Cosmos Read Online Free PDF

returning to his office in three weeks, and then Drozdowski would stare at the heating stove with a martyr-like expression, because, Fuks said, he even gets a rash from my jacket, he’s grown sick of me, it can’t be helped, he’s grown sick of me . . . and Leon’s eccentricities somehow suited Fuks because he watched them with his yellow, pallid, carroty look . . . and this pushed me even further into resenting my parents, into rejecting all that was there, in Warsaw, and I sat with resentment and hostility, halfheartedly watching Ludwik’s hand that I couldn’t care less about, that repulsed me, that riveted me, compelling me to penetrate its erotic-tactile possibilities . . . then therewas Roly-Poly again, I knew, overflowing with activities, laundry, sweeping, mending, tidying up, ironing, etc., etc., and so on and on. Distraction. Swish and swirl. I would find my piece of cork on the bottle, watch the neck and the cork for the sake, I suppose, of not watching everything, the cork became in a way my bark on the ocean, even though only a distant hum reached me from the ocean, a hum too universal and too general to be really audible. And that was all. Several days filled with a little of everything.
    The sweltering heat continued. What an exhausting summer! And so it dragged on with the husband, the hands, the mouths, with Fuks, with Leon, it dragged on in the sweltering heat, like someone walking down the road . . . On the fourth or fifth day my eyes strayed, not for the first time actually, far into the room, I was sipping tea, smoking a cigarette, and, having abandoned the cork, I fastened my eye on a nail in the wall, next to the shelf, and from the nail I moved on to the cupboard, I counted the slats, tired and sleepy I forayed into the less accessible places above the cupboard where the wallpaper was frayed, and I went trudging on to the ceiling, a white desert; but the tedious whiteness changed slightly farther on, near the window, into a rough, darker expanse contaminated with dampness and covered with a complex geography of continents, bays, islands, peninsulas, strange concentric circles reminiscent of the craters of the moon, and other lines, slanting, slipping away—sick in places like impetigo, elsewhere wild and unbridled, or capricious with curlicues and turns, it breathed with the terror of finality, lost itself in a giddy distance. And dots, I don’t know what from, not likely from flies, their origins totally inscrutable . . . Gazing, drowned in it and in my own complexities, I gazed and gazed without any particular effort yet stubbornly, until in the end it was as if I were crossing some kind of athreshold—and little by little I was almost “on the other side”—I took a gulp of tea—Fuks asked:
    “What are you gawking at?”
    I didn’t feel like talking, it was stuffy, the tea. I replied:
    “That line there, in the corner, behind the island, and that sort of a triangle . . . Next to the straits.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    “What about it?”
    “Well . . .”
    After a long while I asked:
    “What does it remind you of?”
    “That smudge and the line?” he took it up eagerly, and I knew why so eagerly, I knew this would distract him from Drozdowski. “That? I’ll tell you, just a minute. A rake.”
    “Maybe a rake.”
    Lena joined in the conversation because we were playing at guessing, a parlor game, easy and in keeping with her shyness.
    “What do you mean a rake?! It’s a little arrow.”
    Fuks protested: “Nonsense, it’s not an arrow!”
    A couple of minutes filled with something else, Ludwik asked Leon, “Would you like to play chess, father?” I had a broken fingernail that was bothering me, a newspaper fell to the floor, dogs barked outside the window (two little dogs, young, amusing, off their leashes at night, there was also a cat), Leon said, “One game,” Fuks said:
    “Maybe it is an arrow.”
    “Maybe an arrow, maybe not an arrow,” I remarked, I picked