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Why don't I have You? Why don't I see the trace of Your hand in the inhumanly rational construction of a blade of grass. The blackbirds' song for me is only ownerless, I can't hear Your hearing. I don't hear the voice piercing the day's clamor. And at night, drowned in its enormous breath, I feel how everything takes place from me: between me and the blind star runs a frosty road of terror, my measure of infinity, which ends with me. I can't see...

Chapter One: The Yellow Dress Before the mafiosi appeared in my apartment in the company of the dusky poetess Alberta Lulaj, before they wrenched me from my drunken sleep and before they set about demanding-first with hypocritical pleas, then with ruthless threats-that I arrange for Alberta Lulaj's poetry to be published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, before there began the tempestuous events I wish to recount, there was the eve of those events, there was the morning and there...

Music I heard with you was more than music . . . Music heard with you will stay forever with us. Grave Brahms and elegaic Schubert, a few songs, Chopin's third sonata, a couple of quartets with heart- breaking chords (Beethoven, adagia), the sadness of Shostakovich that didn't want to die. The great choruses of Bach's Passions, as if someone had summoned us, demanding joy, pure and disinterested, joy in which faith is self-evident....

Each day that whole summer, apart from the week when she was to learn to swim, Andrea stood at the quay and waited as the Prince drew in to land. It wasn't the passengers she wanted to see, as they came along the gangway with all their luggage-cases, rucksacks, and great parcels from town wrapped in brown paper. It wasn't the ice-cream man who held an interest for her, the man who used fingerless gloves and put on a hat with earflaps each time he opened the freezer that he called...

The tree of the world, like every other tree, at the beginning of the season of vegetation puts out tiny delicate golden leaves which with time acquire a dark green hue and a silvery sheen. Then they become yellow and red as if they were burning in a live flame and when they have burned their last they go brown and fall to earth ragged and full of holes akin to pieces of paper turned to ash or rusted-through tin cans. From the first moments when the greenery is freshest and the greatest...

The five were only men. Some younger, some older, all between thirty and fifty. The eldest was beginning to gray here and there, but the others had heads of hair black as bumblebees. They looked like men: eyes where eyes should be, noses where noses should be, teeth where teeth should be. Arms and legs where arms and legs should be. Copper-colored complexions. White turbans-some old, some new. Cholas of white muslin, like their dhotis. Knotted gold earrings in their ears. Gold pendants...

Published in 2001, this novel takes the form of a long letter addressed to the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997. In this extract, during a driving lesson the narrator tells his instructor, Miss Ciwle, about the motoring exploits of his grandfather Karol in the 1920s, when he was a newly qualified engineer. "So what about those crazy ideas of your grandfather's?" "The best one was with the wall," I replied at once, "that was one in a million, like the star turn from a...

Dante and Philosophy Philosophy contracted a well-trained muscle and lifted her bosom invitingly toward Dante. He leaned forward and snatched a sliver of onion in his teeth. "The sauce too," she murmured. "Infernally delicious." At this point Dante pounced, Philosophy fell back on the carpet, and a steaming sausage was imprisoned betwixt their bodies. Dante let loose a childlike yelp, but she mashed the sausage with a single thrust of her hip, destroying it with the desperation of...

I Trains a freight train cattle cars in a very long line it goes through fields and forests through green meadows over grasses and herbs so quietly the buzzing of bees can be heard it goes through the clouds through golden buttercups marsh marigolds bluebells forget-me-nots Vergissmeinnicht this train will not leave my memory a pen rusts flies away on its quill turning beautiful in the light of awakened spring Robigus nearly unknown the demon of...

I was born in Basra many times, in all of the stories that I heard about it-in the stories which were told around me when I was a child, in the images I formed of it during my first trips there with my mother, and in all of the experiences I lived through there in later years. Later I left Basra to roam in exile like a sailor circling the earth, until, with the years, the picture I had of it became a mix of truth and illusion, of reality and fantasy, of the original and invention. I have...

I lie with my face low in the grass, a lark high above us. An ant drags a dry stalk across my hand. I see what it sees: precipitous pores, a forest of grass, the treacherous peaks of sand. Salty sweat floods its eyes and mine. The lark is already there, where we peer from, clinging to the earth: the ant, the yellow flowers, and I. It soars still higher, moving toward the truth. Or farther from it. And if there are two truths: the ant's and the lark's, the sky's...

Witold Gombrowicz is probably the most important twentieth-century novelist most Western readers have never heard of, which is to say that he is the kind of writer whose following consists largely of other writers, whose faith in Gombrowicz's under-recognized genius has led them to shower him with superlatives. Susan Sontag, in her introduction to the recent English translation of Ferdydurke, his ironic masterpiece, calls him brilliant. John Updike takes this praise one step further,...

