The Possessed E-Book

Witold Gombrowicz

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 569

Beschreibung

In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland's greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his status, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside where he is to train Maja Ochołowska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. But no sooner has he arrived than the relationship with his pupil develops into one of twisted love and hate, and he becomes embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby. Haunted kitchens, bewitched towels, conniving secretaries and famous clairvoyants all conspire to determine the fate of the young lovers and the mad prince residing in the castle. Translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic masterpiece that, despite being a literary pastiche, has all the hallmarks of Gombrowicz's typically provocative style.

Leseprobe

‘One of the great novelists of our century.’

— Milan Kundera

‘A master of verbal burlesque, a connoisseur of psychological blackmail, Gombrowicz is one of the profoundest of late moderns, with one of the lightest touches.’

— John Updike

‘Gombrowicz is one of the super-arguers of the twentieth century.... The relentless intelligence and energy of his observations on cultural and artistic matters, the pertinence of his challenge to Polish pieties, his bravura contentiousness, ended by making him the most influential prose writer of the past half century in his native country.’

— Susan Sontag

‘There are also novels of another genre, false novels like Gombrowicz’s, that are kinds of infernal machines.’

— Jean-Paul Sartre

‘What we have here is an unusual manifestation of a writing talent.’

— Bruno Schulz

‘Gombrowicz’s art cannot be measured with the passing of decades. It is a monument of Polish prose.’

— Czeslaw Milosz

The Possessed

Witold Gombrowicz

TRANSLATED FROM THE POLISH BY ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEINTRODUCTIONTHE POSSESSEDI.II.III.IV.V.VI.VII.VIII.IX.X.XI.XII.XIII.XIV.XV.XVI.XVII.XVIII.XIX.XX.XXI.XXII.EPILOGUEFITZCARRALDO EDITIONS CLASSICSABOUT THE AUTHORSCOPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

by adam thirlwell

I.

No one was better than Gombrowicz at talking about Gombrowicz. It’s possible that his masterpiece is his Diary, which he began writing in the Parisian émigré magazine Kultura in 1953, and continued until he died in July 1969. ‘I must become my own commentator, even better, my own theatrical director. I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary Gombrowiczes.’ In another brilliant work of self-commentary, Testament, a book-length interview with Dominique de Roux published in 1968, where Gombrowicz considers his entire oeuvre, he comes up with a constant barrage of self-definitions and aphorisms: ‘I consider myself a relentless realist. One of the central aims of my writing is to forge a path through the Unreal to Reality.’ Or: ‘I could define myself as a little Polish nobleman who has discovered his raison d’être in what I’d call a distance from Form (and therefore also from culture).’ But also: ‘Sincerity? As a writer, that’s what I fear above all. In literature, sincerity leads nowhere.’

The persona was all violence and haughtiness, but at the same time this violence was a product of a total marginalization. He had grown up in Poland in the early twentieth century. In 1933 he published his first book, a collection of stories called Memoirs from the Time of Immaturity (later republished in an expanded version with the new title Bacacay) and entered the world of Warsaw publication: of little magazines and their domestic disputes. Four years later he published a novel, Ferdydurke, and then a year later a play called Yvonne, Princess of Bourgogne. A year after that, in the summer of 1939, he had his so-called potboiler, The Possessed, published in serial form in a popular daily paper, using a pseudonym: Z. Niewieski.

Now, we will come back to The Possessed. But what then happened to Gombrowicz was a catastrophe but also a fairy tale of world history. On 29 July 1939 he took the inaugural transatlantic liner from Gdynia in Poland to Buenos Aires in Argentina, a diplomatic voyage to which he was invited by Jerzy Giedroyc, who worked at the Ministry of Industry. (After the war, Giedroyc, in his Parisian version of exile, went on to found Kultura.) Gombrowicz arrived in Buenos Aires on 21 August. Two days later, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the non-aggression pact, and just over a week later Hitler invaded Poland. As scheduled, the liner turned to go back to Europe. Gombrowicz took his suitcases on board and then, just before departure, in a moment of self-preservation, took them back to shore – where he remained, in Argentina, until 1963. The literary life had suddenly become a life of anonymity and poverty.

I cherish this image of Gombrowicz anonymous very much – working a terrible nine-to-five career in the Banco Polaco, a European writer lost in Argentina, while the Nazis annihilated central Europe, including his friends from literary bohemia, like Bruno Schulz. With some Latin American writers Gombrowicz worked on a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke – a translation that became legendary partly because of the difficulty of its production: between Latin Americans who spoke no Polish, and a Polish writer who spoke only rudimentary Spanish. It appeared in 1947, and was infinitely ignored in Latin America. Gombrowicz’s next novel, Trans-Atlantyk, was published in Kultura, and therefore only read by its 3,000 subscribers. This was why in 1952 Gombrowicz began to write a Diary for Kultura. In it, he would create a personality equal to his lost ambition. It was his only method left to impose himself on the world.

II.

What I mean is that, between the Gombrowicz who finally died in the south of France in 1969, a celebrated European novelist, and the Gombrowicz who wrote The Possessed aged thirty-four, in the full typewriter wildness of central Europe, there is this thirty-year gap in which he offered up his early writing to the full clarity of his dominating intelligence. The Possessed, however, is almost an absence in this analysis. Serial publication of The Possessed hadn’t been completed when war broke out, and on 3 September 1939 its publication ceased. And it was only just before Gombrowicz died, when he compiled a list of key dates and works for Dominique de Roux, that he acknowledged that The Possessed was one of his works at all. The Possessed therefore has the allure of a disowned work, a tacit work – a pulp novel that was written under a pseudonym, written only (so the story goes) for money: as if this novel couldn’t fit into the vast work of self-commentary and explication Gombrowicz had set himself.

