Read Online Cosmos by Danuta Borchardt - Free Book Online

. . . distance, extreme reaches, a separate life in hot silence, a buzzing. The stick was there, as we had left it, it hung on the thread.
    “Look closely at this,” he pointed toward a pile of garbage in the open door of the shed, “do you see anything?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Absolutely nothing?”
    “Nothing.”
    He stood in front of me, a tedium to us both.
    “Look at this whiffletree.”
    “What?”
    “Did you notice it yesterday?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Was it lying in exactly the same position? Hasn’t that changed since yesterday?”
    He was tiresome—and he knew it, no illusions—he emanated the fatalism of a man who is bound to be a bore, he stood by thewall, all this was hollow in the extreme, futile. He insisted: “Try to remember . . . ” but I knew that he insisted out of boredom, and this bored me as well. A yellow ant marched along the broken whiffletree. On top of the wall the stems of weeds were outlined clearly against the sky, I didn’t remember it, how was I to remember, maybe the whiffletree had changed its position, maybe it hadn’t changed its position . . . A yellow flower.
    He would not accept defeat. He stood over me. It was unpleasant because in this remote place the emptiness of our boredom met with the emptiness of these supposed signs, with evidence that wasn’t evidence, with this total nonsense—two emptinesses and the two of us caught between them. I yawned. He said:
    “Look closely, where is the whiffletree pointing?”
    “Where?”
    “To Katasia’s little room.”
    Yes. The whiffletree aimed straight at her little room by the kitchen, in the addition, next to the house.
    “Aa . . .”
    “Exactly. If the whiffletree has not been touched, then it’s nothing, then it has no meaning. But if it has been touched, it’s in order to direct us to Katasia . . . It’s someone, mind you, who got wise to it when I hinted at the stick and the thread yesterday at supper, and realizing that we were on the trail, comes here at night and points the whiffletree to Katasia’s room. It’s like a new arrow. He knew that we’d come again to see if there’s a new sign.”
    “But how do you know that the whiffletree was touched?”
    “I’m not sure. But that’s how it seems to me. There is a track where the wood scraps have been moved, as if the whiffletree lay in a different position before . . . And look at the three pebbles . . .and the three sticks . . . and the three blades of grass that are pulled out . . . and the three buttons, from a saddle probably . . . Don’t you see anything?”
    “See what?”
    “They seem to form triangles pointing at the whiffletree, as if someone had wanted to draw our attention to the whiffletree . . . they seem to create, don’t you think, a kind of rhyme directed at the whiffletree. It’s . . . perhaps . . . what do you think?”
    I took my eyes off the yellow ant that appeared on and off between the leather straps, rushing to the left, to the right, back and forth, I hardly listened to Fuks, in one ear and out the other, how idiotic, misery, abject misery, humiliation, this bilious state of ours, the nasty taste of it, the nonsense, all floating above the pile of rubble and other odds and ends, by the wall, as well as his carroty mug, bug-eyed and disdained. I again started to explain—“who would bother, who would make up such insignificant signs, almost invisible, who would figure that we’d catch on to the change in the whiffletree’s direction . . . no one with all his marbles . . . ” But he interrupted me: “Who says it’s someone with all his marbles? Another thing: how do you know how many signs he’s making up? Perhaps we’ve discovered only one of many . . . ”With a wave of his arm he encompassed the garden and the house: “Perhaps the place is swarming with signs . . . ”
    We stood there—a clod of dirt, a cobweb—and we knew that we wouldn’t leave this alone. What else did we have