The Black Boar

Soren A. Gauger

To resume our discussion: the nature of a man best reveals itself in a state of utmost romantic antipathy. Take, by way of illustration, the jilted lover. The one man kills his wife, the other commits suicide. The first man encloses himself in a room, plotting and contriving, weighing the virtues [virtu] of arsenic versus suffocation, versus again a swift push over the rail of a bridge in the dead of night; the other, no less compulsively, dreams of stumbling into a gorge, of final salutations scrawled in ink, of drowning inebriated in the bathtub, or the rather Germanic melodrama of a noose from the rafters of the attic. The first need not even say what is on his mind; he begins to smell oddly, like boiled meat, he stutters overmuch, his nervous laughter is a joyless and shadowy thing to hear.

The second man is a much more discreet and elusive sort of creature, more cognizant of the horrors brewing in his belly, and thus more inclined to disguise them in shame, or even to turn them into their opposites. A suicide-in-the-making is a secret to be jealously guarded from the world, an exceedingly intimate affair, a kind of black root that grows tangled and wild in the darkness of the soil.

It is he, this second kind of man, who succumbs, from time to time, to the Black Boar (or, depending on the local dialect, the Demon Pig, the Black Swine, the Boar of the Devil). The story typically goes as follows: Our man leaves a pub or a restaurant after a strangely emotional discussion; he has had too much to drink, his eyes are bloodshot and his gestures unpredictable. No one ever remembers the content of the discussion precisely, but what begins as a light talk most suddenly takes a morose, even sinister turn; the others become confounded, one by one they drop out of the conversation, until, strictly speaking, it is only a long and diseased monologue, which no one truly understands but which everyone fears to interrupt, an experience which the listeners find both confusing and profoundly distressing (later on, they report being tormented by nightmares or prone to long periods of bleak reflection, wherein all those things that once had seemed quite sufferable tip into the crevice, suddenly becoming unsufferable to the extreme; some listeners begin to wonder at their supreme gullibility in having endured their wretched state for so long).

Having concluded his litany, the man leaves the pub (or restaurant) with a stumbling gait, vowing never to return. He looks as though he is setting off for home, but then his feet mysteriously alter their course, he finds himself taking the off road and then a gravel path that leads him into the woods. Deeper he goes, deeper and deeper, where the branches are too thick for the moon to light the path, and several weeks later, an unsuspecting woodsman or farm girl gathering mushrooms receives a traumatizing sort of surprise upon encountering the remains of the man’s bones, gnawed clean by unusually large teeth.

It goes without saying that the Bible contains no mention of black boars, demon pigs, or any other such concoctions of the folkloric imagination. It does, as some of my observant parishioners have noted, contain mention of throwing pearls before swine, whereafter they stomp them in the dirt and tear you to pieces. And here all my calm explanations of the strictly metaphorical currency of this passage is in vain; to no avail do I tell them that I believe it highly improbable that the Scripture meant to actually warn against swine, demon or otherwise, and that God, to the disappointment of a great many readers, seldom speaks in literal admonitions. Yet the unhappy fact of the matter is that if the reader wants to find a Demon Pig or Boar of the Devil in the Bible, he invariably will, and then no amount of theological dithering by his local parish priest will ever convince him that it was not there to begin with. Few delusions have the strength of those we devise on our own.

Then at one point, it became a sort of obsession—I had to debunk this idiotic Black Swine in an utterly conclusive way, to end this nonsense, this antireligious fervor that only sent my feeble-minded rabble hurtling back into paganism, into a stupid fear of the natural world as beyond their control. Where were we, Lord above, in the history of the world. With this thought in mind, I knew I had to locate a victim. I had to track down a probable victim and follow him where he went, into the very heart of the woods if need be, and to give testimony that there is nothing supernatural at work, only unremarkable despair.

To this end I found Henryk Wyleżyński, an anatomy student abandoned by his fiancée for Lech, the strapping son of a textiles baron. Henryk’s courtship of Klaudia had progressed by tiny increments: introduction, invitation, retreat, reintroduction, confidences, an anxious clasp of hand, retreat, emotional irruption, embarrassment, then an ungainly, if decisive, kiss square on the lips. Klaudia had endured this process of several months with extraordinary patience and good humor, a fact which Henryk saw as, perhaps, indicative of love.

