Andrzej Bobkowski

Point of Balance

About the book

The next day I slept longer, and after waking up I felt quite strange. Something had happened, and I knew it could not be undone. I took a sidelong look at the attaché case in which I had shut the written pages, and felt as if I had shut something live inside it. I even instinctively checked to see that nothing had escaped from it. No, I didn’t read it, the someone folded away in that wad of twenty sheets of paper got in my way. I felt impatient, wanting to have it all behind me as soon as possible.
At around eleven Father Andrew landed his seaplane on the lagoon, and as soon as he came down onto the float he started waving a big wrapped bottle of Bacardi at us, shouting that as well as that he had swindled somebody out of a box of real “Partagas” Havana cigars for a dollar a piece. We helped him to moor and drag out a barrel of petrol. He told us that in Yucatan it had already begun to pour regularly, and that in a few days the rains were sure to reach us too. Involuntarily I found myself treating him with respect now, a bit like the way you treat travelling salesmen from large companies.
On the deck, after a short conversation, I stammered, “I wanted to have a little chat with you,” took him by the arm and led him into the cabin. There he gave me an inquiring look, and when I nodded, he smiled and sat down on one of the crates. I handed him my essay. There was total silence again, with just the steady sobbing of the gruya birds coming in through the little windows. He pulled a stole from his back pocket and threw it around his neck. You know – a priest’s stole against a flowery shirt with short sleeves, tight blue jeans and bare feet… I’m no expert on the liturgy, but I’m afraid he wasn’t entirely au fait with it himself. Then everything went on normally. He read, and I stared at his profile, thinking that in that shirt, with his athletic shoulders, he looked like William Holden. Then, quite involuntarily, I brought my text to mind, and I was surprised to find I could remember it almost word for word.
This took almost an hour. He picked up the sheets of paper, ripped them into small shreds and threw them through the window into the water. I got up too. I was completely gutted, shaky, and my point of balance had totally shifted. “It does you good,” he said. “A man could get used to it.” I nodded. “You know,” I went on, “my father used to say that everything is to a large extent a matter of getting used to it. Straight after the war when I wanted to get married he told me: ‘So get married – you’ll get used to it’.” He smiled. “What you just said is correct. What of it? you ask. We don’t know. There are people who try to stop smoking, though they never entirely stop. But the point is that they’re trying. So why not try? That counts too. We all have to try. Sometimes all that trying produces saints.” We went back upstairs.
After a drink on deck he flew off to his lake, wishing us a successful take-off. Well, yes – at any rate I felt much better and – I was already trying not to think about the incident. I tried out the engine, calmed down, and was ready for anything again, just itching for a fight. But for a change my inner buoyancy bothered me, I felt ashamed of it in my own eyes. The remedy seemed to me too simple and too convenient, and I could hear a constant whisper of pride – the pride of a man who has suddenly discovered one day that it is harder and worthier on his own, that nothing is bigger than something. Perhaps. But when I thought it through to the end, when I went back to my experience, it seemed to me that neither of the two paths was harder than the other. Both were identically tough provided you only chose one and followed it unwaveringly. What we tend to go in for is constant skipping from one to the other, putting our own comfort first.
A couple of days later the rains came – an incessant roar, streams of water pouring from the clouds onto the earth, breathtaking. And coolness, at last a bit of real coolness. But as soon as the downpour stopped, usually before noon, and the sun shone through from behind the clouds, the forest belched hot steam. The colours kept changing, almost from one hour to the next. The lagoon filled quickly, and after each night the shore had run further off. During each break in the rains Burt sailed out in our boat to take measurements and get things ready. I gathered up all the bits of junk that we had to leave behind to avoid overloading the plane unnecessarily.
And we did it. That morning will remain in my memory for ever. I was sitting next to Burt. The sky was covered in dirty clouds, but their ceiling was quite high. After a whole night of rain the wind was blowing. When the engines started up and we slowly began to sail in order to position the old tub for take-off, when shortly after we got moving at 2550 revolutions, I came to a standstill. We’d done it. I wouldn’t know how to express what was happening inside me during those long seconds. I changed into both engines. First the opposite shore glided towards us faster and faster, I could feel a gentle turn, then the outlines of distant trees and the gently undulating, creamy surface of the water in the lagoon went blurred before my eyes and almost vanished. When we tore free at the last moment, by a millimetre, and the spongy-looking jungle began to flash by low down beneath us, when the surface of the sea spread out below, Burt smiled at me and stuck two thumbs up. Joy. And then all of a sudden Le Chatelier’s theorem came to mind, according to which if some extra force acts on a system that is in a state of equilibrium, then the point of balance in that system shifts in the direction in which the impact of that force is being weakened. I started to think about this, because once we were over the sea, amid the steady, healthy drone of the engines, I realised that down there on the lagoon,  my entire system had been subject to the effect of some force, against my will, and that my point of balance had definitely shifted. But not in the direction in which its effect had been weakened. And to this day it still bothers me.

Translated Antonia Lloyd-Jones