At the Crossroads: Anthology

Andre Gal

AT THE CROSSROADS

Anthology

Montreal 2014

AT THE CROSSROADS

Anthology

Andre Gal

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 Andre Gal

ISBN

Cover - painting The dancing tree

Andre Gal 1992

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Everything you can imagine is real

Pablo Picasso

Table of contents

1. Rozamunda

2. The Case of Marcel

3. Yellow, round eyes

4. Touch me ...

5. Teddy Bear

6. Granma

7. Eh, Kowalski ...

8. Ambush

9. Metamorphosis

10. Peary

11. The Witch

12. Hard night of Slawomir

13. Jan

14. Fuckus and Grim Reaper

15. Malvina

16. Sea-Maid

17. Plein air painting in Bialowieza

18. Quiet September Night

19. Once you, once me...

20. Ghost

21. Gate No 44

22. Boozer

23. The Naked Truth

24. From Our Courtyard

25. The Frog

26. Still Water

27. Psychotherapy

28. The Wall

29. A True Knight Of His Lady

30. In The Shade

Rozamunda was not beautiful. In fact, she was not even pretty. Rather, Rozamunda was ugly and as forbidding as a black, November night. Besides, she lived right next to the cemetery.

At night, Rozamunda would walk through the cemetery. Even the most daring ghosts kept out of the way, except for one: Count von Knopf, who, in his life, was a known reveller and a gambler. Even after death, the Count did not miss any opportunity to gamble, so when Rozamunda passed by the cemetery alley around midnight with her moths, small spiders and other insects nested in her tangled hair, Count von Knopf decided to play a game with her.

He jumped from behind his grave with an empty bottle of cheap alcohol, which had been left in the bushes by local gravediggers.

Shall we play? Count von Knopf proposed to Rozamunda who was not the least bit startled, rubbing his hands which were encased in black gloves and pointing to the toppled bottle on top of his granite tomb.

The Count would have wanted to play a different game but the Spin the Bottle game was the only game the Council of Spirits had granted him permission to play. Other games, such as dice games or games of cards were strictly forbidden to him for fear that he would come across innocent, young spirits and corrupt their morals.

Rozamunda said nothing as she usually did. She just sat on one end of the tomb while Count von Knopf sat on the other. The Count was the first to spin the bottle but afterwards, they took turns spinning. Whenever the bottle’s neck pointed to either of them, that person had to take off a piece of clothing.

About half an hour later, the two were something to look at - Rozamunda sitting half naked, and Count von Knopf half-undressed. Naked he was never, for as a punishment for his dissolute life, he was deprived of the visibility of his body. All that sat on one end of the tomb were an empty tailcoat, a cloak, a pair of mittens that seemed to move on their own and a hat seemingly floating on air, and with each defeat, he became less and less visible, and Rozamunda on the contrary, more and more visible.

And what a beautiful body she had! So beautiful that despite her ugly face, it attracted passers-by and even the pale moon stopped to peek out of the clouds and brighten the dark sky over the cemetery just to get a glimpse of it, especially when Count von Knopf won the game.

It happened that at that exact moment, a Post Office employee by the name of Grzelak wandered into the cemetery. He was already drunk after a meeting turned party with his co-workers, which took place in the town’s main Post Office building. As a result of his drunken state, Grzelak had completely lost his sense of direction, which was why he found himself in the cemetery. When he came across the bizarre sight of Rozamunda, who was already naked since she had lost the Spin the Bottle game, much to the joy of Count Von Knopf, who had his invisible legs buckled under him, he took one look at Rozamunda’s body and immediately fell in love.

That woman is such a beauty, Grzelak said to himself, his heart pounding and his eyes wide as saucers and glistening with love.

Rozamunda’s ugly face did not bother him, as love at first sight is sometimes blind, particularly in the case of a drunken postman.

Unfortunately for him, though, Rozamunda did not flirt with living beings, as she claimed they were boring, void of the creative imagination known only to those immaterial. Thus, she rejected the courtship of the poor suitor, who from that ill-fated night when he saw her naked, could do nothing but think about her. He could not sleep at night thinking about her, and while segregating the letters at the Post Office, he started to misplace them, leading to problems at work.

