Cosmos

by Danuta Borchardt

  “I’d like to have a bath.”

  A bath, that was one of Lukie’s favorite topics, and Lulu’s even more—almost as much as the topic “my mother” had been—on the horse cart we had already learned that “I couldn’t live without a shower,” and “I don’t know how one can bear it in the city without bathing twice a day,” and “my mother used to bathe in water with lemon juice,” and “well, my mother went to Carlsbad every year.” Thus, when Fuks mentioned a bath, that he’d like to take a bath, Lulu immediately began to lulu, that even in the Sahara she would wash in the last glass of water, “because water for washing is more important than water for drinking, and you, Lukie, wouldn’t you like a bath?” and so on . . . but while chirping she must have realized, as I did, that the word “bath” seemed to peek unpleasantly in a certain direction, namely toward Venomie, it was not that she was uncleanly, no, but she had that special quality of bodily egoism which reminded me of Fuks’s expression on another occasion “go to your own for whatever turns you on.”* She somehow treated her body as if it were bearable to herself alone, its owner (as is the case with certain smells), and that was why she gave the impression of a person who had little interest in bathing. Lulu, sniffing with her little nose and noticing that something wafted from that direction, began to carry on: I feel sick if I don’t bathe, etc., while Lukie also pitched in his own remarks, and so did Leon, and Fuks, Ludwik, and Lena, as people do at such times, to avoid being accused of indifference toward water. While Venomie and Tolek remained silent.

  And under the influence of some of them talking, some keeping quiet, something arose, something like the likelihood of Venomie not bathing . . . why should she, let her go to her own self, just for herself . . .

  Something wafted more strongly from her direction—not actually a smell but something unpleasantly personal, like her own juice—and Lulu, like a pointer on to a scent, and with a most innocent little expression on her face, was all sweetness—while Lukie was seconding, jabber, jabber. In God’s truth, Venomie remained, as always, silent, not taking part—except that now her closing herself off was taking on the traits of bathing—but worse than her silence was Tolek’s silence, because Tolek was, one could see, totally at ease with water, most likely an excellent swimmer, so why didn’t he breathe a word? In order not to desert her in her silence?

  “Well, that’s like . . . ” the priest said.

  He fidgeted, as if he were uncomfortable, and then resumed sitting quietly on the little chair—yet his pronouncement that no one had expected created an unusual effect; it broke through the Lulus’ luluing, everyone looked at him. I don’t know whether everyone was under the same impression—that those stubby fingers, the skin reddened by the collar, his bodily uncouthness, all his troubles, splintering and festering, everything, together with the pimple at the base of his nose, united him with Venomie. Venomie with the priest. The blackness of his cassock, his fingers fumbling, her eyes gazing, her trust, her right to love, her awkwardness, her anguish, his torment, her right, his despair, everything, everything, blended together in a clear yet unclear partnership, perceptible and yet not, in their own juice in common “go to your own for your own . . . ”

  I was eating the little torte. I stopped eating, my throat tightened, with my mouth full I watched . . . the . . . the . . . what would you call it? Turning to within oneself, one’s own horror, one’s own filth, one’s own crimes, closing oneself off, condemned to oneself, oh, egoism! One’s very own! And like a flash of lightning: this must lead to the cat, the cat was close, close by . . . and immediately the cat crawled onto me, I felt the cat. I felt the buried cat, the strangled cat—hanged between the sparrow and the stick which were there, immobile and becoming overgrown with their own existence, strained with their own immobility, in an abandoned, forsaken place. What a devilish contrariness! The farther, the closer! The more trivial and nonsensical, the more intrusive and powerful! What a trap, what a hellishly malicious arrangement! What a snare!

  The cat, the cat strangled—hanged!

  *From a Polish patriotic song.

  *From a Polish saying.

  †From another Polish saying.

  ‡From a Polish song.

  *Further development of the onanistic theme.

  chapter 8

  Ludwik said drowsily to Lena that it would be good to take a nap. Sure. We deserved a nap after traveling since daybreak. Everyone rose and began looking around for blankets.

