WOMAN, FROG, AND DEVIL

January Wojnicz, a retired civil servant and a landowner, was a splendid man, as they said in Lwów, handsome and dignified.

- Olga Tokarczuk

As a man of fifty-plus, he had dark hair with hardly any gray and thick stubble; he shaved with great tenacity, leaving only his magnificent mustache, which he cared for and curled with the use of a pomade, the base ingredient of which was tallow. As a result, his son, Mieczysław, forever associated the smell of rancid fat with his father; it was his second, aromatic skin.

January could easily have made a good second marriage, but he had lost all interest in women, as though his wife, who had died several months after giving birth, enfeebled by the effort of producing a child and by some sort of inexplicable depression, had permanently destroyed his trust in the fairer sex—as if he felt cheated by this, or even disgraced. She had given birth and promptly died! What nerve! His mother had passed away prematurely, too. There was something wrong with these mothers; they seemed to do a terribly dangerous job, risking their lives tangled in lace in their boudoirs and bedrooms, leading a lethal existence among the bedclothes and the copper pans, among the towels, powders, and stacks of menus for every day of the year. In Mieczysław Wojnicz’s family world, the women had vague, short, perilous lives, and then they died, remaining in people’s memories as fleeting shapes without contours. They were reduced to a remote, unclear impulse placed in the universe temporarily, for the sole purpose of its biological consequences.