Cosmos (4 page)

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 expanse 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 to 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 .
.
.

Did one of the windowpanes look at me with a human eye?
People were still having their afternoon naps—judging by the silence—but it was quite possible that someone watched us from behind a windowpane—Leon?
Roly-Poly?
Katasia?—and it was conceivable that the one watching us was the same person who sneaked into our room, most likely during the morning hours, and gouged the line that created the arrow—what for?
To poke fun at us?
For a lark?
To tell us something?
No, it didn’t make sense!
Well alright, indeed, yet irrationality is a stick that has two ends, and Fuks and I at the other end of this irrationality moved and acted quite rationally—and I, engaged in such laborious maneuvers, had to bear in mind (if I didn’t want to betray my action)
the possibility of a gaze lurking behind the painfully glistening and blinding windowpanes.

So I did bear it in mind.
And Fuks’s gaze, looking from above, was helpful to me.
I moved about cautiously so as not to arouse suspicion, I raked the grass here and there, dropped the rake as if worn out by the heat, then imperceptibly moved it with my foot in the desired direction.
These precautions increased the intensity of my collaboration with Fuks more than I had intended, I moved about almost like his slave.
We finally determined the direction of the arrow—the line led all the way past the tool shed by the wall where the lot, partially littered with rubble and bricks, ended as an extension of the little garden.
We moved slowly in that direction, diverging here and there as if busy studying flowers and herbs, talking, gesticulating from time to time, and carefully looking for something significant.
From furrow to furrow, from twig to pebble, our gaze lowered, we were absorbed by the ground that unfolded before us—gray, yellowish, rusty-dark, boring, complex, sleepy, monotonous, barren, and hard.
I wiped the sweat off my face.
It was all a waste of time!

We came close to the wall .
.
.
but here we stopped, helpless .
.
.
it seemed quite difficult to conquer the remaining ten steps, we were too exposed!
So far, our march through the little garden under the gaze of the windowpanes has been relatively easy—about fifty yards across level ground—and yet it became difficult because of a concealed difficulty that turned it almost into a climb—and now this same difficulty, brought about by the progressively steeper and more dizzying climb, increased sharply, as if we were reaching a summit.
What an altitude!
He squatted, pretending to look at a bug, and so, hunkering down and moving as though following the bug, he reached the wall; I veered to the
side, meandering here and there in order to join him in a roundabout way.
We were by the wall, at the far end, in the corner made by the shed.

The heat.
Grasses, some rather luxuriant and swaying in the breeze, a beetle marches on the ground, bird droppings by the wall—the heat, yet now somehow different, and a different odor, of urine perhaps, I daydreamed of remoteness, it was all remote as if we had wandered for months, a place thousands of miles away, at the ends of the earth—suddenly a whiff of warm decay, there was a pile of garbage nearby, rains had created a seepage by the wall—stalks, stems, rubble—clods of dirt, pebbles—yellowish stuff .
.
.
The heat again, yet different, unfamiliar .
.
.
yes, yes .
.
.
our reaching this corner that lived apart, referred us to that other, the darkly-cool thicket with its little pieces of cardboard and sheet metal—with the sparrow—as if by the power of distance, the one echoed back to the other—and our searching here seemed to come to life.

An onerous task .
.
.
because, even if something were hiding here, to which the arrow, on the ceiling, in our room, was pointing, how would we find it in this entanglement, among weeds, among bits and pieces, in the litter, surpassing in number everything that could be happening on walls, on ceilings?
An overwhelming abundance of connections, associations .
.
.How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet?
How many meanings can one glean from hundreds of weeds, clods of dirt, and other trifles?
Heaps and multitudes gushed also from the boards of the shed, from the wall.
I got bored.
I straightened up and looked at the house and the garden—these huge, synthesized shapes, these enormous mastodons of the world of reality, were restoring order—I rested.
Let’s go back.
I was
about to say this to Fuks but his face, stuck to one spot, stopped me short.