Cosmos (9 page)

She took off the towel.
She had no blouse.
Nakedness assailed me from her breasts, her shoulders.
Bending her nudity she began to pull down her stockings, the husband spoke again, she answered, she took off a stocking, he placed his foot on a chair and was unlacing his shoe.
I delayed my retreat, I thought that now I would find out what she’s like, what she’s like with him when naked, is she vile, mean, dirty, slippery, sensual, sacred, tender, pure, faithful, fresh, attractive, perhaps a coquette?
Perhaps just easy?
Or profound?
Perhaps just obstinate, or disillusioned, bored, indifferent, passionate, cunning, evil, angelic, timid, impudent, I’ll finally see!
Then her thighs showed, once, twice, I’ll soon know, I’ll finally find out, finally something will reveal itself to me .
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The kettle.

He picked it up, moved it from the table to the floor and went to the door.

The light went out.

I looked closely but saw nothing, with my unseeing gaze piercing the darkness of the cavern I kept looking, what could they be doing?
What were they doing?
And how were they doing it?
At this moment anything could be happening there.
There was no gesture, no touch, that would not be possible, the darkness was truly inscrutable, she writhed or she didn’t writhe, or she was embarrassed, or she loved, or else there was nothing, or something entirely different, or it was baseness, or horror, I’ll never find out anything.
I began to climb down and, letting myself down slowly, I thought that even if she were a child with very blue eyes she
could be a monster as well—blue-eyed and childish.
So what does one know?

I will never know anything about her.

I jumped to the ground, brushed myself off, slowly walked toward the house, in the sky all was rush and speed, entire herds sped on, disheveled, the whiteness of their luminous edges, the blackness of their nuclei, everything sped on below the moon that also raced, swam out, glided, dimmed, then emerged immaculate, the heavens were embraced by two contradictory motions, speeding and calm—and I, walking on, wondered whether to throw everything out the window, whether to get rid of the entire ballast and say “I pass,” because, finally, Katasia’s lip, as was evident from the photograph, was a purely mechanical blemish.
So why did I need this?

And on top of it all, the kettle .
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Why did I need the association of the mouths—her mouth with Katasia’s?
I won’t do it anymore.
I’ll leave it alone.

I was reaching the porch.
Lena’s cat, Davie, sat on the banister and, on seeing me, it stood up and stretched itself so that I would tickle it.
I caught the cat tightly by the throat, I began to strangle it—what am I doing—flashed through me like lightning, but then I thought: too bad, it’s too late, I tightened my fingers with all my might.
I strangled it.
It hung limp.

What now, what next, I was on the porch with a strangled cat in my hands, something had to be done with the cat, lay it down somewhere, hide it?
However, I had no idea where.
Perhaps bury it?
Yet who’d be burying anything at night!?
Throw it out on the road, as if a car had run over it—or perhaps into the bushes, toward the sparrow?
I deliberated, the cat weighed heavily on me, I couldn’t make up my mind, all was quiet, but suddenly my eye
fastened on a tough string that tied a small tree to its pole, one of those trees white with lime, I untied the string, made a loop, I looked around wondering if anyone could see me (the house was asleep, no one would have believed that not so long ago a din had swept through here), I remembered there was a hook in the wall, I don’t know what for, perhaps for hanging laundry, I carried the cat there, it wasn’t far, about twenty paces from the porch, I hung it on the hook.
It hung like the sparrow, like the stick, completing the picture.
What next?
I was so tired that I was barely alive, I was a bit fearful of returning to the room, what if Fuks is there, not asleep, he’ll be asking questions .
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But as soon as I quietly opened the door, it turned out he was fast asleep.
I too fell asleep.

chapter 5

K
atasia stands over me, going on at length, such villainy, someone hanged Davie, Davie is hanging on a hook in the garden, who hanged him, God have mercy on us, what a disgraceful thing to hang Lena’s cat!
This woke me brutally.
The cat had been hanged.
I hanged the cat.
I cast an uneasy eye toward Fuks’s bed, it was vacant, apparently he was already by the cat, and this gave me a moment of solitude to come to grips with .
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.

The news surprised me, as if I were not the strangler.
To find myself, with a single leap out of sleep, in something so unbelievable, for God’s sake why did I strangle the cat?
Now I remembered that, while I was strangling the cat, I felt the same banging through to Lena that I had felt when I was storming at her door—yes, I was getting at her by strangling her beloved cat—I could only have done it in a fit of madness!
But why did I hang it on the hook, what recklessness, what stupor!
And, what’s more, contemplating this stupor, half-dressed, with a dubious smile on my shriveled face that I saw in the mirror, I experienced as much satisfaction as I
did confusion—as if I had played a prank.
I even whispered, “It’s hanging,” with joy, with delight.
What am I to do?
How am I to extricate myself from this?
The people downstairs must be going on about it—had anyone seen me?

