Free Cosmos by Danuta Borchardt

I just say Leon, we’ll go to the ball, well, I tell you, forabout two weeks I was secretly getting ready, two seamstresses, a hairdresser, massages, I even had a pedicure to give myself courage, I borrowed Tela’s jewelry, Leon was dumbstruck when he saw me, I’m calm, we walk into the ballroom, music, I take Leon under the arm and we head straight for the countess and, imagine, she turned her back on us! She insulted me! So I say to Leon, Leon your aunt is a fathead, and I spat on the floor, while he, you know, not a word, he’s like that, talk, talk, but when it comes to doing something, he does nothing, he beats around the bush, he wriggles out, but later, when we lived in Kielce, I made preserves, lots of neighbors visited us, they ordered my preserves months in advance, she fell silent, she went on dusting as if she hadn’t said anything, until Fuks asked:
    “Then what?”
    So then she said that one of her tenants in Pułtusk was a consumptive and I had to serve him cream three times a day “to the point that it was disgusting” . . . and she left. What did it all mean? What was the sense of it? What was behind it? And the glass tumbler? Why did I notice the tumbler yesterday, in the living room, by the window, on the table, together with two spools of thread—why did I look at it as I passed by—was it worth the attention—should I go down, look again, check? Fuks too must have been checking up on things in secret, studying, looking around, pondering, he too was extremely scattered—stupidly scattered. Fuks, yes . . . but he didn’t have even one hundredth of the reasons I had . . .
    Lena was circulating like blood in this nonsense!
    I couldn’t resist the impression that Lena was behind it all, striving toward me, straining to force her way, shyly, secretly . . . I could almost see her: straying about the house, drawing on ceilings,setting up the whiffletree, hanging the stick, making figures out of objects, she darts along the walls, around corners . . . Lena . . . Lena . . . Forcing her way to me . . . maybe even pleading for help! Nonsense! Yes, nonsense, but on the other hand, couldn’t those two anomalies—that “union” of mouths and those signs—have anything in common? Nonsense! Yes, nonsense, but could something within me as intense as the contamination of Lena by Katasia’s lips be just my imagination? We had supper alone with Roly-Poly because Lena went with her husband to visit their acquaintances, Leon was out playing bridge, it was Sunday, Katasia’s day off, she had left right after lunch.
    Supper, seasoned with Roly-Poly’s incessant voice—when Leon wasn’t around, chattering beset her—on she went, that the tenants, that with the tenants, that her whole life, you gentlemen have no idea, a meal for this one, sheets for that one, enema for yet another, this one wants a space heater, goes on about a space heater . . . I hardly listened, something about “with whores” . . . “a bottle behind the bed, he’s almost dying, yet the bottles” . . . “I tell him, whims, whims, but you know where your scarf is” . . . “I fought tooth and nail, worked myself to the bone, I’m not made of stone” . . . “Oh, the rabble, so help me God” . . . “it’s a holy terror, that human filth, dear Jesus” . . . her beady eyes followed our food consumption, her bust resting on the table, and on her elbow the skin peeling off and passing into pink violet, just as on the ceiling where the pustulation of the central bay passed into a pale, yellowish rash . . . “If it weren’t for me, they’d all be dead” . . . “often in the night when he groaned” . . . “so they transferred Leon, and we rented” . . . She was like the ceiling, behind her ear she had what looked like a hardened blister, and then a forest began, her hair, first there seemed to be two or three rings of hair, then theforest, grayish-black, thick, rolling up, curled, here and there in locks, here and there in