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12M

P3

An Element Of Destruction

by

August A. Raymont

Synopsis

The story takes place in Poland in the twenties and thirties and is about two young men from different backgrounds and personalities. One is autocratic, courageous and of high code of honour. The other is intellectual, poetic, reserved, nervous and intense and a friendship develops becoming a bond between them dominating their lives. Both fall in love with the same girl, she marries the intellectual. Unfortunately, the husband, unable to father a child, takes advantage of their friendship and manipulates his wife into an affair with his friend and a boy is born.

The question of paternity changes their friendship into an element of destruction in terms of emotional traumas, blackmail and consideration of murder.

As the growing boy begins to display the physical characteristics of his true father the conflict intensifies, drawing the boy into it.

 

The novel “An Element of Destruction” if produced as a film or television series would equal that of “Doctor Zhivago” in every sense of human drama.

 

 

An Element of Destruction

 

Chapter Two

 

Witold and Zenon’s friendship, born in those tragic days of the Bolshevik war of 1920, withstood the test of time. They lived together through the hell of its desperate battles. They got to know each other in deathly tiredness and in peaceful rest, in hunger and in a state of satiation, in happy and in tragic moments. In a despair bred by the hopelessness of seemingly inevitable death. And the better they got to know each other the closer they became bound to each other.

This was no ordinary case of familiarity born out of common experiences of an unusual nature, nor was it only a skin-deep attachment. Their friendship had not only the outward elements of human relationship but also some of the spiritual fusion emanating from their mutual exploration into their mental as well as emotional regions.

“I’ll never understand how on earth the two of you ever became such close friends.”

Their mutual company’s friend often remarked, not without a fair amount of irritation. You two argue constantly about everything that is arguable, your opinions and ideas are as diverse as heaven and earth, and yet you two manage somehow to respect each other’s diverse opinions. Actually you two, by virtue of the wide differences between yourselves, ought to hate each other.”

And they were different. Not only in temperament and tastes but in opinions and outlooks in almost every field of human participation.

Witold was conservative in all matters, personal and public. His emotional reactions were constantly under perfect control, never a word or gesture of his would betray their true depth.

Zenon, on the other hand was enthusiastic about changes for changes’ sake.

He was enthusiastic about progress in every discipline of human life. His emotions were constantly on display in a totally unbridled state.

Witold preferred to look at the world through the sceptical eyes of a naturalist.

Zenon’s mind basked in the never ending light of human emotions shrouded in the mist of his mysticism and unfounded passion for the occults.

Witold was a realist while Zenon was an idealist.

If these differences did not succeed in dividing and separating them, they certainly contributed in no small measure to the intensification of their friendship, because of the sincerity of the respect they had for each other’s opinions, outlooks and personal conduct.

Of course, from their endless discussions, Witold knew everything about Zenon; his family relationship, his life history, with its whole register of incidents and changes, which in fact were not that many for his age. But Witold on the other hand, if accused of being rather short on communication, would be on a thin ground in defending himself because he didn’t speak much, indeed very little about himself and Zenon was too tactful to inquire. He knew that his friend studied agronomy before volunteering into the army, that he came from an old landed family and had a family estate in the district of Polesie that he and his only sister Helana were orphans. These meagre facts were however quite sufficient for Zenon since he viewed Witold as the closet human being to him in the world.

Zenon appealed to Witold from the first moment they met. He had a slim silhouette, black, slightly wavy crop of hair and strikingly expressive black eyes with long thick eyelashes.

He himself was quite unaware to what degree his eyes reflected his every mood. The most frequent was a dreamy one, but when angry or in a happy mood, because of the change in the expression of his eyes, he changed almost beyond recognition.

Zenon hardly remembered his mother, who died when he was only seven years old, but knew that he was very much like her. In his father’s study there hung an enormous painting of her and from her he had inherited the colour and texture of his hair, his complexion and his expressive eyes. He had also inherited from her the hyper sensitivity, softness of expression, feebleness, irresolution and gentleness which so easily won him human warmth and good will without which he could not have existed.

