Ferdydurke (27 page)

I was tying my tie and putting on my jacket, but I stopped, intrigued. I had never seen anything like it. Mrs. Engineer rushed to her husband's rescue, she caught Kopyrda by the leg and pulled on it with all her might. They all swirled and tumbled down in a heap. What's more, Pimko, who stood a step from the swirling heap suddenly did something exceedingly strange, almost beyond telling. Had the prof finally given up? Had he surrendered? Had he run out of determination to keep standing while others lay? Did lying down seem no worse to him than standing on his legs? Suffice it to say that he voluntarily lay down on his back in a corner and raised his four paws in a gesture of complete helplessness. I tied my tie. I wasn't moved even when the girl threw off her covers, sprang up sobbing, and proceeded to jump up and down around the Youngbloods, who were rolling about with Kopyrda, as if she were a referee at a boxing match, pleading through her tears:

"Mommy! Daddy!"

The engineer, stupefied by the rolling about and looking for a handhold, unwittingly grabbed her leg above the ankle. She fell. The four of them rolled on the ground quietly, as if in church, because shame wouldn't let them do it otherwise. At one point I saw the mother biting her daughter, Kopyrda pulling Mrs. Youngblood, the engineer pushing Kopyrda, then Miss Youngblood's calf flashed on top of her mother's head.

At the same time the professor in the corner began to display an ever stronger predilection for swarming—lying on his back, all fours extended upward, he definitely began to gravitate in their direction and oscillate (seemingly without moving) toward them, doubtless the swarming and rolling about became for him the only viable solution. He couldn't get up, and why should he?—yet he couldn't lie on his back any longer. Just to get some sort of hold would be enough, and when the family and Kopyrda rolled closer—he caught Mr. Youngblood in the vicinity of the liver and was pulled into the vortex. I finished packing the most essential things into a small suitcase and put on my hat. I was weary of it all. Farewell, oh modern one, farewell Youngbloods and Kopyrda, farewell Pimko—no, not farewell, because how could I say farewell to something that didn't exist anymore. I was departing with a light heart. Oh, how sweet, how sweet it is to shake the dust off my shoes and depart, leaving nothing behind, no, not depart, just go ... Was it so that Pimko, the classic prof, had dealt me the pupa, that I had been a pupil at the school, a modern boy with a modern girl, that I had been the dancing one in the bedroom, the one pulling wings off a fly, the one peeping in the bathroom, tra la la... ? That I had been the one with the pupa, with the mug, with the leg, tra la la ... ? No, it was all gone, I was neither young nor old, neither modern nor old-fashioned, neither the pupil nor the boy, neither mature nor immature, I was neither this nor that, I was nothing... To depart and go, to go and depart and carry no memories. Oh, blithe indifference! No memories! When everything dies within you, and no one has yet had time to beget you again. Oh, it is worth living for death, to know that all has died within us, that it is no more, that all is empty and barren, all quiet and pure—and as I departed it seemed to me that I was going not alone but with myself—and right next to me, or maybe within me or around me, walked someone identical and cognate, mine—within me, mine—with me, and there was no love between us, no hate, no lust, no revulsion, no ugliness, no beauty, no laughter, no body parts, no feeling nor anything mechanical, nothing, nothing, nothing . . . But only for one hundredth of a second. Because as I was crossing the kitchen, feeling my way in the semi-darkness, someone called softly from the servants' quarters:

"Joey, Joey..."

It was Kneadus sitting on the servant girl, hurriedly putting on his shoes.

"I'm here. Are you leaving? Wait, I'll go with you."

His whisper struck me from the side, and I stopped as if a bullet had hit me. I couldn't see his mug distinctly in the darkness, but judging by his voice it must have looked horrible. The servant girl breathed heavily.

"Shhh ... be quiet. Let's go." He climbed off the servant girl. "Here, this way... Careful—here's a basket."

We found ourselves in the street.

It was getting light. Little houses, trees, railings stretched in orderly fashion as if on a string—and the air, limpid near the ground, thickening above into a desperate mist. Asphalt. Space. Dew. Emptiness. Next to me Kneadus buttoning his pants. I tried to avoid looking at him. From the open windows of the villa—a pale electric light and a continuous shoving of bodies rolling about. A piercing chill, a sleepless cold as if on a train; I began to shiver, my teeth chattered. Through the open window Kneadus heard the Youngbloods shoving and asked:

"What's that? Is someone getting a massage?"

