Authors: Stefan Grabinski
An overwhelming stuffiness took possession of his mind, it prevailed in his throat and chest. A dim nightmare managed to slip in … . His impulsively outstretched hand wanted to hold back the enemy, but fettered, it fell back. A stagnant darkness followed … .
At some time during the night Ozarski awoke. He rubbed his eyes lazily, raised his heavy head, and began to listen. He thought he had heard a noise coming from the region of the oven. Indeed, after a moment, a distinct rustling issued from there, like soot giving way in a chimney. He tried to focus his eyes on its cause, but the complete darkness prevented him from doing so.
Suddenly a strip of moonlight penetrated the frosted windows, and cutting the middle of the room with a bright streak, its greenish glow illuminated part of the kitchen.
The engineer instinctively directed his eyes upward, in the direction of the oven, and to his amazement saw a pair of naked, muscular calves dangling from the hood and over the stove. Not changing his position, Ozarski waited with bated breath. Meanwhile, amid the continual noise of falling soot, powerful shanks emerged from the smoke-hole, to be slowly followed by wide, sinewy loins, then a woman’s abdomen with strong, expansive lines. Finally, with one jerk, the entire figure came out of the opening and dropped onto the floor. Not far from Ozarski, a huge, horrible hag stood in the moonlight … .
She was completely naked, with loosened long white hair falling below her shoulders. Even though, judging by the colour of her hair, she seemed an old woman, her body possessed a strange compactness and flexibility. Entranced, the engineer let his eyes wander along big breasts, firm like a girl’s, along strong, solid hips and supple thighs. The hag, as if wanting him to get a more thorough look at her, stood motionless for a long time in the moonlight. After a while she silently advanced toward the bed, pausing in the middle of the room. Now he could clearly see her previously shadow-covered face. He was met by the fiery glance of big black eyes, wildly brilliant against wrinkled eyelids. But he was most amazed by the expression on the face. That old countenance, furrowed by a system of folds and hollows, seemed doubled up. Ozarski sensed in it a familiar physiognomy, but for the present it escaped his mind. Suddenly, realizing where he was, he unraveled the tangled enigma: the hag was looking at him with a double face – the innkeeper’s and Makryna’s. The repugnant warts spread all over her, the hawk-like nose, the demonic eyes, and the age – belonged to the lecherous old man; on the other hand, the sex (unquestionably a woman’s), the white scar from the middle of the forehead to the eyebrow, and especially the birthmark on the right breast – betrayed Makryna.
Shocked by this discovery, he didn’t lower his gaze from the hag’s magnetic eyes.
Meanwhile, she advanced right up to the bed, and placing one leg along its edge, with the other she rested her big toe on his lips. This happened so unexpectedly that he didn’t even have time to avoid the heavy, overpowering foot. He was gripped by a strange fear. In his burdened chest a nervous heart pounded; his lips, pressed down by the toe of the hag, couldn’t utter a cry. Thus lasted a long, silent moment.
Slowly the shrew, not changing the position of her legs, removed the quilt and started to take off his underclothes. At first Ozarski attempted to defend himself, but feeling her pressure on him, and his will fettered by the fire of her lustful eyes, he surrendered with some kind of terrible joy.
The hag, noticing the change which had overcome him, removed the foot crushing his lips and, sitting on the bed, began a wild, debauched fondling of his body. After several minutes she gained complete control: he quivered from pleasure. An unleashed heat – animalistic, insatiable, primitive – rocked their bodies and entangled them in a titanic embrace. The lustful female threw herself under his body, and humbly, like a young maiden, drew him into her with a craving movement of her thighs.
Ozarski satisfied her. Then she went crazy. She encircled his middle with her strong arms, ensnared his loins with her muscular legs, and began to squeeze him in a terrific hug. He felt a pain at the small of his back and in his chest.
‘Let go! You’re strangling me!’
The terrible embrace didn’t ease up. He thought she would crush his ribs, shatter his chest. Half-conscious, he laid a free hand on a glittering knife lying on the nearby table, pushed it under her arm, and plunged it in.
A hellish double-cry tore apart the quiet of the night: the savage, animalistic roar of a man – and the sharp, piercing wail of a woman. And then silence, absolute silence … .