Where did I wake up? where am I? Where's my right side, where's the left? where's above, and where's below? Take it easy, that's my body on its back, that's the hand I use to hold my fork, there's the one I use to seize my knife or extend in greeting; beneath me are the sheet, mattress, and floor, above me are the quilt and ceiling; on my left the wall, the hall, the door, the milk bottle that stands outside the door, since on my right I see a window, and beyond...

The terror of the whole neighborhood, which had been so settled and well-off, was a brute, a scamp, and a brigand known as the Hooligan. He was born in the middle of nowhere on an expansive plain, grew up in forests, mountains, valleys, and expanses, and never slept in closed quarters, which leant him a particularly massive nature-an expansiveness of the soul-and fostered the outpouring of his disposition. Yes, it was a wide nature, which recognized no tight recesses and had a fondness...

I was surprised to hear that Marek Huberath was a mountain climber in his spare time. I thought, "Maybe not a real mountain climber." People do like to boast. He was achiever enough, not only one of the best and most respected writers of his generation (when describing him to others, I often use the word "powerful") but also a Ph.D. research physicist at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and for few months of each year in Belgium. Over a beer, I told a Polish writer in Warsaw, Artur...

On the floor, several bright spots formed a row. Snorg liked to watch them move slowly across the dull tiles. The spots of light were different from the glow that suffused the Room. He had discovered some time ago that the source of this light was the small windows near the ceiling. He liked to lie on the floor so the spots would warm him. He wanted to do this now. He tried to move his arms but managed only to fall helplessly off the bed. "Dags . . . ," he hissed between clenched teeth. He...

Nowhere has denying reigned as rife as in this not which is outsitting me here.Oh, if only death would outstare itself for ever in its iron mirror. God, what a down-at-heel hope for a voiceless evaporation with wind and light as the silent witnesses which one finds here. From Springvossen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2000). By arrangement with the estate of Hans Faverey.

Yesterday, yes, I still existed here: in this pitiful winestain, in these paupered words way past their prime,in that handshake which I will never manage to hold in any of my handbooks, and which under my table leads the still life of a retired country doctor. Go on, admit it: yesterday you also existed here, when the sun turned up humming and we took in the fact that neither one of us, in this circus, dared fight the bear. From Springvossen (Amsterdam: De...

With one hand in my lap, with my other hand on the table. My head is located above it;in which a landscape drops anchor, sun-drenched. It is one moonless evening. While his son carefully draws the sculls through the water, his father stands by the hissing lamp, leaning forward, peering into the sea, trident raised. Where is it, now that I am writing it; where am I, now that you are rereading this? From Springvossen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2000). By...

Since nobody was there anyway, and since it is not blocked off, it's time for a walk once again along the brink of the beach, where all of a sudden the woods held back, or have withdrawn by degrees.Thinking this is someone who does not know that he is in this text and will never get out again, however he tinkers with sentences and shifts the meanings about. Better that than the other way round, when cold strikes without warning; and better never than late. Here I go...

One fine day it was night. I seemed to be just about to catch my first fish. Suddenly it allconspires against me. It was too late to unbait my hook. I head for home, humming in my sleep, to worship the dark- ness, with pounding heart. From Springvossen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2000). By arrangement with the estate of Hans Faverey.

If later, or sooner, it is, or becomes, sayable-this is the most thingable it will be; best of all, let my text encircle someonewho foists it on himself, or by whom it's fobbed off with itself; if smoke fails to announce the outcome, I might as well go to sea: to let oneself be blown away. From Springvossen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2000). By arrangement with the estate of Hans Faverey.

"Then they went away too." Hardly had I known them. I also hardly stayed behind. I would have liked to write something down, but I had forgotten to writeit down. If you listen to people, it's all about a future which lives in a pebble and is as smooth as the self-same pebble. Now and again I own such a pebble as well: a moment before I've thrown it away. From Springvossen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2000). By arrangement with the estate of Hans Faverey.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, rumors about the cities spread. Some people spoke of their demise, others of a strange rebirth from out of the rubble. Clandestine groups would whisper secrets about cities that were still inhabitable, where it was possible to walk, see a bird, explore a museum, or take in the color of the sky. But places like that were few and far between. Gradually, people started talking about Berlin. Not in public, in newspapers, or in social gatherings. The...

Part One: The Macuto Yarn On a journey I recently had cause to make to Venezuela, I had the opportunity to admire the famous "Macuto Yarn," one of the Wonders of the New World. It is the legacy of nameless pirates, a tourist attraction, and an enigma without answer. It constitutes a strange moment of naivete that traversed the impenetrable centuries and in the process became one with a Nature that in these latitudes is as rich as every new growth it engenders. Macuto is one of those...