| About the book
Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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| | About the book
8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Hanna KrallAn Extremely Long Line
About the book
Czechowicz - continued
She never gave up furniture, she never bought new things, it was all as in the past: a long table with squat legs, a green velvet tablecloth, a three-armed chandelier and an oil lamp in the middle of the table although the tenement had electric lighting by then.
She too sat as in the past at the head of the table.
Czechowicz placed his written in, graph-paper exercise book before her.
He waited.
She read in silence, but repeated some of the verses aloud. She was nodding her head; I knew she liked it.
Once he began with polite questions they were easy, so he guessed them from the lip movements.
How is the doctor? He meant her husband.
Then: how is the captain? He meant her son.
Then: how is your daughter-in-law? He meant her son’s fiancée.
Then: how’s everything in general?
She replied in short, matter-of-fact sentences, though he had asked quite formally.
Rywcia Winograd gave birth to a child with no fingernails, so I consoled her by saying they would grow.
Meir Reichgold’s daughter can’t learn French. Her parents won’t let her to, because the lessons are on Saturdays. I consoled her by saying she can teach it to herself.
My granddaughter prayed in her own words at school again. No, I didn’t console her, I talk to my granddaughter like an adult, said F.A., and from a letter-writing pad she tore a page with a poem, neatly written out in capitals, with artistic flourishes.
He listened. He changed seat. He started writing, about the poem she had read to him a short time ago, or his own poem, unfinished, that he was still working on. Their sheets of paper lay next to each other. She looked over his shoulder. When he took his pencil off the page, as if suspending his voice, she tried to guess how it would go on, generally getting it wrong. Then he finished writing. Oh yes, she said, of course it’s like that.
They decided to put some pages together as a whole, his and hers. F.A. wrote them out in a fair copy. A lengthy work emerged, with fifty-six verses divided into “Voices” male and female. In the final stanza next to two verses he wrote “Together”.
I’ll quietly enter, an old man, into the light of ancient bonfires,
for I lived with the double strength, of waiting and of loving.
(that’s him)
Sunset already. The day is at an end. What has the slave of hunting
in his net.
(that’s her)
What’s left beneath the silver distaff of Lachesis?
A work the gleam and the body of verse in stigmata.
(that’s him)
He brought her poems about the approaching holocaust. He was listening out for it. He tried to tame it with words.
one is from time immemorial
the famine the holocaust and you
one is from time immemorial
the famine the holocaust and you
He spoke, or rather wrote: in your fate what I have feared all my life, what I still fear will come true. What I fear most of all: death and loneliness. They are coming after me step by step, but it’s you they’ll catch up with, not me. You will take them on for both of us.
So nothing bad can happen to you, she wrote, though she might have said it aloud.
You’re consoling me like Rywcia Winograd, he smiled, but he did seem reassured.
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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