  “Ti, ri, ri!”

  Leon’s little melody. But louder than usual and defiant. Roly-Poly asked him, surprised.

  “What is it with you, Leon?”

  He sat alone at the table littered with dishes and the remnants of the banquet, his baldness and pince-nez glistened, on his forehead were drops of perspiration.

  “Berg!”

  “What?”

  “Berg!”

  “What berg?”

  “Berg!”

  Not a trace of kindliness. Fawn, Caesar, Bacchus, Elagabalus, Atilla. But then Leon smiled in a friendly way from behind his pince-nez.

  “Niczewo,* old gal of mine, that’s two Jews talking . . . a joke . . . I’ll tell you some other time . . . ”

  Everything was ending, falling apart . . . The table deserted, chaotic, chairs being moved, blankets, beds in empty rooms, languor, wine, etc.

  Around five o’clock, after my nap, I stepped out in front of the house.

  Most of our company was still sleeping—no one there. The meadow dotted with spruces, boulders, sunny, hot, behind me the house filled with sleep, with flies, ahead of me the meadow and farther on the mountains, mountains all around, so mountainous and grown over with forests that they are impossibly forest-like in their deathly silence. It’s not my place, what good is it to me, although I am here, I could just as well be somewhere else, it’s all the same, I knew that beyond the mountain wall there were other, unfamiliar regions, but they were no more foreign to me than this here, a kind of indifference established itself between myself and this landscape which could transform itself into a harshness or even something worse. Into what? In the distinctive narcosis of these meadows and forests rising from the depths, unfamiliar and unenticing, isolated, there was the possibility of a sudden gripping, twisting, strangulation and, ha, ha, of hanging—but this possibility was “beyond,” “beyond it.” I stood in the shade, right in front of the house, among trees. I was picking my teeth with the stem of a blade of grass. Hot, and yet the air was brisk.

  I turned around. Five steps away from me was Lena.

  She was standing there. When I noticed her so suddenly she seemed, most of all, small, child-like—and my eyes were struck by her greenish blouse, sleeveless. But this was just a moment. I turned my head, looked the other way.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  She said this, since she was just five steps away she had to say something. I still didn’t look at her, this non-looking was killing me—had she come to me—to me—does she want to start something with me—this terrified me. I didn’t look, and I had no idea what to do, there was nothing to do, I stood, not looking.

  “Have you lost your tongue? Are you in rapture?”

  Oh, the tone was a bit lulu-like, she had learned it from them . . .

  “Where is Mr. Leon’s panorama?”

  I said this to say something . . . Her laughter was quiet, gentle: “How should I know!”A gain silence, but no longer so glaring, considering that everything was happening au ralenti, it was hot, evening approaching, a pebble, a little beetle, a fly, the earth. As the time for my reply was running out I said, “We’ll soon find out.”

  And she replied right away: “Yes, Daddy will take us there after supper.”

  Again I said nothing, I looked at the ground in front of me. I and the ground—she to one side. I felt uncomfortable, even bored, I would have preferred to have her leave . . . It was fitting for me to say something again, but before I spoke I glanced in her direction, ever so quickly, and in this ba
rely perceptible moment I see that she is not looking at me either, her gaze, like mine, directed elsewhere—and this mutual non-looking, mine and hers, had the air of an unpleasant debility that had its origins in the distancing, we hadn’t been here long enough, I and she, she and I, we were as if flung here from somewhere else, from there, sick, not quite here, like those unseeing apparitions in a dream, connected to something else. I wondered if her mouth was still “in relation” to the disgusting slipaway of that lip, there, in the kitchen or in the little room? I had to find out. I glanced but I couldn’t see her mouth well enough, yet I immediately saw that yes, in and of itself, her mouth was with that other mouth, like two cities on a map, like two stars in a constellation; even more so now, at a distance.

  “What time are we supposed to set out?”

  “Probably around twelve-thirty. I don’t know.”

