to anything that could conceivably have a connection with sex; but since the language was so flowery, so full of metaphor and so richly studded with bizarre turns of phrase, it was not always evident what did and what didn’t.
Take, for example, the following sentence: ‘Exhaustion tore the passion from their bodies.’ The intended significance of this became the subject of endless speculation and analysis: did it mean that the protagonists’ exhausting climb had weakened their sexual desire or, on the contrary, strengthened it? Some believed, with Roz Goltz, that the enigmatic verb could be interpreted only in its negative sense, implying a drop of sexual vigour, and that anything else was absurd. Others, mainly the romantics, insisted that the controversial verb ‘tore’ was to be taken in the sense of ‘intensified’ or, better still, ‘wrung’ or ‘squeezed’, as one squeezes the last of the toothpaste from a tube. In this case, it was the protagonists’ capacity for sexual arousal that was being wrung or squeezed out of them – a capacity they had exploited to excess, one might even say plundered. In support of this theory they adduced – from memory – the following two sentences:
Erupting onto these summits, they not only thrust away water and thirst, and shook the dust of the earth off their feet, but also separated in spirit from their flesh, their veins, their blood, their bodies. Then they acceded to the highest bliss, and it seemed the beginning of eternal happiness, the limit of that other world, a heavenly passion.
‘There you are,’ the romantics insisted, ‘it says that they separated in spirit from their bodies. That means they became pure body: pure, naked animal instinct, shameless and uncontrolled. Isn’t it obvious?’
Another scene that was interminably discussed was the one where the pair, intoxicated with happiness, decide to kill themselves by jumping off the precipice. The fascinating attraction of this passage lay not in the dramatic or lofty subject matter but in two or three sentences (underlined in almost everyone’s copy) of a universal and quite independent significance. The first of these is uttered when the hero, urging his beloved to make the desperate leap that will take them to the ‘land of happiness’, suddenly utters, in tones that brook no denial, the following surprising command: ‘Well, take off your clothes!’ It soon transpires that his intention is simply to suggest that they should use her dress to tie themselves together before the leap, so as not to be separated during their fall; but the first impression these words made on the reader was so strong that it ‘tore’ them irretrievably from the context in which they were embedded.
The next sentence was descriptive: ‘Slowly, as if in her sleep, she rose and with a calm smile began to tear at her bodice.’ Here, again, the final words were underlined, usually twice, and further stressed by an exclamation mark in the margin.
The dramatic suspense was happily broken in the third sentence: ‘But when, from within the folds of black silk, there flashed an arm that was whiter than a pure cloud, he pressed his lips against it.’ Here the crucial phrases were ‘from within the folds of black silk’ and ‘he pressed his lips against it’.
And then there was the final, tragic sequence: the attack, the rape and the leap from the precipice. This, too, was endlessly pored over. Oddly enough, here the attraction lay not in reading about the base pleasures of the robbers, clad in ‘red trousers and black shirts smeared with grease’, but in the passage which precedes this most dreadful event and describes the circumstances of the attack.
The text makes it quite clear that the attack comes at dawn, when the lovers are still lying asleep, ‘covered by a coat’. The hero, however, awakens only when he is already fettered and bound in four places – at the elbows, wrists, knees and ankles – and tied to the trunk of a spruce tree; in the cave a huge fire, lit by the robbers, is burning brightly. The question naturally arises why he did not discover this sooner: how could he possibly have slept through all that tying and binding and fire-lighting, not to mention the noise, to be woken at last only by what, in the text, was described as a ‘terrible feeling’?
Roz Goltz poked merciless fun at this passage. ‘What a load of rubbish!’ he would exclaim. ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind to write something like that. I’m woken by the slightest creak of a door, the buzzing of a fly, the tiniest ray of light – but he, oh, no, he manages to sleep through seven bandits running around, tying him up, undressing him, tying him to the trunk of a tree and leaping over the fire. It’s ridiculous! It just defies plain ordinary common sense!’
‘You may be good at physics,’ one of the romantics would counter, ‘but you don’t know anything about what it’s like to live with someone in a physical relationship. It was because all that sex had exhausted him. There he was, banging away at her day and night without a break – it’s no wonder he was like a corpse afterwards. Just like your Antek after a hard day’s work. It’s perfectly natural. Anyway, Zeromski was a sex maniac, so he knew what he was talking about.’
This lively interest in the mountain scene in Ashes was not kindled by a thirst for knowledge about the still mythical sphere of sex, still less by any appreciation of the qualities of the prose. It sprang, quite simply, from hopeless love for Madame la Directrice. All that debate and literary analysis was mere camouflage, an attempt to pretend to oneself that the issues discussed, while interesting and amusing, had absolutely nothing to do with oneself personally. But the truth was that the story embodied all the secret dreams and longings connected with the person of Madame. In the imagination of the readers, she was the beautiful Helena, and the reader himself the cause of her ecstasies. No one ever admitted this out loud, of course, but it was perfectly plain.
For my part, I’d finished with Ashes a long time before. The book had bored me to death as it had everyone else, and the mountain episode, with its insufferable pathos and purple prose, was more than I could stomach: after a few pages I simply skipped it and went on to where the main story line resumed. Now I was torn: seeing what was going on around me and feeling the tension building up around Madame, I was tempted to take a look and find out for myself what all the fuss was about, what exactly was supposed to be the connection between the book and our own lives. But pride prevented me. I didn’t want to be one of the sheep, didn’t want to stoop, even in my own eyes, to the level of my friends, panting with a mixture of sentimentality and lust. And, of course, there was the fear that it would come out – for it was generally acknowledged that whoever was reading Ashes must secretly be harbouring a burning passion for the icy Madame.
So I thrust away the temptation and refused even to look at the book. Except once, and that was largely by accident. But I paid for it dearly.
It was during a biology lesson. I was sitting on my own at a double desk in the back row, terribly bored. At some point I noticed that on the unoccupied half of the desk someone had left a book, wrapped carefully in brown paper. To while away the time I picked it up and looked inside. The title page was missing and most of the pages were uncut. I took a look at the text. Yes, this was it: Ashes, volume two – the one with the mountain episode. It didn’t take long to find it: it was the only part where the pages had been cut, and their bottom corners were sticky from much thumbing. I placed it on my lap, assumed an attitude of deep concentration, right hand on forehead (the left was needed for turning the pages), and began to read.
What I saw surpassed my wildest imaginings. I knew it was kitsch, full of rapturous moans and heaving sighs, but I hadn’t expected anything like this. It was mind-boggling. How could Zeromski have written this stuff? And, having written it, consented to its publication? Why had no one prevented him? It was also hard to believe that this was part of a book on the school syllabus – and that people actually liked it. Loved it! And then there was their reason for liking it: this – this! – is what they wanted to take as their model for their imaginary love affair with the headmistress!
On the other hand, perhaps it wasn’t so odd after all. For this prose, with its ridiculous