Just this once, I think, Gombrowicz was wrong in his auto-analysis. The Possessed is a true planet from Gombrowicz’s galaxy. Out of its high-speed plot emerge many themes of his later self-portrait. It’s true that it poses as some kind of gothic novel, or the parody of a gothic novel. It has a mad prince in a remote and ruined castle, and a haunted room, and a possible treasure. But it also has a strange layer of ultra-modernity: the dance halls and tennis courts of 1930s Warsaw. And anyway, Gombrowicz was always a writer of the fantastical: his art, he pointed out, was based on pure non-sense, on the absurd. To detach The Possessed from the equally parodic stories he wrote in the 1930s, or from the wild opening of Ferdydurke (where a writer who very much resembles Gombrowicz is abducted by a teacher called Pinko and taken back to school), just because its genre is a fantasy genre, is possible only through a feat of impossible engineering. In Testament he looked back on these early works: ‘The formal apparatus I had set in motion was all my own creation. And this apparatus led me by surprise into regions I would never have risked myself if I hadn’t been so high on the absurd, on playfulness, on mystification, on parody.’

The Possessed has one surface plot, which it gradually abandons. This plot concerns the machinations of the mad prince’s secretary to inherit or steal the prince’s art collection – a collection which has so far been unaccountably undervalued – so that he can then marry Maja Ochołowska: a beautiful, bourgeois girl who is also a tennis star. Gradually that story is overtaken by a darker narrative, which contains two different forms of haunting. The first form is the ghost of the prince’s unacknowledged son, whose presence is figured in the uncanny movements of a towel at a kitchen window in the castle:

It was very gently quivering, probably because of a current of fresh air coming from the window. But this motion was strange. The towel wasn’t moving freely in the draught, but quivering, and it was taut. And that made it look as if an invisible hand were holding onto it from below. This motion could not have been the result of air currents – it was a different motion.

The second form is the developing intimacy between Maja, the tennis star, and her new coach, Marian Leszczuk (whose name, until the end of chapter 2, is in fact Walczak – a change apparently determined by a wish to avoid accusations of libel by a ‘real tennis coach named Mr Walczak’, but really, of course, for Gombrowicz to show off the patisserie lightness of his philosophical style). From the moment they meet, Maja and Marian feel a strange frisson of similarity and resemblance, both physical and psychological, that encroaches on them until soon every conversation and interaction feels uncanny.

And at last here we are, inside Gombrowicz’s studio. The Possessed is a fugue on the theme of resemblance. It imagines resemblance as possession by another, and therefore as a state that’s both intoxicating and also to be resisted. There are likenesses everywhere in this novel, all centring on the trio of Maja and Marian and the prince’s apparently dead and unacknowledged son, Franek. Among them, there are many forms of possession, because there are many ways people can be inhabited by other people: like lust or greed or grief. Everyone is vulnerable to being petrified into a form that belongs to someone else, misshapen by other people’s neuroses and psychoses, or the inherited forms of invisible traditions.

This was the terrible wisdom Gombrowicz discovered in his early works, including Ferdydurke, his novelistic masterpiece – a wisdom partly prompted by the horror of a city’s domestic literary criticism. That city happened to be Warsaw. It could have been anywhere. He had entered the world of publication and found himself deformed, into a subject of conversation and journalism. And so he had been forced into a defining philosophy, a sort of existentialism based on shame and humiliation: ‘Accept and understand that you are not yourself, no one is ever themselves, with anyone, in any situation; to be human means to be artificial.’ And then, as he told the revelation thirty years later to Dominique de Roux:

I wasn’t the only one to be a chameleon, everyone was a chameleon. It was the new human condition, you had to understand this very fast.

I became ‘the poet of Form’.

I amputated myself from myself.

I discovered the reality of the human race in this unreality to which it is condemned.

And Ferdydurke, instead of helping me, became a grotesque poem describing – as Schulz wrote – the torments of human beings on a Procrustean bed, that of Form.

The other grotesque poem from this era is The Possessed.

III.

Yvonne, or the Princess of Burgundy, the play Gombrowicz wrote in the same period – and which was never performed until the years of his post-war European success – was about a prince who meets a woman who disgusts him in every way. Nevertheless, he is so determined to refuse the apparently universal and implacable laws of desire and disgust that he resolves to marry her. The plot then functions the same way Pasolini’s Teorema would function – but an anti-Teorema, a Teorema of the abject. Introduced to the court, Yvonne’s absolute lack of charm or beauty acts as a drastic catalyst on the prince’s courtiers, so that each reveals their own vices and weaknesses – until finally, horrified at the revelations prompted by her mute presence, they all band together to kill her.

In The Possessed, too, people find themselves desiring people who apparently disgust them, just as everyone in the novel finds themselves hypnotized by the uncannily repulsive movement of a towel. Disgust is one of Gombrowicz’s discoveries. It’s also one of his wonderful lessons for the history of the novel. He was a grand stylist whose perception of the artificial and the unreal was so absolute that it included high style itself. In Buenos Aires he gave a talk called ‘Against Poets’, which he reprinted in his Diary. It was written, he announced, against ‘the cult of Poetry and Poets’, but as he continued it becomes obvious that what it’s really written against is our continued miasma of unreality. In poets, he writes,

not only their piety irritates us, that complete surrender to Poetry, but also their ostrich politics in relation to reality: for they defend themselves against reality, they don’t want to see or acknowledge it, they intentionally work themselves into a stupor which is not strength but weakness.

Beautifully venomous, true, but earlier on in the talk he had secreted another acidic truth with possibly even larger implications: ‘that all style, every distinct attitude forms itself through elimination and is, basically, an impoverishment.’

Famously, Gombrowicz kept another diary as well as his Diary – a text called Kronos, which functioned as a kind of shadow diary, an everyday record of money and sex and ambition, written almost in note form: the misshapen double of the Diary written for publication. That text only emerged in full in 2013 when it was first published in Polish. In the same way, The Possessed, which after publication in an incomplete form in 1973 only emerged in full in 1990 when the final three chapters were rediscovered (and which is now for the first time translated directly from Polish into English with beautiful brio by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) is a kind of shadow novel. Like the prince’s abandoned son, it was almost entirely unacknowledged by its creator. And while it contains irrepressible moments of high literature – if you need an example, the moment at its finale where three bewildered characters are transformed into ‘three speechless question marks’ – it also features gleefully untalented scenes of exposition, with plot information crudely transported to the reader in impossible train conversations and purloined letters. Two major scenes of demonological investigation are detailed descriptions, shot by shot, of a tennis match, like some kind of magazine story for public schoolboys.