  Why did I do it to her?

  Spoiling everything for myself . . . Why did I, then, that first night in the hallway . . . begin . . . (Well, in the beginning our deeds are skittish and capricious, like grasshoppers, but slowly, on returning to them, they acquire a spasmodic nature, like claws clutching, unrelenting—so what can one know?—there, then, in the night, in the hallway when for the first time her mouth had united in my mind with Katasia’s mouth, oh, a whim, a fantasy, a trifle, just a fleeting association! And today? What can one do now, great God, what is to be done? Especially now that I had spoiled her for myself, and to such a degree that to approach her, catch her, spit in her mouth—why did I spoil her for myself like that? It was worse than raping a little girl, it was rape done unto me, I had raped her “for myself,”this phrase appeared to me against the background of the priest, it had the air of sin, I realized that I was in a state of churchy, mortal sin, and this presented me with the cat, and the cat emerged.)

  The ground . . . clods of dirt . . . a few inches away two other clods . . . how many? . . . two, three . . . I should take a brief walk . . .Admittedly the air . . . Another clod of dirt . . . how many inches?

  “I took a nap after dinner.”

  She said this with the mouth that I knew (I could no longer not know) had been spoiled by the other mouth, her mouth was . . .

  “I had a nap too,” I said.

  This was not her. She was there, at the house, in the garden with the little whitewashed trees tied to the stakes. I wasn’t here either. But, just because of this, we were a hundred times more significant. As if we were symbols of ourselves. The earth . . . the clods of dirt . . . the grass . . . I knew that because of the distancing, I had to take a walk, why am I standing here, because of the distancing, the importance of here and today is becoming immense. And decisive. And this immensity, its power, oh, let it be, let’s go! Immensity, what kind of a little bird is that, immensity, the sun is sinking, a little walk . . . Since I had strangled the cat—hanged it, I’ll have to strangle her too—hang her . . . for myself.

  In the bushes by the road, it, the sparrow, is hanging, and so is the stick hanging in the recess of the wall, they are hanging, but the immobility within this immobility surpasses all boundaries of immobility, one boundary, second boundary, third boundary, it surpasses the fourth, fifth, a sixth pebble, seventh pebble, the little blades of grass . . . it’s already cooler . . . I turned around, she was no longer there, she was gone with her lascivious mouth, and she was somewhere else with her mouth. I went away, i.e., I went away from the place I had been, and I walked over the meadow, in the sun that was already less bothersome—in the silence of the mountains’ bosom. Small inclines in the terrain absorbed me, mostly pebbles in the grass that made walking difficult, what a pity that she is not opposing me, but, on the other hand, how can someone, for whom talking serves only as a pretext for making sounds, oppose anyone, ha, ha, ha, just like her “giving evidence” at that time, after the killing of the cat, well and good, she’s not opposing me, so there won’t be any opposition. This meeting of ours was so unpleasant, sideways, without looking, as if sightless—more and more blossoms in the grass, blue and yellow, clusters of spruce, pines, the terrain was descending, and I had moved quite far, an incomprehensible matter of otherness and distance, in the silence butterflies fluttering, a breeze blowing gently, earth and grass, forests turning into peaks, a bald patch under a tree, pincenez—Leon.

  He sat on the stump of a tree smoking a cigarette.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,” he replied and smiled blissfully.

  “What’s so amusing?”

  “What? Nothing! Exactly that: nothing! Ha, that’s a language game, if you please, hm . . . I’m amused by ‘nothing,’ mark you, Your Reverence, my venerable companion and merry-maker and horse-drawn carriage, because ‘nothing’ is exactly what we do all our lives. A fellow stands, sits, talks, writes and . . . nothing. A fellow buys, sells, marries, doesn’t marry and—nothing. A fellow sitzum on a stumpium and—nothing. Soda pop.”

  He was drawling these words, with nonchalance, condescendingly.

  I said: “You talk as if you’ve never worked.”

