Excerpt from "Dusk and Dawn"

Abstract

from DUSK AND DAWN After closing the door behind Doctor Tarnowski, Salomea Goldman looked at the clock. The minute hand pointed straight down as if it were trying to pierce one of the lily petals cast in brass: seven-thirty was passing. Salomea walked to the window and looked out on the street. From the gate Henryk Tarnowski turned right. He didn't turn back. He was walking toward the Salt Market. He noticed that on the town hall clock it was twenty-seven past seven. The clock hands glistened in the sun. The walls of the houses on Perec Street smelled of morning dampness. The air drew from them the aromas of attics, yards, gates, and cellars: the smothered odor of dust, mold; the smell of pickles, barrel herring, cat urine. The smells intermingled with each other, drifted away, returned. They moved, lived, simultaneously spoke different tongues. They embraced the doctor like invisible hoops, squeezing him tightly, then loosening. The Salt Market, Perec Street, Bazylianska, Mleczarska, and other streets created this ephemeral sphere, a transparent and impenetrable circle, rising above the earth, whirling, disappearing, and returning. Different already -transformed, murky, impossible to reproduce in its first clear incarnation. Each step meant entering a world different from the one just left. The smell of pickles in the gate of Salomea's house followed the doctor, and coexisting with it (more accurately, ahead of it) was the smell of baked goods from Fayga Katz's booth. Before the doctor, the expansive sphere of smells from Helena Hawryluk's laundry opened: soapy, fuzzy, blown away by a mere puff of air. But there was something that caused the sphere to rivet one's attention: from the open door of Bina Hechtkopf's store at the Salt Market, the scent of pepper, allspice, and bay leaf floated and mixed with the other smells. This new scent challenged, tempted, stirred the imagination. A map of smells covered the town. It had little in common with the map of streets and squares, their length, width, direction or with the stamp of the name which even on alleys conferred a label different from others. The map of smells wasn't restricted by length, demarcated by direction, imprisoned by the rigor of names. It existed independently: changeable, capricious, in constant motion. If subordinate to anything, it was to the seasons and the time of day, the sun, rain, winds. Real, yet not always precise: where did the sphere of smells from the laundry begin? The sphere of smells -coffee, ginger, vanilla-from Bina Hechtkopf's store? After all, no boundary divided them. The smells coexisted, which meant that they lent one another some of their essence. Doctor Henryk Tarnowski witnessed this phenomenon, which was to undergo another transformation not much farther beyond the Salt Market: right before the stalls a new sphere opened-the smells of cheese, cream, and buttermilk. Passing Helena Hawryluk's laundry, Doctor Tarnowski approached this sphere. It was announced by the din of voices, the rattle of wheels, the snorting of horses. And it brought to mind the smell of the barn and milking. The familiar warm smell of cows. If smells could have color, this one would be milkwhite (near the laundry the white was tinged with pale green and ultramarine, while the aroma of Bina Hechtkopf's import grocery was tinged with bright red, purple, and deep brown). The sun's rays rarefied the color of the air, made it indeterminate. The air, luminous and saturated with smells, seemed unreal to the doctor. Light and joyful, he walked. On his face he could still feel the touch of Salomea's breasts and hair. And Salomea herself could still see before her Doctor Tarnowski, who had disappeared at the corner of Perec Street without looking back. For a moment she watched the last spot she saw him in, which from then on would be acutely empty. It seemed to her that she could hear the doctor's footsteps near the building on the corner, that his white shirt sent her one last signal, that the movement of his head sent her a signal, and perhaps unintentionally so did his right arm when once again he checked the time on the town hall clock. …