But the shamefulness, the pulp and the shlock, is also the mark of its genuine avant-garde originality. A novelist who’s too precious about the creation of a style is not a true novelist because they are not a true person. They are just another ghost of unreality. The Possessed, this novel of mutants and doubles, is mutant Gombrowicz, double Gombrowicz. It’s a modernist text remade with extra gore. It’s so shameful that it belongs to the only true destination of literature, which is the future.

Adam Thirlwell, London, May 2023

REFERENCES

Diary by Witold Gombrowicz, tr. Lillian Vallee, (Yale, 2012)Testament: Entretiens avec Dominique Roux, Witold Gombrowicz, (Folio, 1996). Citations here in Adam Thirlwell’s translations.

The Possessed

I.

‘Can’t you see there’s a sign here that says “Do not lean out”? Do official orders mean nothing to you?’

This remark was addressed to the young man leaning out of the window by a faded, elderly man in pince-nez. It happened on a train, somewhere beyond Lublin. The young man drew his head inside and turned around.

‘Do you know what the next stop is?’ he asked.

‘If I inquire of you whether you are aware that leaning out of the window while the train is in motion is not allowed, perhaps it would be appropriate to answer the question in the first place, and only then pose one of your own,’ said the stickler for form with the face of a fish, bristly hair, and a gold watch chain hanging in the region of his belly. The young man instantly replied in a free and frivolous tone: ‘Oh, sorry.’

This freedom and frivolity increased the fish-faced gentleman’s irritation. Councillor Szymczyk was inordinately fond of lecturing and drilling others, but he couldn’t tolerate his remarks not being taken seriously enough. He cast his victim a look of disgust.

This was a dark blond of about twenty, with an extremely neat physique. Although the summer was coming to an end and the evenings could be cool, he was only wearing a blue, sleeveless string top, grey trousers and tennis shoes on his bare feet.

Who might this be? thought the councillor. He’s got two rackets, so perhaps he’s the son of a resident of these parts? But his hands are rough, with poorly kept nails, as from physical work. Anyway, his hair is not well groomed and his voice is rather common. A proletarian, then? No, a proletarian wouldn’t have ears and eyes like his. But then the mouth and chin are almost working class… and altogether there’s something suspicious about him… a sort of hybrid.

The other passengers must have shared his opinion, because they too were glancing furtively at the young man, who stood leaning against the wall. Finally Councillor Szymczyk became so curious that he decided for the time being to drop further polemic on the topic of failing to attend seriously to instructions and advice given him by qualified people. He proceeded to establish the stranger’s personal details, which in any case came to him easily, as even when on holiday he always considered himself an official, accustomed to filling in the blanks on forms.

‘What is your employment?’ he asked.

‘I’m a tennis coach.’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Twenty? Twenty what? Twenty years old? Please answer properly!’ he said, with impatience and irritation.

‘Twenty years old.’

‘And where are you going?’ asked the councillor suspiciously. He liked this character less and less. He always felt a certain suspicion towards persons who answered questions too hastily and compliantly; many years of office experience had taught him that as a rule such individuals either already had, or intended to have, something on their conscience…

‘I’m going to a place near here,’ the boy replied, ‘to an estate where I’ve been hired as a coach.’

‘Ah,’ exclaimed the councillor, ‘then perhaps you are going to Połyka, to the Ochołowskis? Eh? Of course! I guessed at once, since Miss Ochołowska is by all accounts an accomplished tennis player, sir. Are you there for long?’

‘Nooo… Or rather I don’t know how it will turn out. I’m to repair the rackets, refresh the court and practise with the young lady, as apparently she has no one to play against.’

‘I’m going there too,’ the councillor felt it appropriate to reveal, then stretched out a hand and said abstractedly: ‘Szymczyk.’

To which the coach replied with a bow and said: ‘Walczak.’

At this point they were approached by a hearty old man who had been listening closely to their conversation from the start. ‘What, are you gentlemen going to Połyka?’ he exclaimed. ‘This is splendid, for I am going there too. Allow me to introduce myself,’ he said, addressing the councillor. ‘I am Skoliński, Czesław, professor, or, to be precise, art historian. Skoliński! You must be going to the boarding house, eh? I can assure you that you’ve struck gold – the manor at Połyka is paradise, sir, not a boarding house! Sometimes I really am pleased that the landed gentry is going bust and must establish boarding houses at their manors, for nowhere does one get as good a rest as in the countryside. I’ve been staying there for a fortnight now, I’ve been up to Warsaw for a while, but now I’m on my way back again. It’s a superb place, gentlemen! À propos, Miss Maja Ochołowska, your future partner,’ he boomed at the young coach, ‘is also travelling on this train. Skoliński, if you please, professor, or, to be precise, art historian. I’d introduce you to her, gentlemen, but I do not wish to be indiscreet, because she is travelling with her fiancé… That’s to say, her fiancé is travelling with Prince Holszański – you know, the prince from Mysłocz, which is next door to Połyka – so her fiancé, Mr Cholawicki, is travelling in one compartment with the prince, whose secretary he is, while she, poor lass, is in the next compartment down. The prince is a little… like that…’ – he put a finger to his forehead – ‘and his secretary cannot abandon him. But in any case, we’d better not disturb the young couple.’

The train sped on, swaying steadily, through the mournful land, flat and dark-green against the setting sun. More and more often the woods crept up on either side, more and more often the train sheared through a small pine copse. The two gentlemen immersed themselves in conversation, while Marian Walczak, coach for the Zespół club in Lublin, whistled a tune as he gazed at the passing landscape. He was bored. Altogether he was often bored. Sometimes such colossal boredom came over him that he found it simply unbearable. He set off on a walk down the train.

The first-class carriage he was now passing through was almost entirely empty, but one of the compartments aroused his interest.

That must be the prince, he thought, and pretending to comb his hair in the wall mirror, he peeked inside.

The sight was truly singular. Some huge, extremely old-fashioned-looking suitcases filled the racks; an open dressing case that must have seen the days of Napoleon rested grandly on a cheap, gaudy manufactured rug. An ivory encrusted walking stick was set beside an extremely shabby umbrella, and all around lay lots of parcels, bags of victuals and little boxes, all together reminiscent of the era of the stagecoach.

