A Swarm of Dust Read online

  At such moments, more frequent in recent years, a wild restlessness always gripped him, the urge to leap and bang and hurl things around and smash them. He was aware of these feelings, but he never worked out at what level of withdrawal they occurred. Nor could he ever push them away, they had to disappear on their own. They were like pain, and his will was irrelevant. Whenever they appeared, his heartbeat increased, something reminiscent of extreme joy arose in his chest, a yell, but he was also full of other, very different feelings – hatred of his surroundings, wantonness, a craving for violence – he himself called it a craving for violence and nothing more, because he always had to take hold of something and break it, he had to rush around the room and shout and bang his feet on the floor, and only then could he calm down. But at times the attack would be so strong that he was left trembling when it passed. Sometimes he looked with relish at the windowpane and thought how it would be to smash his fist through it and reduce it to fragments – what a sense of relief he would feel! Mostly the mere thought of the act was enough.

  He thought that perhaps the attic room where he was staying was at fault: There wasn’t a day when he didn’t look out the window and see rain. His view was hemmed in by blackened, lichen-covered roofs, which spread into the hillside at strange angles. This was the old part of town and buildings clung to the slope like rotten grapes. If he wanted to see the sky he had to lean far out of the window. But he never did so, he got used to there being no sky in this part of town. As the roofs clustered in front of the glass pane, dusk came early and if it was raining, it was already hard to make out objects at four in the afternoon. There was also a constant noise from the gutter. The rain quietly pattered; not heavy, not a downpour, but more like a grey curtain, every day. Its falling cast a strange silence, which crept through the window, climbed the dark walls, across the low hanging ceiling. The silence irritated him. With the silence came a sense of remoteness, bodily spasms, the urge to destroy.

  In one such mood he saw a cat climbing up an almost vertical roof, trying to claw its way to the top. But the roof was slippery, the cat slipped and rolled towards the edge; it tried to grab hold of the gutter, but was unable to and tumbled into the deep yard below, where it lay almost immobilised. When Janek saw this he felt a strange delight, which scared him since he was unable to explain it. But it brought relief: as if he’d been choking and then suddenly breathed air.

  After everything remained unchanged for some time, his hearing became sharper again. The first time he noticed it was with the sound of his footsteps. Whereas before they had sounded as if at a distance, now they were right beneath him, very close, and they rattled through his legs towards his stomach. At first, this rattling did not cause him any pain. At every step the shock slid to his stomach, but it took the form of a sound rather than pain. For some time he was suffused with the sound of footsteps.

  He suddenly had the feeling that the shocks were caused by the earth. As if the street was pressing hard on his soles, like a fist from below. He was slipping from his floating state and becoming ever heavier. The blows from the earth took the form of pain and he felt very clearly that in spite of the unpleasant feeling his weight was not being pulled down, into the earth, but that the earth was pressing against him. The blows became increasingly intense until he felt as if the ground was beating his feet. Because his thoughts were still mired in quicksand, he did not know how to put all this into words. The ground was neither warm nor cold, there were no specific feelings, nothing that could be defined. It neither burned, nor stung, nor hurt, nor pricked; everything was concentrated in the fact that he could feel the ground, and the feeling was intensifying. Instinctively, he lifted his feet high, wanting to keep them in the air as long as possible, then he began to jump, his feet twitching as if they were bouncing off the ground. The ground was becoming flexible, but his legs were going numb. It felt as if he wasn’t moving at all, rather that the ground beneath him was wrinkling, folding and giving way, forming waves and washing him forward like water washes a small leaf. A vague awareness that he was running arose. His hearing failed again, the focus of his awareness shifted to his legs, which were numb, right up to his hips, as if they were not part of him. His sight was still functioning to some extent and with its help the spark of realisation that he was running, for the balloon-like objects around him were whizzing past more rapidly. They were crammed together in greater density, merging together and swimming from one field of vision to another. Only when he began to be assailed through the swarm of balloon-like objects by a sharper light – ever sharper – did he clearly feel he was lifting and putting down his feet in rapid succession. The light was stopping him, his hearing was triggered and he suddenly heard again that he was gasping for breath: his chest was heaving, and he felt his hair clinging to his sweaty forehead. The ground slid beneath him, rotated and stopped. Again it seemed to him that it was his legs that were moving, or rather had been moving, for the next moment they stopped again.

