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apartment houses rubbing walls in solidarity as if boosting one
another's spirits in troubled times, there on the fourth floor, lay the tiny
estate of Mrs.
c.,
where I rented my first room in Krakow.
Mrs.
C.
is doubtless no longer living. Mrs.
C.
would certainly not
have wanted her noble surname disclosed to the reading public. Thus
she will remain simply Mrs.
c.,
former member of the landed gentry–
an EL.G., FLAG, as they were usually known-although now, after the
war, she governed not an entire estate but a single small apartment.
I didn't know much about her. I don't know what happened to her hus–
band, or if she'd actually ever been married. I didn't know if she had chil–
dren, and if so, where they lived. Mrs.
C.
despised her tenants and almost
never spoke with them, that is, with us. Her personal life, the prehistory
of her present existence, thus could not be uncovered. But no, I misspoke,
she didn't despise her tenants, it wasn't anything so simple, so vulgar. Her
true residence was elsewhere, in a different realm, in some imperceptible,
inscrutable register of the cosmos. She wasn't there among us, among
those who had agreed that the gray world of Communism actually did
exist. She refused to endorse a treaty with Reality; she performed in a dif–
ferent theater, dwelled in a different country. She wasn't among us-we
met her only in the apartments' corridor, a dismal hallway that called to
mind the ruined parts of town. Mrs.
C.
was determined to maintain her
prewar status in this shabby setting. She had decided to remain an heiress,
the mistress of an estate, and continued to look down her nose at those
from other walks of life. This decision determined everything, since she
wasn't actually distinguished in any way, she didn't know any more than
ordinary people, she wasn't a blue blood, a true aristocrat. She was a
short, heavy woman with a cross, homely face like a crushed doughnut,
hair of an indeterminate color and a damp, unpleasant voice.
Her policy was simply not to appear, to leave the parlor that was also
her bedroom as seldom as possible. To be invisible, not to be swallowed
up in others' eyes, to shield her essence-but what was her essence?–
from contact with other essences. She almost never left the house, and
exhaustive preparations preceded her infrequent outings, as if major inter–
national publications had sent swarms of photojournalists to lie in wait
for her on the street. Once I heard her say, "Each exit is my Rapallo."
Why Rapallo? She probably didn't know herself, but Rapallo had a nice,
round ring to it. From time to time she entertained company-aging
ladies drawn only from her own class, the EL.G.'s-and then only in the
afternoon, at English teatime, never for dinner in the evening.
Mrs.
C.
was preoccupied with her historical mission, with the
defense of her own social position, the defense of feudalism in a hostile
