Ferdydurke (24 page)

Kopyrda! Remember Kopyrda? Oh, I instantly understood it all! My hunch had been right! Kopyrda was the strange boy who had accosted the schoolgirl, he was the subject of conversation at lunch-time! Kopyrda had tossed the note through her window as he passed by a little while ago. He had accosted the girl in the street, and now, lo and behold, he was enlarging on his proposition—how daring, and modern at that! "If you want me, I want you too"—he went straight to the point, propositioning her tersely, matter-of-factly... He saw her in the street, was drawn to her sexually and ... he started talking to her—and now he tossed in the note as he passed under her window, not standing on ceremony, according to youth's new customs . . . Kopyrda! And she—she didn't even know his last name, because he hadn't introduced himself to her...

Something caught me by the throat.

And there was also Pimko, old Pimko, who, like a true gentleman, was openly, legally, formally, and officially coercing her with his professorship. "You must, you must satisfy me through Norwid, because I am your lord and master, your Professor, you are my slave—you, a schoolgirl! ..." The other one had the right to her as her modern brother and her contemporary, while this one had his right as an educator at the high-school level, a licensed pedagogue...

Something caught me by the throat again. All the confessions of the citizens, the attorneys' moans, and the ridiculous, poetic charades were nothing in the face of these two letters. These two were the harbingers of calamity and defeat. The threat, the real danger was that the girl was about to submit to Pimko and to Kopyrda without any feelings, on the strength of custom alone, just because they each had a right—modern and private in one case, old-fashioned and public in the other. Yet this intensified her charm immensely... and neither my dancing nor my working on the fly would have saved me, she would have choked me with her charms. What if she lets Kopyrda lay her—calmly, unsentimentally, physically, in the modern way... Or what if, obeying the prof's orders, she goes to Pimko ... Is she the kind of girl who goes to an old man just because she's a schoolgirl?... Is she the kind of girl who goes to bed with a young man just because she's modern?...

Oh, this cult, this obedience, the girl's slavery just because she is a schoolgirl and because she's modern! Addressing her so harshly and tersely they both knew what they were doing, they knew that the girl would, for this very r e a s o n, be ready to accede . . . The experienced Pimko surely did not expect her to be scared by his threats, on the contrary—he counted on her being charmed by the idea of submitting, under duress, to an old man—almost as charming as submitting to a young man simply because he spoke to her in a modern tongue. Oh, this was slavery to the point of self-effacement for the sake of style, what obedience on the girl's part! I knew that the unavoidable was about to happen . . . And then . . . what would I do, where would I take shelter . . . how would I protect myself . . . against this incoming tide and freshet? Yet note how strange it all was. They were both actually destroying the Young-blood girl's modern charms: Pimko wanted to annihilate her sporty ignorance of poetry, and in Kopyrda's case—worse still, it could end up with—mommy. Yet the actual moment of her (possibly) being destroyed enhanced her charms a hundredfold. Why had I looked in her drawer? Ignorance is bliss. If only I had remained ignorant—I could have continued my activity against the schoolgirl as planned. But now I knew it all—and this weakened me terribly.

These were the penetrating, piercing secrets of the seventeen-year-old's private life, the demonic contents of the schoolgirl's drawer. Poetry... How to contaminate it? How to spoil it for oneself? The fly continued to suffer, immobile, voiceless. The bearded man continued to chew the twig. Holding these letters in my hand, I wondered what course of action to take, what to do next, how was I to cope with the inevitable yet frightful surge of charm, beauty, enchantment, longing...

Finally, in all my madness, an idea for a plot dawned on me—it was so bizarre that until I began to carry it out, it seemed unreal. I tore a sheet out of a notebook. I took a pencil and, in the Youngblood girl's clear, sprawling handwriting, I wrote:

Tomorrow, Thursday, at 12 midnight, knock on the verandah window, I'll let you in. Z.

I placed it in an envelope. I addressed it to Kopyrda. And I wrote a second, identical letter:

Tomorrow, Thursday, after 12 midnight, knock on the verandah window, I'll let you in. Z.

I addressed it to Pimko. The plan was this: Pimko, having received such a terse, informal little note in response to his professorial letter, will lose his head. It will be like a knock on the old man's head. He'll imagine that the schoolgirl wants to have a
sensu stricto
date with him. The sheer audacity, cynicism, moral depravity, demonic quality of it all—considering his age, social class, and upbringing—will intoxicate him like hashish. He won't be able to maintain his role as a professor—he won't be able to persist in his legality and openness. Secretly and illegally he'll make haste to the window, and he'll knock. He will then run into Kopyrda.