Finding out where his beloved lived, he hung around her home in the evenings, playing romantic pieces on his harmonica, and writing love poems outside the walls of her house with a piece of chalk he found somewhere. Rozamunda, however, was merciless. Bluntly, she told him that as long as he lived, nothing between them would be possible, and that he should just cast her out of his stupid, postal mind.

Still, Grzelak would not give up. He had a new idea.

Why don’t I just pretend to be dead? he thought.

The next night, he stood in front of Rozamunda’s house, wearing only a white bed sheet and wailed like an owl at her window. At first, Rozamunda really thought that the poor man had died of a heartbreak, out of his love for her, but when she took a closer look, she saw that something was amiss and when she poured a jug of cold water over the bed sheet, Grzelak’s clever scheme was exposed. Ghosts are not afraid of cold water as you probably know, but Grzelak ran away with a loud desperate scream, shivering from the cold. Rozamunda scowled at him, gave him the finger and shouted a crisp Polish curse at him.

Grzelak absolutely did not know what to do then. Hopelessly lovesick, the postman started to wander at night down the cemetery paths, and whenever he came upon the scene of Rozamunda playing the Spin the Bottle game with Count von Knopf, he feasted his thirsty eyes on her until he almost lost his mind, and his heart began to be swallowed up in intense jealousy that started eating at him little by little until there was a fresh, gaping wound in it that seemed to have been sprinkled with Turkish pepper.

Seeing that there was no other way to win his Rozamunda’s heart than to be a ghost himself, he took out a ball of postal rope from his office and tried to hang himself with it, but the string broke off. He tried again, this time doubling the rope, but even then, he still failed. Finally, he folded the rope four times and this time, it worked out.

After traveling down a swirling tunnel, at the end of which a bright light flickered, Grzelak found himself on the other side. He walked and walked up and down the cemetery wall and waited for midnight. Only then did he dare knock at the cemetery gate. After completing a stack of forms, Grzelak was allowed before the Qualifying Committee of the Spirits. And here he was told that yes, he could scare people – the Committee had no problem with that – but only on the other side of the cemetery wall. On the inside, there were no Communist Party members for they did not believe in an afterlife and their punishment was meted out during their lifetime.

Rozamunda passed quietly to the other side whenever she wanted, and when she saw Grzelak, she threw him a contemptuous look. Oh no, she was not impressed with Grzelak, not impressed at all.

Worse, after that, after losing one of her Spin the Bottle games to Count von Knopf, she became pregnant – as it turned out, not all the parts of the Count were immaterial, after all – and after that, she stopped paying any attention to Grzelak.

And up to this day, folks tell stories about some ghostly apparition circling outside the cemetery walls and groaning miserably, and so ineptly, that not only people, but even the horses drawing the carriages are not afraid of it, all because poor Grzelak didn’t know this simple wisdom:

If you have to love, love the pretty ones, for the ugly expect unearthly pleasures.

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The Case of Marcel

Marcel lit a candle fixed on the neck of a bottle sitting on the table in front of him. Although he had a brass candlestick engraved with an eagle, an emblem of the Duchy of Warsaw, on his bookshelf, he never used it; it was just a decoration. The bottle, with leaking wax that looked like icicles around the neck reminded him of his youth, particularly his days as a student living in a dormitory, when he would read volumes of classical literature at night without turning on the light so as not to disturb sleeping fellow students.

He liked to read. It was his passion. Actually, he read everything he could get his hands on, but his mind was most absorbed with classic novels, especially by French, Spanish and Italian authors. After reading all that was available at the public library in Warsaw, he plunged into the dark rooms and halls of antique shops where he searched for antique pre-war editions of lesser-known authors – the old, forgotten books with the pages yellowed and the covers damaged, with sometimes jagged edges as a result of the passing of time, and where countless fingers had left their mark. It did not bother him. The aesthetic condition of the book was of little consequence to Marcel. The most important was that the book was complete, from the first page to the last, without a smallest fragment of text missing. The lack of a single page, or even part of it made the publication useless in the eyes of Marcel, because it always seemed to him that exactly there, right in the missing fragment was hidden the essence of that masterpiece, the secret key infused by the author with care, without which getting to the heart of the work is absolutely impossible.

