Cosmos

by Danuta Borchardt

  “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 . . . 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 . . . 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? . . . an arrow or maybe a rake . . . 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 . . . granted . . . the hanging sparrow . . . the hanging stick . . . there’s something in it . . . If only these weren’t exactly where the arrow was pointing . . . ”

  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 . . . “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 . . . for the sake of checking. Just in case. Not that we mistrust Katasia . . . 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 . . . please, ladies and gentlemen, judge for yourselves, I’ll simply give you a list . . . 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 . . .

  “Needles, lemon rinds . . . ” Leon grumbled. He didn’t finish, but that was enough: needles, lemon rinds, in other words hogwash, hogwash, a pile of garbage and we were on top of it, like two garbage men.

  “Wait, sir,” Fuks exclaimed, “the remarkable thing is that,” turning to Roly-Poly, “when we left there you were also driving in something! With a hammer! Into the tree trunk by the wicker gate. With all your might!”

  He looked aside. He adjusted his tie.

  “I was driving in something?”

  “Yes you, Mrs. Wojtys.”

  “So what?”

  “What do you mean so what, all the other things were driven in, and you too were driving in something!”

  “I was not driving in anything, I was just pounding the tree.”

  Mrs. Wojtys was reaching for words from the resources of a martyr’s endless patience.

  “Lena, honey, explain why I was pounding the tree.”

  Her voice was impersonal, stony, and her gaze bore the dictum “I’ll bear it.”

  Lena retreated into herself—more a pretense of a movement than a movement, she was like a snail, like certain shrubs, like anything that recedes or coils up when touched.

  She swallowed.

  “Lena, tell them the truth!”

  “Every once in while, my mother . . . It’s a sort of crisis. Nerves. It happens from time to time. Then she grabs anything . . . to relieve herself. She pounds. If it’s glass, she breaks it.”

  She was lying. No, she was not lying! This was the truth and a lie at the same time. The truth, because it corresponded to reality. A lie, because her words (I knew it already) were not important for their truth but only because they originated from her, from Lena—like her gaze, her fragrance. Her telling was halfhearted, discredited by her allure, fearful, as if suspended in air . . .Who, if not a mother, could have sensed this discomfort? Roly-Poly hastened to translate Lena’s assertions into the more matter-of-fact language of an old woman.

  “I work, gentlemen, day in, day out. Year in, year out. From morning ’til night. Drudgery. You know me, gentlemen, I’m composed and tactful, well-mannered. But when my composure snaps . . . Then I grab anything.”

  She reflected, then said with deliberation:

  “I grab anything . . . ”

  All of a sudden she couldn’t bear it any longer, she yelled, in a frenzy.

  “Anything!”

  “Honey,” Leon said, and she yelled at him: “Anything!”

  “Anything,” Leon said, whereupon she yelled: “Not anything! Anything!” And she became quiet.

  I too sat quietly.

  “That’s understandable,” Fuks melted into civilities. “Quite natural . . . With so much work and trouble . . . Nerves! Yes, yes! . . . That explains it . . . but right after that there was another banging, it seemed to be coming from the house, from the second floor? . . .”

  “That was me,” Lena declared.

  “She,” Mrs. Wojtys informed us with a patience that knew no bounds, “when she hears that something is coming over me, she’ll either run to me and catch my arm, or she’ll make a lot of noise herself. To bring me to my senses.”

  That settled it. Lena added a few more details. That they had just returned with Ludwik, that when she heard her mother banging she picked up her husband’s shoe (her husband was in the bathroom), and she drummed on the table, then on a suitcase . . . Everything has been cleared up, last night’s riddles settled on the dry sands of explanation—it didn’t surprise me, I was ready for it, and yet it was tragic, the events we had lived through escaped from our fingers like debris, debris, everything lay at our feet, needles, nails, hammers, crashes . . . I looked at the table and I saw a carafe on a saucer, a crumb brush in the shape of a half-moon, Leon’s spectacles (he used them for reading) and other things—all
sluggish as if they had given up their last breath. And indifferent.

