‘Please calm down. That’s enough of your nonsense. After all, we’re trying to help you.’
I signed every copy of the report, and then the female guard took me gently by the arm and led me to the door. Like a madwoman. I didn’t resist. Meanwhile, she never stopped talking on the phone.
Once again I had the same dream. Once again my Mother was in the boiler room. Once again I was angry with her for coming here.
I looked her straight in the face, but her gaze kept veering sideways, she couldn’t look me in the eyes. She was being evasive, as if she knew an embarrassing secret. She kept smiling, and then suddenly becoming serious – the expression on her face was fluid, the image was rippling. I said I didn’t want her to keep coming here. This is a place for the living, not the dead. Then she turned to face the door, and I saw that my Grandmother was standing there too, a handsome young woman in a grey dress. She was holding a handbag. They both looked as if they were just on their way to church. I remembered that handbag – a funny one from before the war. What can you have in your handbag when you come to visit from the spirit world? A handful of dust? Ashes? A stone? A mouldering handkerchief for your non-existent nose? Now they were both standing in front of me, so close that I thought I could smell their scent – old perfume, bed linen neatly piled in a wooden wardrobe.
‘Go on, go home,’ I said, waving my arms at them, as I had at the Deer.
But they didn’t move. So I was the first to turn around and get out of there, locking the door behind me.
The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.
VIII
URANUS IN LEO
Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.
Obviously, the first Horoscope a Person ever calculates is their own, and so it was in my case. And then a structure emerged, supported by a circle. I examined it in astonishment – is that me? Here before me lay the blueprint for the Person I am, my actual self in a basic written record, at once the simplest and the most complicated possible. Like a mirror that changes the sensory image of the face into a simple geometric chart. Everything about my own face that seemed to me familiar and obvious had vanished; what remained was a distinctive scattering of dots that symbolised the planets set against the celestial vault. Nothing ages, nothing is subject to change, their positions in the firmament are unique and permanent. The hour of birth divides the space within the circle into houses, and thus the chart becomes practically unique, like a fingerprint.
I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter – this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable.
Therefore I’m convinced that we should get to know our prison very well.
By profession I am a bridge-construction engineer – have I mentioned that already? I have built bridges in Syria and in Libya, and also in Poland – near Elbląg, and two in Podlasie. The one in Syria was a strange bridge: it spanned the banks of a river that only appeared periodically. Water flowed in its bed for two or three months, then soaked into the sun-baked earth, changing it into something like a bob-sleigh track. Wild desert Dogs would chase each other along it.
I always gained the greatest pleasure from transforming concepts into figures – from these figures a specific image arose, then a drawing, and then a design. The figures came together on my piece of paper and assumed a meaningful shape. My talent for algebra was useful to me for Horoscopes in the days when one had to do all one’s calculations on a slide rule. Nowadays that’s unnecessary; there are computer programs to do it for us. Who still remembers the slide rule, when the cure for any thirst for knowledge is just a mouse-click away? But it was then, during the best phase in my life, that my Ailments began, and I had to return to Poland. I spent a long time in hospital, but it still wasn’t clear what was really wrong with me.
For a time I slept with a Protestant, who in his turn designed motorways, and he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God. I wondered if this meant the shoulders, or the buttocks perhaps, and what this divine back looked like, since we’re incapable of imagining the front. Maybe it meant that he who suffers has special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend. So in a way the only Person who’s healthy is one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be in harmony with the rest.
For a year I couldn’t walk at all, and by the time my Ailments began to ease a little, I knew I would never be able to build bridges across rivers in the desert again, and that I couldn’t stray too far from a fridge with glucose in it. So I changed profession and became a teacher. I worked at a school and taught the children various useful things: English, handicrafts and geography. I always did my best to capture their attention fully, to have them remember important things not out of fear of a bad mark but out of genuine passion.
It gave me a lot of pleasure. Children have always attracted me more than adults, for I too am a little infantile. There’s nothing wrong with that. The main thing is that I’m aware of it. Children are soft and supple, open-minded and unpretentious. And they don’t engage in the sort of small talk in which every adult is able to gabble their life away. Unfortunately, the older they are, the more they succumb to the power of reason; they become citizens of Ulro, as Blake would have put it, and refuse to be led down the right path as easily and naturally any more. That’s why I only liked the smaller children. The older ones, over the age of ten, say, were even more loathsome than adults. At that age the children lost their individuality. I could see them ossifying as they inevitably entered adolescence, which gradually forced them to be hooked on being the same as others. In a few cases there was a bit of an inner struggle as they wrestled with this new state of being, but almost all of them ended up capitulating. I never made the effort to keep in touch with them after that – for it would be like having to witness the Fall, yet again. Usually I taught children up to this limit, at most until the fifth year.
Finally I was pensioned off. Far too early, in my opinion. It’s hard to understand why because I was a good teacher, with plenty of experience, and free of troubles, apart from my Ailments, but they only made their presence known from time to time. So I went to the education board, where I submitted the relevant certificates, references and applications to be allowed to go on teaching. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I had run into a bad moment – a time of reforms, overhauling the system, changing the program, and rising unemployment.
Then I looked for work in another school, and then another, half-time and quarter-time, by the hour – I’d have taken a job by the minute if only they’d offered one, but wherever I went I could sense an army of other, younger people standing behind me, breathing down my neck, impatiently treading on my tail, even though it’s a thankless, badly paid profession.