Translated from the Polish and excerpted from The Cinnamon Shops (or, as it is sometimes translated in the English, Street of Crocodiles), "Mannequins":
The mournful greyness of the town encircled us from all sides once
more, the dark lichen of the dawns and the parasitic fungus of the
dusks blossoming in the windows, and maturing into the downy fur of the
long winter nights. The wallpaper in the rooms, blissfully unrestrained
in the former days and receptive to the coloured flights of those
winged assemblies, sank back into itself and grew tangled, winding up
in the monotony of bitter monologues.
The lamps blackened and sagged like old teasels and musk thistles.
They hung dejected and acrimonious now, quietly tinkling their glass
crystals whenever anyone passed gropingly through the murk of the room.
In vain, Adela inserted a coloured candle into every arm of those
lamps, an ineffectual surrogate, a pale reminiscence of the magnificent
illuminations with which their hanging gardens had so recently bloomed.
Oh, where was that twittering budding, that rapid and fantastic
fructification in the bouquets of those lamps, from which those winged
phantasms had risen up as if from magical, parting layer cakes,
splitting the air into magical packs of cards, scattering it into
coloured rounds of applause, pouring out thick flakes, sky blue,
peacock and parrot green, and metallic sparkles, drawing lines and
arabesques in the air with the shimmering traces of their flights and
wheels, unfurling coloured fans of flutters which hung long after the
flight in the rich and spangled atmosphere? Even now the echoes and
possibilities of colourful flares were hidden deep within the greyed
air, but no one penetrated with a flute or tested with a drill the
clouded grain of the air.
Larger text this excerpt was drawn from available at this site.
Recent Comments