Anarchistbanjo's World

Homo Sapiens by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel

Yes, he must have exerted some kind of hypnosis over her. How else could it be that she ran away from home and followed him? 

Unpleasant. He had never loved her, after all. He only wanted to observe how love develops in a girl. Yes, he wanted to write a biogenesis of love. Not a bad idea for an eighteen-year-old boy. Well, he had read Büchner and that “triste cochon” Bourget back then. 

He ought to visit her sometime. 

No, better not. If only she could forget him. Falk stood up and paced thoughtfully. 

It’s shameful, really, to seduce her again and again and then, afterward, to take a superior stance and explain that love must be overcome, that it’s a rudimentary feeling, a kind of pathological rash in the spiritual life of modern man. 

Yes, in that he was unmatched. 

If only she could become a little happier. 

He heard her voice, responding to his mocking explanations: 

“I’d only wish one thing for you—that you fall in love yourself one day…” How naive she was. No—no… 

Love?! Hmm… What was it, really? 

That old gentleman in Königsberg, he saw through it. Love is surely a pathological expression… Yes, he must have known. 

He lit a cigarette and stretched out on the sofa. What was Mikita painting now, he wondered? 

There was an incredible strength in that man. To struggle through so laboriously and not deviate a single stroke from his path. 

He could have become rich by now, if he’d done things like the others. 

Those terrible university days. “Do you have ten pfennigs, Mikita?” 

Mikita had nothing; he’d spent the whole morning turning everything upside down in a frantic search for the ten-pfennig coin that must have hidden itself somewhere. 

“So we’ll go hungry.” 

“Indeed.” Mikita didn’t let himself be distracted from his work. “By the way, money’s pretty cheap now. The Russian state has converted its debts.” 

“Yes, yes—I know.” 

“Well, then!” Mikita kept painting. And they went hungry. Horrible! Falk shuddered. 

He’d gone half-mad. Strange that he didn’t lose it completely. How he once stood powerless on the street, nearly run over. 

In the end, they had only one pair of trousers. Mikita had to paint in his underwear when Falk went to lectures. 

Now Falk laughed out loud. 

He remembered how his mother sent the estate manager with money to him. She had sold the forest. Then the three of them went to a tavern and stayed there from early morning until late at night. The manager crawled up the stairs on all fours. Mikita kept pulling him down by one leg until the manager, in his indignation, landed a hard blow with his heel right on the bridge of Mikita’s nose. 

Oh God! How the manager tried to vomit and stuck his head through the windowpane because he couldn’t open the window… 

And now Falk thought again of his hungry days and of his mother, who always helped. 

A tender warmth came over him. Yes, yes, Mother, Mother… 

Well, Mikita must have gone hungry in Paris. The poor pioneers! 

He laughed scornfully. 

But no! In defiance! Not yield a single line, better to starve. He reflected. 

What was it, really? What kept him upright despite all the insults, all the failures? 

He lay back down. 

The great, the glorious art that seeks a new world, a world beyond appearances, beyond conscious thought, beyond every form of expression—a world so incomprehensibly delicate that its connections blur and flow into one another—a world in a glance, a gesture… 

Glorious! 

And the new symbols… Yes, yes—the new word, the new color, the new tone of mood… 

“Everything’s been done before…” 

“No, no, dear sir, not everything. Not the pain that transcends pain, not the joy that becomes pain, not the entire new realm of imagination where all senses merge into one… yes, yes… all those thousand shades of feeling that two, three, at most ten honest contemporaries can comprehend… That hasn’t been done before, or else the masses would already understand it, those who need a hundred years to chew through a morsel of thought.” 

Well, in the end, it was good that not every hack journalist understood you, or you’d have to be ashamed of yourself… 

He watched the wave of smoke that detached itself in a fine streak from the cigarette, winding upward in a strange curl. 

He’d once seen a stream painted like that in a Chinese picture. Suddenly, it seemed he heard Mikita’s voice. 

Yes, he remembered, he’d never again experienced that inexpressibly mystical mood. He was sick then, couldn’t open his eyes, his whole face swollen. 

Mikita cared for him; oh, he knew how to handle him! Day and night, he watched over him. And when Falk couldn’t sleep, he read to him. Yes, he read Heine’s *Florentine Nights*. 

And Falk heard a monotonous, soft singing—yes, singing… half like a prayer, fading more and more, like the last waves on the seashore when the sea calms—ever softer, ever more… 

He fell asleep.