  The indifference of objects, already unfriendly and bordering on stern, was accompanied by the indifference of the people—as if Fuks and I were a nuisance to them. I then became conscious of the cat, and this brought me comfort—because there, on the wall, some of the horror lingered, the jaws were still gaping. And I thought that, even though two of the loud noises lay helplessly on the ground, I had one more loud noise up my sleeve, less easily explainable, a truly vexatious, even a spiteful noise . . . How will she cope with my having banged at her door?

  I asked Lena . . . “weren’t there two salvos from upstairs? . . . One after the other. I’m sure of it, I was by the front door,” I lied, “when the second pounding began. The second noise was quite different.”

  Oh, to bang on! To bang on into her! Just as I had done during the night, at her door! Was I drawing the strings too tight? What will she reply? It was as if I were standing at her door again, banging on it . . . Can she guess who banged on her door? Why hadn’t she breathed a word?

  “A second noise? . . . Ah, yes, after a moment I began to bang again . . . with my fist against the shutter . . . I was upset. I wasn’t sure whether mother had calmed down.”

  She lied.

  Out of embarrassment, surmising perhaps that it had been me? . . .Well, how about Ludwik . . . clearly Ludwik was with her, he heard my banging, why didn’t he open the door? I asked:

  “And Ludwik? Was he with you?”

  “Ludwik was in the bathroom at the time.”

  Ah, Ludwik is in the bathroom, she is in the room alone, I begin to bang, she doesn’t open the door—perhaps she guesses that it’s me, perhaps not—in any case she knows that whoever is banging, is banging into her. She doesn’t open the door, she’s terrified. And now she’s lying that she was the one banging! Oh, what happiness, what triumph that my lie had banged into her lie, and we were both united in a lie, with my lie I was growing into her lie!

  Leon returned to the question:

  “Who hanged the cat?”

  He noted politely that it’s not worth preoccupying ourselves with the noises—that’s been settled, anyway he can’t say anything on the subject, his bridge game had ended at three in the morning—but who hanged the cat, why was the cat hanged? . . . And he asked this with an emphasis that, aiming at no one, hung in the air: “Who hanged it? I’m asking, who?”

  A blind stubbornness spread over his face that was crowned with baldness.

  “Who hanged the cat?” he asked in good faith, in all fairness. He insisted, which began to worry me. Suddenly Mrs. Wojtys, looking straight ahead, pronounced without so much as a quiver:

  “Leon.”

  But what if it was she? What if she had murdered the cat? Of course I knew who had murdered it, I had murdered it—but with her “Leon” she turned everyone’s gaze upon herself, and Leon’s persistence found, so to speak, its proper direction and tumbled onto her. Regardless of everything, it seemed to me that she could have, that if she had pounded with a hammer in fury, she could have, with the same fury, done as much to the cat . . . and it would be like her, like her short limbs and thick joints, her short and broad torso that abounded in maternal favors—yes, she could have—everything put together, the torso, the limbs, etc., all that could have strangled and hanged the cat!

  “Ti, ri, ri!”

  Leon hummed.

  . . . and a hidden delight resounded in the little melody that immediately went silent . . . it sounded malicious . . . this maliciousness . . .

  Wasn’t it delightful that “kookookoo Roly-Poly” had not withstood his questioning, and that his persistence had fallen on her, that she had turned everyone’s gaze upon herself? . . . So, so perhaps he was the one, and no one else, yes, indeed, he could have done it, and why not . . . what about the bread pellets, his fondling them and playing with them, moving them with a toothpick, humming to himself, cutting into an apple peel with his fingernail, his “thinking” and figuring . . . so why couldn’t he have strangled the cat, hanged it? I had strangled it. Yes, I had hanged it. I had hanged it, strangled it, but he could have . . . He could have hanged it and now he could be maliciously happy that his wife is in dire straits! But if he had not hanged the cat (because I had hanged it), he could have, in any case, hanged the sparrow . . . and the stick!

  Because, for God’s sake, the sparrow and the stick haven’t ceased to be a riddle just because I hanged the cat! They were hanging there, at the outer limits, like two centers of darkness!