I didn't answer, and he, noticing the small suitcase in my hand, asked:

"Are you running away?"

I lowered my head. I knew he'd catch me, he'd have to catch me because there were just the two of us, next to each other. But I couldn't move away from him without a reason. So he moved closer, and with his hand he took me by the hand.

"Are you running away? I'll run away too. We'll go together. I've raped the servant girl. But that's not it, that's not it... A farmhand, a farmhand! Let's run away to the countryside—if you want to. To the countryside we'll go. There are farmhands there! Out in the countryside! We'll go together, do you want to? To the farmhand, Joey, to the farmhand, the farmhand!" he went on repeating frantically. I held my head straight and stiff, not looking at him.

"Kneadus, what good is your farmhand to me?"

But as soon as I began walking he went with me, and I went with him—we went together.

11 Preface to "The Child Runs Deep in Filibert"

And again a preface ... and I'm a captive to a preface, I can't do without a preface, I must have a preface, because the law of symmetry requires that the story in which the child runs deep in Filidor should have a corresponding story in which the child runs deep in Filibert, while the preface to Filidor requires a corresponding preface to Filibert. Even if I want to I can't, I can't, and I can't avoid the ironclad laws of symmetry and analogy. But it's high time to interrupt, to cease, to emerge from the greenery if only for a moment, to come back to my senses and peer from under the weight of a billion little sprouts, buds, and leaves so that no one can say that I've gone crazy, totally blah, blah. And before I move any further on the road of second-rate, intermediate, not-quite-human horrors, I have to clarify, rationalize, substantiate, explain, and systematize, I have to draw out the primary thought from which all other thoughts in this book originate, and to reveal the primeval torment of all torments herein mentioned and brought into relief. And I must introduce a hierarchy of torments as well as a hierarchy of thoughts, and provide analytic, synthetic, and philosophical comments on this work so that the reader will know where the head is, where the legs, the nose, where the heel is, so that I'm not accused of being unaware of my own goals, of not marching straight and stiffly forward like the greatest writers of omnitime, but that I've senselessly gone bonkers. But which of the torments is the chief and fundamental one? Where is this book's primeval torment? Where are you, oh, primeval mother of all torments? The longer I probe, study, and digest these things, the clearer it becomes that the chief, basic torment, as I see it, is simply the torment of bad form, of bad
exterieur,
or, in other words, it's the torment of platitude, grimace, face, mug—yes, that's the source, the wellspring, the beginning, and it's from here that all other suffering, frenzy, and torture flow harmoniously, without exception. Or perhaps one should really say that the chief, basic torment is nothing other than the suffering that comes from our being constricted by another human being, from the fact that we are strangled and stifled by a tight, narrow, stiff notion of ourselves that is held by another human being. Or, perhaps at the base of this book is the major and murderous torment of the not-quite-human greenery, of little sprouts, leaves, and buds or the torment of development and not-quite-development, or maybe the suffering of not-quite-shaping, not-quite-forming, or the torment of our inner self being created by others, or the torment of physical and psychological rape the suffering of driving, interpersonal tensions the biased and unclarified torment of psychological bias the lateral torture of psychological wrenching, twisting, and miscuing the unceasing torment of betrayal, the torment of falsehood the mechanical agony of mechanism and automatism the symmetrical torment of analogy, and the analogous torment of symmetry the analytical torment of synthesis, and the synthetic torment of analysis or maybe the agony of parts of the body and the disruption of the hierarchy of its individual organs or the suffering of gentle infantilism of the pupa, of pedagogy, of formalists and educators of inconsolable innocence and naivete of departure from reality of phantasm, illusion, musings, idle notions, and nonsense of higher idealism of lower, shabby, hole-in-the-corner idealism of daydreaming on the sidelines or maybe of the very odd torment of pettiness and belittlement the torment of contending the torment of aspiring the torment of apprenticeship or perhaps simply the torture of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps and straining beyond one's ability, and hence the torture of inability, general and particular the agony of giving oneself airs, and of blowing one's own horn the pain of humiliating others the torment of superior and inferior poetry or the torture of the dull psychological impasse the devious torture of craftiness, evasiveness, and of foul play or rather the torture of the age in its particular and general sense the torment of the old-fashioned the torment of modernity the suffering resulting from the emergence of new social strata the torment of the semi-intelligent the torment of the nonintelligent the torture of the intelligent or maybe simply the torment of petty-intelligent indecency the pain of stupidity of wisdom of ugliness of beauty, of attractiveness and charm or maybe the torture of cutthroat logic, and of consistency in foolishness the anguish of reciting the despair of imitating the boring torture of boredom, and of talking in circles or perhaps the hypomanic torment of hypomania the ineffable torture of ineffability the aching lack of sublimation of pain in the finger in the fingernail of toothache of earache the torture of horrifying interrelation, interdependence, and dependence, of interpenetration of all torments and of all parts, and the torment of one hundred and fifty-six thousand, three hundred and twenty-four and a half other tortures, not counting women and children, as an old French author of the sixteenth century would have said.

