The Brooklyn Rail

Wiesław Myśliwski’s seventh novel, Needle’s Eye, presents a memory of an ancient gate in the writer's hometown of Sandomierz, Poland. You can see the halation, that salty glow of daylight memories, right from the outset. An elderly man muses on love and says he will give the narrator his life, only to collapse down flights of stairs, lifeless. The ensuing investigation will remind readers of Kafka, but there is an escalating doubt and pervasive confusion that put me in the mind of Ferenc Karinthy’s excellent novel Metropole. As the narrative tumbles forward, the diffusion of time and memory swells. Characters speak like people speak in dreams, paying out chains of semi-logic that assume profound weight in the moment. The undeniable brilliance of this work, and the other Myśliwski books I’ve read, makes me suspect he’s not far from being the sort of obscure Central European writer who shocks everyone and wins a Nobel. 

*

It was like I said. He tripped over his cane. I don’t know why he looked back. No one was coming down behind him. Of course I recognized him. Though he’d changed beyond recognition—anyone would have after so many years. But I didn’t let on. Maybe that was why he thought I hadn’t known him. I acted as if, for me, he was just one of those people that are always going up and down the steps. I wondered whether I shouldn’t perhaps warn him not to go down to the old wild green valley, because it no longer exists. But old people like to go around visiting places that don’t exist, and maybe never did. I’ve no idea what it is they’re longing for. Unfortunately though, old people’s longings can be dangerous. If it’d at least been possible to walk to the valley on level ground, I might have understood him. But you can’t get to a valley on level ground, that’s the nature of valleys. Walking down those steps at his age, with a cane, when your legs won’t do what they’re told to and your eyes can’t make out the world, or even the steps you’re taking—it’s like a young person imagining that instead of arms they have wings and they’ll be able to fly down to the valley.

I was expecting somebody else; then all of a sudden he was there. I tensed up and started trembling; at that moment I’d have preferred not to be there. He felt for the first step with his cane; he placed one foot on it hesitantly, then risked his other foot. In the same laborious way he descended the next step, then the next. Doddery and stubborn, I thought to myself. Why are old folk so stubborn, can’t they spare the people who’re going to live on after them?

He paused at each step, looking down at his feet as if he wasn’t sure whether these were the steps he’d always gone up and down, or if perhaps his memory had failed him. At his age it sometimes happens that your memory releases itself from the task of remembering, because it’s been weighing you down with obligations that you’re already tired of, after so many years of living. He felt each new step with his cane, making sure it was alright to continue on down. He first put his left foot on the step, then the right. The cane, which he held in his right hand, looked unsafe to me, it wobbled whenever he touched a step with it.

I was worried that on top of everything else he’d get dizzy from looking at the ground at every step. I was wondering if I should move aside, or if I ought not to let him past when he reached Needle’s Eye.

He wasn’t surprised to see me; he may even have expected me to overtake him before he got this far on his way from the park and through the town. He rested on the step above me and without looking me in the eye, he said:

“I checked in the park as well, but this was the last time. I don’t know if you remember that sometimes she’d walk home from school through the park. I was sitting on a bench and I decided to wait. A Gypsy woman came by with a baby at her breast. Do you think she stopped like she did back then? Not at all. She didn’t even ask if I wanted my fortune told, though the child whimpered as she passed me. She must have reckoned my future wasn’t ahead of me but behind me, and she couldn’t give me any extra years, that was impossible. I sat there for a long time, I was meaning to get up in a moment and walk through the town, because maybe today she’d go home through the town, if she needed to buy something, but an old woman sat down next to me, asking if I didn’t mind. ‘Unless perhaps you’re waiting for someone?’

“‘No, be my guest,’ I said. ‘I was waiting for someone, but that was a long time ago.’

“‘Long ago or not, if you’re in love you keep waiting.’

“‘Were you in love?’

“‘What a question. Is there anyone at all who’s never been in love? I can see you’ve lived a good many years, like me. And you don’t know that? I’m still in love now, though it’s probably in vain. It pains me that I never told him.’

“‘Why didn’t you?’

“‘I was sick, and the doctors didn’t give me long to live, so I didn’t want to burden him with my love. Especially because after he graduated high school he moved away. I don’t even know where, and now he may not even be with us anymore. Would you have said anything if you hadn’t been sure you’d live?’

“‘I don’t know, especially after so many years. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to trouble her with a bad conscience for leaving my love behind if she happened to die.’

“‘Does that mean you used to love someone?’

“‘I love her still, though I’m also not sure whether she’s alive. But I don’t know if we’d even recognize each other if we met now. We’re no longer the same people as when we were young.’

“‘If a person loves, they’re always the same. If people knew that when they were young, they’d live differently. As it is, they let all kinds of things go to waste. Most often love. Well, I’m off. I have to feed the cats.”

