Cosmos

by Danuta Borchardt

  Ludwik wiped his mouth with a napkin, and, setting it aside in an orderly fashion (he seemed to be very neat and clean, but his cleanliness could actually be filthy . . . ), and he said, in his bass-baritone voice, that about a week ago he too had noticed a hanged chicken on a spruce by the roadside—but he had not given it much thought, anyway after a couple of days the chicken was gone.

  “Oh, wonder of wonders,” Fuks marveled, “hanged sparrows, hanging chickens, maybe it’s an omen that the world is coming to an end? How high up was the chicken hanging? How far from the road?”

  He was asking these questions because Drozdowski couldn’t stand him, because he hated Drozdowski, because he didn’t know what else to do . . . He ate a radish.

  “Hooligans,” repeated Mrs. Roly-Poly. She adjusted the bread in the basket with the gesture of a good hostess and provider of meals. She then blew off some bread crumbs. “Hooligans! There are lots of kids around, they do whatever they please!”

  “That’s right!” Leon agreed.

  “The crux of the matter is,” Fuks wanly remarked, “both the sparrow and the chicken were hanged at the reach of an adult’s hand.”

  “Well? If not hooligans then who? So you think, siree, that it’s some weirdo? I haven’t heard of any weirdos in this vicinity.”

  He hummed ti-ri-ri and with great attention turned to making bread pellets—he lined them up in a row on the tablecloth, watched them.

  Katasia pushed the wire-mesh ashtray toward Lena. Lena flicked the ash from her cigarette, while within me her leg responded on the wire netting of the bed, what distraction, mouth above mouth, bird and wire, chicken and sparrow, she and her husband, chimney behind drainpipe, lips behind lips, mouth and mouth, little trees and footpaths, trees and the road, too much, too much, without rhyme or reason, wave after wave, immensity in distraction, dissipation. Distraction. Tiresome confusion, there in the corner was a bottle standing on a shelf and one could see a piece of something, maybe of a cork, stuck to the neck . . .

  . . . I glued myself to the cork, and thus I rested with it until we went to bed, then, dreaming, sleeping, for the next few days nothing, nothing at all, a mire of activities, words, eating, going up and going down the stairs, though I did find out this and that, primo, that Lena taught foreign languages, she had married Ludwik merely two months ago, they went to Hel Peninsula, now they’ll live here until he finishes their little house—all this Katasia told me, kindly, happy to oblige, dustcloth in hand, from one piece of furniture to another, secundo (this from Roly-Poly) “it needs to be cut again, then sewn up, the surgeon told me, an old friend of Lena’s, I’ve told Katasia so many times that I’ll cover the costs because, you know, she’s my niece even though she’s a simple peasant from the country, near Grojec, but I’m not one to disown poor relatives, and besides, it’s not aesthetic-looking, it offends one’s sense of the aesthetic, really, it’s just gross, how many times have I told her over the years, because it’s already been five years you know, since the accident, the bus ran into a tree, lucky nothing worse happened, how many times have I told her Kata, don’t be lazy, don’t be afraid, go to the surgeon, have it done, look at yourself, fix your face, but no, well, she’s lazy, scared, days pass, once in a while she’ll say I’ll go, auntie, I’ll go right away, but she doesn’t, and now we’re used to it, until someone reminds us, then it stares us in the face again, and even though I’m sensitive to the aesthetic, imagine the drudgery, cleaning, laundry, do this and that for Leon, then Lena wants something, then do something for Ludwik, from morning ’til night, one thing after another, while the operation waits, there’s no time for it, when Ludwik and Lena move to their little house, maybe then, but in the meantime, it’s a good thing that at least Lena has found an honest man, well, let him go and make her unhappy, I swear I’d kill him, I’d grab a knife and kill him, but thank God so far it’s not bad, it’s just that they won’t do anything for themselves, neither he, nor she, just like Leon, she’s taken after her father, I have to take care of everything, remember everything, hot water this, coffee that, do the laundry, socks, mend, iron, buttons, handkerchiefs, sandwiches, paper, polish this, glue that, they won’t do a thing, steaks, salads, from morning ’til late into the night, and, on top of it, lodgers, you know yourself how it is, I’m not saying anything, it’s true they pay, they rent rooms, but I still have to remember things for this one and for that one, have it all on time, one thing after another . . . ”