He felt relief; the snake-like tangles of a noctuid loosened, relaxed; a smooth viper seemed to slide down along the length of his body, eagerly slipping to the ground. He saw nothing, for the moon had hidden itself behind a cloud. His head weighed terribly, his temples pounded loudly … .
Suddenly he jumped up from the bedding and feverishly looked for some matches. He found them, tore them open, and lit a taper. A faint light brightened up the room; no one was there.
He leaned over the bed. The bedding was spread with soot, full of signs of the bodies that had rolled over it; on the pillow there were several large blood stains. Then he saw that his left hand was tightened about a knife spattered with gore up to the handle.
He was seized by a dull dizziness. Staggering, he rushed to the window and opened it; a freezing gust of winter morning air came in and hit him in the face. Out of the room escaped a trail of lethal gas … .
He regained consciousness, he remembered the cry. Automatically, half-clothed, he dashed with the lit taper toward the inner room. Standing at the threshold, he glanced inside, and bridled up.
On a filthy plank-bed lay two naked corpses – the gigantic old man’s and Makryna’s – steeped profusely in blood. Both had the same fatal wound, near the left armpit, above the heart … .
The express
Continental
from Paris to Madrid rushed with all the force its pistons could muster. It was already the middle of the night; the weather was showery. The beating rain lashed the brightly lit windows and was scattered on the glass in rolling drops. Bathed in the downpour, the coaches glittered under roadside lampposts like wet armour. A hollow groan issued forth into space from their black bodies, a confused chatter of wheels, jostling buffers, mercilessly trampled rails. The frenzied chain of coaches awakened sleeping echoes in the quiet night, drew out dead voices in the forests, revived slumbering ponds. Some type of heavy, drowsy eyelids were raised, some large eyes opened in consternation, and so they remained in momentary fright. And the train sped on in a strong wind, in a dance of autumn leaves, pulling after it an extended swirling funnel of startled air, while smoke and soot lazily clung to its rear; the train rushed breathlessly on, hurling behind it the blood-red memory of sparks and coal refuse … .
In one of the first-class compartments, squeezed in the corner, dozed a man in his forties, of strong, Herculean build. The subdued lamplight that filtered with difficulty through the drawn shade lit up his long, carefully shaved face and revealed his firmly set, thin lips.
He was alone; no one interrupted his sleepy reveries. The quiet of the closed interior was disturbed only by the knocking of wheels under the floor or the flickering of gas in the gas-bracket. The red colour of the plush cushions imbued a stuffy, sultry tone which acted soporifically like a narcotic. The soft, yielding material muffled sounds, deadened the rattle of the rails, and surrendered in a submissive wave to any pressure. The compartment appeared to be plunged into deep sleep: the curtains drawn on ringlets lay dormant, the green net spread under the ceiling swung lethargically. Rocked by the car’s steady motion, the traveller leaned his weary head on the headrest and slept. The book that had been in his hands slipped from his knees to the floor. On its binding of delicate, dark-saffron vellum the title was visible:
Crooked Lines
; near that, impressed with a stamp, the name of the book’s owner: Tadeusz Szygon.
At some moment the sleeper stirred; he opened his eyes and swept them about his surroundings. For a second an expression of amazement was reflected on his face. It seemed as if he couldn’t understand where he was and why he found himself there. But almost immediately a wry smile of resignation came to his lips. He raised his large, powerful hand in a gesture of surrender, and then an expression of dejection and contemptuous disdain passed over his face. He fell back into a half-sleepy state … .
Someone’s steps were heard in the corridor; the door was pulled back and a conductor entered the compartment:
‘Ticket, please.’
Szygon didn’t stir. Assuming he was asleep, the conductor came up and grasped him by the shoulder:
‘Pardon me, sir; ticket, please.’
With a faraway look in his eyes, Szygon glanced at the intruder:
‘Ticket?’ he yawned out casually. ‘I don’t have one yet.’
‘Why didn’t you buy it at the station?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re going to have to pay a fine.’
‘F-fine? Yes,’ he added, ‘I’ll pay it.’