“‘Do you have many?’

“‘Depends how many show up.’

“‘I’ll walk you there.’

“‘No thank you. I don’t have far to go. What about you, where are you heading? Maybe I could walk you? You have a cane, while I can still walk on my own two feet, thank heaven.”

“‘I’ll be fine, I don’t have as far to go as you.”

He tested the next step with his cane, but he seemed not to trust it, for he moved the tip left and right across the surface before he placed his foot there. I was about to ask him why he was going down to the old wild green valley, but he spoke first:

“I feel sorry for you for having to carry on living. But maybe you’ll have more luck. I wish that for you. Though in my view, wishes never did anything for anyone.” He lowered himself onto the next step, again probing it with his cane. “Truth be told, every life is a repetition of someone else’s life. The past is ahead of us, you must know that, we trail along behind it. Because who could catch up with their own life.” He stopped on the next step. “So many feet must have come this way. Have you noticed how worn the steps are? It’s taken centuries. Who knows if they’re not still passing this way. Maybe I’ll go along with them. You’re surprised? It’s always more cheerful in company.” As he felt for the next step with his cane, he tottered, but it was as if someone held him up. “When I was in grammar school. . . though why should I bother telling you, you’ll experience it yourself, you have to. Without that you wouldn’t be able to ask yourself whether it was worth it. All the questions we ask in life boil down to that one question: was it worth it. Well, not at your age. Only years and years later. Today you wouldn’t be able to answer yourself. Just remember that youth can mislead for a long time. Don’t let it deceive you. It can suddenly turn out that it’s been many years since you were young. Sad to say. I’m sorry for the bitter words, but they’re the only ones left to me. To make up for it, I give you my life. It’ll come in useful when emptiness overwhelms you. Emptiness is the worst thing that can happen to us. And the only way to cope with it is to live in someone else’s life. Besides, no one begins their life from themselves. You don’t understand that yet. But with time, once you spend some time there. . . I’d be curious to know your impressions. Mine have been better and worse, as is always the case with life. Once I ran away from my childhood, but perhaps you’ll never want to part from yours. That sometimes happens. I can tell you, though, that it won’t do you any good. Life means stumbling after yourself without any hope that you’ll ever find yourself. Anyway, that’s enough, because people are wanting to pass. And there are still so many steps to go.”

So I moved out of his way. And at that moment the cane slipped from his hand and tumbled down the steps, and he staggered and then toppled after it. No one happened to be going up or down the steps at the time, and so no one saw it. I bounded down after him. I tried to pick him up in the irrational hope that he might still be alive. But he was heavy. He’d been a tall man when he was alive, and with the inertia of death he was all the heavier. Out of the blue I heard a voice above me:

“Leave him. The ambulance is on its way.”

So I laid his bloodied head back down on the roadway, and only then did I notice there were several bystanders. Where they’d sprung from I have no idea. Maybe it’s like that after any accident, people seem to pop up from the ground or descend from the sky, though when he was falling down the steps I could have sworn there wasn’t a soul. There was no point questioning people then, because no one saw him trip over his cane. They might say this and that, but each of them was going to tell a different story anyway, it’s always that way when people don’t want to be witnesses. And as it turned out, no one did. The man who’d told me to leave him was describing a similar incident as he pointed to a nearby apartment building:

“It was in that building over there. Two buddies who weren’t used to handling guns found a revolver from the war. It was so rusty the trigger couldn’t even be pulled, so one of them started knocking the barrel on the tabletop. And the other one got shot in the belly. He fell down, and the first one started to try and lift him, he even managed to sit him up straight. Afterwards the doctor said that if he hadn’t lifted him, the guy would’ve lived.”

At that point his story was interrupted by the siren of the arriving ambulance. Two orderlies with a stretcher jumped out, along with a doctor who pulled the victim’s eyelid back, placed a stethoscope against his chest just in case, and confirmed the decease. Right after the am- bulance the police of the citizens’ militia arrived, also with their siren wailing. Two uniformed officers got out, the senior one with stars on his shoulder, the junior one with bars. Then a third officer clambered out from the back seat; he was so overweight he looked comical in his uniform.

The senior officer started asking the people standing around the body who had noticed what and how it had happened, while the younger one with the bars wrote it all down, though there was nothing for him to write, because although everyone was talking over one another, no one had witnessed anything. One of them had seen only that I’d come running down the steps when the body was already lying on the roadway. And the man who’d stopped me from lifting him up had appeared right at the moment when I’d been going to do it and had said: “Leave him.” He even started to say that in that building over there. The officer interrupted him:

“Did any of you know him?”

Someone wondered aloud: maybe if they’d seen him while he was still alive. . . The officer waved his hand dismissively.