What then? I didn't know. But I knew that I'd scream, wake up the family, drag the whole matter into the open, that by using Kopyrda I would ridicule Pimko, and by using Pimko I would ridicule Kopyrda—we would then see what the wooing would look like out in the open, what would then be left of those charms!

10 Legs on the Loose and New Entrapment

Next morning, after a stormy night tormented by dreams, I jumped out of bed at the crack of dawn. Not to school, however. I hid behind a coat rack in a small vestibule that separated the kitchen from the bathroom. Following a relentless call to battle, I decided to attack the Youngbloods psychologically, in the bathroom. Hail, pupa! Hail, queen! I needed to muster all my resources and energize my spirit for the final encounter with Pimko and with Kopyrda. I trembled, sweating—yet a struggle for life and death cannot choose its means, I could not afford to lose my trump card. Catch your enemy in the bathroom. Look at him and see what he's like then! Look him over and remember him! When his attire falls off, and with it, like an autumn leaf, all his glitter and pretense of chic, swank, and pizzazz, your spirit can pounce on him like a lion pounces on a lamb. You mustn't overlook anything that might arouse and energize you, thus enabling you to overpower the enemy, the goal sanctifies the means, so fight, fight, fight above all, fight using the latest methods available, nothing but fight! That's what the wisdom of nations has always proclaimed. The entire household was asleep as I lay in wait. No murmurs came from the inhumanly, more than inhumanly bestial... Now or never, nab her right out of sleep, while she's still warm and untidy, disheveled, I'll destroy her beauty within me, her cheap, schoolgirl charms! We'll see whether Kopyrda or Pimko can save her from annihilation!

She walked whisding, she looked funny in her pajamas, a towel round her neck—all with a quick, precise motion, all action. One moment and she was in the bathroom, and I pounced on her with my eyes from my hiding place. Now, now or never, now, when she's her weakest, her most sloppy self !—but she was so quick that no sloppi-ness could cling fast to her. She stepped into the bathtub—turned on the cold shower. She shook her curls, her well-proportioned nudity trembled, ducking and splashing in the stream of water. Ha! So it wasn't I who caught her, it was she who caught me by the throat! The girl, unforced by anyone, first thing in the morning, before breakfast, took a cold shower and subjected her body to spasms and twitches so that she could, with a youthful splashing on an empty stomach, regain her daytime beauty!

In spite of myself I had to admire the discipline that was involved in the girl's good looks! With all swiftness, precision, and dexterity she managed to dodge that most difficult transition—between night and day—and she floated like a butterfly on motion's wings. And if that weren't enough—she subjected her body to cold water, to a sharp and youthful splashing, instinctively sensing that a dose of sharpness would annihilate anything slovenly. When all is said and done—what could harm a girl vigorously puffing in cold water? When she turned off the faucet and stood naked, dripping with water, panting, she began as if anew, as if the other had never been. Hey!—if instead of cold water she had used soap and warm water, it would have served no purpose. Only cold water could, by gushing, force oblivion.

I crept out of the vestibule like a sleaze. I dragged my despicable self back to my room, convinced that further peeping would accomplish nothing, on the contrary, it might prove disastrous. Damn it, damn—

yet another defeat, at the very bottom of intelligentsia hell I was still suffering defeat. Biting my fingers until they bled, I swore to deny the Youngbloods victory, to go on driving and energizing myself, and I wrote in pencil on the bathroom wall:
Veni, vidi, vici.
Let them know I had seen them, let them feel that they've been seen! Their enemy is not asleep, he lies in ambush. Energize, vitalize! I went to school, nothing new there, Ashface, the bard, Mizdral, Hopek and
accusa-tivus cum infinitivo,
Galkiewicz, faces, mugs, pupas, the toe in my shoe, and the daily universal impotence, boring, boring, boring! As I had expected, my letter left no mark on Kopyrda's face, he seemed to wiggle his legs a little more, but I wasn't sure, I could have been imagining it. My schoolmates, however, looked at me in disgust, Kneadus even asked:

"For God's sake, what sort of a mess have you got yourself into?" Indeed, after all this dynamizing and energizing, my mug became so dumb that I didn't really know which end was up, but never mind, forget it, soon it would be night, it was the night that mattered most, I awaited the night in trembling, the night would settle it all, the night would decide. Perhaps the night would bring a turning point. Will Pimko yield to the temptation? Will the seasoned, double-barreled prof be thrown off balance by the girl's sensuous letter? Everything depended on it. Let Pimko lose his balance, I prayed, lose his head, but suddenly, terrified by the mug, the pupa, by my letter, by Pimko, by what had been and what was yet to be, I tried to make a run for it, I kept jumping to my feet in the classroom, like a complete idiot—then I sat down again—because where would I run, backward, forward, to the left or right, from my own mug, from my own pupa? Shut up, shut up, there's no escape! The night will decide.

