The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [371]
Slowly something new began to be born in his soul; the desire to rid himself of these pains and the image. This was like a spark glowing in the night. A sort of feeble consolation gleamed for Wokulski. ‘Am I still capable of thinking?’ he asked himself. In order to check this, he began recalling the multiplication tables, then multiplying two figures by one, and two figures by two. Not believing himself, he wrote down the results of his sums and checked them … The multiplication on paper agreed with those in his head, and he sighed with relief. ‘I haven’t yet gone out of my mind,’ he thought joyfully.
He began imagining to himself the arrangement of his own apartment, the streets of Warsaw, of Paris … His spirits revived, for he saw that not only could he remember precisely but that these exercises brought him a certain kind of relief. The more he thought of Paris, the more clearly he could see the traffic, buildings, markets, museums and the more firmly that image of the woman in the man’s embraces was obscured.
He began walking about his apartment and his glance fell on a pile of illustrated books. There were books from the Dresden and Munich art galleries, Don Quixote illustrated by Doré, Hogarth engravings … He recalled that men condemned to the guillotine spent their time most tolerably in looking at pictures … And from then on, he passed whole days looking at drawings. Finishing one book, he set about another, a third … then he came back to the first again.
The pain grew numb; the spectres appeared less frequently, his spirits revived … Most often he looked at Don Quixote, which made a powerful impression on him. He recalled the strange story of a man living for years in the sphere of poetry — just as he had done, who had hurled himself at windmills — like him, who was shattered — like him, who had wasted his life pursuing an ideal woman — like him, and found a dirty cow-girl instead of a princess — as he had done!
‘All the same, Don Quixote was happier than I,’ he thought. ‘He didn’t begin to awaken from his illusions until the brink of the grave. But I?’
The longer he looked at the engravings, the more familiar he grew with them — the less they absorbed his attention. Behind Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Doré’s windmills, behind Hogarth’s Cock-fight and Drunkenness, there began to appear to him the interior of the compartment, the vibrating window-pane and, in it, the indistinct image of Starski and Izabela. Then he threw aside the engravings and began reading books he had known in his childhood, or in Hopfer’s cellar. With deep emotion he revived in his memory the Life of St Genevieve, the Rose of Tannenburg, Rinaldini, Robinson Crusoe and, finally, The Thousand and One Nights. Once again it seemed to him that neither time nor reality existed any longer, and that his wounded soul had escaped from the earth to wander in magic lands where only noble hearts beat, where vice did not dress up in the mask of deceit, where eternal justice ruled, curing pain and rewarding injustices.
And here one strange point impressed him. Whereas he had drawn the illusions which had terminated in the dissolution of his own soul from Polish literature, he found solace and peace only in foreign literatures. ‘Are we really a nation of dreamers?’ he wondered in alarm, ‘and will the angel who touched the pool at Bethesda, surrounded by sick people, never descend upon us?’
One day he was brought a thick letter. ‘From Paris?’ he thought, ‘yes, from Paris. I wonder what it can be?’ But his curiosity was not strong enough for him to open and read it: ‘Such a thick letter! Who the devil writes so much nowadays?’
He threw the packet on his desk, and took to reading the Thousand and One Nights again. What a delight they were to his weary mind, those palaces of precious stones, trees whose