Which of those tortures is to be the basic primeval torture, which part is the integral, by which of its parts is one to seize this book, and what should one pick from the above parts and torments? Oh, accursed parts, will I ever be free of you, oh, what an abundance of parts, what an abundance of torments! Where is the chief, primeval mother, and should the basis for the torment be metaphysical or physical, sociological or psychological? And yet I must, I must and I cannot not, because the world at large is about to consider me unconscious of my goals and to think that I've lost my bearings. But perhaps, in this case, it would be more rational to develop and bring out the genesis of the work with words, and not on the basis of torments, but in the face of, with regard to, in relation to that it arose:

in relation to pedagogues and schoolboys in the face of half-witted wise guys with reference to deep or high-level beings with regard to the leading writers of contemporary national literature, and the most polished, structured, and rigid representatives of the world of criticism in the face of schoolgirls in relation to the mature, and to men of the world in interdependence with men of fashion, dandies, narcissists, aesthetes, haughty spirits, and men about town with regard to those experienced in life in bondage to cultural aunts in relation to urban citizens in the face of the country citizenry with reference to petty physicians in the provinces, engineers and civil servants of narrow horizons with reference to high-level civil servants, physicians and lawyers of wide horizons in relation to ancestral and other kinds of aristocracy in the face of the rabble.

It's also possible, however, that my work was conceived out of torment from associating with an actual person, for example, with the distinctly repulsive Mr. XY, or with Mr. Z, whom I hold in utmost contempt, and NN, who bores and wearies me—oh, the terrible torment of associating with them! And—it's possible—that the motive and goal for writing this book is solely to show these gentlemen my disdain for them, to agitate, irritate, and enrage them, and to get them out of my way. In this case the motive would seem to be clear-cut, personal, and aimed at the individual.

But perhaps my work came from imitating masterworks?

From inability to create a normal work?

From dreams?

From complexes?

Or perhaps from memories of my childhood?

and perhaps because I began writing and so it happened to come out From anxiety disorder?

From obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Perhaps from a bubble?

From a pinch of something?

From a part?

From a particle?

From thin air?

One would also need to establish, proclaim, and define whether the work is a novel, a memoir, a parody, a lampoon, a variation on a fantasy, or a study of some kind—and what prevails in it: humor, irony, or some deeper meaning, sarcasm, persiflage, invective, rubbish,
pur nonsens, pur claptrapism,
and more, whether it's simply a pose, pretense, make-believe, bunkum, artificiality, paucity of wit, anemia of emotion, atrophy of imagination, subversion of order, and ruination of the mind. Yet the sum of these possibilities, torments, definitions, and parts is so limitless, so unfathomable and inexhaustible that one must say, with the greatest responsibility for one's words and after the most scrupulous consideration, that we know nothing, chirp, chirp, little chickie; and consequently, whoever would like to better understand, to gain deeper insight, I invite him to read "The Child Runs Deep in Filibert," because my answer to all these tormenting questions lies in its hidden symbolism. Because Filibert, positioned conclusively and in analogy with Filidor, conceals within its strange unity the final, secret meaning of this work. And having thus revealed it, there is nothing to stop one from venturing somewhat deeper, into the thicket of those separate and tedious parts.