Richard A Antonius

In those days, Marcin Bogusz, Wiesiek Giza, and Jacek Bolisenga scampered around this street more frequently. They peered into the yard of a house, spying on the new guest that had appeared at the train orchestra conductor’s house. They leapt over puddles in the widest spots, simultaneously craning their necks over the phlox umbels.

At the sight of Mariana’s dancing braid, they shouted as though possessed. Back to back, they stuck out their legs and pushed each other into the suds under the fence. Adam observed this through his binoculars from the attic window of his grandparents’ house. Mariana played with a Mordemba family girl, Magda, and her small, shaggy female dog, Oogly. The girls seemed to pay no attention to the boys’ antics. From time to time, the old dog could not sit through the screams, for she yipped hoarsely, baring her crooked fangs in the direction of the street.

That night he lay awake for a long time, listening to Oogly’s barking. She must have been yapping to the moon embroidered on the tapestry with deer that hung over his bed. Adam turned to his other side and smiled at his secret plan, which he had laid out for the next day.

He stood by the gate holding a comb wrapped in parchment to his lips. He made rustling, papery sounds in the early morning street. He attempted La ci darem la mano, but swiftly jumped to another melody, Tiritomba. Every now and then he had to correct the white peony that he had wedged into his shirt pocket. He had already decided the other day that he would appear to have it by chance, and then he would tell Mariana that it was for her, and she would stick the flower into her hair…

Finally, when he felt that he could no longer stand those papery vibrations on his lips, Mariana’s head appeared from behind the fence.

Adam came out onto the street, jumped over a puddle, and extended his hand with the comb over the fence.

“You can play very nicely on this comb.”

Before realising what had happened, a little hand tore the comb from his grasp. Magda Mordemba ran off to her friend with her prize catch, tripping over Oogly along the way.

“Mulțumesc,” Mariana said to Adam, peering at the comb. The girls whispered to each other for a while, then they giggled, perhaps noticing the peony, and he felt water from the puddle oozing into one of his boots.

“Do you play chess?” Magda asked on Mariana’s behalf.

“I know the Capablanca move,” he gave his answer, which he had rehearsed at night.

Stepping into the courtyard, he worried about the sharp teeth of that little, constantly yapping dog. He and Oogly sidestepped each other, staying at a distance. He expected to see Mariana brushing her dark fringe with his comb. But no, both girls kneeled down by the table, upon which a chessboard was laid out, and tried to brush Oogly with his comb. In response, she set out to bite the comb, as it tugged on her matted fur padded with dried seeds and grass.

“Eh, the teeth from your comb keep falling out,” one of the girls stated with reproach.

“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” Mariana exclaimed, pulled herself up, and pierced Adam with her pupils, which were like black currants. She now held her hands behind her back.

“In which hand?” Magda finished for her.

They laughed as Adam deliberated at length, unable to unhook his eyes from the stripes over Mariana’s ankles.

Finally, he drew a black pawn. That’s nothing, he thought, it’s like having power over sixteen brilliantly black pupils.

Instead of the pawn, he examined the girl. He followed the tip of her tongue as she slowly licked her full, candied lips with it. He was tense from head to toe, as under the table, Oogly wandered around their legs. Every now and then, Magda joined them at the table, making the chess pieces judder precariously. What’s more, her hands placed something in front of Adam that reminded him of a wreath of hair from a grandmotherly prayer book.

“How do you like my doll Flopsy?” she asked, testing the resilience of his comb on the thing that may once have been a bear. The comb itself became frightfully gap-toothed, and probably stunk of old dog.

Mariana began the game of chess with a move from her king.

That Mariana can forget about the little castling, he thought. And in his mind, his father’s face materialised for a moment, leaning over the chessboard. He was certain that even his father would find such an opening to be reckless. As such, he hazarded a similar move. His opponent wasn’t all that intimidating. Mariana did not hesitate for long, and she moved her pawn from the white bishop.

Now, she observed him challengingly. She rested her lovely face on her hand, and wrinkled her brow under her fringe.

He was under the impression that Mariana’s beauty transformed him into a cake of crushed zloty coin, which he had once laid down with Martin beneath a passing train.

He took her pawn. She pursed her lips and with a swift movement, as if she had been ready for this, she blocked his pawn with a knight. He had nothing to worry about; after all, he was the son of an admirable chess player. He decided to give her a fright.

