest assured – no one will ever travel into the past or the future in a machine.’
‘We will never understand each other. A peculiar circumstance! Even though our beings are so intertwined.’
At that moment a terrible chill ran through my body. The watchmaker’s words came to me as if from my own self.
‘Hmm, indeed. At times I feel this too.’
‘If it weren’t for the fact,’ continued the old man in a crestfallen voice, ‘that your thoughts are like new seedlings planted in a barren field, if I didn’t have a presentiment of their blossoming in the immediate future … .’
‘Then what?’
‘I would kill you,’ he coldly replied. ‘With this instrument.’
He extracted from a plush box of wonderful workmanship an ivory-handled dagger.
I smiled triumphantly:
‘Meanwhile the roles are reversed.’
The old man lowered his head in resignation:
‘Because you’ve overcome me in yourself. .. . Now go. I still want to write my last will. Come back in the evening. Take this as a memento.’
He handed me the dagger.
I mechanically took the glittering, cool steel, and without a word of farewell, I left. As I walked down the stairs, I heard a cackling sound coming from the workshop. The old man was laughing … .
- - -
The evening papers of W. gave the following information in their columns:
Murder or Suicide?
A mysterious incident occurred last night at 10 Water Street. This morning Rozalia Witkowska, a widow of a private official, discovered the dead body of a watchmaker, Saturnin Sektor, when she entered his workshop. The body, seated by a window, was covered with blood. An antique dagger of delicate workmanship was buried in the victim’s chest.
At Mrs. Witkowska’s screams the neighbours rushed in, then the police. The medical examiner, Dr. Obminski, confirmed the death, which most probably occurred during the night as a result of blood loss. There were no signs of robbery. Instead, on a table near the body, Policeman Tulejko found the dead man’s will and a sheet of paper on which the watchmaker maker had apparently jotted down the following words:
‘Do not look for any assailants. I die by my own hand.’
The incident exhibits many mysterious and unclear features. Already various rumours are circulating about the deceased. Apparently Sektor spent a few years in an asylum, from which he was only recently released. The director of the institution, a Dr. Tumin, was summoned as a witness in this puzzling matter and stated that the watchmaker had long been suffering from periodic bouts of madness, which grew stronger at every recurrence. This statement is supported by the testimony of Sektor’s neighbours and co-tenants in the apartment house. He had the reputation of being insane. None the less, at periods of
lucida intervalla
he devoted himself to his professional activities, fulfilling a watchmaker’s function excellently. His acquaintances even considered him a brilliant watchmaker.
An interesting light is thrown on the matter by the deceased’s will. Sektor bequeaths all of his substantial fortune for the endowment of an educational fund, with the special stipulation that it be used exclusively by those researching the problem of space and time, as well as any related issues.
Simultaneously with the mysterious incident at Water Street, a couple of sensational facts were reported to police headquarters and the municipal clerk. Strange placards and announcements have been found on the walls of the city in the form of obituary notices, bearing the following message:
The Death Of Time
On the night of November 29th of the current year, Tempus Saturn died, never to return, yielding his place to perpetual Duration.
The second, equally puzzling aspect is that all the tower clocks of our town have stopped for no apparent reason. The hands halted last night at eleven.
A general agitation and some peculiar, superstitious fear reign in the town. Frightened crowds gather in the public squares; voices are heard connecting strange manifestations with the death of the watchmaker.
It had begun then – four years ago, on that August afternoon when Jadwiga left his house for what proved to be the last time. That day she was somehow different. She was quite nervous, as if expecting something. And she held onto him more passionately than ever before.
Then, suddenly, she quickly got dressed, threw over her head her distinctive Venetian scarf, and, kissing him forcefully on the lips, departed. One more time the hem of her dress and the slender outline of her shoe whisked by the threshold, and everything ended forever … .
An hour later she perished under the wheels of a train. Odonicz never found out if her death was accidental or if Jadwiga had thrown herself under the speeding engine. She was, after all, an unpredictable person, that swarthy, darkeyed woman.
But this was not the issue. Truly, it was not. The pain, the despair, the inconsolable grief – all of this was quite natural and understandable. Therefore, this was not the issue.
What struck one was something completely different – something so ridiculously trivial, something so secondary … . Jadwiga, upon leaving him that time, had left the door open.
He remembered that he had stumbled while escorting her through the room, and that, irritated, he had bent down to straighten out a folded corner of the carpet. When he raised his eyes a moment later, Jadwiga was no longer there. She had departed, leaving the door open.
Why hadn’t she closed it? She was usually such a conscientious woman, at times meticulously so … .
He remembered that unpleasant, that most unpleasant impression which the open door had made on him, fluttering its black, smoothly lacquered leaf like a mourning banner in the wind. He was annoyed by its restless movement, which intermittently hid before his eyes a portion of the square in front of his house, to then reveal it in the afternoon sunlight. As he stood there, it suddenly crossed his mind that Jadwiga had left him forever, leaving behind some complex problem to be unravelled whose outward expression was the open door.
Seized by this ominous premonition, he had sprung to the swinging door and looked to his right, in the direction she would have probably taken. There was no trace of her. Before him, spreading out to the railroad embankment in the far horizon, was a golden, empty square, scorching-hot from the summer’s heat. Nothing but that golden, sun-intoxicated plain … . Afterwards came a long, dull ache lasting several months and a silent, heart-wrenching despair born of loss … . Then everything passed – somehow it went away, withdrawing to a corner somewhere … .