  Whenever Daria was with him things unfolded in a similar way. Lust quickly peaked, his tendons flexed, he was gripped by a desire to throw himself at her and strike or bite or pull her hair if she was lying on the couch thinking, or perhaps dozing. Beneath the cover she was naked, for she never dressed until she had decided to leave. The thought of her nakedness always held him back, stopped him throwing himself on her, caused him to listen. Usually she was breathing very lightly. At such moments he would not touch her skin. His lust began to wane as soon as he occupied himself with the question of why her skin still excited him. Before falling asleep they always talked. She asked questions and he answered. Sometimes she seemed pushy, because she kept raking over his past, petulantly, as if it was of immense importance to her to know what had happened to him at different times. But lust always appeared when she was already asleep, when the room was at peace, which was intensified by the pattering of rain. Only then did he sink into the darkness from which he had previously been expelled.

  Before him was a road, now he could see it clearly. He realised he was soaked in sweat, rivulets ran from his forehead, he was tousled, he was breathing deeply, he was agitated, he had awoken from his strange state. He felt he was in the darkness, that he had come from the darkness, which he could not understand. He wanted to look back, for the darkness he had come from was evidently behind him, but he was suddenly gripped by fear, constricting his throat. He wanted to get rid of it at all costs, push it back inside him, he felt his face to reassure himself with his own proximity, his eyes leaped around, attaching themselves to objects as if he was drowning and was feeling for roots in a river. On his right there arose from the haziness the sharp outlines of stone houses, in his ears the wind rustled and a slight chill licked his neck. In front of him there really was a road strewn with stones, but the silhouette of the castle was far off, barely visible. A rainy smell flooded his nostrils, a smell of dampness, of depths, of decay. All that seemed to him far away, out of reach, now slowly fell into the dark depths inside him. His thoughts escaped from the quicksand, they seethed in his brain, clear, measurable. He walked across the wide square towards the tavern at the other end of town.

  Walking up the wide steps, he entered through the open door. In doing so he felt he was being followed, that someone was mounting the stairs right behind him, and he could feel their breath on the back of his neck. After three steps he went higher and then straight ahead, past the beer hall on the right and the café on the left. The oppressive shadow of the stalker slipped away. When he finally half turned, he saw a shaky old man with a walking stick struggling through the heavy entrance doors. A heaviness grew within him that he wanted to dissipate with a burst of laughter, or a reckless cry of joy, but the feeling passed when he awkwardly swallowed his saliva. He opened the double glass doors in front of him and went inside; one of them closed too quickly and struck his back. He went straight towards the toilets, down two flights of stairs to the cellar. The urinals were yellowish, he saw them clearly, they
shone before him as if suspended in the air. It was as if he saw them and nothing else.

  Hastily, he unfastened his trousers to urinate, for he felt an enormous pressure in his bladder. His body was already expecting the kind of relief that floods the veins when a tormenting tension is disposed of. His expectation was so strong that it came like a blow to him when he simply stood and stood, and not a drop emerged. The pressure began to subside, it seemed that relief was already on its way, but then unexpectedly the pressure increased again, this time in his stomach, then it leaped to his back, slid up to his throat and into his mouth. It forced him to cough, but it was very dry, nothing like a real cough – as if his mouth had opened of its own accord. As if the pressure in his body had escaped through his mouth.