  . . . a multitude of other events filling, absorbing me, and every evening, as unavoidable as the moon, supper, sitting across the table from Lena, Katasia’s mouth circling around. Leon manufacturing his bread pellets and lining them up in a row, with great care—watching them intently—then after a moment’s deliberation impaling a pellet on a toothpick. Sometimes, after reflecting for a while, he would pick up a little salt on the tip of his knife and sprinkle it on the pellet, watching it dubiously through his pince-nez.

  “Ti-ri-ri!

  “Grażyna* mine!” he said, turning to Lena,“why don’t you toss your Daddydaddy some radishy foodie food? Toss it!”

  Which meant that he was asking her to pass him the radishes. It was difficult to understand such gibberish. “Oh Grażyna mine, your Daddy’s princess beautiful!” “Roly-Poly my petite, what are you dawdling over, can’t you see I want sucko!” He didn’t always speak in “word-monsters,” sometimes he began crazily and ended quite normally, or vice versa—the shining roundness of his bald dome, his face stuck below it, his pince-nez stuck to that, hovered above the table like a balloon—his mood often turned humorous, and he would crack jokes, mommydear, easy does it, you know the one about the bicycle and the tricycle, when Icyk* sat on a bicyk, what a tricyk, yahoo! . . .While Roly-Poly would smooth out something around his ear or on his collar. He would sink into a reverie and braid the fringe of a napkin, or push a toothpick into the tablecloth—not just anywhere but in certain spots only, to which, after lengthy reflection and with knitted brow, he would return.

  “Ti-ri-ri.”

  This irritated me because of Fuks, I knew it was grist for his Drozdowski mill, the mill that kept grinding him from morning until night, because he could not escape returning to his office in three weeks, and then Drozdowski would stare at the heating stove with a martyr-like expression, because, Fuks said, he even gets a rash from my jacket, he’s grown sick of me, it can’t be helped, he’s grown sick of me . . . and Leon’s eccentricities somehow suited Fuks because he watched them with his yellow, pallid, carroty look . . . and this pushed me even further into resenting my parents, into rejecting all that was there, in Warsaw, and I sat with resentment and hostility, halfheartedly watching Ludwik’s hand that I couldn’t care less about, that repulsed me, that riveted me, compelling me to penetrate its erotic-tactile possibilities . . . then there was Roly-Poly again, I knew, overflowing with activities, laundry, sweeping, mending, tidying up, ironing, etc., etc., and so on and on. Distraction. Swish and swirl. I would find my piece of cork on the bottle, watch the neck and the cork for the sake, I suppose, of not watching everything, the cork became in a way my bark on the ocean, even though only a distant hum reached me from the ocean, a hum too universal and too general to be really audible. And that was all. Several days filled with a little of everything.

  The sweltering heat continued. What an exhausting summer! And so it dragged on with the husband, the hands, the mouths, with Fuks, with Leon, it dragged on in the sweltering heat, like someone walking down the road . . . On the fourth or fifth day my eyes strayed, not for the first time actually, far into the room, I was sipping tea, smoking a cigarette, and, having abandoned the cork, I fastened my eye on a nail in the wall, next to the shelf, and from the nail I moved on to the cupboard, I counted the slats, tired and sleepy I forayed into the less accessible places above the cupboard where the wallpaper was frayed, and I went trudging on to the ceiling, a white desert; but the tedious whiteness changed slightly farther on, near the window, into a rough, darker e
xpanse contaminated with dampness and covered with a complex geography of continents, bays, islands, peninsulas, strange concentric circles reminiscent of the craters of the moon, and other lines, slanting, slipping away—sick in places like impetigo, elsewhere wild and unbridled, or capricious with curlicues and turns, it breathed with the terror of finality, lost itself in a giddy distance. And dots, I don’t know what from, not likely from flies, their origins totally inscrutable . . . Gazing, drowned in it and in my own complexities, I gazed and gazed without any particular effort yet stubbornly, until in the end it was as if I were crossing some kind of a threshold—and little by little I was almost “on the other side”—I took a gulp of tea—Fuks asked:

  “What are you gawking at?”