And then came this. Stealthily, imperceptibly, from neither here nor there, as if by mere chance. The problem of the open door … . Ha! ha! ha! The problem! A mockery, indeed! The problem of the open door. It’s difficult to believe. Yes, it is. And yet, and yet … .
For entire nights this stubborn nightmare revolved in his mind; he saw the door during the day whenever he momentarily closed his eyes; it appeared in the midst of bright, sober reality – illusive, distant, yet seemingly real.
But now it wasn’t tossed about by the wind, as it had been in that fatal hour. Now it moved slowly, very slowly, away from the fictitious doorframe – as if someone on the outside, the side unseen by his eye, was holding the doorknob and carefully opening the door to a certain angle … .
It was precisely this carefulness, this very cautious movement, which chilled him to the bone. One dreaded the angle becoming too great, the door opening too wide. It seemed the door was playing around with him, not wanting to show what was hiding beyond it. Only the edge of the mystery was revealed to him. He was given the knowledge that there, on the other side, beyond the door, a mystery existed, but any greater details were jealously concealed.
Odonicz fought against this frustrating suggestion with all his might. A thousand times a day he convinced himself that beyond his front door there wasn’t anything alarming, that beyond all his doors nothing was lurking. He constantly tore himself away from his work, and with a quick, predatory step, the step of a stalking panther, he would spring to each door, and, nearly ripping off the lock, open each one and glance into the space beyond. Always, of course, with the same result: not once did he find anything suspicious. Before his eyes, which sought out with terrified curiosity any trace of mystery, there unfolded, just as in the good old days, only an empty, barren square, only the banal fragment of a corridor or the quiet and still interior of the adjoining bedroom or bathroom.
Then he would return to his desk somewhat pacified, only to succumb again to his obsessive thoughts several minutes later … . Finally, he consulted a highly eminent neurologist and began treatment. He went to the seaside several times, he took cold baths, he started going to parties.
After a while it seemed everything had passed. The stubborn picture of the open door gradually faded – and finally vanished.
And Odonicz would have been completely satisfied with himself if not for certain manifestations which showed up a couple of months later.
And they came suddenly, unexpectedly, in a public place, on the street … .
He was close to the end of Swietojanski Street, nearing the point where it intersects with Polna, when at that corner, almost near the edge of the last tenement, panic seized him. It came from some nook and grabbed him by the throat with its iron claws.
‘You won’t go further, my dear sir! Not one step further!’
Odonicz had originally intended to turn directly onto Polna Street at the point where the tenement ended, when he felt this resistance. He didn’t know why, but suddenly it seemed that the angle of the intersection was too sharp for his nerves. Quite simply, an overwhelming anxiety arose within him that there – ‘beyond the bend,’ ‘around the corner’ – one could meet with ‘a surprise.’
The corner building, which one had to go around at an almost perfect right angle to turn onto Polna Street, shielded him for the time being from that unpleasant circumstance, hiding with its several-storied front a view of the other side. But eventually the wall would have to end, suddenly revealing, terrifyingly so, what was to the left of the corner. That suddenness, that instant crossing from one street to another as yet almost completely hidden from his eyes, seized him with boundless alarm. Odonicz didn’t dare meet ‘the unknown.’ Therefore, he took the path of compromise, and closing his eyes before the turn, with his hand resting against the wall so as not to fall, he slowly swerved onto the new street.
In this manner, sliding his fingers along the surface of the wall, he advanced a few steps. When his fingers brushed by the arris of the building, he sensed that the turn had been successfully passed and that he had entered the zone of the next street. Even so, he didn’t dare open his eyes, and he went down Polna Street feeling the walls of its buildings with his hand.
Only after several minutes, when he had already attained, as it were, the right of citizenship in the new zone, when he finally felt that his presence was known, did he get the courage to open his eyes. Looking ahead, he ascertained with relief that there was nothing suspicious before him. Everything was as ordinary and normal as on any urban street: carriages rushed by, motor-coaches flew like lightning, people were passing each other. Odonicz noticed, however, some empty-headed lout several steps away, who, hands thrust in his pockets, a cigarette dangling from his ugly mouth, was gazing at him quite openly and smiling maliciously.
Odonicz suddenly became seized with rage and shame. Flushed with emotion, he went up to the impertinent man, and asked harshly:
‘Why are you gaping at me with your vacant eyes, you clown?’
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ let out the rascal casually, not removing the cigarette from his lips. ‘At first I thought you were blind – but now I think you’re only playing blindman’s buff with yourself. Can you believe it! What an imagination!’ And taking no more heed of Odonicz’s enraged response.he crossed over to the other side of the street, whistling some arietta.
Thus, a new problem arose on the horizon: ‘turning a corner.’
From then on Odonicz lost his self-confidence and relinquished his freedom of movement in public places. Unable to go from one street to the next without feeling an unknown anxiety, he adopted methods of circumventing turns by using wide circles. This was, admittedly, highly inconvenient, for he had to go greatly out of his way, but in this manner he avoided sudden turns, softening considerably the angle at which streets broke off. Now he didn’t have to close his eyes at corner tenements anymore.