“Pawn to d5!”

She shrugged her shoulders and settled for an exchange.

Maybe she didn’t know that she would be exposed to the queen’s beating? He didn’t want her to back out of this move. That’s what he did. He felt that she would try to scare him off with her second knight.

“Who’s winning?” screeched Magda, tossing a shaggy toy, whose torn head tottered over the chessboard.

He felt Oogly’s damp nose on his calf. A boy ran behind the phloxes, red-faced and rushing the rim of a bicycle wheel in front of him.

Adam returned his queen to base. It was unclear why Mariana clapped her hands. But even she, instead of checkmating, chose to move her knight to e4.

“I’ve got you!” he thought, planting his white bishop on g4. Evidently, the Romanian girl wished to defend her two knights, as she slid her queen to e2. To be sure, with this she had shielded her king.

He decided to act quickly. Now, the attack! He knocked the knight over on f3. Checkmate!

In that moment, Mariana gave out a savage cry. He felt her spittle on his cheeks. Oogly growled from under the table. The spooked Magda crouched on the ground speckled with chicken droppings. Rabbits’ noises resounded in the woodshed. For a fraction of a second, the boy had Mariana’s altered face before him. In her scream, in her roar, she had become old and ugly like… Queen Kinga from his grandmother’s black and white illustration, which hung in the kitchen over the table, or worse. The glossy braid sliced the serene sky like a whip. He closed his eyes. He opened them suddenly, as he had heard an unsettling word. Finalul!

The knight’s move, which Mariana had just executed, had put him in a situation with no exit. It was a mate! A double mate!

Mariana stood on the opposite side of the table, adjusting her braid. All the petals from his peony must have scattered across the chessboard.

He couldn’t sleep until late at night, biting his nails and playing over in his head the word “finalul,” which burned like a nettle.

Then he dreamed that he and Marcin ran along a railway embankment. They placed two coins on the rail, and in a moment, the snuffling locomotive would make two pancakes out of them. They would be able to play cymbergay with them. The green train TKt48 tows red freight wagons. The last one has a guard booth. Suddenly, a familiar head wearing a beret leans out of the window. It is Uncle Magician! He holds something in his hand. He calls out, “Catch, little starling! It is a com-pen-dium!” Adam notices a small notebook flying in the air, from which eight scraps of paper flutter out. He tries to snatch them. They miss his hands and settle in the middle of a large puddle. The last wagon distances itself across the bridge. Only then does Adam see that a bicycle is attached to the booth. The wind wrinkles the water in the puddle, arranging the scraps of paper in various shapes.

Adam hears from beyond the phloxes as his grandmother asks his grandfather whether or not he had torn out her white peonies, the ones by the gate? But the last question has no more to do with his dream.

For a long time, he did not venture near the fence where the chess player from Romania lived. He was embarrassed, all the more so because it had already reached Marcin’s ears, by some side channel, that Mariana had check mated him, and this only in a few moves.

He was very busy. He was in the midst of creating a special cipher, with which he began to write a secret letter in his journal. It was a letter to Mariana. Someone who knew that the letter M was a bird, the letter A signified a triangular skirt on dancing feet, that R was a shoe with a stripe, and so on and the like… could have deciphered this letter. But the boy kept the key to the cipher in another location, in the large attic behind the chimney, beneath a brick.

In this letter, Adam asked her for her hand. He promised to buy her an engagement ring, and that he would bake a strudel. Afterwards, they would eat it together, with their legs dangling from the bridge over the Kamienica River. And they would only share joy, for there would be no sorrows to portion out. They would speak to each other in his fabricated language, so that the grown ups, even if they were to eavesdrop on them, could not understand anything. Admittedly, he thought, what would they live on? They would establish a collective, and they would sell handmade floral water scented of phloxes to the whole world. They would live in the water tower next to the train station, and no boogeyman would manage to crawl up in order to peer into their window and see what they were up to. Grandpa Julian kept a key to that tower in a wardrobe on his veranda, as he had once helped to repair the metal doors.

Autumn in the Old Colony made itself known with the rattle of an apple rolling across the sloping roof of the woodshed. Grandpa Julian sat under the apple tree. From beneath his penknife, a spiral of succulent skin extended all the way to the ground.

