The Baker’s Alchemy
The Baker’s Alchemy
In a corner of old Poland, near a great forest touched by magic, a baker receives a secret to help his ailing marriage. Ignacy Wadowski has taken a new and much younger wife, and while Jadwiga is attentive and dutiful, she hasn’t allowed him into her bed. With the help of a healer from the forest enchantment comes, but when things start to go wrong there is also a price to pay.
In a marvel of plotting, a spiral of double-identity comedy and moral conundrums which require the invention of photography, a Count’s soirée, a squad of Cossacks and a balloon ride to Rome to sort them out, The Baker’s Alchemy brings charm and triumph again to the institution of marriage.
From the Book:
Afterwards Jadwiga took to her music. It was some time since she had played on her springling instrument, though it was a practice her husband himself loved most especially. Many a night in the past, especially the Saturdays when he didn’t need to rise early the next day, in the colder months particularly, had he made of himself a smiling and nodding concert audience for her. He’d be seated out on his old brown plush sofa above – summoned for the event – the long-suffering dog Duke Wellie and more curious cockatoo Kostek. The bird was known to add a trumpet-baffle, scrawky refrain.
This, again, is not to say she was sublime or even a notable competent player, but it was part of her, it was what she did; her husband here with his hand around his glass of home-made cherry brandy wasn’t musical enough himself to feel anything but privileged.
And this evening, Wadowski noticed it at once, any deficit in her technique was swamped by the plaintive force of her playing.
How much of this, by the way, has gone from human life! In a domestic room, in a house, whether this be in a village, a town, in a hamlet or a great city: a family making its own music. No electronic sound or image, only perhaps some firesmoke, and candle light, only the knowledge of the cold air and vast night sky beyond the ceiling, as the notes of a naked instrument grab, unmediated, the handles of the heart and bear it off to other worlds of memory and loss and strange yearning.
Wadowski could see on Jadwiga’s face, tonight, her struggle for expression. It was new. This wasn’t the girl with the steady upright back, long-trained, executing as neatly as possible her chords as though her music teacher were standing stern behind her. This was a young woman who wanted to drag the universe into the room. To entice down through the draped window-frame, a Ring of Saturn. To bring with it knowledge, and answers, and right action.
Wadowski brooded on the many occasions, especially earlier in their time, when he had reached to put a jovial arm around her, and somehow she had allowed it, that is, not made him feel he had done anything wrong. But that was also as far as it went…