Thus confident of her feelings, and quite certain he could never again endure the strain of repeating the process, he asked, somewhat hastily, if she would agree to be his fiancée. Klaudia agreed; somewhat less than two weeks later she was accosted at a marketplace by Lech, a completely different sort of man, whose father had taught him, first and foremost, a bullish pragmatism in all things.

That same day Henryk dropped by to bring Klaudia a bag of fresh dates, and he heard, standing underneath her second-floor window, the unmistakable sound of Klaudia and Lech’s lovemaking.

Henryk never called upon Klaudia again, and Klaudia, oddly enough, never took the trouble to discover what had become of him. I had heard Henryk’s story, and it was at this stage that I began tracking him. Over several weeks I watched him drift restlessly from place to place, abandoning his studies without notice, having written the following abrupt letter to his head professor:

On the one hand, the concrete is beneath our attention; we pursue the abstract. On the other, what to do if the concrete asserts itself with a terrible force. What holds our faith in the abstract.

What indeed. Here, outside the parentheses of the tale, as it were, I would like to take Henryk by the hand and remind him that the abstract is the only sure truth; the path of the concrete, while seeming at first to lead us toward virtue, can slowly, imperceptibly, perform a volta, leaving us to defend ourselves in the mire. It is a Janus-faced thing, by which we stray. Oh Henryk! Oh humanity!

From there, the descent was swift. Henryk stopped shaving and washing his clothes, he acquired a dragging limp and a lazy eye—in sum, every bit the appearance of an emotional shipwreck. His voice became unnaturally gravelly, and he began to chew tobacco; it stuck between his teeth and stained his mouth a sickly yellow.

Then I began joining him in bars. I would try to get there before him—this was not difficult, as he had a loping gait, and a hunted look on his face whenever he was headed out to drink—to pick a table that would be within earshot, but with my back turned to him.

Now it is dusk at the Pod Wpływem far on the outskirts of Kraków; the innkeeper is an ox named Bruno, the last man in the country who wears his mustache in the National Socialist style—not because of this or that conviction, but he has always trimmed his mustache this way, and he is too hardheaded to change merely because it has gone a bit démodé. Bruno’s face is fat, perpetually red, apoplectic. Nobody knows how much he drinks. He is repellent.

The men in Bruno’s family have hunted for generations, and the heads of their conquests sprout from the walls of the inn like flowering buds from a tree. Towering over the others, the pride of the collection, is a great black stag head.

On the evening in question it is already dusky; a harsh golden light shoots through the cracks in the shutters, casting a sharp, luminous glow around the edges of the gloom. The clientele at the Pod Wpływem at this hour is weather beaten and sinister; their golden teeth flash menacingly when they grin. The shadows of the black stag’s antlers creep about the walls like the legs of some gigantic spider. Henryk is especially morose. A table of three men who, in another time and place, would surely have been brigands, but who presently have all of the degradation but none of the swashbuckling intrigue, are seated around Henryk; they are playing a game of dice, and Henryk is losing. With every throw he is sinking further in his chair, his face taking on a darker, more frightening aspect, until one of the men observes that it is not his lucky night.

When has it been my lucky night, asks Henryk. Every night I leave my house and I say to myself, just because misfortune has pursued you like some ruthless hound, just because the sinking feeling has been the median by which all other emotions are measured, because of the alternating insomnia and nightmares, because in all the books of anatomy I have studied there is nothing to rationalize the paranoia, and in all the pages of the Bible there is nothing to explain the Devil, and so it has been for countless nights on end, there is no hard evidence to prove that nothing will change. Why, it could be just tomorrow, I tell myself, that life will cease to be a series of cruel degradations; there is nothing on earth to prevent me from waking to a dawn so bright that I shall have to squint my eyes in the heavenly glow. There is no force in the world that could condemn a man to chronic disappointment, disappointment in the shallow monotony of the human heart, disappointment in the frailty of my own body, which it now takes no great leap of the imagination, gentlemen, to visualize as a corpse.