  Darkness! I needed it! Darkness was vital to me as an extension of the night during which I had been banging into Lena! And Leon too made himself part of this darkness, suggesting the possibility of lascivious sybaritism, of fun that was camouflaged and sealed tight and romping on the Wild Fields of this venerable home—something that would have been less likely had he not just now cut short his ditty for fear of betraying himself . . . His ti-ri-ri had the quality of a roguish, joyful whistling over the fact that his wife had slipped up . . .Could it also have dawned on Fuks that the venerable daddy and husband, the retired banker lounging about the house, who took off solely to play bridge, could have carried on, at the family table, under his wife’s eye, his own private games . . . And if he played with pellets, why couldn’t he have insinuated arrows on ceilings! And have had other fun and games on the side as well.

  A thinker! . . . He was, after all, a thinker . . . he thought and thought—and he could have thought up more than a mere trifle . . .

  Something rattled, shook, a din, a truck, huge, with a trailer, the road, it passed, bushes, it disappeared, the windowpanes fell silent, we turned our gaze from the window, but this called up an awakening of “all the rest of it,” of all that, there, beyond our circle, and I, for one, heard the barking of little dogs in the neighboring garden, I noticed a carafe filled with water on a small table, nothing important, no, nothing, but the intrusion, the intrusion of that something from outside, of the whole world, somehow foiled our plans, and we began talking in a more disorderly manner, that no stranger could have done it because of the dogs, that they would have attacked him, that last year thieves were prowling here, and about other things, etc., etc., this went on for a rather long time, randomly, I went on catching those other sounds “from the depths,” as if someone were smacking, thwacking somewhere, and the sound of copper creaking from somewhere else, as if from a samovar . . . the barking again, I was tired and discouraged, then suddenly I had the impression that something was again beginning to take on a more distinct shape . . .

  “Who did this to you? Why did he do it? Oh, my darling!”

  Roly-Poly embraced Lena. They hugged each other. The hug seemed unpleasant, somehow directed against me, and I regained my vigilance, it was the prolongation of the hug by a trifling billionth (which evoked a sense of excess, of protraction and exaggeration) that actually forced me to be on my guard! What was it, and why? Roly-Poly freed Lena from her short, embracing arms.

  “Who did this to you?”

  What is she up to? Taking aim at someone? Not at Leon . . . at me then? Yes, at me and at Fuks, by hugging Lena she was coaxing into the light of day the whole dark passion of the cat’s murder, well of course, “who did this to you?” meant “it was done to you, and if to you, then passion was the only reason, and who to suspect if not the recently arrived, two young men?” Oh, what bliss! The bliss of the cat becoming a love-cat! . . . look out though, there is danger! I swayed back and forth trying to decide what to say, this was an impasse, a gap, a hole, nothing, and then I heard Fuks speaking, he spoke calmly, as if not connecting it with Roly-Poly, as if pondering aloud: “First someone hanged the chicken. Then the sparrow. Then the stick. The same hanging over and over in a variety of ways. And it’s been going on for a long time, the sparrow pretty well stank when we found it, the first day . . . ” Quite so, Fuks was not so stupid, this was a good line of reasoning, the hanging began to prowl at large even before ou
r arrival, so we were above suspicion . . . unfortunately . . . what a pity!

  “You’re right,” mumbled Leon, and I thought that, for a moment, he too must have had us in his sights.

  Suddenly everyone began talking away. “Katasia,” Roly-Poly said, “that’s impossible! Who would think it was Katasia! What an idea! She’s been grief-stricken, she was so fond of Davie, she walks about totally dejected, I knew her as a child, my God, if it weren’t for my sacrifices, my taking care of her! . . . ” She was talking, but she was talking too volubly, like those silly housewives, those boardinghouse proprietresses, and I thought isn’t she overplaying her part, but suddenly there was the sound of water from a faucet, a car seemed to be starting somewhere . . . “Someone sneaked in,” Leon said, “but to hang a cat . . . Who would sneak in to hang a cat? And the neighbors’ dogs . . . they wouldn’t let . . . ”My shoulder suddenly hurt. I looked out the window, the bushes, the spruce, the sky, the heat, the window frame patched up with a board of a different kind of wood . . . Then Leon said he’d like to have a look at the stick and those other signs . . .