Free Cosmos by Danuta Borchardt Page A

tufts, then smooth again, falling down, the skin on her nape suddenly very delicate, white, then nearby a scratch as if made by a fingernail, and a reddened area, then something like a blemish above her shoulder, while at the edge of the blouse a staleness began, an area of wear and tear that disappeared under the blouse, and there, under the blouse, continued farther down to various warts, adventures . . . She was like the ceiling . . . “When we lived in Drohobycz” . . . “tonsillitis, then rheumatism, stones in the liver” . . . She was, like the ceiling, beyond grasp, inexhaustible, infinite in its islands, archipelagos, lands . . . After supper we waited until she went to bed and, around ten o’clock, we went into action.
    What phenomena would be unleashed by our action?
    Forcing our way into Katasia’s room presented no difficulties, we knew she always left a key by her window that was overgrown with ivy. The difficulty was that we had no assurance that the person who was leading us by the nose—assuming that someone was leading us by the nose—did not lie in ambush spying on us from a hiding place . . . someone who could even raise hell for all we knew? We spent a lot of time wandering about near the kitchen to see if anyone was watching us—but the house, the windows, the little garden, lay peacefully in the night over which swept thick, tousled, clouds, and from behind them the crescent moon sailed out, racing. Dogs chased each other among the little trees. We were afraid of ridicule. Fuks showed me a small box that he held in his hand.
    “What is it?”
    “A frog. It’s alive. I caught it today.”
    “What’s that all about?”
    “If anyone catches us, we can say that we sneaked into her room to put the frog in her bed . . . As a joke!”
    His face, rebuffed by Drozdowski, was white-carroty-fish-like. He had a frog, all right, that was clever! And the frog, one had to admit, was not out of place, its slipperiness circling round Katasia’s slipperiness . . . I was astonished, even worried by his coming up with the frog . . . and even more so because the frog was not all that far removed from the sparrow—the sparrow and the frog—the frog and the sparrow—was something hiding behind this? Did it mean anything? Fuks said:
    “Let’s go and see what’s happening with the sparrow. We have to wait a while anyway.”
    We went. Out the door, in the bushes, we encountered the familiar darkness, the familiar smell, we approached the familiar place, but our gaze beat in vain against the blackness, or rather against a multitude of various blacknesses effacing everything—there were black caverns caving in, next to other holes, spheres, layers, poisoned by semi-existence, and this flowed together into a kind of concoction that had a restraining, opposing effect. I had a flashlight, but I wasn’t free to use it. The sparrow had to be ahead of us, by two paces, we knew where, but we couldn’t reach it with our gaze that was being devoured by something negating it, by darkness. Finally . . . the bird loomed as if it were the center of a configuration, a thickening no bigger than a pear . . . it hung . . .
    “Here it is.”
    In the silent darkness the frog in the box announced itself . . . not that it made a sound, yet its existence, excited by the sparrow’s existence, made itself known. We were with the frog . . . it was here, with us, in the presence of the sparrow, the sparrow was itscrony in the frog-sparrow realm, and it brought the slippery lip slipaway to me . . . and the trio of sparrow-frog-our-little-Katasia pushed me into her mouth cavern, turning the black cavern of the bushes into her gaping mug, equipped with the affected frolic of her lip . . . leaping aside. Lust. Swinish business. I stood motionless, Fuks was already retreating from the bushes, “nothing new,” he whispered, and, when we came out onto the road, the night with its sky, its moon, with its plenitude of silver-edged clouds,