Homo Sapiens by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel
“Strange, strange… the doctor said you should lie at least three days, and I have seen this expression of strength and energy in your face for a long time. You are different from all people.”
“Yes, yes, that is the new strength. Drink, drink with me… I was so little with you… Drink the whole glass out.”
They drank out and Falk filled the glasses anew.
He sat down beside her, took her both hands and kissed them. “We have not spoken together for a long time,” he said.
“Now everything is good, isn’t it?” she asked tenderly.
“It will become good. We will travel away from here… What do you think of Iceland?”
“Are you serious?” “You make so many new plans…”
“This time I am serious, because it is namely no plan. It occurred to me today, yesterday, I actually don’t know when, but I must away from here.”
Isa beamed. She did not want to tell him, but she found it unbearable in this boring city.
“Think, such a small fisherman’s house by the sea. Isn’t it? Wonderful! And the autumn nights when the waves play this terrible eternal music on the beach. But you will not be bored?”
“Did I ever get bored with you? I need no person, nothing, I need absolutely nothing if I only have you.”
“But I will often be away from you, very often. I will go out with the fishermen for entire nights, I will go into the mountains. And when we are together, we will lie in the grass and stare at the sky… But drink, drink then… Oh, you can no longer drink as before.”
“See then!” She drank the glass empty.
“And in this twosomeness: you and I, and you a piece of me, and we both a revelation of the immanent substance in us…” He stood up. “Isa! we will seek the God we lost.”
She was as if hypnotized.
“The God we lost,” she repeated half unconsciously. “You don’t believe in God?” he asked suddenly.
“No,” she said thoughtfully.
“You don’t believe one can find him?” “No, if one does not have him in oneself.”
“But that is what I mean: to find God, that means to feel God, to feel him in every pore of one’s soul, to have the immediate certainty that he is there, to possess the wild supernatural power that the God-feeling gives.”
“Do you want to seek another God, a God outside? What do you want this God for? I don’t want him. I don’t need him. I have the immediate certainty of the God-feeling, I feel him as long as you are there. I need nothing higher… And I will not tolerate such a feeling in you either. Then I will not go with.”
He looked at her long.
“How beautiful you have become now. As if a light had suddenly bloomed in you…”
Suddenly he lost balance and came into a strange rapture.
“Yes, yes, I mean the God who is you and I. I mean the holy, great My-You! Do you know what my you, my dark you is? That is Jahveh, that is Oum, that is Tabu. My you, that is the soul that never prostituted itself in the brain. My you, that is the holy soul that rarely comes over me, perhaps once, as the Holy Spirit came only once over the apostles. My you, that is my love and my doom and my criminal will! And to find my God, that means: to explore this you, to know its ways, to understand its intentions, so as not to do the small, the low, the disgusting anymore.”
Isa was carried away. They grasped each other violently by the hands.
“And you want to teach me to find and explore it in me?” “Yes, yes…” He looked at her as if he had never seen her before.
“And you will be in me?”
“Yes, yes…”
“I am yours, your thing and your you… Am I it?” “Yes, yes…” He began to become distracted.
“We are poor, Isa,” he said after a while, “I lost the whole fortune.”
“Throw the rest away too,” she cried laughing to him and threw herself on his breast.
Fear suddenly rose in him.
“You, you—if it is over tomorrow? I have such mistrust of myself.”
“Then I will pull you with.”
“But is it perhaps not only an over-fatigue, an over-excited mood that whips us into this ecstasy?”
He started.
“I lie, I lie,” he said suddenly hoarsely, “I have lied too much… Now…”
He broke off. The thought to tell her now everything, to tell everything in detail, shot through his head and grew into a great, maniacal idea.
“Isa!” He looked at her as if he wanted to bore into the ground of her soul… “Isa!” he repeated, “I have something to tell you.”
She started frightened.
“Can you forgive me everything, everything I did evil?”
The confession forced itself with irresistible power over his lips. Now he could no longer hold it back. He grasped her hands.
“Everything? Everything?!” “Yes, everything, everything!”
“And if I had really done the one thing?” “What?” She recoiled horrified.
“This… with a strange woman.”
She stared at him, then cried out with an unnatural voice: “Don’t torment me!”
Falk came to his senses instantly. He felt sweat run over his whole body.
She jumped toward him and stammered trembling: “What? What?”
He smiled peculiarly with a superior calm.
In the same moment Isa noticed that he became deathly pale, and that his face twitched.
“You are sick!”
“Yes, I am sick, I overestimated my strength.”
He sank together on the sofa and in a wild maelstrom the experiences of the last days shot through his head. He saw Grodzki:
“One must be able to do it with will!”
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