The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [364]
In the store, I have hardly anything to do, for Szlangbaum rules there, and I remain only to deal with Staś’s affairs. By October Szlangbaum will have paid us off entirely. I shall not be poor, for honest Staś assured me fifteen hundred a year for life; but when a man thinks that soon he will not mean anything in the store, that he won’t have the rights to anything…
Life isn’t worth living…If it weren’t for Staś and young Napoleon, this earth is sometimes so painful to me that I could do away with myself… Who knows, my old colleague Katz, that you didn’t act for the best? True, you have no hopes, but you don’t fear disappointments either. I won’t say that I do, for after all, neither Wokulski nor Bonaparte … But, all the same …
How tired I am; already it’s hard for me even to write. I’d gladly travel somewhere … Good God, for twenty years I haven’t been beyond the Warsaw toll-gates! And sometimes I have a great yearning to visit Hungary once more before I die … Perhaps I’d find the bones of my comrades on those former battlefields. Ah, Katz! Do you remember the smoke, the bullets, the signals? How green the grass was, and how the sun shone!
No help for it, I must take a journey, see mountains and forests, bathe in the sun and in the air of the wide plains, and begin a new life. Perhaps I’ll even move to some place in the provinces near Mrs Stawska, for what else is left to a retired clerk?
This Szlangbaum is an odd fellow; I’d never have thought, when I knew him poor, that he’d turn up his nose so. Already, I see, he has made the acquaintance — through Maruszewicz — of barons, through the barons — of counts, though he hasn’t yet been able to reach the Prince, who is polite to the Jews, but keeps them at a distance.
And when the likes of Szlangbaum turns up his nose, there’s an outcry in town against the Jews. Whenever I drop in for a beer, someone always catches hold of me and scolds me because Staś sold the store to Jews. The councillor complains that the Jews are depriving him of a third of his pension; Szprott affirms the Jews have wrecked his business; Lisiecki weeps, because Szlangbaum has given him notice as of midsummer, but Klein keeps silent.
Already they’re beginning to write against the Jews in the newspapers, but what is still odder is that even Dr Szuman, although himself a Jew, lately had the following conversation with me: ‘You’ll see, sir, that in a few years there will be trouble with the Jews.’
‘Allow me,’ say I, ‘but you yourself praised them recently.’
‘I did, because they’re a race of genius, but with vile characters. Imagine, sir, that the Szlangbaums, old and young, wanted to cheat me, so …’
‘Hm,’ I thought to myself, ‘you’re beginning to turn against ’em, now they’ve defrauded you.’ And, to tell the truth, I quite lost my liking for Szuman.
And what don’t they say about Wokulski! A dreamer, an idealist, a romantic … Perhaps because he never did anything mean.
When I told Klein of my conversation with Szuman, my skinny colleague replied: ‘He says there will be trouble with the Jews in a few years? Set his mind at ease, sir, it will come sooner.’
‘Good God!’ say I, ‘why?’
‘Because we know them well, even though they are flirting with us,’ Klein replied. ‘They’re sly! But they have miscalculated. We know what they are capable of, if they had the strength.’
I regarded Klein as a very progressive man, perhaps even too much so, but now I think he’s a great reactionary. Besides, what does that ‘we’ and ‘us’ mean?
Yet this is supposed to be the age which followed the eighteenth century, which inscribed on its banners: Freedom, Equality, Fraternity! What did I fight against the Austrians for, in the devil’s name? What did my comrades die for? Jokes! Premonitions! The Emperor Napoleon IV will remake everything. Then Szlangbaum will stop being arrogant, and Szuman stop boasting he’s a Jew, and Klein won’t threaten them.
These times are not far off, for even Staś Wokulski … Oh, how tired I am … I must go away somewhere.
I’m not so old as to have to think of death; but, my God, when they take