The first house on my tour of inspection belonged to the Professor and his wife. It was my favourite – small and simple. A silent, solitary house with white walls. They were rarely here; instead it was their children who turned up with their friends, and the wind would carry their noisy voices. With its shutters open, illuminated and filled with loud music, the house seemed a little dazed and bewildered. One could say that those gaping window holes made it look rather empty-headed. It recovered as soon as they left. Its weak point was a steep roof. The snow would slide down it and lie against the northern wall until May, letting the damp seep inside. So I had to shift the snow, which is always a hard and thankless task. In spring my job was to take care of the small garden – plant some flowers and see to the ones already growing in the stony scrap of earth outside the house. This I did with pleasure. Occasionally, minor repairs were needed, so I would call the Professor and his wife in Wrocław, they’d transfer money to my account, and then I’d have to hire the labourers myself and keep an eye on the work.
This winter I’d noticed that a fairly large family of Bats had taken up residence in their cellar. One time I’d had to go in there because I thought I could hear water dripping down below. There’d be a problem if a pipe had cracked. And I saw them sleeping in a tight cluster, up against the stone ceiling; they hung there without moving, yet I couldn’t help feeling that they were watching me in their sleep, that the glare of the lightbulb was reflected in their open eyes. I whispered farewell to them until spring, and without finding any evidence of damage, I tiptoed back upstairs.
Meanwhile, there were Martens breeding in the Writer woman’s house. I didn’t give any of them names, as I could neither count them nor tell them apart. Their special Characteristic is being difficult to spot – they’re like ghosts. They appear and disappear at such speed that one can’t be sure one has really seen them. Martens are beautiful Animals. I could have them in my coat-of-arms, should the need arise. They seem to be light and innocent, but that is just an appearance. In fact they’re cunning and menacing Creatures. They wage their minor wars with Cats, Mice and Birds. They fight among themselves. At the Writer’s house they’d squeezed in between the roof tiles and the attic insulation, and I suspect they were wreaking havoc, destroying the mineral wool and gnawing holes in the wooden boards.
The Writer usually drove down in May, in a car packed to the roof with books and exotic foods. I would help her to unload it, because she had a bad back. She went about in an orthopaedic collar; it seems she had had an accident in the past. Or perhaps her spine was ruined by writing. She looked like a survivor from Pompeii – as if she were entirely coated in ash. Her face was ash-grey, including her lips, and her eyes were grey, and so was her long hair, which was tightly gathered into a small bun on the top of her head. If I hadn’t known her so well, I’m sure I would have read her books. But as I did know her, I was afraid to open them. What if I found myself described in them in a way that I couldn’t fathom? Or my favourite places, which for her are something completely different from what they are to me? In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.
She spent time here until the end of September. She didn’t come out of the house much; just now and then, when despite our wind the heat became sticky and unbearable, she would lay her ashen body on a deckchair and stay there in the Sun without moving, going even greyer. If only I could have seen her feet, perhaps it would have turned out that she was not a human Being either, but some other form of life. A water nymph of the logos, or a sylph. Sometimes her girlfriend came to see her, a strong, dark-haired woman who wore brightly coloured lipstick. She had a birthmark on her face, a little brown mole, which I believe to mean that at the hour of her Birth Venus was in the first house. Then they cooked together, as if they had suddenly remembered their atavistic family rituals. Several times last summer I ate with them: spicy soup with coconut milk, and potato pancakes with chanterelles. They cooked well – it was tasty. The girlfriend was very affectionate towards the Grey Lady and looked after her as if she were a child. She clearly knew what she was doing.
The smallest house, below a damp copse, had recently been bought by a noisy family from Wrocław. They had two obese, pampered children, teenagers, and a grocery store in the Krzyki district. The house was going to be rebuilt and transformed into a miniature Polish manor – one day they’d add columns and a porch, and at the back there’d be a swimming pool. So their father told me. But first it had all been enclosed by a precast concrete fence. They paid me handsomely, and asked me to look inside every day, to make sure no one had broken in. The house itself was old, in bad shape, and looked as if it wanted to be left in peace to carry on decomposing. This year, however, there was a revolution in store for it – heaps of sand had already been delivered and piled outside the gate. The wind was always blowing off its plastic cover, and replacing it cost me a major effort. They had a small spring on their land, and were planning to make fish ponds there, and to build a brick barbecue. Their family name was Weller. I spent a long time wondering if I should give them a name of my own, but then I realised that this was one of the two cases known to me where the official surname fitted the Person. They really were the people from the well – they’d fallen into it long ago and had now arranged their lives at the bottom of it, thinking the well was the entire world.
The final house, right by the road, was a rental home. It was usually hired by young couples with children, the type in search of nature for the weekend. Sometimes lovers rented it. Occasionally there were suspicious sorts too, who got drunk in the evening and spent the whole Night shouting drunkenly, then slept until noon. They all passed through our hamlet like shadows. Just for a weekend. Here today, gone tomorrow. The small, impersonally refurbished cottage belonged to the richest Person in the neighbourhood, who owned property in every valley and on every plain. The fellow was called Innerd – and that was the other instance where the name fitted its owner perfectly. Apparently he had bought the house because of the land it occupied. Apparently he bought the land to turn it into a quarry one day. Apparently the whole Plateau is fit to be a quarry. Apparently we’re living on a goldmine here, gold that’s known as granite.
I had to make quite an effort to take care of it all. And the little bridge too – I had to check it was in one piece, and that the water hadn’t washed away the brackets that were fixed onto it after the last flood. And that the water hadn’t made any holes. At the end of my tour, I would take a final look around, and I should have felt happy that everything was there. After all, it could just as well not have been. There could have been nothing but grass here – large clumps of wind-lashed steppe grass and the rosettes of thistles. That’s what it could have been like. Or there could have been nothing at all – a total void in outer space. Perhaps that would have been the best option for all concerned.
As I wandered across the fields and wilds on my rounds, I liked to imagine how it would all look millions of years from now. Would the same plants be here? And what about the colour of the sky? Would it be just the same? Would the tectonic plates have shifted and caused a range of high mountains to pile up here? Or would a sea arise, removing all reason to use the word ‘place’ amid the idle motion of the waves? One thing’s for sure – these houses won’t be here; my efforts are insignificant, they’d fit on a pinhead, just like my life as well. That should never be forgotten.