“Search his pockets,” he ordered.

The overweight one clumsily knelt down, took a wallet from the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket, and handed it to the junior officer, who without looking inside passed it to the other officer. The wallet had many compartments, but aside from money and the photograph of a young girl it didn’t contain so much as a laundry stub.

“No ID card?” the officer said in surprise. “Take a closer look, maybe there’s one in there somewhere. No?” He was more and more puzzled.

“A citizen without an ID card, it’s like he doesn’t exist,” the over-weight one said.

“There’s a body so there ought to be an ID card,” said the junior officer. “How’s anyone supposed to investigate?”

“Maybe it fell out and he’s lying on top of it. Lift the body up,” the officer ordered.

The orderlies raised the body, but underneath there was nothing except a large pool of blood.

“Put him back down. The way he was lying.”

“What about the girl in the photo?” The junior officer peered at the wallet where it lay open in the other officer’s hand. “She’s real pretty.” The senior officer nodded. “Could be his daughter. People are more likely to recognize her than him. Should I show it around?” He took the photo from the senior officer and presented it to each bystander in turn.

They shrugged, they didn’t know her. Someone said:

“It must be old. Those curly edges. They don’t do them like that nowadays. I’ve got pictures like that that used to belong to my grandparents.”

“What about you,” he said, turning to me. “Do you know her?”

Yes, it was her, I recognized her. But I didn’t let on. And so as not to arouse their suspicion, I called the officer’s attention to the cane: “Maybe someone’ll recognize him from the cane. Canes get connected to particular people. Everybody’s cane is different. One of the teachers at the grammar school—”

The officer didn’t let me finish. He eyed me distrustfully.

“We know how to identify people. Leave that to us, if you please.” He gave orders to the other officers: “Just in case, search for the cane, and put the money in the evidence room. Draw a line around the body. Who knows, maybe he was a tourist and he left his ID with the tour guide so he wouldn’t lose it.”

They drew a line in chalk around the body, the ambulance took it away, and the junior officer and the overweight one started looking for the cane. The chalk outline of his body on the roadway, along with the bloodstain from where he’d hit his head, seemed to breathe with his breath, even to whisper something in his words; it was more stirring than when the body had been lying there.

“We’ll need to drive around the town, and where there’s a coach, make inquiries,” the senior officer instructed, since despite a search of the steps and all around, the cane hadn’t turned up. “It’s Saturday, there are lots of visitors today. The coaches park under the castle, by the granary, in the new town. Wherever they’re parked, go ask. Luckily there’s only one hotel, ask there too. And ask at private guest rooms, get a list from the town hall, they have to be registered.” He took off his cap and scratched his head as if his thoughts were itching him. “Also, it’d be good to put up posters, saying that a man aged—except we don’t know his age, we didn’t find his ID. Dammit, we didn’t even bring a camera, we could’ve taken his picture.”

“How could we have known he’d be dead?” the overweight officer put in. “They called in an accident, and an accident could have meant he’d broken an arm or a leg. There’s no shortage of broken arms and legs on these darned steps.”

“We could put up the photo,” the one with bars added. “Not here, in town rather, otherwise people’ll be afraid to use the steps because they’ll say there’s a ghost. Though a photo of a corpse—who’s going to let on they knew him. It’d be better to use the picture of the daughter. Someone’s more likely to admit knowing her.”

“How do you know it’s his daughter, not his granddaughter?” the senior officer asked sharply. The other man blinked in surprise that he hadn’t thought of that himself. “From all this, it seems you’re our only witness,” the senior officer went on, turning to me. He added as if unsure: “And you’re the only starting point for the investigation, since we don’t have the deceased’s ID, or photograph, or any other witnesses. Come with us, we’ll get a statement.”

At the station he sat me in front of his desk, asked if I’d like some tea, and picked up the phone: “Two teas,” he ordered. “Do you take sugar, sir? Then I’ll have some as well today. Bring sugar as well. Oh, and tell Bronka to come through and take things down.”

A skinny little woman, the cleaning lady as it turned out, brought in two glasses of tea, sugar in a candy tin, and one spoon. The officer helped himself to sugar, stirred his tea, then handed me the spoon.

“I ought to bring another spoon from home. These aluminum ones break easily, there’re hardly any left in the whole station,” he explained.

Bronka came in too. She gave me a scornful glance, sat down at the typewriter and opened an illustrated magazine.

“I’ll just check out the fall fashions while you finish your tea.”

“Type. How does drinking tea prevent an interview?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

He waited till I’d at least had my first sip; he took maybe his third, then pushed back from the desk, arranging himself against the backrest of his chair. He folded his hands together, visibly relaxing; he even stretched his feet out under the desk, because I felt them bump against mine.

“Go ahead.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“What you know.”

