78
PARTISAN REVIEW
"We're going upstairs," he said and finally took the suitcase from the
hands of his utterly exhausted current woman. "It's quite a weight," he
growled reproachfully, and led the way up the wooden stairs.
When his current woman found herself in the attic, to begin with she
could not comprehend what world she had come to. Kohoutek, though
he had told her everything, never mentioned that his family had since
time immemorial been in the habit of collecting basic forms of packing.
First they amassed cardboard boxes; later came the plastic bag period.
There had also been a time of collecting paper sacks from sugar, flour,
and rice, though rice was rarely used in Lutheran cooking.
Truly cubist expanses extended before the eyes of Kohoutek's current
woman. Who thought up the first cardboard container in the world?
Who was the creator of the first box? Certainly there must exist ency–
clopedists who know the dates and names of these inventors. Certainly,
too, on the second floor of that old slaughterhouse there could be found
at least one box from the very first series.
In
any case there were con–
tainers from before the war with labels still legible: "Pawel Molin of
Cieszyn: Groceries, Agricultural Supplies, and Building Materials,"
"Ryszard Ploszka's Bookstore and Stationer's, Jablonk6w," "Scharbert's
Department Store, Ustrori," "Fussek and Sons Glassware, China, and
Haberdashery," "Amsterdam Brothers of Cesky Tesfn, Woven Goods
and Silk Stockings."
There were towering piles of German boxes with Gothic hieroglyphs
that Kohoutek's current woman was unable to decipher, bulky cubes
marked UNRRA, countless numbers of ordinary brown receptacles
which had once been used to pack Christmas presents or prison parcels,
boxes that had at one time contained apples or fragile crockery, boxes
that smelled of naphthalene, gray soap, or tobacco. Boxes that to this
day retained the smell of the fifties, the scent of the first oranges and the
first lemons. Boxes that came from unspecified periods and were cov–
ered in dust and spiders' webs.
Kohoutek's cu rrent woma n 's fi rst reaction was to th ink that
Kohoutek had led her to this container graveyard in order to tidy it up
a little. For Kohoutek had in fact thrown himself upon the cardboard
pyramids with a singular zeal and had begun to toss them from one
place to another. And Kohoutek's current woman was familiar with
Kohoutek's fears and habits, and knew that the principle had been
drilled into him that everything in life had to be earned by superhuman
exertion in inhuman conditions. She imagined to herself, then, that
Kohoutek was attempting to deserve her arrival, to be worthy of her pres–
ence by the superhuman exertion of tidying up the attic of the old slaugh-