I strangled the cat.

This fact threw me.
The cat had been strangled and was hanging on a hook, and there was nothing I could do but go down and pretend I knew nothing.
But still, why did I hang it?
So many issues piling up, so many threads interweaving, Lena, Katasia, signs, pounding, et cetera, take even the frog, or the ashtray, et cetera.
I was lost in the tumult, it even occurred to me that perhaps I had killed it because of the kettle, because of the excess, to top it all off, an extra horse to the cart, in other words the strangling, like the kettle, was supernumerary.
No, that wasn’t true!
I had not strangled the cat because of the kettle.
What was the link then, what did the cat even have to do with it?
I had no time to think, I had to go down and confront a situation that was, even without the cat, uncanny and filled with the night’s quaint oddities .
.
.

I went downstairs.
The house was empty, I surmised that everyone was in the little garden.
But before appearing at the door of the porch, I looked out the window from behind the curtain.
The wall.
On the wall the cat’s body.
Hanging on a hook.
In front of the wall people standing, among them Lena—she’s farther off, reduced in size, it all looked like a symbol.
To make my appearance on the porch was not easy, it was like a jump into the unknown .
.
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and what if someone had seen me, what if in the next moment I’ll have to mumble something, beside myself with shame?
I walked slowly along the gravel path, the sky like sauce, the sun dissolved in a whitish expanse, again the foreboding heat, what a summer!
As I was getting closer the cat became more distinct, its tongue
protruding from the side of its jaws, its peepers thrust out of their orbits .
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it hung.
It would have been better, I thought, if this were not a cat, a cat by its very nature is already awful, the cat’s softness, furriness, are as if grounded in a mad screeching and scratching, a horrifying hissing, yes, hissing, a cat is made for stroking, but also for torturing, although it’s a kitten, it is also a tomcat .
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I walked slowly to gain time, because its sight astonished me in the daytime that followed my nighttime act, when it had been less visible and intertwined with that night’s wonders.
It seemed that sluggishness affected everyone, they too barely moved, while Fuks, much to my amusement, hunched over, studied the wall and the ground below it.
Yet Lena’s beauty puzzled me, it was so sudden and amazing, and I thought in terror: oh, how much more beautiful she has become since yesterday!

Leon asked me, hands in his pockets: “What do you make of this?”
A tuft of pomaded hair stuck out above his baldness, like a ship’s lookout.

I breathed a sigh of relief.
They didn’t know I had done it.
No one had seen me.

I turned to Lena: “How sad for you!”

I looked at her, she wore a soft, coffee-colored blouse, a navy skirt, she was nestling into herself, her mouth soft, her arms against her body like the arms of a recruit .
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and the palms of her hands, her feet, her little nose, her little ears were too small, too petite.
At first this annoyed me.
I had killed her cat, I did it to her brutally, solidly, and now these little feet, they were so little!

But my fury rolled into bliss.
Because, please do understand me, she was also too slight in relation to the cat, and that’s why she was ashamed, I was sure of it, she was ashamed of the cat!
Oh!
She was too slight in regard to everything, a tiny bit smaller than she
should be, she was only fit for love, nothing else, and that’s why she was ashamed of the cat .
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she knew that whatever pertained to her must have the meaning of love .
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and even though she hadn’t guessed who did it, yet she was shamed by the cat, because the cat was her cat, and it had to do with her .
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.

Yet her cat was my cat, strangled by me.
It was our cat.

Delightful?
Nauseating?

Leon asked me:

“Don’t you know anything?
Who, how?
Haven’t you noticed anything?”

No, I haven’t, late last night I took a walk, I returned well after midnight and came in through the porch, I don’t have any idea whether the cat was already hanging—my delight at misleading them grew in step with this deceitful deposition, I was no longer with them but against them, on the other side.
As if the cat had transferred me from one side of the medal to the other, into another sphere where mysteries happened, into the sphere of the hieroglyph.
No, I was no longer with them.
Laughter tickled me as I watched Fuks laboriously looking for signs by the wall and attentively listening to my lies.

I knew the mystery of the cat.
I was the perpetrator.

“Hanging the cat!
Imagine someone hanging the cat!”
Roly-Poly exclaimed with fury and then stopped, as if something had come over her.