He picked up one of those books, a booklet rather than a real book, in a paperback edition published by one of the now extinct publishing houses specializing in literature for the plebes. The author's name, Marquis de Saphire, meant nothing to him, probably a pen name for the French aristocrat who wrote for his own amusement and entertainment mostly, and kept his own works a secret from his family and friends. The booklet was titled La Noirette, a strange name which could be freely translated from French as Blackie or Brunette, though either way, it did not attract the attention of Marcel when he laid eyes on it in one of the private antique shops on Koszykowa street in Warsaw. The main reason for his interest was the picture posted on the front page of this book.

It depicted a young girl with dark hair, her blouse shamelessly open, resting half-swooned in the arms of a man, whose appearance at first sight seemed to Marcel very suspect. He had a goatee and a thin, black mustache, and was dressed in the Spanish fashion with a white ruff around his neck. Mostly, though, it was his eyes that betrayed him – narrow, treacherous and dishonest. If Marcel had ever conjured an image of the devil in his imagination, that man was the exact image.

For a long time, the strange book rested among the others in the library of Marcel, waiting for Marcel to adjudge the proper time to read it. Now, thinking that maybe that time had finally come, maybe, just maybe now was the right time, he flipped the pages in the candlelight. His eyes rested by chance on the backs of his hands; thin, emaciated, covered with the skin as thin as parchment.

They were not the hands of someone who had a long time left to indulge in the pleasures of the world. On the contrary, that pair of hands belonged to someone whose days were numbered and counted back again, just to make sure there was no mistake.

Marcel was dying. He knew it well. He could feel it through the skin of his pale, gaunt cheeks and with eyes that grew increasingly watery by the day, he saw his impending end. Let Teresa say and repeat again and again whatever she wanted to comfort him, and let Dr. Sawicki do as much research as he wanted, but he, Marcel, knew very well that his time was coming and that the last blood test would only confirm that unwavering certainty.

Marcel was dying, but he did not want to die like any ordinary mortal, as he did not consider himself to be an average man. He did not want to die in a hospital, surrounded by moans and groans of other dying men. He wanted to go in a different way, lofty and dignified, and it was with that goal, the quest for such an epilogue, in mind, that he spent the last few days of his existence.

He began to read even more, and in a very special manner. Only some extremely passionate bookworms knew such an art of reading, wherein one does not simply move through the text with his eyes in a hurry, trying to get as soon as possible to the end of the work. That kind of casual reading was not real, not profound at all, because the reader simply looks at the story, seldom discovering the true secret of the book, the very message of the author.

Marcel was one such a bookworm, one such an expert on the art of reading. When reading a book, he always dug into the content of the work without rest. He read carefully, word by word, isolated from the world around him, and taken completely into the story, which until the completion of it, was the only and real home for his body and his soul. He had mastered this art so well that the mere contents of the book were not so important for him; he could equally be in the royal court as among beggars; he could also become a hungry wolf rushing after deer fleeing in terror, or the same deer when it was the main character of the book. This kind of reading consumed his life, his boring everyday life full of stupid repetitive activities like eating, drinking, washing dishes or other unnecessary nonsense. After all, is it not more fascinating to break away from the mundane and become a pirate on the high seas somewhere in the Caribbean? Or an eagle soaring high over the clouds?

Most of us had a chance to master this art of reading once upon a time, when as boys we read in the bed and with a flashlight under the covers, the adventures of d'Artagnan, or as girls, the musings of Anne of Green Gables while taking a break from chores, though most of us lost that chance as we grew up. Marcel did not lose it. On the contrary, with the every book he read, the deeper his awareness became of this ability, until he came to perfected it to an enviable degree.

