The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski

Author:Andrzej Szczypiorski
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2022-09-14T19:21:49+00:00

XII

The front doorbell rang. Pawełek looked at the clock. It was almost nine. Pawełek’s mother cast a frightened look at her son, who was sitting at the table, his hand on a book, listening to the silence that fell after the ringing ceased, the silence of an evening in an empty apartment, separated from the rest of the world by blinds of black cardboard and heavy poppy red curtains. Now only the grandfather clock, made by the firm of Gustav Becker, was ticking quietly in the corner of the room, its golden weights and chains glittering behind the glass. A gaslight framed in a metal crown glowed pale blue above the table. Pawełek’s fingers moved on the book, and his eyes ran again in the direction of the clock, which trembled somewhere deep inside its mechanism and began to strike nine measured beats.

“But it’s past curfew,” his mother said in a whisper.

They both stood up and looked at each other.

“I’ll open it,” she said. She was a pretty woman, with delicate, expressive features like those on an old cameo. A wave of fear welled up within her, a feeling she’d grown familiar with over the last few years and which paralyzed her each time she heard the doorbell ring, steps on the stairs, words spoken in German. Her husband, an officer in the September 1939 campaign, was in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Each day she watched her son, and the sight of his ever more masculine, slender silhouette terrified her. She wanted him to remain a child, and as that was impossible she wished upon him some gentle but visible deformity, perhaps one short leg or crooked shoulders, and would have been happiest if for a time he could have become a dwarf. But he was not a dwarf, but a strong and well-built young man. He was about to turn nineteen. He didn’t speak much to his mother and was rarely at home. His companions were other tall and well-built young men—and she was certain that this Pawełek of hers was plotting something, scheming against her in some way, risking his life, so she trembled with fear, love, and hatred. She reproached herself for her former thoughtlessness and her big mouth, for all those fairy tales and Polish legends that years ago she put into her child’s head. She reproached herself for those little poems and prayers, songs and reminiscences, by Mickiewicz and Grottger, Piłsudski and Father Skorupka. She cursed all those battles of Grunwald, Byczyna, Psków, the Praga massacre and Napoleon, Olszynka Grochowska and Małogoszcz, the ramparts of the Citadel, The Pawiak Ten, the Magdeburg fortress, the miracle on the Vistula, and above all else she thought ill of her husband, who, although he sat behind the barbed wires of an Offizierslager, nevertheless still roamed around the house, working Pawełek’s hands when the latter wound the grandfather clock by pulling the weights and the chains; when he took books down from the library shelves to read them; and

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