“I don’t know any more than what I’ve already told you.”

“Oh yes you do, we know you do. Anyone who’s being questioned says the same thing: they give their first name, last name, date of birth, and claim they don’t know anything. But experience has taught us that people don’t know what they know if they’re not helped along. There are various ways of helping. Me though, I use ordinary conversation to, you might say, raise awareness. I start from the assumption that each person has to realize for themselves what they know. So then?”

Evidently I didn’t yet understand a thing, for I decided to remind him of what he’d said to me when he brought me to the station:

“I’m sorry, but there’s been a misunderstanding. I was only supposed to be a witness.”

“That’s true, I don’t deny it, you’re still a witness. But you’re the only one. We don’t have any other statements we could compare with yours to establish your trustworthiness. When nothing is certain, the question arises whether being a witness was your only role in this incident, or if you might be assigned another. For the moment I don’t know which, but we need to try and clear that up. Both of us. So I need you to understand that I have to question you in various roles. In fact, the boundaries between the roles are fluid. Determined by circumstances. To offer a comparison, a liquid state may turn into a gaseous state or a solid state, depending on the temperature. Water, steam, ice. The same, but not the same. We can’t permit ourselves to be helpless. That would incapacitate us. We’d be unnecessary. So we have to look into things, sometimes till it hurts. The truth, as you know, has the highest price; even years later it isn’t reduced. So I wouldn’t count on that. The truth never expires. However long the case may go on. If we only had just one more witness. But in your case that could only be the deceased. And unfortunately we can’t question him. Though it’d be interesting to hear what he’d have to say. All we have is conjecture. And that’s not so unwarranted. The quest for leads usually starts from conjecture, since few people are caught red-handed. Think for instance of all those betrayed husbands and wives. It’s rare that any of them catches their partner in flagrante, as they say. Most betrayals start from conjecture. And it’s only conjecture that leads to a search for evidence. So it’s not impossible that the deceased would testify against you when you state that it was his own fault since he tripped over his cane. Where is the cane? We looked for it, as you saw. If it had been there we’d have found it. Canes don’t have wings, they can’t fly away.” He laughed, but it was a laugh that chilled me. “Well, we’ll look again. In the meantime, tell me: which hand was he holding it in, left or right, when he tripped over it? You don’t remember. Too bad. You’re surprised a detail like that can be meaningful? Let me tell you, a detail can tell us more than we’d expect. A little detail, yet it can undermine every statement, contradict every witness. A detail is a universe. They say the world is vast, but details determine someone will meet somebody else here and not there, that the apple fell from the tree so Newton could discover the law of gravity, that the bacteria Fleming was cultivating were killed unexpectedly by some fungus so penicillin could be invented. And so on and so forth. Did you write that down, Bronka? Then throw that sheet away.”

He continued to question me, and I have to say that at times his shrewdness startled me:

“You said that no one was coming down the steps behind him, right? And yet he looked back. Maybe the sun dazzled him, because it’s bright today, and he couldn’t see anything so he turned away, and at that point, let’s say, you offered to help him down to the next step?”

At times he interrupted the interview mid-sentence and left the room, as if giving me time to think. Or he lost himself in thought, after which he told Bronka to cross something out, though to me it had seemed important. His thoughts were clearly following a different train. Then at other moments he seemed to wish to moderate the tone of the interview and make it more like a sharing of confidences: he put in something about himself, that he had two children, a son and a daughter, with his first wife, who had died, so he’d had to bring them up himself.

“And you know how it is. Work’s no picnic.”

He’d remarried, and now they were expecting another child. At times he asked me questions that seemed to have nothing to do with the case:

“Your father and mother are alive? I realize you’re young, but you never know. I can barely remember my mother, she died of TB. And my father passed away two years ago.”

Then he’d surprise me once again:

“When did you graduate from high school? Why didn’t you go to university?”

“They didn’t admit me.”

“You failed the entrance exam?”

“No, I passed.”

“What do you mean? You passed the exam and they didn’t let you in? Interesting. That should be looked into. What do you do now?”

“I work.”

“Where?”

“At the canning factory. They make jams, marmalades, juices.”

“I know that place. We had a case there, five train cars loaded with barrels of sour cherries stood on a siding till the merchandise went bad. Where do you live?”

“With my parents.”

“Why did you come to town? Were you meeting him?”

“Who?”

“The deceased.”

“I didn’t know him.”

“You didn’t know him, yet you recognized him. That’s what you said, that you recognized him. Or perhaps he only thought you didn’t recognize him. Well, we can’t ask him. But I’m wondering, since this was a chance encounter, why you happened to meet at Needle’s Eye and not on the street, in the park, in a cafe or restaurant or wherever, the way chance meetings usually go. Think about that. I’ll be right back.” He left the room.