The Coming Spring

Part Three: The Wind from the East

325 PART THREE The Wind from the East pon his return to Warsaw Cezary Baryka enrolled once more in his medical studies and took up residence, at his own invitation, in the room of one of his fellow students, a certain Buławnik. This Bu- ławnik came from a line of innkeepers or small-town profiteers, as a result of which he was always “in the money.” He lived, however, in a remote and entirely Jewish neighborhood, on Miła Street, in a dingy, crumbling apartment building whose stairs were so filthy, and the walls of whose entranceway were so blackened by the fumes of gas lamps, that it would have required a truly angelic goodness of heart to look upon them without gnashing one’s teeth. The room was on the fourth floor of this peeling ruin. Buławnik’s residence was accessed through the apartment of a sizeable number of rather malodorous and unkempt old ladies. On entering his room one was immediately struck by a leaky corner in the ceiling and an unwholesome smell rising from beneath the floor. Upon making inquiries with the caretaker, alternatively the concierge, about this matter, Cezary heard the following declaration: “Of course there’s a leak—it’s hardly surprising when there’s a whopping great hole in the ceiling right there in U The Coming Spring 326 the corner. It’s so big a sheep could crawl through it into the attic.” “Why is there a whopping great hole? The whole point of having a roof is so there won’t be holes that sheep can crawl through into the attic.” “Sir!” the caretaker, alternatively the concierge, said in an ironic tone. “That’s all well and good, but these days there are more important things to worry about than holes in the roof. You’ll just have to live there and make do.” “I understand, sir. But there’s also an unpleasant smell coming up from the under the floor. What do you think’s causing that?” “There’s a smell from the floor because it’s a gable wall. The beam’s got dry rot and the joists too. It’s no surprise that there’s dry rot, since it’s a gable wall, especially if you take into consideration the fact that it’s a corner room too.” Having received this explanation Cezary, instructed and fortified in spirit, ceased worrying about anything. He lived there and made do. But he did not like the room. Perhaps ten years before the Great War it had been painted the color of tomato soup. It was small, uncomfortable, and excessively draughty. What blew from the window and door, moreover, was not clean air but the smell of certain indispensable toilets which were located far down on the ground floor, it was true, but right underneath the window of the room. Furthermore, just beyond the outside wall there was the tin chimney of a bakery, which blasted constant streams of dullcolored smoke into the students’ window. At night there The Wind from the East 327 could be heard the interminable clatter of bread carts being pushed by hand from where the ovens were, making the thin if long-established walls tremble as though in a fever. In a word, it was not a pleasant place. And Buławnik was not a pleasant roommate—he was an egotist and miser by day, and a master of sarcasm and vulgarity in the evening, while in the night he snored enough for ten men. But Baryka had no choice. He had to put up with this arrangement with his fellow student, since his own pockets were empty. Immediately after moving in he took from his suitcase the tail coat and accessories that had been a gift in friendship from Hipolit Wielosławski, and decided to sell this relic, this symbol of life at Nawłoć—this memento . On the pretext of assessing the value of the outfit , Cezary gazed intently at the curious garment and, in secret from the coarse and insensitive Buławnik, shed a final tear. The coat still smelled of “Laura’s” perfume. Oh, how painful that scent was now! It was truly as if the devil were taking revenge with this faint, invisible, yet so powerful means of recalling former pleasures. Indistinctly, vaguely, as if in a dream, Baryka was beginning to understand that certain unimaginable scales were...