  It helped him a lot to talk to her, to confess. She was no ordinary woman, she kept trying to define him, she had an opinion on his every step, some of his actions she foresaw before he had even formed them in his mind. He always thought this was because she felt something for him. After his secondary school years, when the idea was planted in his brain that his behaviour was unpleasant, deceitful, revengeful, reckless and that there was something fundamentally wrong with him – years when he had got used to being looked at with disapproval, with a raised finger, with disappointment – this woman was special, different, something beyond his imagination.

  ‘You’re not a normal person,’ she often told him. ‘You don’t belong in the crowd – not because you have different characteristics from ordinary people, but because in you these characteristics are in different proportions, which are constantly changing. I haven’t managed to work out why they change, because in regard to these changes you are powerless, a tragic figure, and in certain moments not responsible for your actions. That in itself is not tragic, but you are responsible to others, you are responsible to the mass of people who have their opinions. They are not interested in causes and circumstances, but only events, results. You were created by events. Nothing is as important for someone’s state of mind as what he experienced in childhood. At that time you only perceive, you only realise, but you can’t define anything, you don’t have enough reasoning power to get to the bottom of things. If at that time things are placed in the wrong slots and those things are so strong that they cut into your soul, then they shape your mind, which with the years gets strengthened and added to, so that reason can no longer change it. Reason comes too late. The organism reacts as it is accustomed to doing. If I knew your past in detail I could tell you why you are not responsible for some of your actions. You’re ruled by your instincts, you live in the past, where your reason cannot reach. Your reason is limited, but the past you carry inside you is very strong. You are not aware that you react now as you reacted in the past.’

  Apart from a slight prickling in his throat, he no longer felt any unease. Then the prickling stopped and in a moment his head rang with what sounded like a metal spoon being struck against the edge of a saucer. Before his eyes flashed a hazy picture: a hairy hand with long bony fingers. The fingernails were bitten, black and decaying, and a little above the wrist the arm disappeared into the sleeve of a filthy check shirt. Geder’s shirt. Between his fingers was a metal spoon. It rose and fell evenly, striking the edge of a yellowish saucer. Then the image in his eye glinted and right in front of him he saw the smooth surface of a smooth wall with drops of water running down it.

  He went over to the washbasin, turned on the tap and splashed water in his face. Then he watched the water run down the plughole. As it ran away, the metallic sound in his head faded. When the last of the water gurgled in the pipe and with a pop was replaced by air, there was a similar pop in his head: as if the saucer against which the spoon had been clinking had disintegrated. Another image danced before him. He saw the fragments of the saucer and the spoon lying on the table. But this only lasted a moment, a blink of an eye and it all disappeared with a pop. Once again, as some moments before, he felt a lump in his throat containing a burst of laughter, the beginnings of a sudden yell, a gasp, like someone who was suffocating but then the air rushes into his lungs. Just like before, the lump disintegrated before it could become a sound.

  All at once, he noticed a stench in his nostrils, and the objects around him moved closer. He realised he was standing in a badly lit toilet. A fat fly was buzzing from one corner to the other. Water was dripping from the pipe into the urinal and from there onto the floor, like rainwater from a roof. There was also water on the floor, several centimetres deep. All the outflows were blocked and so the liquid, including stuff from other people’s bladders, was collecting there. The window just below the ceiling was hermetically sealed and there was a dense, terrible odour in the air. As soon as the stench entered his nostrils, his feet started to move of their own accord and he headed for the door. First up three steps, then straight on for two metres and then three more steps. He was already at the door. He had started to open it when he realised his trousers were still unfastened. He opened the door completely and went along the corridor, fastening his flies with his right hand.