“My teeth can no longer tolerate apple skin,” he spoke. And then he wondered aloud, when a letter from Adam’s mother would finally arrive.

Grandma was likewise unsettled. She soaked the laundry in the tub, wiping her forehead with her sleeve and said:

“I was thinking that she must have gone to Asia, because after all, the Asian fever came to us from those parts. To say nothing of what it was like there!”

One day, Tadzio Maligniak appeared behind the gate with a card. It was a summons to the phone, from the post. It was to be an international conversation with Kiev. Grandma Filomena and Adam appeared before the appointed time. They were called into the second booth. However, something merely wheezed in the receiver. Grandma said that she heard static, and then someone in the distance, possibly Adam’s father, yelled out in Russian.

“Maybe it was the name of the village on the Dnieper?” she wondered later at home. “Some Komatoznoje or other. And then it disconnected.”

A travelling cinema came to the railway park that evening. The boy did not know the title of the film, because he had gotten there a little late with his grandmother. A black and white world pulsated on the screen, hanging among trees and stars. A funny clown sat down at a piano, but the stool was placed too far away. He rolled up his sleeves and began to push the entire piano.

“What is that nitwit about?” Grandma said in astonishment. “It would be enough to pull up his chair.”

Someone jostled through the last, raised row, cutting the light from the projector. The shadows of three giant figures moved across the screen. The boy had the impression that he could see his mother’s profile, Mr Bernard and just behind them, his father.

“Adam, dear, don’t doze off,” Grandma nudged him in the side. “How’s this?”

At this precise moment, the clown’s face froze across the screen in a sorrowful smile. His cheeks swelled, his eyes bulged out, and a blazing, large hole melted in his lips. In another moment, the bald patch between his tufts of hair transformed into stretched bubbles and bogeys. At last, a blinding whiteness tore through the screen.

“Once again, their film strip has broken,” Grandma said. In the illuminated audience, a few rows ahead of them, he noticed Mariana’s head. She had now a pretzel woven from a braid on her head. Next to her sat a boy, who jumped up impatiently, turning his face. In the white light of the projector, Adam recognised Jedrek Pahletko.

The filmstrip was glued back together, and in a moment, from underneath the screen, the speakers again spluttered.

“It’s a film titled The Last Performance of Grock, Mrs Szatko,” whispered from the side one of Grandma’s acquaintances.

Adam craned his neck and peered at the hair pretzel, over which waved, like black birds, Pahletko’s paws. On the screen, the clown with the oversized boots tumbled from the stool. The black speck that materialised seemingly out of nowhere must have frightened him, and he somersaulted across the entire screen. And when, with the whistle of the train, the magnified operator’s finger appeared, trying to chase it from the shutter, the entire train park burst into laughter.

Adam was chiefly fascinated by the projector with giant reels, which was set on the back of the truck. He thought that if in the future he wouldn’t become a train conductor, maybe he would be a film operator, or even a playful clown, like in the movie.

When the credits appeared and everybody rose from their seats, he pleaded with his grandmother to approach the truck. Just on the edge of the platform, under the operator’s feet, among the cigarette butts and stubs of matches, he noticed a small piece of filmstrip. It must have been a film frame that had been sliced with scissors. After a moment, he held his discovery in his hands. The clown’s face beamed at him against the park lantern. Next to the face, to one side of the perforated holes, he noticed the fragment of a quivering line. It must have been an optical recording of Clown Grock’s smile!

“One little frame from the twenty-four per second, Grandma.”

“Ho-ho! Adam, dear, you certainly know a good deal,” Grandma said loudly, as though she wanted her acquaintance to hear this.

He hadn’t time to remove the filmstrip from his eye when, against the backdrop of the night, upon the star speckled sky; a luminous needle appeared. It sped over the roof of the train station lobby. “A falling star!” he thought. He knew that in such cases, one was expected to evoke a wish in a flash. And so he did.

Wiesiek Giza, Marcin Bogusz and Jacek Bolisenga picked him up from the gate. Jedrek Pahletko was already in Mariana’s yard. Two of Magda’s brothers had crept in through a hole in the fence: Wicek who was toothless, and Heniek with one shorter leg. Wicek twirled a cord in his fingers. Mariana, who was in a white dress, crafted angel wings out of mud. She formed them from dirt clods and together with Magda; they pretended to bake pastries on a metal toy stove. Only Oogly behaved strangely. She did not bark: she wagged what remained of her tail and offered her paw to everyone.

