Homo Sapiens: In the Maelstrom by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel
Oh no, where do you think, Herr Czerski. For that Certain is much too knowing. Ha, ha…
Yes, I misunderstood you. You as philanthropist naturally ask why he wanted to do that.
Why? He doesn’t know that.
That would all be incredibly ridiculous if it weren’t so fatal. The small tiny gap widens with rapid speed. It is like a growth with long processes that crawl into every pore of his soul, force themselves into every opening with growing rage and spread the terrible poison into the whole organism… Ha, ha, ha…
Why do I laugh so ugly? To thunder, man! isn’t that to laugh at?!
But so it goes on. The fantasy is once set in motion. It suddenly becomes as lush as a jungle, sharp and poisonous as an Indian arrow, inventive as Edison, brooding and enduring in thinking like Socrates, who is known to have stood the whole night before his tent without noticing that a foot-deep snow had fallen. Don’t you think the old gentleman posed a little?… Well, Certain’s fantasy activity is also very interesting.
He tries to imagine the two. They sat in the room. He had carefully locked it. She had slowly let down her hair, then unbuttoned her waist, he stood there meanwhile, hot, trembling and devoured her with greedy glances…
Cute pictures, what?
Or, let’s pass to another side… He looks at his child. It suddenly shoots through his head by what miracle it was prevented that she didn’t get a child with the other earlier. This question, and the possibility that she actually should have got it, makes him quite mad.
Or: he reads an indifferent story of two lovers… He, he… Why was he not the first? And this question makes him quite raging with despair.
Or: he gets to see one of her youth photographs. Was it before or after? Yes, naturally before. He looks at the photograph, he makes a painful science of it, he loves her there, loves her with a painful torment, he worships her in an agony of rage and despair. Why? Why? Why did she not keep herself so, so pure, so unknowing for him?
From everything I cited here you will probably have gotten the sufficient impression of the psychic state of our Certain.
He loses balance. He still tries to tear out the proliferating weed, to cut off the roots of the poisonous evil, but it is too late. He no longer gets rid of the visions. In his soul rage boils, hate takes away his reason, he cannot touch her without thinking of the other, he cannot look at her without being reminded of him. His soul gets wrinkles and gray hair. And yet he drags himself after his wife like a sick dog. He cannot do without her, he loves her a thousand times more than before in this frenzy, this boiling rage and this hate. Can you understand that?
Falk screamed.
Can you understand that? That is madness! That is no pain, that is… that is…
He suddenly got fear of himself and a wild fit of rage seized him against the person who forced him to live through all this again, to tear open the old scabs.
He walked searching around the room with clenched fists, he was completely out of his senses.
Why do I scream? Because I have heart cramp, I have colic, stitches all around in the whole chest… Oh if I had you here, you cursed Satan with your demand for truth, your marriage proposals… Ha, ha, ha… me marry Janina!
His strength left him. He sat at the window. He dried the sweat from his forehead, and suddenly became calm. He fell into heavy brooding. Now he will probably understand how one comes to seduce a girl. Naturally he will understand. He sat and sat, repeated incessantly in his thoughts that Czerski must now finally understand, and woke again.
He had probably fallen asleep.
And again he looked at the sky, at the dark, sick melancholy of the sky and then felt how the spaces widened and began to flee with the impetuosity of a wild debris.
He listened tensely.
It seemed to him as if the abysses of eternities coiled into still deeper depths, as if calm formed into an infinite funnel that swallowed everything and time and sound and the melancholy light of the stars—it seemed to him as if he were enveloped in dark, dull distances: everything had disappeared, only one remained: the wide, sick sky above him.
And this sky he had begotten with his eyes, with his arms he had thrown its vault over the earthly all…
He jumped up.
It seemed to him as if the door had opened and someone had come in.
No! It only seemed so to him. And again he walked up and down.
Terrible, terrible that something like that can destroy one’s soul. Why? He became raging. Am I there to solve all riddles? Haven’t I rummaged enough in my soul? Haven’t I searched every corner of my soul with the greatest meticulousness? But can I grasp what lies under my consciousness, what plays out beyond the ridiculous brain life? Can I? Hey? Don’t you understand, you stupid man, that under certain circumstances one can come to betray one’s wife? Don’t you understand that there are moments when one can hate a woman so intensely, so unheard-of that one must soil her through intercourse with another woman out of rage, out of pain, out of frenzy, out of a sick need for revenge? Falk shook with laughter. Out of revenge because the poor woman five years earlier, yes, before she met me, didn’t sense me!
Falk ran around. The unrest grew so that he thought his head must burst.
And now, just now, when the torment subsided, when the wound began to scar, now Isa will be torn from him.
She will naturally go.
He tried to imagine it to himself.
No, impossible! He was bound to her. She was everything to him. He could not live without her. He had grown together with her, he rooted in her…
One thing became clear to him: He had to get rid of Czerski. But how, how?
A feeling of desperate powerlessness seized him. He became limp and resigned. What could he do? Now everything had to break over him.
Then suddenly a thought shot through his head.
Olga had to arrange the whole thing. That was the only way out. He became glad.
That he hadn’t thought of that earlier!
With feverish haste he wrote a long letter, put paper money in, sealed the envelope, leaned back in the chair and stared thoughtlessly ahead.
Suddenly he started. Now he hated her again.
Yes, she was to blame that he became so torn, so miserable, that he had lost all faith, that he saw no goal and no purpose in life.
She, she was to blame that in his brain he had only the one great, sick idea, the one rage, the one raving hate, that he was not the first…
Isa, Isa, if that hadn’t happened!… He, he, he… Yes, naturally, Herr Czerski… Naturally? Did I say: naturally!? Nothing is natural, everything is a riddle, everything is an abyss and everything a torment and a nonsense…
It was after all better that now everything came to an end.
And the torment laid itself on his heart and constricted it tightly and bit into it with fine, long, pointed teeth…
The night was so sultry and so wide and so dark. He sank into himself.
The world is going under! The world is going under…
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