The three men around Henryk sit stock still, struck, it seems, dumb. Bruno stops his clattering of glassware and nervously runs his fingers through his mustache. The shadows descend further still.

Gentlemen! Henryk declares, wild-eyed, we are past the time for diddling! We no longer have the luxury of pretending that life can be as dull and idiotic as this bar, this game of dice! Who would dream that the human beast could sink so low. People have fought wars and devoted their lives to perpetuating the species and we thank them with this gross parody of existence. You have made me sick! What a grim spectacle we make, gentlemen! This waiting, this hoping at the gate, it becomes grotesque. Well I, for one, will refuse to take it any longer with this bovine demeanor. I, for one, will no longer sit here and be sickened by this hemming and hawing, this toing and froing, this playing tiddlywinks with existence. Begging your leave!

I am electric with excitement. This is it, I think. Enter the Demon Pig.

And indeed, not a minute later Henryk is drunkenly throwing back his chair and storming out of the bar, on a dark path leading Heaven-knows-where. His exit causes no small amount of consternation—I have to wait a very long minute before I, too, push back my chair and leave, when I am quite sure that my going will not attract general attention.

Then into the sudden blackness of the night. Everything beyond the halo of light cast by the inn’s lantern bleeds into the darkness. But there is the dreary shuffle of Henryk’s feet somewhere to my right to guide my way, and this I pursue.

Here, I confess, a thrill flashes through my veins and floods my heart. It is as though, on some deeply primitive level, I feel I am about to prove the existence of God. Because I know how it will all end—I know it as though it were a manuscript which one reads for days and then suddenly discovers, to one’s surprise, is written in one’s own hand. I know that I will walk a fair ways in pursuit, that my legs will even grow tired; that we will turn off the road and onto the inevitable dirt path that leads into a forest. And I know I will hear his footsteps slowing, becoming more contemplative and unsure, until, not so very far now, they will come to a stop, and after a rummaging through pockets, a light will be lit. When my face then emerges from the gloom and I am found to be, not a beast, but a man Henryk knows and trusts, his features will seem to thaw, his life will be saved, and God will be restored to his rightful throne. And so it goes. To a point.

For when I step into the light and I see the terror flush into his bloodshot eyes, I see his cheeks start to twitch and his hands begin to shake, he drops the lighter and we hear it skitter away on the ground. And he manages to choke out, in a grave whisper: It’s you. You are the Demon Pig.

Well, and who can say if he was correct. And indeed, who knows what really happened next, if Henryk attacked me or if I lunged at his throat. It was so completely black, there was utter confusion. What kind of memory can be said to exist when there is nothing to be seen. Shadows upon shadows. But it is certain that we grappled, I remember the sensation of my thumb pressing into his eye, I took a vicious kick to the ribs, and I squealed, Lord I squealed.

And then later on, what was there really to be said about Henryk’s disappearance. What did I really know myself. But when I heard the first suggestions that this was another victim of the Boar of the Devil, I was not quite so quick to deny it. In fact, I found myself urging them on, adding a little fuel to their mindless flames. When a human tibia was found in the woods some three weeks later, and it was declared to be Henryk’s, it was I, alas, who gasped and cried: The Black Boar!, as if still quoting from the manuscript, and again, The Black Boar!, and I watched their pupils grow wide with confusion, and it was horrible, I won’t pretend it wasn’t horrible, but I saw it out, with God, and perhaps only God as my witness, I saw it out.

©2018 Soren A. Gauger

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Soren Gauger is a Canadian who lives in Krakow, Poland, earning a living as a freelance translator for cultural institutions, festivals, and publishing houses. His fiction has been published in English (Hymns to Millionaires, Quatre Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus) and more recently, in Polish, co-translated by himself (Nie to, nie tamto). He has also translated several works of Polish literature into English (including Bruno Jasieński, Jerzy Ficowski, Wojciech Jagielski) and contributed to several dozen journals and magazines in Canada, the USA, and Europe.