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gradually geared himself up for social action, until in November the depression left him and he found himself on the other side of it. Now for a change he hardly slept at all and had no time to eat. He ran about the country, made trips to Kraków and saw it as a princess awoken from sleep. He organised elections for the first parliament, founded several associations, two parties, and the Malopolski Union of Fish Pond Owners. In February the next year, when the Small Constitution was enacted, Squire Popielski caught cold and ended up in his room again, in bed, with his head turned towards the window – in other words, in the place where he had started.
    His recovery from pneumonia was like coming back from a distant journey. He read a lot and began to write a memoir. He wanted to talk to someone, but everyone around him seemed banal and uninteresting. So he ordered books to be brought up to his bed from the library and ordered new ones by post.
    Early in March he went out on his first walk about the park, and saw an ugly, grey world again, full of decay and destruction. National independence didn’t help, nor did the constitution. On a path in the park he saw a red, child’s glove sticking out of the melting snow, and for some strange reason the sight of it sank deep into his memory. Dogged, blind regeneration. The apathy of life and death. The inhuman machinery of life.
    Last year’s efforts to rebuild everything anew had come to nothing.
    The older Squire Popielski became, the more terrible the world seemed to him. A young man is busy with his own blooming, pushing forwards and extending the boundaries: from his childhood bed to the walls of the room, the house, the park, the city, the country, the world, and then, in his manhood, comes a time of fantasising about something even greater. The turning point occurs at about forty. Youth in its intensity, in its full force, tires itself out. One night or one morning a man crosses a boundary, reaches his peak and takes his first step downwards, towards death. Then the question arises: should he descend proudly with his face turned towards the darkness, or should he turn around towards what was, keep up an appearance and pretend it isn’t darkness, but just that the light in the room has been extinguished?
    Meanwhile the sight of the red glove emerging from under the dirty snow convinced the squire that the greatest deception of youth is optimism of any kind, a persistent faith in the idea that something will change or improve, or that there is progress in everything. So now the vessel had broken inside him, full of the despair he had always carried within him like hemlock. The squire looked around him and saw suffering, death and decay, which were as widespread as dirt. He crossed the whole of Jeszkotle and saw the kosher abattoir, the rotten meat on hooks, a frozen beggar outside Szenbert’s shop, a small funeral cortege following a child’s coffin, low clouds over low houses on the marketplace, and the gloom that was invading from all directions, already infesting everything. It was like a gradual, continual self-immolation, in which human destinies, whole lives are thrown into the consuming flames of time.
    On his way back to the manor house he passed the church, so he dropped in there, but found nothing inside. He saw an icon of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, but there was no God in the church capable of restoring the squire’s hope.
     
     
    THE TIME OF THE VIRIGN MARY OF JESZKOTLE
     
    Enclosed in the icon’s decorative frame, the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle had a limited view of the church. She hung in a side nave, so she couldn’t see the altar, or the stoup at the entrance. A pillar shielded her view of the pulpit. All she could see were the people arriving – individuals who dropped in at the church to pray, or else whole strings of them as they glided up to the altar for communion. During mass she saw dozens of people’s profiles – men’s and women’s, old