Amid this scattered confusion of luxury and rubbishy objects a small, slight, scrawny old man was dozing with his head against an embroidered pillow; his clothes were incredibly old, with a large patch on his right knee, but his face, for all its pitiful senility, had something so imperious and refined about it that at first sight no one could fail to understand that the smart gentleman in the perfectly cut suit sitting opposite could at most be a secretary and underling of this majestic personage. The secretary was holding an open book, though he wasn’t reading, but gazing out of the window, lost in thought.

Suddenly the distinguished old man sneezed and opened his eyes – upon which he caught sight of Walczak staring at him – and at once his small, faded blue eyes began to goggle and gape as if he’d seen a ghost. His face went red, and he started trying to say something, moving his lips before shrilly crying: ‘Franio! Franio!’

He stretched out his hands, but his companion turned from the window and with one good pull lowered the door blind.

Though not entirely sure what had happened, Walczak realized he’d better move along, and peeped into the next compartment. Here he discovered a sight no less curious – in some respects similar to the one that had vanished from view a moment ago, but in other ways the polar opposite. To wit, there in the compartment sat a young woman, fast asleep.

Aha, he thought, this must be Miss Ochołowska.

He couldn’t see her face because she was hiding it with her arm, but the way she was sleeping surprised him – her smartly dressed, fine and slender body was tossed into a corner with her feet on the opposite seat, her legs bent high at the knees, her body leaning to one side, and her head almost lower than her feet – if someone had tried to find the most uncomfortable position to sleep in they couldn’t have arranged themselves in a more eccentric manner, or even a more brutal one. One simply wanted to shake her by the arm and shout: ‘How on earth can you sleep like that?!’

‘But she’s also sleeping without any care for herself,’ he muttered. ‘As if she had no self-respect. As if it were all the same to her if her head were lower than her feet, or vice versa… And yet she’s so elegant…’

The train soared on, rumbling monotonously, everything shook and jiggled up and down, including the sleeping girl. He was so absorbed in watching her that he quite forgot where he was and where he was going. Actually he didn’t find her especially attractive – he preferred older women, more ample, but there was something about her that captivated his attention. Until finally he realized.

She’s sleeping in exactly the same way as I do! he thought in amazement.

Indeed, whenever he’d happened to wake in the middle of the night, he’d been in a similar position – his way of sleeping was exactly the same, and his pals had often teased him about it. Well, it was all right him sleeping like that, it was quite understandable – but for this stylish young lady to sleep in this manner, with no self-respect… She’s sleeping like someone at a police station, on a bench, he thought. I wonder if this really is Miss Ochołowska?

Her coat was hanging on a hook by the door. There was a white envelope sticking out of the pocket. He hesitated, but his curiosity got the better of his scruples – he pulled out the letter, and with occasional glances at the sleeping girl, he began to read it. Yes, it was her. Addressed to Maja Ochołowska, the letter went like this:

My darling Maja,

If you’d like to stay on in Warsaw for a few more days, you can boldly go ahead, as I’m managing extremely well here, and the guests – regrettably – are few in number. It’s dreadful that we’re obliged to host strangers at our lovely old house. But what can one do? If only it pays off! But there’s something else I want to write to you about. It’s your engagement to Henryk.

My dearest child, you know how deeply I desire your happiness. I leave you full freedom to make your own decisions, as I know you won’t obey me anyway, but I’m finding your secretiveness awfully tiring. It’s funny to be writing you this in a letter when we’ll be together in a couple of days from now, but to be quite frank I don’t know how to talk to you.

How painful it is for a mother to be unable to communicate with her own daughter on the most important and most personal matters. And yet relations between us are in such a state that I’d sooner discuss some of these things with a complete stranger than with you.

My darling girl, don’t be angry with me for writing to you like this. I know you love me, and you know I’d give up my life for you, but we have no common language. So I’m taking advantage of the physical distance between us to try to tell you what’s on my mind by letter. Please take it on board, and then we won’t talk about it, all right?

For some time I’ve been so frightened for you that it’s poisoning every spare moment I have.

I’m frightened of your beauty, of your youth, I’d rather you were less self-confident… How can I put it? I sense in you determination, ambition, and an unquenched desire for happiness. I think you’re extremely hungry for the outside world, and you find our monotonous rural existence so deeply unsatisfying that you’d do anything to gain access to a rich, city life.

Do you really think Henryk can secure that for you? Are you genuinely attached to him, or are you just wanting to break away from here with his assistance? Perhaps you’ve already reckoned on dropping him in a few years’ time?

In any case, even if you do feel affection for him, isn’t it based on the fact that by nature you share the same unsatisfied craving for pleasure? Sometimes it looks to me as if he doesn’t respect you, nor you him – that it’s just calculation, the life partnership of two completely wild animals. Oh God, what am I writing! But let it stand as it is. If I’m wrong, if it’s just a lack of understanding of you young people on my part, as an old woman, brought up in different times and living according to different ideals, then please don’t hold it against me.

But you can understand how agonizing this sort of conjecture must be. With each day the modern world becomes more terrifying and more of a mystery to me. You two have no dignity and you don’t respect yourselves or others – that’s the worst thing of all.

You may spend all of the money you withdrew in Warsaw, as I’ve unexpectedly received 1300 zlotys by virtue of settling accounts with Lipkowski. I’m so unaccustomed to large amounts of cash that I’m truly scared of keeping such a sum in the house! For the time being I’ve put it in the left drawer in your closet. Please ignore the expense and buy yourself anything you need for your wardrobe, because the money for that can always be found, it simply must! How ghastly of me to be working at encouraging and sustaining the need for luxury in you, but I’m too fond of you not to! That is my greatest weakness! I hope you’ve upped your game during your short stay in Warsaw. Don’t be angry with me, darling, think about what I’ve written, and when we’re together, pretend you never received this letter at all. Do you love me?

Mother

Walczak thrust the letter back into her coat pocket.

Yes, this was Miss Ochołowska, the talented tennis player, whose game he was to ‘up’ starting tomorrow – his future partner. Aha, so she wanted to marry money – sure, who wouldn’t? – every girl like her wants to marry a rich man and enjoy life. Just like me! he thought, and laughed.

