The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [16]
Come closer and ponder this inscription …’
His voice died away slowly as if he were descending into a well, then silence fell, but that voice reached our ears again from the street. After a while there was an uproar down below, and when I looked out I saw a policeman taking Mr Raczek to the police-station.
Such were the incidents preceding my taking up the trade of shop-keeper.
I had known Mincel’s shop for a long time, for my father used to send me there to buy paper, and aunt for soap. I would always hurry there with joyful curiosity to look at the toys in the window. As I recall, there was a large mechanical Cossack in one window, which jumped and waved its arms by itself, and in the doorway were a drum, a sabre and a wooden horse with a real tail.
The interior of the shop looked like a large cellar; I could never see the far end of it because of the gloom. All I know is that pepper, coffee and herbs were sold on the left, at a counter behind which huge cupboards rose from floor to ceiling. But paper, ink, plates and glasses were sold at the counter to the right, where there were glass cupboards, and for soap and washing-powder one went into the depths of the shop, where barrels and piles of wooden boxes were visible.
Even the rafters were loaded. Suspended there were long rows of bladders full of mustard seeds or paint, a huge lamp with a shade, which burned all day long in winter, a net full of corks, and finally a stuffed crocodile, nearly six feet long.
The owner of the shop was Jan Mincel, an old man with a red face and a tuft of grey hair on his chin. At all hours of the day he would sit by the window, in a leather armchair, dressed in a blue fustian robe, a white apron and a white nightcap. In front of him on a table lay a great ledger, in which he kept the accounts, and just above his head was a bunch of canes, intended mainly for sale. The old man took money, gave change, wrote in his ledger and sometimes dozed off, but despite all these tasks, he watched with unbelievable vigilance over the flow of business throughout the entire shop. From time to time, he tugged at the string of the mechanical Cossack for the diversion of passers-by in the street, and also — which pleased us least — he punished us with one of the canes for various offences.
I say ‘us’ because there were three candidates for corporal punishment: myself, and the old man’s two nephews, Franz and Jan.
I became aware of my master’s watchfulness and his skill in using the cane on the third day of work at the shop.
Franz was measuring out ten groszy-worth of raisins for a woman. Seeing that one raisin had fallen on the counter (the old man had his eyes closed at this moment), I stealthily picked it up and ate it. I was about to extricate a pit which had got between two teeth when I felt something like the heavy touch of burning iron on my back.
‘You rascal!’ old Mincel roared, and before I realised what was happening, he had slashed me several times from top to toe with his cane.
I coiled up with the pain, but from that time on I never dared taste anything in the shop. Almonds, raisins, even bread-rolls tasted like dust and ashes to me.
After settling matters with me in this way, the old man hung the cane up, entered the sale of raisins in his ledger and, with the most benevolent look in the world, began to tug at the Cossack by its string. Looking at his half-smiling face and blinking eyes, I could hardly believe that this jovial old gentleman had such power in his arm. And it was not until this moment that I noticed how the Cossack, seen from within the shop, looked less comical than from the street.
Our shop dealt in groceries, haberdashery and soap. The groceries were sold by Franz Mincel, a young man a little over thirty, with red hair and a sleepy face. It was he who most frequently got trouncings from his uncle, for he smoked a pipe, came to work late, disappeared from home at night and, above all, was careless about weighing out goods. However, Jan Mincel — the younger, who was in charge of the haberdashery and,