For several days I missed him very much – his toiletries in the bathroom and even the empty teacups he left all over the house. He called every day. Then less often, every other day or so. He sounded as if he were living in another dimension, in a spirit world in the north of the country, where the trees are thousands of years old, and large Animals move among them at a slowed-down pace, outside time. I calmly watched as the image of Boros Sznajder, entomologist and taphonomist, faded and evaporated, until all that was left of him was a little grey pigtail hanging in mid-air, ridiculous. Everything will pass.
The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.
XII
THE VENGEFUL BEAST
Towards the end of June the rain began to come down in torrents. That often happens here in summer. Then in the omnipresent damp one can hear the rustle of the grasses growing, the ivy climbing up the walls, and the mushroom spore expanding underground. After the rain, when the Sun breaks through the clouds for a while, everything takes on such depth that one’s eyes are filled with tears.
Several times a day I went to examine the state of the little bridge across the stream, to make sure the agitated waters hadn’t washed it away.
One warm, stormy day Oddball appeared at my house with a timid request. He wanted me to help him make a costume for the mushroom pickers’ ball, taking place on Midsummer’s Eve, organised by the Penny Buns Mushroom Pickers’ Society, of which, as I learned to my surprise, he was the treasurer.
‘But the season hasn’t started yet,’ I said hesitantly, unsure what to think.
‘You’re wrong. The season starts when the first ceps and field mushrooms appear, and that’s usually in mid-June. After that there won’t be any time for balls, because we’ll be out picking mushrooms.’ As proof he stretched out a hand, in which he was holding two lovely birch boletes.
I happened to be sitting under my terrace roof, doing my astrological research. Since mid-May Neptune had been well-aspected to my Ascendant, which, as I had noticed, was having an inspirational effect on me.
Oddball tried to persuade me to go to a Society meeting with him. I think he even wanted me to enrol and instantly pay my member’s fee. But I don’t like belonging to any sort of society. I took a quick glance at his Horoscope too, and discovered that Neptune was well-aspected to Venus for him as well. Maybe it would be a good idea for me to go to the mushroom pickers’ ball? I glanced at him. He was sitting opposite me in a grey, faded shirt, with a small basket of strawberries on his knees. I went into the kitchen and fetched a bowl. We started to remove the strawberry stalks; they were slightly overripe, so we needed to hurry up. He used a special pair of tweezers of course. I tried removing the stalks with them too, but found it more convenient to do it with my fingers.
‘What is your first name, by the way?’ I asked. ‘What does the Ś before your surname stand for?’
‘Świętopełk,’ he replied after a brief pause, without looking at me.
‘No!’ I exclaimed as a first reaction, but then I thought that whoever had given him that strange, traditional name had hit the bullseye. Świętopełk. It looked as if this confession brought him relief. He put a strawberry in his mouth and said: ‘My father called me that to spite my mother.’
His father was a mining engineer. After the war he’d been given the task of revitalising a formerly German coalmine in Waldenburg, which – now that this region was part of Poland – had been renamed Wałbrzych. He was to work alongside an older man, the German technical manager of the mine, who wasn’t allowed to leave the country until the machines started working. At the time, the city was deserted; the Germans had left, and every day the trains brought new workers transferred from what had been eastern Poland, but they all settled in the same place, in one district only, as if the enormity of the empty city frightened them. The German manager did his best to perform his duty as quickly as possible, so he could finally leave for Swabia or Hesse or wherever. So he would invite Oddball’s father home for dinner, and soon the engineer had taken a fancy to the manager’s attractive daughter. In fact it was the best possible solution – for the young people to marry. Both for the mine and for the manager, as well as for the so-called people’s power, which now had the daughter of a German as a sort of hostage. But their marriage was troubled from the start. Oddball’s father spent a lot of time at work, often going to the bottom of the pit, because it was a difficult and demanding mine, where the anthracite was extracted from immense depths. Finally he came to feel better under the ground than above it, hard as that is to imagine. Once everything had gone to plan and the mine was up and running, their first child was born. The little girl was given the name Żywia, a traditional Slavic name, as a way of celebrating the return of the Western Territories to the Motherland. But gradually it became clear that the husband and wife simply disliked each other intensely. Świerszczyński began to use a separate entrance to the house and converted the basement area to provide himself with his own study and bedroom. At this point their son was born, in other words Oddball, perhaps the fruit of their final, farewell sexual intercourse. And then, knowing that his German wife had trouble pronouncing her own new surname, driven by some vengeful emotion that’s quite incomprehensible nowadays, the engineer gave his son the old-fashioned Slavic name Świętopełk. The mother, who couldn’t pronounce her own children’s names, died as soon as she had seen them through secondary school. Meanwhile, the father lost his mind completely and spent the rest of his life underground, in the basement, continually extending his network of rooms and corridors underneath the villa.
‘I must have inherited my eccentricities from my father,’ Oddball concluded.
I was truly moved by his story, but also by the fact that never before (or since) had I heard him make such a long speech. I’d love to have known about further episodes in his life – for instance, I was curious to learn who Black Coat’s mother was – but now he seemed sad and exhausted. And we also found we had quite unconsciously eaten all the strawberries.
Now that he had revealed his real name to me, I couldn’t refuse to go to the meeting with him, so that afternoon we went. The Tools that I kept in the back of the Samurai rattled as drove along.
‘What are you carrying about in this car?’ asked Świętopełk. ‘What on earth do you need all those things for? A camping cooler? A petrol can? Shovels?’
Surely he knew that if you live on your own in the mountains you have to be self-sufficient?
By the time we arrived everyone was seated at the table, drinking strong coffee brewed in the glass. To my surprise I noticed that the Penny Buns Mushroom Pickers’ Society had a large membership, including people whom I knew well from the shops and kiosks, and from the street, and some whom I hardly recognised. So this was the one thing capable of bringing people together – mushroom picking. The conversation was dominated from the start by two men of the genus Woodcock who, like those noisy birds, outshouted each other in an effort to recount their rather unexciting adventures, which they both called ‘anecdotes’. Several other people endeavoured to silence them, but to no effect. As I learned from the woman sitting to my left, the ball was to be held at the firehouse, which was situated near the Fox farm, not far from Ox Heart Corner, but some of the members were protesting against that plan.