The train began to slow down. He returned to his carriage, where Councillor Szymczyk and Professor Skoliński were already fetching down their suitcases and putting on their coats. The carriages shuddered and stopped.

‘Get off the train!’ cried the professor. ‘Just a two-minute halt!’

II.

‘Are there any horses from Połyka?’

Emerging onto the porch in front of the station, Councillor Szymczyk cast this question ahead of him. A porter followed, lugging two cases and a bag of bedding.

Not receiving an answer, the councillor asked again louder, but the handful of gawping boys responded with stony indifference.

If Szymczyk had addressed one of them directly, he’d have had the information at once, but as he cast the question straight ahead of him, they just looked at him as if watching a spectacle.

‘There’s a fine shout for you!’ cried the youngest, picking his nose.

This annoyed the councillor, and he went red. But instantly he became cold and calm, because someone had jostled him from behind.

‘Excuse me,’ said the councillor, looking around. ‘Would you please watch out! You’re jostling me with your bag.’

‘What? I am? You? With my bag? A thousand pardons,’ said the professor, for it was he who had accidentally driven his bag into Szymczyk’s back. ‘Oh, what’s this I see? Miss Maja! Gentlemen, allow me to make the introductions. Mr… er, what was it… Szymon…’

‘Treasury Councillor Szymczyk,’ Councillor Szymczyk introduced himself and added: ‘I sent a telegram to herald my arrival.’

‘A thousand pardons. Szymczyk. And this is Mr Myńczyk… The tennis coach…’

‘Excellent!’ said Miss Ochołowska, offering her hand. ‘We’ll all fit, because there’s the britzka as well for your things.’

The carriage drove up, and she and the professor sat down on the back seat, while the councillor and Walczak took their places on the bench. They drove along a muddy road amid sparse forest; here and there a vista opened onto a wide, flat, mournful region.

The sun had set by now, and the silence pervaded their ears. No one spoke. Not once did the woods retreat from the horizon, but now the road led through meadows sparsely covered in stunted trees.

‘What a country!’ uttered the councillor at last.

‘Yes, round here it’s a wilderness, poverty and sorrow,’ said the young lady, laughing, and to Walczak somehow this laughter seemed familiar – he looked at her closely. She spoke very softly, whether out of coquetry or for other reasons he couldn’t tell, but it gave her a tinge of mystery. Yet he recognized that laughter from somewhere. Which of his acquaintances laughed like that? Suddenly and for no clear reason his heart began to beat very fast.

What the devil is it? he thought.

As darkness fell, the veil of approaching night started to cover the boughs of the trees. A great moon was rising over the meadows. Dogs were barking in a distant village. Walczak couldn’t ward off a strange sense of anxiety; as he tried to penetrate the increasing shadows, all of a sudden he thought he was dreaming… A large and ancient coach of a kind not used for at least a hundred years by now, drawn by four horses, rumbled right past them at immense speed with a rasp and clang of metal and disappeared in clouds of dust.

‘What was that?’ cried the councillor.

The professor leaned out and gazed in curiosity after the mammoth vanishing into the distance.

‘That was the prince from Mysłocz,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Maja. ‘He’s on his way home from Warsaw too, poor thing. You don’t know the greatest attraction of these parts,’ she said, addressing Szymczyk. ‘Mysłocz is a few kilometres from Połyka. We’re driving across Mysłocz land now.’

‘But why on earth does he use such a strange means of locomotion? Like something from the days of Queen Bona!’ said Szymczyk. ‘It’s both uncomfortable and noisy.’

‘Why? Because he has bats in his belfry!’ said the professor. ‘That’s why, my dear councillor! Since time immemorial the poor old prince has been an oddball, to put it mildly. I’m amazed he was in Warsaw – he never puts his nose out of his great big castle. Mr Cholawicki must have had a good deal of bother with him,’ he said, turning to Miss Ochołowska.

‘Quite so,’ she replied. ‘Henryk only just managed to persuade him to make the trip, but business required it. In Warsaw he wouldn’t let Henryk leave his side.’

‘Look, look, sir!’ cried the professor to the councillor. ‘From here you can see the castle, but I don’t know if it’s not too dark.’

But by now the moon was beaming over the boundless plains, dotted here and there with the fantastic silhouettes of trees. In the pale glow, a white stretch of water appeared – it was the Muchawiec rolling slowly and idly across the flatlands, creating giant pools, almost unable to move from the spot.

The vast sheet of water that appeared to the councillor’s view could have been called a lake if not for the reeds, rushes and osiers rising above it in the most unlikely spots. It looked more like a flood than a lake, or a large number of individual ponds. In places, the earth and water were so mixed together that it was hard to tell which element prevailed.

The surprise in this hopeless, wetland scenery was a hill that soared above the water, inexplicably rising out of nowhere. And even more astonishing was the vast edifice built on top of it.

Being short-sighted, Szymczyk could not distinguish the details, but he was aware of a great mass of stone, from which an enormous tower shot up, possibly six storeys high, ragged and ruined at the top. Solitary, noble and feudal, it dominated the landscape. Mist was gradually enveloping the foot of the castle.

‘What an immense pile!’ exclaimed the councillor.

‘Bah!’ replied the professor. ‘One hundred and seventy ruined bedrooms, living rooms, ballrooms, halls, atria and whatever else you care to mention! But for an art historian it is of no significance. No style, you see! Ruin, neglect, a typical lordly mansion in a state of total collapse. Poland, as you know,’ he went on didactically, ‘is not rich in architectural monuments. In former times there were some splendid castles, but they were almost all destroyed during the Swedish wars, and the rest have been consumed by their owners’ negligence and barbarism. How many of these monuments were simply demolished for the stone… Now they say Łańcut is the finest palace in Poland. But Łańcut is an infant, a callow youth without a past! True, it has splendour, orangeries, marble stables and God knows what, but it has no patina. At least Mysłocz is some six hundred years old!’

‘Six hundred?’ wondered the councillor. ‘In these parts?’