The boys circled the table with the toy stove, feigning hunger and rubbing their stomachs, while Pahletko went so far as to swipe one of the pastries and cram it into his mouth. Everybody bent over laughing as he coughed and spat for a considerable time under the woodshed.

Adam observed Mariana. That day, she had freshly plucked double cherries on her ears. At every movement of her head, the fruits’ succulent scarlet bumped against each other, soaking in the sparkle of the sun. Finally he approached her, producing the tiny film frame from his pocket.

“Look at this,” he said to Mariana. “I’ve got the clown on film. It’s Grock.”

She took it from him with muddied fingers and, crinkling her nose, she looked at it under the sun.

“Take it,” he encouraged her.

“Mulțumesc,” she said and tossed the scrap onto the table. The cherries on her ears swung cheerfully.

In the meantime, Wicek placed a mud angel wing under the dog’s nose.

“Eat the leftovers, vermin!”

But Oogly wanted none of it. Foam hung from her oddly protruding teeth.

“I’ve got her!” exclaimed the eldest Mordemba, snatching the dog, lifting her up, and placing her on top of the stack of railroad ties by the woodshed. He must have prepared this in advance.

“Mom and dad told me that the bitch is old, ill and useless,” he clarified. “And she gobbles down too much food. C’mon!” he encouraged his brother, all the while placing the looped rope on the dog himself, and tying the other end to the horseshoe nail in the board. “Now let her jump.”

But Heniek refused.

“Blockhead!” his brother cursed him and turned to Marcin.

“Nah,” said Marcin, spreading his arms and making a run for it along a narrow path among the plant frames, pretending to traverse a labyrinth. Bolisenga was already there.

“So then who will push her? What about you?” he motioned towards Wiesiek Giza. “You don’t want to see Oogly taking the plunge?”

“Let her sit there,” said Giza, beginning to kick a rock.

“And you?” he asked, turning to Adam.

The boy shrugged his shoulders. He could sense that something bad was about to happen. He didn’t like the halter, or the Mordembas’ strange feverishness.

“Haven’t you been to the circus? Eh? What a bunch of girls!” Wicek waxed impatient.

Mariana hurled an ugly grimace at Adam, and then she turned her head towards Pahletko.

“Andrei! Andrei!” she called out. Seeing that he too dillydallied, she clapped her hands, flicking the dirt from her fingers, tore the two cherries from her ears, and threw them at him with a laugh. She danced in the sunlight and ran up to Wicek.

“Salto mortale!” she yelled in her way and shoved Oogly.

The animal barked fearfully and crashed down from on high. Just over the ground, the loop tightened around the dog’s neck. The sharp teeth ground even more strangely, the tongue flickered, and after a moment, the black eyes fell motionless, as though fixed on the sun.

Mariana screeched with her savage laugh, with which she had already once startled Adam. In one instant she transformed into a boogeyman, which a second later splattered into a torrential fountain of playground laughter. Even the boys crouched behind the plant frames. Magda crushed a dirt cake in her palm and said, “Oh, yuck!”

Adam could see spit dribbling from Oogly’s snout. The dog’s hind legs thrashed about, making out of him a clumsy dancer.

“He pooped!” the eldest Mordemba shrieked, and addressed Mariana appreciatively: “You’re incredible! Mulțumesc!”

Somehow, Pahletko was the first to run to the gate.

“Wait up!” cried Marcin, and together with Giza and Bolisenga, they ran out onto the street. “We’re off! To the bridge!” came the command.

Adam also had nothing more to do there. He could not forget the sight of Mariana Suave spitting a cherry seed after them.

Translated by Suzie Komza

©Richard A Antonius

antonius@tele2.se

Chapter 42 from my novel OMNIUM. Wydawnictwo MUZA april 2017.

Chapter 42 in POLISH. CLICK HERE.

NEW! Link to my newest short story FRAGRANCE OF PHLOXES:

https://spark.adobe.com/page/TICGqiQv6st10/

More about Richard A Antonius at: Gallery AAA Antonius on Facebook, Film Channel on YOUTUBE and his webside www.atlango.com.