‘Where did you get on? Paris?’
‘I don’t know.’
The conductor became indignant.
‘What do you mean you don’t know? You’re making fun of me, sir. Who else should know?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s assume that I got on at Paris.’
‘And to what destination should I make the ticket out for?’
‘As far as possible.’
The conductor looked carefully at the passenger:
‘I can only give you a ticket as far as Madrid; from there you can transfer to any train you like.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ replied Szygon, with a wave of his hand. ‘As long as I just keep on riding.’
‘I will have to give you your ticket later. I must first issue it and work out the cost with the fine.’
‘As you wish.’
Szygon’s attention suddenly became riveted by the railway insignias on the conductor’s collar: several jagged little wings weaved in a circle. As the sardonically smiling conductor was preparing to leave, Szygon sensed that he had already seen that face, twisted in a similar grimace, a few times before. Some fury tore him from his place, and he threw out a warning:
‘Mr. Wings, watch out for the draft!’
‘Please be quiet; I’m closing the door.’
‘Watch out for the draft,’ he stubbornly repeated. ‘One can sometimes break one’s neck.’
The conductor was already in the corridor.
‘He’s either crazy or drunk,’ he remarked under his breath, passing into the next car.
Szygon remained alone.
He was in one of his famous ‘flight’ phases. On any given day, this strange person found himself, quite unexpectedly, several hundred miles from his native Warsaw and somewhere at the other end of Europe – in Paris, in London, or in some third-rate little town in Italy. He would wake up, to his extreme surprise, in some unknown hotel which he looked at for the first time in his life. How he came to be in such strange surroundings, he was never able to explain. The hotel staff, when questioned, generally measured the tall gentleman with a curious, sometimes sarcastic glance and informed him about the obvious state of things – that he had arrived the day before on the evening or morning train, had eaten supper and had ordered a room. One time some wit asked him if he also needed to be reminded under what name he had arrived. The malicious question was completely legitimate: a person who could forget what had occurred the previous day could also forget his own name. In any event, there was in Tadeusz Szygon’s improvised rides a certain mysterious and unexplained feature: their aimlessness, which entailed a strange amnesia toward everything that had occurred from the moment of departure to the moment of arrival at an unknown location. This emphatically attested to the phenomenon being, at the very least, puzzling.
After his return from these adventurous excursions, life would go on as usual. As before, he would frequent the casino, lose his money at bridge and make his famous bets at horse races. Everything went along as it always had – normal, routine and ordinary … .
Then, on a certain morning, Szygon would disappear once again, vanishing without a trace … .
The reason for these flights was never made clear. In the opinion of some, one had to look for its source in an atavistic element inherent in the nature of this eccentric; in Szygon’s veins there apparently flowed gypsy blood. It seemed he had inherited from his perpetually roaming ancestors a craving for constant roving. One example given as proof of this ‘nomadism’ was the fact that Szygon could never reside long in any one place: he was continually changing his living quarters, moving from one section of town to the other.
Whatever impulses prompted his aimless romantic travels, he certainly didn’t glorify in them after his return. He would come back – likewise unexpectedly – angry, exhausted and sullen. For the next few days he would lock himself in his home, clearly avoiding people, before whom he felt shame and embarrassment.
Most interesting of all was Szygon’s state during these ‘flights’ – a state almost completely dominated by subconscious elements.
Some dark force tore him from his home, propelled him to the railway station, pushed him into a carriage – some overpowering command impelled him, frequently in the middle of night, to leave his cosy bed, leading him like a condemned man through the labyrinth of streets, removing from his way a thousand obstacles, to place him in a compartment and send him out into the world. Then came a blindfolded, random journey, changing trains without any destination in mind, and a stop at a foreign city, or an out-of-the-way town or village, not knowing why precisely there and not some other place – and finally a terrible awakening in completely unfamiliar surroundings … .
Szygon never arrived at the same place: the train always put him off at a different destination. During his ride he never ‘woke up,’ i.e., he never became aware of the aimlessness of what he was doing – his full psychic faculties returned only after his departure from the train, and this frequently only after a deep, fortifying sleep in a hotel or a roadside shed or inn … .