‘Why, yes,’ replied the professor. ‘It was the ancient fort of the former princes Holszański-Dubrowicki. There has been a stronghold here since time began… This castle,’ he added, with a note of despondency, ‘had its glorious episodes in the past, but now… it’s just a heap of stones stripped bare and that’s all! The dismal seat of a madman, the tomb of a dying clan… For the past hundred years no one has lived here but madmen.’

They drove into forest again. It grew darker, because the moon only rarely peeped through the branches, and an infinite sorrow gripped Walczak’s heart. At the same time, he was seized by such anxiety that he had to stop himself from jumping out of the carriage and fleeing into the bushes.

The despondency of this gloomy terrain also infected the professor, who fell silent; only the councillor began to hold forth on such typically Polish failings as disorder, disarray, dishevelment, the lack of proper care, the lack of organization in conservation. No one was listening to him, as they were all engrossed in the forest, in the past, and perhaps in their own, hidden anxieties.

Suddenly Miss Ochołowska turned to Marian.

‘We’re going to play!’ she said.

‘Sure!’ he replied, and laughed.

Did he imagine it, or had she looked at him carefully? Yes, he caught her inquiring gaze, peering furtively at his face. It occurred to him that perhaps she had noticed his underhand doings with the letter – but no, it was impossible, she’d been asleep.

So why was she looking at him like that?

He shook off his reverie, and just then the professor announced: ‘Oho, we’ve arrived.’

Sure enough, they had driven into a large clearing, then through a gateway and there were dogs leaping around them.

Połyka was a large, old manor house with a distinctive high roof and a small porch. Marian stood to one side, waiting for the introductory formalities and greetings to be over.

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Ochołowska at last, to whom Maja had whispered a few words. ‘How wonderful that you’re here. My daughter has been dreaming of you for ages. Marysia, show the gentleman upstairs and then take some supper up to his room.’

She offered him her hand in a friendly manner and disappeared with the remaining guests. Preceded by the maid holding a candle, Walczak climbed a narrow, creaking staircase. His room was a small cubbyhole in the attic. The maid was extremely neat and sensible, though young.

‘Here’s a bowl and water,’ she said, ‘I’ll bring a towel at once. If you need anything, please ring, but I think that’s everything.’

‘Do you have a lot of guests here?’ he asked, sitting on the bed.

‘Hm… no. Apart from the ones who arrived today there’s a doctor’s wife from Lwów and one other lady. It’s only the start of the season.’

She said goodnight and left. He went up to the window and tried to open it, but couldn’t, so he merely opened the vent. The old trees in the park were gently rustling, while just beyond them stood the forest, deaf and silent. Once again he had a sense of anxiety. He felt as if he shouldn’t have come here, and that even now, even if on foot it would be better for him to run back. But where was he to go back to? The course of his life so far had been entirely random.

Quite by chance, at the age of ten he’d become a ball boy at a tennis club in Lublin. His father, a locksmith by profession, was pleased with his son’s ‘position’, especially as the boy often brought more money home in tips than he earned all day doing hard work. The boys at the club did in fact receive regular remuneration of a few groszy per hour, but often one or another of the richer players would give the lad an extra fifty groszy or even a whole zloty. And eventually Marian had learned to keep this incidental revenue for himself.

Noticing the reduction in income, and with no opportunity to control it, his father began to beat him, which made the boy even more determined to keep the money. He hated his father and refused to give him a single groszy, even at risk of being battered to death. With every year that passed their relationship worsened as the son matured. He learned not to come home for the night but would stay with friends, only showing up a couple of days later, but afterwards there was always a beating.

Meanwhile at the club there were smooth courts strewn with red clay, sunshine, ladies and gentlemen dressed in white, jokes, shouts and merriment. Ah! Marian felt at home here; he learned how to wrangle money out of people with saucy wit and brazen cheek, while at the same time borrowing a racket from the players in the breaks between one set and another to try out some classic strokes. Mieczkowski, the ageing coach and manager of the club rolled into one, noticed the boy’s remarkable talents and decided to train him as a coach. He gave him the permanent loan of a battered old racket.

By the age of sixteen, Walczak knew how to serve the balls correctly to beginners and spent hours coaching schoolboys and schoolgirls. He also learned how to string a racket and – to an even higher degree – how to string along the guests, persuading them they had unusual talent.

At this point another happy accident occurred: his father went off to the provinces to take up a job, and the boy moved in with Mieczkowski for good. On top of that he earned extra money at the club restaurant, or rather canteen, which Mieczkowski had been gradually and imperceptibly transforming into a ‘restaurant’ that was also designed for guests from the street.

But Walczak had started loafing around on the court and in the restaurant. He was bored with coaching duffers, he wanted to play – he started paying more attention to his own playing than his opponent’s, and would ‘finish’ the ball with a killer smash instead of passing it gently to his opponent’s racket, on top of which he became difficult, wayward, disobedient, moody, dissatisfied and rebellious. He was bored. He couldn’t have said why. He went to the cinema, read cheap thrillers, and sighed for a different life. He felt he was wasting every hour he spent here, that instead of sitting around at Mieczkowski’s he could do something – go somewhere, start on something, come up with a plan to get into something better at last.

At night he was sometimes overcome by such awful despair that he wanted to put an end to himself forever. He was going to ruin. He felt he was going to ruin, an utterly lost cause. He liked to read The Sporting Review, knew the names of all the greatest players by heart and imagined their travels abroad, their matches, the successes and the ovations… Why the devil did he have to sit in a provincial town, at a second-rate club instead of travelling and winning, like those fellows? Bah, they had talent – they were real players. While he could beat all the local no-hopers when he wanted, he had never yet seen good playing at first sight.

He was so bored with it all that when an engineer he knew had asked if he could go to Połyka for a couple of weeks he’d agreed at once, and begged Mieczkowski to let him. He’d read about Miss Ochołowska in The Sporting Review as one of the most promising female players of the younger generation.

‘I’m going!’ he begged Mieczkowski. ‘She must be stuck in the countryside, and there are no players out there – she’s no one to play against. I’ll practise with her and restring the rackets, and I’ll pay for my keep like that. You’ll manage without me for two stupid weeks, Mr Mieczkowski! I’ll only escape for a few seconds!’

