One glance was enough to conclude that the resident of the flat was a nutter. Back then I used to be cautious with my judgements and weigh my words carefully. It seemed to me that life was like a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Connections and confections; the curtain never falls. Sneers, caresses, frills, excesses and arse-licking. But in this case, it should be firmly said that the fellow – when he was still alive – must have been seriously screwed up.

I was frantically wondering if there was something to hang a story on here, something about him and this whole rather sad situation: a low-key tale, perhaps a little secret. I didn’t expect anything sensational, but I could use a spicy morsel concerning the freshly discovered stiff. I wasn’t looking for material for the Odyssey. I was just sniffing around routinely, to get my per-word fee for an evening beer and a buttered bread roll. And, unfortunately, I found it. (…)

I should have said to myself, this is a nobody, found another topic and shut him up inside copy totalling eight hundred characters with spaces. There would have been nothing left of him, zero, and zero problems. Zero questions and a hundred times less answers. He could have been a boring loony at most, the latest exposure of a banal downfall, nothing more than a strained pretext to scribble a slim note for the prying column about whatever.

The right words used at the appropriate moment can save a person’s life or honour, restore order, create distance or build a defensive wall, act as an effective vaccine against all sorts of shit that a stiff might be storing in his cavernous closet. Or in his suspect skull. That’s why one must use words extremely carefully. Use a slightly different word than is called for and the next thing you know, your dirty laundry is airing out in public, or you’re hanging naked and defenceless in front of a camera, waving your white CV out the window, and losing face, cash, status or love. Or everything at once. (…)

There were stacks of papers everywhere. On the desk, the kitchen table, the dresser, the chairs; the floor was covered with cardboard boxes, plastic crates and bags filled with papers. They were spilling out of two large rucksacks and even fermenting in the pots in the kitchen, except for one that was full of cooked and dried-up buckwheat groats. The overwhelming majority of these papers were single sheets the size of an average book, each containing a few handwritten lines. I glanced at them. I will never forget that moment. To be honest, I didn’t even get to the end of the sentence. It didn’t make the least impression on me; it didn’t inspire a hint of a deeper thought. I only noticed that there were no cross-outs or corrections in the text. Only later did I realise that the contents of every single page were identical. These were not notes; the text was, as the old term goes, a fair copy. (…)

The handwriting on the various sheets was fairly uniform. It might have belonged, and probably did belong, to the deceased resident. It was only after years of comparisons and intense study that I noticed the differences between individual instances, for example in the shapes of letters. For quite some time I was an ignorant amateur; I could not decipher the author’s purpose or understand the intentions behind that kindly hand.

There were two reasons for the differences in the shapes of letters. One, rather obvious, was the author’s age and state of health, meaning the increasingly uncertain, feeble hand and failing eyesight. The second, much more important and less obvious, as I will explain a bit later, was the result of the eccentric recluse’s attempt to record his bizarre ideas and theories.

From the short story Thirty-three words

Translated by Eliza Marciniak