OFF_press

The Sun, basking in its own light, gazed down at the Moon with a self-satisfied grin.

The Moon couldn’t face it. Being stared at always made him feel queasy.     The Sun always appeared rather icy in attitude, or perhaps it only felt that way at the vast distance which separated them. Then again, it might have been a question of the difference in their potential. The Moon’s literary output was far less substantial, and far less warmly received by critics, who fawned over every new Sun publication while turning up their collective noses at the Moon’s dark musings.

The Sun did make some attempts at maintaining cordial relations with the Moon, but these went nowhere. The Moon fumed in isolation, becoming ever more bitter.

Ireneusz Kurbiel, a renowned literary critic, was perhaps the only friend the Moon had. Kurbiel had devoted his life to the promotion of his works, and though other critics grew to ignore the Moon Kurbiel remained true to his first love. He was thrilled with the complex narrative structures, individual tales seen from pessimistic perspectives suspended in a cosmic void, blending sparkling commentary with changing perspectives of consciousness.

It should be noted that the Moon’s works could never be considered easy to digest, but their intellectual dryness somehow suited Kurbiel’s palate. The Moon’s books tended to languish in unsold piles, while the Sun’s populist products flew off shop shelves in their millions. Kurbiel himself had to take some credit for this imbalance, his convoluted deconstructions only helping to cloud the already murky stories the Moon produced.

The Sun’s outpourings were by comparison based on simpler mechanisms. Readers found them full of the joys of life, brimming with illusory visions of existence without care. His narratives brimmed with wild adventure, the heroes, defined by generic character flaws and superficial beliefs, presented as models to young people. Everyone marvelled at their sensual, spontaneous style, always seeming to defy convention, yet always surrendering to it in the end.

For the inexperienced reader the works of the Sun appeared to be more inventive than those of the Moon, who reached real depths using very few, yet very carefully selected strokes. The literary asceticism the Moon displayed did not in any way mean that his output was any less artistic. He achieved greatness by default, without having to resort to Sun-like pyrotechnics.

The Sun spoilt by the critics. The Moon steeped in misery. This is how literature in those days was divided. The latter’s slim volumes started appearing at ever less frequent intervals. Cultural circles began whispering about the irreversible decline of teh Moon’s creativity, while Ireneusz Kurbiel was forced to confront the possibility of both professional and personal disaster.

Meanwhile, a small publishing house by the name of Cosmos, specialising in limited print run editions of the Moon’s titles, received an unexpected and rather hefty new manuscript. The editor couldn’t contain his joy. The Moon had written a proper novel, one whose narrative was unputdownable. Sensing a best-seller, the editor decided not to share it with Kurbiel until it was actually in the shops, so as not to jinx the new arrival.

A major advertising campaign for the book caught the distinguished critic unawares. Kurbiel, having worked closely with Cosmos for some years, at first felt offended. Being excluded from the editing and publishing processes felt like an insult aimed at him in full view of the literary establishment. Yet, at the same time, there was a ray of hope that this would signal the return of the Moon’s previous creative mastery.

Alas, the book sold in vast quantities. Literary publications and the populist press, usually on the Sun’s side, sang its praises. Kurbiel, however, remained silent.

The literary world poised itself for the publication of his monthly review column in the obscure journal Night. The piece finally appeared, consisting of just two sentences:

The latest work from the Moon, aptly titled “The Sun”, is, apart from all its superficial brilliance, the darkest piece of writing I have ever read. The Moon has come to believe he is the Sun.

Having written these words, the critic threw himself from his own balcony, his death instantaneous.

The Sun could smile once again. The Moon turned its dark side towards it and vanished.

© translated by Marek Kazmierski

Taken from the collection “Odpowiadania”, published by Rita Baum 2012

And so you look on as more and more dead villages and dull little towns go by, followed by warehouses, forests and the occasional control towers of moustachioed junction switchmen who stare out of the rooms where they work, eat, watch television, sleep, celebrate religious holidays and eventually pass away. They stare like the old women down narrow town streets nearby, resting, in royal fashion, on cushions perched on window sills, only the view before them different. Instead of young people, rushing to and from work, to and back from shopping, to kindergarten, from kindergarten, with a howling babe in arms to some obligatory family dinner, back from same obligatory family dinner with faces that tell of pain, instead of all that the switchmen have before them trains rushing along predestined courses, full of successful folk, laptops open wide, sitting side by side with unsuccessful folk, sandwiches peeled of tin foil, wristwatches ticking all their lives away. For the switchmen it is almost like being at the movies, rectangular compartment window after rectangular compartment window flying by, the frames of a never-ending film about real life, some within arguing, others cuddling, everyone, including the switchmen, existing but for that one moment, disappearing in the distance, replaced soon enough by so many others.

And so sometimes you wave back, without once trying to work out what they could be thinking about you, what sort of a life they might be inventing, be having you live. All you know is that nothing they can imagine could be worse than the reality of what you are experiencing right now.

Four hours of travelling to go. Four there and four back and between them all those control towers set right by the train tracks, the name of each junction coded in some unintelligible railway language, etched beneath their windows. Eight hours altogether. And even before you leave home you often wonder what else could be done with so much time. In eight hours, you could fly to the other end of the world, start a whole new life. In eight hours, you could visit endless nightclubs, meet enough friends, drink yourselves into proper stupor. In eight hours, you could make so much love, lose all sense of all those hours passing by, all sense of time and place, nothing mattering anyway. For those eight hours, you could be sat behind a desk in an immaculately pressed suit, pushing valuable papers about, in that one working day earning more than those railway switchmen earn in a year. Eight endless hours to hold out on these short, regional trains, in carriages where the heating never works, where toilets never have running water, from which the old restaurant carriages have forever been disconnected and no one bothers to walk past offering colourfully packaged refreshments like they do on  intercity express trains or jet planes soaring far from here. In eight hours you leave behind thousands of towns and hamlets and villages, none of which you would have ever seen, ever thought of, if not for these trips, thousands of places where some semblance of normal life still goes on, the sort you struggle to try and still remember, nose glued to the compartment window, even though actually you couldn’t care less about any of it any more. For eight hours, you try to read the books you always bother to pack for the journey, turning page after page, laboriously, never into the narrative, never in the action, never connecting with any protagonist. Else you try studying from the school textbooks and notes you sometimes drag along, though can never fix in memory any of the countless dates, figures, definitions and myriad of other data they want crammed into your teenage head. For eight hours you find yourself in some other, utterly different world, a chink between worlds, a place no news can reach, or where that which does is somehow diluted, twisted, hollow. And you no longer know how to kill time, how to stop those hours lasting as long as they do, how to numb yourself against this journey, a journey becoming ever more painful each time you choose to yet again take it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Night and Day

A long, long time ago, there lived a little boy. Every time he left the house, the sun would vanish, the world outside turning dark. People called him Night. Once, Night overheard them saying that whenever he returned home something strange happened outside. It wasn’t dark, quite the opposite, it “brightened up” and all around a new world, unknown to him, came into being. He decided to find out if this were true for himself and so one evening left his window slightly ajar, to spy on the goings on outside. What happened next went beyond anything he could have imagined. A little girl came out of the house opposite. The moment her feet touched the doorstep, the sun began to rise slowly and the boy, for the first time ever, saw light. People called her Day. Day looked at him for a split second, which was enough for him to vanish. And yet, from that moment on, Night and Day always stand at the same time in the same place, a moment before the sun realises it has to either rise or set. This is their time beyond time, somewhere in between.

Read the rest of this entry »