And he had got away… But now as he gazed out of the window at the motionless rural linden trees, he was starting to regret escaping. Maybe this old manor, maybe the gloom wafting from these godforsaken parts was the cause of his disquiet and strange sense of sorrow. He thought about everything he’d encountered on the journey – the prince’s mysterious exclamation, the letter he’d read, Miss Ochołowska’s manner of sleeping, her laughter, her glance, the money that was hidden away in a closet somewhere in this house – and couldn’t imagine which bit of it could have got him so worked up.

He stretched blissfully until his bones cracked in their joints. Aaaaah! and he laughed softly, frivolously, at the thought of all the unexpected events that still lay ahead of him in life.

At the very same moment, in her room Miss Ochołowska, half undressed, was stretching in an identical way, with exactly the same smile on her lips as she thought about some of the plans and projects she had for the near future. A light breeze arose and the linden trees started to rustle outside.

Next morning, dressed in white, Walczak and Miss Maja strolled across the lawn towards the tennis courts, from where they could already hear the voices of the kids who’d been summoned to pick up the balls. It was a splendid day, with no wind, just some feathery white cloudlets scudding across the pale blue sky.

Each of them had two rackets tucked under an arm.

Walczak, who was extremely well versed in the inside story of the sport, knew that although Miss Ochołowska had yet to take part in the major tournaments, she had carried off some unofficial victories against leading players, and that was among the men. The experts often noted her exceptionally versatile style, promising the highest hopes and the greatest successes abroad for her.

As for Walczak, there was really no one at the club who could dream of winning a set against him, but nor was there anyone to represent the higher class of player. So he decided to limit himself to nothing but serving her the ball and helping her to practise her individual strokes. In any case, Miss Ochołowska probably wasn’t expecting any special thrills. She walked along in silence, apparently thinking about something else – sullen and inattentive, with her eyes fixed on the ground. When she stopped at the courts – which were excellent, as Walczak could immediately judge – she didn’t say a word but just rapidly withdrew beyond the baseline.

‘Forehand!’ she called.

He served the ball and it went into the net. The second one was out. The third was finally in, but Miss Maja had to run up to catch it on her racket. The next few landed chaotically, too near or too far away.

‘But you haven’t a clue!’ she finally shouted.

‘Everyone does as best he can,’ he replied without thinking.

She stopped. ‘What a pity you can’t do better,’ she said, shrugging. He sent her a new series of balls, which she returned with fine, well-practised swings.

He swore to himself that he wouldn’t return any of her balls – the disrespect she had shown him had deeply wounded his ambition.

Now Miss Ochołowska began to practise her backhand, especially on the high balls, which she returned with a deep twist at the waist, retracting her racket with both hands almost behind her back. Her strokes, hitting the baseline, were so superb that Walczak couldn’t resist after all, and when one of the balls presented itself to his racket, he hit it. The ball passed an inch over the net. His opponent bent at the knees, drew her racket right back and returned it with a lightning crosscourt shot.

He lunged for the ball almost before it had been returned, and that was the only reason why he managed to reach it at all.

He returned it.

‘What??’ she cried, already on the run, leaning forwards.

There followed an exchange of very sharp crosscourt shots delivered backhand – the rackets began to ring out rhythmically and fast. Miss Maja herself had no idea when she was thrown off the court by her opponent’s long, killer shots. At the same time Walczak ran up to the net, and when she tried to get past him with a high lob, a killer smash followed, which left her totally helpless.

‘We’ll play a set!’ she shouted.

Walczak was surprised by his own success. He realized he had played the ball extremely well, but perhaps – fancy that! – there was also no great difference between them as players? He concentrated and received her perfectly sharp, well-placed serve. The rackets rang out again. The first point was his!

‘Either she plays worse than I thought,’ it occurred to him, ‘or I play better.’

And suddenly, somewhere in the very depths of his being he felt an almost mystical connection with nature, the sort of confidence and certainty that sometimes comes over a sportsman or a card player. He realized that he really was in excellent form. He narrowed his eyes and killed her service with an unerring smash, whacked into the corner, and won himself the first game.

In the next game Miss Maja started to play more cautiously – the balls arced far above the net with changing fortunes. Meanwhile, lured by the sound of the game, the boarding-house guests had appeared on benches at the side of the court.

The presence of spectators excited them even more, and imperceptibly the match turned into one of those unique, impetuous encounters that intoxicate the players and the gallery to equal measure. Walczak’s sense of abandon, of losing himself in the game, was accompanied by insane joy at discovering and revealing his talent – now he was in no doubt at all, every stroke confirmed the truth that he was better than this girl prodigy, that he was a class player, on the road to becoming a champion! And on top of that he had a sense of satisfaction that it was her he was beating as he pleased.

For some strange reason he felt tremendous ferocity towards his opponent – clenching his teeth, he struck the ball as if he were hitting her, straining his sight, he caught all her actions, foreseeing her every move with animal vigilance.

But as well as astonishment, such a keen ferocity, bordering on anger, had appeared in Miss Maja too that she herself was surprised by it.

They fought in total silence; though incapable of understanding the technical details of the game, the people sitting on the bench were excited enough by its fury to stop applauding.

In the quiet of the deciding game a hushed comment by one of the ladies watching was clearly audible: ‘How similar they are!’

‘Indeed,’ replied the other. ‘It’s quite astonishing!’

At this point Miss Ochołowska did not run up to the ball. She stopped and left the court.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s enough.’

‘What?’ he asked in amazement. ‘Aren’t we going to finish the set?’

Both were breathing heavily. She cast him a glance.

‘No.’

She was pale. Walczak went pale too, and had to stop himself from swearing. What was wrong with her? He didn’t reply.

The company received them with cheers.

‘Why did you stop? That was incredibly thrilling!’

‘You’re a superb player!’ called Mrs Ochołowska to Walczak. ‘I’m quite a good judge… Where have you been hiding? Who taught you? You make some basic mistakes, but you have phenomenal talent. You’re not a coach, you’re a player – you could do with a coach yourself!’

‘You’re a phenomenal player!’ cried one of the ladies, an obese blonde with bulbous eyes. ‘Especially those diagonal shots… Exceptional!’

