Much of what he was saying was certainly pure fiction.
‘They took enormous bribes. Where did they get cars like the Commandant’s, for instance? On a police salary? You’ll say power goes to the head in a nasty way, and you’ll be right. A man loses all sense of decency. They’ve sold off Poland for a song. I knew the Commandant for years. He used to be an ordinary militiaman – he joined the force to avoid going to the glassworks, like the rest. I used to play football with him twenty years ago. But these days he didn’t even recognise me. How much our roads diverge in life… I’m a common postman, while he’s a big police chief. I drive a Fiat Cinquecento, he drives a Jeep Cherokee.’
‘Toyota,’ I said. ‘A Toyota Land Cruiser.’
The Postman sighed heavily, and suddenly I felt sorry for him, for once upon a time he must have been one of the innocent too, but now his heart was flooded with bile. His life must be hard indeed. And it must have been all the bitterness that was making him so angry.
‘God made Man Happy and Rich, but cunning made the innocent poor,’ I quoted Blake, more or less. Anyway, that’s what I think.
Except that I place the word ‘God’ in inverted commas.
When Dizzy arrived that afternoon, he’d caught a cold. We were now working on The Mental Traveller, and right at the start a dispute arose over whether we should translate the English word ‘mental’ as mentalny – ‘mental’ in the literal sense, meaning ‘of the mind’ – or duchowy – more like ‘spiritual’. Sneezing, Dizzy read out the original text:
First, we each wrote out our own translation, in the trochaic meter more natural to Polish verse, then we compared them, and started to wind our ideas together. It was a bit like a game of logic, a complicated form of Scrabble.
Or:
Or:
‘Why have we insisted on putting the word ‘women’ at the end?’ I asked. ‘What if we made it: “Men’s and Women’s Land”? Then the rhyme would be with “land”. “Hand” or “stand”, for instance.’
Dizzy said nothing, chewed his fingers and at last triumphantly suggested:
I didn’t like the word ‘domain’, but now we were up and running, and by ten o’clock the whole poem was done. Then we ate parsnips roasted in olive oil. And rice with apples and cinnamon.
After this splendid supper, instead of probing the subtleties of the poem, somehow we found ourselves returning to the case of the Commandant. Dizzy was very well informed about what the Police knew. After all, he had access to the entire police network. Of course he didn’t know everything. The enquiry into the Commandant’s death was being conducted by a higher authority. Besides, Dizzy was sworn to strict professional confidentiality, but not with regard to me. What could I possibly do with a secret, even of the highest importance? I don’t even know how to gossip. So he usually confided in me a lot.
For example, they knew by now that the Commandant had died of a blow to the head, probably when he fell with force into the half-collapsed well. They had also discovered that he was under the influence of alcohol, which should have cushioned his fall, because people are more supple when they’re drunk. At the same time, the blow to the head looked too mighty for an ordinary fall into a well. He would have to have fallen from a height of several metres. Yet no other possible explanation had been found. The blow was to his temple. There was no potential murder weapon. And no clues. Some bits of rubbish had been collected – sweet wrappers, carrier bags, old cans and a used condom. The weather had been awful, and the special team had arrived late. There was a strong wind, it was raining, and the thaw was advancing at lightning speed. We both remembered that Night very well. Photographs had been taken of the strange marks on the ground – deer hoof prints, as I continued to maintain. But the Police weren’t sure if those tracks had been there at all, and if they were, whether they had any connection with the death. In those conditions it had been impossible to confirm. And the human footprints weren’t distinct either.
But there had also been a revelation, which was that the Commandant had twenty thousand zlotys on him, in a grey envelope tucked under his trouser belt. The money was evenly divided into two wads secured with elastic bands. This had puzzled the investigators the most. Why hadn’t the murderer taken it? Didn’t he know about it? And what if it was the killer who gave him the money? And what for? If it’s not clear what a crime is about, it’s sure to be about money. So they say, but I think that’s a gross simplification.
There was also a version involving an unfortunate accident, which seemed rather far-fetched. The idea was that, in a drunken state, he had been looking for a place to hide the cash, but had fallen into the well and been killed.
Dizzy was adamant that it must have been Murder. ‘Every instinct is telling me. We were the first on the scene. Do you remember the sense of crime that was hanging in the air?’
I had exactly the same feeling.
VII
A SPEECH TO A POODLE
The Police harassed us all several times more. In law-abiding fashion, we presented ourselves for questioning, and took the opportunity to see to various things in town – we bought seeds, applied for an EU grant, and once we went to the cinema. For we always went together, even if only one of us was being questioned. Oddball admitted to the Police that he had heard the Commandant’s car whining and wheezing as it drove past our houses that afternoon. He said that the Commandant always drove along the side roads when he was drunk, so he hadn’t been particularly surprised. The policemen who took his statements must have been embarrassed.
Unfortunately, I could not confirm what Oddball had said, although I very much wanted to. ‘I was at home, I didn’t hear any cars, nor did I see the Commandant. I must have been topping up the stove in the boiler room, and noises from the road aren’t audible in there.’
And I soon stopped caring about it, though for the past few weeks the entire district had talked of nothing else, coming up with ever more elaborate theories. I simply did my best to ward off my thoughts on the matter – are there so few deaths around that one should take an obsessive interest in this one?
I went back to one of my Enquiries. This time I carefully analysed the television schedule for as many channels as I could and studied the correlation between the contents of the films being broadcast and the configuration of the Planets on a given day. The mutual connections between them were highly distinct and plain to see. I had often wondered if the people who did the television programming were trying to display to us their extensive astrological knowledge. Or perhaps they just arranged the schedule unconsciously, unaffected by this vast store of knowledge. It could in fact be true that the correlations exist outside us, but that we pick them up quite unconsciously. For the time being I had limited my research to a small scale, only covering a few titles. For instance, I had noticed that a film entitled The Medium, very strange and thrilling, had been shown on television when the transiting Sun was entering an aspect with Pluto and the Planets in Scorpio. The film was about the desire for immortality and how to take possession of the human will. There was talk in it about states bordering on death, sexual obsession and other Plutonic matters.