During lunch nothing noteworthy happened. The schoolgirl and Mrs. Engineer were tight-lipped, not throwing about their modernity, as they usually did. They were scared. They must have felt my energy and vitality. I noticed that the Youngblood woman sat stiffly in her chair, with the dignity of someone whose sitting was under surveillance, funny, this gave her a matronly air, I had not expected this effect. In any case there was no doubt that she had read my inscription on the wall. I watched her keenly, and I made the remark, in a miserable, sleazy, and detached tone, that I was noted for an exceptionally sharp and piercing vision, which is able to go right through a face and exit on the other side . . . She pretended not to hear me, while the engineer burst into giggles in spite of himself, and he went on giggling for a long time, mechanically. As a result of recent events Mr. Younblood manifested—if my eyes did not mislead me—a tendency to messiness, he spread butter on large slices of bread and stuck huge pieces into his mouth, making smacking noises as he chewed.

After lunch I tried peeping at the schoolgirl from four until six o'clock—to no avail, however, because not once did she come into the perimeter of my vision. She must have been on her guard. I also noticed that the Youngblood woman was spying on me, because she walked into my room several times with some lame excuse, she even suggested, rather artlessly, that she would treat me to the movies. Their anxiety grew, they felt threatened, they scented enemy and danger, although they didn't know what was threatening them, nor what I was up to—they caught the scent and were demoralized by it, its shapelessness provoked anxiety that, in turn, gave them nothing concrete to hold on to. And they couldn't even talk among themselves about the danger, because their words sank into a shapeless and ill-defined darkness. Groping her way, Mrs. Engineer tried to organize some sort of defense, and, as I found out, she spent the whole afternoon reading Bertrand Russell and gave her husband Wells to read. But Mr. Youngblood declared that he preferred reading the yearbook of "The Warsaw Figaro" and Boy Zelenski's
Words,
and from time to time I heard him burst out laughing. All in all, they couldn't setde down. Finally, Mrs. Youngblood decided to busy herself with household bills, thus retreating to the solid ground of fiscal realism, while the engineer hung around the house, sat down on one piece of furniture, then on another, all the while humming rather frivolous tunes. It bothered them that I sat in my room, not showing any signs of life. I therefore tried all the more to keep silent. Quiet, quiet, quiet, every so often the silence mounted in intensity and the buzzing of a fly sounded like the blowing of a horn, shapelessness seeped into the silence, creating murky swamps. Around seven o'clock I saw Kneadus slipping between the fence posts toward the housemaid, signaling in the direction of the kitchen window.

By evening, Mrs. Engineer also began flitting from one chair to another, and the engineer had a few nips in the pantry. They couldn't find the right form nor space for themselves, they couldn't sit still, they kept sitting down and jumping back up as if prodded with a hot poker, and they walked hither and thither tense and wrought up, as if pursued from behind. Their reality, under the powerful stimulus of my action, was swept off its course, it bubbled and spilled over, roared and groaned numbly, while the dark, absurd elements of ugliness, of disgust and sordidness became more and more tangible and grew on their rising anxiety as if on yeast. Mrs. Engineer could hardly sit at dinner, all her concentration having gone into her face and upper regions, while Mr. Youngblood, on the contrary, came to the table wearing just his vest without a jacket, he tucked the napkin under his chin and, buttering thick slices of bread that he had gnawed off, he told quasi-intellectual jokes and giggled. The awareness that he had been spied upon tumbled him into vulgar infantilism, he totally attuned to what I saw in him, he became a petty, coquettish, amused little engineer—a jolly, cuddlesome, spoiled little engineer. He also kept winking at me and sending me witty, knowing little signals to which—of course—I didn't respond, and I sat looking pale and miserable. The girl sat tight-lipped, indifferent, she ignored everything with truly girlish heroism, one could swear she knew nothing—oh, I was frightened as I watched that heroism, which only enhanced her beauty! But night will give the verdict, night will decide, and if both Pimko and Kopyrda default, the modern girl will most certainly be victorious, and nothing will save me from slavery.