‘Beyond compare!’ said another lady, thin and bony. ‘Although for my taste a little too powerful. My daughter and her friend can pass a single ball to and fro for far longer. Naturally, that’s not an argument, you play gloriously, and your daughter,’ she said, turning to Mrs Ochołowska, ‘plays like an angel, an angel!’

‘More like a devil!’ replied the fat woman. ‘What a temperament.’

‘Now now,’ said Councillor Szymczyk, ‘let us not exaggerate. One should never overdo one’s praises. If we knew how much praise can swell a person’s head, we’d be more cautious about giving it. An atmosphere of healthy criticism is far better,’ he added, wiping his pince-nez. ‘And there’s no need to overestimate the role of sports!’

‘They played exquisitely!’ said the plump doctor’s wife with an ecstatic sigh. ‘And they’re altogether a lovely couple. How similar they are – you’d think they were brother and sister.’

‘I can’t see any similarity,’ replied Mrs Ochołowska coldly.

‘For sure, for sure, dear lady, nothing of the kind! Of course! And yet there’s something in common, the same temperament, the same tenacity, ferocity – naturally it’s just a superficial impression… Please don’t take it literally, dear madam.’

Mrs Ochołowska gave a faint sigh. Councillor Szymczyk’s overcritical and didactic attitude was nothing compared with the difficulties she had with these ladies. The thin one was sour and cold, while the fat one was sweet and hot in her endearments, but neither of them missed a single opportunity to antagonize her by making impertinent remarks.

Both were convinced that Mrs Ochołowska, as a landowner forced by material necessities to run a boarding house, felt it an indignity and regarded her guests with repugnance. As a result – although Mrs Ochołowska had never once shown any kind of repugnance, and deep down was even sincerely grateful to them for coming to stay –they had decided to adopt a defensive position just in case, and to make it clear to the lady of the manor that they were not so easily impressed!

On the whole, the lady of the manor received their sarcastic comments with complete calm, but this time the tubby doctor’s wife’s remark touched her to the quick. There was some truth in it! Maja really was like the coach in some way, and her mother found this similarity alarming, as it wasn’t a similarity of features, but something else, something elusive… The mother, who was so fearful for her daughter, had a bad feeling about this similarity, though she couldn’t think where the connection between Maja and this… well, this Mr Walczak came from.

Oh, there was no pride in her feelings – Maja’s mother had none of the gentry’s bad habits; she was too well-versed in the nature of the great social revolutions that were gradually but inexorably levelling all classes and castes. So if it worried her so much, and even wounded her, it wasn’t because of inopportune snobbery, but for reasons of a moral kind.

It looked to her as if what connected them was a common trait of character, an affinity of natures… Something elusive, but definitely bad, or even ominous. Mrs Ochołowska ran a hand over her brow – but then maybe it was an illusion!

‘Let’s go in to lunch,’ she said.

‘Ah, lunch, my dear madam!’ gushed the overflowing, plump and goggle-eyed doctor’s wife. ‘I can imagine how delicious it’s going to be! They really know how to eat in the countryside – one does nothing but eat from dawn to dusk!’

‘But think how many people are dying of hunger while we’re eating more than we’re able,’ said the thin woman sourly, rising from the bench.

‘The regulation of food,’ said the councillor. ‘The reorganization and normalization of both substances ingested and substances apportioned is from the economic point of view a state necessity that should be implemented by means of special rules. Each citizen should consume only as much as he requires in order to fulfil his duties to the state in the proper manner.’

They strolled off towards the house.

Walczak, who as soon as the game was over had crossed to the other side of the courts to calm down, could not hear what they were saying, but he could feel their gaze on him. But now he felt that someone else was watching him too. It wasn’t Maja.

She was talking aside to a tall, broad-shouldered and impeccably dressed man, whom he instantly recognized as the gentleman who’d been with Prince Holszański in the train compartment.

He had plainly come to visit on horseback, as he was in riding clothes and was flicking a crop against his boots. It was this clean-shaven, well-groomed, burly man, Prince Holszański’s secretary and Maja’s fiancé, who was looking at him. While talking to Maja, he never took his eyes off him, with the nonchalance of a very self-confident person who doesn’t give a damn about others. Walczak was familiar with this lack of concern, typical of the golden youth who sometimes frequented Mieczkowski’s club and restaurant.

Why the hell is he staring at me like that? he thought angrily.

Everything inside him was quivering with rage. Playing against Maja had angered more than bewildered him. It was that the girl hadn’t said a word to him after leaving the courts that angered him most. She was talking to her fiancé quite indifferently, as if she hadn’t been fighting with all her strength only minutes ago.

But at lunch (this time he ate with everyone else in the dining room downstairs) Miss Ochołowska’s indifference ceased to annoy him. On the contrary, it started to amuse him.

She must have been furious with him for beating her and for clearly being the superior player. It wasn’t indifference, but quite the opposite – anger and humiliation at the fact that he, a common coach, had proved better than she was.

She’s upset! he thought, and it made him feel utterly intoxicated, while also putting him on familiar terms with her.

Sitting at the dull end of the table, he suddenly felt that he was closer to the girl than anyone else – including the fiancé – and for some reason he was gripped by certainty that she wanted to appear to be ignoring him, while in fact she was fully tuned to what he was doing.

To make sure, he cast her a glance across the table – though not looking in his direction she instantly went as red as a peony.

She lowered her head, but just then her fiancé, Mr Cholawicki, started telling a joke and everyone burst out laughing.

Yet it was all unclear. Why had she blushed? Was it only because of losing the game?

And why had she been looking at him in the carriage?

And why had Cholawicki been watching him?

And why had all the other people furtively shifted their gaze from her to him and from him to her, as if they couldn’t stop themselves? One after another they cast a seemingly accidental glance at him, then at her, or vice versa – even Mrs Ochołowska had done it…

Straight after lunch, Walczak set off for the forest, striding ahead along an overgrown path through the shrubbery, flicking away the large, heavy flies that kept landing on his bare arms.

He was bursting with wild joy. He couldn’t think about anything except the game against Maja, and kept reliving every moment of it, with the racket strings ringing in his head.