  I didn’t feel like talking, it was stuffy, the tea. I replied:

  “That line there, in the corner, behind the island, and that sort of a triangle . . . Next to the straits.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well . . .”

  After a long while I asked:

  “What does it remind you of?”

  “That smudge and the line?” he took it up eagerly, and I knew why so eagerly, I knew this would distract him from Drozdowski. “That? I’ll tell you, just a minute. A rake.”

  “Maybe a rake.”

  Lena joined in the conversation because we were playing at guessing, a parlor game, easy and in keeping with her shyness.

  “What do you mean a rake?! It’s a little arrow.”

  Fuks protested: “Nonsense, it’s not an arrow!”

  A couple of minutes filled with something else, Ludwik asked Leon, “Would you like to play chess, father?” I had a broken fingernail that was bothering me, a newspaper fell to the floor, dogs barked outside the window (two little dogs, young, amusing, off their leashes at night, there was also a cat), Leon said, “One game,” Fuks said:

  “Maybe it is an arrow.”

  “Maybe an arrow, maybe not an arrow,” I remarked, I picked up the newspaper, Ludwik rose, a bus rolled down the road, Roly-Poly asked “did you make that phone call?”

  *The name of a beautiful princess and also title of a poem about her by Adam Mickiewicz.

  *A variation on the name Isaac.

  chapter 2

  I don’t know how to tell this . . . this story . . . because I’m telling it ex post. The arrow, for instance . . . The arrow, for instance . . . The arrow, at that time, at supper, was no more important than Leon’s chess, or the newspaper, or tea, everything—equally important, everything—was contributing to a given moment, a kind of consonance, the buzzing of a swarm. But today, ex post, I know it was the arrow that was the most important, so in telling this I move it to the forefront, from a myriad of undifferentiated facts I extract the configuration of the future. But how can one describe something except ex post? Can nothing be ever truly expressed, rendered in its anonymous becoming, can no one ever render the babbling of the nascent moment, how is it that, born out of chaos, we can never encounter it again, no sooner do we look than order . . . and form . . . are born under our very eyes? No matter. Never mind. Katasia awoke me with breakfast every morning and, with my eyes just opened from sleep, I would catch above me the impropriety of her mouth, that slippery slipaway lip superimposed on her peasant-woman’s cheeks, looking on, blue-eyed and kindly. Couldn’t she have moved away from my bed a quarter of a second sooner? Wasn’t she stooping over me a fraction of a second too long? Maybe yes . . . maybe no . . . the uncertainty . . . this possibility burrowed into me as I lay thinking of my nocturnal machinations with her. On the other hand . . . what if she stood over me out of sheer kindness? It was hard to tell, there are substantial obstacles to watching people, it’s different with inanimate objects, it’s only objects that we can truly watch. In any case, my lying beneath her mouth pinned me down each morning and remained with me throughout the day, maintaining the configuration of her mouth in which I had so stubbornly entangled myself. It was too hot for us to work, we were tired, he was bored, he stewed in his own juices, became a wretch, he was like a howling dog though he didn’t howl, he was just bored. The ceiling. One afternoon we lay supine on our beds, the windows were shaded, the afternoon buzzed with flies—and I heard his voice.

  “Maybe Majziewicz would give me a job, but I can’t leave where I am, it counts as training, I’d lose a year and a half, no doubt about it, I just can’t . . . Look there, on the ceiling . . . ”

  “What?”

  “On the ceiling. There, by the stove.”

  “What?”

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “If only I could spit in his mug. But I can’t. And why should I? He means well, but I really get on his nerves, his jaw goes out of joint when he sees me . . . Have a better look at that mark on the ceiling. Don’t you see anything?”