  “Never worked? But I have! Yes indeed! Definitely! At the bankie! The little bankie! From the dumb bankie-dear straight into the stomach! A whale. Hm. Thirty-two years! And what? Nothing!”

  He pondered and blew on his hands.

  “It’s run through my fingers!”

  “What has?”

  He replied nasally, monotonously:

  “Years disintegrate into months, months into days, days into hours, minutes into seconds, seconds run past. You won’t catch them. Everything runs past. Flies away. Who am I? I am a certain number of seconds—that have run past. The result: nothing. Nothing.”

  He flared up and exclaimed: “It’s thievery!”H e took off his pince-nez and began to tremble, like a little old man, like one of those indignant little old men one sees at times standing on street corners, or in a trolley, or in front of a cinema, vociferating. Should I talk to him? Say something? But what? I was still lost, not knowing which way to go, to the right, to the left, so many threads, connections, insinuations, if I wanted to enumerate all of them from the very beginning I would be lost, cork, saucer, the trembling of a hand, the chimney, a cloud of objects and matters undeciphered, first one detail then another would link up, dovetail, but then other connections would immediately evolve, other connections—this is what I lived by, as if I were not living, chaos, a pile of garbage, a slurry—I was putting my hand inside a sack of garbage, pulling out whatever turned up, looking to see if it would be suitable for the construction of . . .my little home . . . that was acquiring, poor thing, fantastic shapes . . . and so on without end . . . But what about this Leon? I’ve been wondering for some time why he seems to be circling in my vicinity, even seconding me, there was some similarity, take the fact that he was losing himself in seconds as I was in trifles, well, well, there were also other leads providing food for thought, those bread pellets during supper and other trifles, the ti-ri-ri, and again, more recently, I don’t know why, I fantasized that the disgusting “selfness” (“ gratify yourself with yourself . . . ”), creeping toward me from the Toleks’ and from the priest’s direction was also somehow making its way toward Leon. What harm would it do to hint at the sparrow and all the other wonders back home? Put it to him and see what I can see, I was, after all, like a soothsayer, looking into a crystal ball, into smoke.

  “You are anxious,”I said, “no wonder . . . After the business of these last few days. With the cat . . . trifles seemingly, yet also puzzles, it’s hard to shake them off, it’s as if they were infested with vermin . . . ”

  “Kitty-cat, eh? Such a trifling matter, who would bother with the catsqueal of a kittycorpse? Look at that gadfly, brother mine, how it’s blaring, the rascal! Only yesterday that kittycarcass was tickling my nervous system with a drilling tickle—but today? Today, with my sky-high gazing at the mountains—oh, my daughters, hey, hey, hey, my only ones?! Granted
, I have in my nervous system a kind of celebrating tension, tumtupuli, narambuli, it’s festive, delightfully celebratory, festively delightful, hey-ho, it’s a festivity, a festivity! A festivity! Haven’t you, sir, my dear sir, my dearie little sir, noticed anything?”

  “What?”

  He pointed his finger at a little flower in his buttonhole. “Please incline your gracious little nose toward me and take a whiff.”

  Sniff him? This alarmed me more than it probably should have . . .

  “Why?”I asked.

  “I’m delicately perfumed.”

  “Did you perfume yourself for your guests?”

  I sat on a tree stump, a little distance away. His bald head formed, with his pince-nez, a glassy-domelike whole. I asked whether he knew the names of the mountains, he didn’t know, I asked him the name of the valley, he muttered back that he knew it once but had forgotten.

  “What are these mountains to you? Their names. This is not a matter of names.”

  I was about to ask “then what is it about?”but I held back. Let him tell me himself. Here in this remoteness “up the summits and down to the fen, Maggie danced with the mountain men!”* And yes, when Fuks and I reached that wall, when we discovered the stick, there too it felt like being at the ends of the earth—the smells, very likely of urine, the heat, the wall—and now, here, why ask, it had to begin on its own . . . because, no doubt, a new arrangement is closing in on me, and something will begin to unravel, to connect . . . Better be quiet. I sat as if I were not there.