The content of La Noirette, as many other pre-war books, did not show too much originality. Rather, it was the typical literature for annoyed maids and housewives – a handsome nobleman from somewhere in Spain plays a guest in the palace of a French aristocrat and seduces one of the maids, which all together was not such an outstanding achievement, as most maids willingly allowed themselves to be seduced, and their pride among the others was the greater if the seducer came from a better family, and the more generous was the gift she received from him in return. The unique thing was that in the particular story he was reading, the gentleman was gone from the house the next day, leaving without so much as a word of goodbye, and Noirette disappeared just as suddenly as he did, as if she had vanished into thin air, both dispelled by the wind into the morning fog, after which no one heard of either of them for a long time. It was not a big problem for the palace, as serving there was an honor and work was not hard – a dream come true for local girls – and so the missing girl was replaced without a problem. What started a sensation, however, after some time, was that one of the well-born dandies boasted to his colleagues that he had just met Noirette and the night he had spent with her was entrancing, and she was even more beautiful than he imagined, and the art of love she performed completely outstanding. This gentleman named Pierre, from well known family, had a popular opinion of a scamp, so the others did not attach too much importance to his bragging, didn’t believe him even, but then, other men soon started boasting in a similar fashion, one after another, and so the people started to smell a scandal. It was an immoral case, a rapidly growing tale of a beautiful girl whom not one of the local nobles could resist.

This kind of story did not undermine the reputation of the village; on the contrary, both residents and visitors loved nothing more than juicy gossip. It only created a fertile ground for whispers and rumors, and speculations about Noirette only grew. One theory was that she hid somewhere in the palace, in a secret chamber, showing herself only to the lonely bachelors in the evening, as only the single gentlemen came across her during their evening walks on foot or on horseback. At the same time, another claimed that Noirette’s shelter was in the neighboring county, where she leads a virtuous life, and comes to the palace in her carriage on some evenings only, just to meet the desires of her flesh. A great scandal ensued, however, when Pierre was found dead in his own bedroom. He was strangled with a use of velvet ribbon during his sleep and it didn’t seem likely that he shared a bed with anyone that night. The black ribbon was tied tightly around his neck and his purple face had become livid and swollen, so that no one had the slightest doubt about the way in which the young man has finished his life.

In succession after him, in a very similar way, all those young men who were fortunate enough to see the beautiful Noirette and be endowed with her uncommon charms died one after the other so that dark fame began to cover the area, and with every new case, it became increasingly darker.

***

Marcel took a break from reading with an effort and rubbed his forehead with a drenched handkerchief. It was, for sure, exactly the book he needed. Someone else could read it to the end quickly and carelessly, and throw into the trash such a ridiculous read, but not him. Now, he knew very well how easily he could get to the very depth of its content and that fate had revealed to him the epilogue he had been dreaming about. He had wanted to leave the world full of happiness and free of pain. Was there anything better he could do to end his suffering?

Teresa would never know what he had experienced, just as she had never been able to understand the emotions arising from his incomprehensible passion for reading. Her feet were attached to the ground, and it was this difference in their characters that became the main reason for their separation.

Marcel got up from his chair and walked to the window. The outside view from his rented studio was not very nice. At night, the gray building next door had rectangles of lighted windows here and there, and during the day, it looked even sadder.

Marcel opened the window using all his power, surprised by how little strength he had, which made him realize that his disease was consuming him from the inside slowly and relentlessly. It was now time to end the show that he called life and so he returned to his chair and resumed his reading, the smooth flame of the candle gently rocked to and fro by a stream coming in through the open window, allowing it to throw light and dark streaks across the yellowed pages of the book.

***

Teresa tore the envelope in her hand, a copy of the results of the blood analysis for Marcel which came in the mail to her address as requested. Little did she understand the columns printed on the white sheet, so she was eagerly waiting for ten o’clock, when it would be possible to make a phone call to Dr. Sawicki to resolve the mystery of the coded page, and when she finally heard his voice on the phone, she was sweating with excitement like a mouse.

***

To one court in the French province, the young traveler arrived from the north, speaking in a language incomprehensible to anyone. His name was Marcel. Of course, he was welcomed with dignity, as