Perhaps because of those characteristics being part of his nature that he never had any enemies, never came across people ill-disposed towards him. Everybody seemed to treat him with warmth and sympathy which at times may have reached the realm of pity and was perhaps the reason why he never had a friend.

There seemed to be within him some kind of barrier, a zone, a region, surrounded by a high wall beyond which he could not or would not admit anyone not even his father. He was friendly with many school boys and later enjoyed the company of his fellow students, but his friendliness was external only, superficial, born not of emotional needs and involvements but from the lack of obstacles in his life’s path to win that human tenderness, affection, sympathy and recognition. And then, suddenly in the tragic environment of fear, suffering and death, he met a person to whom, within barely a dozen days, he was ready to open all doors to his innermost self and expose all his carefully guarded thoughts, emotions, dreams, aspirations and experiences.

This must have meant to Zenon a friendship full of boundless confidence. A readiness for every possible dedication and sacrifice of which a human is capable.

Zenon spent a sleepless night. The emotional experiences of the day drained him completely and the earlier part of his conversation with Witold had emotionally unbalanced him. He couldn’t understand so many things about Witold and his uncomplicated approach and attitude towards life.

Though on returning home he went straight to bed, hoping that sleep would bring relief to his mental and emotional turmoil. For the next few hours he tossed and turned trying to force himself to sleep but his mind was too disturbed and at the end he gave up, got up, put his dressing gown on and turned on every light in every room upstairs and downstairs and began to pace back and forth, up and down, through the house looking at pieces of furniture, ornaments, pictures which he knew and remembered from childhood. Many of them had once held a very special sentimental meaning for him but now, they all seemed to be part of a collection of objects acquired quite accidentally and for no serious purpose at all.

At last he sat down in his father’s study. Every thing here had now been cleared away and books returned to their respective places, giving the room a cold and unlived appearance. The writing desk had the orderly look of an object unconnected with human activity. He was depressed further by this clinical detachment of every thing in this room from any human activity, which, until very recently had been the centre of his father’s work, indeed his whole life.

Zenon opened a filing cabinet and at the bottom of it lay dozens of folders packed with typed pages of unfinished work. Books filled the numerous shelves, some bearing his father’s name.

How many of them, Zenon wondered, were absorbed by his father’s brain over the course of those years?. Each one of them evoking new thoughts in his father’s mind. Projecting new associations, setting out new channels among his brain cells. Leaving in their wake an intricate labyrinth which the human memory flashed through, collecting elusive and immaterial treasurers, from which it would build complicated structures of human views, opinions, and considerations. And now this very brain, cold dead useless, representing nothing, contained nothing and created nothing any more – an empty mass from which the very essence had disappeared – an empty vessel.

‘What kind of power is it then?’ He wondered, that can compel a man throughout the span of his natural life, to think, feel, work, create, only to leave it all behind at the end and not be able to take it with him, not even the smallest fragment of it, whether it be finished or unfinished. And if, in such instances, a man had achieved through his earthly aspirations, efforts and creativity, a microscopic fraction of some infinite quantity, then what titanic power is there that can compel him to leave it all behind unprotestingly and take his place, as yet another infinitesimal link, in that endless and ageless chain of past generations?

‘Surely’, he reasoned’ ‘that power could be no other but man’s spirit, yes! – Man’s free and indivisible spirit which has overwhelmed humanity in time and space.

From caves, where on the walls a savage scraped images of animals with a sharp piece of flint, to the monuments of Rome and Florence; from the discovery of fire to the present day boilers and turbines of large power stations and ocean-going ships; from the first Hindu myth to the works of Suetonius, Gibbon, Kant, Goethe, Pascal, Rcine, Reade, Milton, Pope, Gibbs.

J.W.S. Rayleigh, Pastuer, to mention but very, very few. Yes! – A free spirit without which there could be no creation.’

Zenon sat motionless turning automatically the pages of his father’s hand written unfinished manuscript, while his thoughts were reaching out in search for some understanding of man’s reason for his existence and his desire to create.