The Rings of Saturn

In February 1890, twelve years after his arrival in Lowestoft and fifteen years after his departure from the station at Cracow, Korzeniowski, who now had British citizenship and his captain’s papers and had seen the most far-flung regions of the earth, returned for the first time to Kazimierówka and the house of his Uncle Tadeusz. In a note written much later he described his arrival at the Ukrainian station after brief stops in Berlin, Warsaw and Lublin. There his uncle’s coachman and majordomo were waiting for him in a sleigh to which four duns were harnessed but which was so small that it almost looked like a toy. The ride to Kazimierówka took another eight hours. The majordomo wrapped me up solicitously, writes Korzeniowski, in a bearskin coat that reached to the tips of my toes and put an enormous fur hat with ear flaps on my head, before taking his seat beside me. When the sleigh started off, to a soft and even jingle of bells, a winter journey back into childhood began for me. The young coachman, who was perhaps only sixteen years old, found the way across the endless snow-covered fields with an unfailing instinct. When I commented on his astounding sense of direction (Korzeniowski continues), never hesitating and not once taking a wrong turn, the majordomo replied that the young fellow was the son of Joseph, who had always driven grandmother Bobrowska of blessed memory and later served Pan Tadeusz with equal loyalty, until cholera ended his days. His wife, the majordomo said, died of the cholera too, which reached us when the ice was breaking, and so did a whole houseful of children, and the only one who survived was this deaf mute sitting in front of us on the box. He was never sent to school and no one ever expected he would be much use for anything till it turned out that horses were more obedient to him than to any other stable-boy. And when he was about eleven it emerged on some occasion or other that he had the map of the entire district in his head, complete with every bend in the road, so accurately you’d think he’d been born with it. Never, writes Korzeniowski, have I travelled better than that day as we journeyed into the settling dusk. As in the old days, long ago, I saw the sun going down over the plains, a great red disc sinking into the snow as though it were setting upon the sea. Swiftly we drove on into the gathering dark, into the infinite white wastes that met the starry skies at the horizon, where villages amidst trees floated like shadowy islands.