“Speaking of which, how’s the knightly nose?” Melkior halted at the entrance.
“I’d already forgotten about it. But it seems to be feeling quite well in its larger-than-life-size like a statue in the middle of a town square. But what have you stopped for, Eustachius? Afraid of the dark in the stairwell? Wait, I’m going to strike a light; you can go up after me.”
“I’m not coming up with you, Maestro,” Melkior barely managed to spit out the words; he knew they were going to sadden Maestro. “I’m sorry, but I really …”
“What, you don’t mean to come up?” mumbled Maestro in poignant disappointment. “And I thought … You promised me so long ago! I’d been looking for you all evening, there was this Corso business, too …” he seemed to have pointed to his nose in the dark, “and now you won’t …”
Melkior felt sorry. It was as if Maestro had put out a hand, begging for alms. … Fear of loneliness? The suicide house? What is it he wants tonight? To put himself to death in a brand new original medicinally pure fashion? He spoke mockingly about jumping from upper and lower windows. He’s against jumping.
“Do come, Eustachius, for half an hour only,” pleaded Maestro. He plucked a candle stub out of his pocket and lit it. “Here, I’ll walk ahead and light the way. … I won’t keep you long.” Melkior followed him upstairs. “And the way back … there’s a roundabout, over there, a proper road. Pavements and electric lights,” he laughed in a way that seemed almost shy.
The stairwell reeked of stale cabbage, urine, and unwashed women. How can you have any kind of “medicinally pure” death in here? Melkior was nauseated by the cocktail of smells.
Clambering up the stairs on the wall behind them were two huge, terrifying hunchbacks. Melkior glimpsed their escort out of the corner of his eye. He turned around: he saw two quiet, patient gorillas, long-armed, noseless … we’re following you to the zoo.
“Have a look, Eustachius. Behind each of these doors,” he gestured at a row of doors in long dark corridors, “lives an exemplar, usually single, of those bastard gentlefolk in noble penury, in rags worn with dignity. The life of a convent — the cell being what is known as a room with cooking facilities; independence fiscal and otherwise … I now recommend a quiet ascent,” warned Maestro in a whisper, “we’re entering the habitat of street vendors of holy pictures, picture postcards, and writing paper — but at this late hour they might offer us interesting collections of pictures for the single man. They serve (for those who like them) as inspiration for solipsistic pleasures—Ramona, give my soul its peace and quiet …”
Melkior cast a furtive glance at his gorilla: what was it doing? It hunched its back, compressed itself, poised. … Maestro lifted the candle, the creatures crouched on the wall, bowing to the light.
“Here, Eustachius, behind this door,” whispered Maestro, “breathes the knightly soul of Baron Sigismund. If we hold our breath we might hear Andrzej Kmicic decapitating Tartars. Ssss …” he put his ear to the door. “No, Pan Wolodiowski’s wife is dead — he’s crying.”
“What is he — mad?”
“Depends on your viewpoint. Do you find Don Quixote mad? This one is fond of knights, too. We’ve strayed too deep, Eustachius the Myrrh-Exuding, into belle-esprit-ism of the ovine variety. Grazing on daisies in meadows—she loves me, she loves me not—exactly like sheep and goats, like meek Bethlehem sheep. Dainty souls in quatrains, in crowns of sonnets, ahs and ohs and love that never palls … what a load of balls! Whereas they charged tanks armed with spears, credo quia absurdum. …”
“Who did?”
“Who? The knights, that’s who! The Pans! Skrzetuski, Wolodiowski … never mind their names, the awakened forefathers! At Kutno, at Kutno was where the spearmen, the cavalrymen … we carried the story in our paper … went in against the Teutons, like Boleslaw the Crooked Mouth in the Middle Ages,” Maestro crooked his own mouth in honor of the royal moniker.
Crooked Mouth — that one is missing from my Great Rulers list, thought Melkior.
“How long have you been such a knightly person then?”
“Perhaps since birth, Eustachius. I may be a Porphyrogenite, too, or a Leopold the Landless — this remains to be seen. You’ll know me in my full glory yet. Here we are, Eustachius.” Maestro held the candle aloft: halt! In the flickering candlelight, with its presence-of-death paraffin odor, there was a photograph stuck on the door: a bon vivant with a pencil moustache and a smile under a rakishly angled Maurice Chevalier straw hat.
“And this …”
“… is me, God bless the master of this house. Dating from the age of the Charleston, Eustachius: adieu, Mimi. … In lieu of a visiting card with a nobleman’s boar or some other ferocious animal. Enter my kingdom, Eustachius!” But Maestro bumped into something inside, in the dark; his candle went out in the draft when he opened the door. “Ah yes, the warning. Wait a moment.” He was striking matches and looking for the candle, but the matches went out, too, in the gust of air.
“Please stay where you are, Eustachius. There are certain small warnings here by the door. It’s my sober self in the morning asking a wardenlike question of my drunken self in the evening: where do you think you’re going, you nitwit? Thus the small reality of a common table blocks my way to the door opposite, which could take me to eternity. Can you see the sky? Because all this, dear Eustachius, is taking place on the fourth floor, and my angelic wings are quite stunted. …” explained Maestro from the dark, now using the blind man’s sense to grope for the oil lamp.
He’ll knock it over, spill the oil, set the house afire. …
But Melkior’s fears came to naught. Maestro lit the lamp quickly and with amazing dexterity as if he had flipped on a switch. “Buona sera,” he said with a bow.
An odd mix of coffee and lamp oil smells wafted over Melkior from inside.
“Do sit down, Eustachius, anywhere you like. Everything’s clean in here, that is to say the chairs and the chest are — but don’t look at the floor, it’s fertile soil, I’m planning to plant it with tomatoes.”
The room was with a cooking stove, as he said, and the floor coated with dried mud. Soil, that is, probably fertile at that. But the seats of both chairs were freshly scrubbed, as was the lid of the enormous chest. What did he keep in there?