  At that moment, a woman approached from his left, saw what he was doing, she went past, turned to her right and started up the stairs that led to the first floor. She looked at him once more, first at his hand and trousers, then she raised her eyes to his face and in the next moment she had disappeared round the corner. But for a moment they had looked at each other and he thought he saw in her eyes a shamelessly inquisitive look directed at the hand fastening his trousers. The incident weighed upon him like a heavy load. In his chest began to grow a strange sorrow, a kind of burden that disabled him, his feet stopped and he stood in the corridor …

  The woman had seen him fastening his trousers … He could trace the thoughts that must have flashed through her mind … evidently his behaviour hung in the air before her … he entered her mind and remembered with her, thinking about himself … how he had approached the urinal, how he had unfastened his flies, how he had reached for his member, how he had pulled it out, held it … she must have pictured his sex organ … perhaps in her hands, perhaps she had imagined sex with him … He felt as if he was being pressed to the ground, in heavy chains, suddenly captured, tied up, his freedom lost – he felt guilty before this woman. Curses and accusations rose inside him: now he hated himself for being so careless, for appearing before her at a moment when he was fastening his flies, thus triggering a landslide that shut him off in an incomprehensible dependence.

  As soon as he realised that the woman was touching him with her thoughts, she was there within him. Inside and beside himself he felt her proximity. He felt her as a burden, as a nuisance. He stood there, paralysed, and tried to shatter the clear image of her that still floated before him, to distance her and transform her into an outline. He took a step and, oddly, the woman did the same. Once again she stood before him, looking sharply into his face and then at the buttons on his trousers. Her look radiated curiosity, intrusiveness. Again he made a physical effort to take a step aside, this time backwards, but the woman floated after him, he even felt her breath on his face. He began to wave his arms around to defend himself. While doing so he pushed through the doors into the beer hall, ran into a mass of some kind and turned round in a flash: the picture shattered. In front of him stood another woman, whom he had just stumbled into. He gawped at her with glassy eyes.

  ‘Damn gypsy!’ she cursed, moving round him and disappearing. As if in the distance, he heard these two words like an echo. But they whooshed towards him and echoed inside him. They were sharp and sounded like a scream. In front of him was the beer hall, there were some men standing at the bar. Nobody looked his way. He went over and looked at the waitress. ‘Damn gypsy!’ she too said to him. Her voice was old and repugnant, even though she was young, and her eyes were like a vulture’s. ‘Damn gypsy!’ said a low male voice to his right; he turned and saw a well-dressed man in a hat, looking at him indifferently. ‘Damn gypsy!’ hissed a voice to the left; he turned and fou
nd the voice was that of a young guy with messy hair. ‘Damn gypsy!’ said the whole row of them. ‘Damn gypsy!’ rang out from the speakers on the wall. The glass doors swayed and whispered deeply: Damn gypsy. From the walls rebounded a thousand voices: Damn gypsy! …

  He leaped back, tension building inside him, his lungs gasping for air. He yelled for them all to shut up. It was a hoarse, uncomprehending cry. His voice did not rebound. There was a tomb-like silence in the beer hall. Everyone turned and stared at him with a scared look, as if he were a ghost. He trembled, feeling the coldness of the cement floor beneath his feet. Again a fly buzzed. Quietly, far off.

  Deafness assailed his ears, blindness shrouded his eyes, the cement floor detached itself from his paralysed legs, everything sank, and he floated off. The sense of floating was interrupted by the unexpected peace outside. Before he had gone inside, it had seemed to him that the world was swarming around, beneath and above him; that sometimes it even passed through him like a cold wave – a wave of faces, houses and objects. Now everything was motionless, as if the world had turned to stone. The crossroads were empty; the streets on three sides were empty. Even the cars were not moving, but stood there like scattered stones. People, too. Their appearance was rigid; perhaps they were talking, but no one was waving their arms, no one shaking their head, no one changing their posture. Not even the creases on the women’s skirts moved. The stony chill had fixed him to the ground and flowed into his veins. He also stood motionless. His thoughts were clear; they seethed in his brain like bright crystals with sharp edges. Through the stone percolated the sense of a presence, something invisible. He felt that this presence was the cause of his paralysis, yet he couldn’t define it precisely because he didn’t want to think about it, as if he might fall into even greater dependence.