Katasia emerged from the kitchen and walked toward us through the flowerbeds.
Her “affected” little mouth drew closer to the cat’s jaws—I sensed that she, while walking, feels that she is carrying something akin to those jaws, and this provided me with instant gratification, as if my cat were settling itself more solidly on
the opposite
side.
The lip was drawing nearer to the cat and all
my doubts, which had been raised by her oh so innocent photograph, evaporated, the lip with its slippery slipaway, was drawing closer, dislocated and despicable, a strange swinish similarity was taking place—and a kind of dark, nocturnal shudder ran through my loins.
At the same time I didn’t take my eyes off Lena—and imagine my astonishment, my emotion, my secret tremor, ecstatic perhaps, I don’t know, when I sensed that Lena’s shame intensified at the same time that the depravity of Katasia’s mouth rose above the cat.
Shame has a strange, contrary nature, even while defending against something it pulls that something into the most deeply personal and intimate domain—and so Lena, shamed by the cat and by the lip with the cat, drew it all into the mysteriousness of her private secrets.
And thanks to her shame the cat became united with the lip, like one gear engaging another!
But my soundless cry of triumph became united with a groan, how the devil could this fresh, naïve beauty drink in this foulness .
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and by her shame confirm my fantasies!
Katasia had a box in her hand—our box with the frog—ah, Fuks had obviously forgotten to take it as we were leaving!

“I found this in my place, in my little room, on the windowsill.”

“What’s inside the box?”
Leon asked.

“A frog.”

Leon began waving his hands, but Fuks intervened with unexpected vigor.
“Excuse me,” he said, taking the box from Katasia.
“About this later.
We’ll explain it.
In the meantime I want to invite you all into the dining room.
I’d like to have a word with you.
Let’s leave the cat as it is, I’ll look at this again at my leisure.”

Was this ass planning to play detective?

We slowly made our way toward the house, myself, Mrs.
Roly-Poly not saying a word, unfriendly, resentful, Leon looking crumpled,
a tuft of his hair sticking out.
Ludwik wasn’t there, he wouldn’t be back from the office until this evening.
Katasia returned to the kitchen.

In the dining room Fuchs began: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s be frank.
The fact is that something’s going on here.”

Drozdowski, anything to forget Drozdowski, it was clear that he had latched onto this and would push it no matter what.
“Something’s brewing.
Witold and I, we figured this from the time we arrived here, but we felt awkward talking about it, there was nothing definite, just some impressions .
.
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but after all, let’s be frank here.”

“I actually,” Leon began.
“Excuse me,” Fuks interrupted to remind him that we had found the hanged bird when we first arrived here .
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a truly puzzling phenomenon.
He related how we later detected something like an arrow on the ceiling in our room.
An arrow or not an arrow, it could have been an illusion, especially because last evening we had also imagined an arrow here, on the ceiling, do you all remember that?
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an arrow or maybe a rake .
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in fact, we should not exclude autosuggestion,
atenti!
But out of sheer curiosity, mark you, ladies and gentlemen, for the sport of it, we decided to investigate.

He described our discovery, the position of the stick, the crack in the wall, and he closed his eyes.“Hmm .
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granted .
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the hanging sparrow .
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the hanging stick .
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there’s something in it .
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If only these weren’t exactly where the arrow was pointing .
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”

I suddenly felt happy at the thought of the cat hanging—like the stick—like the sparrow—I felt happy about the symmetry!
Leon got up, he wanted to go see the stick immediately, but Fuks stopped him.
“Please wait.
First let me tell you everything.”

Laboring over the story, however, the cobweb of numerous
conjectures and analogies entangled him, I saw him flagging, at one point he even laughed at himself and at me, then he grew serious again, and with a pilgrim’s weariness he expounded on the whiffletree, that the whiffletree was aiming at .
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“Ladies and gentlemen, what’s the harm in checking?
Since we had checked the arrow, why not do the same with the whiffletree.
We just .
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for the sake of checking.
Just in case.
Not that we mistrust Katasia .
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just for the sake of checking!
And, just in case, I had the frog in the box, to simulate a joke if someone caught us.
I forgot it as I was leaving, that’s why Katasia found it.”

“The frog,” said Roly-Poly.

Fuks recounted the search, how we searched and searched in vain, and nothing, nothing, but please imagine, we finally came upon a certain detail, trivial, granted, entirely third-rate, I agree, yes, but repeating itself more often than it should have .
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please, ladies and gentlemen, judge for yourselves, I’ll simply give you a list .
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And he began to recite, but without conviction and too feebly!

A needle driven into a tabletop.

A pen nib driven into a lemon rind.

A nail file driven into a box.

A safety pin driven into a piece of cardboard.

A nail driven into the wall, right above the floor.
Oh, how this litany debilitated him, tired and bored he took a deep breath, wiped the corners of his ogle eyes and stopped, like a pilgrim who has suddenly lost his faith, while Leon crossed his legs, and this immediately took on the character of impatience, which frightened Fuks, who lacked self-confidence anyway, Drozdowski had liquidated it for him.
I again became furious at being involved in this with him, I, who had that business with my family in Warsaw,
it was all discouraging, disgusting, such rotten luck, well, it couldn’t be helped .
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