  “What?”

  “It’s like that arrow, the one we spotted on the ceiling in the dining room. It’s even more distinct.”

  I didn’t answer, one minute, two, then he spoke again:

  “The remarkable thing is that it wasn’t there yesterday.” Silence, the heat, my head lies heavy on the pillow, a feeling of faintness, but he spoke again as if clinging to his own words that were floating in the juices of the afternoon: “It wasn’t there yesterday, a spider lowered itself from that spot yesterday and I watched it, I would have noticed the arrow—it wasn’t there yesterday. See the main line in the middle, the shaft itself, that wasn’t there, the rest, the point, the branching at the base, those, I grant you, are the old pockmarks, but the shaft, the shaft itself . . . that wasn’t there . . . ” He drew a breath, lifted himself slightly, leaned on his elbow, dust whirled around in a cluster of light rays coming through a hole in the window shade. “The shaft wasn’t there.” I heard him scramble out of bed, and I saw him in his underpants, craning his neck, examining the ceiling—it surprised me—such diligence! That ogling expression! He stuck his ogle face at the ceiling and declared: “Fifty, fifty.* Yes or no. Devil only knows.” And he returned to his bed, but I knew he continued looking from there, which I found so tiresome.

  After a while I heard him get up again and walk over to look at the ceiling, I wished he’d let it go . . . but he would not let it go.

  “The scratch that goes through the center, the shaft itself, mind you . . . I have a hunch, it seems freshly made with a nail. It’s more conspicuous. It wasn’t there yesterday . . . I would have noticed . . . And it points in the same direction as the other, the one in the dining room.”

  I lay there.

  “If it’s an arrow, it must be pointing to something.”

  I replied: “And if it’s not an arrow it’s not pointing.”

  Last night, at supper, while examining Ludwik’s hand with that disgusting curiosity of mine—again!—I shifted my gaze to Lena’s hand that also lay on the table, and then the little hand seemed to tremble or coil ever so slightly, I was not at all sure, yet fifty, fifty . . . But as to Fuks, I didn’t like it, maybe it even infuriated me that whatever he did or said derived from Drozdowski, from disrespect, dislike, disgust . . . all the “dises” . . . well, if only I didn’t have my own problems with my parents in Warsaw, but the two together, one fed on the other. He was talking again.

  He stood in his underpants, in the center of the room, talking. He suggested that we should see if the arrow pointed to anything—“what’s the harm in checking, if we’re satisfied it doesn’t point to anything, it will give us blessed peace, then it will be clear this is not an arrow that anyone has drawn on purpose but merely an illusion—there’s no other way to establish whether it’s an arrow or not an arrow.” I listened silently, I wondered how to refuse him, he insisted rather weakly, but I felt weak too, weakness pervaded everything. I suggested he check it himself if he was so keen on it—he began to insist that I would be indispensable to him in establishing the exact direction because someone has t
o go out, mark the direction in the hallway, in the garden—finally he said, “Two heads are better than one.”And all at once I agreed, I even rose immediately from my bed because the thought of a thrusting, resolute motion along a fixed line suddenly seemed more delectable than a glass of cold water!

  We pulled our pants on.

  The room now filled with decisive and clear-cut activities that, originating as they did from boredom, from idleness, from whimsy, concealed some kind of idiocy within them.

  The task was not easy.

  The arrow didn’t point to anything in our room, we could tell at a glance, so it was necessary to extend its course through the wall, to see if it connected with anything in the hallway, and then continue the line as accurately as possible into the garden—this called for rather complicated maneuvers that he really wouldn’t have managed without my participation. I went down to the garden and pulled out a rake from a small shed so that I could use the handle to show the line on the lawn which would correspond to the one that Fuks was signaling to me with a broomstick from the staircase window. It was close to five in the afternoon—the burning-hot gravel, the drying grasses around the young trees that gave no shade—that was down below—while above, white whorls of large, roundish clouds drifted in the mercilessly blue sky. The house gazed with two rows of windows, on the first and second floor—the windowpanes glittered . . .